Everything I’ve ever heard about Channel Zero, I’ve heard from other people on the internet. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. This rich, gorgeous, and astonishingly frightening horror anthology series takes the story lines for each of its four seasons so far from creepypasta — scary short stories in the form of faked message-board posts and comment threads. They’re the online era’s equivalent of urban legends, passed around from one terrified reader to the next. That’s how Channel Zero reached me, pretty much: from other impassioned viewers, desperate to persuade me to watch it too. The show infected them like a virus, until they passed that virus to me. And now … well, if you’re reading this, it’s too late.

But there’s so much more to the series than that slightly cutesy high concept, which I suspect turns as many people off as it turns on. Created by Hannibal veteran Nick Antosca, Channel Zero is full-service Good Television. It’s engrossingly beautiful and austere filmmaking, as shot by a different promising director every season. It’s a showcase for intriguing and surprising performances by a wide variety of talented actors, particularly women, who’ve led three of its four seasons. It’s a merciless autopsy of suburban disconnection, and how the few intimate bonds that are formed in that environment — with friends, with family, with lovers — can harm as well as help.

And above all, it’s scary. Just incredibly scary. I say this as a horror person, who crammed all four seasons down my gullet as fast as I could, alongside my partner, another horror person, and was flabbergasted by its singular, consistent, and prolonged ability to frighten, disturb, disgust. Take it from someone who endured several prestige-y limited-series adapted from famous horror novels/novelists this year: I was scared more, and more often, by the first scene in the first episode of the first season of Channel Zero alone than I was by quite a few other horror shows combined.

I came late to Channel Zero, but Julia and I burned through all four seasons in October and November and I’ve taken to it with the zeal of the converted. I tried to explain why in spoiler-free fashion (except for mentioning some characters and monsters) for Vulture. You’ve got to watch this thing.

The men of The Terror did not, as they say, die as they lived. They lived as interchangeable cogs in the machine of empire—sailors in the Royal Navy of Great Britain, the largest imperial project ever undertaken by humanity between the ride of the Khans and the Pax Americana currently dying all around us. So the show based on their final misadventure dresses them in their blue uniforms, swaddles them in shapeless and face-covering winter gear, allows the cold to redden their faces and lengthen their beards, until distinguishing between them requires an expert’s eye and ear. (Or at least a thoroughgoing knowledge of English and Irish character actors.)

They lived their final years trapped in the frozen waters and barren lands of the Arctic, searching for an open lane of water that would bridge the Atlantic to the Pacific without the need for Her Majesty’s Ships to sail around the tip of South America to get there—the fabled Northwest Passage. (Only one of them would actually live, and not for long, to see the Passage, and only by accident.) So the show shoots them against endless uniform vistas of white and gray, with snowblinding daylight or soulcrushing darkness alternating for periods that lasted months at a stretch.

And in the end, they lived their final weeks, days, hours, minutes, moments dying from the same things: malnutrition, food poisoning, disease, starvation, exposure to the cold, murder at one another’s hands…and, in some cases, mutilation and consumption by ferocious hulking thing on the ice, out for their English blood. (Fee-fi-fo-fum.)

But when they died? When they died, it was different. They were different. Replacing the uniforms and the uniformity were visions as unique and beautiful and terrible and individual as people are themselves, deep down inside.

I wrote an essay on the many deaths of The Terror for Decider. As you’d expect for a piece on character deaths, there are many spoilers. I tried to do this magnificent show justice and I hope you enjoy the result.

I don’t think I’ve seen “Naked” more than three times. And yet, “Naked” is one of my favorite films. How can both statements be true? Because like Johnny, the human vortex of misanthropy at the heart of this scathing, haunting film from Mike Leigh, “Naked” arrives unexpectedly and does enough psychic damage to mark you for life.

Played by David Thewlis in his breakout role, Johnny is a shuffling, shaggy-haired native of Manchester, now down-and-out in London after fleeing the consequences of the sexual assault that opens the film. (The merciless tone is established from the start.) With his cruel intelligence, dizzying monologues and trademark black trench coat, he upends the lives of old friends, acquaintances and total strangers alike.

