But there’s one more revelation to discuss … and it’s a doozy. Elsa Montgomery, the documentarian interviewing Wayne in 2015, directly connects his case to the one pursued by — you guessed it — Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, who we even get to see in a newspaper clipping. Isn’t it possible, she wonders, that both crimes were part of a massive conspiracy between rich and powerful child molesters? One in which key witnesses were repeatedly killed or mysteriously disappeared to keep the cops from getting to the truth?

How much hay should we make of the now 100-percent confirmed links Seasons One and Three? Not much, most likely. Note that Elsa claims the “crooked spiral” iconography associated with the Rust and Marty case served as a calling card for the elite pedophile ring. But that particular symbol was spread by Errol Childress — an impoverished, illegitimate, extremely mentally ill offspring of the powerful Tuttle family that really ran the show. Presenting the fancy true-crime director as well-intentioned but incorrect gets right down to the notion of: Can even the most educated investigators, whether they’re detectives or writers or filmmakers, ever really know what happened?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of True Detective Season Three for Rolling Stone.

But forget, for a second, the series’s first two divisive seasons and their maddening whodunits. True Detective Season Three has turned into a show about how a single, central crime spreads like a spiderweb into a whole host of small-town sins. Racism and sexism, poverty and class warfare, sexism and homophobia, addiction and religion: They all play a part here.

Even as old men, Wayne and Roland may eventually discover the truth beneath it all. But maybe the point is that some mysteries of the human heart are simply too big to solve.

I reviewed episode six of True Detective for Rolling Stone.

What makes this not just ironic but fascinating is that Hays and West are easily the least weird, least corrupt, least abusive protagonists that showrunner Nic Pizzolatto has created yet. They like each other. They’re capable of long-term romantic relationships with intelligent women who have lives of their own (even if those relationships eventually end). They’re dedicated to solving the case, even if it means defying the higher-ups. Sure, they’re gruff and have a tendency to play bad cop/bad cop when interrogating suspects, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen in like two dozen Law & Order characters. You could even say that they are [drumroll] … true detectives!

And yet the case is as much of a mess as the hunt for the Yellow King. Why?

The answer is rooted in the previous seasons, and not because of various subreddit-worthy clues indicating they occur in a shared universe. Whether Matthew McConaughey or Rachel McAdams were in the lead, those stories left the power players behind their central crimes untouched, even if individual mysteries got solved.

You don’t need to believe in Carcosa to understand that there are evil forces at work in the world that no murder investigation can eradicate. Poverty, race, class, alcoholism, political corruption, misogyny, people just plain being shitty — they all conspired to commit this crime. Catching the killer won’t stop any of those factors from destroying more lives. Not even a keen-eyed Vietnam War tracker and his trusty by-the-book companion can stop that destruction. The best they can hope for is to preserve the peace, along with some of the pieces.

I reviewed episode five of True D S3 for Rolling Stone. By now it’s become clear that Nic Pizzolatto has a very firm grasp on this material.

The thornier material here centers on Tom and Lucy Purcell, the estranged alcoholic parents of the murdered boy and missing girl. When Roland picks up the former from a bar where he picked a fight with a man that his wife slept with, he spits out the n-word to describe Hays; the black cop’s assignment to the case, he claims, proves that no one’s taking it seriously. But when West sticks up for his partner, saying he’s the best detective on the job, Tom apologizes, immediately and repeatedly — and digs deep into his own despair.

“I can’t be in that house, man,” he says, sounding like a broken man even before he adds, “I just wanna die all the time.” It’s an absolutely heartbreaking performance from Scoot McNairy — the fact that it begins with a racial slur and ends with him begging the cop not to reveal his shameful bigotry only makes it more so.

This is doubly true of Lucy, whom Amelia visits. The moment the teacher offers a shoulder to cry on, the grieving mom unleashes a torrent of self-loathing. “I’ve got the soul of a whore,” she says, lamenting her neglect of her kids. Her pain takes the form of rhetorical questions: “Children should laugh, right?” And: “What kind of woman hates the only things that ever showed her love?” Wishing she had the courage to use her gun on herself, she begins just straight-up bawling and howling “God forgive me.” Actor Mamie Gummer is so convincing here you want to cover your ears.

