“3 Body Problem” started out as the television equivalent of a Hans Zimmer composition: a steady crescendo, growing ever more menacing and spectacular. By the time of its bloody, brilliant fifth episode, with its repulsive boat massacre and staggering eye in the sky, it felt like a show capable of going anywhere, doing anything.

Then things simmered down. People spent their time reacting to the crisis. They worked or played hooky, they hid or revealed their feelings, they participated or declined to participate in the war to come. Will spent an episode dying, his friends grieving. (Also inserting his brain into a jar to be fired at an alien fleet, but definitely grieving.) Even so, given the relentless ante-raising of the show’s first five hours, the whole thing screamed “the calm before the storm.”

Well, the season finale has come and gone, and there’s no storm in sight. It wasn’t the calm before the storm. It was all just … calm.

I reviewed the season finale of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

The problem is that compared to a Cyclopean eye in the sky or a boat getting sliced to pieces by an invisible web out of Stephen King’s “The Mist,” none of this is all that interesting. From the very first episode, it was apparent that ideas and images, not compelling characters and a novel plot, were the strength of “3 Body Problem.” Leaning into the characters makes the whole thing lopsided.

I reviewed the seventh episode of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

It had to let up at some point. After five escalating episodes in which each ending was more spectacularly grim than the last, “3 Body Problem” took its foot off the gas for its sixth outing. It’s hard to begrudge an eight-episode literary adaptation a bit of breathing room.

I reviewed episode six of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

To Raj, it looks like the plan has failed. Using the experimental nanofibers developed by Auggie Salazar, finally free of that maddening alien countdown, now that the Shan-Ti have cut off contact with their faithful, they’ve constructed an invisible net that seems ready to catch the ship. Given how the team is talking about casualties, sinking seems the more likely outcome.

But to all appearances, the gigantic repurposed oil tanker is cruising right through the Panama Canal, passing by the support beams across which the nano-net has been stretched. Raj, who inherited his ends-justify-the-means attitude from his war-hero father, has long suspected Auggie’s heart isn’t in the project, since she’s pretty much told him so to his face. He suspects sabotage. He leans in toward her in the command center. “Why isn’t it working?” he asks her accusingly.

The camera shifts focus from his face to hers. “It is,” she says, never taking her eyes off the monitor showing her the ship.

It was at this point that I said, out loud, “Oh, this is going to be gnarly.”

I reviewed the fifth episode of 3 Body Problem, featuring one of the most admirably disgusting things ever aired on television, for the New York Times.

Yet for all their apparent screw-ups, the San-Ti’s servants still appear to be on the winning side of Earth’s future history. Thanks to the script by Madhuri Shekar and the ghoulish confidence projected by Rosalind Chao as Wenjie, the arrival and triumph of the aliens is once again made to feel like a foregone conclusion — about as stoppable as a zombie outbreak in the opening minutes of a movie with the word “Dead” in the title.

If anything, I wonder if that’s the kind of story we find ourselves in. (For the record: I enjoyed “Game of Thrones” having already read George R.R. Martin’s source novels, and I’m enjoying “3 Body Problem” without having done so with Liu Cixin’s.) Unlike earlier apocalyptic series like “The Walking Dead,” which dispensed with the story’s prologue — the “uh-oh, something really bad is about to happen, in fact it’s already started” segment — in the first few minutes, “3 Body Problem” is taking a nice, leisurely approach to watching the blade fall on humanity’s collective neck. The tension is delightfully excruciating.

I reviewed the fourth episode of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

More important, though, while the coming invasion feels unstoppable and fear-inducing, it is also a lot of fun. Invasion and apocalypse stories are just stories about slashers or vampires writ large, in which the monster is multiplicitous and the victim all of humanity instead of just a bunch of foolish teenagers or wan Englishwomen and their suitors. Much as we dread seeing people get what’s coming, there’s an undeniable allure to watching the worst-case scenario play out — as long as it’s happening safely onscreen.

I reviewed the third episode of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

Clearly, fans of spooky technology have much to enjoy in this episode. On one side you’ve got the unfathomable sophisticated video game of unknown origin, and on the other a good old-fashioned scary radio transmission. The video game stuff, however, feels airless and stale, despite the gorgeous CGI vistas and bizarre body-horror moments. In a story where so many things are happening in the real world, it’s tough to get that worked up about the goings-on of a virtual one.

