Escapist Routes #42

Hello, television friends! We have a HUGE edition this week, and more to come next week with the launch of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

I’ve also spent my summer holiday reading, and spending an inordinate amount of time playing Powerwash Simulator while listening to audiobooks. This is, I think, how Hilary Mantel wanted her masterpiece of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, to be read.

It’s absolutely what Robert A. Caro wanted for The Power Broker, his absolute tome of a biography of Robert Moses, the New York parks tsar who invented the baby change table and replaced a lot of poor and Black neighbourhoods, and unspoiled forests, with cars and car parks. (I reserved the paperback at the library last summer, only to find that it was too heavy to carry around. The ebook is not easily available in Australia, so what a great time to become an audiobook person!)

But we’re here for the TV. Let’s get watching. (The last entry contains spoilers for the twist at the end of the first episode of the new season of Hijack, so skip that if it will impact your enjoyment.)

Trigger Point, season 3

Trigger Point is an ITV drama starring Vicky McClure as a down-to-earth-yet-deeply-traumatised-cop. You know, the character Vicky McClure always plays. Specifically, her character here is an Afghanistan vet turned bomb disposal expert, which means there’s a high level of tension and drama built into the premise.

Which is no guarantee that a show will be good! Season 1 was solid, but season 2 ramped up both the twists and the melodrama, to the point where I can’t remember for sure what the plot was, but I think it involved a bomb squad guy murdering the Home Secretary? Or was that one of the other Vicky McClure cop shows?

Anyway, season 3 is a terrible place to jump in for the first time, but it’s a big step up from season 2. It’s not trying to Say Something Profound about terrorism or the alt-right or Afghanistan. The mystery is much more low key and sad, and interesting.

I’m less convinced (“convinced” is always such a difficult word when you’re talking about a series like this) about the subplot where McClure’s character is managing her trauma by abusing over-the-counter codeine/paracetamol. Mostly because, to get the level of opioid high we see, she would simply not have functioning kidneys anymore. Or a liver. I know this has been a fashionable moral panic in many countries (it’s why panadeine is now prescription-only in Australia), but codeine with paracetamol is not equivalent to oxycodone, and the execution of this storyline feels like a bit of after school special finger wagging.

The Night Manager, season 2, episodes 1-3

Hey, uh, does anyone remember what happened in season 1 of The Night Manager? Don’t worry, we got a detailed recap:

Hot ex-soldier turned posh hotel night manager Tom Hiddleston is tasked by MI-6 agent Olivia Colman to get close to ultra-rich arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). Why do I think of Roper as “Richard Roper” when I think of other characters as their actors? Definitely not because Hugh Laurie disappeared into the role, because he is Hugh Laurieing as hard as he can! Anyway, Tom and Roper become close, to the dismay of hanger-on Tom Hollander (the short guy not the Spider-Man guy); Tom also gets very close to Roper’s girlfriend, Elizabeth Debicki, playing another in a long career of Sad Women In Bad Relationships. Some plot goes down, some stuff gets blown up, Roper is arrested in Syria and we are left to understand that he will not meet a good end.

I assumed that season 2 would see Tom Hiddleston in a whole new kind of situation, but it turns out this is a tight sequel to the original. We open four years after the events of season 1, with Olivia Colman identifying Roper’s body in a Syrian prison, then jump ahead to the present day — a full ten years after the first season. Tom Hiddleston has a new name, a new job (watching foreign agents via the CCTV in posh hotels), and an orange cat.

This peaceful life of working all night and avoiding the overtures of hot neighbours all day — not to mention the concern of his MI-6 therapist — is interrupted when Tom spots an old Roper associate, and decides to do a little investigating. Then he finds out his boss is involved in something shady, and then his mentor is murdered. So what choice does he have but to launch an unauthorised operation, fake his death and take off to infiltrate a new arms dealer’s operation?

The first two episodes are fairly slow, and mostly serve to put the pieces in place. Episode 3 ramps up the tension (and the homoeroticism), and ends with A TWIST that I should have seen coming, but I did NOT, and I was DELIGHTED.

