Good morning, my delicious soup dumplings! Autumn has belatedly landed in Melbourne, so I am writing to you from the comfort of my Oodie, with my third cup of tea of the morning in front of me.
It’s perfect television weather, and next week I will be able to report back on The Other Bennet Sister — but I still have two episodes to go. In the meantime, let’s watch some TV!
Widow’s Bay, season 1, episodes 1 to 3
Widow’s Bay is a ten-episode horror-comedy series starring Matthew Rhys as the mayor of a small island town which could be the new Martha’s Vineyard, if not for the curse. I saw a review which described it as “Jaws but from the POV of the mayor”, which is apt.
I’m not a horror person or a comedy person, but I have read enough Stephen King novels (er, one) to know that New England is a deeply haunted place. I’m not convinced this idea has enough legs to sustain ten half-hour episodes, but I enjoy Rhys, and while the comedy is kind of weak, so is the horror, so I’m gonna keep going.
(I mean. The horror in the first episode is weak. Episode 2 has some business involving a corpse, a clown and a crawl space which I did not enjoy.)
Hacks, season 5, episodes 6 and 7
Two good episodes of Hacks, but I did not like the second one. Even though it was good!
But okay, let’s do this in order. Episode 6 sees Deb approached with an offer to licence her material to an AI that will help boring people be funny. Naturally, she is all in, while equally naturally, Ava is horrified. Then Deb realises she will be expected to use DebGPT and comes around to Ava’s side. Meanwhile, Kayla and Jimmy have an adventure. Unfortunately it involves bed bugs. I laughed, I cried, I wondered if this is too blatantly a statement about AI, I itched.
(Disclosure: my boss has asked me to learn to use Claude, so I copied and pasted this whole newsletter into the LLM and asked it to look for typos. It found none, but did flag a bunch of things that were not, in fact, problems.)
Episode 7 opens with Ava breaking her arm — she’s hit by a driverless rideshare vehicle — before she gets roped into Deb’s latest scheme: they have to pretend to be dating, in order to win over the lesbian comedian who has the iconic Bob Mackie jumpsuit that Deborah wants to wear for her Madison Square Garden show.
This is fantastic. The Bob Mackie cameo, the combined power of Cherry Jones and Leslie Bibb. High quality shenanigans.
Unfortunately, I don’t like fake dating when there’s no possibility of real dating arising out of it, and “person pretends to be something they are not” is a brand of comedy that I find deeply stressful. And I kept picturing the Deborah/Ava shippers — they’re real, they’re on Tumblr and they’re kind of scary — and the discourse bound to arise out of this. My brain started to generate its own queerbaiting discourse, at which point I needed to give it a negroni and a nice lie down until it stopped.
For All Mankind, season 5, episode 7
Before I jump in on this week’s ep, I want to flag a couple of things arising out of last week’s.
First, I have to recommend SelenaK’s post on episode 6, where she points out the parallels between the Martian revolution and the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episode “Past Tense”. Selena is always a thoughtful and intelligent viewer, and I highly recommend following her if you are on Dreamwidth.
“Past Tense” is a truly excellent DS9 episode, and also one I have criticised at length for its mushy liberal politics, trust in millionaires and naivete about homelessness even by the standards of the 1990s. And I think it’s interesting that there’s a similar sort of mushy politics here in FAM’s Martian revolution, although the trust in tech bros is completely gone (and good riddance).
As we sat down to watch this episode, I said, “I wonder what those zany Martians will be up to this week?” and my flatmate said, “Hopefully finding a coherent political philosophy.” And then we both laughed bitterly, because yes, I complained last week about Bluesky leftists complaining about the lack of theory here, but ALSO depicting a political revolution without politics is cheating.
A six-month time skip is also cheating, and so is choosing for the political repercussions of the Martian rebellion to only impact the Soviet Union, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
The other thing I wanted to raise was a thought which arose out of a conversation with a friend after she read my newsletter: For All Mankind in season 5 has a serious protagonist problem. Specifically, it doesn’t have a strong one.
