I put together a little explainer for the season finale of The Old Man, which is very good, for Decider. Full review coming soon!

[whispering to date while watching The Old Man when The Old Man first appears on the screen] That’s The Old Man

Apologies to Twitter user @vineyville, but that was the tweet that came to mind the moment John Lithgow’s Harold Harper, the simultaneously scheming and well-intention assistant director of the FBI, told Jeff Bridges’ “Dan Chase” that “the Old Man”—Joel Grey’s Morgan Bote—has his daughter, Alia Shawkat’s Angela Adams/Emily Chase. Their daughter, actually, if you want to count Angela/Emily’s close work relationship with Harold as a father-daughter thing, which both characters seem comfortable doing.

If that paragraph seems confusing, congratulations—you’re watching The Old Man! This penultimate episode of the skillful spy drama’s first season is an at-times dizzying display of conflicting loyalties, secret relationships, and sudden betrayals. Like the coded messages that Angela and Chase send to each other using secret bank accounts, it can take a lot of deciphering.

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

It’s remarkable how much can happen in an episode where nothing really happens. That, at least, is the conclusion I’ve drawn from The Old Man’s fifth episode. As a matter of physical business, it’s almost profoundly uneventful: Harold Harper and Angela Adams sit on a plane and wind up in a records storage closet; Dan Chase and Zoe McDonald take a car ride to a pet hotel and a banker’s house. But within that basic framework, secrets are revealed and allegiances shift back and forth like shadows. I’m not sure how much I’m buying what they’re selling, but it’s never less than a blast to watch.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

“Keeping you alive and safe: That became my priority, Zoe,” says Dan Chase—excuse me, “Dan Chase.” He’s talking to the woman he spirited away from her own home, which had been invaded by a hitman, by secreting her in the trunk of his car. Zoe’s understandable reaction is to back away from him like a beat dog. He tells her to call her son and let him know she’s being held against her will, in a ploy to keep the Feds from considering her an accomplice. She tries to do so, but her son is screening her calls and won’t pick up.

The next thing we know, FBI Assistant Director Harold Harper is saying “Dan Chase is gone.” The phone calls we’d just seen happened three days ago. Time flies when you’re a rogue black-ops veteran on the run from the government, I guess.

It’s bold little maneuvers like this—sweeping three pivotal days aside in a breath—that make The Old Man such compelling viewing, even three full episodes removed from the pilot’s astonishing long-take fight scene. The show, and its characters, are full of surprises, and spring them on us at nearly every turn.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Old Man for Decider.

It’s juicy material, all told. And if it isn’t quite as pulse-poundingly delivered as it was in The Old Man Episode 1 — Zoe’s witnessing of Chase’s battle with the assassin notwithstanding — it’s still pretty riveting stuff. Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, Amy Brenneman, Alia Shawkat: If you were wondering if a series with these leads might be entertaining to watch, wonder no fucking longer. I’m still waiting for a return to that astonishing long-take battle from the premiere, but regardless, this is a spy game worth playing.

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

Which leads to a larger concern I have about the show: Why, exactly, does it exist? As with so many Star Wars tie-in projects, it dances between the raindrops of existing continuity, while occasionally shifting that continuity to its own ends. Like, we kind of knew Obi-Wan had to whip Darth Vader’s ass, because in A New HopeVader tells Obi-Wan he was “a learner” the last time they met. 

But establishing a pre-existing relationship between Obi-Wan and Leia—and in this episode, even Obi-Wan and Luke—adds a whole lot to the existing canon. And for what? A six-episode show with all the visual flair and emotional heft of a Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order cut scene? I don’t think the game is worth the candle. (This is why stuff like “Why didn’t he just kill him when he had the chance?” is popping up in my mind—not because I’m some CinemaSins-style pedant, but because the project’s overall sense of mild aimlessness gave my brain a chance to question plot holes I’d otherwise overlook.)

I reviewed the finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider.

