The episode is, in one sense, a portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“The Rat” reaffirms one of the show’s central ideas that all of us are, to a certain extent, hiding in plain sight.
The episode establishes the rifts in the show’s key relationships through a series of skillful compositions.
The episode tightens the vise around the characters as if to test their instincts.
A charged, unnerving turn of the screw, The Invitation is consumed by the fear of forgetting.
If the episode can be said to have a central thrust, it’s an interest in bruising the characters’ convictions through a series of unexpected developments.
The situation is now so grave one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The Americans is as full of formal coups as any of its more flashy brethren.
Director Gavin Hood treats the aesthetics of high-tech surveillance as the opaque membrane through which the prosecution of the War on Terror must pass.
It constantly blunders into stylistic choices and narrative clichés that sabotage the sturdy two-hander at its center.
It’s the summative effect of the story’s modest exchanges that lends the film its profound sense of loss.
On a cool, cloudy French Quarter morning, we spoke to Fleck about learning to play poker and his love for “old-school American characters.”
Its allegory for internalized homophobia, a gay man’s perilous attraction to straightness itself, seems in this case deeply persona.
It emerges as an almost wistful hour, to be filed, after a truly disheartening season, under “too little, too late.”
A mixture of old ideas and new developments straining to hold our attention, an insolvent phantom itself.
It fails to suggest much more than madness in the method, as the show resumes its retreat into the realm of pure plot.
The fact that it stumbles so badly doesn’t bode well for this shambolic season’s looming finale.
It strings together a series of arresting images, but they’re little more than a placeholder for dramas still to come.
The final act is an appropriate description for viewers who’ve struggled to connect with Orphan Black this season.
Focusing on the clones’ familial and romantic attachments, it offers a glimmer of hope for a return to form.