“Sabine…can I count on you?” “………You know you can.”

“Is everything alright?” “…………Be careful out there.”

“Best get underway soon.” “…………Is that a note of fear in your voice?” “……Experience.”

“Relax.” “…Don’t worry about me.” “…I’m not.” “…Good.” “……Should I be?” “……What?” “……Worried.” “…………Nope.”

Imperial torture scientists toiling in the bowels of the detention level on the first Death Star for months couldn’t come up with a method of interrogation that would leave the human mind in the kind of state required to deliver the dialogue in Ahsoka. The endless pauses, the soporific delivery, the nature of the dialogue itself — my god, look at that last exchange; I honestly can’t believe Rosario Dawson and Natasha Liu Bordizzo were handed a piece of paper with those words in that order typed out on it — are all so bad that I kept waiting for Joel and the Bots from Mystery Science Theater to start dunking on it during every pause.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Ahsoka, which aside from some lovely imagery and a killer performance by Ray Stevenson is the most embarrassing Star Wars thing I’ve ever seen, for Decider.

Whoa. Where did this show come from?

Far and away the best episode of The Wheel of Time yet, this third and final installment of season two’s initial batch of three bears out the wisdom of that release schedule. After watching this teeming hour-plus of television, bursting with big ideas, memorable dialogue, and committed, witty performances, it’s hard not to want to see where the Wheel turns next.

I reviewed the third episode in The Wheel of Time‘s three-part Season 2 premiere for Vulture.

There’s poetry there, right? Potentially, anyway. A neutralized wizard bids farewell to her warrior protector. A messiah can’t be with the one he loves, so he loves the one he’s with. A young student makes a new friend at the potential expense of the old. These are the kinds of relationship dynamics a show can really dig into — and should, if it knows what’s good for it.

I reviewed the second episode of The Wheel of Time Season 2 for Vulture.

I’ve enjoyed these last couple of weeks of comparatively low-stakes scheming among the “Billions” bunch, but they raise an important point. What “Billions” needs for its final act is a bit of financial-thriller legerdemain on par with the instant-classic Season 2 episode “Golden Frog Time.” You remember: the bit where it looks as if Chuck is crying because his big plan to take Bobby down got his own father and best friend in big trouble, only for the show to reveal he’s actually laughing because that was his big plan? It remains my favorite moment of the series, not to mention a moment I would point to as a reason I love covering television for a living. It’s not the fault of “Billions” that my expectations for its conclusion are that high, but they are. I hope the show rises to the occasion.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

When a television show gets on a real creative tear, something special often occurs. To me, anyway. Whether it’s a stone classic deep into its run, firing on all cylinders; a killer from jump, blowing you away right away; or — as is the case here, with Foundation — a formerly sputtering spacecraft that has achieved escape velocity and is now hurtling towards the stars, there comes a point when a regular review simply won’t do, and a litany of superlatives is all that can get the job done. 

In other words? There is simply too much shit to like in “The Last Empress.” Directed with total confidence by Roxann Dawson, working off a remarkable script by Liz Phang, Addie Manis, and Bob Oltra, it’s Foundation’s best episode to date. (Seems like we’re saying that a lot lately, no?) 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation, a success on every level, for Decider.

There are times when the show that results from all this business feels less like a story, like a lived-in world, and more like a very large box purchased at the cost of a few hundred million dollars into which various story — and lived-in-world-shaped objects can be dropped. I’m a big partisan of the ornate White Tower as a set and location design; its pristine snow-colored latticework filigrees mark it as a place too powerful to be touched and sullied by the wars its residents constantly wage. The show has a kind of ostentatiously poly-couple sex positivity that distinguishes it from the pack, if nothing else. Pike and Henney are transcendently attractive. The Trollocs are perfect monsters under the bed. Beyond that, I’m not sure we’re getting anything here we can’t get more of, or better, elsewhere.

But sometimes that’s enough, you know? I tend to see The Wheel of Time through the eyes of my 12-year-old, a fantasy nerd to whom live-action epic fantasy is still so novel that virtually anything corresponding to that description is a home run. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t still enough of a 12-year-old fantasy nerd left within me that I myself didn’t react that way to the show, at least part of the time, even if Jordan’s books weren’t part of my personal repertoire. Sometimes you just wanna see people in tunics fire waves of magic at people in monster suits, maybe with some swords thrown in the middle. The Wheel of Time gives you that, and if you like that sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like.

