"The Phoenician Scheme" Feels Familiar

There's absolutely nothing new about "The Phoenician Scheme" if you've seen any of Wes Anderson's recent films, though at this point I think that's part of the appeal.  The vast ensemble includes many actors who have appeared in Anderson projects, especially from the casts of "Asteroid City," and "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More," but the lead is a relative newcomer to the Anderson universe.  Benicio Del Toro, who has only previously appeared in "The French Dispatch," plays the ruthless business mogul and arms dealer Zsa-Zsa Korda.  He's one of the usual Anderson patriarchs, a man of great ego going through a midlife crisis, and trying to reconnect with his daughter before it's too late.  That daughter, a deadpan novitiate nun named Liesl, is played by Mia Threapleton, in what is easily her biggest film role to date.  Another newcomer is Michael Cera as a Norwegian entomologist named Bjorn, who is roped into the adventure.  

So, immediately the Anderson film that "The Phoenician Scheme" most closely resembles is "The Royal Tenenbaums," which was also about a terrible father trying to pull off a series of elaborate schemes while struggling with the fact that he may want to become a better person.  A lot of the story beats feel recycled and derivative, but fortunately the characters do not. After a near-death experience and very Fellini-inspired visions of the afterlife (Bill Murray plays God, naturally), Korda sets off on a globetrotting journey across multiple Mediterranean countries to gather funds for a massive infrastructure project that will either bankrupt or massively enrich him.  Liesl, who wants nothing to with him, is incentivized to come along as his newly designated heir, because Korda has promised to help her get revenge against the man responsible for the death of her mother - probably Korda's evil half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch in a ridiculous fake beard).  Questions of spirituality are considered, not in much depth, but still I appreciated the attempt.

There's a very cartoonish quality to "The Phoenician Scheme" that I appreciated.  I don't mean the artificiality of the art design and cinematography typical of most Wes Anderson films, which only seems to have gotten more pronounced over time.  It's the humor that I want to highlight, because there's more of it here than usual - slapstick fight scenes, silly visual gags, and a few sublime moments of Looney Toons logic that I don't want to detail too much for fear of spoiling anything.  There's a running gag where Korda brings along a fruit crate of hand grenades to every meeting, offering them to each new host and potential investor as gifts.  There's the gradual escalation in the amount of weaponry everyone is carrying, and Liesl picking up new vices as the film goes on.  I don't think that this is one of Anderson's better films on a story level, but I found myself laughing more consistently than I have at any of his efforts since "The Grand Budapest Hotel."

Benicio Del Toro is an actor I've had some trouble with over the years.  He has the right energy for an Anderson hero, with his hangdog expression and aptitude for surrealism, but it took a long time for me to warm up to him, really almost until the end of the film.  I also can't tell if Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera are actually good in this movie or not, because their characters are so stylized, but they play along with enthusiasm, which is enough.  And if you're not a fan of the leads, there's a familiar face around every corner to discover - Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks as basketball playing businessman, Richard Ayoade as a classy revolutionary, Rupert Friend as a government agent, Scarlett Johansson as a strong-willed utopian, and many more.

"The Phoenician Scheme" has been greeted with a shrug in critical circles, and I understand why.  This is Anderson's third major project in three years, and while his filmmaking looks as good as it ever has, he's starting to come across as very predictable and overly familiar.  The techniques and tricks that were so appealing in "The Grand Budapest Hotel" a decade ago don't have the same effect anymore, and Anderson shows no interest in pursuing new subject matter or new points of view.  I enjoyed "The Phoenician Scheme" very much, and a lot of effort clearly went into its creation, but I can't help feeling that Wes Anderson is spinning his wheels, but losing momentum.

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My Top Ten Episodes of "Lost"

There are 121 hours of "Lost" that aired over six years, with a scale of production and a level of quality that network television has rarely been able to match.  I don't think I can count myself a fan of the series, as I've often been at odds with the show's storytelling methods and thematic preoccupations.  However, after experiencing all of its highs and lows, I can say I admire it greatly for its considerable achievements.  

As always, episodes are unranked, but listed below by airdate.  Very big spoilers below.

"Walkabout" - "Lost" sure loved its plot twists, and one of the earliest and most successful was revealing that John Locke was paralyzed before coming to the island.  More than that, the whole episode slowly reveals that the confident mystery man who seems to have a leg up on the other survivors was actually a miserable nobody before the island.  Locke had one of the wildest and most unlikely arcs out of anyone in the show, and this was a fantastic starting point.  

