Telling this story to her husband, Cooper Howard, when he confronts her with what he knows about the plan to drop the bombs does not have the effect Barb intended. When he asks her how she could sentence millions, billions of people just like them and their daughter to death to protect their daughter herself, she asks, wouldn’t he? I don’t think he would, at least not in this pre-Ghoul incarnation.
But plenty of people not only would, they’d jump at the chance. Just the other day I saw a viral post in which father of a newborn boast he’d wipe out whole continents just to see his baby daughter smile. Odds are that this asshole doesn’t even change the kid’s diaper without being asked, but here he is, champing at the bit to commit genocide to show what a good dad he is.
Remind you of anyone? “Some things just never change,” Hank MacLean tells his daughter Lucy in the present. “People just wanna kill each other, don’t they? I think it’s the only way that people feel safe. It’s ironic, isn’ tit? To feel safe they have to kill each other.” It’s the raison d’être of the fascism we see playing out on American streets in 2026: In order to assuage our baseless fears, we must inflict terror on others.
When presented with a banquet, an absolute feast of an episode like this one, the temptation is to try to swallow it all in one go. The challenge is to resist that temptation. An episode like “The Commander and the Grey Lady,” the second in Industry’s fourth season, is a meal you can return to for seconds, thirds, and leftovers. Once again written and directed by series co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, it’s the kind of episode that makes you ask the host for the recipe — or the help, as the case may be. Best to sample a few delicacies at a time rather than try to gobble it all down.
The following story is intended for mature readers.
The hammer fell for the last time. Its bronze face drove the spike home deep, its head now flush with the wood. The craftsman stood back, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of the corded arm that held the hammer, and looked at what he’d built. Truth be told, on a project this unconventional he wasn’t sure what he was looking for.
After a moment he exhaled sharply and turned to the workbench, laying the hammer down. He picked up a plane and faced his construction once more. Nodding to himself, he stepped forward and gently scraped the plane against the wood, moving up and over the crest of its curved surface. He did this more out of habit than necessity: The object’s exterior was already smooth to the point of seamlessness, every joint and crevice fitted perfectly. But in all his years of renown his’ habits had yet to fail him, and he trusted them like friends.
Daedalus walked to the rack near the wall of his workroom and took down the hide hanging from it. Being careful to keep it off the sawdust-covered floor, he slung it over the structure. It was always the structure, the object, the construction in his mind, and never what it so clearly looked like, never what it was intended to deceive its intended recipient into believing it was in truth. Never the cow.
The next little while he spent tacking the hide into place, light work he was in no particular hurry to finish. I’m covering up that beautiful smooth surface, he thought to himself. Shame. But the effort had not been wasted, he knew. Perfecting even such parts of the project as would never meet the eye was the key to craftsmanship. People sense the work even if they can’t see it, he’d told his nephew long ago. It shines through in what they can. His nephew—
“Is it finished?”
A woman’s voice shook Daedalus from his reverie. He realized he’d been resting his forehead against the rear of the object, eyes closed. He had been working very hard without respite, and he’d long found the afternoon sun to be a natural soporific, as many an unplanned nap at the drawing table could attest. Snapping to, he turned to look at the figure in the doorway — and immediately bowed his head. Pasiphaë, Queen of Crete, stood there, her gown yellow as the sun.
“My Queen!” Daedalus’ exclamation was apologetic. “I— ”
“Oh.” The Queen’s voice silenced his. “It is finished.” She was gazing, wide-eyed, at what he only now found himself thinking of, first and foremost, as the cow.
Pasiphaë approached the wooden animal. Extending a delicate hand the color of golden sand, she touched the cover of cowhide, her fingers gliding over the fine fur. She traced the features of its wooden head, its likeness to one of Minos’ own herd impeccable. From there she caressed the simulacrum’s neck, its flank, its haunches. “And it’s wonderful.”
The Queen turned to Daedalus, the jewels on her diadem gleaming in the golden sun. “How does it work?”
She is your client, he reminded himself. And with Athens closed to you, she is your Queen.
“Ah.” He walked to creature’s right side, standing between it and the Queen. He reached down and lifted a panel of the hide he hadn’t tacked down. There, in a flank of otherwise unblemished wood, could be discerned the faint outline of a small, square door. “You pull up the flap,” he said, “and press here…” He pressed his fingers against a small panel next to the door, which opened with a click.
The Queen approached the entrance, stooping to gaze inside. “I see,” she said. She turned to look at Daedalus. “And…?”
“Of course,” he replied. He gestured toward the back of the cow, where he’d been dozing when she first came in. Now she could see what his body had obscured: a hole, in the lower rear of the body, between its sturdy hind legs. The hole’s edges were rounded smooth and upholstered in leather.
“Once inside, turn to face the front of the edifice and ease backwards. The opening is…” He froze momentarily. “…enough to accommodate,” he said at last.
Pasiphaë reached out a hand and traced the edge of the orifice with her jewel-encrusted fingers. Slowly they curled around the lip of the opening. Extending her arm, she inserted her hand in the hole, which swallowed her up to the elbow. While she was distracted, Daedalus dared a glance at her eyes. The gaze he found there was warm, and dark. He looked away.
“You’ve grown quiet,” the Queen said. She withdrew her hand from the hole. Try as he might, Daedalus could not cloak the dismay on his face — no, not even he who’d dissembled his way through meetings with countless clients who thought they knew better, until he showed them otherwise. “What’s wrong, Architect?” Her pretty brow lifted in concern.
“I fear this whole business, my Queen,” he said honestly, scratching his beard without realizing he was doing so, an old tic. “I’ve feared since first the king refused the sacrifice. I fear it will go ill for all of us.”
Paisphaë put her hand on Daedalus’ bare shoulder. He tensed, despite himself. She was a beautiful woman.
“Architect,” she said, “your crime is behind you.”
And there it was. All it once, everything he now realized he’d been trying to forget by burying himself in this mad project came rushing back. Perdix was his nephew — just his nephew! — but his craft had already outmatched that of the great Daedalus. They had quarreled, well really he had attacked the lad, and there was a window, and…
He started to speak, but Pasiphaë shushed him. “Ah, ah. The goddess of that city saw fit to give young Perdix new life as a bird to spare him the fall, did she not? And with his flight so too departed your guilt. Take heart, sir. You are in Crete now, and you are free.”
He watched as she turned her eyes on the cow. There’s that look again. “As am I.”
Pasiphaë removed her diadem. “I am the daughter of the Sun, the white bull a gift of the Sea,” she said, setting it down on the crowded workbench. “How could our union go ill?”
Daedalus was in his own head, where his thoughts had grown dark. He busied himself by straightening the cowhide, which was already straight. “As you say, my Queen.”
“Now, let’s give this a try.”
“Let’s—?” Daedalus realized he’d only been half paying attention to the wife of King Minos and blinked, turning. Then he saw Pasiphaë, her gown a yellow pool around her tanned feet. Her hair flowed from her head, rippling down her bare body like the reflection of the sun in wavy water.
Before the craftsman could say anything, the Queen walked back to the door in the side of the wooden cow and began climbing inside as he watched. When she reached the halfway mark, her soft belly bisected by the portal, she shifted her weight for better access. Daedalus saw the muscles within her ass and thighs clench, moving the flesh of her lower body around them. As he stared, she stood on her toes and pushed upward, sliding inside with one final motion.
“Does it close from the in—oh, there it is” she said. The door slid shut with another click.
Suddenly chastened, Daedalus averted his gaze from the cow. You had no right. “You should find padding inside,” he said without facing it, his voice thick in his throat. “Reach into the head to—”
“Show me how it works,” came the muffled voice inside the cow.
“My Queen?” Daedalus was confused. “I’m sorry, but I’ve already shown you how it—” He heard the wooden beast creak as if it had been jostled and turned to see the source of the noise.
There in the hole between the thing’s legs, he could see the Queen’s cunt.
Show me how it works.
When he realized what she wanted of him the fear he felt only grew…but so did another feeling, hungry and hot. He leaned his head against the cowhide and closed his eyes. But the apertures of his other senses widened accordingly. He heard the Queen — or rather he heard the Queen’s body, the Queen’s naked body — wrlggling inside the cow. He felt his cock stiffening against his clothes. And even amid the aromas of sawdust and cowhide, he smelled, faint and rich and slightly maddening, the scent of her arousal.
He began to undress. He tossed his robe onto the workbench, then his undergarment, the plain fabric of which obscured the Queen’s diadem entirely. Turning, his cock throbbing as it rose to full stiffness, he walked forward and touched the cow. The cow. Now I can say it. He made a full circuit of it, his hands making a study of all he’d built. He needed it to be real to him, as it would have to be for the sacred animal that was, in the end, his true client.
