Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing Black Doves; Dark Matter; Dept. Q; Detective Hole; Dexter: Resurrection; Fauda; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; Memory of a Killer; MobLand; Outlander; Paradise; Presumed Innocent; Reacher; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Smoke; Star City; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Tehran;The: Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Night Agent; Your Friends & Neighbors +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Knightfall Season 2: On the Precipice

I haven't had a chance to review each episode of season 2 of Knightfall on the History Channel, but I've seen and much enjoyed all eight episodes. Herewith a review:

First, it's crucial to keep in mind that this series is about the fall - as per the title - and eventual eradication of the Knights Templar, so the arc is bound to be grim on balance. Indeed, the eradication is more imminent than eventual, so the Templars are always on the verge of extinction, with victories and survival itself always wrestled from the jaws of destruction, and always in danger of being undone.

On the side of the Templars this season we have Mark Hamill as Talas, who does just what he does in Star Wars as an aged Luke. His saving of the Templars from burning at the stake in the finale, with the help of the leper order that we saw earlier this season in one of its best episodes, was one of the best scenes of the series.

The general narrative, as it did last year, focuses on three knights in particular - Landry, Tancrede, and Gawain. The three characters are well drawn and well acted by Tom Cullen, Simon Merrells, and Pádraic Delaney. Their story arcs are well developed, too, with Tancrede finding love, Gawain pursuing revenge and then redemption, and Landry, as ever, being the leader even though he no longer formally has that post.

King Phillip of France is the prime opponent, amplifying his killing of his wife, the Queen, last season, because she was also Landry's lover, into an all-out drive to exterminate the Templars. To get this done, he kills the Pope, and gets a new one installed in the Holy See, more likely to support his vengeful quest. His son Prince Louis and his wife, as well as the Princess, play significant roles in the intrigue and (in Louis's case) the battles. The epic conflict of faith, decency, and good verses rapacious evil has inevitable parallels to our own time.

At this point, the series's renewal for a third season is uncertain, much like the future of the Templars themselves in the time period depicted. I'll just say that I really hope the series fares better than the Templars.

See also: Knightfall 1.1: Possibilities ... Knightfall 1.2: Grail and Tinder ... Knightfall 1.3: Baby ... Knightfall 1.4: Parentage ... Knightfall 1.5: Shrewd De Nogaret ... Knightfall 1.6: Turn of Fortunes ... Knightfall 1.7: Landry's Mother ... Knightfall 1.8: Crucial Moves ... Knightfall 1.9: "More Than You Think" ... Knightfall Season 1 Finale: Threading the Needle

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

The Enemy Within 1.12 Razor's Edge

I figured I'd check back in with a review of The Enemy Within, which posted its next-to-last episode of the season on NBC last night. It was a good episode in its own right, and, even better, continued keeping us on the razor's edge about whether Shepherd is really working for us or Tal.

On the specific story last night: I like a Congresswoman who turns out to be former CIA black ops and can tote and shoot a gun with the best of them. One of the most enjoyable facets of The Enemy Within is the way it's been able to introduce compelling new characters.

On the question of Shepherd's loyalty, which is the essence of the series: it seems to me that the only evidence we have of her loyalty to Tal are the conversations she's managed to have with him, by stealing a phone or whatever this season. And I right? Did I miss something? Because if I didn't, there's not all that much reason to think her ultimate loyalty is to Tal. After all, she could've been lying to him in those conversations.

There's of course no doubt that her goals are not identical to the FBI's or Keaton's. Shepherd and Keaton both want Tal dead. And Shepherd, rightly or wrongly, probably rightly, has more confidence in her ability to do that, than she does in Keaton's. Or, at very least, she has more confidence in her ability to think-through how to get Tal. And it's also likely that she's concluded that such a plan requires her to escape FBI confinement at the appropriate time.

That would result in the FBI, including even Keaton, turning against her. I don't see how all of this can be resolved in the one remaining episode, and, at present, there's no word on the fate of the series. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next week, and to seeing a season 2 of The Enemy Within next year.

See also The Enemy Within 1.4: Microsoft AI ... The Enemy Within 1.5: The New Mole ... The Enemy Within 1.7: The Conversation ... The Enemy Within 1.8: Oranges (Think About It) ... The Enemy Within 1.9: CIA vs. FBI

Chernobyl 1.2: The Horror Movie

If I hadn't seen last week's first episode of Chernobyl, and had fallen asleep before the beginning of the second episode on HBO last night, and had woken up a few minutes into the episode, I'd have thought that I was watching a horror movie, or maybe a new apocalyptic series on AMC.

