In a Lightless Land

They burned the horses at dawn. Word had traveled fast in the city, and by the midnight break everyone knew what was coming. Wagons rolled out of the mines, the oil barrels glinting in the moonlight, headed for the Temple of Pain. With no recent skirmishes to speak of it wasn’t going to be a matter of prisoners, and even internally there was an unspoken but pervasive sense that too few people had been brought in for the question to fill the arena’s basin. Eventually someone—it could have been Bowd; it usually was for this sort of thing—recalled overhearing a troll who complained about lugging cages around for the expeditionaries. Something about a great herd, too. Animals, then, wild animals. They hated the animals. They hated anything that grew wild.

As daybreak approached Vik was holding her right hand in her left, like she always did by the end of the worknight. Carving the spiral sigil into the wooden shields was once something she dreaded, and after that something she took a perverse sort of pride in; now it was just drudgery, numbing to the mind and brutal to her hand. Her leg hurt, too, a powerful ache that traveled from her right foot up through her calf and thigh until it nestled in a knot below her ass. Attending the burning would give her a chance to walk off the pain before the daybreak cease, she thought as she tidied up her workspace. Even sitting on the stone rows allowed her to shift her weight off her right side. It was something to look forward to at least.

She fell in line with the other humans in the street, their faces flickering in the torchlight as they streamed toward the Temple. Orcs were out in force, baying and guffawing. They knew what they were in for. Vik saw a sizeable group of trolls, too, scaly knuckles dragging against the dirt road. 

But it was the presence of ogres that frightened Vik the most. Ogres, bruise-yellow and black-eyed, towering into the sky. For ogres to interrupt their ceaseless searching—this was a surprise. They didn’t usually turn up for a burning, not unless called by the Higher Ups. That meant there’d be Higher Ups in attendance, Vik realized, and more than just the Vortex Wizard at that. Her nerves spasmed.

Her group were nearing the building now, a massive circle of black stone rising high above the ground, higher than any other building in the city. Fire glimmered in each of its windows, through which the hum of the already assembled crowd could be heard. The flaming spiral above the gates hurt her eyes if she looked at it, so she looked down. The dirt beneath her feet was the same color as her dress.

There was much of the usual shoving and pushing and roaring as the queue became a crush at the bottleneck. Vik let herself be pushed this way and that. Everyone was going to the same place. Why fight it. 

Minutes later, as the sky began to lighten above, she was seated in a row distant from the center. She looked around and saw no one she knew well. That was fine, maybe even good. They didn’t want you getting close to people, not even your workmates, though they couldn’t stamp it out entirely. The Servants’ vicious camaraderie proved too much of an example for the humans not to emulate. Some Wizards, Vik had heard, even took this as a point of pride. The Vortex Wizard was not one of them.

Vik looked down across the basin. There he was, short and bald and small in his armor. His face was an unreadable mask, rendered illegible by the spiral tattoo that matched the engravings on every steel plate. With a shock, Vik saw he was not seated in the central throne. He was not alone in the Master’s Box this time. The Blue Wizard, whose skin and hair matched the azure hue of his robe, he was there. Vik recognized the Wizard of Knives, the Water Wizard in his tank—awkwardly crammed into the box; someone would pay for that—and the Ash Wizard.

But the tall, thin figure in the black robe, with his long hair and full beard and gnarled, peeling hands—he was new to her, to this place, but he could only be the Wizard of the Wastes. For him to be here, so far from the blasted lands, was a surprise. No wonder the ogres had come, Vik thought. He knows their names.

A portcullis at the opposite side of the Temple rose, and suddenly the arena was full of the sounds of horses. They were panicked, terrified. Vik watched as troll handlers, their muscled arms glinting green in the torchlight, beat the animals forward. If one bit or kicked, they were bit and kicked back. One troll got fed up, grabbed a horse’s leg, and snapped it in two. The bones hung together by muscle and sinew. He picked the horse up and threw it forward. It landed in the basin, where the oil waited, its fumes giving Vik a headache. Even as the rest of the horses were forced inward Vik watched the one the troll had tossed as it screamed and struggled. Not long, though: Once it got tired it couldn’t keep its nose above the level of the oil, and it drowned. Lucky.