But when she takes poorly to her visitor’s suggestion that she reach out to Wayne with any information she might not have previously revealed, an entirely different sort of pain starts pouring forth. She immediately turns on the teacher, exploding in a sudden fireball of racist invective so intense that her visitor almost runs from the house. Anyone who says suffering is somehow ennobling is clearly fooling themselves.

I reviewed the strong fourth episode of True Detective Season Three, co-written by Deadwood‘s David Milch, for Rolling Stone.

The real difference now is that the dialogue and performances line up with the relatively linear plot. Mahershala Ali, Carmen Ejogo and Stephen Dorff may play characters tied to a major crime investigation, but other than that they act like normal people. They drink a bit too much when they want to have a good time, or when they want to forget bad ones. They fall out of touch when they take different jobs (“Once we stopped working together, we just … stopped,” as Roland puts it) but are happy to reunite. They complain about the size of big-box stores, racial disparities in the state police, whether or not they spend enough time with their kids. West even holds Tom Purcell’s hand to pray as part of the recovering alcoholic’s surrender to his Higher Power. It’s hard to imagine Marty Hart or Ray Velcoro doing anything of the sort. Never mind the flat circles of time; what you’ve got now is a True Detective that’s shooting straight instead of weaving spirals.

I reviewed episode three of this straightforward season of True Detective for Rolling Stone.

Already you can see that this isn’t just Season One Redux. Like McConaughey’s tortured cop, Wayne is lonely. But he’s just a bachelor, not a guy who sleeps in a bare room with a crucifix above his mattress. He’s a drinker, but just ties one on a few times a month rather than pounding a six pack during a deposition. He suffers from mental illness as an older man, but it’s not, uh, whatever makes you see spirals in the sky and say stuff like “time is a flat circle” to homicide detectives.

Wayne’s partner Roland is a less well-defined figure at this stage in the season than Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart was during his. But so far, despite playing the straight man/good ol’ boy role in the partnership, he isn’t half the sexist shitkicker his predecessor proved to be. What’s more, Roland trusts his mercurial counterpart implicitly, defending the unorthodox tracking technique he picked up in ‘Nam when the local fuzz takes issue with it. That whole “one guy says something insanely profound (or profoundly insane) and the other guy tells him to shut the fuck up” dynamic is nowhere to be found.

Nor are the one-dimensional, do-nothing female characters from Season One. Ejogo’s Amelia is a full-fledged person, a welcome development that follows McAdams’ talking point last season. The show still isn’t perfect on this score — the documentarian character is an oblivious do-gooder whose talk of intersectionality and oppression we’re clearly supposed to find baffling and laughable — but we’ll take it.

I’m back on the True Detective beat for Rolling Stone, starting with my review of last night’s two-episode season premiere.

If the Man gave Marvel its persona, he also created his own. Born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922, he adopted his pen name in part because he held out hope of becoming a serious writer under his real name. Meanwhile, he was cranking out comics of every kind for his uncle Martin Goodman’s publishing company, which eventually evolved into Marvel. That name and everything that came with it — the jocular personality, the never-changing look, the vague but unmistakable air of creative wizardry — was as grand an identity as any superhero’s.

Of course, he had a secret identity too. He was a hopelessly devoted husband to his wife Joan, a British ex-pat whose death in 2017 seemed impossible for Lee to ever truly wrap his mind around. And as recent exposés and interviews have illustrated, he was subject to the same depredations of age as any other person — confusing legal disputes with business partners, elder-abuse allegations — a sad coda to a life lived large.

And he was Stan the Company Man as well. Ask the late Jack Kirby, the creative dynamo (he helped invent both Captain America and romance comics with writer Joe Simon, long before he and Lee teamed up), who by all accounts did much of the heavy lifting not just as artist but as co-writer during their fruitful collaboration, despite Lee earning the lion’s share of the credit and compensation. Kirby’s legacy as “The King of Comics” includes a lengthy legal war against Marvel for rights, royalties, and even the physical pages he drew on. Though Lee assiduously pointed out the role his collaborators played in the formation of the company and its characters during interviews later in his life, he usually took Marvel’s side in these battles when they occurred. To many within comics, “The Man” has the same pejorative connotations it does when used to describe politicians or police.

