It’s the second Boiled Leather podcast to drop today! In the latest installment of our Best of ASOIAF series, Stefan and I take a look at the inspiration for next month’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, “The Hedge Knight” — available here or wherever you get your podcasts!
‘Twin Peaks’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Realization Time’
“Harry, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair — or two cups of good, hot, black coffee, like this.”
It’s exceedingly rare to receive actionable advice on better living from a TV cop, but Dale Cooper is a rare cop indeed. I think this little speech, from the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks’ short first season, does more to endear Coop to us than half a dozen high-speed chases, collared perps, or climactic shootouts would have done.
I reviewed the seventh episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour on Chief of War!
Jason Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett’s gorgeous historical epic Chief of War was one of the best TV shows of the year, especially for viewers of a Throne-ish persuasion. Stefan and I talk all about it in the latest Patreon-exclusive episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Conversation!
‘Pluribus’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Charm Offensive’
Carol’s moaning was sweet, it was hot, it was tender and moving and erotic, and it got me to thinking. Carol reacts to kissing Zosia the way that she does because she’d kept every victim/beneficiary of “the Joining” at arm’s length, and they she, this whole time. But of course it’s insane to completely remove yourself from humanity, even the strange form of it represented by members of the hivemind like Zosia. You need that contact, however peculiar it has now become. Or Carol needs it, anyway: When she was totally cut off, she really did begin losing her mind.
Yet at the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was also insane to talk with Zosia, to befriend Zosia, to make love to Zosia, like Zosia is a real person, when in fact she’s…well, all real people, all at once. She is the original Zosia. She is Carol’s dead wife. She is Carold’s dead wife’s relatives. She is Carol’s own relatives! She is every woman Carol ever fucked, and every woman they ever fucked, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Is the intimacy required for even the most exhibitionistic and non-monogamistic sex possible when your partner is every living human being, minus one dozen? What about the intimacy required to confide, to conspire, to share hopes and dreams and frustrations and inside jokes? To stargaze amid incredible romantic red lights, to play croquet on the 50 yard line, to get massages, to visit an old haunt like the Mulholland Drive–esque diner the plurbs rebuild for Carol’s enjoyment? To do all the things friends and lovers do?
Keep in mind also that Zosia is also all of the world’s greatest lovers. She is every woman who’s ever given head and every woman who’s ever been given head. She’s every man in that same equation, if for some reason that knowledge should come in handy. By the time she and Carol have sex, the episode has already established that Zosia is literally unbeatable in games of skill or knowledge, having instantaneous access to the thoughts — but not the physical or emotional feelings — of every human being on earth. Tough to imagine this idea was introduced in the same episode where she and Carol fuck out of pure coincidence, right?
So is it mind-blowing? Is it the best sex she’s ever had? Is it tailor-made to match the performance and preferences of a familiar lover, like her wife? Is it deliberately dialed down by a collective consciousness that knows every sexual trick in the book, including how not to overwhelm your more inexperienced inamorata? Is there a reason it’s happening now?
‘Fallout’ thoughts, Season 2, Episode 1: ‘The Innovator
There are a million reasons Fallout shouldn’t work. For starters, it’s a video-game adaptation, and those almost never work regardless. It’s an over-the-top satire of capitalism and the fantasy of the American West, a subgenre with a pretty shabby success rate on the small screen. It ricochets between a dizzying array of reference points and emotional tones every episode. It treats violence both as a hideous moral blight and totally awesome.
It shouldn’t work, but it does. Adapted by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner from the games created by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, Josh Sawyer, and others, Fallout is a spectacularly savage send-up of megalomaniacal technocrats, billionaire psychopaths, and American fascists. (Brought to you by Jeff Bezos and all your friends at Amazon!) Starring several of the most telegenic actors working today, it’s stupid like a fox, smarter than it needs to be, and so nasty I’m surprised they can get away with it.
How the ‘Fallout’ Writers Gave Sex Appeal to a Ghoul With No Nose
When we learn his company helped drop the bombs itself, it hits viscerally. Why did you make that choice?
What we were trying to grapple with is a corporation whose stock price goes up when there’s a war and people are terrified. They’d have financial motivation to stoke the fears of war further and further, which might actually cause the bomb to drop. Look around and see what’s happening with A.I., or new technologies in the military space. It feels like everyone’s on this hamster wheel because it’s increasing the number of zeros in their bank accounts, the world be damned. That’s why this felt so interesting and frightening to me. The world might end because a few people needed to get rich.