The “Do not answer” broadcast, on the other hand, fits into a long lineage of paranormal communications both on and off screen. It’s explicitly linked to the so-called “Wow signal,” the aforementioned anomaly detected by OSU, and it’s reminiscent of eerie phenomena like numbers stations, or staticky calls from disappearing planes above the mythic Bermuda Triangle. In movie terms, I couldn’t shake a flattering comparison to the dream broadcast from “Year One-Nine-Nine-Nine” in John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness.” But the horror trope of the final warning before the plunge is a nearly universal one, embodied by all the old men in slasher franchises who warn groups of oblivious teens not to travel to a masked killer’s stalking grounds. Perhaps a slasher on galactic scale is firing up his chain saw with Earth as his destination even now.

I reviewed the very good second episode of 3 Body Problem for the New York Times.

We’re in the early going yet, but it would be a tough sell to say the plot and the characters are strong suits of “3 Body Problem.” The actors are entertaining, but so far they’re playing not much more than broad personality types engaged in a mildly interesting sci-fi mystery. Chao has the more dramatic backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, depicted here as a full-on “1984” meets “The Crucible” dystopian nightmare, to play against — not to mention the more dramatic setting of that satellite installation. But it’s a low bar to clear.

No, it’s the imagery that lingers more than anything else. The colossal transmitter, roosting at the cliff’s edge like an enormous bird of prey. The gradual way the countdown clock emerges into Auggie’s consciousness, from a blur on a karaoke video to a full-on superimposition over the face of anyone she tries to talk to. The uncanny sight of the stars flickering as one. Can the story and the characters rise to that level?

I’m covering 3 Body Problem for the New York Times, starting with my review of the premiere. This is the first time they’ve ever done episodic reviews for an all-at-once season launch.

By now, all Blackthorne wants to do is take his ship and his crew and go home. He feels he’s upheld his end of his deal with Toranaga. But following that punishing conversation with Lady Mariko, she refuses to translate accurately for him anymore, and his pleas go unheeded.

But John Blackthorne has a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time. His shipwreck on the shores of Japan placed him in grave danger, but it was also what gave him the chance to alert Lord Toranaga, the closest thing Japan has to a ruler, to the perfidy of his Portuguese allies. He winds up a prisoner, but his imprisonment allows Toranaga to delay, and then escape, his impeachment and execution.

Now, just moments after Mariko sabotages his request to leave, he bears witness to an earthquake and a landslide — the kind of natural disaster that horrified him when Mariko first told him about such occurrences.

The landslide gives Blackthorne the opportunity to spring into action, find Lord Toranaga buried beneath the dirt and help drag the man to safety. The Anjin slaps Toranaga on the back a few times until he coughs up the last of the dirt blocking his airway, and then gives Toranaga the swords gifted to him earlier by Lady Fuji, an act just as impressive to this audience in its way. Once again, by finding himself in a jam, Blackthorne is also perfectly positioned to prove his worth to the man on whom his life depends. He is the luckiest unlucky man on television.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

Despite all its hallmarks of a real nail-biter — an escape in disguise, a firefight in a forest, a heroic last stand, a race at sea — this episode fails as action filmmaking.

The director Charlotte Brandstrom, late of the tepid fantasy series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” chronicles various exciting things going on. Ishido, Toranaga and the Christian forces fight a three-way battle in a forest by firelight. Buntaro makes his brave stand against dozens of goons on the dock. Blackthorne races against his foul-mouthed Catholic frenemy Rodrigues as they steer their ships into and out of danger. All of these incidents seem, on paper, to be the stuff of crackerjack action filmmaking.

Unfortunately, pointing a camera at action, while necessary for action filmmaking, is not the only criterion for success. Too much of the nominal excitement is filmed at a remove — medium-wide shots that neither give the full lay of the land nor immerse viewers in the physicality of combat. There’s no actual surprise in the surprise attack in the forest, no attempt made to root us in the experiences of the besieged, no fight choreography that communicates the peril of battling two enemy forces at once, as Toranaga, Blackthorne and the surprisingly well-trained Mariko do.

You don’t feel the arrows whizzing by, the way you do in, say, the battle scenes in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” films. You don’t feel the chaos of that nighttime battle. You don’t feel Buntaro’s blend of desperation and terrifying skill as he holds at bay a dock full of assailants. You don’t feel the risk of that game of chicken Blackthorne and Rodrigues are playing, not when your primary view is two guys with their hands on the rudder. You don’t feel much of anything.

