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.

I’m calling it right now: If you’re afraid of heights, and I sure am, this episode of Alice in Borderland is the scariest hour of television you’ll see all year. I’d say it’s scarier than the similarly heights-based games in this year’s Squid Game, for the simple reason that none of us have ever seen a colossal game arena in real life. All of us, however, have seen towers and bridges and under-construction skyscrapers that are nothing but a pile of bolted-together metal for hundreds and hundreds of feet in the air. Hell, if you’ve ever looked up at the catwalks in a basketball arena and freaked out a little bit, you know what I mean. 

Anytime I even think of this stuff I get the shivers and shakes. Making me watch this nightmarish episode, in which half of our heroes are forced to climb Tokyo Tower by hand? Let me see what I wrote in my notes: “THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE FUCKING NIGHTMARE FOR ME” — boldface and all caps in the original — followed by “oh i hate it, oh i hate it so much lol.”

The “lol” is the give away. I hated it so much! I loved it!

I reviewed episode four of Alice in Borderland for Decider.

This remains such a fun, inventive show. It’s capable of recognizing when it needs to course-correct, following up the complex zombie card game with a very basic round “dodge the flying killer frisbees.” The nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, meanwhile, is a still-provocative image that calls to mind the lethal terrorist attacks by a religious cult years ago. The canaries are a great visual, too. 

And Ryuji emerges now as a compelling antagonist — the kind of explorer in the further regions of experience obsessed with going beyond the limits that drove the narrative of the first two Hellraiser films. This is an archetype I like a lot, and as with so much else in this show, I like it here plenty. 

I reviewed the third episode of Alice in Borderland‘s third season for Decider.

I dreaded watching this episode of Alice in Borderland. Not because I’m squeamish, or sensitive, or artistically or philosophically opposed to random acts of gratuitous violence. It’s just that I like my gratuitous violence to mean something, man. If I’m going to watch characters get senselessly mowed down in agonizing terror for an hour at a stretch, I want to know they did so in order for the filmmakers to make a statement about the wielding of power against the powerless, however personal or political you want to make it. I want to know those characters died for a purpose.

That’s never been Alice’s strong suit. This isn’t Squid Game, with its candy-colored Verhoevenesque anti-capitalism. This is just a bunch of cool violent shit happening to nice people who deserve better and try and help each other. I feel for the characters of course, but their plight seems very arbitrary and narrow. I don’t foresee circumstances in which getting sucked into a warp-zone afterlife where you get shot by lasers reveals much about the human experience, you know?

But here’s the thing: The moment you shoot a flaming arrow through some rando redshirt’s neck, all my objections go up in smoke. So to speak.

I reviewed the second episode of Alice in Borderland‘s third season for Decider.

Adapted by writer-director Shinsuke Sato from the manga of the same name by Haro Aso, Alice in Borderland is one of the most complex, complicated, convoluted TV shows I’ve ever covered. The obvious point of comparison is Squid Game, but with more players, way more games, and way more uncertainty as to what the hell is even going on. 

This premiere clears a lot of that uncertainty right up. Obviously it’s possible the show is just straight-up lying to us, but it certainly appears as if Arisu’s adventure’s in Borderland took place during a near-death experience that plunged many people into a sort of shared consciousness where the games took place in classic “if you die in the dream, you die in real life” fashion. 

Now, this obviously still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. If this is just some dream world, why do all the games involve guns, booby traps, and other relatively realistic means of killing people? Why are they themed around a deck of playing cards? Is it connected in a direct way to the meterorite, in the sense that its origin is extraterrestrial? How is Banda able to pass to and fro? Has this happened before, and if so where and when and how often?

But still, given the show’s adamant refusal to answer a damn thing for nigh on two seasons, this return felt like finding the answer key to a chemistry exam. What’s more, there’s no new normal to familiarize yourself with that takes more than two seconds to get accustomed to: “Oh wow, Arisu and Usagi are married now? Cool, good for them.” And other than Ryuji, there aren’t any new characters to familiarize yourself with, not yet anyway. This may be the easiest Season 3 premiere I’ve ever had to review, from a “recapping the action” perspective.

