‘Maniac’ Episode 7 Recap: Elf Help

To paraphrase the promising young entrepreneur Jesse Pinkman, Maniac doesn’t need a fantasy sequence — it needs a fantasy sequence.

Titled with morbid good humor after a method of execution favored by one of its imaginary characters, “Ceci Ne’st Pas Une Drill,” Maniac Episode 7, is a journey deep into the mind of…prestige television?!? I think so, yeah. In theory, what we’re witnessing here is the final stage in Dr. James K. Mantleray’s three-pill process: Confrontation, a vaguely described manner of dispatching unhappiness forever. (If it works.) For Owen, that means envisioning himself as a Post Malone lookalike heir to the criminal empire overseen by his father, played by Gabriel Byrne in a badass gangster mode we haven’t seen from him in way too long.

And for Annie, it entails becoming a hard-drinking, cynical half-elf ranger in a fantasy kingdom, guiding a dying Elf princess who bears a striking resemblance to her real-world late sister (played beautifully, and with an unimpeachable high-fantasy English accent, by Julia Garner) to a mystical lake that will cure her illness.

For Maniac? I assume it means taking two of the biggest storytelling phenomena since the dawn of the New Golden Age of Television — the epic fantasy of Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings and the gritty criminal morality plays of The Sopranos andThe Wire, though the plot itself is very Martin Scorsese’s The Departed — and examining what they represent for the people who watch and enjoy them. “What does any tale mean?” asks the princess when Annie, who by then has looked into a magic mirror and realized what’s going on and is no longer in her fantasy-character persona, confronts her about the fictional nature of their current adventure. Maniac is asking the same thing.

Asking, but not really answering. There are some cool flourishes here, primarily but not entirely in the Owen/gangster side of things. Byrne makes a fantastic crime boss. Jonah Hill parlays Owen’s usual mush-mouthed way of speaking into a unique spin on the crimelord-failson archetype, like when he bumps into the young woman he melted down at during his real-world “BLIP” at a diner and excuses himself from her offer of a study date by mumbling “No disrespect.” The bold but astute use of the Geto Boys’ immortal “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” as Owen tails his father at the behest of the NYPD, who’ve flipped him against his old man, lends the entire affair real gangster-movie frisson. (The song itself practically is a movie all on its own.) And as mentioned above, there’s a delightfully disgusting execution by drill.

I don’t think the fantasy thing works as well, mainly because without the same thoroughgoing attention to detail the show has lavished on every other aspect of its overlapping worlds — and which distinguishes Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings from their many knockoffs — it just looks like a lost episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. But Stone and Garner make fantastic elves, that’s for sure. There’s a nice little hallucinatory visit from a talking dragonfly that may or may not be an homage to the moth Gandalf uses to call for rescue from time to time in the LotR movies. And Annie’s berserker rage when an invisible assassin punctures her flagon of booze is a hoot to behold.

But at bottom, unless you’re a person who just gets reflexively jazzed the moment men with Noo Yawk accents start talking about loyalty or beautiful people with long hair and grey cloaks take off their hoods and reveal pointy ears, this has nothing to offer. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s kinda cool sometimes, but why would the key phase of the Mantleray process involve such obvious pop-culture archetypes? There’s one wonderful throwaway bit — heat waves emanate from Olivia, which she explains to Owen by saying her permanently hyperthermic skin maintains a constant temperature of 106 degrees — that points to the creepy fun that can be had with dream logic, but it’s over in an instant. When you’ve got the chance to do anything, anything, why do the same thing you’ve seen before?

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.

Watch Maniac Episode 7 ("Ceci N'est Pas Une Drill") on Netflix