The second episode had all of the trimmings. Almost all the powers-that-be misunderstanding and downplaying the grave threat. A scientist or two, here and there, getting what was happening, urgently trying to alert everyone around them to the danger, being largely ignored. And when they're finally listened to, at least some of the vulnerable populace is evacuated, but not everyone, including a dog running in vain after a departing bus. And with a far worse, more monstrous catastrophe about to happen, three brave souls stepping up.

Except all of this really happened. And it could happen again, since understanding one accident can never preclude another happening, for slightly different reasons. I'm usually a champion of technology. But I turned against nuclear power after Three Mile Island in 1979 near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. That was a partial meltdown. And I wasn't surprised when the far worse accident happened at Chernobyl in 1986.

This mini-series is a stark reminder that we have take nature and our technologies which seek to harness it very seriously. Because the truth is there is no complete harnessing of the natural world - not of atoms, not of genes, not of bacteria, not of you name it. The best we can be is, yes, bold with technology in trying to improve out lot, but always wary of its unforeseen consequences.

See also: Chernobyl 1.1: The Errors of Arrogance

Monday, May 13, 2019

Killing Eve 2.6: Billie

Hey, I've been so caught up in Game of Thrones - reviewing and thinking about this finale season - that I see I've been remiss in reviewing Killing Eve. But there are only two episodes left after tonight's this season, and tonight's was one of the best, so ...

Great new persona for Villanelle - Billie - working for Eve and the Brits, so she had to be something special and she is. Billie has a passable American accent (about 80-90% right, I'd say), and her job is to get the goods on Aaron Peel, a British Mark Zuckerberg, if you get the picture. (Perfect timing, by the way - I checked the credits to see if Chris Hughes was a special consultant.) Billie's accent isn't totally on key, but her killing instinct is, and in a scene that reminds Eve and us what we're dealing with, she hugs one of the women from her therapy group, on the sidewalk, and then throws her under a passing vehicle. Villanelle hasn't lost her touch.

Eve hasn't either. After her husband leaves her - I never liked him, anyway - she does a little spying on him, of course. Turns out the reason he gave for leaving her - he can't take her dishonesty about her job, etc - was a lie. The reason was the much more mundane he's having an affair. And when Eve confronts the woman with Eve's husband, Eve gets off the best line in the episode, which serves as the title of the episode, "I Hope You Like Missionary!" It's great line, typifying the sharp repartee of the series. I would've used it as the title for this review, but I like my titles to be a little different from the official titles of the episode.

The other significant exchange in tonight's hour was Villanelle telling Eve to back off with her criticism, advising "I don't like you that much," or words that effect (I'm not in the mood to look back it). That gives us an important indication of the limits of Villanelle's infatuation with Eve.

Next week is the series finale of Game of Thrones, so who knows what I'll be doing with Eve. But I'll definitely be here with a review the week after, and, who knows, maybe next week after all.

See also Killing Eve 2.1: Libido and Thanatos ... Killing Eve 2.2: Villanelle as Victim ... Killing Eve 2.3 Lipstick

And see also Killing Eve: Highly Recommended (Season 1)

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Game of Thrones 8.5: Revenge and Fire not Sweet

Well, we now know that Varys was right in his view that Jon would make a better ruler than Daenerys: she slaughtered thousands of innocent people with her dragon's fire, in her quest to destroy Cersei and everything that was hers.

Daenerys had motivation, for sure. She lost one of her children in the sky last week, shot down by one of Euron's war machines. She lost Missandei last week, too. She was right to want revenge. But by any standard of decency and humanity, she went way too far in exacting it.

Tyrion, a man of reason to the core, underestimated that. So did Jon. So did everyone else, except Grey Worm, who also had ample motive for revenge. The best you could say about Daenerys's siege and destruction of Cersei's beloved city is the meta-point that it made for some memorable battles.

Jamie vs. Euron was a good one. The Hound vs the Giant was even better. So, who survived this carnage? Arya definitely. Her riding out of the dragon-produced rubble on a horse was one of the best scenes of the night. Tyrion's still alive. So is Jon, who gave the timely order to get out of there. Jamie and Cersei are probably gone, though we didn't see either of them actually dead. The same for the Hound and the southern Giant (I can't recall, but don't think he's related to the giants beyond the wall in the North).

But back to Jon: he's now amply motivated to take Varys's advice and challenge Daenerys for the Iron Throne. But not when she has her dragon beside her. I suppose there's also a chance he could just walk away from it all and go live with the wildlings. And there's still Sansa at Winterfell, who may come down south to join her sister Arya and convince Jon to take the throne. Or ...

See you here next week, when maybe we'll also learn what happened to Arya's direwolf.

"I was here, in Carthage, three months from now ..."

