This week’s episode of Clarice presents us with a meal and a mystery. From where I’m sitting, both are equally compelling. The first episode of the show that has felt like an organic extension of previous plotlines rather than the introduction or continuation of a procedural-style case of the week, “How Does It Feel to Be So Beautiful” seems to find Clarice finding its footing. I’m hoping it continues down this path indefinitely.
“Clarice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “How Does It Feel to Be So Beautiful”
“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Power Broker”
At a certain point, it starts to feel like the plot holes outnumber the plot threads. One minute, Bucky’s so concerned about Baron Zemo’s hatred for the Avengers that he won’t even allow Sam to speak to him; the next, he’s breaking Zemo out of jail and presenting a team-up with him to Sam as a fait accompli. Sharon Carter has been on the run for the better part of a decade for a crime for which everyone else involved has long been forgiven, including various enormously famous and beloved superheroes. (Once again, I just don’t buy the lack of clout Sam commands as a member of the world-saving Avengers who has an ongoing relationship with the U.S. military.) Sharon just so happens to be on the scene when Sam, Zemo, and Falcon need rescuing; bounty hunters spontaneously appear in the hidden location to which the foursome have traveled to find the evil doctor; Ayo appears to have arrived at the group’s destination before they even got there. Stuff keeps happening, seemingly just to keep things moving, regardless of whether it happening makes any sense.
I reviewed this week’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.
“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “The Star-Spangled Man”
There’s something so dreary about taking Redwing, the comic-book Falcon’s telepathic, bright-red bird sidekick, and turning him into a drone. An explicitly military one at that, property of the United States government, as this episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (“The Star Spangled-Man”) dutifully informs us. When one of those sinister border-hating Flag-Smashers knocks the damn thing from the sky, it felt like a mercy killing on behalf of imagination.
STC vs. Matthew Perpetua: The Return, Part 2
I’m back on Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxcast, discussing music of all kinds. It’s a fun ramble between two pals. I hope you enjoy it!
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 128!
Stefan and I enter the town of Twin Peaks in this episode on David Lynch and Mark Frost’s landmark series. It’s geared to newcomers, so hopefully everyone can listen and enjoy!
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 127!
Gretchen Felker-Martin and I reunite for a second two-hour deep dive into television’s storied recent past! This time, the Original Bad Boy and the Filthcore Queen tackle shows they didn’t touch on before or only touched on briefly. Beginning with a trinity of canonical dramas—The Wire, Deadwood, and Mad Men—they then make the jump to anthology TV—Channel Zero, American Crime Story, and Fargo—with plenty of surprises along the way. It’s better than your most recent Netflix binge—available here or wherever you get your podcasts!
STC vs. Matthew Perpetua: The Return
I’m back on Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxcast for a fun rambling episode on breakup records, Led Zeppelin, Joss Whedon, Godzilla, Drake, Bowie, Usher, Nicki and much more. It’s an elite subscriber-only podcast, so go and subscribe!
“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “New World Order”
I have a confession to make: I have been known, from time to time, to make mine Marvel. I’ve read hundreds of their comics over the years (and even wrote one once myself). I enjoyed the Marvel/Netflix shows Daredevil and The Punisher, as I’ve chronicled at length on this very site. As for the movies…well, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony “Iron Man” Stark was casting so strong it essentially made superheroes the dominant genre nearly singlehandedly (give or take a Hugh Jackman or a Heath Ledger), and the fight scene that opened Captain America: The Winter Soldier however many years back was a pip.
The rest I can take or leave. Mostly leave.
I say all this in the interest of full disclosure. But if I’m gonna cop to being indifferent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, I also want to state for the record that I’m in the liking-things business, and I go into every new series I watch hoping to enjoy what I see. It’s true that I may not have caught a new Marvel movie since the underbaked and overrated Guardians of the Galaxy—after a dozen servings of pistachio ice cream, it’s okay to decide pistachio ice cream isn’t for you and stop eating each new serving just in case this one’s the good one. But I was certainly prepared to enjoy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the latest series to take characters from the blockbuster movies and plop them down on the small screen for several extra hours of screentime. It shares half a title with the one Marvel movie I can actually remember anything about—that’s promising, right?
Wrong, as it turns out! I’ll be covering The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider all season long, starting with my review of the series premiere.
“Clarice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “Get Right with God”
Thus concludes this stage of the investigation into the so-called River Murders. I assume there will be hell to pay for Clarice, who once again went off investigating on her own and fell into the clutches of a killer without having told any of her colleagues where she was going or what she was doing. “Alone is safe for her,” Ardelia tells the ViCAP boys — safe in a psychological sense perhaps, but physically it’s a pretty damn dangerous state for someone in Clarice’s line of work, and two women are dead because of Clarice’s actions. It’s a conundrum: Her investigative instincts are brilliant, but her risky propensity for going solo threatens to undo much of the good she’s otherwise capable of doing. I’m glad the show crafted this compelling little horror story to emphasize this central conflict. Here’s hoping they keep on turning the screws until something snaps.