When his hands finished their tour, he found himself behind the cow once more. He was ready now. He licked his hand and stroked the shaft of his cock, wetting it. He positioned it at the opening in the cow, the opening in the Queen, and — hhhhh — slid inside.
How hot she burned!
He knew right away he would not be long in climaxing. Not out of pleasure, though it was intense — forbidden and perverse and as keen and sharp as ever he’d known it. No, it was as if his body felt a sense of duty. He was demonstrating the efficacy of his creation, nothing more. If he allowed himself to savor this, how could he look himself in the mirror and adjudge himself an honest craftsman?
The Queen moaned within, grunted, sounding muffled and animal from inside the cow’s hide-covered carapace. His arms wrapped around the cow, stretching forward. He clung to it — to her. He bent his head to it one more time and covered it with desperate, delicate kisses.
The sensation of her cunt spasming around his shaft shook him loose. He looked down and saw her jeweled fingers sticking through the opening in the cow, rubbing her swollen clitoris amid a cloud of golden hair as she brought herself off. It was too much for him at last, then. Paisphaë, the cow, the job, all of it, too much.
“My Queen,” he gasped as her own cries faded. “I’mthere…”
“Not in me!” came the muffled command from inside. “Spill it on the floor.”
Had he been able to think clearly Daedalus could have foretold this outcome, which instead took him by surprise. No matter. It was all too far along now. The machine would serve its function.
“Ahhh…” He pulled himself out of her and began stroking furiously, his hand sliding up his cunt-slick foreskin up and down. Swooning, he leaned hard to his left, his shoulder bracing him against the cow as he turned to face the workbench. “Ahhh!” His climax overtook him then. He forced his eyes open, the muscles of their lids wavering, and watched his own semen gush out of his pulsating cock to the sawdust-strewn floor.
As it ended, he leaned back and slid down, his ass colliding with the floor as he leaned back against the beast’s legs. His semen lay in a puddle between his knees.
He felt the cow shake from within, heard the click and whoosh of the door unlocking and sliding open. In seconds, the Queen was by his side, naked and sweaty as he was.
“Oh, good,” she said, looking down beteween Daedalus’ splayed legs. She stuck out one finger and swirled it through his spunk, drawing patterns in the sawdust. “It works.”
Without another word she stood. He looked up and saw her smear her cummy finger against the cowhide, then turn to the workbench. Tossing his clothes to the floor, she retrieved her diadem. It sat there in her hands for a moment, then another.
She looked back at Daedalus. “I love him, you know. I do. I can’t expect anyone else to understand what I myself cannot, but I love him.”
Pasiphaë put the crown back on her head began to dress. “And so I thank you, Architect, for what you have done for me today.” He knew what she meant, and what she didn’t.
She was already leaving. “Have it brought to the pens,” she said. It was a command, not a request.
Daedalus was still sitting naked against the leg of the cow. “Yes, my Queen,” he said.
After a minute, maybe two, he stood, wiped the sawdust from his ass, and began cleaning up.
—
The servants scampered out of the pens, leaving the wooden cow behind. In the shadows stirred a massive shape the color of sea foam in the light beyond. The bull approached the cow slowly, warily even, the tips of its ivory horns parallel to the earth below, but already its excitement was evident.
The white bull of Poseidon reared up and mounted the cow. From his window, Daedalus watched its engorged cock stop, thwarted, then push forward and disappear within the hide-covered container he’d built.
Daughter of Helios, by Aphrodite accursed, I beg of you, he thought. Gods of Olympus, architects of existence, I pray of you. Please, turn not my invention to evil. But even as he thought this, his cock was hard.
He ran his hand through his hair, higher up his forehead with each passing year, and turned from the window. The drawing board awaited, and with it the designs he’d been working on since he’d finished the cow. The Queen had inspired it, in more ways than the obvious.
He was just pressing his reed pen to paper when he heard small footsteps approaching. “Papa!” His son appeared in the doorway of his study, grinning ear to ear, as if privy to a wonderful secret he would soon share.
Daedalus felt the yoke of care that bound him begin to fall away. He put down his pen, arresting his study of his nephew in flight — not as the mere bird into which Athena had transformed him, no, but as the man himself, full grown and yet wingéd still, soaring nigh unto the Sun.
“Yes, Icarus,” he said, returning the boy’s smile. He stood and abandoned his work, for now. “I’m right here.”
The motorcycle parked outside the Palmer house lets you know who’s inside. James Hurley and his girlfriend Donna Hayward have come to visit Maddy Ferguson, the out-of-town cousin of their beloved friend Laura Palmer. In fact, they’ve come to record a love song, using a tape recorder, an old-fashioned microphone, and James’s acoustic guitar. While Maddy and Donna sit side by side on the floor and coo their dreamy backing vocals, James takes lead. His tremulous voice sings a song called “Just You,” which sounds like something you might have slow-danced to at the 1961 Spring Fling.
Donna’s mistake is believing that the song is for her. It might have been when he wrote it. It might even have been when he started singing it. But as the song continues, the dynamic shifts. As Maddy’s eyes seek out James with increasingly obvious hunger, and he responds by looking back at her instead of Donna, Donna’s own eyes grown desperate, pleading, and finally tearful. Eventually it’s too much, and she gets up and runs off.
“I’m trembling, James,” she says when he comes to comfort her. “You made me.” It’s true, but not in the heated way she intends it to sound. The thought of losing James has rocked her.
Maddy just sits there looking uncomfortable for this bit.
Then something happens. As she looks absently into the depths of the Palmer family’s first floor, a man emerges into view. Slowly he approaches, crawling over the sofa, scrambling over the coffee table, staring straight into the camera until he’s right in our faces. Maddy screams uncontrollably, even as Donna and James rush to her side to comfort her. She’s seen Laura’s killer. She’s seen Bob.
These few short minutes of screentime begin with a song so sugary sweet it passes through camp and back around into to dead-serious sincerity. There’s just no denying the passion and pain in the glances exchanged between the three singers. Add in Donna’s attempt to kiss James back into loving her and you’ve got something desperately romantic, in line with the star-crossed relationships of Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive. But then, after some brief comic relief courtesy of Maddy’s third-wheel awkwardness, comes what remains one of the scariest shots ever aired on television: Frank Silva’s Bob, coming for all of us.
You don’t hear whistling in Westeros very often. The warring kings, the scheming viziers, the occasional incursion by angry dragons or ice zombies — there’s just not a whole lot to feel cheerful about in the Seven Kingdoms. It’s hard to whistle while you work when the work is a Hobbesian war of all against all, unless you’re being a real Joffrey about it.
But in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the new HBO show set in the same world as “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” there’s whistling on the soundtrack. Lots of it, in fact. Jaunty, carefree whistling, atop a bed of folksy acoustic guitar. The work that composer Dan Romer does here is a world removed from the dramatic, swirling score provided by Ramin Djawadi for this show’s predecessors. Only once does the music hint at that familiar, rousing theme song … and it is immediately cut off by a shot of the show’s hero violently moving his bowels.
In other words, you can literally hear that this is a different kind of show than the previous Westerosi epics. (The episodes are near-sitcom shortness, too.) “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is adapted from the author George R.R. Martin’s novella “The Hedge Knight,” a far more compact and straightforward story of bravery and villainy than his epic “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of novels. Ira Parker, who created the series with Martin and oversees it as showrunner, is not telling a story that determines the fate of nations or the future of humanity in this fantasy world. (Not so far, anyway.) No wonder the music sounds less like “The Lord of the Rings” and more like “Harold and Maude.”
Why does Avatar endure but still feel like vaporware, even to people, like me, who basically like it? Blending dazzling technical achievement, breathless action, elbow-throwing but self-contradictory politics, and just plain goofy writing, Avatar is the most confounding franchise in Hollywood history, especially given the outsize nature of its financial success. With Avatar: Fire and Blood — my favorite film in the series! — fresh in our minds, Stefan Sasse and I look at James Cameron’s ongoing magnum opus in the latest subscriber-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast!
Maggots feasting on a living man’s arm. A bone poking through a bloody wound before getting forcibly shoved back into place. A man smiling happily as his distended stomach is drained of liter after liter of fluid. A syringe drawing blood from a fully visible and erect penis.
Normally, you’d have to turn to the work of purveyors of the extreme such as Clive Barker, Takashi Miike or Lars von Trier to see such sights. This week, they’re on America’s favorite weekly medical drama. Who says Hollywood is risk-averse?
What impresses me most about this episode is the amount of pathos Walton Goggins is able to generate under an inch of prosthetic makeup and with a digitally erased nose. The moment the Ghoul sits down at that bar, it’s like he’s a different person than the one we knew — ruminative, disappointed in himself, just plain sad about it all. Of course we learn later he’s wrestling with handing Lucy over to her insane father, which he reveals was the whole reason he stuck with her all this time: She wasn’t his friend or his ally, she was his bargaining chip.
