Unfortunately, high-rise-hotel-dwelling zombies attracted by the ruckus raised by the extremely drunk Maddie and Strand in the lobby weren’t the only things that went plummeting on “Los Muertos,” this week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead: The show’s quality did, too. After airing its first top-to-bottom Good Episode with last week’s quiet, thoughtful, Nick-centric survival-horror road-trip ep “Grotesque,” the series has returned to form: fascist tribalism, ham-fisted dialogue, half-baked philosophy, and more idiotic and inconsistent behavior than you can toss an empty shot glass at.

I reviewed this week’s typically bad Fear the Walking Dead for Decider.

The beauty of all this is that Nick is neither a born survivor nor a feckless, hapless loser. He’s a guy trying his best, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. The false dichotomy usually present in Fear the Walking Dead’s survival stories, where living to fight another day usually comes down simply to how violent you’re willing to be, is nowhere to be found. And throughout, director Daniel Sackheim — veteran of some of television’s best-made shows, including The Leftovers, The Americans, and Game of Thrones — frames Nick with some of the series’ most striking shots to date, driving home both his isolation and the lyrical, largely wordless nature (after all, he’s got no one to talk to) of his emotional and physical world.

It’s reminiscent, frankly, of the long, lovely, riveting silent stretches of, say, The Leftovers or Better Call Saul. Sure, it shows how much potential Fear squanders — imagine if it were like this every week! there’s really nothing stopping it! — but even so.

All in all, Nick’s journey here favorably compares to similar passages in, say, Stephen King’s The Stand, where the main obstacle to survival was distance itself — the vast amount of terrain that survivors of the apocalypse had to cover, and the sheer variety of dangers, large and small, they’d have to face on the way. Frankly, this entire franchise has never earned a comparison with a genre touchstone that strong before. I fear it won’t last, but for one week anyway, it’s manna from survival-horror heaven.

I reviewed last night’s Fear the Walking Dead mid-season premiere for Decider. Believe it or not, I liked it a lot! I think it’s the series’ first top-to-bottom good episode. For many reasons detailed in the review I feel a worthy follow-up is unlikely, but still.

Even by the deeply degraded human-behavior plausibility standards of The Night Of, the jailhouse kiss shared by Nasir Khan and his attorney — his attorney! — Chandra Kapoor in “Ordinary Death,” this week’s episode, strains credulity beyond the breaking point and well into the realm of “you’ve got to be fucking shitting me.” Not that I’d expect anything more from Naz, who later in the episode becomes an accessory to murder, for real this time. Nor, frankly, would I hope for much better from Chandra, who despite her law degree and work on a high-profile case for a prestigious firm has been depicted to be green as the summer grass time and time again. (Remember when she didn’t know what ketamine was?)

But from Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, the two highly acclaimed auteurs behind this turkey, I think “not having a brilliant young lawyer make out with the murder suspect she’s representing in full view of Rikers Island security cameras” is the least we could demand. Naz is a handsome guy, sure, and I suppose I could understand how transference could cause Chandra’s protective instincts toward him — at this point, she’s one of the few people alive who believe he’s not guilty — to transmute into attraction. But he’s no more the only eligible bachelor in town than his dad was the only delivery guy capable of bringing her dinner the other week. Yet here we are, once again forcing a plot contrivance the way a prowler would jimmy open a lock. And for what? So Naz can have a series of gruesome flashbacks and visions of Andrea and her bloody corpse during and after the kiss? Whether to deepen our suspicion that he’s guilty or to simply exploit the perverse charge of seeing a woman maimed once again, it’s no more necessary than the kiss itself.

I reviewed last night’s The Night Of, which seems to have caused many in the audience to throw their hands up in despair, and for good reason, for Decider.

