Like all paranormal mystery series, Black Spot wants to be a “binge watch it until the answers are revealed” kind of show. That’s not a criticism—not of the show and not even of Netflix, the most binge-watch dependent of all TV networks. Before the concept of binge-watching even existed Lost was built this way on ABC, just like Twin Peaks was built this way on ABC before it (and on Showtime after it). From those two examples alone I hope it’s clear that you can do good things with this compulsive-viewing format. In the case of Twin Peaks you can do literally the best thing ever done on television with it. If Black Spot wants us to binge watch until we find out just what the hell is happening in Villefranche, more power to it.

Like some paranormal mystery series, Black Spot also wants to be an episodic procedural kind of show. That’s a bit more unusual. I’m not even talking about the “monster/killer of the week” structure like I’ve done in previous reviews; obviously that’s a pretty common approach to genre work on television, or at least it used to be. I’m referring here to the fact that in each episode there’s a small crime-based mystery in addition to the larger paranormal ones, and the police and district attorney who are our main characters investigate that crime, and then they solve that crime. That’s the way Black Spot is going from Point A to Point B with its overarching plot: by going from Exhibit A to Exhibit B until each individual episode’s mystery is solved.

Episode 3, “The Void,” illustrates a major potential problem with this approach: If you’re going to have eight mysteries a season, you have to be good at writing mysteries.

I reviewed episode three of Black Spot for Decider.

Titled “A Wolf’s Dream” after the white wolf (“Ghost! To me!”) that keeps appearing to Major Weiss, and eventually just to the viewers at home, the show’s second episode feels indicative of both a high creative ceiling and a low creative floor. Creator Mathieu Missoffe, director Theirrey Poiraud, and company have a lot of things going for them, but originality isn’t one of them, and I worry that will come back to bite them in the end.

I reviewed episode two of Black Spot for Decider.

In a remote logging town near a secluded forest, a young woman is found murdered. Her death is just the latest in a long string of crimes, including the disappearances of at least two teenage girls over a period of years. The wealthy owner of the town’s ailing sawmill isn’t telling everything he knows to the chief of the town’s slightly comic police department, who has secrets too.

Into the mix steps a quirky outsider, a lawman from the big city sent to get to the bottom of things. Something about the place intrigues him, so he rents a room in a local hotel. Looks like he’ll be staying in this little town for a while.

Sound familiar? Every bit as familiar as Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme song, I’ll bet.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s three-seasons-and-a-movie masterpiece has cast a long shadow over television, with “weird events in a woodland town” at least as popular a dramatic subgenre as that post-Sopranos mainstay, “our protagonist is a gangster.” And Black Spot falls squarely within that macabre penumbra.

I’m covering the French Netflix paranormal drama Black Spot for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. 

(Note: I’m playing catchup with links to my work so these review descriptions will all be pretty brief. I guess you’ll just have to watch the reviews!)

In a remote logging town near a secluded forest, a young woman is found murdered. Her death is just the latest in a long string of crimes, including the disappearances of at least two teenage girls over a period of years. The wealthy owner of the town’s ailing sawmill isn’t telling everything he knows to the chief of the town’s slightly comic police department, who has secrets too.

Into the mix steps a quirky outsider, a lawman from the big city sent to get to the bottom of things. Something about the place intrigues him, so he rents a room in a local hotel. Looks like he’ll be staying in this little town for a while.

Sound familiar? Every bit as familiar as Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme song, I’ll bet.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s three-seasons-and-a-movie masterpiece has cast a long shadow over television, with “weird events in a woodland town” at least as popular a dramatic subgenre as that post-Sopranos mainstay, “our protagonist is a gangster.” And Black Spot falls squarely within that macabre penumbra.

A loose almost anti-translation of the French title Zone Blanche, or “White Zone,” Black Spotrefers to the dead zone (that one’s taken) of cellular coverage in which the grim little town of Villefranche and its surrounding forest are located. If the pilot episode for this Netflix import proves anything, it’s that that particular zone is pretty roomy. Opportunities to color within the lines drawn by both Davids, Chase and Lynch, abound. You may not score any points for originality, but you can still paint an engaging picture.

I’m covering the Netflix show Black Spot for Decider this season, starting with my review of the series premiere.