To me, however, the standout moment isn’t any of the explanations receive. It’s not even the disgusting electrocution sequence, as fun as that is if you’re a gorehound. It’s Arisu’s long twilit walk from the sanitarium to the game zone through the cobalt-blue streets of empty Tokyo. It’s then that it truly feels we’re on the border of some new and terrible thing. At least, so I hope.

I reviewed the season premiere of Alice in Borderland for Decider. I’m covering this whole season in the next few days as well!

Noah Hawley has done what countless unfortunate employees of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation have been unable to do for nearly 50 years: He brought Aliens to Earth successfully.

I reviewed the season finale of Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

I’m also not convinced this is going to go well for the (noticeably wide-eyed) Boy Kavalier. This is a man used to being the smartest guy in the room — or used to being told he is, anyway. It doesn’t occur to him that even as he’s figuring out how best to make use of the eyeball, the eyeball is determining the same thing about him. These monsters have already destroyed a robot so sophisticated it was presumed to be nearly indestructible. The hubris of the powerful is a much softer target.

I reviewed tonight’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

What happened out there? How does a crew with the competence level of the people we’ve seen aboard the Maginot round up not only the universe’s deadliest alien, but several comparably awful creatures? How do you even set foot on a planet where these monsters run wild without getting your head bitten off or your lungs sucked out the moment you take five steps from your landing craft? Is there some kind of big cosmic zoo out there, constructed by more sophisticated aliens, that our Weyland-Yutani pals simply burglarized?

I reviewed this week’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

What manner of man becomes a Morrow? I don’t mean a cyborg, though this flashback episode of “Alien: Earth” gives us that answer: The chief security officer of the doomed spaceship Maginot was once a “feral street kid with a palsied arm.” He was “taken in” by a long-ago Ms. Yutani, the grandmother of the woman who is currently in charge of her family’s mega-corporation. She, or the company she ran, gave him his mechanically enhanced, transforming arm.

In exchange, he gave Yutani a lifetime. More than a lifetime, in fact.

It’s never been clear what tempts people to take jobs on Weyland-Yutani’s long-haul space flights. By the time the gig is over, you’ll have spent years, perhaps decades in cryo-sleep, frozen in stasis while the world moves on without you. Morrow already mentioned that he had a little girl back home who died long ago; now we know the circumstances.

Morrow clearly joined the mission in order to permanently provide for his little girl, whose painfully cute pet name for him is “Dadabear.” But eight years into the journey, Morrow received word from the Company that his daughter died in a house fire. A printed-out memo indicates 53 years would have to pass between Morrow hearing the news and Morrow returning to Earth to collect his daughter’s belongings. By then he might be the only person alive who remembers she existed.

So for the bulk of his time in the cold recesses of space, surrounded by people he doesn’t like, collecting disgusting and deadly creatures capable of wiping out everyone aboard, Morrow has known he has nothing to return to. All this time, all this loss, is for nothing. I think that might break me too.

But nothing can be turned into something if you try hard enough, or if you need it to badly enough. With nothing else to cling to, Morrow now has only two priorities. He must fulfill his mission to bring back the specimens safely to Earth, or it really will have all been for nothing, and that cannot be borne. And he must do so to honor the trust and care shown to him by the chief executive’s grandmother long ago.

I reviewed last week’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

This episode offers us a brief history lesson of the “Alien” world, courtesy of Joe, the still-human brother of the show’s lead “hybrid,” Wendy. (Joe insists sentimentally on using her human name, Marcy.) Joe explains to the childlike hybrids that once upon a time there existed things called governments, in which people voted for how they wanted their world to be run. “It didn’t work,” Joe says simply. So the corporations stepped in, and “apparently, they solved all the problems.” That “apparently” sure feels pointed.

It’s a chilling scene for several reasons. First, every single thing we’ve seen about Boy Kavalier would indicate that this man should be nowhere near the levers of power. The default assumption that the ability to succeed in business or technology makes one a natural leader is one of the fundamentally delusional capitalist beliefs that the “Alien” franchise exists to skewer, ever since the Weyland-Yutani Corporation sent a bunch of long-haul truckers to recover a lethal species of giant parasitical space piranhas in the 1979 film that started it all.

