A Rube Goldberg machine of death

This newsletter is a day late, because I was out being social with my friends instead of watching TV on the couch at home. Pretty offensive, if you ask me.

This week: Murderbot, Poker Face and season 3 of Dark Winds.

Murderbot, season 1, episode 7

One of the few times I’ve had a post blow up on Tumblr, it was a lament that fandom often can’t tell the difference between “found family” and “cult”, so I end up reading fic which thinks it’s a wholesome, cuddly fic but is actually about conformity and groupthink.

I have a similar reaction to “cosy” fiction, which all too often earns its cosiness by simply not engaging with implications or subtext it doesn’t like. I wouldn’t say I am a fan of grimdark fiction per se, but I’d rather face the horrors head on. (Related: last week I read Atoms to Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima by Serhii Plokhy, an account of nuclear disasters, and I’m now reading Chernobyl Roulette by the same author, about the Russian army occupying the former Chernobyl power plant in 2022. I really like Ploky’s work; as a Ukrainian, he has a healthy skepticism of all Cold War powers, and as an historian, he understands that my brain does not comprehend physics.)

All this is to say that I completely get why Gurathin is uncomfortable with the PresAux bitter/sweet game, and why Murderbot spends this episode wanting to hide its face, or better yet, walking into the forest and staying there forever. The depiction of the PresAux culture in the TV series has my shoulders right up around my ears, and while I think that’s intentional — that they want to be inclusive and welcoming, but are actually extremely alienating to people with trauma — it makes me miss the characters in the books.

I am pining extra hard for book!Pin-Lee this week, since the TV version is briefly in character. (I realised belatedly that TV!Pin-Lee is nonbinary, like the actor playing them; sorry about the misgendering in previous newsletters) Pin-Lee is my favourite PresAux character after Mensah, so to have someone with her name, but with a completely different personality and gender, is hard to watch.

On the other hand, I really enjoy Mensah’s approach to managing conflict, which is to say: she’s in favour of it. She objects to violence, understandably, but she’s a peacemaker in the sense that she thinks disagreements should be acknowledged and addressed, and ideally resolved. Compared with the less experienced members of her team, who are mostly conflict-avoidant to a fault (someone needs to have a serious talk with Ratthi about boundaries), this is welcome. Frankly, it’s a skill I need to develop myself.

In terms of the wider plot, this episode feels a bit … fillery. It contains important and necessary character development, but fails to move the external story forward. The team fled their hub, and now they’re going to go back to their hub. This jumped out at me because it’s a problem I had to fix in my own manuscript — but I’m not on deadline and don’t have to produce ten episodes of television by a specific date.

Poker Face, season 2, episode 9

Okay, so first of all, we don’t have “rent control” in Australia because the landlord class would never stand for it, but I too would contemplate murder for a rental that only cost $640 a month, even before you threw in three beds, two baths, two fireplaces and floor to ceiling bookshelves. Alia Shawkat is so valid for that.

SECOND, I enjoyed this episode, but it felt more than usually flimsy. No one is watching Poker Face for realism, but Alia’s plots are so complicated, and Charlie’s mistake is so lucky, that even I was going, “Oh come on.”

But not in a bad way, because I really did enjoy this episode. The Vulture reviewer called it a pilot for a new version of the show, and I can see that — after one and two-thirds of a season on the road, Charlie has arrived in New York City and is illegally subletting an apartment from Steve Buscemi. (Again: valid.) This brings her into contact with the guest stars of the week, Alia, Awkwafina and Lauren Tom, but also a cast of supporting characters who feel like they might be around for a while.

Of these potential recurring figures, my favourite is Ricardo the librarian. Mostly because it’s my dream to be a librarian in New York City, although not the actual city that exists in a country currently succumbing to totalitarianism, where they only recently discovered the wheelie bin.

But mostly I’m excited to see what happens when Charlie stays in one place for an extended period. Her situation isn’t quite stable, what with the illegal sublet, but this feels like the beginning of a new era.

Dark Winds, season 3

My household’s crime drama spree continues, and I have to be honest: every time I open Beehiiv to talk about a new cop show, I send silent, apologetic vibes to my friend Lili, who subscribes to this newsletter and hates cop shows.

And she’s not wrong to do so! Crime dramas and copaganda go hand in hand, and while I consider myself a critical viewer, writing this newsletter has made me appreciate just how much casual police brutality goes into even very self-aware and sophisticated police dramas.

But I keep coming back, because for me, a crime drama (not necessarily the same thing as a cop show, but they often go hand in hand) is an amazing way to figure out what a society values, and what it fears. For example, a lot of Scandinoir is concerned with the inadequacies of the welfare state, and also Islam. A surprising amount of British crime dramas of the last decade have essentially boiled down to “what if disabled people are getting one over on us?”, and also Islam.

Dark Winds is a series about the Navajo Tribal Police, and its worries are incredibly interesting to me. What does it mean to represent the state, when the state has attempted to commit genocide against your people? Is “community policing” a concept that is doomed to failure? How can you uphold the law when the white man’s law is inadequate, but Indian law is tantamount to vigilante justice? How do you investigate homicide when your culture has deeply rooted taboos around death?

In this third season, an extra wrinkle is added, because season 2 ended with lead female character Bernadette leaving the NTP to join … Border Control. I watched that last year, and went, “I don’t know if I want to see a series about a woman of colour working for ICE, actually.” (The series is set in the 1970s, but still.)

As it happens, “Can Border Control be trusted? Is it possible to be a good border official? What does it mean to be a Navajo woman working for Border Control?” are very relevant questions in 2025. You are not gonna believe this, but Border Control is complicit in trafficking both humans and cocaine. No, I know. Furthermore, ICE must be abolished.

The other main plot — which intersects with Bern’s — follows two teenage boys in their early teens. One turns up dead; the other is in the wind. The investigation brings Young Hothead Chee and Actual Main Character And One Of The Most Interesting Men On TV Right Now Joe Leaphorn to a chilli farm run by dirty hippies, who have a side hustle selling cocaine for Bruce Greenwood. Seems bad!

And then there’s the ongoing story: season 2 ended with Joe administering “Indian justice” to the crooked businessman who was responsible for his son’s death — along with a whole bunch of other murders. Now FBI agent Jenna Elfman (no, really) is investigating that man’s disappearance. Joe is avoiding her attention, but he’s also haunted by the spiritual damage of taking a man’s life, and, as his wife puts it, tainting their son’s spirit. (Dark Winds gets into horror movie territory here, threading the very fine needle of using familiar imagery and tropes to convey Leaphorn’s guilt and spiritual anxiety without being disrespectful to Navajo beliefs.)

Zahn McClarnon is a very quiet presence as Leaphorn, but he’s absolutely magnetic. I love seeing a character actor getting his due as a leading man, and it’s particularly exciting to see it happen for a Native American actor of his gravitas and experience. He does a lot with a little, and tells a whole story in the way he carefully fills a glass with tap water before admitting to his wife that he killed a man. Episode six takes the form of a dream sequence where McClarnon is almost the only regular actor featured, and I love a story which takes time out from the A plot to dig deep into a character’s past.

If I have a criticism of the season, it’s that while Leaphorn is an oil painting, the supporting characters around him are variously detailed sketches. I love Leaphorn, but I’d like to see some of that attention going to, say, Leaphorn’s wife.

The good news, for Lili, is that our current run of crime dramas is probably coming to an end, if only because new episodes of The Bear AND Squid Game are dropping this week.