The lighting is a persistent problem in this regard. Both the blue-gray of the nighttime scenes and the blinding haze of daytime at sea make the show feel not so much surreal as unreal, like action taking place in a digital no-man’s-land.

I reviewed last night’s mixed Shōgun for the New York Times.

Of the two episodes in this initial offering, the former is by far the weaker. For one thing, it falls victim to a bad case of first episode syndrome: a tendency to front-load shows with attention-grabbing material that is much blunter and broader than what follows. (I always think of “Billions,” which opened with a bound and gagged Paul Giamatti being used as a human ashtray and toilet.)

Here, the voyeurism and torture had something of the air of “This ain’t your average samurai story”; the very expensive but rather staid look of the series, with all the usual medieval peasant grime and aristocratic splendor, gives lie to that claim, at least visually. At any rate, when you’re killing babies in side plots and boiling men alive onscreen in your very first outing, where do you go from there?

You go in an entirely different direction, as it turns out. It’s not that the second episode lacks for spectacle: the murderous rescue of Blackthorne by Yabushige’s “bandits,” and the genuinely shocking rampage of a maid-turned-assassin through Toranaga’s quarters on the hunt for Blackthorne, provide plenty. What does the trick is exposition, of all things. The multiple scenes in which characters are given the lay of the land — Father Martin and Blackthorne explaining to Toranaga their nations’ conflict; a Franciscan prisoner describing Toranaga’s rivals to Blackthorne; Blackthorne outlining the Spanish/Portuguese conspiracy for world domination to the court — may be inelegant, but they sure are engaging.

These expository dialogues add much-needed density to the comparatively airy first episode. Suddenly, a straightforward adventure story about a cool lord and a fish out of water is a complex latticework of countries, religions, underlings, rivalries, assassinations, alliances and conspiracies — all on top of the basic culture clash that drives Blackthorne’s narrative. Threats can come at any character from any direction. Simply staying alive requires both Blackthorne and Toranaga to bob and weave like they’re making their way through razor wire, and one wrong move will slice them to ribbons.

I reviewed the double series premiere of Shōgun for the New York Times.

Mourning a coworker you’ve never physically met is a motherfucker. You grieve, and when people ask why you apologize instead of unburdening. Caveats, explanations, I can’t imagine what the people who were really close to her must be feeling. (The last of these, at least, has the benefit of being heartfelt.) Who am I, you ask yourself, to miss this person who was only ever a face on a Zoom call to me? To be this upset is stealing valor, you say to yourself. To be this sad is embarrassing. 

But to have worked with her, been inspired by her, felt in some way bettered by your time with her, and still somehow be embarrassed to miss her? It won’t do. No, it won’t do, if only because it’s so difficult to imagine Cecilia Gentili being embarrassed herself. She could not have amassed such a record of concrete accomplishment, in so many fields and on so many fronts, if she’d wasted her time apologizing for how she felt. If she felt strongly enough about something, in fact, the world would hear about it.

I wrote about Cecilia Gentili, a co-writer and colleague of mine in the New York Times trans solidarity letter campaign, for Defector. I’m very sad she’s gone.

I am a little embarrassed by how hard Cecilia’s death has hit me. It feels like stealing valor, you know? Based on her memorial last night the number of people whose lives she transformed for the better — and I mean hand to hand, person to person, on a retail basis — is beyond count. That’s even before you get to whatever exponent of that number benefitted from the work she did or the example she set.

I’m one of the latter. I worked with Cecilia in organizing the New York Times trans letter campaign, which I can say without fear of contradiction would not have been what it was without her. It’s not just the doors her name opened, the connections she worked, the people impressed enough by seeing “Cecilia Gentili” listed at the top to sign beneath. It was the sense that she would not be wasting her time with this if it weren’t important, or wasting her time with the rest of us if we were doing a rotten job. If Cecilia was on board, then we were on the right track.

I never got to meet Cecilia in person. We arranged everything over the internet, so she was a face and voice on Zoom to me more than anything else. But that was enough. That’s how she thanked me one time for helping to get the project off the ground, and I remember she just seemed so happy that people from outside the community were doing things like that. I mean, what can you even say when Cecilia Gentili tells you “good job”? “You’re very welcome, important figure in New York City queer history, I appreciate it”? I think I just blushed and grinned.

