It begins with a fantasy. As a cover of “Fly Me to the Moon” plays, as if we’re watching an old bootleg of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a resplendent Samantha descends into the high-end hostess club she’s opened. Her old coworkers preside over the place like respected courtesans. Everything is golden and gorgeous.
Then the fantasy ends, and we find Samantha in a vacant building she plans to buy and convert into the club of her dreams. Will she get there? I’d say Tokyo Vice is ambivalent about her chances. This episode (Episode 4, “I Want It That Way”) is in large part about the gulf between what we want, and what we get.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “I Want It That Way”
“Moon Knight” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “The Friendly Type”
We’re now fully halfway through Moon Knight’s short six-episode run, and by now it’s pretty clear what the show’s real selling points are: Oscar Isaac as our troubled hero, and F. Murray Abraham as the voice of the surly, petty god who powers him. Isaac plays Mark Spector as a straight-down-the-middle action hero in the Jason Bourne vein…then switches gears to play Steven Grant as a refugee from some unmade British slapstick remake of Night at the Museum. All the while he has Abraham’s booming voice in his ear, making demands and doing freaky shit with the sky. It’s a hoot.
That said, the fight choreography is a mixed bag, especially for a series that sold itself on being sort of a return to the grim and gritty combat of the old Marvel/Netflix shows. It’s not that the rooftop knife fight that opened the episode or the spear battle near its conclusion were bad, per se; I just don’t see them sticking in my memory. This, of course, is a pitfall for nearly all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s products—full of sound and fury, but weightless in the end.
Ah well. Even if I weren’t getting paid to watch it, I’d stick with Moon Knight on the strength of Oscar Isaac’s unusual star turn and the extremely cool-looking superheroic power of his costume. And at a scant six episodes, it’s a very small time investment relatively speaking; fighting aside, one advantage this show has over its lengthier Daredevil-style antecedents is that there will be no room for the dreaded Netflix Bloat. For now, at least, the Fist of Khonshu still has me in its grip.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Twelve: “Cold Storage”
There are times, and this is one of them, when “Billions” feels less like a show to recap than like a show to be decoded. Not because it’s a “Lost”-style mystery-box series, constantly introducing new known unknowns to be theorized about, but because its plotting is so dense and meticulous that if you miss a beat, you miss the point.
I’ve been staring at my laptop screen for a long, long time, trying to figure out how best to explain this episode. It begins with Chuck Rhoades and Mike Prince, along with their attorneys Ira Schirmer and Kate Sacker, dragged in for questioning by Chuck’s successor, Dave Mahar. After bouncing back and forth to a series of flashbacks, it ends as Prince loses $3.5 billion but salvages his political career and Chuck is sprung from jail for the express purpose of ending that career. TL;DR: It’s complicated!
I reviewed the season finale of Billions for the New York Times.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Read the Air”
For me, the show is at its most interesting at its most granular; the details matter as much as the big picture. I enjoyed Adelstein and Samantha talking about manga. (She recommends Dragon Head and 20th Century Boys, recommendations I happily second.) I enjoyed, if that’s the right word for it, Tin Tin’s disclosure that people in Japan tend to commit suicide by fire in public so that their families won’t face legal repercussions from their landlords for damaging their apartments. I enjoyed the demure way Sato averted his gaze when Samantha tried on the dress he picked out for her, even if he immediately reneges on the gift.
I enjoyed that our first glimpse of maniac tough guy Tozawa involves a prostate exam. I enjoyed seeing Jake’s editor Emi work on murder cases in between getting berated by her Korean husband. I enjoyed the off-hand disclosure by Jake that the medical condition plaguing his kid sister was a suicide attempt. I enjoyed seeing Sato and his superior, Kume, steal a bunch of dresses right off the racks just because they could. (It reminded me of that Sopranos subplot where Tony and Christopher steal a bunch of booze off a biker gang just for shits and giggles.)
And it stands to reason that details like these stick out. If Adelstein’s mission statement means anything, it certainly means that the details matter at least as much as the big picture; without details, there wouldn’t be a big picture to begin with. Here’s hoping the show continues going down this direction when the next pair of episodes drop next week.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Kish Kaisei”
Tokyo Vice has largely been sold to the world as a Michael Mann joint, but the director of Heat and Manhunter was only behind the camera for the premiere. Where does that leave us now? In a surprisingly strong place. This episode does a lot to alleviate many of the concerns I had about Ansel Elgort as the show’s leading man, and thus about the show itself. (No, not all of the concerns, obviously, not by a long shot.)
