The deck is stacked from the start. As the new season of The Last of Us begins, survivors of a massacre bury their dead. They’re the Fireflies, members of a scattered network of rebels fighting the fascist government that took over in the wake of the cordyceps outbreak that killed or zombified billions. (Ah yes, those happy golden bygone days when we thought it would take an evil fungus for fascism to come to America.) The perpetrator of the massacre was no jackbooted government lackey, though. Nor was it the monstrous and powerful infected known as “clickers” for their method of echolocation. It was Joel (Pedro Pascal), our player character — ahem, our protagonist. 

And what choice did the writers — sorry, the Fireflies — leave him? Either he killed them or they would kill his adoptive daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Sure, if they did so it might enable them analyze why she’s immune to infection (she was exposed to a minuscule amount of the fungus during birth), and thus find a cure for cordyceps and save the world. But a real man does whatever he has to protect his family, or something. 

The whole killcrazy climax to the show’s first season was frustrating because it set up a false binary, a choice between individual and collective needs. Reality is not a zero-sum contest between you and everyone else — only fascists believe otherwise — and genre stories that make such a conflict their central moral dilemma are playing fast and loose with how morality actually works. 

We’re not five minutes into the Season 2 premiere when writer-director-co-creator Craig Mazin does it again. The surviving Fireflies are led by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who’s born-again hard from the ordeal. Not only does she want to track down and kill Joel with the other survivors’ help, she wants to kill him slowly. She repeats the word for clarity and everything.

Once again, The Last of Us is not-so-subtly nudging us in the direction they want our sympathies to go. If this were a simple case of a gaggle of survivors hunting down and shooting the outlaw who gunned down their kinsfolk, we’d probably still be rooting for Joel — he’s Pedro Pascal, for god’s sake — but we’d at least sympathize with their goal. Torturing Joel to death is a bridge too far when you’ve spent a season asking us to identify with the guy, in a story based on an art form where identifying with the protagonist is baked right into the game mechanics. We can’t root for Abby now. That’s The Last of Us for you: It’s always less complex than it looks.

I reviewed the season premiere of The Last of Us for Decider.

So now, here, in the the tenth episode of the third season, Yellowjackets finally explains why none of this shit ever came up before now: the magic of memory suppression! All of a sudden, we start hearing about how hard it’s been for the adults to remember what happened to them out there — not because it was so bad, according to Shauna, but because it was so good! The experience of hunting and eating people to honor a Wilderness demon made them “so alive in that place that we lost our capacity for self-reflection,” according to Shauna. “We can’t or won’t remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun.” That’s why Shauna acted like a nincompoop instead of a sociopath all this time, you see. “I let it all slip away from me,” she writes. “It’s time to start taking it back.”

Long past time, if you ask me! It’s now apparent that Yellowjackets‘ own structure prevents it from working. It creates a scenario in which the filmmakers cannot be honest with or about the adult characters, because doing so would spoil the teenage material. This creates an obvious qualitative discrepancy between the two storylines. If this had been a show just about the kids, that would be something. If the adult material had been presented seriously, without holding back just what they did out there and why, and with the adult characters’ personalities existing in continuity with what happened back then, that would be something. What we got is neither. 

I reviewed the season finale of Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. Since its inception, the existence ofYellowjackets‘ dual timelines has been its biggest weakness. Though the stunt casting of beloved actors who cut their teeth as troubled teens in the ’90s covered it up for a time, the present-day material, following the lives of the castaways as adults back in civilization, has been dead weight since at least its first zany murder mix-up. As time has passed and we’ve seen the situation for the teenagers grow more dire, it’s been increasingly difficult to square the grim-faced cannibal killers of the past with the whoopsie-daisy-we-killed-someone-again shenanigans of their adult selves. The teenage material remained strong, at least, but the adult stuff has been on the verge of collapsing under its own absurdity for some time.

This week on Yellowjackets, the collapse finally comes, and it tears the whole thing down with it. Having painted themselves into a corner with the adults — Shauna, our heroine, begins this episode in the process of forcing her long-lost ex-girlfriend to eat a part of her own arm at knifepoint — the writers seem to have, at long last, given up. Across the board, from the 2020s to the 1990s, they’ve come up with a single solution to their problems: Make everyone, adult or teen, a whacked-out murderer. But rather than create the much-needed sense of psychological continuity between kids and grown-ups that the show has lacked for so long, this only drags the messy, half-assed feeling of the present-day story to the previously strong flashbacks. 

