It’s in those final steps of the hunt for the killer that the problems really begin. Kreizler bamboozles Roosevelt and his men so that Kreizler and Moore, already under close watch by Byrnes, could sneak away to the child-killer’s new lair unnoticed. How do they know that this lair is in the Croton Reservoir? How does Sara, whom Kreizler also dupes (reasons unclear), figure out that same thing in turn, arriving at the reservoir just in time to save their lives? There’s some hand-waving about interpreting the killer’s map of the water and sewer systems, a change in his modus operandi, and his apparent obsession with John the Baptist. But that’s all wild guess work, and New York was a really big city — on an island, no less — even during the Gilded Age. Water, water everywhere, yet they know exactly where to go.

The episode ratchets up the tension by including Byrnes and Connor as factors in the final showdown, from a poorly explained scene in which Byrnes monitors our men at the opera house to Connor’s almost comically dogged pursuit of the alienist’s team. But while their acute interest in the case made sense while one of their high-society patrons was under suspicion, it made considerably less sense once that patron was killed by Connor. His involvement in the murder of Laszlo’s beloved Mary seems to be an open secret as well, although this, too, is poorly explained. Now Connor goes to all this trouble just because the police object to the doctor’s newfangled methodology? It simply doesn’t hold up as a motive.

Put it all together, and it feels rushed and forced, as if the filmmakers looked at the clock, realized they were running out of time and did a speed run through the final hour of what until now had been a very meticulous, patient detective story.

I reviewed the finale of The Alienist, a show I never really liked but also kind of enjoyed (??), for the New York Times. Charming performances by Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning, and a slightly harder-to-swallow but still endearing turn from Daniel Brühl, buoyed the proceedings considerably. Still, it never had that spark, you know? That magic. Some shows do and some shows don’t.

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” drawls Attorney General Waylon Jeffcoat to an assemblage of United States attorneys now under his employ, “and you are my deputies. Gonna be one hell of a turkey shoot!”

Well, yes and no. After watching the Season 3 premiere of “Billions,” Showtime’s amusement-park ride of a financial drama, it is clear that the show’s creators and characters are indeed coming out guns blazing. But the new sheriff, known as Jock, hasn’t changed the series’s old winning ways. A boots-on-the-desk Texan played by the dulcet-toned character actor Clancy Brown, Jock Jeffcoat announces he’s pulling the Justice Department away from Wall Street’s white-collar crimes. Elsewhere, the revelation that the unctuous hedge-fund creep Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), previously the show’s comic-relief antagonist, has been named Treasury Secretary is perhaps the best gag of the episode, in that funny-because-it’s-true sort of way.

The premiere is the most direct reference to the advent of the Trump era we’ve seen so far, if not explicitly so. And yet “Billions” is still the story of the hedge-fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), the crafty, crusading prosecutor out to take him down. The two remain uncomfortably connected by Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), Axe’s on-staff therapist and performance coach who’s also Chuck’s wife and dominatrix. Each man is the other’s Ahab, with Wendy playing Ishmael to them all, complemented by one of the strongest supporting casts on television. Trump may have changed the playing field, but the players and the game remain the rollicking, entertaining same.

I’m very excited to be covering Billions for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a terrifically fun show in which the writing just gets tighter and the performances cannier with each passing episode, it seems, so it’s a delight to write about anyplace of course. But writing about it for the Times, where a) the readership could not possibly be more Billions’ target demographic, and b) my reviews will almost certainly be among the most left-wing things the paper publishes, is a little something extra.

You don’t want to reduce an actual human being to an avatar of impersonal forces at work in the world, but Andrew is in one sense the weaponization of all the obstacles that have been placed in all those people’s way by homophobia. Even at Versace’s funeral, the priest performing the ceremony refuses to take his partner’s hand in comfort.

Yeah. All of that is real. We’ve got the footage of the priest pulling his hand away from Antonio. That’s not an inference — we can see it. That priest knew he was on camera, knew he was in front of thousands of people, knew he was at the funeral for this man, and still couldn’t control his hatred. He still felt no need to control it. Versace was so successful he managed to overcome that, which was what was so extraordinary about him. But the whole point of Andrew’s personality was that he wanted to impress people, and he’s born into one of the most marginalized groups in society. That paradox — How can you impress someone when they find you disgusting intrinsically before you even open your mouth? — that’s the conundrum of Andrew.

