Julia Garner. Julia Garner. Julia fucking Garner.

I reviewed the mid-season finale of Ozark Season 4 for Decider.

Simply put, there’s no way this ends well. The half-season itself, however, has every chance of ending very strongly—drawing on the smiling sociopathy of Laura Linney as Wendy, the badly damaged sweetness of Julia Garner as Ruth, the gawky gentleness of Charlie Tahan as Wyatt, and so on down the line. I just wouldn’t get too attached to anyone. There’s only one way all this ends, as the episode’s punning title “Sangre Sobre Todo” hints: Blood above all.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of the first half of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Ozark has a grim view of our country, and that may be its strongest characteristic. In Ozark’s world, everyone’s a grifter, everyone’s constantly hustling, everyone’s on the make and on the take. Art imitates life, you know?

I reviewed episode five of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Wendy Byrde is becoming a loose cannon in Ozark Season 4 Episode 4. Not that she’d acknowledge it if you asked, of course. Like just about everyone in the Byrde family, she’d be the first to tell you that everything’s under control, provided we all stick together As A Family. This, of course, became markedly harder to do after she made the Sophie’s choice of sacrificing her brother to protect her husband and children. (And herself.) Her son Jonah hates her, and has joined what amounts to a rival drug organization with Ruth Langmore and Darlene Snell. Her husband, meanwhile, watches dumbfounded as she repeatedly says, falsely, that her brother Ben had addiction issues—which is why, she says, he is missing today, and which is also why, she says, the Byrde Family Foundation has gone into business with Shaw Medical Solutions to open opioid rehab centers. 

“It’s reckless,” Marty says. 

“It’s good PR,” she replies.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Ozark‘s fourth season for Decider.

There’s a point early on in Ozark Season 4 Episode 3 where FBI Agent Maya Miller notes that cartel boss Omar Navarro, with whom she has been dragged to a meeting, has a two-month-old son who was nearly killed at his own baptism. It’s a time frame worth remembering: Everything we’ve seen on this show since that baptism massacre—all the ups and downs, the betrayals and backstabbing, the schemes and plans, the life-changing upheavals—have taken place in a matter of just a few weeks. Ozark storytelling is a bit like the omicron variant: In just a little time, it’s fucking everywhere, man.

I reviewed the third episode of Ozark‘s fourth season for Decider.

The funny thing about Ozark is that despite packing so much plot into any given episode, it feels strangely slow-moving. Tons of stuff happens, but the sheer volume of plot mechanics is such that any one development hamstrings the movement of any number of others. I think that, ironically, the show would feel much faster and more gripping if it limited itself to a smaller number of storylines at a time. Is that likely? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I reviewed episode two of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Literally titled “The Beginning of the End,” the show’s final season premiere (technically speaking, anyway—the season will be divided into two parts, released separately) starts out in typical Ozark style, i.e. a shocking cold open. Perhaps you recall how Ozark Season 3 ended, with the Wendy and Marty Byrde’s frenemy Helen Pierce getting her brains blown out right in front of (and all over) them? Well, we start out half a continent and an unspecified amount of time away from all that. Wendy (Laura Linney) and Marty (Jason Bateman) chit-chat about an FBI meeting. Their kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), talk about leaving behind laundered money as a surprise for some lucky person in the future to find. They’re all so distracted by basically being happy together, for the first time in god knows how long, that they don’t see an oncoming truck until it’s (almost) too late.

Which, as I sit here thinking about it, is not a bad metaphor for Ozark in general. The Byrdes are constantly bombarded with do-or-die assignments and ultimatums, bearing down on them like a tractor trailer headed into oncoming traffic. In this episode, for example, they are tasked by cartel boss Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) with shutting down the heroin operation of local crime boss Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery) and securing some kind of sweetheart deal with the FBI for Omar himself, who wants to retire from his criminal enterprise a free man. This is how Ozark works: The Byrdes are told to do something under pain of death—in this case either at the hands of Omar himself or his grasping nephew Javi (Alfonso Herrera)—and we watch them figure out how to do it or die trying. No one’s died yet, so they must be doing something right.

I’m covering the first part of Ozark‘s bifurcated fourth and final season for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere.

Station Eleven’s core belief is that even amid the worst of things, at least a few people will look out for a few people more. Sometimes this takes the form of art, created to bring joy to people’s otherwise difficult lives, but it can take other forms as well. Jeevan’s long-ago care for Kirsten didn’t save the world, any more than Miranda’s phone call to the pilot of that stranded airplane did. But they both saved some people, and in the world of this powerful, humane series, perhaps that will do. 

I reviewed the series finale of Station Eleven for Decider.