Six episodes in, two episodes to go, and it’s time to admit it: I don’t understand The Night Of. Like, at all. I don’t understand its pacing — what happens, and when, and for how long. I don’t understand its characters — who gets centered, and when, and what we do or don’t learn about them. I don’t understand the dividing lines between episodes — why last week’s installment ended with John Stone in a dark basement with a lead pipe in his hand and a convict on the run, only for nothing to come of it, and why this week’s ended with him looking at a personal trainer possibly putting the moves on a client of a certain age with a hip-hop song based on Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” playing on the soundtrack. I don’t know why every black man is menacing. I don’t know why every decision Naz makes is transparently idiotic. I don’t know why it continues to pull casting stunts with HBO veterans — all rise for the Honorable Yellow King presiding, for example. I can’t even begin to fathom its fascination with John Stone’s feet — maybe the single biggest discrepancy between the time and effort placed into a plot element by a show and its emotional, thematic, and narrative payoff for the audience. For me, at least, the mystery at the center of The Night Of — including last night’s episode, “Samson and Delilah” — is what the hell The Night Of is trying to do. For a miniseries that’s 75% complete, that’s a bad place to be.

I reviewed this week’s baffling The Night Of for Decider.

Of all the ways prestige cable dramas could redress the woeful full-frontal-nudity gender imbalance — and I’m sure we’ve all thought of several, many of them involving Kit Harington — using the penis of a dead, nude black man for a raunchy bit of prop comedy is probably last on the list. And yet! This is the road The Night Of has chosen to go down. In “The Season of the Witch,” overall the series’ most awkward combination of hardcore crime drama and gross-out humor to date, a district attorney and a medical examiner debate the origin of a knife wound in a photograph placed, for no apparent reason other than laughs, next to the exposed genitalia of a corpse in the middle of getting the fluids from its eyeballs and bladder drained. Shit, I’ve already complained about the overabundance of sexualized shots of the unclothed body of the female murder victim at the heart of the story; “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” is not the remedy I had in mind.

And hey, this isn’t even the only nude, brutalized black male body on display this week! Earlier in the episode, Naz is offered the opportunity of revenge against the man who burned him last week by his benefactor Freddy, who has the assailant naked, prostrate, and trapped in the showers. Naz gets a half-hearted kick or two in on his tormenter and is ready to walk away — until the man, unwisely given his circumstances at the time, taunts the kid as a “faggot.” Since there’s nothing more menacing than having your sexuality threatened by a black man, Naz goes berserk, pounding the guy into a bloody pulp until Freddy’s goons have to pull him off to keep him from committing “another” murder. Later, Freddy expresses admiration for the “secrets and rage” that motivate his new apprentice; this conversation, at least, does not take place in front of a dead or injured person’s penis for no apparent reason, so thank heaven for small favors.

I had real problems with last Sunday’s The Night Of, which I reviewed for Decider.

Say what you will about what happens in this week’s The Night Of: At least you can see it, for a change. Titled “The Art of War,” this episode was directed by The Theory of Everything and Man on Wire’s James Marsh — the only episode in the series not helmed by co-creator and, as of next week’s installment, co-writer Steven Zaillian. Marsh eschews the ostentatious, obfuscatory camerawork that has marked Zaillian’s contributions: no characters talking while out of focus, no shots of the back of people’s heads, no endless series of close-ups of inanimate objects, no random portraiture of brick walls or puddles. When he does isolate elements of the setting — a dripping hot-water faucet, cigarette smoke wafting up to the ceiling, the harsh overhead lights of the cellblock — these shots have meaning to the characters. You can, and probably should, complain that that meaning is getting doled out with a trowel (the episode ends with a shot of smoke right after Naz makes a deal with the devil! Get it???), but it sure beats spending multiple minutes of screentime zoomed in on the corners of tables just to prove that this is a gritty environment, or whatever.

There’s good news and bad news about last night’s The Night Of. The good news is above. The bad news you can read in my review for Decider.

I’m similarly baffled by their insistence on what I referred to last week as uncommunicatively artsy framing. I actually lost count of the number of close-ups of the rear of someone’s head as they 3/4-cheated their faces away from the camera. What idea or mood or character insight is this intended to convey? Why cut yourself off from the ability to capture the nuances of the human face unless you’ve got a damn good reason? I’m stumped.

