Posts Tagged ‘decider’

“Fear the Walking Dead” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “Captive”

May 9, 2016

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.

“Fear the Walking Dead” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Blood in the Streets”

May 9, 2016

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.

“Fear the Walking Dead” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Two: “We All Fall Down”

April 18, 2016

“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.

“Fear the Walking Dead” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “Monster”

April 13, 2016

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.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode 13: “A Cold Day in Hell’s Kitchen”

April 6, 2016

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.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode 12: “The Dark at the End of the Tunnel”

April 5, 2016

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.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode 11: “.380”

April 5, 2016

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” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “The Man in the Box”

April 5, 2016

Daredevil is the only superhero show that matters.

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

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Nine: “Seven Minutes in Heaven”

March 30, 2016

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.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Eight: “Guilty as Sin”

March 30, 2016

As a matter of fact, one of Daredevil’s most consistently impressive features is its ability to stage and shoot conversations in a visually engaging and communicative way. Take a look at the exchange between Matt and his mentor Stick in which the old man finally divulges the nature of “the war” he’s been issuing ominous warnings about for decades. First of all, what kind of recruitment technique is that? If you want to indoctrinate at-risk youth into your apocalyptic cult of holy-man assassins, you might try telling them the cool origin story at some point before they grow up and decide you’re a dangerous lunatic.

But second of all, the scene is shot with both intimacy and urgency. As the green-gold light that’s the show’s visual go-to bathes their faces, revealing Stick’s crags and crevices while simplifying Matt’s silhouette into a smooth and elegant series of curves, the camera moves almost constantly, up and down, back and forth, slowly enough not to make you seasick but emphatically enough to convey the lack of solid ground on which these two men’s relationship currently stands. This is only enhanced by the lack of the customary eyeline-match crosscutting; the basic pattern is there, but since these are two blind men, no eye contact is implied, leaving you unmoored in the words rather than rooted in their experience of each other. Throughout, Stick is usually placed at the far left side of the frame, while Matt will alternately be shortsighted toward that end of the screen or situated on the opposite side, again evoking his competing curiosity and skepticism. Forget the ninja stuff — this is fight choreography, alright.

I reviewed episode eight of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Seven: “Semper Fidelis”

March 30, 2016

“Semper Fidelis,” the seventh episode of Daredevil’s second season, was the most subduded and uneventful of the lot. Sure, the show attempts to ratchet up the drama in the beginning, marching the Punisher into court in slow-motion to tune of Inception-style BONNGGGGGGs, and positioning him in front of an American flag with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast. But hey, this is the Punisher we’re talking about. Subtlety is neither his strong suit, nor the strong suit of stories that wish to use his blunt-force allegory effectively.

I reviewed episode seven of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “Regrets Only”

March 26, 2016

Hey, anyone order a full-fledged Kill Bill homage? ‘Cuz in “Regrets Only,” the sixth episode of Daredevil’s second season, that’s what you’re getting. The ep opens with a crew of yakuza assassins in suits and ties zipping through Manhattan on motorcycles. Sure, they lack the Kato masks of the Crazy 88, and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Date With the Night” provides the soundtrack instead of Al Hirt’s “Green Hornet” theme, but I mean, c’mon. Then there’s the first of two different fights in which Daredevil and Elektra wind up silhouetted against some kind of strikingly lit backdrop and/or behind some strikingly lit screen. “Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves,” baby!

I reviewed Daredevil’s sixth episode of Season Two for Decider.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “Kinbaku”

March 24, 2016

Amazingly, Daredevil has joined Mad MenThe Affair, and Outlander in the pantheon of television shows that accurately convey the feeling of what my friend and favorite cultural critic Alyssa Rosenberg once described as “fuck fever”—an all-consuming lust so strong an actual human connection forms around it. Watching young Matt and Elektra together, or hearing them jokingly describe a future when they’re married with children whom they blow off in order to “spend our time doing better things…like sex,” you can see how sex really is enough fuel to sustain a relationship, even a serious one—at least until Elektra’s sociopathy intervenes and brings Matt to the brink of killing someone.

