A-bombs aside, this episode, like its predecessor, made me appreciate the emotional and ethical complexity of Carol’s situation. Should it have been self-evident that Zosia was capable of lying to her by omission, and that the plurbs will never rest until they convert her? Yes. Could that have overcome all her human desire for love and companionship? Should it have done so? I’m not so sure.

Yet Manousos is capable of rejecting the embrace of the Joined. His personality and rigid adherence to the rules make him seem like a difficult person to love, on either the giving or receiving end. (Remember him calling his mom a bitch?) But presumably he desires human fellowship no less than does the similarly misanthropic Carol. He managed to stay true to the cause of the human individual against the encroaching hivemind. What’s her excuse?

It’s love, of course. In getting to know the collective through Zosia, she’s fallen in love with this…individual? Instance? She was selected to be optimally physically attractive to Carol, and she can cater to her with the knowledge and enthusiasm of every human being on the planet. She’s a walking lovebomb. Director Gordon Smith’s Jonathan Demme–esque straight-on closeup as Carol processes her feeling of betrayal upon learning that Zosia is still just one of them — as she realizes certain truths which should perhaps have been self-evident — is powerful because you can feel Zosia’s pull all the same.

I reviewed Pluribus‘s strong season finale for Decider.

Carol’s moaning was sweet, it was hot, it was tender and moving and erotic, and it got me to thinking. Carol reacts to kissing Zosia the way that she does because she’d kept every victim/beneficiary of “the Joining” at arm’s length, and they she, this whole time. But of course it’s insane to completely remove yourself from humanity, even the strange form of it represented by members of the hivemind like Zosia. You need that contact, however peculiar it has now become. Or Carol needs it, anyway: When she was totally cut off, she really did begin losing her mind.

Yet at the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was also insane to talk with Zosia, to befriend Zosia, to make love to Zosia, like Zosia is a real person, when in fact she’s…well, all real people, all at once. She is the original Zosia. She is Carol’s dead wife. She is Carold’s dead wife’s relatives. She is Carol’s own relatives! She is every woman Carol ever fucked, and every woman they ever fucked, and so on, and so on, and so on. 

Is the intimacy required for even the most exhibitionistic and non-monogamistic sex possible when your partner is every living human being, minus one dozen? What about the intimacy required to confide, to conspire, to share hopes and dreams and frustrations and inside jokes? To stargaze amid incredible romantic red lights, to play croquet on the 50 yard line, to get massages, to visit an old haunt like the Mulholland Drive–esque diner the plurbs rebuild for Carol’s enjoyment? To do all the things friends and lovers do?

Keep in mind also that Zosia is also all of the world’s greatest lovers. She is every woman who’s ever given head and every woman who’s ever been given head. She’s every man in that same equation, if for some reason that knowledge should come in handy. By the time she and Carol have sex, the episode has already established that Zosia is literally unbeatable in games of skill or knowledge, having instantaneous access to the thoughts — but not the physical or emotional feelings — of every human being on earth. Tough to imagine this idea was introduced in the same episode where she and Carol fuck out of pure coincidence, right?

So is it mind-blowing? Is it the best sex she’s ever had? Is it tailor-made to match the performance and preferences of a familiar lover, like her wife? Is it deliberately dialed down by a collective consciousness that knows every sexual trick in the book, including how not to overwhelm your more inexperienced inamorata? Is there a reason it’s happening now? 

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

There are a million reasons Fallout shouldn’t work. For starters, it’s a video-game adaptation, and those almost never work regardless. It’s an over-the-top satire of capitalism and the fantasy of the American West, a subgenre with a pretty shabby success rate on the small screen. It ricochets between a dizzying array of reference points and emotional tones every episode. It treats violence both as a hideous moral blight and totally awesome.

It shouldn’t work, but it does. Adapted by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner from the games created by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, Josh Sawyer, and others, Fallout is a spectacularly savage send-up of megalomaniacal technocrats, billionaire psychopaths, and American fascists. (Brought to you by Jeff Bezos and all your friends at Amazon!) Starring several of the most telegenic actors working today, it’s stupid like a fox, smarter than it needs to be, and so nasty I’m surprised they can get away with it.

