Hello, television friends! This is another addition of Escapists Routes drafted via dictation software, so apologies if some errors have crept through. You're not gonna believe this, but the app really struggles with Irish names. No, I know.

Let's watch some TV!

Significant Others is a 2022 Australian miniseries following a family as they deal with the disappearance of Sarah, a single mother of two teens. Her adult siblings were feuding with her over their late mother’s will; now they have to come together to find and/or mourn their sister and care for her kids.

Truthfully, this series didn’t touch my radar at the time it aired, but it has become notable for being the only other major credit of Zoë Steiner, now featured in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. I like her work there, so I was interested to see her in a different context.

And I’m glad I made the time, because where her performance in Star Trek is self-conscious and spiky, here — playing a sixteen-year-old who becomes infatuated with an older woman who helped search for her mother — she is totally unaffected. Even naïve. I think it’s too easy to look at young actors with short resumes and assume they are basically playing themselves, and comparing Steiner’s two major jobs reminds me what a mistake that would be.

Otherwise, this is a competent domestic drama with a particularly lovely focus on Sydney’s queer community. One episode ends in the early hours of the morning after Mardi Gras, as the family gets the news that Sarah’s body has been found. They gather outside a gay nightclub, variously sleep-deprived, hungover or coming down from a high, and embrace each other in the morning sun. A fat, bald man in leather joins the embrace. The homophobic brother-in-law stiffens, then leans into it. It could have come across as a joke, or a gotcha, but in this moment, it felt like home.

How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is the new series from Lisa McGee, creator of Derry Girls. Like Derry Girls, this follows a chaotic group of women (no James this time) as they stumble through life. Unlike Derry Girls, the focus is on their life as adults, though with flashbacks today youth in 2003, when they experienced a cataclysmic event which split their quartet into a trio. Now Greta, the friend they left behind, is dead. Or is she?

The series has wild total shifts, some of which didn't work for me, but at no point was I not enjoying it. Does that make it a success? I'm genuinely not sure. The blend of very dark things with deeply absurd storytelling verged on tasteless, which is not a bad thing, but maybe I was in the wrong mood for it.

On the other hand, every detail of Saoirse’s career as a writer of a formulaic yet wildly successful BBC crime drama was perfect to me, a fan of formulaic yet wildly successful BBC crime dramas. There was also a running gag about Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong that frankly filled my heart with joy. And I cannot fault McGee's audacity in filming a scene starring Saoirse-Monica Jackson of Derry Girls in front of the iconic Derry Girls mural.

I want to be like, “The penultimate episode of the season is a flashback that tells us how the protagonist got here? Groundbreaking.”

But actually I love that cliché.

So instead, I’m gonna go, “The inciting event which changed the protagonist’s life was the violent death of a female character?”

I continue to be mystified by the widespread popularity of this series. Aside from the presence of Bertie Carvel, and, like, I love him, but I also am not ready to forgive him for doing the HBO Harry Potter series. Plus his character is about to die.

Anyway, if you wanna fully appreciate the utter pointlessness of this series, go look up how Dunk and Egg die. It’s fun! No, wait, not fun. The other thing. Nihilistic.

Stuff happens, Idris Elba’s day somehow manages to get even worse, but let’s change tracks (that’s a train joke) and talk about a supporting character.

This is Detective Zoran Beck, played by Serbian actor Dejan Bućin. He would, on the whole, prefer that Idris Elba not hijack a train full of explosives in the middle of Berlin, which is fair. But what’s important is that every time he appears on screen, my brain sings, “Hot German cop!” to the tune of “Pink Pony Club”.

Look at that face. According to IMDb, his credits include Jesus Christ and a sexy priest, but clearly he was born to also play Rasputin, and a semi-reformed dark wizard tormented by the guilt of his past crimes and the fear that he will commit more crimes if the people he loves are threatened.

How is this even legal?

Late last year, and into the early weeks of this year, my podcast did a series looking at Star Trek’s wedding episodes from 1967 to 2004. And it was really kind of Starfleet Academy to do a special tie-in for us!

I feel like this is the weakest episode of the season so far, but it was also quite enjoyable to watch, so I’m not mad about it. After the death and violence of last week, we return to the realm of low stakes and hijinks with some character development along the way. And I won’t lie, I’m a little disappointed. I like to be surprised, but I also have whiplash — plus my story structure senses are telling me that we should be ramping the tension up, not taking a quick break.

But it is what it is! And this is a spring break story that completely avoids all the cliches. No one goes to the beach, gets drunk or goes wild.

On the other hand, it’s not a trope-free zone. Darrem’s arranged marriage dusts off a whole pile of Star Trek wedding episode cliches and plays them mostly straight — albeit with a queer love triangle at play, as Jay-Den foregoes his trip to Ibiza with Kyle (they’re at the cheek-kissing/hand-holding stage! my heart!) to save Darrem from what appears to be a kidnapping.

