Bosching Bosch

The White Lotus, season 3, episode 8

I’ve been a lot gentler on The White Lotus than a lot of other people, mostly because I was keen to see how it ended before I passed final judgement.

But now we’ve had the finale, and my review is in:

Oof.

Which is not to say it was bad, but it certainly didn’t live up to the standards set by seasons 1 and 2. In some ways, this was inevitable: when you have one person as writer/director/executive producer, sooner or later he’s going to make choices that maybe wouldn’t have arisen in a more collaborative setting. Especially when he’s being universally hailed as a genius. That sort of thing opens doors, but also people stop telling you “no”.

Except for the White Lotus composer, who makes White sound like hard work, but also this guy told everyone but White that he was quitting, and then seemed annoyed when word got back to White. Maybe everyone in the film and television industry is hard work.

My feeling is that season 3 of The White Lotus told the story it set out to tell, but didn’t execute it particularly well. It’s the pacing again. We’ve gone from six episodes a season, to seven, and now we’re at eight, with the finale being the length of a feature film.

And what did we do with all that extra time? Definitely didn’t develop Mook, a shadow of an idea of a character. Played the same notes over again with the Ratliff parents, the terrible trio, Belinda, Chelsea and Rick. The story held itself in stasis for so long that you couldn’t help but notice who got to be complicated three-dimensional characters (Saxon, Lochlan, Gaitok, occasionally Laurie, eventually Rick) versus who remained one-note (Victoria, Jaclyn and Kate, Chelsea). (You see the key demographics there, right?)

Chelsea is particularly frustrating, because we’ve spent so much time with her, and she’s interacted with a much wider range of characters than anyone else, but all we see is the same thing, over and over again: devoted Fixer Of Broken Birds. She’s a manic pixie dream girl in a resin bikini. You could argue that she stays true to herself, that she has integrity — but you could say the same thing about Victoria.

Stasis is fundamental to the concept of The White Lotus. Like I said last week, very few characters change; if they learn anything at all, it’s that they are eternally trapped in the hell of being themselves. But having it play out over eight weeks (eight and a half hours of television!) is different to bingeing it over two or three nights. Spending too much time here gave us the opportunity to overthink things, to notice the cracks. Like Piper noticing the dirty mattress and bland food, it’s all a bit … cheap.

So I think season 3 of The White Lotus is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. But the parts are good! Every single actor gives a great performance, some revealing facets of their skill which are not usually on display. I would not go so far as to call Tim Ratliff Jason Isaacs’ first role as a good father, because he did try to murder most of his family (the bar is in hell, AND YET), but his scene by the pool with Lochlan had a vulnerability that he rarely gets to act. Patrick Schwarzenegger revealed layers I would not have predicted back in episode 1.

And I’m sorry, but Carrie Coon’s speech at the mid-point came close to single-handedly redeeming every single problem I had with the finale, if not the season as a whole. It was unearned, but she sold it, and as The Friend Who Is Just Happy To Be At The Table, it really resonated with me. Coon is so good that sometimes I think about watching season 2 of The Gilded Age even though that is one of the worst historical dramas I’ve ever put in my eyeballs.

Finally, there’s the Rick of it all. Here’s a character whose stasis is intentional. I’ve seen Redditors with CPTSD identify very deeply with his portrayal, and particularly appreciating the fact that he demonstrates the unappealing, unsexy side of trauma. And I think those are completely reasonable interpretations — I like them a lot, in fact — but also I am simply tired of fictional men who make their trauma everyone else’s problem.

I guessed that Chelsea would die from the moment Aimee Lou Wood said everyone would be mad at Mike White. And it’s like, oh, the manic pixie dream girl dies so her sad boyfriend can learn an important lesson in his final minutes?

Groundbreaking.

I’m coming back a few days after I wrote all that to add some thoughts:

1. This is the classic White Lotus ending, in that everyone gets what they want, which is not what they need, and nearly everyone is unhappy about that. (The main exceptions are Mook, whose wants and needs aren’t explored in any depth, and Tim, who has taken a weirdly long time to figure out that murdering his family is bad). I can’t fault it in that regard; I just think we took too long to get there. Which brings me to…

2. Mike White said in an interview that the pacing was slow because he was edging the audience, and to that I say, (a) I did not consent to that; (b) I don’t wanna kinkshame, but bad pacing is not a good kink.

3. As someone who works in an office with a lot of pink linen-wearing wealthy men, I can assure you that Tim leaving the poison blender sitting dirty on the bench was the most realistic thing in the entire series.