I reviewed the series premiere of Fallout for Decider. Woo!

There’s so much that Pluribus is doing that no other show on TV is doing right now. Those crystal blue skies! The majority of entire episodes passing in dialogue-free silence! The full commitment to the bit of playing the entire “Hello, Carol” voicemail recording every single time she dials! Pluribus makes life feel like the never-ending struggle it is, and it’s damn good at it. I don’t need the jokes and gags and bits. Just point the cameraat two people slowly being driven insane by the fact that, for all intents and purposes, they are the only two people.

I reviewed last night’s strong Pluribus for Decider.

For the first however many minutes of this week’s Pluribus, the louche Mr. Diabaté reenacts a generic James Bond scene with a gaggle of plurbs (for lack of a better term) dressed up as cool party people and/or evil villains. At no time is anyone in any danger, even of losing money, let alone their lives. Mr. Diabaté is not at risk. His enemy is not at risk. No one at the party is even really partying! They’re all just playing along to please him, and the moment he leaves the room they switch off the revelry and start cleaning the place up, as if someone had thrown a switch. (God only knows how creepy this effect is when the women with whom he’s constantly having orgies get up and leave the hot tub room.)

In essence, this episode asks us to spend its opening minutes watching something that isn’t happening, that doesn’t matter, and that isn’t even necessary, given that we already learned the kind of person Mr. Diabaté is during our first meeting, and that the mere existence of his Las Vegas digs conveys this too. Why waste valuable screen time on an inert Austin Powers riff?

It’s equally bold to hire a massive star to do a little cameo just for funsies. But while that may be bold, the identity of the massive star matters. Had Pluribus gotten, I dunno, Daniel Day-Lewis, now that’d be something. Instead, it got John Cena, the most happy-to-be-here man in Hollywood. 

A spinoff TV series for his D-list superhero from the DC Universe? A cohost for a show in which people get whacked by large foam-rubber balls into water 15 feet below them? A WWE event in the haven of creative freedom known as Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? An apology to the nation of China for acknowledging the existence of Taiwan? John Cena’s your man. If there’s an audience for “funny” John Cena cameos in 2025, I am not a part of it.

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

I love how much of Pluribus takes place in silence. I love how much strength it derives from simply putting a complicated person on the screen, wordlessly, and allowing us to observe them. I love how much the show moves to the rhythms of labor, the painstaking, time-consuming, and necessary efforts we put into living that most shows ignore. There’s even a time-lapse shot of Carol Sturka sleeping as the light coming through the window shifts with the lengthening of the day. In short, Pluribus takes great pains to convey what it is like to simply exist in the world it has constructed — to be a human, a thinking person in a human body, surrounded by a world grown hostile and strange. 

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

So let’s review. The Others are all permanently blissed-out people pleasers. They cannot kill other living things. They want to convert the last few holdouts, and won’t harm them directly, but won’t hesitate to hand them ways to harm themselves. They have no meaningfully personal concept of personal expression. Their big changeover has cost the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. Assuming the show is leaving these plot holes open on purpose and I’ll grant you I’m shooting it a lot of bail here, my final question is this. If you were the senders of the transmission responsible for the Joining, and you were trying to turn a fractious planet full of nuclear armaments into a smooth, flat runway for an invasion and a pasture of docile livestock for the slaughter — if, in other words, you were making a weapon — would you have designed that transmission any differently? 

This, however, raises another question. I’m interested, in a sort of academic way, about the nature of the joining, its origin, its ultimate purpose. Let’s say I’m right and we’ve got a science-fiction story about an alien weapon that turns everyone into pod people. Hey, great! I figured it out, I solved the puzzle. Well, then what? The story itself has to offer something more than the thrill of solving a riddle. There’s a reason it’s not called “theorytelling.”

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

“This should be exciting,” I said to my wife as I sat down to watch the sixth and final episode of Last Samurai Standing’s first season. “There should be some cool fights.”

My wife laughed. “I think that’s a safe bet,” she said.

