![]() ![]() The unusual specificity of this relationship (his son bringing pre-prepared food to dinner at his house for the kids while later refusing to respect his mother’s agency as he once did) feels fresh, tense dynamics about religious difference usually going for the extreme leap (from, say, Christianity to a dangerous cult) rather than within the same religion but the script works so hard to give Alan and his family such depth that one often wishes it was just about them. It’s one of the show’s many lived-in details, from Sam’s obsessive interest in the finest new restaurants to Alan’s flashbacks to long-stewing family disputes, and with two textured characters at its centre, unfurling piece by piece by the episode, it’s a genre show made with thought and care.Īlan is as plagued by unhappiness and remorse as Sam is, as a widower and as a father to a son whose move from Judaism to orthodoxy has led to deep, perhaps irreparable, damage. Rather than Sam acting out some Zodiac-level spree, he’s motivated more by daily slights, the weird look from someone at work or the perceived rudeness at a restaurant, someone who can’t stop killing because society can’t stop forcing him to the edge. It’s a neat little premise for a contained thriller – high stakes therapy sessions with a murderous psychopath – and Fields and Weisberg make a concerted effort not to swerve their series into easy schlock, keeping it all grounded and at times mundane, a sane story about an insane person. Sam is a serial killer who wants to stop killing and Alan is the guy who is tasked with stopping him. Sam, played by Domhnall Gleeson, a recent patient of his, has decided that he wants his sessions to be a little more intimate, kidnapping him and keeping him in his house. Steve Carell, continuing to focus more on his dramatic side, plays therapist Alan, who wakes up chained to an unfamiliar bed. In FX and Hulu’s 10-part thriller The Patient, The Americans’ writers Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, keep their episodes as short as 21 minutes and, for the finale, as long as 46, a decision that works until it doesn’t, when intrigue starts morphing into frustration. It was tight and unexpected at a time when so many shows were anything but, yet since then only a handful of other dramas have opted for something similar. There’s also a welcome offline mode with the full economy enabled, and a sandbox mode that gives you unlimited money, which is great if you want to terraform your perfect landscape as a starting point before opening a zoo there.There were many reasons why the first season of Sam Esmail’s sleek Amazon thriller Homecoming was the finest of that year – an on-form Julia Roberts, stylish and surprising direction, that brilliantly borrowed score – but key to its success was the rare decision, for a drama, to make each episode around 30 minutes long. Franchise Mode is where I spent most of my time, in which you can build a multi-zoo franchise online and your Conservation Credits conveniently carry over from one to another and you can trade animals with other players. Menagerie of ModesĪside from a story mode with charming voice acting that does a decent job of teaching you important mechanics little by little, Planet Zoo has all the modes I’d expect. There’s no way to acquire grants or anything for having a good conservation program, so investing entirely into these expensive animals will still mean you have to make cuts to staff and sell a bunch of hats like a ruthless capitalist or your important environmental work will get shut down. My only disappointment with this system is that Conservation Credits can’t keep the lights on. Doing so can also earn you Conservation Credits, which are sometimes the only way to acquire particularly rare specimens. This score gives your zoo a bonus to popularity and guest happiness for housing and breeding endangered species, releasing good specimens back into the wild, and putting up informational displays and audio speakers to educate your guests. My favorite new feature is the Conservation Rating. On the economic side, Planet Zoo has a well-balanced set of income sources and expenses to consider.
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