But whatever his faults (many) and autumn-years misfortunes (also many), Lee’s ambition, imagination, and ability to combine high melodrama, high-octane action and playful, personable banter on the comics page was the foundation upon which the entire Marvel empire was built. And most importantly, long before his characters ruled the box office, they populated the back pockets and bedroom floors of countless kids, thirsty for adventure and desperate for connection. Peter Parker, Tony Stark, T’Challa, Natasha and the rest of the gang brought incalculable hours of enjoyment to their readers, and eventually their viewers. All of it based on Lee’s basic premise, reflected in his own life in so many ways, that radioactive spider bites or not, heroes are only human.

Without Stan Lee, it would be a poorer, lonelier, drearier life, in which picked-on kids would dream fewer dreams. Forget the Marvel Universe. Stan the Man reimagined our own.

After his death, I wrote about Stan Lee for Rolling Stone. I tried to be specific and fair about his faults and achievements.

Before he was a character, Venom was a costume.

Imagine if the Joker started out as a clown outfit that Batman wore for circus-themed missions and you’ll have some idea of just how odd the path that this character took to antihero superstardom really was.

Back in 1982, comics reader Randy Schueller submitted an idea to Marvel for a storyline in which Spider-Man acquired a black costume (with a red spider logo, rather than the familiar white one) made of “unstable molecules,” i.e. the Marvel Universe material from which the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards made his team’s uniforms. More than mere fabric, this outfit would be able to adjust to Peter Parker’s needs, as well as enhance his powers. Controversial Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter bought the idea from Schueller for a cool $220.

It took a couple of years for the new white-on-black look to make its first chronological appearance in the pages of the company-wide crossover “event comic” Secret Wars #8, courtesy of a design by artist Mike Zeck and a script by Shooter that saw the Webslinger acquire the costume on an alien planet.

Though the issue came out in December 1984, the costume had popped up several months earlier — first as a sketch in March’s comic-length newsletter Marvel Age #12, then in a Spidey story set after the events of Secret Wars in May’s Amazing Spider-Man #252, plotted by Roger Stern, written by Tom DeFalco, and illustrated by Ron Frenz.

… And also an alien parasite.

During their Amazing Spider-Man run, DeFalco and Frenz fleshed out the origin of the liquid-like black outfit, which would respond to Peter Parker’s thoughts; it would even hijack him in his sleep for late-night crimefighting binges. Sure, it looks badass, but it’s not merely a futuristic crimefighting costume or the self-repairing clothes writer/artist John Byrne had devised for the martial-arts hero Iron Fist (an influence on Stern’s concept for the costume). It’s a sentient, symbiotic alien entity, one which bonds to a human host and bestows them with incredible powers while still maintaining a mind of its own.

That “mind of its own” thing is the rub. Though he digs the power-up, Parker quickly learns that this “Symbiote” wants to bond to his body permanently. By exploiting the alien’s vulnerability to fire and sonic energy — and with a little help from the Fantastic Four — Spider-Man separates himself from the costume, which slithers off to find another host to inhabit.

I wrote a quick cheat sheet to catch people up on the history of Venom in comics and film, just in time for the new Tom Hardy movie, for Rolling Stone. I like doing pieces like this because it’s a way to give some shine to the writers and artists who made this multibillion-dollar industry possible.

Which leaves us to wonder: What, exactly, was the point?

It’s not just that you can find more compelling (and bewildering) horror-tinged alternate-reality dramas without breaking a sweat, from Lost to Twin Peaks to The Leftovers. It’s not even that the ending cribs so hard from The Shining (and, from non-King country, The Babadook) that you feel déjà vu. It’s that Castle Rock undermined its own big twist — the introduction of the whole parallel-world concept and the idea that the Kid might be a hero rather than a monster — almost immediately after introducing it.