One of the wizards was speaking. The Vortex Wizard; it was his Temple. Probably he was welcoming his honored guests. Vik clapped when everyone clapped and that was good enough. His whispering voice, amplified by magic, proclaimed this a great day, the day when the last of the free herds of the darklands would be put down. The smoke from the burning would blot out the hateful sun as the flames made mock of its cursed illumination, and all would know what the People of the Spiral had done to honor the Sorcerer. 

Death to the Bastard Sun, roared the Servants. Death to the Wild Green, responded the humans.

A huge troll, its body resinous with burned tissue, strode to the box and handed a torch to the Wizard of the Wastes, the highest of them. With a nod to his host he tossed it down into the basin. It bounced off a horse’s head and into the oil.

The conflagration was immediate and the result unbearable. The horses screamed like men, eyes rolling, mouths frothing in agony. Their manes and tails went up like candles. Those that could still move trampled the fallen further into the flames before going up themselves. The smell was vile and also enormously appetizing. Vik’s stomach leaped and it took all she had not to vomit. Others were not as lucky, and there were orcs pointing at them, and the trolls were bellowing, and the ogres gazed in silence.

She looked away, back at the basin, back at the last of the great herds as it died. She looked to the sky, reddened now from the rising sun, darkened now by the smoke of the burning. She looked at all the Servants, the orcs and trolls and werewolves and the vampires behind their shaded glass. She looked at the Master’s Box, at the Vortex Wizard and the Blue Wizard and the Wizard of Knives and the Water Wizard and the Wizard of the Wastes. She looked at all of these telepaths and conjurers, these necromancers and elementals. She even, for as long as she dared, looked at the ogres.

She looked at them, and she hated them, and as the burning died down and the chants ended and she shuffled her way down the row and down the stairs and out the gate and through the streets and into her cell to wait out the day alone with the stink of death on her, she wondered why they had not killed her yet. Their hammers rose; their hammers fell; they would fall on her someday, she knew, but when they did they would crush her body but not her hatred. Her hatred would live on because she knew she was not alone, she could not be alone, it was impossible. Her hatred would leave her battered body and take root in another’s. She would be like a demon, a demon who yearns for life not death, for laughter not screams and not chants and not tears. Incorporeal and eternal she would one day look through other eyes and see the sun.

originally published March 13 2020, revised Feb 8 2025

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour on “Midnight Mass”!

Over on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour Patreon, we like to stretch our muscles a bit to stuff less directly relevant to ASOIAF/GOT/HOTD/fantasy/SF/the sweep of history. If you’re a subscriber, listen to our new episode on Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror miniseries Midnight Mass. I think it’s one of our best.

“Severance” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Woe’s Hollow”

She doesn’t get caught because she gets overheard plotting with the Board. She doesn’t get caught because she accidentally lets slip that she knows something she couldn’t possibly know. She doesn’t even get caught because she invented a “night gardener” as a shoddy alibi regarding her time on the outside, or because Irving B. has a weird prophetic dream when he sleeps rough in sub-freezing temperatures. 

No, it’s simply being a little bit too mean that gives this impostor away. “What you said to me last night, it was cruel,” Irving B. tells her, his suspicions confirmed by this behavior. “Helly was never cruel.” Indeed, the way “Helly” deflects Irving B.’s accusations by bringing up his heartache over his loss of his office romance Burt G. stands out like a sore thumb in the moment, even before you think through what it says about who she really is. It’s the kind of emotional manipulation we saw Milchick use to get Mark to come back to work just a couple episodes ago — straight out of the Lumon handbook, perhaps even literally.

Shows that try their hand at mystery-box storytelling would do well to follow the example set by Severance in “Woe’s Hollow” (Season 2 Episode 4). It’s much more compelling to let the nuances of performance and writing reveal a character’s layers over time, the way they do in a regular drama, than to constantly pull rabbits out of hats like a stage magician. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

“Paradise” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “Agent Billy Pace”

Acting is the engine that drives Paradise. Not the plot, which you’ve seen before on better shows (watch Silo! watch Fallout!); not the dialogue, which is a wildly mixed bag of astute and cartoonish. Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden: These are the load-bearing components of what creator Dan Fogelman has built down in that bunker.