"Numbers" - Hurley, however, is my favorite character.  His first flashback episode introduces the magic numbers that seem to guide his fate and bring misfortune wherever they pop up.  His personal journey from directionless schlub to lottery winner to man-on-the-run-from-a-curse makes for one of the most entertaining hours of the early years of "Lost."  The island sequences with the search for Rousseau and the antics with the traps are also a great time.

"Exodus" - Most of the "Lost" season finales are multi-hour deals that feature a lot of big spectacle and action set pieces.  If I have to be specific here, I'm singling out the very last hour where the hatch is opened and the raft is blown up.  It's absolutely the best cliffhanger the show ever came up with, and I'm still upset that the Michael and Walt storyline went so sideways in future seasons after the setup we got here.  The flashbacks all coalescing together was also very satisfying.  

"One of Them" - Sayid was one of the show's most morally interesting characters in the beginning, as this episode reveals his past as an Iraqi soldier who picked up some scary enhanced interrogation skills over the years.  He uses them to get answers out of the slippery Henry Gale, whose allegiances weren't confirmed at this point in the show.  Naveen Andrews and Michael Emerson's performances are both fantastic, and I wish they'd gotten more episodes like this to show it. 

"Tricia Tanaka is Dead" - Another episode with Hurley flashbacks, centering on his difficult relationship with his deadbeat dad.  However, this episode is on the list for the island storyline this time.  It's a classic filler plot, but it's such an unexpected pleasure.  Hurley, Jin, Charlie, and Sawyer find an old VW camper van and beer, and just have a guys' hangout episode.  Nothing much actually happens, except watching these four bond and get into trouble together, and it's perfect.  

"D.O.C." - I had to have a Jin and Sun episode, because simply having these two on the show was a big risk for "Lost."  Also, I love that the creators stuck to their guns and presented their flashbacks in Korean with subtitles.  "D.O.C." is from Sun's POV, building on events previously seen from Jin's POV, revealing another layer of secrets between the two in their complicated relationship.  Yunjin Kim was quietly one of the show's best performers, and this was a great showcase for her.

"Through the Looking Glass" - The third season finale was the best of the show's big action spectaculars.  It pulled off multiple major twists, gave us a satisfying goodbye for Dominic Monaghan's Charlie, and "Not Penny's Boat" and "We have to go back!" instantly became catchphrases.  As the show went on, a lot of the conflicts between the various groups on the island became increasingly contrived, but here the storylines were still very well set up and easy to follow.

"The Constant" - I was conflicted as to whether to include this, because while it's widely considered one of the best episodes of the show, the character of Desmond Hume doesn't do much for me.  However, if I had to pick any episode to explain what "Lost" is all about, it would have to be this one - exactly the right mix of mystery, science-fiction, spirituality, and sentimental romance.  And kudos to Sonya Walger, who I haven't given enough props for playing the eternally patient Penny.

"Dr. Linus" - I enjoyed all of the "flash sideways"  stories, and particularly the one for Ben Linus.  It does such a great job of presenting him with a new moral test that echoes the previous one, in an entirely different context, and making it compelling.  I like that the conclusion is bittersweet, with the Linuses ironically unsatisfied for having made the right choices.  The way Arzt and Alex are used is perfect, and it's always a treat to have another William Atherton villain.  

"The End" - I understand why the finale was considered controversial when it originally aired.  The amount of sentiment and the vague spiritual business with the church reunions could have been pure hokum.  However, after all this time, it felt like the show had earned this kind of resolution, even if it was only a fantasy of one.  And it was very gratifying that the right guy was left in charge.

Honorable Mentions: "Pilot," "The Other 48 Days," "Live Together, Die Alone," "There's No Place Like Home," "The Incident," "Ab Aeterno."

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"Lost," Years Five and Six

Spoilers ahead.

After hitting the low points in season four, I binged a lot of the last two seasons of "Lost" just to get to the ending as quickly as possible.  And fortunately, I thought they were a big improvement.  There were still too many characters to keep track of, too many time-wasting conceits, and I'm not a fan of some of the explanations for the island's mysteries that the writers came up with.  However, I was happily surprised by how many answers were offered, and how much effort went into all the worldbuilding and timeline juggling to make sure that everything more or less fit together.  In retrospect, I think a lot of the trouble with season four definitely came from the writers' strike, because the whole season feels like it's setting up season five without much payoff for too long.

