In the Flesh: Dead Ringers Episode 2

One of the first things a writer learns is the difference between a scene and a segue. A scene is muscle and bone, developing characters, advancing plot threads. A segue is the ligament connecting scenes to one another. A character walks from room to room. A pointed line sets up a cut to a related sequence. The second episode of Alice Birch’s Dead Ringers features no such connective tissue. It’s more a leech, a snail, a cephalopod — one huge thrashing sack of muscle held together by some imperceptible trick of evolutionary differentiation. As Beverly (Rachel Weisz) and Elliot (Rachel Weisz) Mantle sink and swim respectively at a weekend getaway hosted by opioid heiress Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle) and her nervous young wife Susan (Emily Meade), this relentless vision unfolds with jarring and arrhythmic speed. The sisters join the ultra-rich for dinner, Elliot poking and prodding at their hosts, Beverly demure and obviously uncomfortable, and it becomes apparent very quickly that their hosts are just as monstrous as their real-life counterparts, the Sacklers, who built an empire on an epidemic that killed and incapacitated millions.

It’s not the typical sendup of the ultra-rich, not something you’d see on Succession with its foulmouthed failsons and scheming boardroom cutthroats. These people, as Beverly screams in their faces, have had the humanity bred out of them. They have faces, fingers, genitals, and no other relationship whatsoever to the human race. “We made a good product,” shrugs self-styled “biohacker” MacKenzie (Allyson Kloster) of the opioid epidemic’s ravages. At one point during dinner many of the guests lean forward and shift their hair to reveal trepanning scars received during therapeutic skull-drilling at the behest of wellness guru Lara (Miriam Silverman). These people think they’re brave because everyone’s afraid of them. They think they’re geniuses because they have enough money to do anything. They think they’re honest because they ask soulless, reptilian questions like “why is it important that [this birthing clinic] is accessible?” with the smug affect of twitter trolls trying to lure people with actual human beliefs and principles into a fight just for the sport of it.

Ming Peiffer scripted the show’s second installment, and the confidence with which she leaps from scene to scene is nothing short of mind-blowing. Elliot’s fucking the repulsive Ju-won (Soji Arai) and making his translator (Enoch Suho Lee) watch without touching his clearly agonizing erection. The Parkers are playing some obtuse and terrifying game of hide and seek. Lara and her wormy, cringing husband Jeremy’s (Aaron Dean Eisenberg) disgusting little Aryan pod person children are singing Coldplay for the assembled guests. Susan’s explaining that the tremendous portrait of a vagina hanging behind her wife belongs to Rebecca’s ex, dumped for the crime of having a baby. “I just want to stay perfect,” she confides in Beverly, her anxiety over meeting the same fate plain. “It’s good. It’s the best of both worlds.” It’s like we’re falling asleep at the wheel and waking up in the burning wreckage again and again and again, each scene skidding into the next until the world is nothing but these stupid, dead-eyed ghouls convinced they’re playing with the fire of the gods. Easily and instantly among the best episodes of television ever aired.