The technique reaches its nadir during Naz’s bizarre scene with the jail’s resident kingpin, Freddy (a thoroughly wasted Michael K. Williams, naturally introduced with a series of closeups of seemingly every inanimate object in his room, beginning with — rimshot! — a wire). A prizefighter turned druglord turned unofficial lord of Rikers, he’s bribing the male guards, fucking the female ones, and intimidating everyone else into line. For some reason he’s taken an interest in Naz, and he offers him protection after a strange Luciferian monologue in which he tells the kid, “Close your eyes, give me your hand,” like he’s singing the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame,” and makes him feel a handful of veal. As he makes his offer, in the stilted language a vampire might use when demanding to be invited into someone’s home, the scene is shot from the back of Naz’s head, with Freddy completely out of focus. Maybe you can make the sophomore-year film-student argument that the latter choice conveys the man’s inscrutability to Naz. But why obscure Naz, too? Why hide his face, when it’s all we have to go on?

I reviewed last night’s The Night Of for Decider. I don’t think it’s what it’s cracked up to be.

Faced with the challenge of explaining why something is or is not “hard-core pornography,” Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart punted, famously. In the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio, Potter wrote “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” In attempting to evaluate “Subtle Beast,” the second episode of The Night Of, I find myself returning to the good justice’s words. By many external markers — classy cinematography, gritty subject matter, a cast drawn from basically every noteworthy HBO drama and crime show of the past 20 years — this is a good show. But I know good shows when I see them, and the program involved in this case is not that.

Let’s focus on the cinematography at first, since I think that’s the biggest headfake at play here. Characters are situated low in the frame, or off to one side. Scene transitions are marked with close-ups of individual objects in the environment, abstracted and imbued with significance by their sudden centrality to what’s on screen. Fade-transition shots of the murder scene are overlaid with the sounds of the events leading up to the murder. New York City is depicted as an overcast hellscape. Lots and lots and lots of characters are shot stylishly smoking with their backs to alley walls. Twenty seconds of people walking are shot as an upside-down reflection in a puddle…just because.

Director Steven Zaillian checks off item after item from the “how to make your crime film look fancy” playbook, but it’s all resolutely uncommunicative in its artsiness. Now here’s where we get into “I know it when I see it” territory, but here goes: Shows like Better Call Saul, Hannibal, and Mr. Robot use unconventional framing not just to class up their potboiler plots, but to externalize the emotions of the characters, to present a visually cohesive worldview, to emphasize isolation and mental illness. They’re expressionist TV.The Night Of, by contrast, takes a pointlessly pointillist approach to a vision of Noo Yawk we’ve all seen a million times. These shots do little but pad out the running time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Night Of, with which I remain deeply disappointed, for Decider.

The Night Of is being hailed as a truly great drama, perhaps the first HBO has aired in half a decade that isn’t set in Westeros. It’s being compared to all manner of acclaimed crime stories, even documentaries, from Making a Murderer to Serial to O.J.: Made in America to The Jinx to American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson toFargo and on and on and on. And who knows? To extent that the critics making these comparisons have seen the whole shebang, they may well be proved right. But as of “The Beach,” the series premiere, I’m about as optimistic about this series becoming one for the ages as poor wrongfully accused Nasir Khan is about getting released on his own recognizance. One overlong episode in, The Night Of is a deeply okay show.

Which comes as something of a shock even if you don’t factor in its rapturous reception. For a series with such a writerly pedigree — Price is an acclaimed novelist in addition to his work writing for The Wire; Zaillian is an A-list screenwriter with credits like Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York, Moneyball, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo under his belt — what’s on offer here is surprisingly, disappointingly rote. The biggest problem is Andrea Cornish, the murder victim. A sort of manic-depressive pixie dream girl, she waltzes into Naz’s purloined cab mouthing vague, poetic, patently unrealistic dialogue: proclaiming “I can’t be alone tonight,” citing her destination as simply “the beach,” and so on. You know, like you do when you’re a woman hopping alone into a complete stranger’s car in the middle of the night.

As the night goes on she becomes even more of a magical mystery tour in female form — dispensing drugs, inviting him back to her sumptuously appointed apartment, lending a sympathetic ear when he’s mocked by an Islamophobic passer-by, dispensing more drugs, indulging in a bit of erotic mumbletypeg with Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust” cooing in the background, and finally fucking him. As far as the show’s concerned, she died as she lived: a glamorous cipher for the advancement of the male protagonist’s plot.

