The first bloodbath takes place offscreen. By the time the episode begins it’s already over, in fact. Goaded into brutal action by the lies of Cornelius Hickey, the crew of the Terror and the Erebus have shot five Netsilik men, women, and children to death, adding their bodies to the pile of two already assembled by Hickey himself. After witnessing the savagery with which he assaulted Lieutenant Irving in order to instigate this attack in the last episode, not seeing the killing of the innocent people Hickey framed for that murder feels worse, somehow — worse still because it took place during a moment of genuine bonding, brotherhood, and love between once-rival captains Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames just a few miles away. There’s a dreadful finality to discovering, as they did upon their return to camp, that a crime against humanity is a fait accompli.

So begins one of The Terror’s tightest and tensest episodes. (Which is saying something, that’s for sure.) Indeed, “Terror Camp Clear” has the most straightforward, least spiderwebbed storyline of any installment so far. Written by creator and co-showrunner David Kajganich and directed by Tim Mielants, it takes advantage of the narrowing scope of the story, not to mention the dwindling cast of characters, by keeping the focus squarely on Mr. Hickey’s incipient mutiny, its confirmation by the officers and their trusted associates, and the attempt to put it down and punish its bloody-minded ringleaders. On a show about the slow, grinding, literally glacial nature of death in the arctic wastes, it’s the first time a race-against-the-clock atmosphere has taken hold, and it works beautifully for the contrast.

I reviewed episode eight of The Terror for the A.V. Club. This show is tremendous. So tight, smart, austere, and rooted in fear.

Westworld frustrates because it doesn’t seem to recognize its own strengths. Hint: They don’t lie in lines of clichéd dialogue like “We ain’t so different, you and I,” or in raga-fied instrumental cover versions of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” (as heard in the opening sequence, ugh), or in a predictable cliffhanger in which a samurai attacks Maeve’s group when they arrive in Shogunworld. The whole point of the park it has the potential to be anything, but winds up being something awful, because that’s human nature. That’s rich territory to explore, but the show’s still wandering in circles.

I reviewed episode three of Westworld Season 2 (the one with India in it) for Rolling Stone. I think it’s pretty clear this is not going to turn into a good show, which makes its few flashes of…brilliance is way too strong a word, but interest, at least? more frustrating.

SPOILER WARNING

“Horrible From Supper” is the latest exercise in crystalline near-perfection from The Terror, written by Andres Fischer-Centeno and directed by Tim Mielants (who’ll be helming the remaining three episodes as well). If you’re reading this fresh from watching the episode, Mr. Hickey’s murderous dementia at the episode’s climax is no doubt lodged in your head like a knife (sorry). Rightly so. Like the death of Sir John Franklin earlier in the season, this is one of the most singular and memorable outbreaks of violence on television I’ve seen in a very long time. The staging and buildup are impeccable, with Hickey leading a fellow member of his hunting party off to his death in the far background while their commander, Lt. John Irving, receives potentially life-saving sustenance from a group of Netsilik travelers, his back to the danger behind him. It’s not merely the murder that shocks, it’s Hickey’s demeanor: First found crouched over the body of his victim, he leaps up shirtless and wild, stabs Irving over and over like something straight out of a true-crime podcast, then crouches and gazes around with an unintelligible mix of ecstasy and wariness in his eyes. The music, by the late composer Marcus Fjellström (god what a loss that is), uses clanging bells and distorted vocal samples; it’s dissonant and off to the point of being hard to listen to, like being trapped with a murderer inside the coda to “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The buzzing, clanging music and Hickey’s mannerisms evoked a similarly awful scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; the running figure of Lt. Irving combined with Fjellström’s core reminded me of an inverted Unedited Footage of a Bear (which, if you haven’t seen it before, hoo boy); the beach-like setting gave me flashbacks to a scene from Under the Skin that bothers me so much I’m not even going to link to it. But the overall effect is so rooted in the strength of Adam Nagaitis’ deceptive performance as Hickey, the wide-open gray-white void of the landscape as captured by Mielants and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden, and the decision to cut out the sound of the act itself, that the overall effect is utterly unique. The brief coda that follows, in which the Hickey we’ve come to know and love first boards the ship and it becomes clear he’s killed the real Hickey and stolen his place, hit me like the second shot of a double-tap execution.

