The funny thing is that despite the length of the finale and the glacial pace of most of the preceding episodes, Westworld Season Two still feels like it just barely got started. Take away the shifting time frames and the occasional detour into Flashback Country, and what have you got? A road movie in which characters who either perpetrated or survived Season One’s climactic massacre all head to the Valley Beyond. A bunch of robotic redshirts and a few supporting players get killed. A few other supporting players make it through to a virtual-reality paradise while Bernard, Dolores and the Man in Black live on (in one form or another) in the real world to fight another day.

It’s not a bad narrative, necessarily. From The Warriors to the freaking Odyssey, plenty of good work concerns its characters’ quest to get from Point A to Point B without losing their lives or souls in the process. But the show’s parameters for the park are too vague to give their journey a sense of direction. All we know is that it’s really, reallybig. That, and there are strategically located bunkers and hideouts just a few minutes of screentime away from wherever the characters are at any given moment so they’re never in real danger of getting lost.

Meanwhile, the constant cross-cutting between storylines dilutes our investment in the physical journey of any one character or group, since we know we’ll be whisked away to some other place and time at any moment. There’s a reason the Akecheta episode hit as hard as it did, even aside from Zahn McClarnon’s performance: It rooted us in the experiences and perils of a single character for an entire episode, in a way that made us feel what was at stake – and that no amount of Dolores monologues could equal.

And we don’t even have a recognizable endpoint in mind to serve as an anchor, the equivalent of The Lord of the Rings‘ Mount Doom. “The Valley Beyond” is amorphous even by the show’s standards (at least Season One’s “Maze” implies a central location). It’s just a bunch of rocks in the middle of a Western landscape like countless others the characters have crossed, and even as a metaphysical concept it’s just a bog-standard promised land. To paraphrase Bernard’s imaginary Ford, you might as well have spent the season chasing the horizon.

Which is a bit like the experience of watching Westworld itself. There are enough individual elements at play – concepts, creature effects, a handful of strong performances – to make you believe it could all come together at some point. There’s a consistent leap of faith needed, a fingers-crossed hope that the show will Get Good the way many other dramas that suffered shaky starts eventually did. Yet all our pathways keep leading us to the same place: clichéd dialogue, meaningless twists, plodding pacing. And the good Westworld remains, as ever, its own Valley Beyond, maddeningly out of reach.

I reviewed the blah season finale of the blah show Westworld’s blah second season for Rolling Stone. I wanted to post this long an excerpt for a couple of reasons. First, it’s me riffing on one of my favorite topics: the way film can use the motion of bodies and objects across physical space to communicate. Second, and more on this soon, it illustrates a point I frequently try to make, which is that rather than start with thematic or sociopolitical critiques and work downward, you can often start with seemingly small formal considerations of cinematography, writing, performance, etc. and discover how they work upward toward larger flaws.

I’d also recommend reading my new Rolling Stone colleague Alan Sepinwall’s thoughts on the season; we realized early on that our takes were very complementary.

Evan Rachel Wood’s performance since her transformation into the Deathbringer has been impressive in its steeliness, but her hard-ass attitude and mechanical lack of emotion have left her little to do than act like a grumpy robot unless there’s something especially traumatic for her to process. We saw how well she could play that kind of emotion when she encountered the ruin of her father, his computerized mind torn to pieces by having too much data pumped into it.

Here, over the body of the man with whom she’s shared so much, we see it again. There’s something weird and alien in how her face registers the pain of Teddy’s death, as if her internal processors have to learn what grief feels like from scratch and figure out an appropriate physical response. Her face goes weirdly flat, then asymmetrical, then contorts in an animalistic silent howl of anguish and rage. It’s acting as creation, using the face and body to build a new way of expressing a familiar emotion. You want a metaphor for how good sci-fi operates? You got it. If only Westworld gave it to us more often.

Three weeks ago I reviewed the penultimate episode of Westworld Season 2 for Rolling Stone. It’s a return to mediocre form after the beautiful Zahn McClarnon/Akecheta episode from the previous week. One thing that emerged really strongly to me this season is how badly the material hamstrings even the best actors on the show, and there are some really good ones, and how in the hands of less-good actors (it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Tessa Thompson is at it again) it just goes nowhere at all.

