There’s a scene in this episode of Yellowjackets (Season 2, Episode 4) where teenage Taissa and Van are wandering around a narrow patch of woods, the same patch they’ve spent the whole day exploring. They’re searching for another tree with that now-familiar symbol carved into it, because Taissa has discovered a double-digit number of them while sleepwalking. Van has mapped their locations out and discovered that, when the dots are connected, they’re arranged in the shape of that same symbol. So there’s gotta be one last tree in this specific area in order to complete the pattern, there’s just gotta be! But try as they might, they can’t finish the picture. 

Okay, fine — they discover Travis’s long-lost kid brother Javi, mute but otherwise miraculously unharmed after months in the freezing wilderness, giving Van the proof she needs that Taissa, like Lottie, is psychically attuned to…whatever it is that’s going on out there. But shhhh, I’m trying to make a point here, which is this: Like the map that drove Taissa and Van’s seemingly pointless search for the missing symbol, I feel like Yellowjackets is an incomplete picture. I keep seeing what it’s supposed to be, recognizing exactly where it needs to go to fully flesh things out and become what it’s meant to become, but dammit, it never quite connects that last dot.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Yellowjackets season two for Decider.

I’m a broken record on this point, I realize, but good gravy, the lighting in this show. This time we can credit the director, Marialy Rivas, and the director of photography, Eliot Rockett, for the way Perry’s cigarette smoke obscures his face as light streams through his blinds; for the near-blinding morning light that similarly illuminates Milligan’s office when Pete pays his fateful visit; for the cold blue-gray glow of the small hours when Paul staggers in from the beatdown Perkins forces him to deliver, a smart, stark divergence from the lighting scheme of pretty much every other scene.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Perry Mason season two for the New York Times.

On Yellowjackets, the present-day material functions like training wheels. Interested in a survival-horror story about cannibalistic ‘90s teenage girls lost in a haunted no-man’s-land, but afraid things might get too spooky and you’ll fall and scrape your psychological knees? Don’t worry! The comedic shenanigans of present-day Shauna, Misty, and Natalie will keep you nice and steady if things get too intense. 

I reviewed the third episode of Yellowjackets season two for Decider.

Life, like a murder case, has its ups and downs. First, the down: Perry, Paul and Della have learned that the brothers Mateo and Rafael Gallardo have been lying and did indeed murder Brooks McCutcheon. Now, the up: Perry, Paul and Della all hooked up. Call it a glass-half-full situation.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Perry Mason season two for the New York Times.

The best episode of Yellowjackets since the very earliest episodes? The best episode of Yellowjackets since the pilot itself? An argument can be made, for sure. “Edible Complex” is fast-paced, frequently disturbing, and most importantly, deadly serious for about 85 percent of the time. It’s the Yellowjackets I want, for the most part.

I reviewed the second episode of Yellowjackets season two for Decider.

Yellowjackets sold something I wasn’t buying. The breakout Showtime hit — not a phrase you hear everyday in this Netflix/HBO dominated landscape, which explains the network renewing it for not one but two additional seasons after its initial run ended — seemed, from its harrowing and horrifying cold open anyway, to be a story of survival horror among a late-‘90s high school girls soccer team stranded in the wilderness by a plane crash. The Terror starring girls who probably have a favorite Smashing Pumpkins song? Now that’s a show I can do business with.

The bifurcated thing we got instead, however, was not really what I was in the market for. Don’t get me wrong, I adore much of the work of the adult cast, whose job it is to chronicle the lives of the survivors in the present day. Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis? The stars of Heavenly Creatures, Speed Racer, and Natural Born Killers, very literally on my ballot for the best movies ever made? How could you possibly go wrong?

Oh gosh, let me count the ways. While the teenage material more or less stayed true to the promise of the concept — increasing desperation, clandestine sexuality, teenage betrayals, drug trips, incredibly disgusting self-administered amateur surgery, the establishment of a folk-horror cannibal cult at some point — the adult segments of the show became bogged down in schtick. Suddenly characters whose journey into murderousness you’re supposed to treat as deadly serious when they’re kids start offing people for black-comedy punchlines, deflating any sense of moral urgency. How are we supposed to take their moral conflict seriously, when the show very literally cracks jokes about them murking people and covering it up in the here-and-now?

I reviewed the Season 2 premiere of Yellowjackets, which I’ll be covering all season, for Decider.