The film’s devastating final shot casts Johnny as a sad-sack Satan wandering the world, unwilling to accept either punishment or forgiveness for his sins. When FilmStruck vanishes from the internet, it will take this unforgettable portrait of humanity as a failed state with it for now — but the film will remain lodged in my mind forever.

I wrote about Mike Leigh’s brilliant film Naked for the New York Times’ tribute to the late great streaming service FilmStruck, alongside a murderers’ row of other critics.

And since it’s been a while, I’ll note that I still contribute movie recommendations to the Times’ free streaming-advice newsletter Watching. I think I’ve covered The Love Witch and Eyes Wide Shut since last time. Click and subscribe for free!

Horror is a genre in conversation with itself — more so, perhaps, than any other genre, because the topic of conversation is always ultimately the same. Horror filmmakers study the things that frighten them, then reimagine, refine, and revise them, the better to unleash their own specific fears upon new audiences. This is as true of capital “G,” capital “F” Great Films like Under the Skin and Hereditary as it is of derivative corn like Stranger Things, or of recent critical darling Mandy, which after the weed-scented glacial pacing and lush psychedelia of its first half has nary an original idea in its head and is basically just Stranger Things for heshers. The stuff that’s truly worthwhile does more than merely remix the past, because the people making it filter those fears through their own unique ideas about the present.

Among many other things, “The House of Special Purpose” is a horror film, and it is not Matthew Weiner’s first. As the creator and showrunner of Mad Men he presided over several eerie and gut-wrenching hours of television, primarily during the show’s death-haunted fifth season. The fever-dream murder (guest-starring Twin Peaks’s Mädchen Amick) and the real-life terror of mass murderer Richard Speck in “Mystery Date,” the car-crash scare tactics and the shadow of tower sniper Charles Whitman in “Signal 30,” the acid-trip creepiness and artificially lit missing-person freakout of “Far Away Places” — all this is before the season’s climactic death, which I prefer not to name-drop publicly if I can help it but to which the character’s fellow cast members reacted, by all accounts, with genuine horror. (Of course, let’s not forget the lawnmower scene, either.)

But the anthology nature of The Romanoffs enables Weiner to go deeper into the genre than ever before. A self-contained story, with no previously screened backstory for the characters and no need to write for their continued existence either, abrogates the need for Weiner to do anything but creep people out in his own idiosyncratic way. Working with writer Mary Sweeney, he does exactly that.

Playing long-overdue link catchup: I reviewed the Christina Hendricks episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.

Which leaves us to wonder: What, exactly, was the point?

It’s not just that you can find more compelling (and bewildering) horror-tinged alternate-reality dramas without breaking a sweat, from Lost to Twin Peaks to The Leftovers. It’s not even that the ending cribs so hard from The Shining (and, from non-King country, The Babadook) that you feel déjà vu. It’s that Castle Rock undermined its own big twist — the introduction of the whole parallel-world concept and the idea that the Kid might be a hero rather than a monster — almost immediately after introducing it.

As a drama, the show boasted intelligent, understated performances from Holland, Skarsgård, Spacek, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Glenn and more. As a Stephen King riff, it understood and updated his concept of everyday American evil better than any adaptation of his work in recent memory. But as a horror story of its own, the series made promises then all but went out of its way to avoid delivering in the end. A finale that seemed destined for dark magic was just a bait and switch. The show has been renewed and a new tale will be told. Let’s hope our next visit to this terrible Maine town lives up to its potential.

I reviewed the final episode of Castle Rock’s first season/storyline for Rolling Stone. The bottom line is that it never really got scary for more than a moment or two, and it doesn’t amount to much as a head-scratcher either. The acting is there, and the attention to American evil too, and both were handled with smarts and restraint, but it was pretty much exactly the sum of its parts.