To that number we can safely add Jon Beavers, who plays — or played — Agent Billy Pace, the character who gave this episode its title. Via a series of flashbacks, we learn how he became the man he is — or was — today, and it’s a very different man than what we’ve seen from him so far. But Beavers is so endearing in the role and so deft with his bantering dialogue that he almost singlehandedly makes the contradiction make sense.

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

“Severance” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Three: “Who Is Alive”

Well, that was fast! It was probably inevitable that Severance would, at some point, un-sever Mark and Mark S., the outie/innie pair at the center of the series. But if it went anything like everything else on this show goes, the process would take several painstaking steps over several hour-long episodes, during which time any number of other pathways would open up and get walked down before we made our way to our appointed destination.

Instead, Mark learns he can be reintegrated, agrees to do it, then gets it done in a grand total of two back-to-back scenes at the very end of this episode. Zero to 100, just like that, in defiance of the way this show has told its story since its inception. It’s a surprise that works on more than just an entertainment level, too: If your show is about the tyranny of routine, it’s a good idea to break from routine now and then.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

“Paradise” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “The Architect of Social Well-Being”

It may be an espionage thriller, but no one’s gonna mistake Paradise for Michael Clayton or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy anytime soon. Information about the assassination of President Cal Bradford and the compromising positions of virtually everyone involved in the case isn’t unearthed or deduced — it’s delivered in great gobs of personal exposition, the confessor standing face to face with the interrogator. The casework seems to amount to a series authority figures asking people “Did you do it?” and backing down when the person says “No.” I’ve seen more compelling detective work in episodes of DuckTales

Okay, so creating a thrilling murder mystery is not Paradise’s strong suit. What it relies on instead is using the strength of its cast to turbo-charge its tearjerking tales of their pasts. Even when the material is kind of underbaked, simply involving Sterling K. Brown means you’ll get something edible.

I reviewed episode three of Paradise for Decider.

STC on WIZARDS: The Podcast Guide to Comics

There’s a podcast about my old job, and this week I’m the special guest! I had a wonderful time discussing my stint at Wizard. If you ever wanted to hear me tell tales out of school about that time in my life, now’s your chance!

“Paradise” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Sinatra”

I single out these two moments for a reason: Man oh man do they make creator/co-writer Dan Fogelman’s strengths crystal clear. Working with co-writer Katie French, he just sort of casually tosses off two enormously endearing moments, from two very different spheres of human interaction. The flirtation is fun and genuinely sexy. The family bonding is warm and sincere. None of it feels particularly like something from a television show — or if it does, it feels like it’s from a good television show. You know, the kind of television show that doesn’t immediately give young Dylan a terminal illness to wring out extra sympathy points for his mother, who in the present day is a calculating man-behind-the-throne figure straight out of billionaire reality. 

But Paradise is that kind of show, too! Paradise is the kind of show that has the son beg Julianne Nicholson to tell him if he’s going to Heaven and what it will be like — it’s going to have more horsey rides! — over a breathy cover version of, I swear to god, “We Built This City” by Starship. This is a level of tasteless, mawkish sentimentality that feels like it comes from a whole different universe than that bit about her lying in hopes of picking that dude up. It’s so much broader, too, than everything this beautifully observed moment outside the supermarket on the horse with the ice cream had been right up until that point. 

From a strictly mercenary perspective, I get it: People like having their heartstrings tugged. But the show had already proven it could do so without resorting to crass, poorly soundtracked emotional manipulation. Why settle for a single when you’re a home-run hitter?

I reviewed episode two of Paradise for Decider.