For one thing, Elgort’s character Jake Adelstein spends a lot of the episode laughing, smiling, busting the balls of his coworkers, striking up a conversation with a yakuza soldier by comparing their sneakers, riding around on a bicycle like an overgrown kid. He just seems like a much livelier, more youthful character in this outing, and it makes the story that much more believable.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “The Test”
The biggest problem facing Tokyo Vice is the matter of its leading man. I’m not even talking about the sexual abuse and misconduct allegations swirling around Ansel Elgort, although yes, that too. But even as a simple matter of casting the right man for the job, something feels off here. Elgort’s affect is too flat, his eyes too blank, his semi-permanent sneer too pronounced. You can’t exactly do “wide-eyed idealistic rookie reporter learns the ropes in a strange land’s seedy underbelly” when the actor involved couldn’t be wide-eyed to save his life. (It’s possible the show leaned away from the more traditional approach to the part on purpose, but where Elgort’s concerned it comes across more as a matter of necessity.)
It’s worth comparing and contrasting Elgort’s casting to that of Miles Teller in Nicholas Wending Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, another stylish cop thriller directed by a major talent, over on Amazon Prime Video. Teller’s character is supposed to be a dead-eyed, flat-affect sociopath, so selecting a fundamentally unlikeable actor and playing up his emptiness makes a lot of sense. (Hell, Tom Cruise has made a career out of it, including in collaboration with Michael Mann!) There’s none of that logic present in Elgort’s use in Tokyo Vice.
I’ll be covering Tokyo Vice for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.
“Moon Knight” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Summon the Suit”
After watching Moon Knight Episode 1, I wrote on Twitter that “I kind of hope every episode has this same basic tone of Oscar Isaac bumbling around, blacking up, waking up, and realizing he just killed six guys or whatever.” I’m pleased to report that, after watching Moon Knight Episode 2 (“Summon the Suit”), this appears to be the direction in which Moon Knight is headed!
“Billions” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Eleven: “Succession”
Chuck refers to Prince as “Greg Stillson from ‘[The] Dead Zone,’” a reference to the Stephen King book in which a psychic sets out to stop a wildly dangerous presidential candidate by that name. Prince may be fictional, but take a look around the political landscape: Greg Stillsons are one thing this country still manages to produce in bumper crops.
“Moon Knight” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “The Goldfish Problem”
Written by series creator Jeremy Slater and directed by Mohamed Diab, “The Goldfish Problem” is a fun little diversion. Again, its success largely hinges on Oscar Isaac, who plays the Steven Grant persona as a more chipper and scatterbrained British version of his loser character in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Whether he’s missing a date, taking part in a high-speed chase, getting yelled at by his boss, receiving strange phonecalls from an unknown woman on a burner he found hidden in his wall, or waking up surrounded by people he’s beaten the crap out of, he treats everything with the same sense of mild-mannered “oh, bugger” confusion. He’s a fun secret identity to watch, and that goes along way.
So does that final reveal of Steven/Marc/whoever in full Moon Knight regalia. It’s no exaggeration to say that the character has had the staying power he’s had in the comics world because that costume design—Batman at P. Diddy’s white party, basically—is so bitchin’. Based on the glimpse we get of him in this episode, the show has made no concessions to superhero-movie kevlar-uniform “realism” in translating it to the screen. He really does look like he teleported in directly from the funnypages, and that’s good to see.
I’ll be covering Moon Knight for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. It ain’t bad!
“Billions” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Ten: “Johnny Favorite”
When you put all the pieces together, you’re left with one of the strangest and most unsettling, and unsettled, episodes of “Billions” in quite some time. Chuck, Prince, Taylor, Wendy — they all seem to be “at the precipice of a crossroads,” as “The Sopranos” would put it. For all its complexity, this episode is essentially a holding pattern, a brief reprieve before the masters of the universe at its heart select their next lines of attack.
Here’s hoping they let the power go to their heads. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have much of a show, would we?
I reviewed tonight’s odd episode of Billions for the New York Times.
Cut to Black Episode 013!
Gretchen Felker-Martin and I return to the airwaves after many a moon to discuss, of all things, the Season 8 finale of Little House on the Prairie. Yes, you read that right! You can find it on most any platform via our anchor.fm page, and here it is on Apple Podcasts.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Nine: “Hindenburg”
“We need Chuck dead, not wounded and angry.” Wise words, those, from Governor Bob Sweeney. He has intuited something Chuck himself failed to, when Chuck yanked the Olympic Games away from Mike Prince without delivering a killing blow. In retrospect, it was obvious that a wounded, angry Prince, for all his self-avowed graciousness in defeat, would strike back. It just wasn’t clear that his retaliation would, in fact, be a death blow.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
“Raised by Wolves” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Eight: “Happiness”
There’s an old short story by Clive Barker, the creator of Pinhead and the writer-director of Hellraiser, that I think about a lot. It’s called “Pig Blood Blues,” and you can read a pretty beautiful comics adaptation by Chuck Wagner, Fred Burke, and Scott Hampton right here. Go ahead, take a few minutes, I’ll be here when you get back.
Anyway, old Clive, he wrote a line in this story that was frequently on my mind while watching this final episode of Raised by Wolves’ extraordinary second season. The line goes like this—
“This is the state of the beast…to eat and be eaten.”
