"Margo's Got Money Troubles" and More

"Margo's Got Money Troubles," based on the book by Rufi Thorpe, is an admirable attempt to try and navigate some of the murky attitudes around sex work, drug addiction, and non-traditional family structures.  It's also a prime opportunity for some talented older actors to play some colorful, interesting characters that we haven't seen them play before.  The adaptation is spearheaded by David E. Kelley, who really outdid himself casting this one.

Margo (Elle Fanning) is a 20-year old with a bright head on her shoulders, who gets involved with her literature professor Mark (Michael Angarano), which results in a cutie pie baby boy named Bodhi, and Margo dropping out of school to support him.   Her mother Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer), a former Hooter's waitress, is wooing the local pastor Kenny (Greg Kinnear), and can only offer limited help.  Her father Jinx (Nick Offerman), a former wrestler, eventually shows up fresh from rehab and in need of a place to stay.  Margo and her roommate Susie (Thaddea Graham) let him move in, where he becomes Bodhi's regular babysitter.  Unfortunately, Margo finds that the only way she can reliably make money is with an OnlyFans account, where she posts risque stories and photos under the persona of the Hungry Ghost, a sexy space alien. 

"Margo's Got Money Troubles" is absolutely bursting with talented actors.  Marcia Gay Harden and Nicole Kidman show up later in the series in roles that I will not spoil.  In addition, familiar faces like Kerri Kenney, Paul McCrane, and Laura San Giacomo keep showing up in bit parts.  And it's clear why.  "Margo's Got Money Troubles" is largely a family dramedy full of complicated, entertaining characters struggling to connect with each other.  It's offbeat, but heartwarming and an easy watch.  Nick Offerman and Michelle Pfeiffer strike me as the clear standouts, two people who had a wild youth together and now have to deal with the consequences as best they can.  Offerman as a burly, hard-living ex-wrestler who effortlessly slides into the role of doting grandfather, is a joy to watch.  Pfeiffer as the more reluctant, status-obsessed grandmother trying to maintain the fiction of a wholesome family life, takes longer to warm up to, but I found her deeply relatable in the end.

And of course there's Elle Fanning, taking on one of her most challenging roles yet as an overwhelmed young mother whose life gets complicated very quickly.  The show's creators make it clear that motherhood is tough, spending a good amount of screen time on the hell of newborn care.  Most of the nudity in the show involves Margo nursing, or in other non-sexual contexts.  And for all the talk of demystifying and destigmatizing sex work, Margo quickly discovers that making money with OnlyFans has its own challenges.  She has to be a smart self-promoter, find a niche,  and eventually partner up with other creators.  My biggest criticism of the show is that it's a little too cutesy about portraying OnlyFans as a platform where Margo is able to find a creative outlet, and focuses on the cosplay and the kitsch while avoiding the sleaze.  There are negative social consequences that Margo has to face for her OnlyFans work, but the depiction of work itself feels too sanitized, and probably paints a misleading picture of how much effort is actually required.

Then again, "Margo's Got Money Troubles" isn't really about the sex work.  It's about Margo making choices about her life that society deems unacceptable and having to deal  with the fallout.  And it's about the people closest to her also reckoning with their choices, and eventually reconnecting and becoming close enough to try and help one another when things get tough.  I was constantly being surprised by the show, whether it was Shyanne repeatedly misjudging Kenny, or Jinx and Susie unexpectedly bonding.  I don't expect that "Margo's Got Money Troubles" will be around for the long term considering the caliber of the cast, but it's so nice to see talented actors in roles where they actually get to use that talent.  Nicole Kidman in a slightly kooky supporting role is great - she could totally transition to being a character actress if she wanted.  Michelle Pfeiffer doesn't get enough good roles, and I'm so grateful she got to do this.

And with an eight episode season, "Margo" doesn't outstay her welcome.  I know another season is in the works, but the first feels like a complete show, and one I will happily recommend.

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"Strange New Worlds" Year Three

I went back and forth over whether I wanted to write a full post for this season of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," because there are no major changes to the status quo and there are no major deviations in quality or production to discuss.  There aren't any interesting new characters introduced, except Ortegas's brother Beto (Mynor Luken) and Chapel's new love interest Dr. Korby (Cillian O'Sullivan) in recurring roles, and hardly even any guest stars of note.

However, as "Star Trek" is moving into another transitional phase, I think it's worth taking stock of how the best regarded "Trek" show of the streaming era is doing.  This is definitely a less experimental, less risk-taking year.  Despite some of the grumblings I've heard, only three of the ten episodes are comedic ones.  A few others break the show's standard format, but for the most part "Star Trek" is focused on pretty straightforward adventuring this season.  Captain Pike's love interest, Captain Marie Batel, is onboard the Enterprise for most of this year and is at the center of several of the ongoing plot arcs.  Unfortunately, these arcs are pretty badly handled, ultimately culminating in an incoherent finale that's resolved with the worst kind of random science-fiction gobbledegook.  

The individual stand-alone episodes, fortunately, are much better.  The plots are familiar stuff to "Star Trek" watchers, but the execution is very strong.  There's a holodeck mystery episode, a funny wedding episode, an "Enemy Mine" scenario, a documentary expose episode, and one where multiple regulars get turned into Vulcan versions of themselves.  However, the highlight of the season is "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail," where James T. Kirk gets an early test of his leadership skills when the Enterprise is attacked by unknown enemies.  It's classic old school science fiction of the best kind, and still has room for action beats and a little of Pelia's kookiness.  The versatility of "Strange New Worlds" is what I appreciate the most about it, because all of these stories are able to exist very comfortably together in the same season.         

On the relationship front, Spock and Chapel are firmly no longer a thing, with both of them seeing other people.  The breakup takes a while to process, but I'm just glad these two aren't paired together anymore, because the relationship always struck me as awfully juvenile and a little out of character for "Star Trek."  The show's romances remain largely on the back burner, playing out as a secondary concern to whatever the adventure of the week is, but I do appreciate that the writers take the care to develop them fairly realistically, using them to explore parts of the characters that we wouldn't see otherwise.

There are a lot of callbacks to the original '60s "Star Trek," and every time the future Captain Kirk shows up, there's a lot of pointed foreshadowing of the crew's future adventures together.  However, as someone with only a cursory knowledge of the first "Star Trek" series, this never got in the way of my enjoyment of "Strange New Worlds."  I completely forgot that certain characters were part of the old show at times, because I've become attached to the current incarnations.  In fact, I'm getting worried about the fates of the ones who aren't, particularly La'an and M'Benga.

