Saying Stranger Things wears its influences on its sleeve is like sayingBarb had a lousy time at Steve’s party: It’s true alright, but it understates the case considerably. Entire articles have been written detailing the themes, concepts, creatures, fonts, sound effects, and imagery swiped more or less wholesale from other films — here’s Vulture’s, just for example. And any fan of genre entertainment, particularly (though by no means exclusively) from the ’80s, can rattle off the creators whose original visions fueled the Duffer Brothers’ own without breaking a sweat. Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and John Carpenter are the most obvious touchstones, but you can also spot Judd Apatow, Shane Black, John Byrne, James Cameron, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Wes Craven, Joe Dante, Richard Donner, Fred Dekker, Jonathan Glazer, Gary Gygax, Tobe Hooper, John Hughes, Richard Kelly, John Landis, David Lynch, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Robert Zemeckis from a mile away. Any show assembled from building blocks that solid is going to be entertaining, at the very least; factor in universally fine performances from the show’s many child and young-adult actors, the strongest such cast assembled since Game of Thrones, and you’d be tempted to move Stranger Things out of the “hey, that was kinda fun” column straight into “this is a stone classic, gimme season two immediately” territory.

But unlike many of its countless forerunners, Stranger Things’ story of small-town terror communicates little beyond the contents of its creators’ Blu-ray collections. It’s so fixated on stirring nostalgia for the science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and adventure tales of yore that it has no time or energy left over for what made those horror tales compelling in the first place: wrestling with the fears and desires of the time period, and the different kinds of people — boys and girls, men and women, parents and children, kids and teens and adults — who found themselves struggling with them. Nearly everything difficult about the original works, everything weird, gross, uncomfortable, unexplained, and hidden beneath the surface (“occulted,” to use an evocative lit-studies term) has been stripped away in favor of a lowest-common-denominator pastiche that retains the surface elements but loses the power within.

The more I saw of this show, the more what it did with its source material bothered me. I went in-depth on how Stranger Things squandered its potential to actually be a stranger thing for Vulture.

It starts with the character’s look. Reilly’s physical appearance has always served him well as an actor. There’s something about the combination of his large frame and round, expressive face that makes him look not so much tall as overgrown, like a child stretched to adult proportions. This gives him an air of vulnerability that belies his size; it lends pathos to his dramatic performances, like the sad-sack cop in Magnolia, and a goofball naïveté to his comedic turns, like the fake music legend in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.  It’s how a guy who’s six-foot-two can sing the ode to interpersonal invisibility “Mr. Cellophane” in the film adaptation ofChicago and earn an Oscar nomination, or pair up with the relatively diminutive Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights and come across like a natural sidekick.

In these strictly physical terms alone, Dr. Steve is his magnum opus, the idiot man-child he was born to play. Wearing a brown suit that’s at least two sizes too small, teasing his curly hair to fright-wig proportions, twisting his mouth and squinting his eyes to give his face a vibe of permanent confusion, Reilly leans into his quirks as Dr. Steve.

I wrote about how John C. Reilly’s turn as the title character on Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule is one of the best dang performances in TV comedy today for Vulture. I’ve been saying it for years and I’m so glad I got the chance to obsess on it publicly.

7. “The Winds of Winter” (Season 6, Episode 10)
Rarely, if ever, have the stakes of “the great game” been as clear as they are in this year’s season finale. In King’s Landing, Cersei Lannister eliminates all of her political enemies in one fell swoop and becomes undisputed Queen of the Seven Kingdoms — but loses her son Tommen to suicide in the bargain. In the Riverlands, Walder Frey toasts to victory over his enemies — then gets killed by Arya Stark after she serves him his own sons for dinner. In Winterfell, Jon Snow is crowned King in the North by his grateful lords — and though Sansa Stark bears a more direct claim, they may well be right anyway, since he’s secretly the blood of the Dragon. And in the East, Daenerys sets sail for the Seven Kingdoms at the head of a massive alliance between the Dothraki, the Unsullied, the Ironborn, the Dornish, and the Tyrells — and, of course, her dragons. Rulers rise, rulers fall, and winter is officially here.

I ranked every single episode of Game of Thrones in ascending order of quality — 60 in all, from the series premiere to last night’s season finale — for Vulture. This is my wildfire explosion.

