Two very, very different images of post-mortem movement bookend “The End of the Road,” yet another drearily predictable mystery wrapped in sumptuous cinematography and magnetic acting in Black Spot‘s ever-growing tally. It’s like taking Woodward & Bernstein and using it to wrap the catch of the day.

The real asskicker is that if creator Mathieu Missoffe had gotten half as creative with the script as the filmmakers and cast have gotten with what they’re doing, so many of the show’s problems would be nothing but dodged bullets.

I reviewed episode five of Black Spot for Decider.

I dunno, folks, I really just don’t know. The more I watch the more I feel that Black Spot is just an extremely well-made primetime broadcast-network supernatural cop show that could be so much more. I suppose we’ll get to the bottom of it in the end.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Black Spot for Decider.

I’m starting to think that I’d make an excellent addition to the Villefranche police department. Could I help them account for their town’s unusually high rate of violent crime? Free the people and the surrounding forest from the grip of the Steiner family? Figure out what the hell is up with the weird antler-man making all that infernal racket out there in the woods? No, no, and no. But I sure could solve murder cases a lot quicker than Major Weiss’s cuddly cops, I can tell you that much.

I reviewed episode four of Black Spot for Decider.

It’s no fun at all to watch a mystery you’re halfway to solving by the time you actually see the crime. It’s especially no fun when the mystery in question is this well shot, well cast, and well acted. The cast, led by Suliane Brahim as Major Weiss and Laurent Capelluto as District Attorney Sirani, are warm and endearing—even Weiss and Siriani, the prickliest of the bunch. Meanwhile, director Thierry Poiraud is as proficient with landscapes as he is with closeups. Both are used to convey isolation and fear in a way that’s far more moving than the mystery material.

I reviewed the fourth episode of this frustrating series for Decider.

Episode 3, “The Void,” illustrates a major potential problem with the show’s approach: If you’re going to have eight mysteries a season, you have to be good at writing mysteries.

I reviewed the third episode of Black Spot for Decider.

Like all paranormal mystery series, Black Spot wants to be a “binge watch it until the answers are revealed” kind of show. That’s not a criticism—not of the show and not even of Netflix, the most binge-watch dependent of all TV networks. Before the concept of binge-watching even existed Lost was built this way on ABC, just like Twin Peaks was built this way on ABC before it (and on Showtime after it). From those two examples alone I hope it’s clear that you can do good things with this compulsive-viewing format. In the case of Twin Peaks you can do literally the best thing ever done on television with it. If Black Spot wants us to binge watch until we find out just what the hell is happening in Villefranche, more power to it.

Like some paranormal mystery series, Black Spot also wants to be an episodic procedural kind of show. That’s a bit more unusual. I’m not even talking about the “monster/killer of the week” structure like I’ve done in previous reviews; obviously that’s a pretty common approach to genre work on television, or at least it used to be. I’m referring here to the fact that in each episode there’s a small crime-based mystery in addition to the larger paranormal ones, and the police and district attorney who are our main characters investigate that crime, and then they solve that crime. That’s the way Black Spot is going from Point A to Point B with its overarching plot: by going from Exhibit A to Exhibit B until each individual episode’s mystery is solved.

Episode 3, “The Void,” illustrates a major potential problem with this approach: If you’re going to have eight mysteries a season, you have to be good at writing mysteries.

I reviewed episode three of Black Spot for Decider.

Here’s what we know about Black Spot as of the completion of Episode 2. Pretend I’m about a half dozen quirky law enforcement professionals piecing this together if that helps.

It’s a paranormal cop show that keeps an overarching mystery—who or what is stalking the people of the murder-happy forest town of Villefranche—on a low simmer while bringing a new case to a boil each episode. That places it more with the “monster/serial killer of the week” mold of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The X-Files, and Hannibal Season One than with Twin Peakseven at its most episodic.

It’s not above tossing a crying baby off a cliff into a roaring river as a fakeout to drum up cheap heat.

