It’s COLD you guys! I am sitting here in my giant fleece-lined hoodie, three pairs of socks and pyjamas, wondering if the feeling will ever return to my toes.

This week saw the release of season 3 of Interview with the Vampire, which actually brings something new to Escapist Routes: a show I watch religiously but don’t actually really like. Seasons 1 and 2 gave me a lot of practice in saying, “This is good, but it’s not for me,” and season 3 … well, based on the first episode, I’m not even sure I’d call it good anymore. But also I couldn’t look away? It’s a lot.

Here’s my thing with AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire novels: I think the story is bad. I dislike most of the characters. I never understood the appeal of Rice’s books. I find vampires repellent. There are too many French people.

There are three reasons why I watched the first two seasons:

But oh gosh, this first episode of season 3—Lestat’s response to what he considers Louis’s slanderous and inaccurate account of their relationship—made me question my choices. Not because the quality has dropped, but because this is the season where Lestat becomes a rock star. And that means multiple scenes where Reid is snarling into microphones and crowdsurfing while the camera zooms in on his crotch. It was, in a word, embarrassing.

(It doesn’t help that the new theme song sounds an awful lot like “A Little Bit Alexis”, the deliberately-bad theme song of Alexis Rose’s defunct reality show in Schitt’s Creek. Several people have made this observation, but thanks to AMC+ Australia breaking the embargo, my flatmate was the first.)

I think the embarrassment is intentional. (Aside from the Alexis Rose of it all.) This is all happening at the very beginning of Lestat’s rebirth as a rock god (sigh), and he’s learning how to perform in this new context. He doesn’t like his bandmates and they don’t trust him, and they’re playing small venues in the midwest. One presumes that the band will, eventually, get good. Although I’ve seen Daisy Jones and the Six so I have doubts as to whether live action prestige drama for adults can ever achieve a convincing depiction of a successful music career.

In contrast to Louis’s careful, long-rehearsed narrative of seasons 1 and 2, Lestat is a frantic storyteller. He flashes back and forth, losing his thread, breaking the fourth wall, lying and then changing his mind to tell a version of the truth. If the first two seasons were compelling, this has a car crash quality. I was not once tempted to reach for my phone, but also I wasn’t quite enjoying myself. Lestat wants to set the record straight and clear his name, but I kept thinking, this rock ‘n’ roll career could have been a defamation suit.

It’s possible I simply do not have enough poetry in my soul, but in the final scenes, as Lestat begins to fuck his mother (who is also a vampire), I have to suggest that maybe that is a good thing?

(Since writing this up, I’ve learned that generative AI was likely used in the opening credits, which were outsourced to VFX studio called Antibody. I’d like to think the secondhand embarrassment I experienced was because on some level I knew, but nope! Had no idea! But it doesn’t predispose me to be nicer about the sequence!)

This season, with Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage secure, they turn their attention to their children. And also undermining the United States from within while avoiding the attention of the FBI agent who lives across the street, but mostly it’s about parenting.

For one thing, two colleagues have just been horribly murdered, along with their teenage daughter, which raises the spectre of the same thing happening to the Jennings. For another, daughter Paige is acutely aware that something is very wrong in her house and that her parents are lying to her. She rebels by joining a church and becoming the sort of white suburban Christian kid who protests nuclear weapons. Her parents, good Communist atheists, are at a total loss. This is very funny to me, but also rings true to both the era and Paige’s background as (she thinks) a very privileged, sheltered person whose parents have no convictions. It’s bonkers to look back at when the series was first airing and remember that Paige was considered the villain of the series, but we all know how the world feels about teenage girls.

Mirroring Paige, and reminding her parents of how unsafe their world is for their children, the Jennings encounter other young women who die for their beliefs. Elizabeth briefly mentors a young Sandinista who is killed when she can’t be pragmatic about the man who is helping destroy her country. Wrenn Schmidt appears as Kate, a very young handler who dies at the hands of the same man. And, as the audience is aware but the Jennings are not, their neighbour Stan has been having a dangerous affair with a young Soviet embassy staffer who is tasked with turning him traitor.