What a way to cap a season in which this ruthlessly entertaining and intelligent show, so gimlet-eyed about the corrupting influence of power and so deft at depicting its argot and appeal, finally brought in the buzz it has long deserved. To paraphrase the Hulkster, “Billions”-mania is running wild, brother. Long may it flex.

I reviewed the season finale of Billions for the New York Times. What a pleasure to write about this show this season!

If you want something done right, give it to actor Zahn McClarnon to do. That’s the logical conclusion to draw coming out of this week’s episode of Westworld, titled “Kiksuya” – and the series’ best hour by a considerable margin. For once, the show’s annoyances (easy escapes, constant pointless bickering, those damn orchestral alt-rock cover versions) aren’t enough to overwhelm the material of real value. It took one of its most underutilized cast members, placed him at the center of a storyline that directly addressed the series’ sci-fi conceit but combined it with real mythmaking power and then let him run. The warrior Akecheta may not save Ghost Nation and its many human captives, but he just might have saved this show.

Until now, McClarnon had only been required to do is act mysterious and menacing – which is easy to do when you’re covered head to toe in death-cult warpaint – and spend a little time in a real-world flashback scene looking smart and suave. (The dude is all cheekbones.) But if you watched Fargo Season Two, you know that this actor is capable of so much more. As Hanzee Dent, the Native American enforcer for a Midwestern crime family, he was a nearly mute murder machine whose every move and murmur carried the weight of the whole rotten world. His reading of a weary, whispered line like “Tired of this life” – so tired that even identifying himself as said life’s owner was too much to bear – was all he needed to make himself the season’s greatest monster and its wounded moral heart.

This is the McClarnon we get tonight.

Last night’s Westworld was, by a considerable margin, the best episode of the series. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone.

This week, on “Billions”: Salt Bae.

The viral-video sensation and steakhouse hearthrob Nusret Gokce makes an unexpected appearance to open the episode. Of all the real-life restaurateurs, athletes and hedge-fund aristocracy who’ve appeared on this show, none made me laugh harder at their sheer delightful audacity. Come to think of it, I don’t know if anything on TV has made me laugh harder than this.

The look of lust in the eyes of Condola Rashad’s normally unflappable attorney Kate Sacker, accompanied by the sensual strains of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” on the sound system, simply add additional seasoning to the scenario. Silly as it sounds, the scene is a textbook example of the attention to detail “Billions” pays to its Manhattan machinations. The show never settles for satisfying when spectacular will do.

Billions is so good. I reviewed this week’s episode for the New York Times.

It was the best of worlds, it was the worst of worlds. Like no episode before it, this week’s voyage to Westworld (“Les Écorchés”) was the proverbial non-stop action thrill ride – a carnival midway of cool sci-fi/horror imagery and visceral combat. It had James Marden’s Teddy going full Terminator, dressed in body armor and beating short-lived security badass Coughlin to death with his bare hands. It has both Clementine and Angela going out in blazes of glory, the latter by blowing up the hosts’ backup files in the Cradle and setting them free from the park’s endless loop. It has a beautifully shot face-off between Maeve and the Man in Black, the camera resting on Thandie Newton’s foregrounded face as she uses her psychic powers to turn the MiB’s own android allies against him. It has a creepy Bluebeard closet full of Bernard replicas and the real version getting possessed by the electronic spirit of his own creator so he can murder Delos thugs guilt-free. In short, it’s full of rad-ass robot shit.

[…]

The same cannot be said of the new narrative’s antagonist. Frankly, it’s time to come to terms with Charlotte Hale. Obviously, Tessa Thompson’s on a career hot streak – but the character of Hale is ice cold, and not in the unflappable-villain way she’s supposed to be either. There’s just nothing interesting about this one-note one-percenter, or the smirking way in which Thompson delivers every line. She has the mocking affect of a condescending reply from a Trump supporter on Twitter. She’s obnoxious when she has the upper hand over Peter Abernathy and Bernard in their respective torture chambers, and she’s just as irritating when her picked-on minion Stubbs, or rogue hosts Dolores and Teddy, have the upper hand on her in turn.

