The military-pillar subplot never devolves into dopey first-person-shooter shenanigans. From the start, when dozens of troops descend on a haunted house that looks as if it might fall over in a stiff breeze, the operation is depicted as hubristic folly. Men die for no reason, nothing is achieved, and the end result will be the persecution of Rose’s community for her role in the debacle.

As much as Gen. Shaw wants to believe otherwise, sending fully armed troops rolling down American streets to storm houses is a cure worse than any disease it purports to treat. Some problems can’t be fixed with boots and guns. If you try, you’ll only hurt the country you’re claiming to save.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

So let’s review. The Others are all permanently blissed-out people pleasers. They cannot kill other living things. They want to convert the last few holdouts, and won’t harm them directly, but won’t hesitate to hand them ways to harm themselves. They have no meaningfully personal concept of personal expression. Their big changeover has cost the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. Assuming the show is leaving these plot holes open on purpose and I’ll grant you I’m shooting it a lot of bail here, my final question is this. If you were the senders of the transmission responsible for the Joining, and you were trying to turn a fractious planet full of nuclear armaments into a smooth, flat runway for an invasion and a pasture of docile livestock for the slaughter — if, in other words, you were making a weapon — would you have designed that transmission any differently? 

This, however, raises another question. I’m interested, in a sort of academic way, about the nature of the joining, its origin, its ultimate purpose. Let’s say I’m right and we’ve got a science-fiction story about an alien weapon that turns everyone into pod people. Hey, great! I figured it out, I solved the puzzle. Well, then what? The story itself has to offer something more than the thrill of solving a riddle. There’s a reason it’s not called “theorytelling.”

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

Director Duwayne Dunham, who collaborated with Lynch as an editor both before and after working on Twin Peaks’ original run, clearly knows Lynch’s stuff well. His shot compositions for the one-on-one heart-to-hearts echo the quietude of Lynch’s own approach, against which surreal flourishes, like the blue glow on Hawk in the hospital, or scary ones, like the sudden appearance of that man behind the bed, pop more brightly. 

He also respects that this is a show about people experiencing pain over Laura Palmer’s murder, not just trying to solve it: The sympathetic way he shoots characters like Sarah and Donna as they each grieve in their own way are among the show’s most memorable so far. Granted, “so far” means two episodes. But what episodes! From the mesmerizing opening credits on down, Twin Peaks asks you to quietly sit with whatever it’s doing — gags and bits, soapy melodrama, serial-killer horror, coping with loss, ranting about cotton-ball-powered drape runners — and listen to the screams, or the sighs, or the silence.

I reviewed episode two of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

The eyeball scene and the flashback are the episode’s two standout sequences, and they’re a mixed bag. The injection of Indigenous folklore into the “It” story feels like a tip of the cap to “Twin Peaks,” which similarly chronicled a town haunted by a demonic presence secretly known to both Native Americans and the United States military. The voice-over narration, however, makes the flashback material feel clumsier and cornier than it needs to be. It would have stood better as a stand-alone episode, the way similar stories were told by shows like “Lost” and “Westworld.”

Poor Margie’s eye-popping experience, by contrast, is a top-to-bottom success. It is gross, gory and inventive, constantly ratcheting up the violence, discomfort and cruelty. The use of a bifurcated snail’s-eye-view effect to show us events from Margie’s perspective, forcing us to experience the horror through her googly eyes, is disturbing on a gut level. That’s what I want from a horror television show.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

I have to admit, I didn’t expect to find myself suddenly bearish about a new Vince Gilligan show by episode three. It’s true that neither Better Call Saul nor Breaking Bad were anywhere near as smart, tight, bleak, and brilliant in episode three as they were by Season 5, and I’m certainly not writing off Pluribus, because I’m not stupid. But both BB and BCS, even the prequel series, felt like they were doing something new to TV. This post-apocalyptic dystopia simply does not. 

I reviewed this week’s disappointing (!) Pluribus for Decider.

