It’s a note of anti-climax, to be sure, and in a series that has had its problems with figuring out how to end episodes. But it’s everything that came before that impressed me: the weird complexity of the Ji-ah character, who’s part starry-eyed romantic, part dutiful daughter, part fish out of water, and part tentacle monster; the no-bullshit approach to Atticus’s ghastly conduct during the war; the implicit comparison between the lynching of communists in Korea and the similarly brutal treatment of minorities in America; the way Ji-ah both is and is not the daughter of a woman who’s trying her best not to become fond of the spirit she has called forth, since helping that spirit devour souls is the only way she’ll get her real daughter back, and so on. The emotional valence of the episode is constantly shifting, even at the risk of making it harder to root for the show’s hero, and that’s admirable.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country, the second in a row I’ve enjoyed, for Decider.

Raised by Wolves Episode 7 (“Faces”) concerns itself primarily with the trials and temptations of Campion, stuck in that silo, and Marcus, the man who put him there. Both face thorny issues of truth, faith, identity, and personal ethics. And both are haunted by paranormal entities, as if they didn’t have enough to worry about.

I reviewed episode 7 of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

“I’m not one who wants,” Mother tells Tempest, one of the children in her charge. “I’m one who serves.” Turns out she’s only half right. Mother was indeed designed to serve her human creators, first as a weapon of war, then as a caretaker for the children meant to restart human civilization.

But as we’ve seen thus far in Raised By Wolves, she does want. She wants to protect those children and she wants to serve well—those are a given. But her time reliving her buried memories in the crashed Mithraic ark’s still-functional simulation has taught her to want something else: her creator, Campion Sturges. Just before she was deployed, Sturges buried her memories of him deep down inside, so she wouldn’t experience the pain of separation. Now she’s been reunited with him, in electronic spirit anyway, and she treasures every moment. She even steps into her digital past to share a kiss with him before the simulation ends. It’s so achingly romantic you forget one of the participants isn’t human.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

The Third Day doesn’t star Jude Law so much as Jude Law’s face. Expressive, careworn, and, in the words of The Young Pope, “incredibly handsome,” Jude Law’s face weaves in and out of focus as he makes a frantic phone call to his wife while in a panic over a burglary at his office (which winds up costing him 40,000 pounds meant to bribe an official). Jude Law’s face peers through the windshield of his car, mouth slightly agape with concentration as he wends his way across a twisty, waterlogged causeway. Jude Law’s face is swollen with the tears of uncontrolled grief. Jude Law’s face stares with narrowed, disgusted eyes at the carcass of a brightly colored cricket stuffed with dozens if not hundreds of tiny black beetles. Jude Law’s face beams with boozy delight as he and his fellow pub patrons, thrown together by circumstance, party the night away. Jude Law’s face stares at itself in the mirror, all the fun of the evening drained out of it as he realizes just how lost he is emotionally, let alone physically. Using a script by series co-creator (with Felix Barrett) Dennis Kelly, director Marc Munden knows what an incredible instrument his leading actor has, and he composes the whole episode around it like a symphony.

Somehow I forgot to mention that I’m covering the new Jude Law/Naomie Harris folk-horror drama The Third Day for Vulture! Here’s my review of the premiere.

If there’s two things I like about television drama, it’s a sudden uptick in quality I never saw coming, and a shocking twist that in retrospect I should have seen coming but didn’t. “Strange Case,” the strongest episode of Lovecraft Country so far and by far, presented me with both scenarios, and I couldn’t be happier.

This week’s episode of Lovecraft Country was the first one I really liked, and I really liked it. I reviewed it for Decider.

“I have never been prouder of anything in my life than I am of you,” the man says.

“You’re more pleasing than I imagined,” says the android, when the man gives her back her eyes.

“I please you?” he replies, seemingly grateful beyond words to hear it.

I single out these lines in episode five of Raised by Wolves (“Infected Memory”) because they’re so swooningly romantic to hear—but they’re not the voices of lovers speaking to one another. The android is the man’s creation, and the man is preparing to send her from his side forever, in hopes that she will preserve a kernel of humanity rocketed from a dying world. That’s Raised by Wolves for you: constantly tapping wellsprings of emotion where you least expect to find them.

