What’s a normal amount of wrist and thumb braces to own? More than three? Please note I have the usual allocation of two hands, but also my thumbs and wrists remain INFLAMED. Zero stars, do not recommend, why are only assholes working to upload consciousness to the cloud?

Let’s watch TV!

Somewhere along the line, Industry became good.

Not original — I remarked that the third episode of this season is the best so far, and my flatmate kindly explained that it’s ripping off Uncut Gems — but good. With Gus having left at the end of season 2, we’re down to just a handful of characters left from season 1’s grad intake — plus Eric, still the worst mentor ever, but now creeping on Yasmin instead of Harper.

Yasmin’s story is interesting: we knew she was the daughter of a wealthy publisher who preys on women and leaves a trail of trauma and NDAs in his wake. As the season opens, he has mysteriously vanished from his yacht, and it has come to light that he has been embezzling the company’s pension fund.

You might be thinking, “Wait, isn’t that what happened to Czech soldier/anti-Nazi partisan/Allied spy/Mossad agent/Murdoch nemesis Robert Maxwell?” And yes. Yes it is.

And then you might remember that Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine is better known now as the accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, and THEN you might wonder where Industry is going with all this. The answer: nowhere good, but I’m pretending that I’m not spoiled for season 4. But at least the parallels are intentional, so it’s marginally less tasteless than it could have been. I think.

But the real main character of Industry is The Market. The Market is struggling with the incompetence of the Tories, and responding poorly to greenwashing and debt-powered investment in “ethical” industries. The money is angry and the bank is sad, and Harper — at least — is in a position to get very rich off this situation. Provided she can persuade a lot of rich, white conservative men to give her, a young Black woman, their money.

Meanwhile, Rob is beginning to suspect this whole “unrestrained capitalism” business might be a bit problematic, which is a sign the actor is about to move on to something new…

I feel a little manipulated.

No, that’s not fair.

I feel a lot manipulated.

Annie is dead. We spent two episodes getting to know her, she saved and befriended Xavier, and then — on the road to Atlanta — she goes into labour, reveals she has had pre-eclampsia all along, gives birth and dies.

I cannot help but feel like we were given a female character whose entire job was to be impregnated and die. And I do not care for that sort of nonsense.

For one thing, now Xavier has to care for a newborn. While searching for Teri, who has been abducted (according to the guy who is really quick to say she’s his best friend and like a sister to him and they were absolutely not romantically involved).

The thing is, babies are quite … demanding. The episode repeatedly tells us that babies are hard to kill, but ummmmmmmmmm history and cemeteries full of tiny graves tell us otherwise. How is Xavier feeding the baby? How is he changing her? Where do you get formula and bottles and nipples and sterilisers in the apocalypse? Is he a disposable nappy type of guy? I thought we all learned with Squid Game 3 that you can’t bring a newborn baby into an action-adventure scenario and just handwave the logistics, but here we are.

Meanwhile, Xavier is having prophetic dreams and also seeing Link — the father of the baby he has for some reason not left with the nice family who were willing to foster her — in his visions. That’s new.

With respect, I have to indulge one of the most annoying reviewing tropes of our age: this eight-hour series could have been a movie. Two hours, tops. Maybe two and a half if you want to be a bit indulgent.

Season 1 of Hijack was very silly, but the very concept of a plane hijacking in the 2020s is inherently fraught. Oh no, we’re flying over Iraqi airspace. Oh no, every single country along our route is panicking and wants to shoot us down. Oh no, a hijacker has been shot and needs medical attention. And then, in the end, the evil plot turns out to be motivated by … share price nonsense. I’ve watched three seasons of Industry and still don’t completely understand what a short is, but the bad guys were shorting airline stock and figured a nice air disaster would help. The specific nature of the air disaster didn’t really matter, all that counted was something going badly wrong.

(Yes, I am aware that there’s a whole scene in The Big Short where Margot Robbie looks at the camera and explains what a short is, and I’ve seen it. I simply do not retain the information, the same way my brain refuses to learn how electricity works, despite the best efforts of my high school science teachers. And yes, I’ve also given serious thought to “which Industry character would hijack a plane in order to short the stock,” but obviously the answer is Harper Stern.)

Season 2 of Hijack is a revenge plot. The lead hijacker from season 1 would feel better if Idris Elba and the gang leader who came up with the stock market idea were dead.

