In our SECOND Boiled Leather podcast of the day, Stefan and I have an in-depth discussion of Fallout, which is not a thing either of us thought would happen. It’s up now for our Patreon subscribers!

Okay, so he’s an alien. By now we’ve had a week to digest that John Sugar is a blue superhuman who can stop bullets with his bare hands — a sort of combination Dr. Manhattan/Ozymandias from Watchmen (the comic; we do not speak of the others here). Sure, I’ve been wondering what will happen next, but it was how it would happen that had me worried. Would Sugar still feel like the same offbeat, upbeat neo-noir suggested by Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s smoky theme music and Colin Farrell’s impeccable tailoring?

Yes and no. Sugar’s unraveling of the conspiracy against him feels like the Sugar we know. But there’s an element of the resolution of the Olivia mystery — which does get resolved, though there’s a whole episode left for aftershocks and final twists — that rings phony, even in a show about alien private investigators with fists of steel, a heart of gold, and eyes of electric blue. 

I reviewed the most recent episode of Sugar for Decider.

I’ll note here that Deborah Ayorinde has delivered one of my favorite performances of the year, amid competition that’s already very stiff. The dynamic range of emotional intensity she can convey with the way she holds her eyes, her nose, her mouth alone is astonishing, all the more so for how simple she makes it look. At the drop of a hat she can be a mother driven to reckless anger, an abuse survivor seeing the true story of her young life play out, a doppelgänger embodying only her worst qualities, a horror-movie character watching as a malevolent creature slowly approaches.

I reviewed the finale of Them: The Scare for Decider.

Whatever else it is, the penultimate installment of Them: The Scare is one of the most visually accomplished episodes of television to air this year. Directing a script by Scott Kosar, creator Little Marvin employs a variety of striking visual techniques to create the sense that for Dawn Reeve and her family, the walls are closing in; Marvin makes this all but literal by adjusting the frame to the comparatively claustrophobic dimensions of an old TV screen. 

But limiting the characters’ room to maneuver is just one of Little Marvin’s tricks. He tints the screen blood red for the characters’ nightmarish visions. He breaks out a split diopter shot straight out of classic Hollywood to heighten the painful melodrama between Athena and Dawn. He uses dissolves, overlays, and slowly spinning images to fade us from one image and scene to another in a hypnagogic rhythm. There’s a Vertigo shot, a camera attached to a car door, static horrors placed at the center of the frame in  monumental horror-image style. Why settle for just being scary when you can be scary and gorgeous, too?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.

When the showdown comes, who will be there? Who can you count on to have your back? In episode six of Them: The Scare, our heroes find out the hard way. 

I reviewed the sixth episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.

In an episode that involves the discovery of a vast network of Nazis inside the LAPD and the birth of a bone-mangling serial killer in the back of a Chuck E. Cheese, I’m not sure how much attention anyone will be paying to needle drops. But under the dreamy direction of horror specialist Axelle Carolyn and the superb music supervision of Christopher T. Mollere, a crate-digging music cue provided the backdrop for my favorite shots of the Them: The Scare Episode 4. The song is “Free” by Deniece Williams, and as its gossamer introduction floats over the soundtrack, the faces of Dawn Reeve and Edmund Gaines as they drive through the lights of the Los Angeles night fade in and out, to and fro. It doesn’t advance the story. It isn’t scary. It’s merely beautiful.

I reviewed episode four of Them: The Scare for Decider.

The way I see it, there are three theories as to who, or what, is killing people in Them: The Scare, and all three get a turn in the spotlight in the season’s third episode.

I reviewed episode three of Them: The Scare for Decider.

On a completely different note, Reeve is a character with some zip to her. There’s a marvelous moment in the first episode where she throws away a birthday card from her ex-husband, the father of her kid, without reading it. She doesn’t seem furious or jilted or anything like that. It’s more that she’s like, well, okay, he remembered my birthday, that’s nice, it’s the thought that counts, I’ve now acknowledged the thought, let’s move on. She’s neither a pushover nor a grudge-holder. She’s just living her life.

I reviewed episode two of Them: The Scare for Decider.

There’s an old maxim about how only the very rich and the very poor can afford to make great art, since they’re the only ones with nothing to lose. Perhaps that’s why Amazon’s Prime Video, the creative fiefdom of the richest man in show business (or any business), is the most adventurous streamer out there when it comes to original programming. In shows like Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad; Ed Brubaker and Nicholas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young; Leonardo Fasoli, Mauricio Kartz, and Stefano Sollima’s ZeroZeroZero; and Alice Birch’s Dead Ringers, Prime has pushed the content envelope farther than I ever thought it would go on television. These shows have more in common with arthouse or extreme cinema than they do with Succession. They are challenging viewing, but for viewers who love a challenge, they’re a godsend.