4. The repeated close-ups on the blender’s Bosch logo were very funny to me, a person who is also watching season 3 of Bosch: Legacy.

Matlock, season 1, episode 16

Now, I have a morally ambiguous older lady in fiction more than just about anything else. Matty’s evolution from “charming scam artist” to “ruthless betrayer of friendships” has been fantastic to watch, even as I’m secretly disappointed that Olympia has become personable and sensitive to the needs of her staff.

But here’s the problem. In episode 16, Matty blackmails an information source by threatening the life of a dog. And while we, the audience, know that Barry Manilow The Dog is never in the slightest bit of danger, and is in fact having a great day with Matty’s loving grandson, his human does not know that.

I think about how I’d feel if someone tried that with Harvey. I mean, I’d be concerned that Harvey would commit murder, but ALSO I’d be desperately worried.

So with all due respect to Matty, I cannot sign off on this.

HOWMSTEVER. The episode ends with the reveal that Olympia has suspected Matty for some time, and promises a confrontation. I don’t know how Olympia feels about dogs, but she’s a champion of underdogs in general, so I trust her to call Matty out appropriately, and move this story into its next phase.

The Murderbot trailer is out

I’ve been on the fence about the Murderbot adaptation ever since the casting of Skarsgård was announced, but I had a powerfully visceral reaction to this trailer. When it ended, I went straight to Bluesky and muted the word “murderbot” and then blocked Martha Wells so her promotional posts wouldn’t end up in my timeline.

I fear I’m about to become one of those assholes who throws a tantrum because Foundation isn’t exactly as Creepy Uncle Isaac imagined, only AppleTV’s Foundation is a much richer, more diverse universe than Asimov’s, while AppleTV’s Murderbot looks cheap and generic compared to the version in my head, and replaces a non-binary SecUnit of colour with a cis white man.

Also the dialogue is bad and The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon looks like shit.

HAVING SAID THAT, it’s possible that I’ll end up watching it anyway, purely because my household is generally open to any AppleTV+ series. And I will try really hard not to be a dick about it. But currently, it’s giving me the ick.

(Upon consideration, I think that I’m going to treat this as the in-universe drama based on Murderbot’s story. Murderbot hates every second of it, especially the casting of a human — of course — as itself. It has watched every single episode more times than a human can count.

ART is a big fan.)

Bosch: Legacy, season 3, episodes 1-5

The Bosch Cinematic Universe, in all its iterations, sets the police procedural in a noir universe. What if we’re door-knocking and following up leads and doing the gruntwork of an investigation, while also knowing that all cops are bastards (and so are most politicians)?

It has always been an uneasy alliance. At best, you get a nuanced and probably realistic look at the nature of policing in Los Angeles. At worst, it feels like the shows are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

The latter is the vibe I got from the first half of Bosch: Legacy’s third and final season. Bosch’s old friend and colleague Jimmy Robertson is investigating Bosch for maybe arranging the prison murder of the man who abducted Maddie Bosch at the end of season 1. Jimmy is a “good” cop, who is horrified when he uncovers footage of Bosch assaulting the abductor in an interrogation room, but he’s also intimidating and blackmailing a recent parolee linked with the case. (Using Bosch’s own tactics against him; hence the title of an episode and also this newsletter.)

In the end, the murder was the first step in a wildly elaborate prison break scheme, while the investigation was overseen by a crooked DA trying to undermine his rival, an ally of Bosch. Good news, the LAPD investigated itself and found that the LAPD did nothing wrong.

More interesting to me has been the meat and potatoes procedural side of the story. Bosch, in his capacity as a private investigator, is retained by ORLA FUCKING BRADY to look into the disappearance of her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, which essentially boils down to a sad story of small business embezzlement and four shallow graves in the woods. Meanwhile, low-ranking street cop Maddie Bosch is following up a series of “follow home” robberies. Super basic stuff, but competent and plausible.

Episode five ends on a turning point for the series: Bosch is exonerated, the family murderer is on the run, Honey Chandler has won her bid to be DA, and the audience — but not the cops — knows that one of the follow home guys is the cousin of Maddie’s partner. And, in the final moments, Jimmy Robertson is murdered in an armed robbery gone wrong. A sad end for a character I liked, but death is always on the table in the city of angels.

The Pitt, season 1, episode 15

I appreciate that The Pitt leaned into its format and used its final episode to wrap up the final strands of plot thread, just as the day shift doctors are ordered to wrap up their cases and go home.

