Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson’s chemistry makes the incoherent spy drama series worth the ride.
Photo: Katalin Vermes/PEACOCK
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’d fuck a guy they hated if it meant stopping a nuclear war. Except that’s 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’ll like it because it’s “red, for communism!” 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.
The most compelling onscreen friendships present the relationship as a kind of osmosis, one in which two companions affectionately absorb each other’s qualities and quirks over time. Ponies nails that arc. Where Clarke plays Beatrice as heady and prim, Richardson’s 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’s 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’s chemistry makes Ponies work even when everything around them makes no sense. I’ve watched the season finale three times to try to understand the complicated series of double crosses and revealed secrets that cap off eight episodes’ worth of surveillance and betrayal, and I still can’t make head or tail of it. But Clarke and Richardson are undeniable.
In 1976 Moscow, Beatrice’s and Twila’s 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 — 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’ll ignore each other for the rest of the trip. Beatrice and Twila gripe about the Soviet Union’s 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’t 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.
Then Chris and Tom’s 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’s Moscow station, won’t share any 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’s mysterious fixer Emile (Pál Mácsai) to train them in espionage. Their pitch: Because they’re women, they’ll be underestimated and therefore have an advantage. “People only look at us if they want to fuck us or marry us, and that’s it,” Twila insists in one of the season’s recurring bits of girl-power self-actualization. No one would expect the Americans to risk a woman (or a “person of no interest” — a PONI) in the field, they reason, so they can get things done that no one else can.
In selling the idea to his boss, Walter says the Soviets would never bring on a woman as a case officer, “so they’d never suspect that we would,” a claim I emphatically refute after watching six meticulously researched and scrupulously detailed seasons of The Americans, in which female case officers were an accepted aspect of spycraft. Then again, Ponies’s 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’s pretending to be a teacher and never questions her erratic behavior. Walter seems to regularly forget about protecting the Americans’ 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’s 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.
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 territory, her voice going cold and imperious as she bosses around members of the Soviet military. But before Dany was ordering her dragons 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’s initially aimless and filterless Twila evokes her past work as Portia on The White Lotus, but there’s a looseness to Richardson’s physicality, too — the way she tilts her head, cocks her hip, and swings her arms as she walks — that complements Twila’s plucky, all-American-girl aura.
The series is consistently funny, with most of its humor coming from the gap between Beatrice and Twila’s expectations for their covert responsibilities and what they turn out to be. There’s a great rhythm to how Twila always takes a beat longer than Beatrice to grasp what’s going on; she calls a copy machine a “cunt” 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’s driving her crazy “down there” should be goofy, but Richardson is so good at making Twila feel like she’s spoofing herself that she pulls it off.
As Beatrice gets deeper into her investigation of Andrei, Twila begins investigating why so many women are missing from Moscow’s brothels. When asked why she cares so much about the cause, Twila responds with resignation, and a bit of pride, that “I’m an anonymous woman.” 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’s very much of interest.
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