But the most unnerving thing about the episode is the way it depicts Number Six’s fellow Villagers as mysterious, fundamentally unknowable people. Some of them are brainwashed automatons. Some of them are active agents of the enemy. Some seem reluctant to fulfill their duties, others positively gleeful. They spend their days in endless parades and celebrations, blasting John Philip Sousa marches and screaming at the top of their lungs — except for the times when they’re eerily silent and still. 

How can you possibly live in a society constructed of people this unreliable, this unstable, this incapable of conceiving of genuine common good and working towards it together? How can you live with people who’ve collectively abandoned reality?

My latest review of The Prisoner is up at Pop Heist. (Gift link, but please subscribe, it’s worth it!)

“I am not a number! I am a free man!”

To this last declaration of Number Six, the final line of the dialogue that from here on out is a standard fixture of the opening sequence of The Prisoner, the new Number Two only laughs. Everything else Number Six says to her, she dignifies with some sort of response. The idea of freedom garners only mocking dismissal without a word.

I reviewed the second episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. (Gift link!) Please note! If you’re following along you’ve already noticed we’re watching the show out of order vs. how it’s listed on streaming sites. That’s because it was not really intended to be watched in the order it was aired! Fun, right? We’re using Zack Handlen’s so-called AV Club order, which you can find here, in a nifty table you can rearrange according to the various suggested viewing orders floating around out there with a couple of clicks.

The Prisoner can largely be credited, or blamed, for the mystery-box genre via its outsized influence on Lost, which in many ways feels like a sexier, less severe version of this show — The Prisoner: Pacific Nights, if you will. Certainly the question of who runs the Village and why they’re so obsessed with Number Six is of grave concern both to the audience and Six himself. 

But what I take away from this episode is not a puzzle to solve but a person to study. Here’s a guy who did Her Majesty’s dirty work, and apparently with enough aplomb and success to drive a preposterous sportscar. He was so good at his job of being a spy for a Western government that the Village, whoever or whatever is behind it, has dedicated its resources to cracking his brain open and seeing what’s inside. 

And what is his attitude towards all this? Lol yeah right, best of luck, assholes. Is he confused, is he angry, is he frightened? Oh, for sure. But he has a single conviction, and it is this:

“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.”

The most talked about and praised show of the year is Andor, Tony Gilroy’s exploration of violent insurrection in the face of fascism, set in the Star Wars universe. The reason it has resonated so much with people, I think, is because its eponymous character shares this sentiment. 

For all its maddening — and intentional; it serves fascists well to confuse their opponents and victims — contradictions, fascism presents us with a straightforward proposition: We are human only to the extent that we fit the regime’s perpetually constricting definition of who is human. Resisting fascism is in large part a matter of personal integrity: My words will match my thoughts, my actions will match my words, I will be the person I am and not the servant they want me to become, I will not betray my soul. Number Six, who in this episode gives Patrick McGoohan’s birthdate as his own down to the minute, will not go along with any of this either. He’s not the machine-man with a mind of gray sludge that Number Two and his masters want him to be. He is a human. He is not a number. He is a free man. 

So are you.

Oh boy! Starting today over at Pop Heist, I’m launching a new series called Prestige Prehistory, about stone-classic pre-Sopranos dramas that helped (re)define what you could do on television. My first show is Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, beginning with its premiere, “Arrival”!

Pop Heist is worker-run, subscription-supported, and anti-algorithm, and new reviews go up early for subscribers. Check it out!

So now, here, in the the tenth episode of the third season, Yellowjackets finally explains why none of this shit ever came up before now: the magic of memory suppression! All of a sudden, we start hearing about how hard it’s been for the adults to remember what happened to them out there — not because it was so bad, according to Shauna, but because it was so good! The experience of hunting and eating people to honor a Wilderness demon made them “so alive in that place that we lost our capacity for self-reflection,” according to Shauna. “We can’t or won’t remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun.” That’s why Shauna acted like a nincompoop instead of a sociopath all this time, you see. “I let it all slip away from me,” she writes. “It’s time to start taking it back.”

Long past time, if you ask me! It’s now apparent that Yellowjackets‘ own structure prevents it from working. It creates a scenario in which the filmmakers cannot be honest with or about the adult characters, because doing so would spoil the teenage material. This creates an obvious qualitative discrepancy between the two storylines. If this had been a show just about the kids, that would be something. If the adult material had been presented seriously, without holding back just what they did out there and why, and with the adult characters’ personalities existing in continuity with what happened back then, that would be something. What we got is neither. 

