Still, I think turbo-charging Ellie and Dina’s relationship, kicking it off the episode after they set out on their quest rather than saving it for some climactic moment down the line, is smart. It adds some verve to things, some spice, and that’s needed in the absence of Joel’s quiet charisma. And for all the hoary action-game tropes it employs, the long escape from the infected keeps the pace elevated. Even the sudden and brutal violence inflicted by Isaac, first on his squad and then years later on his prisoner, serves the additional purpose of simply keeping us in the audience alert, anxious, uncomfortable. These are exactly the kind of emotions a post-apocalyptic horror show should be aiming to generate. No offense to voting on motions brought before the town council, but that was no way to follow up the death of your main character. Thrills and chills are more like it.

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

MobLand isn’t swinging for the fences or plumbing the depths, but it’s not trying to be The Sopranos and failing, it’s trying to be a show in which a bunch of cool attractive people bark orders or dodge bullets, with Tom Hardy’s deadpan machismo as its center of gravity. It’s easy as pie to assemble a great cast, write a big genre piece for them to perform, and call it a day, counting on familiar beats and familiar faces to carry the project. It’s much harder to do this well. (Does anyone else remember Zero Day?) 

On the big screen, there’s a reason Conclave last year and Sinners this year caught on the way they did: big beautiful costumey pulse-pounding thrillers starring beloved actors that actually work are rarer these days than hen’s teeth. Both of those films are a sight more serious-minded than MobLand has shown itself to be, but the principle remains the same here. There’s a lot of unclaimed territory between tenderloin steak and fast-food franchise crap. Sometimes people just want to eat a goddamn burger. Give it to them!

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

I can’t tell you how much good it does my heart to watch a Star Wars show that’s horny. Actually horny, not just “oh look, it’s a hunky guy with his shirt off, aren’t we all excited” Kylo Ren/Steve Rogers/Disney horny. Horny enough to make Dedra Meero topping Syril Karn more or less canon. Horny enough to finally, finally have a queer kiss onscreen because, despite their danger, it’s been years, and Vel Sartha and Cinta Kaz can’t keep their hands off one another. Horny enough for Bix Caleen to only semi-jokingly ask her boyfriend, Cassian Andor, to bring his glamorous fashion-designer cover identity home with him one night so she can have sex with someone “very, very pretty.” I’m all for a smoldering kiss between Han Solo and Princess Leia, don’t get me wrong, but this is something else. This is sex, not romance, or not just romance, and it makes Andor feel alive even in the midst of death.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

Syril Karn is living the life of his dreams. He’s involved in highly classified work for the Imperial Security Bureau, pretending to chafe at the Empire’s yoke while secretly setting up its opponents for a sting. He’s working directly with his girlfriend, Dedra Meero, a relationship he has to keep a secret from everyone including his ghastly mother. In both cases, I can only imagine the thrill leading a double life gives to this man — particularly when one of those double lives involves Dedra in all black, commanding him to turn out the lights because they only have an hour together and they need to get down to business. Oooh-whee. Even though House of Cards creator Beau Willimon wrote this script, it feels like erotic fanfic where these two are concerned, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.

I reviewed episode 5 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

But the highlight of the episode is quiet, wordless. It’s the moment of parting, when Cassian and Bix simply touch each other, hand to hand. Composer Nicholas Britell’s music is minimal yet lushly romantic here — like their love itself, I suppose, which they’ve forced into the tiny compartment left available for love by the world they inhabit. There’s something truly beautiful in that moment. These people are not deluding themselves that the world is okay, that life is okay, that their own lives are okay. But they love each other anyway, because while the government they live under does not value the things that make us human, we do, we can, and we must.

I reviewed episode 4 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

There are no bloody stabbings in this episode, no fight scenes, no gun battles. The only pyrotechnics to speak of — I mean, other than the car bombing — come from the tension between the Stevensons and the Harrigans, embodied in the gritted-teeth determination projected by actors Geoff Bell and Pierce Brosnan as their respective bosses. Tom Hardy remains excellent as a man who doesn’t necessarily always stay cool, but does alway stay under control. Helen Mirren is having a ball as Maeve grows increasingly ambitious and unhinged. As he did on House of the Dragon, Paddy Considine excels as a guy who’s doing a basically okay job as a figure of importance but who’d probably be better suited doing literally everything else. 

And director Daniel Syrkin peppers the thing with the occasional lovely vista: Conrad fishing as night falls over his country house, Harry on his balcony looking out over the nighttime city. The Fontaines D.C. theme song, “Starburster,” whips ass. In short, MobLand is good gangster TV.

