“It’s cool, dude. We don’t have to talk.” From Darlene Alderson’s lips to the creator, writer and director Sam Esmail’s ears: The fifth installment of the final season of “Mr. Robot” is almost entirely dialogue free.

It’s an attention-getting feat from the filmmaker, who is no stranger to such stunts. Recall that high-rise thriller episode that looked like it was filmed as one long take, for example, or the series’s perfect simulacra of 1990s sitcoms and 1980s slasher films.

This episode primarily tracks Darlene and her brother, Elliot, as they finagle their way into a secure server farm in order to hack the bank account used by their nemesis, Whiterose, and her Dark Army. One side plots tracks the outgoing E Corp chief executive, Phillip Price, and the compromised F.B.I. agent Dom DiPierro as they follow the Dark Army’s instructions. Another tracks Elliot’s therapist, Krista, who doesn’t realize she is being followed by the minions of Elliot’s old drug-dealing enemy, Vera, until it’s too late.

It all makes for a rather miserable Christmas Day for all concerned; indeed, the contrast between the characters’ stressful states and the compulsory joy of all the Christmas music they encounter is the episode’s best running gag.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Mr. Robot‘s final season for the New York Times.

Even at this relatively early stage in Watchmen‘s game, summarizing the events of an episode, much less watching one, can be a dizzying prospect. Phone calls to Mars, exploding coffins, racism detectors, homemade spacesuits, dead buffalos, pet owls, Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites,” cars falling from the sky, massive blue dildos—it makes you sound like a crazy person, or at the very least the police chief from The Naked Gun.

But that’s the charm, isn’t it? Alright, I’m not asking, I’m telling: That’s the charm. Even though “She Was Killed by Space Junk,” Watchmen Episode 3, is so far the only one to make a big deal of its ties to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s epochal comic book, it is every bit as weird in its content and jarring in its rhythm as its predecessors. You thought introducing the Silk Spectre was going to slow things down? Think again.

I reviewed the third episode of Watchmen for Decider.

There’s a going on here, and it’s been a while since I’ve watched a show that seems so full of conflicting ideas it might burst at the seams. It’s a good feeling.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Watchmen for Decider.

Risk is the essence of romance. A wise woman told me that once; I live with her now, so I’m inclined to believe she knew what she was talking about. Exposed and vulnerable, we reach out to another person and hope they’ll reach back. We put ourselves at their mercy in hopes of connection. In some cases, we put ourselves at the mercy of a world that will punish us for that connection should it be discovered. There is some pain we suffer gladly because it’s the vessel in which pleasure comes.

Titled “403 Forbidden” — like every episode title so far, it’s both an internet error message and a signpost for the story — this installment of “Mr. Robot” has both the series’s protagonist and antagonist putting themselves at risk in romance’s name. In one case, it leads to disaster. In another … well, the season isn’t over yet.

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

I’ve started a new column about film called My Favorite Movies, which will cover exactly that. The inaugural installment: Eyes Wide Shut. It’s available for my Patreon subscribers at the $5/month tier. I hope you dig it!

With that in mind I’ve experimented with making my pro wrestling column, Sweeping Up the Eyeballs, free this week. I hope you dig that too!

It’s wild!

No, seriously, it really is wild. It reminds me, in a good way, of some of the most far-out episodes of Lindelof’s Leftovers run—the ones where Justin Theroux near-death-hallucinates that he’s an international assassin, say, or the one where Christopher Eccleston talks to God on a weird cult’s orgy boat before God gets mauled to death by a lion. Where Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen eased you into its world’s weirdness—which to be fair was orders of magnitude less weird than either the Marvel or DC shared universes of which it served as a critique—Lindelof and director Nicole Kassell dump you into the deep end and expect you to do the butterfly, with the aggressive and eerie music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross blaring in the background.

I reviewed the series premiere of Watchmen for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season. It’s good!

Now here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today: The season finale of The Terror: Infamy moved me to tears.

Wait, what? We’re talking about the same The Terror: Infamy that squandered its predecessor season’s goodwill by shoddily cobbling together warmed-over J-horror with real-world historical atrocities? The one that employed a central supernatural metaphor that appeared to place the blame for Japanese Americans’ political predicament on Japanese Americans themselves rather than their racist captors? The one that was haphazardly plotted, jerking from location to location and time period to time period with seemingly no sense of narrative balance or emotional logic? The one where the main character chose the moment when he and his family are rounded up by the American government as potential traitors to tell his mom that he got some lady in a family way? That The Terror: Infamy?

Yes, that The Terror: Infamy.

Written by co-creator and showrunner Alexander Woo and directed by Frederick E.O. Toye, “Into the Afterlife,” the final episode of the AMC anthology series’ second season, is an extended grace note for a story that up until now had just been banging on the keys at random. Attentive to the historical import of the time period it chronicles, generous in spirit toward its characters both living and dead, and driven in large part by the season’s most effective and poetic imagery, it nearly makes up for all the dross that’s come before. It left me imagining a season that had lived up to this standard from the start, and wondering how much more impact a finale like this would have had if it had.

I reviewed the shockingly good finale of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

Adding additional layers to an already complicated plot is tricky business, of course. But the mysteries are so intriguing, and Esmail’s command of his craft so sure, that the investment seems sound as a pound.

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

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. Tough to know what to make of it.

Succession‘s second season finale ends on a high point not just for the episode or the season but the entire series. Until now it’s seemed almost unthinkable that one of Logan Roy’s brood would defy him this dramatically after first agreeing not to. This is more shocking than Kendall’s first attempt to dethrone his dad, since we’d watched him build to that point over several episodes. Our only clues here were implicit and contextual: the presence of Cousin Greg, who kept copies of incriminating documents, by Kendall’s side; the Judas/Fredo kiss Kendall planted on his dad’s cheek when he agreed to be the fall guy required to placate congressional investigators and nervous shareholders alike. With so little fanfare beforehand, watching Kendall actually get up there on the world stage and call his dad out for what he is feels like watching a dog suddenly stand on its hind legs and speak fluent Latin.

