Pretty much all fantastic fiction — sci-fi, fantasy, horror, superheroes, dystopias, you name it — is riddled with what could be considered plot holes, since implausibility is exactly what makes these stories fantastical in the first place. You might notice them, but you only start fixating on and complaining about them if the work that surrounds them fails to present you with anything of compensatory value.

If The Rain had a less talented cast, a less firm grasp on the emotional dynamic between the characters, a saggier running time, a more cynical dog-eat-dog attitude about what it takes to survive and what “surviving” even means, then yeah, maybe it’d be time to start writing whole paragraphs about why the Strangers don’t simply saturate the area with drones or whatever. As it stands? The Rain is a good show, in almost all the ways a show can be good. Pick your nits elsewhere.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Rain Season One for Decider. (Having now seen the finale, I’m kind of impressed with myself for how on-track I was with my predictions.)

It could have been worse. I sure thought it would be.

From a historical perspective, The Americans’ final season feels an awful lot like, well, The Sopranos’ final season. The similarities stem in part from the sensation that Season Five and Season Six are two halves of one larger run, with the sense of anticlimax that pervaded last year’s finale actually serving as a “stay tuned” for the final ten episodes this year. The Sopranos, you’ll recall, divided its final season into two parts, a model adopted by heirs to the throne like Mad Men and Breaking Bad as well. If The Americans disguised this by solidifying the split with different numerical designations, it’s kind of fitting.

But it’s the dreadful feeling, the awful feeling, shared by The Americans and The Sopranos in the end that stands out to me in “Harvest,” this week’s episode, and throughout this final season in general. Maybe it’s the presence of that cancer-stricken artist, who’s now so racked with pain she looks like she has a seizure disorder even as she barks orders at Elizabeth so she can keep making art until the end. Maybe it’s the return via flashback of Dylan Baker’s bioweapons-expert character, dying of a self-inflicted hemorrhagic viral infection as he talks to Stan Beeman about how the Jennings live the American dream. Whatever it is, there’s something sickly, diseased in the atmosphere. It permeates even the most innocuous or cheery scenes. So when Philip and Elizabeth embark on their most difficult mission yet, one in which failure could lead to the dismantling of their entire network, while at the same time their neighbor Stan grows more and more suspicious of his friends each time we see him…I expected a catastrophe. Somehow, not getting one, not yet anyway, feels even worse.

I reviewed last week’s tense episode of The Americans for Decider.

In The Rain‘s storytelling arsenal, group dynamics are its secret weapon. Netflix’s consistently surprising (is that an oxymoron? oh well) post-apocalyptic drama treats its band of six (previously seven) thrown-together young adults not as a collection of types, but as people, capable of making their own decisions but shaped by the response of the group around them, both individually and collectively. Turns out the best way to show off that skill is to focus an episode on the one person who doesn’t fit.

I reviewed episode six of The Rain for Decider. Sexy and sad.

Some shows don’t know their own strengths. Westworld, for example, is the best example of this phenomenon on the air right now. Its creators took Michael Crichton’s old sci-fi horror concept and ported it to a modern-day prestige-TV landscape where they could play up the sex and violence all they wanted, while still having the breathing room to depict the robotic theme-park attractions’ burgeoning self-awareness so slowly that entire scenes can pass featuring completely realistic conversations between “characters” who have no idea their every thought, word, and deed has been preprogrammed. The pulp thrills are right there for the taking; so is the (as far as I can tell) unprecedented experience of watching a work of fiction in which the heroes start out from a position where their interactions no more “real” than your iPhone connecting to your car via Bluetooth. And what does Westworld do? Bury both the juicy and heady stuff in boring puzzle-box narratives, pointlessly shifting timelines, and long boring conversations about What It Means To Be Human—a perennial thematic non-starter, given that all of us have a pretty good idea of what that means every time we wake up in the morning, thanks. There’s a fine show in there, but the show itself doesn’t know it.

The Rain is the anti-Westworld. As its fifth episode (“Have Faith”) amply demonstrates, it knows where its bread is buttered: in the faces and emotions of its cast of characters as they face a horrific world in which only connecting with each other keeps them afloat, and in racing through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes at a pace brisk enough to keep them feeling fresh while making each deviation from the expected path a genuine surprise rather than a “twist” so painstakingly telegraphed that redditors could figure it out months in advance and call it a day.

