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.)

It could have been worse. I sure thought it would be.

From a historical perspective, The Americans’ final season feels an awful lot like, well, The Sopranos’ final season. The similarities stem in part from the sensation that Season Five and Season Six are two halves of one larger run, with the sense of anticlimax that pervaded last year’s finale actually serving as a “stay tuned” for the final ten episodes this year. The Sopranos, you’ll recall, divided its final season into two parts, a model adopted by heirs to the throne like Mad Men and Breaking Bad as well. If The Americans disguised this by solidifying the split with different numerical designations, it’s kind of fitting.

But it’s the dreadful feeling, the awful feeling, shared by The Americans and The Sopranos in the end that stands out to me in “Harvest,” this week’s episode, and throughout this final season in general. Maybe it’s the presence of that cancer-stricken artist, who’s now so racked with pain she looks like she has a seizure disorder even as she barks orders at Elizabeth so she can keep making art until the end. Maybe it’s the return via flashback of Dylan Baker’s bioweapons-expert character, dying of a self-inflicted hemorrhagic viral infection as he talks to Stan Beeman about how the Jennings live the American dream. Whatever it is, there’s something sickly, diseased in the atmosphere. It permeates even the most innocuous or cheery scenes. So when Philip and Elizabeth embark on their most difficult mission yet, one in which failure could lead to the dismantling of their entire network, while at the same time their neighbor Stan grows more and more suspicious of his friends each time we see him…I expected a catastrophe. Somehow, not getting one, not yet anyway, feels even worse.

I reviewed last week’s tense episode of The Americans for Decider.

In The Rain‘s storytelling arsenal, group dynamics are its secret weapon. Netflix’s consistently surprising (is that an oxymoron? oh well) post-apocalyptic drama treats its band of six (previously seven) thrown-together young adults not as a collection of types, but as people, capable of making their own decisions but shaped by the response of the group around them, both individually and collectively. Turns out the best way to show off that skill is to focus an episode on the one person who doesn’t fit.

I reviewed episode six of The Rain for Decider. Sexy and sad.

Some shows don’t know their own strengths. Westworld, for example, is the best example of this phenomenon on the air right now. Its creators took Michael Crichton’s old sci-fi horror concept and ported it to a modern-day prestige-TV landscape where they could play up the sex and violence all they wanted, while still having the breathing room to depict the robotic theme-park attractions’ burgeoning self-awareness so slowly that entire scenes can pass featuring completely realistic conversations between “characters” who have no idea their every thought, word, and deed has been preprogrammed. The pulp thrills are right there for the taking; so is the (as far as I can tell) unprecedented experience of watching a work of fiction in which the heroes start out from a position where their interactions no more “real” than your iPhone connecting to your car via Bluetooth. And what does Westworld do? Bury both the juicy and heady stuff in boring puzzle-box narratives, pointlessly shifting timelines, and long boring conversations about What It Means To Be Human—a perennial thematic non-starter, given that all of us have a pretty good idea of what that means every time we wake up in the morning, thanks. There’s a fine show in there, but the show itself doesn’t know it.

The Rain is the anti-Westworld. As its fifth episode (“Have Faith”) amply demonstrates, it knows where its bread is buttered: in the faces and emotions of its cast of characters as they face a horrific world in which only connecting with each other keeps them afloat, and in racing through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes at a pace brisk enough to keep them feeling fresh while making each deviation from the expected path a genuine surprise rather than a “twist” so painstakingly telegraphed that redditors could figure it out months in advance and call it a day.

I reviewed episode five of The Rain for Decider. This one took a tried-and-true staple of post-apocalyptic narratives — the colony of seemingly well-meaning survivors who maybe aren’t so well-meaning — and made something new out of it.

The first bloodbath takes place offscreen. By the time the episode begins it’s already over, in fact. Goaded into brutal action by the lies of Cornelius Hickey, the crew of the Terror and the Erebus have shot five Netsilik men, women, and children to death, adding their bodies to the pile of two already assembled by Hickey himself. After witnessing the savagery with which he assaulted Lieutenant Irving in order to instigate this attack in the last episode, not seeing the killing of the innocent people Hickey framed for that murder feels worse, somehow — worse still because it took place during a moment of genuine bonding, brotherhood, and love between once-rival captains Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames just a few miles away. There’s a dreadful finality to discovering, as they did upon their return to camp, that a crime against humanity is a fait accompli.