I reviewed tonight’s Westworld, which was both good pulpy fun and incredibly stupid, for Rolling Stone.

The Terror didn’t end tonight. It died.

That’s the best way to make sense of “We Are Gone,” the tenth and final episode of this brutally humane series, that I can come up with. More so than anything else on television in recent memory—ever, perhaps?—The Terror is about the experience of death, because the story requires virtually every character we meet to die before the end. Much of that die-off happens here, tonight. It happens onscreen and off, spectacularly and quietly, peacefully and gruesomely, by suicide and murder and disease and starvation—and, of course, a gigantic demonic bear. Death is like a prism turned around in The Terror’s hand, showing every facet, never settling on any one of them as the force’s true face.

I reviewed the finale of The Terror, a truly great television show, for the A.V. Club. I’m proud of the writing I did on this show, and there will be more of it coming your way soon.

It would do the show’s writers — in this case, the series co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, joined by Matthew Fennell — a disservice to describe these financial machinations as merely a MacGuffin; too much effort is put into nailing the almost esoteric intricacy and jargon of these multi-hundred-million dollar transactions. But in the same way that the Maltese Falcon or the “Pulp Fiction” briefcase are meaningful mostly through what people do in their name, Bobby’s predicament — moronically described as “Defcon 6” by his unctuous, hilarious compliance officer Ari Spyros (Stephen Kunken) — enables an entire cast of characters and guest stars to shine.

It’s Paul Giamatti vs. Clancy Brown and Damian Lewis vs. John Malkovich with a heaping helping of David Krumholtz, Maggie Siff, Asia Kate Dillon, and Maria Sharapova (!) on the side: I reviewed last week’s Billions for the New York Times. Absolutely unimpeachable writing, casting, acting.

You can take the boys out of the blood feud, but you can’t take the blood feud out of the boys. Just two episodes after the successful conclusion of the truce that saw the main men of “Billions” call an end to hostilities and help each other out of potentially career-ending legal trouble, both Bobby Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades have launched dangerous new contests of the will. And this time around, it’s not the courtroom versus the boardroom: Each man has entered into a rivalry with a bigger fish in their own professional pond.

For Chuck, this means setting his sights on a new white whale: Attorney General Jock Jeffcoat, the Alamo authoritarian running the Justice Department. For Bobby, it entails entering an alliance of creepy convenience with Grigor Andolov, a cheerfully violent Russian oil baron, whose bottomless reserves of liquid cash are exceeded only by his well-earned reputation for criminality and cruelty. Together, writers Adam R. Perlman and Willie Reale and director Stacie Passon operate this week’s episode, titled “Icebreaker,” like a factory assembly line, cranking out perfect new foils for two characters who are never complete without conflict.

If you needed another reason to start watching Billions, please note that John Malkovich and Clancy Brown now play major antagonists. I reviewed the episode that introduced Malkovich’s character for the New York Times.

Dismemberment, disembowelment and decapitation: Traditionally, these aren’t what you’d call teachable moments. But thanks to some swordpoint shenanigans in Shogunworld, all three figure prominently into a key scene in this week’s episode of Westworld (“Phase Space”). Even better, they go a long way toward demonstrating why this installment is such a dramatic uptick in quality from its predecessors. Whether it’s the script by Mad Men veteran Carly Wray or the direction by Swedish filmmaker Tarik Saleh is unclear, but there’s attention paid here to subtle human reactions to events as they unfold that’s unequaled by previous episodes. It’s all about the execution – even when you’re talking about an actual execution.

Let’s take that gory swordfight as a starting point. The duel in question involves Musashi, the ronin befriended by Maeve and her posse last week, and his former lieutenant turned rival Tanaka. Eschewing the techno-telepathy of “the witch” in favor of an old-fashioned mano a mano – staged in broad daylight, as opposed to the previous episode’s inexplicably murky swordplay – the two men go blade for blade in front of our heroes and a whole crowd of townspeople. (Contender for most memorable shot: An old man covering a little boy’s eyes to shield him from the bloodshed.) The fight ends with Tanaka’s protracted, screaming demise: Musashi cuts his hand off at the wrist, then provides him with the short sword he must use for harakiri, before beheading him. It’s the first time in a long time that the show’s brutality has been this inventively and empathetically staged. When the samurai and his geisha comrade Akane (who memorably carves out the heart of her own daughter for cremation) choose to stay behind and fight for their homeland instead of fleeing, the decision feels truly earned.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Westworld, which I thought was better than most, for Rolling Stone.

