Escapist Routes #40

Hey guys, we’re 40 posts old! And I’m coming to the time of year where I wonder what I want to do with this newsletter over the break. I may scale back for a couple of weeks and just cover Pluribus and season 2 of Fallout (which is dropping weekly) unless my heart says otherwise.

Blue Lights, season 3

Blue Lights is an unpretentious cop show from Northern Ireland. It launched with the promise of following four probationary constables in their new careers — an older woman who had previously been a social worker, a Catholic who has to keep her job secret from her community, a brilliant young man who WOULD be on the fast track to promotion except he can’t shoot, and a Protestant everygirl who just wants to do a good job and serve the people.

The first two seasons dealt with the lingering tensions of the Troubles, the ongoing resentment of the PSNI among Catholics, and the ways organised criminal enterprises have filled the vacuum left by paramilitaries. That’s a lot, but I use the word “unpretentious” for a reason. It’s your classic six-episode getting-on-with-the-job, maybe-there’s-a-bit-of-romance series.

Season 3 picks up as the no-longer-probationers begin to hit burnout. This is particularly true of everygirl Aisling, who is left deeply traumatised by her attendance at a fatal car accident, leading her to make risky decisions and putting herself in danger. The season ends with her agreeing to stay at an in-patient facility specialising in PTSD.

I enjoyed this storyline because it wasn’t about a dramatic shootout, or anything particularly out of the ordinary, just a head-on collision between two cars, and a victim who couldn’t be saved. And Aisling’s behaviour — confronting a detective she suspects of domestic violence and visiting a separatist enclave to see the dead boy’s parents — is the sort of “off the books but basically heroic” behaviour which is normally rewarded in cop shows. Here, it’s “Yeah, it worked out really well for everyone, now hand over your badge and gun and if you want to keep being a cop, you’re going to go away for a while.”

This is where Blue Lights functions as copaganda: the system basically works. The uniformed police have a profound (and justified) mistrust of higher ranking officers, detectives, the intelligence and security services, but overall, they’re the good guys. And when they’re not, the Hot And Stern Internal Affairs Bitch is there to conduct an investigation, deliver a stern talking-to and/or consequences, and generally keep them in line. To me, watching from Australia, this is mildly irritating; I imagine that if I had any dealings whatsoever with the PSNI, I’d find it offensively unrealistic. But then, that’s why I fill my need for cop shows with the ones from other countries.

Down Cemetery Road, season 1, episode 8

And we’re done! Zoe, Sarah and Dinah are alive, all the Black men are dead, the South Asian man is alive but badly injured after blowing half his hand off, and the white men escape with no consequences for their crimes.

You really don’t want to think too hard about the racial dynamic of this series. Unfortunately the plot didn’t hold my attention well enough to make up for it. It’s absolutely not the worst streaming drama I’ve watched in 2025 — off the top of my head, I think that’s probably Smoke — but it’s not great. A huge waste of Emma Thompson’s skills, and honestly I understand why Slow Horses was Mick Herron’s break out after this series of novels floundered.

Pluribus, season 1, episode 7

At the end of last week’s episode, my flatmate said, “Is Manousos going to drive an MG thorugh the Darién Gap?”

And I, a geographical ignoramus, said, “What’s the Darién Gap?”

Then I went away and read a whole lot of Wikipedia articles. To sum up:

Now that I’m an expert, we were delighted to see that this episode is titled “The Gap”, and indeed, the Gap plays a big role in the story.

But also, and I’m not the first person to say this, here’s another episode which drives home that Pluribus is a series about grief. And specifically the grief of living in a post-covid world, where some of us have lost our loved ones, or our health, and yet everything is expected to proceed as if it’s more or less normal.

I recorded an episode of my Star Trek podcast this morning, where we talked about how, for all its considerable faults, Star Trek: Enterprise in its later seasons was one of the first post-9/11 shows to consider the grief and trauma of the attacks, and not just the “we’re gonna get revenge, rah rah America!” side. Although it did plenty of that, too. (I think Battlestar: Galactica was probably the second, and it’s interesting that it takes science fiction to explore these things.)

Pluribus, in a much more competent and subtle way than The Least Good Star Trek (fight me), feels like the first real post-covid story. Carol, the only one of the individuals who has lost a loved one (at least, we don’t get the impression Koumba had anyone to lose), makes the others uncomfortable with her raw grief and rage. Why can’t she just adjust to the new normal? Why is she so difficult?

This episode covers a larger span of time than any other — a whole month and ten days of solitude for Carol. At first, she seems to settle into a less extreme version of Koumba’s hedonism. No one else is gonna appreciate that Georgia O’Keefe painting, might as well move it into her house. Time to play some golf, smash some windows, enjoy the local hot springs in solitude. It’s a bit like lockdown, if lockdown meant we could leave our house but never interact with another person.

And like lockdown, it gets depressing. Carol’s destructive and self-destructive tendencies come to the fore. She’s lonely. She asks the Hive Mind to come back. (She does not, I note, apologise.)

If Carol has found a less extreme version of everyone else’s acceptance — like me, continuing to wear a mask on public transport, but not really thinking about it when I’m in a shopping centre — Manousos remains All Mask, All The Time. But the mask analogy is faulty, because his behaviour, too, is self-destructive. He won’t accept water, he won’t accept help in crossing the gap. Until he is badly injured, and the Hive Mind saves him because, well. They kind of feel like they don’t have a choice.

I don’t think that Carol has given up on saving the world, but I do think their different attitudes will put her and Manousos at odds. Which on the one hand is great, because that’s where drama happens, but ALSO most of the human race hates Carol’s guts these days, and maybe she needs a friend? Outside the hive mind? Whom I still do not trust?

Heated Rivalry, season 1, episode 1

Or, the already-infamous Canadian Gay Hockey Drama. In a fictionalised version of the NHL, a Canadian and Russian hockey player — one playing for Montreal, the other for Boston — fall in love.

Romance is not my genre — I prefer it to be a flavour within a meal, rather than the focus of the entire dish — but as far as I can tell, Heated Rivalry is doing really good work within its genre. I personally would prefer more hockey, but that’s the sort of asshole I am. (I’m mostly watching it because everyone’s talking about it and I felt left out.)

One thing it does which truly impresses me is the way it uses silence. Maybe because I watched it right after Pluribus, another show which is not afraid to leave a long space in the soundscape, but there are long scenes of the main characters shedding clothes, or putting clothes on, or looking at each other, with no music or dialogue. Just the environmental sounds and, I assume, some foley guys working their hearts out.

In an era when so many shows insist on having dialogue which explains what’s happening on screen, this feels like a huge gesture of trust in the audience, and I appreciate that.