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Okay, now I’m really paying attention. For the second time, The Regime has bucked my expectations of what The Regime would be about. The premiere made it seem that Corporal Herbert Zubak was going to be our audience identification character, the comic everyman, the fish out of water dumped into the absurdist aquarium of Chancellor Elena Vernham’s titular regime and forced to swim with the sharks.
Instead, it almost immediately revealed that Herbert is a power-mad Rasputin, who by the time this episode rolls around has the palace staff in “1984” Outer Party jumpsuits and a cabinet minister in something like lederhosen, while he himself serves the Chancellor and her husband Nicky teacups full of dirt for their health. (Herbert: “It’s what we used to eat when we had nothing.” Nicky: “Yes, but we don’t have nothing, do we.”)
So in the first few minutes of “The Heroes’ Banquet,” this week’s episode, I had little reason to expect anything but more of the same. For crying out loud, Herbert is running cabinet meetings on his own, ordering a sweeping land redistribution program, and marching around with his own praetorian guard. Sure, he and Elena seem slightly out of sync — she doesn’t seem to be sharing his dreams anymore, which is to say she’s no longer working so hard at pretending to have shared them. But the basic setup — an odd couple set themselves up as dictators with the odder of the two increasingly calling the shots — seemed built to go the distance.
So imagine my surprise when the plans of our little cabal of conspirators — Nicky, intelligence chief Laskin, obsequious Schiff, and sarcastic Singer — succeed in their plan to marginalize the Corporal. True, this comes at the expense of a major international incident: the annexation of the Faban Corridor, a no-go zone from a previous war under some kind of peacekeeper protection that folds like a suitcase when the troops roll in. But Herbert is sent to the front, and by the time he returns, all of his reforms, from the palace uniforms and cuisine to the whole give-back-what-was-stolen routine, have been abandoned.
It’s important to note that Elena orders the annexation for reasons just as irrational as any Herbert has been providing her. Reading between the lines, it’s becoming clear that she suffers from a pretty severe mental illness, possibly schizophrenia. Either this or direct action by her dictatorial father (played here in revenant form by Finbar Lynch) killed her. Elena is determined not to be like that, so much so that when she dreams of being harangued by her father’s corpse about “taking it” from Herbert — “He has you sucking his cock, doens’t he? Answer, you ugly bitch!” — she goes with her father’s long-held dream of Faban annexation just to prove she’s not simply doing with the corporal tells her.
We learn a few things from this illusory exchange between Elena and Peter Vernham. One, again, is that she’s mentally ill. Two, the misogynistic specificity of the words he uses to insult and degrade her, and her mother to boot, indicate that her father was abusive in such a way as to hasten this illness along. When Herbert grabs her roughly and sprains her wrist, the ease with which she lies about the cause strongly implies this isn’t her first rodeo with physical abuse.
Which is important, because in the end that’s what her relationship with Herbert comes down to. Feeling that he’s been marginalized, he sits through a ghastly, authoritarian-kitsch dance and comedy performance to celebrate the annexation with the nation’s luminaries — who once again include Bartos, the billionaire mine owner he had Elena performatively humiliate. Now that the Americans are out, they’ll need his money again.
They’ll also need their own money, about a billion dollars of it, all stolen from the country’s coffers and hidden offshore to be shared by Elena and her closest associates and advisors. Her biggest mistake in this episode may not be the Faban annexation, in fact, but coming clean to Herbert about the corruption. Though he’s prevented from announcing it to the public the way he wants, he still knows all about it, and that’s dangerous.
It’s somewhat less so, however, after the way things go down in the end. Left alone together in her room, he begins to complain, and she begins to needle him. She passive-aggressively insults his nervous tic of snorting. She calls him stupid, calls him a baby ox. She repeatedly asks if he dreams about fucking her, nearly straddling him at one point, wearing a daring blue dress in which Kate Winslet simply needs to be seen to be believed. But she doesn’t dream of fucking him, she says. He used to be fun, but he’s boring now.
Enraged, he chokes her. “I’m not an ox!” he roars. “No,” she says through his grip. “You’re a butcher.” Her fearlessness in the face of this physical attack is genuinely impressive. (Agnes, the head of staff, showed similar mettle when Herbert threatened to have her fed to lions earlier in the episode. )
So Herbert returns to the party, slugs the comedian who roasted himth, and beats the living shit out of Bartos. The next day he’s arrested and everything goes back to normal, including the old epilepsy medication for head of staff Agnes’s son Oskar. There’s just one catch: Oskar must live with Elena now. Perhaps she’s on to her latest project: motherhood. Isn’t she the mother of the nation already, after all?
The Regime remains a very funny show. It’s not packed with compound swearing and dick jokes of course, but it’s deft with its humor: Elena opting to sing the harmony for the final line of the “Happy Birthday” song, for example, or Schiff verbosely sputtering “Surely she doesn’t mean ‘reform’ in the most literal sense of changing the form of what is.” Posing her ridiculously in the middle of beet harvest to look as out of place as all politicians do when they present themselves as the salt of the earth. The bit about how it couldn’t possibly be a military takeover because the Faban parliament has unanimously approved the reunification, the way parliaments so famously love to do. Even the idea of an American government outraged by an illegal occupation earns some dark guffaws.
But the way the ghost of Peter tears Elena to shreds, the way Elena does the same to Herbert, Herbert’s obviously severe mental anguish despite the frightening figure he cuts, Agnes’s hopeless plight of having her sick child be bounced from one lunatic to the next — this is all very cutting stuff. This show has teeth, and in this episode it sank them a little bit deeper.
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.
