“Hope and wisdom. Which do we value more?”

“Even if the entire world has turned into zombies, let’s not despair.”

“We need hope more than logic.”

The trapped kids at the core of All of Us Are Dead’s narrative understand how important it is to believe in a light at the end of the tunnel, to forego despair in favor of a belief that, somehow, things will turn out alright. Unfortunately for them, there’s little evidence to support their hopes at present. And if the episode’s surprise ending is any indication, things may well get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all.

I reviewed the fifth episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

Jam-packed with action, humor, pathos, pitch-black cynicism, bright-eyed optimism, cutting social commentary, and major character developments across the entire sprawling cast, the fourth episode of All of Us Are Dead seems to be where the series has truly found its stride. If it keeps up this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, the copious comparisons to Squid Game may well be earned.

I reviewed the fourth episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

One of the unwritten rules that govern many apocalypse stories is the commandment “thou shalt not kill.” I was first exposed to this ethos in Stephen King’s The Stand, in which the character Nadine Cross comes to believe that killing anyone, after so many billions of people have died from a superflu, is the worst sin anyone can commit. She winds up eating those words, but they’ve stuck with me ever since, no matter what kind of apocalypse drama I’m watching. It’s a big part of why the kill-or-be-killed ethos of The Walking Dead has always rubbed me the wrong way—and it’s why I found this episode of All of Us Are Dead to be the most impressive one so far. 

I reviewed the third episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

Now comes the big question: Is All of Us Are Dead good horror filmmaking? I’d say no—but with a big fat caveat, so don’t get mad at me just yet. Frightening the audience is the lifeblood of horror as a genre, and I said in my review of the All Of Us Are Dead Episode 1, there’s nothing here that’s actually scary. Gross and violent? Absolutely. Thrilling and chilling, in a Halloween haunted-house kind of way? Sure. Keep-you-up-at-night, jumping-at-shadows scary? Not from where I’m sitting.

You could maybe make an argument that, insofar as the apocalypse is a frightening concept, all zombie apocalypse films are frightening on a basic what-if level. But when you get to the point where the characters themselves are doing light comedy about how this is just like a zombie movie—Cheong-san compares it to the Korean zombie blockbuster Train to Busan—that end-times fear is pretty much evaporated.

Ah, but is All of Us Are Dead good action filmmaking? Here I’d have to say that the answer is yes. I mean, what else can you say about a show that revolves around kill-or-be-killed battles in enclosed spaces like classrooms and hallways, like it’s Oldboy or a Marvel/Netflix show? So what if the protagonists are students rather than vigilantes, and the enemies are ravening zombie hordes rather than armies of goons? The underlying principle is the same.

I reviewed the second episode of All of Us Are Dead for Decider.

Are there hints that there may be more to the show than meets the standard-zombie-fare eye? I think there are. Certainly, what appears to be the underlying concept—a concerned parent concocted a zombie rage virus in hopes that it would help his outcast son defend himself against bullies—is a powerful one, if you’ve ever been bullied or are the parent of a kid who has. That it appears to have backfired horribly, leading to more and worse violence rather than less—well, there’s your social commentary about the inevitable endgame of redemptive, retributive bloodshed. We’ll see if this underlying theme, coupled with some pretty strong zombie visuals, is enough to keep the show up and running.

I’m covering Netflix’s new Korean zombie series All of Us Are Dead for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Station Eleven’s core belief is that even amid the worst of things, at least a few people will look out for a few people more. Sometimes this takes the form of art, created to bring joy to people’s otherwise difficult lives, but it can take other forms as well. Jeevan’s long-ago care for Kirsten didn’t save the world, any more than Miranda’s phone call to the pilot of that stranded airplane did. But they both saved some people, and in the world of this powerful, humane series, perhaps that will do. 

I reviewed the series finale of Station Eleven for Decider.

There’s still one episode to go, and I suppose it could settle the question of whether Kirsten and Jeevan wound up happier apart than they would have been together. But there’s a beautifully sad moment from early in the episode that I keep thinking about. In the suburban house where he was attacked (he wound up knocking his attacker out), Jeevan finds a synthesizer keyboard; the father of the family who lived there, all of whom died before he did, had programmed it to “play” snippets of his wife and children’s voices. It’s a gutwrenching moment, hearing all those happy children with no idea what was coming their way. But what an incredible way to preserve their memory—indeed, to recreate the entire phenomenon of memory, our brains’ way of taking snippets of the past and constructing them into a story, or something more like a melody. What melody will Kirsten wind up playing in the end?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

Station Eleven doesn’t bounce between timeframes and plotlines, it glides between them. This can make writing episodic reviews—recaps, in the parlance of our times—a dicey proposition. Any given episode can show you the same character in extremis at different points in his or her life, for entirely different reasons. How do you determine which outburst or confrontation is more important? The show can can insert crucial moments in a character’s growth, in their understanding of the world and art’s place in it—not to mention their own—in a flashback that lasts mere seconds, between minutes of meaty material set in the here-and-now. How do you pull it all apart and piece it back together in a linear way, a way that makes sense?