Have you guys seen Henry Deaver around? You know — tall skinny guy, floppy hair, big Gollum eyes, white as the Swedish snow? The renowned Alzheimer’s researcher who fled Castle Rock when his mother escaped his abusive preacher father? The guy who found a little boy locked in a cage in his old man’s basement, where the kid has apparently lived without aging for nearly three decades? The one who realizes that this little boy’s name is also Henry Deaver?

You have now.

Titled “Henry Deaver” after not one but two of its main characters, the penultimate episode of Castle Rock‘s first season takes the biggest storyline swerve the show has seen yet. It relocates us to a different version of the town, one that’s still marked by tragedies like helicopter crashes and schoolbus accidents but noticeably healthier and wealthier overall. (Best gentrification joke: That awful dive bar is now a “gastropub.”) Here, Molly Strand isn’t a pill-popping real-estate agent, but a member of the city council who’s got serious clout with folks like the police department — and their top cop, Dennis Zalewski.

Most importantly, Castle Rock 2.0 is the hometown of Henry Deaver — not the African-American defense attorney played by Andre Holland as an adult and Caleel Harris as a teen, but a white neurologist played by Bill Skarsgård, a.k.a. The Kid. You thought Lost had some wild timeline-shifting tricks up its sleeve? Hold Castle Rock‘s beer.

I wrote about episode nine of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. As narrative sleight-of-hand, and as a showcase for the surprisingly wide range of Bill Skarsgård as an actor, it worked. As horror? Not really, and that’s the show’s biggest problem.

Saying this episode continues the show’s hot streak isn’t telling the whole story. It doesn’t rely on the introduction of world-building sci-fi/fantasy concepts like “The Schisma” and “The Filter,” nor is it carried on the back of an Academy Award winner given an entire hour to herself. It simply expresses the horror of sublimated violence and the ability of the supernatural to unleash it — the stuff that drives so much of the Master’s work — in its own voice.

If you’ve ever watched a show like Boardwalk Empire or The Americans, you might recognize the vibe. Like the Prohibition-era mob in the former and Cold War espionage in the latter, the particular strain of horror on display here is the mannequin that writer Mark Lafferty and director Ana Lily Amirpour (of the modern horror classic A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), as well as showrunners Dustin Thomason and Sam Shaw, can position into new shapes of their own devising.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It was my favorite to date.

I’m a guest on the latest episode of Struggle Session, a terrific left-wing pop-culture podcast starring Leslie Lee III, Jack Allison, and Jonathan Daniel Brown! On this episode I join the gents to talk about the entire Alien franchise — all eight movies, from the original quadrilogy to the Alien vs. Predator spinoffs to the Ridley Scott prequels. In space no one can hear you debate the space jockey, but down hear on earth all you have to do is subscribe and listen!

The most striking thing about the performance is, well, that it isn’t that striking at all. Eschewing straight-up tear-down-the-sky “tour-de-force” emoting, the veteran actor keeps Ruth’s reactions well within the range of normal human experience. When she’s sad, she cries rather than wails. When she’s angry, she yells rather than screams. When she’s frightened, she’s furtive and trembling rather than panicked and flailing.

It’s a rewarding approach. By rooting her performance in recognizable everyday reactions and emotions, Spacek avoids playing Ruth’s dementia as a source of horror itself. What’s happening to her brain isn’t treated as somehow creepy or gross, the way mental illness often comes across in projects like these. She is still a “normal” person, just one who’s no longer in control of how her mind processes space and time. Sure, it’s a frightening condition to suffer from. But both series co-creator Sam Shaw’s writing and the acting emphasize that it’s mainly emotionally exhausting.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s a straight-up showcase for Sissy Spacek that she underplays beautifully. I remain at arm’s length from the show as a whole for reasons I get into later in the review, but across the board the performances are thoughtful and quiet.

You may not have heard of the monumental horror-image before, but like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it. The little girls in The Shining, the statue of the demon in The Exorcist, the titular entities in The Wicker Man and It Follows: Though they’re rarely discussed compared to jump scares, gore, monsters, slashers, torture, or other hallmarks of the genre, the monumental horror-image is everywhere. Chances are good that if a movie has ever really frightened you, you have strange, standalone sights like these to thank.