I reviewed last night’s fantastic episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club.

Monsters

Unleash the kraken! And the dragon, and the Other, and the wight, and the giant, and the direwolf, and the FrankenGregor, and the giant turtle, et cetera. Sean and Stefan tackle the monsters of Ice and Fire — the ones that aren’t human, we mean — and their roles in the setting, the narrative, and the overall project of ASoIaF. Consider it our Walpurgisnacht Special!

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That said, all the usual caveats apply. The return of Logan and Young William and the debut of James Delos add even more assholes to a cast of characters full to bursting with them. Despite the stamp of co-creator Jonathan Nolan and Mad Men vet Carly Wray, the script still tends toward the obvious (the predictable twist at the party, a too-cute bit that introduces the “doesn’t look like anything to me” catchphrase) and the clichéd (someone actually says “You have no idea what you’re up against”). The plotting is plodding, with one thing happening after another and no clear climax or standout sequence to point to.

And with the exception of a sprinkling of jokes, the tone is so unsmilingly serious that it feels like its parodying a Weekend Update Stefon bit: “This park has everything: unhappy robots, unhappy people, unhappy robots who think they’re unhappy people …” Like the characters, we’ve got a long road ahead of us before we reach our destination. If the show stays in this grim mode, it may not kill us to take that ride. But it won’t exactly thrill us, either.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone. It’s not a good show, but the way in which it’s not good is mesmerizing. With both this review and the one I wrote for the premiere, I found myself doing a ton of beat-by-beat plot recapping, which I usually avoid, and wondered why. I came to the conclusion that it’s because the show is nothing but plot. The puzzlebox mysteries can’t be commented on without indulging in baseless speculation, the themes can all be encapsulated in a sentence or less, and there’s no poetry or rhytm; the show just morosely moseys along until it ends, week after week. Yet it’s never actively off-putting to watch, somehow. On twitter someone described it to me as watching a ballgame with no commentary and no real rooting interest in either team, which is as good a read on it as I’ve ever heard.

To do character work this deft within a magisterially frightening set piece is impressive. For it to be just one such element among many is even more so. For all of it to come together in a sequence that symbolizes the entire story—grand plans laid disastrously low, or as the title of another harrowing work about the Franklin expedition puts it, Man Proposes, God Disposes—and for none of it to blunt the blow of all that death and fear in the slightest? That’s a mark of great horror, and that’s exactly what The Terror is.

I reviewed last week’s great episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club. This show improves upon the book in ways both large and small.

As drama, however, Westworld still needs a serious tune-up. Working off the first season’s template, co-showrunner Lisa Joy and her co-writer Robert Patino have once again created a world in which everyone’s an asshole and no one likes anyone else. Even aside from the actions of obvious villains like the Man in Black or Dolores – who kills hosts and humans alike if she feels they don’t fit into her grand plan – you’ve got Lee trying and failing to sell Maeve out to human security forces the first chance he gets; Maeve keeps him around and alive out of necessity, but that’s about it. Ditto her utilitarian affection for Hector: She’s got a kid to rescue, and she needs a gunslinger to do it. As for Miss Abernathy, her promise that she and Teddy will be together till the end apparently winds up floating belly-up alongside the poor cowboy himself.

On the human end of the spectrum, Sizemore and Charlotte react to the deaths of dozens, if not hundreds, of people primarily as an annoyance, both of them slipping back into their usual sleazy subroutines without missing a beat. Strand, the domineering Delos thug who “rescues” Bernard, treats everyone he meets like dirt; it’s enough to make you miss the as-yet unseen dirtbag Logan from Season One. Even the offsite company higher-ups are willing to let all their friends and financial backers die gruesome deaths until they get what they want; considering the real-world class solidarity among the One Percent, this is even harder to believe in than the existence of killer robots in cowboy outfits.