I reviewed the premiere of The Night Of for Decider. I was not a big fan.

“Look at me!” Chris Manawa yells at his father Travis, minutes after holding a child hostage at gunpoint and moments after trying to stab his old man to escape. “I’m no good! I’m no good!” He may not be wrong—he’s directly threatened the lives of his stepmother and stepsister multiple times—but nor is he alone. “Shiva,” the “midseason finale” (ugh) of Fear the Walking Dead, offers the clearest demonstration yet that there’s something rotten in the extended Clark-Manawa-Salazar-Strand clan. Too bad the only people capable of seeing it are batshit insane.

I reviewed last night’s Fear the Walking Dead for Decider. Lots of fire, but not so hot.

Fear the Walking Dead just served up one of 2016’s great doomed romances. Show of hands: Who the hell saw that coming? Before today, this largely superfluous spin-off’s idea of tenderness was…well, who knows, since it never showed us. Travis and Maddie have all the chemistry of a wet firecracker, Daniel’s love of his late wife seemed primarily a matter of wanting to save her life and/or determine the time and place of her death, whichever was necessary, and Alicia’s two love interests either died in the initial outbreak or were part of a crew of pirates who nearly got them all killed. Enter Victor Strand and Thomas Abigail, two he-men with hearts of gold, separated by the apocalypse itself, tragically reunited just in time to say goodbye. Their love for each other made “Sicut Cervus,” this week’s episode, the best Fear the Walking Dead yet.

You’re not gonna believe this: I really liked last night’s Fear the Walking Dead, which I reviewed for Decider. It shows how easy it would be to defuse the franchise’s fascistic overtones simply by introducing alternatives to “kill or be killed.”

Break out your Dungeons & Dragon alignment chart, folks: “Captive,” this week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead, spelled out this show’s versions of good, neutral, and evil in no uncertain terms. “Good” came from Travis, held prisoner by chef-turned-pirate Connor and his not-so-merry men: “I’m sorry,” he tells Alex, the woman Strand cut adrift a couple episodes back. “I’m so sorry for all of this. We can…we can be more than what we’ve become, can’t we?” Though neither he nor Alex necessarily believe the answer is yes, he’s at least striving for than the vicious cycle of violence he and his companions have embraced during the course of the series. “Neutral” arrives via Ofelia, while she’s mopping up the blood of the imprisoned pirate Reed whom Chris had just shot to death. “This is what we do now,” she says: “Spill blood, clean it up, and spill it again.” She sees the horror in this but neither embraces nor rejects it — it just is. And before he dies, Reed gives voice to “Evil”: “Blood’s all that matters now,” he tells Chris, articulating the blood-and-soil pseudofascism that underlies Fear’s central survival tenet: To protect you and yours, you must do whatever it takes against all potential threats. If you can’t guess which ethos wins out, you haven’t been paying attention.

I reviewed last night’s Fear the Walking Dead for Decider. This was the calmest I’ve been while writing about the show in a while, and it wound up being an interesting episode to pick apart, even though I still feel the same about the series.

Every time I think Fear the Walking Dead has hit bottom, out comes some big steampunk subterranean drillmobile to dig even deeper. On “Blood in the Streets,” this week’s episode, it comes in the form of Reed, the leader of the trio of pirates who’ve been following our heroes since they hit the high seas. He and his mates, Alicia’s ersatz shortwave-radio boyfriend Jack and a very pregnant woman named Vida, bluff their way aboard the Abigail by faking a bloody pregnancy complication. Chris, standing guard duty on deck with Ofelia, is paralyzed with indecision about whether or not to shoot them, shouting to anyone who’ll hear for advice, but it’s too late — though not too late to spare us the obscene spectacle of a teenager pointing a gun at a pregnant stranger and wondering aloud whether he should shoot her to death.

