James Poniewozik

A handful of people are left out of it.

One of them is our heroine, Carol Sterka, played by the great Rhea Sehorne, who you might recall from Better Call Saul.

She is an author of...

romantic fiction and a sort of misanthrope by nature who ends up being kind of the perfect foil for this new collective of alien-juiced beatific humanity.

The sort of through line is Carol dealing with this new world, Carol trying to figure out if there is a way to reverse this virus and restore humanity to where it was before.

Part of the thing that I think is interesting is that it's a little bit playing around with the idea of, is what we've witnessed an apocalypse?

there is suddenly no war on Earth.

There's no conflict.

There's, you know, a lot of things that we say we aspire to in humanity have been achieved by our brains being taken over.

And underneath this highly entertaining, very funny, extremely well-acted, I mean, it's often like Ria Sehorne sort of giving a solo performance, is a very interesting idea about...

collectivism versus individualism, about what happiness means, about whether it is better to be blissful and have no free will or to be discontented but an intact individual.

Fascinating.

You know, like Severance, I think just a knock your socks off first season.

I hope it doesn't take as long coming back.

Yeah, I will say, you know, I love experimentation.

I love a wild idea.

But there is still pleasure in just a hospital show done well.

So well.

I think it would stress... You know, my take on it was that, you know, for parents of kids, particularly male kids of a certain age, this was like the day after, you know, people just watched and discussed it in these sort of, like, hushed, traumatized terms.

And it's essentially a four-part story