There’s no easy reentry into the world of Dark. Netflix’s twisty time-traveling psychological thriller, created by Baran bo Odar (who directs this episode, entitled “Deja-vu”) and Jantje Friese (who wrote it), has no shallow end of the pool to step into. You’ve got to plunge in head first where it’s deepest and, yes, darkest. That’s where the show’s sophisticated, character-rooted approach to one of science fiction’s most shopworn devices shines the clearest.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

I’m covering the final season of Dark for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a hell of a show.

What an episode. Emotional, unsparing, thrilling, and horrifying in turns, it displays all of the strengths of the season that led up to it. And it never loses sight of the fact that this excellent series is, in the end, a character piece—a show that uses its action and suspense sequences to reveal who the characters really are, not simply provide some thrills between dully revelatory monologues. 

I reviewed the season (series?) finale of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

Beautifully shot, compellingly plotted, and gorgeously acted, this is yet another excellent episode of the most surprising crime drama of the year. I’m sad there’s only one hour to go.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

Two scenes, two minutes: That’s all you’re getting of the Lynwood family saga in ZeroZeroZero Episode 6. The fate of their cocaine shipment and the money owed on it? The subject of two or three lines of throwaway dialogue half a world away. The Italians who purchased it to begin with? Not present at all.

For this episode, it’s Manuel’s world, and we just live in it.

Directed by Pablo Trapero from a script by Leonardo Fasoli and Max Hurwitz, “En El Mismo Camino” is a breathless nightmare journey into the life—I hesitate to say “mind,” since he remains so sociopathically opaque—of Manuel Quinteras, the special forces soldier turned chief muscle for the Leyra Brothers cartel. Only he’s much more than that: He’s the commander of an entire army of young men he’s training to become perfect killers, just like himself and his squad mates. Though known to the outside world as the Firm, they take their internal name from Manuel’s old callsign: They’re the Vampires.

I reviewed the extraordinary sixth episode of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

From its title, “Sharia,” on down, the fifth episode of ZeroZeroZero is nominally concerned with the fundamentalist militia that becomes the latest obstacle in the path of the show’s ill-fated cocaine shipment. The way it handles the group is…tricky. Much is done to humanize them, particularly their leader, and to portray them as just another gun-toting subculture, like the Italian mob and the Mexican cartel. That said, there’s a degree of stereotyping that American eyes and ears will impose on such characters almost automatically; having a bunch of them cheer “Allahu Akbar!” when a bomb goes off in a hotel on a live news broadcast isn’t doing them any favors, that’s for sure.

But there’s a throughline for this episode, and it’s not jihad—it’s family.

I reviewed episode five of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

“When did it start?” Emma Lynwood asks her brother. Silence. “Chris,” she says for emphasis. “When did it start?” Again, silence. There’s no choice; she has to come right out and say it. “When did the spasms start?” she asks, her tone that of a statement: The spasms have started.

A pause. Then, Chris, quickly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That’s how this episode of ZeroZeroZero (“Transshipment”) ends, as Mogwai’s melancholy score plays us out over a shot of the Senegalese coast. And there’s an ocean of character in that brief, terse exchange. It tells us that with everything else she has to worry about—the cargo stuck in international limbo, the cocaine she’s desperate to move from Mexico to Italy, the new Senegalese partners Chris cut in on the deal in exchange for their help in offloading the coke—she’s worried about her kid brother’s disease.

I reviewed episode four of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

A pig gets slaughtered and men drink its blood. A man is set on fire as his friend is forced to watch. The heir to a business is betrayed by his father’s close friend. A rogue soldier barges into the halls of power even though he’s the most wanted man in the country. This is an action-packed episode of ZeroZeroZero, filled with gruesome deaths and daring escapes—and yet we learn so much about the main characters in the process that it’s like we sat down with each one and interviewed them about themselves. That’s quite a trick.