I’ll say this for The Old Man’s second episode: It was wise of FX to schedule it back-to-back with that bravura first episode. Many of the pilot’s strengths—the cat-and-mouse games, the bone-crunching combat, the barrage of surprises—are replaced by the (admittedly charming) relationship dynamics between Chase and Zoe on one hand and Harper and Adams on the other. And for all that the ep includes a brief monologue from Chase about a wise man who believed “the truth lived only in silence”—an echo of Harper’s Frank Lloyd Wright quote about space being “the breath of art” from the first episode—the ostentatious long takes and silences of the first episode aren’t really on display here. Aside from a lovely prolonged shot of Chase and Zoe taking and holding each other’s hands, it’s a much more standard episode of television, for whatever that’s worth.

Still, I think you’d be a fool to write off what Bridges and Lithgow and Brenneman are delivering here: thoughtful portraits of aging people by intelligent and extremely telegenic actors. I mean, I’d watch a romance about Chase and Zoe even without the CIA-killing-machine business. And I have some confidence, whether earned or not, that the show can return to the nail-biting thriller sequences of its debut if and when it wants to, especially with Harper’s assassin in play. 

What I wonder, beyond hoping for a return of the premiere’s suspense, is whether The Old Man will delve into the wisdom, or lack thereof, of America’s imperialist counteroffensive in 1980s Afghanistan. When you look at the past 20-plus years of life on this planet, it seems pretty important to get that story straight, right? As a rabid anti-communist who helped the mujahideen (until he suddenly stopped, for reasons unknown), Chase is a hard figure to valorize. Will the show try, or is the futility of what he did a part of the narrative? Whatever my reservations about this episode, I’ll be sticking around to find out.

I reviewed the second episode of The Old Man for Decider.

Take another lengthy sequence, for instance—actually, it’s not a sequence, it’s one long shot that lasts for roughly five and a half unbroken minutes. In this shot, Chase rams his car into one of his black-ops pursuer, gets out of the car and shoots the guy to death, then has a seemingly endless mixed martial arts battle against the surviving agent, until Chase’s well-trained attack dogs chase the guy back into another car for safety. Remember that teary-eyed old man from the driver’s-seat phone calls? In his place is a vicious operator who manages to kill three highly trained men half his age, and we get to observe him in action without the camera cutting away. After all the attention the show has lavished upon Chase’s age, watching him defeat his enemies—with a little help from his dogs—is borderline miraculous. And indeed, Jeff Bridge’s masterful physical performance throughout the episode makes his every impressive physical feat feel like a borderline miracle. That power from that body? It feels incredible, and totally earned.

This is the kind of gripping, self-assured action filmmaking that awaits you in The Old Man’s pilot episode, the first half of a two-episode giant-sized series premiere. Based on the book by Thomas Perry and directed by Jon Watts (late of the Spider-Man franchise) from a script by co-creators Robert Levine and Jonathan E. Steinberg, who serves as showrunner, it’s the most engaging espionage thriller debut since The Americans.

I reviewed the series premiere of The Old Man for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show.

Overall, it’s hard to look at the episode as a success from a suspense perspective, though when you think about it, that’s nothing new. Star Wars has always been about characters we know aren’t gonna die anytime soon, with rare exceptions; its great trick was in constructing action set pieces so gripping that they make you forget. (Seriously: No one on the planet thought Luke Skywalker was going to get shot down during the attack run on the first Death Star, but if your knuckles don’t still whiten at least a little bit every time you watch it, I don’t wanna know you.) 

But a prequel show that features Obi-Wan, Darth Vader, and Princess Leia as main characters faces an extra challenge, just as the prequel movies did: We know, for a fact, that these characters survive, since we’ve seen their future adventures. For that reason, the action must be doubly exciting and inventive to maintain audience investment. 

Does the show deliver on that score? No, I don’t think it does. It’s true that there are occasional moments of menace or awe, like when the Grand Inquisitor sweeps back in to gloat, or when Darth Vader uses his incredible Force powers to stop an entire transport from taking off. (It’s a decoy transport, but still.) And of course there’s that nostalgic duel between Obi-Wan and pre-Vader Anakin.

