The fascinating thing about all this is that we’re spending the season rooting for the Mechanicals to win, even though we know everyone will die if they do. That’s the whole point of the Juliette plot, after all: She’s in a race against time to get back to the original Silo and warn everyone not to come out after her, because the surface world really is poisonous. It goes to show you how much the structure of genre narrative can trigger our sympathies, even when intellectually we understand our sympathies are dumb as hell.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

 Jet Wilkinson is a director who tends to do whatever he’s doing as well as it can be done, and in this case he takes the challenge of filming a gloomy horror climax about grief and sets it against a background of hard gray wintry afternoon light. There are shots of Eli alone on the shore stronger and eerier than any of the show’s more explicit horror moments.

Which, I suppose, speaks to Before’s bigger problem: It’s a horror show that was never particularly scary. Surprising, intriguing, occasionally disgusting? Yes. An odd but effective vehicle for Billy Crystal to stretch his legs by playing, basically, a maniac who should never be let near a child again? Definitely. Something that made me afraid, the way Twin Peaks or Channel Zero or Them or the first season of The Terror made me afraid? No. That may matter to you, it may not, but as a Horror Person I feel it bears mentioning. 

I reviewed the series finale of Before for Decider.

I guess some points about the kids’ comfortable lifestyle’s pros and cons are made in the back-and-forth between Hayna and Neel over the course of the episode, for what it’s worth. It makes you soft, but that softness is your strength, or something. They tried. I dunno, it’s little tough to take a lesson in heroism from a company selling out trans kids as we speak.

To me, the pleasures of this episode are a lot simpler to appreciate. SM-33’s creepy heel turn, Ryan Kiera Armstrong’s fine performance as Fern, Neel and Hayna’s charming friendship, some pleasantly Star Warsian armor and weapons designs, and a sense of forward motion almost entirely lacking from several of the franchise’s other small-screen efforts — that’s time I don’t regret spending long, long ago.

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

This climactic act of self-harm is one of Before’s gnarliest moments yet, which is saying something. I’ve yet to find the show genuinely scary — the rapid editing of many of the frightening visions and the breakneck pace of these short episodes overall largely preclude building any sense of real dread — but it’s admirably disgusting, that’s for sure. Billy Crystal just did the Joker’s disappearing pen trick on his own hand, for crying out loud. Not something you see every day!

[…]

All of this happens in the timespan of a network sitcom, which is wild to me. The show’s speed and staccato rhythm are unique, that’s for sure, though I’m not convinced they’re good for tension, fear, or atmosphere. What they do provide is an effective simulacrum of what Eli Adler’s battered brain must be going through. By the end of any given episode, you’ve seen so many insects and torn pages and bodily injuries and drowned ghosts and shots of Eli screaming in the snow, and (this is especially true of this episode) heard increasingly maddening noises like the drip-drop of a bathtub, the tick-tock of a clock, or the click-clack of a retractable pen, that shish-kebab’ing your hand almost feels like a reasonable response. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Before for Decider.

Without Law’s star power and talent, carefully honed over decades, the kid characters just don’t hold up by comparison. Wim remains simultaneously defiant and credulous, two annoying traits that make him hard to take under almost any conditions. Fern, whose ability to take charge of the situation made her the hero of episode 2, comes across as boringly one-note in her opposition to Jod’s very clearly necessary involvement in their escape. Neel is cute, obviously, but cloying, and the lack of nuance in his voice acting can’t be made up for by physical performance since it’s just someone in big blue elephant mask or whatever.

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew

Juliette Nichols is an engineer by trade, helping to power the Silo. But what her job really does is power Silo, the show. Thanks to her background of mechanical know-how and pragmatic problem-solving, the show can serve up one seemingly insurmountable problem with a so-crazy-it-just-might-work solution after another. Then all it has to do is sit back and point its camera at a sweaty Rebecca Ferguson and a bedraggled coworker or two, and the result is some of the tightest, tensest action setpieces on television.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

It may have taken eight episodes, a shocking confession, an imaginative method of storytelling, a surfeit of eerie old photos (featuring a vanishing young Eli, notably), and a scary dream-farmhouse to get it there, but Before has some real dark energy to it now. Let’s hope that energy keeps building.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

Aliens, droids, starships, a dangerous spaceport, a Jedi in hiding, and not a lawn in sight. Now that’s more like it! Directed with an eye for both creatures and color by David Lowery, this week’s episode of Skeleton Crew is good harmless Star Wars fun. That’s all I ask! Oh, and it also brings Michael Jackson’s Captain EO firmly into Star Wars continuity, for some reason?

