Sixty newsletters! What a milestone!

I almost held this newsletter off for a day, because I have just two short episodes left on Margo’s Got Money Problems. But then I realised that I’ve already written nearly 2000 words this week, and you know what? Margo can wait.

Let’s watch TV!

First HBO and now Apple gets into the “dropping multiple episodes for no reason that I can see” game. I mean, I assume the reason is, once again, Emmys deadlines, but surely these deadlines are well known in advance? I’m not angry, I just have questions.

I will say, though, that I think that dropping two longer, pivotal episodes in one week felt like a bit too much. I wish we had been given more time to stew over our glimpse of Widow’s Bay’s past, and the final scenes of episode 6 (in which Wyck digs up town founder Richard Warren’s coffin), before we jumped into episode 7 (in which Richard Warren is alive and well and eating Wyck’s food).

Obviously my prediction that episode 6 would follow Patricia was totally wrong. But Betty Gilpin plays Sarah Prescott Warren with the same nervous energy, and even the make-up creates a resemblance that is absolutely not there in real life. So maybe I was also right! Except that the show makes it pretty clear that Sarah and Richard never consummated their marriage, and honestly I don’t think Sarah made it back to the mainland alive, so there’s no inheritance here. Just vibes.

Episode 7 is largely about Tom and Richard, both mayors of Widow’s Bay, and their attempts to break the curse. Richard reckons that killing him — and thus ending his bloodline — will do it, and that seems plausible, definitely love the logic coming from the guy who is 324 years old, except that the very last scene suggests one of his children may have returned to the island instead of escaping to freedom certain death with Sarah.

Which brings us to Tom’s son, Evan, and his discovery that his mother did not in fact die in childbirth. Can I just say that digging into the pictures your dad keeps locked up in his bedroom is a very brave move? Maybe kids today don’t know that porn used to be analogue. Anyway, Tom and Evan need to have a very serious chat, and also maybe Tom should have gotten a DNA sample from Richard before reducing him to a few dusty bones.

I do not feel bad for Peter Capaldi’s Daniel Hegarty, and more importantly, Criminal Record doesn’t want me to.

This is important, because it would be very easy to go, “Well, yeah, Hegarty is ruthless, deceptive, just barely not corrupt, and weirdly invested in rehabbing his mate who got done for corruption, but he’s doing it for good reasons! Don’t you want him to get a win? Just a bit?”

I do not! And neither does June! Watching their boss simply refuse to play Hegarty’s game was intensely satisfying, even as they uncover new depths of Borderline Criminal Dodginess in Hegarty’s behaviour. And they don’t even know, yet, that one of the alt-right terrorists has identified June as a cop.

Billy is also figuring out that Daniel is unreliable. This is bad, because, like, he’s here to be a double agent in the terrorist cell, and now he knows the cops won’t protect him as promised. Except JP, the least bad cop on Hegarty’s team. (I mean, he seems to be trying to do his job in an ethical way, but also he’s cheating on his nice fiancé with June, so, like. You know.)

We have two episodes left, and I can just smell the looming disaster. It’s not as flashy, but Criminal Record does for the Metropolitan Police what Slow Horses does for the British intelligence services.

For a minute there, I thought Hacks really was going to end with Deborah’s death. I was composing An Irate Rant about how too many stories about women equate professional success with death (but we’re not up to the For All Mankind finale yet).

Luckily, the story pivoted. And you can argue that it’s because Hacks consistently pulls its punches, but I would say it’s because Hacks is a show that believes in second, third and fourth chances. A show that opens with Deb and Ava facing different types of professional death isn’t going to end with one of them literally dead. (I mean, if you really, really want to kill Deborah Vance, you can interpret the final moments as a daydream or fantasy or hallucination as the fatal injection goes in, and that is totally valid, but also you and I are very different people.)

What I love about Hacks is its total lack of interest in giving anyone a conventional happy ending. Deb wants to spend her final days, not with her daughter and grandson, but with Ava. Ava ends up a showrunner without a love interest of any gender. (Random question: is there, like, a class where they tell you how to make the leap from comedy writer to showrunner? Because it looked like she knew what she was doing. I need to know in case David Ellison rings up to ask me to take over Star Trek.) Kayla and Jimmy are weirdly codependent and absolutely platonic. Randi is in love with Hollywood and Hollywood loves her back.

And none of this reads as cold or heartless. Everyone has their person, and it’s not romantic or sexual. It’s a little like the end of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel but without several seasons of weirdly avoiding any hint of queerness lurking in the subtext. It’s a love letter to work and friendship and women.

Okay, here’s my rant: it actually makes a lot of sense for Kelly to sacrifice her life on Titan as karmic balance for her deception in getting Sojourner there in the first place.