I think it’s tricky. The most homophobic person in this story is Andrew, by far. When he becomes this killer, he becomes a horrific homophobic bully. It’s like he’s soaked up everything and unleashes it on Lee and Versace. He’s like, “I’m going to shame you. You’ve achieved success and I’m going to rip it down, both through physical destruction, but also through the act of scrutiny and having the world look down upon you.”

Even when he was younger and acting as a welcoming figure in the gay community, he was pushing his racial identity as an Asian American to the side. That’s a stark contrast.

You know, he kind of did both. He wanted to change his name from Cunanan to DeSilva so he could say he’s Portuguese rather than from the Philippines. Then he was saying he was Israeli. So yeah, he would push the racial thing to one side. But the sexual thing is interesting, if you look at the way his life tracks. He can’t deal with anyone who might be critical. If he met someone who was homophobic and he wanted to be friends, he would say that he was straight, or that he had a wife and a daughter. He would play the audience. Eventually he went into an audience of these older men that he didn’t have to play to, because he was instantly impressive. He was younger and witty and clever and appreciated. Once he lost that audience, he hit rock bottom.

There’s this moment we never managed to get into the show which I’ve always thought captured something about Andrew. He was at a party when his descent was really accelerating, and no one was paying attention to him; in fact, someone had already reprimanded him for being really annoying. He just went over to this table and set fire to a napkin. He needed people to run over and notice him.

I interviewed Tom Rob Smith, the writer of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, for the New York Times. Again, ACS Versace is a great show.

It all leads to the grimmest discovery of the season, coupled with its goriest onscreen moments. While John’s young friend Joseph listens in horror, the murderer butchers one of his friends in the public baths, dragging his bloody corpse down the hall and off to whatever urban aerie will become this latest victim’s chosen resting place. At the same time, in the killer’s bedroom, Sara opens a heart-shaped box and discovers an actual human heart, while Marcus Isaacson uncovers a jar filled with human eyeballs — many more, it’s clear, than the known victims could have provided.

It’s an awesome, awful image, one that easily transcends its B-movie-prop connotations because of what it enables both the investigators and the audience to truly see. Each of these gross little chunks of nerve and tissue, floating in a jar stuffed away under bed, represents the life of a child, plucked out at the root. What’s more, each of the victims came from the immigrant underclass; the killer groomed them all by commiserating over their abusive, hated fathers. (In the victims’ cases, many of their dads were also neglectful gambling addicts, which Beecham was in a position to know through his gig as a debt collector.) In a grotesque sense, the murderer values them more than anyone else ever has.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It’s not a particularly good show, but Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning are very watchable in it, and in moments like the one described above it proves gore can still be communicative.

To its credit, “The Alienist” always treats the deaths of the children upon whom its serial killer preys as a series of tragedies. It is equally respectful, and properly outraged, about the grotesque class inequities that help enable the murderer to operate with impunity, or even under outright protection. The conditions to which the mentally ill are subjected by the institutional options of the day, the routine dismissal and degradation of women by men, the barbarity of white America’s genocidal war on the indigenous population, the cycle of sexual abuse that turns victims into victimizers ad infinitum: This episode alone exhibits fist-on-the-table fury about all of it. The PG-13 “Perils of Pauline” routine can only cloud this moral clarity.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It can be hard to make a crime show about how murder is tragic when the threat of murder is also supposed to be exciting.

Indeed, from top to bottom, characters are coming into their own. In their off-duty moments, the chemistry sparks and sizzles between Moore and Sara, on the one hand, and between Kreizler and his mute maid, Mary, on the other. When Mary cuts her finger while preparing the doctor’s dinner, Kreizler notices the injury and slowly unwraps the bandage; the eroticism of the act is unmistakable even before he licks his own finger and applies his saliva to her wound as a “natural coagulant.”

Speaking of fingers, Sara’s later riff on why John would be a lousy typist is one big digit-based double entendre. “I think you lack dexterity — in your fingers, that is,” says. “All men do. That’s why they’ll never be any good at it.” I’m sorry, what were we talking about again?

Sex! Now that I have your attention, I reviewed last night’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It was the best episode so far, by far.

Just when it seemed they’d cracked the case, it turns out the investigators on “The Alienist” don’t have a clue what’s really going on. Frankly, neither do I. Ain’t it grand?

