Literally titled “The Beginning of the End,” the show’s final season premiere (technically speaking, anyway—the season will be divided into two parts, released separately) starts out in typical Ozark style, i.e. a shocking cold open. Perhaps you recall how Ozark Season 3 ended, with the Wendy and Marty Byrde’s frenemy Helen Pierce getting her brains blown out right in front of (and all over) them? Well, we start out half a continent and an unspecified amount of time away from all that. Wendy (Laura Linney) and Marty (Jason Bateman) chit-chat about an FBI meeting. Their kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), talk about leaving behind laundered money as a surprise for some lucky person in the future to find. They’re all so distracted by basically being happy together, for the first time in god knows how long, that they don’t see an oncoming truck until it’s (almost) too late.

Which, as I sit here thinking about it, is not a bad metaphor for Ozark in general. The Byrdes are constantly bombarded with do-or-die assignments and ultimatums, bearing down on them like a tractor trailer headed into oncoming traffic. In this episode, for example, they are tasked by cartel boss Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) with shutting down the heroin operation of local crime boss Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery) and securing some kind of sweetheart deal with the FBI for Omar himself, who wants to retire from his criminal enterprise a free man. This is how Ozark works: The Byrdes are told to do something under pain of death—in this case either at the hands of Omar himself or his grasping nephew Javi (Alfonso Herrera)—and we watch them figure out how to do it or die trying. No one’s died yet, so they must be doing something right.

I’m covering the first part of Ozark‘s bifurcated fourth and final season for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere.

Station Eleven’s core belief is that even amid the worst of things, at least a few people will look out for a few people more. Sometimes this takes the form of art, created to bring joy to people’s otherwise difficult lives, but it can take other forms as well. Jeevan’s long-ago care for Kirsten didn’t save the world, any more than Miranda’s phone call to the pilot of that stranded airplane did. But they both saved some people, and in the world of this powerful, humane series, perhaps that will do. 

I reviewed the series finale of Station Eleven for Decider.

There’s still one episode to go, and I suppose it could settle the question of whether Kirsten and Jeevan wound up happier apart than they would have been together. But there’s a beautifully sad moment from early in the episode that I keep thinking about. In the suburban house where he was attacked (he wound up knocking his attacker out), Jeevan finds a synthesizer keyboard; the father of the family who lived there, all of whom died before he did, had programmed it to “play” snippets of his wife and children’s voices. It’s a gutwrenching moment, hearing all those happy children with no idea what was coming their way. But what an incredible way to preserve their memory—indeed, to recreate the entire phenomenon of memory, our brains’ way of taking snippets of the past and constructing them into a story, or something more like a melody. What melody will Kirsten wind up playing in the end?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

Station Eleven doesn’t bounce between timeframes and plotlines, it glides between them. This can make writing episodic reviews—recaps, in the parlance of our times—a dicey proposition. Any given episode can show you the same character in extremis at different points in his or her life, for entirely different reasons. How do you determine which outburst or confrontation is more important? The show can can insert crucial moments in a character’s growth, in their understanding of the world and art’s place in it—not to mention their own—in a flashback that lasts mere seconds, between minutes of meaty material set in the here-and-now. How do you pull it all apart and piece it back together in a linear way, a way that makes sense?

I reviewed episode eight of Station Eleven for Decider.

As is by now custom with Station Eleven, this episode (marvelously written by Kim Steele and directed by Lucy Tcherniak) is ripe with powerful details. Jeevan telling Kirsten everything’s going to be okay, and Kirsten replying that he’d just said “We’re fucked,” out loud. Jeevan “talking” to his dead sister, and the younger Kirsten showing her older self that this behavior started long before they staked out a cabin in the woods. Frank’s addiction, a direct result of war trauma, and Jeevan’s impatience with it: “We’re not heroin people. We’re barely even weed people!” The lone, Stand-esque voice on the television, fatalistically explaining how no one was prepared for “a flu that does not incubate, it just explodes…a one out of one thousand survival rate.” The terrific visual of the free-standing door that Kirsten passes through to access her memories. Older Kirsten crying at her youthful self’s optimism as she sings “The First Noel” to her new guardians. The passively suicidal Frank, who does not want to leave the familiarity of his apartment even though cold and starvation are now serious threats, refusing to vacate his home for the knife-wielding interloper. Kirsten’s adoption of the killer’s knife as a totem and her signature weapon.

It’s not a perfect episode; the costumes for Kirsten’s play are childlike only in the sense of adults trying to make something look childlike, and it takes you out of an important moment. But it’s a powerful episode nonetheless, in a series that seems to stack one such episode on top of the next. Like logs, or like bodies.

I reviewed episode seven of Station Eleven for Decider.

They can’t all swing for the fences.