But this is Fear the Walking Dead, so of course the answer was yes: Once on board, the newcomers drop the ruse, quickly overpower everyone aboard, shoot Strand’s raft and leave him for dead as he tries to escape, help their pirate leader Connor kidnap Alicia and Travis, and nearly kill everyone else before an unexpected rescuer (more on him later) kills them instead. Before he dies, Reed drives the point home by taunting Chris for his hesitation to, and I stress this, shoot and kill a pregnant woman in distress and the two panicked men trying to help her. “‘Should I shoot ’em?’ Piece of advice: If you have to ask the question, someone should already be dead.”

Folks, if I sat around and tried, I could not possibly have come up with a better illustration of what makes this show such an appalling, fascistic spectacle. Like I keep saying over and over and over, because the show keeps doing it over and over and over, the correct choice in any given situation is always cruelty and violence, without exception. Anything less — helping children, aiding a wounded person, not shooting a pregnant woman to death — is foolhardy to the point of suicide. For the preservation of your people, you must act without mercy. I dunno about you, but I liked it better in the original German.

I reviewed last week’s Fear the Walking Dead for Decider, and you’re damn right I linked to a speech Himmler delivered to the SS.

“Ring Around the Rosie” is not about the bubonic plague. It’s not a song invented by medieval children about carrying posies to ward off infection, or about how the disease’s rash takes the form of a rosy red ring, or in which “ashes to ashes” is a corruption of the “ah-choo” sound of sneezing, or in “we all fall down” refers to death. The idea that it is is pure fabrication, an urban legend spread around by people who get a thrill out of inserting fake-deep, phony-dark meaning into entertainment for children. So naturally, it’s the perfect chunk of horseshit for Fear the Walking Dead.

Fear presents the fake factoid with a straight face in this week’s episode — actually named “We All Fall Down,” for god’s sake — as a way a doomed little girl to get schooled by sadder, wiser teenager Alicia, despite the fact that the Snopes page debunking the claim is “Ring Around the Rosie”’s second fucking google hit. I never thought I’d tell a show as tryhard as FtWD to try harder, but seriously, Fear writers, Let Me Google That For You.

I reviewed last night’s Fear the Walking Dead for Decider. What a contemptible show.

They called it Fear the Walking Dead because The Walking Dead was taken and Sad-Faced People Walking Into and Out of Rooms on a Boat for an Hour was too long for twitter. But make no mistake: Sad-faced people walking into and out of rooms on a boat for an hour was precisely what “Monster,” the premiere of FtWD Season Two, delivered. Sure, there were zombies on the beach at the beginning and zombies in the ocean at the end, but for the most part, there were unhappy, underwritten characters, played by actors who treat their presence on the show like a trip to the county courthouse to dispute a parking ticket, entering the places where other such characters are, having a desultory conversation about mercy or family or safety or bravery or some shit, then leaving again. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a snoozer.

For my sins, I’m covering Fear the Walking Dead for Decider again this season. Here’s my review of the season premiere.

SPOILER ALERT

A superhero story is only as good as its villain. Actually, pretty much any genre work based on conflict with a “villain” is subject to this same dependency. The X-Men didn’t take off as a concept for 15 years or so, until writer Chris Claremont and artists Dave Cockrum and John Byrne beefed up Magneto as their archnemesis and transformed leading lady Jean Grey, aka “Marvel Girl,” into the godlike Dark Phoenix. Once Lost cycled through its initial season of nonstop mystery and frustrated viewers with its Schrodinger’s Hatch, the introduction of Benjamin Linus midway through the second season sustained the show for years to come. And if you wanna get highfalutin about it, where would the great religious works — or the great religions themselves — be without Satan? Paradise Maintained just doesn’t have that same ring to it, you know?

In general, this principle has served Daredevil very well. Its first season was marked by an all-time-great character-meets-performer act of villain creation in the person of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk; its climax was driven by putting these two completely incompatible yet equally compelling figures together in an alley and having them pound on each other until one of them stopped moving and the other was left standing. Season Two flipped the script by using DD’s fellow vigilantes as villains, with the Punisher, Elektra, and Stick’s unrepentant lethality driving Matt Murdock apart from his friends, his firm, and his entire normal life as he battled either to stop or save them.

