Did the Jedi really brainwash Osha into believing a lie about the arson incident? Can they brainwash people like that? Or is Mae just delusional? It may be somewhat interesting to see Sol and Mae hash this out, just as it’s somewhat interesting to meet a Sith who’s not trying to conquer the universe or topple the Republic but just be evil on his own. Somewhat interesting is fine, if you just like Star Wars and your main criteria is “Is there more of it?” I still have no idea what this show is about, what it’s trying to say, what reason it has to exist beyond those two four-letter words.
“The Acolyte” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “Night”
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour on House of the Dragon Week One!
Stefan and I are going weekly for the duration of House of the Dragon Season 2 with episode-by-episode, uh, episodes! We’re starting, of course, by talking about the season premiere — listen here or wherever quality podcasts are found!
‘House of the Dragon’: Elliott and Luke Tittensor on That Brutal Duel
“House of the Dragon” is a civil war story, and civil wars are often described as wars of brother against brother. Your characters make that theme literal.
LUKE Our relationship and our death were very much a symbol — not just of what’s to come, but the theme of the whole piece, really, which is family against family.
Does taking on that symbolic weight add pressure?
ELLIOTT No, because that symbol is built within our relationship naturally, being identical twins. That’s a unique relationship — unique only to identical twins, who are split-embryo. Even a twin who’s not split-embryo … not to sound disrespectful, but they’re more like a brother and sister born at the same time. An identical twin is a beautiful phenomenon of nature.
But you’re playing identical twins in the act of killing each other.
LUKE I think it helps. You’re aware of what they’re up against because of all these years of being a twin. If that was a scene between me and Criston Cole, it would probably be a bit harder. Doing it with Elliott made it easier to get there and sit in that head space. It’s naturally grounded, something you can latch onto.
“House of the Dragon” thoughts, Season 2, Episode 2
This ability to shock — not in the gross-out sense, although this is often the case as well, but rather in the sense of a sudden, severe surprise — is the greatest strength “House of the Dragon” possesses. Civil wars are often said to be battles of brother against brother; fantasy can make the metaphorical literal. What better way to illustrate the senseless brutality of warfare than by having two men who look and sound exactly alike, who love each other, who say they are one soul in two bodies, perish in a brutal murder-suicide that achieves exactly nothing?
I reviewed tonight’s weirdly untitled episode of House of the Dragon for the New York Times.
“The Acolyte” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “Day”
5. Bad guys who look like if the Hellraiser puzzle box existed in a galaxy far, far away
Seriously, check out Mae’s masked, anonymous Master. Look at that array of metallic whatchamacallems that makes him look like the Chatterer cenobite. Dig the way he descends from the sky in the background out of focus like a vampire when he first appears in this episode. Check out how he wordlessly punks out an entire Jedi SWAT team. Getting real “We have such sights to show you” vibes from this fellow in a way I haven’t from a Star Wars villain since the initial appearance of Darth Maul. I realize that “design a cool guy in black armor” is barely a challenge for a seventh grader, let alone professionals, but still.
STC on Scavengers Reign
I’ve put together a post rounding up my thoughts on Scavengers Reign, the acclaimed animated science-fiction/survival-horror story now airing on Netflix after Warner Bros. bobbled it over on Max. (It should be an Adult Swim show, insanity that it isn’t.) You can read them at my Patreon. I’m going to try to do this more often when I’m inspired to say a lot about something I wasn’t hired to watch.
“House of the Dragon” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “A Son for a Son”
Like “Game of Thrones” before it, “House of the Dragon” can be challenging to the prestige-TV palate. Its emphasis on criminal-political conspiracies, high-octane performances by a suite of talented character actors, and family drama in all its forms can be traced directly back to “The Sopranos.” But its use of high-fantasy spectacle and Grand-Guignol violence add notes that can ring as discordant in some viewers’ ears.
Listened to the right way, however, the sound is magical. Condal and company have constructed a drama of chamber rooms and bedrooms, roiling with sexual energy and gendered experience, occasionally marked by near-psychedelic explosions of high-fantasy supernatural spectacle. As women pray and sob and make love, dragons soar, blades are drawn, and eyes are taken for eyes. It’s Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” via the sword-and-sorcery artist Frank Frazetta. And if it’s what you’re into, it’s magnificent.
