Escapist Routes #32

Vigil, season 2

Season 1 of Vigil involved a civilian police officer (Suranne Jones) investigating a murder aboard a British nuclear submarine. It wasn’t very good (like, do the Royal Military Police not exist for this purpose?) but it was set aboard a submarine and had a lot of actors I liked — and also one I strongly dislike — so I enjoyed it. Not that I remember much about the plot, save that it boiled down to the inherent corruption of the British military industrial complex.

I did not think Vigil needed a second season, and I wasn’t going to watch it, but then I learned that season 3 will take place in the Arctic. Unfortunately I enjoy Arctic nonsense almost as much as I enjoy submarines, so here I am.

This season takes place on a British airforce base in a fictional Middle Eastern country, and Suranne Jones’s Amy Silva is sent out to investigate after a demonstration of remote-operated drone technology ends in a bunch of British soldiers being killed. The drone was being operated from the air force base, so off she goes — even though this is a country which jails queer people, and Silva is a lesbian whose girlfriend is heavily pregnant with their baby.

(Unfortunately the girlfriend — also a cop, and she spends the entire season variously investigating, being told to rest, and threatening the families of dissidents because ACAB — is played by Rose Leslie, for whom I do not care. In part because she’s a Tory, but mostly because she was closely linked with Michael Sheen’s subplot in season 3 of The Good Fight, which was so awful that I have been unable to watch Sheen in anything since. Leslie I can tolerate, but she’s on thin ice. I did not go back for season 4.)

Anyway, you aren’t going to believe it, but this time the plot boils down to the inherent corruption of the British military industrial complex. Like, using false evidence to get Britain to join an immoral war in the Middle East so as to enrich arms dealers. Thank heavens that has never happened in real life. This completely fictional idea is conceptually solid, but way too complicated in execution. I will, however, give them points for being way less racist than I expected.

Suranne Jones is always good, but honestly she is really testing the limits of my willingness to watch her in anything.

Task, season 1, episode 6

So I wrote up my little piece about the Task finale, being the episode that aired this week, and THEN I learned that it wasn’t the finale. We have a whole extra episode coming. So that’s embarrassing! Especially since I even wrote down in the little spreadsheet where I track my TV watching (shut up) that it had 7 episodes, so I should have known.

Anyway.

I don’t think that Task had a perfect finale penultimate episode, but I wound up liking it a lot — ironically (given everything I said last week about how Tom and Robbie needed to spend more time together) because Robbie’s death was like a release valve, and suddenly a lot of pieces fell into place.

One of those pieces is, uh, Lizzie’s body. This is my first complaint about the episode: I actually like getting a deeper look at the process and fallout after a law enforcement officer is killed in the line of duty, but I feel like as a character, there was too much emphasis on Lizzie being a manic pixie cop girl, and not enough on her as a person in her own right. She mainly existed for Grasso’s storyline, and I do not care for that. Lizzie’s interactions with Aleah felt much more real and insightful.

This brings me to my second complaint: HBO keeps trying to convince me that Fabien Frankel is this great actor who can play complicated characters, and I simply do not see it. He’s pretty, he’s not actively bad, but he’s also not on the level of a Mark Ruffalo.

And here’s the third complaint: I like that Tom takes in Sam, but (a) I’m not sure he’s actually in a position to provide that child with a safe and stable home environment right now, and a new kid is not a magic cure for alcoholism; and (b) without so much as a mention of whether he’s now going to visit Ethan in prison, it kinda feels like he’s replaced his faulty Black son with a fresh new white model. How I feel about this development in the long run depends on what happens in the actual finale, and now I know that this isn’t where the season ends, I feel a lot better about it overall.

I was going to wrap up this review saying that I liked Task, but it was no Mare of Easttown. But with a bonus episode, it’s too soon to say! What a gift!

The Last Frontier, season 1, episodes 1 and 2

The Last Frontier is a new Apple thriller, but it is ALSO a USA Network drama from the mid 2000s which somehow travelled in time to 2025 and got made with a hugely inflated budget and permission to use swear words.

Here’s the concept: a planeload of prisoners goes down in a remote part of Alaska. Among them is a CIA asset who was being subjected to human rights violations extra-judicially transported in a black ops operation. Now a Hot/Hot Mess CIA Agent (Haley Bennett, aka We Have Sarah Snook At Home) has been dispatched to help the US Marshals round up the prisoners, while also seeking out the CIA asset she used to handle before he went off the rails. MEANWHILE, Mr Ex CIA has kidnapped the wife of the chief marshal and is engaging in a game of cat and mouse, because he thinks the CIA is a moral cancer (fair!) and small town America is the pinnacle of ethics and morality (er).

Nearly everyone is white*, save for a handful of Inuit characters who say things like, “That sounds like white man bullshit” and a Black mob accountant who talks like he fell out of a blaxploitation film and landed in a gangsta rap album c1992. Oh, and Alfre Woodard plays Haley Bennett’s boss; you’re not gonna believe this, but she’s a straight talking woman who doesn’t tolerate bullshit. Everyone so far is straight. The heroic US marshal gives a long speech about how small towns are good because everyone looks out for each other.