For some people, that means righting perceived wrongs (Cassie talks to Incel David Who Is Not The Shooter); for others, that means committing new ones (Robbie, Robbie, Robbie). Samira is high off adrenaline and about to crash; the new residents and interns are almost sleepwalking. Maybe the exhaustion is what cracks Santos’s hard shell and enables her to make a meaningful connection with a patient she suspects of having attempted suicide.

Let’s do the rounds:

Robbie is at the end of a day which would have been challenging even before a guy opened fire at a music festival. Unable to bear losing another patient, he takes Unvaccinated Measles Kid’s dad for a tour of the temporary morgue. Super unethical and multiple people call him out, including the dad.

Then he gets into it with Jake, who rejects his paternal ex-stepfatherly support, and Robbie ends his shift up on the hospital roof on the wrong side of the safety barrier. This brings us full circle from the first episode, where he found Abbott in the same place, and it’s Abbott who brings him in and suggests that Robbie would benefit from therapy.

These scenes feel super important; these are very masculine characters who get to be vulnerable and talk about their emotions. It would be preachy, except that once again these are really good actors doing top tier work, and the series has spent fifteen hours earning this moment.

Robbie and Abbott join their colleagues in the park with a cooler of beer, where they sit in the dark, share a few minutes of camaraderie, before Robbie puts his AirPods in and goes home. Where, you have to hope, he’s going to get a few hours of sleep.

Langdon takes time to make Robbie’s day a bit harder by continuing to deny that he has a problem. He was stealing benzos to manage withdrawal from prescribed painkillers, and he thinks he wouldn’t have been allowed to practice medicine if he had been honest about the problem.

Langdon’s second chance will involve rehab, compulsory drug tests and NA meetings for up to five years. That’s a lot. When Carter went through his addiction storyline in the early 2000s, the timeframe for monitoring was a lot shorter. Of course, a few things have changed in America’s addiction landscape in the last 25 years.

What struck me about this scene was how much better it is than the equivalent plotline in Berlin ER. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

Dana is still reeling from her assault back in episode 9, and is talking about resigning. She’s such a load-bearing character that I cannot imagine a second season without her, but her departure at the end of the night feels very final.

Collins hasn’t returned at all since Robbie sent her home and told her to turn her phone and TV off. In terms of narrative and structure, this feels wrong to me — she was such an important character! And yet it’s also realistic, and heaven knows she has earned a rest.

McKay is not off the hook for tampering with her ankle monitor, but Robbie and a more senior cop saves her from arrest. And, as I said, she takes time to speak with Incel David.

I think Robbie was wrong to chew her out (again) for involving the police in his case, but I also think she had to be the one to speak to him in the end. Incel Dave looks after his mother in a way which suggests he is not an out-and-out misogynist, and I think he responded to having McKay, a woman in her forties with a no-nonsense demeanour, speak to him firmly but empathetically about his situation.

Mel and the night shift take care of Unvaccinated Measles Kid after the dad pulls a shady double cross and says his wife has consented to a spinal tap. She hasn’t, of course, but the team has enough time to run the procedure, and now, whatever happens to the kid, at least he’ll get the treatment he needs.

That’s the end of Mel’s work day, but like everyone with caring responsibilities, she has a second shift. We follow her to her twin sister’s care facility, where they set out together for their Friday night ritual of dinner and a movie. Or maybe two dinners. I am adding “burnout” to my list of concerns for Mel, but I love this, and I love that her sister is played by the #actuallyautistic Tal Anderson.

Samira is hyper and Victoria is exhausted, but they both make it to the after-work park hang. This is a big deal for Samira, who is postponing things like “having a social life” until she’s where she wants to be in her career (girl), and for Victoria, who is already heading down Samira’s path, and also she is twenty years old. These women have earned their beers.

Santos has the biggest plotline of the residents, sharing a little more of her story with her patient. Earlier in the season, we learned she was a victim of sexual abuse; now we learn that her friend also suffered, and eventually took her life.

We actually have some more information about this from interviews and behind-the-scenes peeks. Santos was a gymnast, and the abuser was her coach. This is more interesting to me than the story I expected about a parent or step-parent, and of course, reflects the mistreatment of many of America’s top gymnasts. Santos’s ambition and abrasiveness makes sense when you have the context that she was an elite athlete, and that a lot of this behaviour is self-protective. She’s still an asshole, but she makes sense as a character.