I interviewed Fallout co-creator and co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet for the New York Times. Yes, they made the Ghoul sexy on purpose.
‘Twin Peaks’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 6: ‘Episode 5’ aka ‘Cooper’s Dreams’
Twin Peaks doesn’t have storylines, it has story clusters. That’s the simplest way to picture it, I think, and the easiest way to make sense of it. There are a handful of core concepts — the murder of Laura Palmer, the Ghostwood Estates/Packard Sawmill real estate swindle, the cross-border drug trade, the saga of Norma and Big Ed, the cops, the teens, the dreams — around which different sets of characters swirl. A few characters, like Dale Cooper, Audrey Horne, Leo Johnson, Bobby Briggs, and Laura Palmer herself, are able to cross between clusters. By connecting them, they help create the sense that it’s all one big story after all.
I reviewed the sixth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!
‘It: Welcome to Derry’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Winter Fire’
This fluid approach to the movies’ continuity is part of what makes this show such a surprise. “It: Welcome to Derry” feels like a mulligan for Muschietti, who directed them. The first film’s haunted-hayride vibe, the second’s nonsensical plot and warmed-over, quip-heavy dialogue: All of that has been jettisoned. In their place stands a season-long testament to the power of cruelty in art.
From start to finish, “Welcome to Derry” has relentlessly probed fears that plague our childhood and our adulthood. Children are tormented with their worst nightmares. Adults are taunted for their most painful failures and confronted with their most terrible memories.
At the center of it all lurks an orange lunatic who feeds on fear and suffering, empowered by a government apparatus working to spread that fear and suffering from sea to shining sea. As such, Pennywise is a monster for our degraded age.
The Art of the Ordeal: How ‘Pluribus’ Fits Into Cinema’s Most Grueling Subgenre
Rooting you in the physical experiences of another person, one who isn’t even real, is one of the great magic tricks cinema is able to pull off. It’s especially hard when those experiences are unpleasant, enormously so when those unpleasant experiences drag on and on for an episode or a movie. Yet the Ordeal draws us in, because there’s catharsis to be found in physically connecting with someone who is suffering — the profound catharsis of empathy, which requires us to get out of our own heads just as the Ordeal itself requires its harried heroes to leave the comforts of the familiar world behind for parts unknown. As for Manousos, he’s still got a long way to go if he survives the spines. (The arrival of a hivemind helicopter is a good sign, right?) With any luck — ours, not his — his grueling, stunning Ordeal will continue.
In honor of this week’s Pluribus I wrote about the Ordeal, one of my favorite cinematic subgenres. Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Revenant, Stalker, Gravity, The Descent, Aguirre – The Wrath of God, Annihilation, Children of Men, Fitzcarraldo, Valhalla Rising, The Terror, American Primeval — if a movie or TV show is about someone killing themselves to get from Point A to Point B, I’m going to make a Point of C-ing it.
‘Pluribus’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 7: ‘The Gap’
There’s so much that Pluribus is doing that no other show on TV is doing right now. Those crystal blue skies! The majority of entire episodes passing in dialogue-free silence! The full commitment to the bit of playing the entire “Hello, Carol” voicemail recording every single time she dials! Pluribus makes life feel like the never-ending struggle it is, and it’s damn good at it. I don’t need the jokes and gags and bits. Just point the cameraat two people slowly being driven insane by the fact that, for all intents and purposes, they are the only two people.
The Prism
a short story by Sean T. Collins
“It’s trivially easy.” Vayanna was standing near the rocks at the edge of the glade, deposited by some long-ago stream. She pawed at the ground impatiently with one hoof. “That was the whole point of all of this.”
Sitting on the grass in the twilight, Barnod looked at the enormous gemstone in his hands. The Red Prism they called it, the wizards who’d warred over it for years. Barnod was first blooded in one of those wars, striking down a Thedan while in the service of the Wizard of the Wastes. Even as the blade sank into the man’s skull, Barnod saw in his eyes that the man no more wanted to be there than did Barnod himself. But orders come, and men march.
He set the gem, which was half again as broad as his fist, down on the grass beside him. He and the Prism were surrounded by an intricate pattern of shapes and runes, rendered in white around the center of the glade. Vayanna herself had done it, carefully following the steps outlined in the spellbook Barnod had stolen along with the Prism herself. Over and over she would dip her horn in the bucket of paint Barnod had carried with him into the Bluewood, then lower her head toward the ground. Barnod would take it in both hands and guide it, gently, as they painted out the spell together.
