Compare these two monologues from Elena Vernham, chancellor of Central Europe’s premier source of cobalt and sugar beets. The first comes at the beginning of this second episode, as she marvels over “the art of country medicineâ€:
“My loves. I was once tired, lethargic, weighed down by the stresses of modern life. Until I unlocked the ancient power of the potato. And now, thanks to the healing properties of potato steam …â€
The second comes much later, as she holds a meeting with Judith Holt (Martha Plimpton), an American senator who’s taking a special diplomatic detour to chat with Elena about her alarming rhetoric in the hope that it will put their relationship back on track. To that gesture, she offers this:
“We let you dig our earth for a pittance. We provided refueling and airspace support for your wars in the Middle East. We handed you hundreds of dossiers on supposed Russian cyberterrorists working in our country. We swore off China and her Belt and Road. We let your CIA run its black sites here, right here, on our sovereign soil. You shoveled your shit on our doorstep for years and told us we were happy to eat it.â€
Based on these two passages, who is the real Elena Vernham? Is she a gullible, easily manipulated fool who will guzzle every drop of snake oil that’s waved in her direction? Or is she a sneakily savvy stateswoman who’s keenly aware of her country’s importance to a superpower like the United States, which is willing to plug its nose over all sorts of unsavory behavior to stay in business with her? The Regime has a tendency to toggle back and forth between these two Elenas without necessarily reconciling them. It’s hard to believe that the iron-fisted autocrat standing up to a U.S. diplomat can be the same woman who’s eager to have a mustard compress applied to her chest.
The one possible common denominator here is power. She likes to wield it and she tends to respond to it. That’s what Herbert Zubak was able to figure out at the end of last week’s premiere when he furiously knocked away all the spore treatments that were in place to prey on her weakness and susceptibility. Now it’s Zubak’s turn to prey on her weakness and susceptibility by filling the palace with so much potato steam that Nicky says it “smells like an Irish whorehouse.†Elena’s decision to bring the man primarily responsible for killing 12 mine protestors is standard-issue reactionary behavior, like Donald Trump granting clemency to war criminals. But Zubak was smart enough to seize on Elena’s lust for power: After exposing the spore patrol as traitorous manipulators, he can simply take their place, all while making her seem like the decisive one.
Elena’s new hard-line position against the United States is upsetting the natural order of things. The entire point of her regime is for a small handful of rich people to get fat off the cobalt trade, while the penniless masses are left to nibble on their sugar beets. Whether by charisma or brute force, Elena’s job has been to hold her citizens at bay while all this looting takes place, but she either doesn’t know it’s her job or she’s consciously rebelling against the sleazy oligarchs who have served as her advisers/puppet masters. (Again, the show is weirdly cagey about whether Elena is savvy or impressionable.) With Zubak’s sudden rise as the most prominent voice in her ear, Elena has adopted a nationalist fervor that’s more genuine rather than just another tool to placate the masses.
Naturally, the oligarchs are alarmed, as is poor Nicky, who didn’t leave his family behind to get denied his rightful place in the trough. (And in the marital bed, for that matter.) And so the men gather secretly in a nightclub of the damned to discuss strategies for wresting their golden goose from Zubak’s influence. They know already that Zubak has violent tendencies, though that’s not necessarily a great argument against him since Elena hired him because he butchered the mine protestors, not despite it. They have a folder stuffed with more evidence of Zubak’s brutality, which started early with beating his mother at age 14 and continued with his time in the military, where he was denied a promotion due to her erratic behavior. Seemingly more damning, still, is footage that Agnes has secured of Zubak’s self-flagellation in his room, where he’s been abusing his body and strangling himself with a telephone cord.
Yet the consensus seems to be that Zubak’s violence, whether to himself or to others, isn’t going to be a sufficient turnoff for Elena, who’s so energized by it that she gets an erotic charge from Zubak bullying the senator into a locked room in the palace. (“How does it feel to not be in control? You will never be in control of this place again, do you hear me?â€) The new strategy is much riskier, which is to grant Zubak such an exalted status that Elena will naturally feel envious or threatened and throw him in the brig alongside her former finance minister and physician. Through astounding “DNA evidence†— which is brought to her for scrutiny, given her medical expertise — the oligarchs offer Zubak as a direct descendent of “the Foundling,†the mythical root of the country itself. With Elena’s similarly made-up genetic link to Charlemagne, this would be an unbeatable duo, provided that she has any interest in sharing power.
But who knows? The plan seems to have backfired for now, as Agnes watches a giant rendering of Zubak get wheeled into the palace for display. But Elena is a fickle leader who tends to act impulsively and Zubak isn’t exactly a model of stability himself. The larger question for The Regime is whether all these machinations are serving a satirical point or merely salty palace intrigue for its own sake. Stay tuned.
Spores
• Nicky seems alarmed by his wife no longer needing him to slice into her own poached egg. Bit by bit, he’s become less useful to her.
• Agnes is proving to be a survivor in the regime, willing to participate in behind-the-scenes power plays but not to the point where she puts herself at risk of the chancellor’s ire. And so, sure, she can pretend that nibbling on black radish is curing her son of his epilepsy, but she’s still sneaking his crushed-up pills into his pudding pops.
• “We’re mice in a bathtub. Three inches of water and we drown.†A great line from Emil Bartos (Stanley Townsend), the country’s richest man, about the limits of Elena acting out. He’s rewarded for his candor by being embarrassed in a public ceremony for kowtowing to the U.S. Nothing more humiliating for a billionaire than stacking chairs.
• “Blur your vision. Breathe through your mouth. How else does one get through life?â€
• Wonderful to see Martha Plimpton turn up as Judith Holt. Plimpton has been great in movies and television (and gathered acclaim onstage) since the mid-’80s, when she parlayed a breakthrough role in The Goonies into more serious roles. She’s always had a tart sense of humor too, which serves her well in this role.