(I would normally be irritated that we get key pieces of context from off-screen material, but given the format of the series, I think it works. People don’t spill their entire history on their first day of work. Well, some people do, but they’re either deeply annoying or they’re Dr Mel King.)

Santos’s final act in the finale is to figure out that Whittaker is homeless and sleeping in the hospital. (We learned way back in episode one that the hospital has a lot of empty beds because admin won’t employ enough nurses to run those wards.) In her typically abrasive way, she offers him to a place to live, and I have not been this happy since that season of ER where Carter shared an apartment with Kerry Weaver. I want a whole series of fifteen-minute shorts about their sharehouse arrangement.

Finally, there was one thing I did not love in this finale: the reveal that Abbott has a prosthetic leg. I don’t hate it, I just think that this show has been too good with disability to spring a last minute “Surprise! This character played by an able-bodied actor has a disability!” twist. I’m not furious about it, but it felt cheap.

ANYWAY. That was season one, and I am delighted that we will get season two in less than a year. Remember when all TV was like this?

Yellowjackets, season 3, episode 10

Look. It was a finale. It was better than I expected, but not good enough to deserve to use “Mystery of Love” by Marianne Faithfull.

A lot of mysteries were resolved, sometimes in very predictable ways. I appreciate that we’ve moved to a clear “Shauna has been the villain all along” position, but it does feel like the creators did not have enough plot for the promised five seasons.

I assume season 4 will come down to whether Misty or Shauna is the last Yellowjacket standing. I suppose Tai could be a contender, but this has never been a series inclined to let Black women have a win.

Will I watch it? That’s a premature question, given we are yet to get a renewal. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll simply experience it through the medium of Vulture recaps.

Berlin ER, season 1, episode 8

Berlin ER goes out the way it came in: doing largely the same stuff as The Pitt but not as well. (See, for example, Ben’s insistence on returning to work in an emergency, despite literally having had a workplace fentanyl overdose a few days earlier. I mean, yes, he is a better doctor when he’s had a fresh dose of morphine, but that is a very low bar.)

Unfortunately, the twist at the end — that the government has been starving the Krank for funds to as to sell it to a private healthcare company — is interesting enough that I’m probably gonna come back for a second season.

Events of note

Fake Dr Dom heroically dies trying to save people from a nightclub fire. It’s even possible that he was a real doctor, just not very good at his job or simply unsuited for emergency medicine. Either way, it’s an unsatisfying ending to his storyline. But he truly did have magnificent hair.

Cranky Dr Emina initially refuses to treat the cop who beat her brother into a coma. Dick move, Emina, although also imagine if they had enough doctors on hand that she didn’t have to. Olivia calls her out and Emina comes good, and then Emina and Olivia touch hands in a romantic way. I love them.

Also Emina decides not to move on to a better-paid and more comfortable job in Munich. Good for her — I got bad vibes off Zanna’s brother-in-law last week.

Overall, Berlin ER has not met the standards I expect for AppleTV+ or ZDF. But it’s possible that I need to watch more contemporary German dramas to know for sure. That will definitely be a chore.

Hacks, season 4, episodes 1-2

Do I enjoy watching Hacks, or do I enjoy the experience of having watched Hacks and putting the secondhand embarrassment behind me? I love these characters, but they stress me out, man.

Every season of Hacks opens with Deborah and Ava at odds, and I hate it. I realise that the tension in their relationship is inherent to the series, but why can’t they just be friends? Or at least realise that they cannot destroy each other without also destroying themselves?

Obviously it’s a fact of life that we keep having to learn the same lessons over and over again, just like Jimmy has to learn (again) that he doesn’t have the emotional fortitude or technological competence to act as mediator between Deborah and Ava. But WHAT IF IT WASN’T.

(Concept: Deborah Vance checks into the White Lotus.)

Fortunately, when it all gets too much, I have Kayla. From being the character who stressed me out the most in season 1, she now feels like one of the most competent people in the room. Not because she is but because she carries herself like it, and the universe bends to her will. I feel like the Deborah-and-Ava story is running out of places to go, but I would gladly accept a spin-off about Jimmy and Kayla.

Anyway, did you know that Hacks is technically not a HBO series? It runs on HBO Max in the US, but is made by Universal, which is why it’s on Stan in Australia, and remains on Stan even though Max launched here last week. I’m so confused, but also this knowledge does nothing to enrich my life so I’m going to try to forget it as soon as possible.

Next week

The Last of Us is back, baby!