The Terror didn’t end tonight. It died.

That’s the best way to make sense of “We Are Gone,” the tenth and final episode of this brutally humane series, that I can come up with. More so than anything else on television in recent memory—ever, perhaps?—The Terror is about the experience of death, because the story requires virtually every character we meet to die before the end. Much of that die-off happens here, tonight. It happens onscreen and off, spectacularly and quietly, peacefully and gruesomely, by suicide and murder and disease and starvation—and, of course, a gigantic demonic bear. Death is like a prism turned around in The Terror’s hand, showing every facet, never settling on any one of them as the force’s true face.

I reviewed the finale of The Terror, a truly great television show, for the A.V. Club. I’m proud of the writing I did on this show, and there will be more of it coming your way soon.

Dismemberment, disembowelment and decapitation: Traditionally, these aren’t what you’d call teachable moments. But thanks to some swordpoint shenanigans in Shogunworld, all three figure prominently into a key scene in this week’s episode of Westworld (“Phase Space”). Even better, they go a long way toward demonstrating why this installment is such a dramatic uptick in quality from its predecessors. Whether it’s the script by Mad Men veteran Carly Wray or the direction by Swedish filmmaker Tarik Saleh is unclear, but there’s attention paid here to subtle human reactions to events as they unfold that’s unequaled by previous episodes. It’s all about the execution – even when you’re talking about an actual execution.

Let’s take that gory swordfight as a starting point. The duel in question involves Musashi, the ronin befriended by Maeve and her posse last week, and his former lieutenant turned rival Tanaka. Eschewing the techno-telepathy of “the witch” in favor of an old-fashioned mano a mano – staged in broad daylight, as opposed to the previous episode’s inexplicably murky swordplay – the two men go blade for blade in front of our heroes and a whole crowd of townspeople. (Contender for most memorable shot: An old man covering a little boy’s eyes to shield him from the bloodshed.) The fight ends with Tanaka’s protracted, screaming demise: Musashi cuts his hand off at the wrist, then provides him with the short sword he must use for harakiri, before beheading him. It’s the first time in a long time that the show’s brutality has been this inventively and empathetically staged. When the samurai and his geisha comrade Akane (who memorably carves out the heart of her own daughter for cremation) choose to stay behind and fight for their homeland instead of fleeing, the decision feels truly earned.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Westworld, which I thought was better than most, for Rolling Stone.

But – listen, this is Westworld, there’s always a but – enough baffling decisions remain to knock you out of the action faster than a katana to the face. For starters, despite what looks like very strong fight choreography and a behind-the-scenes budget bigger than a small country’s GDP, all the combat is shot in the dark. This is usually either a cost-cutting measure (you don’t need to pay for details you can’t see) or a way to hide sloppy swordplay. Since neither of those factors appear to apply, it comes across like sheer addiction to the murky, somber lighting and color palette of Prestige TV. What’s the point of all that precise blade-wielding if you don’t actually get to see the damn blades?

Also, true to the show’s programming, cringeworthy music cues are abound here. If you thought the cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway” (coincidentally the week he went full MAGA) or the “White Stripes: Indian Edition” version of “Seven Nation Army” were hard to take, wait until you hear faux-Japanese versions of the Stones’ “Paint It Black” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” The former, at least, is a callback to the show’s first use of the song, during the Sweetwater bandit raid that ShogunWorld has recycled for its own setting. But “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” during a scene that has nothing to do with cash? Is the idea “Well, Wu-Tang love samurai flicks, so it works”? If so, why not remake a song that actually samples music or dialogue from those films? As it stands, this just sounds like taking the Wu’s most recognizable hit and dumping it in the middle of a scene just because they can. Not even dropping a big sack with a dollar sign right in Thandie Newton’s lap would seem more jarring.

I reviewed the Westworld where they went to Fake Japan for Rolling Stone. I was pleased to see the show embracing its innate pulpiness, which has always been far more interesting than the deep thoughts it seems to think it has, and I write about that a bunch. But it still makes everything such a challenge to actually enjoy because of choices like the ones described above.

“You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” Barbara Kruger’s influential work of feminist agitprop may not have had murder in mind. But murder exists on a continuum that spans the rowdy-boy horseplay her image depicts, the societally approved homosociality of the playing field and the locker room, and the “rum, sodomy, and the lash” trifecta of life in the Royal Navy. The sailor-on-sailor killings, mercy or otherwise, in this incredible episode of The Terror can be seen as that continuum’s logical endpoint. The taking of life, up close and personal, is a form of male intimacy like any other.

I tried to do this week’s episode of The Terror justice for the A.V. Club. I hope I succeeded.

A hallmark of great art is showing you something you never imagined needing to see until you actually see it. No one is claiming that Westworldis the second coming of the Sistine Chapel, but the HBO hit has flashes of greatness from time to time – and there’s a scene in this week’s episode (“The Riddle of the Sphinx”) that’s damn near canon-worthy. Who knew that watching a grizzled Scottish character actor playing a robotic replica of himself, boogieing down to the manic crooning of Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music’s glam-dance classic “Do the Strand,” was what our lives were collectively missing? You can keep your mazes and mysteries and violent delights woth violent ends. We’ll take Peter Mullan’s Jim Delos rocking out to an Eno-produced glitter-rock jam any ol’ time.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone. Typical Westworld: a good scene or two amid a ton of self-important dross.

Some shows don’t know their own strengths. Westworld, for example, is the best example of this phenomenon on the air right now. Its creators took Michael Crichton’s old sci-fi horror concept and ported it to a modern-day prestige-TV landscape where they could play up the sex and violence all they wanted, while still having the breathing room to depict the robotic theme-park attractions’ burgeoning self-awareness so slowly that entire scenes can pass featuring completely realistic conversations between “characters” who have no idea their every thought, word, and deed has been preprogrammed. The pulp thrills are right there for the taking; so is the (as far as I can tell) unprecedented experience of watching a work of fiction in which the heroes start out from a position where their interactions no more “real” than your iPhone connecting to your car via Bluetooth. And what does Westworld do? Bury both the juicy and heady stuff in boring puzzle-box narratives, pointlessly shifting timelines, and long boring conversations about What It Means To Be Human—a perennial thematic non-starter, given that all of us have a pretty good idea of what that means every time we wake up in the morning, thanks. There’s a fine show in there, but the show itself doesn’t know it.

The Rain is the anti-Westworld. As its fifth episode (“Have Faith”) amply demonstrates, it knows where its bread is buttered: in the faces and emotions of its cast of characters as they face a horrific world in which only connecting with each other keeps them afloat, and in racing through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes at a pace brisk enough to keep them feeling fresh while making each deviation from the expected path a genuine surprise rather than a “twist” so painstakingly telegraphed that redditors could figure it out months in advance and call it a day.

I reviewed episode five of The Rain for Decider. This one took a tried-and-true staple of post-apocalyptic narratives — the colony of seemingly well-meaning survivors who maybe aren’t so well-meaning — and made something new out of it.

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!

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 74

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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.