John Sugar is a stop and smell the flowers kind of guy. He puts it in so many words to Melanie, the ex-rock star who is his semi-partner in the search for her stepdaughter Olivia. Melanie, shaken by the revelation that Olivia’s half-brother David is a serial rapist, feels differently. “The reason we don’t look,” she suggests, “is it’s all so sad and ugly.”
“Yeah, but not everything,” Sugar counters. Then, with effortless delight, he rattles off several roses to stop and smell, so to speak. “Sea lions…Patti Smith…Cypress trees…The sound of your little sister laughing and having fun…Paris.” Even Melanie, who’s never been there, has to admit Paris seems pretty good.
This exchange from Sugar’s fourth episode (“Starry Eyed”) could not have better encapsulated the mental and emotional battle that consumed my brain for years during a prolonged bout of major depression. The depressed part of me, the Melanie part, fully and truly believed that life is defined by its worst moments, the world by its horrors. The healthy part of me, the not-sick part of me, is John Sugar conceding “Yeah,” then adding “…but not everything.”
“Sugar” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “Starry Eyed”
“Shōgun” thoughts, Episode Nine: “Crimson Sky”
Finally, the lady gives up. Since she cannot obey her lord’s instructions to return to Edo with his family, she also cannot live with the offense of failing him. She will kill herself at sunset, she announces. Since Mariko is Christian, this is a mortal sin, unless she can find a second willing to deliver the death blow. It’s a grim honor — one that the Christian regent Lord Kiyama (Hiromoto Ida) refuses, despite his own beliefs. The lords are not yet ready to make a public break with Ishida and Ochiba, whose control of the Heir gives her incredible power.
But Mariko’s resolve gives her power of her own — a terrible sort of power. When Kiyama fails to show up at the ceremony to serve as her second, her ultimate reward for all this suffering seems to be the damnation of her immortal soul.
It’s all too much for Blackthorne to take. Grabbing a sword, he takes his place by her side, preparing the fatal stroke that will slice off her head after she thrusts a blade into her belly.
Ironically, this is one of the show’s most intensely romantic moments. Such is Blackthorne’s love for Mariko that he is willing to kill her in order to grant her death the honor she believes it will hold. Mariko believes she is damning herself to hell for eternity. Whether he also believes this is immaterial. He simply cannot allow her to experience that anguish in her last moments. He cannot let her die alone and afraid.
This fleeting but real emotional intimacy, profound beyond words, is conveyed by Cosmo Jarvis and Anna Sawai with minimal speech and movement. It’s all shown with their eyes.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.
‘Shogun’: Anna Sawai on Her Character’s Final Transformation
What attracted Lady Mariko to Catholicism?
That was one thing I was really trying to understand. I didn’t know how you could be Catholic and a samurai, because they feel so opposite. But it’s not because Mariko believes in the power of the religion, or the money, or the politics. She wasn’t interested in any of that. It was more that the Catholic priest reached his hand out when she really needed something to hold onto. It could have been anything, but it happened to be that. She found light where she couldn’t see any.
I interviewed Anna Sawai, star of Shōgun (and Monarch and Pachinko), for the New York Times.
“Sugar” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Shibuya Crossing”
Uhhh…is John Sugar an alien?
Is Ruby an alien? Is everyone in the Société Polyglotte Cosmpolitaine an alien?
Is Sugar a show about aliens???????????
Forgive me if I’m jumping off the deep end here. I suppose there could be any number of explanations for John Sugar’s physical inability to get drunk, or his ability to catch flies with chopsticks, or his immunity to anger and violence. Maybe the Société Polyglotte Cosmpolitaine is just a run of the mill organization of ex-spies who come together to save the world, like Davey Siegel suggests — and which Bernie Siegel rejects as the preposterous premise of one of his own shitty movies. Maybe when Ruby tells Sugar “We’re here to observe these people, not participate in their lives,” she’s not echoing Star Trek’s Prime Directive, nor Jor-El’s words to Kal-El in Superman: “Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you are not one of them.”
But anything’s possible, right? And a private-eye series willing to bend the genre far enough to incorporate a hero who’s a pure white hat is probably willing to bend it even farther and place that white hat atop a large, domelike grey head, right?