But – listen, this is Westworld, there’s always a but – enough baffling decisions remain to knock you out of the action faster than a katana to the face. For starters, despite what looks like very strong fight choreography and a behind-the-scenes budget bigger than a small country’s GDP, all the combat is shot in the dark. This is usually either a cost-cutting measure (you don’t need to pay for details you can’t see) or a way to hide sloppy swordplay. Since neither of those factors appear to apply, it comes across like sheer addiction to the murky, somber lighting and color palette of Prestige TV. What’s the point of all that precise blade-wielding if you don’t actually get to see the damn blades?

Also, true to the show’s programming, cringeworthy music cues are abound here. If you thought the cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway” (coincidentally the week he went full MAGA) or the “White Stripes: Indian Edition” version of “Seven Nation Army” were hard to take, wait until you hear faux-Japanese versions of the Stones’ “Paint It Black” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” The former, at least, is a callback to the show’s first use of the song, during the Sweetwater bandit raid that ShogunWorld has recycled for its own setting. But “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” during a scene that has nothing to do with cash? Is the idea “Well, Wu-Tang love samurai flicks, so it works”? If so, why not remake a song that actually samples music or dialogue from those films? As it stands, this just sounds like taking the Wu’s most recognizable hit and dumping it in the middle of a scene just because they can. Not even dropping a big sack with a dollar sign right in Thandie Newton’s lap would seem more jarring.

I reviewed the Westworld where they went to Fake Japan for Rolling Stone. I was pleased to see the show embracing its innate pulpiness, which has always been far more interesting than the deep thoughts it seems to think it has, and I write about that a bunch. But it still makes everything such a challenge to actually enjoy because of choices like the ones described above.

The Americans was a thriller. I don’t mean in general. I mean “Once, The Americans was a thriller.” For a while it wasn’t much else. The show’s first season was lauded to the heavens, and—from the ferocity and agency of Keri Russell’s co-antihero Elizabeth Jennings to the bold and clever use of Big ‘80s pop—not without reason. Yet it lacked the quiet, the dread, and the terrible empathy that would come to define the series. Early Americans opted instead for violent high-stakes spy games among its principals, the likes of which The Americans as we know it today would take a full season or more to build up to, if it were to show them at all. Recall that Stan Beeman murdered a man, and that at one point Elizabeth and Claudia—Claudia—have a physical fight as part of a quickly resolved side-plot. Either of these events would now drive a dozen episodes.

The show tightened up significantly during its second season. It was helped by its terrific antagonist, a closeted Navy SEAL whose innate all-American fascism blossomed forth spectacularly when he had a chance to serial-kill his way to the Soviet agents that blackmailed him into becoming an informant. But its main purpose was setting up what was to become the central conflict of the series: Philip and Elizabeth’s decision to follow orders and recruit their teenage daughter Paige into the KGB. The plight of a Soviet defector whom Philip kidnaps and repatriates was a major leap forward for the show too, in terms of taking the suffering of the Jennings’ victims as seriously as the suffering of the Jennings themselves.

This is the terrible empathy that would reach full flower in the form of Martha, the FBI secretary who falls in love with and marries Philip’s alter ego “Clark.” An act of profound cruelty on Philip’s part, it forms a moral abscess the show never really stops probing, as surely as Philip using pliers to rip one of his “real” wife Elizabeth’s teeth out. This is the trademark of The Americans, once it truly became The Americans: taking the time to linger on pain.

All this is to say that “START,” the end of The Americans, suffers from a structural disadvantage, one that sets it at irrevocable odds with the series at its best. Everything that happens in this final hour-plus happens here and only here, because there are no other hours. There’s no place left to linger. And in the absence of the ability to wallow in the guilt and shame and horror of it all, The Americans becomes a thriller once more.