The Wheel of Time is back and so am I, covering it for Vulture. It’s mid, but in a basically good way? Here’s my review of the Season 2 premiere.

Ahsoka comes across as the bare minimum of Star Wars required to make Star Wars fans go “Sure, I’ll watch it.” It feels less like a television show, let alone a movie, and more like a Happy Meal tie-in toy. If you’re absolutely desperate to hold something from a galaxy far, far away in your hands, it’ll do in a pinch. But the better toys, and the imagination required to make them worth playing with, are found elsewhere.

I reviewed today’s episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

Watching a good episode of “Billions,” which this undoubtedly is, is like watching someone expertly play a puzzle game — solving a Rubik’s cube, say, or beating a level of “Tetris.” You gaze in admiration as skilled hands slide pieces and panels from one place to the next until everything lines up exactly where it should. Chuck’s friends and enemies inadvertently guide him to the correct course of action. Wendy’s petulance puts her on the path toward a major breakthrough. Winston’s defection provides Wags with the fresh kill he requires. “Billions” makes it look easy, but if it were, everyone would be doing it.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

One element worth singling out: The deft, origami-like folding of Constant and Poly, General Bel Riose and his husband Glawen Curr, and Hober Mallow and the Spacer hive into one single elegant construction. In a sort of cascading series of scenes, Hober makes Hari Seldon’s big offer to the Spacers: an unlimited supply of a synthetic version of the compound that keeps them alive, heretofore controlled by Empire, in exchange for their support. The spacer queen, She-Is-Center (Brucella Neman-Persaud), decides the risk isn’t worth it and rats him out to her daughter, She-Bends-Light (Judi Shekoni), who serves with Bel and Glawen. Hober is handed over to their custody, but escapes thanks to his sentient navigator beast Beki and makes a jump right there within Bel’s ship’s hangar, thus proving the existence of Foundation’s advanced faster-than-light travel technology. As a result, Poly and Constant are brought before the Cleons and Demerzel, taunted, tortured, and returned to prison. It’s almost elegant, the way the pieces are put together.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

Instead, though, most of our time is spent with Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo. Man, I just do not know what’s going on there. Winstead’s delivery is completely undistinguished — où sont la Swango d’antan? — and Bordizzo and Dawson sound like someone forgot to wake them up. I don’t want to oversell this, mind you, it’s not like I’m outraged or appalled or upset, I’m just confused. I know these actors. How did this happen? What do you think? Post a comment.

And the show still displays absolutely zero facility for action or suspense, an absolute dealbreaker for the setting. I’m trying hard not to constantly compare Ahsoka to its predecessors, but the heist of the hyperdrive by the bad guys has an apples-to-apples comparison in the form of the heist in Andor, while the double-bladed two-on-one lightsaber battle Ahsoka has with a droid and that mystery assailant is straight-up Duel of the Fates stuff. In neither case is the comparison a flattering one. It’s an embarrassing one, is what it is.

I reviewed the second episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

The costumes look like decent San Diego Comic-Con cosplay. The commemorative mural on display at a big ceremony in Sabine’s honor is laughably amateurish. The children’s drawings Sabine finds in a bunk on Ahsoka’s ship are so obviously an adult trying to draw like a child that it’s almost a provocation to include them. The opening crawl is a syntactical nightmare. The score is frequently dreadful — a ghastly guitar-driven rock song here, lugubrious and out-of-place string sections there. Two lengthy sequences involve puzzle-solving you normally think of as the domain of the parts of Tears of the Kingdom you don’t like playing.

The performances aren’t helped by the dialogue, naturally. There’s only so much anyone can do with clunkers like “May their courage and commitment never be forgotten” or “Mentoring someone is a challenge” or “Sometimes even the right reasons have the wrong consequences.” (Jesus.) The ne plus ultra of this combination of bad writing and bad acting comes in this exchange between Dawson and Bordizzo’s characters:

“I go where I’m needed.” “Not always.” “You never make things easy.” “Why should I? You never made things easy for me, master.” “There is nothing easy about being a Jedi.” “Well, then I should have made a good one.” “Yes, you should have.” It’s like listening to an AI voice chat program train. 