But the battle between the Path folks and the stormtroopers is indifferently blocked and shot—it’s just a bunch of people shooting guns at each other and somehow missing despite the fact that they’re like four feet apart. The Imperials are so bad at this that Obi-Wan’s lightsaber-twirling presence on the side of the good guys is barely needed. The fight between Vader and Reva, at least, is supposed to be a one-sided affair, driving home Vader’s superior power, and on that count it succeeds. 

I reviewed today’s episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider.

All in all, it’s a brisk little episode that reminds me of nothing so much as a cut-scene sequence from a Star Wars video game like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. (It doesn’t hurt that the game features a Fortress Inqusitorius break-in/break-out sequence of its own.) It utilizes the spartan Imperial aesthetic to create an illusion of impregnability, then shows our characters shattering that illusion. It’s a tried-and-true method of Star Wars storytelling that goes all the way back to Obi-Wan, Luke, Han, Chewbacca, R2-D2, and C-3PO’s adventures on the first Death Star. And there are interesting glimpses of how the Empire has handled Force-sensitives since its establishment, namely a hallway full of Jedi bodies in suspended animation that Obi-Wan stumbles across. Entombing the Force sensitive is at least part of the Fortress’s true purpose, and that’s some good Dark Side storytelling.

But the episode brushes past some of the series’ most momentous moments to date. Take that confrontation between Vader and Obi-Wan in the previous episode. That scene was already burdened by the filmmakers decision to wedge in a new face-to-face between the two old frenemies that had little of the mythic power of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s confrontation on Mustafar in Revenge of the Sith or their final battle on the Death Star in A New Hope. Now, its one moment of real urgency, Vader using the Force to push Obi-Wan into a fire so as to mimic Vader’s own injuries, gets brushed away with a quick dunk in a bacta tank. Hell, Obi-Wan doesn’t even stay in the tank for the doctor-recommended length of time! If this was all that was gonna come of that confrontation, why have it happen in the first place, given how it short-circuits the “circle-is-now-complete” loop between Mustafar and the Death Star?

I reviewed today’s episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider.

In a way, Under the Banner of Heaven winds up being as much about fragile masculinity as it is about religion, though religion no doubt shaped the masculinity of the people involved. When Ron’s estranged wife Dianna returns to town in hopes of rescuing the other brothers’ wives before it’s too late, she confronts their brother Sam. “You’re not special,” she tells him, arguing that he and the other brothers turned to fundamentalism because they were unable to confront their own failures.

And that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? A failing chiropractic practice, a failing construction company, a refusal to pay fines and taxes—this is the quotidian bad luck and bad decisions that led the Lafferty brothers to collectively go mad. Every setback is refashioned into a challenge to be overcome with ever more fervent and violent faith. Anything but admitting that such mighty men as they could possibly have steered the plane into the mountain on their own.

Ditto the polygamy concept. These small little men, losing control in other aspects of their lives, no doubt treasured the power and thrill of having multiple wives (or “wives,” in the sense that simply having sex with a woman constitutes marriage to them). It’s an extension of the control they wish to have over their own original wives, and a reflection of the misogynistic rage that drove them to kill Brenda Lafferty and her daughter over her perceived meddling in their affairs. 

I reviewed the finale of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

Bernthal makes it clear that Jenkins does not see himself as a dirty cop—he reacts in horror several times when this allegation is made—but rather as a resourceful one, a guy who sees all the angles and commits a series of victimless crimes. The fact that innocent people are routinely brutalized and, in the case of one high-speed chase, accidentally killed during the course of his work doesn’t really concern him. He feels he meant well, and that’s all that matters.