I won’t get into who in the story says it and why—that’s for you to discover—but I will say that there’s something so perfectly fatalistic in that line, something that sums up so much of what goes on in this season finale. The beast, of course, is humankind, and it’s their—our—fate to kill each other until some larger force comes to kill us all.
I reviewed the season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Eight: “The Big Ugly”
When dealing with the Olympics honcho Katerina Brett (Jennifer Roszell), Chuck embarks on a lengthy analogy involving “high-grading” bears, which before hibernation eat only the choicest parts of the salmon they catch, leaving the rest to rot. To Chuck, billionaires like Prince are the bears, and we civilians are the salmon. I’m not quite sure what that makes Chuck.
I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
“Raised by Wolves” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Seven: “Feeding”
So we’re left with a ragtag band of survivors, adult and child, android and human, atheist and believer, running around trying to figure out how to save themselves from a giant tentacled serpent, an acid sea full of humanoid creatures, and an ancient alien intelligence that seems to want them all dead. I can’t be the only person reminded of Game of Thrones (and not just because of the similarities between the two shows’ scores), in which various fabulously wealthy families carried on killing each other while a threat to all life grew more and more powerful, the danger more and more urgent. Good thing these are only stories on TV, right?
Right?
I reviewed last week’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Seven: “Napoleon’s Hat”
You know, it’s funny: Before I watched this episode of “Billions,” I’d been thinking to myself, “It’s been too long since Chuck Rhoades went to a dungeon.”
Seriously! The series launched with an image of Chuck in flagrante, and his so-called “arousal template” played a major role in the show on and off for quite some time. A calculated admission of his predilections helped him win the attorney general’s office. And a failure to service his kink spelled the end of his relationship with last season’s romantic interest, played by Julianna Margulies.
In this very episode, in fact, Rhoades says regarding sex workers, “I’m out of that game.” An almost entirely sexless sixth season, at least as far as Chuck is concerned, just didn’t sit right.
So it was with some pleasure that I greeted Chuck’s descent into his old dungeon, on a quest to uncover the current location of the high-end brothel where Wags illegally entertained the bigwigs who select the host city of the 2028 Olympics. It was great to see Clara Wong as Troy, Chuck’s one-time dominatrix, and even better to see Paul Giamatti squirm as Troy painfully tweaked Chuck’s ear.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
“Raised by Wolves” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “The Tree”
Raised by Wolves is, among many things, a work of ferocious body horror. The human—and android—body is a grotesque battlefield on this show—bleeding white goo, erupting into hideous tumors, sprouting growths that surround the victim like a cocoon, giving birth through multiple orifices, removing and consuming weaponized eyeballs, evolving and devolving into terrifying creatures, you name it. At the climax of this episode, aptly titled “The Tree,” it seems like we have a brand new body-horror image to add to the list: Sue’s transformation into a fucking tree.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Six: “Hostis Humani Generis”
There are few things on television I enjoy more than a good “Billions” fake-out. The sine qua non comes from the stellar Season 2 episode “Golden Frog Time,” in which a Chuck Rhoades who at first appears to be sobbing is actually laughing hysterically because his plan to undermine his enemy Bobby Axelrod worked like a charm. (At the expense of his best friend and his father, but still!)
The sleight-of-hand that occurs in this week’s episode isn’t nearly as momentous, but it provides that thrilling frisson nonetheless. For a moment, it looks as if Chuck has put the screws to Mike Prince’s alma mater, Indiana A&M, to prevent it from investing in his firm. How? By blackmailing the university’s endowment chair, Stuart Legere (Whit Stillman alum Chris Eigeman), who has been embezzling.
But it turns out that the opposite is true. Chuck is blackmailing Legere and the endowment into investing with Prince by threatening to expose the embezzlement. Having previously rejected his father for the role as too obvious a choice, Chuck wants an inside man who will report back on Prince’s every move, and now he has found one. The needle drop of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” that accompanies the maneuver is no mere music cue. It’s a mission statement: No matter what Mike Prince does, the watchful eyes of Charles Rhoades Jr. will be on him, whether he knows it or not.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
“Raised by Wolves” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “King”
And there you have it! A narratively and emotionally complex episode, filled with far-out sci-fi imagery, fueled by powerful performances from Amanda Collin as Mother and Aasiya Shah as Holly (my God, the way she sobs when Marcus returns to her) among others, raising far more questions than it answers yet still delivering the goods from a storytelling and image-making perspective—all amid a bestiary that seems to be growing by the day. Raised by Wolves, folks. Isn’t it something?
I reviewed the most recent episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.
“Raised by Wolves” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Control”
When reviewing a particularly bizarre episode of television, you always run the risk of blowing things out of proportion. The breathless prose you might adopt in order to describe what you’ve watched is a cliché unto itself at this point, and it’s a safe bet that someone out there is making genuinely outré work that puts any given hour of a streaming drama to shame. So I’m going to try and restrain myself when talking about “Control,” the fourth episode of Raised by Wolves’ second season, once I get past saying this: holy Jesus, that was bat-guano crazy.