To this group we can safely (if anything about this show can be said to be safe) add Them. Conceived of as an anthology series by writer-creator Little Marvin, the show debuted in 2021 with a season subtitled Covenant and bristling with some of the most harrowing and horrific violence ever aired on TV. Since almost all of the terror, even the supernatural elements, comes heavily freighted with anti-Black racist animus, Them is doubly upsetting. Watching that first season is like fighting a battle wielding a sword without a hilt: You can emotionally survive it, but not intact.

I reviewed the season premiere of Them: The Scare for Decider.

There’s an energy to Sugar that’s hard to describe. A lot of it is the performances — a stacked cast of tremendous supporting players, headed by a bonafide movie star, with all the looks and charisma such a job entails. Some of it is the frenetic, finger-snapping editing by Fernando Stutz and John Petaja, which feels more be-bop than the old attention-deficit MTV style. Its dreamy vision of Los Angeles is unique for a noir mystery, in that we’re seeing the city through the eyes of a sweet guy who truly loves the place, not a hard-bitten thrice-around-the-block gunsel or a femme fatale’s hapless patsy.

 I think that may be why a lot of people I know, even professional artists, erroneously pegged the opening credits as AI (it’s not): This is not quite a version of L.A. we’ve seen before. This is not quite a version of the private investigator story we’ve seen before. I’m really not sure what it is, and that’s a wonderful place to be with any story, let alone a mystery.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Sugar for Decider.

So in the end, it is the show’s opening credits, with the image of a frightening mask erupting from a mountainside, that have the right of it. “Shogun” is not the story of a hero charging his enemies. It’s the story of a mastermind slowly revealing himself, until a nation cowers before his countenance.

I reviewed the finale of Shōgun for the New York Times.

John Sugar is a stop and smell the flowers kind of guy. He puts it in so many words to Melanie, the ex-rock star who is his semi-partner in the search for her stepdaughter Olivia. Melanie, shaken by the revelation that Olivia’s half-brother David is a serial rapist, feels differently. “The reason we don’t look,” she suggests, “is it’s all so sad and ugly.”

“Yeah, but not everything,” Sugar counters. Then, with effortless delight, he rattles off several roses to stop and smell, so to speak. “Sea lions…Patti Smith…Cypress trees…The sound of your little sister laughing and having fun…Paris.” Even Melanie, who’s never been there, has to admit Paris seems pretty good.

This exchange from Sugar’s fourth episode (“Starry Eyed”) could not have better encapsulated the mental and emotional battle that consumed my brain for years during a prolonged bout of major depression. The depressed part of me, the Melanie part, fully and truly believed that life is defined by its worst moments, the world by its horrors. The healthy part of me, the not-sick part of me, is John Sugar conceding “Yeah,” then adding “…but not everything.” 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Sugar for Decider.

Finally, the lady gives up. Since she cannot obey her lord’s instructions to return to Edo with his family, she also cannot live with the offense of failing him. She will kill herself at sunset, she announces. Since Mariko is Christian, this is a mortal sin, unless she can find a second willing to deliver the death blow. It’s a grim honor — one that the Christian regent Lord Kiyama (Hiromoto Ida) refuses, despite his own beliefs. The lords are not yet ready to make a public break with Ishida and Ochiba, whose control of the Heir gives her incredible power.

But Mariko’s resolve gives her power of her own — a terrible sort of power. When Kiyama fails to show up at the ceremony to serve as her second, her ultimate reward for all this suffering seems to be the damnation of her immortal soul.

It’s all too much for Blackthorne to take. Grabbing a sword, he takes his place by her side, preparing the fatal stroke that will slice off her head after she thrusts a blade into her belly.

Ironically, this is one of the show’s most intensely romantic moments. Such is Blackthorne’s love for Mariko that he is willing to kill her in order to grant her death the honor she believes it will hold. Mariko believes she is damning herself to hell for eternity. Whether he also believes this is immaterial. He simply cannot allow her to experience that anguish in her last moments. He cannot let her die alone and afraid.

This fleeting but real emotional intimacy, profound beyond words, is conveyed by Cosmo Jarvis and Anna Sawai with minimal speech and movement. It’s all shown with their eyes.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

Uhhh…is John Sugar an alien? 

Is Ruby an alien? Is everyone in the Société Polyglotte Cosmpolitaine an alien? 

Is Sugar a show about aliens???????????

Forgive me if I’m jumping off the deep end here. I suppose there could be any number of explanations for John Sugar’s physical inability to get drunk, or his ability to catch flies with chopsticks, or his immunity to anger and violence. Maybe the Société Polyglotte Cosmpolitaine is just a run of the mill organization of ex-spies who come together to save the world, like Davey Siegel suggests — and which Bernie Siegel rejects as the preposterous premise of one of his own shitty movies. Maybe when Ruby tells Sugar “We’re here to observe these people, not participate in their lives,” she’s not echoing Star Trek’s Prime Directive, nor Jor-El’s words to Kal-El in Superman: “Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you are not one of them.”

