I’ll give The Rain‘s second season this: I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flummoxed by a season finale in my life. Thematically, that’s on point.

Overseen by co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt, Season 2 shifted the series from being a survival story about searching for family into a story of surviving the search for a cure. In that respect it mimics the rapidly mutating macguffin of a virus that wiped out the world, or at least the section of the world with Denmark in it, in minutes—but which over the course of the intervening years has started transforming plants into deathtraps and people into supervillains with magic virus powers.

“Surival of the Fittest” is, in its way, the most perplexing mutation yet. Not because it’s outright bad, like the first half of this strange season, but because despite containing and even doubling down on so much that made this season bad, it’s…actually good? I dunno, man, I just work here. If I sound confused, it’s because I am.

I reviewed the season finale of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

I’ll give The Rain‘s second season this: I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flummoxed by a season finale in my life. Thematically, that’s on point.

Overseen by co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt, Season 2 shifted the series from being a survival story about searching for family into a story of surviving the search for a cure. In that respect it mimics the rapidly mutating macguffin of a virus that wiped out the world, or at least the section of the world with Denmark in it, in minutes—but which over the course of the intervening years has started transforming plants into deathtraps and people into supervillains with magic virus powers.

“Survival of the Fittest” is, in its way, the most perplexing mutation yet. Not because it’s outright bad, like the first half of this strange season, but because despite containing and even doubling down on so much that made this season bad, it’s…actually good? I dunno, man, I just work here. If I sound confused, it’s because I am.

I reviewed the season finale of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.

The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.

Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.

(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)

I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:

He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!

I reviewed episode four of The Rain Season 2 for Decider. This includes my theory about people wearing hats.

Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.

I reviewed the strong fifth episode of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.

The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.

Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.

(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)

I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:

He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!

Why the change? Because while all fantastic fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and while “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is a solid rule of thumb to follow when reading or watching it, you need to be kept in a mentally non-sweaty mood. The weaker the work, the less you’re getting by way of compensatory value in terms of ideas, images, writing, acting, all the things that make shows or movies or whatever of any genre worthwhile, the more likely you are to start noticing people’s hats. In that light,The Rain Season 2 might as well be a ad for a haberdashery.

I reviewed episode 4 of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

“It’s Rasmus. He’s exploding!” —The Rain Season 2, Episode 3

“Can’t you hear how insane this sounds?” —The Rain Season 2, Episode 2

Loud and clear, The Rain. Loud and clear.

After a beautifully understated first season, Netflix’s once-promising post-apocalyptic thriller hits the halfway point of its second go round with a thud. Ironically titled “Stay in Control,” this episode appears to show a series that’s almost completely lost track of what made it compelling viewing in the first place. The grim but humane magic of its initial run is slipping right though its fingers.

I reviewed episode three of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

After a beautifully understated first season, Netflix’s once-promising post-apocalyptic thriller hits the halfway point of its second go round with a thud. Ironically titled “Stay in Control,” this episode appears to show a series that’s almost completely lost track of what made it compelling viewing in the first place. The grim but humane magic of its initial run is slipping right though its fingers.

I reviewed the third episode of The Rain Season Two for Decider.

There’s no way around it: I do not like this development at all. I don’t like the way it makes Rasmus even more of a superhuman dark-messiah figure. I don’t like how it pushes the boundaries of plausibility established by the series up until this point. I don’t like how it looks, as a visual effect. I don’t think it fits with the show’s quick yet fundamentally gentle and restrained tone. It just…doesn’t work. Not even having it unleashed under powerful circumstances—Sarah, grieving her brother and their friends, begs Patrick to kill her, and the virus emerges when she enters his room—can salvage it. My hope is that the show itself isn’t irrevocably infected as well.

I reviewed the second episode of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.

There’s no way around it: I do not like this development at all. I don’t like the way it makes Rasmus even more of a superhuman dark-messiah figure. I don’t like how it pushes the boundaries of plausibility established by the series up until this point. I don’t like how it looks, as a visual effect. I don’t think it fits with the show’s quick yet fundamentally gentle and restrained tone. It just…doesn’t work. Not even having it unleashed under powerful circumstances—Sarah, grieving her brother and their friends, begs Patrick to kill her, and the virus emerges when she enters his room—can salvage it. My hope is that the show itself isn’t irrevocably infected as well.

I reviewed episode two of The Rain Season 2 for Decider. It’s a mess.