(Note: I’m playing catch-up here so these review descriptions will be minimal moving forward. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

I’ll give The Rain‘s second season this: I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flummoxed by a season finale in my life. Thematically, that’s on point.

Overseen by co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt, Season 2 shifted the series from being a survival story about searching for family into a story of surviving the search for a cure. In that respect it mimics the rapidly mutating macguffin of a virus that wiped out the world, or at least the section of the world with Denmark in it, in minutes—but which over the course of the intervening years has started transforming plants into deathtraps and people into supervillains with magic virus powers.

“Surival of the Fittest” is, in its way, the most perplexing mutation yet. Not because it’s outright bad, like the first half of this strange season, but because despite containing and even doubling down on so much that made this season bad, it’s…actually good? I dunno, man, I just work here. If I sound confused, it’s because I am.

I reviewed the season finale of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

I’ll give The Rain‘s second season this: I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flummoxed by a season finale in my life. Thematically, that’s on point.

Overseen by co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt, Season 2 shifted the series from being a survival story about searching for family into a story of surviving the search for a cure. In that respect it mimics the rapidly mutating macguffin of a virus that wiped out the world, or at least the section of the world with Denmark in it, in minutes—but which over the course of the intervening years has started transforming plants into deathtraps and people into supervillains with magic virus powers.

“Survival of the Fittest” is, in its way, the most perplexing mutation yet. Not because it’s outright bad, like the first half of this strange season, but because despite containing and even doubling down on so much that made this season bad, it’s…actually good? I dunno, man, I just work here. If I sound confused, it’s because I am.

I reviewed the season finale of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.

The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.

Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.

(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)

I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:

He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!

I reviewed episode four of The Rain Season 2 for Decider. This includes my theory about people wearing hats.

Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.

I reviewed the strong fifth episode of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.

The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.

Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.

(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)

I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:

He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!

Why the change? Because while all fantastic fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and while “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is a solid rule of thumb to follow when reading or watching it, you need to be kept in a mentally non-sweaty mood. The weaker the work, the less you’re getting by way of compensatory value in terms of ideas, images, writing, acting, all the things that make shows or movies or whatever of any genre worthwhile, the more likely you are to start noticing people’s hats. In that light,The Rain Season 2 might as well be a ad for a haberdashery.

I reviewed episode 4 of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

“It’s Rasmus. He’s exploding!” —The Rain Season 2, Episode 3

“Can’t you hear how insane this sounds?” —The Rain Season 2, Episode 2

Loud and clear, The Rain. Loud and clear.

After a beautifully understated first season, Netflix’s once-promising post-apocalyptic thriller hits the halfway point of its second go round with a thud. Ironically titled “Stay in Control,” this episode appears to show a series that’s almost completely lost track of what made it compelling viewing in the first place. The grim but humane magic of its initial run is slipping right though its fingers.

I reviewed episode three of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

After a beautifully understated first season, Netflix’s once-promising post-apocalyptic thriller hits the halfway point of its second go round with a thud. Ironically titled “Stay in Control,” this episode appears to show a series that’s almost completely lost track of what made it compelling viewing in the first place. The grim but humane magic of its initial run is slipping right though its fingers.

I reviewed the third episode of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

There’s no way around it: I do not like this development at all. I don’t like the way it makes Rasmus even more of a superhuman dark-messiah figure. I don’t like how it pushes the boundaries of plausibility established by the series up until this point. I don’t like how it looks, as a visual effect. I don’t think it fits with the show’s quick yet fundamentally gentle and restrained tone. It just…doesn’t work. Not even having it unleashed under powerful circumstances—Sarah, grieving her brother and their friends, begs Patrick to kill her, and the virus emerges when she enters his room—can salvage it. My hope is that the show itself isn’t irrevocably infected as well.

I reviewed the second episode of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

There’s no way around it: I do not like this development at all. I don’t like the way it makes Rasmus even more of a superhuman dark-messiah figure. I don’t like how it pushes the boundaries of plausibility established by the series up until this point. I don’t like how it looks, as a visual effect. I don’t think it fits with the show’s quick yet fundamentally gentle and restrained tone. It just…doesn’t work. Not even having it unleashed under powerful circumstances—Sarah, grieving her brother and their friends, begs Patrick to kill her, and the virus emerges when she enters his room—can salvage it. My hope is that the show itself isn’t irrevocably infected as well.