It occasionally displays striking proficiency with horror-fantasy imagery and makes the absolute most out of its misty arboreal setting.

It’s not above buying slo-mo shots and horror-movie music cues wholesale to drive its points home.

It’s pretty good at setting its top cop, Laurène Weiss, apart from a bajillion other characters in her tough-as-nails-but-full-of-secrets vein, courtesy of actor Suliane Brahim, the head of an engaging, attractive, even amusing ensemble.

It’s not above dipping into horror-imagery wells—like mysterious symbols and antlered monsters and the proverbial wolf in the woods—you’d think would have run dry by now.

Seeing a pattern emerge just yet?

I reviewed episode two of Black Spot for Decider.

Titled “A Wolf’s Dream” after the white wolf (“Ghost! To me!”) that keeps appearing to Major Weiss, and eventually just to the viewers at home, the show’s second episode feels indicative of both a high creative ceiling and a low creative floor. Creator Mathieu Missoffe, director Theirrey Poiraud, and company have a lot of things going for them, but originality isn’t one of them, and I worry that will come back to bite them in the end.

I reviewed episode two of Black Spot for Decider.

In a remote logging town near a secluded forest, a young woman is found murdered. Her death is just the latest in a long string of crimes, including the disappearances of at least two teenage girls over a period of years. The wealthy owner of the town’s ailing sawmill isn’t telling everything he knows to the chief of the town’s slightly comic police department, who has secrets too.

Into the mix steps a quirky outsider, a lawman from the big city sent to get to the bottom of things. Something about the place intrigues him, so he rents a room in a local hotel. Looks like he’ll be staying in this little town for a while.

Sound familiar? Every bit as familiar as Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme song, I’ll bet.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s three-seasons-and-a-movie masterpiece has cast a long shadow over television, with “weird events in a woodland town” at least as popular a dramatic subgenre as that post-Sopranos mainstay, “our protagonist is a gangster.” And Black Spot falls squarely within that macabre penumbra.

I’m covering the French Netflix paranormal drama Black Spot for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. 

(Note: I’m playing catchup with links to my work so these review descriptions will all be pretty brief. I guess you’ll just have to watch the reviews!)

In a remote logging town near a secluded forest, a young woman is found murdered. Her death is just the latest in a long string of crimes, including the disappearances of at least two teenage girls over a period of years. The wealthy owner of the town’s ailing sawmill isn’t telling everything he knows to the chief of the town’s slightly comic police department, who has secrets too.

Into the mix steps a quirky outsider, a lawman from the big city sent to get to the bottom of things. Something about the place intrigues him, so he rents a room in a local hotel. Looks like he’ll be staying in this little town for a while.

Sound familiar? Every bit as familiar as Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme song, I’ll bet.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s three-seasons-and-a-movie masterpiece has cast a long shadow over television, with “weird events in a woodland town” at least as popular a dramatic subgenre as that post-Sopranos mainstay, “our protagonist is a gangster.” And Black Spot falls squarely within that macabre penumbra.

A loose almost anti-translation of the French title Zone Blanche, or “White Zone,” Black Spotrefers to the dead zone (that one’s taken) of cellular coverage in which the grim little town of Villefranche and its surrounding forest are located. If the pilot episode for this Netflix import proves anything, it’s that that particular zone is pretty roomy. Opportunities to color within the lines drawn by both Davids, Chase and Lynch, abound. You may not score any points for originality, but you can still paint an engaging picture.

I’m covering the Netflix show Black Spot for Decider this season, starting with my review of the series premiere.

(Note: I’m playing catch-up here so these review descriptions will be minimal moving forward. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

I’ll give The Rain‘s second season this: I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flummoxed by a season finale in my life. Thematically, that’s on point.

Overseen by co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt, Season 2 shifted the series from being a survival story about searching for family into a story of surviving the search for a cure. In that respect it mimics the rapidly mutating macguffin of a virus that wiped out the world, or at least the section of the world with Denmark in it, in minutes—but which over the course of the intervening years has started transforming plants into deathtraps and people into supervillains with magic virus powers.

