Review Category: Television

EPISODES 1-6 (WHOLE SEASON)

Nic Pizzolatto’s creation is now in the hands of Issa Lopez as show runner, writer and director for this fourth season, and make no mistake about it Night Country is the best series since the first. A return to the very roots of the show, whilst also boldly embracing some deeper supernatural ideas and otherworldly genre inspirations, Night Country is a darkness-strewn, snowy, Alaskan detective procedural that strikes as sharply and deeply as severe frostbite.

Jodie Foster is Chief Liz Danvers and Kali Reis is Trooper Evangeline Navarro, as the two women are forced back into working together to investigate a particularly strange case of some missing research scientists at a remote outpost, that soon spirals into something that burrows deeper than anyone could possibly imagine and re-opens old cases, events, and wounds, in the process.

From John Carpenter’s The Thing and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Nordic style chilling detective procedurals and elements of the first season of this show, Night Country takes in many influences and delivers a blood-stopping walk into the darkness of isolation, corporate greed, broken humanity, fractured family and stolen culture. Ultimately arriving at a destination both satisfying and interpretive depending on your own beliefs and readings. This is a season full of evil, full of pain, but also with a building hope that escalates from an enticing beginning slowly towards a surprising and incredible finale.

Foster is absolutely phenomenal here, as the beaten down and alone but resilient Danvers, whose chemistry with an impressive and impactful Reis develops beautifully throughout the season. This pairing works so well and, as the chilling case spreads, you are constantly on edge to see their dynamic develop, their backstory filled in and their unenviably difficult and sometimes insurmountable case reach its apex.

There are also some astonishing supporting turns by the likes of Finn Bennett and Christopher Eccleston, though Fiona Shaw may be the showstealer as the reclusive Rose. A character who has perhaps the truest line spoken, “I guess you’re thinking, the worst part is done. It’s not. What comes after, forever, that’s the worst f***ing part.”

Night Country is an early but strong contender for the best television show of 2024. Atmospheric, emotional, thrilling and with a host of performances that are assured awards attention. 

Masterful, satisfying, unexpected and resonant television that wears both the light of hope and belief in something but also the pain of surviving and living on past our trauma. Inter-twined with one hell of a compelling mystery. We really are in the Night Country now, and you just might not want to leave it.

All Six Episodes of True Detective: Night Country are available to watch now on Sky.

A follow-up to the fantastic Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Kevin Smith has seemingly shirked off review bombing to return to the Eternal fold with Revolution. A now-mechanised Skeletor (Mark Hamill, in awe-inspiring form) works as a servant to the Motherboard (Meg Foster) and her superior, the all-conquering Hordak (Keith David). It is up to Prince Adam/He-Man (Chris Wood), Teela (Melissa Benoist), and their allies to quell this latest threat. 

Much like Revelation, Revolution doesn’t skimp on the thrills. Every episode has stratospheric action in abundance. How the animation keeps everything looking fresh while retaining a slightly jagged, aged feel is a magnificent accomplishment. It brings out the best of its characters in the most stupendous, over-the-top moments, exactly like it should. But the rich colour and design also work in the quieter moments, where the conflicts of being that several characters face feel explored with genuine pathos. Skeletor’s origin is brought to life with a gleeful style and is guaranteed to please both new and seasoned fans.

And yet, compared to Revelation, Revolution doesn’t toy with the established order of things. It is happy to return to the tried-and-tested route of an extended brawl between hero and villain. Combined with some hammy dialogue (sometimes very hammy) which feels out of place even for those giving themselves over to the ridiculousness of it all, Revolution descends into a pleasing but unchallenging narrative. This is admittedly not helped by a very short series length, and while a follow-up is definitely hinted at, Revolution on its own feels like a step down from what Smith is really capable of. 

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: REVOLUTION is available on Netflix now. 

Given the problems that have afflicted Fear in its final season, the worry was that everything would unravel at the very moment it all needed to come together. So it’s welcome to be able to report that the writers of this final episode, Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg, have put together the kind of sign-off that the show needed, at least from the point of view of servicing its key characters. The hopes of long-term Fear fans have very clearly loomed large in their consideration, and (with one notable exception) everyone in the main ensemble who’s survived to this point gets an end story.

