The Regime recap: Zombie daddy issues

Two Months Later.

Don’t worry, I’ll stop marking the passage of time in these recaps just as soon as The Regime dispenses with such time jumps in every given episode. Any guesses as to how many more weeks/months will have passed by the time we get to episode four?

But yes, two months have passed since Chancellor Vernham (a half-droop lipped Kate Winslet) humiliated one of the richest men in her country. And in the meantime, it seems things have only further unraveled as Elena continues to give now corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts, in brute fist mode) more and more power. First it was steamed potatoes. Then it was mild diplomacy advice. Now he’s in full control of government morning meetings. It’s there where he’s now announced Elena’s next steps in her plan to…well, it’s unsure what her plan is other than do as Herbert suggests in a plea to appease him. And so land reform is next on the docket.

A new package of reforms designed to “improve the lives of working families” (such a neat and empty little soundbite) is meant to take land back from the gentry and return it to the masses. All of Elena’s advisors (even those who now dress in folk costumes to better flatter the foundling’s heir) try to ask logistical questions—namely, how will the country pay for this? They’re cowed into submission by the mere cowering presence of Herbert, whose scowls are enough to silence them. Clearly their plan to sideline him has not worked. Yet.

And so Elena pushes ahead with this land reform—which apparently includes taping a laughably absurd campaign ad that gifts us Winslet’s deadpan ability to cape act like no one else. “This beloved land must belong to you” she tells the camera with a kind of deadened sincerity (“I wasn’t too earnest?” she wonders) you have to imagine will soon find her floundering. The ad, the campaign, the policies…they’re all too perfect examples of a leader’s weaponization of wistful nostalgia to get some buy-in from her electorate. But it’s all smoke and mirrors. Because, as Nicky reminds his wife, she can’t both be Robin Hood and the King. She can’t pretend to be want to give back to the people while also skimming from the top into a holding company that continues to line her pockets.

Oh yeah. Turns out (surprise!) Elena is a full-time crook. Is this a cliché? Perhaps. It’s all too real as well. Corruption so often goes hand in hand with populism, especially of the kind Vernham and her ilk project. But then, as we keep learning, The Regime is content with pegging its toothless satire on such easy targets. See also: the way this episode fleshes out Elena’s own motivations—which boil down to daddy issues.

We knew her reign was clearly motivated by some sense that she could do in power what her father had not been able to accomplish and that her leaning on Herbert was a way to push an agenda the former Chancellor never could. But here we get two scenes that further solidify the way Elena’s entire personality—her health anxiety, her self-serving vanity, her insecurities—all come from needing Daddy’s approval. The first finds Elena visiting her embalmed father (in a glass casket, naturally) ahead of his birthday celebration where Winslet is tasked with running a one-sided conversation that finds Elena talking to her very very dead father: “You’re wrong about Herbert,” she tells him, clearly responding to, perhaps, her own misgivings about how out of control the rural brute’s become now that he’s flush with power. But it was that virile masculinity that she clearly craved and that would help set her apart from her father’s reign. Only, of course, she cannot control Herbert, not even as the two continue working out together and she breaks down in tears (and fears) and spills all about the holding company: “I have made such a fucking mess,” she tells Herbert in a moment of vulnerability that will quickly come to haunt her.

We’ll get to the actual haunting later. Because after that gym mishap, where Elena has to have her wrist braced, Herbert moves to banish Nicky from Elena’s bedroom at night and even finds time to berate Agnes (Andrea Riseborough). It all sets up the way Herbert is a bit unhinged. And maybe too in control. And also maybe a bit out of his depth in a rarified world that doesn’t quite work the way he’d like.

That’s especially clear in the Chancellor Vernham birthday celebration, which shows how much Elena, no matter how much she cosplays as a folk peasant, is out of step with her people. I mean, baking a cake for an embalmed former leader and then singing happy birthday to him? Bananas. Especially as a way to avoid Herbert from outing her as the corrupt leader that she is.