"The Constant," which was the first unstuck-in-time episode, ended up being a template of sorts for much of season five, where John Locke and several other survivors are sent back and forth through time.  Or maybe the whole island is time traveling.  This allows the writers to fill in a lot of the gaps about the DHARMA initiative, the Others, and finally reveal that two quasi-magical beings, Jacob (Mark Pelligrino) and the Man in Black (Titus Welliver), and their rivalry, have been behind most of the conflicts from the start.  There's also a three year time jump and the cast being split into two major groups to add more complications.  Season six introduced the "flash sideways" universe that I thought was a fantastic way of bringing back departed characters and doing "what if" stories that gave us more insights on key figures like Ben Linus and John Locke.  I found these more compelling than the big season six goal to choose Jacob's successor and keep the Man in Black from escaping the island.

I understand that the sudden shift in these last seasons to embrace magic and spirituality were not popular with some fans, but considering that we were dealing with smoke monsters, time travel, and immortal Spaniards, only so much could be explained away by special electromagnetism and secret science experiments.  The important thing was that once the writers decided everything was magic, they leaned into it.  All the mystery figures from the prior seasons were much more interesting once their histories were actually fleshed out and all the dots connected.  Several characters that I'd written off early, like Miles and Richard, got spotlight episodes that made me reevaluate them.  I'm a little unsatisfied with the fate of John Locke, but the structure of season six meant we got to have it both ways and Terry O'Quinn got to play two totally different characters.  

Still, "Lost" kept biting off more than it could chew nearly all the way to the end.  New characters Ilana (Zuleikha Robinson) and Zoe (Sheila Kelley) feel like substitutes for other characters that the writers regretted killing off too early, and their actors seem to resemble other actors who the show perhaps couldn't get back as regulars.  Lance Reddick, Hiroyuki Sanada and John Hawkes show up in a few episodes, only to be utterly wasted.  It was wonderful to see all the prior cast members who were brought back for the finale episodes, but it's glaringly obvious that two season one regulars weren't in that big church tableaux in the end.  Malcolm David Kelley at least made it into the DVD epilogue.     

As is typical with shows that go on for as long as "Lost," I eventually came around on most of the major characters.  Jack and Kate will never be my favorites, but their actors both got to do some good work.  Breaking up the main love triangle helped a lot - James and Juliet are way more compelling, and the actors actually have chemistry with each other!  Sun and Jin remain my favorite "Lost" couple though.  Claire finally got to be an active character after a season-long break.  Ben Linus getting a redemption arc was great.  Desmond and Faraday work much better as side characters, and it was great to see Hurley get his due.  Not enough Sayid, but there is never enough Sayid. 

  

I watched the finale live as it aired originally in 2010.  Because I hadn't been a regular viewer, I didn't get much out of it, naturally.  This time around, I got plenty of dopamine hits from all the callbacks and reunions and montages.  It's all shamelessly maudlin, but exactly what I expected considering that so much of "Lost" is a soap opera, even with all the expensive action scenes and tropical locations.  And I was able to enjoy it this time around on that level.  Of course the plot doesn't all make sense - it never made sense.  But emotionally, I was satisfied with where the plane ultimately landed.  

My Top Ten list of individual "Lost" episodes is coming in a few days.

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The Hell of "Baby Invasion"

So, what has Harmony Korine been up to lately?  I ask this question, not because I enjoy Harmony Korine films, but because he's one of those directors who has consistently turned out interesting, challenging, and very topical work that is like nothing else out there.  I don't particularly enjoy his latest movie either, but it's going to keep me up at night.

The last Korine film that I watched was 2019's "The Beach Bum."  I decided to skip 2023's "Aggro Dr1ft," which was shot entirely in infrared photography, and was the first production of Korine's media company EDGLRD.  "Baby Invasion" is the second, which reveals that Korine has dived headfirst into the world of online gaming for inspiration.  You can tell this is the same filmmaker who gave us "Gummo" and "Spring Breakers," using minimal plotting and shoestring production values to tell his tales of alienated youth.  However, "Baby Invasion" is also a film that takes place inside fully artificial environments, and versions of reality subjected to so many filters and twisted gamification systems that it's impossible to tell what's actually real.  

 

We start with a brief clip of an interview with a game developer who never takes off her VR headset, telling us about how her planned "Baby Invasion" first-person shooter game was stolen, hacked, and loosed on the dark web.  Then we switch to the POV of one of the players of this game who is livestreaming.  They're only ever identified as "Yellow," and the actor credited as Anonymous.    The objective of "Baby Invasion" is to infiltrate the homes of the wealthy and rob them.  The players are heavily armed and have their faces digitally replaced with the faces of happy babies in real time.  From the opening clip, we know that the game has inspired copycat crimes, but it's impossible to tell if what we're seeing Yellow play is just the game, a real crime that has been gamified with Baby Invasion graphics, or something else.  