This is hard to watch, but never feels gratuitous or misogynistic, the way the early episodes of season 1 felt. The Americans is a series that really likes and cares about its female characters (more than the audience at the time it aired), but which understands that when patriarchy and politics collide, the consequences fall disproportionately on women.

Okay. I’ve slept on it for a night, and come to a conclusion: I hate that Widow’s Bay let a character use the R slur. I understand that the joke is that everyone else is horrified that Rosemary said it, but it … isn’t funny. Which is kind of a failure mode. If you’re trying to do a joke.

I’m definitely not the only person to notice that the R word has made a return since Trump’s re-election, even among people who congratulate themselves that they would never use the N word or a homophobic or transphobic slur. It’s a “block on sight” offence for me on social media, and I am extremely disappointed in the Widow’s Bay writers for going there.

Not least because this was the first episode of the series to make me laugh out loud. Widow’s Bay has been a source of amusement rather than guffaws for its season, but when that painting came down on Tom, and the whole sequence of Rosemary trying to lift it but triggering her sciatica—my friends, I giggled.

This episode also surprised me on a narrative level—I fully expected that Warren’s final descendant would be Ethan, Patricia or both.

Instead it’s Ruth, who has been around from the beginning as Tom’s assistant. Which triggers a fun new moral dilemma for Tom: Ruth isn’t married, she doesn’t have children, she’s very elderly. How long can she have left, really? And from there, it’s a logical step to “well, maybe if we speed things along…”

Wyck is all for putting a bullet in her head. (From the back. Kinder that way.) Patricia is horrified that this is even up for discussion. Tom … well, we don’t know what he’s decided, because that’s where the episode ends. But it’s not looking good.

Final note: much as I’m mad at this episode, I also wanna shout out Patricia’s shirt, which is super cute and I would absolutely wear it. Unfortunately, the only one I can find is on Poshmark, it’s US$158 and it’s not in my size.

There was a point, late in this finale, where I was like, “I feel a bit cheated. Cosmo is gonna go free and only his minions will face consequences for the crimes he has urged them to commit. Where’s the justice?”

Justice for Cosmo only comes in the fact that his celebrity is minor and the cops have his passport; he’s an alt-right media figure feeding information on his followers to the police.

But at least one mediocre man gets his comeuppance, even if his mediocrity isn’t criminal.

As Leo got into the car he had borrowed from June, my flatmate and I simultaneously thought, “Oh, it’s gonna blow up.” But then their conversation went on and on, and the moment passed, even though I certainly wanted him to explode after he admitted he wanted to have children with June and resented her for not reading his mind.

And then. The car blew up.

What a glorious moment. For me, a Leo Hater. Not for June, who has just lost her partner at the moment their relationship was ending anyway, and who surely knows that far right extremists are targeting her. That’s rough. And worse, it has cemented her bond with Hegarty, who is without doubt the worst man in this entire series. But Capaldi and Jumbo have such amazing chemistry, so again, I’m winning here.

Okay, so first of all, I know that this episode sees Sasha and Anastasia finally consummate their arranged marriage, HOWEVER I cannot help but observe that Anastasia’s minder looks a lot more like Costa Ronin’s dad than Sasha does. And the Chief Designer wants to send Sasha on a nine-month mission to Venus. I’M JUST SAYING.

Anyway. This episode is titled “Dark Forest”, and I saw speculation that it would involve some revelation about alien life.

“But Liz, it took For All Mankind five seasons and a trip to Titan to find even microscopic life on another world!”

Yes, but there’s this thing called the Dark Forest Hypothesis, and I’m just gonna copy and paste from Wikipedia for you: “The dark forest hypothesis is the idea that extraterrestrial civilizations may exist in abundance across the universe, but remain silent and hidden out of fear that revealing themselves would lead to destruction by a more technologically advanced and hostile civilization.”