There’s still one episode to go, and I suppose it could settle the question of whether Kirsten and Jeevan wound up happier apart than they would have been together. But there’s a beautifully sad moment from early in the episode that I keep thinking about. In the suburban house where he was attacked (he wound up knocking his attacker out), Jeevan finds a synthesizer keyboard; the father of the family who lived there, all of whom died before he did, had programmed it to “play” snippets of his wife and children’s voices. It’s a gutwrenching moment, hearing all those happy children with no idea what was coming their way. But what an incredible way to preserve their memory—indeed, to recreate the entire phenomenon of memory, our brains’ way of taking snippets of the past and constructing them into a story, or something more like a melody. What melody will Kirsten wind up playing in the end?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

Station Eleven doesn’t bounce between timeframes and plotlines, it glides between them. This can make writing episodic reviews—recaps, in the parlance of our times—a dicey proposition. Any given episode can show you the same character in extremis at different points in his or her life, for entirely different reasons. How do you determine which outburst or confrontation is more important? The show can can insert crucial moments in a character’s growth, in their understanding of the world and art’s place in it—not to mention their own—in a flashback that lasts mere seconds, between minutes of meaty material set in the here-and-now. How do you pull it all apart and piece it back together in a linear way, a way that makes sense?

I reviewed episode eight of Station Eleven for Decider.

As is by now custom with Station Eleven, this episode (marvelously written by Kim Steele and directed by Lucy Tcherniak) is ripe with powerful details. Jeevan telling Kirsten everything’s going to be okay, and Kirsten replying that he’d just said “We’re fucked,” out loud. Jeevan “talking” to his dead sister, and the younger Kirsten showing her older self that this behavior started long before they staked out a cabin in the woods. Frank’s addiction, a direct result of war trauma, and Jeevan’s impatience with it: “We’re not heroin people. We’re barely even weed people!” The lone, Stand-esque voice on the television, fatalistically explaining how no one was prepared for “a flu that does not incubate, it just explodes…a one out of one thousand survival rate.” The terrific visual of the free-standing door that Kirsten passes through to access her memories. Older Kirsten crying at her youthful self’s optimism as she sings “The First Noel” to her new guardians. The passively suicidal Frank, who does not want to leave the familiarity of his apartment even though cold and starvation are now serious threats, refusing to vacate his home for the knife-wielding interloper. Kirsten’s adoption of the killer’s knife as a totem and her signature weapon.

It’s not a perfect episode; the costumes for Kirsten’s play are childlike only in the sense of adults trying to make something look childlike, and it takes you out of an important moment. But it’s a powerful episode nonetheless, in a series that seems to stack one such episode on top of the next. Like logs, or like bodies.

I reviewed episode seven of Station Eleven for Decider.

They can’t all swing for the fences.

Titled “Survival Is Insufficient”—there’s no particular relationship I can detect between the title and the content; it’s almost like they just grabbed a phrase from the Station Eleven graphic novel out of a hat, but whatever—this is the slightest episode of the series so far. Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine! Sometimes you just need to push the story in a certain direction, making incremental progress toward your eventual goal. (This used to be much more of a thing in the days of twelve-to-thirteen-episode prestige-TV seasons, but even early seasons of, say, Game of Thrones bear this tendency. You learn to live with it.)

I reviewed the sixth episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

Written by Cord Jefferson and directed by Lucy Tcherniak, this is a dense, rich episode—seriously, I’ve barely touched on the soccer team, and I haven’t even mentioned the nuns, or Clark rejecting Miles’s romantic advances because he’s grieving for his dead partner, or Clark spending most of his time blasted out of his skull on booze and MDMA he found in the belongings of the fake Homeland Security agent. (And that magnificent beard of his!) It’s the kind of thing you point to when you want to say no, the New Golden Age of Television is not over, there’s still enormously moving and intelligent work being done, coincidentally on a subject—pandemics—that now dominates every moment of our waking lives. I’m glad it exists.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

It’s the end of the world, and for good or ill, art lives on. Even art about the end of the world—or a world, or a space-station simulacrum thereof. Station Eleven Episode 4 is all about art’s ability to soothe or exacerbate the world’s wounds; even its title, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead,” cheekily paraphrases the name of Tom Stoppard’s play, itself a riff on Hamlet, a play performed in a modernized version by the characters in the show. Sample quote: “Fuck you, Hamlet.” Times have changed, and art changes with the times. Even the End Times.

I reviewed episode four of Station Eleven for Decider.