There's almost no plot to speak of.  We watch Yellow and their fellow players break into luxurious homes, terrorize the inhabitants, and collect loot and bonuses, which are helpfully highlighted with dollar signs or helpful neon signage.  There's a barely readable chat feed forever scrolling along one side of the screen, and heavy electronica music constantly playing, provided by British musician Burial.  Yellow's view is often partially obstructed by text boxes delivering instructions with odd syntax that seem to have been translated from a foreign language.  On top of that, the images of the victims Yellow sees often have overlays blocking out their faces or whole bodies, making them easier to treat as targets.  In the disturbing climax, a woman Yellow is interrogating has her voice muted, likely to remove sounds of screaming.  There are also occasional, hallucinatory videos of rabbits that keep appearing in parts of the landscape, perhaps indicating a glitch or serving as a reminder that this world isn't real.   

Whether the crimes are really happening or not is beside the point.  What Korine is interested in is the way that Yellow views the world through the game, and all the ways that the game enables their alienation and sociopathy.  "Baby Invasion" is very aware that gaming is now the dominant form of popular media, and Korine has spent a great deal of effort to capture the particular idiosyncrasies of gaming visual language in detail.  I don't play first person shooters, but I immediately recognized the targeting systems, the livestream display, and even the cutesy animation at the bottom of the screen that would occasionally show up to depict chibi versions of the players moving from one location to another.

Korine's provocative nature continues to shine through - there's one sequence where AI generated imagery is prominently used - but at the same time his aims have never been more accessible or transparent.   Unlike in his previous films, where the images of exuberant deviancy could be beautiful and even transcendent, the views of the "Baby Invasion" game offer only endless horror no matter how much it tries to contort itself into more pleasing shapes.  And as much as the game dehumanizes the victims, it dehumanizes the players even more so.    

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The First Five of "The Studio"

"The Studio" should be a series that's right up my alley.  It's a Hollywood spoof that focuses on the executives who are in charge of greenlighting and putting together the deals that get movies made.  The fictional Continental Studios is run by newly promoted Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), a film lover who wants to make great art but also has to deliver profits.  The cast is full of funny actors - Catherine O'Hara plays Matt's mentor, Chase Sui Wonders and Ike Barinholtz play film executives, and Kathryn Hahn plays the head of marketing.  But more importantly, there's the cavalcade of guest stars, including Martin Scorsese and Charlize Theron, who show up to play versions of themselves.  I love movies and stories about moviemaking, so I should love "The Studio," right?

Well… it's fun to watch smart, informed, movie-obsessed people have conversations and debates about all the things that I get obsessed with, like directors shooting on film, actors discussing press tour schedules, and how blatant the remakes are getting.  The episode about shooting a single-take "oner" actually being shot as a single-take oner itself is geeky in the best way.  Sometimes following the production drama and dealmaking going on behind the scenes of a movie can be more fun than watching the movie itself.  So, even if all the projects being put together are fictional, "The Studio" has plenty of juicy material to work with.  However, the show doesn't have much of an interest in actually depicting movies getting made.  Instead, "The Studio" seems determined to showcase the absolute worst aspects of working in Hollywood in every episode.

To put it bluntly, "The Studio" is a pitch-black comedy that relies almost entirely on cringe humor and anxiety-inducing scenarios where things go very wrong, similar to "Veep."  All the characters are awful in their own ways, with Matt usually being the worst.  He's under soul-crushing pressure, hates making people unhappy, and frequently lets his selfish fanboy tendencies get the better of him.  This means he'll get himself into awful situations like in the pilot, where he agrees to make a Kool-Aid movie, even though he doesn't want to, and sets up a deal to make an expensive Martin Scorsese film, without really thinking through the consequences.  Initially it seems like Matt has some talent as an executive, but we only ever see him at his worst in subsequent episodes.  

The actors are great and the writing is pretty sharp, but I found the constant negativity about working in Hollywood depressing.  Frankly, this isn't the kind of humor I respond to, because the anxiety overwhelms the absurdity for me, and I can't enjoy it.  After five episodes, the only one I really liked was "The Note," because it allowed guest stars Anthony Mackie and Ron Howard to play really ridiculous versions of themselves, and the core cast were all being stupid in very relatable ways.  I understand why people working in the industry like "The Studio," because it does away with all the mythologizing about show business, and reveals all the pettiness and egomania underneath.  I'm sure that creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have been in many similar situations, and are taking the chance to work through some frustrations.  I, however, don't have much patience for this when the frustration is all there all there seems to be.     