But here’s what I did see coming. Tom’s boss is played by Indira Varma, whom I first encountered via her work on Torchwood. I have a lot of Torchwood-related trauma, not just because it’s bad, but because people kept acting like it was, in fact, great television? And then it finally was great, and everyone hated it? I felt gaslit. And then I simply did not think about it ever again because it wasn’t that memorable.

EXCEPT. Varma was introduced in the first episode as the second in charge of the Torchwood team, and a regular, but SURPRISE! She’s the bad guy! And now she’s dead!

I was pretty mad, and I still am pretty mad, and I feel like Varma has been cursed ever since. Her characters are all either evil or just treated really badly, and then they die. One day I want a series where Indira Varma and Rekha Sharma play friends who FIGHT CRIME and DON’T DIE, but until then, I will settle for Varma’s dodgy spy chief ending up under arrest instead of dead.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, season 1, episodes 1 and 2

Star Trek has an uneven history with premieres. At best, they’re a little piloty. At worst, they’re a hodgepodge of tropes, old Star Trek plots and exposition. Even in the new era, the live action premieres tend to be hit and miss — I really liked the Discovery premiere, but it opens with a teaser full of clunky dialogue, and ends on a bleak note which doesn’t really suit the tone of the show as a whole, but provided a lot of fodder for people who complained that Disco was Dark ‘n’ Gritty. Picard took three episodes to get started. Strange New Worlds recycled a Voyager plot.

So I’m not damning SFA with faint praise when I say its premiere is “competent”. That’s a much harder bar to clear than you might think. The opening is dark — Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) sentences space pirate Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) and accomplice Anisha Mir (Tatiana Maslany) to prison and rehabilitation respectively, separating Anisha from her six-year-old son, Caleb. Caleb is meant to go off to an idyllic school for orphans, but instead he runs away. Fifteen years later, Caleb is a prisoner himself, failing to escape from a brutal alien police force.

That’s bleak! I’ve seen people complain about Star Trek endorsing the carceral state and the separation of a child from his parent, which is because they rage quit before they got to the next scene, where we learn Captain Ake quit Starfleet, ashamed of her role in separating a family, and has been teaching at the idyllic orphan school since. Given the reputation of the YA literary community for being overly literal, scolding and bad at reading comprehension, I do think it’s funny that the self-styled sophisticated Trekkies are the ones mistaking depiction for endorsement, but anyway…

Nahla has been asked to return to Starfleet and lead Starfleet Academy, which is reopening after a century of disarray, militarism and imperial decay, and she’s bringing in Caleb as her special project. He’s an orphan, plucked out of the masses to go to a special school, classic YA trope if you think that Harry Potter is YA and/or relevant. (It is a YA trope, and was one long before J. K. Rowling picked up a pen.)

Nahla is white; Caleb, played now by newcomer Sandro Rosta, is mixed race. One of the ways SFA impresses me is how this doesn’t come across as a white saviour narrative. Nahla is rescuing Caleb because it’s the right thing to do, because she has already failed him once, and because she comes to see herself in him. They share a curiosity and a love of chaos. She has lost a son. He has lost his mother. They’re not equals, and they’re not family, but they share common ground.

The rest of the premiere is about introducing most of the rest of the cast — which is huge — and giving the young characters a crisis in which they can prove their mettle.

The young characters are sketched quickly, with a shorthand familiar from teen dramas and YA fiction:

• The BFF (Jay-Den Kraag, a Klingon smol bean with anxiety who wants to become a healer; YES, his name is Jay-Den and I want to thank every Australian on set for keeping their mouth shut).

• The Supportive Nepo Baby (Genesis Lythe; I personally would not take a 17-year-old girl and name her “lithe”, but I do love to see a character who looks at a bunch of misfits and outsiders and promptly, without an ounce of condescension, adopts them).

• The Future Fan Favourite (Sam, a holographic being who is programmed to feel 17, but is in fact only four months old, here to study, learn about humanity and engage in “reasonable acts of rebellion”; I love her, the assholes in fandom are already being horrible about her race and body shape; this fandom is genuinely terrible.

• The Asshole Who Has To Learn Better (Darem Reymi, a scion of a wealthy planet who is introduced with a moment of bullying more appropriate to middle schoolers — here is where I think the teen drama shorthand is weakest, although he quickly becomes a solid foil for Caleb.)