I’m not quite sure what to make of The Rain’s new season premiere. Oh, the stuff I loved the first time around is still there: the cast (in addition to the Andersen siblings, Jessica Dinnage as the cherub-cheeked Lea and Mikkel Følsgard as Simone’s love interest Martin are also standouts), the fundamental gentleness of the core characters, the unswerving sense that hurting other people to protect your own is Bad, Actually.

But the pacing has been dialed up to Ludicrous Speed even by The Rain‘s standards. So have the sci-fi elements, which have gone from “unscrupulous corporation creates miracle cure that turns into a biblical plague when unleashed” to “there are infected trees now and they can communicate with people” and “this one guy’s bodily fluids have all been replaced by liquid virus that explodes out of him like that oil rig in There Will Be Blood.” It’s…a lot, is what it is. Maybe too much.

I’m covering the second season of The Rain for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere. 

(Note: I’m playing catch-up with links so these review summaries will be brief. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

When it Rains, it pours. Since Netflix’s Danish sci-fi thriller The Rain debuted—and I mean the very first seconds, which follow main character Simone Andersen running to school, and the very first minutes, which depict the apocalypse from beginning to end in significantly less time than it takes to watch an episode of I Think You Should Leave—the story and character beats have been delivered not in a drizzle but in a torrential deluge.

Which is what made The Rain such a refreshing experience to soak in. Compared to standard post-apocalyptic fare, which tends to belabor the obvious like no one in the audience has ever seen one of these things before, and the legendary pacing problems of “Netflix bloat,” a show that moved this quickly came as a pleasant surprise.

It moved deftly, too. This wasn’t some no-attention-span repeated bludgeon to the head, but a surprisingly nuanced study of young people forced to fend for themselves, and eventually care for each other, in a world rendered uninhabitable by, literally, their parents. (Imagine that!) The gentle faces and studied softness of lead actors Alba August as Simone, Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen as her brother Rasmus (patient zero for the rain-borne virus that nearly wiped out the population), and the small band of survivors they hook up with lent warmth to the inherent coldness of any post-apocalyptic/dystopian project. Whether it was one or not, it sure felt like a deliberate rejection of The Walking Dead‘s fascist prioritization of us-versus-them conflict.

So I’m not quite sure what to make of The Rain‘s new season premiere. Oh, the stuff I loved the first time around is still there: the cast (in addition to the Andersen siblings, Jessica Dinnage as the cherub-cheeked Lea and Mikkel Følsgard as Simone’s love interest Martin are also standouts), the fundamental gentleness of the core characters, the unswerving sense that hurting other people to protect your own is Bad, Actually.

But the pacing has been dialed up to Ludicrous Speed even by The Rain‘s standards. So have the sci-fi elements, which have gone from “unscrupulous corporation creates miracle cure that turns into a biblical plague when unleashed” to “there are infected trees now and they can communicate with people” and “this one guy’s bodily fluids have all been replaced by liquid virus that explodes out of him like that oil rig in There Will Be Blood.” It’s…a lot, is what it is. Maybe too much.

I’m covering The Rain for Decider again this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. 

(Note: I’m playing catch-up so these review descriptions will be short. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

We’ve all seen post-apocalypses that ask what the survivors are willing to kill for in order to keep surviving, but asking what they’re willing to live for is a much more important question.

I reviewed the eight and final episode of The Rain Season One. That’s it in a nutshell. This show was such a pleasant surprise, and so easy to binge with just eight very brief and brisk episodes. I recommend it.

Pretty much all fantastic fiction — sci-fi, fantasy, horror, superheroes, dystopias, you name it — is riddled with what could be considered plot holes, since implausibility is exactly what makes these stories fantastical in the first place. You might notice them, but you only start fixating on and complaining about them if the work that surrounds them fails to present you with anything of compensatory value.

If The Rain had a less talented cast, a less firm grasp on the emotional dynamic between the characters, a saggier running time, a more cynical dog-eat-dog attitude about what it takes to survive and what “surviving” even means, then yeah, maybe it’d be time to start writing whole paragraphs about why the Strangers don’t simply saturate the area with drones or whatever. As it stands? The Rain is a good show, in almost all the ways a show can be good. Pick your nits elsewhere.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Rain Season One for Decider. (Having now seen the finale, I’m kind of impressed with myself for how on-track I was with my predictions.)

In The Rain‘s storytelling arsenal, group dynamics are its secret weapon. Netflix’s consistently surprising (is that an oxymoron? oh well) post-apocalyptic drama treats its band of six (previously seven) thrown-together young adults not as a collection of types, but as people, capable of making their own decisions but shaped by the response of the group around them, both individually and collectively. Turns out the best way to show off that skill is to focus an episode on the one person who doesn’t fit.