That’s a tall order for any actor to convey, but Bernthal somehow makes it look easy. From underneath a series of world-historically unfortunate haircuts, his dark brown eyes radiate a sort of idiot good cheer. (When that good cheer goes away at the end of the story, those same eyes become the dim dark eyes of a hit dog, wondering what went so wrong.) Bernthal gives a physical performance that indeed makes Jenkins look like he owns this city and everyone in it. Indeed, he’s often polite to the point of comedy to the very people he arrests, robs, and/or frames. Why wouldn’t he be? He’s a good guy, right? Call it noblesse oblige, call it whatever you want: Bernthal radiates a lethal “who, me?” charm even at his character’s most brutal moments.

I tried to explain what makes Jon Bernthal so good for Decider.

For his part, Obi-Wan mostly gets wrecked, which is to be expected—he’s facing the most powerful former Jedi in the galaxy, a guy who’s been using unchecked power for years instead of hiding in a cave in the desert someplace. But it lacks the drama and power called for by the moment—a poor follow-up to their final battle in Revenge of the Sith, which even most prequel haters seem to appreciate.

The new rendez-vous also calls into question the conversation he has with Vader during their fateful duel aboard the Death Star in the first Star Wars movie, about how when they last met, Vader was his student. As with Leia, who now has canonically spent time with Ben Kenobi prior to her plea for his help in A New Hope, there’s now an extra wrinkle to the Kenobi/Vader timeline, and I’m not convinced it makes sense, or that the payoff here was worth monkeying with the continuity.

And that’s the big question dogging Obi-Wan Kenobi. Is it pleasant to spend more time with Ewan McGregor in the title role? Absolutely. Is it fun to hear James Earl Jones’s voice coming out of Vader’s mask, and to catch blink-and-you’ll-miss-him glimpses of Hayden Christensen as the once and future Anakin Skywalker? You bet. But does the story that reacquaints us with these characters have both the logic and the emotional heft to make it worth telling, in the end? On this matter, the Force is hazy.

I reviewed today’s episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider.

And I’m left sounding like a broken record, because the show’s pros and cons have remained constant right up through the end. Jon Bernthal delivers a for-the-ages villain performance as Jenkins, the jolliest goon in the entire BPD. Jamie Hector imbues (relatively) good cop Sean Suiter with intensity and pathos. And the show’s thesis, repeated once again by Grabler, that the War on Drugs is what turned policing into the brutal business we know and loathe today still doesn’t hold water.

Look back through the history of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, environmental protests, gay liberation, fucking Prohibition, you name it—the police have been a brutally reactionary right-wing force for decades before the War on Drugs’ militaristic terminology took effect. Writer-creator David Simon’s belief in some platonic ideal of Good Policing, something that once existed and which could perhaps be revived if the drug war were abandoned, remains his and the show’s biggest blind spot.

I reviewed the finale of We Own This City for Decider.

And where are we left, in the end? With Dan Lafferty’s browbeaten wife Mathilda, staring at the ground as if remembering her lines as she warns Brenda about blood atonement. With Jacob Lafferty, brain damaged by his father’s beating, sticking up a convenience store. With Detective Bill Taba arriving at Onias’s dream mine, invited in by the bearded racist himself. With Pyre, sobbing in his car in his home’s garage. In all cases, faith does not heal, it destroys. With only one episode to go, the only question is how deep the damage will go.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

What we’ve got in this episode amounts to a fairly serious retcon of the relationship between Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Previously, he was simply the legendary warrior to whom a desperate Leia reached out for help as Darth Vader’s forces attacked her ship. Thanks to the event of this episode, though, he’s now a person she would remember, recognize, and most likely treasure for rescuing her as a kid. You can probably square this away with how Leia reacts to his presence in A New Hope—her excited cry of “Ben Kenobi?!?” when Luke tells her the old Jedi is on the Death Star with them now feels more justified, for example—but speaking personally, I’d have kept him an aloof and mysterious figure. This feels a little like how the prequels randomly made C-3PO a creation of Anakin Skywalker. Like, okay, but…why?

