One thing that is clear? The Third Day has not missed a step despite the creative changeover. (Series co-creator Dennis Kelly remains aboard, it should be noted, co-writing the episode with Kit de Waal and Dean O’Loughlin.) The causeway is still an evocative visual signature for the show. John Dagleish’s Larry is still an intimidating heavy; somehow he’s even scarier being friendly than he is being surly. The Martins remain maddening and menacing despite their surface friendliness and their ability to explain away every weird thing that happens—your missing car? Stolen, not towed! The screaming woman? She’s gone into labor! The abandoned house with a fully equipped operating theater? It’s for the birth, since the woman refuses to go to the mainland! The frightening iconography you see everywhere you look? “We’ve had our customs for years,” says Mrs. Martin; “They ain’t pretty, but I’m not fucking apologizing for them.” See? There’s a too-perfectly logical explanation for everything!

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. A fine start for the folk-horror series’ second half.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Lovecraft Country used Emmett Till’s murder as an in-story plot motivator and I…I just don’t know.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. I really struggled with it.

I believe it was Chekhov who said that if you put an apple pie loaded with ipecac syrup on the table in the first act, you’d better use it to give a stickup artist uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea in the second. 

I reviewed last night’s eventful, scatalogical episode of Fargo for Decider.

Primarily, though, I’m grateful for a show that was so consistently surprising—the biggest surprise of all being that it was a good show in the first place. Raised by Wolves is the best American science-fiction show I’ve seen in years—asking big but not boring questions, using tried-and-true sci-fi devices in unexpected ways, constantly unfolding its dark mysteries before our eyes. With so little resolved in the finale, it is admittedly possible that the show will return for Season 2 only for us to discover it’s bitten off more than it can chew. But I’m all for a show that errs on the side of ambition. In that sense, Raised by Wolves‘s mission is accomplished.

I reviewed the wild season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider. What an unexpected pleasure this show turned out to be.

Moreover, what I said in my review of the series premiere remains true: Jude Law’s face alone tells the story. His pores are choked by dirt and grime. His temple is caked with blood, both dry and wet. His cheeks are streaked with tears for himself and, eventually, for his son. There’s something … I dunno, almost thrilling about seeing a handsome male actor subjected to the final-girl indignities of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens or Marilyn Burns’s Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Florence Pugh’s Dani in Midsommar. To watch someone so beautiful be physically and emotionally broken down is like witnessing a human sacrifice of a sort.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

Lovecraft Country, I’d now venture to say, is pretty good. Which is not to say I don’t have problems with it still. The CGI effects are still often shockingly poor—there’s an outrageously fake-looking digital blood-spread across a decapitated Confederate’s shirt that’s particularly egregious; meanwhile, imagine how much more impressive last week’s episode would have been if Ji-ah’s tentacular tails had been practical effects a la John Carpenter’s The Thing and weep for what might have been. And there’s an innate corniness to some of the proceedings, like the math equations superimposed over Hippolyta as she crunches the multidimensional numbers; how has this particular device survived years of ruthless memeification?

But it should hardly need saying that a mainline injection of Afrofuturism in the form of Seraphina and her world-warping technology—not to mention a Sun Ra voiceover describing Black people as living myths, or the massacre of the Confederacy’s protofascist infantry by Black women with swords—is something of a balm in these troubled times. Aunjanue Ellis, meanwhile, is expected to dance like Josephine Baker and swordfight like Wonder Woman in the space of a single episode, which she does with fearless aplomb.

I still don’t find Lovecraft Country scary, except insofar as it chronicles racist realities, rather than horrific fantasies; the two have yet to properly meld. But I do find it engaging, for three episodes in a row now. It’s a start.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Writer-director-creator Noah Hawley gets a lot of grief for reasons that don’t entirely make sense to me—look, I didn’t like Legion at all, but the dude’s not the devil—yet he has a knack for the little narrative filigrees that the almighty Coen Brothers weave into and out of their films, particularly the crime films with a darkly comedic edge. He also shares the Coens’ affinity for couples so odd it’s like they’re speaking a different language; cf. the Mutt-and-Jeff physicality of Gaetano and Josto, or the contrast between Gateano’s fiery youth and Doctor Senator’s smooth and serious experience, or Nurse Mayflower’s chatty but hard-edged relationship with the quietly sharp Ethelrida. And he’s certainly not above throwing in the occasional overt homage, like the cattle gun used by the slaughterhouse workers, a shoutout to Anton Chigurh’s modus operandi in No Country for Old Men.

