Running through the plot in this much detail is kind of a must, given how little there is to say about what happens. Aside from the final scene, and everything that happened off camera before the events of the episode begin, and maybe the Janey encounter, there’s just not much there, there. But when a show is this accomplished, this confident, this unlike anything else on the air, it doesn’t matter what is there. The journey is at least half the fun. Like Jesus’s Mama Magdalena, Too Old to Die Young is simply an acquired taste.

I reviewed episode six of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

The final episode of Dark‘s relentlessly gripping second season is entitled “Endings and Beginnings,” a reversal of the season premiere’s title “Beginnings and Endings.” And believe me, that cheap symmetry is the only cheap thing about it. Whether you’re talking about Stranger Things on Netflix, Westworld on HBO, or even the letdown of (sigh) Mr. Robot Season 3 on USA, Dark is the science fiction show to beat. Its take on its sci-fi concept is wholly original. Its grasp on its complex story is sure. Its creation of characters worth caring about—not necessarily liking; there’s a difference, and it cuts in Dark’s favor—is unmatched. Its refusal to pull punches is glorious.

I reviewed the season finale of Dark Season Two for Decider.

This is how a time-travel story can be used as a metaphor—a barely disguised one at that—for how our own lives can feel like a closed system from which there can be no escape. It’s direct, it’s discomfiting, and it is very dark.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Dark Season Two for Decider.

From the opening montage to the closing scene, this is a tour de force episode of Dark. The everyday trials and tribulations of the adult and teenage characters are sexy and sad and often both. The Hannah/Ulrich/Katharina triangle of love, lust, friendship, and betrayal clicks in every respect. The beach scenes are funny and hot. The party is both sweet and, knowing what we know about the fates of everyone involved, brutal. Ben Frost’s music, particularly during the Martha/Jonas love scenes, is huge and rapturous, the way doomed young love feels.

And the meeting between Jonas and Michael is powerful and quietly crushing given its outcome. Actors Louis Hofmann, a truly extraordinary talent, and Sebastian Rudolph seem to pour themselves out all over the table where they sit and talk. What’s more, unlike the Ulrich/Mikkel material from the previous episode, the emotional impact of this father/son reunion isn’t hampered in the slightest by relying on sci-fi shenanigans to take place.

It feels like what it is: a son trying to save the man he loves most, a father trying to save the boy he loves most, and the both of them arriving at a decision over who must live and who must die. It takes the toughest decisions we must make as members of a family, as children and as parents, whether we’re ever actually forced to make them or whether they remain the stuff of troubling daydreams and what-ifs, and uses the science-fiction genre to probe that nerve as directly as possible. It does the same with falling in love, with the loss of virginity, with marital infidelity, with motherhood, with couplehood, with friendship. It’s reminiscent of “The Garveys at Their Best,” the standout episode from the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers—the episode that showed that series would become a classic. It’s dynamite. I’m glad it exists.

I reviewed episode six of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Adding an entire working theory of theology, theodicy, and the nature of the universe to, y’know, families in the German suburbs being torn apart by time travel, episode five of DarkSeason Two offers a lot to ponder, from plot to philosophy. It offers an eye-opening look at both the tactics and the worldview of Adam, the prime mover of Winden’s cross-generational “war” for control of time and the wormholes within it. Yet it muddies up some of the show’s more directly effective and affecting interpersonal elements.

I reviewed episode five of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Let us sing the praises of James Urbaniak, whose dark energy in “The Fool,” the riveting fifth episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s currently peerless crime drama, is powerful enough to fuel the goddamn Death Star.

I reviewed episode five of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

“The Travelers” brings us to the halfway point of Dark‘s strong second season, and the music of composer Ben Frost is our company on the journey. An experimentalist whose musical and geographical travels have taken him far and wide, and who’s spent time working with venerable avant-rock superproducers Brian Eno and Steve Albini (just don’t call them superproducers to their faces), Frost’s work in this episode is a sanity-testing tide basin of shrieks and thrums and tones of alarm. It’s reminiscent of Brian Reitzell’s confrontational work on Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, or the collaborative soundscape produced by Angelo Badalamenti, Dean Hurley, and David Lynch on Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Not just sonically, either: Dark continues to make the case that it’s the best genre drama Netflix has put out yet. If it’s not on Hannibal‘s level, much less Twin Peaks‘s, it has no reason to be shy about standing in their company.