The result is an ugly thing to witness. It’s a show falling apart before your eyes.

I reviewed this week’s dire Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

It doesn’t help that the behavior of the teenage Shauna is, at this point, equally preposterous. The Sophies, Nélisse and Thatcher, have both become masters of emulating their adult counterparts’ speech patterns, and in this episode it’s especially noticeable how good they’ve gotten. Perhaps for the first time since the very first episodes, young Shauna and Natalie feel, or at least sound, of a piece with their adult selves. 

But only sonically. Truth be told, young Shauna’s turn to the dark side, which in practical terms means behaving like an irrational paranoiac who makes life impossible for everyone around her, feels carelessly sketched out rather than built up. Other than that initial scene where she angrily writes in her diary, we’ve gotten nothing out of teen Shauna this season that justifies her new killcrazy ethos and her determination to stay in the woods even when rescue is at hand. That leaves Nélisse in the difficult position of glowering and barking orders and being obnoxious, because the writers think this makes her intimidating. 

What it actually makes her is annoying. At least Lottie and Taissa, the other girls who try to stay behind when everyone gets ready to follow their captives Kodi and Hannah to safety, have been established as being deeply mentally ill. What’s Shauna’s excuse for not only staying behind, but ordering the rest of the group to ditch the escape attempt entirely? Get out of everyone’s way, you underwritten asshole! If I were Natalie or Travis I’d have shot her a long time ago.

I reviews this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Stranded in a shitty motel room with her dad, Callie finally comes out and says what I wish the show itself had made up its mind about two seasons ago: Her mother, Shauna, is a bad person, capable of horrible crimes, including the disappearance of the two researchers and their guide during her time in the wilderness. Her dad, Jeff, would rather unconsciously scratch his skin raw than face facts. But in the meantime, Shauna’s parked outside a stranger’s house with a recently purchased Rambo knife. Callie has the right idea, I suspect.

I wish the show did. I wish Yellowjackets had the kind of faith in itself and its audience displayed by, well, any number of other shows about murderers, which didn’t feel the need to obscure its’ protagonists’ awfulness with zany mix-ups and Scooby Gang shenanigans. If adult Shauna had shown any signs of being a lastingly bad person, instead of an adorable housewife having a fling, back in Season 1, Seasons 2 and 3 would have been a lot more interesting. Instead you get what we’ve got, which is a show in which half of the airtime feels like it’s being spent actively combatting the other half. Even the Yellowjackets know that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Fantastic stuff from top to bottom, really. Ben’s fate is bleaker and more brutal than anything I’d anticipated. His death gives several characters — Natalie, Misty, Shauna, Lottie, and Akilah, who’s now having stop-motion animation visions of three-eyed bear-wolf hybrids — their strongest material of the season. Sophie Thatcher in particular stands out as Natalie, whose very soul you can see buckling under the weight of all its been asked to endure. She makes the character as we come to know her later make sense, which hasn’t quite been possible in many other cases. 

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

The problem is that Tai can’t go through with it, even while doing target practice by aiming at a frowny face on a tree. Van, who’s helping her practice, suggests they try to summon Tai’s dark side, which we haven’t seen anything of yet this season. First, they try summoning it with sexual energy: Van pins Tai against a tree face first and fingers her. (The sex scenes have gotten a lot more fucked up and hot this season for sure.) 

When that fails, they kill a rabbit caught in one of the girls’ traps, since the sinister spirit of the wilderness seems to frequently call for blood. In keeping with the show’s storied tradition of extremely nasty up-close survival violence, Tai slits the poor rabbit’s throat in full view of the camera, which lingers as the animal’s legs and paws frantically flail at the air in pain and terror. With Van’s encouragement, Tai narrates the entire process of the rabbit’s death. “I see its fear. I feel its breath … I smell its blood. I feel its heartbeat slowing. It’s calmer now.” To really be present with the fear and pain you’re inflicting on another living thing — more importantly, to force the audience to be present with it — makes for harrowing television.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

The episode-length sequence is a flop for a variety of reasons. For starters, key members of the cast don’t seem to know how to act after such a radical tonal shift, though a few rise to the challenge. Sophie Thatcher maintains Natalie’s uneasy balance of responsibility and fear easily enough, and Sammi Hanratty really demonstrates her range as a righteously indignant and legalistically canny Misty; it makes you excited to see what the actor will do when given actual adult roles, and it’s my favorite work of Hanratty’s in the series so far.