As a drama, the show boasted intelligent, understated performances from Holland, Skarsgård, Spacek, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Glenn and more. As a Stephen King riff, it understood and updated his concept of everyday American evil better than any adaptation of his work in recent memory. But as a horror story of its own, the series made promises then all but went out of its way to avoid delivering in the end. A finale that seemed destined for dark magic was just a bait and switch. The show has been renewed and a new tale will be told. Let’s hope our next visit to this terrible Maine town lives up to its potential.

I reviewed the final episode of Castle Rock’s first season/storyline for Rolling Stone. The bottom line is that it never really got scary for more than a moment or two, and it doesn’t amount to much as a head-scratcher either. The acting is there, and the attention to American evil too, and both were handled with smarts and restraint, but it was pretty much exactly the sum of its parts.

Have you guys seen Henry Deaver around? You know — tall skinny guy, floppy hair, big Gollum eyes, white as the Swedish snow? The renowned Alzheimer’s researcher who fled Castle Rock when his mother escaped his abusive preacher father? The guy who found a little boy locked in a cage in his old man’s basement, where the kid has apparently lived without aging for nearly three decades? The one who realizes that this little boy’s name is also Henry Deaver?

You have now.

Titled “Henry Deaver” after not one but two of its main characters, the penultimate episode of Castle Rock‘s first season takes the biggest storyline swerve the show has seen yet. It relocates us to a different version of the town, one that’s still marked by tragedies like helicopter crashes and schoolbus accidents but noticeably healthier and wealthier overall. (Best gentrification joke: That awful dive bar is now a “gastropub.”) Here, Molly Strand isn’t a pill-popping real-estate agent, but a member of the city council who’s got serious clout with folks like the police department — and their top cop, Dennis Zalewski.

Most importantly, Castle Rock 2.0 is the hometown of Henry Deaver — not the African-American defense attorney played by Andre Holland as an adult and Caleel Harris as a teen, but a white neurologist played by Bill Skarsgård, a.k.a. The Kid. You thought Lost had some wild timeline-shifting tricks up its sleeve? Hold Castle Rock‘s beer.

I wrote about episode nine of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. As narrative sleight-of-hand, and as a showcase for the surprisingly wide range of Bill Skarsgård as an actor, it worked. As horror? Not really, and that’s the show’s biggest problem.

Saying this episode continues the show’s hot streak isn’t telling the whole story. It doesn’t rely on the introduction of world-building sci-fi/fantasy concepts like “The Schisma” and “The Filter,” nor is it carried on the back of an Academy Award winner given an entire hour to herself. It simply expresses the horror of sublimated violence and the ability of the supernatural to unleash it — the stuff that drives so much of the Master’s work — in its own voice.

If you’ve ever watched a show like Boardwalk Empire or The Americans, you might recognize the vibe. Like the Prohibition-era mob in the former and Cold War espionage in the latter, the particular strain of horror on display here is the mannequin that writer Mark Lafferty and director Ana Lily Amirpour (of the modern horror classic A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), as well as showrunners Dustin Thomason and Sam Shaw, can position into new shapes of their own devising.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It was my favorite to date.

Castle Rock has just leveled up.

That’s the big takeaway from this week’s episode (“Filter”). From the start, the show had a baseline level of quality — talented cast, understated writing, a keen eye for everyday American evil and a willingness to aim for “eerie” rather than “over the top” — that’s a step up from most Stephen King adaptations (and also several prestige dramas in their shaky early episodes). Yet it’s never quite gelled into anything more transcendent than the sum of its competent parts. This installment was the first time it felt like you could see the series as something closer to a cohesive whole.

I reviewed this week’s Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s getting there.

