Nothing says “we are in our forties” like blasting the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack as we drive to Ikea. We bought some shelves for our pantry, and some little thermometers for every room because it’s nice to know that there’s a reason you’re desperately cold.

Let’s watch TV!

Look, I know I’ve been complaining all season about the quality of Lestat’s music. But to have him write a song which is truly vulnerable and revealing, exploring his love for Claudia and his guilt over her death, while showing off Sam Reid’s genuinely good voice—and yet it’s a middle of the road piano ballad that sounds like a parody of an Elton John song. That is unforgivable. Maybe even worse than killing Claudia.

Well, no, nothing is worse than that, but this is up there in terms of Crime. I know Lestat is having a rough time, but to resort to adult contemporary? Truly the Straits are Dire.

THAT ASIDE. Last week I mentioned that I needed to have a little think about the connections between this series and Velvet Goldmine, and now Lestat has faked his death in a shooting. Only, unlike Brian Slade, the central figure at the heart of Velvet Goldmine, Lestat has not created a new identity as a Christian rock singer of the Reagan era. Although that piano ballad … no, I need to stop being mean about it. Lestat has suffered enough, JUST ASK HIM, HE’LL TELL YOU AT LENGTH.

Anyway, both Velvet Goldmine and The Vampire Lestat are, in many ways, about fans. There’s a throughline from Christian Bale’s closeted suburban teen seeing Slade on the TV and imagining himself telling his parents, “That’s me!” to the vampires being liberated by Lestat, to the ordinary human beings who see a reflection (heh) of themselves in Lestat’s music. And yes, vampirism is inherently selfish and destructive and literally incestuous, but have you looked at fandom in 2026?

Truthfully I feel like I’m not the right person to explore this idea in any depth — not being a fan of Anne Rice or the series itself to any great degree, or even Velvet Goldmine, it’s just a movie I enjoy a lot — but I’m tossing this seed out there in the hopes that someone smarter and more passionate takes it on.

Let’s talk about a queen even more dramatic than Lestat: AKASHA IS HERE, BABY.

Weird fact: even though I have never read an Anne Rice novel or see the original, iconic Interview With The Vampire, I have seen Queen of the Damned. In cinemas, no less. It’s a work of early 2000s Auscore in the same way as Farscape or Mission Impossible 2: it was filmed here, it features an improbable number of Australian actors, it feels like a local film.

The Death Valley concert scene which I think forms the movie’s climax was filmed quite close to my house, and I know multiple people who worked as extras. (If you know someone who was a goth or goth-adjacent in Melbourne in the early 2000s, you probably know one of the QotD extras.) Fallen Australian nepo baby Matthew Newton played Armand, and Pia Miranda had a small role as the heroine’s roommate, so Queen of the Damned is basically canonical Looking for Alibrandi

Anyway, I am extremely excited to meet Akasha Actual, even in her mostly-statuary form. There’s a whole lot of dialogue that I absolutely could not parse, save Lestat’s delightful monologue about the ice cream scoop, but MOSTLY what we learn is that Lestat has two mothers—vampiric and actual (also a vampire)—and they both want to watch the world burn. And since writing adult contemporary piano ballads is no substitute for therapy, this is probably not going to end well.

You guys aren’t gonna believe this, but it turns out that ruling Westeros is hard. Especially if you aspire to do a good job and make people’s lives better.

I don’t think Rhaenyra ever thought for a second that this wasn’t the case, but it’s one thing to know there’s a challenge, and quite another to actually deal with rats and stolen gold and a High Septon who is being a little bitch about your coronation. Not to mention a husband who is all, “Why worry about good government? Let’s just take our dragons and go conquer some shit. We are basically gods, you know.”

Daemon is … not helpful.

Now, not to backseat queen, but if I were Rhaenyra, I’d be sending my uncle-husband and a few of our dragons out to Casterly Rock to be all, “Hey, uh, the head of your family stole the crown’s gold, so we’re gonna take yours. And in return, we’re NOT gonna burn down your castle, and if the stolen gold turns up, maybe you can keep some.” If the Lannisters object or resist, do a bit of dragonfire, let the Dragonseeds fight over who gets to rebuild and live in Casterly Rock 2: This Time It’s Fireproof. (This option also has the benefit of saving Westeros from future problems, although it may also create new ones.)

I understand that the whole point of this universe is that the Iron Throne is a curse and a burden and there is no good way to rule Westeros, but I’m different.

Anyway, Rhaenyra does not do any of this, and nor does she keep Corlys onside by throwing him a bone and legitimising her kids. She doesn’t even promise to legitimise them soon, when everything is stable again. (This is, again, what I would have done. Play for time, girl!)

But she does one really smart thing: she goes to Alicent for advice. Alicent is probably the person most qualified to sit on Rhaenyra’s Small Council, but for reasons (see: every single episode of the series to now) she is not an appropriate choice for Hand of the Queen. She still gives Rhaenyra some solid advice (hard choices: she’s gonna need to make them) and even a sympathetic-ish ear.