I applaud the queering of the wedding episode, and I like this love triangle, but it feels like a missed opportunity to dig into Darrem’s existing conflict with his perfectionist and emotionally withholding parents. Instead we get his very nice relationship with his intended bride — his best friend, he says; she seems to feel more, but she also has a maid of honour who holds her hand and rocks a sharp suit, so I’m getting extremely Gen Z queer poly vibes — and the development of his relationship with Jay-Den. But there’s never any doubt that Darrem will somehow escape from matrimony and return to Starfleet.

Back at the Academy, we have a plotline with fractionally higher stakes. Caleb is staying at school for the holiday, and he’s joined by Genesis, who has ducked out on her family obligations. They engage in some low-key hijinks, but it’s all part of Genesis’s real plan: to get access to the bridge so she can retrieve a key that will let her edit her Academy application before Captain Ake can submit her name for pre-command training.

“Did Genesis do a collegegate?” I wrote in my notes. Not quite — she earned her place at the Academy, but every single one of her references described her as being motivated by fear. She’s a nepo baby — her dad is an admiral — but she is so far from feeling entitled to her opportunities that her perfectionism is self-destructive.

I love this, because it is SO relatable, and her decisions at every point have been SO stupid. And that’s important, because Genesis has presented herself from the beginning as being totally competent and mature. As an adult, I (and Ake) am going, “Oh honey, those references are a big fat nothing, that’s just something you gotta work on as you enter adulthood.” It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up, you know? But Genesis is seventeen. She doesn’t have perspective.

The punishment is relatively mild — academic probation, menial duty (someone has to keep the floors clean so Nahla can avoid wearing shoes) — but we finally have a crack in Genesis’s armour, and I welcome that.

However.

A second love triangle has hit the YA Star Trek.

Genesis seemed interested in Caleb from their first interaction, but also said she wasn’t going to hook up with anyone in the first semester. It’s clear now that she remains attracted to him, and wasn’t aware of his connection with Tarima until the events of last week. Now he’s flailing — Tarima is recovering at home, and he is having trouble reaching out to her — and she gives him good advice on dealing with that, but it’s clear they have a connection.

Now, I’m not really mad about this. I think that “I am attracted to this person, but they are not available and I value our friendship and respect myself too much to make an issue of it” is a story worth telling. I expect awkwardness to arise because Tarima is, you know, an empath, but I’m reasonably confident this will be well-executed.

I simply have reservations because, well. YA. Love triangles. You know. There was a period in the 2010s where it seemed like every second YA trilogy had a love triangle awkwardly shoehorned in, thanks to Twilight on the one hand and the popular misreading of The Hunger Games on the other. It’s not usually a trope I enjoy, but more than that, it’s just one of those things which People Who Don’t Read Current YA Think Is A Bigger Thing Than It Is. I’m pre-emptively wary of the discourse.

(For the record, love triangles in YA are still around, because what are your teen years for if not having big feelings, but the execution has evolved. Vanessa Len’s timeline-jumping YA fantasy trilogy, for example, ends with a throuple.)

We’re on the cusp of the mid-point of the season, and here’s what we know about Dr Al-Hashimi:

BASICALLY I love her. She's not entirely a character I support, but she's also not a villain. She is in some ways antagonistic to the characters we already know and like, but in general not in an unreasonable way. Obviously, I think she's wrong about AI, but I see her perspective, and as someone who has had good experience with AI in the medical field, I think she's wrong but with good intentions. She was not a good mentor or manager to Santos in the early hours of the season, but she's improving. And let's face it, Santos is not easy to mentor. Robby seems to do well at it,but is he actually mentoring her, or just encouraging her worst instincts?

Not that I mistrust Robby, but he's clearly not in a good place. His rejection of Langdon comes hand-in-hand with his embrace of Whittaker, and I worry that Whittaker is being set up to fail Robby in the same way LinkedIn did – through being human and flawed. Robby, knowing that he is human and flawed, wants his protégés – the ones who are white men, like him – to be superhuman and flawless. This makes him a problematic mentor, but a great character.

As for Santos, while I think that Robbie encourages her cowboy tendencies a little too much for this early stage in her career, she's clearly struggling on this day and I love the scene where Robbie checks in with her, and she encourages him to check in on Whittaker. (“He's our fucking huckleberry.") I also love to the scene where Dr Al-Hashimi give Santos a little encouragement. I've been pretty critical of Al Hashimi's managerial skills, and I stand by that, but she's finding her feet fast. I think that if she and Santos can reach an equilibrium, Santos will benefit from her guidance. Except about AI.