Finally he looked up at Vayanna. The unicorn was a mottled purple and brown against the blue foliage of the forest and the grey of the rocks. She looked at him expectantly, through eyes violet and sad. That was not the state of Vayanna, though. She was happy, always happy. Like all beasts of her kind, she was joy incarnate. Barnod loved her for it.
He took a deep breath and let it out. “You’re right,” he said finally, the statement a deliberate exorcism of his own doubt. “You’re right,” he repeated. “The Red Prism will take care of it. I just— ”
“So what if you’re not a wizard?” Vayanna walked closer to her lover, careful not to tread on the markings they’d made. “Have I ever cared about that in the slightest?”
Barnod brushed his hands over his bloody cloak and stood. “No…”
Vayanna shook her head, her dark purple mane a luminous, lively black in the moonlight. “No, not ever,” she confirmed. “I don’t love an apprentice wizard, I don’t love some dropout from the Crucible, I love you.” She lowered her muzzle onto his shoulder. ”I love Barnod.” He could feel her jaw move as she spoke.
Barnod tilted his head to the side to rest it against her, raising his left arm to wrap around her head in an embrace. “I love you,” he said. “More than…well, more than I ever thought it was possible to love a—” He stopped short.
“A person,” Vayanna said, lifting her head to look him in the eyes with one of her own. “That’s all I am, Barnod — a person.”
“Of course you are!” His voice was suddenly vehement, so terrified was he of offending her. Whatever their other differences, the Horned Ones were a thinking race just as humans were. “You are the greatest person I’ve ever known, Vayanna Ayalawaya of the Ivory Horn.”
It was true. When Barnod had deserted the Waste Wizard’s army, it was Vayanna who’d found him, dying of infection and exposure at the Bluewood’s edge. With her power she’d nursed him back to health; with her tenderness she brought him back to life.
Quickly they found they had much and more in common. They shared a love for birds and their study; Vayanna would call one species after another to alight on her horn or her back, where Barnod could observe everything from the tiniest hummingbird to the mightiest hawk at a closeness even the gods were not afforded. They both drew deep delight from the music of the Kelekeri, whose harps were praised above all of Elf-kind, and for good reason. They both fell in love with the Bluewood, for under its eaves they fell in love with each other.
Barnod couldn’t remember whose idea it was to use the Red Prism. That was funny; it seemed like the sort of thing he ought to remember. But that’s often how it was with he and Vayanna: Their thoughts blended together, so that it was hard to tell one’s ideas from the other.
The Prism, it was said, refracted all light to a gruesome shade of crimson, an indication of its uncanny nature. Its origin was a matter of dispute. Some wizards said it was dropped into the world by Shon, the Lord of Time, as a means of transformation and redemption. Others insisted it was thrust up from the underworld by Loshon the Unchanging, who intended it to tempt the followers of Shon into defying their fate. No one seemed to know for sure during the wars, but everyone had a buddy whose buddy had a brother whose commanding officer had said…whatever. It didn’t matter, not anymore.
The thing was that Barnod didn’t fear the change itself. Neither did Vayanna — to a fault, almost. What Barnod feared was his own capabilities, or lack thereof. He’d barely started at the Crucible when the wars began, and like most students he was immediately drafted, in hopes that the aggregate of their abilities would be enough to turn the tide.
That hope was not misplaced, as it turned out. The Wizard of the Wastes’ control over the crucible gave his army the edge, and when the final battle took place on Nickel Plain, students stood on the front line against the Spiral Wizard. Barnod had not been among them, which was the reason he was still alive. But the acolytes’ sacrifice enabled the Wizard of the Wastes to claim the Red Prism as his own, once and for all. The Spiral Wizard retreated into his vortex, and the matter was settled.
But not for Barnod. The Waste Wizard’s victory was catastrophic for him, as he would now be a wanted man for his desertion among the victorious side and an outcast for his initial participation in the slaughter among the losers. All he wanted to do was slink away and raise a family on a farm somewhere; he didn’t know the first thing about farming, but the sound of it was irresistibly romantic.
One of the few things that the grunts on both sides of the battle agreed upon was that the Red Prism could refract life as well as light. A person who gazed into its depths could emerge from the experience a different person entirely — the person they were meant to be, perhaps, or the person they most wanted to be.