I have a few minor nitpicks about things like how often certain characters are featured (or not featured), and the finale really was an awful flop, but overall this was a good season and gave me nearly everything I want out of a "Star Trek" show.  We've got sixteen episodes over two seasons left to go, with Paramount+ shifting its attention over to the new "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" series.  It's a shame, because I think that "Strange New Worlds" has the potential to go for several more seasons in this vein.  However, I'm also glad that the show isn't outstaying its welcome.      

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My Top 25 of the Last 25 - Movie Trailers

I've thoroughly enjoyed all the "Best of" lists celebrating the superlatives of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. And I'm going to be fashionably late to the party and make some of my own lists this year, looking at media from 2001 to 2025.  However, I'm not going to make "Best Movie" or "Best Show" lists.  No, I'm going to do the fun stuff.  This month, I'm spotlighting my favorite movie trailers.

Each list will get 25 entries, but only the top ten will get write-ups. 

Comedian (2002) - Let's start with the meta.  The "Comedian" trailer is listed on IMDB as a short, because though it's supposed to be a trailer for a Jerry Seinfeld documentary about comedians, it also functions as a funny stand-alone sketch making fun of movie trailers and their tropes, especially the deep-voiced narrator, performed here by the legendary Hal Douglas.  "In a world…" style trailers have largely gone out of style, and I like to think this trailer had something to do with it.

Kill Bill (2004) - Music choices have a massive impact on how well a trailer works.  Tomoyasu Hotel's "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" instrumental plays a big part in setting the tone here, for our first look at "The 4th Film By Quentin Tarantino."  It becomes clear that the movie is going to take no prisoners, as the action and the characters keep getting wilder and more over-the top as it goes.  The instrumental got a lot of play after this, becoming cultural shorthand for incoming badassery

Sin City (2005) - A prime example of a trailer that's better than the movie it's promoting.  The big selling point of "Sin City" was translating comic book visuals to the screen in a novel way.  This novelty wears off quickly over the length of a whole movie, particularly one that's not very well written or well put together.  However, a two-minute trailer is the perfect length to show off some of the creative applications of this very specific aesthetic, based on Frank Miller's grimly beautiful artwork.  

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) - Then you have the trailers that are selling you on a premise, and it was a tall order to sell "Benjamin Button," the tale of a man who ages in reverse.  The trick here is that you think you see the whole movie, but it's only giving you the broadest outlines - the love story and the peculiar circumstances of the title character.  Crucially, it also provides confirmation that Fincher and crew nailed the special effects wizardry to do all the aging effects right.

A Serious Man (2009) - I love this movie, and this is the perfect trailer for it - a trailer that asks a lot of questions and throws a lot of balls in the air, and offers absolutely no answers or guarantees, except that the characters will be Coen brothers characters.  It establishes a very specific tone and type of humor, full of anxiety and middle-aged neurosis, and does it perfectly.  I also like to think that the rhythmic thwacking of Michael Stuhlbarg's head against the wall is a tribute to the "Point Blank" trailer.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) - Some trailers are vital for setting expectations.  You'd think that an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are would be a typical children's adventure picture.  Instead, the trailer immediately shows us that we're in for something much more thoughtful, poignant, melancholy, and strange.  It's absolutely a children's film, but one that is likely to hit the adults much harder.  I still tear up watching this sometimes, and I can never quite say why.  

Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of Monsters (2019) - Here's my token representation of the big blockbusters.  What I like about these trailers for movies from the "Godzilla" franchise is that they're so good at conveying a sense of scale.  You've got the immersive halo jump from the first "Godzilla" trailer, and then all the reveals of the new kaiju designs in "King of Monsters," presented in the most epic way possible.  It's an absolute delight to see these familiar monsters fill our screens once more.    

Barbie (2023) - I can't resist a "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference.

28 Years Later (2025) - This is the first trailer in ages that I've seen that feels like it's willing to experiment with the format.  In this case, the long-anticipated horror movie set its images of a dystopia and zombie carnage to an evocative reading of a Rudyard Kipling poem about WWI, written more than a century ago.  It's a piece that's absolutely lousy with historical significance, sounding a dire warning against the worst sins of man - which are of course the really scary parts of "28 Years Later."   

The Next Fifteen:

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Shining (parody trailer) (2005)

The Fountain (2006)

Little Children (2006)

Be Kind Rewind (2008) (sweded version)

Cloverfield (2008)

The Social Network (2010)

Inception (2010)

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

One Battle After Another (2025)

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"Slow Horses," Years Four and Five

I like that I never know what I'm going to get with each season of "Slow Horses."  Season four is the first one that really digs into the background of any of the major characters, with an assassination attempt on River's grandfather leading to all sorts of juicy family secrets being spilled.  The major villain is a cult leader, Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), and River spends a good deal of the season rambling around France on a solo mission.  Season five is lighter and funnier, with Roddy Ho's disastrous dating life being a major plot point, and the biggest villain of the year is probably the new "First Desk" of MI5, Claude Whelan (James Callis), who is awful at his job.

There are a couple of new faces in the cast - JK Coe (Tom Brooke) joins Slough House as an introverted weirdo who mostly keeps to himself, and Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley), a former cop, is now the head of the "Dogs" tactical unit, under Taverner.  These change the existing character dynamics a bit.  I also want to spotlight Molly Doran (Naomi Wirthner) as the MI5 archivist with a difficult personality, who becomes a recurring minor player.  The other major characters continue to progress from season to season, with a few taking leaves from Slough House, and others noticeably getting better at their jobs.  River's competence continues to be wildly variable, which is part of the fun.  Jefferson Lamb is still the best character in the show's roster.  His contemptuous facade is cracking a bit as we get to know him more, and his relationships with the other characters gain more mileage.  We still don't know that much about him, which makes him all the more intriguing.

Usually when shows are this far into their runs, they start to repeat themselves and maybe fall back on old dramatic tropes to keep the momentum going.  Maybe it's because the show has such short and self-contained seasons, or because it's adapting books that work off of a different storytelling model completely, but "Slow Horses" has none of these problems.  I think it helps that the story progression concerning anything more character-centric is ongoing, but taking its time.  For instance, the possibility of a romantic relationship between two members of the Slough House team becomes a serious possibility in the fifth season, but it's such a minor development that has nothing to do with the larger plot, it gets completely tabled early on.  We'll have to wait and see if the romantic tensions actually go anywhere in season six or seven.   There are hints of more tragic territory to explore that we've barely scratched the surface of, but I won't feel too disappointed if we never get there.