More importantly, this is not just a smart choice on Rhaenyra’s part, it gets us back to the whole point of the show: the complicated relationship between these two women, who have so much in common. Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke have amazing chemistry, however you read it, and watching them interact is a joy.

(Coming back a few days later to add: I saw a trailer for this season at the cinema, ahead of Supergirl, and even in a cinema, it looked terrible. I know HBO knows how to make attractive television! Why does HotD look like … this?)

As much as I have hugely enjoyed Star City, it made me realise just how little I remembered of season 1. I was like, “Uh, Soviets on the moon, Ed Baldwin is THE WORST, women??? astronauts???????????, Ellen is gay, Karen is ALSO the worst, Shane dies, Dani breaks her arm, ants???????????????????”

Clearly I was due a rewatch.

It turns out that my feelings about this series have not particularly changed since the first time I watched it: the first two episodes are absolutely dire, and then it picks up and gradually becomes engrossing until, almost without noticing, you are (I was) hooked.

This season covers a much longer stretch of time than Star City’s first season, but I am deeply amused that the Americans spend the first years of the ‘70s fretting that the USSR will build a military base on the moon before they do, while the Soviets are like, “We should do a secret crewed mission to Venus. No, secret from our government.”

But each series includes a disaster. For the Soviets, it’s the loss (“loss”, it turns out) of Venera 7, caused by paranoia and disregard for human life. For the Americans, it’s the launchpad explosion of Apollo 23, which is caused by … capitalism. Not that America is free of paranoia—I had forgotten how much of the season is taken up with the FBI investigating Ellen and Larry’s lavender marriage—but if the FBI finds out that Ellen is a lesbian, she will lose her place as an astronaut. If the KGB uncovers people’s secrets, they could lose their lives.

It’s sort of a talking point in FAM fandom (FAMdom?) that the series “became a soap opera” in season 2. And season 2 is definitely going to make a choice about two characters which I think was WILDLY ill-considered, but the focus on the characters’ emotional and personal lives has been there from the start. The tension in the Stevens’ marriage from Gordo’s infidelities and then Tracy’s success as an astronaut. Karen’s aggressive Stepford wifing. The death of Shane Baldwin and the decision to keep it secret from Ed while he’s on the moon. These “soapy” elements were always there, for better and for worse.

Here is my confession: I like the Netflix live action Avatar.

Which is not to say I think it’s good, or that it in any way stands apart from the original animated series. But watching it feels like I’m reading fanfic—the dialogue is uneven, there are some odd formatting choices (does Netflix US … know? about colour?), but it understands and loves the characters.

In season 1, that understanding and love was skewed a bit towards the Fire Nation characters—which was fine by me, A Fire Nation Fangirl, but not so great for everyone else. In season 2, that imbalance has been rectified somewhat. Aang is still much more serious than the character in the cartoon, but honestly I think that his hyperactivity would be really off-putting in a live action setting. Some ideas only work in animation. It’s why the medium is so great.

Joining the regular cast is Miyako as Toph. Ordinarily I’d be big mad about an able-bodied character playing a disabled role, but for Toph—a blind twelve-year-old master martial artist who does a lot of stunt work and a lot of complicated emotional work—I genuinely don’t think it was feasible.

(Is Netflix Toph still twelve? Given the long gap between the filming of season and and its release, followed by renewal and the time it took to film season 2, we’re just gonna handwave the kids’ ages and pretend Aang didn’t have a five o’clock shadow in that one scene. Most of the cast are not of legal drinking age. In the US. At least season 3 was filmed back-to-back with season 2.)

My biggest nitpick is not about the special effects (cheap) or the colour grading (but why is everything blue-green?), but the dialogue. Which is, uh, not great. And they remind us how not great it is by inserting lines from the original series, just so we remember that words can actually be … good.

And yet. If I think of this as a remix, or a fanwork,or an in-universe low budget historical drama streaming on Cabbageflix, all of that is forgivable. I love how episode four, “The Water Falls, The Stones Emerge” (and what a title!), incorporates elements of “Tales of Ba Sing Se” without being so crass as to actually have Paul Sun-Hyung Lee sing “Little Soldier Boy”. I love how we get a glimpse of a community of Fire Nation deserters living as refugees in Ba Sing Se. I love seeing dissidents earthbend the names of their dead into the city’s walls, before the Dai Li come to erase and arrest them.

I especially love this adaptation’s commitment to fixing the biggest problem with the cartoon: a lack of adult female characters. Rekha Sharma has a recurring role as a refugee, and Yvonne Chapman and Dichen Lachman turn up as Avatars Kyoshi and Yangchen. And Lourdes Faberes plays General Sung, who in the animated series was a semi-competent but politically astute man. Here, she’s extremely competent, but out-maneuvered by less ethical opponents.

