“Welcome to my filth!” So says a cheery Brother Day (Lee Pace), the absentee Emperor of the galaxy, to his predecessor/older brother/imperfect clone, Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann). He’s welcoming the aging avatar of Empire to his lovely villa, where he’s “playing poverty” with his beautiful lover (and drug dealer), Song (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing). But Day — stupid, sexy, Christlike Day, with his bare chest and his oversized drug rug and his “Common People” decision to slum it — speaks for me as well. Foundation is extremely my shit. Welcome to my filth!
I’d like to get right down to it in this review, so I’m doing something uncharacteristic and including a content warning: If frank discussion of sexual abuse troubles you in a way you’re not up for at the moment, you can skip this one. Like I said, I’m gonna get right down to it.
Everyone alright? Okay. Well then:
One of the best things I’ve ever done in my life was tell the woman I love that I was sexually abused as a child. Doing so meant, among other things, that I was finally willing to tell this to myself, to admit to myself what had been done to me. Weird verb choice there, I realize: How do I admit to myself what was done to me? How does that work? How have I, the victim, done anything to admit? But that’s the kind of infuriating anti-logic abusers embed in your brain.
More than that, though, telling my wife about my abuse was, in its strange way, a major building block in our relationship. I forced myself to trust this woman with a terrible part of my life, because I had faith that she would handle me with care. When she did, which of course she did…well, the reward has been the healthiest romantic relationship of my life. And whatever else it is or does, Too Much is a romance in the end.
It all comes full circle when she makes it to Polly’s and screams for Felix to come out to talk to her. (“There’s a bell,” he points out.) She invites him to move in, which he agrees to do — but from now on, she has to talk about her problems with him with him, not with her phone.
Now get this: That’s exactly what she does! We catch up with them some time later at her apartment, where she’s just wrapping up telling him the whole Zev story. Her conclusion isn’t even “please tell me how bad that guy sucked,” it’s “please understand this my instincts are so screwy because I have all this bottled-up anger at him with no place to go but the wrong directions.”
When Jessica ends up needing an abortion after a “look how spontaneous I’m being” fling with a production assistant at her latest gig, she finally decides to break things off with Zev. She outlines her reasons in a speech that actor Megan Stalter seems to bring forth from her bile ducts somewhere, with a clarity about who he is and what he’s done that’s hugely gratifying to hear after watching this poor woman get the shit kicked out of her for 20 or 30 minutes. “You just want to beat me into submission,” she says, accurately. “Maybe not with your fists, but with your words, and your lack of love.” She’s got him dead to rights. But she still affords him the grace of an opportunity to tell her he still loves her. The door is still open, if just a crack.
Zev slams it shut as hard as he possibly can. After first flipping the script so that it’s Jessica, not himself, who kept the other person trapped in a relationship she didn’t want, he says sure, it’s possible he’s made her feel as lonely as she claims to feel. But there’s an alternate explanation that he prefers: “At the root of it all, you really are just a fucking cunt.” The crooked-mouthed, open-jawed look of combined horror, sadness, fury, disgust, and terrible clarity that comes over Jessica’s face when she hears this shocking statement is Stalter’s finest moment on the show so far.
This is the surprisingly humane and complex note on which Murderbot ends. This is what sci-fi on television can be: a simple idea, staged in a vividly imagined universe, executed with skill at delivering both the expected thrills and the unexpected complications.
The vast majority of this episode is like a good crazy-party episode of any comedy you’d care to name, from Woody’s wedding on Cheers to Pam feeling God in this Chili’s tonight on The Office to, well, more rich-asshole-party-based dramedy episodes than I could possibly list. And since every single person in the cast is a funny actor in a funny role, guess what? It’s funny! It’s wall to wall good bits, like Boss explaining to Felix that he was avoiding eye contact because he prefers to avoid eye contact with people he might have sex with, or Jessica slurring “Icanhaveadrink onceinawhile,” or Ann talking about how her dog was there for her during “Jonno’s emotional affair with Kylie Minogue.” (“What happened to her?” “She became like a sister.” “No, I mean, like, your dog.”) You’ve got some rom, you’ve got some com. No complaints here!