“Paradise” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “Wildcat Is Down”

Even after just one episode (out of three debuting simultaneously), the strengths of Paradise are obvious — and they have nothing to do with the twist, or even with the simple murder mystery. If anyone’s gonna care about any of that at all, they owe it to Fogelman’s knack for writing engaging, real-feeling friendly banter, and the casting of the deeply charming (and good-looking, which doesn’t hurt) actors Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden to deliver much of it. Whether Xavier is allowing his kids to gently bust his chops, or whether he’s doing the same thing to his buddy Billy, or whether he’s navigating his complicated relationship with President Bradford, the conversations are lively and hard to predict from one beat to the next. It’s a gift to write that kind of scene, and I feel I can assume without looking that this is what drove This Is Us at least as much as the twists and turns.

also assume we’ll get a whole lot more of those in the episodes to come. When you drop “oh by the way, this is science fiction” on the audience at the end of your pilot, it’s hard to imagine there are no further tricks up your sleeve. That’s putting aside the fact that Fogelman made his bones off creating an engaging sense of mystery and surprise for his viewers. The subject matter feels weird in the present moment, that’s for certain — for one thing, it presupposes the continued existence of the federal government, which seems like an open question at this point. Many of the creative choices — the pedestrian teal-and-apricot color grading, a breathy ominous cover version of a pop hit to close the episode out — fall flat the same way they do when pretty much any show tries them. (Remember True Detective Season 4?) But “What will they do next?” is a decent hook, especially with actors like Brown, Marsden, and Nicholson dangling from it. Sure, I’ll bite.

I’m covering Paradise, the new show from the creator of This Is Us and Only Murders in the Building, for Decider

“Severance” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Two: “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig”

But the main benefit of an episode like this is to take us out of the, for lack of a better word, zany world of the severed floor. Down there, Mark S., Dylan G., and Irving B. are basically empty shells, or maybe characters in a one-panel gag cartoon about office life. (Helly R., who never buys into the bullshit for a second, is considerably more vibrant.) Up top, however, Mark is a real guy, a guy who hangs out with his sister a lot and gets real angry about his wife’s death. Irving seems to share his innie’s vocal pattern, but his military background, music taste, obsessive painting of a secret location in the basement, and potential link to anti-Lumon activities mark him as a very different guy from his lovesick but largely comical counterpart. I wish we weren’t being kept in the dark about Dylan and Helena’s lives at home, but at least there’s some dark to explore. I’m interested in these people, not the meticulously constructed world around them.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

“Severance” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “Hello, Ms. Cobel”

There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear. Since it began, Severance has relied on obfuscation as a load-bearing element of its storytelling. Created by Dan Erickson, the show is many things at once — a dystopian thriller, a sci-fi satire, a workplace dramedy, a black comedy about cults, an anticapitalist broadside, an on-again off-again meditation on what we owe the people we love. But it’s stuffed all of those things into a Lost-indebted mystery box, and every time one of its mysteries is solved, you get another three or four mysteries as a perk, or a penalty.

I’m covering the widely beloved show Severance for Decider, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.

“Silo” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “Into the Fire”

Brutalist architecture is misleadingly named. When people think of the stark, colossal buildings that are the hallmark of the style, they think brutal as in overpowering. In fact the term comes from the french word brut, meaning “raw,” referring to the style’s tendency to display rather than mask its raw materials, its concrete and steel.

Brutalism is often associated with such massive construction projects as low-income housing or government buildings, and for good reason: It’s a postwar style that emerged from the social-democrat consensus following the conflict, and was embraced by left/liberal governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Only when the tail end of the Cold War and its conservative ascendency shook that consensus did these buildings take on the vaguely sinister air with which they are often associated to this day. 

The reason for that is simple, as anyone who’s ever seen a crumbling castle or haunted house can tell you. When a system dies, the buildings constructed by that system for the greater good become symbolic instead of the system’s collapse. City halls become sites of faceless bureaucracy. Monuments become gravestones. Shelters become tombs. 

[…]

The Silo — the Silos, plural — are brutalist in their construction: the concrete is unadorned and enormous in scale. They’re brutalist in their purpose: They were built to safeguard 10,000 souls apiece, recreating society in miniature. 

But they’re also “brutalist” in the misnomer sense: They are the site of authoritarian oppression. If indeed they ever really were built to safeguard anything, all they really exist for now, as Lukas and Bernard and Juliette and Jimmy all learn, is to seal off the lives of those within forever, lethally if need be. 