Titled “Survival Is Insufficient”—there’s no particular relationship I can detect between the title and the content; it’s almost like they just grabbed a phrase from the Station Eleven graphic novel out of a hat, but whatever—this is the slightest episode of the series so far. Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine! Sometimes you just need to push the story in a certain direction, making incremental progress toward your eventual goal. (This used to be much more of a thing in the days of twelve-to-thirteen-episode prestige-TV seasons, but even early seasons of, say, Game of Thrones bear this tendency. You learn to live with it.)

I reviewed the sixth episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

The biggest problem with The Wheel of Time isn’t what’s onscreen, but what isn’t. Watching the seemingly endless credits spool out, listing a crew of hundreds if not thousands across multiple European nations, I found myself wondering what all this money and all these resources were being thrown at and drawing a blank. What is The Wheel of Time about in the end? Friendship? Yes, it’s nice to have friends; no, I’m not sure a massive monster war is required to illustrate this. Destiny? What does that even mean? Is anyone watching this show going to become the one single person capable of stemming the onrushing tide of evil? There are no Dragons Reborn IRL, I’m afraid. So what are we watching, exactly?

To draw a couple of comparisons that are sure to annoy a lot of people, TWoT is a lot more Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker than it is Game of Thrones. I hope it’s not tooting my own horn to say that I’ve made my position on the conclusion of Game of Thrones very clear, but the point I’ve always tried to make is that from the start it was a show about something, namely the way that man’s inhumanity to man keeps us from uniting against a massive common threat. (In 2021, that framework is more topical than ever.) The Rise of Skywalker, by contrast, is about how important the grandchildren of the antagonists of the previous trilogy of Star Wars movies turned out to be, which is another way of saying it’s about nothing in particular. I see a lot of Rey in Rand, and that’s not a good thing.

TWoT’s great hope for the future is that Rand’s discomfort with his own status, his drive to protect his friends by removing himself from their orbit, results in a journey of personal growth that’s both engaging and relatable. The chances are that no one reading this review will be the single person responsible for saving American democracy, stopping fascism and climate catastrophe, and generally setting the world to rights. But certainly, some of us reading this review — to say nothing of the person writing it — feel that they have personal traits best kept away from the people they care most about. If Wheel can lean into that aspect of Rand’s narrative, allowing us to relate to his decision to walk away from his friends lest he drag them down into madness and death with him, it can actually be about something, and thus become more than just a pleasant diversion in a fantasy world far, far away.

I reviewed the season finale of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Written by Cord Jefferson and directed by Lucy Tcherniak, this is a dense, rich episode—seriously, I’ve barely touched on the soccer team, and I haven’t even mentioned the nuns, or Clark rejecting Miles’s romantic advances because he’s grieving for his dead partner, or Clark spending most of his time blasted out of his skull on booze and MDMA he found in the belongings of the fake Homeland Security agent. (And that magnificent beard of his!) It’s the kind of thing you point to when you want to say no, the New Golden Age of Television is not over, there’s still enormously moving and intelligent work being done, coincidentally on a subject—pandemics—that now dominates every moment of our waking lives. I’m glad it exists.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Station Eleven for Decider.

It’s the end of the world, and for good or ill, art lives on. Even art about the end of the world—or a world, or a space-station simulacrum thereof. Station Eleven Episode 4 is all about art’s ability to soothe or exacerbate the world’s wounds; even its title, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead,” cheekily paraphrases the name of Tom Stoppard’s play, itself a riff on Hamlet, a play performed in a modernized version by the characters in the show. Sample quote: “Fuck you, Hamlet.” Times have changed, and art changes with the times. Even the End Times.

I reviewed episode four of Station Eleven for Decider.

The night that follows is kind of a CliffsNotes version of great Game of Thrones calm-before-the-storm moments, like the pre-battle portion of “Blackwater” or the entirety of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” before the Battle of Winterfell in season eight. Rand gets mad at Egwene for thinking poorly of Mat. Nynaeve gets mad at Rand and Perrin for fighting over Egwene. (Yes, apparently Perrin has it bad for Egwene, a fact that had in no way been communicated by anyone’s dialogue or performances until this episode.) Rand and Egwene make up and have sex off-camera. Nynaeve trails Lan to his adoptive family home, and later on they have sex, also off-camera.

Honestly? Other than some smooches and Moiraine’s terrific delivery of the command “on your knees” last week, the sexual relationships on this show are bizarrely sexless. The actors involved may be hot, but there’s no heat in their chemistry at all. In Lan and Nynaeve’s case, it’s not clear from the episode’s editing that she so much as removed a single garment in pursuit of her partner. It all feels like an embarrassing overreaction to the embarrassing overreaction to Game of Thrones’ use of sex and nudity, a discourse I hope and pray I never see the likes of again.