As Coach Ben, Stephen Krueger is similarly compelling. Fully believing the girls will convict (and likely kill and eat) him no matter what he says or does, he therefore has no reason to lie, and is bracingly honest both about what he dislikes about his job, which he has never seen as a career, and what he loves about the girls, even though they’re a threat to his life. Emoting all of this through a layer of grime and beard is an impressive feat in and of itself, and it shows how crucial Krueger is to the flashback material.

But Jasmin Savoy Brown as the faux-D.A. and Sophie Nélisse as the chief hang-‘im-high juror flounder are speechifying and smirking and acting more or less like people reading the script of a courtroom drama out loud. Liv Hewson as the bailiff fares little better with the corny shit she’s forced to say to open the trial, but as her part is relatively minor it’s nowhere near as grating as Tai and Shauna’s flared-nostril rage against their assistant coach, who quite obviously did not burn their cabin down. They’re straight-up trying to kill him, just as he’s accused of trying to do to them. Misty does such a bang-up job of unpacking this, in fact, that it makes the eventual guilty verdict feel not so much as unjust as merely stupid.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Even in the present, the show’s historic weak spot, the material improves a great deal now that Shauna finally comes out and says the obvious truth: Misty and Lottie are a murderer and a cult leader respectively and have no business being around her and her teenage daughter. Van and Tai’s goofy waiter storyline also gets a much-needed shot of adrenaline when it gets connected to the No-Eyed Man and the wilderness mythos instead of just dangling there as a story of yet another poor sap who winds up dead because he encountered the Yellowjackets. In both cases, it feels like writers Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, and Bart Nickerson stood behind their own show and gave it a good hard shove, forcing it out of the mud it had been stuck in.

But there’s one last observation to make, and it’s about what wasn’t in this episode. It’s easy to forget just how much crazy shit has happened on Yellowjackets, because Yellowjackets itself seems to forget from time to time. Remember how Shauna’s murdered lover Adam Martin was all mysterious because he had no online presence whatsoever? What happened there? Remember how Walter framed that murder on Shauna’s cop classmate Kevyn, whom he murdered in turn? Has anyone in the Shipman family mentioned how they owe their continued freedom to some lunatic friend of Misty’s they’d never met before? This is the problem with mystery-box storytelling, where you open three doors for every one you close. It’s easy to get, well, lost.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Yellowjackets for Pop Heist!

Two of Yellowjackets’ greatest strengths are on display in this week’s episode before five minutes have elapsed. The first: This show has long offered viewers some of the gnarliest self-applied field surgery the small screen has ever aired. Here we have Mari, her knee dislocated after a fall into Coach Ben’s trap, following his advice and shoving her grotesquely out-of-whack kneecap back into place. It’s the kind of scene that makes you say to yourself “It’s only make-believe,” for all the good it does you. Like all of the show’s makeshift amputations and childbirths and facial reconstruction surgeries before it, you know it’s not really happening, it’s just very good practical effects, but that doesn’t stop you from feeling it in your own bones. It’s great stuff.

So too is the opening credit sequence. With its eerie and aggressive theme song by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker (of ’90s alt-rock bands Shudder to Think and that dog. respectively) and its distressed VHS aesthetic courtesy of Digital Kitchen art directors Rachel Brickel and Peter Pak, it towers above an opening-title landscape that’s been dominated by “shapes of familiar things morph into shapes of other familiar things” for what feels like a decade. Honestly, it may be almost too good, as it promises a level of anxiety and terror that the show only occasionally aims for or achieves. 

Actually, we can throw in a third strength of the show: At no point is it ever digitally color-graded into a bluish haze or a gray-purple murk or a ghastly teal-and-orange mailman-with-a-fake-tan color palette. When you see these kids out in the woods, it looks like they’re in the woods. When you see these grownups out and about in the ‘burbs, it looks like they’re in the ‘burbs. There’s light and shadow and contrast. I’m not saying the cinematography is spectacular, but it’s not meant to be: It’s meant to be legible, to be a reliable delivery mechanism for the story being told by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco et al are telling. It never distracts, and that really is an achievement. (This is admittedly a bugbear of mine, but the aquamarine nighttime of True Detective Season 4 and the bright orange nighttime of The Penguin broke something in me.)

