And in the end, The Underground Railroad‘s titular, fictional, fantastical version of the real world’s underground network wound up being a bit player in its own story. Cora is transported from place to place by the Railroad and its offshoots several times, yes. But the story is found in the crimes that drive her from one destination to the next, always seeking safe harbor, finding nothing but an uncertain future—a hopeful one, yes, especially compared to where she’s come from and where she’s been, but still an uncertain one. We know now, decades and decades after Cora’s story, that there really is no safe harbor from the horrors of American racism—not in St. Louis, not in California (ask Them about that one), not in any given place.

No, to the extent that a better place exists, it’s in the uncertain hopes of people, people like Cora and Polly then and everyone involved struggling against what the late, unlamented Arnold Ridgeway referred to as “The American Imperative” today. “Are you kind, mister?” Cora asks Ollie when she approaches his wagon. “Most times, yes,” he says, before adding “Of course, like anybody, I falters, of course.” Of course, of course—he repeats it for emphasis, taking it as a given that no one can be their ideal self all the time, not in this world. But you can try, damn it. You can try.

I reviewed the finale of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

“You shoulda let ’em win a little,” Judge Payton tells the man named Mingo after their poker game with the local worthies has concluded in The Underground Railroad Episode 9. “Wouldn’t hurt not to parade around how as-good-as-white-men you are every chance you get.”

“But I am, Payton” Mingo insists, every syllable weighed with a lifetime of frustration and fury over not being able to convince people of this simple fact. “But I am.”

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

What follows her trip to the Ghost Tunnel is, essentially, a dream version of the same excursion. In Cora’s dream, she descends the Tunnel’s long rope ladder and winds up in a truly palatial Underground Railroad station packed with Black travelers of all kinds. But the ticket agent says she can’t move Cora along until her testimony checks out, a potential problem since she hasn’t offered testimony in Indiana. “Did you really tell your truth?” the agent asks; Cora has nothing to say in response.

The tension mounts courtesy of some incredible sound design, which makes this mysterious mega-station—whether it is above or below ground “depends on where you’re coming from,” says a conductor—sound like it’s constantly inhaling and exhaling, with a crying baby thrown in for good measure. Cora exits and finds herself in the run-down house in the forest where the hatch is from; she reenters and everyone is staring at her as she walks her way to a reunion with her lost friend Caesar. They dance together, quoting their own romantic banter from several episodes earlier. They cry. This is not the surreal logic of a Mad Men or Sopranos fever dream; it’s a straightforward longing for something that can no longer be had.

I reviewed the eighth episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Well, that was a relief.

Clocking in at just over 16 minutes, not counting the closing credits—that’s slightly longer than an installment of, like, Teen Titans Go! or Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!—The Underground Railroad Episode 7 rockets right by, taking us from tragedy to triumph in record time. Titled “Chapter 7: Fanny Briggs” after its main character, whom we’ve already met under another name, it’s a rare moment of elation in this relentlessly, appropriately grim series.

I reviewed the seventh, short, structurally bold episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider. More shows should do stuff like this.

From the moment Arnold Ridgeway takes out a flask and begins drinking whiskey from it, you know he’s in strange territory. Not literally, not at all—he’s returned to his family home for one last attempt at rapprochement with his dying father, “rapprochement” in this case meaning “my dad owes me an apology.” The strangeness is all in his demeanor, which takes a sudden turn for the fearful, the petulant, the anxious and uncertain—a far cry from his nearly supernatural implacability up until that point. “So Arnold Ridgeway is human after all,” Cora says after finding out the nature of their visit. He’s not a good human, but yes, something like that.

This episode of The Underground Railroad (“Chapter Six: Tennessee: Proverbs”) is essentially one drawn-out drunk for Ridgeway, who is absolutely hammered by the time he witnesses his father breathe his last breath. In one particularly galling scene, he drags Cora to a nearby saloon—in chains—for a meal and a drink, though in his case “a drink” means “an entire bottle.” He waxes philosophical and patriotic about Manifest Destiny and the American spirit—”The only ‘Spirit’ worth its salt,” he says, compared to the Great Spirit that his father borrowed from indigenous religious beliefs. The American spirit, he says, is a call to the people of the Old World to come to the New civilize the land, and either “lift up, subjugate, [or] exterminate, eliminate” the other peoples they encounter. “The American Imperative,” he calls this last bit. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Throughout it all, Barry Jenkins’s camera makes slow pilgrimages from one end of a given scene to the next, like it too has been enlisted in Ridgeway’s grim procession. The ruined vistas it captures are stunning in their own bleak way. The camera also captures some characters looking directly at us, like Cora when she speaks aloud to her absent mother and Lovey and Caesar, or Ridgeway Senior when he glares at (presumably) his detestable son in the vision Cora conjures of their eventual pointless reunion. It is hard to meet their gaze.

I reviewed episode 5 of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

In reviewing the premiere of The Underground Railroad, the word “dystopia” came up as a description of the slave state of Georgia—an attempt to apply this powerful fictional designation to the very real nightmare regime of American slavery. In reviewing the second, the word’s opposite, “utopia,” was used to in describe the illusory nature of South Carolina’s genteel “betterment” policies for its Black residents, all of whom still live and thrive only at the pleasure of their patronizing white overlords.

What I didn’t count on is for The Underground Railroad to traffic in out-and-out, alternate-history dystopianism. That’s what Cora finds when the Railroad runs into a roadblock, stranding her in North Carolina. There’s no betterment here. There’s not even slavery. There’s genocide.

I reviewed episode three of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: When Sir Thomas More coined the term utopia, he did so as a pun. Spelled eutopia, from the Ancient Greek, it means “good place,” which is how the term functions in fantastical literature—utopia as ideal society. But spelled utopia, which is the version More emphasized, it translates rather to “no place.” By definition, then, the ideal society cannot exist.

Griffin, South Carolina seems like a utopia in the eu sense, at least at a glance. By the time The Underground Railroad arrives there for its second episode (“Chapter 2: South Carolina”), our heroes Cora and Caesar have been safely ensconced there for some time. In this semi-integrated town, dominated by its futuristic “skyscraper,” Black people are not enslaved, but free—again, at least at a glance.

I reviewed the second episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Of course, that kind of underground railroad is a fantasy, and that’s the simple genius of novelist Colson Whitehead’s original idea. Why not take the reality and make it a fantasy? Why not concretize the journey of slaves to freedom by creating a locomotive that literally operates underground? Genre stories use fantastical and spectacular ideas and images to communicate powerful ideas and emotions in a visual vocabulary that matches their power. The idea of an actual steam-powered underground railroad—well, it puts the status-quo-smashing “punk” back into “steampunk.”

And by taking on directorial duties for all ten episodes, Jenkins—who also wrote the episode—instantly joins a select company of Academy Award–winning filmmakers helming entire seasons of television, right alongside David Lynch and Steven Soderbergh. If this episode (“Chapter 1: Georgia”) is any indication, Jenkins, like his predecessors, will be making no qualitative distinction between the two cinematic mediums. His camera is calm, cool, and collected, allowing the inhumane drama of the plantation to play out in unsparing long takes. It’s a stylistic choice that makes sense, since so much of that drama is a matter of people being made to bear witness to atrocity. The camera won’t let us look away, either. And when the viewpoint does shift, most memorably letting us—or forcing us to—look through the eyes of the lynched slave as he burns to death, the impact is all the stronger. The surreal, staccato editing of the episode’s opening moments also stand out by comparison.

I’ll be covering Barry Jenkins’s strong new series The Underground Railroad for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.