I reviewed the season finale of Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. Since its inception, the existence ofYellowjackets‘ dual timelines has been its biggest weakness. Though the stunt casting of beloved actors who cut their teeth as troubled teens in the ’90s covered it up for a time, the present-day material, following the lives of the castaways as adults back in civilization, has been dead weight since at least its first zany murder mix-up. As time has passed and we’ve seen the situation for the teenagers grow more dire, it’s been increasingly difficult to square the grim-faced cannibal killers of the past with the whoopsie-daisy-we-killed-someone-again shenanigans of their adult selves. The teenage material remained strong, at least, but the adult stuff has been on the verge of collapsing under its own absurdity for some time.

This week on Yellowjackets, the collapse finally comes, and it tears the whole thing down with it. Having painted themselves into a corner with the adults — Shauna, our heroine, begins this episode in the process of forcing her long-lost ex-girlfriend to eat a part of her own arm at knifepoint — the writers seem to have, at long last, given up. Across the board, from the 2020s to the 1990s, they’ve come up with a single solution to their problems: Make everyone, adult or teen, a whacked-out murderer. But rather than create the much-needed sense of psychological continuity between kids and grown-ups that the show has lacked for so long, this only drags the messy, half-assed feeling of the present-day story to the previously strong flashbacks. 

The result is an ugly thing to witness. It’s a show falling apart before your eyes.

I reviewed this week’s dire Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Stranded in a shitty motel room with her dad, Callie finally comes out and says what I wish the show itself had made up its mind about two seasons ago: Her mother, Shauna, is a bad person, capable of horrible crimes, including the disappearance of the two researchers and their guide during her time in the wilderness. Her dad, Jeff, would rather unconsciously scratch his skin raw than face facts. But in the meantime, Shauna’s parked outside a stranger’s house with a recently purchased Rambo knife. Callie has the right idea, I suspect.

I wish the show did. I wish Yellowjackets had the kind of faith in itself and its audience displayed by, well, any number of other shows about murderers, which didn’t feel the need to obscure its’ protagonists’ awfulness with zany mix-ups and Scooby Gang shenanigans. If adult Shauna had shown any signs of being a lastingly bad person, instead of an adorable housewife having a fling, back in Season 1, Seasons 2 and 3 would have been a lot more interesting. Instead you get what we’ve got, which is a show in which half of the airtime feels like it’s being spent actively combatting the other half. Even the Yellowjackets know that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Fantastic stuff from top to bottom, really. Ben’s fate is bleaker and more brutal than anything I’d anticipated. His death gives several characters — Natalie, Misty, Shauna, Lottie, and Akilah, who’s now having stop-motion animation visions of three-eyed bear-wolf hybrids — their strongest material of the season. Sophie Thatcher in particular stands out as Natalie, whose very soul you can see buckling under the weight of all its been asked to endure. She makes the character as we come to know her later make sense, which hasn’t quite been possible in many other cases. 

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

The problem is that Tai can’t go through with it, even while doing target practice by aiming at a frowny face on a tree. Van, who’s helping her practice, suggests they try to summon Tai’s dark side, which we haven’t seen anything of yet this season. First, they try summoning it with sexual energy: Van pins Tai against a tree face first and fingers her. (The sex scenes have gotten a lot more fucked up and hot this season for sure.) 

When that fails, they kill a rabbit caught in one of the girls’ traps, since the sinister spirit of the wilderness seems to frequently call for blood. In keeping with the show’s storied tradition of extremely nasty up-close survival violence, Tai slits the poor rabbit’s throat in full view of the camera, which lingers as the animal’s legs and paws frantically flail at the air in pain and terror. With Van’s encouragement, Tai narrates the entire process of the rabbit’s death. “I see its fear. I feel its breath … I smell its blood. I feel its heartbeat slowing. It’s calmer now.” To really be present with the fear and pain you’re inflicting on another living thing — more importantly, to force the audience to be present with it — makes for harrowing television.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

The episode-length sequence is a flop for a variety of reasons. For starters, key members of the cast don’t seem to know how to act after such a radical tonal shift, though a few rise to the challenge. Sophie Thatcher maintains Natalie’s uneasy balance of responsibility and fear easily enough, and Sammi Hanratty really demonstrates her range as a righteously indignant and legalistically canny Misty; it makes you excited to see what the actor will do when given actual adult roles, and it’s my favorite work of Hanratty’s in the series so far.