“Well, sure,” I granted. “Then again, I thought the same thing about Shōgun.” The point is, being the final episode of a combat-centric show is no guarantee of combat. Unless, of course, the episode in question is titled “Mortal Combat,” as this one is. In that case you can pretty much rest assured that you are, in fact, gonna see some cool freakin’ fights.

Man oh man, does this season finale deliver on that front.

I reviewed the gangbusters season finale of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

Kawaji justifies Kodoku, as do the members of the four conglomerates, by noting the way samurai were able to flout the law because they were the law. The bankers in particular seem to have been routinely ripped off by ex-samurai seeking loans they have no intention of repaying, because who’s gonna get the money out of them, some clerk? And one need look no further than Bukotsu, whose rampages against civilians are protected by the game guards, to see what happens when you give some lunatic a sword, extensive martial arts training, and the belief that he exists in a different class of people from the hoi polloi. Hell, you can look around the streets of Chicago or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. to see that too. (Minus the extensive martial arts training, of course.)

But Kawaji’s new system, too, deals out death indiscriminately. In addition to overseeing the whole bloody game, Kawaji’s underling Ando also sees to it that Shinpei is strangled to death before his decoded telegrams definitively tying Kawaji to the game can make their way to the Home Minister. Moreover, all the guards are capable of seeing that Futaba and Shinnosuke have no business playing a game designed to pit samurai against samurai, but at no point have these noncombatants been given the chance to bow out. It all feels very Fall of the Galactic Republic, doesn’t it? (Or rather, the Star Wars stuff feels very samurai.) The Jedi made some terrible mistakes, especially toward the end, but do you prefer stormtroopers?

I reviewed the fifth episode of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

As engaging as the little twists and turns of the game are, this show is as entertaining as it is because of the filmmaking and the fighting. The you-are-there camerawork of director Kento Yamaguchi weaves all around the restaurant during the rumble scene, much of which is shot in one continuous take to make it feel as though you your self are dodging punches and ducking for cover. The silver glow of Sakura and Shujiro’s crossed swords pops brightly after 45 minutes of the show’s usual thoughtfully muted color palate. All this gives the aquamarine of the puppet-masters’ secret base an even more opulent feeling. Last Samurai Standing is its own cohesive visual world, occasionally sliced open by a giant sword.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

Samurai schools are failing our children. There, I said it. Kyohachi-ryu School, “the origin of swordsmanship” if its brochure is to be believed, has one teacher and eight students — okay, so they’ve got class size under control at least — but they all have to kill each other to graduate. That’s a pedagogical method that would have even Donald Trump’s weird, pedophile-enabling Education Department destroyer Linda McMahon going “hey, slow down.” 

I reviewed the third episode of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

Star Junichi Okada’s action choreography in both scenes is fist-pumpingly good, but in two totally different ways. Bukotsu and Ukyo fight in quick bursts, lashing out and then regrouping, before things break down as Bukotsu gets the upper hand. Their whole battle, which is intercut with Fubata and Shujiro’s storyline as well as Ukyo’s origin story throughout the episode, is filmed as it happens, with minimal camera trickery.

Shujiro’s killcrazy rampage through the game’s enforcers, by contrast, is a balletic, bullet-timed thing of beauty. Against a blue-gray sky tinted purple-pink by the spray of blood in the air, Shujiro moves in and out of regular speed, with the action slowing down to show us individual sword strikes and spectacular deaths and dismemberments. As Sakura, the top lieutenant with the gnarly scar, says from a safe distance, “Kokushu the Manslayer has awakened.”

I reviewed the second episode of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

After watching the first episode of Last Samurai Standing, one thing becomes apparent very quickly: This show rules. I mean it is mint. I mean I walked around my apartment after it was over, saying “Holy shit, that was fuckin’ great” to myself, confusing my cat. Gorgeously shot, emotionally written, with serious things to say about the destruction of a way of life and breathless action choreography by producer and star Junichi Okada, it reminded me favorably of modern classics like 13 Assassins, or, strangely, Godzilla Minus One. There’s really no sense in beating around the bush here: I enjoyed the hell out of this episode, and my only hope is that the remaining six are exactly the same.