The things you see in images like these aren’t brandishing a chainsaw or baring a mouthful of fangs, but something about them feels completely terrifying anyway. It’s not just scary, it’s wrong, like you’re seeing something that should not be.

Why “monumental?” In part, because subjects of these images are horrifying more for what they represent than what they actually do. In most cases, they don’t do anything but stand there. Yet seeing them alone is enough to indicate that something dreadful going on. Just as monuments in real life commemorate events or embody ideals, these images function as horror’s forward-facing surface — “monuments” to the deeper evil they connote.

Inspired by a twitter thread I did on the topic that went viral recently, I wrote about the monumental horror-image for The Outline, and they made an incredible visual presentation out of it that you really should check out if this subject interests you at all. This piece was nearly 20 years in the making and i’m so proud of how it turned out.

Castle Rock has just leveled up.

That’s the big takeaway from this week’s episode (“Filter”). From the start, the show had a baseline level of quality — talented cast, understated writing, a keen eye for everyday American evil and a willingness to aim for “eerie” rather than “over the top” — that’s a step up from most Stephen King adaptations (and also several prestige dramas in their shaky early episodes). Yet it’s never quite gelled into anything more transcendent than the sum of its competent parts. This installment was the first time it felt like you could see the series as something closer to a cohesive whole.

I reviewed this week’s Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s getting there.

Castle Rock is burning. Not just because of the wildfires raging across the hills that surround the town, either, although their hazy orange glow, reflected in the skies above, gives this new episode — “Harvest” — an appropriately infernal vibe. Consider the opening flashback, in which Henry Deaver seeks treatment for the unexplained ringing in his ears that’s plagued him on and off since he was a teenager. “I guess everyone thinks they grew up in the worst place in the world, huh?” the doc asks with a smile. In the lawyer’s case, of course, the answer is a resounding yes. But the implication, via a smart script from Lila Byock, the dreamy direction of Andrew Bernstein and the inclusion of real-life, ripped-from-the-headlines horror that’s become part of this show’s dramatic schematic, is clear: Everyone did grow up in the worst place in the world. The world is not a nice place to grow up in at all.

I reviewed episode five of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. There’s a lot I think is admirable about this show—it handles the Everyday All-American Evil that’s King’s specialty in a way that feels current and urgent rather than nostalgic and corny, and the cast of fine actors is taking the material seriously. But in the end, it comes down to what kind of villain the Skarsgård character is, doesn’t it? And we don’t know that yet.

SPOILER WARNING

This leads directly to the show’s most disturbing sequence to date. Trapped in his hellish prison job for the foreseeable future, helpless as his fellow guards beat and dehumanize the prisoners — and quite possibly tainted by the touch of the Kid — Dennis Zalewski snaps. Grabbing his gun, he methodically marches through Shawshank, murdering every officer and official he finds. When he finally reaches the warden’s office, he finds Deaver there. “I wanna testify,” he says … before a flashbang grenade drops them both to the ground and a shotgun-wielding bull blows him away.

It’s a gorgeously fucked-up sequence, in large part because it’s just so very Stephen King-ish — and not in a way we’ve really seen before on screen. This kind of killing spree is a staple of the Master’s work: Seemingly ordinary men just lose it one day. They pick up a rifle or an ax, slaughtering their way through as many people as possible, offering one final deadpan non sequitur before someone puts them down like a rabid dog. (The town history of Derry, where It takes place, is full of rampages like this.)

And there’s nothing about Zalewski’s affect here to suggest that if he’d gotten away clean, he wouldn’t have just gone down to the bar for a drink, complaining about a rough day at work. It’s not quite the banality of evil, but there’s a workmanlike quality to it that gets right under your skin. Murder is so routine it barely registers.