"Slow Horses" remains primarily a fast-past delivery system for action and thrills.  In season four, we've got a really solid mystery involving doppelgangers and screwed up families. In season five, the plot involves a lot of crowds and gunplay, as several of the setpieces deal with foiling political assassinations.  Slough House itself also comes under literal fire multiple times in these two seasons, which is usually resolved by one of the regulars doing something cool at a critical moment.  I think it's important to note that this is the exception to the rule, though.  The show works because the members of Slough House keep proving that they deserve to be there, and continue to be a passel of hopeless idiots most of the time.  Fortunately, their screwups are just as entertaining as their successes.

In short, "Slow Horses" remains easily the best spy series that is currently running.  I wish that I'd gotten acquainted with it sooner, but this also means that I don't have as long of a wait for the sixth series, which is due in fall of 2026.  The preview promises more shenanigans, and I can't wait.

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A Trip "Down Cemetery Road"

Several members of the "Slow Horses" creative team have adapted another Mick Herron novel, about the detective Zoë Boehm.  Emma Thompson plays Zoë, and Ruth Wilson portrays the book's other heroine, Sarah Tifford, in the "Down Cemetery Road" miniseries.  And since these are two of my favorite currently working UK actors, there was no way that I was going to miss this.

A fiery explosion in a suburban neighborhood interrupts the dinner party that Sarah and her husband Mark (Tom Riley) are having a few streets away.  Sarah becomes suspicious when one of the victims, a little girl, appears to disappear from media coverage and is refused all visitors at the hospital.  She tries to investigate herself, eventually recruiting a private detective named Joe Silverman (Adam Godley), who is married to the much more skeptical investigator, Zoë Boehm (Thompson).  Meanwhile, we learn that the explosion was an unauthorized action by people working for the Ministry of Defense.  We follow a verbally abusive official known only as "C" (Darren Boyd), and his hapless underling Hamza (Adeel Akhtar), as they try to cover up what happened.  There are various other figures in play, including dangerous men played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Pip Torrens, and Fehinti Balogun, whose motives are unknown.

The bumbling mismanagement of the Ministry of Defense characters are what are the most reminiscent of "Slow Horses," and they provide a nice counterpoint to the fairly typical mystery and conspiracy plots being unravelled by Sarah, and later Zoë.  Ruth Wilson is in the fairly thankless role of an ordinary person whose obsession puts her into an extraordinary situation, and a lot hinges on her retaining the audience's sympathies while making foolhardy decisions left and right.  Wilson's fine, but it often feels like a questionable use of her talents.  Emma Thompson as Zoë is more fun, because she gets to rock a leather jacket and a cool haircut, and drop a few antisocial one-liners here and there.  The show is at its most successful when the characters are the most in the dark, and the situation seems to be out of everyone's control.  The best twists are the ones that are deployed the earliest, and Zoë gets a paltry amount of screen time despite easily being the most interesting character.  Okay, the second-most interesting character after one of the villains, but that's a spoiler.

Once we actually get a better picture of what's going on, the story gets bogged down in near-misses and chance encounters, with the characters travelling to a Scottish island for a big, final confrontation.  At eight episodes, the series doesn't feel too long, exactly, but the pacing could be improved.  There are a wealth of promising minor characters who all needed a little more screentime, and the ending is very abrupt.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who could have used another episode just to tie up loose ends and confirm that Zoë's hacker friend Wayne (Joshua James) is all right.  Both of the heroines are going to have a rough time picking up the pieces of their lives that have been disrupted by the investigation, and there are a lot of the more personal questions that are left unaddressed.  These are not the answers I'd be demanding of your usual mystery series, but they're ones that the show posed and that I was left waiting for.  Since there are three other Zoë Boehm novels, this could be covered in a sequel series, but that's never a guarantee these days. 

If this is your genre, "Down Cemetery Road" is worth watching, but it's not a series that I'd prioritize over the new "Department Q," or "The Lowdown," or any of the better mystery series that have come out recently.  I wouldn't mind seeing Emma Thompson in another one of these though, but I hope she's actually the main character next time.                

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My Favorite Julie Taymor Film

This is an interesting entry to write, because Julie Taymor is better known for her achievements as a theater director than as a feature film director, and she's only qualifying for this writeup because I'm counting recorded stage productions as  part of her filmography.  Still, there's nobody who makes movies like Julie Taymor, with her particular blend of mixed media, stagecraft influences, elaborate production design, and experimental elements.  Her film directing debut was a TV movie, "Fool's Fire," possibly the best puppet film ever made.  However, the first of her features that I saw was "Titus," a very bloody  adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus."  A few decades later, I'm still processing it.

There was a resurgence of Shakespearean cinema in the late 1990s, mostly spurred by Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo+Juliet" and the Kenneth Branagh adaptations.  "Titus" is part of this trend, a star-studded, wildly over-the-top piece of phantasmagoria that added surreal "penny dreadful" fantasy sequences, a framing device from a child's POV, and glaring anachronisms to the lurid revenge story.  The setting is now a combination of Ancient Rome and the Fascist Italy of the 1930s, with gorgeous sets straight out of a Fellini film - and that's no surprise, given that "Titus" was shot at Cinecitta Studios with some of Fellini's old collaborators involved.  Despite this, "Titus" sticks very close to the original text, and retains the Shakespeare's dialogue.  Anthony Hopkins also grounds the film, giving a striking performance as Titus Andronicus with all the gravity and weight you'd expect of any tragic Shakespearean figure.  Well, until the last act, where he goes mad and gives into the camp at just the right moment.

"Titus Andronicus" has long been one of the less popular and least well-regarded Shakespeare plays because of its gruesome nature, featuring multiple deaths, maimings, sexual violence, and even cannibalism.  "Titus" leans into the morbid and prurient content, stylizing the worst acts into Grand Guignol spectacle.  The metaphorical is made literal, and the literal is often abstracted into the psychedelic.  What initially drew me to the film were the wild costuming choices, with Jessica Lange in a literal crown of kitchen knives as the spirit of Revenge, Alan Cumming in Mussolini dress uniforms and leopard prints as the smug Emperor, and Laura Fraser's brutalized Lavinia sporting tree branches in the place of severed limbs.  Anthony Hopkins appears in a chef's outfit for the cannibalism scenes, naturally.  Not all of this works, with the lengthy closing shot of a character walking off into the distance pinging as especially indulgent and pretentious, but it's a thrill to see someone engage with the play with this amount of earnest passion and rigor.  "Titus" remains the definitive screen adaptation of "Titus Andronicus," because nobody has been brave enough to try anything remotely as ambitious with it since.  I also suspect it went a long way toward popularizing and rehabilitating "Titus Andronicus" with modern audiences.

