It’s Easter! You’d think the four-day weekend would make it easier to catch up on my newsletter-drafting. But you would be wrong.

I was going to take some time this weekend to see Project Hail Mary in cinemas, but then Andy Weir went on a notoriously anti-woke YouTube channel to talk shit about Starfleet Academy and complain that (a) Star Trek should not be political, it should just be the Federation and Romulans shooting each other; and (b) Alex Kurtzman rejected his pitch for a Star Trek series.

A day or so later, he posted an apology with a strong “My agent called and reminded me that he worked hard to get me an opportunity to pitch to Kurtzman” vibe, but I have made other plans regardless. I’m not cancelling Weir, I am simply taking my finite time and even-more-finite money and spending them elsewhere.

Let’s watch TV!

A few weeks ago, I went to a G Flip gig with The Beaches as co-headliners and Heartbreak High star Ayesha Madon as the support act. Madon came out and announced, “You might not know my music, but you may have seen me getting fingerblasted on Netflix.” Then she pulled out a keytar. The kids are all right, you know?

Watching the third and final season of Heartbreak High shortly after season 1 of Starfleet Academy is a super fun experience. Both are 21st century streaming reboots of iconic shows from the past, and both are very good, but Heartbreak High really drives home how tame SFA was, and how much harder it could have gone in terms of teen drama. Certain Trekkies were moaning about Star Trek: 90210 and Star Trek: Dawson’s Creek, and I actually think they might have a heart attack if they watched a teen drama made this century.

Not just because Amerie and Malakai, the endgame OTP, address each other affectionately as “cunt”, but while SFA dealt with trauma and geopolitics and building a better world, Heartbreak High is out here going, “Okay, so the interschool rivalry sees a guy end up in a coma. Meanwhile, the new kid is renting out the sensory room for students to have sex, and someone is anonymously publishing erotic fan fiction on a section of the school server that looks suspiciously like AO3.”

As someone who watched the original Heartbreak High back when she was an actual teen, the heightened drama and stylised presentation can feel jarring compared with what came before. But as someone who enjoys good television, I … just like this dumb show. This season sees the kids make a series of colossally bad decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time, and then, as they step into adulthood, they finally have to be accountable for their choices. Sometimes that means legal consequences; at other points, it means difficult conversations.

I don’t think it’s entirely successful, but that’s my feeling — as an adult — that Harper and Malakai are both terrible people and Amerie needs to go to uni and find new friends. And I wouldn’t care if I wasn’t deeply engaged with the show and characters.

Three seasons of eight episodes is a solid run for our current media hellscape, and the Netflix executive who commissioned the series has moved on, but I do hope that we can revisit Hartley High again in the future.

First, we need to discuss something very important: in the opening montage that sets the scene for this point in the timeline, we get a clip from Breaking Bad. The existence of Breaking Bad in the FAM timeline presupposes the existence of The X-Files in the FAM timeline — but can you have an X-Files in a universe without a Watergate? And more importantly, is there an arc where Mulder and Scully visit the moonbase? These are significant issues and absolutely will not be explored this season.

And don’t even get me started on the questions that arise about this timeline’s Pluribus.

Secondly, somehow, Ed Baldwin is still alive. Barely. The revelation that he has advanced lung cancer suggests that he won’t be with us much longer. The persistence of the original cast-members (okay, we only have Margo and Ed left of their generation) feels like a metaphor for the American baby boomer gerontocracy, but maybe not in an intentional way? But I have to admit that I have never once looked at this series and thought, “Yes, this is a show whose writers have a full grasp of the story they’re telling.” At least the age make-up is good. Mostly.

The new status quo for the 2010s looks like this: there are roughly 5,000 people on Mars, and the general vibe is a lot more comfortable than before. There’s a Dominoes Pizza on Mars (and a Blockbuster on the moon!), and the school has produced five whole high school graduates. Techbro Dev is building what he says is a full-scale city, and a rival corporation is building a space elevator (having read Arthur C. Clarke at an impressionable age, I love a space elevator). Mars has illegal immigrants, who travel from Earth in shipping crates, and a thriving economy, and oh, cops. Lots of cops. And a murder.