I reviewed episode eight of Station Eleven for Decider.

As is by now custom with Station Eleven, this episode (marvelously written by Kim Steele and directed by Lucy Tcherniak) is ripe with powerful details. Jeevan telling Kirsten everything’s going to be okay, and Kirsten replying that he’d just said “We’re fucked,” out loud. Jeevan “talking” to his dead sister, and the younger Kirsten showing her older self that this behavior started long before they staked out a cabin in the woods. Frank’s addiction, a direct result of war trauma, and Jeevan’s impatience with it: “We’re not heroin people. We’re barely even weed people!” The lone, Stand-esque voice on the television, fatalistically explaining how no one was prepared for “a flu that does not incubate, it just explodes…a one out of one thousand survival rate.” The terrific visual of the free-standing door that Kirsten passes through to access her memories. Older Kirsten crying at her youthful self’s optimism as she sings “The First Noel” to her new guardians. The passively suicidal Frank, who does not want to leave the familiarity of his apartment even though cold and starvation are now serious threats, refusing to vacate his home for the knife-wielding interloper. Kirsten’s adoption of the killer’s knife as a totem and her signature weapon.

It’s not a perfect episode; the costumes for Kirsten’s play are childlike only in the sense of adults trying to make something look childlike, and it takes you out of an important moment. But it’s a powerful episode nonetheless, in a series that seems to stack one such episode on top of the next. Like logs, or like bodies.

I reviewed episode seven of Station Eleven for Decider.

They can’t all swing for the fences.

Titled “Survival Is Insufficient”—there’s no particular relationship I can detect between the title and the content; it’s almost like they just grabbed a phrase from the Station Eleven graphic novel out of a hat, but whatever—this is the slightest episode of the series so far. Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine! Sometimes you just need to push the story in a certain direction, making incremental progress toward your eventual goal. (This used to be much more of a thing in the days of twelve-to-thirteen-episode prestige-TV seasons, but even early seasons of, say, Game of Thrones bear this tendency. You learn to live with it.)

I reviewed the sixth episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

Written by Cord Jefferson and directed by Lucy Tcherniak, this is a dense, rich episode—seriously, I’ve barely touched on the soccer team, and I haven’t even mentioned the nuns, or Clark rejecting Miles’s romantic advances because he’s grieving for his dead partner, or Clark spending most of his time blasted out of his skull on booze and MDMA he found in the belongings of the fake Homeland Security agent. (And that magnificent beard of his!) It’s the kind of thing you point to when you want to say no, the New Golden Age of Television is not over, there’s still enormously moving and intelligent work being done, coincidentally on a subject—pandemics—that now dominates every moment of our waking lives. I’m glad it exists.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

It’s the end of the world, and for good or ill, art lives on. Even art about the end of the world—or a world, or a space-station simulacrum thereof. Station Eleven Episode 4 is all about art’s ability to soothe or exacerbate the world’s wounds; even its title, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead,” cheekily paraphrases the name of Tom Stoppard’s play, itself a riff on Hamlet, a play performed in a modernized version by the characters in the show. Sample quote: “Fuck you, Hamlet.” Times have changed, and art changes with the times. Even the End Times.

I reviewed episode four of Station Eleven for Decider.

In a way, this is Station Eleven’s origin story. Not the origin of the flu that wipes out humanity, nor the origin of any of the characters we’ve come to care about in the series’ previous two episodes. No, this is the origin of Station Eleven itself—the graphic novel that gives the series its title. In this installment (“Hurricane”), we spend time with the book’s creator, cartoonist and logistics expert Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler), as she navigates life, love, art, and death—the Big Four of all human endeavor, I’d say. Written by Shannon Houston and directed by Hiro Murai, the episode that results is a minor masterpiece.

I reviewed the third episode of Station Eleven of the initial batch of three released by HBO Max this week. Comparisons to The Leftovers are more than justified.

I’ll tell you when I lost it during Station Eleven’s second episode.

I reviewed the second episode of Station Eleven for Decider. Couldn’t make it through this one without crying.

When I say Station Eleven makes for difficult viewing, I’m referring to its subject matter: a flu pandemic that shatters society virtually overnight, effectively bringing about the end of the world. All the signs and signifiers we’ve learned from our own experience with a very real global pandemic are there: the overtaxed hospitals, the confusing news updates, the panicked grocery store runs, the fear of contact with other people coupled with the desperate need to be in contact with other people. Bonus points if you have or care about children: You’ll recognize he constant calculations you make to keep them as safe, happy, and healthy as possible in a world growing scarier by the second. 