In the hands of a wizard, the Red Prism’s power was nearly limitless. In the hands of an apprentice like Barnod it was primarily a large red gem, but by all accounts it would still be enough to transform a unicorn into a human even in untrained hands. It could turn Vayanna into the woman of his dreams, and hers as well.
They had tried doing it the way they were. They really had. After sucking her horn for a while, he’d put himself inside her and spend. It was good for Barnod, great even, and it was frightfully romantic for them both. But he wanted, he needed, Vayanna to feel as good as he did when they did it, and so did she.
They loved the idea the second they came up with it. They thrilled to it, held it between them, threw it up in the air to watch it flutter around them like a swarm of butterflies. Love like this, need like this, did not come around for people like Barnod often. He knew that unicorns experienced love differently from humans — it had something to do with their immortality — but in the moonlight in the blue forest, looking into Vayanna’s eyes, he knew she loved him as much as she’d ever loved anyone or anything else. All either of them wanted was for him to look into eyes that matched the size and shape of his own.
Vayanna had brought him to the Waste Wizard’s fortress herself, cloaking them both under a shield of inviolability using the power of her horn. With the Vintner’s Blade in his hand — he’d stolen it from the corpse of an enemy soldier he only later realized was King Strobba of the Valleylands — Barnod and his mount and lover slew their way through a phalanx of guards, stealing the Red Prism and the spellbook that had been claimed with it. It was over before the guards knew what hit them, and the Wizard, who’d been in his cups since his victory, was too drunk to notice anything was wrong.
They rode hard for half a week until they reached the eaves of the Bluewood. Only then did they feel safe from the Waste Wizard’s forces. Even now they would be combing the no-man’s-lands for the bloody-handed thieves who’d stolen his rightfully gained spoils of war, looking for a man with a mighty blade and a steed with a deadly horn.
It wouldn’t matter. By the time the hunters reached the Bluewood, Barnod and Vayanna would be long gone. His sword was driven into a dead tree nearby, from which he had no intention of retrieving it; his hornéd steed would soon be neither, but rather a beautiful woman with violet eyes who in no way would match the evidence of an animal attack.
For all the danger of the plan, Vayanna had been happy to go along. She could find the happiness in anything. It was one of he reasons Barnod loved her so much to begin with. God, how he dreamed of holding his woman in his arms — how he longed for it, how he hungered for it. His love for Vayanna was a staruburst inside of him, an exploding sun. He needed her to have a body capable of receiving the imprint of his love for her, using his own body as an instrument. He wanted to walk with her, really walk with her, arm in arm, hand in hand. He wanted to sleep in a bed with her, curling up behind her, telling this immortal woman she was a little girl he’d take care of for as long as he lived.
He hadn’t meant to do it, but by pronouncing her full name and title, he had initiated the ritual.
“Now, baby?” Vayanna said trepidatiously, hoof in the air.
“Now, baby,” Barnod confirmed.
She stepped into the circuit of spells. Immediately they blazed forth in heatless crimson fire.
Barnod picked up the Red Prism and stood. He and his lover approached one another as the red flames flickered, until they were face to face. Barnod lowered his forehead to Vayanna’s snout, left hand wrapped around to stroke her main, right hand carrying the Prism.
“I love you with all my whole heart,” he said.
“I love you too,” she said. “Do it, please.”
Barnod nodded. Holding the prism to her horn, he closed his eyes and repeated the phrase he’d studied half a hundred times in the moldering spellbook:
“Let the heart have its way.”
A wave of red light coursed down the length of Vayanna’s horn and through her head and body. Then another, then another, then another, syncing to the beat of her heart.
“Vayanna, are you—”
A fearsome whinny told him all he needed to know. Take care to stay within the circuit, Barnod stepped away from the unicorn, who by now appeared to be throbbing with an infernal red glow that got brighter and brighter with each pulse. A sudden spray of droplets against his face made him realize the red light was turning liquid, spraying now from Vayanna’s body with each burst of illumination. The unicorn shook her head from side to side and staggered.
Then the light grew so steady and bright Barnod had to shield his eyes. He didn’t see the explosion coming until it was already hitting him, soaking him from head to toe in thick red fluid that was luminescent in the dark. The spray of red in the air made the Bluewood behind look purple in the gloaming.