With this week’s episode, “The Alienist” has reached the halfway mark of the season. It has also arrived at that most deliciously frustrating stage in any murder mystery: the point at which the detectives, fully armed with information and deductions, make their move, only to discover that they’re still several steps behind their quarry. For heroes and villains alike, this has the potential to be the most engaging and revealing moment in any such story. It can show us how the heroes deal with adversity and the villains with unexpected good fortune (if not so good for his hunters and victims). Lucky for us viewers, “The Alienist” is emerging from this stage of the race firing on all cylinders.

I reviewed this week’s fun episode of The Alienist for the New York Times.

Four episodes in, understanding what “The Alienist” does and doesn’t do well is a walk in the park. Well, it involves a walk in the park, at least.

The stroll in question is taken by Sarah Howard. Tasked by Commissioner Roosevelt with delivering John Moore’s purloined sketchbook to Dr. Lazlo Kreizler — whom she would otherwise as soon avoid, after his callous inquiries about her father’s suicide — Sarah finds the doctor people-watching in a local park. The person he’s watching, specifically, is a mother who once drowned her two young children in the bath. Protected from prosecution or institutionalization by her family fortune (sound familiar?), she now pushes an empty baby carriage around the park, doting on an infant only she can see.

Empathizing with such a person is a bridge too far, Sarah tells Kreizler. But the doctor points out that while the drive to kill may be alien to Miss Howard, the societal pressures faced by all women — “to marry, to have children, to smile when you feel incapable of smiling” — are as familiar to her as they are to the murderous mother.

“Society formed her,” he states bluntly, suggesting that everyone has the “raw materials” to become a killer, lacking only the external spark to make them “combustible.” It’s a provocative payoff to an exchange between Sarah and Kreizler earlier in the exchange, which seemed like simple black comedy at the time: Angry at the doctor for his attempts to glean insight into murder by probing her own psychology, Sarah sneers, “I don’t believe I have it in me to kill a child.” Kreizler smiles reassuringly and says, “You might surprise yourself,” as if he’s encouraging her to apply for a promotion or run a 5K.

If only “The Alienist” had the same faith in its audience’s ability to understand the complexities of its characters’ minds that Kreizler has in Sarah’s. Take the sequence in the park. It’s not for-the-ages dialogue, but the writing is certainly clear in its emotional and intellectual intent (Daniel Brühl and Dakota Fanning’s characteristically restrained performances make the gruesome details of their exchange even more memorable.) But the end of the sequence lays aside the scalpel and breaks out the sledgehammer: As Sarah contemplates Kreizler’s sad tale, children sing a schoolyard rhyme about putting a baby “in a bathtub to see if he could swim,” while a close-up practically immerses us in the waters of a nearby fountain. It could hardly be less subtle if the script had called for Ms. Fanning to turn to the camera and say, “Get it?”

I reviewed episode four of The Alienist for the New York Times.

“The Alienist” started its series premiere with a beat cop discovering a severed human hand. It began its second episode with an undertaker lighting torches fueled by decomposition gases in the bellies of corpses. This week the showrunner, Jakob Verbruggen, who is also the episode’s director, steers the series in a decidedly less disgusting direction, although the subject matter is no less disturbing: What is the etiquette for informing a high-society couple over lunch that their son may have murdered a young boy prostitute? Should one wait till after dessert, or just jump straight in?

Thomas Byrnes, the corrupt former chief of the New York Police Department (played by Ted Levine, who still bears the murderous imprimatur of his role as Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs”), clearly feels his wealthy patrons the Van Bergens have no time to lose if they wish to keep secret their son’s possible involvement in the recent child slayings. The exchange is shot through with dark, absurdist humor by Byrnes’s hilariously long walks from one end of the Van Bergens’ lengthy dining table to the other. “Willem has got himself in water a bit hotter than usual,” he says to Willem’s mother, portrayed in a surprising, tight-laced cameo by Sean Young.

“Thought you should know now,” he adds, before hoofing it back to Mr. Van Bergen (Steven Pacey), who sits at the other end of the table, chewing a spoonful of pudding. “There’s no later.”