But the Coen-ness of such details is just gravy, not the main course, which is the show’s deliberate pacing and slow ratcheting-up of stakes in anticipation of an eventual explosion. And language itself is often a pleasure on this show. Witness the brief exchange Loy Cannon and Rabbi Milligan have, when the latter tells the former he’s teaching his son that “dog eat dog” is the way the world works: “That’s how dogs work,” Cannon replies. “Men are more complicated.”

“Not in my experience,” Milligan counters.

Fargo feels like a roller coaster slowly cranking its way up an incline, waiting for the drop to come.

I reviewed the back half of Fargo‘s two-episode season premiere for Decider.

Ah, that Fargo feeling. A chill in the air and in the blood. An assemblage of eccentrics, drawn together by someone’s elaborate criminal scheme. A sense of time and place that does more than provide context, but traps the characters in amber, allowing for dispassionate observation of the fate they’re unable to escape. A shootout between fact and fiction, fake and real, the stories we tell ourselves and the true stories that underlie them. And split screens—lots of split screens.

Last sighted during the opening months of the Trump regime—a regime it anticipated and echoed with its grotesquely greedy modern-day gangster V.M. Varga—and returning now for, god willing, that regime’s final days, Noah Hawley’s Fargo is back, baby. And for a show that has fallen in and out of critical vogue so fast you can feel a slight breeze, it seems blithely unconcerned with being anything but Noah Hawley’s Fargo. It’s a loving tribute to the crime films of Joel and Ethan Coen, writing a melody in their signature key while improvising notes all its own. I’m thrilled to have it back. Aren’t you?

I’m covering Fargo for Decider this season, starting with my review of its fine season premiere.

We’re deep in the weirdness now. The penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves‘ remarkable first season takes the show’s characters and the world they inhabit in increasingly strange directions. Body horror, splatstick comedy, visions of some unimagined past replete with mysteries—the austerity of the early episodes has been replaced by something far messier, but in its way, just as interesting.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves‘ first season for Decider.

When you’re eight episodes deep into a show as immaculately crafted as Raised by Wolves, even a single new note in a familiar performance opens up whole new realms of possibility. That’s certainly the case in “Faces,” one of the show’s strangest and least predictable episodes to date. Pivoting off powerful turns by Amanda Collin as Mother and Travis Fimmel as Marcus, it radically upends the status quo, yet it does so in a way that feels like it was organically grown from the soil provided by these two fine actors. The madness makes sense.

I reviewed episode eight of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

I promise you there’s a good reason so much of this review is just the breathless recitation of the plot. It’s like that because the plot has reached that magical point that horror movies, the good ones anyway, arrive at midway through. So much is happening, so many threats are emerging, so many false leads are being tried and rejected, that the resulting feeling borders on intoxication. Your heart and mind race even as you remain glued to the spot, trying to keep up, trying to identify the danger — and worrying, on some lizard-brain level, that the danger has the ability to reach out and identify you. This is thrilling filmmaking, raw and weird and alive, like the rituals it chronicles.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. If “The Wicker Man, starring The Young Pope” appeals to you in any way, you need to watch The Third Day.

It’s a note of anti-climax, to be sure, and in a series that has had its problems with figuring out how to end episodes. But it’s everything that came before that impressed me: the weird complexity of the Ji-ah character, who’s part starry-eyed romantic, part dutiful daughter, part fish out of water, and part tentacle monster; the no-bullshit approach to Atticus’s ghastly conduct during the war; the implicit comparison between the lynching of communists in Korea and the similarly brutal treatment of minorities in America; the way Ji-ah both is and is not the daughter of a woman who’s trying her best not to become fond of the spirit she has called forth, since helping that spirit devour souls is the only way she’ll get her real daughter back, and so on. The emotional valence of the episode is constantly shifting, even at the risk of making it harder to root for the show’s hero, and that’s admirable.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country, the second in a row I’ve enjoyed, for Decider.

Raised by Wolves Episode 7 (“Faces”) concerns itself primarily with the trials and temptations of Campion, stuck in that silo, and Marcus, the man who put him there. Both face thorny issues of truth, faith, identity, and personal ethics. And both are haunted by paranormal entities, as if they didn’t have enough to worry about.

I reviewed episode 7 of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

“I’m not one who wants,” Mother tells Tempest, one of the children in her charge. “I’m one who serves.” Turns out she’s only half right. Mother was indeed designed to serve her human creators, first as a weapon of war, then as a caretaker for the children meant to restart human civilization.