So begins one of The Terror’s tightest and tensest episodes. (Which is saying something, that’s for sure.) Indeed, “Terror Camp Clear” has the most straightforward, least spiderwebbed storyline of any installment so far. Written by creator and co-showrunner David Kajganich and directed by Tim Mielants, it takes advantage of the narrowing scope of the story, not to mention the dwindling cast of characters, by keeping the focus squarely on Mr. Hickey’s incipient mutiny, its confirmation by the officers and their trusted associates, and the attempt to put it down and punish its bloody-minded ringleaders. On a show about the slow, grinding, literally glacial nature of death in the arctic wastes, it’s the first time a race-against-the-clock atmosphere has taken hold, and it works beautifully for the contrast.

I reviewed episode eight of The Terror for the A.V. Club. This show is tremendous. So tight, smart, austere, and rooted in fear.

Tempered expectations can be a real blessing where TV drama is concerned. During the first three episodes of The Rain on Netflix, I’ve come to expect a well-acted, exciting, handsomely shot show about young people making their way through a rather lush post-apocalyptic hellscape, with the subgenre’s tendency for cruelty tempered by an appreciation of the value of sweetness and happiness as both the means and end of survival. That’s a long and labored way to say I think it’s pretty good and I’m having a good time watching it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be reduced to tears sitting on my couch in the middle of the afternoon by the thing. And yet here we are.

I reviewed the very sad fourth episode of The Rain for Decider.

There’s no denying it now: “Billions” belongs in a special class of dramas — “The Americans,” “The Leftovers,” “Halt and Catch Fire” and even the era-defining “Breaking Bad” — that skyrocket upward in quality from one season to the next. In fact, I think the last of those is the best series with which we can compare “Billions” at this point. “Billions” is the new “Breaking Bad,” with white collars instead of blue meth.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Billions, which I think was the show’s best, for the New York Times.

Westworld frustrates because it doesn’t seem to recognize its own strengths. Hint: They don’t lie in lines of clichéd dialogue like “We ain’t so different, you and I,” or in raga-fied instrumental cover versions of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” (as heard in the opening sequence, ugh), or in a predictable cliffhanger in which a samurai attacks Maeve’s group when they arrive in Shogunworld. The whole point of the park it has the potential to be anything, but winds up being something awful, because that’s human nature. That’s rich territory to explore, but the show’s still wandering in circles.

I reviewed episode three of Westworld Season 2 (the one with India in it) for Rolling Stone. I think it’s pretty clear this is not going to turn into a good show, which makes its few flashes of…brilliance is way too strong a word, but interest, at least? more frustrating.

What a pleasant—and unpleasant—surprise Episode 3 of The Rain turned out to be. Set primarily in the devastated city of Copenhagen, where our band of seven survivors grows closer to one another while realizing just how far gone much of the rest of humanity has gotten, this installment both embraces the tropes of post-apocalyptic life-on-the-road narratives and thoughtfully avoids many of the pitfalls that plague such stories. It proves that the series is capable of facing ugly truths about human nature without functioning as a backdoor endorsement of that ugliness—all with a running time of just 36 minutes and change.

I reviewed episode three of The Rain for Decider. Here’s where the show really started to impress me.

The first episode of The Rain was 46 minutes long. This one is a cool 37. In the words of Tuco Salamanca, tight tight tight! Narrative economy is at a premium in this day and age, whether it’s the end of days or not. And if the show’s second installment lacks the premiere’s breathless pacing, at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome as it slows things down.

The problem facing the series at this stage in its eight-episode opening season is pretty straightforward. Now that it’s established its rain-delivered armageddon, cemented the roles of its protagonists Simone and Rasmus in its creation and possible cure, and (most importantly) abandoned the little underground world of two that made their situation so unique, can it still hold our interest as it retreads the familiar ground of so many post-apocalyptic stories before it?

I reviewed the second episode of The Rain for Decider. It’s the shakiest, insofar as it has to go through all the usual maneuvers described above, but I was impressed by how un–Walking Dead it managed to be nonetheless.