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

You can feel it right away. Even though it’s three months after the episode’s opening — in which a badly traumatized Ellie wakes up screaming in a hospital after witnessing her father figure Joel’s execution — and the good people of Jackson Hole are busy rebuilding in the spring sunshine, the sense of loss is palpable. I’m not talking about the dozens of citizens killed by the infected during their incursion into the fortified city. I’m not even talking about the death of Joel himself, not exactly. 

Pedro Pascal isn’t on this show anymore!

I reviewed this week’s The Last of Us for Decider.

Andor feels designed to prove that the Star Wars setting can do anything any other science fiction can do. If it’s ugly, if it’s sexy, if it’s violent, if it’s pathetic, if it’s human, it can be done way out there just as surely as it can be done down here. The Star Wars branding is just plausible deniability. This isn’t a show about the Empire and the Rebellion. It’s a show about us, because we’re both.

I reviewed the third episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

The second of three episodes released simultaneously as this season’s opening “chapter,” this episode doesn’t pack the wallop of its predecessor. That’s understandable: The thrill of being the first new episode of Andor in two years is something you can really only capture once, even if you’re debuting three of them at a time. Since the first episode already gave us the “where are they now” for almost all of these characters, there isn’t that same rush of new information to contend with either.

For the most part, anyway. Dedra and Syril forming a romantic relationship is a genuine shock. Dedra running her thumb tenderly around Syril’s mouth because her baby’s afraid of his mom is an even bigger shock. I genuinely didn’t think she had it in her! But fascists are human too, which makes this scene even creepier. Watching a genocidal space Nazi comfort the man who loves her is like watching a Black Lodge entity pretend to be human on Twin Peaks. It’s uncanny, and it only gets more so the closer to human they get.

I reviewed the second episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

There comes a time when the price of inaction outweighs the price of action. There comes a time when the cost of living with your failure to do something outstrips the cost of doing something and paying the price. What Andor’s talking about is integrity — integrating your thoughts and your words with your actions. Anything less is a betrayal of your soul, and on some level you know it. That’s why committing to the fight against oppression feels so freeing. It’s not because you’re now in less danger, quite the opposite. It’s because it makes you feel like a whole human, maybe for the first time ever. Andor’s quest is to capture that feeling and transmit it to the viewer. What you do with it next is up to you.

I reviewed the season premiere of Andor for Decider. This is one of the best television shows of al ltime.

Sure, okay.

This is the big shocking episode of The Last of Us this season, I guess, the one designed to throw the viewer off balance and generate “I can’t believe they did that!” buzz. The problem is that nearly 12 years after the Red Wedding, that particular party trick is played out. I don’t mind that this episode, just the second of the show’s second season, kills off Pedro Pascal’s lead character, Joel — and that’s the problem. I don’t mind, and I don’t care.

I reviewed last night’s The Last of Us for Decider.

It occurs to me now that Harry is a Mike Ehrmantraut, as in the similarly employed cartel fixer from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Played by Jonathan Banks with the same kind of seen-it-all sad-sack professionalism Tom Hardy brings to Harry, he’s a character far more likeable than the things he does would lead you believe if you heard about them in a vacuum. Harry is a huge piece of shit, but he’s also Tom Hardy, making the most of his natural gift of coming across like a hard man with a heart of caramel. In wrestling parlance, he’s a tweener, a guy with heel tendencies who’s treated like a face by the audience. You want him to succeed, despite yourself.

I reviewed this weekend’s MobLand for Decider.

As I said in my review of the premiere, I’m not reviewing the podcast on which this show is based, and I am absolutely not “reviewing” the life and death of the real Molly, or the experiences she shared with the real Nikki. Maybe this is exactly how things went down. Certainly no show is under any obligation to be a huge bummer just because a critic is goth and likes depressing sex stuff like In the Realm of the Senses better than the more uplifting alternative.

But let’s say it did all go down like this. Molly never had any need to earn a living during her illness. Her estranged husband kept her on his insurance, even as he formed a happy new family. Her “sex quest” was more or less effortless, guided by her palliative care counserlor, its culmination coincidentally living across the hall. Her best friend gave up everything for her but didn’t give up anything in the end — same great boyfriend, even better relationship with his quasi-estranged daughter, even better gig in showbiz as a skilled director instead of struggling actor. Her ex-husband is having a baby with his wonderful new partner. Her ex-junkie mother who never respected a boundary of hers in her life finally got the picture and was a helpful, warming presence instead of a draining one. Death itself was greeted with a cheery “Let’s get this show on the road!” 

Let’s say it all happened like it did in Dying for Sex. Again, no show is required to be bleak. But shows about dying from cancer, I think, are required to explore the ways in which they aren’t bleak a lot better than this one did. Money, beauty, a unflagging support system, legions of sexual suitors, a love that demands little of her but gives her a cure for her lifelong trauma — with one or two very obvious exceptions!!!, Molly has so much going for her, and Dying for Sex doesn’t address any of it as such even once. For all the skill of its execution, it’s half a show.