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” is a question that drips with a pain that Lynch and Frost admirably refuse to clean up and wipe away. Whatever their original intent regarding the resolution of her murder, Laura Palmer is no MacGuffin, no glowing briefcase or unobtainium or Maltese Falcon. She is, or rather was, a real person. She was complicated, obviously, and led multiple secret lives, lives even Donna and James, her best friend, knew nothing about. She was likely an addict. She may have been trafficked. She was a child — Leland and Sarah Palmer’s child. She was Laura Palmer.

Now she’s gone. Through all the surreality and silliness, as suspect after suspect is introduced and dismissed, Lynch and Frost never lose sight of Laura. They never silence the cries of those who loved her, to the point where I found it impossible not to cry along with them all. They never take their eyes off that empty desk. They never let you forget what it means.

I’m reviewing all of Twin Peaks — Season 1, Season 2, Fire Walk With Me, The Missing Pieces, The Return — for Pop Heist, starting with this essay on the series premiere. Twin Peaks is my favorite show, the best ever made, and I’m going to give my heart and soul to this.

Please note that while this is a gift link, Pop Heist is a worker-owned site that makes algorithm-free pop-culture coverage with no big-money backer. No other place would let me do this (or I, Claudius, or The Prisoner). It’s $7/month or $70/a year to subscribe, and it’s worth it.

I reviewed the second episode of Pluribus for Decider.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are two of the best television shows ever made. Both created by Vince Gilligan, the latter with Peter Gould, they use crime-drama frameworks for lengthy, thoughtful, ultimately melancholy examinations of the way humans choose expediency over morality. 

At least that’s how we critics tend to think and talk about them. Equally important to their success and well-deserved reputation: They were scary as shit! That whole multi-episode Breaking Bad arc pitting Walter White against Gus Fring in a lethal stand-off? The white-knuckle scene in which Nacho Varga must either poison his boss or die trying? Todd Alquist? Lalo Salamanca? Breathtaking suspense and thrilling action involving best-in-class TV psychopaths was as big a part of the BB/BCS appeal as the slow spiritual deaths of Heisenberg and Saul Goodman.  

So when Pluribus, Gilligan’s new show for Apple TV, starts off with a harrowing depiction of the apocalypse, localized in Albuquerque, New Mexcio, maybe I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. In addition to his own two stone-cold masterpieces, Gilligan also worked on The X-Files, so this nucleotide was within him all along, just waiting to be activated.

I reviewed the series premiere of Pluribus for Decider.

Instead of a haunted house, what if there were a haunted city? What if the troll lurking under the bridge hid beneath the entire municipality? What if small-town America’s racial, sexual, gender and class divisions could be exploited by a billion-year-old cosmic shape-shifter that has taken the form of a child-eating clown?

These propositions are fundamental to “It,” Stephen King’s 1986 doorstopper of a horror novel, which for my money is his most frightening book. Derry is not just a setting, it’s a secondary antagonist. The real horror of “It” is that the presence of the evil entity beneath that quaint Maine town has warped the place’s inhabitants.

No one in Derry ever seems to notice when bad things happen — when outcasts are bullied, Black people tormented, L.G.B.T.Q. people bashed, women assaulted, children abused. The good people of Derry stare, dead-eyed, and do nothing. The second episode of “Welcome to Derry” conveys this pervasive sense of wrongness by fleshing out the city, with the Main Street shopping district, the Black side of town and the nearby air base all taking their turns in the spotlight. Derry feels like a real place, where real children live and grow and, frequently, vanish.

I reviewed this weekend’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Full disclosure: This episode made it hard for me to get a good night’s sleep. There are horrific images, excruciating moments, and an overall tone of queasy cruelty in this hour of television that I simply couldn’t shake. To me, that’s the mark of great horror.

I recall getting that feeling from reading the 1986 novel “It,” Stephen King’s epic portrait of a small town in Maine called Derry that is haunted by a demonic, shape-shifting, child-eating clown. I first read it in middle school, when I was the same age as its young protagonists — I’m closer in age to their adult selves now — and it hit me like a possessed car. Beyond being King’s scariest book, and his grossest, it is also his cruelest: a nightmare dive into the horrible realities of child abuse and small-town closed-mindedness, transmuted into the supernatural.