But as we’ve seen thus far in Raised By Wolves, she does want. She wants to protect those children and she wants to serve well—those are a given. But her time reliving her buried memories in the crashed Mithraic ark’s still-functional simulation has taught her to want something else: her creator, Campion Sturges. Just before she was deployed, Sturges buried her memories of him deep down inside, so she wouldn’t experience the pain of separation. Now she’s been reunited with him, in electronic spirit anyway, and she treasures every moment. She even steps into her digital past to share a kiss with him before the simulation ends. It’s so achingly romantic you forget one of the participants isn’t human.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

The Third Day doesn’t star Jude Law so much as Jude Law’s face. Expressive, careworn, and, in the words of The Young Pope, “incredibly handsome,” Jude Law’s face weaves in and out of focus as he makes a frantic phone call to his wife while in a panic over a burglary at his office (which winds up costing him 40,000 pounds meant to bribe an official). Jude Law’s face peers through the windshield of his car, mouth slightly agape with concentration as he wends his way across a twisty, waterlogged causeway. Jude Law’s face is swollen with the tears of uncontrolled grief. Jude Law’s face stares with narrowed, disgusted eyes at the carcass of a brightly colored cricket stuffed with dozens if not hundreds of tiny black beetles. Jude Law’s face beams with boozy delight as he and his fellow pub patrons, thrown together by circumstance, party the night away. Jude Law’s face stares at itself in the mirror, all the fun of the evening drained out of it as he realizes just how lost he is emotionally, let alone physically. Using a script by series co-creator (with Felix Barrett) Dennis Kelly, director Marc Munden knows what an incredible instrument his leading actor has, and he composes the whole episode around it like a symphony.

Somehow I forgot to mention that I’m covering the new Jude Law/Naomie Harris folk-horror drama The Third Day for Vulture! Here’s my review of the premiere.

If there’s two things I like about television drama, it’s a sudden uptick in quality I never saw coming, and a shocking twist that in retrospect I should have seen coming but didn’t. “Strange Case,” the strongest episode of Lovecraft Country so far and by far, presented me with both scenarios, and I couldn’t be happier.

This week’s episode of Lovecraft Country was the first one I really liked, and I really liked it. I reviewed it for Decider.

“I have never been prouder of anything in my life than I am of you,” the man says.

“You’re more pleasing than I imagined,” says the android, when the man gives her back her eyes.

“I please you?” he replies, seemingly grateful beyond words to hear it.

I single out these lines in episode five of Raised by Wolves (“Infected Memory”) because they’re so swooningly romantic to hear—but they’re not the voices of lovers speaking to one another. The android is the man’s creation, and the man is preparing to send her from his side forever, in hopes that she will preserve a kernel of humanity rocketed from a dying world. That’s Raised by Wolves for you: constantly tapping wellsprings of emotion where you least expect to find them.

I reviewed episode five of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Four episodes in and I’m willing to stake a claim: You’re not going to find a better show this strange September than Raised by Wolves. Using hoary old sci-fi concepts—androids, aliens, harsh desert worlds, war-torn dystopias—it seems to have tapped into deep new veins of vitality in each, something I wouldn’t have thought possible in a prestige-TV format. But I suppose that just goes to show you that the death of prestige TV has been greatly exaggerated.

I reviewed episode four of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

In some ways this is Lovecraft Country‘s most effective use of genre to date. Largely stripped of horror’s mandate to terrify—this is comfortably the least Lovecraftian of the four episodes so far—it’s free to have some fun with swashbuckling, treasure-hunting tropes instead. These date back to the same period of pulp fiction as Lovecraft, or even before to the likes of Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, but being a citizen of turn-of-the-21st-century America I recognize more modern sources of inspiration: the Indiana Jones series (booby traps, perilous bridges, stolen artifacts, a beam of light revealing a treasure’s location), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (more perilous bridges, moonlight revealing a secret, a choice between subterranean tunnels), even stuff like The Goonies (the madcap energy of much of the episode, the watery tunnels). It’s not the most exciting use of this stuff, I guess, but it’s still a fun way to spend some time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. At least this one isn’t really even trying to be scary?

Can you trust someone who’s been programmed to lie to you? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, at least as far as Raised by Wolves is concerned. The show’s third episode (“Virtual Faith”) is deeply concerned with the issue of honesty at odds with people who are programmed—whether technologically, religiously, biologically, or by virtue of their role in a family—to be less than honest. When do their lies cease to be white and start to be actively destructive?

I reviewed episode three of Raised by Wolves for Decider.