Did you know: This season of Mindhunter is just nine episodes long. If you’re reading this, it means the chances are good that you’ve just watched the penultimate hour of that season. Did it feel penultimate to you? Have things been building to a head? Or is it more like, I dunno, you followed a whole bunch of false leads and wash-out strategies, only for the climax to fall into your lap pretty much out of nowhere? If you’re like me, it’s the latter scenario. That tells me Mindhunter Season 2 is doing its job very well.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. I really think this show has turned around.

If you’ve been reading these reviews of Mindhunter Season 2, you know one of my main (or really only) complaints about this season has been the lack of interesting things for Nancy Tench to do. Not the lack of interesting things done with her—when your little boy crucifies the dead body of another little boy in hopes of bringing him back to life, you’ve got a lot on your plate, to understate the case to an absurd degree. But her reaction has consisted mostly of fretting that everyone else, from his case worker to his father, is doing more harm than good, and only she can see it. My term for this character type is “mama bear,” and my go-to example of the syndrome is Catelyn Stark during the first season of Game of Thrones. (The book version of the character was far livelier and slipperier.)

I’m not leveling this complaint anymore, not after this episode. For one thing, Nancy is evincing unspoken feelings at last, when she is clearly but (and this is key) not vocally perturbed that even the goddamn caseworker investigating her child’s welfare after a goddamn killing is as spellbound by hubby Bill’s stories of serial killers as your average small-town cop or D.C. bigwig.

But more importantly, she denies the mother of a victim closure, and we’re made to sit with this decision, and we’re forced to live with it. I can’t tell you how much good it does a show to have this kind of faith in its audience, to let a character do something seemingly unsympathetic and ask you to sympathize anyway.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider.

If there’s a chink in Mindhunter‘s armor right now, it’s Nancy Tench. That’s not the fault of actor Stacey Roca, mind you; her performance is sharp and vibrant. But between Catelyn Stark–style “You have a choice, and you’ve made it” dialogue, shopworn stage business like lying secretly awake with her eyes open as her husband climbs into bed, and a relationship with the two other characters with whom she comes into contact, Bill and Brian, that consists solely of reprimanding them, she’s a reactive and predictable character. A type, even.

Being a concerned parent, or a concerned mother specifically, doesn’t suddenly rob you of the potential for a rich emotional life—it might even enhance it—but you wouldn’t know it from watching this. Where’s the Behavioral Science Unit when you need it?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. It’s not perfect.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m finding all of this rather compelling this time around. Without that weird clipped dialogue from last season dragging it down, Mindhunter is able to live its authentic self: a smart period crime drama asking questions about human behavior that its characters don’t have the answers to.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Mindhunter Season 2, which feels almost like a new show, for Decider.

Even as Bill investigates a series of child murderers, the investigation of the child murder that was discovered in his wife Nancy’s real-estate listing takes a disturbing turn. Their son Brian, it seems, was part of a group of children who killed their toddler playmate; it was he who found the key to the vacant house, and he who suggested arranging the boy’s body on a makeshift crucifix. The episode ends almost the moment the disconsolate Nancy reveals this information to her husband, as it probably should. Nothing more can be said.

Except that the real-life Bill Tench, Robert K. Ressler, never went through this with his own son. By all accounts, the show made this storyline up from scratch.

The question is whether this large a leap from the reality of the situation is worth the effort. It wasn’t on, for example, Masters of Sex, a similarly high-minded period piece about cutting-edge research on human behavior. Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan’s Masters & Johnson had their family lives changed around to give them obnoxious teenagers with screentime-devouring personal problems, an infamous prestige-TV pitfall the show actually went out of its way to create for itself.

We’ve already sat through a season-plus of Dr. Wendy Carr, Lesbian, with minimal difficulty. Her queerness is a solid method for establishing her as different from the straight and narrow (in every sense of the words) FBI world, and the pathologization of homosexuality commonplace at the time is a way of demonstrating the blowback bad research can have on innocent people; both of these are important aspects of the BSU for the show to tackle. Plus, it simply gives Wendy, and actor Anna Torv, a bit more to do than show up and be smarter than everyone else—nice work if you can get it, but hardly enough to make a character out of.

The situation with Bill’s son strikes me as very different, and potentially very detrimental. If it turned out that one of the founders of the serial-killer concept had a child murderer for a son—well, that would come up in virtually everything every written about the study of serial killers, right? America’s Most Wanted founder John Walsh’s son fell victim to serial killer Ottis Toole, and that gets talked about every time Walsh and his program are discussed, to cite a comparable situation. There will be a marked drop-off in verisimilitude unless this is made central to the saga of the BSU going forward.