The Prisoner is, no pun intended, a number of things. It’s both colorful episodic sci-fi and a bleak, Kafkaesque parable of persecution. It’s a work of dreamlike surrealism and an extended riff on swinging ’60s super-spy shows. And it’s a dystopia in miniature, its setting an eerily idyllic open-air prison instead of a gigantic closed society. Of course, at least one Number Two has suggested that the endgame for all of this can be summed up as “Today the Village, tomorrow the world.”
Of all the episodes we’ve watched, “A Change of Mind” is the one in which actor-auteur Patrick McGoohan — who once again directs under his “Joseph Serf” pseudonym — seems engaged most directly with the mid-20th century’s dystopian landmarks. Orwell’s 1984 looms large, of course, as it long has: faces of authority looming down from sloganeering posters, captives reconditioned to love their tormenters, a reassuring face replacing an image of terror in compulsory film viewing, even the Winston/O’Brien relationship between Number Six and several of the Number Twos.
The use of drugs and aversion therapy to induce reflexive compliance and nonviolence, meanwhile, is straight out of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, published five years prior. The show predates Stanley Kubrick’s infamous and stylistically influential adaptation of the novel and anticipates the director’s aesthetic approach, from its costumed droogs to its combined movie theater/torture chamber.
But McGoohan’s also firing live ammo here. Under the new Number Two (John Sharp, whose roles in The Wicker Man and Barry Lyndon yield a significant Prisoner-fan Venn diagram overlap), the Village’s methods of bringing antisocial, inadequate, disharmonious, UNMUTUAL Villagers to heel recall any number of real-world oppressions: Soviet show trials, McCarthyite purges, Maoist self-criticism sessions, the vicious conformity of little England or small-town America. The term used in the episode for its science-fictional mind-wiping procedure, “social conversion,” carries bitter echoes of the persecution of queer kids in the decades to come.
More or less a two-hander other than the major cameos by Emily Ratajkowski and Kit Harington — I know, I know, that’s not a two-hander, but you get what I’m saying — this is an episode of fairly modest ambition. It’s a snapshot of a point in time for these two people. Writer-director Lena Dunham is using Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe, two charismatic and attractive actors with believable chemistry, to depict what it’s like to be so into your new significant other that you pull an all nighter to have sex four times. That’s a fun topic to take on, and together they do it well.
All told, this is a very promising episode. As Kim and Boss, Janciza Bravo and Leo Reich waltz onto the screen as if Too Much is a show about them, not Jessica — the exact right energy for these characters, who are clearly the stars of the shows running perpetually in their own minds. Meanwhile, I love the way writer-director Lena Dunham gradually but unmistakably reveals that Felix, for all his kindness and warmth, is kind of a cad. For all that Jessica’s first two days in London have resembled one of her beloved Brit romances, she’s got a rockier road ahead of her than she realizes. I’m looking forward to watching her (and Megan Stalter, who’s a delight) rant and rave her way down it.
Lena Dunham is a fascinating talent. I’ve written that as this review’s first sentence fully expecting a number of readers to hit EJECT and bail right away. Let’s give them a minute.
Now that we’re among friends, Lena Dunham is a fascinating talent. Girls, the only dramedy I’ve ever enjoyed, is as perfect a cringe-comedy portrait of Dunham’s age group and demimonde as Curb Your Enthusiasm is of Larry David’s; simply substitute fabulously wealthy middle-aged showbiz types from New York who now live in L.A. with liberal-arts college grads bumbling around Brooklyn trying to find themselves and/or get laid and you’re basically looking at the same show. Seriously, cue up an episode of Girls on HBO Max and mentally replace Michael Penn’s twee indie-guitar score with the familiar Curb stock music. Now do you get what she was doing?
Of course, Girls also frequently got serious, as dramedies do, and here’s where Dunham’s chops as a director come in. A tremendous chronicler of The City and life in it, she has an eye for beautifully lit street scenes and skylines and an ear for the kind of dialogue people regret shouting at each other in those streets once they’ve calmed down or sobered up. After you’ve finished Curb-ifying that episode of Girls, stay on the HBO app and watch the first episode of Industry: A showcase for Dunham’s talents as a director of both actors and images, it’s one of the best pilots ever made. Dunham did that!