I reviewed episode five of The Rain for Decider. This one took a tried-and-true staple of post-apocalyptic narratives — the colony of seemingly well-meaning survivors who maybe aren’t so well-meaning — and made something new out of it.

Tempered expectations can be a real blessing where TV drama is concerned. During the first three episodes of The Rain on Netflix, I’ve come to expect a well-acted, exciting, handsomely shot show about young people making their way through a rather lush post-apocalyptic hellscape, with the subgenre’s tendency for cruelty tempered by an appreciation of the value of sweetness and happiness as both the means and end of survival. That’s a long and labored way to say I think it’s pretty good and I’m having a good time watching it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be reduced to tears sitting on my couch in the middle of the afternoon by the thing. And yet here we are.

I reviewed the very sad fourth episode of The Rain for Decider.

What a pleasant—and unpleasant—surprise Episode 3 of The Rain turned out to be. Set primarily in the devastated city of Copenhagen, where our band of seven survivors grows closer to one another while realizing just how far gone much of the rest of humanity has gotten, this installment both embraces the tropes of post-apocalyptic life-on-the-road narratives and thoughtfully avoids many of the pitfalls that plague such stories. It proves that the series is capable of facing ugly truths about human nature without functioning as a backdoor endorsement of that ugliness—all with a running time of just 36 minutes and change.

I reviewed episode three of The Rain for Decider. Here’s where the show really started to impress me.

The first episode of The Rain was 46 minutes long. This one is a cool 37. In the words of Tuco Salamanca, tight tight tight! Narrative economy is at a premium in this day and age, whether it’s the end of days or not. And if the show’s second installment lacks the premiere’s breathless pacing, at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome as it slows things down.

The problem facing the series at this stage in its eight-episode opening season is pretty straightforward. Now that it’s established its rain-delivered armageddon, cemented the roles of its protagonists Simone and Rasmus in its creation and possible cure, and (most importantly) abandoned the little underground world of two that made their situation so unique, can it still hold our interest as it retreads the familiar ground of so many post-apocalyptic stories before it?

I reviewed the second episode of The Rain for Decider. It’s the shakiest, insofar as it has to go through all the usual maneuvers described above, but I was impressed by how un–Walking Dead it managed to be nonetheless.

Written by series co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt and directed by Kenneth Kainz, The Rain’s series premiere is the most breakneck work of sci-fi worldbuilding I’ve seen since the pilot episode of Lost. It’s a smart play. The high-speed opening distinguishes the show not only from the usual Netflix-bloat pacing problems, but also from the traditional way in which post-apocalyptic narratives dole out information about the stakes and the threat a little bit at a time. The show seems to assume that yeah, we’re familiar with how these kinds of stories operate, and we can dispense with the formalities and get right into the good stuff.

I reviewed the first episode of The Rain, Netflix’s surprisingly good new Danish post-apocalyptic drama, for Decider. Much more on this show to come.

Let’s talk about silence. I mean, the Jennings family certainly does this week, and how can we go wrong following their example? Elizabeth discusses it in the context of Rififi, the classic French crime movie by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin. She watches the film in an attempt to ingratiate herself with one Jackson Barber, a handsome young film buff who works for Senator Sam Nunn, a key player in the arms-reduction negotiations she’s spent the season trying to undermine. The movie features a heist sequence that clocks in at something close to half an hour without a single word spoken. You can see how this would appeal to Elizabeth, who knows how these kinds of things work—and to The Americans, which has worked out so well in large part by following in its footsteps.

Elizabeth talks about silence again with her son Henry, in a painful phone conversation the pleasantries of which reveal long-standing estrangement between her and the child she didn’t bother recruiting. Henry complains about having to read Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on the virtues of quiet contemplation. “It’s important literature, apparently,” he verbally eye-rolls; critics of this show’s slow-burn approach no doubt know how he feels.

Yet Henry picks up on something hidden inside Elizabeth’s strategic silences: pain that she’s struggling, in vain, to cloak in small talk. “She was asking about school and the weather,” he tells his father Philip about the call. “It was weird, because she doesn’t really call me? We barely ever talk, but all of a sudden she’s calling from a business trip and asking me about English class.” He concludes with a casual observation that hits her husband like a Mack truck: “I don’t understand why she’s so unhappy.” She never said a word to that effect, bur her silence spoke volumes.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Americans (from a couple weeks back) for Decider.