I reviewed episode three of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

As a critic, I consider myself to be in the liking-things business. I go into every show I watch with as few expectations as possible, save one: I expect that what I’m watching will be good, until proven otherwise. That’s it! I’m never like “Oh brother, this looks awful, but here we go”; even in cases where I suspect a show might not be for me, I hold out the hope of being pleasantly surprised. Some of the shows I’ve had the most fun writing about—The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, Billions—took the better part of a whole season to get to that point, but when they got there, whoa baby, I sure became a fan. I’m always open to starting to like something, from the moment the premiere begins until the credits roll on the last episode I’ve been assigned to review.

I say all that to say this: The second episode of ZeroZeroZero kicks twelve kinds of ass. Hallelujah!

I had my problems with the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, but the second episode of ZeroZeroZero basically blew me away. Wild. I reviewed it for Decider.

I’m a broken record on this anytime it comes up on a television show, but here goes: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner once told an interviewer he’d never consider killing one of Don Draper’s children, because any show in which a child dies would need to become about the death of that child, the way people’s real lives reshapes themselves around that tragedy.

Is ZeroZeroZero going to wrestle with this? Is it going to dig down deep into how it feels to know you caused the death of a kid? Or is this just a kind of detail intended to add instant gravitas and then given no more thought? I have my suspicions, yes I do.

At the very least I don’t need television’s umpteenth narco series to show me a little girl whimpering in pain and fear as blood pulses out of a hole in her neck, until eventually she dies, all on camera, which is exactly what ZeroZeroZero does. The main goal of a show like this is, let’s face it, to entertain people who want to watch people get whacked in expensive location shoots, and tossing the brutal on-screen murder of a child into the mix just so the cop character can have a sad about it is an ugly, ugly impulse. “Rules are for men”? Alright, then—that’s my rule. Break it again at your peril.

I had very strong reservations about the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, the Amazon crime show I’m covering for Decider. But stay tuned…

White Lines‘ first season tried to do a lot of things, and that kind of ambition is worth praising. Zoe’s midlife crisis, her romance with Boxer, the Calafat family drama, Marcus’s third-time loser routine, David and his spirituality and drugs, Anna and her sexuality and drugs, raising teenage children, the sideplot about Zoe and Axel’s dad, Ibiza, house music—it’s all in there, and all of it is handled more or less well. But the whole isn’t so much less than the sum of its parts as it is a jumble of them thrown together, all of them prominent but none of them truly emerging as what this show is about. Its hedonistic pleasures are undeniable. But like many of its questing characters, I want more.

I reviewed the season finale of White Lines for Decider.

With one episode in the season remaining, it’s worth taking stock of how far we’ve come. The jumpy timeframe and the rapidity with which these characters form and break bonds makes it easy to forget that Boxer brutally murdered two guys a few days ago, and that Zoe and Marcus are both involved in the cover up. Instead, the show focuses on their personal growth journeys, their sex lives, the question of whether they’re in love and if so who with. I can’t quite square that with the same people who hauled dead bodies out of the water and buried them in a shallow grave, you know? It seems like that would take precedence in their psychological landscape.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of White Lines Season One for Decider.

To paraphrase Lenin, there are episodes of White Lines where whole seasons happen. This is one of those. Boy, is it ever!

I reviewed the eighth episode of White Lines for Decider.

There’s a part of me who’s down with White Lines just for the fun of it. That’s probably something the characters could relate to, no? The beautiful setting, the beautiful people, the rampant hedonism, the sex scenes, monster acid house tracks like A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray” on the soundtrack—it’s kind of hard to resist! Almost enough to forget, you know, the murders!

I reviewed episode seven of White Lines for Decider.

You know, after a long day of looking at photos of my murdered brother picking street fights and pulling his own tooth out of his mouth with a pair of pliers, going scuba diving to retrieve my friend’s lost cocaine, accidentally uncovering a pair of dead bodies, holding them beneath the surface in order to prevent the police from finding them, loading them into a boat and accidentally driving into the middle of a religious procession, watching the metal rods in my friend’s broken legs accidentally tear free, driving the boat into the middle of nowhere until my car stalls out, dragging the boat halfway across a field by hand, calling the murderer with whom I had a one-night stand for help, and burying the bodies and the drugs in a rainstorm, there’s nothing quite like having sex on top of a wet and shallow grave to take the edge off.