What relevance does that have to Star City? None. Did we discover alien life in this episode? We did not!

But it did occur to me that the Soviet citizens of this series live their lives as if they are in the allegorical dark forest. For safety, they have to keep some of their interests and passions under wraps, for fear that revealing themselves will lead to destruction by the state. And not necessarily their own state! We see in the opening how Tanya’s love for music eventually makes Valya vulnerable to a western intelligence agency. But also their own state, given that the episode ends with Sergei being hauled off to interrogation on account of having some forbidden literature in his apartment.

I started rewatching season 1 of FAM this week, and one thing which strikes me is how I have so much more sympathy for the characters of Star City at the equivalent point in the series. Ed and Karen Baldwin are deeply unpleasant people; Margo is great, but she’s also extremely Team Werner Von Braun in a way that’s not great. Aleida, Child Arsonist, is the most likable character, and her story has not yet intersected with anyone else’s.

In Star City, most of the characters are just trying to live their lives, advance some science and do some sort of good, within the confines of an oppressive surveillance state that could turn against them at any moment. Even Lyudmilla, who is objectively a bad person, is at risk from her KGB superiors, and even though she arguably brought that on herself through the summary execution of a cosmonaut, we know her and we want her to be okay.

(This is a writing trick I first noticed in Rogue One and Andor: a really useful way to deliver some dry exposition is in the form of internal politicking among the bad guys, and if you want one of your villains to be a little bit sympathetic, make them vulnerable to someone even worse. It’s the Deedra to Krennic to Darth Vader hierarchy.)

“Dark Forest” introduces a new character, an outsider to the whole Soviet milieu: Indian scientist Lakshmi Chadha. India was deliberately neutral in the Cold War, and there was a fair amount of back and forth between the subcontinent and the USSR. (Stalin’s daughter at one point married an Indian Communist, which—like Lakshmi’s presence in Star City—made it clear that the USSR was not in fact a paradise free from racism.)

Lakshmi has found a way to maintain breathable air on long missions, which is essential to the Venus project. I love her, I want nothing but good things for her, I cannot believe the Chief Designer is proposing to send an Indian national on an unsanctioned mission to another planet. Like, she has a husband who is already not delighted to be living in the USSR. Imagine if it goes wrong. This is the sort of stuff that ambassadors get recalled over, you know?

In fact, I have to assume that the Chief Designer’s plan is not to do a cheeky little secret rocket launch (I mean, how could you?), but to go to his superiors at the last minute. “Comrades, I have good news! With no funding whatsoever, I have pulled together a viable mission to Venus! Once again, we can beat the USA and demonstrate Soviet superiority to the world! The launch window closes in twenty-four hours, make your decision quickly. PS please let me have Sergei back, canon says he lives for another couple of decades.”

MEANWHILE, Irina has been pulled off Parasocial Spying Duty to investigate the transmitter that was hidden in Lunar 17. And she’s good at it! Good enough that I am willing to forgive the improbability of her making the connection between the transmitter and the missing spring in Valya’s fancy French cologne. I would die for her, except that we already know she’s going to have a body count, and truthfully, I feel like she’s definitely going to kill Tanya.

In an interview, Agnes O’Casey described Irina as being a bit in love with Tanya, and I hope that signals canonical queerness; also obviously part of the reason I’m now rewatching FAM is to reconsider all her interactions with Margo and Aleida. I mean, “queer agent for the state executes the woman she is in love with” is exactly the sort of Tragic Gay Story that is deeply problematic when it’s the only gay story, but it’s also delicious. What if The Lives Of Others but tragic and there are lesbians. Sometimes you just need to roll around in your feelings and appreciate the doom of it all.

And speaking of toxic love stories: when Lyudmilla and the Chief Designer were having their argument about the espionage, part of me was like, “Hmm, if her protegee is going to murder his protegé, does that mean they should hook up"?” This is possibly the worst basis for an OTP I have ever found. I love it.