William Hughes

The best you can say about Spider-Noir is that it’s a noble, but ultimately failed experiment. Its lead clearly set out to create a character who didn’t feel entirely like a human being; what he got was one that never really feels like a person.

I sat down to these three episodes excited for the series to show me something new and instead watched as it treated character beats and battle sequences as buttons to mindlessly hammer on. I get that Invincible wants to make being a superhero feel like a grind. Does it have to make watching it feel just as bad?

When the show is cooking—when we’re with Purnell, MacLachlan, or either version of Goggins—it’s easy to be reminded of what was worth missing about this series in the year-plus since we last got new episodes. That push and pull of cynicism and idealism remains bracing, just as the similar war between the show’s comedic and horrific impulses keeps either side from dominating. When we don’t have those anchors, though, it’s easy to feel the show veering off the rails.

As is, we’ve got some effective scares, but acting, and especially writing, that can’t live up to the series’ pedigree.

Shows like this live or die not on whether we loved their characters back in the day but if we love the people they’ve become now. By that metric, King Of The Hill is a rousing success. The show isn’t perfect. But that boy? He’s just right.

What it does have is a return to the tensions that make this show so wonderfully uncomfortable, a looming game designed specifically to exacerbate them—and a proven, and unflinching, willingness to twist the knife.

Really, though, this is Skarsgård’s show, and he only acquits himself better as the premiere progresses.

Being back in a version of Star Wars where people act like this, talk like this, think like this, is simply too exciting to get slowed down with splitting hairs. The party’s kicking off, and the bolts are flying: I’m simply humming with excitement to see where Andor takes us next.

The writing, and the performances, are all top-notch—Yeun and co-star Gillian Jacobs, for instance, continue to have great chemistry as potential love connectors Mark and Eve—but there’s a stiffness in both action and drama scenes that leave the whole thing feeling cheaper than the show’s previous two seasons.

It’s not just the violence; it’s not even the desperation. It’s the way the villains endlessly remind their victims that they chose to be there; that what’s happening to them is happening with their own consent, and is their own fault. That ugly paternalism, which arrives here primarily through Gong’s nigh-unflappable grin, has always been the true horror of Squid Game, and it’s what has me hooked again after so long away from its black and bitter charms.