Isn’t that what Zalewski himself tells Deaver? “Bad things happen here because bad people know they’re safe here,” the guard warned the lawyer when he tried to downplay the potential to open a prison-wide investigation. “How many times can one fuckin’ town look the other way?” In his desperation to expose Shawshank’s horrors, the man turned himself into one of those horrors. He had to become the prison in order to destroy it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. The ending was impressive.

During another flashback, we see Molly invite young Henry up to her room to hang out. Her neighbor leads a sheltered life, most likely an abusive one. So he’s baffled by her meticulously curated posters for period-appropriate college-rock bands. (“What are ‘Violent Femmes’?”)

He’s even more flustered when Molly drops this bomb on him: “I know what you do in your room. Touching your thing. It feels like fireworks.” The moment is cut short when Daddy Dearest starts hollering for Henry to come home, but this sudden and relatively explicit swerve into adolescent sexuality is a welcome sign that Castle Rock will take that element of Stephen King’s work seriously. (The recent It adaptation excised the book’s infamous orgy scene entirely, but replaced it with a weird scene of a bunch of guys leering at a girl in her underwear instead … as if that’s somehow an improvement.) Carnal knowledge is a huge driver of the author’s character development and horror craftsmanship alike. Kudos to the show for having the courage to even try to tackle what can be a danger zone onscreen.

I reviewed the third and final episode of Castle Rock that Hulu launched all at once last week for Rolling Stone. This was the weirdest and best.

The bigger question facing Castle Rock is how much it wants to tap dance between the Master’s raindrops. Strong performances by the cast in general, and by the remarkable, dead-serious Andre Holland in particular, make the show watchable if you don’t know your Randall Flagg from your Kurt Barlow. But if you’re a fan, hearing Lacey talk about “the dog” and “the strangler” most likely gave you a bigger thrill than anything else narrative-wise. And when you think back through the King mythos, it’s not hard to come up with another character who had the ability to inflict disease and cause death with a just glance of his own dark, intense eyes. Is the show content to be a superhero-comic-style nostalgia act, where the main dramatic drive is figuring out when your favorite villains are about to return? Or does its portrayal of an economically devastated small town where the biggest source of jobs is a privatized prison provide fertile enough ground to grow evils all its own?

I reviewed episode two of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s still a show finding its sea legs.

If the premiere is any indication, it’s not the diverse strands of the Stephen King Extended Universe that’s holding this thing together: It’s Moonlight veteran André Holland. His character Henry Deaver is a just a black American from a lily-white small town, raised with a heaping helping of old-time religion and unexamined trauma. He’s not dreading an encounter with a demonic clown – the lawyer just wants to make sure that his client gets the legal representation the Constitution guarantees. He’s a careworn man trying his best, not a hero undertaking a quest. This is Mr. Holland’s opus: He acts like doesn’t know he’s in a highly anticipated television event from the creators of Lost and The Shining. He makes Castle Rock feel like a drama, not the haunted-house ride at the county fair.

And while Holland gets the meatiest material this time around, he’s surrounded by actors capable of moral and emotional seriousness. His mom is played by Carrie herself, Sissy Spacek. Pangborn is played by Scott Glenn, who’s brought grizzled gravitas to everything from The Silence of the Lambs to The Leftovers. Molly Strand, the suburbanite pill-popper who briefly shows up? That’s Melanie Lynskey, who hasn’t met a role she couldn’t crush since Heavenly Creatures. Frances Conroy, a solid player in both prestige dramas (Six Feet Under) and guilty genre pleasures (American Horror Story), cameos as Warden Lacy’s blind wife. And the Kid? It’s Bill Skarsgard, dialing his performance as Pennywise from It down several notches but still weird and wall-eyed as ever.

Finally, there’s the not-so-good Warden Lacy, played by Terry O’Quinn. All the emphasis on Lost‘s unanswered questions makes it easy to forget all these years later, but the actor was an absolute godsend for that show — an MVP who could play a wily survivalist, a Wolverinesque badass, a failed hero, a bitter old man and an embodiment of pure evil with equal nuance and skill. Yes, the Warden commits suicide by driving off a cliff with a noose around his neck (“guillotining himself with a Lincoln,” as Henry puts it). But we’re in King Country now, and even if you discount supernatural shenanigans, the flashback toward the episode’s end indicates we haven’t seen the last of him.

