Consider Leland Palmer. He, too, has an uncomfortable outburst at Laura’s funeral. Perhaps triggered by the fight between Bobby and James, he quite simply melts down, throwing himself atop his daughter’s coffin. The hydraulic apparatus designed to lower it into the ground then malfunctions, yanking the sobbing man up and down. “Don’t ruin this too!” shrieks his wife, Sarah, who’s been decompensating in her own way as well.

Some mourners, like Shelly Johnson, find the whole thing comedic enough to reenact for the amusement of the diner patrons at the Double R. (She’s also hiding a gun in her home to protect her from her psychotic husband Leo, the prime suspect in Laura’s killing at the moment, so cut her some slack.) And it’s true, there’s something funny about it, and not just the slapstick-comedy nature of the incident. 

Leland’s grief is so over the top that it provokes nervous laughter, the kind you let out when what you’re watching is too intense to take seriously, for a moment at least. It’s hard to watch him weep and wail on the coffin, or again on the dance floor at the Great Northern, as he begs for someone, anyone, to dance with him in Laura’s place. I bet Sarah could do with some attention, too, but what happened to their daughter is pulling them apart, not bringing them together. That’s a second tragedy.

What’s worrisome is that Leland has another family member to worry about while this is going on. Laura’s cousin Madeleine — a brunette with big glasses but a lookalike in every other way, played by Laura actor Sheryl Lee — arrives in town for the funeral, and is there to witness the catastrophe at the cemetery. We’ve already seen Sarah superimpose her daughter’s face on the girl’s best friend, Donna Hayward. It isn’t difficult to imagine Madeleine being cast in that same role, whether she wants to play it or not.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Although our attention has been largely occupied by the kids and the clown, let’s not take for granted how good this show’s three grown-up leads are. Chris Chalk, Jovan Adepo and Taylour Paige make the adult material as magnetic as that of the young losers.

They don’t feel as if they’re playing characters in a spooky popcorn flick; they feel as if they’re playing human beings who are worried about their families, their ethics and their sanity. That scream from Chalk is one of the most harrowing things I’ve heard on television all year, and it’s been a harrowing year.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. Gift link!

I love how much of Pluribus takes place in silence. I love how much strength it derives from simply putting a complicated person on the screen, wordlessly, and allowing us to observe them. I love how much the show moves to the rhythms of labor, the painstaking, time-consuming, and necessary efforts we put into living that most shows ignore. There’s even a time-lapse shot of Carol Sturka sleeping as the light coming through the window shifts with the lengthening of the day. In short, Pluribus takes great pains to convey what it is like to simply exist in the world it has constructed — to be a human, a thinking person in a human body, surrounded by a world grown hostile and strange. 

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

Okay. Now we’ve seen Twin Peaks.

The show’s third episode is, in effect, the final chapter of a big three-part premiere. This is literally true, to an extent: Coop’s dream recycles footage originally created for an extended cut of the pilot for European markets. More to the point, it introduces multiple load-bearing elements of Twin Peaks’ cultural iconography, things you’ve probably seen or heard of whether or not you have any idea whodunit or where all this is headed (no spoilers, in other words): Audrey’s dreamy dance, Leland’s hysterical grief, Coop’s unconventional police work, One-Eyed Jack’s, the Red Room, the Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson), the backwards speech, Laura Palmer whispering in Agent Cooper’s ear, the “Fire Walk With Me” poem, one-armed Mike, Killer Bob. 

Episode three is where it becomes clear that something not just strange but supernatural is occurring in this quiet logging town. It’s where the show goes from weird to Weird. And in all its non sequitur, nonlinear surrealist menace, it’s where David Lynch as we’d know him for the rest of his career — the David Lynch of Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and this show’s own unlikely comeback season — is born.

I reviewed the third episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

The military-pillar subplot never devolves into dopey first-person-shooter shenanigans. From the start, when dozens of troops descend on a haunted house that looks as if it might fall over in a stiff breeze, the operation is depicted as hubristic folly. Men die for no reason, nothing is achieved, and the end result will be the persecution of Rose’s community for her role in the debacle.