Saturday, May 11, 2019

The Red Line 1.1-4: Bursting with Crucial Lessons for Our Age

My wife and I caught up with the first four episodes of The Red Line - shown on two evenings - and found the mini-series powerful and important, addressing more than one crucial issue of our time. I was going to say that The Red Line is especially good for a non-cable traditional network - it's on CBS - but the truth is it's especially good for all television media, including cable and streaming services.

The trigger that starts the story is a young white cop in Chicago shooting and killing a black MD in a convenience store, mistakenly believing the MD, who was actually trying to help the store owner, was about to kill him. This opens a wrenching black-lives-matter narrative (see my two videos that address that subject, here and here.) But there's much more to this story.

Harrison, the MD who is killed, is not only African-American. He's gay, and happily married to Daniel, a white high school teacher. They have an adopted daughter, and we soon learn that Jira, also African American, now has a special need to get to know her mother. She's the only one that Jira can relate to as an African-American living in Chicago. This brings us into another significant part of this story - parent-child relationships, and their special complexity when the child is adopted, even more complex when adopted by parents who are gay, and one is black and the other white.

But there's even more. Jira's mother, Tia, is running to be on the Chicago City Council - a position as Adlerman - and this pitches us into no-holds-barred Chicago politics. Her opponent has been there for decades, and is not only a grand old man, but someone willing to do anything to keep his seat.

The three threads - fast-on-the-trigger Chicago cops, family relationships, and down-and-dirty big city politics - are woven together well, with Tia meeting her daughter at memorial event for Harrison at which Daniel is speaking, Tia being threatened by white cops who don't appreciate her criticism of the CPD, etc. The acting is superb, with special creds to Noah Wyle as Daniel, Emayatzy Corinealdi as Tia, and Aliyah Royale as Jira. This is a series bursting with lessons necessary for our age. Highly recommended.

I'll be back here in the weeks ahead with more reviews. There are a lot of questions yet unanswered in this compelling series, a lot of relationships as yet unexplored or even revealed. On that last point, I'll hazard a prediction. We don't yet know the identity of Jira's biological father. I'm thinking it would be a wild but logical twist if her biological father was none other than Harrison.

Friday, May 10, 2019

Chernobyl 1.1: The Errors of Arrogance

Tampering with Mother Nature has its risks, and there's probably no greater tampering than messing with the atom. The stark dangers are paramount not only in the use of nuclear weapons, but, unfortunately, in the attempt to harness the power of the atom for peaceful purposes, such as the production of energy. Three Mile Island in the US, Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, and Fukushima Daiishi in Japan are examples of what can go very wrong at a nuclear power plant. Chernobyl, with anywhere from 4000 to 200,000 deaths resulting for the explosion of its core, is far and away the worst.

Its story is therefore manifestly right for docu-drama treatment. And it's about much more than what can go wrong at a nuclear power plant. It's about how a totalitarian regime is singularly unfit to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, and in terms of ultimate loss of life, makes the consequences of the disaster much worse.

In the first episode of Chernobyl, we see this writ large. All but a handful of people at various levels minimize the destruction of the core, even though they're repeatedly told by close observers that it no longer exists. The level of roentgens (radiation) is said to be 3.2, even though administrators are repeatedly told that's the highest level on the small device making the measurement, meaning the device can't show a higher level. And when a more sophisticated device is brought in, with an upper limit of 200 roentgens, the powers that be make the same mistake.

One of the administrators sitting around the table in a bunker says everyone in the area should be evacuated as fast as possible. He's overruled by a higher up who sees the event as a great opportunity for the Soviet Union to demonstrate its capability of dealing with the accident and keeping the public calm.

Errors like this, self-inflicted, did far more damage that the explosion itself. The question that all of us in 2019 must ask is: are we better at avoiding those errors of arrogance now than the Soviet Union was in 1986?

Sunday, May 5, 2019

Game of Thrones 8.4: Tough Night for Pleas

Lots of crucial developments in Game of Thrones 8.4, most of them designed to lock in the inevitable battle - the "last battle," as Daenerys says - between Daenerys's (and Jon's) forces and the power Cersei has at her command.

That power is much more than we thought it was before, with a smiling Euron Greyjoy in possession of a machine that fires spears into the sky and can kill dragons. As indeed it does, bringing down Rhaegal (who I wrongly thought was killed last week, but was only badly wounded). Daenerys is able to skillfully ride Drogon between arrows, which suggests that Rhaegal would have succumbed even if not recovering from last week's wounds (though, if Rhaegal had been healthy, Jon might have been atop, and able to steer Rhaegal to safety).