Hanging around other film fans, it can be fun to criticize the movie execs and second guess what projects got greenlit, and who got attached to which project.  I do appreciate "The Studio" for humanizing the people who actually make these calls, and reminding us all that nobody sets out to make a bad movie.  However, as someone who does love movies, I can't help feeling that Rogen and Goldberg are leaning way too hard on the cringe, excoriating Hollywood to the point where it gets kinda dull.  I also think that they're sabotaging themselves by not letting their characters display any depth, or get any wins whatsoever.  The more we learn about the main characters, the more miserable everyone seems, and I just don't find this entertaining.  

So, with full acknowledgement that this is an extremely good version of this kind of cringe comedy, I'm bowing out after five episodes of "The Studio."  I may be back in the future for certain guest stars, but  I know when a show is definitely not for me.

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Reviving "Final Destination"

I don't count myself a fan of the "Final Destination" movies.  I know I've watched the first two, but don't recall much about them except the odd bits of trivia.  I watched the newest installment, "Final Destination: Bloodlines," not really expecting much beyond the well-established formula of photogenic teenagers cheating death, and then being dispatched by gory Rube Goldberg-style kills, one by one.  However, I really enjoyed it.  I enjoyed it enough that I started asking myself why I had enjoyed this particular "Final Destination" movie when I hadn't much liked any of the others, or the similar "The Monkey" from earlier this year.

First, the "Final Destination" franchise operates on the macabre premise that audiences like watching people die in creative and terrible ways.  For me, however, the kills by themselves are not enough, and presented in the wrong tone, I find them too bleak and nihilistic to enjoy.  I don't want to pick on "The Monkey," because feel-bad media has its place, but that was a movie that focused too much on the mindless, arbitrary nature of death, where the sick humor got downright disturbing, and the characters weren't fun to root for.  "Final Destination" is designed to be more conventionally entertaining.  The  series has always been very consistent about clear setups and payoffs.  Most of the deaths are either shown to be a deserved comeuppance or inadvertently caused by the victim themselves in some way.  We frequently see the action from the POV of death itself, a disembodied force that is never personified, but allows us a God's eye view to follow the design of the kills as they come about from seemingly random confluences of events.  So, it's less about who is going to die as much as discovering how the deaths are going to happen.

"Final Destination" exists in the same kind of hyperreality as Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons, where cartoonishly broad characterizations and a certain amount of mental distancing from the consequences of the carnage are baked into the formula, the same way it is with older slasher films that kill off most of their casts.  What "Final Destination: Bloodlines" does a little differently  is to give the characters slightly more nuance by making them all part of the same family.  The main protagonist is Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who has nightmares of her grandmother Iris (Brec Bassinger in flashbacks,  Gabrielle Rose in the present) being killed in a mass casualty event in 1968.  It turns out that Iris was supposed to die, and has secretly been living in isolation to stave off her demise for decades.  Death hasn't just been killing off the intended victims of the event, but also their offspring, so this means Stefani, her brother Charlie (Teo Briones), and cousins Erik (Richard Harmon), Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) and Julia (Gabrielle Rose) are marked for death.  The existing relationships and family dynamics add just enough intrigue to make the traditional collection of doomed teenagers a little more compelling to follow, and it's nice to have a reason for death coming after them in a specific order.  

However, the characters are still fairly flimsy horror movie creatures who we're never intended to have much emotional investment in, except as vehicles for black humor and irony.  A subplot that absolutely does not work is the awkward attempt to have Stefani reconnect to her estranged mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt).  Instead, most of the film's resources are spent on those Rube Goldberg kill sequences, which are rendered with great care and attention to detail.  "Bloodlines" didn't cost that much more than any of the previous installments, but every aspect of the filmmaking feels like it's been upgraded.  The opening premonition scene with the mass casualty is thrilling stuff.  The directors, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, do a great job of playing with their audience's expectations, deploying fake-outs and misdirections, adding big doses of humor, and really amping up the anticipation for each terrible tragedy.  They have the viewers hyperfocused on pennies, shards of glass, and even an innocent game of Jenga, trying to figure out how it's all going to go fatally wrong.  