I reviewed the final episode of The Americans for Decider. I wasn’t crazy about it. This was a great show with an adequate finale, one that for all its many strengths (I go into them in detail and was not immune to their power) was both too much and not enough. Having such mixed feelings about the last episode of such a great show was a difficult position to be in, so I took writing them out very seriously, and I hope that shows.

9. Yaz, “Only You” (Season 3, Episode 4) / Pink Floyd, unspecified (Season 3, Episode 6)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPpHLK4SHt8

The Ballad(s) of Jim and Kimmy. Along with Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac, and Roxy Music (don’t touch that dial, music fans!), Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet’s synth-soul duo Yaz — that’s Yazoo to us Yanks — were one of The Americans’ go-to artists. They were never employed better than when poor infatuated teenager Kimmy Breland played the group’s gorgeous love song “Only You” to “Jim,” the hipster weed-dealer alter ego Philip employs to gain access to her CIA father’s house. Sweet but never saccharine, it suits the dancing-in-the-moonlight ambience of the scene perfectly.

“Jim” returns the favor a few episodes later, with a truly brilliant non-music cue: Placing headphones on the ears of a very stoned Kimmy, he plays her an unnamed song by Pink Floyd, the mind-expanding beauty of which we’re left to imagine through watching the blissed-out expressions on the face of actor Julia Garner, then 21 and already a formidable talent. The heart of Kimmy and Jim’s relationship was a dark one, and it only got darker when she returned for the final season. But in these two scenes, Kimmy’s need to be acknowledged and understood, Philip’s desire to do right by a teenage girl while failing his own, and the power of music to transport and delight shine through anyway.

Combining three beats I love—The Americans, pop music, and the use of music by TV dramas—I wrote about the best music cues in the show’s history for Vulture.

“Is there anything I should know, as an FBI agent, about the Jennings family?”

“Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are not Russian spies.”

“Do you think it doesn’t matter who our leader is?”

“It was all for nothing, Elizabeth. You destroyed it all today.”

“I’ve always known, Mom. Every time, every lie, my whole life. And I know now.”

“Sex? Ha, what was sex? Nobody cared! Including your father!”

“Hi. I was hoping to make it home for dinner, but things are very topsy-turvy at the office.”

If you expected fireworks in the second-to-last episode of The Americans ever, you didn’t get them. Not in the usual sense anyway. Ever since The Sopranos established the structure for the contemporary drama’s short-season model — and certainly since Game of Thrones began using character-defining, character-destroying acts of violence to cement it — penultimate episodes have become the go-to spot for bodies to drop, en masse. (At least on shows where people kill other people for a living.) Yet the only prominent character to die here is Tatiana, the KGB agent based in the Soviet Rezidentura, whose relationship with Oleg Burov ended in career suicide for her when he outed her plan to steal weaponized biological agents to the FBI. Perhaps desperation is what drove her to accept a dangerous mission way out of her wheelhouse to assassinate a reformist negotiator; desperation is certainly what drove the Centre to ask her to do so, since their star agent refused. That star agent—”Jennings, Elizabeth,” as both the episode’s title and Stan Beeman’s computer list her—winds up killing Tatiana herself to stop the assassination. It’s over in seconds, and the eyewitnesses appear more confused than panicked. It’s the quietest public execution you can imagine.

No, this episode’s weapon of choice wasn’t weapons at all, but words. Over and over again, characters said things they’d never dared say before, or never had to, or never wanted to, or never even thought of. And no matter how soft-spoken the character or actor involved—The Americans is the most soft-spoken show on the air—each such line sliced through the show’s quiet like a knife.

I reviewed the beautiful penultimate episode of The Americans for Decider.