I reviewed the second episode of Yellowjackets Season 3’s two-part premiere for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Yellowjackets has always thrived when it tears out its own heart of darkness and holds it beating in front of the audience’s face. This is what’s always made the material about the teenage soccer team stranded and starving and going insane in the woods more compelling than the material about the messed-up middle-aged women having zany murder hijinks played largely for laughs. The strength of the adult cast, cleverly (though not entirely, which has always been weird to me) made up of former teen actors Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis (RIP Natalie, we miss you girl, they really should have dyed your hair blonde so you’d look more like Sophie Thatcher), Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Elijah Wood, disguises the lopsided nature of the drama somewhat, but only somewhat. As fun as, say, Ricci’s performance as adult Misty, the world’s perkiest sociopath, can be, I’d much rather watch her teenage self react with shock and grief to her first kill than her adult self react with quirky neurotic cheer to her third or fourth. 

I’m making my debut at Pop Heist, a new non-corporate worker-owned pop-culture publication!, with my review of the Yellowjackets season premiere. (Gift link!)

Over on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour Patreon, we like to stretch our muscles a bit to stuff less directly relevant to ASOIAF/GOT/HOTD/fantasy/SF/the sweep of history. If you’re a subscriber, listen to our new episode on Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror miniseries Midnight Mass. I think it’s one of our best.

In the end, it’s both beautiful and brutal. All-out mass murder in a blue-and-red darkness. Muzzle flashes erupting from dozens of crevices in a vast pastel cavern. Desperate men and women fighting to the last bullet. Lovable characters cracking under pressure. A final betrayal in the royal purple corridors of power. The season finale of Squid Game is everything you’d want from a season finale of Squid Game…except for the “finale” bit. There’s nothing final about this episode at all. 

I reviewed the season finale of Squid Game for Decider.

By the time you finish this season of Squid Game, you will have witnessed hundreds of murders. Hundreds! It’s baked right into the premise. Other than shows that involve actual war, this kind of body count is just unprecedented. It’s certainly unique in that in virtually every case the murder victims are unarmed and helpless, and are getting killed because they messed up while playing a children’s game. 

The question I ask myself when I watch things like this is simply, Why? Why am I watching something in which human lives are discarded like garbage, in graphic on-screen deaths so numerous you need the show to keep track of them for you? Is this some high-octane action-movie thing that’s using murder the way roller-coasters use downward slopes — to shock your system and give you a thrill? Does the violence have weight, does it cause emotional pain, does it speak to something broader than “look out for armed men in pink jumpsuits”? In short, what does the violence communicate, and is it a message worth hearing?

I’m wrestling with this question, I’ll admit. That’s because I think it’s very obvious Squid Game does, indeed, have something to say. The cartoonish bluntness with which its premise is stated — poor and indebted people are pitted against one another in sadistic games for a chance to win enough money to become solvent again, in a sham quasi-democracy overseen by the world’s richest men — tricks the mind into thinking it’s simplistic. 

But read that premise again, and tell me how it differs from conditions on the ground right here and now. Friends, the real world is simplistic at this point. Just as the lethal games are designed to evoke fun childhood pastimes, Squid Game just renders the real world’s cruel absurdity in caricature form. 

There is, however, such a thing as diminishing returns. With only one episode remaining in this short season, and a longer one behind us already, it’s fair to wonder what this heap of several hundred green-tracksuited corpses tells us that we didn’t learn from the previous pile. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Recapping this episode of Squid Game is a daunting prospect. Not because it’s complicated — on the contrary, it’s a simple as these things get. The players play a game, the survivors take a vote and then a break, they bond with each other, they start a new game, there are brief detours for the No-eul and Jun-ho side plots, the end. 

No, the problem stems from how much of the energy of Squid Game is lost if you summarize it. I mean, the show really is as simple as it sounds above. The characters sound equally sketched out when you break them down in text form: the kindly old woman, the genial jarhead, the arrogant celebrity, the gentle trans woman, the surprisingly human villain, and so on. I found all their interactions compelling, but if I were to sum up their conversations without the benefit of the performances conveying them, they’d seem gossamer thin.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Squid Game‘s second season for Decider.