I reviewed episode six of The Rain for Decider. Sexy and sad.

Some shows don’t know their own strengths. Westworld, for example, is the best example of this phenomenon on the air right now. Its creators took Michael Crichton’s old sci-fi horror concept and ported it to a modern-day prestige-TV landscape where they could play up the sex and violence all they wanted, while still having the breathing room to depict the robotic theme-park attractions’ burgeoning self-awareness so slowly that entire scenes can pass featuring completely realistic conversations between “characters” who have no idea their every thought, word, and deed has been preprogrammed. The pulp thrills are right there for the taking; so is the (as far as I can tell) unprecedented experience of watching a work of fiction in which the heroes start out from a position where their interactions no more “real” than your iPhone connecting to your car via Bluetooth. And what does Westworld do? Bury both the juicy and heady stuff in boring puzzle-box narratives, pointlessly shifting timelines, and long boring conversations about What It Means To Be Human—a perennial thematic non-starter, given that all of us have a pretty good idea of what that means every time we wake up in the morning, thanks. There’s a fine show in there, but the show itself doesn’t know it.

The Rain is the anti-Westworld. As its fifth episode (“Have Faith”) amply demonstrates, it knows where its bread is buttered: in the faces and emotions of its cast of characters as they face a horrific world in which only connecting with each other keeps them afloat, and in racing through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes at a pace brisk enough to keep them feeling fresh while making each deviation from the expected path a genuine surprise rather than a “twist” so painstakingly telegraphed that redditors could figure it out months in advance and call it a day.

I reviewed episode five of The Rain for Decider. This one took a tried-and-true staple of post-apocalyptic narratives — the colony of seemingly well-meaning survivors who maybe aren’t so well-meaning — and made something new out of it.

Tempered expectations can be a real blessing where TV drama is concerned. During the first three episodes of The Rain on Netflix, I’ve come to expect a well-acted, exciting, handsomely shot show about young people making their way through a rather lush post-apocalyptic hellscape, with the subgenre’s tendency for cruelty tempered by an appreciation of the value of sweetness and happiness as both the means and end of survival. That’s a long and labored way to say I think it’s pretty good and I’m having a good time watching it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be reduced to tears sitting on my couch in the middle of the afternoon by the thing. And yet here we are.

I reviewed the very sad fourth episode of The Rain for Decider.

What a pleasant—and unpleasant—surprise Episode 3 of The Rain turned out to be. Set primarily in the devastated city of Copenhagen, where our band of seven survivors grows closer to one another while realizing just how far gone much of the rest of humanity has gotten, this installment both embraces the tropes of post-apocalyptic life-on-the-road narratives and thoughtfully avoids many of the pitfalls that plague such stories. It proves that the series is capable of facing ugly truths about human nature without functioning as a backdoor endorsement of that ugliness—all with a running time of just 36 minutes and change.

I reviewed episode three of The Rain for Decider. Here’s where the show really started to impress me.

The first episode of The Rain was 46 minutes long. This one is a cool 37. In the words of Tuco Salamanca, tight tight tight! Narrative economy is at a premium in this day and age, whether it’s the end of days or not. And if the show’s second installment lacks the premiere’s breathless pacing, at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome as it slows things down.

The problem facing the series at this stage in its eight-episode opening season is pretty straightforward. Now that it’s established its rain-delivered armageddon, cemented the roles of its protagonists Simone and Rasmus in its creation and possible cure, and (most importantly) abandoned the little underground world of two that made their situation so unique, can it still hold our interest as it retreads the familiar ground of so many post-apocalyptic stories before it?

I reviewed the second episode of The Rain for Decider. It’s the shakiest, insofar as it has to go through all the usual maneuvers described above, but I was impressed by how un–Walking Dead it managed to be nonetheless.

Written by series co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt and directed by Kenneth Kainz, The Rain’s series premiere is the most breakneck work of sci-fi worldbuilding I’ve seen since the pilot episode of Lost. It’s a smart play. The high-speed opening distinguishes the show not only from the usual Netflix-bloat pacing problems, but also from the traditional way in which post-apocalyptic narratives dole out information about the stakes and the threat a little bit at a time. The show seems to assume that yeah, we’re familiar with how these kinds of stories operate, and we can dispense with the formalities and get right into the good stuff.

I reviewed the first episode of The Rain, Netflix’s surprisingly good new Danish post-apocalyptic drama, for Decider. Much more on this show to come.