‘The Regime’ Episode 5 Recap: Regime Change

Ah, The Regime! A delightful satire about a flighty mad tyrant and the sad salt-of-the-earth soldier who falls under her contr— no.

Ah, The Regime! A surprising satire about a power-mad Rasputin who takes advantage of his unexpected elevation to power to slowly take over the sta— no.

Ah, The Regime! An unpredictable satire in which the dictator’s callous behavior drives her imprisoned svengali into the arms of the one man who presents a political threat to her reig— no.

Ah, The Regime! A wild satire in which a dictator and a thug fiddle (with each other) while Rome burns until the flames finally come for them. Yes? 

I dunno, man. There’s been five episodes of this thing and each one has revised the show’s underlying premise as presented by the last. This time around the leap was more shocking to me than ever. Not because it was impossible to predict that Elena Vernham and Herbert Zubak would run Unnamed Central European State right into the ground — the only other option would be some satire-genre contrivance in which they get away with it all scott-free, which I still wouldn’t rule out since it’s so irresistible to satirists. No, this was shocking because of how goddamned unpleasant it was to watch, and to listen to.

That last point is really important. Throughout the early going of this episode (“All Ye Faithful”), every conversation and meal and speech to the staff is soundtracked by the sound of distant explosions. They’re our first sign that things have gone disastrously wrong for the regime. Occasionally the explosions can even be seen through a window in the background. So as Elena prattles on about this or that inane thing, or as Agnes gives a stiff-upper-lip speech to the kitchen, or as little Oskar helps with yuletide traditions like selecting the Christmas Carp (??), there’s just a constant sound of death at a military scale thrumming in the background. It’s The Zone of Interest of cringe comedy.

I’m not making that comparison just to be cutesy about their shared employment of sound design to create an atmosphere of subconscious brutality; obviously, of the two, only The Regime is playing this for laughs, even uncomfortable ones. I’m making it because this is the episode where The Regime finally really wallops you with the human effect of all this shitty, insane behavior by the people at the top.

It kills Agnes.

The “visitor from another show” character is a fascinating one in TV comedy. Whether as a cameo or a part of the core cast, these characters swoop in and behave the way a character from a different style or even different genre of series might behave, so that the audience can get something out of the resulting contrast. A lot of times this is as simple as dropping a pastiche character into the show: Think of Bookman, the hardboiled library policeman, on Seinfeld. Sometimes you can derive frisson from the actor’s association with a prior work in that separate genre, the way Fargo cast Ray Wise in its third season to bring some of Twin Peaks’ supernatural menace with him. 

Agnes is a main character, not a bit part; Andrea Riseborough is an opening-credits actor, not a cameo. She’s been baked into the equation from the start — “the only good sort here,” as her doctor-turned-spy friend tells her, the one person who seems capable of actual human emotion, the one person who cares about Oskar, the one person who reacts to being browbeaten and threatened with a determination she wraps around her fear like a shield, instead of by blubbering and fawning like all the other “funny” characters do. 

In short, Agnes is a drama character, airdropped into the middle of an over-the-top political satire. She’s a human among mutants. It’s why she seems so decent and so sane and so trustworthy relative to everyone else, who in writing terms primarily exist to deliver jokes about indecent, insane, untrustworthy people. Agnes is there to show you how a real human being might do under these circumstances, and it’s only because she herself is so formidable that the answer is anything other than “abjectly terribly.” Credit not only Riseborough, a brilliant actor, but the hair and makeup team that made her look like the most no-nonsense motherfucker in the entire Unnamed Central European State — yet also somehow vulnerable, like you were always looking right at her without the screen of well-dressed well-coiffed bullshit erected by everyone else.

So I had high hopes that she really would calmly, carefully, methodically walk her way through the gun-toting rebels who seize the palace in the episode’s closing minutes — after drawing closer and closer throughout the hour, their distance noted by constantly updated chyrons — and retrieve Oskar. The terrified little boy was abandoned without much thought by Elena and Herbert during their own abortive escape attempt, and by the time Herbert remembers, Elena insists it’s too late to go back. (She’s right, but still, eww.)

But then you hear a gunshot amid the chaos and she goes down like a sack of potatoes. At first I thought, or at least I hoped, she’d hit the deck to dodge the bullet, or that it winged her or something. But the shot of her sightless eyes staring blankly is TV speak for “no, this is final.” 