The Silos are the brutalist paradox transmuted into sci-fi plot form. Are these massive structures the only hope for humanity? Or are they indeed better thought of as haunted places, places of deceit and domination, because whatever world they once existed to protect is long dead? 

[…]

Silo asks a provocative and timely question, one reflected in the controversy of the architectural style upon which it’s based: Are structures of protection really structures of oppression? And when the time comes, will we be able to tell the difference?

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider.

“Skeleton Crew” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “The Real Good Guys”

From the start, Skeleton Crew has run like an R2 unit whose motivator is a bit on the wonky side: In large part, it still works just fine. Its theme-park-ride sense of forward motion and energy alone makes it the most entertaining — okay, make that the only watchable — new Disney Star Wars show since Andor. That’s before you get to its deployment of oodles of fun creatures and droids and space pirates, the kind of good clean fun you want in a Star Wars show for kids. The key ingredient is the lead performance of Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood; his transformation from bad guy with a heart of gold to a real rat bastard is the kind of genuine, character-based surprise that a shocking twist or secret identity can only hope to deliver. 

But there were always signs that the machine wasn’t running as smoothly as it could be. The premise and the show’s initial suburban setting amount to crass Gooniesploitation. The core kids started out as stock characters reciting dialogue straight out of kids’ adventure movies; Wim, the worst offendernever grew out of it. Key action sequences felt thrown together. Most tragically, Kelly MacDonald, who by rights should be the co-lead in a whole Star Wars show of her and Jude Law’s own, gets like two minutes of screen time. 

Like the pirate frigate that makes a fiery but stately descent into the surface of At Attin after being blown out of the sky by X-wings, this is the episode where it feels like the whole thing just kinda stalls out and comes in for a crash landing. It’s the kind of finale that feels like it wasn’t so much written as translated from a series of shoulder shrugs in the writers’ room. After all of this adventuring, the good guys flip the special good guy switch after sending the good guy signal, and the good guys win. 

I reviewed the season finale of Skeleton Crew for Decider.

“American Primeval” thoughts, Episode Six

As I write this review, wildfires brought on by climate change are ravaging Los Angeles. The climate change denier whom a plurality of voters selected to be their president, and who as best I can tell is completely insane, is threatening to bring back American expansionism by conquering Canada and Mexico and Greenland as his conservative Christian backers cheer him on. In this final episode of American Primeval, a fanatical Brigham Young rants about his God purifying the world from wickedness as his Mormons, fresh off a genocidal attack on the Shoshone, solidify their claim on Utah by burning Fort Bridger to the ground. You hear Young’s words over the flames. It feels familiar, is what I’m saying. People will always use fires they themselves started as a smokescreen for their murderous ambition, I guess. 

I reviewed the finale of American Primeval for Decider.

“American Primeval” thoughts, Episode Five

It’s preposterous how good Shea Whigham is at delivering dialogue. Boardwalk EmpirePerry MasonAmerican Primeval — whatever the assignment, he makes every line sound like he’d never heard a word of it before thinking it up right then and there. When Whigham’s Jim Bridger verbally spars with Kim Coates’s appropriately bloviating Brigham Young, he makes the great evangelist sound like a high school freshman at his first debate club event. Sure, Bridger has likely just brought the murderous wrath of the Mormon nation down on his head with his backtalk and intransigence — not to mention his heavily armed squad of employees, mountain men, and Native Americans with nothing left to lose. But Young attacking Bridger now after failing to verbally fluster the grizzled frontiersman in the slightest is a bit like Drake suing after Kendrick Lamar beat the brakes off him in their beef. Even if he wins, he’s a sore loser. 

I reviewed episode five of American Primeval for Decider.

“Silo” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Nine: “The Safeguard”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’m thinking about this line from 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke a lot while watching Silo these days.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

“American Primeval” thoughts, Episode Four

One of my favorite film microgenres is the Ordeal. In Ordeal movies, characters embark on a perilous journey across some wild territory, and endure a grueling struggle for survival along the way, marked with repeated instances of terror and pain. Think Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Descent, Gravity, and most relevantly The Revenant, written by American Primeval creator Mark L. Smith. Go ahead and throw Martin Scorsese’s After Hours in there if you’re feeling generous, and Homer’s The Odyssey if you want to be complete about it. These narratives are compelling because of how they join the viewer and the protagonist at the hip: You’re not going anywhere until this guy or girl gets out alive, or dies trying. The only way out is through.