But with Frank Castle cut free from the storyline that bound him to Murdock, Nelson, and Page and both Elektra and Stick firmly in pocket, these threats are neutralized, dramatically speaking. That left Daredevil to battle the faceless horde known as the Hand and its leader, the physically powerful but emotionally inert Nobu, for the season’s grand finale. And that made “A Cold Day in Hell’s Kitchen,” the Season Two finale, a chilly farewell.

I was left a little flat by the final episode of Daredevil Season Two, which I reviewed for Decider. That said, it’s still the best live-action superhero adaptation in nearly three decades.

SPOILER ALERT

Both of the ultraviolent vigilantes at the center of this season’s dueling narratives, the Punisher and Elektra, reached a point at which they could decide to become the cold-blooded killers people said they were, or figure out another way to fight. Frank Castle chose what was behind door number one, murdering his mentor-turned-enemy and seizing his arsenal of military-grade weaponry for his own. “If you do this,” Karen had warned him, “you are the monster they say you are.” Well, that settles that.

In fact, Frank takes the metaphor a step further. “You’re dead to me,” Karen shouts in dismay when it becomes apparent he plans to kill Schoonover for his role in the gang shootout that (coincidentally? it’s unclear) wiped out the family of his former subordinate. “I’m already dead,” Castle responds, allegorically identifying himself with both the grim reaper his superhero costume evokes and even with zombie-like warriors of the Hand, who pursue their bloody quest for domination from beyond the grave. Frank Castle can relate. The whole sequence is shot like a cabin-in-the-woods horror movie, leaving Karen as the “final girl” who survives the killer’s rampage.

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

Eleven episodes deep into the season and with only two more to go, Daredevil’s plotlines are proliferating at an alarming rate. The Blacksmith, a sinister druglord I’d previously assumed to be just a McGuffin to keep the moving parts running, has now taken on central importance as both Daredevil and Punisher attempt to track him down. The Kingpin is in play, as is his old associate Madame Gao, who’s simultaneously battling the Blacksmith herself and issuing dire warnings about “the real threat” to the city. Said real threat is most likely the Hand, run by another former Fisk running buddy, Nobu, and his ninja army. They’re re-kidnapping brainwashed teens, murdering nurses, and fighting Daredevil, who is also busy fighting Gao’s men, the Blacksmith’s men, and the Punisher. Some mysterious person, likely the Blacksmith but yet to be confirmed as such, is murdering people and framing Frank Castle for it, including the district attorney and medical examiner who covered up the government’s involvement in the shootout between the Mexicans, the Irish, and the bikers, orchestrated by the Blacksmith and responsible for the deaths of Castle’s family. Karen Page is another of their would-be victims, though she’s now been saved twice by the Punisher. Matt’s other ex-girlfriend, Elektra, is similarly the survivor of a hit ordered by her and Matt’s old mentor Stick, who is also fighting the Hand. She’s now tracking him down to kill him, a confrontation Daredevil is racing to stop. Also Karen Page got a new job as an investigator for the Daily Bulletin, Claire Temple quit her job after the Hand bought off her hospital, and Foggy Nelson got a job offer at the law offices of Jeryn Hogarth from Jessica Jones from his sexy ex-girlfriend. Does that about cover it?

So it’s a testament to Daredevil and to this episode, “.380,” that the chaos feels planned — that it’s Daredevil’s world, not his show, spinning out of control.

I reviewed episode 11 of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

Daredevil is the only superhero show that matters.

I explain why Daredevil is the best there is at what it does for Decider.

Of all the things that “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” the ninth episode of Daredevil’s second season, does well, restaging the sensational hallway fight from Season One with the Punisher as its protagonist may be the smartest. Nothing drives home the moral, philosophical, tactical, and phyiscal differences between the two vigilantes quite like watching each of them tear through a small army of opponents in an enclosed space: With Daredevil, the worst that happens is that one of his foes gets beaned with a flying microwave oven; with Punisher, dudes get their eyeballs gouged out. As if to make the point that this fight scene reveals who Frank Castle really is even clearer, the sequence ends with an ersatz Punisher skull logo emblazoned on the man’s chest. It’s red on white rather than white on black, but I think we get the picture.

I reviewed episode nine of Daredevil season two for Decider.