The Regime recap: The walls close in on an ever-delusional Elena

Six Months Later.

We begin yet again with a time jump and boy has a lot happened since we last saw Elena (Kate Winslet), Corporal Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), and the rest of the minions who precariously govern this fictional Central European country populated with folks with various British accents. Gone is Elena’s faithful husband Nicky (Guillaume Gallienne), supplanted as he’s been by Herbert, who now is no longer a shadow presence in Elena’s governing. They are now together—they’re even attending therapy together. Well, sort of. This is dream therapy, where a blank-faced woman massages the messages this aggrieved and traumatized soldier continues to get from his unruly subconscious. This amounts to assuring Herbert that Elena does love him and that he mistakenly conflates pain and love (understatement!). Still, the idea that he’s nothing more than a weapon she’ll eventually dispense with isn’t all that farfetched.

What isn’t far enough are the encroaching rebel forces who have only been emboldened by Elena’s botched attempt at tamping down union unrest. They are mere kilometers away from the palace—not that Elena is all that worried. As ever, she’s ensconced in her own version of reality where the sounds of bombing and fighting outside the palace (as she beds Herbert, say) is little else but white noise. It’s only a matter of time until reality comes crashing into this carefully curated green/blue-decorated palace. But until then, it’s business as usual, which means no amount of cajoling from her own ministers will persuade the chancellor into passing any number of reforms that would hopefully sway her people from violently toppling her government.

Indeed, every attempt at bringing some sense into Elena is met with a wry, condescending smile. She won’t concede that her numbers are plummeting (fake CIA stats!) nor that her people really want to kill her (if only they saw her, maybe they’d understand). Sure, there are 13,000 civilian deaths and the popularity of the Westgate rebels is only growing. But to Elena, whose blissful life with Herbert seems to shut everything else out, these are but pesky details. “The Westgate agitators have been fed lies by NATO tyrants,” she says. “They’re just confused. They don’t know how bad it can get without me.” It’s no surprise to find her devout ministers (the ones who haven’t yet defected, as Laskin eventually does) begin plotting an inner coup focusing on her mental stability. I mean, that level of self-delusion is clearly proof of a breakdown that could allow them to take control of the government, no? Who else would air an Annual Christmas Village Celebration special where she goes full Mean Girls singing and dancing in a provocative Santa outfit while her people are starving, rioting, and all around angry over the way she’s been running their government?

Alas, before such a plan can be put in motion, the rebels cut off all media. Elena and her government only have hours before they’re captured. Even at that point, Herbert is blunt: “They hate you and they want to kill you,” he informs her, and you can almost see her trying to make sense of the truths behind those words. Could she find a way to still come out on top? Or at least find a dignified way out?

And so, surrounded by her most trusted (if slightly drunk on Christmas drinks) advisors, Elena has one moment of borrowed lucidity: She could resign! And appoint someone else! Who could follow in her footsteps, though? Herbert, of course. Isn’t this what it has all led to?

Plans are set in motion: All Elena needs to do is go live on social media and inform her countryfolk that she’s stepping down and that the foundling heir himself is taking over. But once she’s all done up and in front of a camera (now wearing red instead of her preferred green), she can’t bring herself to give up power. She’s been good for a lot of things. She riles off plenty of stats to back this up, going off book and letting the words on her teleprompter taunt her. And then, before she can make up her mind at all, the palace is breached and any reasonable way through this mess vanishes.

Under siege, Elena is led by Herbert up to the roof where a helicopter with the chancellor’s ministers proves that there was a line those men were willing to draw: They’d rather shoot a soldier than let her join them in the copter. Finally, all she has is her soldier/lover—not her husband (who’s in Switzerland following a suicide attempt), not her son (who’s cowering in his quarters by himself), not her acolytes (who taunt her as they fly away), and clearly not her people (who are all too happy to trash the palace and all it stands for).

It’s pandemonium, with gleeful violence and looting everywhere. (Elena’s father is thrown out of a balcony, as obvious a metaphor for a change of guard as anything else.) Herbert does his best secret service moves to keep Elena protected as they move through the palace’s inner hallways, leaving Oskar behind; she can’t bring herself to go back for him (as Agnes is doing, in fact). Will they make it out alive? Will a new government bring any kind of difference to this country? And, perhaps more importantly, will the finale episode greet us with a “One Year Later” title card?

Stray observations

• Even when I find myself wishing The Regime were more biting, I do find small tidbits like promoting the former minister of civil services and sports to minister of defense. That feels particularly apt for the absurd regime the series is skewering.
• Ditto for the use of The Barber Of Seville as shorthand for a coup d’etat. (That’s how you know you’re in Europe and not, say, in the U.S.)
• What do we think Oskar got for Christmas?
• Speaking of Oskar, I didn’t even talk about his obsession with the Christmas cod he got to choose and name (“Elena,” obviously), which led to some of the episode’s bluntest metaphors: “Will they eat Elena tomorrow?” he asks his mother, confusing her even as she realizes he’s talking about the fish that will be served for dinner the following day. That only worked slightly better than Agnes’s attempts to curry his favor in agreeing to leave for better grounds (France) through a series of oblique references to French baked goods.
• Two shots in the episode I love and which remind me that, however I feel about the script, this is as handsomely mounted modern drama as we’re seeing these days: Winslet gardening, her red lips matching the flowers she’s clipping, her green dress doing the same with the foliage around her and, of course, Winslet showing us Elena speaking into a phone as a window behind her shows an explosion right outside the palace. Both are gorgeous moments that show the extent to which she’s cocooned herself in a world of her own making.
• One of my greatest pet peeves in contemporary television, especially in shows that make use of video calls (Zoom, Facetime, Skype, you name it) is the overuse of green-screen technology. I get that sometimes you can’t get actors to interact with one another during certain scenes but the way in which TV shows ask us to blindly forget how these apps work is sometimes all too laughable. Not so here in The Regime, which either made great use of VFX or went as far as actually having Winslet and Gallienne video call one another, making their interaction all the more believable.
• What is there to make of The Regime arguably rendering Elena just a petty, vain girl with daddy issues who swaps one (zombie, dead) daddy for another in the way of Herbert? And what’s there to make of Winslet, who’s called to turn this caricature of a tyrant feel into a well-rounded one, only for her to ultimately be nothing more than an emotionally manipulative woman?

The Regime is available to stream now on Max.