I reviewed episode five of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Four episodes in and I’m willing to stake a claim: You’re not going to find a better show this strange September than Raised by Wolves. Using hoary old sci-fi concepts—androids, aliens, harsh desert worlds, war-torn dystopias—it seems to have tapped into deep new veins of vitality in each, something I wouldn’t have thought possible in a prestige-TV format. But I suppose that just goes to show you that the death of prestige TV has been greatly exaggerated.

I reviewed episode four of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

In some ways this is Lovecraft Country‘s most effective use of genre to date. Largely stripped of horror’s mandate to terrify—this is comfortably the least Lovecraftian of the four episodes so far—it’s free to have some fun with swashbuckling, treasure-hunting tropes instead. These date back to the same period of pulp fiction as Lovecraft, or even before to the likes of Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, but being a citizen of turn-of-the-21st-century America I recognize more modern sources of inspiration: the Indiana Jones series (booby traps, perilous bridges, stolen artifacts, a beam of light revealing a treasure’s location), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (more perilous bridges, moonlight revealing a secret, a choice between subterranean tunnels), even stuff like The Goonies (the madcap energy of much of the episode, the watery tunnels). It’s not the most exciting use of this stuff, I guess, but it’s still a fun way to spend some time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. At least this one isn’t really even trying to be scary?

Can you trust someone who’s been programmed to lie to you? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, at least as far as Raised by Wolves is concerned. The show’s third episode (“Virtual Faith”) is deeply concerned with the issue of honesty at odds with people who are programmed—whether technologically, religiously, biologically, or by virtue of their role in a family—to be less than honest. When do their lies cease to be white and start to be actively destructive?

I reviewed episode three of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Well, this is a relief: Episode two of Raised by Wolves is really, really good, too.

And thank goodness. After the effusive, even bombastic praise I heaped on the pilot, boy oh boy would there have been egg on my face if the show were a one-hit wonder that fell apart immediately thereafter! Fortunately, there’s no such problem. Smart, surprising, tense, austere, and still rooted in remarkable performances, “Pentagram” lives up to the promise of the premiere.

I reviewed episode two of Raised by Wolves for Decider. Another winner.

First, an exclamation: Holy shit.

Second, an explanation: I had low expectations for Raised by Wolves. No, scratch that: I had no expectations for Raised by Wolves. You have to understand that I went into this show almost completely cold—no trailers, no advance reviews, nothing. All I knew is that it was an android show directed by Ridley Scott…and that’s where my expectations started to crater. Android-based science fiction is, for me, a big fat zero; I’ve never understood the compulsion to examine What It Means to Be Human over and over and over when we all experience exactly what it means all day every day for our entire lives. Love, joy, fear, suffering—like, we get it. I don’t need Alex Garland to serve me a sexy robot to figure this shit out.

More specifically, I’m deeply indifferent at best to the work of Ridley Scott, the big-time film director and now fairly frequent television producer who directed the series premiere from a script by creator Aaron Guzikowski. With very few exceptions (primarily Alien) I find Scott’s style simultaneously fussy and flaccid, its slovenly storytelling overcompensated for by strange aesthetic flourishes (think of his shaky frame-rate action/horror scenes from the likes of Gladiator and Hannibal) that convey no useful information or emotion. He’s had his name on some stuff I like a great deal, executive producing the masterful first season of AMC’s extraordinary survival-horror show The Terror for example, but that’s about it.

So. A show from one of my least favorite sci-fi subgenres, from a director in whom I have no faith as a rule? I’ll be honest: If I hadn’t been getting paid to watch it, I would have given this one the proverbial hard pass.

Boy, am I happy to be wrong.

I’ll be covering the new HBO Max series Raised by Wolves for Decider all season, starting with my review of the Ridley Scott–directed series premiere. All I can tell you is go into this as cold as you can, because wow.

So, it’s a monster of the week show.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I suppose. Episodic storytelling has been a mainstay of genre fare since television’s early days. You can rattle off a perfectly respectable list of shows ranging from watchable schlock to deliberate camp to proto-prestige that used this format: Lost in Space, the Star Trek franchise, Batman, Kolchak, Doctor Who, The X-Files, Buffy, Supernatural….Some have more connecting tissue between their adventures than others—The X-Files famously vacillated between the long-term storytelling of its mythology episodes and the short-term payoffs of its one-offs—but that’s the deal that fans of genre TV have made for decades.