A comedy of manners? In a squalid period piece full of mutilated bodies? Yes, and thank goodness. Levine’s craggy deadpan, Young’s “well I never” fan-fluttering, and a second surprise cameo, from Grace Zabriskie as John Moore’s disapproving mother (Zabriskie played Sarah Palmer in “Twin Peaks”), temper the gloom and grime with charmingly effective humor. In Byrnes’s visit to the Van Bergens — which, by the way, gives us our first real hints as to the identity of the killer — and in moments like Mrs. Moore’s jumpy reaction to a ringing phone (“Oh! Loathsome machine!”), the writer Gina Gionfriddo gives us room to breathe after immersing us in so much horror and squalor.

I reviewed episode 3 of The Alienist, the best of the bunch so far, for the New York Times.

“The Alienist” does, however, play to the cheap seats in another way common to period dramas of its ilk: period-appropriate gore and squalor, and as much of it as you can stomach. The episode’s first shot is of a corpse, one of many laid out in a morgue and illuminated by flames lit to burn off the gas inside each cadaver’s bloated belly. A visit to the tenement home of the Santorellis, whose child was one of the victims, reveals a waterfall of sewage, a horde of screeching rats and a baby left to crawl through the hallway while the parents scream at each other inside.

Irish cops beat witnesses to a pulp. Underage sex workers in revealing drag attach themselves like leeches to prospective clients. The eyeless heads of slain humans and cattle stare blindly and balefully at us through the screen. The contrast with the opulence of the opera house and restaurant where Kreizler and his companions convene is striking, sure, but it’s also about as subtle as Captain Connor’s interrogation methods.

I reviewed episode two of The Alienist for the New York Times. This portion of the piece is mostly surrounded by stuff I thought was pretty decent, but I wanted to highlight this passage because man does this stuff get grating after a while. It’s so over the top that it makes it hard to take the rest seriously.

Playing the title character presents Brühl with a tough task. Dr. Kreizler spends his non-sleuthing hours dealing with the living, not the dead; his work with troubled and vulnerable patients — children in particular — requires sensitivity, gentleness and genuine care. As such, aloofness, arrogance and the other traits that typically define maverick masterminds like Kreizler would be out of character. In its way that’s a blessing: Do we really need to see the umpteenth knockoff of Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House? Indeed, Brühl imbues the alienist with a plain-spoken dignity, even in the moments when his behavior is demanding or shocking by the standards of his day.

But there’s a reason you don’t often see the phrase “eminently reasonable visionary” used to describe fictional detectives. (To be fair, with all due respect to our fictional Times colleague John Moore, sexually magnetic crime-solving newspaper cartoonists are rarer still.) Kreizler is so calm and so conscientious that he has a tendency to fade into the meticulously constructed background as a result. When he finally does something truly weird, delivering a concluding monologue about his need to “become” the killer in order to catch him — to “cut the child’s throat myself,” psychologically speaking — the change is so sudden and stark that the lines land with a thud.

The fact that serial-killer procedurals from “Manhunt” to “Mindhunter” have painted their protagonists by pretty much these exact same numbers doesn’t help either. It’s true that the source material here predates the current surplus of unstable cop geniuses, but this adaptation of a 1994 book about an 1896 crime must still move and thrill us in 2018. Like the killer himself, who escapes Kreizler during a peculiar pursuit through an abandoned building after taunting him with a grisly trophy, the answer as to whether it will remains elusive for now.

I’m back in the New York Times to cover The Alienist all season long, starting with my review of tonight’s series premiere.

Stylish cyberthriller. Anticapitalist agitprop. Cassandra-esque prophecy of doom. Experimental canvas for the auteurist creator-writer-director Sam Esmail. Surprise-twist generator. Think of “Mr. Robot” as a gadget capable of running all these programs and more simultaneously, making it one of television’s most engrossing shows.

It can also be one of its most complex and confusing. Esmail and company weave conspiracies into conspiracies, shift points of view and bury them beneath elaborate hallucinations, and rely on tricky hacker plots for their action sequences. Season 2, which aired in summer 2016, spent more than half of its running time immersed in a reality that only existed in the head of its main character.

Worried you won’t be able to follow when Season 3 debuts Oct. 11 on USA? (You can watch the new season on the network’s app and digital on-demand platforms.) Here’s a quick refresher on the main players.

