Something very strange happens when they finally meet Lord Asriel. When he sees Lyra, he pretty much flips out. “I did not send for you!” he shouts, seemingly on the verge of panic. Then he lays eyes on her little pal Roger, and his whole demeanor changes. “I am very pleased you came,” he says to the boy. He sounds like a spider who’s discovered a fresh fly in his web.

Lyra has escaped every enemy, survived every skirmish, journeyed to places of great danger and lived to tell the tale. (All this, and she helped overthrow the king of the ice bears to boot!) Now that the young woman can give her alethiometer to her father, as she believes she was chosen to do, her quest should be at an end. That’s how a traditional fantasy story would work, you know? But there’s something about Lord Asriel’s voice, and the look in his eyes, that hints at horror to come.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

Anyway, there’s some perfunctory “and the moral of the story is…” stuff about masks—Ozymandias says they “make men cruel,” Hooded Justice says “you can’t heal with a mask” because “wounds need air”—the sum total meaning of which you can grasp in about the time it took you to read this sentence. It seems to me that in an episode that featured, again, Angela Abar breaking someone’s fingers one by one for information, you should probably have shown how vigilantism and unaccountable law enforcement are bad rather than just told us. It would have made it easier to believe the show meant what it was saying.

As it stands, I’m not really sure what the show means. Not that meaning is the be-all and end-all of visual narrative—like I said a few episodes ago, this is a drama, not a thinkpiece. If you were to treat all of this as an essay rather than serialized television, you’d miss how much dizzying fun Damon Lindelof’s brand of blow-to-the-head surrealism can be, or how good Regina King and Jeremy Irons and Jean Smart and Tim Blake Nelson and Louis Gossett Jr. and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Tom Mison and Sara Vickers and Don Johnson and Hong Chau were in their roles. (Seriously, that is a murderers’ row of individually vivid performances, whatever you think about the show they were in.)

But seriously, what do we have here that we didn’t have before? Watchmen the original article had a lot to say about America, the Cold War, vigilantism, the right, the superhero genre, and the comics art form. Other than opening with the Tulsa Race Massacre—a big point in its favor—did Watchmen the TV show comment on politics in general or its own medium in particular with anything approaching Moore & Gibbons’s innovation, vision, and purpose? The puzzle pieces all fit, but what kind of picture are we looking at? I’ll give you a little time to think it over. Tick tock, tick tock.

I reviewed the finale of Watchmen for Decider. I feel like in the end it was a bunch of beautiful humbug.

If there’s one phrase that sticks in the head after tonight’s episode of His Dark Materials (“The Daemon-Cages”), it’s “the tyranny of sin.” Uttered by one of the scientists who oversees the cruel, child-abusing “intercision” technique in the cold Northern prison known as Bolvangar, it explains nearly everything we’ve seen Mrs. Coulter and the sinister agents of the Magisterium do.

After all, if you truly believe that the planet is suffering under the boot-heel of original sin, is there anything you wouldn’t do to “free” it? Isn’t a sacrifice of the few for the many, as Mrs. Coulter puts it, worth the price?

The answer depends on whether you believe in the concept of sin to begin with. In this fantasy world, of course, the concept is equated with an actual physical substance called Dust, which in turn is associated with human souls in animal form, known as daemons. But what if you don’t buy into the notion that there’s something corrupt in the human heart, which only church and state can destroy? Then you can see Bolvangar for what it is: a facility for the torture of innocents.

It’s all very heavy stuff to wrestle with, and this episode is uncompromising in its depiction of the traumatized, zombified children left in the wake of the villains’ grand experiment. It’s also unflinching in showing us the excuses adults will cling to — sin, science, the need to follow orders — in order to justify their cruelty.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

I appeared on the latest episode of the Struggle Session podcast to talk to hosts Leslie Lee III and Jack Allison about the latest episode of Watchmen. Give it a listen!

It’s only when the episode reaches its conclusion that it starts to trip over itself. First, it indulges in a cheap and easy Terminator-style temporal paradox: Angela tells Dr. Manhattan that her grandfather murdered Judd Crawford for being a closet Klansman and member of the Cyclops conspiracy, facts of which he goes on to inform her grandfather years earlier, causing him to commit that very murder in the first place.

Alan Moore wisely avoided these chicken-and-egg brainteasers when he wrote the character. Instead, he emphasized the way Dr. Manhattan’s quantum-physics experience of life would affect him emotionally. Passing messages backwards and forwards in time until reality becomes a loop is a lot less interesting than the idea of a man constantly adrift in an endless sea of memory, experience, and anticipation. One is a parlor game; the other is a story. It doesn’t surprise me to see the co-writer of this episode is Jeff Jensen, the former TV critic best known for his elaborate and always incorrect theories about what was really going on on Lindelof’s Lost. (Apparently Lindelof appreciated those pieces a lot more than I did.)