Daredevil is the sexiest show on television (or whatever Netflix is) right now, and I explained why in my review of Season 2′s fifth episode for Decider.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Penny and Dime”

March 24, 2016

Okay, so maybe it’s overstepping to name this review after both the subject of the greatest Mad Men Don Draper pitch of all time and the title of the episode it came in. Entire books have been written on that series using the Carousel—Kodak’s slide-projector product and Don’s speech’s central metaphor for the mental time-travel loop of nostalgia—as an emblem. But consider the alternatives: I could have gone with “Drill, Baby, Drill!” or “Face-Off.” You’re welcome!

Put the ultraviolence aside, though, provided the images aren’t lodged in your brain. What makes “Penny and Dime,” the fourth and best episode of Daredevil’s excellent second season so far, so effective really is Draperesque. What is Frank Castle, after all, but a tall dark and handsome antihero with a shadowy past, hypercompetent at his job but discovering this cannot compensate for the happy family he’s been denied? And what is the Central Park Carousel but a larger version of the slideshow Don uses to remind himself of the people he loves, and the poor job he’s done at loving them?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Daredevil season two for Decider.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Three: “New York’s Finest”

March 22, 2016

The most compelling thing about Daredevil and Punisher’s rooftop heart-to-heart is what doesn’t get said. As many critics have noted, their argument centers on the relative lethality of their respective brands of vigilante justice: The Punisher kills, Daredevil doesn’t. Anywhere outside a superhero story, this is a pretty thin reed on which to hang a system of morality, since Daredevil routinely beats the living shit out of people, and tortures someone for information at least as often as Sarah Koenig posts new episodes of Serial Season Two. No matter how much Matt waxes eloquent about hope and redemption, forces that Frank snuffs out when he takes life, isn’t this a ridiculous, hair-splitting argument to have with a masked man who hurts people in the name of helping people?

Well, yes, it is — and just as it always has, the show knows this. “I don’t do this to hurt people,” Matt tells Frank, who responds with skepticism: “Yeah, so what is that, just a job perk?” “I don’t kill anyone.” “Is that why you think you’re better than me?” Frank presses. “No.” “Is that why you think you’re a big hero?” “It doesn’t matter what I think or what I am,” Matt insists “Is that a fact?” When pushed on the question of whether beating people is heroic, Matt simply refuses to answer. It’s just like when instead of telling Wilson Fisk that yes, one man really could change the system, he simply knocked the dude out. Daredevil the show knows that Daredevil the heroic figure is a mess of contradictions and impossibilities, and to its credit it never shies away from this, nor offers a half-assed explanation or excuse. It goes out of its way to point this out repeatedly, both in dialogue scenes like this one, and in its use of violence, which is uniformly ugly rather than antiseptically thrilling. Like Game of Thrones, it brings to the audience’s attention the brutality that genre pieces of its ilk usually would like you to forget, and like Game of Thrones it gets lambasted under the assumption that depiction equals exploitation, if not endorsement. But it’s the only superhero show I can think of that asks us to think about what happens when people hit people to stop them hitting back.

I wrote about Daredevil’s willingness to stare vigilantism straight in the face for Decider.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Two: “Dogs to a Gunfight”

March 21, 2016

They call him the Punisher, and he’s got the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe in his crosshairs.

Don’t get me wrong: In “Dogs to a Gunfight,” the second episode ofDaredevil’s second season, the vigilante’s victims are still primarily career criminals, with the consciences of less lethal extralegal do-gooders like Matt Mudock (Charlie Cox) and company serving as collateral damage. But a character like the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) doesn’t just challenge the acceptable bounds of superhero violence and morality — he threatens the structural integrity of the shared superhero universe itself.