Can people change? The question drives many of the New Golden Age of Television’s greatest shows. Arguably it drives the New Golden Age of Television. To the extent that the medium’s rebirth coincides with the seismic upheavals in American life in the time period that stretches from 9/11 through the election of Barack Obama to the ascension of Donald Trump, the question may resonate because it’s so similar to the one we’ve been asking ourselves as a country for over half a generation.

Can people change? Different shows have come up with different answers. The Sopranos says no. Deadwood says yes, but at a cost. The Wire says the system prevents change, so “n/a.” Mad Men says yes, eventually. Breaking Bad (and its doom-laden prequel Better Call Saul) says yes, for the worse. The Walking Dead says yes, for the worse, and that’s good, which is why the show is bad.  Game of Thrones says we’d better fucking hope so.

Can people change? After watching “The Great Patriotic War” — an appropriate title for one of the most upsetting episodes of this series yet — I think The Americans is saying yes and no, simultaneously. Perhaps this, more than the simple fact of having co-ed co-protagonists, is its real innovation in the antihero genre. It’s telling two stories at once, chronicling two competing theories of the world. It’s its own cold war.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. I’m proud of what I was able to do with this review (and, in a different way, that headline).

I’ll close with one of my favorite-ever scenes of allegorically resonant sickness in a series that’s been full of them: Elizabeth in her home-care disguise, taking her patient to a World Series party so she can spy on the woman’s husband and a potential double agent with in the Russian negotiating team, then getting vomited on as the dying artist panics and gushes up food and fluid from her disease-ridden guts. It’s Elizabeth who pushed the woman into attending the party in the first place so she’d have a chance to spy first-hand; it’s Elizabeth who talked her and her husband out of euthanasia to keep the information channel open; it’s the hated Russian negotiator who rushes over to help clean the vomit by Elizabeth’s side.

As best we can tell, Elizabeth’s primary reaction to the incident is dismay that it interrupted the taped conversation between her husband and the Russian. But earlier in the episode, the artist told Elizabeth she wishes she’d spent less time painting and more time with her spouse “The work is the best of me,” she thought, “something to leave behind. But really, who cares? Who cares. All those hours, just…honestly, I wish I’d spent them with Glenn. Just being with him, doing I don’t know what. Just…doesn’t matter.” Something’s eating Elizabeth up from the inside, too: her work. “There’s something rotten about it,” Oleg says to Philip; perhaps that’s why the artist vomits three times, once for each of Elizabeth’s victims earlier in the episode. Will Elizabeth listen to the woman whose suffering she’s aiding and abetting and get out before any more lives are wasted, with bullets or otherwise?

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Americans for Decider. This is such a rewarding show to write about. It’s got so much to give.

Based on the talent involved, The Looming Tower could and should have been better. But with the task it faced and the approach it took, I’ll be damned if I can figure out how. Some things just weren’t meant to be dramas. So despite a slate of fine actors doing their best — and despite a scorching critique of the CIA, the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the Saudi royal family — The Looming Tower never built up into something more than a well-cast book report. It gets harder and harder to never forget.

I reviewed the final episode of The Looming Tower for Decider. The show never really worked, though it did give us a magnificent Michael Stuhlbarg performance (is there any other kind?) as, of all people, Richard Clarke.

“I am alone without them, here. Alone.” This line — delivered by Soviet hockey player turned double agent turned defector turned likely divorcé Gennadi to the FBI agent he considers his only friend, Stan Beeman — hit me harder than anything else in this week’s episode of The Americans. As a reminder, this week’s episode of The Americans opened with Elizabeth Jennings washing a man’s brains and blood off her face, then yelling at her traumatized daughter Paige for making the unforgivable mistake of running toward the scene to make sure her own mom was still alive. It includes Elizabeth straight-up lying to Paige about the nature of the man’s death, which she calls a suicide without mentioning that “assisted suicide” is closer to the mark but still woefully inadequate. It includes Elizabeth rolling some poor sap who may have been her easiest mark ever, effortlessly getting him to tell her everything he knows about the weak spots at the secure warehouse where he works before grabbing him from behind and choking him to death on his way out the door. It includes Stan apologizing to his old ally Oleg Burov for his inadvertent role in the CIA threatening him and his family should he refuse to turn double agent, and Oleg rejecting the apology. It includes Philip Jennings growing so alarmed about Elizabeth’s contempt for the United States and oblique hints about her participation in some kind of power struggle against Mikhail Gorbachev that he accepts Oleg’s proposal to spy on, and potentially act to stop, his own wife. If you’re in the market to get hit hard, this is an embarrassment of riches.