I reviewed the series premiere of Ahsoka for Decider. Dreadful.

You know, when it comes to this week’s episode of Foundation, I think Tim Robinson put it best: What the fuck?! What the fuuuuuuuuck?!?!

I’ve been OOO but I cannot let the weekend pass without drawing your attention to one of the most insane things I’ve seen on TV in a long time: this week’s episode of Foundation, which I reviewed for Decider.

AI does not feel like the future, at least not the future I want. It feels like I’m watching a robot take a shit. It feels like I’m being forced to consume some kind of vile digital excrescence — a Silicon Valley Salò. Resnick, O’Brien, and Kelberman’s grotesque floating heads and their meaningless drivel got there ten years ago. It’s simply taken the real world this long to catch up, or more accurately, fall down.

I wrote about Live Forever as You Are Now with Alan Resnick, the old Adult Swim infomercial that predicted the vileness of AI to a tee

Foundation is funny, exciting, lyrical, dazzling to the eye, epic in scope, and horny at heart, in service of the refreshingly non-pollyannaish goal of limiting humanity’s next dark age to a mere millennium. Even its hero’s journey involves getting off a few stops early and walking. That’s just one more thing to admire about the year’s best comeback.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation for Decider. More big-budget streaming-network SFF adaptations should feature plotlines in which the supreme leader is in serious diplomatic trouble because immortal robot lover never taught him that the cowgirl position exists.

2. Losing My Religion

Impeccable, untouchable, not a note out of place. Despite its acoustic nature it sounds as insistent and relentless to me as something off of …And Justice for All. Once you learn what the song’s about — I had no freaking clue back when it was a hit — it feels like Stipe pounding on your door, begging for help, using Buck as a battering ram.

I wrote about my five favorite R.E.M. songs for the great Luke O’Neil’s newsletter Welcome to Hell World along with tons of other cool writers and such. My relationship with R.E.M. doesn’t go that deep but the stuff I know and like I REALLY know and like, so I hope that’s an interesting perspective.

NB: I would name the core unit at the heart of both Parliament-Funkadelic and the JBs (and their many side projects) as the greatest American band, followed by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and then probably R.E.M. But that’s really neither here nor there.

Long one of the most purely entertaining shows on television, “Billions” has always preferred to let its message about the robber barons who rule our world play out amid the beats of a well-made financial thriller over the more direct and unmissable approach preferred by heavy-handed satires like “Succession” and “The White Lotus.” If what we’re seeing in this premiere holds true for the series’s remaining episodes, though, the show seems to have well and truly gotten religion at last. It will spend its final hours depicting our heroes, and many of our villains too, battling to prevent a dictatorial billionaire from becoming the leader of the free world.

Bobby Axelrod is back in the Billions business and so am I, baby. I reviewed today’s seventh and final season premiere (if you’re streaming, Sunday if not) for the New York Times.

If I’d blinked I might have missed it, and this was Friedkin’s intent. He meant for the shot to be nearly subliminal, and he would come to rue the technology that allowed people to rewind and freeze-frame on that ghastly visage. After all, it’s just Ellen Dietz, Linda Blair’s stand-in, wearing some corpse paint — a rejected design for how Regan herself would look when possessed, created by the film’s makeup-effects genius Dick Smith. 

I didn’t know any of this as that terrified teenager. All I knew were two things. This was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, and I needed to see it again immediately.

So I rewound that VHS tape. I watched the dream again. And I forced myself to look as that eighth-of-a-second view of the face of pure evil popped back up on my screen before disappearing back into the unnerving expressionism of Karras’s dream. 

To this day I couldn’t tell you exactly why, except to insist, contra Friedkin, that it was not to conduct aversion therapy on myself. This wasn’t a situation where I thought repeated viewings would leech the Face of its power. The exact opposite, in fact. I knew it would scare the living shit out of me all over again — like, real fear, not roller-coaster fear, not spilling-your-popcorn fear, but heart-bursting adrenaline-dumping fear — and I did it anyway. 