Speaking of Elena’s father, we have to talk about that Zombie Daddy nightmare where Elena gets a talking to from him. Like something out of a horror movie about the patriarchy, he asks her first to stop apologizing and calls her a “a vapid, feckless political whore with no principles. A comic figure bereft of vision, easily ruled. All tits and no spine.” Hell of a subconscious, no! But that’s all the ever hesitant ruler needs to try and prove to herself, and her dead daddy, that she’s not ruled by Herbert.

Attending a morning meeting like she hasn’t in weeks, she sets to pause the land reform. Because you have to “secure” the land before you reform it, no? And she owes it to her people to, well, do just that. In laymans’ terms that means annexing the Faban corridor—which may well give her the press splash Elena had gotten used to (canny of her advisors to wheedle her with such vanity-driven advice). This takes Herbert for a loop; the last thing he wanted, it seems, was to be shipped off to invade an adjoining territory.

Well, not “invading.” Elena doesn’t want to use such language: “This isn’t an occupation” she insists, to her government, to her people, to the press. And then, as if wanting to do away with the very real consequences, the show clips through said non-invasion via broadcast news clips, and then brings Herbert back as a kind of hero of sorts, even if he’s now clearly wary of what’s to come. Elena, it seems, has no desire to waste more political goodwill with “land reform” following what’s clearly now an international debacle which has further alienated the Americans, if not the entirety of Western Europe.

But she still celebrates the win, no matter how coerced it’s been. (Voting at gunpoint to be annexed into another country does sound like it’d be quite a red flag.) And celebrating is one thing she knows how to do best. And so get a garish, tacky victory celebration, replete with a tone-deaf emcee gently ribbing everyone from Nicky to Herbert (who, surprise, is humorless and sees no room in the new/old country he wants to build for such bourgeois affairs).

And so we come to the one moment in the series that feels like what The Regime could be if it were more disciplined and its satire more scalpel than chainsaw. Herbert and Elena gather in her quarters and finally come head to head: “You’re not enormously bright, are you?” she goads him, knowing she’s cowed him as far as she can. She needles him about wanting to fuck her and calls him a “big baby ox man” (which you have to admit is a perfect distillation of his personality) only to have him finally snap. Whatever fine S&M balance they’d achieved has now disappeared. He chokes her and then leaves in a huff, the better to go beat up Bartos whom Elena was to meet about China. Winslet and Schoenaerts are thrilling in that scene where the attraction and disdain between Elena and Herbert is all too clear, where their mutual desire to control and contain the other bubbles up in ways both violent and erotic. Why not hang the show on that dynamic?

It’s unclear what will happen next since Herbert is, the following day, dispatched away from the palace, banished from Elena’s inner circle. Will he become a folk leader eager to dethrone her? He fits the part, at least—foundling “heir” and all.

Stray observations

• If your series is premised on absurdist humor and comedic beats, maybe don’t have one of your characters say out loud how “Comedy is like that: nobody is good at it”? It just makes us recap writers’ jobs all the easier.
• Oh I forgot to mention that Elena and Herbert (much to the rightful dismay of Nicky) eat…um, dirt for breakfast? Yes. Actual dirt. Which just made me curious as to what the props department came up with for Winslet and Schoenaerts to eat in those scenes.
• Love the idea of a first husband making poetry centers his key policy.
• Can we talk about Herbert’s tight and taut workout attire?
• In the subplot we hope one day will pay off, we find that Elena/Agnes’s son has not been able to keep taking his Western meds for his epilepsy, leaving him having a seizure during the birthday bash. That eventually prompts Agnes to tell Elena how the holistic approach to their son’s health wasn’t working. Which is all the excuse Elena needs to take Oscar from Agnes, since she can’t trust her from having kept the fact that her son wasn’t doing well. Cruel and vindictive, a.k.a. classic Elena.
• Alexandre Desplat’s strident score in that final scene is a thing of beauty. It perfectly matches the chaos Elena’s choices have unleashed.