But her presence in his life is changing him, as surely as she’d never have killed someone before meeting him in turn. It may not seem like much, but being kind to that dog and feeling any kind of way at all about Lucy are huge steps for the subhuman piece of shit we met last season. Especially as the flashbacks draw us closer to…well, whatever happened with him and Barb and House and the bombs, who knows what kind of human being the Ghoul will turn out to be.
Industry is a freefall into the moral void, as thrilling as it is terrifying. It’s the only show that dares to depict our world today as it is: an elevator shaft without a bottom to hit. I’m so glad this miserable, wonderful show is back.
If you called Twin Peaks Season 2, Episode 1 one of the greatest season premieres of all time, you’d be telling the truth. You’d also be lying by omission.
I love Desmond’s debut down the Hatch at the start of Lost Season 2 (a show whose creators never made any bones about the debt they owed Twin Peaks). I love the knife’s-edge suspense between Walt, Jesse, Mike, and Gus at the beginning Breaking Bad Season 4. Shit, I love Sam drinking and whoring his way through getting left at the altar by Diane to kick off Cheers Season 3. But to compare these excellent episodes of television to these revolutionary 90 minutes is to damn what Mark Frost and David Lynch did here with faint praise. Those episodes have surprises, shocks, bittersweet laughs. This episode has the waiter, the Giant, Leland’s musical numbers, Audrey Horne’s prayer, Gersten Hayward’s recital, Major Briggs’s vision, Laura Palmer’s murder. They are not the same.
When people toss the word “Lynchian” around, it’s usually either as a very specific subgenre of surrealism, or as a way too broad synonym for “weird.” But the opening scene of this episode is a whole different flavor of Lynch, one every bit as important to his overall project. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, you’ll recall, was shot three times at point-blank range by a still-unidentified assailant to end Season 1. (We learn from the insufferable but brilliant Agent Rosenfield, back on the scene to bully everyone within the Twin Peaks city limits, that his would-be assassin was of average height, hardly narrowing it down.) When we rejoin Coop this episode, we can see that only one of the bullets penetrated his body, right where he’d lifted up the bulletproof vest he’d been wearing beneath his shirt while undercover at One-Eyed Jack’s. He was hunting for a pesky wood tick, you see; the bullet found the little bugger, and his torso, instead.
At great length, an elderly room service waiter (Hank Worden) slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly delivers Cooper a glass of warm milk, hangs up the phone on a panicked Deputy Andy rather than call a doctor, and gives Coop — whose reputation apparently precedes him among the staff, if the waiter’s nearly giddy repetition of “I heard of you!” is any indication — several encouraging thumbs up and eye winks before shuffling away. The waiter also has him sign the room service bill. (Gratuities are included.)
Experiments in comedic tedium like this have been a Lynch hallmark since Eraserhead. I’d argue that on Twin Peaks in particular, as we’ll see later this episode with Leland Palmer, they’re a form of proto–cringe comedy, predating Steve Coogan and Armando Ianucci’s creation of Alan Partridge in 1991, Garry Shandling and Dennis Klein’s The Larry Sanders Show in 1992, and Mike Lazzo and Keith Croffod’s Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast (the most Peaksian of these early examples) in 1994. Scenes like these (fire) walk the fine line of boredom, discomfort, and silliness. It’s astonishing to think that in this case, they’ll lead to the absolute horror we see at episode’s end.
It’s all in a day’s work at the Pitt. (A long day: Like the show’s first outing, Season 2 will tell the story of 15 consecutive hours in the E.R., played out across 15 weekly episodes.) But “The Pitt” isn’t, or isn’t just, a workplace drama. Certainly the friendships and flirtations, the alliances and rivalries, the infuriating inconveniences and the “man, I love this job” moments will feel familiar to anyone who has worked hard with the same group of people in the same place, day in and day out.
But what Wyle, the creator R. Scott Gemmill and the director John Wells achieve here is more than a recreation the past glories of their stints on “ER,” which before the New Golden Age of TV ushered in by “The Sopranos” represented the cutting edge. More germane points of comparison for the world of “The Pitt” include the teeming city of King’s Landing in “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” or the fully realized and lived-in sci-fi environments of “Andor.” “The Pitt” is an act of world-building first and foremost.
That starts with the show’s formal aspects: one contiguous set, filled with all different kinds of people, filmed by two hand-held cameras, set in what is meant to feel like real time. After even one episode in that crucible, you start to see it as a place you could hang out in and explore, even get lost in. “The Pitt” shares a sense of repleteness with the grand fantasy epics — the feeling that they’re teeming with life, which continues whether you’re watching or not.
As important to that parallel, though, are the staffers of the Pitt. They are heroes, drawn from all walks of life to serve their collective mission to save that lives. Neither addiction, nor immigration status nor autism spectrum disorders prevent them from doing their jobs. Indeed, their wide variety of life experiences are crucial to their ability to help as many people as possible.
The personal struggles of the medical staff, the intriguing — and often gory and disgusting — cases of the patients, the dazzling you-are-there production: These are the hooks that get you watching. But beneath it all is a message. Rock-star Robby may be the main attraction, but “The Pitt” is a full-throated celebration of expertise, competence, cooperation, science and diversity, at a time when those values are under widespread attack. In “The Pitt,” at least, those values are still alive and kicking.
It’s in relatively simple and straightforward episodes like these that we can see just how sturdy a structure Fallout is. It’s obviously full of monsters and moments torn from the video games to please fans of the franchise, but I haven’t so much as hit start on a single one of those things and I’ve had no trouble making sense or feeling the impact of anything on the show. Okay, so I had to look up the name of the big monster with horns, but if I hadn’t, “big monster with horns” gets the point across quite nicely. You don’t need to know a giant radioactive eggshell is an easter egg to appreciate a giant radioactive eggshell.
The insistence on practical sets and effects as often as possible is a huge boon to the show as well. It’s easy to imagine the Ghoul and Lucy’s faceoff with that monster in New Vegas as a Dave Filoni Star Wars show or a late-period MCU movie — two people standing on a volume stage with a bunch of CGI slop surrounding them. Instead, it looks like Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins faced a Balrog that somehow managed to extinguish itself (they can do that underwater, look it up) in a gigantic pile of rubble and abandoned pleasure palaces, which is basically what the set builders constructed.
Finally, the charms of Purnell and Goggins really can’t be oversold. The latter is so likeable as Coop and so vile, yet weirdly endearing, as the Ghoul. The former makes a drug-fueled rampage feel like the next logical outgrowth of Lucy’s cheery, can-do persona. In an opposite register, the tremulous performances of Aaron Moten and Michael Cristofer during Maximus and Quintus’s corresponding showdown go a long way to making you understand that these two people really do share a deep bond, no matter how loathsome you find Quintus personally.
The Hammerstein Ballroom is a beautiful place to watch wrestling. The ring is surrounded on three sides by multiple tiers of scalloped balconies, blue with gold trim, a prestige-TV color palette. From the vantage point of the TV viewer, the audience looms over the action in ornate concentric circles—Dante’s Inferno for people who like a good German suplex. Seated on one of the venue’s upper levels, every seat feels close enough to the action for you to fall into the ring if you lean forward far enough. In events dating back decades, the independent wrestling promotions ECW and Ring of Honor helped make the place a mecca for the sport.
My 14-year-old kid, H, has heard me give variations on this spiel for over a year now. (They’ve also heard me explain it’s owned by the Moonies; they’re big on religious cults.) Now, the Saturday before Christmas 2025, they could finally see for themselves. By the time we made it up to our second-balcony seats for “Dynamite on 34th Street,” All Elite Wrestling’s now-annual holiday stopover at the Manhattan Center, however, H was mostly just winded by taking the stairs. They’re the kind of kid who was born to complain about having to run in gym class; they’ve told me repeatedly they’re physically afraid of volleyballs. We have that in common.
That’s always been part of the appeal of pro wrestling for me, ever since I got into it as an adult seven or eight years ago. It’s a sport for all kinds of people, people who don’t like sports among them. It distills athletic competition down to pure spectacle, staging genuinely impressive and difficult feats of athleticism in such a way as to heighten drama and tell stories of the triumph of good over evil. If, like me, you were raised by Yankees fans, it’s nice to have a rooting interest you don’t have to feel vaguely guilty about.
After catching their breath, H settled happily into people-watching mood soon enough. While I’ve never missed a single AEW episode in its six years of existence, H isn’t a TV-wrestling fan. They love the live experience: the crowd, the characters, the lights, the pageantry, the inventive audience chants. You don’t hear repeated cries of “THIS IS AWESOME! THIS IS AWESOME!” when Shohei Ohtani hits his 12th home run of the game or whatever, but you’ll damn sure hear it if Kazuchika Okada hits someone with an especially well-timed dropkick.