Perhaps even more crucially, it has to be central to the show as drama. Maybe this is just me repeating my oft-cited principle, via Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner, that when you kill a child on your show, your show must then be about that death, since life itself would be, too. This has to go double if the child is killed by another child, triple if that child is the son of your main character, quadruple if your main character studies killers. Anything less would throw off the emotional machinery of the entire show.

A good procedural needs to be taught, tight, and relentlessly logical in how its characters think and act. Is Mindhunter Mach 2 a good procedural? We’re about to find out.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. This is an unusually long excerpt because I think everything it discusses is vitally important.

This isn’t wisdom from on high, doled out to us in the audience by mad-genius investigators. It’s more like seeing Bill and Holden and Wendy slowly clean out a messy room until only the important things remain. Watching the hard work and leaps of intuition that go into what we now take as common sense is what sets Mindhunter apart from the rest of the procedural pack.

I reviewed episode 3 of Mindhunter for Decider.

In Mindhunter Season 2 Episode 2, we pay a visit to a Mr. David Berkowitz. This enterprising young man brought the largest city in America to its knees and sent cryptic communiqués to the press and police before finally getting caught over a parking ticket. He’s one of the most famous serial killers of all time, known to one and all as the Son of Sam. And he’s damn lucky that’s the self-applied nickname that stuck, as opposed to alternate choices like “The Wicked King of Wicker” or—well, let’s hear it from Bill Tench.

Oliver Cooper guest stars as Berkowitz in the latest of Mindhunter‘s series of serial-killer cameos. His waxen features and schlubby, slouching posture in the role are perfect for illustrating the disconnect from these creeps’ delusions of grandeur and their often pathetic reality. Indeed, by fluffing up his ego, FBI Agents Bill Tench and Holden Ford are able to gain insight not only into their current quarry, Son of Sam wannabe BTK, but into Sam himself, getting him to admit that his demonic-possession story is bullshit. With a smirk, even!

It’s enough to make you fantasize about a version of Mindhunter that’s just these sit-down face-to-face interviews, like In Treatment with the Boston Strangler.

I reviewed the second episode of Mindhunter for Decider. This is a much better show than it used to be.

Never let it be said that Succession doesn’t know its audience. Effusively chattered about by New York’s downwardly mobile professional media chatterers, the series this week served up an inside look at its fictional BuzzFeed/Gawker equivalent, “Vaulter.” (The company name doubled as the episode title.)

The fake headlines generated in the storyline about the gutting of a once-promising new media company display the kind of laser-focused contempt that the phrase “it takes one to know one” is meant to cover; whoever came up with “Meet the World’s Richest People Trafficker (He’s a Surprisingly Nice Guy),” “5 Reasons Why Drinking Milk on the Toilet Is Kind of a Game-Changer,” and “Is Every Taylor Swift Song Secretly Marxist?” has a devotée’s, or perhaps even a veteran’s, familiarity with the milieu.

[…]

The thing about the Vaulter storyline is that all the jokes are the obvious ones if you follow the media business at all. Clickbait, SEO, Facebook algorithm changes, unionization, almond milk in the cafeteria, a lot of good-looking twentysomethings with glasses, pivot to video, middle-class marxism, union busting … yes yes, we all get it.

What I don’t get is why jokes so accurate they barely qualify as jokes require such a slovenly wind-up. The looseness of Succession—the improvisatory stop-start feel of the dialogue with all its repetitions and “um”s and “yeah”s, the amount of time spent watching people just walk into rooms, the handheld shakicam and its innate inability to stay steady for long—better befits more nuanced material, where giving the audience the time and freedom to interpret and focus as they will is a necessary component to the filmmaking. Here it just feels…lazy. Like, all this just to say that rich people fuck over the poor(er) people who work for them, especially in digital news media? Billions would do this in a two-sentence exchange between Wags and Dollar Bill and have plenty of room left over for Paul Giamatti in a bondage harness. (Billions is also way too tightly written a show to generate joke headlines like the above, which as funny as they are undercut the vital-to-the-story notion that this might be a business worth saving.)

I wrote about Succession‘s pander-fest of an episode this week for Decider.