Whatever else it is, Westworld is a workplace drama. (The office may be overrun by rampaging androids and the drama mostly consists of dodging bullets and accessing robotic brains, but still.) If everyone we meet is a sarcastic creep who’d sacrifice everyone they know to achieve their goals, the workplace can’t function and the drama can’t engage or enlighten. For conflict to mean anything, there has to be some kind of genuine cooperation and affection for contrast. Unless and until that emerges, the guns of Westworld will never quite hit their marks.

I’m covering Westworld for Rolling Stone again this season, starting with my review of last night’s premiere. I think the best we can hope for is a bunch of cool gross violent shit to tide us over during long dull periods of dorm-room philosophy and people being dickheads, but I’d love to be wrong.

Inviting officers from both ships, including the hated Sir James Fitzjames, to sit in, the drunken sailor asks them a favor. “I’m going to be unwell, gentlemen,” he tells them. “Quite unwell, I expect. And I don’t know for how long.” It soon dawns on his officers that he means to quit drinking cold turkey; the favor he’s asking is their help in covering for him in command, covering up the true nature of his illness, and above all refusing to let him talk them out of it. “We mustn’t stop until it is finished,” he says, drawing from an unexpected reserve of dignity and resolve, “and you musn’t let me.” His tone softens with rueful anticipation of agony to come as he adds, “I may beg you.” He slurs, shakes, grins, and cries his way through the scene, as if the ice of his addiction is slowly crushing the hull of his spirit, and he’s frantically trying everything he can to hold the ship together. Even Sir James seems deeply moved by the display, and considering the raw power of Jared Harris’s performance here, he damn well better be. If you’ve ever known an alcoholic who got sober, you know this moment. I do, and the recognition made me cry. There are all kinds of terror, after all.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club. Jared Harris, man. Jared Harris.

9. Will there be so many mysteries this time around?
This is the biggest question of all. Season One came with all the clues, twists, and meta-mindgames you’d expect from a show co-created by J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan, whose puzzle-box projects include Lost, the Cloverfield franchise, Memento and The Prestige between them. (The third member of the trinity, Lisa Joy, has a track record of more straightforward storytelling.) All that code-cracking, flash-backing, and maze-running kept YouTubers and Redditors busy for months. But sometimes the trickery got in the way of what otherwise would have been a cracking yarn about machines struggling to become sentient, the sadistic humans who made them that way and the weird war between them.

Maybe it’s foolish to expect an old host to learn new tricks. But if the Season Two trailers – full of half-built robotic bulls, menacing fleshless android skeletons and Evan Rachel Wood on horseback straight-up murking dudes – are any indication, Westworld has pulpy power to spare. With the secrets of the Maze, the Man in Black and Ford’s new narrative finally solved, could the show embrace the joys of sci-fi/fantasy/action genre storytelling that have worked so well for shows from Game of Thrones to Breaking Bad, without ever dumbing them down?

I’ll be covering Westworld for Rolling Stone again this year, starting with this piece on the big questions left over from Season One; the question above is really the only one that matters.

I’m spelling all this stuff out in detail because the details are there, and the material is designed to withstand this kind of scrutiny. The Terror could be coasting on survival-horror staples and period-prestige clichés. Instead, it’s using these extraordinary circumstances as a crucible for revealing character, not melting it away for cheap thrills and meaningless misery. It’s a miracle on the ice.

My review of this week’s episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club focuses on a worried-wife scene and a torture scene that the show elevates from rote to vital.

SPOILER WARNING

Many, and perhaps most, prestige television shows traffic in death. Name your top five dramas right now and chances are good the majority are about people who kill other people for a living, or at the very least on a pro-am basis. Yet for all their fixation on mortality, violent or otherwise, few shows bother attempting to answer the unanswerable question of what death feels like. The one that (maybe) gave it a serious try wound up doing something so strange by the standards of its peers that we’re still talking about it eleven years later.