I did not get that welcomely awful feeling from the two films to which this series serves as a prequel, “It” (2017) and “It Chapter Two” (2019), both from the director Andy Muschetti. Which is why I’m happy, if that’s the right word, to report that the first scene of this first episode of “It: Welcome to Derry” is scarier and more disturbing than everything in the two movies combined. With Muschetti once again behind the camera for the premiere, he and the showrunners, Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane, serve up a perfect nightmare of mounting panic and terror.

I reviewed the series premiere of the It prequel Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

In a sequence that dropped my jaw with its sheer audacity, a dying Ed is wheeled towards the light down a corridor full of people from the hospital, along with a gaggle of mass murderers — Speck, Brudos, Ed Kemper, Charles Manson. While the killers express their admiration and the onlookers cheer Ed on, nurses and orderlies and doctors dance to, of all things, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes. (It was the song playing on MTV when he lost consciousness. Yes, Ed Gein wanted his MTV.)

So here’s the thing. I adore that song. I adore a novel use of it that doesn’t simply signify “Hey, it’s the 1980s!” I adore dream dance sequences, especially ones accompanying a person’s final moments — see also All that Jazz and the seventh season of Mad Men. And while it’s been many years since I was really in that dark place, I know an awful lot about those awful men. Seeing them as part of this joyous sequence is the exact note of discord it needed. There’s something awesome and terrible, in the old-school senses of those words, in watching Ed transcend in this way. It reminds me of how the show aims straight for the most indelible images from the three films it references: the shower scene, Leatherface twirling with his chainsaw, Bill in front of the mirror — just going right for it. I fucking loved it.

I reviewed the finale of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider. I thought this was a very impressive and troubling show.

“It’s like your mind is a mirror that somebody dropped on the floor. So everything you’ve ever seen or heard or read or imagined — there are all these shards reflecting back at you, and you can’t tell what’s real and what’s a fantasy.”

This is how the psychiatrist (Randall Newsome) treating Ed Gein at the mental hospital where he has been institutionalized describes Ed’s condition. It’s schizophrenia, he says, and it’s caused him to remember commiting crimes he never committed — like killing the new head nurse for bullying him, in a scene that may or many even have been real itself — he didn’t do, as well as forget ones he did — like killing Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, the latter of whom at least he considered a friend. (He does eventually remember killing Bernice and Mary, the only two victims every officially linked to Gein, and he’s devastated to realize it.)

It’s also writer-creator Ian Brennan’s approach to this material. The titular story is only partially about Ed Gein the man; it’s largely about Ed Gein the myth. Covering both his official victims and those he is suspected of killing, it’s working through the entire American Gein gestalt. As such it ricochets back and forth from the past to the future, from fiction to reality. 

I reviewed the seventh episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.

What did Ed Gein know, and when did he know it?

It sounds like a ridiculous question: Unlike Richard Nixon, who did not conduct the Watergate break-in himself, Ed Gein did a whole bunch of crimes and violated a whole bunch of corpses. But when he is inevitably discovered, arrested, and brought in for questioning, he passes a polygraph test with flying colors even when asked about crimes there is zero evidentiary basis to believe he didn’t commit. But even in the case of Bernice Worden, whose mutilated corpse is found trussed up and decapitated in his barn, Ed sounds like a defendant in the Iran-Contra scandal: He just doesn’t recall.

Is he lying? Boy, it sure seems like it, doesn’t it? Now that he’s busted, that aw gee aw shucks dag nabbit cheese and crackers demeanor sounds not just out-of-place but disingenuous, even smug. This sick son of a bitch thinks he can please and thank you and may I his way out of multiple homicides and a charnel house of human remains that will ring through the ages as one of the worst-ever places to set foot?

But that’s just it: Maybe he does. Monster: The Ed Gein Story writer-creator Ian Brennan has been consistent in his portrayal of Ed as so deep in the grips of delusion that he can dissemble easily one second, then invite the literal police to go see the dead body he has in the upstairs bedroom the next. He seems to have no idea why some people who find him agreeable eventually get squicked out. For god’s sake, when he’s getting the living shit beaten out of him by Deputy Frank Worden (Charlie Hall), Bernice’s loving but lonely son and the poor bastard who discovers her body, Ed seems genuinely confused and upset. They’d always gotten along before, you see.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Monster for Decider.