After another hour spent in Perry’s company, I get the sense that injustice and tragedy are, to him, almost like a physical malady from which he suffers. There are times when he can simply take no more and springs into action, as he did with Emily’s case in the first place, and as he is doing with the Gallardo brothers now. It’s this almost impulsive zeal that leads him to stand up against the oil tycoon Lydell McCutcheon, whose goons strong-arm Perry into a meeting that devolves into threats. (Elsewhere in the episode, McCutcheon maims a man who comes looking to collect on a debt owed him by his dead son, Brooks, so we know he is willing to make good on those threats.)

But Perry is also capable of ignoring this kind of pain until it’s too late, then wallowing in it, even exacerbating it. Yes, he is the kind of guy who can deftly, gently shame the new case’s slightly pretentious presiding judge (Tom Amandes) into having the Gallardos placed in protective custody after they report finding broken glass in their jailhouse chow. But he is also the kind of guy who’ll deliberately drive his motorcycle at unsafe speeds rather than admit to Della that he may have contributed to his former client’s sense of suicidal isolation and despair.

Perhaps the sad tale of his service in the Great War — he was discharged after mercy-killing his own wounded men in the trenches — says everything you need to know about Perry. He’ll fly in the face of authority and society at large to do what he feels is right, but as that judge points out to him, he almost never does so in a way that will lead to a happy ending for anyone.

I reviewed the third episode of Perry Mason Season 2 for the New York Times.

You can take Perry Mason out of criminal defense lawyering, but you can’t take the criminal defense lawyer out of Perry Mason. That Perry discovers this with no evident chagrin is a testament to the truth of it. You don’t gain a sourpuss like his without a keen sense of the injustice of the world; on the evidence of last season, he has the legal know-how to do something about it, and he’s not about to forget it.

I reviewed this week’s Perry Mason for the New York Times.

In a series of patreon-exclusive podcasts, Stefan Sasse and I discuss episodes four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine!

What happens in that Firefly hospital, then, isn’t a material break with the past, but rather a palette swap. Marlene is a more sympathetic figure than either Kathleen or David, she has her eyes on a much bigger and legitimately noble prize, but in the end she’s still just a person other than Joel who thinks she knows what’s best, and “what’s best” involves killing Ellie. Again and again we’ve been conditioned to believe that when faced with such a person, there’s only one right move for Joel to make.What do you think? Post a comment.

A more charitable critic than I might say “Yes, and that’s the point: after zigging and zigging and zigging for eight episodes, The Last of Us has finally zagged. It’s meant to be confounding. It’s meant to be challenging.” To that I can only reply that the show doesn’t have the chops to pull off such a complicated maneuver, not after the season of rehashed The Walking Dead/The Road/The Mandalorian that it offered us up until this point.

I reviewed the season finale of The Last of Us for Decider.

Working off a script by Amiel and Berger, the director Fernando Coimbra — with Blanchard’s invaluable help — crafts a convincing and familiar 1930s Los Angeles atmosphere for this motley crew of strivers and sad sacks to inhabit; it truly is hard to notice the creative handoff that has occurred between seasons. We’re back in business with Perry, and so far, business is good.

I reviewed tonight’s season premiere of Perry Mason for the New York Times, where I’ll be covering the show all season.

And I’m actively repulsed by Joel’s half of the story, the 40,000th illustration of the necessity and effectiveness of violence that the American culture industry has produced in the past 20 years. In reality torture is ineffective and — this is the important thing — fucking immoral. Creating scenarios in which it’s the only way out for the good guy, and thus the good guy’s goodness makes torture acceptable, is slimy, wormy shit. So is doing the same thing to set up one kill-or-be-killed scenario after another, thus conveying to the audience that wholesale slaughter in the name of your loved ones is the only moral arbiter. The Walking Dead made a whole show out of this low-grade fascist bullshit. Who needs another?

I reviewed last night’s The Last of Us for Decider.

I guess that’s a weakness of your basic post-apocalyptic road-movie structure: You’re only gonna run into so many people, most of whom are adults, most of whom are carrying guns that they may or may not be shooting at you. Not a lot of opportunities to explore the rich panoply of human emotion, you know? This lack of variety is reflected in the effectively one-note performances of both Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, and it handicaps the show considerably. More interesting or innovative writing could work around that, but, well, you get what you get. 

Even the exceptions, like this flashback, aren’t really much to write home about. You can see Ellie’s wide-eyed wonder at the mall coming the moment its lights switch on, and the show does nothing unexpected with the sequence. Even if it did, Gustavo Santaolalla and David Fleming’s constant, hyperactive, sledgehammer-subtle score tells you exactly how to feel about everything at every moment. I’ve been rewatching The Sopranos recently — I know, I know, that’s hardly a fair comparison for this or any other show — and it’s amazing how its lack of a score makes it feel so much more wide-open and intriguing than this. A little more faith in the audience’s ability to think for itself would go a long way.