As much as Gen. Shaw wants to believe otherwise, sending fully armed troops rolling down American streets to storm houses is a cure worse than any disease it purports to treat. Some problems can’t be fixed with boots and guns. If you try, you’ll only hurt the country you’re claiming to save.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

So let’s review. The Others are all permanently blissed-out people pleasers. They cannot kill other living things. They want to convert the last few holdouts, and won’t harm them directly, but won’t hesitate to hand them ways to harm themselves. They have no meaningfully personal concept of personal expression. Their big changeover has cost the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. Assuming the show is leaving these plot holes open on purpose and I’ll grant you I’m shooting it a lot of bail here, my final question is this. If you were the senders of the transmission responsible for the Joining, and you were trying to turn a fractious planet full of nuclear armaments into a smooth, flat runway for an invasion and a pasture of docile livestock for the slaughter — if, in other words, you were making a weapon — would you have designed that transmission any differently? 

This, however, raises another question. I’m interested, in a sort of academic way, about the nature of the joining, its origin, its ultimate purpose. Let’s say I’m right and we’ve got a science-fiction story about an alien weapon that turns everyone into pod people. Hey, great! I figured it out, I solved the puzzle. Well, then what? The story itself has to offer something more than the thrill of solving a riddle. There’s a reason it’s not called “theorytelling.”

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

“This should be exciting,” I said to my wife as I sat down to watch the sixth and final episode of Last Samurai Standing’s first season. “There should be some cool fights.”

My wife laughed. “I think that’s a safe bet,” she said.

“Well, sure,” I granted. “Then again, I thought the same thing about Shōgun.” The point is, being the final episode of a combat-centric show is no guarantee of combat. Unless, of course, the episode in question is titled “Mortal Combat,” as this one is. In that case you can pretty much rest assured that you are, in fact, gonna see some cool freakin’ fights.

Man oh man, does this season finale deliver on that front.

I reviewed the gangbusters season finale of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

Kawaji justifies Kodoku, as do the members of the four conglomerates, by noting the way samurai were able to flout the law because they were the law. The bankers in particular seem to have been routinely ripped off by ex-samurai seeking loans they have no intention of repaying, because who’s gonna get the money out of them, some clerk? And one need look no further than Bukotsu, whose rampages against civilians are protected by the game guards, to see what happens when you give some lunatic a sword, extensive martial arts training, and the belief that he exists in a different class of people from the hoi polloi. Hell, you can look around the streets of Chicago or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. to see that too. (Minus the extensive martial arts training, of course.)

But Kawaji’s new system, too, deals out death indiscriminately. In addition to overseeing the whole bloody game, Kawaji’s underling Ando also sees to it that Shinpei is strangled to death before his decoded telegrams definitively tying Kawaji to the game can make their way to the Home Minister. Moreover, all the guards are capable of seeing that Futaba and Shinnosuke have no business playing a game designed to pit samurai against samurai, but at no point have these noncombatants been given the chance to bow out. It all feels very Fall of the Galactic Republic, doesn’t it? (Or rather, the Star Wars stuff feels very samurai.) The Jedi made some terrible mistakes, especially toward the end, but do you prefer stormtroopers?

I reviewed the fifth episode of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

As engaging as the little twists and turns of the game are, this show is as entertaining as it is because of the filmmaking and the fighting. The you-are-there camerawork of director Kento Yamaguchi weaves all around the restaurant during the rumble scene, much of which is shot in one continuous take to make it feel as though you your self are dodging punches and ducking for cover. The silver glow of Sakura and Shujiro’s crossed swords pops brightly after 45 minutes of the show’s usual thoughtfully muted color palate. All this gives the aquamarine of the puppet-masters’ secret base an even more opulent feeling. Last Samurai Standing is its own cohesive visual world, occasionally sliced open by a giant sword.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

Director Duwayne Dunham, who collaborated with Lynch as an editor both before and after working on Twin Peaks’ original run, clearly knows Lynch’s stuff well. His shot compositions for the one-on-one heart-to-hearts echo the quietude of Lynch’s own approach, against which surreal flourishes, like the blue glow on Hawk in the hospital, or scary ones, like the sudden appearance of that man behind the bed, pop more brightly. 