None of which should be read to mean that The Road Ahead is an inspired farewell. Because it’s not; it’s a messy, flawed and frankly idiotic story that seems unaware of just how nonsensical its main narrative is. But the showrunners do deserve credit for the effort they’ve made to wrangle something coherent out of a mythology that’s long since descended into disorder. They don’t really succeed, but there’s evidence of genuine effort – something that’s been painfully absent in more than a few of this season’s episodes.

Shocked by Troy’s disclosure about her lineage, Tracy has fled into the woods to hide. When Madison – who now sees herself as Tracy’s grandmother – finds her, she tells everyone that the two of them will locate Alicia’s corpse and put Madison’s daughter (and Tracy’s mother) to rest. A confrontation with Luciana and Daniel encourages Tracy to think that Madison might now genuinely want to protect her. When Strand arrives and insists on taking Tracy to PADRE, Madison fires her handgun and attracts a herd of walkers, who lay siege to Luciana’s garage.

The remaining militiamen from Troy’s group have piloted a barge bursting with walkers upriver to PADRE. Panic ensues inside as the undead surround the walls. Prisoner Russell warns of the plan to force the community from the safety of PADRE just as explosions rock the compound. Dwight rallies his troops for a battle to the death, while Strand tries to convince a reluctant Madison to risk everything and join the fight to save PADRE. This sense of entrapment and jeopardy provides the background for the show’s now-signature motifs: characters accusing each other of betrayal, shooting guns at one another, and making and breaking agreements without rhyme or reason.

In terms of the main PADRE story, despite some well-shot nighttime combat, almost all of what follows fails to convince. The defences of this impenetrable fortress, which so many people have died in the struggle to control, give way after a single inbound salvo renders the place uninhabitable. Madison, who’s made the survival of PADRE indivisible from her own redemption, is so preoccupied with thoughts of Alicia that she chooses to stay away as Dwight, his team, and the children fight for their collective lives. After building up the significance of PADRE for countless episodes, the writing team effectively abandons the place with barely a backward glance.

And that carelessness is nothing compared to a pivotal moment in the Madison story that’s so impossibly cheesy that director Michael Satrazemis really should have served it with crackers and chutney. That event is part of Tracy’s implausible storyline, which leads to her reconciliation with Madison (shortly after she attempts to kill her). This culminates in a much-anticipated but far-from-guaranteed reunion and Madison’s elevation to the status of a near-mythical mentor – something already awarded to Alicia.

Throughout this season, Madison has flipped between self-obsessed cynicism and altruistic optimism, and the writers here attempt to slam the brakes on that endless cycle. Alongside that, the ensemble of characters who’ve battled through to this ending are each given their brief reflective moment in the limelight before they head out in different directions to their separate futures. It’s the kind of fan-pleasing send-off that genre showrunners ignore at their peril, and it’s certain to draw plaudits.

But the positive feelings that this might engender should not be allowed to distract attention from the compound failings that have crippled Fear in its later years. The first three seasons of the show offered exciting, innovative and unexpected drama that cast new and different light on the world of the zombie apocalypse. Things then began to unravel as the show stumbled and then lost its way in obsessively exploring what became dramatic cul-de-sacs and dead-ends. The final season has to be judged as the show’s least successful and most infuriating. For The Walking Dead, “the road ahead” must now take the franchise as far as possible from the final resting place of Fear.

New episodes of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD – SEASON 8 premiered on Mondays on AMC in the UK

Read our previous reviews of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD below:

Season 8, Episode 1, REMEMBER WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU
Season 8, Episode 2, BLUE JAY
Season 8, Episode 3, ODESSA
Season 8, Episode 4, KING COUNTY
Season 8, Episode 5, MORE TIME THAN YOU KNOW
Season 8, Episode 6, ALL I SEE IS RED
Season 8, Episode 7, ANTON
Season 8, Episode 8, IRON TIGER
Season 8, Episode 9, SANCTUARY
Season 8, Episode 10, KEEPING HER ALIVE
Season 8, Episode 11, FIGHTING LIKE YOU

The penultimate episode of the final series of Fear, the opening instalment of the closing two-parter, has to carry a huge weight of expectation. The key questions driving the narrative of Fear’s last-ever story arc all need to be answered and decisively settled in these two remaining stories. The fate of PADRE, the battle between Madison’s disparate allies and Troy’s resentful militia, and Madison’s determination to lay the corpse of her daughter Alicia to rest – all these concerns require resolution.