If there’s a throughline that connects every aspect of this episode — which is Adeline’s more than it is Ed’s — it’s misogyny. Adeline flees her hometown because its only future for her is as a housewife and mother. The women’s circle is a punishing group of judgmental hypocrites who question Adeline’s womanhood even as they make excuses for their rapist sons. She’s half-forced, half-intrigued into indulging Ed’s blue balls like they’re a matter of life and death, going so far as to help dig up a corpse to take care of them.

After Weegee indulgently looks at Adeline’s photography, he first mocks her as a no-talent, then makes crude sexual comments about her until she flees. Even the landlady she savagely beats suggests finding a man is her main option. When she finally returns home, her mother — in a magnificent monologue by Weigert, one of our very best — viciously berates her, suggesting Adeline’s in some way defective because she threw herself down the stairs multiple times in an effort to end the pregnancy. 

The legal lack of reproductive freedom, like contemporary anti-trans measures that seem a million miles removed from the friendly newsreel footage of Christine as a compelling curiosity, is the ultimate state expression of woman-hatred, turning women against one another in the process. In many ways this is the most grim thing about watching The Ed Gein Story right now. Across the country, and at the highest levels of government, men are working to return the country to the benighted state it was in when Ed and Adeline went insane because of it. 

I reviewed the fifth episode of Monster for Decider.

Now, obviously, “Ed Gein, Babysitter” is a world-historically awful idea. To paraphrase The Big Lebowski, say what you will about John Wayne Gacy, but at least the man was a semi-professional clown. Ed’s idea of a magic show is to take the children he’s babysitting — with Adeline’s strong recommendation — to his house of horrors. There, he plays a game of three-card monty with skulls and a human finger. He tells the kids he can change into a lady, then hides his head in his flannel shirt and puts a woman’s severed head on top of his own. When the kids protest that it’s stupid and fake, he pops his real head out, revealing a mask of human skin.

The sequence works as black comedy, however, because at no point does it seem like Ed is actually going to hurt these kids. That’s the weird thing about Ed: When he’s being sweet and good-natured, he kind of means it? Gein lives fully in the grips of delusion, one with no real seams between the everyday world of saying hello to neighbors and the nightmare world of having a house full of human body parts. This is how he can easily lie to the sheriff one second, then make the insane decision to invite him inside to meet Mother the next. Fortunately for Ed, the sheriff declines.

I reviewed the third episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.

The irony is that Psycho really doesn’t make people “look at something like this.” It seems like it does, people feel like it does, opening-night audiences have a series of health scares in this episode because it does, but it doesn’t. There’s no nudity, for example, but the shower scene and the peeping-tom routine by Norman Bates that precedes reveal nothing. (A dark sort of credit here belongs perhaps to Hitchcock’s own penchant for peeping: He’s shown spying on an actress getting changed earlier in the episode, just as both Norman and Ed do.)

There’s no graphic violence in the mother of all slasher films, either. The knife wielded by Norman Bates dressed in Mother drag never visibly pierces the naked flesh of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane. It’s all movie magic — the foley art of a knife sinking into a melon repeatedly, the meticulous storyboarding of title designer Saul Bass, George Tomasini’s precision editing, the famous screeching strings from composer Bernard Hermann, Leigh’s panicked performance, Hitchcock’s near-peerless mastery of filmmaking’s dark arts.

So Winkler and writer Ian Brennan do what they’ve been doing across both episodes, right down to a lengthy look at the fake vulvas: They make you look at it.

With Suzanna Son’s Adeline standing in for Leigh and Marion, and Ed dressed as his own mother rather than Norman Bates as his, the episode cross-cuts immaculately between the shower stabbing and the opening-night audience’s horrified reaction. This time, however, you see the knife stab and slice away at the victim’s naked body, over and over and over again. 