I reviewed episode two of Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a school shooting. Armed gunmen burst into an academy for children and began firing at anything that moved. A teacher sacrificed her own life to protect her students, dying so that they might live.

If you came in search of escapism, look elsewhere: This is the painfully timely way in which Obi-Wan Kenobi begins. At this early stage in the series—the most ambitious live-action Star Wars project that Disney+ has yet unveiled—it’s hard to tell if this awful coincidence is for the better or for the worse. Driving home the horror wrought by the Empire and its architects gives this project an emotional heft that predecessors sometimes lacked. (In the very first Star Wars film, an entire planet—which we see in some detail here—gets blown up, and it’s barely a blip on the emotional radar.) But does the show’s story of a Jedi Master’s time in the literal wilderness merit this kind of seriousness?

I’ll be covering Obi-Wan Kenobi for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

But there’s a deeper problem with We Own This City, one that transcends its strengths and weaknesses as agitprop or institutional critique, and it’s on full display in this week’s episode. Dramatically speaking, what We Own This City lacks is characters.

Oh sure, there are plenty of people in the show, some of whose names you might even be able to remember from one week to the next. But the vast majority of those people can be split into one of two camps: exposition givers and exposition receivers.

Many of the show’s most prominent roles—investigators Sieracki, Jensen, and Wise; DOJ employees Steele and Jackson—fall into the latter category; their role is simply to interview or interrogate other people about what the hell is going on, so that we in the audience can learn.

Then there’s the other camp, the exposition givers. Crooked cops like Gondo and Rayam and Ward, people in power like the mayor and the chief of police, guest stars like Treat Williams’s cop-turned-professor Brian Grabler: They respond to the interrogators’ and interviewers’ questions to deliver information that the show then passes along to us viewers.

Both halves of the equation are dramatically inert. There’s the occasional flash of human interest I suppose, like Jensen’s flute playing (Sieracki, predictably, asks if she knows any Jethro Tull), but for the most part these people are walking, breathing Wikipedia articles or Baltimore Sun investigations. They don’t function the way characters in a drama are supposed to, living and changing and growing and surprising us.

I reviewed this week’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.

Some families are hunting grounds. In these families, the man of the house sees his wife and children not as people but as belongings. Slap a religious imprimatur on it, give it the blessing of God Himself, and there’s no telling how far things will go.

That seems to be the story of Under the Banner of Heaven as of the show’s fifth episode, titled “One Mighty and Strong.” That title refers to a prophesied leader who will return the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to its true roots. Predatory losers Dan and Ron Lafferty seize on the concept and act accordingly. The bloodshed that followed was almost a foregone conclusion.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

When I think of how Jenkins is portrayed in this episode, I think of Henry Hill’s description of Jimmy Conway in GoodFellas: “What he really loved to do was steal. I mean, he actually enjoyed it.” In scene after scene, Jenkins makes out like a bandit. He robs drug dealers. He robs drug dealers twice, first by looting their car, then by going to their house and looting it, too. He robs a stripper, taking back the money he gave her and then some. He robs a couple of guys raiding a Rite Aid for oxycontin, then takes the drugs to his crooked bail bondsman friend to make money off the stuff he looted from the looters. He robs a dealer’s safe, then stages a video re-creation of the looting of the safe so that the missing money never goes in the public record. And in a sense, he robs all the other crooked cops in his circle by constantly keeping the lion’s share of each haul for himself. The dude just can’t help himself.

But it’s the larger community of Baltimore he’s really robbing blind. As he explains to his fellow cops, he can take an 8-to-4 shift, show up to work at 2pm, and still make enough overtime to nearly double his salary. Why? Because during the hours where he actually quote-unquote does his job, he’s constantly “hunting,” busting heads and making arrests and seizing drugs and guns and money. “As long as we produce, as long as we put those numbers up, they don’t give a shit about what we do,” he explains. “We literally can do whatever the fuck we want.” And then the kicker: “We own this city.”

I reviewed last night’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.