The ground was as saturated as his hair and clothes when next Barnod looked up. There, standing before him, was Vayanna, a unicorn no longer. But her purple hair, her skin of coffee and lavender, and the white horn that lay glowing red at her feet left no doubt: This was the woman he loved.
Then he looked in her eyes, and he knew something had gone wrong. They were remote, staring off into the distance, gathering tears. Her lips quivered. With what appeared to be genuine physical force, she wrenched her head to look at Barnod, and sobbed so hard it was as though she were vomiting.
Barnod rushed to her, throwing his cloak around her nakedness, taking her hands in his. “Vayanna,” he said, “Vayanna, Vayanna my love, what’s wrong?”
He looked into her eyes and saw horror looking back at him. Speech was a struggle for her, he saw, perhaps due to the unfamiliar musculature of her jaw. Nevertheless, with some effort, she spoke to him. “Is,” she said. “This. What it’s. Always. Like? For you?”
“Like what?” Barnod asked, not understanding. “Is what always like—”
“Love,” she said, through teeth she restrained from chattering long enough to get the wordout.
“Yes!” he shouted, eyes brightening. “Yes, love is always like this, it’s always there, it never dies.”
Vayanna’s face crumpled. Tears streamed from her eyes. “Mortals die,” she said. “Love should die.”
Her legs gave out, and Barnod caught her, easing her to the ground, where he held her in his arms. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Forever, that’s what we wanted, remember?”
With what seemed like physical pain she lifted her beautiful face to look into his. The tears were flowing freely now, in rivulets that marked the borders of her human form’s strong nose. “Forever is too long.”
Barnod’s heart was pounding. Something was very wrong here. “Vayanna” — it pained him to say this, but he loved her too much not to — “we can change you back at any time. The Prism has that power.”
“Can it undo what I have done to my own heart?” she wailed with sudden vehemence. “Now I see! Now I see that love is a curse for those of mortal form,” she finished for him. She was shaking now.
Barnod was starting to panic. “But — but you’re still immortal, the spellbook said that you’d still be immortal!”
“Immortal, yes,” she said bitterly. “In my bones, in my sinews, in the hair of my mane, yes, yes, immortal, yes. But my mind has taken a shape that can never be restored.”
She looked up at him, and there was such pity in her eyes it made him ashamed. “How do you live like this, o man? How can you survive love, knowing all the while that it yokes you forever to the heart of a corpse?”
She had the horn in her hands already, somehow. Before Barnod knew what was happening she plunged it into her chest. Deeper and deeper it sank without emerging from the other side.
Barnod had her hands in his now, he was pulling back, he was fighting her every inch, but it was no use. Still glowing a dull and angry red, the horn vanished into the bare spot between Vayanna’s breasts.
She opened her mouth, let out an equine scream that sent a flock of bluecrows soaring into the air above the canopy, and died in Barnod’s arms.
He spent all that night and into the next morning preparing her grave, digging till his fingers were bloody and his body wavering with exhaustion. Finally he lowered her into he hole, kissing her on he forehead where her horn once grew. The horn itself he placed in her hands.
He buried her then, one handful of soil after another. As the sun shone down he finished, fingers dirty and bloody, gore-stained tunic soaked now with sweat, body trembling with exhaustion. At last he collapsed and fell asleep on the grave he’d made her. In the distance he heard, faintly, a Thedan horn. As the last few tears left clear paths through the dirt coating his face, he slept with the woman he loved.
‘Twin Peaks’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Episode 4’ aka ‘The One-Armed Man’
And then there’s Bobby and Shelly. Boy oh boy, is there ever Bobby and Shelly. Director Tim Hunter films the two of them making out in her unfinished house, Shelly straddling Bobby’s lap in her waitress uniform as they kiss and clutch at each other. When Bobby gets the idea to use Leo’s shirt to get rid of him, Shelly rewards him by opening her uniform to reveal a black lace teddy, against which she clutches a gun suggestively. And just like that, Bobby decides he has a few minutes to spare before he leaves after all.
I don’t blame him. Mädchen Amick is the most beautiful woman in a cast that includes Lara Flynn Boyle, Joan Chen, Sherilyn Fenn, Sheryl Lee, and Peggy Lipton, which to paraphrase The Big Lebowski puts her in the running for the most beautiful woman worldwide. Dana Ashbrook is a megababe too, whose mercurial nature — beneath the tough-guy act he’s clearly an emotional and easily hurt kid — makes his obvious hunger for Shelly feel wild and insatiable.