It was a bad night for the heroes, which only makes sense, narratively, given how they beat death itself last week. I thought for a moment that even Tyrion might succumb, as he stood there, bravely trying to reason with Cersei. Why didn't she kill him? Not because he is her brother. Possibly because she didn't want her emissary, who was down there, too, to die. But in many ways Cersei is the most difficult to understand and predict in this final game.

So is her brother Jamie. After sleeping with Brienne, who now seems to care for Jamie maybe even loves him, Jamie elects to go down south to join the battle. On behalf of whom? Daenerys and Jon? I can't quite see him doing that. But neither can I see him joining forces with his sister.

So the battle looms. The Starks up north now know that Jon has a better claim to the Iron Throne than does Daenerys. This despite Daenerys's plea to Jon not to tell anyone. And Tyrion and Varys now know, too, despite Jon's plea to his relatives not to tell anyone. In this episode, pleas, including Tyrion's to Cersei, didn't fare very well.

Cersei has understandable confidence in her ability to kill the remaining dragon and what's left of her adversary's armies. She flaunted that by killing Missandei. But there was a concern in Euron's eyes as he looked to the sky in the coming attractions - a concern that seemed born of seeing more than just one or only a dragon.

"I was here, in Carthage, three months from now ..."

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Traitors: Britain in the Middle

I streamed the first season (six episodes) of Traitors (2019) on Netflix last night. The territory has been often and well mined - Britain right after World War II, struggling with Soviet infestation of secret services in London, American sense of entitlement to the point of bullying the Brits, and the shift from the conservative Torys to the leftist Labor Party in power. Probably the best of these shows was Michael Kitchen's long running (2002-2015) Foyle's War. Traitors is the best I've seen of a new kind of rendition of this story, probably truer to actual history, with far more violence and deaths at hand, in expected and unexpected places.

Emma Appleton does a great job as Feef Symonds, "A British civil servant [who] agrees to spy on her own government for the Americans in the aftermath of WWII". She's in bed and in love with an American officer (married) and recruited by his boss, ruthless spy-master Rowe, who couldn't be better played by Michael Stuhlbarg (Boardwalk Empire). Actually, he's not quite yet a spy-master. His goal is to create from the wartime American OSS the CIA, with eyes and ears everywhere in the world, to report on and deal with the burgeoning Soviet menace, which he sees as the main threat to democracy with the Nazis now vanquished.

He's not wrong. In both real history and Traitors, Soviet sympathizers and out-right spies already abound in British government - e.g., Kim Darby - and don't hesitate to mete out death to not just enemies but inconveniences. Rowe is pretty much the same, and this tension between two cunning and brutal adversaries, with Britain and thus Feef in the middle, is the platform, ambience, and essence of Traitors.

The narrative is animated by current events, ranging from Truman dropping the A-bomb, to the British midwifing the state of Israel, and they're all shown with the familiar British bristling to American arrogance, which often comes from the mouth of Rowe. The dialogue is sharp and funny when it needs to be. Even the secondary characters are memorable (especially good work by Keeley Hawes), and when you catch your breath after the last episode you'll be glad if not happy you saw this.

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Game of Thrones 8.3: Fighting Death

The great battle came early in the final season of Game of Thrones - 8.3 - and it was stunningly worth the short wait. In real life, you can't beat death - at least, not ultimately - though sometimes your words and works can, like Shakespeare's and John Lennon's. But in high fantasy, complete victory over death, though hard fought and costly, can happen.

It didn't happen for everyone tonight. The saddest deaths were Jorah's and Theon's and Lyanna's. I hope there weren't others that I missed in the flames and the killing frost (I especially hope not Sam's or the direwolf's). The most satisfying was of course the Night King's, epitomizing Shelley's observation that "tis death that's dead". And seeing Arya do it was one of the high points of the series. The best I can understand of how she was able to do it was her own prowess combined with the Night King's fixation on Bran distracted him at a crucial moment. And/or maybe Bran actively helped distract him.

The Night King's death means all of his dead puppets are now dead dead - gone - as well. Most importantly, that includes the blue-spewing dragon. But one of the good dragons - I think - was killed by the Night King's minions, too. So that leaves Daenerys and Jon with just one dragon to share.

And they'll need it in the fight looming ahead with Cersei. The ranks of the legitimate heirs to the Seven Kingdoms have been depleted by the battle tonight. Fewer heroes abound. Even Melisandre and her fiery magic are gone. In a more conventional narrative, the battle with Cersei would have come before the battle with the Night King. Hats off to Game of Thrones for reversing this order, and leaving us wondering tonight how the battle with Cersei could possibly top what we saw on HBO this evening,

"I was here, in Carthage, three months from now ..."

"challenging fun"
- Entertainment Weekly

e-mail received from a reader:
Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchildren. Thanks! Tom

I of course happily replied...

42 reviews of The Plot to Save Socrates!