H and I have been going to AEW shows since 2021, when the company set its then-attendance record at the beautiful, punishingly inaccessible Arthur Ashe Stadium. (The NYPD sent me to the ass end of nowhere to park; H saved us from wandering around lost at one in the morning by remembering we’d found a spot near a Crab du Jour restaurant.)
That pastime of ours had been on pause for over a year, however, since before AEW’s trip to the Hammerstein in December 2024. I wound up going to that show with a friend instead, because when your child is institutionalized with an eating disorder you’d never heard of before they were diagnosed, they don’t let you take them out on field trips to wrestling shows. I asked.
Last Christmas, my child was in a residential treatment facility for a little-known neurological eating disorder called ARFID, so we missed All Elite Wrestling’s Christmas show at the Hammerstein Ballroom. This year they’re healthy, so we went. I wrote about it all for Defector. Happy New Year, my wonderful readers and friends.
Man, Falloutis a killer show. I don’t know what else to say! When I press play on any given episode, I sit back secure in the knowledge that everything I see will be entertaining. Some of it will be funny in a nice way. Some of it will be funny in an extremely nasty way. There will be violence that makes you go “fuck yeah!” and violence that makes you go “oh fuck.” Practical effects and physical sets will prevail over CGI sludge. A bunch of actors you like — Macaulay Culkin! Jon Gries! Kumail Nanjiani! — will show up and do something rad or weird or awful or hilarious. Corporations and capitalism will be dragged in a way that would shock the non-existent conscience of Amazon overlord and Trump crony Jeff Bezos, our era’s answer to Robert House. (I know people will think Elon, but it’s always the quiet ones.) All on Amazon’s dime! Fallout has the giddy feeling of people getting away with something, and it’s infectious as fuck.
It’s Kyle MacLachlan’s finest moment to date as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, though you wouldn’t know he’s a Fed to look at him when it happens. He’s undercover as a high roller at One-Eyed Jack’s, the Canadian casino and brothel we (though not he) now know is owned by corrupt Twin Peaks business magnate Benjamin Horne. Wearing glasses and a tux, he’s fronting as the secret money man behind Leo Johnson’s cross-border cocaine smuggling operation.
Very quickly, he wins the trust of Leo’s partner in crime, bartender and blackjack dealer Jacques Renault. Convincing Jacques that Leo’s taking advantage of him, Cooper’s yuppie druglord offers Jacques ten thousand dollars cash to complete a job directly for him, “No Leo, no middleman.” Unsurprisingly given what we know of his work schedule, the French-Canadian dirtbag happily accepts the job.
There’s just one question Cooper has for Jacques before he sends him off on his errand, which of course is a trap designed to snare him within Sheriff Harry Truman’s jurisdiction in Twin Peaks itself. He’s already brandished the broken poker chip that matches the fragment found in Laura’s stomach. How did the chip get broken, that night with the girls, he wonders?
Cheerfully, with the relish of a schoolkid about to share his dad’s porn stash with a friend, Jacques explains that Laura liked to be tied up, which is what left her wide open when Waldo the bird was freed from his cage by Leo and landed on her shoulder. She and Waldo liked each other, and they were only “love pecks” according to Jacques, but with Leo “doing a number on her,” it was too much. She began to scream.
So Leo grabbed the chip, shoved it in her mouth, and said — Jacques delivers, chortling, in his thick accent — “Bite the bullet, baby. Bite the bullet!”
Throughout Jacques’s story, the view alternates between increasingly tight, subtly slow-motion closeups on Jacques’s grinning mouth as he talks, and Cooper’s rigid inexpressiveness as he listens. You can see, courtesy of MacLachlan’s best work on the show, that Cooper hates this man. He’s practically vibrating with it.
But he holds back all his loathing, all his disgust, and reacts as if he’s heard nothing out of the ordinary for men in their line of work. “Thanks for clearing that up,” he says in the end, with a snort of mirthless laughter. Coop’s pained non-reaction of a reaction reminds us this is not just a whodunit, but a tragedy. Jacques has given himself up as a suspect, but it won’t undo what was done.
My Prestige Prehistory series is taking a week off after this, but we’ll be back for Season 2 on January 12. That gum you like is going to come back in style!
“Sure as you’re born, sire, beggin’ your pardon, sire.” The furrier added the last part hastily, afraid he’d gotten too familiar with one of the royal blood. The prince could only shake his head. Life would be much easier if we could cut through the He wished there were some way he could spare the peasantry this awkwardness. Or himself, for that matter.
“My pardon you can have — for a fee,” he said, smiling reassuringly. The man looked confused. “All I require is a description of the beast.”
“O’course, sire. It were frightful large—”
“Compared to an elk…?”
“An elk I reckon it could swallow whole and take hardly no notice, sire,” the furrier said. He was more animated now, less afraid. This was a brush with greatness, after all. “That’s if meat’s its diet, which I couldn’t say, sire. But it were scaly and wrinkly like, and frightful large.”
“Yes, so you said.”
“Reminded me of a tortoise out its shell it did,” the man continued. “It had them kind of legs like, bowed, squat. But they was spikes on its back instead of a shell, if it please you, sire.”
He turned to Brorr and tilted his head; the bald old huntmaster nodded reassuringly.
“It does,” he replied to the furrier at last, turning back to face him. Ruddy-faced and full-bearded, he looked the picture of health to Prince Rahbo. Perhaps the corrosive effects of proximity to the survivors of the White Battle were overstated. What a surprise. “And you’re sure you can direct us to the beast?”
“Sure as you’re born, sire, beggin’ your pardon, sire,” the man said again, before realizing he was repeating himself. He bowed in apology. “Beggin’ your pardon, sire,” he said.
“Again, it’s not…” He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers, which he’d unsheathed from his glove before conversing with the peasant. People liked to be able to see your hands when convincing themselves to trust you, he’d found. It let them tell themselves you weren’t hiding anything. “Friend — may I call you friend?”
“Why, of cou—”
“Friend, we are glad of your counsel, and your guidance. Long leagues are we from the capital, where even now my father awaits news of our victory in this hunt of one of the Foul One’s spawn.”
“A good man, your father, sire — I mean the King — I mean His Majesty, your kingly father, sire, beggin’ your—”
“And your father,” Prince Rahbo said, knowing how this sort of thing went. “Did he by chance serve the King’s father, my royal grandsire, in the Third War?”
“The Final War he called it, sire!” The furrier seemed proud, as though it had been his accomplishment. “The last overthrow of the Foul One’s servants in the capital, the cleansing of his strongholds and laboratories, the routing of his soldiers and monsters, the renunciation of his perversion and blackest science, AN END TO EVIL!.” This was all repeated with the unmistakable cadence of a child’s memorized catechism. All that was left was to add— “Sire.” Ah, there it is.
“Aye, that it was,” Prince Rahbo said absently. He was fiddling with the locket around his neck. “Brorr, get the directions from this man, and make sure he’s outfitted for the trip. I’ll be back in my tent.”
“The trip, sire?” It had taken the furrier a second to realize with Prince Rahbo had said.
“You said you’d lead us to the beast, did you not?”
“I — sire, I—”
“Leave a couple of guards behind with his family just in case,” Prince Rahbo said, heading through the door of the furrier’s small timber home.
“In case of what, sire? Are they in danger?”
“If you steer us true they’re in no danger at all,” Prince Rahbo said as he left. He’d gotten the locket open. By the time he reached the flaps of his yellow tent, emblazoned by the historic sun emblem of the Kings of Lihann, he’d inhaled three pinches of the light blue powder inside.
He caught Aleen’s expression from across the tent, where she lay wrapped in furs of gold and red. He looked right back at her and had a fourth sniff.
“Don’t you start with me,” he said before she could begin. You don’t know what it’s like dealing with these people.” He took off his heavy cloak and tossed it on a chair. “The shit I have to do just to get through the day.”
If he’d hoped this would defuse things with Aleen he realized his mistake soon enough. “The shit you have to do just to get through the day?” She was seated fully upright on the bed, her mane of curly black hair hovering around her like a cloud, furs clutched about her chest. If she’s not letting me see anything I’m in real trouble, goddammit. “Okay, fine, let’s start with the fact hat I wouldn’t know what you do all day — you never take me anywhere!”
Prince Rahbo rubbed the bridge of his nose again. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m here — in a tent I can’t leave — not even to relieve myself, Rahbo.”
The prince smiled. “You’re welcome to visit the latrines.”
“Shut up.” Aleen wasn’t amused.