You’d think that the personal motivation would be more compelling than the abstract notion of manipulating the stock market, but honestly? Revenge plots are a dime a dozen, and this one had way too many moving parts, and relied on a lot of people doing the right thing at the right time. It was blown open because one operative had a tattoo of the pub where all the bad guys met to do their scheming, which seems like an easily avoidable situation. New rule for all my henchpersons: no tattoos, and we are not hijacking any commuter trains. As the Bolsheviks and White Army both learned during the Russian Civil War, the problem with trains is that they run on rails, which makes them suboptimal for stealth.

And finally, Idris Elba is allowed to … simply walk away? I’m sorry, I know the hijacking wasn’t his fault, and he was doing his best, but I kind of feel like “should there be consequences for hijacking a train under duress?” is a question to be answered by the courts? I mean, one passenger did die. Of a heart attack, true, but he did put her in a very stressful situation. Surely no one is pretty enough to escape what is no doubt the polite and efficient German justice system.

I am not one of those people who yearns for the days when Star Trek had 26-episode seasons. I think that driving writers, actors and everyone else involved in production to burnout and beyond is a bad idea, both in terms of labour relations and on a creative level. The exhaustion accumulates until you end up with the relentless mediocrity of season 7 of TNG. Or season 7 of DS9. Or season 7 of Voyager.

But I would trade every single episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for SFA to have 12 to 15-episode seasons. Because here we are: last week saw the beginning of the second semester, and now it’s the end of the academic year.

I just don’t think that ten episodes is enough for this combined episodic+arc type of storytelling to work. Strange New Worlds pulls it off by relying on racist shorthand like “this Black man is the embodiment of all evil, actually, and no one’s going to ask any difficult questions about that,” but SFA is telling a more sophisticated story. Except that now we’re into the first half of the season finale, and some character development has happened off-screen — but no time for that, we have to revisit Caleb’s search for his mother, a thread which has been sidelined for a while in favour of his love life.

I don’t think that “300th Night” is a bad episode, but it’s let down by external considerations like the short season. And it doesn’t go into overtly racist territory the way SNW does, but the mission to Planet Star Wars does rely on classic racist SF tropes like “you can tell this market is scary because there is bird meat hanging from a stall and people are speaking other languages.”

Here’s what I did like: just about everything else. Sam is going through an experience common to young people: looking back at her younger self and absolutely hating that kid. Thank God she’s now a mature and rational seventeen-year-old and not a dumbass kid like she used to be, she’ll never make that mistake again. She’s also pulling away from her friendship with Genesis. She’s not quite the same person she was before last week’s episode, and that means her relationships have to change. Kerrice Brooks plays Sam with subtle differences from the “old” version of the character: she holds herself differently and moves through the world with more confidence. She’s still an absolute ray of sunshine who would do anything for her friends, but she’s a more complicated person.

See, for example, her decision to help Caleb steal a shuttle and go after his mother, who is in hiding on a planet that’s about to be annexed. This involves accidentally kidnapping Genesis and Darem (who consents to the trip, but he’s also very drunk, soooooooooo). It’s PEAK YA shenanigans in the best possible way, which is great, because the rest of the story is heavy. The adults are concerned with geopolitics, until they realise a bunch of their kids have gone AWOL straight into enemy territory. And Caleb finds his mother, who is fiercely intelligent and independent, and deeply afraid.

A lot of people (including me) have theorised that Anisha Mir would be the real villain of the series. You don’t cast Tatiana Maslany for a simple role, and she is maybe one of the few actresses of her generation who could dominate a Paul Giamatti. But one look at Anisha, who is living a hand-to-mouth life on a backwater planet and clearly terrified, while wearing a very sad wig, and I abandoned that theory. All she wants is to be reunited with her son and to get the two of them to safety.

Unfortunately, Caleb has turned up with his posse of friends in tow, and then the Venari Ral annex the planet, and then the Athena has to rescue them all. So Anisha ends the episode where she began the series: in Starfleet’s custody, looking into the face of the woman she fears most: Nahla Ake. Her son’s mentor.

Oh, and uh. Also there was more plot: Federation space is surrounded by space-destroying mines. If they detonate, billions of people will be killed and quite a lot of space will be rendered impassable. The Athena is the only Federation ship outside the barrier. No one is coming to save them, but maybe they can save the Federation. Roll credits.