Boyd, one of those cops, is played by Mireille. Friends, I love her. Enos, I mean. Go watch the television adaptation of Hanna, which also stars Joel Kinnaman. She takes the larger-than-life fairytale villain originated in the film with Cate Blanchett in the role, and makes her a person.

Boyd may also be a villain. The Mars Peacekeepers, with their berets and ominous red and black uniforms, seem more like oppressors than protectors. Mars is rumbling with unrest — treated as an unruly colony that Earth needs to bring to order (and exploit for its natural resources), while its residents don’t get a vote on their future. The new governor (Costa Ronin, my beloved) seems like a reasonable guy, but who knows how long that will last.

(Can I just say that I find the ongoing existence of the USSR even more improbable than the lingering presence of Ed Baldwin? Especially if the introduction of sustainable space-based energy technology kills the market for gas, Russia’s primary export. I hope the Star City spin-off addresses this, ideally in the form of a monograph with footnotes. I … cannot be trusted with alternate history, I’m sorry.)

Back on Earth, the Republican president is threatening to crack down on “lawless” Mars, while Aleida is facing a midlife crisis. She has everything she ever wanted, except her teenage daughter’s respect, and she’s not sure she’s happy. Luckily, she can visit Margo in prison to swap equations and commiserations. The connection between Aleida and Margo is my favourite thing about this whole dumb series, and I’m so glad it’s continuing. A little thing like being in prison for treason cannot come between friends! Right? RIGHT?

SPEAKING OF BEING IN PRISON, episode 1 ends with Lee Jung-gil, Actual First Man On Mars and longtime friend of Ed, being arrested for murder. The very first murder on Mars, in fact, although I suspect we’re going to learn that other “suicides” were in fact murders.

Because Lee is technically an asylum seeker — he switched allegiances from North Korea at the end of season 4 — he is not going to face trial on Mars, but on Earth. Where it is very strongly hinted that it will go badly for him even if he’s not just automatically handed over to North Korea.

Naturally, Ed won’t take that lying down. We had a whole scene last week where he’s told that if he tries flying anywhere, he could die. But no, he has to go commandeer a hopper and rescue Lee, dropping him off at the ISN base, where I guess he will become an asylum seeker again. (The ISN were briefly covered in the opening montage, they are a new multi-national group aiming to settle and exploit Mars — I think India and China are involved, but I cannot recall off the top of my head. The characters on the module look like Traditional Chinese, not Simplified, so it might be Taiwan, not the mainland.)

Lee gets out okay, but Ed is in rough shape when the Mars cops get to him. Luckily Boyd is in charge of this operation, and she seems to be more interested in actually uncovering the truth and bringing the killer or killers to justice than being a jerk. It’s a low bar, but, thanks to low Martian gravity, she has cleared it!

Her investigations so far reveal that one of the corporations is doing something shady involving secret deliveries and non-union labour. I am extremely invested in workers rights on Mars, guys, and also the growing sense that Earth is only interested in Mars as a source of natural resources, rather than as a political entity or outpost of humanity in its own right.

There was a discussion on Bluesky the other day about space colonisation, and people were arguing that it would not be exploitative because there are no indigenous people to become victims of a genocide. And sure, but that’s only one facet of colonisation, let’s talk about the exploitation of labour in the construction of so-called Australia. Or the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Sorry, people were being wrong on the internet.

Paradise ends its season exactly how I expected: with some extremely questionable decisions and yet another cover of “Another Day In Paradise” by Phil Collins.

I will say that I did not expect Sinatra to die, but I do have this ongoing problem where morally ambiguous older women I love are blown up or otherwise killed off as a result of poor design and inadequate workplace health and safety practices. So I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d be mad if I thought this was the end of Julianne Nicholson’s presence in the show, but we’re clearly getting into time travel and alternate universe territory, plus this show loves a flashback, so she’ll be back.