So why did this line from a minor character in the grand scheme of things affect me so much? “I am alone without them, here. Alone.” When he says this, Gennadi has been unceremoniously yanked from his double life in the middle of the airport, where in the middle of one of his courier missions Stan approaches him saying he understands he’s requested political asylum — an agreed-upon signal that he’s at risk and must end his life in the Soviet Union forever. Stan’s old partner Dennis Aderholt does the same with Gennadi’s wife Sofia, the TASS news agency worker who helped the flip Gennadi in the first place, but who’s now so unhappy in their marriage that she’s leaking secrets to her new beau, some unseen guy named Bogdan. Other agents pick up her son Ilya from elementary school. The protection they’ll need as defectors ensures that they’ll be moved far away; if the divorce goes through, they’ll be moved to separate locations where they’ll be unreachable to one another. So Sofia moves ahead with her plan to divorce him, Gennadi will never see her or Ilya again. What all of this means for Gennadi is that he’s lost his homeland, his home life, both of his jobs, and his family in the space of an afternoon. He is a man without a country.

Is there a better way to describe each individual member of the Jennings family?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. As an aside, it’s nice that the soundtrack calmed down a bit.

If I had to sum up this hour-long portrait of how Elizabeth’s studied, professionally mandated distance from the emotional needs of other people — except insofar as they can be instrumentalized and weaponized — is slowly destroying her, I’d do it with an exchange she has with Claudia. Elizabeth can’t help but see how Paige has responded to the woman’s grandmotherly presence in her life. “The way Paige has taken to you,” Elizabeth says to Claudia, “if something were to happen to me at any point…” Your mind fills in the blank before Elizabeth can do so herself — surely she wants Claudia to care for her daughter in the event of her own death — until Elizabeth finishes the thought: “I think you could finish with her.” Just as when she uses her children as a ploy to get the general to let down his guard when he pulls out the gun she’ll eventually use to kill him, the mission is the priority, not the well-being of another person, not even that of her own daughter. It’s clear where that leads them both.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Americans, in which Paige gets a good look at her mother’s monstrousness, for Decider.

Serious question: When the makers of The Looming Tower called this episode “A Very Special Relationship,” did they have Jeff Daniels’s graphic sex scenes in mind?

I wrote a whole bunch more about how the failure of The Looming Tower to make a cohesive character out of FBI anti-terrorism chief John O’Neill undermines a lot of the dramatic parallels the show is trying to make in my review of its eighth episode for Decider, but I also just want you to see these gifs.

Elizabeth Jennings sits in a cafe in Mexico City and learns that the leader of the Soviet Union will be murdered if he agrees to deactivate his country’s top-secret plan for retaliatory nuclear annihilation. She learns this not in a warning, but in a demand for her assistance. Making an end-run around her superiors back home, a man from the Soviet army has come to recruit her to spy on Gorbachev’s team at a disarmament summit. Her job is to make sure that the Strangelovian project — codenamed “Dead Hand,” because why fuck around — is not on the bargaining table. If it is, she is to report back, and history will change forever.

As she learns this information, which will culminate in her receipt of a necklace with a poison pill hidden inside in order to protect the sanctity of Dead Hand should she ever be captured, Peter Gabriel’s “We Do What We’re Told” rises in volume on the soundtrack, higher and higher, until the only reason we can make out her contact’s words is because we can read their subtitled translations. It’s a clever callback to The Americans‘ first episode and its use of “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins — another eerie solo standout from a Genesis alum that was famously used in the soundtrack for Miami Vice some thirty years ago. But it’s also away to focus our attention not on the mission, but the shock of receiving it. The Americans deploys quiet and wordlessness as effectively as any show on TV; so many of its standout performers (Noah Emmerich, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin) are strikingly soft-spoken, and many of its best moments consist of characters just standing and staring at something they can only just bear to see. This isn’t an option in the middle of receiving your marching orders, so the show does the next best thing: It drowns them out. Elizabeth herself is quiet, but there’s a tumult in her head.