I reviewed episode four of Dark Season Two for Decider.

The fourth installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s extended meditation on the evil that men do is one of the most unnerving episodes of television in recent memory. I’d put it up there with any highlight you’d care to name from The Terror, The Act, Channel Zero, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, and even the gut-churning war-crime climax of Game of Thrones.

I reviewed episode four of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Time travel, kidnappings, cancer, nuclear apocalypse—yes, sure, all well and good. But for this review of Dark, I’d like to start out by showcasing some acting. That’s an advantage of having two or three different actors play every single character at different times in their lives, right? There’s a lot more acting to go around!

I don’t mean to make light of it, either. “Ghosts,” the third episode of the German Netflix drama’s second season, shows how important the cast is to making this crazy-on-paper project work. Following young, adult, and old versions of characters spread across a hundred-year timespan, often interacting with each other anachronistically and even starting whole new lives out of sync, is demanding work for the audience. Rooting that work in the happiness, sadness, and shame of the characters—making them people, not plot devices—is the secret of the show’s success.

I reviewed episode three of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Titled “The Hermit” after the corresponding card from the tarot (that’s where every episode gets its moniker), the third exquisite installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young has only one thing wrong with it that I can see: It could have been longer.

I reviewed episode three of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

As always, getting through the raw plot of the show takes up a lot of column inches. But don’t let it take up all the storage space your brain has allotted for the show. While the family tree is a maze of brambles and the timelines look like the tangle of wires connecting your TV to your Xbox, the emotions are recognizable and real. Feeling like you don’t really know the people who are supposed to love you; feeling like you’re trapped in a great cosmic fuck-up and the only way to be happy is to try to just ignore it; feeling powerless to stop oncoming tragedies both great and small—that’s the stuff this show is working with, the stuff it really cares about. It’s dark matter indeed.

I reviewed episode two of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Easily one of the most thematically ambitious dramas Netflix has produced (in any language), and certainly the most narratively complicated one, Dark has returned after a year and a half for a second season of sci-fi and sadness in the woody suburbs of Germany. It does so without making the slightest concession to the notion of jumping-on points for viewers coming to the second season fresh. This is not that kind of show. If you want to get the most out of Dark—if you want to get anything out of Dark—you’d better start from the beginning. This is a journey you have to follow every step of the way.

I reviewed the premiere of Dark Season Two on Netflix for Decider. It’s the network’s best show, give or take a Suburra: Blood on Rome. 

(NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)

Murder? Yes. Illicit sex? You bet. Gross rich criminal father figure? Mmhm. Hot monochromatic and duochromatic lighting? Oh, indeed. Tracking shots and camera pans so slow they should be measured by half-life? Absolutely. Yes, most of what characterized the first episode of Too Old to Die Young shows up in the show’s second outing as well. With one major exception: the main character.

I reviewed episode two of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Here’s a cinematic axiom you can take to the bank: It’s impossible to be pretentious when you’re patient.

At the very least it’s damn difficult. To the extent pretentiousness means anything (other than “this person thinks they’re better than me and my concern is they’re right”) it signals that an artist is rubbing an unearned sense of intellectual or aesthetic superiority in the audience’s face. The last thing a truly pretentious artist would want is to give that audience time to think. For one thing, pretentious artists don’t believe the audience is capable of thinking, at least not on their own level. More importantly, time for the audience to think is time better spent showing off.

Now consider Nicholas Winding Refn, one of Danish cinema’s many enfants terribles. With each film he’s made since his breakthrough Drive—the Ryan Gosling reunion Only God Forgives, the Elle Fanning fashion-horror freakout The Neon Demon, and now Too Old to Die Young, an elephantine miniseries co-created by crime comics writer Ed Brubaker—his willingness to not bum-rush the viewer from one signpost of his ostensible genius to the next has grown to an almost perverse degree.