We also haven’t seen the end of Jane, given that the final montage before the bunker implodes shows us Gabi’s empty shower. She’s out there. Somewhere. Stabbed and probably irradiated, and very likely to be mad about it. That’s my girl. (I have since learned that she has been spotted among the evacuees. So she’s not likely to be irradiated, which I guess is good, but also maybe disappointing?)

Now the season is done, it feels like it’s all been set up for the third and final season. It’s a really bad case of Middle Act Syndrome, and as someone who struggles with middle acts, I feel that, but also, what is the point? Like, beyond providing Link with a priority beyond Finding And Stopping Alex, what is the narrative purpose of Annie’s Baby? Was it necessary for Annie to die? No! Why did Robinson spend a whole season arguing with her boyfriend’s shitty kid? How did we spend all this time with Gabi and yet she remains the series’ least interesting character?

This is a bad show, guys. And yet I thoroughly enjoy it. The season ends with the reveal that there is a SECOND, SECRET BUNKER underneath Denver Airport, specifically underneath the extremely cursed statue of a horse which is Denver Airport’s most notable feature. (The statue is noted for its glowing red eyes, its prominent horse genitals, and having killed the artist who created it.) I cannot WAIT for season 3.

It was a relatively quiet episode of The Pitt this week, and completely overtaken in The Discourse(TM) after the announcement overnight that Supriya Ganesh (Dr Mohan) will be leaving the series at the end of season 2.

The announcement took care to emphasise that this is a story/character decision, rather than Ganesh quitting or being fired. I assume this is because Tracy Ifeachor’s departure partway through season one was accompanied by rumours that she either quit out of protest at the revelation that her character had an abortion, or was fired because she clashed with colleagues over the series’ progressive politics.

This year, I am actively avoiding gossip and discourse about The Pitt, but I will say that I don’t love the optics of the show shedding a woman of colour each year. It feels like the season has been building to Samira deciding that emergency medicine is not for her, but also it feels like to some extent she is coming to that conclusion because Robby keeps bullying her. So my feelings about this development are messy, and I’m trying not to reach any conclusions before the series actually ends.

Especially because it increasingly feels like the season’s crisis is not a mass casualty event, or even the tech problems, but Robby himself. His behaviour is getting worse, and Dana’s callouts are increasingly less gentle, and his suicidal ideation (“What if I don’t come back?”) is ever more overt.

But hey, at least Santos had a good hour! She got some positive reinforcement from McKay, who has noticed how good she is with oddball cases, and some pleasant hangs with Whittaker — and even a nice moment with Mel as they shred documents together.

Standout patient of the week

I think I’m gonna give it to turmeric lady. It sucks that her attempt at healthmaxxing has damaged her liver, but she’s a nice, low-stakes case that gives Santos and Cassie a win.

Standout doctor of the week

She’s technically not a doctor, but I really like the new intern. She has a fun energy, confident and clinical, but also eager to learn.

In terms of actual doctors, I’m also very into Cruz, the senior resident of the night shift. Cruz control, baby! He can diagnose a fracture from an ultrasound, what’s not to love?

Standout nurse of the week

Every time Dana calls out Robbie, she gets another gold star from me. But I also really like her interactions with Digby, the homeless man we’ve had with us all season. At the beginning of the shift, she seemed really offhand and disengaged from his care, and I was like, “Wow, Dana is NOT okay.” But now, twelve hours later, while everyone else is hanging on by a thread, she’s back to having a great and respectful rapport with him.

Standout nightmare fuel of the week

Not a medical horror this time, but the sheer unprofessionalism of Robby loudly speculating about whether a patient was suicidal, as his wife steps out of the room where he’s being treated. Thank goodness Dana shut him up.

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

Dr Abbott takes it for his expression when he sees Robby farewelling Noelle. Who knew that man had such side eye in him?

But Robby gets pettiness points for the way he seizes on Al-Hashimi’s weakness. He is clearly going to use it against her in some way.

(What is her deal? She has what I’m going to call dissociative episodes and is a patient of a neurologist. This could be anything from PTSD to MS. Stay tuned!)