Like the Mona Lisa removed from da Vinci’s verdant landscape and plunked in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Sansa Stark’s smile at the end of “The Battle of the Bastards” is all the more enigmatic for the madness of its context. Here is the young woman who’s endured the attentions of a long succession of the worst people in Westeros: Joffrey Baratheon, Cersei Lannister, Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish, Lysa Arryn, Roose and Ramsay Bolton. Here is the heir to House Stark, so far as anyone knows — the torchbearer for Ned’s decency in the face of injustice and Catelyn’s tenacious defense of those she loves. Here is a survivor, who made it out of murderously abusive conditions under which her hot-tempered siblings would not likely have lasted half as long. Here’s the generational hope for the North, the way Daenerys Targaryen and Yara Greyjoy represent similar paths to a better future. Here she is … grinning as a man is eaten alive by dogs.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I wrote about Sansa, Ramsay, and Game of Thrones’ long history of portraying revenge as an inherently ugly enterprise for Vulture.

All of this is what makes boiling Jaime and Brienne’s relationship down to “You think they’re fucking?” so silly. It may be ex-prosecutor Marcia Clark, of all people, who’s best put this into perspective. She and former colleague Christopher Darden formed this year’s other great star-crossed-romance story line in FX’s stunning docudrama The People v. O.J. Simpson. Clark has spoken eloquently of their bond, marked by similar forced intimacy, breaches of trust, and mutual understanding: “Fact of the matter is, Chris Darden and I were closer than lovers. And unless you’ve been through what we went through, you can’t possibly know what that means.” I’m guessing Jaime and Brienne would have more than an inkling.

Which is not to deny the actual erotic potential of those two big, beautiful, blond-haired, brokenhearted warriors going at it. Repurposing the ideal physicality and emotional intensity of your favorite fictional characters into the stuff of sexual fantasy is an entirely righteous enterprise, or at the very least a harmless one. If your goal is to get off, by all means hop on that ship and sail off into the postorgasmic sunset. It can even provide readers or viewers, particularly those whose sexuality has been marginalized, with vital grist for imagining and thus understanding their own needs and desires. The problem with shipping arises when the entire spectrum of intimacy between adults is reduced to the romantic or the sexual. It does a relationship like Jaime and Brienne’s a tremendous disservice to flatten it into “will they or won’t they.” In the ways that matter most, they already have.

I wrote an essay on the history of Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister’s relationship, and the limits of shipping on Game of Thrones and beyond, for Vulture.

In its latest episode, Game of Thrones carved the heart out of one of its central story lines. When “The Broken Man” revealed that Sandor “The Hound” Clegane had put down his sword and taken up with a religious community in the Riverlands, it was echoing a passage from A Feast for Crows, the fourth volume in author George R.R. Martin’s epic-fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire. But in that echo, something sounded very different. The antiwar monologue known as “the broken man speech” that made this section of the books so crucial to understanding the whole series was removed and replaced, with a much darker outcome for its participants. And that change demands special scrutiny.

[…]

So when we consider the show and the book’s treatment of this plotline, it’s worth resisting the instinct to pit the two approaches against each other. Snap judgments do a disservice to the challenging, upsetting, and ultimately rewarding themes that Game of Thrones has chosen to tackle. Yes, while it’s difficult for even the biggest skeptic of the “but this isdifferent!” book-to-show style of criticism to resist an apples-to-apples comparison, there are whole orchards to consider.

These are the opening and closing paragraphs of an essay I wrote on how Game of Thrones handled Septon Meribald’s “broken man speech,” and what conclusions we can or should draw from it, for Vulture. I hope you’ll read the rest.

Indeed, there’s something tactile, sticky, greasy about the whole affair. We first glimpse Rachel McAdams’s Detective Ani Bezzerides seconds after she cuts off sex with another cop, who freaked out after an apparently unorthodox request on her part; she never quite shakes the unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed look of someone interrupted during an afternoon delight gone sour. For his debut, Taylor Kitsch’s CHiPS Officer Paul Woodrugh pulls over a parole-violating actress for speeding, who wrongfully accuses him of soliciting a sexual favor; he runs home to his randy girlfriend and insists on showering before they have sex. This is primarily an excuse to chug back Viagra and let chemistry take its course, since he’s secretly gay, but this scene too conveys the notion that there’s something dirty about Woodrugh he’s desperate to wash off. As for Velcoro, the stench of failure and frustration clings to this guy like the smell of Modelo and American Spirits; it’s hard to look at him, especially in the first half of the season, without your eyes watering. In other words, characters get under your skin in large part because of the emphasis placed on theirs.