So it was with considerable excitement that I cued up Too Much. Loosely based on Dunham’s own life and co-created with her British musician husband Luis Felber, it tells the story of a young American woman with a media job who moves to London and falls in love with a British musician. Hey, write what you know!
Even if there isn’t much tension involved in the question of whether the title character, played by the show’s only marketable star, dies in the season one finale, there’s still just, y’know, the pleasures of watching Murderbot. Solid jokes, solid action, impressive gore, a clever spin on robotics and actual artificial intelligence, some cutaways to Murderbot’s stories, a monster or two maybe, and off-kilter romantic/sexual tension between just about everyone in the crew — that’s the Murderbot promise, and I see no reason why the finale won’t deliver.
It begins in silence, and in silence it stays. Other than some unintelligible radio chatter and a couple of lines barked in German, 19 minutes pass after Number Six proclaims “I am not a number, I am a free man!” at the end of the opening sequence before anyone utters a single word. The Village is deserted, so there’s no one there to speak. The boat which Six builds and sails to freedom, sails all the way back to England in fact, houses exactly one passenger, and he has nothing to say to himself. Six’s first line of dialogue — the episode’s first line in English — is a question, to a Roma traveler he encounters on a seaside cliff. It’s just three words and just three syllables: “Where is this?”
That is the question, Number Six. That is the question.
In response, the Nazis swept into the village of Lidice, which was wrongfully suspected to have hid co-conspirators, and wiped it out. They executed 340 people, including every male resident over the age of 14, as well as 82 children, who were gassed to death after being transported to a concentration camp.
On May 27, 1942, members of the Czech resistance killed a monster. Though the assassination itself was a comedy of errors involving jammed machine guns and “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades” grenade throws, Reich Protector Reynard Heidrich, the brutal overseer of Czechoslovakia and a prime mover of the Holocaust, died of his wounds several days later.
In this episode of The Prisoner, a clockmaker Villager played by actor Martin Miller, a Czech Jew, plots to assassinate the Village’s overseer, Number Two. In that context, I think Number Six can be forgiven for what he does, or doesn’t do, next.
The big problem with all this is pretty much what you’d expect it to be: Riri has never seemed stupid enough to literally shake hands with the Devil. Nor has she ever deluded herself about what N.A.T.A.L.I.E. really is or was, not even when she came around to treating the simulation, if not like her old friend, then at least like a new one. It doesn’t hold water that she’d risk turning into a berserk demonically powered killing machine forced to do the business of an infernal devil-king in order to revive what amounts to a really good version of Siri. Smart people get scammed all the time, I get it. But to get scammed by the guy whose minion just tried to tear your face off with his claws? That’s not the Riri Williams I know.
It feels like another place where Ironheart’s short six-episode length can really be felt. With more time, maybe we could have gotten Riri to a place where her desperation to revive the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. AI felt raw and real. Maybe turning to the evil cosmic entity responsible for creating the supervillain who’d just tried to kill her would have felt like the desperate act of a heartbroken friend, instead of the impulsive decision of a genius hero who should know better.
The glass-half-full way of looking at it all, though, is that Ironheart is the story of a Marvel superhero permitted to be kind of a fuck-up. She starts the season by getting expelled from MIT after maiming a professor. She ends the season by selling her soul to the Lord of Lies. In between she joins a gang of bank robbers, leaves a defenseless man to die, jams up a friend with legal trouble so bad he becomes a supervillain to cope, and (admittedly this bit was an accident) creates the least ethical form of MCU AI since Ultron.
That’s all kind of interesting, right? As clumsy and rushed as it was to get there, the deal with Mephisto was necessary to undercut the sense that Riri had made everything right with everyone she could, done her good deed for the day, and could soar off into the sunset in her bitchin’ new suit. That would have erased all the work done in the paragraph above in creating a character whose intelligence and impulsivity are constantly either working in concert or at odds. Whether or not the ending works for you depends on whether or not you think her impulsivity is really capable of beating her intelligence that decisively.