Taymor originally staged "Titus Andronicus" in 1994 as an Off-Broadway show, in the middle of an impressive run of theater projects that included the operas "Oedipus Rex" and "Salome," and the musical adaptation of "The Lion King."   The acclaim from "The Lion King" is almost certainly why Taymor got to direct "Titus," and was able to assemble such a high calibre cast and crew for it.  Nearly all of the film's defining artistic choices and imagery came from the stage production - the costuming, the video projections of nightmare imagery, and plenty of graphic violence.  Taymor has claimed that she was drawn to the play because she found it so relevant to the modern era.  Some of the characters certainly stand out as ahead of their time, especially the Moor, Aaron, played by Harry Lennix as a notably complex villain.  She also expands the role of Young Lucius, a minor character, in order to highlight the cycles of violence, generational trauma, and revenge begetting revenge.  

I've enjoyed Julie Taymor's subsequent films, especially "Frida," but none of them have resonated with me like "Titus."  I suspect it's because underneath all the extremity and the flashy visuals, there's a very solid Shakespearean tragedy here, with compelling characters and strong performances.  And deep down, I've always been a sucker for Shakespearean tragedies, and the few screen adaptations that really do them justice.   

What I've Seen - Julie Taymor

Fool's Fire (1992)

Oedipus Rex (1993)

Salome (1995)

The Lion King (1997)

Titus (1999)

Frida (2002)

Across the Universe (2007)

The Tempest (2010)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (2014)

The Glorias (2020)

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"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is Relevant

It's not often that you see a film as timely as "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die," which pits a motley collection of LA residents against an evil AI in a battle for the future.  It's not just that the film takes aim at social media, screen addiction, and ad-filled subscriptions replacing human interactions, but it captures the uneasy feeling of always having to question whether what you're seeing is real or not, in the age of large language models generating AI slop and online grifters constantly trying to hijack your attention.  "Eddington" tackled similar subject matter last year, but was focused on the proliferation of relatively grounded misinformation and conspiracy theories.  "Good Luck" is much zanier and more unhinged, where reality itself seems to be in danger of total collapse.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The movie starts with an unnamed man, played by Sam Rockwell, barging into a busy Norm's restaurant one night, claiming that he's from a dystopian future.  He threatens to blow them all up unless six people come with him to save the world.  However, as the night goes on and we get to know all the characters better through a series of flashbacks, it looks like everyone is living in a dystopia already.  School teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) have to deal with phone-addicted students who seem to be turning into zombies.  Susan (Juno Temple) is grieving her teenage son Darren (Riccardo Drayton), who she's been able to get a clone replacement for.  Ingrid (Hayley Lu Richardson) is allergic to electronics, and was recently ditched by her partner Tim (Tom Taylor), when he became obsessed with a VR game.

Stylistically, "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is taking a lot of influence from "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," particularly the low budget effects work and the chaotic storytelling.  There are lots of absurd, whimsical elements, like Ingrid spending the whole mission in a princess dress, that help to lighten the tone and increase the silliness of some pretty dark material.  The time traveler claims that he's come back to the same night in the diner over and over again, looking for the right combination of participants and tactics to complete his mission, so he's constantly talking about his failed attempts where people died horribly.  The whole Susan subplot comes about because school shootings are common in this universe, and there is some very black humor dealing with parents cloning their dead kids.  

"Good Luck" is very reminiscent of the "Black Mirror" anthology episodes in many respects, so I'm predisposed to like it.  However, what gives the movie a real kick is that it's also the return of Gore Verbinski to the director's chair after a decade-long absence.  This is a man who understands how to put together an action sequence that feels epic, and how to evoke horror vibes from the most innocuous situations.  I also appreciate how he leans into the oddity and the unreality of many sequences.  "It feels like AI" has been a popular criticism of a lot of media over the past year, since ChatGPT and its ilk have invaded the internet, and "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is one of the first movies I've seen that turns this into a plot point.  I have no idea how long the movie has been in production, but it feels eerily prescient, and I'm very curious how well it's going to age.   

If you're primarily interested in the entertainment value, I had fun.  The cast is mostly made up of rock-solid character actors who have no trouble handling the humor or the wild hairpin turns of the plotting, and the production looks pretty polished in spite of the limited budget.  I'd have liked the movie to be a little longer or more tightly written, so we could have gotten more time with some of the characters - Asim Chaudhry's Uber driver, Scott, for instance, didn't feel like he got a fair shake - but that's likely a matter of taste.  There's just enough existential trippiness that the people who like treating movies like puzzles will have a grand time trying to figure out how much was real, and how all the little loose ends connect.  If you just want to see fights and explosions and flashing lights, there are quite a few of those here too.  

And it ends on a hopeful note, which I appreciate.

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"Pluribus" For One and All

There are a lot of spoilers in "Pluribus" that make it difficult to talk about.  It's a science fiction show from Vince Gilligan starring Rhea Seehorn, it's very conceptual and deliberately paced, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  It's not going to appeal to everyone, because it's not in a hurry at all, but I loved the way that the first season unfolded, slowly giving us more and more information over nine episodes, and letting the characters work through various dilemmas at their own pace.  About 90% of the show is solely focused on Seehorn, playing our protagonist Carol Sturka, a difficult woman who is still a good person.  How much you like "Pluribus" may come down to how much you like spending time with her.  From this point on, I'll be spoiling the events of the first two episodes.

"Pluribus" is my kind of science-fiction, all about exploring a fantastical concept that isn't just an excuse for cool action sequences or power fantasies.  Rather, the focus is on how the world changes because of this new event, and exploring all the unintended consequences and unexpected issues that come about in its wake.  In this case, you have everyone on Earth, minus eleven people, becoming part of a single hive mind through an extra-terrestrial agent.  Gilligan and his collaborators have clearly spent a lot of time thinking this through, and a lot of the fun of "Pluribus" is watching them spend an impressive amount of Apple TV+'s money to realize the sweeping, grand scale spectacle of humanity's transformation.  You don't need a lot of society and infrastructure when everyone is in perfect agreement with each other, and you can get so much more done, more efficiently.  Some of the most unnerving images in the show involve groups of people simply moving or talking in unison, which must have taken a monumental amount of work to achieve.