The Mystery Men: Elliot Alderson, Mr. Robot and Tyrell Wellick

Technically, Elliot Alderson is Mr. Robot. Played by Christian Slater, the title character exists only in Elliot’s head — a mental projection of the hacker’s dead father, embodying all the rage Elliot feels against the colossal conglomerate E Corp for its role in his dad’s untimely death from environmental toxins. As a separate personality existing within Elliot’s head, Mr. Robot can hijack their shared body to advance his militant agenda, leaving Elliot himself in the dark about the plans everyone else believes he, not his imaginary alter ego, devised.

Season 2 embroiled them both in two main mysteries. The first involved Elliot’s short stint in prison after copping to a minor charge following the 5/9 hack — which the show kept secret for seven full episodes, depicting a false reality Elliot constructed to protect himself from the truth.

The second mystery centered on “Stage 2,” the mysterious next step in the war against E Corp that Elliot’s Mr. Robot personality helped organize in collusion with the sinister cyberterrorism organization the Dark Army. He discovers the truth from an previously hidden co-conspirator: Tyrell Wellick, the disgraced and unstable E Corp executive who was blamed for the 5/9 hack, and who had been missing ever since. (Elliot assumed he’d murdered the man and disposed of his body during a three-day period of amnesia following the hack itself.)

Wellick informs Elliot that they plan to hack into the secret storehouse where E Corp’s paper backup records are kept, blowing it up and destroying the company once and for all — but also killing everyone in the building. When Elliot balks and tries to shut down the program, convinced Wellick is just a figment of his imagination, Wellick shoots him, following the by-any-means-necessary instructions that Elliot had issued himself while under Mr. Robot’s control.

I wrote a quick-and-dirty refresher course for Mr. Robot in anticipation of Wednesday’s season premiere for the mighty New York Times.

I really couldn’t ask for a more delightful criticism of my Game of Thrones Evil Rankings than Ross Douthat defending the High Sparrow

“Don’t be afraid to care,” advises the Pink Floyd singer-guitarist David Gilmour in the prog-rock titans’ dreamy anthem “Breathe.” It’s a signature track on “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the perpetually best-selling concept album about modern life and mental illness that has soundtracked many a dorm-room bull session and chemically enhanced “Wizard of Oz” screening.

And given the propensity of “Legion” to make subtext text, I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised that the show would use this jaw-droppingly literal music cue for a pivotal scene in its season finale. Why not use a song with the lyric “All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be” for an astral-plane confrontation in which David Haller’s life literally flashes before his eyes? Why not mesh the lyrics’ fatalistic take on the inescapable nature of death with a sequence in which David discovers how lethal it would be to free himself from the grasp of his nemesis, the Shadow King? Why not cap off a show renowned for its surreal, spacey visuals and structure with a song that comes pre-loaded with four and a half decades of psychedelic nostalgia?

The answer is right there in Gilmour’s line “Don’t be afraid to care.” Creator Noah Hawley and company crafted a show that stood out against its drab and unadventurous superhero peers, to be sure, and maybe that’s good enough. But it could have been great with a little more willingness to avoid the obvious, to go for magic rather than parlor tricks, to not use one of the most famously trippy songs in the history of rock ’n’ roll to tell the audience, “Wow, man — trippy, isn’t it?” A little more care is exactly what this episode, and the show in general, really needed.

I reviewed the season finale of Legion for the New York Times last week. I didn’t like the finale, or the season. I’ve seen semi-convincing arguments that the show is enjoyable when looked at as a silly fun superhero show with some unusual visual flair, but as that’s neither how it was sold nor, quite clearly, what its creators intended it to be, they must remain only semi-convincing.

Fortunately for David, diagnosis is nine-tenths of the cure. Now that he knows the source of his sickness, he’s able to shake it off and break through the barriers of his mind. With a little help from his mutant friends, he shuts down the hospital hallucination they’ve all been experiencing, seizes control of his own body, subdues the Shadow King, stops the bullets fired at him and Syd mid-flight and lives to fight government mutant-hunters another day. Simple, really!