“Surival of the Fittest” is, in its way, the most perplexing mutation yet. Not because it’s outright bad, like the first half of this strange season, but because despite containing and even doubling down on so much that made this season bad, it’s…actually good? I dunno, man, I just work here. If I sound confused, it’s because I am.

I reviewed the season finale of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

I’ll give The Rain‘s second season this: I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flummoxed by a season finale in my life. Thematically, that’s on point.

Overseen by co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt, Season 2 shifted the series from being a survival story about searching for family into a story of surviving the search for a cure. In that respect it mimics the rapidly mutating macguffin of a virus that wiped out the world, or at least the section of the world with Denmark in it, in minutes—but which over the course of the intervening years has started transforming plants into deathtraps and people into supervillains with magic virus powers.

“Survival of the Fittest” is, in its way, the most perplexing mutation yet. Not because it’s outright bad, like the first half of this strange season, but because despite containing and even doubling down on so much that made this season bad, it’s…actually good? I dunno, man, I just work here. If I sound confused, it’s because I am.

I reviewed the season finale of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.

The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.

Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.

(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)

I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:

He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!

I reviewed episode four of The Rain Season 2 for Decider. This includes my theory about people wearing hats.

Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.

I reviewed the strong fifth episode of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.

The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.

Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.

(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)

I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:

He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!

Why the change? Because while all fantastic fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and while “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is a solid rule of thumb to follow when reading or watching it, you need to be kept in a mentally non-sweaty mood. The weaker the work, the less you’re getting by way of compensatory value in terms of ideas, images, writing, acting, all the things that make shows or movies or whatever of any genre worthwhile, the more likely you are to start noticing people’s hats. In that light,The Rain Season 2 might as well be a ad for a haberdashery.

I reviewed episode 4 of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

“It’s Rasmus. He’s exploding!” —The Rain Season 2, Episode 3

“Can’t you hear how insane this sounds?” —The Rain Season 2, Episode 2

Loud and clear, The Rain. Loud and clear.

After a beautifully understated first season, Netflix’s once-promising post-apocalyptic thriller hits the halfway point of its second go round with a thud. Ironically titled “Stay in Control,” this episode appears to show a series that’s almost completely lost track of what made it compelling viewing in the first place. The grim but humane magic of its initial run is slipping right though its fingers.

I reviewed episode three of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

After a beautifully understated first season, Netflix’s once-promising post-apocalyptic thriller hits the halfway point of its second go round with a thud. Ironically titled “Stay in Control,” this episode appears to show a series that’s almost completely lost track of what made it compelling viewing in the first place. The grim but humane magic of its initial run is slipping right though its fingers.

I reviewed the third episode of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

There’s no way around it: I do not like this development at all. I don’t like the way it makes Rasmus even more of a superhuman dark-messiah figure. I don’t like how it pushes the boundaries of plausibility established by the series up until this point. I don’t like how it looks, as a visual effect. I don’t think it fits with the show’s quick yet fundamentally gentle and restrained tone. It just…doesn’t work. Not even having it unleashed under powerful circumstances—Sarah, grieving her brother and their friends, begs Patrick to kill her, and the virus emerges when she enters his room—can salvage it. My hope is that the show itself isn’t irrevocably infected as well.

I reviewed the second episode of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

There’s no way around it: I do not like this development at all. I don’t like the way it makes Rasmus even more of a superhuman dark-messiah figure. I don’t like how it pushes the boundaries of plausibility established by the series up until this point. I don’t like how it looks, as a visual effect. I don’t think it fits with the show’s quick yet fundamentally gentle and restrained tone. It just…doesn’t work. Not even having it unleashed under powerful circumstances—Sarah, grieving her brother and their friends, begs Patrick to kill her, and the virus emerges when she enters his room—can salvage it. My hope is that the show itself isn’t irrevocably infected as well.

I reviewed episode two of The Rain Season 2 for Decider. It’s a mess.