I always liked Seehorn as Kim Wexler in "Better Call Saul," and she's similarly fantastic as the very different Carol Sturka.  The show is just as much an examination of Carol as it is about the hive mind.  She's a successful romantic fantasy writer who wants to write more serious books, but isn't good enough to do that.  She doesn't like people much, except her partner Helen (Miriam Shor), and takes the loss of her very hard.  And despite being a curmudgeon and world class grump, who ticks off nearly every other person on the planet over the course of the first season, Carol discovers that she needs other people.  Seehorn is often the only character onscreen for large amounts of time, and the role is often very physical and demanding.  She does such a great job of keeping us in her headspace as she goes through doubts, frustrations, discoveries, and the grieving process.  Her relationship with the hive mind is fascinating to watch develop, since Carol is often stubborn, prickly, and downright mean, while the hive mind, usually embodied in the form of Carol's assigned "chaperone" Zosia (Karolina Wydra), is nothing but kind, generous, and accommodating.  I love that there's a real ambiguity as to whether Carol's resistance to "The Joining" is actually a good thing for her and the rest of humanity.    

  

"Pluribus" is the rare kind of show where I have no idea what's going to happen in most of the episodes, and I love it.  Most of it takes place in Albuquerque, but "Pluribus" also regularly goes globetrotting to Morocco, Peru, Colombia, and other far-flung locations.  Multiple episodes open with characters I don't know, speaking languages I don't speak, and I'm instantly caught up in figuring out what's happening every single time.  Vince Gilligan and his collaborators have earned the benefit of the doubt from me after all those years of "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul."  But even if they hadn't, "Pluribus" is executed so well, and the material is so consistently interesting that I'd be hooked regardless.  Of all the shows that came out in 2025, this is easily the most distinct, unique, and ambitious.  And it has my full attention.    

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Catching Up With "Slow Horses"

This write-up covers the second and third series of "Slow Horses."  I watched the first one back in 2022, but never wrote a review for it.  I haven't revisited it since then, so I'm playing fair and leaving it out of this post.  However, so far each series has functioned pretty well as an individual piece of media, and you could easily watch them in isolation from each other.  And if you like British crime series or spy series, "Slow Horses" is definitely one to seek out.

Gary Oldman played spymaster George Smiley to perfection in the most recent film version of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," but the spy he'll likely be best remembered for is Jackson Lamb.  He's the head of Slough House, whose members have been nicknamed "slow horses."  This is the unit where the problem children of MI5 are banished, home to those who haven't erred seriously enough to be outright fired.  Its members include the screw-ups, the insubordinates, the addicts, and a few who have fallen through the cracks.  Lamb is a cynical, slovenly man of awful habits and worse hygiene, who has a long history in intelligence, and knows all the major players.  He is also secretly very good at his job, which is why Slough House keeps getting involved in stopping major threats to national security despite its reputation.

  

Oldman's performance is the main event, of course, with Lamb befouling the atmosphere and throwing zingers at everyone unlucky  enough to cross paths with him.  However, I like the whole ensemble.  The second lead is Jack Lowden, who plays River Cartwright, a former star agent and grandson of a famous spy (Jonathan Pryce), whose flair for heroics tends to go wrong.  He badly wants out of Slough House, but keeps getting into one catastrophe after another.  Other members of the team include ex-alcoholic administrator Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), formidable field agent Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), family man Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan), spitfire drug addict Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and sleazy techie Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung).  Their bosses include the totally amoral MI5 leaders Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo), and MP Peter Judd (Samuel West).

I like that "Slow Horses" offers a little of everything.  Based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, the tone is darkly comedic, but the spy adventure elements are solid.  We get plenty of twisty John LeCarre power plays and conspiracies to untangle, and major characters are killed off with surprising regularity.  At the same time, the show has been steadily increasing the number of raucous James Bond-style action sequences, with the third series climaxing in a protracted gun battle.  Physical humor and pratfalls are not uncommon, though deployed with care, so as not to undercut the thrills.  Though our heroes can be counted on to do the right thing, and can be surprisingly competent in a pinch, they're also prone to making bad calls and being easy marks.  Cartwright has all the making of being a great spy, except that he takes things at face value too quickly, and is thus easy to manipulate.  Up against half the cast of "The Darkest Hour," he's totally outclassed, and it's such fun to watch him flounder. 

It was also a pleasant surprise to discover that the show is managing to deliver a full series yearly, with the sixth one due this year.  Also, six hour-long episodes is a perfectly good length to cover a novel's worth of material.  So far, each series has ended with a preview for the next one, and there are enough "Slough House" books still coming out that "Slow Horses" could easily run to the end of the decade adapting them all.  This depends on Gary Oldman sticking around, of course, and thankfully he seems to be having a very good time being very awful as Jackson Lamb.  

Keep an eye out for write-ups of the remaining series soon, because they're not going to last me very long at the rate I've been watching them.  

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The 2025 Films I Didn't Watch

I write this post every year to acknowledge some of the movies that I've made a conscious decision to skip watching.  In some cases there's a reason, and in some cases there's just a lack of enthusiasm.  I've got very strong completionist tendencies, so I hope writing about some of these films this way will help me put any lingering doubts to rest.  So, here are eight films that didn't make the cut this year.   I reserve the right to revisit and reverse my viewing choices in the future. However, I still haven't watched anything from last year's list.

It's Never Over Jeff Buckley - I generally like music documentaries, but I've found that I have little interest in the ones about musical artists where I'm not familiar with their music.  Jeff Buckley is an obscure singer-songwriter who put out one album and gained a cult following.  I'm sure the documentary about him is very good, but I'm also sure that I'm not likely to get much out of it.  

Ballad of a Small Player - Edward Berger directs a gambling film starring Colin Farrell, in scruffy loser mode, set in Macau.  A few critics I like are adamant that this is a hidden gem, but I remain wary.  "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Conclave" were respectable, but I didn't particularly enjoy either.  What really sank this one for me, though, were the totally unimpressed reactions this got at Toronto and Telluride early in the season.  

The Assessment - I generally watch every weird, high-concept science-fiction and speculative fiction film I hear about.  "The Assessment" is supposed to be about a future world where couples have to pass an interview to have a child.  However, this is just an excuse for a movie where Alicia Vikander gets to screw with Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel for two hours.  Once I saw the trailer, which looked insufferable, I dropped it in spite of positive reviews.

