What I think is inarguable is how writerly Lady Trieu is, how removed from our everyday experience of language, of interaction and reaction, for which cleverness has been substituted. The easy irony (following up a fatuous threat to “destroy” the baby with a smiley “Guys, I’m joking”); the ability to cap off her conversation with a bon mot (“What was that?!?” “That…is mine”); and most especially the penchant for treating the most remarkable and outlandish things—her unimaginable wealth, her ability to manufacture babies, a meteor (or is it a rocket containing Superman?!?!?!) falling out of the sky just seconds after she purchased the land into which it crashes—like they’re just part of an ordinary day…this is extremely Smart Comic Book Writer shit. Or as Lady Trieu herself puts it, when talking to Angela’s missing grandpa Will Reeves about his plan to deliver vital information to her by leaving behind a bottle of pills in her car for her to investigate, “It’s still too cute by half.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of Watchmen for Decider.

Dread, Mr. Robot explains, is that feeling of crossing a line you don’t realize exists until you’ve already crossed it. It’s that “My God, what have I done” sensation, when you find yourself in over your head and realize you’re the one who got yourself there.

And if there’s one thing the director Sam Esmail does well, it’s dread. His long takes, his slow zooms, his beautiful close-ups of big-eyed people staring in disbelief: They make him television’s poet laureate of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and knowing that when it falls, it will hit hard.

This week’s episode of “Mr. Robot” was all about that ugly feeling. It divides its time between three situations in which characters are held against their will, desperate to find a way out, waiting to see what their captor will do next. Throw in the composer Mac Quayle’s increasingly ominous score and the cinematographer Tod Campbell’s confidently stark camera work and you have a recipe for a very black Christmas indeed.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times.

Question: What does your daemon look like? Is it a ferret, a fox, a monkey, a regal snow leopard? In the world of His Dark Materials, the joint BBC-HBO adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s hugely acclaimed young-adult fantasy series, everybody’s got a literal spirit animal — magical creatures called “daemons” that function like having an external animal-shaped soul you can run around with and talk to. As a way to engage the audience, daemons rank right up there with Harry Potter’s Gryffindor-to-Hufflepuff sorting matrix, or Game of Thrones’ great houses, only even more personalized. And if HBO pulls off yet another swing-for-the-fences fantasy adaptation properly, you’ll want one of your own.

I’m back at Rolling Stone to cover His Dark Materials this season, starting with my review of the series premiere.

The final episode of “The Affair” begins and ends with different versions of the same song. In its opening minutes, “The Whole of the Moon” by the Irish folk-rock band the Waterboys blares forth while Noah Solloway drills friends and family in a dance routine for his daughter Whitney’s wedding. As sung by the vocalist Mike Scott, the lyrics regard a loved one with awe that borders on pagan devotion: “I saw the crescent,” he joyfully yelps. “You saw the whole of the moon.”

By the time the episode ends, Noah is an old man, alone with his memories on the shores of Montauk. This time, Fiona Apple, who provided the show’s opening theme, performs the song. In her ragged voice, the lyrics sound less like praise and more like accusations: When she sings “I sighed, but you swooned,” the words catch and drag in her throat like a curse.

Yet the sense that Apple is in love, deeply, with the person to whom she is singing is no less palpable here than it is in Scott’s original. Rather, her performance reflects the way the people we love can confound, even infuriate us while at their best as well as at their worst. Sometimes, loving someone who feels bigger and better than we are can be an enormous burden. Sometimes we want to see only a sliver of the sky rather than the whole thing, and to hell with those who would force us out of ourselves to do otherwise.

If you’ve watched all five seasons of “The Affair,” you can see where this is going. To Helen Solloway, her ex-husband, Noah, is maddeningly impulsive and self-pitying but also patient and sweet. To Noah, his ex-wife Helen is infuriatingly Type A and judgmental but also caring and almost impossibly together. Sometimes their virtues are nearly as difficult to tolerate as their vices. But that’s love, isn’t it?

I reviewed the series finale of The Affair for the New York Times. It’s been one of the great rewards of my career to watch and write about this show.