“Fallout” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “The Beginning”
Fallout may be the first show I’ve ever watched that actually benefits from the standard streaming model of a simultaneous full-season release. Watching this show, moving from level to level and world to world, following Lucy and Maximus and the Ghoul and Norm on their side quests, getting those Cooper Howard cut-scene flashbacks: Watching Fallout feels like spending the weekend trying to beat a video game. What do you think? Be the first to comment.
I mean that as a full-on compliment, by the way. Making no effort, and showing no desire, to conceal its roots in an entertainment-first art form, Fallout is that rarest of beasts: a post-apocalyptic romp with a sense of humor too black to be cute about it. In the process provides a real star turn for Ella Purnell in particular, the one lead whose face is on display for all to read at all times and who thus has to carry so much weight on her shoulders. I want Lucy to beat this game, and I’ll be happy to watch her try.
I reviewed the season finale of Fallout for Decider. Fun show!
“Fallout” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “The Radio”
You know what they say: If you’re in a Vault, and you’re not conducting an experiment, you’re the experiment. That’s the lesson I think Lucy MacLean ought to take from her madcap adventures in the mysterious Vault 4, which come to a surprising conclusion in this, yet another charmingly nasty episode of Fallout.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Fallout Season One for Decider.
“Fallout” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “The Trap”
While far from a perfect episode of television — if I never see that goddamn blue-orange color scheme on a TV screen again it’ll be too soon — this is a very well-structured one. Both Coop in the past and Lucy in the present go through the same slow journey of terrified disillusionment. They’re both realizing that the society that made them the people they are, in which they believe, for which they’ve worked and fought and even killed, is a sick society, not a healthy one. What does that make them?
“Fallout” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “The Past”
Coming back to video games, I mentioned in a previous review that each episode of Fallout feels like reaching a new level, or unlocking a new area, or launching a new side quest. This, perhaps, is how to adapt video games: Translate their iterative structure into episodic storytelling in the old television tradition, with cliffhangers to keep things going. You know what show did this really well, even though a generation of television that followed seemed determined to learn every wrong lesson they could from it instead? Lost. Not a bad place to be.
“Fallout” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “The Ghouls”
The Ghoul does not 100% work for me as a villain. I find his shock-value tough guy talk, the whole “I’m you, sweetie, you just give it a little time” business, to be the kind of stuff that makes “video game dialogue” an inherently pejorative phrase. I’m not sure what kind of lesson he’s trying to impart.
It was around the time he was calmly, methodically slicing off Lucy’s finger as payback for biting off one of his own that I realized this is the point: He’s not trying to teach Lucy anything. You want to believe he’s trying to toughen her up, shake her out of her naïveté, but you can’t square that with the way he pours his water out right in front of her, or gloats as she guzzles down radioactive animal piss or whatever the hell it is, or chops off her finger and then sells her to organ harvesters, presumably never to see her again.
He’s just being mean, because he’s a mean person. He’s a villain, as described by his old fully human self in a movie just prior to blowing a bad guy’s head off via “an old Mexican eulogy” about how a person “was ugly, strong, and he had dignity.” Cooper awards the baddie two out of three before putting one through his skull. But now, the Ghoul, too, is nothing more than ugly and strong. His dignity died out long ago, as his senseless cruelty to Lucy demonstrates.
“Fallout” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “The Head”
Ideologically, this episode of a video game adaptation makes some provocative points. That’s probably not a sentence you’d have read until very recently, given the track record of video game adaptations.
But that’s a historical fluke, not a reflection of limitations in the source material. When I was awakened to the artistic potential of video games in the 1990s first Myst, then Quake, then Super Mario 64, then The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — I’ve never seen any reason a movie or TV show based on one couldn’t also be thoughtful, beautiful, powerful in its own right. Even if we’re not quite there yet, it’s only a matter of time.
At any rate, Fallout Episode 3 (“The Head”) is, indeed, an interesting political text. It starts early, in a flashback to the Ghoul’s days as horse-opera movie star Cooper Howard. On set one day, Cooper balks at executing a wounded villain in cold blood after a cool monologue. He’s told by the director that the original writer has been fired for being a Commie, that the new script reflects “the power of the individual when the chips are down, the new America,” and that “out here, it’s just you, your gun, and your personal code, bringing order to the Wild Wild West.”