Fictional worlds like the MCU thrive on the idea that its characters can meet, team up, and/or fight, whether those crossovers are theoretical or actual. But in general — particularly in the comics, where massive “event” crossovers, however common, are still dwarfed in number by the month-to-month sagas of individual series — every hero stays in their own backyard, dealing with their own stable of villains, many of whom just so happen to be mass murderers. The Punisher, a mass murderer of murderers, upsets the applecart. With this guy floating around, why are the Green Goblins and the Wilson Fisks, the Jokers and the Lex Luthors, still alive and kicking? Wouldn’t he make tracking them down and taking them out a priority? Wouldn’t that force the other heroes to defend their worst enemies, vicious killers all — or reveal those heroes as choke artists, whose precious but deeply weird morality (punching people into unconsciousness or dangling them off rooftops for information is fine, killing mass murderers in the midst of a firefight is beyond the pale) is a meaningless, if not outrightly deceptive, fig leaf over the choice to let monsters roam free for the sake of further adventures?

This, even more than the violence he perpetrates, is what makes the Punisher such a fearsome figure. Superhero comics have numerous cracks in their suspension-of-disbelief bridges upon which it is ill-advised to lean too heavily: mutants, for example, have served as inspiring and empathetic audience-identification figures for generations of outcast groups — black, Jewish, queer, disabled, merely geeky, you name it — by fighting to protect both themselves and the world that hates and fears them. But none of the aforementioned groups can shoot laserbeams from their eyeballs, you know? There’s a reasonthe people of the Marvel Universe hate and fear mutants: They’re dangerous as fuck! This makes their appeal as a metaphor for civil rights or what have you more emotional than intellectual. We simply agree to look past that, the same way (say) we accept that a superheroic society in which gods and ghosts and sorcerers supreme routinely roam around in city streets is fundamentally the same as our own, in which the existence of the supernatural remains resolutely unverifiable. The Punisher, then, is a one-man distillation of a similar faultline in the superhero-universe metafiction, a perplexingly undeployed human drone strike against the countless metahuman Bin Ladens whom the Avengers or the Justice League allow to roam free. In his way he’s as threatening to the fabric of superhero-universe reality as a Lovecraftian god or Lynchian demon is to ours. He should not be, yet there he is.

I went long on the role of the Punisher as shared-universe spoiler in my review of Daredevil Season Two’s second episode for Decider.

“Daredevil” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “Bang”

March 19, 2016

Time to give the ’devil his due: Season One of the Marvel/Netflix Daredevilseries was the best live-action superhero adaptation since Tim Burton’s firstBatman movie in 1989. In Charlie CoxDeborah Ann WollRosario Dawson, Vondie Curtis Hall, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ayelet Zurer, Toby Leonard Moore, and (eventually) Elden Henson, it boasted the strongest cast of any Marvel project; The company’s actors are virtually always charismatic, but rarely are they called on to deliver the shading and subtlety these people were capable of. D’Onofrio in particular just slew it as Wilson Fisk, his pause-laden pressured speech and overgrown-baby bulk as far from a cookie-cutter villain as the genre has ever risked going. The cinematography enhanced the more restrained and refined mood created by the performances, lighting their faces like some DiBlasio-era Rembrandt.

The story, too, zoomed past the traditional good guy vs. bad guy set-up to tell the tale of two surrogate familes formed in the New York City crucible — one centered on Matt Murdock and his crime-fighting alter ego, the other on magnate/philanthropist/crime boss Wilson Fisk. Like any circle of friends, both groups truly cared about the city, and about each other. It’s just that for the latter crew, that love was ultimately selfish, toxic, and lethal. Their conflict was ultimately expressed in fight scenes that featured the finest choreography in any superhero film or TV show ever, hands down. Like all great fight scenes, they made spatial sense, took advantage of their unique environments, and served as physical metaphors for emotional turmoil. Put it all together and you have one of the vanishingly few superhero projects outside of comics that feel, to quote Boogie Nights, like “a real film, Jack.”

So yeah, you could say I’m a fan.