I reviewed the second episode of Skeleton Crew, which is perfectly fine, for Decider.

There’s something disgusting about seeing lawns in Star Wars. Once, outside the living memory of many people who will watch Skeleton Crew, this franchise became a franchise because it showed people things they’d never seen before — or at the very least, remixed its disparate sources into something exciting and novel. Skeleton Crew opts for neatly rectangular patches of freshly mown grass, in front of tasteful two-story family homes with attached garages, lining a sunlit street down which cars drive as their occupants return from their commute to the city…in Star Wars. An entire galaxy to explore, and co-creators/co-writers Christopher Ford and Jon Watts (who also directs this episode) decided to recreate the environmentally ruinous, politically alienating post-war American suburb? My reaction was instant and instinctive: This is sick.

I reviewed the premiere of the new Star Wars show Skeleton Crew for Decider. (The next two episodes are much better, but good lord.)

My favorite scene, one of the best non-thriller scenes in the entire series in fact, has little do do with any of this. It’s just Bernard, stuttering and stammering and awkwardly telling Judge Meadows that he has to measure her for her surface suit. He does this with obvious sensuality, implying a whole universe of emotions between the two characters who were once so close, and giving actors Tanya Moodie and Tim Robbins a moment of serious displaced sexiness. In a way, it’s an echo of the later sit-down between Solo and Juliette: a man and a woman in intimate company, each glad for the presence of the other despite the dire circumstances. These are lovely notes for the show to play; considering the likelihood we’re getting an old-fashioned “Juliette does some engineering and some death-defying” sequence next episode as she goes diving for those firefighter uniforms, let’s enjoy the loveliness while we can.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Dr. Eli Adler is not a Velvet Underground fan. I don’t know how else to explain his bafflement when Noah, his mysterious patient, puts on VU’s devastating junkie epic “Heroin,” causing the late addict Benjamin Walker’s brother Lawrence to break down and cry. Eli, I’m begging you, at least pick up The Velvet Underground and Nico! (Loaded too, if you want a different kind of sound, but that’s really neither here nor there.)

If I’m making light of this moment it’s not because I wasn’t affected it. Oh, on the contrary. In my review of last week’s episode I made no bones about my admiration for character actor Lenny Venito, who plays Lawrence…or Lonnie, as Noah calls him when he apologizes to him, speaking as his junkie brother Benjamin. Between the boy and the song and his memories of his brother playing it for him over and over — parents, this is a warning sign, but maybe it was also the only way the guy could communicate what he was going through to his baby brother — Lawrence crumbles. Using the incredible power of the song (they don’t even get to the part where Lou Reed sings the word “heeeeeeee-rooo-innnn” like the exhalation of a dying man) and Venito’s excellent performance, the show really makes you feel for the man, and for the brother he lost.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

All over the Silo’s brutalist concrete expanse, graffiti has begun popping up reading “JL” — Juliet Lives. 

Might it have been nice if she lived in this specific episode? Sure. Robbins, Common, Moodie, and Walter are lively screen presences, but Juliette’s steely glare is the show. I completely understand the decision to bifurcate these two storylines, for the time being anyway. Still, no doubt writer Fred Golan and director Michael Dinner knew they had an uphill climb, or upstairs in this case, facing them with this episode. There are defects in the script beyond that to be sure: Shirley’s rebelliousness is fairly rote, and I heard the word “tape” more in this 45-minute episode than in the hundreds of hours of TV I’ve watched all year long. 

But — much like this review! — this episode has a task to perform: It has to reintroduce the world, the story, the plot (from the big picture to the nitty-gritty storytelling mechanics), and the characters to the audience. All episode one had to do was show Rebecca Ferguson Indiana Jonesing herself through an abandoned Silo. The degree of difficulty was higher here, in other words, and for fewer rewards. If the task was just to refresh my memory and recommit me to the story, mission accomplished.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Forty-five minutes following Rebecca Ferguson around as she explores an impenetrably dark subterranean structure in silence, with the exception of the occasional understated “okay”? I can’t help but feel that the first episode of Silo’s second season might have been a tougher sell to Apple in a pre–Dune 1& 2 world. But Ferguson is a star now, and one of the ways you can tell is how she carries this episode when most of the time all you can really see is her face, and barely at that. She’s got the kind of face, with its command of the screen and the audience’s attention, that can pull it off. That’s a star in my book.