I reconsidered the second, and apparently final, season of True Detective for Vulture.

Huge thanks to editor Neil Janowitz for tapping me to help put together this massive Game of Thrones character relationship guide for Vulture, written by Jennifer Vineyard and assembled by their crack interactive team. You’ve really gotta see this thing to believe it. Enjoy!

Nor has there been a finer, sadder example of a wounded warrior than Richard Harrow. Introduced by writer Howard Korder during season one while waiting for a psychiatric evaluation at a veteran’s hospital, Harrow (an unrecognizable Jack Huston in his breakthrough performance) makes a knockout first impression with his broken-throated, Gollum-like croak, the unnerving uncanny-valley mask he uses to hide his severe facial disfigurement (a sniper himself, he was shot in the face), and with the black nihilism he cites as the reason he no longer reads novels. “It occurred to me: The basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.” I gasped when I first heard this line, dredged from my worst fears about life, love, and their collective lack of lasting meaning. Richard’s capacity for belief in humanity was blown out of him in the Great War, and much of his time on the show chronicled its slow restoration, though dozens of dead bodies dropped behind him on his way. This archetype — the man (usually) who is taught violence in service of an ideal, only to discover one is real and the other a cheap fiction — is a distinctly American one; The Wire’s Omar Little,Fargo’s Hanzee Dent, and Game of Thrones’ Sandor “The Hound” Clegane all share Richard’s table in their sad Valhalla. And though his final scenes were devastating, his greatest contribution to the series is in the teeth-grinding tension of the shoot-out sequence that completes the third season, as he blows his way through a small army of Rosetti men to rescue his late friend Jimmy’s son. The scene weds action to emotion as effectively and movingly as any I’ve ever seen, its resolution viewed through a blood-spattered window, an impenetrable barrier to normalcy for this tragic figure.

On the eve of the debut of Vinyl from the same creative team, I got to write a longtime dream essay of mine, a full-throated defense of Boardwalk Empire as one of the New Golden Age of TV Drama’s hidden treasures, for Vulture.

Fitting for a show about those occupying society’s technological substrata,Mr. Robot’s characters are often placed at the very bottom of the frame. This leaves massive amounts of headroom that suggests a great weight hanging over their heads, and echoes their isolation: When they’re talking right to each other, they seem alone. In more conventional filmmaking, conversations are cut with the characters looking at each other from opposite ends of the frame, leaving what’s known as “leading room” between their faces that helps convey the physical space they occupy. Mr. Robot inverses the norm by “shortsighting” the characters, positioning their faces at the edge of the frame closest toward the person to whom they’re speaking.

“Shortsighting is unnerving,” Campbell explains. “It further accentuates how fucked-up Elliot’s world is. The idea was to convey the loneliness. That’s the internal dialogue I had with myself: How do we tell that story? How do you get Elliot across?”

The effect goes a long way in selling audiences on the mounting paranoia and dissociation of the show’s main character, hacker Elliot Alderson (Malek). Without the usual pattern to help us intuit spatial relationships, these scenes create the sense that the characters don’t know where they stand in relation to one another. They also remind us of the picture-in-picture, face-against-flat-surface nature of video chatting, which can’t be overlooked on a show this attuned to the alienating effects of technology.

I spoke with Mr. Robot’s director of photography, Tod Campbell, about the show’s gorgeous shot compositions for Vulture. It felt great to write an article about television that focused on pure form. Woo!

That camaraderie came through on the screen. You can understand why these characters are drawn to working together, even when they’re not getting along. They seem to respect each other.
That’s really great. One of the big differences between season one and season two is that the working relationships in season one were incredibly contentious. The characters would manipulate and lie, and they were really out for themselves. In season two, the working relationship really changed. While it remained contentious, there was a sense that these two women [Donna and Cameron] in particular very deeply respect and value each other, and they’re really trying hard to make it work.

And in many of their disputes, both of the positions on where to take the company are equally reasonable. It’s much more exciting to watch a drama when you genuinely can’t decide what “should” happen.
I love that. That’s what good writing does, to me. All the characters have good reasons to do what they do, so you can understand CameronandDonna, even though they’re making opposite decisions or have opposite priorities. You still feel like they’re both completely justified in the choices they’re making. I concur, I think that’s a really great part of this show.

