Escapist Routes #43

Hello, friends! It’s the Sunday after a desperately hot Saturday and my study is entirely filled with the smell of bushfire smoke. “Why did you open the windows?” my flatmate asked, pointing to the air quality, and it was at that exact moment that my eyes began itching.

I don’t do new year’s resolutions, but I’m going to try to be better, going forward, with giving you a quick overview at the top of what you can expect below, and also maybe I’ll investigate the tags at this here newsletter hosting site. (I went digging through my archives for my Department Q review and went, “Oh no, this is annoying.”)

So, this week we have:

• season 1 of Industry and new episodes of

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

• The Night Manager

• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

• Fallout

• The Pitt

Industry, season 1

Back in 1989-1990, ITV ran two seasons of a high budget, incredibly glossy evening soap opera called Capital City, about the sexual and romantic entanglements of a bunch of attractive young stock traders. It was notable for several things: dropping right after the stock market crash; being essentially Thatcherite yuppie apologia at a time when the culture had turned against yuppies; and having no likeable characters whatsoever except for the one played by a young, pre-typecasting Jason Isaacs.

Industry is literally the same show, only it’s a 2020 HBO production, so there’s a lot of nudity and the HBO Prosthetic Penis Department gets to show off its work, and the cast is actually diverse.

It’s clearly going for a Succession sort of vibe, where the characters are awful, but without the quality of writing which makes Succession such a joy. Truthfully, I found it a bit of a slog, but season 4 is currently dropping and seems very zeitgeisty, and I am assured it gets better.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, episode 1

There are four women with speaking roles in this episode: an innkeeper, two sex workers and a storyteller/puppet show narrator. None are fully-fledged characters.

As I recall, it took me about 40 minutes to read the original novella this is based on. Stretching it out into a six-hour series already feels like an absolute slog, and I simply cannot get excited at the prospect. I’m only going to keep covering this if it becomes more interesting.

The Night Manager, season 2, episode 4

Going forward, my flatmate and I are communicating exclusively by sending pixelated photos of Hugh Laurie and the words

WHY DID YOU LIE TO ME?????????????

PINE

The sign-off is what makes it perfect.

Yes, Richard Roper is alive and well and plotting regime change in Colombia with his secret illegitimate son, not knowing his son has been sexy dancing with Tom Hiddleston. I’d say he’s gonna be so disappointed, but honestly, Roper is not winning Dad of the Year here, what with how he’s being super racist about Teddy and Colombians behind Teddy’s back.

Like, Mr Richard Roper, I know you’re an arms dealer and a murderer and generally not a nice person, but you can’t just come into a colonised country and talk about terra nullius and the good old days of imperialism? That’s, like, super problematic?

Possibly even more important than Hugh Laurie being back: OLIVIA COLMAN IS BACK! Briefly! To confirm that yes, she deliberately misidentified Roper’s “body”, but he was threatening to murder her child, and also she immediately let MI-6 know, so, like, technically she did the right thing. More or less. It’s not her fault that MI-6 was already compromised. Let a bitch live!

Some stuff is GOING DOWN. Roper has a brand new British passport, and plans to cut his adoring son loose as soon as he has his money. Teddy, after some difficulties, finally takes out Latin American Alan Rickman, the prosecutor who has been holding up his shipment of weapons. Some of those difficulties involve “Tom Hiddleston is here and he has a gun, SHIT, has the extremely hot Englishman who seems a little too interested actually working against me?” ALAS, NO ONE LOVES TEDDY FOR WHO HE IS.

AND THEN — okay, one of my favourite things is when you know something is coming, and you have a pretty good idea how it’s going to happen, but you’re on tenterhooks waiting for THE MOMENT.

For some reason THE MOMENT came by fax? WHICH ONLY MAKES IT BETTER. Roper knows Tom Hiddleston is in play, and has been all along. I AM DYING. I AM DEAD. I AM SO HAPPY.

I do have one serious note within the memes, though. When season 2 launched, a lot was said about how Camila Morrone’s Roxana would be more proactive and less passive than Elizabeth Debicki’s character in season 2. Four episodes into the season, I do have to ask: is that proactive character in the room with us now? Because so far, Roxana has been a pawn of various men, and I feel a smidge misled.

Hijack, season 2, episode 2

Obviously I support Idris Elba in all things, and if he wants to hijack a train, he should be allowed to. Frankly it might improve the overall service in Melbourne.

However. I do have to ask how well he has thought this plan through, because with respect, a commuter train is a terrible hijacking target. It’s easy to find, even if you disappear for a while down a “closed” tunnel, and your passengers have access to the internet and social media. Plus, you have whole carriages of the things — passengers — including a bunch of English kids on a school trip. Do you really want to be dealing with stroppy teenagers and their overwhelmed teachers while you’re trying to blackmail the Berlin chief of police? Of course not!