I once said The Americans is a great show for faces. I’ll now go a step further: The Americans is the greatest show for faces. Since the show’s third season at least, when it permanently slowed down the clip of its capers and became one of the most ruminative “thrillers” of all time, it has relied on long stretches of silence, on closeups held on faces as if actor and camera were in a staring contest, during which only a look in the eyes or a twinge in the cheek or a tightening or loosening of the lips can convey what’s really happening and what the people it’s happening to think about it. The only show that surpasses The Americans in this regard is the third season of Twin Peaks, which among its many other attributes studies the tectonics of faces with geological patience. Not coincidentally, Twin Peaks is also the last time I can remember that a show made me feel as nauseous, for as long, as this week’s episode of The Americans did.

Written by Joshua Brand and directed with series-standard restraint by Sylvain White, “The Summit” delivered a constant barrage of shocks to the storyline, belying its peacemaking title. Yet it was concerned less with those detonations than with their impact, spread across the faces of the characters involved.

I reviewed the faces of last night’s episode of The Americans for Decider.

“You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” Barbara Kruger’s influential work of feminist agitprop may not have had murder in mind. But murder exists on a continuum that spans the rowdy-boy horseplay her image depicts, the societally approved homosociality of the playing field and the locker room, and the “rum, sodomy, and the lash” trifecta of life in the Royal Navy. The sailor-on-sailor killings, mercy or otherwise, in this incredible episode of The Terror can be seen as that continuum’s logical endpoint. The taking of life, up close and personal, is a form of male intimacy like any other.

I tried to do this week’s episode of The Terror justice for the A.V. Club. I hope I succeeded.

The dust has settled, but “Billions” has not. After last week’s tour de force put an end to two and a half seasons’ worth of warfare between Bobby Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades, you might expect the show to settle into what remains of its status quo: Chuck’s run for governor, for example, or Bobby’s relatively cautious relationship with his company. But by the time the closing credits roll on this week’s episode, all that has been torn to pieces too.

Written by two of the show’s creators, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, and directed with minimal flash by Mike Binder, this week’s installment tosses the seven-dimensional chessboard out the window in favor of a series of direct confrontations. Characters get together, face off, and verbally pound away at one another until only the strongest remain standing. No room for stealth mode here: It’s vulgar displays of power all the way down.

Now that Chuck, Bobby and Wendy have won, are they going to press their advantages against their rivals? To continue my “Breaking Bad” comparison from last week, “You’re goddamn right,” as Walter White would say.

I reviewed last night’s very good episode of Billions for the New Yokr Times

A hallmark of great art is showing you something you never imagined needing to see until you actually see it. No one is claiming that Westworldis the second coming of the Sistine Chapel, but the HBO hit has flashes of greatness from time to time – and there’s a scene in this week’s episode (“The Riddle of the Sphinx”) that’s damn near canon-worthy. Who knew that watching a grizzled Scottish character actor playing a robotic replica of himself, boogieing down to the manic crooning of Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music’s glam-dance classic “Do the Strand,” was what our lives were collectively missing? You can keep your mazes and mysteries and violent delights woth violent ends. We’ll take Peter Mullan’s Jim Delos rocking out to an Eno-produced glitter-rock jam any ol’ time.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone. Typical Westworld: a good scene or two amid a ton of self-important dross.

We’ve all seen post-apocalypses that ask what the survivors are willing to kill for in order to keep surviving, but asking what they’re willing to live for is a much more important question.

I reviewed the eight and final episode of The Rain Season One. That’s it in a nutshell. This show was such a pleasant surprise, and so easy to binge with just eight very brief and brisk episodes. I recommend it.

Pretty much all fantastic fiction — sci-fi, fantasy, horror, superheroes, dystopias, you name it — is riddled with what could be considered plot holes, since implausibility is exactly what makes these stories fantastical in the first place. You might notice them, but you only start fixating on and complaining about them if the work that surrounds them fails to present you with anything of compensatory value.

If The Rain had a less talented cast, a less firm grasp on the emotional dynamic between the characters, a saggier running time, a more cynical dog-eat-dog attitude about what it takes to survive and what “surviving” even means, then yeah, maybe it’d be time to start writing whole paragraphs about why the Strangers don’t simply saturate the area with drones or whatever. As it stands? The Rain is a good show, in almost all the ways a show can be good. Pick your nits elsewhere.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Rain Season One for Decider. (Having now seen the finale, I’m kind of impressed with myself for how on-track I was with my predictions.)