The brilliance of this move lies in how it relies on you, the viewer, to help make it work. That sounds wrong — it’s all right in front of you — but the better you know the original shower scene, the worse the scene is for you. You can probably already hear those horrible knife-in-melon squelching sounds, hear Marion’s gasps and cries and grunts, see the knife rising and falling, see the blood running endlessly down the shower drain. Your brain has already conjured that horror, however many times you’ve seen the movie. 

Once it becomes apparent what the show’s incredibly gutsy, borderline blasphemous act of revealing the violence carefully hidden within Hollywood’s most famous murder is doing, it dawns on you: Oh my god, I’m going to have to see the whole thing. I’m going to watch this man butcher this woman for half a minute. As the dream-Hitchcock says to Perkins during that strange hallucinatory sequence in the fake Gein house, “You’re the one who can’t look away.”

I reviewed the remarkable second episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.

When a crime is so monstrous it defies imagination, imagination sometimes strikes back. To understand the calamity that has befallen the world, to process it in such a way that the mind can move forward, it can enlarge the problem, embellish it, twist it into even more lurid and fantastical forms. Thus the obscene horror of the Holocaust is transmuted into taboo sexuality in the form of Nazispolitation, BDSM-themed books, comics, and movies in which blonde-bombshell SS officers sexually torment their prisoners. And thus fully three of, conservatively, the 20 best horror films ever made — Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs — can be said to originate from the same single, sad, sordid source: Wisconsin farmer and necrophile Ed Gein.

Work as extreme as what Ryan Muphy and creator-writer Ian Brennan have been doing across the Monster series — its first installment tackled Jeffrey Dahmer, its second Lyle and Erik Menendez and their abusive parents — is rare on the small screen. Seeing it done this well is rarer still. Between the two Monster/s seasons and the American Crime Story seasons on O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan, Murphy, whatever his other faults as a filmmaker and impresario, has brought us the four best true-crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Will Monster: The Ed Gein story give us more of the brutal, vital same? 

I’m covering the new season of Monster for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

But beyond that, what’s the meaning of Alice in Borderland’s finale? Love. That’s always been the meaning of this show. While there are many dystopian life-and-death game shows and movies out there — from Squid Game to The Running Man to Battle Royale to The Hunger Games — they typically stand as commentary on a malevolent force at work in our own world: capitalism, fascism, conformity, the class system, culture-wide callousness towards suffering and death. 

Alice, by contrast, has never struck me as political in this way. The meaning of this show has long been that people should love one another and take care of one another, because it’s the right thing to do. Time and again, people who’ve only just met put their lives on the line, often sacrificing them, for each other. Arisu is granted his final “win” because he volunteered to stay behind so that others might live. 

Since we now know all of this is taking place on the border between life and death, the Borderland now really does feel like some kind of final testing ground for people’s character. Are you gonna go feral and launch a one-person war against everyone in your quest for victory? Or are you gonna create a real community and help it survive? Even the games are structured so that cooperation is key. The Borderland is a harsh judge, and an unfair one, but in its own weird way it’s enforcing the Golden Rule. The basic human dignity of the people around you is worth fighting for, even dying for.

Huh, maybe this show is political after all.

I wrote a servicey piece explaining the Alice in Borderland Season 3 finale for Decider, and as usual I get a little philosophical.

What am I gonna do, complain about that Tokyo Tower sequence, or about characters like Rei and Tetsu and Ryuji, or about A HUNDRED MILLION FLAMING ARROWS? I am not. Even if Alice S3 is the definition of an inessential sequel, “inessential” is not a synonym for “bad” or “not worth watching.” The bottom line is that I like these people a lot, and I like the way Shinsuke Sato puts them through the wringer. That’s enough.

I reviewed the Alice in Borderland finale for Decider.

Alice in Borderland has always been about human relationships first and foremost. It doesn’t have any grand statement to make about capitalism, conformity, wealth inequality, fascism, or anything else you might expect a show in this genre to explore. It’s about coming up with cool, complicated murder games, then watching normal people fight like hell to save strangers they’ve come to care about during the course of the game, or get back to the people they’ve left behind. It’s about the human spirit under adversity — random-ass sci-fi adversity, but adversity nonetheless — and what becomes of that spirt under those circumstances.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Alice in Borderland for Decider.