“Sorry! Sorry. But I mean, you know how it works. Consorts,” he said, being extremely generous with that word, “don’t attend meetings or join sorties. I’m pushing it having you here now as it is.” He poured himself a goblet of wine from a nearby decanter and drained it. “Plus,” he said, swallowing. “Plus my son is here, and I don’t wanna have to get into—”
“Your son is three, Rahbo,” Aleen said, incredulous. “Tell him I’m Queen of the Faeries. And leave him with his mother next time, for fuck’s sake.”
“A boy’s place is with his father,” the prince shot back with surprising vehemence. “I’ll not have him raised behind his mother’s skirts as I was.”
Aleen smirked. “He’ll stay behind her skirts if you want what’s beneath mine.”
Prince Rahbo paused, then smiled back slowly. “Oh, I think I’m entitled to what’s beneath those skirts.” “
“Is that a fact. On account of your incredible performance these two nights last?”
“It’s true, the drink and the powder did interfere with — well, it’s of no matter. I think you’ll recall my tongue faced no such impediment.”
Aleen shrugged. “I’ll not deny it. I may still deny you, though.”
The prince had shucked off his mail. “Is that wise,” he said, approaching the bed, “eeing as I’m the reason you’re sleeping in a tent bigger than your family’s old hovel?”
Aleen sighed, shaking out her curls. In the process she let the furs fall to her lap. “You’ve got me there,” she said, and smiled wider.
“I’ve got you here alright,” said the prince, undressing.
—
The hunting party got underway an hour later than Brorr had planned, and it made the huntmaster uncomfortable. Not angry — if the prince wished to pursue other interests until such time as he felt prepared in body and spirit, that was his princely prerogative — but on edge.
The burden-beasts had never been the deadliest or most fearsome creatures in the Foul One’s legions. Left to themselves they roamed the far northern jungles where the foliage was dense enough to hide even genuine behemoths like these. Pressed into the Foul One’s service by one of his Great Spells of Control, they were warped into indefatigable servants, carrying orcs, trolls, even ogres to the front lines. Their massive horns and spikes were no joke, and like all creatures of the Wild North they triggered the Sickness among humans sufficiently exposed, but they had no will to battle of their own, not even after facing the Foul One’s cruel tutelage.
That said, they were ferocious creatures at bay, and the same qualities that made them among the hardiest survivors of the craggy, wooded Southern wilderness surrounding the site of the White Battle two generations past made them among the most dangerous. They were solitary creatures, impervious to most attacks, and too stupid to stay hidden when raiding human settlements if food became scarce. Orcs, by contrast, knew their geese were cooked. They hid, eking out a meager existence from homes within the Great Trunks — or had done, until Father had them burned out for good and all. The Kingdom faced its highest death toll from orcs since the White Battle that year, but such was the price of victory.
“I have my concerns, my prince,” the huntsman said, his huge eyebrows twitching. The hair missing from his head seemed to have migrated to directly above his eyes, the prince thought.
“Well then,” said Prince Rahbo, bending to kiss Aleen’s pale bare ass. His naked consort lay flat on her stomach, asleep, snoring softly, and the touch of the prince’s lips did not wake her. “Share them.”
“Burden-beasts are known to be at their most restless near dusk,” Brorr said. “It’s when the Foul One trained them to expect feedings.”
“Not this one,” the prince said, sliding out of bed and into the robe hanging off a nearby seat. “You heard the furrier — its horns haven’t curled into ram shape yet. This isn’t one of the beasts that rode into battle against Grandfather, it’s…” He stopped, realizing something, and smiled. “Why, it’s a grandson, just like me!”
Brorr smiled politely. (The prince noticed this, but he appreciated good manners.) “Even so, my prince, the mark of the Foul One runs deep, into the very life-essence of the creatures he corrupts. Think ye not of how often we see the young drakes burning fields instead of soaring off to their mountain eyries, as they’d done before his dark work was done to them?”
The huntmaster wasn’t wrong. (He rarely was, the infuriating man.) Prince Rahbo knew the dragon thing had really upset people back then; even his father would swear and cuss when the topic came up, to a degree that seemed to the prince almost involuntary.
Control yourself, he’d always thought at his father. It was a long time ago. And you’re welcome to end dragon-riding in your armies anytime you like, you hypocrite.
“Alright, alright,” the prince conceded. “We’ll get moving.” He glanced back at Aleen. They fought sometimes, but he planned to make her a gift of the creature’s skull after it was all over. Traffic in relics of the Foul One was illegal in the Kingdom of course, but if you knew the right trader and greased the right palms you’d be set for life. He didn’t know how much longer this thing with her would last, but he didn’t want to be mean when it was over. Besides, he’d long found that a happy mistress was a quiet mistress.
“I’m all done here anyway,” he said, grabbing his robe before following Brorr deeper into the tent complex to the armorer.
—
They marched along the forest road for half a day, Brorr leading the way, the furrier by his side. Prince Rahbo road in the back of the train, near the weapon-wagon, which required his close supervision. Messengers ran back and forth along the line if the prince and the huntmaster needed to communicate. The road his grandsire cut through the forest ran so straight it was said the keen-eyed could stand in the center at one end and see straight through to the other.
Like most things about Grandfather, this was peasant horseshit, too good to be true. He’d taken the road often enough to know it bent fifteen degrees to the southwest midway through to avoid the Brownie King’s domain. Not even the Foul One’s leftovers would tread where the mad faery warlord and his army of maneaters made their home.
Either way they had not yet reached that point when a messenger, breathless, ran up to Prince Rahbo’s destrier. They’d found a bear carcass in a shallow bend of the river they were soon to cross. Brorr said it had been gored, and the edge of the wounds was burned a dark green.
So it’s to be easy, then, he thought, sighing over all the time he’d wasted conversing with the furrier in his hovel. I could have had my face between Aleen’s legs. I’ll miss that; she tastes like something I’d order twice.
“Tell Brorr he’s to signal me the moment the beast is in range,” Prince Rahbo said.
“Aye, sire.” The messenger ran back whence he’d come. After a few minutes, the line began to move again.
—
“But sire, I—”
“I’m sorry,” Prince Rahbo said to the furrier. “Did I give the impression this is a negotiation?”
The prince took another pinch of blue powder from his locket and snorted it. He’d catch hell if his father got wind of this, but he’d thrown enough money and girls around court that his father hardly got wind of anything anymore. The old man was still formidable, of course, but…
“Negotiation?” the furrier repeated inanely. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know about all that. It’s me family, sire. Without me I don’t know what would become of them.”
“Nothing will become of them!” The prince had to stop himself from wincing at the sound of his own voice, his statement sounding more angry than reassuring. “You’ll be fine. You see this weapon-wagon, right?” He slapped his gloved hand against the wooden cart. “You’ve got nothing to fear against some burden-beast whose horns haven’t even curved yet.”
“You’re right, sire, begging your pardon, s—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you have my pardon! Never has there existed a man with more of my fucking pardon than you, man. Now what I need you to do,” Prince Rahbo said, reaching for his sword. “Is to get your fucking ass out into that water,” he continued, drawing it. “And bring that fucking burden-beast out from the cave behind the fucking falls.”
“Sire…my family…”
“The family surrounded by my guards?” Prince Rahbo said, eyes twinkling. “The family we know are alive right now? That family? Because if you want I can send someone to ask the guards how they’re doing.” He put his hand on the furrier’s shoulder. “Would you like me to send someone to talk to the guards about your family?”
The man’s face went white. “No need, sire, no need! I’ll go! I’ll go!”
“Good!” Prince Rahbo clapped the man on the back. “Good. Bring us that burden-beast, my good man, and you and your family will have every reason to be glad of it.”
The furrier nodded low and scampered back up the line without a word.
The prince signaled to the men who worked the weapon-wagon. The Sun of Lihann shone white against their black uniforms — Prince Rahbo’s own style. He knew that even now there were those in his father’s court, some even of his own generation, who objected to the absence of yellow in his vexillography.
But the strength of Lihann had never been of gaiety and gold. The Kingdom’s power lay within the white bone and black resolve of its people. If these were also the colors of the Foul One, what of it? Where was it written that a former Chief Wizard of the Kingdom, whatever his faults, must needs be wrong about all things?
“Roll it forward,” Prince Rahbo commanded the men. “Carefully, now.” He nudged his horse forward, keeping pace with the weapon-wagon as the horse that drew it carefully made its way down the increasingly overgrown road. As they passed one particularly hoary tree, the white-on-black sheet covering the wagon’s cargo snagged on a low-hanging branch, revealing a massive metal tube, its mouth broad enough to fit a human head.
—
“I needn’t have worried about the noise.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘I needn’t have worried about the noise’!”
“Aye, it is!” Brorr said, nodding vigorously. It was clear he hadn’t heard a word Prince Rahbo had said. It was nearly impossible to be heard over the roar of the falls, which splashed into the rocks that jutted out of the pool below like teeth before the water continued its flow. The falls created a curtain of water in front of the entrance to the cave behind them, creating a bone-rattling boom with its echo. The half-eaten carcasses another bear and two forest lions lay snagged on the jagged stones; their waterlogged fur made their mangled bodies look sad in the gathering dusk.