But that’s just it: He’s complicated, and so is their whole situation. Bobby is a red-hot lover, but he really did care about Laura, and Shelly says she wished she could have comforted him at her funeral. Shelly, meanwhile, is perfectly capable of playing the seductive desperate housewife, all bullets and black lace, but she also spends her shift commiserating with Norma about their similarly shit taste in husbands.
So yes, they’re gorgeous, but it’s the stickiness of their situation, the sharp angles and rough edges, that makes Bobby and Shelly’s romance work so well. Passion is the means by which they process their pain. Isn’t that the purpose of soaps — like Invitation to Love, the show within the show that the characters keep on watching even as their real lives exceed it — in the first place?
I reviewed the fifth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!
‘It: Welcome to Derry’: Madeleine Stowe on Playing Evil’s Little Helper
Ingrid does not appear evil at first. Was it challenging to keep that aspect of the character under wraps?
Andy [Muschietti] actually loved her very much! He feels that she was good in her heart. That wasn’t a difficult thing to portray. There’s a sense that Ingrid is stunted. She’s caught in the age when this terrible tragedy happened. She’s been in a state of suspension all these years, waiting for the impossible, waiting for her father to be reclaimed. She sees something in this girl Lilly, and her compassion for her is very real — but then it stops, because there’s something else that’s really driving her. Part of that involves Pennywise’s trickery over her, the illusion that he’s created.
But when I see what’s going on right now, there are grand illusions happening before our very eyes. And nobody believes that they’re a bad human being. You can see that in the Epstein emails, for instance. It’s fascinating to me, watching Epstein have conversations with Larry Summers: They’re saying certain things about Donald Trump, but nobody’s looking to themselves. They view themselves as the good guys. In Ingrid’s mind, she thinks she can extract her father from It and bring him back to himself, and all the rest will end. It’s an “end justifies the means” situation.
‘It: Welcome to Derry’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 7: ‘The Black Spot’
“This town is the monster.” After the events of this episode, I think Charlotte Hanlon can be forgiven for stating the thesis of “It: Welcome to Derry” so baldly. The creature known as Pennywise runs riot in this episode, to be sure, in all of his head-chopping, child-terrorizing glory. But he is helped in his gruesome work by the good people of Derry, who commit a mass murder that is swept under the rug by the time people are having their coffee the next morning.
I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)
How crass all this is: I Love LA vs. The Chair Company
Load up HBO Max these days and you can’t miss the promos for its big comedy of the season. Created by and starring a cult-favorite comedy actor, it’s a skin-crawling look at a secret, sweaty side of the American experience. Desperate to find not just money but career fulfillment, our hapless protagonist must negotiate a world of scams, in which people with no morals purposely sell junk with no value to customers with no standards, enriching themselves at the expense of society while lying through their teeth. The show depicts the inner workings of its unique death-spiral-capitalist hellscape — one in which many of the characters do not even appear to realize they live — with an understanding of how this awful, soul-crushing shit works that borders on frightening in its clarity. But hey, if I Love LA doesn’t work for you, there’s also The Chair Company.
‘Pluribus’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 6: ‘HDP’
For the first however many minutes of this week’s Pluribus, the louche Mr. Diabaté reenacts a generic James Bond scene with a gaggle of plurbs (for lack of a better term) dressed up as cool party people and/or evil villains. At no time is anyone in any danger, even of losing money, let alone their lives. Mr. Diabaté is not at risk. His enemy is not at risk. No one at the party is even really partying! They’re all just playing along to please him, and the moment he leaves the room they switch off the revelry and start cleaning the place up, as if someone had thrown a switch. (God only knows how creepy this effect is when the women with whom he’s constantly having orgies get up and leave the hot tub room.)
In essence, this episode asks us to spend its opening minutes watching something that isn’t happening, that doesn’t matter, and that isn’t even necessary, given that we already learned the kind of person Mr. Diabaté is during our first meeting, and that the mere existence of his Las Vegas digs conveys this too. Why waste valuable screen time on an inert Austin Powers riff?
It’s equally bold to hire a massive star to do a little cameo just for funsies. But while that may be bold, the identity of the massive star matters. Had Pluribus gotten, I dunno, Daniel Day-Lewis, now that’d be something. Instead, it got John Cena, the most happy-to-be-here man in Hollywood.
