I reviewed the season finale of Billions for the New York Times.

Like all paranormal mystery series, Black Spot wants to be a “binge watch it until the answers are revealed” kind of show. That’s not a criticism—not of the show and not even of Netflix, the most binge-watch dependent of all TV networks. Before the concept of binge-watching even existed Lost was built this way on ABC, just like Twin Peaks was built this way on ABC before it (and on Showtime after it). From those two examples alone I hope it’s clear that you can do good things with this compulsive-viewing format. In the case of Twin Peaks you can do literally the best thing ever done on television with it. If Black Spot wants us to binge watch until we find out just what the hell is happening in Villefranche, more power to it.

Like some paranormal mystery series, Black Spot also wants to be an episodic procedural kind of show. That’s a bit more unusual. I’m not even talking about the “monster/killer of the week” structure like I’ve done in previous reviews; obviously that’s a pretty common approach to genre work on television, or at least it used to be. I’m referring here to the fact that in each episode there’s a small crime-based mystery in addition to the larger paranormal ones, and the police and district attorney who are our main characters investigate that crime, and then they solve that crime. That’s the way Black Spot is going from Point A to Point B with its overarching plot: by going from Exhibit A to Exhibit B until each individual episode’s mystery is solved.

Episode 3, “The Void,” illustrates a major potential problem with this approach: If you’re going to have eight mysteries a season, you have to be good at writing mysteries.

I reviewed episode three of Black Spot for Decider.

Here’s what we know about Black Spot as of the completion of Episode 2. Pretend I’m about a half dozen quirky law enforcement professionals piecing this together if that helps.

It’s a paranormal cop show that keeps an overarching mystery—who or what is stalking the people of the murder-happy forest town of Villefranche—on a low simmer while bringing a new case to a boil each episode. That places it more with the “monster/serial killer of the week” mold of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The X-Files, and Hannibal Season One than with Twin Peakseven at its most episodic.

It’s not above tossing a crying baby off a cliff into a roaring river as a fakeout to drum up cheap heat.

It occasionally displays striking proficiency with horror-fantasy imagery and makes the absolute most out of its misty arboreal setting.

It’s not above buying slo-mo shots and horror-movie music cues wholesale to drive its points home.

It’s pretty good at setting its top cop, Laurène Weiss, apart from a bajillion other characters in her tough-as-nails-but-full-of-secrets vein, courtesy of actor Suliane Brahim, the head of an engaging, attractive, even amusing ensemble.

It’s not above dipping into horror-imagery wells—like mysterious symbols and antlered monsters and the proverbial wolf in the woods—you’d think would have run dry by now.

Seeing a pattern emerge just yet?

I reviewed episode two of Black Spot for Decider.

Titled “A Wolf’s Dream” after the white wolf (“Ghost! To me!”) that keeps appearing to Major Weiss, and eventually just to the viewers at home, the show’s second episode feels indicative of both a high creative ceiling and a low creative floor. Creator Mathieu Missoffe, director Theirrey Poiraud, and company have a lot of things going for them, but originality isn’t one of them, and I worry that will come back to bite them in the end.

I reviewed episode two of Black Spot for Decider.

In a remote logging town near a secluded forest, a young woman is found murdered. Her death is just the latest in a long string of crimes, including the disappearances of at least two teenage girls over a period of years. The wealthy owner of the town’s ailing sawmill isn’t telling everything he knows to the chief of the town’s slightly comic police department, who has secrets too.

Into the mix steps a quirky outsider, a lawman from the big city sent to get to the bottom of things. Something about the place intrigues him, so he rents a room in a local hotel. Looks like he’ll be staying in this little town for a while.

Sound familiar? Every bit as familiar as Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme song, I’ll bet.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s three-seasons-and-a-movie masterpiece has cast a long shadow over television, with “weird events in a woodland town” at least as popular a dramatic subgenre as that post-Sopranos mainstay, “our protagonist is a gangster.” And Black Spot falls squarely within that macabre penumbra.

I’m covering the French Netflix paranormal drama Black Spot for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. 

(Note: I’m playing catchup with links to my work so these review descriptions will all be pretty brief. I guess you’ll just have to watch the reviews!)

