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.

In the meantime, the show is most artistically successful in Eli’s dreams. Whatever else you think of what is going on, and whatever you think of Crystal’s performance (I like it but I don’t feel he’s had the chance to do much nuanced work with this material yet), the man repeatedly dreams of being maimed and killed — by Noah, by Lynn, by himself. That’s the depth of desperation and darkness beneath the surface-level warmth everyone seems drawn to in Eli. I wonder how much Noah and the phenomena surrounding him will drag up to the light.

I reviewed the second episode of Before for Decider.

But the focal point of the episode remains Eli’s attempts to figure out what’s going on with his patient. A harrowing MRI goes awry when the boy hallucinates one of those black-goop tentacle-worm things, a tiny one this time, extruding from the top of the chamber and slithering into his IV wound. I so wish they’d taken the time to use practical effects for an image that inherently squirmy and uncomfortable; the CGI just doesn’t feel viscerally frightening and gross the way it needs to. (Being more creepy than actually scary is a consistent problem for the show.)

I reviewed the second episode of Before for Decider.

Weird kid. Dead wife. Bloody bathtub. Black goop. Creepy tentacles. Recurring nightmares. Scary drawings. Cursed cabin. The series premiere of Before, the new psychological-supernatural thriller from writer-creator Sarah Thorp, feels a little like it went into the horror store and said “I’ll take one of everything.” With nine half-hour-or-so episodes to go after this one, there’s only one question to ask: Will the whole add up to more than the some of its parts?

I reviewed the first episode of the new Billy Crystal/Judith Light supernatural/psychological thriller Before for Decider.

With a fun script by Nick Towne, and a distinct lack of the orange that has often overwhelmed the image on this show — kudos to director Kevin Bray and cinematographer David Franco for making the night scenes look like they were shot in the night air of a big cold city, just for starters — this episode makes it seem like The Penguin has truly gotten its sea legs. I’m still crossing my fingers it get its (bat-)wings eventually too, that’s all. 

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

Now please forgive me as I say something corny: The real star of the show is the camera. Disclaimer is stupidly lovely to look at, a rejoinder to anyone who says all TV is color-graded digital shit. Watch how the light shifts from grey to gold when Nicholas receives the DM that proves his new friend Jonathan died years ago, echoed several scenes later as Stephen stands in his house pondering what he’s done to the young man. Look at the bright grey rainy afternoon light seeping into Stephen’s house when Catherine comes calling, demanding for him to listen to her side of the story. (For our sake I hope he acquiesces!) For crying out loud, look at how well-lit the dinner scene is. It’s not a big orange glow, there are actual light sources, there’s contrast, there’s shadow…this is basic stuff, but it’s worth calling out. 

I reviewed this week’s Disclaimer for Decider. Maybe next week I’ll review Decider for Disclaimer.

Friends, I flapped my arms like an excited goose when I saw Dan and Emily reunite. This despite the fact that I already knew she was alive — they revealed it at the end of last episode and spent the first third of this one explaining how she pulled it off by killing all her Pavlovich-hired captors, duh — and that their reunion was almost certainly inevitable. I’m just that invested by this point in how much these two characters love each other. 

And why wouldn’t I be? The whole point of the show is about how their love for one another persists despite all the madness and misery. It’s the only constant in either of their lives, through multiple identities and countries and continents and allegiances. You can question whether their love for each other is healthy, you can question whether professional killers feel love the way you and I do, but you can’t question that connection between them, flawed and befouled though it may be. 

I reviewed the strong season finale of The Old Man for Decider.

All of this is set against some of the most astonishing gorgeous ocean cinematography I’ve seen in my life. From Children of Men to Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón has long been a “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” director, pushing the envelope of everything from long takes to IMAX. What I don’t know about how he does what he does could fill a book. But man, all that time with the cameras in the water, lit so brightly by the sun that you want to squint just from looking at it on your television, capturing actual nuanced human expression at the same time as conveying the backbreaking, breath-shortening labor of bringing even a child back to shore through rough seas…it’s a technological marvel is what it is, grim though what it’s showing us may be.

I reviewed episode four of Disclaimer for Decider.

Is Sofia Gigante sexy? Oh, you better believe it. Her huge dark eyes perpetually accentuated with thick black eyeliner, she adopts a dress code of low-cut off-the-shoulder numbers to show off not just her skin, but the countless scars that criss-cross it, some of them fresh. And in an inversion of the Joker/Harley Quinn origin story, she effortlessly — and I mean no effort at all, this was not something she was even thinking about trying to do on purpose — secures a submissive sycophant in the form of Dr. Julian Rush, who abandons his career to serve by her side. (It’s a bit like how Victor became the Penguin’s sidekick the same way the second Robin, Jason Todd, became Batman’s: by trying to steal the rims from his ride.) When he begs to join her, she’s not even wearing pants. 

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

Disclaimer does two very worthwhile things here: It finds the big red button marked SEXUAL AROUSAL and the big black button labeled GRIEF and leans on both of them as hard as it possibly can. This is almost certainly bound to displease the segment of the audience that can handle the tearjerking but not the regular jerking, and vice versa. It’s a big risk, in short. Why else watch television? Why else make television?

I reviewed episode three of Disclaimer for Decider.

I’m sitting here trying to collect my thoughts on the sexual confidence of Catherine Ravenscroft. Young Catherine Ravenscroft, that is, the one played by Leila George on the Italian seaside on a fateful day years ago. I’m trying to capture the confidence with which she approaches, discomfits, flirts with, and effectively seduces smitten young amateur photographer Jonathan Brigstocke before so much as touching him. The best I can come up with is this:

She approaches this young man from the sea with the towering swagger of the invincible.

I reviewed the second episode of Disclaimer for Decider.

It’s a grimy little circle, isn’t it? The best hope any of these people having of leading functional lives is, what, lying forever, after killing enough people to get set up safe somewhere to begin with? So that, what, someone can come crawling out of the past 40 years later to kill you or your loved ones anyway? When does it end? Sooner for some than others, I suppose. 

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