I’m covering a cool show with a goofy title, Last Samurai Standing, for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

I have to admit, I didn’t expect to find myself suddenly bearish about a new Vince Gilligan show by episode three. It’s true that neither Better Call Saul nor Breaking Bad were anywhere near as smart, tight, bleak, and brilliant in episode three as they were by Season 5, and I’m certainly not writing off Pluribus, because I’m not stupid. But both BB and BCS, even the prequel series, felt like they were doing something new to TV. This post-apocalyptic dystopia simply does not. 

I reviewed this week’s disappointing (!) Pluribus for Decider.

I reviewed the second episode of Pluribus for Decider.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are two of the best television shows ever made. Both created by Vince Gilligan, the latter with Peter Gould, they use crime-drama frameworks for lengthy, thoughtful, ultimately melancholy examinations of the way humans choose expediency over morality. 

At least that’s how we critics tend to think and talk about them. Equally important to their success and well-deserved reputation: They were scary as shit! That whole multi-episode Breaking Bad arc pitting Walter White against Gus Fring in a lethal stand-off? The white-knuckle scene in which Nacho Varga must either poison his boss or die trying? Todd Alquist? Lalo Salamanca? Breathtaking suspense and thrilling action involving best-in-class TV psychopaths was as big a part of the BB/BCS appeal as the slow spiritual deaths of Heisenberg and Saul Goodman.  

So when Pluribus, Gilligan’s new show for Apple TV, starts off with a harrowing depiction of the apocalypse, localized in Albuquerque, New Mexcio, maybe I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. In addition to his own two stone-cold masterpieces, Gilligan also worked on The X-Files, so this nucleotide was within him all along, just waiting to be activated.

I reviewed the series premiere of Pluribus for Decider.

Wow. Wow. It’s a pretty good sign for a season finale when you have to repeat the word “wow” for emphasis to describe it, right? But I don’t know how else to put it. This episode of The Lowdown, by my estimation, contains one of the year’s funniest scenes and one of the year’s most ruthless and unflinching endings. It’s got a shootout AND a cookout. It shows a bad man having a change of heart, and a good man having a change of heart too. There are some fun wedding outfits, even. And it contains a quote from the Bible that needs to be drilled into the head of every man, woman, and child in America: “A poor man is better than a liar.”

I reviewed the season finale of The Lowdown for Decider.

That The Lowdown, like Andor before it, can now be called “a show for our times” is mightily depressing, at least if you are predisposed to care about the kinds of things it cares about. (If you’re not, why are you reading this?) It’s a show for people who see that bad things are happening and just kind of instinctively react against it, the way your body rejects poison. It’s about someone who goes beyond shuddering and vomiting, and tries to turn himself into a one-man vaccine.

“If I see an injustice, and I don’t do anything,” Lee says to his one-eyed editor Cyrus’s lawyer cousin, “what’s that make me?” You know what that question is? The sound of a functioning conscience. Some people still fucking have them in this country! 

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Lowdown for Decider.

Watching this episode in October 2025, when there are open Nazis and Christian Nationalists at the highest levels of government and the rule of law is being rewritten to favor white people and punish everyone else more or less openly, is…bittersweet. Nevertheless, it is bracing and necessary for art to address these people for who and what they are. Lee Raybon and his compatriots are up against people who prattle about an imaginary America, even as they attempt to replace it with the Confederacy, Jim Crow, the Third Reich. A story in which fractures in the right-wing coalition can be exploited like rap beefs until, hopefully, someone emerges from the fascist cipher a clear-cut loser is a story worth telling.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Lowdown for Decider.

It’s so easy to write of the wrong done to others as just that, wrong done to others. But evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every stone thrown at goodness and justice and love has ripples that spread out over the surface of the whole of society. This is what makes living in times like these so agonizing: So many are suffering, and so many more will suffer because of that suffering, and there’s so little any one of us can do beyond stilling the waters that directly surround us. Brad Ingelsby’s project is dramatizing this ripple effect in the form of cop thrillers set in Pennsylvania. After this engrossing, moving season of television, it’s a project with my full support. 

I reviewed the finale of Task for Decider.