The problem with having a head cold in 2026 is that obviously you’re glad it’s not covid, but ALSO, what if your head didn’t contain quite so much mucus?

Pass me the tissues, it’s time to sit on the couch and watch TV.

This eight-episode AppleTV series follows the misadventures of Margo Millet, a 20-year-old freshman in community college who is seduced and impregnated by her lit professor. Finding it difficult to make ends meet after her baby is born, she turns to digital sex work via OnlyFans. Shenanigans ensue.

This is one of those interesting streaming series which defy genre. It looks like a comedy, but it’s not that funny. It could be a drama, but that implies something with more grit than this candy coloured semi-fantasy.

Margo is actively interested in exploring this space between genres. The daughter of a pro wrestler (Nick Offerman) and a Hooters waitress (Michelle freaking Pfeiffer), Margo (Elle Fanning) has grown up writing stories which fictionalise her life. “Did you actually write this?” is the first thing her lit professor says, because he is the worst. Her roommate is a cosplayer. Her OnlyFans persona becomes a sexy green alien girl who gets into jelly fights with other content creators; it’s a B movie shot on iPhone. Even her stepfather, an Episcopalian minister, is promoting a sort of unreality, and her lawyer is a former pro-wrestler played by Nicole Kidman, a woman whose real face and hair have not been seen in decades.

But it’s 2026, so the series also has to explain what it’s doing in very small words so the audience understands. “She calls herself a feminist, but has she even thought about the example she’s setting?” sniffs one of Margo’s roommates in the first episode, and in the finale, one of her coworkers calls her out for saying she makes art not porn.

It’s ironic to have an AppleTV series offering a full-throated defence of adult content, when social media networks purge such material in order to keep their apps on iPhones, but also the series is maybe a little too coy—we see a lot of Elle Fanning’s body, and I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way, but she does not have the areolae of a woman who is currently breastfeeding. Where should artifice end and realism begin?

I wasn’t completely satisfied by Margo, but I’m still thinking about it, and I would go so far as to call it a rich text (complimentary).

I was complaining to a friend the other day that we live in an era of very high quality horror media, and that’s a problem for me because I am a weenie. All my friends are going to see Backrooms this afternoon, and I am staying home because, while it’ll probably be fine, I don’t want to risk the cost of a movie ticket when I’m gonna have to walk out, you know?

But Widow’s Bay, encompassing as it does a whole lot of subgenres within horror, is really good for helping me define my preferences. For example: I am beginning to think that the type of horror I like least is when a woman is chased by an unrelenting monster who can’t be reasoned with. (The worst type of Unrelenting Monster Who Can’t Be Reasoned With is all or part machine, which is why I have had nightmares about Daleks, the Borg and the turrets from Portal since childhood. I mean, the turrets weren’t there in childhood, but it’s the same vibe.)

Anyway, this episode was utterly hilarious and also I could barely watch it. Even though the Boogeyman never gets faster than a saunter. That is a nope for me. Patricia episodes are my favourite in this season, and I loved this and I will never watch it again.

To be quite honest, it feels like this episode is just setting the pieces into place for next week’s finale. The big shock is that, just as the police think they’ve secured the loyalty of their man on the inside, Billy is confessing all to Cosmo The Worst And Most Annoying Man In The World.

(This may be a Me Problem, I watched the episode later in the week than usual and was not feeling my best—I suspect there was a lot of stuff I missed on account of my brain being 33% snot.)

Next week: will bombs go off? Will Cosmo face justice? More important, will Peter Capaldi ever stop being almost as bad as the criminals he’s bending the law to catch?

First of all, this episode did not have enough Lyudmilla. Whenever Lyudmilla Raskova isn’t on screen, all the other characters should be asking, “Where’s Lyudmilla Raskova?” I understand that her narrative role in the series is to be an antagonist to our heroes and to draw Irina down a path of moral corruption that ends in the murder of Sergei and the eventual installation of Anastasia and Sasha’s son as the leader of the USSR, but what if we also get to hang out with her?

I don’t think Lyudmilla can ever be a protagonist; I don’t expect her to live beyond season 2 at the most. But at the very least, I hope AO3 provides some good Irina/Lyudmilla fic.

Irina continues to be the protagonist we can’t cheer for. But she’s not yet fully onboard with her villain era. She’s covering up Tanya’s love of decadent western rock music, and even befriending her—conveniently, Tanya is Irina’s daughter’s music teacher.

Tanya was not a hugely sympathetic character when we met her in episode 1. It’s hard to get on board with someone when literally the second thing you learn about them is that they’re cheating on their spouse. Now we get to spend more time with her, and learn that she gave up her own career (as a rehearsal pianist for the ballet) in sophisticated Moscow to follow Valya out to the middle of nowhere. She’s bored and lonely and struggling to fit into the narrow box labelled Cosmonaut’s Wife. (She and Karen Baldwin have nothing and everything in common.)

(I am aware that I have a Too Many Parentheticals Problem, but let’s all take a moment to appreciate the glory of Tanya’s armpit hair. She’s the most overtly sexy and sexual woman on this series, and her underarms look like Burt Reynolds’ chest. I cannot remember the last time I saw this much body hair on a woman in a show produced by Americans.)

I refuse to get attached to Tanya because my first impression, way back in season 1, was that she was going to end up either dead or in a gulag. And the revelation at the end of this episode, that Valya—decent, nerdy Valya! Whose actor also played the sweet firefighter in Chernobyl!—is the person sabotaging the lunar missions doesn’t do anything to change my mind.

I mean. It’s not clear whether the transmitter was hidden aboard Soyuz as sabotage, or merely information gathering. But a cosmonaut is dead, and I only think Sasha’s gonna make it home alive because he needs to live long enough to conceive Costa Ronin’s character. So put a pin in that: it’s tentative sabotage.

As for the Chief Designer’s plan to launch a … secret … mission … to Venus. My dude. I understand that the idea of KGB omniscience was really just propaganda, and the USSR was a bureaucratic nightmare where paperwork and people were routinely misplaced, but do you really think? That a cosmonaut can just disappear? For nine months? Closed Military Townlet No. 1 was a very small community! People are gonna notice if someone isn’t around for a while!

Sergei Khrushchev, The People’s Nepo Baby (and a very competent engineer in his own right), worked with the real Korolev and considered him a better manager than engineer, who wildly overestimated the potential of Soviet technology. I feel like we are seeing the seeds of the fictional Chief Designer’s downfall.

But sure, fine, whatever. The Chief Designer has visited a friend at a submarine yard, whose Scottish accent and Sean Connery beard are surely not coincidence, and acquired an old bathysphere. We’re going to Venus. Apparently. But I agree with Sergei, and with more evidence: bringing Valya in on this is gonna go badly.

One final note: we didn’t spend much time with Anastasia Belakova this week, but I thought it was interesting that her scenes were filmed using that technique which sees part of the screen blurred. I think it’s an anamorphic lens; there’s an interesting post here about its use in Netflix productions. I asked my flatmate, who has a film degree and understands things like editing and aspect ratios, and she said, “You know, it’s when the thingy is wide open.”

Star City is using it in a really cool way: to signal that Anastasia is drinking too much (although it’s the USSR, I’m pretty sure you got arrested if you weren’t walking around with a flask of vodka), and that she—and the other characters with whom it’s used, like Tanya—are on unstable ground. They can’t trust the world around them.

Hey, you know who is mostly in focus at all times?

Irina.