In a remote logging town near a secluded forest, a young woman is found murdered. Her death is just the latest in a long string of crimes, including the disappearances of at least two teenage girls over a period of years. The wealthy owner of the town’s ailing sawmill isn’t telling everything he knows to the chief of the town’s slightly comic police department, who has secrets too.

Into the mix steps a quirky outsider, a lawman from the big city sent to get to the bottom of things. Something about the place intrigues him, so he rents a room in a local hotel. Looks like he’ll be staying in this little town for a while.

Sound familiar? Every bit as familiar as Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme song, I’ll bet.

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s three-seasons-and-a-movie masterpiece has cast a long shadow over television, with “weird events in a woodland town” at least as popular a dramatic subgenre as that post-Sopranos mainstay, “our protagonist is a gangster.” And Black Spot falls squarely within that macabre penumbra.

A loose almost anti-translation of the French title Zone Blanche, or “White Zone,” Black Spotrefers to the dead zone (that one’s taken) of cellular coverage in which the grim little town of Villefranche and its surrounding forest are located. If the pilot episode for this Netflix import proves anything, it’s that that particular zone is pretty roomy. Opportunities to color within the lines drawn by both Davids, Chase and Lynch, abound. You may not score any points for originality, but you can still paint an engaging picture.

I’m covering the Netflix show Black Spot for Decider this season, starting with my review of the series premiere.

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

Chuck Rhoades has issued his own mission statement. “I myself will be doing my usual boogie,” he tells the gaggle of favor-trading power brokers he’s assembled to help him take down Jock Jeffcoat. “Inducing mistakes through temptation, misdirection, obfuscation and conflation-slash-corruption of the ideals that built this great nation.” A brief pause for breath follows, before he adds, “For a good and noble purpose, of course.”

The assembled bigwigs all nod in the affirmative and concur. Why wouldn’t they? For one thing, they’re all in on Chuck’s shady attempt to expose Jeffcoat’s even shadier collusion with a voting machine manufacturer to rig elections. That “good and noble purpose” is ostensibly one they share.

But you don’t need to be part of criminal conspiracy to recognize the underlying sentiment. Chuck’s merry men all agree that this self-admitted liar is telling them the truth, in the familiar manner of people who’ve decided to humor someone who’s full of it because disagreeing would be more trouble than it’s worth.

Fortunately, we here are under no such obligation.

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

“All is quiet on New Year’s Day.” Fat chance, Bono.

U2’s wintry hit “New Year’s Day” may kick off the “Billions” episode it shares a title with, but Bono’s opening line certainly doesn’t describe it. Directed with verve and humor by Adam Bernstein and written by the series creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien — always a sign that the game is well and truly afoot — “New Year’s Day” has the feel of a turning point for the season. Nothing shocking or momentous takes place, but the air is electric.

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

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.

When I picture the deaths of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, the first word that comes to mind is obscene.

The dragons are technical filmmaking achievements of a scale and quality never before seen on television. They are emblems of high-fantasy spectacle with real awe and real bite, in a field now dominated by literally and figuratively bloodless blockbusters. Most guttingly, they are symbols of the wonders of the natural world, pointlessly destroyed by merchants of death. For all these reasons, their killings made me want to look away … which is exactly why I felt the need to look closer. And the survival of the third, greatest, and last dragon in the Game of Thrones finale made that need impossible to resist.

Surviving the deaths of his siblings, Drogon leveled King’s Landing at the behest of his master and mother, killing countless thousands. Yet after her death, freed from human control for the first time in his life, he appears to decide against further devastation in favor of escape. He flies away and his future is unknown.

But while the minds of these dragons remain a mystery, what they symbolize can be sussed out more readily. With two of the creatures killed by two very different enemies and the third taking off on its own, the departures of the dragons track with the trajectory of the show’s final season. As such, they serve as legends on a map of the future. Two paths say, “Here be dragons.” The third is wide open.

I wrote about the deaths of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons and what they symbolize for Vulture. Many people have called this the best writing I’ve ever done on the show, and I tend to agree.

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.

Bran, Arya, Sansa, Jon: In their final destinies, the heirs of House Stark all defy their house words, “Winter Is Coming.” After showing us a nightmare for eight seasons, Game of Thrones finally dares to dream of spring.

I reviewed the series finale of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone. I loved this show, and I owe it so much.