The killer is already inside the house. The woman doesn’t know it yet. She puts down her groceries and calls out, but only the sinister sound of Roxy Music’s nightmarish song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” can be heard in response.

That, and the sound of a door shaking under the strain of a rope tied to the knob.

She makes her way down the hall, calling out “Honey?” She sees the door shake. She opens it, and a man collapses forward—rope around his throat, a cheap kewpie-doll mask on his face, a woman’s slip on his body.

She runs away, gasping, in slow motion. He calls after her, saying he was just playing around. He’s not her killer, then. He’s her husband.

This is how Mindhunter returns after nearly two years—though only a week has passed in the world of the show. Right away we see the series, created by Joe Penhall and directed here by David Fincher, is leaning into its strengths.

Season One was an aggressively mixed bag, its deeply compelling serial-killer scenes interspersed with interpersonal drama that you’d need a Behavior Science Unit to try and make sense of. So opening things up with a visit to the BTK Killer, who for the first time is brought to the attention of the pioneering agents of the BSU later in the episode, makes sense.

What’s exciting is how the interpersonal stuff seems to have played catch-up during the time off. For the first time, Holt McAllany’s Agent Bill Tench, Jonathan Groff’s Agent Holden Ford, and Anna Torv’s Dr. Wendy Carr all feel like thoughtfully drawn characters whose problems, and responses to those problems, are those of real people, not just styrofoam packing peanuts shoved into the story at random to pad out the time between visits to psychopaths.

I’m covering Mindhunter again for Decider this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a step in the right direction.

Setting a ghost story against the backdrop of a major historical atrocity is a high-risk, high-reward proposition. As to the risk, no one can fault the filmmakers for a failure to take this troubling subject seriously, even personally. Promotional materials for the show indicate that lead actor Derek Mio’s grandfather was imprisoned at Manzanar, as was director Lily Mariye’s. Her grandfather died there, while her father’s family was killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s grandfather survived the blast. And supporting actor George Takei, who also serves as a consultant to the show, was interned in two camps himself. So I believe the show is interested in chronicling and decrying this historical crime in and of itself, not merely as a backdrop for J-horror shenanigans, nor even as an easy allegory for the present-day horrors of the Trump Administration’s immigrant gulags.

But good intentions only get you so far. As a work of horror filmmaking, this doesn’t go very far at all.

I’m covering the new season of the anthology show The Terror, titled The Terror: Infamy, for the AV Club, starting with my review of the premiere. It’s not promising.

Ah yes, television, that escapist medium we turn to for respite from the real world. Instead of watching the rich and powerful loot everyone else and getting sad about it, we can switch on Succession to watch the rich and powerful loot everyone else and have a few laughs!

Or try to, anyway. After a buzzworthy first season (the reach of which far exceeded its grasp), Succession returns for another look at the life of Rupert Murdoch stand-in Logan Roy (Brian Cox), his chief failson and would-be successor Kendall (Jeremy Strong), and the rest of their relatives and retinue. The premiere, titled “The Summer Palace” after the very smelly mansion in which much of it takes place (we’ll get to that), is the kind of thing you’ll like a lot if you liked this kind of thing the last time around. Skeptics, and I’ll cop to being one, will find the same frustrations.

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

The mesmeric qualities of Refn’s filmmaking make taking in all of this cacophonous and terrifying information a leisurely, sensual matter. The sparse dialogue and the long stretches of silence surrounding it make the monologues outlining the fascist mindset stand out like towering obelisks of ideology. The performances of the five leading actors are masterful in their vagueness, blank screens against which we can project our own hopes, fears, and lusts. The result is a show for our time. It is perhaps the show of our time.

I reviewed the season finale of Too Old to Die Young for Decider. (I’m gonna be playing some catch-up on old links, so these descriptions are gonna be pretty no-nonsense. But this was a hell of a show, I’ll say that!)

Titled “The Empress,” presumably in reference to Yaritza though quite possibly in reference to Diana—and it seems like a lot will be riding on the answer to this riddle in the finale—the penultimate episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s masterpiece of surrealist noir is less an advancement of the plot than an escalation, or the promise of one to come.