I’ve seen some critics complain about the high stakes of this development, and I am here to say: do you know? How stories work?

Not that I don’t believe in small stakes — call me, Alex Kurtzman, I have a pitch for you: one ship, ten days, 200 lives — but at a time when so-called democracies are pursuing genocides, when institutions are crumbling, when environmental collapse feels closer every day, I think the young audience responds to stakes. And we can talk about how so much speculative media is just following in the footsteps of Joss Whedon in terms of story structure, but this doesn’t feel like a well-informed or good faith criticism.

I have a huge problem with this episode.

Seeing the chaos caused by the move to an analogue ER, Dana has called in an old colleague, a former charge nurse who retired ten years ago rather than master digital technology. And I am sorry, I simply cannot endorse any situation where “that old lady in your office who refuses to learn email” is validated. I have worked too many years in admin to tolerate this sort of nonsense. I appreciate her skills, but no.

Another episode, another nightmare hour. It’s Javadi’s turn to stuff up: she misunderstood how the board worked and her patient got lost in the shuffle, going through “easily treatable” to “critical” in that time. She’s beating herself up about it, while Dr Garcia takes way too much pleasure in dressing her down. Not your job, Garcia, go play weird mind games with Santos instead.

Meanwhile, Robbie has his promised check in with Whittaker, although honestly what he said is more what he needs to hear than Whittaker. But I guess “don’t push yourself too hard or else you’ll burn out or end up addicted to benzos like the last protegé I idealised” is maybe too much.

And Mel’s sister has presented at the ER with what turns out to be a UTI. She’s treated by Langdon, who turns off the lights as he begins his exam. He has learned to treat one autistic person, but can someone please explain to him that not everyone on the spectrum is the same and he should try asking about their preferences instead of assuming.

Standout patient of the week

She’s been around for a few episodes, but I gotta give it to Roxie, the young mother who is dying of cancer and ready to go. I feel like so many people have been making predictions (Cassie’s gonna get caught up in an assisted suicide pact! Her husband is poisoning her!) that we haven’t appreciated the excellent writing and acting that has gone into this storyline. I am actually not going to be okay when she goes.

Standout doctor of the week

I’m giving it to Santos for being extremely professional and reasonable (no, really!) about both the kid who blew his fingers off, and the dehydrated furry who was flirting with her.

(But also, people gotta stop flirting with ER staff, those people are there to work.)

But seriously, while I think it’s kind of funny that Trinity “child abusers should be tortured, actually” Santos is okay with a bit of neglect, I think she handled a really difficult case well.

Also bonus shout out to Isa Briones, who had to take a break from filming this episode to have an emergency appendectomy.

Standout nurse of the week

Wait, is Donnie a nurse-practitioner or a physician’s assistant now? Either way, he’s getting my “medical professional who isn’t a doctor of the week” award for both spotting Victoria’s lost patient, and being on scene for the episode’s cliffhanger: a water park disaster. Go fill the time between episodes by watching Class Action Park.

Standout nightmare fuel of the week

I was going to say “the kid who blew his fingers off with a firework while drinking with his buddy”, but ACTUALLY it’s the story behind that: his parents were picked up by ICE at their immigration hearing and deported, leaving this child in the care of his college-aged sister. Who is doing her best, but obviously her brother needs more supervision.

If this is the ICE subplot which HBO asked to be rewritten to be more kind to ICE, that kindness, uhhhh. Isn’t coming across.

The Dr Michael “Robby” Robinovitch Award For Achievements In Petty Bitchiness

This goes to Garcia for her treatment of Javadi, except it’s less petty bitchiness and more workplace bullying.

I actually really like Garcia as a character, because I think she’s a very familiar type: good at her job, often very fun to work with, but also a bully when she thinks she’ll get away with it, and — as we saw last season with Langdon and Santos — more interested in maintaining the status quo than doing the right thing. She’s what Santos-haters think Trinity is, basically.

I was taken to task last week for not mentioning Abbott, so

Abbott was also in this episode, but then he said he was leaving to get some sleep, and I will not miss him. I enjoy him in small doses, but his presence this season is very “he was a fan favourite last year so now we have to shoehorn him into the day shift at the expense of other characters, mostly women”.