I reviewed this week’s lackluster calm-before-the-storm episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

In a way, this is Station Eleven’s origin story. Not the origin of the flu that wipes out humanity, nor the origin of any of the characters we’ve come to care about in the series’ previous two episodes. No, this is the origin of Station Eleven itself—the graphic novel that gives the series its title. In this installment (“Hurricane”), we spend time with the book’s creator, cartoonist and logistics expert Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler), as she navigates life, love, art, and death—the Big Four of all human endeavor, I’d say. Written by Shannon Houston and directed by Hiro Murai, the episode that results is a minor masterpiece.

I reviewed the third episode of Station Eleven of the initial batch of three released by HBO Max this week. Comparisons to The Leftovers are more than justified.

I’ll tell you when I lost it during Station Eleven’s second episode.

I reviewed the second episode of Station Eleven for Decider. Couldn’t make it through this one without crying.

When I say Station Eleven makes for difficult viewing, I’m referring to its subject matter: a flu pandemic that shatters society virtually overnight, effectively bringing about the end of the world. All the signs and signifiers we’ve learned from our own experience with a very real global pandemic are there: the overtaxed hospitals, the confusing news updates, the panicked grocery store runs, the fear of contact with other people coupled with the desperate need to be in contact with other people. Bonus points if you have or care about children: You’ll recognize he constant calculations you make to keep them as safe, happy, and healthy as possible in a world growing scarier by the second. 

Sure, the situation in Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel) is far more dire even than our own. But barring a murdered security guard here, a delirious victim in a stuck SUV there, or a presumably flu-induced plane crash in the middle of a major metropolitan area, it’s all too recognizable from our vantage point here in late 2021, with eight hundred thousand dead Americans and a host of ghoulish politicians and pundits attempting to profit from the carnage. It’s bound to be more than many viewers can bear.

That said, bearing it is easier than you’d think.

I’m covering Station Eleven for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. This is going to be a hard, hard sell for a lot of people, but based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s worth it.

Moiraine, drinking tea. Moiraine, talking shop with a colleague in a sauna. Moiraine, letting down her hair in front of a mirror at the end of a long day. Moiraine, sneaking off for a late-night assignation with her secret lover and confidante, who’s also her boss. Moiraine, standing on the balcony, admiring the view one last time before she leaves, perhaps forever.

If nothing else — and believe me, there was plenty else — this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time (written by Justine Juel Gillmer and directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfield) established the vital but straightforward fact that Moiraine, the powerful sorceress at the heart of the narrative, has a life. She enjoys simple and not-so-simple pleasures. She has co-workers she trusts and some she doesn’t. She has an office romance on the down-low. She’s into sexual power dynamics. She likes tea, and she occasionally spills it to keep her position secure.

In short, Moiraine is a human being, not just a wizard or a plot device. So even when, at the end of the episode, she reunites the five potential Dragons Reborn, you don’t simply have a picture of a questing witch in your mind — you envision a woman, in full. She’s fulfilling a quest, yes, but she’s been a person the whole time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Minas Tirith. King’s Landing. And now, Tar Valon. Despite its pastoral roots, fantasy filmmaking has long counted upon its practitioners to nail the look and vibe of its fictional capital cities. And so, from Middle-earth to Westeros to the world of The Wheel of Time, these ancient and ornate metropolises have played a major role. So kudos to TWoT’s team for making the city of the Aes Sedai’s White Tower such an intricate and impressive milieu — a staging ground for the human drama taking place within its beautifully patterned columns and corridors.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture. It’s the definition of “if you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’ll like,” but guess what—I like this kind of thing.

In a way, storytelling is The Wheel of Time’s biggest storytelling problem.

The world Rafe Judkins has brought to the screen feels boundless, replete with different cultures and subcultures, sects and sub-sects, thousands upon thousands of years of history, of wars won and lost, kingdoms risen and fallen, songs and languages learned and forgotten and learned again. (Dip your toe in the book series’ wiki, I double-dog dare you — you might fall in and never come out again.) From an epic-fantasy perspective, this is an impressive feat.

However, from the perspective of a television drama, it’s almost an obstacle because virtually every new development requires someone to tell someone else a story about it. Every time a character sees another character praying, a conversation must ensue as to what the prayer means and to which deity or ancestor or metaphysical concept it’s directed. Each time a phrase from a lost language is uttered, someone has to explain what it means, who originally said it, and what context it was said. Each new enemy requires one of the heroes to tell one of the others what the enemy is and what its powers might be, and how best to defeat or defend against it. And so on, and so on, and so on, for fifteen novels and however many seasons of those novels’ adaptations Amazon deigns to make.