I reviewed the finale of Dying for Sex for Decider.

The deck is stacked from the start. As the new season of The Last of Us begins, survivors of a massacre bury their dead. They’re the Fireflies, members of a scattered network of rebels fighting the fascist government that took over in the wake of the cordyceps outbreak that killed or zombified billions. (Ah yes, those happy golden bygone days when we thought it would take an evil fungus for fascism to come to America.) The perpetrator of the massacre was no jackbooted government lackey, though. Nor was it the monstrous and powerful infected known as “clickers” for their method of echolocation. It was Joel (Pedro Pascal), our player character — ahem, our protagonist. 

And what choice did the writers — sorry, the Fireflies — leave him? Either he killed them or they would kill his adoptive daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Sure, if they did so it might enable them analyze why she’s immune to infection (she was exposed to a minuscule amount of the fungus during birth), and thus find a cure for cordyceps and save the world. But a real man does whatever he has to protect his family, or something. 

The whole killcrazy climax to the show’s first season was frustrating because it set up a false binary, a choice between individual and collective needs. Reality is not a zero-sum contest between you and everyone else — only fascists believe otherwise — and genre stories that make such a conflict their central moral dilemma are playing fast and loose with how morality actually works. 

We’re not five minutes into the Season 2 premiere when writer-director-co-creator Craig Mazin does it again. The surviving Fireflies are led by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who’s born-again hard from the ordeal. Not only does she want to track down and kill Joel with the other survivors’ help, she wants to kill him slowly. She repeats the word for clarity and everything.

Once again, The Last of Us is not-so-subtly nudging us in the direction they want our sympathies to go. If this were a simple case of a gaggle of survivors hunting down and shooting the outlaw who gunned down their kinsfolk, we’d probably still be rooting for Joel — he’s Pedro Pascal, for god’s sake — but we’d at least sympathize with their goal. Torturing Joel to death is a bridge too far when you’ve spent a season asking us to identify with the guy, in a story based on an art form where identifying with the protagonist is baked right into the game mechanics. We can’t root for Abby now. That’s The Last of Us for you: It’s always less complex than it looks.

I reviewed the season premiere of The Last of Us for Decider.

Rob Delaney is for sure gonna break some hearts as the neighbor in this episode, and not on account of being sweet or sad either. The neighbor’s body is showcased in all its tactile, hirsute glory; the episode often feels like sponcon for chest hair. After however many years of smooth-chested Marvel hunks, it does a fuzzy fellow’s heart good to see this kind of masculine beauty — “so beautiful” is what Molly calls him in so many words, returning his compliment to her — celebrated on screen.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

In an attempt to honor what this episode of Dying for Sex was at least attempting to do, this review will not be mincing words about some of the roughest stuff there is to talk about. So please consider this a warning before proceeding.

I was sexually abused as a child. Like Molly, Dying for Sex’s protagonist, it only happened once, though what was done to me was nowhere near as severe and traumatic as what was done to her. Like Molly, I’ve been haunted by it on and off ever since, though again not to her degree. Like Molly, I suspect it’s cast a long shadow over my sexual life, including the kind of kink I enjoy. It’s not as present a presence in my life as it is in hers — I don’t see my abuser like they’re there in the room with me — but it’s there. It’s alright. It is what it is. 

At one point during this episode, Molly reads aloud to Nikki an account of that terrible night — how the man roofied Molly’s mom, how Molly saw this but didn’t say anything, how she was unable to rouse her mother for help, how she wound up apologizing to her abuser for striking him with a hairbrush in an attempt to escape. 

It’s hard to watch. It’s hard to listen to. As the scene progressed I found myself getting sadder and sadder — not for Molly and not for myself, but because we live in a world where something so profoundly unfair happens to so many children. We live in a world run by men actively working to make things less safe for the vulnerable, so that more children suffer. I felt discomfort, rage, despair, catharsis. I felt a lot of things.

Then Molly farts. 

What are we doing here, man. What are we doing?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

“I said if you help the Harrigans, the Harrigans will help you. You have not helped the Harrigans. Not at all. Okay? So now I, Kevin here, he’s gonna lose his family, I’m gonna lose my family, both of us are gonna die, and others, yeah? Thanks to you, okay, and Eddie. So I don’t think it’s very fair that you don’t share in some of that joy, you understand.”

