For a brief window of time — no more than a crack — it looked as if Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet) might get what was coming to her. The finale of "The Regime'" finale opened with the middle-European dictator and her psychotic ex-military lover Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) on the run through barren fields, trying to hide in the bombed-out ruins of her cuckolded husband's poetry center — Elena still in her red silky holiday gown, Herbert with a sad service pistol. Eventually they squeezed into a hovel before being discovered by a turncoat cabinet member.
Will Tracy, the series' creator, is amply aware that this is how things usually end for autocrats and strongmen. Elena, however, demanded a separate denouement — one where she lived on as a puppet leader boxed in by Western interests who prop up her rule and pull the strings.