And then there’s the adult cast: in addition to Holly Hunter, we have British stand-up comedian Gina Yashere as Lura Thok, cadet master/drill sergeant/second in command/a terrifying force of nature whom I love; Robert Picardo, reprising his role as My Least Favourite Character in Star Trek: Voyager; and Jett Reno and Oded Fehr, reprising their roles from Star Trek: Discovery. One thing that I think SFA does well is balancing the adult stories against the YA stories, which ensures crossover appeal — which is essential for a high budget series whose established audience is ageing and frankly not welcoming to newcomers.

But I hope new viewers ignore the gatekeepers, because SFA is a great place to jump into the franchise for the first time. The second episode is quieter and less quippy than the first, and a lot of it involves the young characters watching adults give speeches (you learn to be in Star Trek by watching Star Trek happen in front of you). But between those scenes, they are attending classes, experiencing interpersonal issues, and Caleb is bonding with a youth activist from a world which has left the Federation and turned isolationist. (This is Tarima Sadal, the final member of the ensemble and The Love Interest With A Terrible Secret.)

As a lifelong Trekkie and an aspiring author of fiction for young people, I’m very interested in the ways SFA combines the Star Trek setting with the tropes and expectations of current young adult storytelling. This means some on-the-nose dialogue and a regrettable tendency to explain the subtext, but also an interest in inequality, activism, democracy and honesty. So far, it’s promising!

Fallout, season 1, episode 5

This episode gives us a montage of the Snake Oil Salesman trekking across the Wasteland to New Vegas, interspersed with moments where he’s fighting radroaches or picking flowers. My flatmate said to me, “Is this what playing the game is like?”

And I had to say yes, it is exactly what playing the game is like. One of the things which makes Fallout great, and which sets it apart from other video game adaptations, is how well it captures that experience and conveys it through a different storytelling medium. I once fought a Deathclaw with nothing but a weak pistol, four bottles of vodka and a buffout addiction. And then, like Lucy, I had to go find and steal some addictol.

I didn’t vomit, though.

My favourite plotline this week was Norm and his Junior Executives finding and ransacking Vault-Tec HQ. First they meet the elderly lesbians that Lucy encountered in Filly back in season 1 — Ma June tells Norm his sister is probably dead, which is inaccurate but understandable — and then Norm bonds with Claudia and they hack Vault-Tec’s systems.

I’m very excited to ship Norm with Claudia, not least because I think it’s nice for him to meet a girl who’s not his cousin. And she started a new job at a cult, was almost immediately put in suspended animation while the world ended, and now she’s awake and her cat is gone. Let her date a short king.

I mean, then Ronnie figures out that Norm lied about being with Vault-Tec, and so that’s bad, but nothing can stand in the way of true love, right?

Right?

Definitely not the Ghoul’s principles. He has traded Lucy to her father for the promise that his wife and daughter — in suspended animation in Vegas — will stay safe. Actually, he was going to take Lucy back to Vault 33, but then she impaled him and her dad turned up, and I guess next week will see a McClean Family Reunion. Minus Norm.

Ironically I was least engaged by the biggest scenes of the episode: Cooper meeting Robert House (Justin Theroux) and learning of House’s theory that there is a secret player manipulating Vault-Tec, the government and all the other players. He also thinks Cooper is intensely important to the whole thing, and will bring about the end of the world, which seems … unlikely to me? I mean, yes, Cooper/The Ghoul/Vault Boy has been on hand for some pretty key moments, but his pre-war incarnation is super passive.

But maybe that’s about to change…

The Pitt, season 2, episode 2

The power struggle between Doctors Robby and Al-Hashimi continues into its second hour, and guys, I am ready to bang their heads together.

Here is how Robby is wrong

• Dude, it is your last day before a three-month sabbatical, you can just relinquish control and focus on a smooth handover, the same way you would with the night shift! (This inability to prioritise, of course, is a symptom of burnout.)

• Openly disapproving of Al-Hashimi’s methods is unprofessional. Clearly both his instinct-driven approach and her more rigorous methodology have their place.

