Warning: Reviews of The Regime will contain spoilers.

You know you’re in the hands of a talented creative team when what you’re not being shown is just as impactful as what you are being shown. In episode 2, The Regime still feels hampered by its self-imposed limitations, but manages to mine a great deal of comedy and drama out of so little. I admire a project that takes place almost entirely in a single location, as is the case so far with the show, but I wonder if we’d get a better sense of the problems that plague Elena’s (Kate Winslet) still-unnamed country.

And yet, paranoia is kind of the unnamed main character of the show, and it rears its head once again this week. “The Foundling” deals with the fallout of Elena’s refusal to deal with America last week, and shows her further descent into madness. Her relationship with Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) takes even more strange twists and turns in episode 2, and Schoenaerts and Winslet continue to work wonders with their material. 

Indeed, a good deal of the developments within “The Foundling” deals with their implied mental link, and solid onscreen chemistry helps a great deal with that. Consider the scene when Elena negotiates with Senator Judith Holt (Martha Plimpton) as she attempts to reconcile their cobalt deal. Without saying a word to each other, Herbert gets the sense that she’s ready for the talks to end, and the scene takes a more menacing, and humorous, tone.

But maybe it’s all in Zubak’s head. We learn a great deal about his fragile mental state this week, and his fraught upbringing, as Elena’s top advisors and Nicholas (Guillaume Gallienne) conspire to keep him away from her. We see his self-flagellation in service to Elena, and his growing influence in Elena’s medicinal routine. Traditional, science-backed medicine is quickly replaced with home remedies and topical mustard treatments, and any ill effects are dismissed as the body purging itself of long dormant toxins. 

All of this is humorous enough, but it’s given real stakes when it’s also revealed that Agnes’s (Andrea Riseborough) son’s epilepsy medicine has been taken away. I don’t feel like The Regime has exactly figured out how to best utilize Riseborough yet, or what her purpose on the show ultimately is. She’s not exactly the straight man to Elena’s derangement, but she works in close proximity with her that it feels like she should be more important to the show’s proceedings – especially with an actor of Riseborough’s caliber in the role. Perhaps she’s the people’s proxy, a kind of way for the show to demonstrate how Elena’s administration affects the country’s real citizens.

I still don’t know what to make of Elena’s pointedly public dressing-down of Bartos (Stanley Townsend). What was her ultimate goal in humiliating the richest man in the country? Was it simply to flex her power and show how unwise it is to cross her? Or to show how delusional she is, by persecuting a major figure that posed little threat to her, when another group of conspirators is right under her nose? 

Episode 2’s best bits of comedy come from Nicholas’s fraying marriage – he reveals that it’s been over a year since they’ve been intimate. But, in true, delicate masculine fashion, as soon as she relinquishes, he changes his outlook on her. I still have some quibbles with The Regime overall, but I think “The Foundling” is an improvement over episode 1, dispatching the sillier bits of comedy for more grounded, but still absurd, observations.