Anyway, this show continues to be outstanding nonsense. I am very eager to find out why Idris Elba has broken bad (if, indeed, he has — season 1 also played with the “maybe he’s a bad ‘un” twist). I’m also enjoying all the train nerdery: views of tunnels, the control centre, the driver’s cabin. I’m not a gunzel, but I respect their culture. I’m having a good time.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, season 1, episode 3

Let’s talk about Save the Cat for a minute.

Save the Cat is a hugely popular and useful guide to screenwriting, and specifically film structure. It has a bunch of spin-offs, most notably Save the Cat Writes A Novel, which translates the three-act film structure to a novel.

Save the Cat is widely used in YA fiction, and honestly nearly all commercial fiction. I’ve seen pushback against this, as it’s arguably overused, and can leave people thinking that the three-act structure is the only valid story structure, but in my opinion — as a pantser who is trying really hard to become a plotter — it’s a useful tool. Especially if, say, you’re writing a ten-episode season in a franchise which has, let’s say, really struggled with figuring out pacing for its serialised series.

Starfleet Academy is following the Save the Cat narrative path. Episode 1 introduced Caleb’s status quo, then opened act 2 by introducing him to a new world, which was further explored in episode 2.

Now we’re into the phase called The Promise of the Premise, where you explore the new world and have fun with it. I’m picturing the SFA writers room gathered around a whiteboard, scribbling down their favourite college/high school story tropes. Obviously you have a prank war. Clearly you need a sport.

After a premiere that had a lot of quips, punching and space battles, and a second episode which had philosophy, romance and space diplomacy, episode 3 gets into another side of Star Trek: enjoyable nonsense. There are no stakes here, only character development. The Mean Girls (gender neutral) of the rival War College have instigated a prank war; the underdog Academy cadets try to fight back via sport, but ultimately get the upper hand through empathy, imagination and science.

This feels like a tribute to the late DS9 episode “Take Me Out To The Holosuite”, where the gang forgets there’s an interstellar war on and plays baseball with the crew of a rival ship. (That the instigator of the War College rivalry is a Vulcan, like the captain who was Sisko’s nemesis at the Academy, is probably not coincidence.) We learn a lot about our kids along the way:

• Caleb is super into Tarima, and thinks he can save her from making the “wrong” choice (attending the War College over the Academy; he claims to be anti-sport, but actually welcomes the opportunity to play

• Darem is an overachieving asshole because his parents were assholes who accepted nothing less than perfection

• Genesis is a Janeway figure — an admiral’s daughter who has some neuroses about that, but mostly she’s a natural leader who is looking at this team of misfits and outsiders and going, “Yes, this is my family.”

• Jay-Den is sincerely anti-sport (and Genesis respects that), but he’s also down for shenanigans and up for telling really terrible jokes to soft gay War College boys

• Sam is not the focus of this episode, but is a delight in all things

• Tarima joined the War College because she wants to learn to discipline her unusually powerful and dangerous telepathy; she likes Caleb, but is afraid of her own feelings

On the adult side, Captain Ake develops her professional trust and friendship with Lura, while also trolling the hell out of her opposite number at the War College. This man is not a hypermasculine soldier, but an absolute dweeb, and I love him almost as much as Ake loves making him mildly uncomfortable in social situations.

And we learn that Jett and Lura are dating, which is a huge win for lesbians everywhere. (On the queer representation side, we also learn that Darem is bi or pan, and I actually think that if Jay-Den isn’t gay, I’m going to have to cite the series for queerbaiting. I hope his story is, instead, simply a slow burn.)

Fallout, season 2, episode 6

We get more creepy “young” Hank this week, with Cooper going from confronting Barb about her whole “nuking the world for capitalism” plan (she says she was blackmailed by Michael Emerson, and you know what? Fair!) to spiking Hank’s drink and knocking him out. The briefcase handcuffed to his wrist on this work trip contains, not the cold fusion chip, but the fancy little gun that implants and extracts the chip from a person’s head.

Barb seems to be working with Coop in this moment, which raises the question: were they allies against Vault-Tec by the end? The series opens with a scene which implies Coop’s acting career has dried up and he owes alimony to Barb, but maybe that was a ruse? I hope so, not least because I’ve always found it a little troubling that the series blames the end of the world, in part, on a Black woman. It’s always been the most tone deaf note in the show for me.

In the present day, Lucy is reunited with her dad, who has installed mind control chips on a whole lot of surface dwellers and put them to work making more. Problematic. Lucy makes a strong case for self-determination, but at the same time, the chip people are safer and happier and not living marginal, cannibalistic lives this way, soooooooooooooooo … no, I still think brainwashing is bad, it’s just easier than building a functional society where people don’t have to prey on each other.