I’m covering Castle Rock, the new “songs in the key of King” series on Hulu, for Rolling Stone, starting with my review of the series premiere. It’s not sit-up-and-take-notice stuff like The Terror was, but it’s promising.

Stream This Absurdist but Empathetic Documentary About Live-Action Gamers

A scene from “Darkon.” Ovie Entertainment

‘Darkon’ Where to Watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime; rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, or YouTube. Save it to your Watchlist.

This 2006 documentary from Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel takes its title from the Darkon Wargaming Club, a society of live-action role players in suburban Baltimore. Strapping on homemade armor and whacking each other with foam-padded weapons, these weekend warriors (and wizards and elves) gather to enact elaborate story lines of conquest and intrigue. But peel away the helms and tunics, and you’ll find a diverse group of people, driven by personal or economic dislocation to find fulfillment in an imaginary world: a stay-at-home father, a single mother, a young businessman, a teenage misfit.

“Darkon” is bracingly honest — and, in the context of today’s cultural conversations, prophetically relevant — about the limits of escapism. And the determination its subjects display in using their own imaginations to find agency and joy is deeply moving. At a time when wide swathes of nerd culture have gone toxic, the downtrodden but upbeat adventurers of “Darkon” are downright inspiring. — Sean T. Collins Stream an Overlooked, Terrifying Slice of Satanic Panic From John Carpenter Alice Cooper, center, in “Prince of Darkness.” Universal Pictures   ‘Prince of Darkness’ Where to Watch: Rent it on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Vudu. Save it to your Watchlist. The writer and director John Carpenter birthed the slasher film with “Halloween,” reinvented the creature feature with “The Thing” and created the sci-fi dystopia of our age with “They Live.” The guy is good. But he has never been better than in one of his most overlooked efforts, “Prince of Darkness” (1987). This bone-deep-disturbing supernatural horror film pits an outmatched team of professors and students against Satan himself, who appears in the form of a swirling green ooze that the Catholic Church has kept sealed away for centuries. As that evil essence permeates the claustrophobic and abandoned urban church where they’re trapped, the academics’ mission switches from study to survival. Simply put, this movie just feels wrong. Both the story’s structure and the entity’s powers shift constantly, preserving the power to shock. The theology underpinning the horror, meanwhile, is perverse enough to make even my extremely lapsed Catholic jaw drop. If you liked the madness of “Hereditary,” bow to the “Prince.” — Sean T. Collins

I’ve begun contributing movie recommendations to Watching, the New York Times’ fun and useful email newsletter that offers tips on good movies and TV shows available to stream on pretty much any and every service and network. It’s free to subscribe, and the newsletters don’t appear anywhere else online (unless I copy and paste my segments, like so, which I shan’t be doing again), so go sign up!

Looking back, do you have a favorite moment from shooting?

Harris: Pag Island.

Menzies: The time on Pag Island? Really? That’s interesting.

Harris: Yeah, that was a fantastic place for us to shoot. It was totally different when we were in Budapest, because people were in and out from London for their bits. Once we were on Pag Island, everyone was there for six weeks, so we all got to hang out properly. And it was just gorgeous. So bleak and beautiful. The [tourist] season hadn’t started yet, so we had the run of the town to ourselves, and there was a really lovely feeling to it.

Menzies: In terms of filming, I think [my favorite moment was] finally doing our long walk-and-talk with you, up there on the high ground of that island.

Harris: Yeah, that was good. We rehearsed that a lot just the two of us. We would go for walks around the little town.

[Your favorite part] wasn’t playing against Pag F.C., Tobias? Taking on the locals?

Menzies: You know what? That was a bit of a letdown, because the day before I pulled a muscle in my leg so I couldn’t really play. I remember being disgusted about that. That might have been a high point, but not for me.