That carries over to the characters’ personal lives too. The show didn’t pump-fake in the direction of Donna’s abortion — she actually went through with it, and her reasons were presented as sound and strong and nothing to be ashamed of.
That was a fascinating story line, and it was interesting how it all played out. The writers were really intent on making it a confident decision that Donna made. They didn’t want her to be wishy-washy, they didn’t want it to be a thing that [dramatic voice] destroyed her, you know? They did a great job of giving her that backbone. But at the same time, in a bigger-picture way, I didn’t want it to feel like, you know, working women who have a career have to sacrifice, or that given the opportunity women will choose their career over their family. It felt like threading a needle to me. It ended up being a pretty good balance between what the writers needed it to be and what I needed it to do to feel okay about what we were putting out in the world.

Over at Vulture I interviewed actor Kerry Bishé, who plays Donna on Halt and Catch Fire, about its fabulous second season, and she was very, very insightful.

5. Sansa Stark

Sansa’s got the potential to be happy. First of all, she’s matured a lot. She actually liked Joffrey at the beginning! And given how terrible it’s been for her, she’s not doing too bad. I think that for her, it’s possible to recover from trauma. They show her to be that type. I mean, she’s pretty tough. She never got to the point where she just gives up. She thought everybody in her family was dead, but when it looked like Theon would light that candle and she would be saved, she really thought she was going to be okay. It didn’t go well, but even now she’s got hope again, now that she’s found out her little brothers weren’t killed. And also, she chewed Theon out, but then when she found out her brothers weren’t killed, she backed off. She’s not so angry and vindictive that it’s destructive. She’s appropriately so.

4. Samwell Tarly

This guy has peace. With his background of being bullied, he’s unusual because he doesn’t seem overly insecure. He’s not trying to prove to people, “I’m not really such a wimp!” He does stuff when he has to, not just to prove things. It’s not the usual outcome of his whole set of features for him to be comfortable with himself, but he is. He loves his girlfriend, he loves the baby she named after him, he has purpose, and he’s very comfortable with that. It’s not the overly driven ones who are happy, it’s the ones who find peace within. It sounds so trite, but it’s true.

I talked to my therapist about Game of Thrones – I mean, I always do, but this was for Vulture – to help rank the characters of GoT’s saddest season by happiness.

Certainly, roads to Hell paved with good intentions are as easy to find inGame of Thrones as reanimated corpses at Hardhome. Tyrion Lannister did his best to mitigate the cruelty of his psychopathic nephew King Joffrey and wound up framed and sentenced to death for his murder. Daenerys Targaryen put aside her quest for the Iron Throne to emancipate the people of Slaver’s Bay and ignited an insurgency that forced her to flee on the back of a dragon. Brienne of Tarth swore to serve relatively decent sorts, like Renly Baratheon and Catelyn Stark, but couldn’t stop their murders, and she vowed to protect Cat’s daughters Arya and Sansa, only to be rejected by both. Their brother Robb broke a pledge to his weasel-y ally Walder Frey in order to marry his true love, Talisa, resulting in the Red Wedding slaughter of himself, his mom, his pregnant wife, and his entire army. Sunday night, his half-brother Jon Snow saw his humanitarian campaign to save the hated Wildlings from the far greater threat of the White Walkers lead to his own assassination. The Ur-example of all this, of course, is Ned Stark: He risked his own life to warn Cersei that he’d uncovered her crimes so that she and her kids could escape before her wrathful husband Robert killed them, but it’s Ned’s own head that wound up rolling. Time and time again, the better angels of characters’ natures are precisely what caused them to give up the ghost. As Ser Jorah Mormont — who, by the way, contracted a fatal disease when he risked his life to save Tyrion’s — put it when discussing the defeat of Dany’s apparently benevolent big brother: “Rhaegar fought valiantly. Rhaegar fought nobly. And Rhaegar died.”

Does this make Game of Thrones a fundamentally nihilist series — a work where, when it comes to the evil that men do, resistance is futile? Seven hells, no.