The Ghoul remains impaled on a pole, unable to reach the vials that keep him sapient. Even Dogmeat abandons him — although it turns out he’s gone off to find Maximus and Thaddeus, who have fled the Brotherhood with that pesky old cold fusion chip in hand. Around the campfire, they debate morality in the wasteland, while the Ghoul is rescued by a super mutant played by … Ron Pearlman? Now we’re talking!

I’m less enthralled by the Vault 33 storyline, which is your standard “unpopular long-term planning versus unsustainable populism”. It’s well-executed, and I gotta say, the populists’ desire to just not think about recent tragedies was, uh, familiar. But it’s just not as compelling as the other storylines.

The Pitt, season 2, episode 3

The Pitt fandom has an antisemitism problem.

Tumblr user userautumn has a post breaking down how fandom, especially the fic and shipping side of fandom, has a bad faith reading of Robbie across a lot of axes, but they essentially boil down to antisemitism. He’s a Jewish character played by a Jewish actor, and that seems to be a problem for some people.

I don’t pay attention to the fic or shipping side of The Pitt fandom (no, I know, who even am I?), but I do follow PittTok, and I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that people have been really eager to find a reason to cancel Noah Wyle. He praised the work of an Israeli hospital! He criticised Israel’s genocide … but not enough!

It has come to a head in the last 24 hours, as people scramble to argue that the depiction of a Russian Jewish woman in this week’s ep — which Wyle wrote — is proof that he supports Putin. Or she says she used a samovar, but she is clearly Ukrainian, so Wyle is erasing her heritage because he supports Putin.

For the record, samovars are used in many eastern European countries and as far away as Iran, and actress Irina Dubova’s official bio describes her as a Russian speaker who also works in Ukrainian, as well as English, French and some other languages. But also, it simply doesn’t matter, because these are not good faith arguments.

None of this is about supporting Ukrainians or Palestinians, it’s about finding a “valid” reason to hate on a writer-actor who is unabashedly Jewish.

I also think part of the motivation is a desire to build a backlash against the series itself. Not because this season is in any way inferior to season 1 — three episodes in, how could you even make that judgement? — but because that’s how media consumption goes right now. You have the success, then you have the backlash. This season of The Pitt is too woke, it’s not woke enough, it’s too racist, it’s too anti-racist, it has been spoiled by its own success and needs to be taken down a peg by any means necessary.

Here’s one critique of this week’s episode/a plotline which has been running since the premiere: I don’t think The Pitt understands mandatory reporting. This was a problem in season 1, so it’s not a new issue, but both seasons have had storylines where Santos uncovers possible child abuse and “overreacts”.

Season 1 saw her threaten to harm the abuser, which is obviously not cool; season 2 sees her call in her supervisor and a social worker and make the necessary investigations. It turns out that there was no abuse, just a kid with an unusual but treatable condition which caused heavy bruising and internal bleeding.

But the show, and fandom, is acting like she overreacted and behaved inappropriately, and I’m like … is this not? How mandatory reporters are required to behave? If anything, she should have called CPS and then continued the medical investigation? (Please note that my entire understanding of the law around mandatory reporting in the US comes from Reddit, do not take my word as gospel for literally anythng.)

Obviously it’s a problem that Trinity has such a strong emotional reaction when she suspects child abuse, that she automatically personalises it. But it’s a problem for her and her long-term mental health. Her patient-facing behaviour here was correct, and is obviously a huge improvement over her actions ten months ago.

OTHERWISE. Some stuff happened. Some patients got treated. Patients kept flirting with McKay, and it was cute, but I am going to remind people that ER staff are on the job and you should not sexually harass them. The nice Russian-Jewish patient called Robby out for his midlife crisis nonsense, and they had a really good conversation about PTSD.

Truthfully, “Robby treats a Tree of Life shooting survivor” is a plotline that sounds super tacky on paper, but it was handled with a lot of sensitivity, and the very key message that even though she wasn’t shot or hurt in any physical way, her ongoing trauma is real. And her thanking Perlah for the compassion and assistance of the Muslim community after the shooting was a really lovely moment — especially for me as an Australian, seeing how our own antisemitic violence last month has become a trigger for Islamophobia and repression.

Aaaaand the episode ends with some shit kicking off. Another hospital has called a code black and is not taking ambulances due to an internal disaster. Which, as they say, could be anything from a power failure to a leaking toilet, but I suspect it’s the IT problem (hack?) that we’ve glimpsed in the trailers. Dr Al-Hashimi is gonna have to work without AI, and honestly I think that will be good for everyone.