Which makes “The Ladder,” The Terror’s horrific third episode, one of the year’s most impressive hours of television. Climaxing with the surprise death of a major character—a shock tactic you’ve almost come to expect from high-profile dramas—it takes the opportunity to root the viewer in the experience of dying, and dying horribly. Using dizzying camerawork, surreal editing, brutal gore, and a simple but staggering performance by Ciarán Hinds, the episode makes the killing of Sir John Franklin a real voyage into the unknown: the mind of a man who suddenly finds himself in the grips of panic and pain from which there will be no return.

Episode three of The Terror featured one of the best death scenes I’ve ever seen on television; I wrote about why in my review for the A.V. Club.

You don’t need to get clocked on the head by a hailstone the size of a grapefruit to think that there was something playful about The Terror this week. For one thing you wouldn’t have much of a head left, but it’s more than that. Titled “Gore,” the episode creates a sense of anticipation that something terrible, or at least disgusting, is going to happen from the start. This isn’t wrong, but it also isn’t the whole picture. In shades of the series title’s double meaning, Gore is the surname of the lieutenant to whom the horrible thing happens. What’s more, his death and disappearance at the claws of a huge, elusive bear takes place after eight months of nothing happening, apparently: Between the final shot of the premiere and the first shot of this installment, eight months have elapsed. A series with the confidence to take such a huge narrative leap this early in its run, and to make gallows-humor puns about the inexorable doom approaching all its characters, is a series worth watching.

I reviewed episode two of The Terror for the A.V. Club. It’s an impressive show.

“Past hope. Past kindness or consideration. Past justice. Past warmth or cold or comfort. Past love. But past surprise? What an endlessly unfolding tedium life would then become!” —Francis Wolcott, Deadwood

The men of the Royal Navy about whose lives and deaths The Terror concerns itself have set out on an expedition into the unknown, but the show itself is not. Carefully researched, meticulously art-directed dramas about the evil that heavily accented, infrequently bathed men did back in the olden days are as common across the TV landscape as ice in the Arctic. (At least, as common as ice in the Arctic used to be.) In too many of these cases, hitting that one note of grim, grimy gloom seems to have been viewed as sufficient by the filmmakers involved.

What The Terror gets right, and so many other works of period miserabalism—including executive producer Ridley Scott’s own Taboo, starring a soot-encrusted Tom Hardy—get wrong, is that you have to feel bad that the characters are so miserable in the first place. If you start them all at the same glowering, fundamentally mean-spirited place and just make things worse from there, that empathy can’t be generated; you’re left with the “endlessly unfolding tedium” that the granddaddy of the genre once described. Deadwood never fell into that trap, and neither, based on this opening hour, does The Terror.

I reviewed the crackerjack premiere of The Terror for The A.V. Club, where I’ll be covering the show all season. Most people I know who read Dan Simmons’s source novel enjoyed a lot of it a whole lot but have major problems that kept them from declaring it a truly great book, and I’m in that camp myself. When I heard they were making a show of it, I got excited not because the book is perfect, but because it isn’t, and a good show might be able to excise those imperfections. I’m happy to report that The Terror is, indeed, a good show. Remember that spark I said The Alienist doesn’t have? The Terror does. It’s got the magic.

It’s in those final steps of the hunt for the killer that the problems really begin. Kreizler bamboozles Roosevelt and his men so that Kreizler and Moore, already under close watch by Byrnes, could sneak away to the child-killer’s new lair unnoticed. How do they know that this lair is in the Croton Reservoir? How does Sara, whom Kreizler also dupes (reasons unclear), figure out that same thing in turn, arriving at the reservoir just in time to save their lives? There’s some hand-waving about interpreting the killer’s map of the water and sewer systems, a change in his modus operandi, and his apparent obsession with John the Baptist. But that’s all wild guess work, and New York was a really big city — on an island, no less — even during the Gilded Age. Water, water everywhere, yet they know exactly where to go.

