K.MAT
@kevinmmathews11
Pop Culture Commentator, Composer, Educator, Tottenham fan, AI Creator & Consigliere. Troll accounts will be BLOCKED! Music: Writing:
A big thank you to everyone who has subscribed to my humble blog. It is an honor and privilege to share my pop culture thoughts with you. And for those who have paid subs, I appreciate you from the bottom of my heart. We keep going! kevinmathews.substack.com
Episode 3 of Star City proves the only thing more dangerous than Soviet rocket science is institutional paranoia. Valya being the Western mole is a stellar twist that reframes the space race as a tragic byproduct of mutual mistrust. The dour 70s aesthetic and bureaucratic misery feel flawless.
The finale proves these fragile finance bros have zero skills for body disposal. Coop, Barney & Nick turned a simple accident into a drowning, a secret pact, broken homes & a looming cartel threat. That car in the lake guarantees Season 3 will just be them drowning in their own hubris. Delightful.
Episode 5 of The Terror: Devil in Silver proves human bureaucracy is just as toxic as literal demons. Shutting the unit to save a buck clears a path for the entity. Dorry’s brutal lobotomy flashback shows New Hyde was a monster long before the supernatural arrived. open.substack.com/pub/kevinmat...
Imagine pretending you beat the town curse just to have the Bogeyman show up because you forgot how contracts work. S1E8 was a one-gimmick hour, but Patricia’s deeply irritated "Final Girl" turn saved it. The pact is still active, and Evan is the collateral. tinyurl.com/5aekfnmb
Everyone hypes the horror in Damian McCarthy’s 'Hokum,' but the real win is the tight script. Adam Scott plays a tortured writer in a damp Irish hotel, but a mushroom-munching local and a locked suite turn it into a great claustrophobic mystery. Earned ending. open.substack.com/pub/kevinmat...
Euphoria didn't end with redemptive closure; it ended as a gritty 1970s grindhouse homage where OnlyFans crashed into Breaking Bad. Tonal madness, topped off by Lexi—the writer—being the only one to survive the wreckage. A deeply cynical, meta finale. open.substack.com/pub/kevinmat...
Star City S1E1-E2 swaps the optimistic American "what-if" of For All Mankind for a bleak, paranoid dive into a Soviet surveillance state. Rhys Ifans and Anna Maxwell Martin crush the cosmic ambition vs. KGB control dynamic. Weird British accents aside, the writing is incredibly taut.
From S4E6 moves the goalposts again. Roger has morphed into a totem, Fatima's Golem is done, and Sophia is recycling Abby’s toxic "it's all a dream" delusion. The only hope? Boyd’s raw willpower might actually be rewriting the town's geography. Full breakdown: open.substack.com/pub/kevinmat...
The Silver Door is open. The Terror: Devil in Silver E4 stops hiding behind healthcare metaphors and unashes the gore. A tragic inmate sacrifice gives Pepper an ironclad resolve. This is pure Season 1 energy: man vs. unimaginable evil. 2 episodes left. Let’s fucking go. tinyurl.com/krs37bjs
Your Friends & Neighbors S2E9 blew up its own narrative. Ashe’s ridiculous exit solves nothing, leaving a mountain of loose ends for the finale to frantically shrug at. Coop is unmoored, the plot is messy, and the real question is: do we still care enough to stick around? tinyurl.com/yc24ny6w
For All Mankind S5 finale proves space travel is just a meat grinder for the Baldwins. Happy Valley gets independence via a horrific oxygen trap, while Kelly dies on Titan for methane microbes. Brutal, cynical, excellent. Full review: tinyurl.com/5t3fdkks
We watched Richard Gadd build a beautifully toxic look at broken masculinity, only for Half Man to pivot to a cheap Inception-style ambiguous final shot. A gimmicky blemish on an otherwise raw, stellar drama, but still an emotional meat grinder and an artistic tour de force. tinyurl.com/3p4ueuv4
Ladies First wastes a killer British cast on a chintzy, one-joke disaster. Gender-flipped satire that thinks "penile fillers" is peak social commentary. It’s lazy, binary writing that assumes a matriarchy would just be the patriarchy in a wig. Cliched, dated, and unfunny. Avoid. tinyurl.com/mvx2ubje
Apple TV+’s Widow’s Bay just pulled off the wildest tonal pivot. Ep 6 is eerie 17th-century folk horror directed by Ti West. Ep 7 is pitch-black supernatural comedy featuring grave robbing and Matthew Rhys being hilariously incompetent on a boat. 3 episodes left and the curse is mutating.
Harry Lighton’s "Pillion" is the antidote to sanitized cinematic romance. A matter-of-fact look at a gay BDSM dynamic that will either inform or repel you. Melling and Skarsgård are brilliant. When the rules lose meaning, it's over, but the self-knowledge gained is a quiet triumph.
The Rick and Morty S9 premiere was just a multi-million dollar anime fight searching for a plot. Reducing Evil Morty to a clingy, jilted science buddy is a massive regression. Pure spectacle, zero stakes. Hope the standalone episodes actually have something to say. open.substack.com/pub/kevinmat...
Remember when Euphoria was about glitter and house parties? Now it's Armenian loan sharks and Jacob Elordi getting taken out by a rattlesnake. Sam Levinson traded teen angst for a ridiculous cartel thriller. Naivety is a death sentence here. Full penultimate review: open.substack.com/pub/kevinmat...
Your Friends & Neighbors S2E8 is peak Murphy’s Law absurdity. Dumping a DUI, legal ruin, and relationship collapse all at once doesn't build tension—it just creates viewer numbness. If that ending means Coop becomes an FBI informant, they're copying a silly Tulsa King trope. Pass.
For All Mankind S5E9 proves empires don't negotiate with idealists; they shoot them. The Happy Valley invasion was a trigger-happy bloodbath. Alex and Lily wanted a revolution and got a hallway of bodies. Complete FUBAR with one episode left. Mars is a graveyard. open.substack.com/pub/kevinmat...
The anti-AI panic is pure hypocrisy. Clyde Stubblefield’s "Funky Drummer" break built hip-hop, was sampled thousands of times, and he got zero royalties. The industry called it "transformative culture." Now AI does pattern recognition and it’s "theft"? You don’t care about creators, just the tech.