Magazine Dreams - This one had Oscar buzz when it originally premiered at Sundance back in 2023, but the allegations against Jonathan Majors quashed them.  After changing distributors, the film finally got a very limited release this year, and reviews were very positive, but this was never the kind of film that I was going to enjoy, due to the punishing subject matter.  Once it was out of contention for the major awards, I took the excuse to ignore it.  

Good Boy - I like the concept.  I get the concept.  However, watching an entire movie of a poor dog in danger from supernatural forces struck me as an experience I had absolutely no interest in having.  This was also a tiny production made for $70,000, helmed by a relative newcomer, so I wasn't keen on having to deal with shoestring aesthetics on top of everything else.  I'm glad people enjoyed this, but I'm also very sure about my decision to keep my distance.

Eleanor the Great - This is Scarlett Johansson's directing debut, starring June Squibb as a newcomer to New York who is accidentally mistaken for a Holocaust survivor.  The situation snowballs into a learning experience for everyone involved, and the trailer didn't do anything to convince me that the movie was any better than its tiresome plot.  The critical response was fine, but everything about "Eleanor" comes across as too contrived for me to take.     

Christy - Sydney Sweeney plays a female boxer who deals with domestic abuse.  I promise that I steered clear of all the culture war uproar around the film, and I'm avoiding it simply because this is a female-led awards hopeful that doesn't have much going for it except a lead performance that hasn't really made any waves.  I skip a lot of similar films like the Daniel Day Lewis starrer "Anemone," and I don't feel too bad about skipping this one too.  

Keeper - I'm a fan of Tatiana Maslany, but I've given Osgood Perkins enough chances.  After "The Monkey," I need a break from his brand of horror for a while.  And there were more than enough excellent horror films this year to keep me occupied. 

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"The Plague" Gets Under Your Skin

First time filmmaker Charlie Polinger has made a nerve-wracking film about a group of twelve and thirteen year-old boys at a water polo camp.  Everett Blunck stars as Ben, who runs afoul of the established group dynamics of the other boys, where a kid named Jake (Kayo Martin) has started a cruel game to treat the oddball Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) like he has contracted a mysterious "plague."  Desperate to fit in, Ben initially goes along with the ostracism, but also finds he enjoys being around Eli, who doesn't seem bothered by the negative reaction.

There have been many films about bullying and the way that adolescent growing pains can turn kids into monsters.  However, I've rarely seen a film like "The Plague" that lays out the forces at play so clearly.  The kids' cruelty looks harmless, but is extremely hurtful, even in the earliest stages.  It's immediately obvious that all of the boys involved in the game are vulnerable in some way or another, and most are like Ben - going along because nobody wants to be in the target role.  The ringleader, Jake, is the kind of smirking little instigator that seems Machiavellian to Ben, but later scenes make it clear that this is a child who is processing a lot of negative emotions very badly, and his cruelty is learned.  He has no real idea of the consequences of his behavior, or that the game will end up spinning out of everyone's control.  

The performances from the young leads are very good, and the writing is perceptive enough to nail the behaviors and dynamics of kids this age, even if the specific vernacular might not be right.  Ben is guileless enough to say exactly what he's thinking most of the time, and when he tries to feign amenability or aloofness, he's bad at it.  Eli seems to have no self-awareness, which seems odd for a kid his age, but not unlikely.  I found myself getting frustrated with Ben and Jake, and had to keep reminding myself that these were seventh graders who may have never been away from home for an extended period before, and whose social skills were rudimentary at best.  The kids being so young certainly increased the emotional intensity of the film throughout, and I found myself hyperaware in even the most innocuous dialogue scenes.    

You have to suspend disbelief about some aspects of "The Plague."  For instance, the only adult presence at the camp seems to be the coach Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton), who is aware of the bullying and does his best to intervene when things get out of hand.  However, the lack of supervision was something that I couldn't help fixating on.  This is a horror/thriller, largely told from the subjective point of viewpoint of a prepubescent kid, so was this an artistic choice?  Was Daddy Wags the only adult around because that's what it felt like to Ben, and the other adults simply didn't register for him?  Was this to suggest that the camp, despite catering to the kind of rich kids who would have the money to play water polo, was financially cutting corners?  Or was this simply because the "Plague" is a low budget film and couldn't swing the cost of more adult actors?

My instinct is to go with the first option.  "The Plague" does a lot with a little, whipping up some potent horror imagery out of swimming pools, darkened bathrooms, and institutional corridors.  I especially like the opening underwater shot, where the boys appear to be headless as they tread water.  The sound design is a marvel, using human voices as part of the soundscape in places where you might not expect them.  Water is a recurring motif, naturally, standing in for the subconscious.  

Horror fans may come away disappointed because there's only one real moment of gore, most of the chills are strictly psychological, and the story stays mostly grounded in reality throughout.  However, I came away extremely impressed with everyone involved.

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"The Night Manager" and "Fallout" Return

I'm grouping the reviews for the second seasons of "The Night Manager" and "Fallout" together, because they're both short ones, albeit for different reasons.  In the case of "The Night Manager," it's a good season with plenty to talk about, but the spoilers are unwieldy, and I feel that saying less is more.  As for "Fallout," the new season is worth some acknowledgement, but I don't feel that I have that much to add that wasn't already covered in my review of the first season.  So, here we go.  

First, the second series of "The Night Manager" comes ten years after the first, and really should be treated as a self-contained sequel.  Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) and Angela Burr (Olivia Coleman) parted ways after the death of arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie), and Pine has been quietly working in intelligence under Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge) at the Foreign Office.  Contact with a woman named Roxana (Camila Morone) brings Pine to Colombia, where a major arms deal appears to be in the works.  The key figure is the mysterious Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), who turns out to be a protege of Roper's.  We also get a new villain played by Indira Varma, and a new ally played by Hayley Squires.

We've swapped out directors, so Georgi Banks-Davies replaces Susanne Bier, but David Farr is back to script the whole series.  I'm happy to report that the quality hasn't fallen off at all, and the second season of "The Night Manager" is every bit as good as the first.  Thorny personal relationships and a very intense menage-a-trois are again at the center of the story, but the dynamics are different.  Hiddleston and all the returning cast are great, as expected, but the actor who really grabbed my attention this time around was Diego Calva, who I last saw in "Babylon," channeling a young Javier Bardem here to very good effect.  The new tropical setting is also very helpful in distinguishing this season as a different animal, with lots of excuses for everyone to get sweaty and disheveled.  As I mentioned previously, I do want to steer clear of spoilers, but I want to give the last episode special kudos for being one of the very best season cappers I've seen in a while, with a lot of good surprises, and the best set-up for a possible third series that may never happen.  And if it doesn't I won't even be mad. 