He also respects that this is a show about people experiencing pain over Laura Palmer’s murder, not just trying to solve it: The sympathetic way he shoots characters like Sarah and Donna as they each grieve in their own way are among the show’s most memorable so far. Granted, “so far” means two episodes. But what episodes! From the mesmerizing opening credits on down, Twin Peaks asks you to quietly sit with whatever it’s doing — gags and bits, soapy melodrama, serial-killer horror, coping with loss, ranting about cotton-ball-powered drape runners — and listen to the screams, or the sighs, or the silence.

I reviewed episode two of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

The eyeball scene and the flashback are the episode’s two standout sequences, and they’re a mixed bag. The injection of Indigenous folklore into the “It” story feels like a tip of the cap to “Twin Peaks,” which similarly chronicled a town haunted by a demonic presence secretly known to both Native Americans and the United States military. The voice-over narration, however, makes the flashback material feel clumsier and cornier than it needs to be. It would have stood better as a stand-alone episode, the way similar stories were told by shows like “Lost” and “Westworld.”

Poor Margie’s eye-popping experience, by contrast, is a top-to-bottom success. It is gross, gory and inventive, constantly ratcheting up the violence, discomfort and cruelty. The use of a bifurcated snail’s-eye-view effect to show us events from Margie’s perspective, forcing us to experience the horror through her googly eyes, is disturbing on a gut level. That’s what I want from a horror television show.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Samurai schools are failing our children. There, I said it. Kyohachi-ryu School, “the origin of swordsmanship” if its brochure is to be believed, has one teacher and eight students — okay, so they’ve got class size under control at least — but they all have to kill each other to graduate. That’s a pedagogical method that would have even Donald Trump’s weird, pedophile-enabling Education Department destroyer Linda McMahon going “hey, slow down.” 

I reviewed the third episode of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

Star Junichi Okada’s action choreography in both scenes is fist-pumpingly good, but in two totally different ways. Bukotsu and Ukyo fight in quick bursts, lashing out and then regrouping, before things break down as Bukotsu gets the upper hand. Their whole battle, which is intercut with Fubata and Shujiro’s storyline as well as Ukyo’s origin story throughout the episode, is filmed as it happens, with minimal camera trickery.

Shujiro’s killcrazy rampage through the game’s enforcers, by contrast, is a balletic, bullet-timed thing of beauty. Against a blue-gray sky tinted purple-pink by the spray of blood in the air, Shujiro moves in and out of regular speed, with the action slowing down to show us individual sword strikes and spectacular deaths and dismemberments. As Sakura, the top lieutenant with the gnarly scar, says from a safe distance, “Kokushu the Manslayer has awakened.”

I reviewed the second episode of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.

After watching the first episode of Last Samurai Standing, one thing becomes apparent very quickly: This show rules. I mean it is mint. I mean I walked around my apartment after it was over, saying “Holy shit, that was fuckin’ great” to myself, confusing my cat. Gorgeously shot, emotionally written, with serious things to say about the destruction of a way of life and breathless action choreography by producer and star Junichi Okada, it reminded me favorably of modern classics like 13 Assassins, or, strangely, Godzilla Minus One. There’s really no sense in beating around the bush here: I enjoyed the hell out of this episode, and my only hope is that the remaining six are exactly the same.

I’m covering a cool show with a goofy title, Last Samurai Standing, for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

I have to admit, I didn’t expect to find myself suddenly bearish about a new Vince Gilligan show by episode three. It’s true that neither Better Call Saul nor Breaking Bad were anywhere near as smart, tight, bleak, and brilliant in episode three as they were by Season 5, and I’m certainly not writing off Pluribus, because I’m not stupid. But both BB and BCS, even the prequel series, felt like they were doing something new to TV. This post-apocalyptic dystopia simply does not. 

I reviewed this week’s disappointing (!) Pluribus for Decider.

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” is a question that drips with a pain that Lynch and Frost admirably refuse to clean up and wipe away. Whatever their original intent regarding the resolution of her murder, Laura Palmer is no MacGuffin, no glowing briefcase or unobtainium or Maltese Falcon. She is, or rather was, a real person. She was complicated, obviously, and led multiple secret lives, lives even Donna and James, her best friend, knew nothing about. She was likely an addict. She may have been trafficked. She was a child — Leland and Sarah Palmer’s child. She was Laura Palmer.