But beyond that, the scene shows how corporate control of education and media eliminates the ability of Joe and the hybrids to understand and articulate the problems facing the world they live in. Democracy “didn’t work”? OK … says who? The five corporations who replaced it? They hardly seem an unbiased source of information. “Apparently, they solved all the problems?” What problems did they solve? And why are there still so many problems now?

I reviewed tonight’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. Gift link!

The “Alien” franchise explores two overlapping nightmares. The first is the Alien, a cold and implacable force against which humanity is defenseless. The second is humanity itself, which through technological hubris and old-fashioned greed might well invite its own destruction. Against the first we are helpless; with the second, we are all too eager to help.

I reviewed tonight’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Hawley is no stranger to playing with other people’s toys. He is also the creator of “Fargo,” the acclaimed crime anthology series based on the film by Joel and Ethan Coen, and “Legion,” an ambitious take on the Marvel Comics mutant character from the writer Chris Claremont and the artist Bill Sienkiewicz. But both of those shows draw from a wider set of influences than simply the work they’re named after; Hawley’s “Fargo,” for example, is a sort of “Songs in the Key of Coen” riff on the brothers’ entire oeuvre rather than just their snowy Minnesotan black comedy.

“Alien: Earth” casts a similarly wide net. In the closing credits, we read that the show is “based on elements created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett,” who developed the first film’s original story (O’Bannon also wrote the screenplay). But obviously, the contributions of Giger, Scott, Cameron and Fincher are all in play as well.

Scott’s “Blade Runner” is referenced in the sprawling cityscape Prodigy City; in the models strutting and posing on oversized video screens; and in Olyphant’s strikingly coifed synthetic, who feels like a tip of the cap to Rutger Hauer’s character, Roy Batty. The creatures are reminiscent of similar beasts from Stephen King’s “It” and “The Mist.” Wendy’s plight bears the marks of the sci-fi anime classics “Akira” and “Battle Angel Alita.” Even the high-rise setting falls squarely in the action-movie lineage of “Die Hard,” “The Raid” and “Dredd.”

None of this is to say the show feels derivative. A product of its influences? Of course — this is franchise filmmaking. But Hawley’s homages are laser-precise. And they make use of techniques rarely seen on big-budget TV, like the leisurely zooms of 1970s cinema. Hawley brings his own penchant for dreamy montage to the proceedings as well, adding an aesthetic ingredient that is new to the setting.

I’m covering Alien: Earth for the New York Times, starting with my review of tonight’s double premiere. (Gift link!)

Are there any self-imposed taboos in your work, like rules that you won’t break?

Yes, there definitely are. Probably a lot of them are not things that I’m immediately conscious of. I won’t put a beautiful girl on the cover of my book, just because I find it boring and kind of pandering, and also obviously kind of misogynist. I guess I don’t really like to put people on the covers of my books at all.

I’m very careful about the way that I depict violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, things like that. I think it’s important to show, and I won’t hide them. There can be a tendency to think it’s fine to show these things as long as you do it properly in a way that it telegraphs your true intentions, so you have to have a disclaimer on every page that says, well, this character is stomping on a duckling, but I would never stomp on a duckling. 

I try to show things like that with as little judgment as possible, because when you encounter those things in real life, they don’t usually come with a disclaimer. And usually when violence suddenly appears in your otherwise violence-free day-to-day life, it is difficult to know how you are supposed to feel about it. So I don’t want to give the reader any help in that regard. 

I also won’t show things that I can’t stomach. So if there’s a certain type of violence that I show, like, for example, I don’t know if I’ve ever shown somebody being burned alive. I think probably not. But if I were to show that, I would do my best to read firsthand accounts of that type of death, people who have come close to it, people have witnessed it, or maybe even watch videos of it if they exist. I mean, to my way of thinking, it’s the least that I can do. 