It might have been watching you order pink drinks around various continents. [Laughs.] Jared is very partial to a pink cocktail, so I saw more pink cocktails than I think I’d ever seen.

Harris: Yes, yes. I do love pink cocktails. My theory is that pink cocktails are very potent.

Menzies: You mean they’re more potent the pinker they are?

Harris: Yes. The only thing more potent than a pink cocktail is a blue cocktail, but …

Menzies: What? I’m going to accuse you of false science. What the hell is that? Blue is better than pink?

Harris: No, blue cocktails are very potent as well, but you’re properly forewarned when you look at a blue cocktail. Pink cocktails look quite friendly. They have an umbrella in them, some sort of fruit … they look innocent, and boy do they pack a punch.

Here’s a very silly excerpt from what is otherwise a very serious interview I conducted with Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies about their work on The Terror, the best show of the year so far, for Vulture.

If you want something done right, give it to actor Zahn McClarnon to do. That’s the logical conclusion to draw coming out of this week’s episode of Westworld, titled “Kiksuya” – and the series’ best hour by a considerable margin. For once, the show’s annoyances (easy escapes, constant pointless bickering, those damn orchestral alt-rock cover versions) aren’t enough to overwhelm the material of real value. It took one of its most underutilized cast members, placed him at the center of a storyline that directly addressed the series’ sci-fi conceit but combined it with real mythmaking power and then let him run. The warrior Akecheta may not save Ghost Nation and its many human captives, but he just might have saved this show.

Until now, McClarnon had only been required to do is act mysterious and menacing – which is easy to do when you’re covered head to toe in death-cult warpaint – and spend a little time in a real-world flashback scene looking smart and suave. (The dude is all cheekbones.) But if you watched Fargo Season Two, you know that this actor is capable of so much more. As Hanzee Dent, the Native American enforcer for a Midwestern crime family, he was a nearly mute murder machine whose every move and murmur carried the weight of the whole rotten world. His reading of a weary, whispered line like “Tired of this life” – so tired that even identifying himself as said life’s owner was too much to bear – was all he needed to make himself the season’s greatest monster and its wounded moral heart.

This is the McClarnon we get tonight.

Last night’s Westworld was, by a considerable margin, the best episode of the series. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone.

It was the best of worlds, it was the worst of worlds. Like no episode before it, this week’s voyage to Westworld (“Les Écorchés”) was the proverbial non-stop action thrill ride – a carnival midway of cool sci-fi/horror imagery and visceral combat. It had James Marden’s Teddy going full Terminator, dressed in body armor and beating short-lived security badass Coughlin to death with his bare hands. It has both Clementine and Angela going out in blazes of glory, the latter by blowing up the hosts’ backup files in the Cradle and setting them free from the park’s endless loop. It has a beautifully shot face-off between Maeve and the Man in Black, the camera resting on Thandie Newton’s foregrounded face as she uses her psychic powers to turn the MiB’s own android allies against him. It has a creepy Bluebeard closet full of Bernard replicas and the real version getting possessed by the electronic spirit of his own creator so he can murder Delos thugs guilt-free. In short, it’s full of rad-ass robot shit.

[…]

The same cannot be said of the new narrative’s antagonist. Frankly, it’s time to come to terms with Charlotte Hale. Obviously, Tessa Thompson’s on a career hot streak – but the character of Hale is ice cold, and not in the unflappable-villain way she’s supposed to be either. There’s just nothing interesting about this one-note one-percenter, or the smirking way in which Thompson delivers every line. She has the mocking affect of a condescending reply from a Trump supporter on Twitter. She’s obnoxious when she has the upper hand over Peter Abernathy and Bernard in their respective torture chambers, and she’s just as irritating when her picked-on minion Stubbs, or rogue hosts Dolores and Teddy, have the upper hand on her in turn.

I reviewed tonight’s Westworld, which was both good pulpy fun and incredibly stupid, for Rolling Stone.