Castle Rock is burning. Not just because of the wildfires raging across the hills that surround the town, either, although their hazy orange glow, reflected in the skies above, gives this new episode — “Harvest” — an appropriately infernal vibe. Consider the opening flashback, in which Henry Deaver seeks treatment for the unexplained ringing in his ears that’s plagued him on and off since he was a teenager. “I guess everyone thinks they grew up in the worst place in the world, huh?” the doc asks with a smile. In the lawyer’s case, of course, the answer is a resounding yes. But the implication, via a smart script from Lila Byock, the dreamy direction of Andrew Bernstein and the inclusion of real-life, ripped-from-the-headlines horror that’s become part of this show’s dramatic schematic, is clear: Everyone did grow up in the worst place in the world. The world is not a nice place to grow up in at all.

I reviewed episode five of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. There’s a lot I think is admirable about this show—it handles the Everyday All-American Evil that’s King’s specialty in a way that feels current and urgent rather than nostalgic and corny, and the cast of fine actors is taking the material seriously. But in the end, it comes down to what kind of villain the Skarsgård character is, doesn’t it? And we don’t know that yet.

25 The Crow

Actor Brandon Lee, a.k.a. Bruce’s son, seemed born to play writer-artist James O’Barr’s undead vigilante, who returns from the grave to murder his way through the gang responsible for his girlfriend’s death. But despite the on-set tragedy that claimed the actor’s life, Lee helped create a no-holds-barred hero with an unforgettable look and vibe. The Crow doesn’t need the bulky armor and high-tech gadgets of his peers: His body is his weapon, and his spectral presence alone is enough to strike terror into criminals’ hearts. Batman beware. STC

24 Judge Dredd (Karl Urban)

Sorry, Mr. Stallone, but there’s only room for one “I am the law”-man on this list – and that’s the version from the punishing 2012 film Dredd. Played with unsmiling fury by Karl Urban, that judge is an instrument of capital punishment so pure and implacable that you never see his full face – an unknowable and untouchable avenger behind his helmet. This deliberate dehumanization does the original ultraviolent comics by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra proud, and when this Dredd shows up at the ground floor of a skyscraper apartment complex, one look at him is all it takes to know he’ll kill his way through every floor to get to the gang boss at the top. Which he does, with honors. STC

I wrote about the Crow, Judge Dredd, the Toxic Avenger, Raphael, Barbarella, Neo, Speed Racer, and Superman for Rolling Stone’s list of the top 50 movie superheroes of all time.

SPOILER WARNING

This leads directly to the show’s most disturbing sequence to date. Trapped in his hellish prison job for the foreseeable future, helpless as his fellow guards beat and dehumanize the prisoners — and quite possibly tainted by the touch of the Kid — Dennis Zalewski snaps. Grabbing his gun, he methodically marches through Shawshank, murdering every officer and official he finds. When he finally reaches the warden’s office, he finds Deaver there. “I wanna testify,” he says … before a flashbang grenade drops them both to the ground and a shotgun-wielding bull blows him away.

It’s a gorgeously fucked-up sequence, in large part because it’s just so very Stephen King-ish — and not in a way we’ve really seen before on screen. This kind of killing spree is a staple of the Master’s work: Seemingly ordinary men just lose it one day. They pick up a rifle or an ax, slaughtering their way through as many people as possible, offering one final deadpan non sequitur before someone puts them down like a rabid dog. (The town history of Derry, where It takes place, is full of rampages like this.)

And there’s nothing about Zalewski’s affect here to suggest that if he’d gotten away clean, he wouldn’t have just gone down to the bar for a drink, complaining about a rough day at work. It’s not quite the banality of evil, but there’s a workmanlike quality to it that gets right under your skin. Murder is so routine it barely registers.

Isn’t that what Zalewski himself tells Deaver? “Bad things happen here because bad people know they’re safe here,” the guard warned the lawyer when he tried to downplay the potential to open a prison-wide investigation. “How many times can one fuckin’ town look the other way?” In his desperation to expose Shawshank’s horrors, the man turned himself into one of those horrors. He had to become the prison in order to destroy it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. The ending was impressive.

During another flashback, we see Molly invite young Henry up to her room to hang out. Her neighbor leads a sheltered life, most likely an abusive one. So he’s baffled by her meticulously curated posters for period-appropriate college-rock bands. (“What are ‘Violent Femmes’?”)