Harry Da Souza has a strange way of speaking. Understatement is one of his primary rhetorical devices: “You have not helped the Harrigans” to a man who helped conceal a war-starting murder. “I don’t think it’s very fair” that you don’t die along with the rest of us. I keep circling back to that big in the first episode where he tells an eyewitness that unless he cooperates, either Harry “or one of my associates, depending upon my availability” will kill him for it. He’s a man with the power of life and death, but he talks like a slightly peeved Nando’s manager. 

He peppers his speech with little stops and starts, little marks of inquisition designed to give the listener no other choice but to agree with him. Look at that paragraph above, the way it’s dotted with “Okay? Yeah? Okay. You understand.” It sounds like he’s merely commiserating with his interlocutor, relating to him, saying “obviously you and I agree that this is simple common sense,” even as he’s threatening to kill the man and his wife and children.

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

It’s a blue rose case.

The opening image of this week’s Daredevil: Born Again is taken straight from the iconography of David Lynch, in the form of the blue-colored flower used to designate paranormal investigations in the world of Twin Peaks. When the image resolves, we see it’s a flower in a garden, but that the garden is surrounded by the bars and towers of a prison yard. This feels like a play on another famous Lynch image, that of the verminous insects writhing beneath the pristine red roses and green lawns of the all-American suburb in Blue Velvet. This time, however, the darkness is on top. Maybe that’s appropriate these days.

This isn’t the only Lynchian moment in the episode. Several times, as we follow the mass-murdering marksman nicknamed Bullseye as he’s transferred to general population in prison, escapes, and arrives at Mayor Fisk’s black-and-white ball, the screen takes on a blue tint. When Matt Murdock takes the bullet Bullseye intended for Fisk, the screen is hypersaturated with red. It’s reminiscent of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, respectively. 

Lynch’s work ties to what writers Jesse Wigutow and Dario Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead are up to in this episode only in the loosest possible sense. Maybe you could stretch and say the dual personae of both Murdock/Daredevil and Fisk/Kingpin are just the superhero genre’s way of exploring the same fissures in identity that Lynch’s Hitchcockian doubles did in the two aforementioned horror masterpieces. Or maybe Vincent D’Onofrio’s raspy stop-and-start voice reminds you of Robert Loggia growling his way through Lost Highway as the similarly, let’s say, romantically possessive gangster Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway. 

But I don’t think you need to be doing the same kinds of things David Lynch did to borrow the tools he used to do them with. Indeed, that’s where many soi-disant “Lynchian” films and TV shows go wrong — aiming for his thoughtful, sensual surrealism and landing somewhere in the neighborhood of “whoa, that was weird” at best. Why not stick a blue rose at the beginning of a TV show about a blind lawyer’s blood feud with both a gangster the size of Shaquille O’Neal and an assassin who can spit out his own tooth hard enough to put an eye out with it? Why not do big beautiful things with color just because they’re big and beautiful things you can do?

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

Dying for Sex has every right to be funny if it wants, and it’s often very good at it. The sight gag where Nikki pulls bloody gauze out of her mouth like a magician at a child’s birthday party is delightfully gross. Gail telling Molly that her ex-husband “said you were on some kind of ‘sex quest’” made me snort with laughter. The increasingly large and dreadful gathering around Molly’s chemotherapy, when it became apparent that Steve brought his new girlfriend to meet her under these conditions? Curb Your Enthusiasm–level stuff. I am not trying to sell the show short in that regard. 

I just question why 9 scenes out of 10 have to either tickle your funnybone or make you nod in approval when they end. With material about sex, illness, power, friendship, family, kink, love, and death this intense, it’s almost insulting for the show to add a little rimshot to the proceedings every now and then. Let me be blown away by this stuff. I think it’s got that strength.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

Kinks and fetishes are like a psychosexual itch on the small of your back. Under normal circumstances, no matter how you stretch and reach, it’s untouchable. Grab a back-scratcher or a wooden spoon or whatever’s available that suits the purpose, though? Ahhhhhh, what a relief! You just need to know what the tools are and how to use them, so to speak. (This is a metaphor, not a demand that you invest in some BDSM hardware.)

The best thing about Dying for Sex’s journey into dominance and submission this episode is that it shows Molly scratching an itch. Here’s a woman who’s lost her bodily autonomy for years at a time, as cancer attacks her body from within and doctors poke and prod and scan and irradiate and pump pills into from without. Her (ex?) husband, Steve, took total control of her treatment when he was around. Her best friend, Nikki, isn’t nearly so domineering and constantly encourages Molly to get involved — but Nikki’s primary mode of dealing with Molly’s illness is anger, which brings out Molly’s anger in turn, which makes her feel even less in control. The episode also alludes to the abuse she endured as a child — just briefly, just a good guess by a supporting character, but that’s a loss of control from which she’s suffered her whole life.

What better way to process all of this than by re-shaping it into something with the power to get you off?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.