Music Time: Black Sabbath – Vol. 4
Two of Vol. 4’s ten tracks have found enduring second lives as storied covers by other acts. The rollicking, science-fictional “Supernaut”—like an inverse “Iron Man,” it’s about a voyager through space and time who’s actually enjoying the trip—received a thrashing industrial makeover at the hands of a dubiously named Ministry side project dubbed 1,000 Homo DJs by Jim Nash, the (gay) head of their record label WaxTrax!. (Hold out for the version with vocals by Trent Reznor, which wound up suppressed by his old record label for years.) On the other end of the sonic spectrum, the moving piano ballad “Changes” was converted into a gut-wrenching soul scorcher by singer Charles Bradley, who transmuted its lyrics about a dissolved romantic relationship into a lament for his late mother. Blessed with one of Iommi’s wickedest riffs and Osbourne’s most vulnerable vocal performances, respectively, the original versions of both songs can stand next to these excellent reinterpretations without being eclipsed; Ward’s carnival-like percussion breakdown in “Supernaut” in particular feels like finding a prize in the song’s otherwise thunderous Cracker Jack box.
“Clarice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “You Can’t Rule Me”
Still, as Clarice is waylaid by yet another killer whom only she seems able to detect and stop, it’s hard to ignore the show’s liabilities as a narrative. The Silence of the Lambs works because Clarice investigates only one case and has only one brush with death. In Clarice, she’s already had three near-death experiences in four episodes total. This is standard cop-show shit, for sure, but don’t you want your Silence spinoff to be more than standard cop-show shit? If, multiple times a season, Starling’s going to come within a hair’s breadth of being killed before the killer gets thwarted, its painstaking realism will become a liability right quick. Hannibal could get away with Will Graham & Co. bagging killer after killer because it was pointedly disinterested in realism from the start. Clarice has no such ambition and no such luxury.
“Clarice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Are You Alright?”
And it’s a decent episode, all told, and for all its faults. I’m not sure if the conspiracy story line has legs, or if it’s the kind of story fans of The Silence of the Lambs Cinematic Universe are interested in seeing; if this show doesn’t serve up a new serial killer with a cool nickname and a horrifying M.O. by the end of the season, I’ll eat a census taker’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. I’m also not wild about recasting Martin and Krendler as Clarice’s surrogate work-mother and work-father.
But that close-up device from Clarice’s therapy sessions, and her surreal visions of those moths, point to a potentially more visually imaginative show than what we’ve seen so far. Clarice’s ability to bulldoze institutional obstacles with her powers of observation is another positive trait for the show. I think that’s the real tension underlying Clarice: Can a show on CBS, a network replete with Good Police catching the bad guys, ever be as interesting as the hugely and deservedly acclaimed film on which it’s based? That a “yes” is even possible at this point has to be counted as a victory. And like Clarice and the VICAP team, you take your W’s when you can.
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 124!
I’m so excited to share this one: I’m the solo host of the new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, as special guest Gretchen Felker-Martin and I share nearly two hours of discussion on the New Golden Age of Television. From the stone classics to underrated gems, we cover so much ground here. I hope you enjoy it—listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!
“Clarice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Ghosts of Highway 20”
Last week, Clarice Starling uncovered a series of murders targeting whistleblowers. For now, at least, that case is off the docket. Instead, she and the rest of the FBI’s VICAP team are off to Tennessee, where local and federal law enforcement are in a tense standoff at a heavily armed militia compound. The confrontation, which began when an unknown member of the group opened fire on an ATF agent, threatens to become “another Waco”—something Attorney General Martin, a Tennessee native, wants to avoid at all costs. There’s dingy local color, there’s flashbacks to Clarice’s Appalachian childhood, and there’s a bunch of generic cop-show stuff that raises some uncomfortable questions about what, exactly, we’re doing here.
For starters, why is Clarice tagging along on this mission, considering the insubordinate way she went off-script and described the whistleblower killings as coordinated and targeted rather than the work of a serial killer last week? Her boss, Agent Krendler, has in fact already requested her transfer off the VICAP team as a result. “The only reason you’re here,” he says to her, “is I don’t trust you out of my sight.” That creaking sound you hear? That’s the writers strrrrrrrrrrretching to keep Clarice at the center of the action despite behavior that ought to sideline her. Not a good sign, this early in the series!
“The Stand” thoughts, Episode Nine: “The Circle Closes”
Maybe that’s the single biggest problem with this version of The Stand: It pulled all its punches. There was really no internal struggle going on among any of the characters other than Harold and Nadine—Larry didn’t repeatedly second-guess his own habitual shittiness, for example, nor did Lloyd Henreid realize he’d sold his soul to the devil, nor did the Trashcan Man struggle to reconcile his pyromania with his desire to fit into Vegas society and do right by Flagg, the man who elevated him from captivity to the height of power. Vegas itself is pure fantasy and spectacle; it never makes the vital point that people willing to serve a sadistic authoritarian look and sound like normal people more often than not. The demands of Mother Abigail’s very Old Testament God are never properly struggled with either; the idea that the forces of Good can be cold and uncompromising in their Goodness never gets communicated. The freaking plague itself was an afterthought!