For all their lurid colors, lurid subject matter, and ultraviolence, Refn’s movies are ssssslllllllloooooooowwwwwwwwwww. Closeups, zooms, pans, tracking shots, exchanges of dialogue, tones from Cliff Martinez’s vibratory scores: They all proceed at the pace of the profoundly stoned, which indeed is the best state in which to watch them. While dazzling, I don’t think their intent is to dazzle, since that implies a reflective surface. If you like a Refn movie it’s because you sink right into it, and can float around inside it with the company of your own thoughts to fill the space, kill the time, and assign meaning to these multicolored worlds full of moral morons.

This is my long-winded way of saying “The Devil,” the feature-length pilot episode of Refn & Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, whips ass. Am I being pretentious? That, dear reader, is for you to decide.

I reviewed the series premiere of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young for Decider. This show is exquisite and disturbing. (NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)

From the start, Black Spot has been a case study in how the whole can be equal or less than the sum of its parts. Lush location filming and thoughtful character work that tells much of the emotional story simply via well lit closeups on their faces, juxtaposed with perfunctory mysteries and recycled horror imagery: The combination frustrates because anyone capable of pulling off the former ought to know better than serving up the latter.

Titled “The End Is Only the Beginning” with almost maddening bluntness, the show’s cliffhanger season finale offers yet more evidence of this irritating tendency. Yet for once, the surprise reveals are—almost—as good as anything else on the show. Making it work in the final hour is a mystery alright, but it’s a happy one despite it all.

I reviewed the surprisingly engaging season finale of Black Spot, which still isn’t the show it could be, for Decider.

Black Spot has a strong, quiet cast that does great work with what they’re given. It’s as good at landscapes and intimate closeups as any show you’d care to name right now. I mean, look at this:

But as long as it keeps both telegraphing and pulling its punches, depending on the episode, it’s never going to feel worthy of the raw material with which it’s working. It will never see the forest for the trees.

I reviewed the season finale of Black Spot for Decider.

If you’ve watched six episodes of Black Spot so far, it’s a fair bet you can figure out what’s going on in the seventh. For the most part, anyway—and it’s that “for the most part” that’s the key.

While its done-in-one mystery is as simplistic as ever, “The Secret Behind the Window” (note: no windows are involved) is much more concerned with the overarching mysteries—the secret of the woodsman, the disappearance of Marion Steiner, the dirty deeds her father and grandfather are up to—and with the emotions of the main characters. You don’t have to be a great detective to figure out that this is a marked improvement over its predecessors.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Black Spot Season One for Decider.

If you’ve watched six episodes of Black Spot so far, it’s a fair bet you can figure out what’s going on in the seventh. For the most part, anyway—and it’s that “for the most part” that’s the key.

While its done-in-one mystery is as simplistic as ever, “The Secret Behind the Window” (note: no windows are involved) is much more concerned with the overarching mysteries—the secret of the woodsman, the disappearance of Marion Steiner, the dirty deeds her father and grandfather are up to—and with the emotions of the main characters. You don’t have to be a great detective to figure out that this is a marked improvement over its predecessors.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Black Spot Season One for Decider.

How many times can you say the same things about the same show, I wonder. Well, let me see. How many episodes does Black Spot run again? The awkwardly titled “Dark Heroes” is the sixth installment of the most aggressively mixed bag of a Netflix show I’ve seen so far. By now, if you don’t have its like-clockwork rhythms committed to memory, you should probably set your content filter to “Kids” to avoid complex narratives entirely.

I reviewed episode six of Black Spot for Decider.

How many times can you say the same things about the same show, I wonder. Well, let me see. How many episodes does Black Spot run again? The awkwardly titled “Dark Heroes” is the sixth installment of the most aggressively mixed bag of a Netflix show I’ve seen so far. By now, if you don’t have its like-clockwork rhythms committed to memory, you should probably set your content filter to “Kids” to avoid complex narratives entirely.

I reviewed episode six of Black Spot for Decider.