‘The Regime’ Episode 2 Recap: The Healing Properties of Potato Steam

The acquisition and hoarding of wealth and power should be understood as a mental illness. Period, point blank, deadass. At the very least it’s a cognitive impairment on par with getting spike piledrivered onto your noggin in a wrestling ring for several decades running. This is in no way a joke. Access to the money and authority that prevents you from every hearing the word “no” if you don’t want to turns your brain into soup. Ask Elon Musk. 

The Regime gets this and runs at it more directly than any other satire of its sort, which makes it the satire for me. Kate Winslet as the incredibly sexy and stylish, incredibly self-absorbed and stupid, incredibly gullible and theatrical and vindictive and woo-woo New Age-y, and incredibly impossible to actually be around or get to know unless you’re just as fucked in the head as she is commander-in-chief of a modern nation. That, friends, is a TV show. It’s also life in these United States, but it’s a TV show too, boy howdy.

In this week’s episode, things go from bad to worse, as one assumes they will continue to do until the series ends in a few weeks. It’s three weeks after the conclusion of the premiere, and Corporal Herbert Zubak, the honest-to-god Butcher of Site Five, is running the show. The folk remedies he remembers from his mother — a woman he beat, badly, when he was just 14 — have replaced all the high-tech bullshit used to manage her phobia of mold in the past. Bowls of potatoes are kept steaming throughout the halls for their purgative properties, leading the Chancellor’s husband to tell her it’s being said that the palace “smells like an Irish whorehouse.”

But she’s feeling much better, for real! The mold and moisture obsession is all gone. She’s feeling her oats on the world stage. (Whether that’s good or bad is in the eye of the beholder.) Even her husband has to admit she’s been much happier since the Butcher came around, as he learned first-hand when she strode into his room and fucked him for the first time in over a year. (“Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to fuck you now.”)

Even Oskar (Louie Mynett), Agnes’s epileptic son, has been forced to get with the program: Herbert has replaced his epilepsy medication with daily mouthfuls of black radish. Agnes, despite being sympathetic to Herbert over his literally self-lacerating guilt from the massacre (he self-harms with the same zeal he brings to every other task), won’t have it, and secretly doses the kid with the meds by mixing them into his popsicles. 

Which is where they get her. Unbeknownst to Elena, who’s dealing with the fallout of her antagonism towards her American partners, her husband Nicholas is part of a secret cabal of advisors who meet in a seedy discotheque to plot the preservation of her rule and the realm. Laskin (Danny Webb), the head of intelligence, digs up all the dirt on Herbert, blackmailing Agnes over the pills in order to force her to plant a camera in Herbert’s room. This reveals the self-harm, and the obsession with the Chancellor, which has become sexual in nature. 

(In both directions, it’s pointedly hinted: When Herbert admits to Elena that their allegedly shared dreams of one another have become “much spicier” recently, Elena goes right along with it. “Spice is nice,” she coos distantly, as she coos everything. I might have had to fan myself down at that point.)

But Nicholas advises them that revealing all his misdeeds and mental health crises will only drive the Chancellor closer toward him. He suggests an accelerationist approach: Deliberately boost Zubak’s profile until there’s nowhere to go for him but down, where all of the Chancellor’s obsessions (including a previous moisture-meter man) eventually wind up. To that end they concoct bogus genetics that link Zubak directly to the Foundling, the figure of legend who first settled the land of Unnamed Central European Country. With the blood of the Foundling and the blood of Charlemagne (they’re all very reasonably almost positively pretty certain that the Chancellor is one of Charles the Great’s descendants, yeah, that’s the ticket), they tell her, how can they lose?

They’d better hope this works. Two of their number are already in prison. Another, the billionaire Bartos (Stanley Townsend), is humiliated on national television at Herbert’s suggestion. Not even United States Senators like foreign relations committee chair Judith Holt (Martha Plimpton) are safe; allegedly telepathically, the Chancellor and Herbert conspire to trap her in the palace alone and terrify her, to show her, an American, how it feels when someone else is in charge for a change. These men (the crew also includes excellent character actors David Bamber and Henry Goodman) can feel their fortunes, and possibly their freedom, slipping away. Elevating Herbert Zubak to secular godhood is a pretty crazy gamble to avoid that fate.

Two things impress me most about The Regime. The first is Winslet. Literally always good in everything, she is self-evidently having a ball with the Chancellor’s clipped diction, casual aggression, and that unique authoritarian blend of razor-sharp acuity and complete empty-headedness. (Orwell described this in 1984, the need for people in such regimes to think with incredible complexity and dexterity one minute, then shut down thought completely the next.) This is to say nothing of her wardrobe, which makes her look about as good as any human being has looked on television since Mad Men. If this show were nothing but a series of shots of her throwing open big double doors or drawing apart curtains and walking through, I’d still watch it, though I’d have a lot less to write about.

The second is the unique nature of the protagonists. Buried underneath the comedy — and in Herbert’s case, not-so-buried — both the Chancellor and Herbert are messed up in the kind of compelling ways you can usually build a prestige-TV drama around. Herbert: poor country boy, victim of bullying and abuse, turns into a bully himself, goes into a line of work where bullying is rewarded, bullies too hard, cracks, tries to kill himself, fails, loses his mind, becomes one of the most important people in Europe. 

Elena: smart (she’s a medical doctor!), spoiled, vengeful, mentally broken by the loss of her father, flailing around for something to replace him and to convince her she’s as righteous and powerful as she presents herself to others, distinct borderline tendencies (alternately idolizing then reviling and discarding people), clearly conscious of her sex appeal as a political tool but averse to sex itself for a year at a time, and just as much in need of mental health intervention as Herbert. 

I don’t really think this is the kind of combo you see that often. Satires certainly pile bad person on top of bad person in order to see what shakes out — it’s not like Succession or The White Lotus seriously give you anyone to root for; even the least actively evil people are still just looking out for number one — but making the audience identification character (at least at first) even more warped than the protagonist is a new one on me. It leaves you feeling a bit like Wile E. Coyote suddenly realizing he’s three feet past the cliff’s edge. Nobody in The Regime, not even the man you might have suspected was created by writer Will Tracy to do so, has their hands on the wheel.

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.