Who’s Who in ‘House of the Dragon’? Here’s a Refresher
It has been nearly two years since the shadow of dragons’ wings last darkened our screens. When “House of the Dragon,” HBO’s hit “Game of Thrones” prequel based on the book “Fire and Blood” by George R.R. Martin, returns this weekend, its sprawling cast of characters will be prepping for war, the sides distinguished by the color of the banners they fly.
The Blacks are led by Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy). Named heir by her father, King Viserys, years earlier, she has seen her claim to the Iron Throne of Westeros usurped by her younger half brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney); he and his backers, including his mother, Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), are known as the Greens. Now these two women will determine the fate of what remains very much a patriarchal world.
Whether you want to pick a team or simply brush up ahead of the Season 2 premiere, airing Sunday on HBO, here is a primer on the major players from both sides of the great dragon divide.
Did I write a cheat sheet for this season of House of the Dragon? Does a Dornishman [REDACTED]?? I broke down Team Black and Team Green for the New York Times, where I will be covering the show all season long with both episodic reviews/recaps and interviews, and maybe more.
“Presumed Innocent” thoughts, Episode 2: “People v. Rusty Sabitch”
There’s one more aspect that really needs mentioning: Presumed Innocent is, in part, a tone poem about the power of sex. That’s the thing that Rusty keeps thinking of, that’s what keeps drawing him back to Carolyn. There are a few memories of other times sprinkled in now and there, but just barely. When his thoughts turn to her, they’re naked, sweating, pinning each other down, fucking each other’s brains out. Or they’re languid, post-coital, reveling in the pleasure they’ve experienced. Or she’s trying to break up with him and instead fucking him fully dressed on the floor of an office.
As Decider’s own Nicole Gallucci points out, this show needs this material. Personally I’m all for sex of all kinds on TV, “essential” or “inessential” to the plot. (Pop quiz: Was the last sex you had essential to your plot, and if not, would you prefer to have skipped it?) But in this case it is absolutely essential, since only the intensity of their sexual connection can explain why Rusty has behaved in the way that he has, why he didn’t break things off cleanly, why he may get pinned with her murder in the end. Sex is the great, and sometimes not-so-great, motivator, and Presumed Innocent is laying its evidence out for all to see.
“Presumed Innocent” thoughts, Episode One: “Bases Loaded”
David E. Kelley is the kind of consummate TV pro they don’t really manufacture anymore, because the kind of lengthy series with which he made his bones — L.A. Law, Doogie Howser, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Ally McBeal, Boston Public, Boston Legal — are no longer made in the kind of volume that leads to the formation of David E. Kelleys. Whatever you think of his work, and lately he’s tons of it for every network and streamer you’d care to name, it moves with the kind of crackling rhythm designed to keep you from changing channels during the commercial break. He makes crisp, confident television.
His smarts display themselves best in the almost gladitorial combat between Horgan and Rusty on one side, and Nico “Delay” Guardia (so nicknamed, to his face, due to his penchant for delaying cases until the defense runs out of money and gives up instead of actually taking them to court) and Tommy on the other. There’s no pretense of collegiality here, no sheathed knives coming out when you least expect it: These guys fucking hate each other, and they’ll fucking say it, too, with all the fucking f-bombs you might expect. Watching Camp, Gyllenhaal, Fagbenle, and Sarsgaard tear into each other with gusto and glee is every bit the treat you’d expect. My favorite quotes: Tommy muttering “You dismiss me at your peril” like a supervillain when Horgan gives Rusty the case, and Horgan responding to Tommy telling him his belligerence at the funeral is beneath him with “Nothing’s beneath me. I once fucked an ottoman.”
Get to Know House of the Dragon’s Royal Air Forces
In fantasy combat, dragons are a difference-maker. Aegon the Conqueror and his sister-queens Visenya and Rhaenys united six out of seven quarreling kingdoms by lighting entire castles and armies on fire from the backs of their beasts. Daenerys Targaryen effortlessly torched the forces of House Lannister — then of the people of King’s Landing — with a single surviving dragon at the end of Game of Thrones. If you wanna get really nerdy, none other than Gandalf the Grey reveals in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings that he helped Thorin, Bilbo, and company kill Smaug the Golden so that a revived Sauron could never use him as city-killer against the Elven kingdoms he himself couldn’t touch. From middle-earth to Westeros, these creatures are no joke.