I just expected Lovecraft Country to be something more, is all.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Courtney B. Vance is one of the most watchable actors on television. And listenable, too: His voice is a mellifluous thing, waxing and waning with his emotional tide. Lovecraft Country boasts a compelling lead in Jonathan Majors, and a high-energy co-lead in Jurnee Smollett, but Vance is where the show’s gravitas and its primary human interest comes from. You believe this guy is a guy, a fully dimensional person. You want to see what happens to him.

So naturally, they kill him in the second episode.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Lovecraft Country is about a horde of ravening, bloodthirsty white monsters who prowl the backwoods at night, terrorizing the innocent. Also, there are some multi-eyeballed Lovecraftian entities in it.

I reviewed the series premiere of Lovecraft Country for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season.

Looking back on this refreshingly ambiguous season of whodunit television, I think I’ll revisit Perry’s reunion with Sister Alice quite a bit. Before he gives up on the case entirely, before he takes out the stitch he saved from baby Charlie’s eyes and blows it into the Pacific Ocean, he tells Alice about her mother’s new ministry and wonders who removed Charlie’s body.

But however much she has questioned her own gifts, Alice is still a woman of faith. What comfort has digging for proof of the truth ever given Perry, she asks? In the end, both of them, with their diametrically opposed views of how the world works, will be alone. (She’s more right than she realizes; Perry has officially called off his relationship with Lupe, though he has finally admitted that her asking price for his family farm was a fair one and given her the land.)

Which leaves Perry with one final question: “Did you really think you could bring Charlie back?”

“I did, didn’t I?” Alice replies. As far as her mother and Charlie’s mother are concerned, the answer is, for all intents and purposes, yes. It’s not true, of course. But maybe it’s right.

I reviewed the season finale of the excellent Perry Mason reboot for the New York Times.

What follows is admirably ambiguous. Bloodied from the chaos at the grave site, Sister Alice watches her mother proclaim Alice’s success in resurrecting the baby — and runs away, by herself, blood streaming from her broken nose, silk garments catching the wind behind her. Is she smiling in the episode’s final shot? Is it a smile of triumph or, more likely, one of bitter recognition of her mother’s skulduggery in producing a fake miracle in lieu of a real one?

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Perry Mason for the New York Times.

One of the gifts this episode gives us is a side of Matthew Rhys we’ve rarely seen before: absolute fury. Perry explodes in anger at Emily after the courtroom revelation that she took her baby to a motel assignation with her lover — and Charlie’s eventual co-kidnapper — George Gannon, a fact she failed to divulge to him as her lawyer. He loses it again after Emily’s jailhouse matron perjures herself by claiming Emily admitted to the crime while behind bars: First, he imitates his dead mentor E.B. Jonathan (read: Matthew Rhys doing his best John Lithgow), excoriating himself for thinking he could catch the killer while working as a defense attorney. Then he vents his rage at E.B. for killing himself instead of upholding his duty to his client.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Perry Mason for the New York Times. What a pleasant surprise this show has been.

It begins with the death of a lawyer and ends with the anointing of a new one. In between, this episode of “Perry Mason” covers a good deal of ground with nearly all of its characters, from the fed-up Black cop, Paul Drake, to the true-believer evangelist, Sister Alice, to the dogged legal secretary, Della Street, to the title character. It’s the hour when “Perry Mason” stops being an origin story and starts becoming the first proper Perry Mason case.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Perry Mason for the New York Times.

“Cops investigating cops? That’s a trip for biscuits,” E.B. says at one point.

Which leads me to my final point about this episode: E.B. Jonathan’s way with words. Aging, he tells Perry at one point, is a matter of finding “a nose hair half the length of your arm, half your friends in the cemetery and a million strangers on the street.” Truth, he says, “won’t move wind chimes.” George Gannon’s faked suicide note? “Donkey dust.”

I reviewed the fourth episode of Perry Mason for the New York Times.

One of the best science fiction shows ever made, and one of the finest dramas of the Peak TV era, Dark ended thoughtfully, emotionally, beautifully, brilliantly.

I reviewed the series finale of Dark for Decider.