That’s fascism. You get that that’s fascism, right? Persecuted Communists, patriotic übermenschen, the wide world tamed by the master race and the beauty of its weapons: plain old American fascism, ladies and germs! That’s the America that went up in smoke when the bombs dropped: a fascist state in Donna Reed dresses and Ward Cleaver cardigans. That it’s also the America one of our two major political parties is frantically scrambling to recreate…I leave it to you to decide if the filmmakers had that in mind.
“Fallout” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “The Target”
Like Guy Ritchie’s recent Netflix surprise The Gentlemen, this is (so far) good solid genre storytelling in an over-the-top mode. with no pretensions of profundity beyond its welcome, intelligent mean streak. Let’s hope the streak continues.
“Fallout” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “The End”
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I’ve never played a Fallout game. Other than recognizing its ubiquitous blond-haired mascot man and understanding it takes place after some kind of nuclear apocalypse, I knew nothing about the franchise at all prior to pressing play on the television adaptation’s first episode.
But co-writers/co-creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, along with director Jonathan Nolan and his creative partner Lisa Joy, got me firmly on Fallout’s side in two easy steps. First, they opened with one of the most frightening nuclear attacks I’ve ever seen in film or television. Second, they made some funny incest jokes.
Seriously! It’s kind of a yin and yang thing. Adapted from the video game series created by Tim Cain, Fallout makes the argument that when it comes to doing a broad sci-fi satire, you can have your cake and eat it, too — you can depict the horrors of the devastation as honestly as possible, and still crack some sick jokes along the way.
I’m covering Fallout for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.
“Shōgun” thoughts, Episode Eight: “The Abyss of Life”
The ritual of seppuku has been described and threatened by multiple characters since episode 1, but it isn’t until this point that “Shogun” finally depicts the act in graphic, agonizing detail. Indeed, Hiromatsu’s death scene functions as a microcosm of the whole series: teasing us with the taboo thrill of violence, then really making it hurt when it sinks the knife in.
The good-hearted Hiromatsu is the canvas on which the sound and effects team paint a grotesque portrait of metal tearing through flesh and muscle and viscera, until the sword of his son Buntaro, who Hiromatsu has asked to “second” the act, severs his head. It rolls directly toward Toranaga, like a grotesque accusation.
Here’s your code of honor, the show seems to say. Choke on it.
“The Regime” thoughts, Episode Six: “Don’t Yet Rejoice”
When I sat down to watch the finale of The Regime I had no idea what to expect. That’s not hyperbole, that’s not a figure of speech, that’s legit. Time and again I’d failed to predict the show’s wild changes of direction. What would it do for an encore?
Elena Vernham and Herbert Zubak were last seen trapped on the roof of the palace, rebels everywhere. The way this show goes, the finale could start six months later when they’re already in a labor camp somewhere. They could wind up getting killed. They could wind up back in charge none the worse for wear. They could flee to another country and do the talk-show circuit. They could somehow trigger a world-devouring nuclear holocaust. Anything could happen.
I like what we got a lot.
“Sugar” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “These People, This Place”
COP VS. COP. MERCILESS. MR. MAYHEM. There’s an art to coming up with good fake names for pop culture trash. Seinfeld had it, with bogus titles that nailed genre after 1990s film genre: Chunnel, Checkmate, Rochelle Rochelle, Prognosis Negative. The comics writer Grant Morrison exquisitely spoofed the compound-word and common-noun names of XXXTREME!!! grunge-era superheroes like Venom, Deadpool, and Cable in their and Keith Giffen’s parody comic Doom Force: Gridlock, Timesheet, Campfire, Spatula. And with the three titles listed at the top of this paragraph — movies produced by squirrelly sleazeball Bernie Siegel, played by Dennis Boutsikaris, a welcome face anywhere he shows up — Sugar shows it has that juice.