Unfortunately, Fighting Like You buckles under the pressure to deliver. Instead, the showrunners revert to what have become Fear’s storytelling signatures: nonsensical and inattentive plotting, wild lurches in character motivation, and random and ridiculous pivots in almost everyone’s behaviour. This makes for frustrating viewing, which offers precious little return for those who have stuck with Fear to the bitter end, watching every other spin-off from the original series leave it for dead.

Troy’s troops have thawed out his frozen walker army and are rallying the herd for a final decisive assault on PADRE’s defences. When Troy is badly injured after his truck is smashed off the road, he persuades a reluctant Tracy to abandon him and find help. Madison discovers Tracy hiding in her armoured car and cuffs her to the vehicle while she sets off to kill Troy. Strand tries to convince Madison to show mercy and forgiveness, but she insists her vengeance will cleanse them of their rage and allow them to build PADRE in the way that Alicia would have wanted.

To his horror, Madison dispatches Troy’s zombified wife Serena, but relents from taking Troy’s life in return for the promises he makes to bring her peace and allow PADRE to survive. While neither fully trusts the other, they agree to intercept Troy’s right-hand man, Russell and halt the walker herd.

The three writers credited on Fighting Like You (Nick Bernardone, Jacob Pinion and Kelly Jane Costello) set aside a lot of time for one-on-one dialogue, much of it focused on the antagonism between Madison and Troy. One of the heavy-handed themes dominating the second half of series eight is redemption and the question of which survivors deserve a second (and, to be strictly accurate, a third, fourth or fifth) chance to make amends for past crimes.

When a seemingly penitent Troy reveals to Madison the reason behind his loathing for Alicia, he shares the story of his unfortunate wife’s demise. Inspired by Alicia, it was, he suggests, altruism and a belief in the decency of others that sealed her fate. It’s this 180-degree turn in Troy’s account of himself to which everyone else has to respond. Throughout the episode, characters take sides on the issue of whether Troy’s recognition of his own failings is sufficient to win him a ‘do-over’. But this gimmick is not just an unconvincing evolution for Troy, its introduction also means that the threat he poses to PADRE evaporates in his remorse. That’s a pretty odd choice for a show looking for an impressive final showdown.

Yet, the writers cannot keep focused on the issue. Instead, they waste time shoe-horning in the unnecessary return of ex-PADRE boss Crane, who captures Madison and Troy. Crane narrates a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it season four flashback, which is intended to explain Madison’s survival back at the stadium. It’s the answer to a question that, by this point, few viewers are still concerned about, and feels like tick-box scriptwriting. This, in turn, leads to a dismally executed sequence involving a rope bridge over a swamp, which ends with Madison and Troy at risk of drowning in the waterlogged mud beneath. It’s only inserted into the plot to clumsily reinforce the idea that Troy is truly remorseful after Crane’s pointless reinsertion is brought to an abrupt end.

All of which and more is upended in the fumbled final moments, which contain a dubious revelation that will surprise almost no one and a single notable killing. It’s a death robbed of its impact by its flip-a-coin justification and by the fact that it sucks the air out of the plot’s preoccupation with the idea that the guilty are not doomed to re-offend. This is all dismal stuff, like watching a once favourite band blow it on their much-hyped farewell tour. With Fighting Like You grinding through the show’s most well-known riffs, there’s now only the guessable closing number to endure.

New episodes of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD – SEASON 8 premiered on Mondays on AMC in the UK

Read our previous reviews of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD below:

Season 8, Episode 1, REMEMBER WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU
Season 8, Episode 2, BLUE JAY
Season 8, Episode 3, ODESSA
Season 8, Episode 4, KING COUNTY
Season 8, Episode 5, MORE TIME THAN YOU KNOW
Season 8, Episode 6, ALL I SEE IS RED
Season 8, Episode 7, ANTON
Season 8, Episode 8, IRON TIGER
Season 8, Episode 9, SANCTUARY
Season 8, Episode 10, KEEPING HER ALIVE

“This is not the way to end this,” Strand yells at Madison at the episode’s end as she once again storms off on a solo vendetta, leaving everyone else watching her go. With just three instalments of Fear left, it’s hard not to read Strand’s comments as a meta-critique about the series’ own endgame.