No, seriously. The real secret of “Legion” is that it is a simple story, when all is said and done. Unlike, say, “Westworld,” none of the show’s countless Easter eggs, deliberate details and plot-twist trickery are essential to understanding the story. They’re aesthetic elements, not narrative ones; they exist not to convert the show into a puzzle-box but to make it an objet d’art, successfully or not. The simplicity of David’s origin and of his nemesis, as revealed in this episode, should make that clear. (Even a passing knowledge of the Marvel comics upon which the show is based — in which the writer Chris Claremont established the founder of the X-Men, Professor Charles Xavier, as David’s father and cocreated Farouk as one of their most powerful enemies — would have made it clear to a sizable chunk of the audience already.)

But while this simplicity allows “Legion” to cut through the Gordian knot of needlessly byzantine plotting that has plagued other genre shows of recent vintage, the blade is double-edged. Lacking narrative necessity, the show’s stylistic flourishes are free to sink or swim on their own. By that standard, they too often hit bottom.

The climax of tonight’s episode is a case in point. It’s an all-roads-converge kind of deal, in which Syd and Kerry’s battle with Farouk’s alter ego Lenny in the hospital simulation; Cary, Melanie and Oliver’s struggle to shield Syd’s and David’s bodies from the bullets in the time-frozen real world; and David’s attempt to psychically shatter the doors of his mind-prison all sync up successfully at the last second, saving their skins and stopping the bad guys simultaneously.

But all that action should be enough to stand on its own without the cutesy context the filmmakers provide. What is gained by having the fight play out like a silent movie, shot in black and white with dialogue printed as intertitles and Lenny gussied up in Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp meets Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands drag? Why is the musical accompaniment an EDM version of Ravel’s “Boléro”? Irony has its place in the frequently too portentous superhero subgenre, but here it undercuts the tension and terror without providing much compensatory value.

I reviewed this week’s penultimate episode of Legion for the New York Times. This show isn’t the worst thing on TV or anything like that, but at this point I am truly stunned that anyone thinks it’s great and am starting to mistrust critics who allege that it is.

Yet for all its intelligent design, the episode still feels as stuck in limbo as its characters. At no point are we in any doubt as to the nature of the situation: The devil with the yellow eyes has used David’s telepathic brain to construct a mental prison for him and his friends. We know they’re not crazy. We know their therapist is really their captor. We know the asylum in which they’ve been stowed is a simulacrum of the one David escaped in the pilot. We even know some of the dialogue they’re speaking, since it’s a deliberate repeat from scenes in that first episode. The only mystery is how they’ll break free, and since there are two episodes to go, that they will break free is a given. So it doesn’t take long for the novelty to wear off — and for the same weightless unreality that a dimly cognizant Syd complains to Dr. Busker about to begin taking hold of the viewer as well. Given the momentum the show had built as David gained control of his powers and then had them violently seized by his nemesis, devoting a full episode to this sense of stasis is a real shame.

It could be worse, however, at least if the ways in which the show really cuts loose in this episode are any indication. In a gravely miscalculated musical interlude, the devil-Lenny cavorts around David’s memories in a leotard and fishnets to the tune of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.” The song’s recent fate as a weight-loss jingle was bad enough, but to see it reduced to the soundtrack for a psychic parasite’s bump-and-grind — occasionally shot in silhouette against monochromatic red, like a James Bond title sequence — is somehow even more dispiriting, doubly so given the showrunner Noah Hawley’s impeccable use of found music in his other FX vehicle, “Fargo.” Like the easy allegory of the entire asylum-limbo story line, it’s a case of infatuation with form impeding function.

I reviewed last week’s Legion for the New York Times. More on this show soon.

Like the personalities inside the mind of David Haller, the superhero and horror genres coexist in a way that’s difficult to untangle. Superman, the ur-superhero invented by the Jewish-American creative team of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, has often been linked by scholars (though never by Siegel and Shuster themselves) to the myth of the golem. (“Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley is said to have been inspired by golem as well, although she never said so herself.) The mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner turns into a raging behemoth as the Incredible Hulk, an echo of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Some heroes have powers that are outright demonic in nature, from Etrigan the Demon to the flaming-skull cyclist, Ghost Rider. “Blade,” the 1998 film about a vampiric hunter of the undead was the key precursor to the modern era of superheroic pop-culture hegemony.

And we haven’t even begun counting the villains, a rogues’ gallery of grotesques who evoke virtually every monster and murderer from myths and movies alike. None, of course, is more prominent than the Joker, Batman’s arch-nemesis, whose permanent grin was drawn directly from the expressionist silent horror film “The Man Who Laughs.”