He’s even more flustered when Molly drops this bomb on him: “I know what you do in your room. Touching your thing. It feels like fireworks.” The moment is cut short when Daddy Dearest starts hollering for Henry to come home, but this sudden and relatively explicit swerve into adolescent sexuality is a welcome sign that Castle Rock will take that element of Stephen King’s work seriously. (The recent It adaptation excised the book’s infamous orgy scene entirely, but replaced it with a weird scene of a bunch of guys leering at a girl in her underwear instead … as if that’s somehow an improvement.) Carnal knowledge is a huge driver of the author’s character development and horror craftsmanship alike. Kudos to the show for having the courage to even try to tackle what can be a danger zone onscreen.

I reviewed the third and final episode of Castle Rock that Hulu launched all at once last week for Rolling Stone. This was the weirdest and best.

The bigger question facing Castle Rock is how much it wants to tap dance between the Master’s raindrops. Strong performances by the cast in general, and by the remarkable, dead-serious Andre Holland in particular, make the show watchable if you don’t know your Randall Flagg from your Kurt Barlow. But if you’re a fan, hearing Lacey talk about “the dog” and “the strangler” most likely gave you a bigger thrill than anything else narrative-wise. And when you think back through the King mythos, it’s not hard to come up with another character who had the ability to inflict disease and cause death with a just glance of his own dark, intense eyes. Is the show content to be a superhero-comic-style nostalgia act, where the main dramatic drive is figuring out when your favorite villains are about to return? Or does its portrayal of an economically devastated small town where the biggest source of jobs is a privatized prison provide fertile enough ground to grow evils all its own?

I reviewed episode two of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s still a show finding its sea legs.

If the premiere is any indication, it’s not the diverse strands of the Stephen King Extended Universe that’s holding this thing together: It’s Moonlight veteran André Holland. His character Henry Deaver is a just a black American from a lily-white small town, raised with a heaping helping of old-time religion and unexamined trauma. He’s not dreading an encounter with a demonic clown – the lawyer just wants to make sure that his client gets the legal representation the Constitution guarantees. He’s a careworn man trying his best, not a hero undertaking a quest. This is Mr. Holland’s opus: He acts like doesn’t know he’s in a highly anticipated television event from the creators of Lost and The Shining. He makes Castle Rock feel like a drama, not the haunted-house ride at the county fair.

And while Holland gets the meatiest material this time around, he’s surrounded by actors capable of moral and emotional seriousness. His mom is played by Carrie herself, Sissy Spacek. Pangborn is played by Scott Glenn, who’s brought grizzled gravitas to everything from The Silence of the Lambs to The Leftovers. Molly Strand, the suburbanite pill-popper who briefly shows up? That’s Melanie Lynskey, who hasn’t met a role she couldn’t crush since Heavenly Creatures. Frances Conroy, a solid player in both prestige dramas (Six Feet Under) and guilty genre pleasures (American Horror Story), cameos as Warden Lacy’s blind wife. And the Kid? It’s Bill Skarsgard, dialing his performance as Pennywise from It down several notches but still weird and wall-eyed as ever.

Finally, there’s the not-so-good Warden Lacy, played by Terry O’Quinn. All the emphasis on Lost‘s unanswered questions makes it easy to forget all these years later, but the actor was an absolute godsend for that show — an MVP who could play a wily survivalist, a Wolverinesque badass, a failed hero, a bitter old man and an embodiment of pure evil with equal nuance and skill. Yes, the Warden commits suicide by driving off a cliff with a noose around his neck (“guillotining himself with a Lincoln,” as Henry puts it). But we’re in King Country now, and even if you discount supernatural shenanigans, the flashback toward the episode’s end indicates we haven’t seen the last of him.

I’m covering Castle Rock, the new “songs in the key of King” series on Hulu, for Rolling Stone, starting with my review of the series premiere. It’s not sit-up-and-take-notice stuff like The Terror was, but it’s promising.