(* Mrs The Marshal is played by Simone Kessell, who is of Māori heritage, but their kid is played by an actor with blond hair and blue eyes, so I feel like we’re meant to read her as white.)

Needless to say, this show feels like a throwback in the worst possible way, and comes with a lot of red flags. It’s also simply not very good. The dialogue is obvious; the plot is already too complicated; and there’s a scene where Alfre Woodard tells Haley Bennett that the main dude is a pussy who has only ever fired his gun once in the line of duty, but we’ve already seen him mowing down escaped inmates like it’s a scene from The Last of Us and not feeling any way about it at all. Related: it is not clear to me that this show understands that “escaped felons” and “zombies” are not the same thing.

For some reason my flatmate seems to like it, so I guess it’s going to be regular viewing for the next eight weeks. Maybe it will improve? Maybe my flatmate will move on? We’ve already agreed to put the next episode on hold to watch season 3 of The Diplomat…

Slow Horses, season 5, episode 4

Slow Horses gives us almost an entire episode of the crew being competent and mostly reasonable, so of course we end with maybe the biggest fuck up ever: the accidental death of a right wing political candidate under River and Coe’s watch.

Obviously this is bad for plot reasons, but I think it’s actually good on a character level: Coe is extremely competent and put-together, by Slough House standards, and here he gets to fuck up. Not because of the PTSD which saw him sidelined, but through pure carelessness: climbing and jumping around scaffolding without a thought for objects that could fall and injure someone below.

Not that I blame Coe entirely. This is an accident, albeit that’s both foreseeable and preventable, and honestly some responsibility lies with the workmen who left all that stuff up there. But, like. You’re up high. You can see there are tools lying about, and you have a passing familiarity with the concept of gravity. Coe could have moved with more care, or simply stayed in the dressing room instead of trying to be Batman.

On the upside, Shirley and Catherine saved Nick Mohammed, which is really Londerful. And Flyte agrees with my guess that Tara has caught real feelings for Roddy, although also that makes me doubt myself. Solid stuff all around.

The Morning Show, season 4, episode 5

Welcome back to The Morning After The Morning Show! Once again, we’re joined by Liz to discuss this week’s episode of The Morning Show. Liz, how are you doing?

I’m great, thanks, Liz, and very happy to have a good episode of this series to talk about.

They namechecked Gaza!

They did! In passing! And it raised the awful spectre of exactly what TMS’s Gaza coverage must look like, which is chilling.

More importantly, the focus turned to Chris and Mia, and from the very first scene, I kept thinking that if this was a sincere drama about Black women in media, instead of a half-assed satire-slash-evening-soap-opera, it would probably be actually good.

Chris and Mia make a great team, and they know it.

Yes, and Mia apologised for her bullshit maternity-shaming of Chris. As she tells Alex, it’s her ability to be accountable which makes her stand out — something that Alex is completely incapable of doing.

And Chris takes accountability, too!

I kind of hate the whole doping plotline because I just know how thoroughly Chris would be cancelled in real life. Like, people can’t even cope with Simone Biles dropping out of competition for her mental health, can you imagine if an acclaimed Black athlete admitted to taking steroids? Even if she was clean by the time of the actual Olympics?

At the same time, I think this is a solid story about the way athletes — especially women, and especially Black women — are objectified and exploited, and their bodies treated as public property. Chris talks about losing her sponsorships because she got pregnant, and then losing the baby — so she didn’t just need income, she needed to pay medical bills. (Question: how do US athletes get health insurance? Actually, I’ve decided I don’t want to know.)

My whole thing about the Olympics is that I think they are irretrievably corrupt and broken, and honestly the whole institution of professional sports needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch. So I’m into this storyline, while also hoping that Chris faces no consequences whatsoever because I love her.

Did we not just mention accountability?

Yeah, no, I realise my wish is both unreasonable and incompatible with good writing. I just want nothing but good things for Nicole Beharie and every single character she plays.

Speaking of good things…

I cannot imagine where this is going, because we are talking about The Morning Show.

…Cory seems really hung up on Bradley? Until he’s not?

You know, I’ve spent three and a half seasons joking about how Cory is a monster in a person suit pretending to be human, and I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure out that the same is true of Bradley and Alex.

Having said that, aside from going back in time to not sleep with Cory, I kind of feel like Bradley didn’t do anything hugely wrong? Obviously going through his phone is a dick move and not what you’d call ethical, but also? He knew she was a journalist with a self-righteous streak. If I were a shady dude with a history of doing shady dude things, I would maybe just not date journalists. Or private investigators, come to think of it.

Anyway, I do not support this relationship, but it did give us a scene where Alex compares Cory to an open elevator shaft, which is both canny and very funny. It was a real, “Oh yeah, I forgot that Jennifer Aniston is one of the great comedic actresses of her generation!” moment. No, I did not watch Friends.