I reviewed episode six of White Lines for Netflix.

Things are getting sexy on White Lines.

I reviewed the fifth episode of White Lines for Decider.

This is a plot-dense episode, and some of the show’s storytelling decisions are a bit baffling to me, I must admit. Take the big fight Boxer and Zoe have when he chews her out for being ungrateful for his help. (At this point she’s unaware that his “help” included a double homicide.) We see Boxer blow up at her and kick her out, we see her bump into Kika and Kika’s fuckbuddy Sissy on the way out, we see her dance, we see her bring up the fight—and then we get a flashback to the fight that adds a few sentences and a few household items thrown in anger but is otherwise much the same. In other words, there wasn’t some secret about the fight that was withheld, there’s no big revelation in the flashback to events that happened just minutes prior; the flashback just kind of happens, and that’s that. If you squint at it hard enough you can maybe see the show making a point about selective recollection of events—the whole series does revolve around a murder the details surrounding which no one present can remember—but since the initial view and the revisit show basically the same thing, I’m not sure that explanation washes.

I wrote about episode four of White Lines for Decider. Things are starting to get hinky.

Well, we learned a lot about what kind of show White Lines is in Episode 3. Is it the kind of show that will drop music cues by the Happy Mondays or that screaming cowboy song for atmosphere? Yes, but we knew that. Is it the kind of show that derives a lot of mileage from the extremely photogenic people playing the late DJ Axel Collins and his apparent mother-daughter love interests Conchita and Kika Calafat? Also yes, and we knew that too.

But the incestuous overtones, not just to Axel having sex with two women from the same family but also Conchita’s casual toplessness in front of and intimate embrace of her son Oriol? That’s new. The high-speed chase that begins the episode, in which Boxer and Zoe deal with the problem of having seven kilos of coke in their car by racing away from the cops and dumping it out the windows as they go? Also new.

And you know what else is new? The brutal violence.

I reviewed the third episode of White Lines for Decider.

I very nearly titled this review of White Lines Episode 2 “Seven Kilos and a Funeral.” The seven kilos are obvious enough: They’re the purloined payload of drugs that Zoe Collins steals from her late brother Axel’s DJ friend Marcus in hopes that this will force him to come clean with what he knows about her brother’s disappearance and murder—the absence of which lands Marcus in leg-breaking hot water with his suppliers. The funeral would be the memorial service for Axel thrown by his friend-turned-guru Dave, who serves magic mushroom tea to the mourners-slash-revelers.

But then I remembered: There was a second funeral in this episode. For a dog.

I reviewed episode two of White Lines for Decider.

If there’s one thing I love about the English, it’s their dance music. If there’s two things I love about the English, it’s their dance music and their stylish crime thrillers. If there’s three things I love about the English, it’s their dance music and their stylish crime thrillers and their conviction that the golden age is always receding into memory, to be revisited and yearned for but never quite recaptured.

Is this my way of saying White Lines might be extremely my shit? Yes it is.

I reviewed episode one of Álex Pina’s new Netflix show White Lines for Decider.

Grappling with the big questions?

Try The Young Pope and The New Pope (HBOGo/HBO NOW)

Here’s the deal: Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s outrageously bold pair of series take on the iconography and ideology of the Catholic Church with a sly sense of humor and a knack for surreal visuals. The Young Pope stars Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, an “incredibly handsome” American elected Pope by his brother cardinals, whom he comes to rule with an iron fist. The New Pope, which is simply The Young Pope Season 2 by a new name, introduces John Malkovich as Belardo’s successor, the dandyish Englishman Sir John Brannox. Fully loaded with eye candy, both shows grapple head-on with the power of faith and the mystery of love—or is that the other way around? Your jaw will drop even as your mind expands.

I wrote a guide to 10 off-the-beaten-path shows to binge-watch during quarantine for Decider. This one was a long time in the making—I hope you dig it!