Good morning, newsletter friends! It’s a cool, bright Sunday morning and I’ve been watching TV.

And also reading books; here is a drive-by rec for the Little Thieves trilogy by Margaret Owen, which great worldbuilding and romance, and honestly some of the best prose I’ve encountered in current YA that wasn’t written by one of my friends. Owen also threads a really fine needle in terms of including contemporary references and Tumblr speak in her fantasy German 18th century world without making me want to throw the book across the room. Also the Ever Given turns up.

Let’s watch TV!

As foreshadowed: oof.

Never mind helicopters or character deaths, or character deaths caused by helicopters, my hot take is that ER stopped being good when it stopped being ER. When it ditched its format (fast-paced ER scenes, a little soap opera) to become a Shein Grey’s Anatomy (slower, fewer ER scenes, lots of soap opera).

Season 14 sees the rot deepen with the addition of an Australian sex pest to the cast. We’re now Temu House MD, and even House MD was past its peak by 2008. I read somewhere that season 14 was meant to be the final one, but the looming writers strike made it difficult to plan anything good, so instead we got … this.

My biggest complaint is the treatment of Abby Lockhart, a complicated character who appeared about ten years before society was ready for a morose, self-sabotaging, ambitious woman with a history of addiction. (Contemplate: a universe where Maura Tierney plays the protagonist of Pluribus.) By season 14, she’s married, she has a kid, she’s on the cusp of completing her residency. What can you do with that character? Obviously it’s time for her to fall off the wagon, start drinking, and end up in bed with her new boss, played by Stanley Tucci.

Unfortunately I am of the opinion that (a) Abby Lockhart can do no wrong; and (b) all marriages, fictional or otherwise, should have a clause allowing one or both spouses to sleep with Stanley Tucci. Provided that Mr Tucci consents, of course. So I spent a lot of the season going, “This is bad writing, and ALSO Luka should just get over it, possibly by also sleeping with Stanley Tucci.”

It’s not all bad. There are a handful of episodes in the early-mid part of the season, which are directed by old hands like Laura Innes and Paul McCrane, and capture some of the pace of ER at its peak. Early character Jeanie Boulet makes a return. I particularly enjoyed the subplot about Pratt completing his residency and aspiring to run the ER. Yes, that is wildly ambitious for a character who is barely qualified to practice unsupervised, but it’s not like he could do worse than some of the earlier chiefs of emergency medicine. (Remember the one who wasn’t even a real doctor?)

Unfortunately, the season ends with a fairly decent episode where Steve Buscemi is a former mob doctor who stepped out of witness protection to attend his mother’s funeral. He’s injured in an attempted assassination, and right before the credits roll, his ambulance blows up. Inside was either a hot white woman whose new relationship is the driving romance of the series at this point, or the ambitious Black doctor who is about to propose to his girlfriend. Who survives? I suppose I should pretend I don’t know…

Okay, team, who else is getting a vibe from Space Governor Lenya’s wife? I don’t know if it’s her femme fatale attitude or the terrible Russophone sexposition, but I am getting powerful KGB vibes from her. I know what you’re thinking: “Oh my god, Liz, not every two-dimensional Russian female character is secretly KGB.” But now you’re wondering, right?

Speaking of two-dimensional female characters … that is not the vibe I get from Avery Jarrett, nee Stevens, granddaughter of Gordo and Tracy. Between the heroic legacy of her grandparents, and her father’s fuck-ups and eventual death as the first suicide on Mars, she has a complicated legacy. If I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t be gunning for a position in the US Space Marines, but fortunately I’m not a fictional character in a TV show.

Avery is clearly emotionally fragile, if not unstable, but luckily she has Dani Poole as her mentor. (I think it’s the appearance of Krys Marshall that makes me feel like Avery is a potential Jane-From-Paradise type of threat, because that’s absolutely not in the text itself.) Dani suggests she try being honest about her internal conflict, and apparently the Marine Corps really like it when you cry and admit you’re scared of being like your dad, because Avery is accepted, and presumably going to be on her way to Mars.

Where things are about to kick off. It’s interesting to me that Lenya and Dev are extremely different men, but share a similar disregard for the culture which is organically developing on Mars — Lenya is trying to distract the residents from their grief for Ed and concern about Lee’s defection, while Dev has to be told by new employee Alex that people might like to make their own decisions about what the new Martian city will look like, and to customise their homes.

But just who is going to live in this Martian city? Alex has hacked some encrypted files and learned about a secret plot between Helios, the M6 and Other Evil Corp Kugarin to automate the mineral extraction processes and send all the Mars residents home. Thanks to his friend, aspiring journalist/graffiti artist Lily, the news breaks as the episode ends, and we get a montage of people getting pop up notifications on their phones. Was Aleida aware of this? Was Dev? We’re unionbusting in space, guys! That won’t go badly at all!

(Random aside: I love how the iPhones in this timeline have the chunky look of the Apple Newton, a failed Apple product — 1993-1998 — which served as a precursor to the modern smart device.)

