When I sat down to watch the finale of The Regime I had no idea what to expect. That’s not hyperbole, that’s not a figure of speech, that’s legit. Time and again I’d failed to predict the show’s wild changes of direction. What would it do for an encore?
Elena Vernham and Herbert Zubak were last seen trapped on the roof of the palace, rebels everywhere. The way this show goes, the finale could start six months later when they’re already in a labor camp somewhere. They could wind up getting killed. They could wind up back in charge none the worse for wear. They could flee to another country and do the talk-show circuit. They could somehow trigger a world-devouring nuclear holocaust. Anything could happen.
I like what we got a lot. The Regime goes out on a bitter, small little note, as what amount to two severely mentally ill people responsible for the deaths of thousands are ping-ponged from one faction to another, violently, until an agreement is reached. Elena Vernham can remain chancellor, but she’ll be a puppet only. The real rulers of Unnamed Central European Nation will be the billionaire Bartos and his American backers. They need Elena as a figurehead to stabilize the country, but that is the only role she will now serve. The people she and Herbert fought so hard against are in charge. And the cost of saving her own life is sacrificing his.
Normally I have a problem with comedies when they turn serious, or expect us to act as though characters whose dialogue includes regular punchlines can suddenly act like regular human beings. The Regime gets away with it for a few reasons. First, frankly, I like it and it can do what it wants. Second, more dispositively, it’s not as though satires can’t end on a legitimately serious down note: Look at Animal Farm, or A Clockwork Orange, or much of the work of Kurt Vonnegut.
Third, and specific to this show, are the killing of Agnes and the abandonment of her son Oskar. When those things happened, the show’s comedic armor was pierced. Their terrifying and tragic ordeal function like a wound in the show, to which the rest of it slowly succumbs.
Because this really is a much more serious episode than any of the previous ones. You can see and hear it, very literally, in the incredible performance of Kate Winslet as the Chancellor. When Elena feels most powerless — when the rebel security forces led by the turncoat Laskin capture and torture her, when she’s forced to go on stage inside a bulletproof glass cage almost exactly like her sexually abusive father’s coffin and give a bullshit speech to her people — out comes a lisp that her preposterous posh accent was clearly designed, over likely endless training sessions, to cover up. It’s the aural equivalent of the wigs she wears to hide how her hair is falling out in anxiety-triggered clumps.
Recall how her father’s “ghost” mocked her inability to speak clearly when she hallucinated him earlier in the season. Recall also how he accused her of sucking Herbert’s cock; Laskin flippantly tells Herbert this is what her father is suspected of having made her do to him. Now her reticence to have sex with Nicholas takes on a sad new meaning, as does her sexual reawakening with Herbert. She was crazy about him like that because he made her feel safe.
Her affect is different after it’s all said and done, too. When she’s back together with Nicky she’s no longer her confident, flighty self. The sparkle is gone from her eyes, the aristocratic shimmer gone from her voice. When an obviously still bitter Nicky presses her on what went on during the period she became obsessed with Herbert and destroyed her country as a result, she calls it “a bit of a wobble” with the flat conviction of a battering victim telling a doctor they fell down some stairs.
Before she steps into that big glass coffin to address the people, though, Herbert must be placed in one of his own. But Bartos and his American minions — a swarm of guys in flack jackets, baseball caps, and face-obscuring sunglasses, they look like guys who’d cut you off in traffic in their F-150s with Blue Lives Matter Punisher decals — allow her a moment of grace to say goodbye to him. In fact, she comes to him as though it’s all been settled, as though they’ll both survive. She tells him how much she needed him, how glad she is he came along. They drift off to sleep together. When Herbert wakes up, he’s alone, and he is shot to death.
Now it’s Herbert rather than daddy dearest who resides in the crypt beneath the palace. The final scene shows Elena solemnly visiting him, but only to leave a bouquet of flowers, not to communicate with his corpse. Not yet, anyway.
In the end, creator Will Tracy posits the literal, physical triumph of capital over all. Bartos’s boys take down the rebels, who took down the regime, and now get to install a new regime (albeit with an old face) of their own design. I could score cheap points here by pointing out we too live under a regime where billionaires essentially pay high-ranking government officials to decide things in their favor, but that just feels smug, no matter how I may feel about Clarence Thomas.
Rather, I point this out to note that despite all its unpredictable changes of direction, The Regime wound up in the most predictable place possible: with American business interests running the show. I should have seen it coming. But I didn’t, because the show conditioned me never to trust my instincts about what happens next. The Regime worked because it taught you to expect the unexpected, then closed with the expected, the most unexpected thing of all.
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.
