Anticlimax is a television mini-trend. The first season of Shōgun, the second seasons of House of the Dragon and Fallout — all three of these acclaimed shows spent a full season building to an epic battle that never arrived. Even if the action arrives in the subsequent season, you can’t help but feel as though you’ve fallen for a bait and switch. When a show promises a climax, I want that climax.
Vladimir’s series finale puts to rest a question I’ve been asking for half a season now: Are these two actually gonna fuck? The answer is yes, a big yes. After recovering from his overnight idea with a lot more forgiveness than you might expect, Vladimir finally stop vacillating and equivocating and asking questions he already knows the answers to and makes his move.
There’s an awkward instant where he turns it into student/professor roleplay, repulsing her. “I don’t wanna act out your high school fantasy of some pervy older woman.” They both just want to make the other person happy, but the professor doesn’t want to be catered to, or have her desires interrogated. “Stop asking me questions,” she says.
So Vladimir finally, finally, pins her up against the wall. He takes our heroine in his hands, his arms. He throws her around the cabin, kissing her hard, telling her all the things he’s wished he could have done to her throughout their times together. Everything he does matches the fantasy snippets we’ve been seeing in her mind’s eye. These weren’t just fantasies, they were prophecies.
The result is an incredibly hot sex scene. It works because it pays off every last bit of anticipation we’ve experienced all season long. It achieves catharsis through sex just as surely as the final battles in shows like Chief of War and Last Samurai Standing and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms offer explosive emotional climaxes through violence. All of it is driven by Vladimir’s vocalized desire, and the narrator’s vocalized enjoyment. “Oh my God! Oh Jesus! Oh fuck!” she exclaims with each of Vladimir’s moves and maneuvers. She is absolutely transported by all this. When he finally penetrates her she orgasms instantly. Her dream has literally come true.
Then she kicks him out of bed and finishes her novel, with both her body and the bed still wet with the evidence of their sex. As she tells John later, wanting Vladimir was not the most important thing here: Wanting the next book was. “I thought it was about desire, but it’s about what the desire did. It was invigorating. It gave me” — here she indicates her pile of notepads — “this.”
There’s fallout to navigate beyond that, of course. While Vladimir was passed out, the professor texted his wife from his phone, confronting her about her affair with John. Vlad figures this out when he opens the messenger app on his laptop, which the narrator didn’t dunk in a sink full of water like she did his phone. Knowing Cynthia was cheating helped drive Vladimir to make his move on the professor.
But when John shows up at the cabin, he upsets the apple cart by revealing he wasn’t sleeping with Cynthia at all. What he was doing was worse — he was taking drugs and writing with her, even though she’s supposed to be sober. An affair Vladimir could handle. This sends him into a white-hot rage, physically attacking John before the professor can break them up. It’s as passionate as we’ve ever seen him, outside the sex scene that is.
Both men wind up offering the narrator a proposition. John, who was acquitted at his hearing at the cost of his daughter’s respect for him, wants to give up the whole open marriage thing and recommit. Vladimir wants to make their cabin liaison a weekly thing.
In the end, whether metaphorically or literally, the narrator chooses to put her apparently brilliant new book ahead of everything else. Unsurprisingly, it’s the story of an older woman’s obsession with a younger man; she tells us it sells much better than Vladimir’s book about a younger man’s tender affair with an older woman. His is good. Hers serves a need.
We learn all this as we watch the cabin burn. Her unreliable old space heater gave off sparks and lit the place on fire. In a dramatic scene she assures us is just a fantasy, she escapes with the manuscript, leaving both John and Vladimir behind. But she promises that she called 911 and everyone got out alive. “You don’t believe me?” she asks. Cut to black.
I believe she’s telling the truth here, yes. She’s no killer, and rescuing the book while leaving the two men to die was more a statement about how important this work is to her than some kind of I am woman, here me roar, I am fire and life incarnate/Carrie prom scene situation.
At least that’s how I’m choosing to read it, since at no point in the past did she seem to feel rage against either man. Irritation, frustration, obsession, yes, but not a desire to be rid of them. On the contrary, she’s a woman who wants attention, and you need other people to provide that.
But Vladimir is a tricky, sticky show. It counts on its audience to be adults, and to approach complicated questions of desire, power, commitment, gender, and aging with nuance. Nowhere does that shine through more clearly than in the last scene we see from John’s hearing, when Lila finally gets her turn to speak. You can say what you want about whether what John did by habitually sleeping with undergraduates who saw him as a mentor broke any laws or university regulations. But when Lila says “It wasn’t kind,” well, there’s no arguing with that, is there?
It’s this line that breaks Sid more than any other. Her father may have obeyed the letter of the law, as his acquittal would appear to indicate, but there’s no question of whether what he did was good for the students in the end, or whether he should have known better, done better, been better.
But the show’s most embodied experience for the viewer is that big sex scene. We are taken by the hand and guided through the professor’s physical experience of fucking Vladimir step by step, move by move, image by image. This is the feeling John is describing when he says nothing feels better than desire.
Vladimir’s challenge is to show us that he’s wrong, at least in this instance. Desire is a beautifully deranging force, and I can think of few television shows that have depicted its crescendoing power more effectively. Vladimir is hot as hell, is what I’m saying. The chemistry between Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall is incendiary, and silver fox John Slattery lurks in the background. Most importantly, the show’s relentless commitment to depicting an intelligent woman’s sexual desire in full flower is mesmerizing, with those fantasy flashes achieving an almost hypnotic effect of putting you in her mindset, feeling what she feels, wanting what she wants.
But for the professor, the fruit of that desire — her new book — is better than the desire itself. That’s why the show never resolves the question of whether she goes back to John full-time or keeps her affair with Vladimir going. It’s irrelevant now. She’s gotten what she truly needed, what she truly desired, out of Vladimir. Refreshingly, it’s left up to the viewer, whose intelligence is taken as a given, to think about all these people’s crimes of the heart and decide if the juice was worth the squeeze. So to speak.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