Written by series co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt and directed by Kenneth Kainz, The Rain’s series premiere is the most breakneck work of sci-fi worldbuilding I’ve seen since the pilot episode of Lost. It’s a smart play. The high-speed opening distinguishes the show not only from the usual Netflix-bloat pacing problems, but also from the traditional way in which post-apocalyptic narratives dole out information about the stakes and the threat a little bit at a time. The show seems to assume that yeah, we’re familiar with how these kinds of stories operate, and we can dispense with the formalities and get right into the good stuff.

I reviewed the first episode of The Rain, Netflix’s surprisingly good new Danish post-apocalyptic drama, for Decider. Much more on this show to come.

Let’s talk about silence. I mean, the Jennings family certainly does this week, and how can we go wrong following their example? Elizabeth discusses it in the context of Rififi, the classic French crime movie by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin. She watches the film in an attempt to ingratiate herself with one Jackson Barber, a handsome young film buff who works for Senator Sam Nunn, a key player in the arms-reduction negotiations she’s spent the season trying to undermine. The movie features a heist sequence that clocks in at something close to half an hour without a single word spoken. You can see how this would appeal to Elizabeth, who knows how these kinds of things work—and to The Americans, which has worked out so well in large part by following in its footsteps.

Elizabeth talks about silence again with her son Henry, in a painful phone conversation the pleasantries of which reveal long-standing estrangement between her and the child she didn’t bother recruiting. Henry complains about having to read Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on the virtues of quiet contemplation. “It’s important literature, apparently,” he verbally eye-rolls; critics of this show’s slow-burn approach no doubt know how he feels.

Yet Henry picks up on something hidden inside Elizabeth’s strategic silences: pain that she’s struggling, in vain, to cloak in small talk. “She was asking about school and the weather,” he tells his father Philip about the call. “It was weird, because she doesn’t really call me? We barely ever talk, but all of a sudden she’s calling from a business trip and asking me about English class.” He concludes with a casual observation that hits her husband like a Mack truck: “I don’t understand why she’s so unhappy.” She never said a word to that effect, bur her silence spoke volumes.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Americans (from a couple weeks back) for Decider.

SPOILER WARNING

“Horrible From Supper” is the latest exercise in crystalline near-perfection from The Terror, written by Andres Fischer-Centeno and directed by Tim Mielants (who’ll be helming the remaining three episodes as well). If you’re reading this fresh from watching the episode, Mr. Hickey’s murderous dementia at the episode’s climax is no doubt lodged in your head like a knife (sorry). Rightly so. Like the death of Sir John Franklin earlier in the season, this is one of the most singular and memorable outbreaks of violence on television I’ve seen in a very long time. The staging and buildup are impeccable, with Hickey leading a fellow member of his hunting party off to his death in the far background while their commander, Lt. John Irving, receives potentially life-saving sustenance from a group of Netsilik travelers, his back to the danger behind him. It’s not merely the murder that shocks, it’s Hickey’s demeanor: First found crouched over the body of his victim, he leaps up shirtless and wild, stabs Irving over and over like something straight out of a true-crime podcast, then crouches and gazes around with an unintelligible mix of ecstasy and wariness in his eyes. The music, by the late composer Marcus Fjellström (god what a loss that is), uses clanging bells and distorted vocal samples; it’s dissonant and off to the point of being hard to listen to, like being trapped with a murderer inside the coda to “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The buzzing, clanging music and Hickey’s mannerisms evoked a similarly awful scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; the running figure of Lt. Irving combined with Fjellström’s core reminded me of an inverted Unedited Footage of a Bear (which, if you haven’t seen it before, hoo boy); the beach-like setting gave me flashbacks to a scene from Under the Skin that bothers me so much I’m not even going to link to it. But the overall effect is so rooted in the strength of Adam Nagaitis’ deceptive performance as Hickey, the wide-open gray-white void of the landscape as captured by Mielants and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden, and the decision to cut out the sound of the act itself, that the overall effect is utterly unique. The brief coda that follows, in which the Hickey we’ve come to know and love first boards the ship and it becomes clear he’s killed the real Hickey and stolen his place, hit me like the second shot of a double-tap execution.

I reviewed last night’s fantastic episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club.