I reviewed episode two of The Rain Season 2 for Decider. It’s a mess.

I’m not quite sure what to make of The Rain’s new season premiere. Oh, the stuff I loved the first time around is still there: the cast (in addition to the Andersen siblings, Jessica Dinnage as the cherub-cheeked Lea and Mikkel Følsgard as Simone’s love interest Martin are also standouts), the fundamental gentleness of the core characters, the unswerving sense that hurting other people to protect your own is Bad, Actually.

But the pacing has been dialed up to Ludicrous Speed even by The Rain‘s standards. So have the sci-fi elements, which have gone from “unscrupulous corporation creates miracle cure that turns into a biblical plague when unleashed” to “there are infected trees now and they can communicate with people” and “this one guy’s bodily fluids have all been replaced by liquid virus that explodes out of him like that oil rig in There Will Be Blood.” It’s…a lot, is what it is. Maybe too much.

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

(Note: I’m playing catch-up with links so these review summaries will be brief. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

When it Rains, it pours. Since Netflix’s Danish sci-fi thriller The Rain debuted—and I mean the very first seconds, which follow main character Simone Andersen running to school, and the very first minutes, which depict the apocalypse from beginning to end in significantly less time than it takes to watch an episode of I Think You Should Leave—the story and character beats have been delivered not in a drizzle but in a torrential deluge.

Which is what made The Rain such a refreshing experience to soak in. Compared to standard post-apocalyptic fare, which tends to belabor the obvious like no one in the audience has ever seen one of these things before, and the legendary pacing problems of “Netflix bloat,” a show that moved this quickly came as a pleasant surprise.

It moved deftly, too. This wasn’t some no-attention-span repeated bludgeon to the head, but a surprisingly nuanced study of young people forced to fend for themselves, and eventually care for each other, in a world rendered uninhabitable by, literally, their parents. (Imagine that!) The gentle faces and studied softness of lead actors Alba August as Simone, Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen as her brother Rasmus (patient zero for the rain-borne virus that nearly wiped out the population), and the small band of survivors they hook up with lent warmth to the inherent coldness of any post-apocalyptic/dystopian project. Whether it was one or not, it sure felt like a deliberate rejection of The Walking Dead‘s fascist prioritization of us-versus-them conflict.

So I’m not quite sure what to make of The Rain‘s new season premiere. Oh, the stuff I loved the first time around is still there: the cast (in addition to the Andersen siblings, Jessica Dinnage as the cherub-cheeked Lea and Mikkel Følsgard as Simone’s love interest Martin are also standouts), the fundamental gentleness of the core characters, the unswerving sense that hurting other people to protect your own is Bad, Actually.

But the pacing has been dialed up to Ludicrous Speed even by The Rain‘s standards. So have the sci-fi elements, which have gone from “unscrupulous corporation creates miracle cure that turns into a biblical plague when unleashed” to “there are infected trees now and they can communicate with people” and “this one guy’s bodily fluids have all been replaced by liquid virus that explodes out of him like that oil rig in There Will Be Blood.” It’s…a lot, is what it is. Maybe too much.

I’m covering The Rain for Decider again this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. 

(Note: I’m playing catch-up so these review descriptions will be short. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

The final episode of The Act is titled “Free,” and the irony is hard to miss. This is, after all, the episode where Gypsy and Nick are imprisoned for the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard — Gypsy for ten years and Nick for life. But despite the foregone-conclusion resolution of this true-crime drama, there are two scenes of actual freedom here, by my count, and each serves to drive that terrible irony deeper into your brain.

The first is the flashback to 1997 that opens the episode. This is the night when the Blanchards’ bedtime routine begins: Dee Dee comforting Gypsy, who’s spooked by the Spanish moss swaying from the branches above them as they lie in the grass, telling her that the stars are angels who will protect them, just as they will protect each other. They’re sleeping under the open sky, in the great outdoors, yet Dee Dee is forging a crucial link in the chains that will stay wrapped around her daughter until the night she herself is killed.

The second takes place on that fateful night, which we see in flashback near the end of the episode. After the murder, as Nick and Gypsy prepare for their farcical flight to freedom in Wisconsin, Gypsy grabs her two pet guinea pigs and sets them free on the lawn outside the pink Blanchard house. These two small domesticated rodents stand about as much chance of surviving out there on their own as the other two life forms who emerge from that house on that night. By freeing them, Gypsy has unwittingly sentenced them to death.