From where he stood in the treeline with Brorr, Prince Rahbo turned away. He’d never liked seeing things like that. These were beautiful creatures, their lives cut short due to Father’s failure. He felt a despair well up inside him he hadn’t felt since he led the attack on the Farmer’s March to the capital, the Year of the Bad Wheat. Father’s weakness had forced the prince’s hand then, too. Much as they hated each other, neither Grandfather nor the Foul One would have allowed things to get that far. The Foul One especially would—
“My Prince!” Brorr was shaking him.
Prince Rahbo turned to look at the huntmaster square in the face, staring right at his lips, fat and pink as nightcrawlers. Maybe he could understand what he was saying better this way.
“The oracular statue the scouts found said the beast returned to its cave at daybreak and hasn’t left!” The man’s bald head was beet red with the strain of shouting to be heard.
“Then we must draw it out while the light shines still. Send the furrier.”
Brorr half-nodded, half-shrugged. “We could always send the furrier,” he shouted.
Prince Rahbo pinched his nose again. “Good idea.”
Brorr turned to his squire who ran down the supply line. Several long minutes later he returned with the furrier, who looked harried and disheveled.
“Begging your pardon, sire, I do apologize sincerely for my tardiness. The call of nature…” He trailed off, embarrassed to shout about taking a shit in the woods.
“Never you mind all that, friend,” Prince Rahbo said. “Now’s your chance to help us rid the King—”
“Beg pardon, sire?”
“—dom of —” He stopped, restarted. “I said, ’Now’s your chance to help us rid the Kingdom of this—”
“I’m sure I don’t rightly know how big the Kingdom is, sire. Frightful big, I expect, sire“
The prince took a deep breath, his eyes widening as far as they’d go. “It’s fucking huge, dipshit.”
“Beg pardon, sire?”
“I said, ‘Go down there and lure the burden-beast out.’”
This the furrier heard loud and clear, judging from the way all the color left his ruddy bearded cheeks. The prince took some satisfaction in that. It was the color people went when they realized they were going to do something not because they wanted to, but because Prince Rahbo wanted them to. He referred to it as the whore’s blush in his mind, though in his memoir he hadn’t yet settled on a name for it.
“Sire, please—”
“Oh, it’s fine,” said the prince, pushing the furrier off the side of the road nearest the falls. With his other hand he pointed back at the weapon-wagon, at the metal tube with Prince Rahbo’s monchromatic coat of arms draped over it. “You will not end in the beast’s belly, this I promise. With this weapon the work of my grandsire will, at last, come to an end. It begins here, friend. It begins with your bravery.”
The furrier grabbed his own beard and tugged. “What?” A pause. “Sire?”
Prince Rahbo grabbed he man by the fur lining of his coat and pulled his face in close, speaking directly into his ear. “Get the fuck down into that pool and start splashing. We’ll kill the fucking thing before it can touch you, this I swear on my grandsire’s tomb.”
Still the man did not budge.
The prince brought him in even closer. “We could fetch your family if you’d like their support, of course.”
That did it. Without another word the furrier turned and scampered down the sloping surface of dark brown soil, green moss, and knotted tree roots. In under a minute he was thigh-deep near the banks of the pool. He turned, looking back at the prince for approval.
Prince Rahbo turned to his huntmaster, who shook his head no.
The prince turned back to the distant furrier and waved him forward with his gloved right hand, dangling at the wrist, whisking at the air to motion him on.
The furrier was waist-deep now. His head tossed this way and that, now at the prince, now at the falls and the cave behind it.
Looking back at the furrier, the prince raised his arms in the air and waved them frantically. The furrier took a moment, then three, before turning back to face the falls, waving and splashing.
They felt it move before they saw it, and with the falls they never heard it. But the massive, trunk-like bowed legs of the burden-beast were moving, up towards the entrance of the cave.
A forked tongue emerged from he darkness, luridly pink, flicking at the spray that filled the air in the space between the cave and the cascade.
Slowly into the light emerged a serpentine head the size of a haywain. Its horns, which protruded from the crest of its head, had just begun to curl. Its eyes shone black in the twilight.
The furrier turned and ran.
On its great legs the burden-beast, a young adult now, emerged from the cave. Its horned, fanged head connected almost directly to its body, its circular shape giving the impression of a tortoise out of ifs shell. Rows of bristling spikes guarded its massive back instead; this creature had never known riders, but time was the servants of the Foul One strapped themselves to those spikes and marched these monsters to war. How hardy they’d proven, while in the Kingdom only the oldest of the old still lived to remember their maker’s defeat. How noble they were in exile.
“FIRE,” Prince Rahbo yelled.
A whirr, like the stirrings of a great wheel, could be heard even over the din of the falls. The tube, now fully unsheathed, glowed purple for two seconds, three, before a sound like a thunderclap split the air and a burning white globule burst forth from its mouth.
Prince Rahbo watched as the white fireball sped through the air, embedding itself into the flank of the burden-beast with a sizzling thunk. The creature bellowed in pain, then stopped, froze, suddenly motionless. Beams of red light, then orange, then yellow, then on through the spectrum shot out of its torso from where the white fireball had embedded itself. Each ray punched through guts and bone and muscle and flesh and scales and spikes on its way out.
The burden-beast opened its mouth to roar again. Then its head flew off.
The severed skull was several times larger and faster than the furrier when it collided with him, killing him instantly. The rest of the body exploded in a shower of black blood and viscera that burned every living thing it touched. Prince Rahbo sighed with relief. Out of range, he thought. The tests had not been conclusive about that.
—
The men were moving by torchlight now. Some were tending to the beast’s head, which they’d found fifty yards from the edge of the pool, The furrier’s head and spine remained wrapped around the horn that had hit him when the explosion decapitated the creture; the rest of the man was missing.
Prince Rahbo stood by Brorr, watching the men clean and dress he head for transport. He couldn’t use the royal tanner, that would raise suspicion even about a Prince of Lihann. But he knew someone; knowing people was his real role in this Kingdom, and knowing how to convince them of the inevitable. That someone could transfer the preserved head to Aleen, at which point someone else he knew would take it abroad and sell it for a small fortune. White War enthusiasts were always eager preservationists of history.
But there were other, more frustrating matters to attend to first. “I’ll have to say something to the widow,” the prince said. (At a conversational volume; the trees were dense enough here to block most of the noise from the falls, though the beast’s horned head had shattered a dozen of them like twigs before it landed.)
Brorr continued looking at the giant head. “Will you?” he asked quietly. Beneath his bristly brows his eyes were twin secrets.
Prince Rahbo pinched the bridge of his nose again. Rule is an ugly business. He signaled to the nearest messenger, who came running. “Go back to the furrier’s cabin,” the prince said. “We left guards there.”
“What should I say to them, sire?”
“You won’t need to say anything,” Prince Rahbo said. With his brows furrowed in confusion, the messenger nodded and sped off.
An ugly business, rule. But what could he do? He couldn’t have word of the weapon getting out beyond his loyalists. People would wonder what book of witchcraft contained the instructions for its creation. People would wonder where the prince might aim it. People might prepare against it.
We can’t have that, Prince Rahbo thought. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, we can’t have that.
He would succeed now, he knew. The destruction of the burden-beast was proof of that. A monster bred for generations to be nigh indestructible by man or nature, shattered like a thrown glass, blown apart by magic even the Foul One himself had not yet mastered when Grandfather drove a sword through his face. But he’d kept the great wizard’s spellbooks, every one. For decades now they’d been kept in a vault deep beneath Castle Lihann, where only members of the royal family could access them. To keep them safe, Grandfather had told him just before he died.
Oh, they were safe alright, Grandfather. For year after year we kept our most dangerous weapons safe by not using them. How many good men had died putting down the Farmers’ Rebellions? How many loyal soldiers of Lihann went to the gallows after the Pinewood Conference, all for the offense of demanding a seat at the table? Men died on that day, and this the Council of Regents called a crime. But men die — that’s what men do. If the day came sooner for some than for others…
Well. Let the Farmers take up their pitchforks again. Let another Yellow gather a crowd to hear her calumnies against me. Let the Eastlanders keep swarming the Sun Gate, spreading their filth in the capital. Let the Council of Regents meet to discuss what is to be done with me, and let them invite Father.
This was not the only weapon he’d had made. Even now they were hidden throughout the city, manned by his most loyal soldiers, aimed squarely at all the Kingdom’s problems. The moment they forced him to forego his policy of peace and act, which they came closer to doing with each passing day, the White Sun would rain fire on everyone who befouled the land of Lihann. Then the work of putting the Kingdom to right could truly begin. The men were eager for that day, maybe more than he was himself.