Cecilia was a part of the best thing I’ve ever done in my life and now she’s gone. That’s hard. That’s fucking hard. Thank you, Cecilia. Thank you so much.

The demimondes depicted by the American master Martin Scorsese vary widely — his New York stories alone span three centuries — but they have one common requirement: It takes intelligence, of one kind or another, to navigate them. His protagonists are smart, street smart, shrewd, skillful or some combination of those qualities as a rule.

That rule is broken in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Normally, a character like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a World War I veteran turned henchman in a plot to murder Osage people for their oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma — would either rise to the top of his uncle Bill Hale’s organization, or wise up and fight to stop it on his own. Ernest does neither, precisely because he lacks the qualities Scorsese has spent a lifetime depicting.

I wrote a little visual essay about Killers of the Flower Moon and Martin Scorsese protagonists for the New York Times.

Am I at a loss for words over the series finale of “Billions”? That depends. Do hooting and hollering count as “words”?

There’s no other way to put this: In its final hour, “Billions” delivered, and delivered, and delivered. It saw what it needed to do — spend 45 minutes beating the living snot out of Mike Prince, and the remaining 15 minutes depicting beloved characters being really nice to each other for a change — and by God did it. In the process, it gave us that rarest of prestige-TV commodities: a happy ending.

I reviewed the marvelous series finale of Billions for the New York Times. I’m gonna miss this wild show.

Since “Billions” first aired, shows taking on the very wealthy have become both common and popular. But shows like “Succession,” “The White Lotus,” even a horror story like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” are often satirical. “Billions” is frequently funny, but the intent feels different.

LEVIEN This was not a satire. It’s a drama with comedic moments, but that’s different than a satire. These characters are perhaps exaggerated in some ways, but we’re not sending up the rich. That wasn’t our goal here. It was more to let people into a world we felt we’d identified — yes, with our spin and our point of view, but not so that we could all huddle together and laugh and feel better than them.

KOPPELMAN There’s an absurdism to “Billions,” for sure, but that’s because the world right now is capital-A Absurdist. The show has to capture that spirit.

On the eve of the series finale, I spoke to co-creators and showrunners David Levien and Brian Koppelman about Billions for the last time (sniff!) for the New York Times.

Whatever may eventually happen with this almost vestigial story line, it doesn’t here. There’s no big prestige to whatever trick the writers Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Beth Schacter are pulling, not in this episode anyway. This one really is as simple as two groups vying for an alliance with a minor character we’ve seen only once, ahead of revealing her pick. Forgive me, but I still have visions of that fabulous shock ending from Season 2’s penultimate episode dancing in my head, a level of scheming, skulduggery and surprise that I want to see again before the curtain closes.

We may yet get it. I simply refuse to believe that a show this beautifully bombastic won’t go out with a bang, in a finale with more twists and turns than a Mario Kart racetrack. Keep in mind that while the opposing armies seem pretty firmly established, they have every possibility of fracturing, reconfiguring or turning on themselves. Which leads to the biggest question of all, and no, it’s not whether Chuck and Axe can stop Mike Prince — it’s whether they will be back at each other’s throats if and when they do.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Billions ever for the New York Times.

A common criticism of “Billions” is that its constant pop-culture references can seem forced. This time around, that’s the idea, as Prince bobbles two separate Quentin Tarantino references during the standoffs with Bobby that begin and end the show. Axe goes so far as to point this out — sure, it’s the show hanging a lampshade on what is either a tic or a signature, but it makes sense.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Ain’t it grand? Beyond the wealth porn and barrage of pop-culture and sports references, the charm of “Billions” has always been that it is simply a well-made financial thriller, written by smart people who, like the characters they chronicle, enjoy being five steps ahead of everyone else. Personally, I love that feeling. I love not knowing what Chuck is up to, or whether Prince can root out the conspirators before they close ranks with Chuck, or what fate worse than death Prince is planning for his enemies once he has them in his clutches. I love being outsmarted by a television show, and that is the stock in trade of “Billions.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Is “Billions” the most chilling show on television right now? And I’m not talking about the wintry setting of this week’s episode. Like virtually every episode since Prince’s presidential ambitions became clear, “The Owl” casts an unflinching eye on the danger posed to American democracy by megalomaniacal strongmen, by the ultra-rich, and especially by the people who are both.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.