But mostly I like this series because it gets the characters. Katara is a determined idealist who will wage a one-woman war against poverty and oppression. Sokka is the smartest guy in the room and also determined to protect the people he loves so they don’t turn into the moon again. Zuko and Azula are acutely aware that their father is abusive, but they don’t know who they are without his influence. Mai and Ty Lee are best friends, and if Azula tells them to kill each other, they’ll do it.

So yes, Netflix Avatar has the guilty pleasure of staying up late reading badly written fic on FFnet … but I did that. I’ll do it again. You cannot stop me and, since I am in my Azula Era, you should not try.

Technically I watched this after Star City, but I wanna build to a finale. PACING.

This episode gives us more background on the memory-erasing/rewriting drugs that Camille is using on Juliette—they were tested on Congressman Nate From Succession’s sister—and it’s all fine, but I kind of want less about the conspiracy and more about the actual challenges of living in a silo. Like, I wish this was all a subplot.

Related: my favourite episode of the whole series is the one where Juliette insists that they shut the main reactor down for overdue maintenance. It was the perfect blend of tension, meaningful danger and silo politics.

Yes, I think the series peaked early in its first season. I’m so sorry. I am trying to enjoy Silo for what it is, not what I think it should be, but they’re not making it easy.

They did it! My emotional support comrades made to the end!

I mean, except Valya, but he was always more of a comrade of a comrade than an actual comrade. And, okay, the Chief Designer and Sergei are on their way to the gulag. To be joined by Sasha and Anastasia, if they’re lucky. (Except that we know Sergei and the Chief Designer are still involved in the space program in coming decades, and Sasha and Anastasia are going to have a Soviet nepo baby semi-failson. My guess would be that season 2 sees Lyudmilla’s fall and the rehabilitation of the comrades.)

The important thing is that everyone’s alive. Lakshmi made it to Finland! Lyudmilla got a win over her KGB rival and got to deploy one of the army of space program lookalikes she apparently has! Irina’s humanity is slipping away! Tanya is thriving in Paris with a bad haircut! And, okay, she’s being stalked by the Black woman who works for Lyudmilla, but it’s fine, it’s fine, nothing bad’s gonna happen. Probably. Everyone lives to another season, provided that AppleTV renews Star City. And if they don’t, I am going to scowl very hard at every single Apple device that I own, and then maybe buy a Samsung tablet, or something.

Now, is this ending plausible? Oh, you mean, could Lakshmi and Sasha run a couple of kilometres after spending nine months in zero gravity? Could an emergency landing module be piloted with enough precision to land in just the right place for dramatic tension and at the right time? Look, sometimes science has to give way to narrative. That’s just how it is.

Given that the USSR did land a probe on Venus around this period, and got photos of the surface back, I’m willing to handwave the survival of the bathysphere for a few moments after landing. And, having made it this far, why wouldn’t you want Valya to get a moment to look at a new world and appreciate his success before the bathysphere implodes like an OceanGate submersible?

More importantly, Valya sacrifices himself to save Sasha and Lakshmi and the Venera mission, and also avoids a much more horrible death at the hands of the USSR. He was never a villain, but he did play an unintentional part in the death of a fellow cosmonaut, and with this sacrifice, he has more than redeemed himself.

There’s a small moment in this episode which is utterly pivotal to For All Mankind and the lives of various characters: Irina becomes aware that Sergei exists. I’ve seen people on Tumblr saying, “This is the moment she starts to hate him, this is the moment she decides to destroy his life,” but I’m sorry, I don’t think Irina cares about Sergei even a little. He’s going to be a useful honey trap for an American woman, and when his usefulness has ended, she will kill him. Irina simply does not think about men.

But speaking of passion, there’s one aspect of this episode that I don’t quite believe. Sasha and Anastasia were in an arranged marriage, they barely tolerated each other until, at the end of a difficult day, they had sex. Once. And I have trouble buying that they have this great love that would lead them to risk so much for one another.

I can buy that they’ve convinced themselves that there’s a great love here. They’re both young, passionate, not too bright, and full of noble ideals of sacrifice and service. But I wish we had gotten a chance to explore the gap between their feelings (or what they think their feelings are) and reality. Maybe in season 2?

(But if two people are under the delusion that they are madly in love, doesn’t that mean … they’re madly in love? I am too asexual for this.)

ANYWAY. I loved this whole season, even the totally bonkers bits. THEY LANDED A MAN ON VENUS. AND NO ONE KNOWS. COMRADE COLONEL LYUDMILLA ROSKOVA HAS A WHOLE STABLE OF PEOPLE WHO LOOK LIKE WORKERS IN THE SPACE PROGRAM. YES I NEED TO KEEP CAPSLOCKING ABOUT THAT, BECAUSE, LIKE, HOW DO YOU RECRUIT FOR THAT. I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS AND ALSO CONCERNS.