The episode ratchets up the tension by including Byrnes and Connor as factors in the final showdown, from a poorly explained scene in which Byrnes monitors our men at the opera house to Connor’s almost comically dogged pursuit of the alienist’s team. But while their acute interest in the case made sense while one of their high-society patrons was under suspicion, it made considerably less sense once that patron was killed by Connor. His involvement in the murder of Laszlo’s beloved Mary seems to be an open secret as well, although this, too, is poorly explained. Now Connor goes to all this trouble just because the police object to the doctor’s newfangled methodology? It simply doesn’t hold up as a motive.

Put it all together, and it feels rushed and forced, as if the filmmakers looked at the clock, realized they were running out of time and did a speed run through the final hour of what until now had been a very meticulous, patient detective story.

I reviewed the finale of The Alienist, a show I never really liked but also kind of enjoyed (??), for the New York Times. Charming performances by Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning, and a slightly harder-to-swallow but still endearing turn from Daniel Brühl, buoyed the proceedings considerably. Still, it never had that spark, you know? That magic. Some shows do and some shows don’t.

Starship Troopers and Rambo

Come one, you apes! You wanna live forever? We sure hope not, because when you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing. And so is listening to Sean and Stefan discus two of the most violent — and morally complex — action movies of the modern era, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. Made in 1997 and 2008 respectively, these films use satire (in the former case) and spectacle (in the latter) to probe the gaping wounds of fascism, war, war movies, and the act of killing. If, like us, you’re an admirer of how A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones use epic-battle tropes to interrogate the horrors of war, this discussion of two strange films that do the same is for you. Enjoy…?

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You don’t want to reduce an actual human being to an avatar of impersonal forces at work in the world, but Andrew is in one sense the weaponization of all the obstacles that have been placed in all those people’s way by homophobia. Even at Versace’s funeral, the priest performing the ceremony refuses to take his partner’s hand in comfort.

Yeah. All of that is real. We’ve got the footage of the priest pulling his hand away from Antonio. That’s not an inference — we can see it. That priest knew he was on camera, knew he was in front of thousands of people, knew he was at the funeral for this man, and still couldn’t control his hatred. He still felt no need to control it. Versace was so successful he managed to overcome that, which was what was so extraordinary about him. But the whole point of Andrew’s personality was that he wanted to impress people, and he’s born into one of the most marginalized groups in society. That paradox — How can you impress someone when they find you disgusting intrinsically before you even open your mouth? — that’s the conundrum of Andrew.

I think it’s tricky. The most homophobic person in this story is Andrew, by far. When he becomes this killer, he becomes a horrific homophobic bully. It’s like he’s soaked up everything and unleashes it on Lee and Versace. He’s like, “I’m going to shame you. You’ve achieved success and I’m going to rip it down, both through physical destruction, but also through the act of scrutiny and having the world look down upon you.”

Even when he was younger and acting as a welcoming figure in the gay community, he was pushing his racial identity as an Asian American to the side. That’s a stark contrast.

You know, he kind of did both. He wanted to change his name from Cunanan to DeSilva so he could say he’s Portuguese rather than from the Philippines. Then he was saying he was Israeli. So yeah, he would push the racial thing to one side. But the sexual thing is interesting, if you look at the way his life tracks. He can’t deal with anyone who might be critical. If he met someone who was homophobic and he wanted to be friends, he would say that he was straight, or that he had a wife and a daughter. He would play the audience. Eventually he went into an audience of these older men that he didn’t have to play to, because he was instantly impressive. He was younger and witty and clever and appreciated. Once he lost that audience, he hit rock bottom.

There’s this moment we never managed to get into the show which I’ve always thought captured something about Andrew. He was at a party when his descent was really accelerating, and no one was paying attention to him; in fact, someone had already reprimanded him for being really annoying. He just went over to this table and set fire to a napkin. He needed people to run over and notice him.