“It’s cool, dude. We don’t have to talk.” From Darlene Alderson’s lips to the creator, writer and director Sam Esmail’s ears: The fifth installment of the final season of “Mr. Robot” is almost entirely dialogue free.

It’s an attention-getting feat from the filmmaker, who is no stranger to such stunts. Recall that high-rise thriller episode that looked like it was filmed as one long take, for example, or the series’s perfect simulacra of 1990s sitcoms and 1980s slasher films.

This episode primarily tracks Darlene and her brother, Elliot, as they finagle their way into a secure server farm in order to hack the bank account used by their nemesis, Whiterose, and her Dark Army. One side plots tracks the outgoing E Corp chief executive, Phillip Price, and the compromised F.B.I. agent Dom DiPierro as they follow the Dark Army’s instructions. Another tracks Elliot’s therapist, Krista, who doesn’t realize she is being followed by the minions of Elliot’s old drug-dealing enemy, Vera, until it’s too late.

It all makes for a rather miserable Christmas Day for all concerned; indeed, the contrast between the characters’ stressful states and the compulsory joy of all the Christmas music they encounter is the episode’s best running gag.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Mr. Robot‘s final season for the New York Times.

Even at this relatively early stage in Watchmen‘s game, summarizing the events of an episode, much less watching one, can be a dizzying prospect. Phone calls to Mars, exploding coffins, racism detectors, homemade spacesuits, dead buffalos, pet owls, Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites,” cars falling from the sky, massive blue dildos—it makes you sound like a crazy person, or at the very least the police chief from The Naked Gun.

But that’s the charm, isn’t it? Alright, I’m not asking, I’m telling: That’s the charm. Even though “She Was Killed by Space Junk,” Watchmen Episode 3, is so far the only one to make a big deal of its ties to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s epochal comic book, it is every bit as weird in its content and jarring in its rhythm as its predecessors. You thought introducing the Silk Spectre was going to slow things down? Think again.

I reviewed the third episode of Watchmen for Decider.

There’s a going on here, and it’s been a while since I’ve watched a show that seems so full of conflicting ideas it might burst at the seams. It’s a good feeling.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Watchmen for Decider.

Risk is the essence of romance. A wise woman told me that once; I live with her now, so I’m inclined to believe she knew what she was talking about. Exposed and vulnerable, we reach out to another person and hope they’ll reach back. We put ourselves at their mercy in hopes of connection. In some cases, we put ourselves at the mercy of a world that will punish us for that connection should it be discovered. There is some pain we suffer gladly because it’s the vessel in which pleasure comes.

Titled “403 Forbidden” — like every episode title so far, it’s both an internet error message and a signpost for the story — this installment of “Mr. Robot” has both the series’s protagonist and antagonist putting themselves at risk in romance’s name. In one case, it leads to disaster. In another … well, the season isn’t over yet.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times.

It’s wild!

No, seriously, it really is wild. It reminds me, in a good way, of some of the most far-out episodes of Lindelof’s Leftovers run—the ones where Justin Theroux near-death-hallucinates that he’s an international assassin, say, or the one where Christopher Eccleston talks to God on a weird cult’s orgy boat before God gets mauled to death by a lion. Where Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen eased you into its world’s weirdness—which to be fair was orders of magnitude less weird than either the Marvel or DC shared universes of which it served as a critique—Lindelof and director Nicole Kassell dump you into the deep end and expect you to do the butterfly, with the aggressive and eerie music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross blaring in the background.

I reviewed the series premiere of Watchmen for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season. It’s good!

Now here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today: The season finale of The Terror: Infamy moved me to tears.

Wait, what? We’re talking about the same The Terror: Infamy that squandered its predecessor season’s goodwill by shoddily cobbling together warmed-over J-horror with real-world historical atrocities? The one that employed a central supernatural metaphor that appeared to place the blame for Japanese Americans’ political predicament on Japanese Americans themselves rather than their racist captors? The one that was haphazardly plotted, jerking from location to location and time period to time period with seemingly no sense of narrative balance or emotional logic? The one where the main character chose the moment when he and his family are rounded up by the American government as potential traitors to tell his mom that he got some lady in a family way? That The Terror: Infamy?