That’s what makes the prospect of a full-scale Targaryen civil war in season two of House of the Dragon so frightening — not just to the defenseless small folk but to the wiser members of the opposing Team Black and Team Green themselves. It also makes the question of who controls what dragons as crucial to the conflict as sizing up your enemy’s nuclear stockpile. A dragon’s size, age, temperament, temperature, combat experience, rider, and perhaps even their relationships with other dragons all play a part in determining their effectiveness in battle.
So in preparation for this Sunday’s premiere, here are all the dragons in play at the start of the so-called Dance of the Dragons, the civil war between the Blacks, led by Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen and her king-consort Prince Daemon, and the Greens, ruled (sort of) by King Aegon II Targaryen and his mother, Queen Alicent Hightower. Each side boasts its own dragons, while some are still up for grabs. Considering the magic and might of these monsters, this could wind up as important as knowing the Targaryen family tree itself.
But brush up on these sky kaiju while you can: This war promises fire and blood, so best not to get too attached.
“The Acolyte” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Destiny”
For their part, the daughters are divided on how strongly to adhere to the ways of their mothers and the other witches, the only people they’ve ever known. This is an interesting dynamic given what we know of the twins’ future selves. Mae, the villain, isn’t the rebel; she’s the mama’s girl, the true believer, the religious conservative. Osha rebels not out of wildness, but out of self-knowledge; she knows she belongs out in the galaxy somewhere, not cooped up where the only other child she’s ever seen is her twin sister.
All this takes on an extra dimension when the four Jedi whom Mae will later hunt show up planetside, in search of rumored children receiving illicit Force training. (The witches call the Force “the Thread” and distrust the Jedi as lunatic monks or something to that effect.) On one hand, our instinct is to regard the interlopers as colonizers, imposing a foreign religion and luring children away from their heritage. On the other, our instinct is to regard the witches as puritans or cultists, restricting an intellectually and emotionally restless child to the ways that suit them, not her.
So which instinct should prevail? Are we right to recoil at the way Koril infantilizes Osha as incapable of knowing her own heart, forcing a belief system and future upon her that she doesn’t want? Or is she the lesser of two evils, when the alternative is a lifetime of service to a holy order that’s perfectly comfortable luring children away from their families for life?
Of course, there’s the added wrinkle of the long-running fannish debate about the nature and degree of the Jedi’s benevolence as rulers and space cops. Some of it is trolling, and some of it is intellectually overburdening what is essentially a children’s property, but some of it is a sincere attempt by fans of the setting to follow certain threads about Jedi teachings and practices to their logical endpoints. Whatever the case, many viewers will be bringing their preexisting feelings about the Force-wielding warrior-monks with them.
In story terms, the debate gets cut short by Mae, who goes berserk and tries to burn Osha to death rather than allow her to voluntarily leave the sisterhood. Mae’s repeated cries of “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?” at the nonconformist Osha will ring ugly in the ears of a lot of people who received similar treatment from their own families for whatever reason. However you feel about the Jedi, only one side here is trying to burn heretics at the stake.
I reviewed the interesting third episode of The Acolyte for Decider.
“The Acolyte” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Revenge/Justice”
The problem facing The Acolyte is that Andor is out there along with Ahsoka, which is to say there’s proof of how good a live-action Star Wars show can be as well as how bad. The Acolyte deserves faint praise for beating the latter, but it won’t deserve real praise until it shows it can hang with the former.
“The Acolyte” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “Lost/Found”
Based solely on this premiere, The Acolyte isn’t the airless continuity rejiggering of Obi-Wan Kenobi or the baffling MST3K-level misfire of Ahsoka, but nor is it a show that feels, I dunno, necessary. Considering that it’s the first live-action Star Wars thing set outside the lifespans of the characters from the original trilogy ever, the potential to redesign what the Star Wars Universe looks and sounds like for another era seems like a massive dropped ball just for starters. The default state of Star Wars shows seems to be “expensive action-figure playset.” Here’s hoping The Acolyte sets its targeting computer for “engaging drama” instead. You can put cool creatures in an engaging drama, too.
Change in the House of Barflies: Why the ‘Cheers’ Finale Is Television’s All-Time Great Ending
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, she walks into ours.
It’s the most breathtaking moment in the eleven-season history of television’s biggest comedy. Diane Chambers (Shelley Long), the high-strung intellectual who won the heart of recovering alcoholic and ex-ballplayer Sam Malone (Ted Danson) before abandoning it to pursue her dreams of writing, walks back into the bar called Cheers. She’s riding the dubious high of having won a Cable ACE award — very much a punchline at the expense of both cable TV, then the broadcast networks’ distant also-ran, and Long, whose departure from the show six years earlier never quite led to the superstar career she’d been hoping for. (Don’t worry, Cheers got its digs in on Danson too; a couple episodes earlier they have him reveal he wears a hairpiece.)
