The Regime recap: “We have no room at all for termites”

Three Weeks Later.

Chancellor Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet) has now been under the thrall of hunky soldier Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) for three whole weeks. That’s good news for the potato farmers in the area since Herbert has convinced Elena that all she needs to better detoxify herself and her palace is…potatoes, everywhere! Yes, even if it means the palace now smells “like an Irish whorehouse.” Clearly clinging to the folk medicine Herbert now has come to represent, the former physician is all in on this holistic, natural, non-Western approach to healing—even if it means having steamed potatoes all over the halls.

But that’s not where Herbert’s unorthodox medicine stops. We see him slathering her with mustard during breakfast. (“Slap me up like a sandwich,” she instructs him, much to the shock and embarrassment of her husband, who’s sitting right there.) We’re supposed to see in Elena’s forceful embrace of Herbert’s folksy ways a kind of political turn: She’s rebuking the West and its inventions (she’s even decided to stop giving her son Oscar his epilepsy pills!), and it follows that she will similarly push back against the U.S. on the diplomatic front. She’s for her country. For her people. Or so she tells herself.

And so, when she learns the U.S. is sending an envoy to smooth out the kinks of what had long been a fruitful alliance between the two countries, Elena is irked that she’s getting a senator—not a President visit and not even a VP. “Just some frequent flyer corn fucker from the farm states” (which, you have to admit, is a great line).

Elena’s decision to be more assertive when it comes to her international allies is clearly spooking her cabinet, all of whom meet in secret with her husband to begin hatching a plan to sever her close-knit relationship with Herbert. They all see him as a threat, all bumbling brute confidence. They worry he’s going to push Elena to do things none of them will be able to take back. But the Chancellor is feeling revitalized by this bond; she’s sick of being seen as the “tacky blonde from a tacky country.” Better she follow Herbert’s advice and continue expelling the poison all her advisors have been feeding her for years now: “You have to flush it out,” he tells her.

It’s all rather schematic and a bit too blunt, which is turning out to be the very register on which The Regime is built; everything seems like posturing toward self-evident platitudes (about authoritarianism, fascism, vanity, etc.) without much complexity of which to speak. I had similar issues with creator Will Tracy’s previous attempt at scathing satire, The Menu. Thankfully, just as in that film, The Regime feels like a chance to give the likes of Kate Winslet and Martha Plimpton (!) plenty of scenery to chew.

Plimpton is tasked with playing Judith Holt, an aw-shucks American senator who thinks a civil conversation with Chancellor Vernham will be enough to reset their diplomatic relations. She’s all brisk business when she arrives at the palace and gets taken aback, slowly and then quite scarily, by Elena’s approach to that same meeting. That moment when Senator Holt is asked to sit all the way on the opposite end of a long (loooong!) table is quite funny and gives the show one of its most affecting shots yet (with Herbert standing near the center of the table).

Turns out there’s no negotiation to be had. Chancellor Vernham, bolstered by her renewed health and the vigor steamed potatoes have gifted her, is bold enough to push back against this idea that her country is supposed to be happy with the crumbs the U.S. offers. Holt rightly pushes back on such an unequal understanding of their relations (given how lax the U.S. has been on Vernham’s civil unrest and even pesky issues like freedom of the press), but it does push the U.S. envoy to promise NATO status and even a chance to join the E.U.

It’s then that Elena escorts Holt around the palace (an impromptu tour!) only to have her be left alone with Herbert with no security detail in place. “You’ll never be in control of this place ever again,” he thunders her way, setting up a new kind of diplomatic approach to dealing with the U.S.—which may well come to bite him and the Chancellor in due time. Once she’s let out she rushes out to her car and instructs her driver to take her straight to the airport.

Left to do some cleanup is Emil Bartos (Stanley Townsend), a titan of industry in the country who clearly has much to gain from keeping a working relationship with the U.S.; it’s he who had escorted Holt to the palace and he who returns there to hopefully talk some sense into Elena. Instead, he’s ambushed by a press conference wherein the Chancellor accuses him of lining his pockets while caring little for his country and his workers: “We have no room at all for termites,” Elena tells him, as he’s forced to play nice lest the cameras further embarrass him. It’s all circus. All theater. All a chance for this vain and self-aggrandizing leader to pat herself on the back for pushing back against corruption once it suits her own goals. And it works, somewhat. But it rankles her closest advisors who keep trying to come up with a plan to break Herbert away from her.

Their first plan (show her video of his self-harm rituals, captured thanks to Agnes, who bugged his room after having seen firsthand his bloodied wounds) wasn’t good enough for Elena’s husband, Nicholas (Guillaume Gallienne). And so we arrive at their counterintuitive plan: convince Elena that Herbert is the descendant from the very first settler of their country. Their hope, it seems, is this would create a rift between the two, seeing as Elena had once hoped to prove she too came from such storied lineage.

We’ll see whether this works. For now, she’s taken the bait and praised this discovery: “We shall reclaim our destiny as the once and future kings of our beloved corner of Europe,” she tells her subjects, as Agnes witnesses the unveiling of a new portrait of Herbert as a Middle Ages knight in the palace. But can this unstable goon really be the future, or will he be proof that the Chancellor and her country need to stop looking at the past to see a possible way forward?

Stray observations

• Elena watching Friends as her comfort watch: a read on the classic NBC sitcom, a read on Elena’s taste, or perhaps a combination of the two?
• A throwaway moment that feels like it revealed a lot to us: Oscar was birthed by Agnes!
• What to make of Herbert’s increasingly spicy dreams about the Chancellor? (And her admission that “Spice is nice” when he shared said sexy red-hued wet dreams about her?)
• Where do I sign up for a joint Matthias/Kate workout session?
• Speaking of Matthias and Kate, we’ve all seen A Little Chaos, yes? I know it’s low-tier Winslet, and it has a preposterous premise (it’s about feuding gardeners/landscapers, after all) but it is quite a curious little gem of a film.
• I have to say I’m really enjoying Consolate Boyle’s approach to Elena’s wardrobe. Boyle, who’s long collaborated with director Stephen Frears (her three Oscar nominations coming from their work on Victoria & Abdul, Florence Foster Jenkins and The Queen) is giving us shapewear dresses that are as simple as they are elegant. They’re clearly meant to be unfussy (you see Elena opting away from frills this episode) but they’re also meant to be quite striking, accentuating the Chancellor’s assets. Compare them to what the American envoy got to wear.
• Favorite line reading of the episode: “Not to me, you hog!” Runner-up: “I’m going to fuck you now.”