A spinoff TV series for his D-list superhero from the DC Universe? A cohost for a show in which people get whacked by large foam-rubber balls into water 15 feet below them? A WWE event in the haven of creative freedom known as Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? An apology to the nation of China for acknowledging the existence of Taiwan? John Cena’s your man. If there’s an audience for “funny” John Cena cameos in 2025, I am not a part of it.
‘Twin Peaks’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Episode 3’ aka ‘Rest in Pain’
Consider Leland Palmer. He, too, has an uncomfortable outburst at Laura’s funeral. Perhaps triggered by the fight between Bobby and James, he quite simply melts down, throwing himself atop his daughter’s coffin. The hydraulic apparatus designed to lower it into the ground then malfunctions, yanking the sobbing man up and down. “Don’t ruin this too!” shrieks his wife, Sarah, who’s been decompensating in her own way as well.
Some mourners, like Shelly Johnson, find the whole thing comedic enough to reenact for the amusement of the diner patrons at the Double R. (She’s also hiding a gun in her home to protect her from her psychotic husband Leo, the prime suspect in Laura’s killing at the moment, so cut her some slack.) And it’s true, there’s something funny about it, and not just the slapstick-comedy nature of the incident.
Leland’s grief is so over the top that it provokes nervous laughter, the kind you let out when what you’re watching is too intense to take seriously, for a moment at least. It’s hard to watch him weep and wail on the coffin, or again on the dance floor at the Great Northern, as he begs for someone, anyone, to dance with him in Laura’s place. I bet Sarah could do with some attention, too, but what happened to their daughter is pulling them apart, not bringing them together. That’s a second tragedy.
What’s worrisome is that Leland has another family member to worry about while this is going on. Laura’s cousin Madeleine — a brunette with big glasses but a lookalike in every other way, played by Laura actor Sheryl Lee — arrives in town for the funeral, and is there to witness the catastrophe at the cemetery. We’ve already seen Sarah superimpose her daughter’s face on the girl’s best friend, Donna Hayward. It isn’t difficult to imagine Madeleine being cast in that same role, whether she wants to play it or not.
I reviewed the fourth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!
‘It: Welcome to Derry’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 6: ‘In the Name of the Father’
Although our attention has been largely occupied by the kids and the clown, let’s not take for granted how good this show’s three grown-up leads are. Chris Chalk, Jovan Adepo and Taylour Paige make the adult material as magnetic as that of the young losers.
They don’t feel as if they’re playing characters in a spooky popcorn flick; they feel as if they’re playing human beings who are worried about their families, their ethics and their sanity. That scream from Chalk is one of the most harrowing things I’ve heard on television all year, and it’s been a harrowing year.
I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. Gift link!
‘Pluribus’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Got Milk’
I love how much of Pluribus takes place in silence. I love how much strength it derives from simply putting a complicated person on the screen, wordlessly, and allowing us to observe them. I love how much the show moves to the rhythms of labor, the painstaking, time-consuming, and necessary efforts we put into living that most shows ignore. There’s even a time-lapse shot of Carol Sturka sleeping as the light coming through the window shifts with the lengthening of the day. In short, Pluribus takes great pains to convey what it is like to simply exist in the world it has constructed — to be a human, a thinking person in a human body, surrounded by a world grown hostile and strange.
‘Twin Peaks’ thoughts, Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Episode 2’ or ‘Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer’
Okay. Now we’ve seen Twin Peaks.
The show’s third episode is, in effect, the final chapter of a big three-part premiere. This is literally true, to an extent: Coop’s dream recycles footage originally created for an extended cut of the pilot for European markets. More to the point, it introduces multiple load-bearing elements of Twin Peaks’ cultural iconography, things you’ve probably seen or heard of whether or not you have any idea whodunit or where all this is headed (no spoilers, in other words): Audrey’s dreamy dance, Leland’s hysterical grief, Coop’s unconventional police work, One-Eyed Jack’s, the Red Room, the Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson), the backwards speech, Laura Palmer whispering in Agent Cooper’s ear, the “Fire Walk With Me” poem, one-armed Mike, Killer Bob.
Episode three is where it becomes clear that something not just strange but supernatural is occurring in this quiet logging town. It’s where the show goes from weird to Weird. And in all its non sequitur, nonlinear surrealist menace, it’s where David Lynch as we’d know him for the rest of his career — the David Lynch of Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and this show’s own unlikely comeback season — is born.
I reviewed the third episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!