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.

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!)