For starters, that would only make sense if the Game players who cheated consistently came out on top, and that’s hardly been the case. Stannis Baratheon’s decision to burn his daughter to death led directly to the collapse of his army. Joffrey Baratheon’s career as the Mad King 2.0 came to an early end when he was poisoned to death at his own wedding by the family of the bride. Theon Greyjoy betrayed the Starks and conquered Winterfell, but wound up forsaken by both his biological and adoptive families and tortured into madness by the Bastard of Bolton. The Warlocks of Qarth and Good Masters of Astapor tried to fuel their dirty deeds with Dany’s dragons and got roasted for it. Nearly every name on Arya Stark’s hit list of murdering shitbags — from child-molesting Meryn Trant to Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane, arguably the biggest sociopath in the series (literally and metaphorically) and now a mindless zombie — has been crossed off, whether or not by her hand. Cersei Lannister brutalized and betrayed her way to the top of the Seven Kingdoms’ power structure, yet it was her own scheming that led to her downfall when she was arrested, imprisoned, and ritualistically humiliated by the very fanatics she’d empowered in the finale’s most excruciating scene. And what of Lord Eddard’s rival patriarch, Tywin Lannister? The archetypal avatar of ruthless realpolitik who orchestrated the Red Wedding and sentenced his own son to death wound up dead on the shitter, with his pants around his ankles and an arrow in his gut.

While it may look like any choice leads to a slit throat or squashed skull, this is in no way an argument that morality doesn’t matter. The constant cruelty of Game of Thrones’ world only increases the importance of doing good deeds while you still occupy it: If all men must die, as the saying goes, this makes the decision to do the right thing anyway all the more valuable. Jon Snow’s murder does not take away the lives he saved by rescuing as many Free Folk as he could from the army of the dead. Ned may have been foolish to trust Cersei to flee rather than fight, but if he’d guaranteed their deaths by narc’ing to Robert right away, he’d have been little better than she was. Tyrion’s brief reformist reign over King’s Landing likely saved hundreds of lives from the madness of King Joffrey before it ended, and now he has the chance to repeat the feat in Meereen. Dany’s drive to free the slaves of that city and its neighbors is perhaps the most complex political question the series poses — its white-savior overtones and occupier/liberator dynamic are uncomfortable to contemplate, and deliberately so — yet it’s hard to imagine that the world would be better off had she marched straight for Westeros on an ocean of fire and blood instead of literally ending the slave trade in one of its most entrenched enclaves.

Does No Good Deed Go Unpunished on GOT? I examined the show’s epic-fantasy ethics for Vulture.

3. Game of Thrones: Cersei Lannister
Westeros’s queen of mean, currently using religious fanatics to menace the family of her kingly son’s wife.

“When it’s a parent who’s trying to drive a wedge between spouses, one [of which is their] child, in a sense, that’s no longer parenting. They’re just being … evil. Now they’re manipulating, they’re interfering, they’re purposefully going against another person who happens to also be their child. In a sense, it’s compounded by the fact that it’s a loved one. For a parent to go against their child in that way, I would say, is the ultimate in betrayal.”

Over at Vulture, I interviewed Dr. Donna Tonrey, director of the Counseling and Family Therapy Master’s programs at La Salle University, about bad TV parents.

In tonight’s episode, there’s a moment after Jim brings Kimmy home drunk from a frat party where he tells her, “unlike your friends, you’re very real.” You get the sense that as much as anything else, she’s just desperate for someone to talk to who will listen.

Absolutely. He’s kind of the only one, it seems to her, who’s paying attention. That’s huge, especially for someone who’s 15 years old. They’re not a kid, but they’re not an adult, they’re at a really weird age. She’s like, “he’s giving me what I want, and I’m feeling satisfied. It’s the attention that I want someone to give me.” It’s not even attention, it’s care. It’s being acknowledged. If a person feels like “they’re not acknowledging me” … That’s a very important feeling in life, even if it’s not romantic. She doesn’t get that acknowledgment at home.

I interviewed Julia Garner, the actor who plays poor young Kimmy Breland on The Americans, for Vulture.

Who is Saul Goodman? The story of how an Irish lawyer named Jimmy McGill became the sleazy, pseudonymous strip-mall ambulance-chaser who checked Walter White and Jesse Pinkman’s attorney-client privilege throughout Breaking Bad will be told in the prequel series Better Call Saul, starring Bob Odenkirk, which debuts with a two-part premiere this Sunday and Monday. But Breaking Bad already gave us a lot of info about Albuquerque’s favorite “criminal lawyer”: his associates, his ex-wives, his alma mater (kinda?), his Xanax connect, and much more. We’ve pulled the files on Saul and arranged every bit of info Breaking Bad gave us on the guy in this easy, episode-by-episode timeline. There’s no better way to find out who you’re gonna call.

Hey, it’s my Vulture debut! I went through Breaking Bad and listed every tidbit I could find on Saul Goodman.