American Primeval is an attempt to create an Ordeal TV Show, which in this age of spiffy limited series is now a possibility. There are pros and cons to this approach. In the former column is the obvious point that on  television show, your Ordeal can last a whole lot longer. You can drag out that primal struggle, allowing for more moments of bloody horror and stark beauty. And to fill up that extra real estate, you can create multiple protagonists, each on a different path, each undergoing an Ordeal of their own, each with their own appeal.

[…]

But on the big screen, the Ordeal is a uniquely focused form of storytelling. The pleasure of the Ordeal is its ability to burrow deep into the mindset of its main character as they’re put through their paces over the course of an entire film. By the end, ideally, you feel what she feels in your gut. That’s just not going to be the case when you’re bouncing around between stories and characters on a regular basis, episode after episode. It can even start to feel a bit, well, episodic: This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and the next thing you know a grizzled mountain man is snapping a screaming child’s splintered bone back into place and it’s cut to black, roll credits.

I reviewed episode four of American Primeval for Decider.

“American Primeval” thoughts, Episode Three

American Primeval is taking an open-world video game approach to its brand of revisionist Western. As our characters wander around, they encounter all kinds: friendly Mormons and murderous ones, friendly indigenous people and murderous ones, friendly settlers and murderous ones. You just never quite know which one is which when you stumble into them, until the shooting starts. 

This approach can be a little, well, video-gamey. As a horror guy, I was certainly tickled when a blind cackling hillbilly witch showed up to lure our heroes into Consanguinity Corner, but you can only take a show that otherwise self-evidently prides itself on gritty realism when Leatherface and Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre show up. 

Yet at the end of the episode, Captain Dellinger writes a lovely and heartfelt letter or journal entry in which he laments the way he feels he’s losing his essential character in the ceaselessly violent world he’s entered. “Hatred” and “brutality” are everywhere, driving out “compassion and basic tenderness.” 

“I am overcome at this time by a deep pain from a tremendous and always present lack of love,” he writes. “So few in these lands know of grace. There is only brutality here.” He’s painting things with an awfully broad brush, as the concurrent shots of Abish being treated with care and kindness by the Shoshone women demonstrate. But he’s not wrong overall. American Primeval may have a kind of shopworn way of showing it, but it really is exhausting to think about how many people in this land of ours like it better when they know others are suffering.  

I reviewed episode three of American Primeval for Decider.

“American Primeval” thoughts, Episode Two

Director Peter Berg has a knack for depicting the inherent sternness of all this. The determined faces of actors Betty Gilpin and Taylor Kitsch and Saura Lightfoot Leon as Sara and Isaac and Abish. The leaders of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, gathered around a campfire, silhouetted agains the big sky. Our four heroes captured with a low angle that makes them look like the Fellowship of the Ring. Rolling vistas and billowing mists. Forests and scrubland. Hard people in a hard land. It’s solid stuff.

What it isn’t is unique, special, or even particularly provocative beyond the in-your-face violence. If that sounds harsh, I don’t mean it to be — it’s just the way it is. American Primeval is a bloody modern Western, and that’s about the extent of it. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. But unlike Brigham Young, this show isn’t making any converts just yet.

I reviewed episode two of American Primeval for Decider.

“American Primeval” thoughts, Episode One

American Primeval isn’t going to be reinventing the Western genre anytime soon, if that wasn’t already apparent. Revisionist Westerns — in which there are no black and white hats, no noble cowboys against uniformly savage Indians, just a continent full of broken people trying to live another day — have been around for so long they’re now just, you know, Westerns. This is a project that will rise and fall on the strength of its action, adventure, thriller, suspense, and survival sequences, and on whether the actors can make you care enough about the characters to worry about what happens to them. Westward the wagons, folks, and let’s find out.

I’m covering Mark L. Smith and Peter Berg’s new survival-horror Western on Netflix American Primeval for Decider.