Now she’s gone. Through all the surreality and silliness, as suspect after suspect is introduced and dismissed, Lynch and Frost never lose sight of Laura. They never silence the cries of those who loved her, to the point where I found it impossible not to cry along with them all. They never take their eyes off that empty desk. They never let you forget what it means.

I’m reviewing all of Twin Peaks — Season 1, Season 2, Fire Walk With Me, The Missing Pieces, The Return — for Pop Heist, starting with this essay on the series premiere. Twin Peaks is my favorite show, the best ever made, and I’m going to give my heart and soul to this.

Please note that while this is a gift link, Pop Heist is a worker-owned site that makes algorithm-free pop-culture coverage with no big-money backer. No other place would let me do this (or I, Claudius, or The Prisoner). It’s $7/month or $70/a year to subscribe, and it’s worth it.

I reviewed the second episode of Pluribus for Decider.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are two of the best television shows ever made. Both created by Vince Gilligan, the latter with Peter Gould, they use crime-drama frameworks for lengthy, thoughtful, ultimately melancholy examinations of the way humans choose expediency over morality. 

At least that’s how we critics tend to think and talk about them. Equally important to their success and well-deserved reputation: They were scary as shit! That whole multi-episode Breaking Bad arc pitting Walter White against Gus Fring in a lethal stand-off? The white-knuckle scene in which Nacho Varga must either poison his boss or die trying? Todd Alquist? Lalo Salamanca? Breathtaking suspense and thrilling action involving best-in-class TV psychopaths was as big a part of the BB/BCS appeal as the slow spiritual deaths of Heisenberg and Saul Goodman.  

So when Pluribus, Gilligan’s new show for Apple TV, starts off with a harrowing depiction of the apocalypse, localized in Albuquerque, New Mexcio, maybe I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. In addition to his own two stone-cold masterpieces, Gilligan also worked on The X-Files, so this nucleotide was within him all along, just waiting to be activated.

I reviewed the series premiere of Pluribus for Decider.

Wow. Wow. It’s a pretty good sign for a season finale when you have to repeat the word “wow” for emphasis to describe it, right? But I don’t know how else to put it. This episode of The Lowdown, by my estimation, contains one of the year’s funniest scenes and one of the year’s most ruthless and unflinching endings. It’s got a shootout AND a cookout. It shows a bad man having a change of heart, and a good man having a change of heart too. There are some fun wedding outfits, even. And it contains a quote from the Bible that needs to be drilled into the head of every man, woman, and child in America: “A poor man is better than a liar.”

I reviewed the season finale of The Lowdown for Decider.

As for Jack Pulman and Herbert Wise’s 1976 TV series? To call it a masterpiece is to understate the case. With a cast that turns over completely mid-series, it keeps churning out compelling new characters, brought to life with performances that feel rivetingly true to life yet grandiose enough to burn Rome down around them. Brian Blessed, Siân Phillips, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, Patricia Quinn, John Hurt, Sheila White, and Derek Jacobi alone sear themselves in your memory with their terrible energy; they are the glistening tip of a spear made of ace supporting players seemingly without end.

With a budget and design aesthetic more attuned to live theater than broadcast television, it uses deft camerawork and industry-best blocking of its actors to draw the audience into a conspiracy of make-believe. Long takes that allow you to sink into the acting and thus inhabit a world you know is not real; you may not be there, but you are there. Since so much of the work is done in-camera, when the series does resort to visual effects or striking editing choices, they hit like a freight train. Try shaking the feeling of all those characters talking directly to you in this episode, I dare you.

What emerges paramount from it all, from those spectral faces looming in the lens on down, is the feeling of ancient history speaking to the present. It is madness, madness, to trade away hard-learned, hard-fought moral and political principles for the expediency of autocracy. The lives of first Augustus and then Claudius himself prove there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship; surrender your rights and you have no right to complain when you are forced to surrender far more. 

I reviewed the series finale of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. What a show!