The clock is ticking on Squid Game, and I don’t just mean for the contestants. In a short season of just seven episodes, we’ve just completed Episode 4 and haven’t even finished our second game out of six. Will the remaining games get rushed through via montage or some other means? Will the competition get cut short, perhaps by Gi-hun and Jun-ho’s mercenary team? Will the season finale end with a big TO BE CONTINUED? No matter the outcome, the result is going to be paced quite differently from the previous season. In other words, we’re guaranteed something novel.

I reviewed episode 4 of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

So much of what makes this episode good is also what makes it familiar: the giant doll, the X and O voting, the “Greta Gerwig’s Barbie remixed by M.C. Escher” staircase set by production designer by Chae Kyoung-sun, But what sells the drama of it all, what makes it feel like more than just a rehash, is what has changed: Gi-hun. When we see flashes of the initial season, he looks like a different person, floppy-haired and fresh-faced. Actor Lee Jung-jae’s transformation is subtle, but it’s like an optical illusion or a Magic Eye poster: Once you train yourself to see it, it’s kind of mind-blowing.

I reviewed Squid Game Season 2’s third episode for Decider.

For a director whose signature achievement is capturing claustrophobically cheery sets, Squid Games‘ Hwang Dong-hyuk has a hell of an eye for exterior shots. An amusement park, a hospital, a bridge underpass, even Gi-hun’s run-down Pink Motel: They’re all given a real sense of scale, color, drama by Hwang’s camera. Even given how gorgeously creepy all the interiors are once we get to the island and its game complex, I’ll still miss the view.

I reviewed the second episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Maybe it goes without saying, but like most episodes of Squid Game, this is a nasty bit of work. The episode stays fairly light until the end, characterized by joking banter between the loan sharks on one hand and Jun-ho and the fisherman (Oh Dal-su) who plucked him out of the sea after the Season 1 finale and now helps him search for the island. Then, all of a sudden, you have a protracted scene of queasy brutality and emotional torture straight out of The Deer Hunter, set to opera. This is followed almost immediately by a very similar scene in which the sociopathic Recruiter positively beams with joy over being a sociopath before shooting himself to death on camera. It’s a lot, but it’s supposed to be. If individual viewers find it’s too much to justify what is at root not all that different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man in conceptual terms, I get it.

But it sure looks good. We haven’t yet immersed ourselves in the pink pastel hellscape of the Game’s HQ yet, but the red and green lighting that falls on Gi-hun and the Recruiter during their face off, along with a sudden cut that jumps the 180-degree line so we suddenly see the bright red window against which they’re seated, had me thinking favorably of Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn’s own beautifully colored foreign-language Netflix thriller, Copenhagen Cowboy. (Go watch it, it rules.)

The most important contrast in this scene isn’t one of color, however, but of character, or more accurately of performance. Gong Yoo is positively demonic as the Recruiter here — eyes gleaming with the joy of cruelty, voice not skipping a beat when he reveals he killed his own father, mouth agape and grinning as he almost lewdly inserts the barrel of his gun into it before pulling the trigger. Lee Jung-jae, meanwhile, retains the sad-sack lovability that endeared him to audiences in the original, but it’s now tempered by trauma, grief, guilt, and the horror of knowledge. You still want this dear man to win, or at least to survive. Under the rules they make us play by, that’s usually the closest to winning you can get.

I’m covering the second season of Squid Game for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

 Jet Wilkinson is a director who tends to do whatever he’s doing as well as it can be done, and in this case he takes the challenge of filming a gloomy horror climax about grief and sets it against a background of hard gray wintry afternoon light. There are shots of Eli alone on the shore stronger and eerier than any of the show’s more explicit horror moments.

Which, I suppose, speaks to Before’s bigger problem: It’s a horror show that was never particularly scary. Surprising, intriguing, occasionally disgusting? Yes. An odd but effective vehicle for Billy Crystal to stretch his legs by playing, basically, a maniac who should never be let near a child again? Definitely. Something that made me afraid, the way Twin Peaks or Channel Zero or Them or the first season of The Terror made me afraid? No. That may matter to you, it may not, but as a Horror Person I feel it bears mentioning. 

I reviewed the series finale of Before for Decider.