Which is the story of The Last of Us, I think. Every week it comes on, every week it’s basically serviceable genre entertainment, and with a couple of exceptions (the highs of Episode 3, the lows of Episode 5) every week it’s out of my mind within minutes of the closing credits rolling. You don’t really need to think for yourself, as there’s simply not much to think about.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

If there were an award given out for the year’s most adequate hour of television, The Last of Us Episode 6 (“Kin”) would be a contender. Basically competent, mildly engaging, largely inoffensive, gesturing in the direction of emotional power without ever running the risk of triggering it directly, it comes nowhere near the highs nor the lows of the five episodes that preceded it. Some lovely scenery, some cursory worldbuilding, a reunion and a farewell, a bunch of wild animals in a post-apocalyptic city, an unsuspenseful cliffhanger, and that’s a wrap. It’s a fresh installment of the biggest show on TV right now, and it’s pretty much just there.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

The Last of Us made its sympathetically portrayed fascist collaborators Black and Jewish and had them hide with a child in an attic or else the antifascists would murder them. When you type it out it feels even more unpleasant than it did to watch it. Who does this thought experiment serve? In whose shoes is this placing us? Surely it’s intended to be “makes you think” television. What, exactly, are we supposed to think here?

I reviewed The Last of Us episode five for Decider.

A group of revolutionaries has overthrown the fascist FEDRA government — but is the cure worse than the disease? Pretend you don’t know anything about how Hollywood tells stories and find out tonight on The Last of Us!!!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

My illustrious cohost Stefan Sasse and I talk The Last of Us Episode 2 and Episode 3 on our Patreon-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Moment podcast. Go subscribe and listen!

Along the way they play Linda Ronstadt on the piano, they eat delicious meals prepared by Bill, they revel in strawberries grown by Frank (Bill’s high-pitched squeal of delight upon tasting a fruity delicacy he probably hasn’t enjoyed in over a decade is delightful), they fend off an attempted invasion of their property by raiders with a show of booby-trap force that makes Kevin McCallister look like a guy with a banana peel, they befriend Joel and Tess (RIP), they renovate the neighborhood and some nearby shops, and they pretty much act like basically decent people making the absolute best out of the absolute worst situation. Keep in mind the entire main narrative stops short for, I dunno, 50 out of the episode’s 76 minutes to show all this.

I reviewed this week’s The Last of Us for Decider.

A striking brunette with porcelain skin, piercing blue eyes, and a body that’s been a meme since True Detective Season One, Alexandria Daddario is the perfect lead for Mayfair Witches. Sure, she can act, which is also true of the rest of the show’s core cast: Annabeth Gish, Beth Grant, Harry Hamlin, Tongyi Chirisa, and Jack Huston. But, and I stress, she’s also one of the most attractive women on god’s grey earth, and that counts for a lot in the endemically horny world of Anne Rice’s witches.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches for my Patreon.

The rest of the episode, and this is definitely the cool thing about it, stars a grand total of three characters and three characters only: Joel, Tess, and Ellie, trekking through the overrun ruins of Boston in order to exchange the girl for the battery the adults will need to fire up a truck and take it cross country. That’s right: no resistance fighters, no jackbooted security personnel, no working stiffs, no fellow smugglers, not even extras save for the infected. It’s all Pedro Pascal, Anna Torv, and Bella Ramsey, which sets up the unconscious expectation in the audience that if enough of these three characters die, so too will our story. It’s smart filmmaking.

Smart enough, I think, that it can power through a lot of objections you might have as to the been-there-done-that nature of what they say and do. I’ll state for the record once again that I have not played the Last of Us video games; I’ll state for the record once again that this doesn’t matter, since I’m reviewing a TV show and not the games it’s based on. As such, well, it’s 2023: You’ve seen crumbling cities overrun by vegetation a million times before (Netflix’s Alice in Borderland Season 2 got there just a few weeks ago!). Ditto plant/fungus-based humanoid monsters. Ditto dialogue like “This is your chance, you get her there, you keep her alive, and you set everything right,” which when delivered by an infected and doomed Tess is supposed to come across like a major moment instead of throwaway text from a cutscene. It’s way more the latter than it is the former, I’m afraid.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.