What an episode. Emotional, unsparing, thrilling, and horrifying in turns, it displays all of the strengths of the season that led up to it. And it never loses sight of the fact that this excellent series is, in the end, a character piece—a show that uses its action and suspense sequences to reveal who the characters really are, not simply provide some thrills between dully revelatory monologues. 

I reviewed the season (series?) finale of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

Beautifully shot, compellingly plotted, and gorgeously acted, this is yet another excellent episode of the most surprising crime drama of the year. I’m sad there’s only one hour to go.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

Two scenes, two minutes: That’s all you’re getting of the Lynwood family saga in ZeroZeroZero Episode 6. The fate of their cocaine shipment and the money owed on it? The subject of two or three lines of throwaway dialogue half a world away. The Italians who purchased it to begin with? Not present at all.

For this episode, it’s Manuel’s world, and we just live in it.

Directed by Pablo Trapero from a script by Leonardo Fasoli and Max Hurwitz, “En El Mismo Camino” is a breathless nightmare journey into the life—I hesitate to say “mind,” since he remains so sociopathically opaque—of Manuel Quinteras, the special forces soldier turned chief muscle for the Leyra Brothers cartel. Only he’s much more than that: He’s the commander of an entire army of young men he’s training to become perfect killers, just like himself and his squad mates. Though known to the outside world as the Firm, they take their internal name from Manuel’s old callsign: They’re the Vampires.

I reviewed the extraordinary sixth episode of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

From its title, “Sharia,” on down, the fifth episode of ZeroZeroZero is nominally concerned with the fundamentalist militia that becomes the latest obstacle in the path of the show’s ill-fated cocaine shipment. The way it handles the group is…tricky. Much is done to humanize them, particularly their leader, and to portray them as just another gun-toting subculture, like the Italian mob and the Mexican cartel. That said, there’s a degree of stereotyping that American eyes and ears will impose on such characters almost automatically; having a bunch of them cheer “Allahu Akbar!” when a bomb goes off in a hotel on a live news broadcast isn’t doing them any favors, that’s for sure.

But there’s a throughline for this episode, and it’s not jihad—it’s family.

I reviewed episode five of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

“When did it start?” Emma Lynwood asks her brother. Silence. “Chris,” she says for emphasis. “When did it start?” Again, silence. There’s no choice; she has to come right out and say it. “When did the spasms start?” she asks, her tone that of a statement: The spasms have started.

A pause. Then, Chris, quickly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That’s how this episode of ZeroZeroZero (“Transshipment”) ends, as Mogwai’s melancholy score plays us out over a shot of the Senegalese coast. And there’s an ocean of character in that brief, terse exchange. It tells us that with everything else she has to worry about—the cargo stuck in international limbo, the cocaine she’s desperate to move from Mexico to Italy, the new Senegalese partners Chris cut in on the deal in exchange for their help in offloading the coke—she’s worried about her kid brother’s disease.

I reviewed episode four of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

A pig gets slaughtered and men drink its blood. A man is set on fire as his friend is forced to watch. The heir to a business is betrayed by his father’s close friend. A rogue soldier barges into the halls of power even though he’s the most wanted man in the country. This is an action-packed episode of ZeroZeroZero, filled with gruesome deaths and daring escapes—and yet we learn so much about the main characters in the process that it’s like we sat down with each one and interviewed them about themselves. That’s quite a trick.

I reviewed episode three of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

As a critic, I consider myself to be in the liking-things business. I go into every show I watch with as few expectations as possible, save one: I expect that what I’m watching will be good, until proven otherwise. That’s it! I’m never like “Oh brother, this looks awful, but here we go”; even in cases where I suspect a show might not be for me, I hold out the hope of being pleasantly surprised. Some of the shows I’ve had the most fun writing about—The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, Billions—took the better part of a whole season to get to that point, but when they got there, whoa baby, I sure became a fan. I’m always open to starting to like something, from the moment the premiere begins until the credits roll on the last episode I’ve been assigned to review.

I say all that to say this: The second episode of ZeroZeroZero kicks twelve kinds of ass. Hallelujah!

I had my problems with the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, but the second episode of ZeroZeroZero basically blew me away. Wild. I reviewed it for Decider.

I’m a broken record on this anytime it comes up on a television show, but here goes: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner once told an interviewer he’d never consider killing one of Don Draper’s children, because any show in which a child dies would need to become about the death of that child, the way people’s real lives reshapes themselves around that tragedy.

Is ZeroZeroZero going to wrestle with this? Is it going to dig down deep into how it feels to know you caused the death of a kid? Or is this just a kind of detail intended to add instant gravitas and then given no more thought? I have my suspicions, yes I do.

At the very least I don’t need television’s umpteenth narco series to show me a little girl whimpering in pain and fear as blood pulses out of a hole in her neck, until eventually she dies, all on camera, which is exactly what ZeroZeroZero does. The main goal of a show like this is, let’s face it, to entertain people who want to watch people get whacked in expensive location shoots, and tossing the brutal on-screen murder of a child into the mix just so the cop character can have a sad about it is an ugly, ugly impulse. “Rules are for men”? Alright, then—that’s my rule. Break it again at your peril.

I had very strong reservations about the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, the Amazon crime show I’m covering for Decider. But stay tuned…