I complained for years about Ed Baldwin’s ongoing prominence in For All Mankind, and very much wanted him to be killed off, like, two seasons ago. But I assumed that one of the other strong characters would step up to fill the vacuum this would create. Aleida, who has been part of the series since the first episode, or Kelly, or both.
Instead, we have Miles. Who is a nice guy, and an everyman, and he’s just doing his best and doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, and that’s all fine, but does this make for an interesting central character? It does not! Ed was a selfish bastard with an ego the size of Jupiter, but he had a point of view. An ethos. It was often conservative and self-serving, but it evolved over the course of the series, and he wasn’t afraid to take actions that would make him unpopular. Even in the eyes of the viewers, which is a braver choice than I appreciated when I was calling for his death.
Miles is a born supporting character. He is the embodiment of white male mediocrity. And I can’t shake the feeling that he’s only the central character because the series is too cowardly to put two middle-aged women of colour (albeit played by actresses in their 20s) in that role. Aleida was introduced as an undocumented immigrant whose father worked as a janitor at NASA; she experienced poverty and homelessness in her youth. She has known power and its opposite, and she should be running Mars right now.
As for Kelly — well. We’ll get to that in a moment.
I’m going to say two nice things about this week’s episode:
“Sirens of Titan” is a great title.
Obviously we are all taking psychic damage from the idea of a period drama set in 2013 (that was last week!) but there’s no better way to ground your story in that era than a flash mob.
Okay. For All Mankind is the timeskip series, so I shouldn’t be surprised about this one, but I am annoyed because we get so much exposition via committee meetings and I am not here for that. (Although this is very true to my understanding of leftist politics, so well done on that front.)
But I did want to see the immediate aftermath of the coup, and I feel a little cheated! Even though probably I am the only person who is interested in the repercussions of the M6 embargo, and specifically the political fallout from President Bragg’s declared intention to use starvation as a weapon of war. (That is, again, illegal.) It makes sense to skip all that, especially since we don’t seem to have any POV characters left on Earth, but again: I think it’s cheating that the only political fallout that we actually see is in the USSR.
What I did like (beyond my two-point list above):
the stuff with the kids, the ag dome, the flash mob — all great
I do not like that Dev ordered the destruction of the ag dome, leading to the death of Lily and Alex’s Russian BFF and the loss of most of Mars’s food supply, but it’s a good narrative choice and a super effective scene
I especially like the fact that Dev wants a self-sufficient Mars, but only on his terms, and he will destroy any attempt to do it without him
(Ever since his introduction, I have had feelings about the Elon Musk character being a Black man, when so much of Musk’s whole everything is bound up in the fact that his grandfather emigrated from Canada to South Africa because he approved of Apartheid — but it’s FAM, so of course I have notes)
the opening sequence, with the loss of KOSMOS-1, was absolutely amazing, FAM is so much better at SPACE than POLITICS (my friend Alex pointed out that KOSMOS-1 would be lost over the course of hours or days, not minutes, and I think it’s very flattering that she thought I would notice)
Which brings me to Kelly, who is following in her father’s footsteps by being an asshole.
I feel like, again, FAM has made it too easy for itself. Of course pulling the plug on Titan was a mistake, and we have never liked that dude because he’s always shutting Kelly down. I feel like FAM wants us to cheer for her as she sabotages the burn for home and leaves her comrades with no choice but to attempt the Titan landing. This is Peak Ed, and the script makes it explicit with the dialogue about Apollo 10 and the Emotionally Significant Plaque.
It’s Peak Ed, but is it Kelly? And I know I was just complaining about Miles’s passivity and niceness, but now I find myself asking: were we meant to be cheering for Ed in all his asshole turns? The Titan landing worked out, and all the various factions were united in a moment of shared awe at human accomplishment, so do Kelly’s actions even matter?
This is For All Mankind, so there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone was thinking about this whatsoever. But I’m me, and I simply cannot stop.
Finally. Let’s talk Nicki Minaj. Right now she is a joke, and not a very funny one, given her willingness to defend and marry men who abuse children. But back in 2013, she created some decent hip hop and some absolutely iconic pop, so let me play you out with one of the greatest fanvids ever made.
