Cho vs Cho

Another quiet week, another Netflix mystery. But ALSO John Cho turned up twice on my screen and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ cancellation was announced (albeit in three seasons’ time), truly a set of birthday gifts just for me.

Murderbot, season 1, episode 6

John Cho The First: his recurring role as the captain in The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. This week we get a glimpse of an episode which I definitely saw first on Star Trek: Voyager (season 7, episode 22).

The PresAux team may be horrified and traumatised by the death of Leebeebee, but I for one was delighted. I like to think I’d feel differently if I was in the room when Murderbot blew her head off, but I truly did not like her, and I am delighted that everyone who called that she was a GrayCris plant was correct. Also delighted that Bharadwaj called her out for being inappropriate, she is truly an ally, we stan a respectful and assertive queen.

I will say that if I were having a panic attack and a nerd tried to calm me down by making me watch an episode of Star Trek they find soothing, my panic would turn to rage. But that’s just me, obviously Mensah is built different, and she probably doesn’t share my visceral dislike of “cosy” media; it’s also possible that she is distracted from panic by laughing at Murderbot. Gently. “That seems implausible” / “It’s canon” is a conversation I have absolutely had in real life.

One thing I do think the show is doing better than the books is demonstrating that Murderbot and the PresAux team have good reasons to be wary of one another. I think it’s good set up for [spoilery thing that happens at the end of the book], and I appreciate that it won’t feel like it came out of nowhere — as it did for me on my first reading, although not on subsequent rereads.

Poker Face, season 2, episode 8

John Cho the Second: he’s the guest star of the week, a charming con artist who is fascinated by Charlie and genuinely seems to like her — and she totally reciprocates, except that she sees how he treats others, and, well, turnabout is fair play.

What’s this? Another great Poker Face episode? is that two in a row? I am DELIGHTED that the show is back on form, and that it gives us the magical gift of John Cho and Melanie Lynskey flirting in the cold open.

I definitely feel like Poker Face is using its second season to play with the format a little, and aside from my previously-registered concerns about comedy animal cruelty, I appreciate it. Like, I respect a format, but you have to be able to break out of it once in a while.

The Survivors (limited series)

I started reading The Survivors by Jane Harper at the airport on the morning of Christmas Eve last year, and finished it that evening on a recliner at my dad’s house. That’s how much I enjoyed it — and yet I had no idea it had scored a Netflix adaptation until the review turned up in The Guardian.

Harper’s standalone novels follow an interesting formula: a man returns to his hometown — which is vividly described and almost a character in its own right — after many years away. He is something of a pariah there, as people hold him responsible, rightly or wrongly, for some terrible past event. He has a complicated relationship with his family. A fresh murder sheds light on the past event, and our hero leaves having learned something about himself and toxic masculinity.

Here, the hero is Kieran, returning to his home in coastal Tasmania after many years away. It’s the fifteenth anniversary of a terrible storm which saw his older brother, his brother’s best friend killed, and also the disappearance of a teenage girl. Kieran’s brother and friend died rescuing Kieran from a flooded cave; even their mother blames him for his brother’s death. The boys are remembered as heroes; the girl is all but forgotten. An art student, in town for the summer, has been creating a memorial to the dead girl; when she turns up murdered on the beach, old secrets come to light.

The Survivors is more than a competent adaptation, it’s actually good. In fact, my flatmate expressed concern because she is not accustomed to such realistic dialogue in Australian drama.

Kieran is played by Charlie Vickers, best known as Sauron in Rings of Power. There, he plays the malevolent dark lord with all the charisma and menace of a sourdough starter; here, his ordinariness is his best asset. Kieran spends a lot of the story as a passive observer, too traumatised to take action when he’s already lost so much.

As an adaptation, the main change from the book is that Kieran doesn’t spend most scenes with his four-month-old daughter strapped to his chest. That’s a sensible change — I assume that babies are challenging on a set — but we lose some of the subtext of Kieran working to embrace a new type of masculinity. But overall, I think this is a worthy addition to the Australian streaming drama landscape, and also the Jane Harper adaptation library.

And now for a brief word about Deadloch

A streaming drama about a murder in Tasmania is inevitably going to bring up Deadloch comparisons, and here’s my hot take: I fucking hated the three episodes of Deadloch that I watched, and I get irrationally angry when people tell me I should give it another go.

This is going to sound hypocritical, because I usually have a very high tolerance for copaganda — but that specifically Australian/New Zealand brand of copaganda where the cops are just silly buggers who aren’t good at their jobs but they’re doing their best really gets my goat.

In my day job, I’ve spent the last few years dealing with the appalling problems with policing and justice in the Northern Territory, and the racist brutality of the NT police. So a funny show about a cop from the NT was just never going to be funny to me. To put it in American terms, imagine it’s the summer of 2020 and Amazon has just dropped a comedy about a woke lesbian cop in Oregon who is partnered with a zany loose cannon from Ferguson, Missouri.

Random Australian of the week

Obviously I could shout out the entire cast of The Survivors (except the New Zealanders), but actually I want to give props to Yerin Ha, who plays Kieran’s partner, Mia. This could have been a thankless role, but Ha’s performance — and the fact that showrunner Tony Ayres has experience being the only Asian kid in a small Australian town — made her more nuanced and complex.

Ha has done a lot of work overseas, but I know her from Dune: Prophecy, where she is one of an improbable number of Australians. She played the young Reverend Mother Kasha, who is played as an adult by Korean actress Jihae. Ha’s Korean-accented English was so good that I didn’t clock her as an Australian until I looked her up this week — which cannot be said for certain other cast members, looking at you, Dusty from Heartbreak High.