Loona seems headed for a makeover after an assassination target sneers at her appearance. The setup invites us to expect a seductive entrance, then she crashes through a window with a gun. It’s a lovely piece of comic misdirection: the joke steers our expectations toward one outcome so that the actual response arrives with extra force. Loona gets to reject the target’s judgment through the way she does her job. Her move into fieldwork gives Helluva Boss’s third season an opportunity to turn a familiar personality into fresh action, and this gag takes it.
“Turtle Emoji” could use that economy elsewhere. Its influencer-apology song keeps working a satirical premise after the point has landed, and an extended repetition gag makes the episode feel stalled. Repetition needs an escalation, some change that gives us a reason to anticipate the next beat.
Here, anticipation starts turning into waiting. The switches from this material to Stolas’s distress are awkward too, with the comedy occupying time the emotional story could use. Across the three opening episodes reviewed here, the series gets much better at making its jokes and its pain contribute to the same scene.
The Immediate Murder Professionals have acquired an employee who is struggling to function. Stolas, stripped of his princely status and powers, now handles communications while living with Blitzø, the boss whose romantic attention he once pursued. His estrangement from his daughter Octavia has left him questioning the life he wanted. Elsewhere in the company, Millie is keeping her pregnancy secret from Moxxie. These changes give the assassination business useful dramatic work: people still have assignments to complete while their private lives become difficult to discuss.
“Bad Reputation” takes Millie back to Wrath and gives her fighting skills a personal history. Her former friend Cass resents the confidence and ability that make Millie so effective, allowing envy to develop into sabotage. Their duel, built out of a hoedown showdown, offers the expected pleasure of watching Millie demonstrate how dangerous she is. The revealing choice comes afterward.
She spares Cass, and the crowd boos. Winning has satisfied the community’s appetite for a spectacle; showing mercy displeases it. Millie’s ability to choose what happens after victory becomes the scene’s most interesting measure of strength. The flashback is less economical. Its account of Millie’s past supplies a reason for her distance from home, but it holds the present-day pregnancy story in suspension for a long stretch.
I like how the pregnancy story gives her room to make a different kind of decision. Millie speaks to her sister Sallie Mae before she tells Moxxie, and that interval allows her uncertainty to belong to her. Moxxie’s eventual response is tender and practical.
He is willing to change his plans, and he has already been gathering equipment to keep her safe at work. Those preparations communicate affection through something he has done before the conversation begins. His support leaves space for the practical questions ahead, while sparing the episode an artificial argument designed to delay a conversation between people who love each other.
“Gimpy Gimpy” gives Stolas a situation in which expressing his preferences seems easier. Through an app introduced by Loona, he meets a partner for an explicit encounter whose staging pays careful attention to agreement. Messages establish preferences beforehand.
A traffic-light system and a safe word make checking in part of the encounter itself. Afterward, water and a caring smile extend that attention beyond the sexual performance. The detail matters because it makes consideration visible. We can understand what the partner is doing to ensure Stolas retains control without needing the scene to stop for a lecture.
Then “Dirty Bird” complicates what we are watching. A musical number can give us access to feelings that a character cannot comfortably explain in ordinary conversation. Bryce Pinkham’s vulnerable performance makes the song feel like such an opening into Stolas, but the lyrics suggest an attachment to punishment that unsettles the encounter’s reassuring procedures.
The knife play recalls his captivity under Striker, a trauma also returning through flashbacks. Stolas’s choices could involve reclaiming control, punishing himself, or some unstable combination of impulses. The scene allows those possibilities to remain uncomfortable.
That uncertainty makes the encounter dramatically worthwhile. The partner’s care is clear; Stolas’s relationship with his own desires remains difficult to read. Treating consent carefully gives the episode enough precision to explore that distinction.
The show is less patient with the friendship that helps bring him there. Loona offers the app after Stolas says he and Blitzø are not together, so her assistance follows what he has told her. Yet the leap from their club night to the next day skips interaction that could have made their growing closeness feel fuller. An emotionally important connection gets hurried past.
Blitzø, meanwhile, has become almost painfully eager to demonstrate his affection. His tangled messages and expedition to Australia for a rare plant give familiar comic excess a new purpose. An elaborate errand suits a man who finds direct emotional communication difficult: he can attempt something dangerous and bring back proof of his effort. The changed dynamic feels credible because his willingness has developed faster than their ability to understand each other. Stolas’s distress over Octavia and his lost life cannot be solved by the scale of a gift, however sincerely it is meant.
When Stolas calls Blitzø his roommate while preparing to leave for a date, the phrase reduces that effort to something he cannot acknowledge. They have no established exclusive relationship, and Blitzø’s affection creates no obligation to return it. The hurt still registers.
His reaction gives the episode a precise way to show how he has changed: he nearly destroys the plant, saves it, and then breaks down alone. Keeping the gift intact requires a restraint he can exercise himself. It also leaves him living with the hope attached to it, after the person he brought it home for has gone out.
The Great Experiment premiered globally on Netflix on October 16, 2026. Created by Søren Sveistrup, the Danish psychological thriller series follows a clandestine government initiative where top scientists and ethicists monitor an isolated community subjected to extreme psychological conditions, leading to deadly unforeseen consequences.
Full Credits
Title: The Great Experiment
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: October 16, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: 45–58 minutes per episode (8 episodes)
Director: Susanne Bier, Per Hanefjord
Writers: Søren Sveistrup, Helle Ryslinge
Producers and Executive Producers: Meta Louise Foldager Sørensen, Tomas Radoor, Søren Sveistrup
Cast: Danica Curcic, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Lars Mikkelsen, Sofie Gråbøl, Ulrich Thomsen, Trine Dyrholm, Søren Malling, Peter Mygind
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Jesper Tøffner
Editors: Martin Schade, Anders Albjerg Kristiansen
Composer: Jon Ekstrand
The Review
The Great Experiment
The Great Experiment gives recent history the ache of something preserved before it has stopped hurting. Monochrome images, uneasy silences, and exposed faces make political estrangement physically felt. Its attention to distress sometimes leaves unequal power insufficiently examined, and the closing ceremony carries too much responsibility for reassurance. Yet the film’s patient encounters restore human uncertainty to events hardened into public memory.
PROS
- Monochrome photography creates unsettling historical distance.
- Intimate encounters preserve uncertainty beneath political identities.
- Pandemic silences recover the weight of passing time.
- January 6 footage physically disrupts the film’s visual composure.
CONS
- Shared distress sometimes obscures unequal causes and consequences.
- The closing ceremony bears an excessive burden of reassurance.