On to the second season of "Fallout," which follows Lucy, Cooper, Maximus, and Norm on their various adventures.  There's less of a piecemeal approach to exploring the "Fallout" world this year, and more of a commitment to sticking with the various storylines that are playing out.  Hank (Kyle McLachlan) and Steph (Annabel O'Hagen) become more prominent characters who also get their own narratives, and there are some fun new recurring characters, including those played by Kumail Nanjiani and Macaulay Culkin as prominent members of the Legion.  As promised in the last episode of the prior season, there's a lot of time spent with Lucy and Cooper in and around New Vegas, who learn that there was a Vault specifically for management located there, and Hank may be restarting certain experiments.  

Frankly, I wasn't too interested in the plottier parts of the season.  It's clear from pretty early on that the showrunners aren't going to provide any major payoffs, and they spend a lot of time setting up bigger conflicts down the road.  We have several factions preparing for war again, scuffles for leadership in both the Vaults and the Legion, and more revelations via flashback as to what Hank and his cohorts were up to in the past.  Cooper and Lucy are briefly on the outs with each other when their priorities clash.  Everybody makes some incremental progress - most notably Lucy, who becomes more comfortable with violence on her quest to bring her father to justice - but mostly it feels like we're playing the side quests.  

Eight episodes is enough to build up some stakes, so that the big, violent, season finale feels kind of meaningful, and one of the major characters gets a pretty good exit.  And that's not too bad for a show like this, which is still very dependent on the spectacle and the action.  The shock value of the gore and black humor have worn off a bit though, so this season isn't as fun.  However, it's still fun enough that I plan to keep watching.  

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"The Boys," Year Five

Parts of "The Boys" fandom seem to have vocally turned against the show in its last season, which is getting weirdly common with genre media these days.  I find this a little mystifying, because "The Boys" has been pretty consistent in quality throughout its whole run, and has even been released on a reasonable schedule - five seasons across seven years.  My pet theory is that it's the same old story.  Some of the fans expected the show to be something that it never was, and handled the disappointment badly.  "The Boys" did decrease in quality the longer it went on, ran short on ideas, started repeating itself, and had to juggle the same issues that all long-running shows do.  Still, I thought it ended just fine - better than "Supernatural," or "Preacher," other genre shows from the same creators.

The fifth season has its ups and downs.  Like "Daredevil: Born Again," events in "The Boys" mirror current events in 2026 to a startling degree.  However, "The Boys" has been purposefully reflecting the rise of MAGA and the alt right since the beginning, with Homelander standing in for Donald Trump.  Still, it's wild how some of the extreme escalations in Homelander's tyrannical behavior look an awful lot like what the Trump administration is actually doing, starting with our heroes incarcerated in a "freedom camp" in the season premiere.  The season's biggest storyline involves The Boys hunting for the means to create a plague that will only affect people with superpowers, and to prevent Homelander from obtaining Compound V, a substance that will potentially give him immortality.  After establishing total control over the US government, Homelander finds he's still miserable, so he turns to religion.  With the help of the superpowered televangelist, Oh Father (Daveed Diggs), he decides to create a new American belief system with Homelander himself as the supreme being.  

Beyond this point, there will be spoilers.

I suspect that one of the reasons certain fans of "The Boys" were so unhappy is that this season, is that it stays pretty small scale throughout.  There's no epic spectacle, no mass casualty events, and a fairly modest amount of property damage.  We do get our big showdown in the last episode, but it's not any more impressive than the showdowns we've seen in previous seasons.  The pacing is also fairly slow and meandering, not really building up to a major climax.  Instead, the season could be called a collection of false-starts, abrupt endings, and lots of indulgent nonsense that the creators wanted to try while they still had the chance.  There's an episode that's essentially a bunch of one-shot character shorts that at one point involves a lot of random celebrity cameos and a few "Supernatural" alums.  It's also very apparent that the creators are setting up storylines for other shows in "The Boys" universe - we're at three spinoffs so far.  This means some characters like Solider Boy really wear out their welcome, and nobody bothers to explain who any of these kids from the "Gen V" show are.  

Still, I was satisfied with the way things shook out, even if the season felt like it was running short of material.  This time there is no more pulling of punches or ducking out on the consequences.  The bill comes due and there are a lot of major character deaths.  Some of them should have probably happened earlier, but none of them feel cheap.  Endings are difficult, and I thought that the showrunners did the right thing choosing to focus on the characters instead of the carnage.  My favorite storylines this year had to do with the Vought toadies like Ashley and Firecracker dealing with their complicity in Homelander's reign of terror.  Ashley becoming Vice President and literally growing a second face on the back of her head (Who has her own personality!  And is telepathic!) is so much fun. 

Sure, there are missteps.  Everything involving Soldier Boy and Sage is pretty underwhelming.  Kimiko being able to talk felt kind of pointless, though clearly it needed to happen.  I wish some of the big character moments, like Hughie finally standing up to Butcher, were given some better buildup.  Honestly, I haven't been very invested enough in the show since the first season, so its slipping quality simply didn't bother me much.  The ending was telegraphed long in advance, and the fact that they stuck it was all I really wanted.          

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My Top Ten Episodes of 2006-2007

Below, find my top ten episodes for the 2006-2007 television season below, in no particular order.  And a few spoilers ahead, including that one episode of "The Wire."  I'm also cheating and counting a certain two-parter as a single episode.

30 Rock, "Black Tie" - Let's start off with the episode of "30 Rock" where we meet Jack's ex-wife, played by Isabell Rossellini, and Paul Reubens shows up as a degenerate Habsburg prince.  This was the first episode of the show that really clicked for me - the absurdity, the character dynamics, and of course the amazing use of the guest stars.  This is also the episode that got closest to putting Jack and Liz together, which thankfully never went anywhere.

Heroes, "Company Man" - The first season of "Heroes" was a phenomenon, and the best episode of that season was the spotlight episode for Jack Coleman's shady Noah Bennet character.  Written by Bryan Fuller, it's a villain/antihero origin story that shows how Bennet operates as a morally ambivalent agent of "The Company," who is nonetheless a good father who will make big sacrifices as needed.  Alas, the show was never this strong again.  