The funny thing is that despite the length of the finale and the glacial pace of most of the preceding episodes, Westworld Season Two still feels like it just barely got started. Take away the shifting time frames and the occasional detour into Flashback Country, and what have you got? A road movie in which characters who either perpetrated or survived Season One’s climactic massacre all head to the Valley Beyond. A bunch of robotic redshirts and a few supporting players get killed. A few other supporting players make it through to a virtual-reality paradise while Bernard, Dolores and the Man in Black live on (in one form or another) in the real world to fight another day.

It’s not a bad narrative, necessarily. From The Warriors to the freaking Odyssey, plenty of good work concerns its characters’ quest to get from Point A to Point B without losing their lives or souls in the process. But the show’s parameters for the park are too vague to give their journey a sense of direction. All we know is that it’s really, reallybig. That, and there are strategically located bunkers and hideouts just a few minutes of screentime away from wherever the characters are at any given moment so they’re never in real danger of getting lost.

Meanwhile, the constant cross-cutting between storylines dilutes our investment in the physical journey of any one character or group, since we know we’ll be whisked away to some other place and time at any moment. There’s a reason the Akecheta episode hit as hard as it did, even aside from Zahn McClarnon’s performance: It rooted us in the experiences and perils of a single character for an entire episode, in a way that made us feel what was at stake – and that no amount of Dolores monologues could equal.

And we don’t even have a recognizable endpoint in mind to serve as an anchor, the equivalent of The Lord of the Rings‘ Mount Doom. “The Valley Beyond” is amorphous even by the show’s standards (at least Season One’s “Maze” implies a central location). It’s just a bunch of rocks in the middle of a Western landscape like countless others the characters have crossed, and even as a metaphysical concept it’s just a bog-standard promised land. To paraphrase Bernard’s imaginary Ford, you might as well have spent the season chasing the horizon.

Which is a bit like the experience of watching Westworld itself. There are enough individual elements at play – concepts, creature effects, a handful of strong performances – to make you believe it could all come together at some point. There’s a consistent leap of faith needed, a fingers-crossed hope that the show will Get Good the way many other dramas that suffered shaky starts eventually did. Yet all our pathways keep leading us to the same place: clichéd dialogue, meaningless twists, plodding pacing. And the good Westworld remains, as ever, its own Valley Beyond, maddeningly out of reach.

I reviewed the blah season finale of the blah show Westworld’s blah second season for Rolling Stone. I wanted to post this long an excerpt for a couple of reasons. First, it’s me riffing on one of my favorite topics: the way film can use the motion of bodies and objects across physical space to communicate. Second, and more on this soon, it illustrates a point I frequently try to make, which is that rather than start with thematic or sociopolitical critiques and work downward, you can often start with seemingly small formal considerations of cinematography, writing, performance, etc. and discover how they work upward toward larger flaws.

I’d also recommend reading my new Rolling Stone colleague Alan Sepinwall’s thoughts on the season; we realized early on that our takes were very complementary.

Evan Rachel Wood’s performance since her transformation into the Deathbringer has been impressive in its steeliness, but her hard-ass attitude and mechanical lack of emotion have left her little to do than act like a grumpy robot unless there’s something especially traumatic for her to process. We saw how well she could play that kind of emotion when she encountered the ruin of her father, his computerized mind torn to pieces by having too much data pumped into it.

Here, over the body of the man with whom she’s shared so much, we see it again. There’s something weird and alien in how her face registers the pain of Teddy’s death, as if her internal processors have to learn what grief feels like from scratch and figure out an appropriate physical response. Her face goes weirdly flat, then asymmetrical, then contorts in an animalistic silent howl of anguish and rage. It’s acting as creation, using the face and body to build a new way of expressing a familiar emotion. You want a metaphor for how good sci-fi operates? You got it. If only Westworld gave it to us more often.

Three weeks ago I reviewed the penultimate episode of Westworld Season 2 for Rolling Stone. It’s a return to mediocre form after the beautiful Zahn McClarnon/Akecheta episode from the previous week. One thing that emerged really strongly to me this season is how badly the material hamstrings even the best actors on the show, and there are some really good ones, and how in the hands of less-good actors (it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Tessa Thompson is at it again) it just goes nowhere at all.