I reviewed the series finale of The Stand for Decider. What a disappointment.
STC on The Silence of the Lambs
I joined Ricky Camilleri and Chris Chafin on the Thirty Years Later podcast to talk about all things The Silence of the Lambs. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about the cornerstone of the Hannibal Lecter Cinematic Universe that I think you’ll really enjoy!
“Clarice” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “The Silence Is Over”
There is one very live issue on which the pilot appears to have closed the book already: How much of a presence will Hannibal Lecter’s absence occupy in the show? Clarice’s legally mandated inability to mention him by name — in one of the episode’s funnier moments, Clarice’s shrink refers to him as her former therapist — did not necessarily mean he wouldn’t still be there, exerting unseen influence.
Consider, for example, the way Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone became a sort of structuring absence in The Godfather Part II, a void around which the whole story implicitly orbited, with Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone attempting to live up to the old man’s legacy while the flashbacks to Robert De Niro’s young version of Vito depicted how he became the larger-than-life presence he was in the first film. A bit closer to home, Laura Palmer was just a prom photo and a few seconds of videotape footage for the bulk of Twin Peaks. However, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never lost sight of how her absence, caused by her murder, continued to affect her family and friends, even after the circumstances of that murder were uncovered and solved. (Well, more or less — particularly by the show’s third season, it was clear that nothing in Twin Peaks was ever truly solved).
By contrast, Clarice devises a bold and, to my mind, successful work-around for the Hannibal issue: It prioritizes Clarice’s experience confronting and killing Buffalo Bill, the murderer whom Lecter helped her track down, rather than her experience with the good doctor himself. The decision actually makes good sense, from a character perspective. Sure, Clarice’s conversations with the Cannibal were harrowing; granting a psychopathic psychiatrist a deep dive into your childhood trauma is gonna leave a mark. But Clarice implicitly argues — with ample justification, as far as I’m concerned — that killing a man before he kills both you and the young woman he intended to be his seventh victim is a much bigger deal, leaving much deeper wounds. Clarice’s constant flashbacks (emphasis on flash; they pop up for split seconds) to Bill and his moth-infested house of horrors ground the show in that experience, not in Clarice’s comparatively tame quid-pro-quo relationship with Lecter.
(That Lecter is currently at large in the show’s time frame, having escaped during the course of the events of the film, does not appear to enter into its calculations at all; as Clarice herself said in the movie, she’s not worried about Lecter coming after her, because “he would consider that rude.” Case closed!)
I’m covering Clarice for Vulture, starting with my review of the series premiere.
“The Stand” thoughts, Episode Eight: “The Stand”
Now consider the Trashcan Man. Arguably the series’ single biggest misfire from a character standpoint, he has no arc or growth or interesting personal journey to speak of. When he first appears in the series, he’s a gibbering crazy man with a penchant for firestarting. When he next appears, he’s retrieving a nuclear warhead, at the express orders of Randall Flagg. And for his final appearance, he delivers the bomb, as requested; the only hiccup is that he brings it to the wrong place, and considering his overall level of sanity it would have been a minor miracle if he hadn’t brought it to the wrong place.
If you’ll permit one last contrast with the novel, this is a case in which nearly every choice made by the show was the wrong one. In the book, Trash is crazy, yes, but he’s capable of coherent speech, coherent thought, and actual attachment to other human beings. He feels friendship with the people he gets to know under Flagg’s command in addition to puppylike devotion to the Dark Man. But his compulsive pyromania gets the better of him after someone unthinkingly ribs him about his fiery habits, and he winds up killing several men and destroying much of Flagg’s nascent air force before fleeing. Desperate to make amends, he does the only thing he feels is big enough to make up for his crime: He retrieves a nuke all on his own, without Flagg’s orders to do so, and delivers it to the Dark Man’s doorstep as an offering of penance. It’s a whole lot more complex, interesting, and ultimately human than just hooting and hollering his way from Point A to Point B to Point C the way he does in the show.
(In a way, Trashcan Man is as underdeveloped as Mother Abigail. In her case, we’re never really made to understand what’s so magnetic about her, or how close a relationship with God she really has. She’s just kind of…there, and it’s like the good-guy characters coalesce around a random old woman, not the Voice of the Almighty on Earth. Similarly, Trash is just a firebug, not the complicated individual with a near-supernatural expertise in weapons, incendiaries, and explosives that he is in the novel.)
“The Stand” thoughts, Episode Seven: “The Walk”
The smartest thing this adaptation of The Stand has done yet is to stand aside. The convoluted, shifting timeframes, the need to balance the apocalypse with its aftermath—that’s all gone now. In its place is a very, very straightforward story: The man in black lives in the desert, and four people (and one dog) are walking to meet him.
I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand, which I pretty much liked, for Decider.