I interviewed Tom Rob Smith, the writer of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, for the New York Times. Again, ACS Versace is a great show.

Andrew Cunanan walks through Miami Beach toward death as “Vienna” by Ultravox plays on the soundtrack. That New Wave masterpiece is both a celebration and rejection of glamour. Sequentially so, in that vocalist Midge Ure sings of “a man in the dark in a picture frame, so mystic and soulful” and “haunting notes, pizzicato strings, the rhythm is calling,” only to follow up by proclaiming “the image is gone…the feeling is gone…this means nothing to me.” Simultaneously so, in that when he sings “this means nothing to me” the song soars as if nothing has ever meant more to him. Inextricably so, in that it wedges “only you and I” between each declaration of faded emotion and emphatic meaninglessness; in that the title comes from the chorus’s climactic phrase “Ah, Vienna,” a cry of joy and a sigh of loss all at once. The first time that chorus hits in the ninth and final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Andrew Cunanan assassinates Gianni Versace. The second time, he’s standing in a stranger’s kitchen, rummaging through a fridge in a house he’s burglarized, pulling out a bottle of champagne and fiddling with the foil around the cork. His lonesome toast to himself is not timed to the music. The feeling is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

[…]

Andrew Cunanan is dead and gone when The Assassination of Gianni Versace, one of the best dramas of the decade, concludes. Its final scenes focus on the family of the title character, not his killer; even this choice is a deliberate disconnection from what’s come before. Estranged though they are, both his sister Donatella and his partner Antonio struggle to connect what they had with what they have now. Donatella, who has coolly presided over Antonio’s excision from his late partner’s estate, sobs, because her brother annoyed her on the day of his murder to the point where she refused to pick up the phone when he called. Antonio has been rejected not only by Donatella but by the priest at Gianni’s funeral mass — where rich and famous friends from Princess Diana to Elton John to Naomi Campbell to Sting were present, but where Antonio himself did not merit a mention as a part of the family, nor a kiss from the cleric, whose institution spent the decade denying the humanity of homosexuals while systematically destroying the humanity of so many children in its charge. Like Andrew, he attempts suicide; unlike Andrew, he is unsuccessful.

Gianni Versace ends the series as a photo in a shrine where his sister goes to grieve and lament what could have been had she picked up the phone. Donatella is a distorted reflection in glass embellished with the House of Versace’s Medusa head emblem, monstrous in her mourning. Antonio lies cradled in the hands of the help, who save him from his effort to die with the love of his life. Andrew is just a name on a wall in a mausoleum, one of countless others, nothing special. It’s all so unglamorous, so unceremonious, so blunt and short and ugly. The beauty Versace worked all his life to create, that Andrew tried all his life to recreate, has no place here at the end. The image is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

I reviewed the season finale of ACS Versace for Decider. This show is an all-timer.

Andrew Cunanan was cool.

Like, really cool.

Sincerely, legitimately awesome.

That’s the tragedy of “Creator/Destroyer,” the penultimate episode of this extraordinary season of television. By the time we see Andrew in his full glory as one of the wildest guys at his high school, we’ve also seen his father Modesto, who debuts in this episode, get his hooks deep into the kid. Andrew has seen his father harangue and assault his mother. He’s borne the weight of all his dad’s dreams, knowing this comes at the expense of his siblings, sensing on some level it’s not right to have this kind of pressure placed on him but, because the pressure is couched as praise, not knowing how to fight back. He’s been…well, the show is cagey on this, but saying he’s been molested by his father would not be out of bounds.

And even now, as an ebullient and confident teenager, he’s begun certain behavior patterns that will get him in trouble in the end: he has a sugar daddy, and he becomes fast friends with Lizzie, his future bestie, because she shows up at a high-school house party pretending to be a kid rather than the married adult she really is. (“I’m an impostor.” “All the best people are.”) He’s picking up little tidbits on how to deceive (including his go-to pseudonym, DeSilva, the name of the people who own the house where the party takes place) and why (because “when you feel special, success will follow” as his father teaches him).

