The scenario the show ultimately posits bears little resemblance to traditional sci-fi fare; the aliens are coming, but not for another four hundred years, putting humanity on notice for an encounter—and possibly a war—that’s many lifetimes away. This time span is as much a curse as a blessing. Forget the science for a second; what kind of political will—totalitarian or otherwise—is required to keep centuries of preparation on track? How do we get the über-rich to contribute to a new space race in a way that also flatters their egos? And what resources does it take to accelerate scientific discovery to a breakneck pace?

From the start, Beyoncé preaches her desire to create a “safe space.” “Renaissance means a new beginning,” she says; it’s a balm “after all we’ve been through in the world.” But what exactly is she referring to? The onslaught of death and illness brought on by the continuing pandemic? The laws aimed at criminalizing trans children and adults? The rising misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Blackness that leads to grave violence? The various, ongoing genocides? Beyoncé gives us no context for what she’s referring to or how it touches the shores of a life dominated and driven by the kind of wealth that insulates her from harm. Her words reflect broadly liberal pablum meant to give the appearance of care and mean just enough that her fans can project radicalness upon her but not so much that she would ruffle anyone enough for her to lose money or be forced to stand for something.

there is no star of such magnitude who more cunningly positions themselves as apolitical than Beyoncé. Her performance as an icon is meant to connect with the broadest number of people possible. To do that, her refusal to stand for anything specific beyond the watered-down treatises on Black excellence must be maintained.

More than anything, Renaissance is a testament that Beyoncé is a brand that stands for absolutely nothing beyond its own greatness

Roman’s one, sweeping, obliterating eulogy blows up on the launchpad, and instead, Logan ends up with three different eulogies — one from his brother (Ewan), one from Kendall, and one from Shiv — each with their own vision of who he was and how to summarize his life. The speeches are tipped against one another — with Kendall’s intended as an opposing viewpoint to Ewan’s, and Shiv’s a softening of Kendall’s. In classic Succession form, though, every eulogy contains its own hairpin turns and attempts to navigate contrasting ideas. Even after Logan’s death, Succession refuses to land on any single idea of who the man was.

As ever with Kendall, there’s still a question about what exactly he’s doing in all of that water. Is it a wellspring or a flood? Is it birth or drowning?

But that central conflict between siblings, stemming from being raised as attack dogs always poised to bite each other, never wavered. It's what ultimately lost them Waystar, and what ultimately eroded their souls.

Throughout the series, Amy frantically maneuvers to sell her plant business, Kōyōhaus, to Jordan Forster (Maria Bello), CEO of a big-box chain and casually obnoxious Asia-phile. Through Jordan and Amy’s various interactions, it is apparent that Jordan sees Amy as an Asian plaything to be acquired alongside her business—from the constant stream of racially-inflected quips, to overly-familiar touching. But on Amy’s part, she seems to have constructed both her business and personal brand for maximum appeal to the kind of white person that carries an orientalist appetite.

It doesn’t escape me that Japanese culture has long been fetishized in the West as being the upper echelon of Asian refinement. Kōyōhaus is Asianesque without cultural substance, engineered to let consumers feel cultured simply through a purchase, not unlike Jordan herself, who is willing to pay $150,000 to buy a chair from Amy called “tamago” (Japanese for “egg”) without even bothering to learn how to pronounce it correctly.

You know, somebody said, would you ever want to play Donald Trump, I may have told you this before, and I said, well, no. Because I think it’s such a bad script, the Donald Trump script. But then I look at Donald Trump, and I think, God, he’s so lost. He’s just a lost individual, and he’s so full of shit, and the reason he’s full of shit is that he’s an abused child. He’s really an abused child, Donald Trump. A tragic figure. Even though a lot of these very right-wing individuals are repellant, ironically, from the actor’s point of view, when the actor gets into the skin of these guys, you begin to understand where they’re coming from.

And there’s some toothy poignancy to the fact that the Roy children spend what will turn out to be their final moments with their father taunting him for his inability to apologize, and that his last words to them as a group are “I love you, but you are not serious people.”

No amount of money or power or connections can undo what has already happened, nor give Logan Roy’s children one more chance to set things right with their late father. Their grief and shock at the sudden loss seems compounded by the sudden-onset realization that their relationship with their father will now always be what it is in that moment. There will be no more fixing, no further rounds of negotiation. The deal is done.

One of the most engaging aspects in the storytelling of The Last of Us is that, because Joel dictates how you move forward in the game, you’re implicated in his increasingly gray decision-making. On TV, the viewer is primed to be sympathetic toward a main character, so there’s not the same level of friction as experienced by the gamer. Story lines that feel alive as an active participant in the game instead feel hackneyed on television. Watching The Last of Us, I wanted to pick it up and shake it free from its preconceptions about what it has to do in order to be faithful to its source material and what it wants to do in order to be taken seriously as television. As a series, it says nothing new in either case.

I think all writing — and criticism is very much included in this — is a form of autobiography, and I thought that I wanted to lean into it a little bit, and talk about what these shows meant to me.