Sure, the situation in Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel) is far more dire even than our own. But barring a murdered security guard here, a delirious victim in a stuck SUV there, or a presumably flu-induced plane crash in the middle of a major metropolitan area, it’s all too recognizable from our vantage point here in late 2021, with eight hundred thousand dead Americans and a host of ghoulish politicians and pundits attempting to profit from the carnage. It’s bound to be more than many viewers can bear.

That said, bearing it is easier than you’d think.

I’m covering Station Eleven for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. This is going to be a hard, hard sell for a lot of people, but based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s worth it.

Gretchen Felker-Martin and I discuss the monsters of Nick Antosca’s Channel Zero in the latest episode of our TV podcast Cut to Black. Start off the Halloween weekend right!

But the most compelling aspect of BNCF is its refusal to hold the audience’s hand. Tried-and-true TV tropes such as, you know, likable characters and relatable protagonists are largely swept aside; in their place are people who grow and change and run wild like the overgrown vine that gradually takes over Lisa’s apartment. Characters lie, they obfuscate, they hide their true origins and intentions. The “good guys” are difficult and often dangerous; the “bad guys” reveal hidden depths of genuine emotion; innocent people live or die — well, they mostly die — for no good reason at all. Lisa and Boro are the trickiest of all: The former shape-shifts from a wronged ingenue into a bloody force of nature, while the latter seems to follow none of the codes of behavior that typically govern witches in fiction. It’s impossible to predict what either will do from one moment to the next, let alone from episode to episode.

And everyone — seriously, everyone — is amoral when amorality suits them. That amorality, that sense that deep down in its bones BNCF is decidedly sleazy, is a breath of fresh fucking air. We live in a cultural climate that increasingly demands that its fiction be easy-to-grasp morality plays with protagonists who model good behavior and antagonists who get what’s coming to them. BNCF devotes far more time to watching characters vomit up kittens than learning lessons.

Maybe that’s the real magic of BNCF: All the characters do things that make them “deserve” comeuppance, but when the comeuppance comes, it’s virtually always worse than what they deserve. You can’t make sense of it because, in its hallucinogenic horrors, there’s no sense to be made. There’s no moral to the story beyond what you make of it. During this spooky season, that’s a flavor worth savoring.

I wrote about Nick Antosca & Lenore Zion’s wonderful horror series Brand New Cherry Flavor for Vulture.

SPOILERS AHEAD

A matter of hours. That’s how long the dominion of the vampires reigns over Crockett Island, from their orgy of death in St. Patrick’s Church to their demise in the morning sun in this, the seventh and final episode of Midnight Mass. This is not to say that Crockett Island survives the night, anymore than they do. By the time they all (well, almost all—more on this later) accept their fate and greet the dawn, they’ve killed and partially devoured everyone else on the island, converting many of them into killers in turn—a grim tide of slaughter we watch slowly overtake the island, dragging people screaming from their houses, falling upon them in the streets as they flee. They’ve burned every building on the island, with the exception of the church, burned by their erstwhile leader, and the rec center, burned by one of their own. The boats on which they were counting to spread their religious contagion to the mainland have been burned by their enemies. They are all dead. Their enemies—Erin Greene, Sheriff Hassan, Dr. Gunning—are all dead. The island is dead. There are two survivors.

I reviewed the finale of Midnight Mass for Decider. This was a very good show.

Utter chaos follows. An orgy of death and violence breaks out in the church, as people poison themselves and die vomiting blood, then rise up to kill and consume the few who resisted this miniature, supernatural Jonestown. Director and cowriter Mike Flanagan lingers on this for a long, long time—echoing the way he shot a candlelit procession of singing congregants for over three minutes, long enough for them to sing an entire hymn—and the effect is profoundly disturbing, a genuine violation of cultural taboo. It’s like watching someone lance a boil from which all the evil done in God’s name bursts out like pus.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Midnight Mass for Decider.

I don’t know where creator/director/showrunner/co-writer Mike Flanagan is going to go with this story in the end, and certainly the hopepunk makeover he gave to Shirley Jackson’s brutal The Haunting of Hill House inspires little confidence. But so far—so far—he sure does seem to be likening Roman Catholicism and Christianity more broadly to, yes, a vampire, profiting off the suffering of the communities on which it battens itself. And that’s something worth a personal confession, of sorts.

The priest who confirmed me was a child molester, and you can read legendary newspaperman Jimmy Breslin’s column about the horror he wrought right here, if you can stomach it. A priest on the faculty of my all-boys Catholic high school was a predator as well; last time I checked, he enjoyed a Vatican sinecure. So even aside from wider questions of doctrine, of historical atrocities, of Catholicism’s role as a bastion of present-day right-wing revanchism from the Supreme Court on down, I get it.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Midnight Mass for Decider.