But for a brief time, he’s just a cool, slightly weird, slightly obnoxious, slightly closeted teenager, and if you weren’t at least two of those things during your high school career I don’t wanna know you. He stands up to homophobes in a familiar way, by camping it up even further, going so far as to pose for his class photo with his shirt all the way unbuttoned to show off his (impressive!) torso. He’s prophetically chosen to be “Most Likely to Be Remembered,” and equally prophetically selects “Après moi, le déluge” as his yearbook quote. He rolls into the parking lot like a refugee from Less Than Zero (complete with that movie’s soundtrack staple, the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter”; the film was his IRL fave) and shows up at the house party in an Eddie Murphy red-leather jumpsuit. (Finally it’s clear why so many of his music cues over the course of the ‘90s portion of the series were anachronistically ’80s: The ’80s were his time.) This Andrew could be loved. This Andrew could be saved.

I reviewed last week’s episode of ACS Versace for Decider. What a show.

“We must be talked about, or we are nothing.” —Donatella Versace, to the Versace staff

“For me, being told ‘no’ is like being told I don’t exist. It’s like I disappeared or something.” —Andrew Cunanan, to Jeff Trail

“Is this normal? Is this normal enough?” —Gianni Versace to his sister Donatella, on creating a less unique ready-to-wear version of the haute couture dress they designed together for her

“It’s just a name they made up to sound special.” —Andrew Cunanan to his mother Mary Anne, on Häagen-Dazs ice cream

“It needs confidence.” “It gives confidence.” —Donatella and Gianni, on the dress

“So you can hold your own at a dinner table conversation.” “I am the dinner table conversation.” —an escort agency owner and Andrew Cunanan, on Andrew Cunanan

“I want the world to see you in a way that you have never been seen before.” —Gianni to Donatella

“Oh, if they could see me now.” “Who?” “Everyone.” —Andrew Cunanan to Norman Blachford

“This dress is not my legacy. You are.” —Gianni to Donatella

“He’s a good boy. He’s always been a good boy.” —Mary Anne on Andrew Cunanan

“Ascent,” the seventh episode of ACS Versace, is the one where my admiration for what writer Tom Rob Smith has accomplished with his scripts and structure for the series shifted into something approaching awe. Returning to the Versaces’ world of high fashion for the first time since Episode 2 (their appearance in Episode 5 centered on Gianni’s coming out, not their work as designers), it creates a series of parallels between the the artist and the man who would murder him that are all the more striking for how different they are in intention and affect.

I reviewed episode seven of ACS Versace for Decider a couple weeks back. (I apologize for all the catch-up linkblogging tonight.) I remember going through my notes on this one and thinking “Christ, this is a well-written show.”

It all leads to the grimmest discovery of the season, coupled with its goriest onscreen moments. While John’s young friend Joseph listens in horror, the murderer butchers one of his friends in the public baths, dragging his bloody corpse down the hall and off to whatever urban aerie will become this latest victim’s chosen resting place. At the same time, in the killer’s bedroom, Sara opens a heart-shaped box and discovers an actual human heart, while Marcus Isaacson uncovers a jar filled with human eyeballs — many more, it’s clear, than the known victims could have provided.

It’s an awesome, awful image, one that easily transcends its B-movie-prop connotations because of what it enables both the investigators and the audience to truly see. Each of these gross little chunks of nerve and tissue, floating in a jar stuffed away under bed, represents the life of a child, plucked out at the root. What’s more, each of the victims came from the immigrant underclass; the killer groomed them all by commiserating over their abusive, hated fathers. (In the victims’ cases, many of their dads were also neglectful gambling addicts, which Beecham was in a position to know through his gig as a debt collector.) In a grotesque sense, the murderer values them more than anyone else ever has.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It’s not a particularly good show, but Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning are very watchable in it, and in moments like the one described above it proves gore can still be communicative.