In a way, this is Station Eleven’s origin story. Not the origin of the flu that wipes out humanity, nor the origin of any of the characters we’ve come to care about in the series’ previous two episodes. No, this is the origin of Station Eleven itself—the graphic novel that gives the series its title. In this installment (“Hurricane”), we spend time with the book’s creator, cartoonist and logistics expert Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler), as she navigates life, love, art, and death—the Big Four of all human endeavor, I’d say. Written by Shannon Houston and directed by Hiro Murai, the episode that results is a minor masterpiece.

I reviewed the third episode of Station Eleven of the initial batch of three released by HBO Max this week. Comparisons to The Leftovers are more than justified.

I’ll tell you when I lost it during Station Eleven’s second episode.

I reviewed the second episode of Station Eleven for Decider. Couldn’t make it through this one without crying.

When I say Station Eleven makes for difficult viewing, I’m referring to its subject matter: a flu pandemic that shatters society virtually overnight, effectively bringing about the end of the world. All the signs and signifiers we’ve learned from our own experience with a very real global pandemic are there: the overtaxed hospitals, the confusing news updates, the panicked grocery store runs, the fear of contact with other people coupled with the desperate need to be in contact with other people. Bonus points if you have or care about children: You’ll recognize he constant calculations you make to keep them as safe, happy, and healthy as possible in a world growing scarier by the second. 

Sure, the situation in Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel) is far more dire even than our own. But barring a murdered security guard here, a delirious victim in a stuck SUV there, or a presumably flu-induced plane crash in the middle of a major metropolitan area, it’s all too recognizable from our vantage point here in late 2021, with eight hundred thousand dead Americans and a host of ghoulish politicians and pundits attempting to profit from the carnage. It’s bound to be more than many viewers can bear.

That said, bearing it is easier than you’d think.

I’m covering Station Eleven for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. This is going to be a hard, hard sell for a lot of people, but based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s worth it.

What does it all mean for the future of this show, thought? That, I’m less certain about. It’s already been renewed for a second season, so you don’t need to worry about that. However, there still is a certain lopsided quality to it all, with the Cleon material standing head and shoulders above the Gaal/Salvor/Hari stuff. The burst of action that punctuated the first season’s last few episodes mitigated this somewhat, but now that Gaal and Salvor are simply adrift together on the surface of a drowned world, it seems like things may get tilted in favor of the Cleons yet again. The missteps involving Hari’s big speech and the secret of Salvor’s parentage certainly don’t help.

But I think there’s much to be enjoyed and admired in Foundation overall. The commitment to far-out ideas about the flow of history (punctuated though it might be by individual actions), the emphasis on grand science-fiction vistas, the performances of Lee Pace and Terrence Mann and Cassian Bilton as the Cleons—there’s room to grow a very good show around these component parts, even as the Lou Llobell/Leah Harvey/Jared Harris segments remain hit or miss. A decent chance—isn’t that all Foundation is asking for, in the end?

I reviewed the season finale of Foundation This show wound up being much better than it had any right to be, sometimes despite itself.

Is it just me, or is Foundation getting better and better with each episode? Maybe it’s simply a case of familiarity breeding admiration rather than contempt, as more time spent with each of its storylines equals more chances to appreciate the unique things that each is doing. Maybe those storylines are legit improving week to week, particularly as the flatter elements, like the chosen-one heroes Gaal (absent this week) and Salvor, draw closer to their plotlines’ denouements and excitement builds as a result. Maybe it’s a matter of the overall Foundation aesthetic—the grand space vistas, the depiction of far-future civilizations, the cool-looking spaceships and costumes and tech and whatnot—winning us over as we get used to it. Whatever the case, the penultimate episode of the show’s first season, portentously titled “The First Crisis,” is entertaining viewing from start to finish.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

Directed by Michael Uppendahl from a script by showrunner Sarah Burgess, the finale of ACS Impeachment, “The Wilderness,” is a brutal denouement for an excellent season of television. It entertains the idea that repulsive people can have repulsive enemies, who do the right things for the wrong reasons. It maintains a studied agnosticism about the worst of Bill Clinton’s crimes, while suggesting that their failure to be brought to light and punished in an efficacious manner is due to the puritanical nature of his enemies. It allows Linda Tripp to be seen as she wished to be seen, and demonstrates that this does her no real good at all. It gives Monica Lewinsky the last word, which does her no good at all either. For all the president’s women, it essentially offers their choice of patriarchal poison. It’s an escape room with no way out. If that escape room comes in the shape of the Oval Office, it is no less inescapable for that.

I reviewed the finale of ACS Impeachment for Decider. This was a hell of a show. I don’t know how Ryan Murphy managed to bottle lightning three times with three different teams on the same anthology, but he sure did.