The one person in the film who is not disposable is the coroner William Bludworth (Tony Todd), a recurring character in the franchise.  The filmmakers have treated him with great care in order to give Tony Todd a proper sendoff, which came across well, even though I didn't remember Bludworth from the previous movies at all.  Apparently there are a lot of Easter eggs and references in the film for "Final Destination" fans, but they're subtle enough that us normies wouldn't notice or feel like we're missing something.  I still have no interest in going back to watch the other "Final Destination" movies, but I'd be happy to have a look at the next one if they keep going in this vein.        

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"Severance," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.

So, things are a little different on the Severed Floor since the last time we saw the Macro Data Refinement (MDR) crew. Lumon tries replacing everybody in the premiere episode except for Mark, which doesn't work because Mark realizes he has leverage and refuses to continue at Lumon without his innie friends.  Ms. Cobel has been removed - maybe given a new job, maybe fired - and Milchick is the new supervisor.  He has his own assistant too, a sinister child employee called Ms Huang (Sarah Bock).  Other Lumon employees like enforcer Mr. Drummond (Darri Olafsson) and the head of Mammalians Nuturable, Lorne (Gwendoline Christie), start popping up.  We meet more people from the main characters' outie lives too, like Dylan's wife Gretchen (Merritt Wever), Burt's husband Fields (John Noble), and Helena's father, Jame Eagan (Michael Silberry).   

There's a greater tension hanging over everybody this year, because we know that the Lumon leadership wants something out of Mark, and are willing to play nice until they get it, but neither Mark or anyone else in the MDR department  have any idea what this is.  Multiple other parties, including ex-Lumon employees like Burt and Reghabi (Karen Aldridge), are interacting with the outie characters in pursuit of their own agendas.  The innies, however, are slowly but surely discovering their own wants and needs, which increasingly come into conflict with the desires of their outie selves.  We get some really compelling character drama this year as the innie and outie worlds keep colliding in more interesting ways.  The bizarre absurdity of Lumon's corporate culture also continues to be a highlight.  This year, we're treated to a wilderness retreat, more weird animatronic figures, disturbing artwork, an industrial video with celebrity cameos, and a visit from the Choreography and Merriment department in the nail-biting finale.       

While I'm glad that the show is more popular, I don't think that the increased scrutiny of "Severance" is doing it any favors.  This is a show full of mysteries, where theorizing about the weird cult of Kier and the intentions of the Lumon leadership are part of the fun, but in the end these parts of the show feel pretty arbitrary.  "Severance" is  more concerned with its corporate nightmare vibes than with intricate plotting or unravelling conspiracies.  This season really boils down to a handful of characters with opposing interests, all trying to pursue what they want.  However, it gets complicated because some of those characters are sharing the same bodies.  I was really torn between innie Mark and outie Mark by the end of the season, and ended up rooting for Gemma.  The love triangle (or pentagram?) didn't come off as well as it could have, though, because we got so little of Helly this year.  Other characters like Irving and Cobel also felt shortchanged.  I can see a lot of the viewers being frustrated that the major revelations come so slowly - there's a reintegration subplot that doesn't seem to go anywhere, and two episodes that follow side characters late in the season, stalling some of the momentum - but the show is really good at paying things off.  There are some missteps along the way, but the highs are very high.

I suspect, however, that "Severance" can't go on for much longer at this level of quality unless it fundamentally changes its premise.  The fragile world of the Severed Floor is so fascinating because it feels so temporary and fleeting.  But beyond that, we're starting to come to some natural endpoints.  Burt and Irving's storyline, for instance, seems to have resolved itself.  There are only so many times the employees can quit and be coaxed back to maintain the status quo, and nothing happening outside the Lumon building feels very important anymore.  However, I understand why Dan Erickson and  Ben Stiller are reluctant to move too quickly.  "Severance" has a very particular mood and tone that might not withstand too much meddling with the existing formula.  Riding that thin line between absurd and sinister must be a challenge.  This set of episodes erred on the sinister side more often than not, and I admit that I liked the show better in its first season, when the stakes weren't quite so high, and the liminal strangeness was more pronounced.   

That doesn't mean that "Severance" didn't have a great year, or that I'm not very gung-ho for the next one.  I just want to acknowledge that "Severance" has changed and continues to change as a series, and I'm having to adjust my expectations along with it. The cast is fantastic through and through, with Trammell Tillman as the MVP.  Gemma's episode is one of the most beautifully directed hours of television I've seen this season.  The finale, however, is my favorite for ratcheting up the suspense to unbearable levels, and springing some delightful surprises on the audience.  There really isn't any other show out there right now that can do what "Severance" does.   

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