[…]

Watching The Americans in 2018 is a much different experience than watching The Americans in 2013 — not just because it’s much better show than it was during that first season (a reasonably enjoyable thriller and not much more), nor because during the 2012 election liberal pundits treated Mitt Romney describing Russia as our enemy as a gaffe while now many of those same pundits are out to start a new Cold War against the country and its ex-KGB leader. You get a little closer when you start talking about why — Russian meddling in 2016 election and influence peddling with its Electoral College–appointed winner Donald Trump and his minions — but only if you treat that as the starting point rather than the finish.

Should even the worst of the allegations against the Putin and Trump governments turn out to be true, they’re basically just tit for tat if you go back to what happened after Gorbachev, when America helped establish an oligarchy by kicking off a capitalist fire sale in the country, and intervened directly and more or less openly to ensure Putin predecessor Boris Yeltsin presided over it. A slightly, but only slightly, less dramatic looting of the commons by corporations, their wealthy viziers, and their paid representatives in the United States government took place here at home. And there’d be no Trump on whose behalf to meddle if our own grotesque racism, sexism, xenophobia, gutting of the social safety net, and worship of money hadn’t made him possible.

In short, it’s much, much harder than it used to be for all but the most blinkered patriots, liberal or conservative, to look at America and Russia’s recent history and see good guys and bad guys. History is a palimpsest, rewritten as we go. And as with Elizabeth in that cafe, things that used to be sound perfectly clear are getting harder and harder to hear.

I reviewed the final season premiere of The Americans for Decider, where I’ll be covering this very special show until the end.

“And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” —Country Joe and the Fish, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag”

If there’s one thing that struck me about “The General,” the seventh episode of The Looming Tower, it’s that the answer to Country Joe MacDonald’s musical question is, as it always was, “not much.” Not much of value, anyway. Ostensibly depicting the investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole off the Yemeni coast, the episode is in fact about how interagency and international strife made a halfway decent investigation impossible. Most of the fighting that gets done here is between people who are supposed to be on the same side. Why are they doing it? As Country Joe put it, “Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Looming Tower, the first one where I started to think maybe they’re gonna run out of fuel for this story long before they run out of story to fuel, for Decider. The Looming Tower does not have the spark. It does not have the magic.

Andrew Cunanan walks through Miami Beach toward death as “Vienna” by Ultravox plays on the soundtrack. That New Wave masterpiece is both a celebration and rejection of glamour. Sequentially so, in that vocalist Midge Ure sings of “a man in the dark in a picture frame, so mystic and soulful” and “haunting notes, pizzicato strings, the rhythm is calling,” only to follow up by proclaiming “the image is gone…the feeling is gone…this means nothing to me.” Simultaneously so, in that when he sings “this means nothing to me” the song soars as if nothing has ever meant more to him. Inextricably so, in that it wedges “only you and I” between each declaration of faded emotion and emphatic meaninglessness; in that the title comes from the chorus’s climactic phrase “Ah, Vienna,” a cry of joy and a sigh of loss all at once. The first time that chorus hits in the ninth and final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Andrew Cunanan assassinates Gianni Versace. The second time, he’s standing in a stranger’s kitchen, rummaging through a fridge in a house he’s burglarized, pulling out a bottle of champagne and fiddling with the foil around the cork. His lonesome toast to himself is not timed to the music. The feeling is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

[…]

Andrew Cunanan is dead and gone when The Assassination of Gianni Versace, one of the best dramas of the decade, concludes. Its final scenes focus on the family of the title character, not his killer; even this choice is a deliberate disconnection from what’s come before. Estranged though they are, both his sister Donatella and his partner Antonio struggle to connect what they had with what they have now. Donatella, who has coolly presided over Antonio’s excision from his late partner’s estate, sobs, because her brother annoyed her on the day of his murder to the point where she refused to pick up the phone when he called. Antonio has been rejected not only by Donatella but by the priest at Gianni’s funeral mass — where rich and famous friends from Princess Diana to Elton John to Naomi Campbell to Sting were present, but where Antonio himself did not merit a mention as a part of the family, nor a kiss from the cleric, whose institution spent the decade denying the humanity of homosexuals while systematically destroying the humanity of so many children in its charge. Like Andrew, he attempts suicide; unlike Andrew, he is unsuccessful.

