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\n Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson\u2019s chemistry makes the incoherent spy drama series worth the ride.
\n Photo: Katalin Vermes\/PEACOCK\n <\/p>\n
Beatrice and Twila do the things all best friends do. They split a bottle of wine and complain about their jobs. They swap recipe ideas and go shopping. They pose galaxy-brained hypotheticals to each other, like whether they\u2019d fuck a guy they hated if it meant stopping a nuclear war. Except that\u2019s not a hypothetical, and the guy is a KGB agent they encounter while investigating the deaths of their CIA-agent husbands in 1970s Moscow. Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) encourages Beatrice (Emilia Clarke) to wear new lingerie to seduce the KGB agent, assuring Beatrice he\u2019ll like it because it\u2019s \u201cred, for communism!\u201d This is not nuanced dialogue, and Ponies is not nuanced in its worldview, nor is it a coherent spy show. It is, however, a gratifying best-friends show.<\/p>\n
The most compelling onscreen friendships present the relationship as a kind of osmosis, one in which two companions affectionately absorb each other\u2019s qualities and quirks over time. Ponies nails that arc. Where Clarke plays Beatrice as heady and prim, Richardson\u2019s Twila is reckless and chummy, and the actresses carve out a distinct puzzle-pieces-fitting-together relationship that evokes some of the best feminist screwball comedies of the past few decades, including Dick, Romy and Michele\u2019s High School Reunion, The Heat, and Spy. (Series co-creator Susanna Fogel has played in this lane before, writing Booksmart and The Spy Who Dumped Me.) Clarke and Richardson\u2019s chemistry makes Ponies work even when everything around them makes no sense. I\u2019ve watched the season finale three times to try to understand the complicated series of double crosses and revealed secrets that cap off eight episodes\u2019 worth of surveillance and betrayal, and I still can\u2019t make head or tail of it. But Clarke and Richardson are undeniable.<\/p>\n
In 1976 Moscow, Beatrice\u2019s and Twila\u2019s husbands, Chris (Louis Boyer) and Tom (John Macmillan), facilitate dead drops, chase Russian assets, and recruit moles to the U.S. cause while their wives pass time bartering for eggs and beet sugar and trying not to say too much in their bugged embassy apartments. When they first meet at a market outside the embassy compound, they immediately dislike each other \u2014 Beatrice a prim-and-proper Wellesley College graduate who learned Russian from her immigrant family and Twila an outspoken dropout who dresses like a Fleetwood Mac groupie. Their first conversation has the air of two women sitting next to each other on a plane who run out of things to talk about within the first ten minutes, then quietly decide, without another word, that they\u2019ll ignore each other for the rest of the trip. Beatrice and Twila gripe about the Soviet Union\u2019s crappy produce, inconsistent electricity, unfashionable clothes, and basically every other stereotype you can think of, then realize they have nothing in common but their complaints. The issue here isn\u2019t necessarily the depiction of the USSR, which certainly had plenty of domestic shortages at this time, but that Ponies is so uncreative in communicating those realities to us.<\/p>\n
Then Chris and Tom\u2019s boss, the stern Dane Walter (Adrian Lester, in a role the late Lance Reddick would have crushed), pulls the women from an embassy Christmas party to tell them their husbands were killed while serving their country. Walter, the head of the CIA\u2019s Moscow station, won\u2019t share\u00a0any information other than that Chris and Tom died in a plane crash, but Beatrice and Twila are desperate to stay in the city and look for answers. They sign up for secretary cover jobs at the U.S. embassy and push Walter; his second, Raymond (Nicholas Podany); and Walter\u2019s mysterious fixer Emile (P\u00e1l M\u00e1csai) to train them in espionage. Their pitch: Because they\u2019re women, they\u2019ll be underestimated and therefore have an advantage. \u201cPeople only look at us if they want to fuck us or marry us, and that\u2019s it,\u201d Twila insists in one of the season\u2019s recurring bits of girl-power self-actualization. No one would expect the Americans to risk a woman (or a \u201cperson of no interest\u201d \u2014 a PONI) in the field, they reason, so they can get things done that no one else can.<\/p>\n
In selling the idea to his boss, Walter says the Soviets would never bring on a woman as a case officer, \u201cso they\u2019d never suspect that we would,\u201d a claim I emphatically refute after watching six meticulously researched and scrupulously detailed seasons of The Americans<\/a>, in which female case officers were an accepted aspect of spycraft. Then again, Ponies\u2019s depiction of espionage collapses if you think too hard about it. KGB agent Andrei (Artjom Gilz), a supposed paranoid mastermind and womanizer, somehow falls in love with Beatrice while she\u2019s pretending to be a teacher and never questions her erratic behavior. Walter seems to regularly forget about protecting the Americans\u2019 desired asset, a tech wiz named Sasha (Petro Ninovskyi), and the embassy staff lets one of its employees hire a foreign nanny without conducting a thorough background check. Ponies is overly reliant on coincidences and characters making unlikely mistakes to keep the plot moving, and all that contrivance leads to some Swiss-cheese-like plotting in the season\u2019s back half. The split-diopter shots and split-screen effects are all welcome visual touches that nod to the period, but they also feel like purposeful distractions.<\/p>\n Ponies knows to give its best stuff to Clarke and Richardson, who each get the opportunity to put a spin on the types you may already associate with them. Clarke has a couple of moments when Beatrice slips into steely Khaleesi<\/a> territory, her voice going cold and imperious as she bosses around members of the Soviet military. But before Dany was ordering her dragons<\/a> to burn up slavers, she was a scared young woman negotiating with men who saw her as nothing more than meat, and Clarke channels that same fragility and frustration before Beatrice grows into a more risk-taking agent of the state. Meanwhile, Richardson\u2019s initially aimless and filterless Twila evokes her past work as Portia on The White Lotus<\/a>, but there\u2019s a looseness to Richardson\u2019s physicality, too \u2014 the way she tilts her head, cocks her hip, and swings her arms as she walks \u2014 that complements Twila\u2019s plucky, all-American-girl aura.<\/p>\n The series is consistently funny, with most of its humor coming from the gap between Beatrice and Twila\u2019s expectations for their covert responsibilities and what they turn out to be. There\u2019s a great rhythm to how Twila always takes a beat longer than Beatrice to grasp what\u2019s going on; she calls a copy machine a \u201ccunt\u201d for not working, resolutely refuses to learn how to type despite being ordered by her boss to do so, and coaches Beatrice on the art of flirting. Her waggly eyebrows when she tells her friend to make Andrei think he\u2019s driving her crazy \u201cdown there\u201d should be goofy, but Richardson is so good at making Twila feel like she\u2019s spoofing herself that she pulls it off.<\/p>\n As Beatrice gets deeper into her investigation of Andrei, Twila begins investigating why so many women are missing from Moscow\u2019s brothels. When asked why she cares so much about the cause, Twila responds with resignation, and a bit of pride, that \u201cI\u2019m an anonymous woman.\u201d Ponies is zippy, fluffy, and a little vacuous, but when it mines the tension between two women learning to make themselves invisible to succeed at work and simultaneously feeling seen and understood within their growing friendship, the show reaches an elemental truth that has nothing to do with American or Soviet aggression. Ponies creates a world in which a woman can stand up and assert her right to exist, and that\u2019s very much of interest.<\/p>\n