Q: Into The Storm doesn’t overly sympathize with Q supporters nor does it simply sneer at the gullible. It’s a delicate balance that Hoback successfully maintains throughout the documentary. ... Both engaging and deeply unsettling—it feels like just the first installment in a far more horrific story.

With the personable Hoback as its guide, it offers real-time access to Ron, Jim, Fredrick, Qtubers, OAN’s Jack Posobiec, and more, and is bolstered by an avalanche of news and internet clips, archival material, and interviews with experts.

If you’re thinking that six hours of conspiracy theories about basements of pizza joints filled with dead children might be a bit much, Hoback’s work is smarter than that. He really digs into the people around the Q phenomenon, focusing a lot of time on the 8chan admins. ... Some early episodes zip past these events a bit too easily, although later ones take the emergence of violence from the QAnon world more seriously.

Q: Into the Storm bears a resemblance to an earlier HBO docuseries, "The Jinx," unfolding like a mystery, as the filmmaker plays mental chess with his subjects. What gives this six-part effort particular heft is the role QAnon has come to play in US politics, becoming, as director Cullen Hoback puts it, "part interactive game, part religion, part political movement."

While Brennan and the Watkinses embody so much about the phenomenon, and while any one of them could be Q, some of the midseries episodes tracking them feel wasteful. At times, Hoback approaches good questions and then backs off, returning to the three men he’s decided to focus on.

It is most successful in its early going at thoughtlessly disseminating the Q message, and by its end has become a muddle with genuine bits of intriguing reporting studded amid so much dross.

At its best, “Q: Into the Storm” is an aimless puff piece on some of the conspiracy theory’s most notorious promoters. At its worst, it’s an uncritical platform for QAnon adherents to promote their worldview and trivializes a conspiracy theory that has directly inspired several violent crimes.