Gianni Versace ends the series as a photo in a shrine where his sister goes to grieve and lament what could have been had she picked up the phone. Donatella is a distorted reflection in glass embellished with the House of Versace’s Medusa head emblem, monstrous in her mourning. Antonio lies cradled in the hands of the help, who save him from his effort to die with the love of his life. Andrew is just a name on a wall in a mausoleum, one of countless others, nothing special. It’s all so unglamorous, so unceremonious, so blunt and short and ugly. The beauty Versace worked all his life to create, that Andrew tried all his life to recreate, has no place here at the end. The image is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

I reviewed the season finale of ACS Versace for Decider. This show is an all-timer.

Andrew Cunanan was cool.

Like, really cool.

Sincerely, legitimately awesome.

That’s the tragedy of “Creator/Destroyer,” the penultimate episode of this extraordinary season of television. By the time we see Andrew in his full glory as one of the wildest guys at his high school, we’ve also seen his father Modesto, who debuts in this episode, get his hooks deep into the kid. Andrew has seen his father harangue and assault his mother. He’s borne the weight of all his dad’s dreams, knowing this comes at the expense of his siblings, sensing on some level it’s not right to have this kind of pressure placed on him but, because the pressure is couched as praise, not knowing how to fight back. He’s been…well, the show is cagey on this, but saying he’s been molested by his father would not be out of bounds.

And even now, as an ebullient and confident teenager, he’s begun certain behavior patterns that will get him in trouble in the end: he has a sugar daddy, and he becomes fast friends with Lizzie, his future bestie, because she shows up at a high-school house party pretending to be a kid rather than the married adult she really is. (“I’m an impostor.” “All the best people are.”) He’s picking up little tidbits on how to deceive (including his go-to pseudonym, DeSilva, the name of the people who own the house where the party takes place) and why (because “when you feel special, success will follow” as his father teaches him).

But for a brief time, he’s just a cool, slightly weird, slightly obnoxious, slightly closeted teenager, and if you weren’t at least two of those things during your high school career I don’t wanna know you. He stands up to homophobes in a familiar way, by camping it up even further, going so far as to pose for his class photo with his shirt all the way unbuttoned to show off his (impressive!) torso. He’s prophetically chosen to be “Most Likely to Be Remembered,” and equally prophetically selects “Après moi, le déluge” as his yearbook quote. He rolls into the parking lot like a refugee from Less Than Zero (complete with that movie’s soundtrack staple, the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter”; the film was his IRL fave) and shows up at the house party in an Eddie Murphy red-leather jumpsuit. (Finally it’s clear why so many of his music cues over the course of the ‘90s portion of the series were anachronistically ’80s: The ’80s were his time.) This Andrew could be loved. This Andrew could be saved.

I reviewed last week’s episode of ACS Versace for Decider. What a show.

“We must be talked about, or we are nothing.” —Donatella Versace, to the Versace staff

“For me, being told ‘no’ is like being told I don’t exist. It’s like I disappeared or something.” —Andrew Cunanan, to Jeff Trail

“Is this normal? Is this normal enough?” —Gianni Versace to his sister Donatella, on creating a less unique ready-to-wear version of the haute couture dress they designed together for her

“It’s just a name they made up to sound special.” —Andrew Cunanan to his mother Mary Anne, on Häagen-Dazs ice cream

“It needs confidence.” “It gives confidence.” —Donatella and Gianni, on the dress

“So you can hold your own at a dinner table conversation.” “I am the dinner table conversation.” —an escort agency owner and Andrew Cunanan, on Andrew Cunanan

“I want the world to see you in a way that you have never been seen before.” —Gianni to Donatella

“Oh, if they could see me now.” “Who?” “Everyone.” —Andrew Cunanan to Norman Blachford

“This dress is not my legacy. You are.” —Gianni to Donatella

“He’s a good boy. He’s always been a good boy.” —Mary Anne on Andrew Cunanan

“Ascent,” the seventh episode of ACS Versace, is the one where my admiration for what writer Tom Rob Smith has accomplished with his scripts and structure for the series shifted into something approaching awe. Returning to the Versaces’ world of high fashion for the first time since Episode 2 (their appearance in Episode 5 centered on Gianni’s coming out, not their work as designers), it creates a series of parallels between the the artist and the man who would murder him that are all the more striking for how different they are in intention and affect.

I reviewed episode seven of ACS Versace for Decider a couple weeks back. (I apologize for all the catch-up linkblogging tonight.) I remember going through my notes on this one and thinking “Christ, this is a well-written show.”