This story builds the growing sense of foreboding about just how bad the upcoming two-part finale might be. And, although it’s up against some stiff competition, Keeping Her Alive may just edge it as the worst-ever episode of Fear. It’s a crashing, infuriating failure on every level.

June, Dwight, Sherry and Dove arrive back at PADRE to find that the German émigrés have settled in, and Strand has, as instructed by Madison, assumed command. Learning that Strand has kidnapped Troy’s young daughter Tracy as leverage, a row breaks out over what to do next. Eventually, June and her colleagues prevail, and it’s agreed to hand over both Tracy and Strand in the hope of placating Troy and protecting PADRE from attack. After he engineers an escape from their riverboat transport, Strand and Tracy stumble across Madison, who’s dealing with her rage by battering walkers she lures in with her boom-box.

When Tracy promises she can take Madison to the living corpse of her daughter Alicia, the three of them set off, hoping to evade detection. But other players are also active in the field, including Luciana’s and Daniel’s tanker crews, June’s and Dwight’s posse (now on the hunt for Strand), Troy’s raiders, and a mysterious trio of young women travelling in an infamous armoured car. All of these different roving groups connect and collide as the events of Keeping Her Alive unfold and the fight to settle the future of PADRE takes shape.

But it’s not the scattergun, random plot points in what’s frankly a risible script by Nazrin Choudhury and Calaya Michelle Stallworth that’s the key problem. It’s the usual suspects in too many later-period Fear stories – inexplicable about-turns by characters whose natures and motivations are rewritten on a whim. But here, in episode ten of twelve, those all-too-familiar weaknesses are amplified by showrunners seemingly unconcerned by coherence or credibility and convinced that viewers will recall nothing of the show’s history. As a result, Keeping Her Alive is 50 minutes of really bad television.

Things get off to an implausible start when the PADRE returnees decide to sacrifice Strand on the ridiculous assumption that Troy will be so grateful as to give up on his plan to take their home from them. That makes about as much sense as the way that Strand’s and Tracy’s escape is staged or their fortuitously timed encounter with Madison, the way they ensnare Daniel and Luciana in their hunt, or even the way that Madison’s quest to find Alicia’s cadaver unravels (as allies fall out, split up and reunite – only to start pointing guns at each other again).

No one seems particularly upset that Strand’s and Madison’s reckless decisions lead directly to the slaughter of most of Luciana’s community or that an unhinged Madison comes agonisingly close to being a child killer. All this and more happens while PADRE is left unprotected by its leader (Madison), its stand-in boss (Strand) and its indispensable military commander (Dwight). PADRE’s kids must feel very reassured about their security.

Madison’s obsessive behaviour means it’s hard to maintain empathy over her quest for answers about her daughter’s fate. Tracy’s attempt to trick Madison as to Alicia’s whereabouts generates little tension and serves no real purpose. This surely had to be the last dead-end in her search. This plotline (if not necessarily Alicia) must finally to be laid to rest next week.

In a throwaway line at the end of the battle at her compound, Luciana reveals that Troy’s men didn’t seem to care if they lived or died. But Troy isn’t a messiah on a mission, he’s just a thug with grievances. Are the writers really trying to inject a whole new backstory about a Troy ‘cult’ into the penultimate episode? The arrival of the trio of Alicia acolytes is an equally unearned development – and pointless, as Madison ignores them and steals their truck.

The showrunners may have saved their budget for the finale, but this episode feels particularly cost-conscious. Troy’s ice walker army (don’t ask) looks woeful, while the most significant firefight occurs unseen off-screen. It is just possible that, from this shambolic low point, the current custodians of Fear can launch a finale able to do justice to the themes and aspirations with which the show’s original creators began. But on the evidence here, the odds are against it.

New episodes of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD – SEASON 8 premiere on Mondays on AMC in the UK.

Read our previous reviews of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD below:

Season 8, Episode 1, REMEMBER WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU
Season 8, Episode 2, BLUE JAY
Season 8, Episode 3, ODESSA
Season 8, Episode 4, KING COUNTY
Season 8, Episode 5, MORE TIME THAN YOU KNOW
Season 8, Episode 6, ALL I SEE IS RED
Season 8, Episode 7, ANTON
Season 8, Episode 8, IRON TIGER
Season 8, Episode 9, SANCTUARY