Prince Rahbo walked over to the massive head, pressing one gloved hand against its forehead, above the point directly between its huge black eyes, which shone dumbly as they reflected the torchlight by which the men worked.
“My prince, I wouldn’t—”
“Your grandsire probably fought my grandsire,” Prince Rahbo said to the severed head quietly.. “When we ended evil.”
He took his hand off the horn, wiped his glove against his tunic, and turned to the men. “Work all night if you have to,” he said, and turned back to find his horse through the torchlit gloom, taking a sniff from his locket as he walked and taking care to avoid the water befouled by the beast’s blood, which by now would have spread far downstream. He wanted the head back at the tents for his mistress and his son to wake up to; he’d be transported, and she’d be so busy cooing over its market value that he could probably get away from her and home to peace and quiet for a week. There would soon be so much work to do.
They’re both right, and that’s true across the board on this show, nowhere more so than with the dueling outlooks of Lucy and the Ghoul. The gunslinger is kind of like a one-man Walking Dead, where he’s both the zombies and the human beings who’ve turned into ruthless, merciless killers to survive. On that show, there was only ever one correct answer when faced with the question of whether to help outsiders: Don’t, because they’re always dangerous, and the most important task for anyone is to protect yourself.
Lucy’s presence upsets all that. While the Ghoul is usually right not to trust outsiders, that doesn’t make Lucy’s belief in people’s fundamental goodness seem like a weakness. When he says “Empathy’s like mud, you lose your boots in that stuff,” we’re not supposed to believe that he — or Elon Musk, or any other real-world anti-empathy crusaders — have the right of it. Lucy’s optimism is presented as a strength even when it gets her into trouble; in Fallout’s view, it’s the world, not Lucy, that is wrong and must be made to change.
A-bombs aside, this episode, like its predecessor, made me appreciate the emotional and ethical complexity of Carol’s situation. Should it have been self-evident that Zosia was capable of lying to her by omission, and that the plurbs will never rest until they convert her? Yes. Could that have overcome all her human desire for love and companionship? Should it have done so? I’m not so sure.
Yet Manousos is capable of rejecting the embrace of the Joined. His personality and rigid adherence to the rules make him seem like a difficult person to love, on either the giving or receiving end. (Remember him calling his mom a bitch?) But presumably he desires human fellowship no less than does the similarly misanthropic Carol. He managed to stay true to the cause of the human individual against the encroaching hivemind. What’s her excuse?
It’s love, of course. In getting to know the collective through Zosia, she’s fallen in love with this…individual? Instance? She was selected to be optimally physically attractive to Carol, and she can cater to her with the knowledge and enthusiasm of every human being on the planet. She’s a walking lovebomb. Director Gordon Smith’s Jonathan Demme–esque straight-on closeup as Carol processes her feeling of betrayal upon learning that Zosia is still just one of them — as she realizes certain truths which should perhaps have been self-evident — is powerful because you can feel Zosia’s pull all the same.
Created by Rafe Lee Judkins; based on the books by Robert Jordan (Prime Video)
In assembling this list of the year’s best shows I decided not to hold the total number of entries to some arbitrary multiple of five. Any show where I’d say to a loved one “You know what you should watch?” makes the cut. Getting canceled immediately after this season makes The Wheel of Time a tougher series to recommend, which costs it some points through no fault of its own. It’s a shame, because Wheel, aka the High Fantasy That Fucks, had really come into its own. Its ornate, colorful design, high-camp dominatrix villains, increasingly impressive cast (we’re missing out on Shoreh Aghdashloo as a main antagonist!), prog-album-art visuals, and occasional rousing lesbian drinking song about how great the locals’ tits are all made it a show I eagerly anticipated; its pleasures are still worth sampling.
17. A Thousand Blows
Created by Steven Knight (Disney+/Hulu)
My primary memory of watching A Thousand Blows, just one entry in creator Steven Knight’s long list of period crime dramas, is being knocked flat on my back by Erin Doherty. As Mary Carr, leader of the all-women’s gang of thieves the Forty Elephants, she projects a raw need under the viciousness that’s frighteningly intense. (Anthony Boyle wowed similarly in Knight’s House of Guinness.) Stephen Graham and Malachi Kirby are deeply impressive, too, as the bareknuckle boxers whose paths intertwine with Mary’s. You want to see these people win, which is why it’s so compelling to see what they do when they lose.
16. Pluribus
Created by Vince Gilligan (Apple TV)
Particularly on television, where the genre has thrived ever since Lost landed on that island — and its roots can be traced even further back, to The X-Files and Twin Peaks and The Prisoner — the sci-fi mystery combines two genres that invite audience speculation to create a Frankenstein’s monster of theory-mongering. For a critic who prefers to write about what’s on screen now instead of what might end up on screen several episodes or seasons later, these shows are frustrating, particularly when all the speculating requires one to overlook holes in the here and now. But after creator Vince Gilligan shook off the broad comedy that tends to mark his shows’ early going and drilled into just how deranging being one of the Last People On Earth would be, the juice finally seemed worth the squeeze. The show is augmented immeasurably by its million-dollar visual, its bold use of composition and color, and the work of Rhea Seehorn, who can make a deliberately insufferable character easy to spend time with.
15. Last Samurai Standing
Created by Kento Yamaguchi and Michihito Fujii; based on the book by Shogo Imamura; Creative Director: Junichi Okada(Netflix)
Are you a fan of Takashi Miike samurai films like 13 Assassins and Blade of the Immortal? How do you feel about end-of-the-Old-West stories like The Wild Bunch and Red Dead Redemption 2? What about the way Yuen Woo-Ping rewrote the rules of on-screen combat in The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? If any of this sounds intriguing to you, let alone a combination of all three, make a point of seeking out this stellar samurai series. Choreographed by star Junichi Okada, every fight and battle is completely different from its predecessors, and somehow better. As a bonus, it’s the kind of rousing action-adventure story you can sell to the non-sickos in your family over the break.
14. The Pitt
Created by R. Scott Gemill (HBO Max)
More stylistically and narratively straightforward — more downright broadcast-networkian, even — than anything else on this list, The Pitt was a tough sell for me at first. It was only a matter of a few episodes. Once the show gets past the unavoidable surfeit of “Here’s this doctor or nurse and here’s their name and here’s their deal” dialogue and digs deep into the physical and psychological labor involved in keeping both a hospital emergency room and its traumatized staff up and running, its game cast and real-time gimmick make it nigh irresistible viewing.
13. Task
Created by Brad Ingelsby (HBO)
Everything everyone else saw in Mare of Easttown, Brad Ingelsby’s previous drama/thriller about crime in the downwardly mobile Philadelphia suburbs, I saw here. Tom Pelphrey, perhaps the single most endearing actor working today, plays a small timer who draws big heat by trying to do the right thing after a home invasion goes horribly wrong; Tom Ruffalo, Fabien Frankel, and Alison Oliver are among the messy, endearing cops (sorry) trying to track him down. Directors Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield shoot the woods of DelCo as if drawing forth their very life force, creating a mood best labeled fentanyl transcendentalism.
12. The Lowdown
Created by Sterlin Harjo(FX/Hulu)
Unless the Dude himself is involved, sun-baked South/Western neo-noir is generally not my scene. I wear all black all the time, and this is a “guys who wear brown” genre. Oil and water, you know? Imagine my surprise, then, as The Lowdown steadily won me over. As a comedy it’s rock solid, its jokes and sight gags — more often than not at the expense of Ethan Hawk’s Lee Raybon, the good-hearted, down-on-his-luck “truthstorian” investigative reporter at the center of it all — landing with a high hit rate. The supporting cast is killer: Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Peter Dinklage, Keith David, Tim Blake Nelson, and Paul Sparks, just to name a few. Ethan Hawke plays Lee as what George R.R. Martin might write as hedge knight — a hardscrabble servant of the public good, whether or not he earns either money or appreciation for it (though he’d be happy for either). The Lowdown is a poignant plea to do the right thing in an era that rewards the opposite, even considering the cost.
11. Daredevil: Born Again
Created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord; based on the work of Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr., Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Charles Soule, Christos Gage, Ron Garney, Stefano Landini, and others (Disney+)
Daredevil: Born Again is about a blind vigilante ninja lawyer called Daredevil teaming up with his frenemy, a serial killer called the Punisher, to take down Donald Trump and his army of sociopathic cops. That’s it. That’s what it’s about. It’s as clear as day. It’s the reason Garth Marenghi called writers who use subtext cowards. This show is the best thing Marvel had put out in years, despite its many growing pains during development and production. Arriving early in the year, it was a welcome sign of artistic resistance to fascism via one of the most popular franchises on the planet; in that category, though, it would soon be topped.