I reviewed this week’s episode of Watchmen, about which I had mixed feelings, for Decider.

But there’s one thing I can’t quite figure out: the episode’s final shot. After numerous references to her insomnia, we finally see Dom fast asleep on the plane, Darlene’s empty seat next to her.

Why does Dom finally sleep the sleep of the just at this moment? Didn’t she run back to the plane because she wanted to reunite with Darlene? If all she wanted to do was break free of her responsibilities — to her family, to her job, even to Darlene — then wouldn’t she have done something else, considering she believed Darlene was on the plane?

At the very least, the music supervisor owes me an apology for getting my hopes up with that Jepsen song. But perhaps that disappointment was the point. As they used to say on “Game of Thrones,” life is not a song.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot (and its Carly Rae Jepsen music cue) for the New York Times.

There is something inhumane, in the most extreme terms possible, about separating children from those they love the most. It robs them of the kindness, care, and security that they need so badly in this cruel, dangerous world — or other worlds, for that matter. Any movement based on tormenting kids in this way, any system that uses the power of the state to kidnap and traumatize its youngest and most vulnerable subjects — that’s the stuff of fantasy villainy. The evil is so clear cut you can write storybooks about it. “It’s worse than anything,” Lyra says.

“It’s about control, isn’t it,” Scoresby replies. “Because if you can remove someone’s soul, you can do anything.” So it would seem.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone. It’s relevant.

Do you see where I’m going with this? The art of this show doesn’t lie in Damon Lindelof’s nervous-breakdown interviews or contractually-obligated making-of mini-documentaries, or in the Peteypedia supplementary materials on HBO.com, or in finding just the right place to stop the chicken-and-egg cycle of racism and racism-induced trauma that led to the state of vigilantism and policing today. It’s in the pacing and the imagery, in that staccato strangeness that Lindelof has developed and unleashed in his Gibbons-endorsed, Moore-ignored homage to the original.

If that’s not to your taste, that is fine—even The Leftovers was Not For Everyone TV. But at least respond to it as a work of visual narrative, not a thinkpiece. At least reflect on and wrestle with where the art of the thing really is, not where you feel you need it to be.

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

SPOILER WARNING

Who was that masked man?

In this week’s episode of “Watchmen,” the show pulls back the hood on one of the story’s most elusive figures, the brutal vigilante called Hooded Justice. A peripheral but pivotal figure in the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Hooded Justice was the very first masked vigilante hero in the “Watchmen” universe, responsible for launching the phenomenon that inspired all the others to don masks of their own.

The big surprise? Underneath that hood and noose, so evocative of the Ku Klux Klan, was a black cop and survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Will Reeves. Employing a mask and a rope that his racist fellow police officers had used to terrify and intimidate him, he turned the terror back onto criminals — including those crooked cops.

The revelation elevates a background player from the graphic novel to the status of protagonist, and in the process it raises as many questions as it answers. Does this surprising secret identity jibe with what we know from Moore and Gibbons’s original book? The showrunner Damon Lindelof — despite having made what he has called a “remix” of the book — claims to treat it as gospel. Could the racist iconography of Hooded Justice have been a ruse all along? We dug back into the source material to see if the case for a placing black man beneath that menacing hood holds up.

I unpacked the big twist on this week’s episode of Watchmen for the New York Times.

Most interesting is the chicken and the egg question all this raises. Is a black man to blame for the pseudofascist superheroes who followed in his footsteps and gave Dick Nixon decades in the White House, then went on to spawn the 7th Kavalry? Or is it the original masked vigilantes, the KKK, who should get the blame for driving Reeves to become Hooded Justice in the first place? And most importantly, does Watchmen have a sure enough grasp on this material to answer the question at all?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Watchmen for Decider. It has a complicated relationship with the source material, to say the least.

The revelation about his father has gutted Elliot to the point where he feels he can no longer go through with the Deus Group hack he has suffered so much to plan. It is hard to hear him sob to Mr. Robot that he can’t do it; anyone who has struggled with trauma or mental illness knows that feeling of having nothing left to give. Ending one of the final episodes of a riveting techno-thriller on that note of powerlessness is a bold choice indeed.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times.

Compare and contrast His Dark Materials‘ core cast with that of The Golden Compass, that ill-fated attempt to kickstart a movie franchise from Phillip Pullman’s book series. Replacing Nicole Kidman with Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter? You’re simply swapping one gifted, gorgeous actor with another. James McAvoy subbed in for Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel? Two intense guys with piercing gazes — it works. Recasting Scoresby, the hard-charging Texas adventurer played by Sam Elliott, with … Lin-Manuel Miranda? It takes some chutzpah, to say the least.

