Better Call Saul Season 5, Episode 2, “50% Off”

In my recap of the season premiere, I questioned the extent to which Jimmy had turned into the Saul with whom we’re familiar from Breaking Bad, concluding that he still had some ways to go. Despite sporting a telltale Saul talisman in his earphone, “50% Off” illustrates even more clearly that there is still some distance between Jimmy and Saul.

Better Call Saul, Season 5, Episode 1, “Magic Man”

Season four of Better Call Saul had a slow start, but finished strong. Season five, by contrast, has come out of the gate firing on all cylinders. “Magic Man” is a crackerjack episode from start to finish, picking up right where things left off in all of the show’s serialized plots: the adventures of Cinnabon Gene, Jimmy’s transformation into Saul, and the Cartel Corner, featuring Mike, Gus, Nacho, and now Lalo.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

I enjoyed Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi for bringing new things to Star Wars, and for having something interesting to say about how to negotiate the relationship between present and past. While not everything in The Last Jedi worked (particularly the Poe and Finn plots), it excelled in paralleling Rey and Ben, and created an interesting conflict by allowing them to understand each other’s perspectives, which led them to feel a complicated mix of sympathy and antipathy for one another. I left The Last Jedi excited to see how the next film in the series would build off of their conflict.

J.J. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker capitalizes on some of this potential, but unfortunately, it does so through a hefty dose of retroactive continuity that often undermines what made The Last Jedi so compelling. It also repeats and magnifies some of The Last Jedi’s faults, along with some of the nagging annoyances of The Force Awakens, particularly that entry’s penchant for rehashing elements of the earlier films. There are still some good things in The Rise of Skywalker, and on the whole the good outweighs the bad, but by a much smaller margin than in the two preceding films. After the highs of The Last Jedi, the lows of The Rise of Skywalker are resoundingly disappointing.

Barry Season 2 Finale, "berkman>block"

Season one of Barry was very good: as a show about a former marine-turned-hit man who discovers acting, the series made some darkly funny parallels between acting and assassination, and the personalities and psychological hang-ups typically (and sometimes atypically) associated with each profession. Season two is even better: delving into Barry’s past, the show invites us to compare his behavior during his tour of Afghanistan with his behavior in the present, interrogating the extent to which people can change.

Game of Thrones, Season 8 Episode 6, “The Iron Throne”

“The Iron Throne” should have been a great series finale. It’s rife with callbacks to earlier parts of the series, and provides us with the satisfaction of seeing the Starks -- long the representatives of all that is just and fair in Westeros -- firmly in positions of power, settling the question of who will rule Westeros, and thus correcting the unconventional story turns of Ned’s beheading and the Red Wedding. However, most of what might be satisfying about these resolutions is thoroughly undermined by the path showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss took to arrive at them.

Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5, “The Bells”

“Let it be fear.” These are Daenerys’s words to Jon after Jon can’t bring himself to return Daenerys’s affections early in the episode, and they are supposed to signal a sea change in her rule of Westeros: if she can’t win their love, then she’ll rule by fear. Much later in “The Bells,” Dany acts on this threat, using Drogon to raze King’s Landing and destroy much of the Red Keep, slaughtering Lannister soldier and innocent Westerosi civilians indiscriminately, despite the Lannister forces and the citizens of King’s Landing ringing the city’s bells midway through the battle to signal their surrender. Dany spares no one, and in doing so, has seemingly become the exact kind of terrible tyrant she always claimed to be fighting to eliminate from the world.

Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 4, “The Last of the Starks”

After “The Long Night,” a lot of critics complained that the stakes of the battle seemed artificial, and the battle itself anti-climactic, partly because no major and/or beloved characters died. I disagreed, and instead found “The Long Night” quite stirring, but the first scene of “The Last of the Starks” made me question my contentment with the outcome of last week’s episode. Jon gives what is meant to be a powerful speech honoring those who died, but all I could think about was how much more powerful it would be if he were eulogizing Tyrion, Brienne, or Jaime, or if not them, then perhaps even more minor characters, like Sam, Gendry, or Tormund. Perhaps it might have been more powerful had Missandei been lighting Grey Worm’s pyre, or vice versa. As it is, however, I found the funeral scene underwhelming because we weren’t terribly attached to most of these characters.