In other words, the swashbuckling and world-saving are nice and all, but sometimes a good superhero story just wants to scare the pants off you.

I reviewed last night’s Legion, a frustratingly mixed bag that only partially makes good on its horror-movie approach, for the New York Times.

The director Larysa Kondracki knows how to open an episode of television. On “Fifi,” the stellar late-season episode of “Better Call Saul” she helmed last year, she started of with a continuous shot of a smuggler’s truck weaving its way across the border that lasted over four minutes. This was just the start of a tour-de-force hour, in which Kondracki framed actor Rhea Seehorn’s starry-eyed attorney Kim Wexler like an ecstatic saint and Jonathan Banks’s sad-eyed killer Mike Ehrmantraut like the subject of a chiaroscuro portrait by a Dutch master. She seemed to intuit and internalize the already impressive visual palette established by showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, then surpass it.

In that respect, lightning just struck twice. On this week’s episode of “Legion,” Kondracki used her considerable talents to fulfill the promise of creator Noah Hawley’s iconoclastic but inconsistent pilot episode and its subsequent installments. Funnily enough, she did so with another multiminute opening shot. But instead of a swooping drone-cam drive-along with a drug-runner’s 18-wheeler, it was a woozy in-and-out close-up of a paunchy middle-aged mutant in a leisure suit, staring into the camera and breaking the fourth wall.

The mutant in question is Oliver Bird (Jemaine Clement, half of the folk-comedy duo Flight of the Conchords), the comatose husband of the mutant underground leader, Melanie (Jean Smart). Looking right into our eyes, he stumbles his way through a monologue about the two kinds of stories parents tell their children: fairy tales designed to uplift them with empathy, and cautionary tales meant to cow them with fear. “Good evening,” he says. “We are here tonight to talk about violence, or maybe human nature … ” He then backtracks. “We are here to talk about human nature.” Later, he overrules himself. “We are the root of all our problems,” he says, adding loftily, “Violence, in other words, is ignorance.” He then promises a five-act play (there are five episodes of “Legion” remaining) in which our hero, David Haller, will discover just what kind of story he’s in.

Whether it’s Oliver’s very ’70s leisure suit, his direct address to the audience, or an overall sense that suddenly this show, y’know, knows what it’s doing, this episode is the first time “Legion” has felt in the same league as the magisterial second season of Hawley’s “Fargo.” That period-piece gang-war epic was television at its most cinematic, a blend of operatically high dramatic stakes and equally operatic visual and sonic spectacle. In this case, the throwback references — jazz and the Kinks on the soundtrack, antiquated vinyl and reel-to-reel playback technology depicted with fetishistic reverence — are just the tip of the iceberg. (Semi-literally, given the frozen purgatory in which Oliver and David find themselves imprisoned.) Now, with Kondracki’s steady hand at the tiller, Hawley’s new series finally feels as substantial and assured as its predecessor.

I reviewed last night’s Legion for the New York Times. Kondracki’s a hell of a talent. She makes it look not just easy but logical.

The biggest tell in this week’s episode of “Legion” isn’t a line of dialogue or a plot development: It’s a window. Specifically, it’s a circular windowpane crisscrossed with an X — the X-Men logo familiar to any superhero fan. During a pivotal conversation between David Haller and his mutant minders, in which he asserts his will to plow forward with his mental training in order to find his kidnapped sister, the window frames his head like a halo, his face directly in front of the spot where the diagonal lines meet. We may never get a more tangible connection between “Legion” and the (sorry) legion of Marvel mutant movies that has led to the impending release of “Logan,” the sad-old-man swan song for the X-Men’s breakout character, Wolverine.

But this single Easter egg serves as a symbol for the whole episode, which sees David take charge of his “treatment” and force his new mutant family to burrow deep into his brain in order to unearth his buried memories — and, they hope, rescue his sister from the evil mutants who have captured and tortured her. After two scatterbrained episodes in which the show simultaneously attempted to establish its ostentatious visual aesthetic and its overcomplicated space-time-contiuum-shifting story line, the show now seems ready to get on with the business of making this superhuman a superhero.

I reviewed last week’s Legion for the New York Times. A step in the right direction. That said, the work Larysa Kondracki does directing this coming Wednesday’s episode makes it the show people said it was from the beginning. Hoo boy, just you wait.