I greatly admire The Regime’s adamant refusal to be predictable. Take its male lead, for example. Herbert Zubak is a working-class grunt tossed into the nightmare world of the authoritarian elite. No, Herbert Zubak is wannabe strongman who’s crazier than his beloved boss the Chancellor, who worships the ground he walks on. No, Herbert Zubak is a fallen star who snaps after falling out of the Chancellor’s favor and finds himself imprisoned. This is where we found ourselves before this episode started, and we were only three episodes in.
At first, it seems like Herbert’s latest reversal of fortune is easy to see coming. Herbert finds himself locked up in the bowels of the palace itself, which is where Chancellor Elena Vernham apparently keeps her MVPs (most valuable prisoners). Herbert’s neighbor in this underground warren of utility tunnels and Batcaves turns out to be none other than Keplinger (Hugh Grant), the hated left-wing leader Elena deposed in her rise to power.
Elena has been claiming to all and sundry that Keplinger is hiding out in his mountain retreat, counting his Marxist millions. (Marxist millions! I’ve never been sure how that particular right-wing claim is supposed to work.) In actuality, she’s been keeping him in a secret prison in her basement, where she can taunt him sexually and politically and have him beaten on command, the entire time. Looks like having hallucinated conversations with her dead father is just the tip of Elena’s insanity iceberg.
Professorially handsome and cynical as only an aging leftist can be, Keplinger has charmed the guards and begins trying his luck with Herbert, whose combat know-how he’s counting on to escape and retake power. It’s real “together we can rule the galaxy as father and son” stuff.
But Herbert isn’t having it. It’s not just because he refuses to read Keplinger’s book. (The whole Keplinger character, from his forbidden tome to the regime propagating the idea that he’s still out there when he’s not, is straight out of Emmanuel Goldstein and 1984.) It’s because, as Herbert puts it to him, “I have to love you, but I don’t.” Keplinger does not inspire the kind of loyalty you feel in your heart and soul and gut and…well, judging from Herbert’s fixation on Elena’s claim that she doesn’t dream of fucking him, the kind of loyalty you feel in your dick.
After Herbert announces his intentions, Keplinger turns on him, and on the downtrodden generally, whom he blames for always preferring scapegoats to actual solutions. Herbert, who’s already killed the guards, kills Keplinger too, before returning to his cell. There he is later awakened by intelligence chief Laskin and brought back to Elena’s office…whereupon the two fall on each other and start fucking in full view of everyone, at least until they clear the room.
So yeah, I didn’t see that coming.
So I am officially out of the prognosticating business when it comes to this show. (Not that it’s a business I ever like to be in — my job is to review what’s on screen, not what I made up in my head to be something that might be on screen in the future — but of course you think about what might happen later in a story.) Frankly, it’s fascinating simply to investigate the present.
Elena, for example, emerges as an even more complicated character than she initially appeared. At first, her new obsession with lowering the temperature and increasing the moisture in the air to offset the resulting dryness seems like another weird health fixation. In part it is. But she also makes an actual, honest-to-god self-deprecating joke about going through perimenopause, showing she does have some self-awareness, some sanity, and some ability to laugh at herself.
However, she also keeps Keplinger as a private torture victim, and delights in refusing to tell him the fate of his family, though given her sneering tone it seems all too safe to guess. She resents having to pretend to feel bad for a pregnant protester kicked to death by a police horse to an almost physical degree, lashing out about it in the middle of a fluffy PR opportunity where she’s supposed to be fielding scripted softball questions from adorable children. She can’t even make it to the lashing-out part of the festivities before making an offensive joke about how bad the working-class people from that region smell.
And when it all blows up in her face so badly that she has to travel to the area to kiss the ass of the union boss leading the protest against the cheap Chinese imports that have flooded the country to offset vanished American investment? She says fuck it and has the guy arrested and framed for treason. This is neither a well woman, nor a strong leader, nor a tyrant whose regime is long for this world.
That’s the message received loud and clear by Agnes, Elena’s increasingly distressed seneschal. She has to endure endless bizarre compliments about how bad her adorable son Oskar’s breath smells, even as the Chancellor insists on seizing — ahem, raising — the child as her own, for however long the fancy takes her. Eventually it gets to be too much, and she entertains an offer from the Americans to report on the comings and goings of Elena’s inner circle in exchange for a new life in the States when the dust settles.
But when will that be? The Three Stooges of Elena’s council, Singer and Schiff and Laskin, believe the country to be on the verge of civil war even before she has her most prominent critic and labor leader arrested and decides to begin a sexual relationship with the Butcher of Site 5. The American on the other end of Agnes’s phone says it’s not a matter of if Elena’s regime will be toppled, but when.
Personally, I’ll miss it, because I like the jokes. The giant triangular video screen that descends from the ceiling of the conference room while displaying the image of Elena taking an ice bath. Elena describing the smell of the improverished area as “like a hog’s urethra.” Singer believing “given the China of it all” is a convincingly childlike thing for one of the kids to say. Elena and Nicky dipping fondue in a photo op. The final sex scene, which is both hilarious and, let’s be honest here, hot. (Imagine being the head of government and having everyone including your advisors and spouse clear the room so your crush can fuck you.) This is how this kind of wealth-and-power satire is supposed to be done.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.