In short, The Wheel of Time is a show that’s almost all fantasy worldbuilding, at least so far. If you’re a mark for that sort of thing — as, frankly, I am — then hey, great! Worldbuilding out the wazoo!

If you’re not into it, though, hoo boy, I can imagine this is quite a slog. For every recognizable moment of human connection — Rand struggling to communicate to his best friend Mat that he doesn’t need to keep any secrets, Nynaeve’s raised-eyebrow reaction to the polyamorous lifestyle of some of the Aes Sedai — there’s great gobs of exposition about the Way of the Leaf or the Song before the Breaking or the Kingdom of Minethrin or the will of the Amyrlin Seat or what have you.

To paraphrase I Think You Should Leave, suffice to say, The Wheel of Time is a lot.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

On the latest episode of our TV podcast Cut to Black, Gretchen Felker-Martin and I discuss John C. Reilly’s remarkable performance as the title character in Tim & Eric’s Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule.

Also, after some discussion, Gretchen and I have designated my Patreon as the official Patreon of Cut to Black. If you’d like, a $5/month pledge will earn you our eternal gratitude. Thank you!

What does it all mean for the future of this show, thought? That, I’m less certain about. It’s already been renewed for a second season, so you don’t need to worry about that. However, there still is a certain lopsided quality to it all, with the Cleon material standing head and shoulders above the Gaal/Salvor/Hari stuff. The burst of action that punctuated the first season’s last few episodes mitigated this somewhat, but now that Gaal and Salvor are simply adrift together on the surface of a drowned world, it seems like things may get tilted in favor of the Cleons yet again. The missteps involving Hari’s big speech and the secret of Salvor’s parentage certainly don’t help.

But I think there’s much to be enjoyed and admired in Foundation overall. The commitment to far-out ideas about the flow of history (punctuated though it might be by individual actions), the emphasis on grand science-fiction vistas, the performances of Lee Pace and Terrence Mann and Cassian Bilton as the Cleons—there’s room to grow a very good show around these component parts, even as the Lou Llobell/Leah Harvey/Jared Harris segments remain hit or miss. A decent chance—isn’t that all Foundation is asking for, in the end?

I reviewed the season finale of Foundation This show wound up being much better than it had any right to be, sometimes despite itself.

The Wheel of Time will be compared to Game of Thrones for as long as it lasts, and for good reason: It wouldn’t exist without HBO’s blockbuster serving as a sort of proof of concept for Jeff Bezos’s bottomless pockets. But Wheel is an unapologetic and effects-heavy epic fantasy from the jump. While GoT’s initial cold-open sequence featured a White Walker, that was pretty much it in terms of magical stuff until the dragons hatched in the season finale; Wheel has already shown us more of the admittedly awesome-looking Trollocs than we’d see of the White Walkers in, like, three seasons.

Wheel is also marching us through a lot of exposition about many different lands and cultures in very short order, as opposed to the comparatively easy-to-grasp “Seven Kingdoms governed by Great Houses” world-building of early GoT. The filmmaking follows suit. No sooner are our heroes split up in that shadow city in the last episode than they wind up in three completely different landscapes, facing completely different threats and encountering completely different allies. What it lacks in recognizable human emotions and drives, it makes up for — or tries to, anyway — in sheer storytelling scope. Will this ploy be successful? Only (the Wheel of) time will tell.

I reviewed the third episode of The Wheel of Time—the last in the batch of three that went live today—for Vulture.

It’s not always the case — no piece of Hollywood visual shorthand is truly universal — but in general, a close-up on a character’s mouth as they eat with gusto is shorthand for evil. It’s a way to communicate a character’s acquisitiveness or hedonism. (Sometimes it’s just plain old fatphobia.) In the case of Eamon Valda (Abdul Solis), the Whitecloak “questioner” who gives this episode of The Wheel of Time its cold open, it’s intended to show his indifference to human suffering.

As he tucks into what is, for all intents and purposes, the Billions/Succession/Hannibal forbidden delicacy ortolan, a woman dies in front of him. Her hand has been chopped off, and she’s being slowly burned at the stake. Her crime? Membership in the Aes Sedai, the powerful order of magic-wielding women whose representative Moiraine is leading our heroes off into the unknown. Clearly, they’ve got some dangerous rivals in the do-gooding department; the collection of stolen Aes Sedai rings Eamon wears on his belt indicates that he’s been down this bloody road many times before.

Solis’s chillingly cheery portrayal of this Captain of the Whitecloaks appropriately introduces Wheel’s second episode. Much more so than its predecessor, it’s concerned with the question of what it really means to be one of “the good guys.” In the war against the dark that both the Aes Sedai and the Whitecloaks consider themselves waging, are “good guys” even a thing?

I reviewed the second episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.