I reviewed episode nine of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Aside from Fargo Season Three and David Thewlis’s hideously acquisitive character V.M. Varga, Too Old to Die Young is the only show I personally have seen that responds to the Trump era with appropriate and unvarnished disgust and fury. In the person of Martin’s openly fascist colleagues on the Homicide squad (sample quotes from this episode: “DEMOCRACY’S MY BITCH! FAKE NEWS! JESUS!”) and Janey’s perverted billionaire father, this show identifies the enemy, hones in on the twin poles of their reactionary politics—a belief in the virtue of violence against the unclean and a belief that the vulnerable exist to be exploited, abused, and discarded, both of them privileges of the select—and creates narrative situations that alternately expose them for the monstrous cretins they are and punish them appropriately.

I reviewed episode eight of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

So, we have fascist, racist law enforcement officers who prey on children. We have a grotesque billionaire who declares, publicly and repeatedly, that he’s sexually attracted to his own daughter. And we have a tremendous explosion of horrific violence.

I dunno. Think there’s a connection to be made there? Think there’s a topical subtext to Too Old to Die Young‘s vicious, vacuous killers and their flimsy yet fanatical justifications for murder? Think there’s something about Janey’s dad that trumps his role in the story—something that connects him to the real world, and invites thoughts of not just punishment but retribution? Think there’s more going on here than just what shows up on the screen?

I reviewed episode seven of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Running through the plot in this much detail is kind of a must, given how little there is to say about what happens. Aside from the final scene, and everything that happened off camera before the events of the episode begin, and maybe the Janey encounter, there’s just not much there, there. But when a show is this accomplished, this confident, this unlike anything else on the air, it doesn’t matter what is there. The journey is at least half the fun. Like Jesus’s Mama Magdalena, Too Old to Die Young is simply an acquired taste.

I reviewed episode six of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

The final episode of Dark‘s relentlessly gripping second season is entitled “Endings and Beginnings,” a reversal of the season premiere’s title “Beginnings and Endings.” And believe me, that cheap symmetry is the only cheap thing about it. Whether you’re talking about Stranger Things on Netflix, Westworld on HBO, or even the letdown of (sigh) Mr. Robot Season 3 on USA, Dark is the science fiction show to beat. Its take on its sci-fi concept is wholly original. Its grasp on its complex story is sure. Its creation of characters worth caring about—not necessarily liking; there’s a difference, and it cuts in Dark’s favor—is unmatched. Its refusal to pull punches is glorious.

I reviewed the season finale of Dark Season Two for Decider.

This is how a time-travel story can be used as a metaphor—a barely disguised one at that—for how our own lives can feel like a closed system from which there can be no escape. It’s direct, it’s discomfiting, and it is very dark.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Dark Season Two for Decider.

From the opening montage to the closing scene, this is a tour de force episode of Dark. The everyday trials and tribulations of the adult and teenage characters are sexy and sad and often both. The Hannah/Ulrich/Katharina triangle of love, lust, friendship, and betrayal clicks in every respect. The beach scenes are funny and hot. The party is both sweet and, knowing what we know about the fates of everyone involved, brutal. Ben Frost’s music, particularly during the Martha/Jonas love scenes, is huge and rapturous, the way doomed young love feels.

And the meeting between Jonas and Michael is powerful and quietly crushing given its outcome. Actors Louis Hofmann, a truly extraordinary talent, and Sebastian Rudolph seem to pour themselves out all over the table where they sit and talk. What’s more, unlike the Ulrich/Mikkel material from the previous episode, the emotional impact of this father/son reunion isn’t hampered in the slightest by relying on sci-fi shenanigans to take place.

It feels like what it is: a son trying to save the man he loves most, a father trying to save the boy he loves most, and the both of them arriving at a decision over who must live and who must die. It takes the toughest decisions we must make as members of a family, as children and as parents, whether we’re ever actually forced to make them or whether they remain the stuff of troubling daydreams and what-ifs, and uses the science-fiction genre to probe that nerve as directly as possible. It does the same with falling in love, with the loss of virginity, with marital infidelity, with motherhood, with couplehood, with friendship. It’s reminiscent of “The Garveys at Their Best,” the standout episode from the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers—the episode that showed that series would become a classic. It’s dynamite. I’m glad it exists.

I reviewed episode six of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Adding an entire working theory of theology, theodicy, and the nature of the universe to, y’know, families in the German suburbs being torn apart by time travel, episode five of DarkSeason Two offers a lot to ponder, from plot to philosophy. It offers an eye-opening look at both the tactics and the worldview of Adam, the prime mover of Winden’s cross-generational “war” for control of time and the wormholes within it. Yet it muddies up some of the show’s more directly effective and affecting interpersonal elements.

I reviewed episode five of Dark Season Two for Decider.