I reviewed the season premiere of Silo for Decider.

Part of the problem with Before’s barely-half-an-hour run time and the resulting pacing of the storytelling is that you feel like you might have covered just this much ground in, like, an episode and a half of an hour-long drama about the exact same topic. However, now that we’ve got enough of the show under our belt, the vision is becoming more apparent. I still can’t say Before is scary, and that’s the biggest knock on it; horror TV shows should frighten you, full stop. But I do find the supernatural mystery becoming more compelling as the wriggly, wormy shape of it comes into focus. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

Despite its extra runtime, this episode mostly flies by thanks to the direction of Jennifer Getzinger. In addition to her capable handling of all the cat-and-mouse business, she almost entirely avoids the ghastly orange color palette of the earlier episodes, which allows the performances of key cast members Deirdre O’Connell and (beneath all those prosthetics) Colin Farrell in particular to actually shine through. You need unsparing grey light on Oz’s face when he’s confronted with his crimes, something that shows his every scar and flaw and combover. And you need to be able to fully register Frances’s horror at the monster she helped create, or at the very least allowed to live on.

I reviewed the finale of The Penguin for Decider.

“You’re managing the idea of me having been violated by someone far more easily than the idea of that someone bringing me pleasure. It’s almost like you — you’re relieved that I was raped. And I just…Sorry, I…I don’t know how to forgive that.”

Catherine Ravenstock is talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband Robert in the hospital waiting room, while their son Nicholas recuperates from his stroke nearby. She’s explaining to him that despite his contrition over having falsely accused her of infidelity is, in its way, worse than the accusation itself. So long as she could be blamed for the crime of enjoying herself illicitly, he could stay angry. One he finds out that she was merely brutalized for three and a half hours by a knife-wielding stranger, he can love her again. And that’s not a love Catherine Ravenstock wants. 

But Catherine isn’t just talking to Robert. She’s talking to the audience.

I reviewed the finale of Disclaimer for Decider. I thought it was very good.

Here’s the kind of day Eli is having. In the morning, he has a meeting with his troubled client Noah where he hallucinates that an action figure the boy buries in the sand so it can’t “hurt anyone” looks just like himself. Before action figures are going to be the hottest toy of this holiday season, mark my words.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

Top hats, tuxedos, umbrellas — there’s even a bit in Astaire’s dance where he mimes machine-gunning the other dancers with his cane…it’s as though The Penguin went out of its way to include everything that traditionally makes the Penguin the Penguin and then said “eh, none of that really registered with him, I guess.” Would a top-hat wearing machine-gun-umbrella toting Oz Cobb really be so terrible to show us?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Penguin for Decider.

Her son is on death’s door. Her husband won’t spend more than two seconds in her company and refuses to listen to a word he says. The man who’s ruined her life has more access to her child than she does. But Catherine Ravenstock is a storyteller by trade, and her story is going to get told, one way or the other.

So she flips the script on Stephen. She breaks into his house, violating his personal space, to let him know what really happened. (The rattling we keep hearing in the background of her flashbacks is actually his malfunctioning freezer, which has been on the fritz since before Jonathan’s death.) Writer-director-creator Alfonso Cuarón shoots her in blazing white light, like an alien visitation. I think that’s a key visual indicator, personally. I think she’s an avatar of the truth.

I reviewed this week’s Disclaimer for Decider.

One thing I’m realizing is that keeping us guessing like this is an artifact of the show’s running time. An unusual half-hour drama — I don’t think Apple TV+ will be submitting this one for Best Comedy, The Bear–style — it’s also an even more unusual half-hour supernatural mystery thriller. What this means is every thirty minutes or so, it’s got to end on a cliffhanger that raises more questions than it answers to keep us moving through all ten episodes, instead of doing so every sixty minutes or so to move us through the same number of episodes or fewer. 

In other words, writer-creator Sarah Thorp all but designed Before to deny us answers. The mysteries add up one on top of the other until it’s tune in next week, same Before-time, same Before-channel. For a while, anyway, we’re gonna be as in the dark as Eli. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.