I reviewed the season finale of Succession for Decider. I liked it, though people need to calm way down about this thing. As I say elsewhere in the review, dramedies are the coward’s drama.

“Government property, in the middle of New Mexico???” You had to know this was coming, even if Chester Nakayama and his family did not. The moment—the moment—Yuko the yureiescaped the fire Chester set in that cabin in the internment camp a few weeks back simply by showing some hustle, I thought to myself “You know what kind of fire she won’t be able to escape?”

Sure enough, we’re now in the Summer of ’45, the Nakayamas are in a bunker in the middle of the New Mexico desert, a random British guy with security clearance is wandering around drunkenly celebrating mankind’s conquest of the laws of nature, and a certain vengeful spirit almost certainly has a date with nuclear destiny. You didn’t think a series as heavy-handed with history as The Terror: Infamy would let the specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pass by unmolested, did you?

I reviewed the inevitable penultimate episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

It starts with the death of a main character. It seems, at first, to end with the death of the main character. In between, it plays out like an eerie paranoid thriller against a backdrop of international corruption and capitalism run amok. Written and directed by the series’s creator, Sam Esmail, the fourth and final season premiere of “Mr. Robot” plays to all the show’s strengths and none of its weaknesses.

I reviewed the season premiere of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. I liked it quite a bit, which was a relief.

Joanie, Joanie, Joanie. What are we going to do with your share of “The Affair”? The grown-up daughter of Cole and Alison Lockhart dominates this episode — which, given the strength of Noah Solloway’s segment, ought to be a compliment. But when Joanie seeks out and finds her mother’s killer, what happens manages to upend the show’s narrative apple cart so completely that it’s hard to appreciate anything that came before.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It took a wild left turn and I did not come along for the ride.

The chickens have sailed home to roost. Written by series creator Jesse Armstrong and directed by series mainstay Mark Mylod, this week’s episode of Succession sees the long-simmering cruise-ship sex-abuse scandal storyline bear fruit, as the Roys and their lackeys are called to testify before the Senate to answer for their crimes. Now, this is Succession, so you know ahead of time nothing will come of it. But the Roys are generally at their most compelling when they’re forced to pretend to be normal humans during the rare occasions when other people have a leg up on them, and this is one of those occasions. It’s worth taking a little time to savor.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession, which I liked better than most, for Decider.

“They will not fail!”

The deluded denialism of Lord Summerisle and his people is made terrifyingly clear. In the nobleman’s piercing, clarion voice you can all but hear him clinging, white-knuckled, to the edifice of ideology he himself helped construct and enforce. He cannot admit that he’s wrong, can’t even brook the possibility. He’s telling himself the sacrifice will be accepted and the crops will return as much as he’s telling Howie or the assembled islanders. He’ll commit murder, doom his community to collapse and his people to starvation, before admitting the truth.

I think about those four words, and Christopher Lee’s perfect delivery of them, a lot. I hear an entire mindset, the complete conservative worldview, in those four syllables.

I wrote about my favorite line from The Wicker Man and why it’s the key to so much that’s wrong with our world for Polygon.

I’ve gone easy on The Terror: Infamy. No really, I have. As you fine A.V. Club readers and commenters have pointed out to me, last week’s installment, with its slapdash approach to how its characters handle for-certain knowledge of malevolent spirits, probably deserved worse than the C- I awarded it. As a horror guy, I can be swayed by shows that show a little bit of effort in that regard, and as such the gruesome opening skin-graft sequence was the episode’s saving grace.

This week’s opening sequence? It ends with a jump-scare crash-cut the moment Yuko the yurei opens her eyes—huge shock, I know, considering how we’ve watched this same undead woman skulk around, eyes wide open, everywhere from Oregon to Guadalcanal. Is it possible to telegraph a moment you’ve already delivered to the audience in triplicate? Apparently so, if you’re as misbegotten a series as The Terror: Infamy.

Speaking once again as a horror guy, something about that moment really…well, almost insulted me. Are we supposed to be that stupid, we horror fans? Are we supposed to be scared just because what we’re being shown has assumed the scare-shape of a moment that’s frightened us before in other, better work? The unexpected eye-opening resurrection beat is a bit that’s been done to death (no pun intended); are we supposed to jump out of sheer Pavlovian conditioning?

I no longer really care what we’re supposed to do, not in The Terror: Infamy’s case at any rate. Titled “My Sweet Boy,” the series’ eighth installment is a hodgepodge of moments that make no more artistic or narrative sense than expecting us to be scared when the undead character reveals that, yes, she is in fact still undead. It’s a trite, lazy, condescending mess from start to finish.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

As if a giant clamshell washed ashore and birthed it nude and radiant from my mind’s own womb, this week’s episode of Succession felt like it was crafted to illustrate my argument that the show’s blend comedy and drama is fundamentally unworkable by the gods themselves. It’s an hour-length demonstration of how going for the cheap and easy laugh can neuter sociopolitical critique and reduce deft character work to hamfisted about-faces a daytime soap would look down on.

[…]

Anyway, I’m sure Kendall’s stupid rap is the toast of Twitter, right up there with the joke about j-school grads writing clickbait (“Ten Reasons Why You’re Never Getting Paid”) and a brief mention of the Democratic Socialists of America. In terms of middling political shows, Succession is The West Wing for people who’ve tweeted about how much they dislike The West Wing, and it just aired its answer to “The Jackal.” Tweet away.

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