But she’s back, and she’s nominally successful, and her arrival hits the bar like a bomb. We in the audience get caught in the blast radius too. After all, we’ve spent more time in Cheers at this point than Diane has — six seasons more, to be exact — and we have all the same memories of the highs and lows of her relationship with Sam as the characters do. Can he, can she, can they, can we really handle this change?
The question is a proxy for the finale itself. Airing on May 20 1993, it’s the conclusion of a decade-plus run in which Cheers changed the face of comedy and television pretty much forever. Losing any long-running show we’re fond of stings, of course. But Cheers is special. More than any other sitcom this side of Gilligan’s Island, it’s about the way things stay the same — the pleasant familiarity of old friends, the local dive, a barstool worn down into a comfortable groove by the accumulated weight of thousands of nights of pressure from the same pair of buttcheeks. The finale works because it confronts the audience and the characters with the same question: Are we ready to move on?
I wrote about the finale of Cheers, which aired 31 years ago this week, for Decider.
‘Outer Range’ Season 2 Ending Explained: What Is the Hole, and Does Josh Brolin Survive?
The sci-fi element of this story isn’t a black hole that warps time for nothing, you know? The most generous read that one can give Outer Range is that it’s a story about the inescapability of small towns — small town people, small town living, small town thinking. Royal, Cece, Wayne, and their children are all effectively trapped in Wabang: Royal and Cece by family ties and poverty, Wayne by mania and greed. Rhett and Maria try to run away but chart a course that runs right back through town at the first obstacle. (Granted, the first obstacle was a herd of time-traveling bison, but still.) Perry has now fallen through the time portal twice and still winds up back on the Abbott family ranch each time. Even Autumn, the wildest and most widely traveled of the characters, is ultimately a refugee who comes back to the only place where she can truly find herself: home. They all get sucked in as surely as spacetime itself.
The challenge facing the show is the one you and I discussed above: A lot of things take place on Outer Range, but not enough happens. With a few exceptions, most of them Perry-related, Season 2 didn’t advance any of its major mysteries nor answer any of its big questions. This is an extremely dangerous game for a mystery-box show to play with its viewers. At a certain point, if all you find in the box is either more boxes or nothing, you’re just gonna put that box down and catch an NBA game or rewatch Shōgun instead.
I wrote an explainer of the end of Outer Range S2 for Decider. I had a lot of fun riffing at the show’s expense, but I also feel I gave it a pretty fair read here.
“Outer Range” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Seven: “The End of Innocence”
Unfortunately, the hoped-for Sophomore Surprise that would have made Outer Range must-watch never materialized. The revitalization of Joy and Luke as characters, that magnificent episode in the 1880s — these were the exceptions to Outer Range’s water-treading second season, rather than the rule. Watching this show feels like jumping in a hole in time, only to wind up right back where you started.
I reviewed the season finale of Outer Range‘s disappointing second season for Decider.
“Outer Range” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “Do-Si-Do”
The problem with airing a really, really good episode of an otherwise mediocre show is that people will raise their expectations accordingly. This what The Wire would refer to as one of them good problems. Of course you want your audience to respect and enjoy the work you do and eagerly anticipate more of the same, if not better.
It becomes one of them bad problems when you fail to deliver on that forward momentum. The all-too-aptly titled “Do-Si-Do,” which believe it or not is the penultimate episode of Outer Range’s second season, shows that last episode wasn’t a breather, but a return to the status quo, even if it makes little storytelling sense to head back there to begin with.
I reviewed the sixth episode of Outer Range Season 2 for Decider.
“Outer Range” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “All the World’s a Stage”
If the fifth episode of Outer Range’s second season fails to deliver the thrills of the fourth, it’s hard to get that upset. That fourth episode, after all, was really freaking thrilling. Its saga of a time-displaced Joy Hawk and her kill-or-be-killed escape from white settlers blended human drama, time-travel genre shenanigans, and riveting action for the show’s best outing yet. Episode five, by contrast, is mostly aftermath. I certainly hoped we’d be off to the races, but it’s not necessarily a bad sign that we’re taking a breather.