FIRST OF ALL, I cannot believe that Hacks has had more Andorian characters than Star Treks: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and Voyager combined. SECOND OF ALL, I cannot believe Ann Dowd has never actually played an Andorian.

Third of all, I am glad that this season has more going on than just Deb Is Being Silenced, because I like that plot, but it runs the risk of being self-righteous and taking itself too seriously. This week, we have Deb Is Resorting To Shenanigans To Escape Being Silenced, and I appreciate that. (I felt bad for the Madison Square Garden lady being stalked by Deborah Vance fans, but then I read about the actual people who own and run Madison Square Garden and I need a subplot where Ava feels a way about Deborah’s future hanging on such a problematic venue.)

“Deborah has to go to a convention to make nice with her fans” is a bit of a contrivance — as a person who goes to the occasional comic con, it’s not the natural home of stand up comedians and their fans — but I’m not mad about it, since we return to the show’s roots (showbiz satire) and get a bunch of neat cameos.

But also I think this episode is really smart in its depiction of fandom, both the entitled and demanding side (Deborah has exactly the fandom she deserves) and the more positive side, where people turn up to support actors who haven’t done significant work in many years, but who appreciate and respect their fans, and are appreciated and respected in turn.

And it’s also Ava’s birthday, and girl, it’s nice that you have one friend, but your entire party consists of people your one friend employs, and your mother and someone you knew in middle school. And Jesse McCartney. I assume this is in part because we’re in Vegas, rather than LA, but Ava seems isolated and I worry. Would I have a weird parasocial relationship with Ava if she was real? No, because I’m not into comedy. But I could. Apparently.

And with that, another nightmare shift comes to an end.

I am genuinely so impressed by season 2 of The Pitt, not just for the things it has done well, but for what it refused to do. We don’t get a repeat of last year’s mass trauma event. We don’t get a big scene where Robby cries and apologises to everyone. Al-Hashimi doesn’t put him on a psychiatric hold, or have a seizure while driving that sends her careening off the rooftop car park. The day shift finally wraps up, charting comes to an end. Some people find catharsis, either watching the fireworks on the roof or, for Mel and Santos, doing karaoke to Alanis Morisette afterwards.

And Robby has a final set of confrontations. Two with Al-Hashimi, the first respectful and the second … loud. I hate having to agree with him, but he’s not wrong that she should not be practising or driving while her seizure disorder is active. She needs to take time off, get the condition under control, and then get cleared to work again. And I think her final scene, breaking down in her car, is her reluctantly agreeing that he’s right. (It feels like she, too, has been on her own journey of denial, breakdown and honesty, paralleling his.) I really hope we see her again next year.

Robby’s conversation with Abbott hits closer to home, and then the confrontation with Langdon at the very end is the capstone to Robby’s season. He needs help, and he needs to acknowledge that. Frankly I’m not sure that confiding in a baby is enough, but Robby says to Baby Jane Doe what he needed someone to say to him. It’s a beginning, not an end, and it’s not a coincidence that the scene takes place in the pedes room, the improvised morgue of the covid era, the site of Robby’s breakdown in season 1.

I have an unpopular opinion: I don’t think Abbott works as a character. He’s a handsome adrenaline junky, a widower, a combat veteran, an amputee but his disability never actually impacts his work or prevents him from riding with SWAT teams. He dispenses wisdom, tries to treat his own gunshot wounds, and gives saucy winks to female patients. As a supporting character we occasionally see, he’s great, but the more time we spend with him, the more I feel like he was engineered in a lab to be That Character Everyone Loves, and I am simply not falling for that. He feels like a parody of a Peak ER character rather than a three-dimensional person, and I would not be sorry if he didn’t appear at all in season 3.

And here’s another one: I am sad to lose Supriya Ganesh, but I completely understand why season 2 is Mohan’s last. Season 1: it’s not clear whether Dr Mohan belongs in emergency medicine. Season 2: it’s not clear whether Dr Mohan belongs in emergency medicine. I assume the writers were breaking season 3 and realised they were about to tell a story about how it’s not clear whether Dr Mohan belongs in emergency medicine. That’s a failure of imagination on their part, but with a cast this big, I can see the logic in cutting your losses and moving on.

Enough nitpicking, here’s what I love:

Standout patient and also nightmare fuel of the week

The “wild birthing” pregnant lady with pre-eclampsia. “Wild” or “free” birthing is the idea that childbirth is a natural process that should have as little medical oversight as possible; in its most extreme form, mothers aspire to give birth alone save possibly for their partner, without even a midwife or doula. It results in a lot of maternal and infant deaths, and is part of the whole movement of rejecting medical expertise.

Any situation where I have to see a uterus is a bad time.

Standout doctor of the week

The Entire Night Shift Team Plus Robby And McKay for saving that mother and baby.

Standout nurse of the week

Perlah weeping as she watches the fireworks was just A Moment.

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

I’m giving it to the fandom, because this episode dropped on World Semicolon Day — dedicated to suicide prevention and mental health services — and yet people are cracking the sads because no one took their own life. Is that petty bitchiness? Mmmmmaybe not, but I don’t like it.