In the sport of kings known as professional wrestling, there’s a concept called “selling.” Pro wrestling’s combat is staged and its moves are designed to eliminate injury and minimize pain as best as possible, and the wrestling audience knows it, but they’re buying their tickets in order to pretend like they don’t. It’s the wrestlers’ jobs to sell those tickets by selling the impact and power of their opponent’s moves. No one’s gonna care that you got dumped off a 15-foot ladder through a table covered with thumbtacks if you just get right back up again, even though you’re a trained professional who can totally do so if you want. You’ve got to act like you’re in pain and peril. You’ve got to sell.
Is Ironheart doing a proper job of selling Riri Williams’s danger? With only one episode remaining in its short six-episode season, I’m leaning towards no.
Colin Gordon is a fascinating Number Two, with a more modish fashion sense and a general vibe of, let’s say, confirmed bachelorhood. Whereas previous Numbers Two who couldn’t get INFORMATION out of Number Six seemed content to mess with him a bit and call it a day afterwards, this one has been tasked with getting results in no uncertain terms, with consequences that are clearly grave should he fail. This gives the episode a previously entirely unused dramatic axis around which to spin. The look of terror he shoots the phone in the episode’s final shot is the finest moment to date for anyone in the role.
Meanwhile, McGoohan is an absolute hoot as the unflappable Six, confident he’s beating his warders at their own game. As 14, Sheila Allen plays a reluctant Dr. Frankenstein, driven past the point of safety by the demands of Number Two. (“Where’s your scientific enthusiasm?” he demands when she worries the procedure could hurt or kill the patient.) Along with Kath, Carell, and Bettine Le Beau in a momentary but memorable bit part as a French maid who catches Six’s eye, Allen is one of several smoldering guest stars, and there’s no crime in that: Even a spy thriller as serious-minded as The Americans understood the value of sex appeal in the spy game.
Visually, this is sumptuous stuff even by Prisoner standards. Director Pat Jackson’s inventive use of rear projection helps conjure up both the giant screen on which Six’s dreams are projected and the Champs-Élysées at twilight as C. drives Six to his secret rendezvous.
Dutch angles turn the third night at the party into a visual fight between Six’s consciousness and the weakened drug. The costuming, from C.’s dress to 14 and D.’s respective capes, remains colorful and creative.
Thanks to an almost unnecessarily heartfelt performance by Alden Ehrenreich during their jailhouse meeting, Zeke’s assessment rings loudly as we watch the rest of the episode play out: “You’re just a selfish kid who can’t take any responsibility for herself. You lie, you cheat, you manipulate, you’ll do anything you can to save yourself, even if that means hurting other people in the process.”
This is unfair, in that it completely erases any kind of context or consideration of motive. But if you were in Zeke’s place — or Parker’s, or the crew’s, or Ronnie’s, or Xavier’s, or N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s — would you be inclined to be charitable to her? She’s not a bad person, but in much the same way that she scavenged and scrounged for parts to rebuild her armor, Riri essentially took the people around her and assembled them into a second suit, using them to achieve her own ends. Parker’s not the only person with a superhuman garment that’s draining their humanity, then — but Riri’s the one with a fighting chance of getting hers back.
In order to reach the Village’s boardroom and broadcast center, you have to put a tiny disc in a little slot. Once you do this, a tiny blue plastic hand emerges from a little box and grabs the disc, snatching it away and disappearing back into the box. After this point, you — and I should mention here that you’re dressed in a top hat and black coat with black sunglasses indoors — can pass unimpeded through the forcefield-protected entrance.
Is there a reason that a tiny little blue plastic hand has to emerge from a little box to grab a disc before you can get in there? Considering that virtually every inch of the Village is monitored by video and patrolled by guards both human and spherical in nature, no, not really. You could just have some guy wave you in after you show an ID card. You could have Rover the floating orb (who does not appear in this episode) act as bouncer. You could do pretty much anything. But The Prisoner chooses to have a tiny little blue plastic hand emerge from a little box to grab the disc and let you in.