Yes, that The Terror: Infamy.

Written by co-creator and showrunner Alexander Woo and directed by Frederick E.O. Toye, “Into the Afterlife,” the final episode of the AMC anthology series’ second season, is an extended grace note for a story that up until now had just been banging on the keys at random. Attentive to the historical import of the time period it chronicles, generous in spirit toward its characters both living and dead, and driven in large part by the season’s most effective and poetic imagery, it nearly makes up for all the dross that’s come before. It left me imagining a season that had lived up to this standard from the start, and wondering how much more impact a finale like this would have had if it had.

I reviewed the shockingly good finale of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

Adding additional layers to an already complicated plot is tricky business, of course. But the mysteries are so intriguing, and Esmail’s command of his craft so sure, that the investment seems sound as a pound.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. It’s good!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. Tough to know what to make of it.

Succession‘s second season finale ends on a high point not just for the episode or the season but the entire series. Until now it’s seemed almost unthinkable that one of Logan Roy’s brood would defy him this dramatically after first agreeing not to. This is more shocking than Kendall’s first attempt to dethrone his dad, since we’d watched him build to that point over several episodes. Our only clues here were implicit and contextual: the presence of Cousin Greg, who kept copies of incriminating documents, by Kendall’s side; the Judas/Fredo kiss Kendall planted on his dad’s cheek when he agreed to be the fall guy required to placate congressional investigators and nervous shareholders alike. With so little fanfare beforehand, watching Kendall actually get up there on the world stage and call his dad out for what he is feels like watching a dog suddenly stand on its hind legs and speak fluent Latin.

I reviewed the season finale of Succession for Decider. I liked it, though people need to calm way down about this thing. As I say elsewhere in the review, dramedies are the coward’s drama.

“Government property, in the middle of New Mexico???” You had to know this was coming, even if Chester Nakayama and his family did not. The moment—the moment—Yuko the yureiescaped the fire Chester set in that cabin in the internment camp a few weeks back simply by showing some hustle, I thought to myself “You know what kind of fire she won’t be able to escape?”

Sure enough, we’re now in the Summer of ’45, the Nakayamas are in a bunker in the middle of the New Mexico desert, a random British guy with security clearance is wandering around drunkenly celebrating mankind’s conquest of the laws of nature, and a certain vengeful spirit almost certainly has a date with nuclear destiny. You didn’t think a series as heavy-handed with history as The Terror: Infamy would let the specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pass by unmolested, did you?

I reviewed the inevitable penultimate episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

It starts with the death of a main character. It seems, at first, to end with the death of the main character. In between, it plays out like an eerie paranoid thriller against a backdrop of international corruption and capitalism run amok. Written and directed by the series’s creator, Sam Esmail, the fourth and final season premiere of “Mr. Robot” plays to all the show’s strengths and none of its weaknesses.

I reviewed the season premiere of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. I liked it quite a bit, which was a relief.

Joanie, Joanie, Joanie. What are we going to do with your share of “The Affair”? The grown-up daughter of Cole and Alison Lockhart dominates this episode — which, given the strength of Noah Solloway’s segment, ought to be a compliment. But when Joanie seeks out and finds her mother’s killer, what happens manages to upend the show’s narrative apple cart so completely that it’s hard to appreciate anything that came before.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It took a wild left turn and I did not come along for the ride.

The chickens have sailed home to roost. Written by series creator Jesse Armstrong and directed by series mainstay Mark Mylod, this week’s episode of Succession sees the long-simmering cruise-ship sex-abuse scandal storyline bear fruit, as the Roys and their lackeys are called to testify before the Senate to answer for their crimes. Now, this is Succession, so you know ahead of time nothing will come of it. But the Roys are generally at their most compelling when they’re forced to pretend to be normal humans during the rare occasions when other people have a leg up on them, and this is one of those occasions. It’s worth taking a little time to savor.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession, which I liked better than most, for Decider.