10. It: Welcome to Derry
Created by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs; Showrunners: Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane; based on the work of Stephen King (HBO)
To paraphrase myself talking about the similarly strong start for Nick Antosca’s Channel Zero way back when, the first scene of the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry is grosser, scarier, weirder, more pointedly political, and just plain meaner than everything in director Andy Muschietti’s two It feature films combined. The show almost feels like penance for those movies, in a way — as if Muschietti and his collaborators were determined to get the queasy mix of nostalgia and brutality found in Stephen King’s masterpiece right this time. They succeed in large part thanks to a surprisingly strong lineup of child actors, led by Clara Stack and Matilda Lawler, and, amazingly, an adult cast that can command audience interest just as well as the adorable kids and the killer clown (played once again, and better than ever, by Bill Skarsgård). Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, Madeleine Stowe, and especially Chris Chalk as recurring King character Dick Hallorann aren’t acting like they’re in a Halloween haunted house, but rather in a place where their families, sanity, and souls are legitimately at stake. Despite some needlessly Hollywood plotting, it’s a testament to the power of cruelty in art.
9. Monster: The Ed Gein Story
Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (Netflix)
Between The People vs. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Dahmer, and Monsters, Ryan Murphy and his collaborators are responsible for the four best true crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Murphy and Ian Brennan’s latest Monster show, about the Wisconsin killer and grave robber Ed Gein, feels less tightly focused than the other four shows, but this is to be expected due to The Ed Gein Story‘s expanded scope. Bluntly gruesome and woven through with surreal flourishes, it really is about the Ed Gein story — not just the killer’s life, his crimes, and the media circus immediately surrounding their discovery, as was the case with O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan and Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers, but the legend that grew up around him. Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and the true-crime industry itself can all be traced, in one way or another, back to Ed’s lonely heart.
8. The Chair Company
Created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin (HBO)
The original concept behind Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard’s comic book series The Walking Dead — which I liked quite a bit, as opposed to the TV show — was simple: What if a zombie movie never ended? “What if an I Think You Should Leave sketch never ended?” works well as a description of The Chair Company. ITYSL creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin trap Robinson’s senior-manager everyman Ron Trosper in a labyrinth of fraud and corruption that he uncovers more or less by being monomaniacally insufferable. I get the impression from the season’s cliffhanger ending that the plan here is to follow the original roadmap for Twin Peaks, whose creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never intended to solve their central mystery, using it instead to draw us deeper and deeper into their weird world. Will Ron ever get to the bottom of why that chair fell out from under him? Does it matter?
7. Foundation
Created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman; based on the books by Isaac Asimov(Apple TV)
There’s no other…okay, there’s one other science fiction show on television that looks as good as Foundation. (More on that in a bit.) Everything from space travel to psychic powers to genocidal superweapons are rendered as kaleidoscopic and beautiful, while owing very little to the obvious genre antecedents. There’s heroism and sadism, derring-do and body horror. There’s mid-century SF’s usual obsession with scientifically measuring and predicting the broad movements of human society. There’s sex appeal galore. Right at the apex of it all are the strange, engrossing performances of Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, and Laura Birn as the immortals cursed with the burden of Empire, turned into monsters by wielding more power than any being should hold. There’s a lesson here about personalist regimes that’s too loud, and often too blackly funny, to ignore.
6. Murdaugh: Death in the Family
Created by Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr; based on the podcast by Mandy Matney (Hulu)
I’ve deliberately avoided using the word “mesmerizing” during any of these write-ups so far, despite it being a go-to superlative for someone in my line of work. (Well, for me anyway.) This is because there is one performance out of everything I watched this year that deserves “mesmerizing,” and it’s Jason Clarke as Alex Murdaugh in this true-crime drama from under the Nick Antosca umbrella. With his Christmas-ham face, his good ol’ boy charm, and his mountain of criminal secrets, his dynamic with his kind but enabling wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette, proving the weakness of her work on Severance is just a writing issue) resembles nothing so much as that of Tony and Carmela Soprano. Both stories are about the insatiable maw at the heart of the American dream, and who gets fed into it, and by whom. A sharp, tight, sensational show.
5. Alien: Earth
Created by Noah Hawley; based on the screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (FX/Hulu)
An unconscious man with an alien parasite attached to his face, hastily stashed under a child’s bed. A sheep with one bulbous eye, gazing coolly at its surroundings. An android with a shock of white hair, observing the sheep-creature right back. A wide-eyed billionaire manchild, vibrating with sociopathic glee. A child in a woman’s body, cooing at an apex predator from outer space. A glowering working stiff with nothing left to live for, and no morality to govern that life, save the completion of his mission. A xenomorph in full flower, running through the forest canopy, basking in the hot sun like a jungle cat. By stitching together memorable images in an almost ruminative way while never skimping on the all-out monster action, Noah Hawley has added a third entry to the Alien canon, behind only Ridley Scott and James Cameron in the originality and impact of his vision of the creature and the world it invades.
4. The White Lotus
Created by Mike White (HBO)
From the moment the show’s new and improved theme song began playing, it was clear something different was going on with The White Lotus this season. I’d previously found its broad satire of the leisure class smug and insufferable, but this season it opened up its tonal range to its great benefit. There’s a grand doomed love affair. There are characters who aim to do the right thing as much as there are who take the easy way out. There’s an astonishing monologue about the nature of desire by Sam Rockwell that has a decent claim on being the scene of the year. Lavish shots of the natural world and its animal inhabitants serve as the lifeblood of the thing, flowing between scenes and lending the whole sordid thing an air of mystery and danger.
3. Chief of War
Created by Thomas Pa’a Sibbett and Jason Momoa; showrunner: Doug Jung(Apple TV)
Jason Momoa, man. Jason goddamn Momoa. Star, co-creator, co-writer of every episode, director of its absolutely breathtaking finale, a landmark achievement in screen combat — watch Chief of War and you’ll find his achievements nearly as impressive as those of Ka’iana, the painfully ethical warlord of the show’s title. Torn between two women, at war with two kings on behalf of another — and all these characters are fully fleshed out to the point where you feel they could sustain the show as the lead themselves — Ka’iana is a real-life figure turned legendary. That’s Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett’s overall approach to the material: a myth for the Hawaiian Islands, an answer to King David or King Arthur. Appropriately, the visuals are mythic in scope, using greens and reds and yellows in painterly fashion; Momoa does things with digitially color-graded orange in the finale I’ve simply never seen on screen before, the way Danny Boyle put new shades of green on camera in 28 Years Later. It’s that kind of story, almost, right down to the presence of a Bone Temple. The finale delivers the climactic battle the show’s been promising all along, too — no false advertising here. An epic like few others.
2. Adolescence
Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham(Netflix)
You forget about the stunt aspect. That’s the highest compliment I can pay Adolescence, considering how impressive the stunt aspect is. Director Philip Baratini shoots each of the show’s four episodes as a single continuous take, immersing us in the lives of a Liverpool family being detonated by their young son’s shocking, misogynistic crime. A Thousand Blows stars Stephen Graham (the show’s co-creator and co-writer) and Erin Doherty knocked me out once already; in this they’re almost too luminous with the terrible truth of their characters’ circumstances to look at. Owen Cooper, who plays the boy at the heart of it all with precocious power, is the acting find of the year. This show is a triumph.
1. Andor
Created by Tony Gilroy; based on the work of George Lucas and others(Disney+)
“Andor,” I wrote on Bluesky partway through watching the show’s second season via advance screener copies provided to me by the Mouse, “is a stone cold masterpiece. There’s stuff in Andor Season 2, images, moments, as good as anything on television ever. Not grading on the Mandalorian curve, grading on the Mad Men curve.” I stand by every word, and I’ll go further. Andor isn’t just the best show of the year, it’s one of the ten best television shows ever made.
I believe Andor is the most expensive television series ever made, and every penny is visible on screen. Tony Gilroy and his collaborators have created a fully fleshed out society from the sketched out structure left behind by George Lucas as the bridge between his prequel trilogy and the original films. He crafts a bright, shiny dystopia of propaganda, ecocide, and genocide — one that countless viewers were all too able to recognize as our own — then examines what enforcing that regime, or fighting back against it, would really look like.
The result is a Star Wars show that treats the existence of something called the Death Star as the moral obscenity it really is. It explores the strangely compelling sexual neuroses of fascist apparatchiks, and is unsparing about the kind of sexual violence the servants of the Empire would inflict on civilians. It tells a terrifying story of genocide from start to finish. It shows the sacrifice of personal happiness inherent in a life lived for the cause. When it finally introduces the Force, a subject from which the series stays away for nearly its duration, the concept regains its power as the animus within all living things. “Life will defeat you,” Winston Smith insisted to the Party in 1984; Andor says the same thing, and means it. Vital, elegiac, magnificent.