But anything’s possible, right? And a private-eye series willing to bend the genre far enough to incorporate a hero who’s a pure white hat is probably willing to bend it even farther and place that white hat atop a large, domelike grey head, right?

I reviewed the third episode of Sugar for Decider.

Fallout may be the first show I’ve ever watched that actually benefits from the standard streaming model of a simultaneous full-season release. Watching this show, moving from level to level and world to world, following Lucy and Maximus and the Ghoul and Norm on their side quests, getting those Cooper Howard cut-scene flashbacks: Watching Fallout feels like spending the weekend trying to beat a video game. What do you think? Be the first to comment.

I mean that as a full-on compliment, by the way. Making no effort, and showing no desire, to conceal its roots in an entertainment-first art form, Fallout is that rarest of beasts: a post-apocalyptic romp with a sense of humor too black to be cute about it. In the process provides a real star turn for Ella Purnell in particular, the one lead whose face is on display for all to read at all times and who thus has to carry so much weight on her shoulders. I want Lucy to beat this game, and I’ll be happy to watch her try.

I reviewed the season finale of Fallout for Decider. Fun show!

You know what they say: If you’re in a Vault, and you’re not conducting an experiment, you’re the experiment. That’s the lesson I think Lucy MacLean ought to take from her madcap adventures in the mysterious Vault 4, which come to a surprising conclusion in this, yet another charmingly nasty episode of Fallout. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Fallout Season One for Decider.

While far from a perfect episode of television — if I never see that goddamn blue-orange color scheme on a TV screen again it’ll be too soon — this is a very well-structured one. Both Coop in the past and Lucy in the present go through the same slow journey of terrified disillusionment. They’re both realizing that the society that made them the people they are, in which they believe, for which they’ve worked and fought and even killed, is a sick society, not a healthy one. What does that make them? 

I reviewed episode six of Fallout for Decider.

Coming back to video games, I mentioned in a previous review that each episode of Fallout feels like reaching a new level, or unlocking a new area, or launching a new side quest. This, perhaps, is how to adapt video games: Translate their iterative structure into episodic storytelling in the old television tradition, with cliffhangers to keep things going. You know what show did this really well, even though a generation of television that followed seemed determined to learn every wrong lesson they could from it instead? Lost. Not a bad place to be.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Fallout for Decider.

The Ghoul does not 100% work for me as a villain. I find his shock-value tough guy talk, the whole “I’m you, sweetie, you just give it a little time” business, to be the kind of stuff that makes “video game dialogue” an inherently pejorative phrase. I’m not sure what kind of lesson he’s trying to impart.

It was around the time he was calmly, methodically slicing off Lucy’s finger as payback for biting off one of his own that I realized this is the point: He’s not trying to teach Lucy anything. You want to believe he’s trying to toughen her up, shake her out of her naïveté, but you can’t square that with the way he pours his water out right in front of her, or gloats as she guzzles down radioactive animal piss or whatever the hell it is, or chops off her finger and then sells her to organ harvesters, presumably never to see her again. 

He’s just being mean, because he’s a mean person. He’s a villain, as described by his old fully human self in a movie just prior to blowing a bad guy’s head off via “an old Mexican eulogy” about how a person “was ugly, strong, and he had dignity.” Cooper awards the baddie two out of three before putting one through his skull. But now, the Ghoul, too, is nothing more than ugly and strong. His dignity died out long ago, as his senseless cruelty to Lucy demonstrates.

I reviewed episode four of Fallout for Decider.

Ideologically, this episode of a video game adaptation makes some provocative points. That’s probably not a sentence you’d have read until very recently, given the track record of video game adaptations. 

But that’s a historical fluke, not a reflection of limitations in the source material. When I was awakened to the artistic potential of video games in the 1990s first Myst, then Quake, then Super Mario 64, then The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — I’ve never seen any reason a movie or TV show based on one couldn’t also be thoughtful, beautiful, powerful in its own right. Even if we’re not quite there yet, it’s only a matter of time.

At any rate, Fallout Episode 3 (“The Head”) is, indeed, an interesting political text. It starts early, in a flashback to the Ghoul’s days as horse-opera movie star Cooper Howard. On set one day, Cooper balks at executing a wounded villain in cold blood after a cool monologue. He’s told by the director that the original writer has been fired for being a Commie, that the new script reflects “the power of the individual when the chips are down, the new America,” and that “out here, it’s just you, your gun, and your personal code, bringing order to the Wild Wild West.”

That’s fascism. You get that that’s fascism, right? Persecuted Communists, patriotic übermenschen, the wide world tamed by the master race and the beauty of its weapons: plain old American fascism, ladies and germs! That’s the America that went up in smoke when the bombs dropped: a fascist state in Donna Reed dresses and Ward Cleaver cardigans. That it’s also the America one of our two major political parties is frantically scrambling to recreate…I leave it to you to decide if the filmmakers had that in mind.

I reviewed episode three of Fallout for Decider.