I wrote about William Friedkin, The Exorcist, and the scariest shot in movie history for Decider.

I didn’t even realize Lee Pace wasn’t in this week’s episode of Foundation until after it was over. How’s that for a high compliment? 

I reviewed today’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

Right there you can see that Cloud’s range is astonishing, and this is what the contention that “he’s just playing himself” gets so wrong. Cloud and Fez may have had a similar vibe in casual conversation. But to access the comedic timing required to pull off that blackly hilarious interrogation scene, in which he conveys the largely accurate idea that the Jacobs’ lives are even more fucked up than his own? To convincingly portray a guy so thoughtful and attentive that a good girl like Lexi would grow closer to the town’s top drug dealer than to any of her own girlfriends? To voice the audience’s anguish as the adorable little psychopath Ashtray goes down in a hail of cop bullets? And to seem like exactly the right person for the job in every scenario? Any one of these tasks requires real talent, real effort, real work as an actor. Cloud did it all, and did it so seamlessly and so absent of ostentation that many viewers didn’t even notice his labor.

And when I say he’s the gateway between Euphoria-as-melodrama (complimentary) and Euphoria-as-thriller (also complimentary), I mean it. Take a look at the episode I consider to be the show’s masterpiece, the fifth ep of Season 2, “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.” It’s a showcase for Zendaya first and foremost, as she first has a mortifying emotional battle with her friends and family when, first at her house and then at Lexi and her sister Cassie’s, they attempt interventions to get her clean. It’s absolutely savage work by Zendaya, as raw and riveting as any of the New Golden Age dramas of yore.

But by the end of the episode, all the manipulation and gaslighting and guilt-tripping is over. Rue’s no longer lambasting her mother for being a shitty parent or accusing her best friends of betraying her or airing out other kids’ dirty laundry to take the focus off of her — she’s on a high-speed foot chase with the cops, breaking into houses, jumping over fences, landing in catctuses, and generally participating in crime thriller antics. Again, the transition is so seamless that you barely realize you’re suddenly watching a different kind of show until you’re knee-deep in some unsuspecting family’s backyard with the police on your tail.

What happens in between? Fez. When Rue has exhausted all of her family and friends, it’s Fez she turns to. When she tries to rob Fez’s grandmother’s meds, it’s Fez who turns her away. She approaches him via the show’s first brand of ugliness, the reality of addiction and confrontation, and departs him for a journey deep into the second variety, the heightened kill-or-be-killed reality of a Boogie Nights, a Pulp Fiction, an American Psycho. Fez is the fulcrum.

I wrote about the late Angus Cloud and his crucial, wonderful work on Euphoria for Decider.

All art has an element of the autobiographical. It is not special in this regard. Art has this in common with all fields of human endeavor, in which past experiences influence present actions. A teacher revises his lesson plan based on the previous class’s response, an Uber driver takes a different route because she ran into construction the day before — or a nuclear physicist designs the most dangerous weapon in the history of humankind because his brain is uniquely wired to understand the process, and because his Jewishness and left-wing politics drive home the terror that if he doesn’t do it, the Nazis will. In all cases choice is involved, and the work you make, including creative work, is not simple regurgitation; talent, skill, and imagination all come into play, and can be honed and sharpened to make better work over time. 

So I think it trivializes neither the hard work that artist Christopher Nolan poured into Oppenheimer — nor the grievous actions depicted in the film itself — to suggest that Oppenheimer, too, is reflective of the life of its creator. (He did cast his own daughter as the woman whose face peels off in the title character’s horrific vision of what he has wrought in an admittedly unconscious expression of his horror of the bomb, so I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb.) Here, after all, we have the story of a brilliant technician, preeminent in his field, successful in ways few of his colleagues can hope to emulate. He is tasked with the completion of a tremendous project that will change the world forever, which he completes with nearly (but not quite—ask Jean Tatlock) monomaniacal furor even when the need that initially drove him to do so subsides. Unleashed upon the world his project is an even bigger success — from the perspective of his bosses, if not that of humanity in general or the people of Japan in particular — than he imagined. And for one reason or another, he will regret that success for the rest of his life.

I wrote about Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan, and the explosion (and implosion?) of the superhero boom for Decider.