Like, to honor those who have been burned alive.

I guess it sounds kind of silly when you put it that way. I just don’t think that I have any right to use that as part of my story if I can’t face it. Does that make sense?

Well, you’re taking a lot of time to draw it, so that’s a sustained amount of time where you have to think about it.

Yeah, and that’s part of how I choose the things that I write about. I will purposely choose things that are difficult for me to think about. I really hate drawing close-ups of people screaming. I hate to look at them, but I do sometimes think they’re necessary. So I and make myself do it and I lean into the discomfort for my own sake to feel like I’ve earned it, maybe. It makes my entire process sound very masochistic. It’s like the comic is just a byproduct of my own need to just kind of swim around in the cesspit of human experience. That can’t be healthy.

And yet.

And yet. I mean, it’s more healthy than a lot of other ways that I could be chasing that feeling.

My brilliant friend Matthew Perpetua interviewed my brilliant wife Julia Gfrörer about her brilliant book World Within the World for the Comics Journal! If you’ve ever been curious about her stuff, this is the interview to read.

It insists upon itself. That’s it. That’s the issue with The Last of Us. That bit of not-quite-intelligible criticism that Seth MacFarlane swiped from a film professor and put in the mouth of his Godfather-disliking creation Peter Griffin is, despite coming from The Family Guy, a one hundred percent accurate assessment of this show. Every case is made a bit too strenuously, every loss is rendered a bit too tragically, every act of villainy is heinously unjustifiable, every act of antheroism is justified in its heinousness, every dive for profundity leaves the show with a cracked skull in the shallow end. It aims for the heavens, but it can only play to the cheap seats. It insists upon itself, Lois.

I reviewed the season finale of The Last of Us for Decider.

Ellie doesn’t know the backstory, of course, but she takes Joel’s words on board. “I don’t think I can forgive you for this,” she says. Yeah, no fuckin’ shit, I wrote in my notes. He perpetrated a mass shooting and doomed humanity to a second dark age like a one-man Trump administration, on behalf of a person who would rather have died for the cause. (One of TLoU’s many false binaries is the idea that the only way the Fireflies could find a cure is by killing Ellie; another is that the only way they could bring about her death is through deception, rather than by respecting her autonomy and asking her for this sacrifice.)

But then she adds “…but I would like to try.”

To quote I Think You Should Leave, you sure about that? 

I think it’s perfectly okay not to forgive Joel for what he did, actually. (No matter what Druckmann says in interviews.) I think it is in fact reasonable to demand that members of society, even one being actively atomized by environmental catastrophes and authoritarian governments, consider not only their rights but their responsibilities, not only the good of them and theirs but of everyone and everyone’s. I think a common good exists, and I think it’s meet and right to shun and despise people who do their utmost to destroy it. 

Like most episodes of TLoU, this one makes the most of its gorgeous natural backdrop. Druckman has a real knack for theatrical tableaux — Joel watching Ellie climb a vine-encrusted dinosaur statue, Joel and Ellie walking around a model of the solar system, Ellie and Joel and Gail and Tommy gathered around Eugene’s body. These moments, where the action slows down so both the characters and ourselves can gaze in something in awe or horror or wonderment, are one of the show’s trademarks, and maybe its strongest aesthetic weapon. And again, Mazin is a frequently clever and capable writer; that moth business is going to stick with me.

But The Last of Us has chosen to prioritize a heartwarming father-daughter reunion over, quite literally, the salvation of humankind. The world is awash with men harboring this exact paranoid fantasy, that their proprietary interest in their wives and children absolve them of their bonds to broader humanity and absolve them of any wrongdoing committed in their in-group’s name. They run our country now, as they do others, and they’ve perpetrated real horrors against real people. I’m not interested in trying to forgive them. I think it’s worth considering what this show is asking us to forgive.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

To sum up: This episode is a dull recreation of a kind of gameplay that’s a lot more exciting when you’re actually playing a game, culminating in the hero of the piece torturing a helpless woman. I can only envy you if you find this diverting.

I reviewed this week’s The Last of Us for Decider.