A literal sentencing awaits, but that’s not even the half of it. Gypsy’s imprisonment, her ongoing sense of being trapped no matter what she does and no matter where she is, is the guiding principle of the episode.

I reviewed the season finale of The Act for Vulture. What a show.

The way you played him, it seemed like every moment he wasn’t actually saying or doing something, he’d be running through a script in his own head: “Okay, here’s what I’m supposed to do next.” You mentioned the actual notes he wrote for himself to that effect, like the one that lists how you’re supposed to treat a girlfriend. It seemed sweet, somehow, despite everything we know.

It’s interesting you say the word “sweet,” because that’s the exact word that the police officer who interrogated him used at his trial. When she was on the stand, they asked, “What were your first thoughts after you finished the interrogation?” She said, “I thought he was a very sweet, kind man.” That was a key piece of information for me: Oh, okay. She thought that in that moment, knowing what he had done? Then the audience has to feel that way, too.

It’s also interesting you used the word “script.” One of the notes I had from my research was that Nick felt like he was in a play, and everyone in the world had been given the script ahead of time except for him. He didn’t know where to stand or what his lines were or when to say them. That was the basis for how I dictated scenes for that character.

I interviewed actor Calum Worthy about his extraordinary work as Nicholas Godejohn in The Act for Vulture.

“Gypsy is excited to start over with Nick in Wisconsin, but their new life doesn’t match the happily ever after she imagined and her anxiety worsens as past transgressions begin to catch up with them.” That’s the descriptive text that accompanies this week’s episode of The Act, and it’s… well, that’s definitely one way to describe it. “Their new life doesn’t match the happily ever after she imagined” is a technically accurate summary of the half-day they spent in Big Bend before getting arrested. “Her anxiety worsens as past transgressions begin to catch up with them” captures the letter of Gypsy and Nick hiding in a closet as a heavily armed SWAT team surrounds the house, if not quite the spirit. Let’s just say I admire the blurb’s commitment to understatement and leave it at that, shall we?

I reviewed the seventh episode of The Act for Vulture.

But the worst thing about the army of the dead and each of its individual members isn’t what they do, or who they do it to, or what they do with them afterwards — it’s that they’re able to do anything at all. They exist, and by existing they issue one huge collective FUCK YOU to all that the living characters’ hope for the future and all they hold sacred from their pasts. Whoever you used to be before the White Walkers get to you and kill you is gone when they bring you back. Your existence is cruelly prolonged, but you’re as mindless and dangerous as a sword in their hands.

This is easily the most ineffable aspect of GOT horror, and it requires a certain Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” mind-set to grasp. But again, think of Ned Umber, this adorable kid who started the episode by awkwardly attempting to be as polite as possible to the very intimidating ladies and lords in charge of Winterfell. That he deserved better than to be murdered and nailed to the wall is obvious. Yet when he opens his eyes and starts flailing and screaming, and when he keeps screeching as he’s slowly burned back to death, you get the sense that something really awful is happening here, something worse than just a standard crypto-fascist Walking Dead zombie kill.

When I watched this scene, I didn’t reach for zombie movies or shows for a point of comparison at all. Instead I thought of the passage from The Lord of the Rings that explains that orcs and trolls were created as a “mockery” of Elves and Ents, races that were generally wise, kind, thoughtful, and caring of the world around them. Morgoth, the original Dark Lord of Middle-earth, saw them and decided to show his enemies exactly what he thought their innate freedom and nobility was worth: a bunch of hideous ravenous sadistic idiots who thrive in darkness and eat people alive.

I thought too of how Bram Stoker and Stephen King describe vampires in Dracula and Salem’s Lot respectively. It’s not just that they’re mean-spirited, bloodthirsty, and possessed of dangerous powers. It’s that they’re wrong, somehow, in a way the humans who encounter them feel in their guts. They’re not just scared of the vampires; they’re disgusted by them. They find them somehow lascivious and obscene in their persistence after death. In both books, the protagonists seem to want to destroy their undead enemies not just to be safe from them, but to be rid of them — to avoid ever having to look at their fanged faces or hear their sepulchral and somehow bogus voices again.

I wrote about Game of Thrones and horror on the occasion of the Season Eight premiere for Vulture.