Battlestar Galactica, "The Occupation" - I really liked the New Caprica arc.  This season premiere clues us in on what's been going on with all the characters, and the new status quo and conflicts that have developed.  Gaius is a collaborator, Tigh is leading the resistance, and Starbuck is in prison under the thumb of a Callum Keith Rennie Cylon who is in love with her.  Lots of real world parallels and gutsy ideas are in play here that I really enjoyed. 

Dexter, "Born Free" - This episode was spoiled for me, as I didn't see it until the network broadcast in 2008, but I adored it.  The first season of "Dexter" is still probably the best one, and the truth about the Ice Truck Killer was one of the show's best reveals.  The performances are key to the episode's intensity, with Michael C. Hall and Christian Camargo taking no prisoners as a season's worth of tensions finally all pay off in the bloodiest way possible.    

Doctor Who, "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood" - And here's that two-parter.  What would happen if the Doctor became human?  And in the face of an implacable threat, what would it mean to sacrifice that human existence?  This would be my pick for the best David Tennant era "Doctor Who" story, where the Doctor barely appears, but the consequences of his actions are far-reaching and deeply impactful for everyone involved.

How I Met Your Mother, "Slap Bet" - Let me clarify that this is the first "Slap Bet" episode, the one that sets up all the ones that followed and where Lily is appointed Slap Bet Commissioner. However, the highlight of the episode is the Robin Sparkles reveal, which is such a wonderful, nostalgic bit of nonsense that is somehow both celebratory of and deeply insulting to Canada.   This is likely the best episode of the show, just based on all the callbacks to it. 

Venture Bros. "Guess Who's Coming to State Dinner?"- It came down to this or "Escape to the House of Mummies Part II," but I'm going with the State Dinner based on the quality of the dialogue and the character interactions.  I may have never laughed harder than at Mrs. Manstrong's come-ons to Brock, or Dean being possessed by the Ghost of Abraham Lincoln.  What's certain is that  I can never watch "The Manchurian Candidate" with a straight face again.  

Extras, "David Bowie" - It's one thing for David Bowie to put in a guest appearance on your sitcom.  It is quite another to have him show up to compose your own personal diss track and lead a sing-along insulting you to your face.  Of course, Ricky Gervais wrote the lyrics himself.  I wasn't a regular viewer of "Extras," but this episode and the clip of Bowie's appearance achieved near-universal acclaim almost instantly, and still brings a smile to my face.

Lost, "Through the Looking Glass"  - "We have to go back!"

The Wire, "Final Grades" - The fourth season of "The Wire" is one of the best seasons of television ever made, bar none.  I was completely gutted the first time I saw the finale, and the fates of the four boys we'd been following all year were revealed.  Never was it more apparent that the kids never had a chance, only reaching good outcomes through extraordinary intervention.  And in the case of Carver and Randy, even that wasn't enough.  

Honorable Mention

The Lost Room

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"Invincible," Year Four

Spoilers for the first three seasons ahead.

I'm having some trouble with "Invincible."  I've become convinced that the show probably peaked with the first season.  There's plenty of interesting stuff that happens this year, as Mark and Nolan reconnect to wage war against the Viltrumites.  There are more allies to be gathered and new villains to be revealed.  However, an awful lot of time is also spent on Nolan's apology tour, as he starts to make amends with Debbie, Mark, and Oliver.  And while I appreciate that "Invincible" is still committed to portraying all of Mark's personal relationships with something approaching realism, it still bothers me that the show has spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to walk back Nolan's betrayal, arguably the defining moment of the entire show.  And the show is worse for it.

It's not that three seasons isn't long enough to pull off this kind of development, but "Invincible" is much better at being a superhero action show than it is at being a melodrama.  During the big emotional showdowns the vocal performances are very good, but visually the characters are noticeably static and there's hardly any change at all in lighting or composition or shot choice to help sell the intensity.  "Invincible" has been cutting corners with its animation from the beginning in order to keep the production timeline reasonable, but I felt it more this season.  There are several flying scenes where the limited animation is especially egregious.  It's hard not to notice that the character designs of new characters like The Grand Regent Thragg (Lee Pace), rebel leader Thaedus (Peter Cullen) and new recruit Tech Jacket (Zoey Deutch) are very derivative of other characters.  

Many of the writing choices this year struck me as off.  While I liked some of the individual episodes, there's a real head-scratcher in "Hurm," which is spent exploring the Under Realm, the show's version of Hell that is populated by supernatural creatures.  It might be setting up something further down the line, but feels like a strange digression the way it's placed in the season.  The Guardians show up for two early episodes, set up a big cliffhanger, and disappear until presumably next year.  The most interesting subplot is actually about Eve having trouble with her powers, and big chunks of that take place completely offscreen.  I'm glad that Debbie gets more of the spotlight, but her wonderfully cathartic scenes with Nolan wind up being seriously undercut by where the story goes in the last episode.  I haven't read all of the source material, but I have the same terrible feeling that I had with a lot of cartoons growing up when they were about to do something that drove me crazy - moving back to the original status quo, and resetting the board even where it doesn't make sense to.  Maybe it won't happen.  I really, really hope it doesn't. 

I know some viewers are only here for the outrageous level of violence that "Invincible" regularly delivers.  I don't think this gets remotely as gory as the third season, but the action fiends should be satisfied.  There are many more Viltrumite-on-Viltrumite battles, and the premiere episode had a pretty gnarly take on an alien invasion that I enjoyed.  Those who have been waiting for a full scale Viltrumite war might come away a little disappointed, however.   Despite spending so much of the prior seasons setting up the Viltrumites as an implacable threat, when push comes to shove they almost feel like underdogs in the fight.  It was akin to preparing for the Galactic Empire, and finding out the enemy is a single terrorist cell - it's still bad, but much more manageable.  

I still like "Invincible" enough that I'm going to stick it out until the end, but I've had to adjust expectations.  That relentless sense of narrative momentum from the first season is probably not coming back.  We're never going to get a better villain than Nolan on this show because it was the family connection and the deception that really made the twist hurt.  And now Nolan is more akin to a redeemed antihero, and watching him is no longer very fun or frightening.  I still want to see where Mark and Eve's stories go, but Nolan's wearing out his welcome.  I hope to see less of him from here on out, as it's already been established that "Invincible" works perfectly well without him.

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