• He’s not out of line in explaining why using ketamine alone on the choking guy was a better choice than Al-Hashimi’s plan of intubating — this is how his students and residents learn — but he did not have to be smug.

Here is how Dr Al-Hashimi is wrong

• I actually do think that AI transcription of a patient-doctor conversation has its place, especially if the privacy settings are sufficiently strong to meet HIPAA and its international equivalents (I love my GP, but honestly half our sessions are taken up with his two-finger typing). But she’s way too cavalier about the 2% error rate (it recorded the wrong medication!), and I have strong ethical qualms about how she used it with a patient who clearly could not give informed consent.

• This might be a side effect of her background in the VA, the only place where Americans experience socialised medicine, but she’s really quick to jump on more technical procedures and solutions, instead of more straightforward, less invasive ones.

• “I’ve never been sued for malpractice” is not helpful. Bringing suit against a VA doctor is a lot harder (and more expensive) than your regular ER situation. It’s possible that Al-Hashimi’s confidence in this regard is unearned, and it’s not what Mel needed to hear.

• I just think that walking into a new workplace and making changes in your first hour, before you’ve even formed a baseline opinion, is a bad move.

I love The Pitt so much that I forgot how rancid its audience is — I’ve seen a lot of people who are excited for Robby to put Al-Hashimi in her place, and frankly there are racial overtones for which I do not care. I want to skip over all the headbutting and get to the bit where they find common ground and mutual respect.

Now, as long as I’m criticising the characters, let’s talk about Dr Langdon telling Mel that his addiction never affected his work. Sir, you stole benzos from a patient, and gaslit/lowkey bullied Dr Santos when she noticed something was amiss. Santos is understandably giving him a wide berth today, but she should be high up on his list of People To Whom Langdon Owes Apologies In Accordance With Steps 8 And 9 Of The Program.

A lack of self-awareness obviously isn’t the worst thing Langdon has done, but it’s a red flag, and feels like he’s manipulating Mel. On the other hand, I have disliked him since episode 1 of season 1, so I am not an unbiased observer.

Onto Santos!

She’s actually softened a lot since season 1, but without becoming, uhhhh, non-abrasive. But she resonates with me, because I think she thinks she’s closer friends with Victoria and Mel than they really are, and who among us hasn’t misread a situation and accidentally offended people with what we thought was banter?

Her patient right now is Kylie, a nine-year-old girl whom she thinks is being abused by her dad. Robby seems very much aware that child abuse is a trigger for Trinity, and this matches my feelings last season that he’s a better mentor for her than Langdon was. She also knows it’s an issue, but is maybe not as on top of her Vengeance Against All Abusers instincts as she says.

Finally, let’s talk about Dana. Obviously I love her, I think she’s a great character, but I feel like her experiences in season 1 have not been good for her professionalism. She has always been brusque, but I feel like she’s less respectful of vulnerable patients (especially Stinky Maggot Guy Whose Name I’ve Forgotten) than she used to be. Everyone in this show has a weak spot (except Whittaker and Mel, who are Too Good To Be True), and this is now hers.

And yes. There’s an erect penis. HBO’s prosthetic dick department strikes again.

Hijack, season 2, episode 1

Season 1 of Hijack saw Idris Elba onna plane. This time, he’s onna train — and not one of Europe’s international trains, but a regular old Berlin commuter.

And he kind of seems not okay. He’s scanning his surroundings, paying too much attention to his fellow passengers, and generally acting like a man whose previous encounter with mass transit involved a hijacking. Understandable!

Then he started racially profiling a Middle Eastern man with a large backpack, and gets him hauled off the train by cops, and I was like, “Excuse me, Idris Elba, I can only forgive so much.” And my flatmate was like, “It would be funny if he was hijacking the train. Like, this is how he’s got the police to disembark.”

And THEN, in the final thirty seconds, he busts into the driver’s cabin, looks the viewer in the eye, tenderly cups her cheek in his hand and says, “I’m hijacking this train.”

IT’S NOT JUST IDRIS ELBA ONNA TRAIN. IT’S IDRIS ELBA STEALING A TRAIN.

I am SO set. I need the next episode immediately. I will never doubt my flatmate’s narrative instincts ever again.