All this preamble is a way to lay down my markers for my review of Daredevil’sSeason Two premiere for Decider.

“Mad Dogs” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “Needles”

February 8, 2016

That there is a Season 2 is a tough thing to complain about. Mad Dogs was entertaining as the dickens from start to finish, its pacing often as good as this kind of “oh shit!” suspense gets, its performances uniformly strong right down to the bit parts, its musings on sacrifice and regret and morality never glib or hamfisted and often quite thoughtful. Plus, with any luck, Allison Tolman and Ted Levine will be along for the ride on a semi-permanent basis next time.

But it’s still tough not to wonder if the show wouldn’t have been better off as a miniseries or anthology. No matter how hard the writers work to justify it, bringing the four friends back together in Belize, or anywhere else for that matter, can’t help but feel like horny teenagers returning to Camp Crystal Lake, or John McClane running into yet another band of terrorist bank robbers only he can stop. As it stands, the series was forced to soft-pedal the confrontation with “Jésus,” introduce Levine’s Conrad Tull but leave him hanging there like an unfinished sentence, and leave many vital questions about Joel and his current situation unanswered (but not in a cliffhanger way—in a “hey, what the hell is up with that?” way). A finite, 10-episode story would almost certainly have yielded a bigger emotional payoff and a more explosive genre-based ending. I’ll be happily watching next year regardless, but perhaps this trip really should have been once in a lifetime.

I liked Mad Dogs a lot, but I got to thinking that even as showrunners have been granted authority to tell and end their stories as they see fit, for the most part (aside from anthology series) they’re still expected to tell those stories over multiple seasons. I wrote about that in my review of the final episode.

“Mad Dogs” thoughts, Season One, Episode Nine: “Seahorse”

February 8, 2016

SPOILER ALERT

…Jazmin just doesn’t measure up. She comes across like a bad guy in a bad action movie, all unpredictable mood changes, inappropriate laughter, and the overall demeanor of an ADHD kid who’s gone off her meds. One second she’s playing Luke Skywalker with a machete, the next she’s asking Joel if he’d like to fuck, and the next she’s telling him how sad his kids will be to hear that he died. This manic pixie drug kingpin schtick flattens the character into a collection of tics, and makes it hard to take Joel’s plight seriously. He’s basically being threatened by a Looney Tunes character, whether the CIA wants to recruit her services or not.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Mad Dogs for Decider last week. Thought it was a bit anticlimactic.

“Mad Dogs” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Broodstock”

February 3, 2016

At some point during the eighth episode of Mad Dogs—I believe it was between when the bomb exploded and when the chihuahua got its throat cut—I got to thinking: This shit is hard. I don’t mean survival for Cobi, Joel, Gus, and Lex, mind you—I mean writing it. Like Breaking Bad and Fargo before it, Mad Dogs depends on a plot structure of interlocking catastrophes so intricate you’d practically need those robot arms they use to handle plutonium to pull it off. The go-to comparison is dominoes, with one thing falling on top of the next as everything speeds out of control, but that implies a linearity that doesn’t exist here. TV shows like this are like dominoes if and only if occasionally new dominoes spring up from the ground, or drop out of the sky, or materialize from space, or are fired from a drone piloted by the CIA. They’ve got to simultaneously maintain the tension of knowing something bad’s going to happen and wanting to avoid it, the suspense of not knowing something bad is going to happen but suspecting that it will, the shock of having something bad happen completely out of the blue, the plausibility that all these events could conceivably occur (within a TV show or movie, anyway) without knocking you out of the story with their ridiculousness, the raw mechanical skill to make the action plain entertaining, and the emotional stakes of protagonists and antagonists you enjoy watching, if not care about as people. Even to a writer who can see the wires, so to speak, pulling off this feat feels close to magic.

I reviewed episode 8 of Mad Dogs and wrote quite a bit about both the Breaking Bad model of constant-bad-shit-happening TV and the importance of a great villain to genre storytelling.