“Sugar” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “Olivia”
Private investigator John Sugar is OP. “Overpowered,” to the non-gamers out there. His skills have been maxed out, to the point where almost nothing can faze him. He’s handsome. He’s wealthy. He’s successful. He’s good at his job. He speaks fluent English, Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. He wears beautiful suits and drives an incredible car. His partner may be even smarter and better looking than he is. He’s a skilled hand-to-hand fighter, but he hates violence. He catches a fly with chopsticks. He can metabolize alcohol at a frankly unbelievable fifty times the rate of normal men. He may be Wolverine.
And he’s kind, too. Superhumanly so. None of the above attributes have gone to his head at all. He does not appear to be a bully, an egotist, a womanizer, or any of the other shortcomings you might expect of someone so blessed. He’s not arrogant about his gifts, nor is he apologetic; he simply uses them to the best of his abilities. He’s friendly to everyone, and sincerely interested in them, knowing the names and family lives of the workers at the hotel where he lives in a well-appointed bungalow. He’s a helper, constantly going out of his way to get people out of jams — a yakuza boss client with a kidnapped child, a limousine driver he overhears talking about his sick daughter, a homeless guy with a dog who happens to be outside a bar Sugar has to visit for work. He is Agent Dale Cooper levels of tall, dark, handsome, and decent. He’s the white private dick that’s a nice machine to all the chicks.
I’m covering Sugar for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “Endgame”
Could they keep it going? Sure, I don’t see why not. Jake always has other stories to work. Katagiri could get pulled back in — or not, if Ken Watanabe’s contract is up. Jake and Trendy’s falling out feels like something set up with a story in mind. So does Mrs. Tozawa’s warning to Jake that she won’t forget how he failed to take Tozawa down with the surveillance tape, which it turns out she sent him. Boss Sato opens up a whole new world of storytelling possibilities. We don’t know where Sam’s headed, what she’ll do when she gets there, or what she’ll be like when she gets back. Emi unchained seems interesting to me. There’s plenty left to explore.
But if that doesn’t happen, that’s fine! Then there’s plenty left to imagine, the way we daydream futures for all kinds of characters in our favorite stories. I like the sense that the world of Tokyo Vice will keep on turning even if we’re not there to see it. Crime will still be committed, and cops and reporters will still investigate it. There will always be people eating and drinking and working and fucking behind those big glass windows. The lights of Tokyo will always stay on.
“Shōgun” thoughts, Episode Seven: “A Stick of Time”
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Few cinematic genres have had as fruitful a conversation with one another as the samurai film and the western, so it’s only fitting to use an epigraph from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to sum up the central conflict in this week’s episode.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.
“The Regime” thoughts, Episode Five: “All Ye Faithful”
Ah, The Regime! A delightful satire about a flighty mad tyrant and the sad salt-of-the-earth soldier who falls under her contr— no.
Ah, The Regime! A surprising satire about a power-mad Rasputin who takes advantage of his unexpected elevation to power to slowly take over the sta— no.
Ah, The Regime! An unpredictable satire in which the dictator’s callous behavior drives her imprisoned svengali into the arms of the one man who presents a political threat to her reig— no.
Ah, The Regime! A wild satire in which a dictator and a thug fiddle (with each other) while Rome burns until the flames finally come for them. Yes?
I dunno, man. There’s been five episodes of this thing and each one has revised the show’s underlying premise as presented by the last. This time around the leap was more shocking to me than ever. Not because it was impossible to predict that Elena Vernham and Herbert Zubak would run Unnamed Central European State right into the ground — the only other option would be some satire-genre contrivance in which they get away with it all scott-free, which I still wouldn’t rule out since it’s so irresistible to satirists. No, this was shocking because of how goddamned unpleasant it was to watch, and to listen to.
That last point is really important. Throughout the early going of this episode (“All Ye Faithful”), every conversation and meal and speech to the staff is soundtracked by the sound of distant explosions. They’re our first sign that things have gone disastrously wrong for the regime. Occasionally the explosions can even be seen through a window in the background. So as Elena prattles on about this or that inane thing, or as Agnes gives a stiff-upper-lip speech to the kitchen, or as little Oskar helps with yuletide traditions like selecting the Christmas Carp (??), there’s just a constant sound of death at a military scale thrumming in the background. It’s The Zone of Interest of cringe comedy.