So far, however, it works. Showrunner Jack Thorne appears to have realized that there’s no way to outdo Elliott in the cowboy department, so he’s taken a radically different tack. The Hamilton impresario plays Scoresby as a more playful kind of adventurer, with a bright smile and breezy disposition that befit his side hustles as a trickster, a card sharp, and a pickpocket. He may not be the kind of guy you want by your side in a shootout, but there’s a decent chance he could swipe your enemy’s gun and save you the trouble.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

The show is called His Dark Materials. But who are we kidding? It’s all about her.

HBO’s latest fantasy epic struck gold when it cast Ruth Wilson as its villain, Mrs. Coulter. In lesser hands, the sinister head of the General Oblation Board and leader of its “gobblers” would be a one-dimensional child-stealing monster, with the occasional glimmer of doubt or remorse. But thanks to The Affair actor, she emerges as a full-fledged human, overwhelmed by her own emotions even as she overpowers everyone in her path.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

What really matters here is how Looking Glass takes it, and that’s written all over his face. I’m sorry, I know that sounds like a bad joke given his faceless mask, but it’s really not Looking Glass who receives this revelation—it’s his secret identity, Wade Tillman. Without saying a word, actor Tim Blake Nelson makes the man’s relief so obvious and so strong it borders on awe. You almost expect him to start weeping tears of joy. In dramas, human responses beat shocking twists every time.

And why shouldn’t he be happy? He was a victim of one of the worst events in human history (the horror of which is very effectively conveyed by that flyover shot of the squid’s path of destruction, accompanied by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s horror-movie score). He’s spent the rest of his life terrified, wearing tinfoil hats to protect him from ever experiencing that sort of thing again. His entire life, in fact, revolves around a worst-case scenario that this videotape, in one fell swoop, erases from the realm of possibility. What would you do on behalf of someone who allayed your greatest fear?

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

Two rooms, six actors, one hour: This week, “Mr. Robot” served us a bottle episode. There was no way of knowing we would find something so truly dark at the bottom of it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times.

But — and maybe this is just Ruth Wilson’s rich performance bringing out these notes in the character — Coulter has moments of softness as well. After she gives Lyra a bath, we see her lingering by the tub with a sad look on her face, like she can see her regrets in the soapy water. When she uses her daemon to abuse Lyra and Pan, she cries afterwards, as if she’s sorry she did it. And when she returns from an outing to find Lyra studying diligently, or at least pretending to, you can see her affection for the girl take her by surprise. Her monkey, an indicator of her true feelings, actually reaches out to tenderly pet Lyra’s daemon.

In other words, if Coulter is a monster, she’s cut from the same cloth as Cersei Lannister: awful in general, but with a serious soft spot for any child she thinks of as her own.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of His Dark Materials, aka The Ruth Wilson Show, for Rolling Stone.

What I think is inarguable is how writerly Lady Trieu is, how removed from our everyday experience of language, of interaction and reaction, for which cleverness has been substituted. The easy irony (following up a fatuous threat to “destroy” the baby with a smiley “Guys, I’m joking”); the ability to cap off her conversation with a bon mot (“What was that?!?” “That…is mine”); and most especially the penchant for treating the most remarkable and outlandish things—her unimaginable wealth, her ability to manufacture babies, a meteor (or is it a rocket containing Superman?!?!?!) falling out of the sky just seconds after she purchased the land into which it crashes—like they’re just part of an ordinary day…this is extremely Smart Comic Book Writer shit. Or as Lady Trieu herself puts it, when talking to Angela’s missing grandpa Will Reeves about his plan to deliver vital information to her by leaving behind a bottle of pills in her car for her to investigate, “It’s still too cute by half.”

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

Dread, Mr. Robot explains, is that feeling of crossing a line you don’t realize exists until you’ve already crossed it. It’s that “My God, what have I done” sensation, when you find yourself in over your head and realize you’re the one who got yourself there.

And if there’s one thing the director Sam Esmail does well, it’s dread. His long takes, his slow zooms, his beautiful close-ups of big-eyed people staring in disbelief: They make him television’s poet laureate of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and knowing that when it falls, it will hit hard.

This week’s episode of “Mr. Robot” was all about that ugly feeling. It divides its time between three situations in which characters are held against their will, desperate to find a way out, waiting to see what their captor will do next. Throw in the composer Mac Quayle’s increasingly ominous score and the cinematographer Tod Campbell’s confidently stark camera work and you have a recipe for a very black Christmas indeed.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times.