But ask yourself: when did Ed Baldwin experience even a moment of karmic balance? Dev destroyed an agricultural dome and killed a teenage girl, and he gets to end the season alive and well and planting cabbage in what I hope is a program of restorative justice. Miles finally makes a hard choice in pulling an Apollo 1 on the invaders’ leaders, but Lenya and Ilya escape, so he doesn’t have to lose anyone he likes, or even knows. Unless you are a member of the Stevens family, consequences either fall disproportionately on women, or female characters are simply sidelined.

Again: Aleida and Kelly should have been the protagonists of season 5.

(See also: our final glimpse of Avery, visiting the North Korean pod where her father died, wearing a name tag that says STEVENS. Sure would have been cool to follow her on that journey.)

Aside from these problems, I’m pretty happy with how the season wrapped up. I don’t think that For All Mankind has ever achieved its potential — but then, its second episode was literally one of the worst hours of television I’ve ever watched, so it’s genuinely impressive that it has become as reasonably okay as it is.

And this finale had a lot that I loved! Margo! She’s back, working problems from the confines of federal prison! I’m glad the series has remembered Aleida’s family, and while I had hoped that the person who finally took Margo’s call would be Dani Poole, I’m not at all mad to catch a glimpse of Will, the astronaut whose coming out in season 3 prompted President Lady Astronaut Republican to introduce Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

I do very much wish we had more characters on the ground on Earth — especially in the USSR, where apparently the “oligarchs” have asked the president to step aside. Will that be the plot of season 5 of Star City?

Speaking of matters Soviet, shout out to Irina, who has been a political prisoner for six months, but whose blowout remains flawless. On Mars! Do they even have hairspray on the red planet? I assume that season 6 will see Lenya as the leader of the Soviet Union — probably overseeing its dissolution, a true believer who couldn’t save his country, like Gorbachev — but Irina will be there. Holding the People’s Brain Cell. I love her. I’m so happy she’s also in Star City.

Speaking of…

Let’s go back to the ‘60s, when the USSR has just landed a man on the moon, and Irina is a young single mother who baulks at killing people and has not yet encountered blowout technology. She is played here by Agnes O’Casey, no longer being overshadowed by more experienced actors, because while For All Mankind prefers to employ actors from Eastern Europe (and also Connor Storrie) to play its Russians, here the Soviet Union is inhabited by the British and Irish. Lots of soviet republics have an Ireland. It’s fine.

The Chernobyl vibes are powerful, and I’m not mad about it. I mean, I absolutely would have watched a subtitled series that was all in Russian, but I understand that I am once again an outlier. The The Americans vibes are also strong, not least because (as a friend pointed out) they’re using the same blue-grey filter that The Americans used for flashbacks set in the USSR. I have questions about that, just in a general “what type of stereotype are we perpetuating here?” way, but mostly I think I didn’t give Ponies enough credit for going orange instead of blue.

Star City has a big cast with a lot of white men I cannot yet tell apart, but we have our young characters — Irina, Sergei (is it shipping if you’re just really excited to know that one day she’s going to murder him?), the cosmonauts and their partners. Stealth Australian Alice Englert plays Anastasia Belikova, the first woman on the moon — an underqualified last-minute substitute who is loyal to the state but bad at remembering her idelogically correct lines.

The woman she replaced? One of Irina’s colleagues in the Department of Eavesdropping came to an incorrect conclusion about her loyalty, and she wound up with a false confession and a bullet in the head. Just Soviet things. I assume that r/marxism is very angry about this series, because everyone knows the USSR was a great place to live and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

For the older generation, we have two mentors: Anna Maxwell Martin — who is aggressively manspreading in a bunch of scenes, I love her — plays a former Night Witch, now an officer of the KGB and mentoring Irina. She’s a bad person. She’s my favourite character. Shut up.

And Rhys Ifans plays the Chief Designer, who is absolutely one hundred percent Sergei Korolev, but for some reason the show is being sneaky and not using his name? This is probably a nod to Stalin and Kruschev’s policy of keeping his identity secret from the general Soviet public, for fear that the Americans would assassinate him, but I feel like Korolev’s colleagues knew his name, you know? Anyway, there is a mole in Star City, and he’s my number one suspect so far.

(Possibly the caginess around using his name is also to avoid confusion with Sergei The For All Mankind Character, who was presumably named for Korolev long before they knew they’d get a spinoff.)

Anyway, several years ago I read a good history of the Soviet space program. Can I remember the title? Of course not. But it’s a super interesting facet of history, and I’m excited to get into the alternate history of it, and to see how many ways Anna Maxwell Martin finds to be an awful and fabulous person.