Still, I don’t think Agnes really dies for us until writers Gary Shteyngart and Jen Spyra and director Jessica Hobbs give us one last shot of Oskar, cowering on the ground, crying as shots and shouts ring out all around him, completely abandoned by everyone who was supposed to take care of him. In his mother’s case this was against her will, and even Herbert expresses obviously sincere dismay that the boy has been left behind, but Oskar doesn’t know any of that. He’s a scared sick little boy wondering where his mommy is. 

When contrasted with the tone and events of its ending — Schiff pulling out of the drunken stupor the ministers have all guzzled themselves into in lieu of actually staging the coup they acted like they were planning long enough to shoot a guard to death so they can flee without Elena and Herbert is the sole comedic moment here — the opening of the episode is even more sickly funny. 

As the explosions ring out in the distance, Herbert and Elena are locked in a passionate, very very physical, very very public folie à deux, making out and groping each other in council meetings and working out their issues with kinky sex play after intense sessions with a dream interpreter. (If you’ve ever wanted to watch Kate Winslet stick her hand in someone’s mouth while fucking, have I got good news for you!) Singer, the chief of her ineffectual coup plotters, refers to Elena as a “cock-mad pharoah” with whom he has no intentions of getting entombed.

Meanwhile, there’s the parallel spectacle of Elena’s magnificently ill-advised Happy Noël special for the nation. As background dancers shimmy and cavort, the Chancellor performs “Santa Baby” while dressed in Sexy Christmas costumes. I’ve made my feelings about how actor Kate Winslet looks in this show as clear as I feel comfortable making them, and this whole business certainly doesn’t change my opinion. The added bonus of this being exactly the kind of tone-deaf stupidity that rich politicians think passes as both entertainment and the common touch — from Trumpian fascist kitsch to Clintonian liberal cringe — is where the comedic juice is found. It seems like the kind of thing Ginni Thomas would do at Harlan Crow’s Christmas party after plotting to ban birth control pills.

One last ingredient worth mentioning is Nicholas, Elena’s estranged husband. At first it seems like he’s decamped to Switzerland both to get away from his unfaithful wife and to avoid the onrushing collapse of her regime. But it turns out he’s there to recuperate from a suicide attempt, spurred by her infidelity. Seen in that light, his expressed desire on TV to return to the country so he can “love” everyone again takes on a crushingly pathetic tone, one only increased by his inability to talk to her without choking back sobs. He’s been cucked on the global stage and all he wants is the woman he loves back. This is a level of comedic cruelty I find genuinely impressive.

I’m poring over my notes to make sure I don’t miss anything major in this splendidly dark episode, because there was just so much. Herbert’s awful painting of Elena and her politic attempt to placate him by saying “I appreciate it. Yeah.” Herbert responding by saying the same thing of her gift of a handgun to him. (“Well I love it, personally,” she replies petulantly.) Elena making Agnes take a family photo of Elena and Herbert and Oskar, Agnes’s own son. The ominous use of The Barber of Seville on the rebel-seized state television broadcast, to indicate to the regime that the straight razors have been brought out and it’s time for a close shave. Elena telling her intelligence director Laskin “off you fuck” and him fucking right off the show, apparently directly into the rebel camp. Elena using one of those folding phones to literally fold Nicholas shut when she’s done talking to him. Elena and Herbert confronting her father’s corpse: “We’ve been doing a lot of work…my friend and I…on each other…” she stammers. Said corpse getting tossed off a balcony by the rebels in one of the most definitive acts of regime change we see. The little detail of the royal leopard crest having been cut out of all the flags waved by the rebels.

My wife and I have a slight difference of opinion about the work of Paul Verhoeven, the sci-fi smut satirist responsible for RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers. We both appreciate what he’s doing, as Elena might put it, but for my wife a lot of it is just…too much. Not that the content is beyond the pale, but just the tone, the vibe, the energy of the films is so strident and harsh and unpleasant that she finds them difficult to enjoy. This episode, with those constant background death sounds and the crushing of human love beneath the heel of violence, has that Verhoeven energy. This episode is a nasty piece of work, one of the highest compliments I can pay it.

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.