"it substantially pares down its tones. Nothing campy or fey shall pass through the dour, strictly heterosexual doors of Talamasca this episode, and you can forget about Interview fan service like Daniel Molloy's appearance in "We Watch" entirely. The whole episode is in the show's Spy Thriller modality. I can quibble with that, considering that Spy Thriller was by far my least favorite of the multiple kinds of shows "We Watch" teased that Talamasca would contain, but at least things aren't as muddled here."
"For another, I complained in my recap of "We Watch" that Guy Anatole, our goofy mop top of a protagonist, didn't have much of a character, thanks in large part to Nicholas Denton's very teen soap-ish performance. That performance is still just as flat and broad (like a delicious thin-crust pizza, I suppose), but let no one say after this episode that Guy has no personality traits. As "Wilderness" will reveal, he is defined in large part by being astonishingly dim."
"After the episode's cold open (the aftermath of the train-assisted suicide of Soledad, our hacker from the last episode; gotta say, I didn't love that the only Black person we've had named so far in the show is reduced to a series of gruesomely bloodied body parts for the camera to linger on), we get a glimpse of Guy's TM Corp training."
A Wilderness of Mirrors tightens tone into a straight spy thriller, dropping camp and Interview fan service. The episode eliminates fey elements and keeps Talamasca dour and strictly heterosexual. The narrative foregrounds Guy Anatole's limited intelligence, making dimness a defining trait despite Nicholas Denton's flat, teen-soap delivery. The cold open depicts Soledad's train-assisted suicide with graphic lingering on bloodied body parts, reducing the only named Black character to gruesome imagery. Talamasca accelerates a yearlong TM Corp training into a week for an urgent London deployment, and on-screen instruction is depicted as superficial and procedural.
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