Photo: Prime Video
Why? Well, the Village is very impressed with its technological prowess and, simultaneously, possessed by the aesthetic sensibility of an outsider artist — the better, perhaps, to bewilder the straightlaced cop types who become intelligence officials. This is a facility that seemingly spares no expense in creating elaborate, even baroque machines and procedures that Occam’s razor, if applied, would slice to ribbons. In that sense, the little blue plastic hand is exactly the kind of shit these weirdos would set up.
However, I think a different explanation gets to the heart of it. The Prisoner is based on a simple concept: What if you made a TV show that was interesting instead of uninteresting whenever a choice between the two was available?
I mean, yes, absolutely, you could have a guard stand in front of that hallway, letting people in based on an approved list of Numbers allowed to attend the board meeting or work in the broadcast center. Indeed, there’s a whole new cadre of guards invented in this episode for just this sort of work — grey-jumpsuited, helmeted, shades-indoors goons with white batons who’ll gladly beat the shit out of you if ordered. They’re literally standing around waiting to do a job like letting people in to a top-secret area.
But the little blue plastic hand that picks a disc up out of a slot and yoinks it back into its tiny black box? That’s something better than plausible: It’s bitchin’. It’s mint. It’s just some of the weirdest, coolest shit you’re gonna see on your screen this week, I guarantee. Would Patrick McGoohan and his Prisoner collaborators put it in quite these terms? No, probably not. But we’re free to call a spade a spade, you and I, and this show is cool as hell. It feels like it’s trying, really going for it, at all times and in all ways, and that is vanishingly rare.
Squid Game didn’t need its second and third seasons, no, but I’m glad they existed anyway. The imagery makes every other TV dystopia look like they’re sleepwalking through the design phase, the supporting cast is unforgettable, and Lee Jung-jae — who spends the bulk of this third season mute, his face his only instrument — delivers an incredible performance in a role without much precedent on the small screen. It’s not hard to see why so many millions of people wanted to swallow this show’s bitter, bitter pill.
But if there’s a central theme to the second and third seasons of Squid Game, maybe the meaninglessness of rules is it. Maybe it’s that Gi-hun doomed himself the moment he agreed to continue playing by their rules — that no matter how good his intentions or how hard his efforts, you simply cannot destroy the system from within. Writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk presents life as an epic struggle between humanism and barbarism, in which barbarism holds all the cards while humanism rolls all the dice. The only way anyone wins is by refusing to play at all.
“All right,” says Player 100. “If there are no objections, let’s go ahead and vote on Player 222’s elimination.” Player 100 presents this as an entirely reasonable statement, and that’s how it’s greeted by his co-conspirators in the final game. In the tradition of the nightly decision whether or not to continue playing, they’ve agreed that a majority vote will settle the matter of whose lives to sacrifice so that the others might live. Player 100 is trying to get things on track, keep things nice and orderly according to agreed-upon precedent and procedure. No more messy arguments that are beneath our dignity as colleagues — It’s time to democratically decide whom to murder.
Taken together, Squid Game’s second and third seasons are one long allegory for sham democracies. I mean, you hear how fucked up their logic sounds when it’s presented by Player 100, right? Vote how they will, the majority can never rightfully take away the rights, or the lives, of the minority. Our inalienable human rights are just that — unseverable from our status as human beings. They are not subject to vote or plebiscite, to Supreme Court ruling or executive order. They are ours forever. You can no more vote them away than you can vote away the bones curled hard in our fists or the hearts that beat in our chests.
But that’s the version of “democracy” that the Squid Game’s sadistic creators — the in-world ones, I mean, not the very nice filmmakers — have presented their players. It’s not dissimilar from the version we’ve been largely forced to accept here in the real world. Illegitimately condemning other people to torment and death because there are more of some than there are of others, the players participate in a series of zero-sum ballots where voters can only conceive of themselves as members of opposing teams since the stakes are so high. And no amount of voting can break the cycle of violence and degradation, not as long as the loathsome, mega-rich VIPs (David Sayers, Jane Wong, Bryan Bucco, Jordan Lambertoni, and Kevin Yorn, each of them almost unbearably obnoxious) want it to continue.
And by this point in the games, it’s all been boiled down to its essence: Can you ethically vote to kill a baby, and are the results of that vote binding?