As Coach Ben, Stephen Krueger is similarly compelling. Fully believing the girls will convict (and likely kill and eat) him no matter what he says or does, he therefore has no reason to lie, and is bracingly honest both about what he dislikes about his job, which he has never seen as a career, and what he loves about the girls, even though they’re a threat to his life. Emoting all of this through a layer of grime and beard is an impressive feat in and of itself, and it shows how crucial Krueger is to the flashback material.

But Jasmin Savoy Brown as the faux-D.A. and Sophie Nélisse as the chief hang-‘im-high juror flounder are speechifying and smirking and acting more or less like people reading the script of a courtroom drama out loud. Liv Hewson as the bailiff fares little better with the corny shit she’s forced to say to open the trial, but as her part is relatively minor it’s nowhere near as grating as Tai and Shauna’s flared-nostril rage against their assistant coach, who quite obviously did not burn their cabin down. They’re straight-up trying to kill him, just as he’s accused of trying to do to them. Misty does such a bang-up job of unpacking this, in fact, that it makes the eventual guilty verdict feel not so much as unjust as merely stupid.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Two of Yellowjackets’ greatest strengths are on display in this week’s episode before five minutes have elapsed. The first: This show has long offered viewers some of the gnarliest self-applied field surgery the small screen has ever aired. Here we have Mari, her knee dislocated after a fall into Coach Ben’s trap, following his advice and shoving her grotesquely out-of-whack kneecap back into place. It’s the kind of scene that makes you say to yourself “It’s only make-believe,” for all the good it does you. Like all of the show’s makeshift amputations and childbirths and facial reconstruction surgeries before it, you know it’s not really happening, it’s just very good practical effects, but that doesn’t stop you from feeling it in your own bones. It’s great stuff.

So too is the opening credit sequence. With its eerie and aggressive theme song by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker (of ’90s alt-rock bands Shudder to Think and that dog. respectively) and its distressed VHS aesthetic courtesy of Digital Kitchen art directors Rachel Brickel and Peter Pak, it towers above an opening-title landscape that’s been dominated by “shapes of familiar things morph into shapes of other familiar things” for what feels like a decade. Honestly, it may be almost too good, as it promises a level of anxiety and terror that the show only occasionally aims for or achieves. 

Actually, we can throw in a third strength of the show: At no point is it ever digitally color-graded into a bluish haze or a gray-purple murk or a ghastly teal-and-orange mailman-with-a-fake-tan color palette. When you see these kids out in the woods, it looks like they’re in the woods. When you see these grownups out and about in the ‘burbs, it looks like they’re in the ‘burbs. There’s light and shadow and contrast. I’m not saying the cinematography is spectacular, but it’s not meant to be: It’s meant to be legible, to be a reliable delivery mechanism for the story being told by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco et al are telling. It never distracts, and that really is an achievement. (This is admittedly a bugbear of mine, but the aquamarine nighttime of True Detective Season 4 and the bright orange nighttime of The Penguin broke something in me.)

I reviewed the second episode of Yellowjackets Season 3’s two-part premiere for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Yellowjackets has always thrived when it tears out its own heart of darkness and holds it beating in front of the audience’s face. This is what’s always made the material about the teenage soccer team stranded and starving and going insane in the woods more compelling than the material about the messed-up middle-aged women having zany murder hijinks played largely for laughs. The strength of the adult cast, cleverly (though not entirely, which has always been weird to me) made up of former teen actors Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis (RIP Natalie, we miss you girl, they really should have dyed your hair blonde so you’d look more like Sophie Thatcher), Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Elijah Wood, disguises the lopsided nature of the drama somewhat, but only somewhat. As fun as, say, Ricci’s performance as adult Misty, the world’s perkiest sociopath, can be, I’d much rather watch her teenage self react with shock and grief to her first kill than her adult self react with quirky neurotic cheer to her third or fourth. 

I’m making my debut at Pop Heist, a new non-corporate worker-owned pop-culture publication!, with my review of the Yellowjackets season premiere. (Gift link!)