“I don’t get why firemen are more popular than cops. Then again, I don’t really follow the news.”

This edition is a day late because yesterday I want to the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria. I’ve seen a lot of Kusama’s work — she is sort of a load-bearing artist at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane — but never so much at once, and her early work was new to me.

When I was 17, one of my mother’s conservative friends gave me a book about how modernist and surrealist art and poetry were harbingers of the downfall of civilisation, and abstract art was simply beyond the pale.

Naturally, I immediately became a fan of modernism and some surrealism, but at the same time I don’t trust my opinions on abstract art. Like, is it enough to simply enjoy the aesthetics? What if I also want to read a short essay explaining the context and the artist’s intent? All this is to say that I need to find some books or something to explain abstract art, but ALSO I really like Kusama’s work. This shouldn’t be controversial, given that she is literally the most successful female artist alive, but I sent some pics to my mother, who had a predictably negative reaction.

Maybe it’s enough to have an emotional and aesthetic response, separate from intellect. But that’s not how I roll. The important thing is that infinity rooms are nifty.

Onto the TV!

The Last of Us, season 2, episode 1

I’ve made a huge mistake. A massive failure of self-awareness.

I forgot that I’m scared of zombies.

I’m not into horror as a general rule, but I have a particular dislike of zombie media. It’s the visceral presence of death, not to mention the literal viscera. It’s the fear of infection and the inevitability that someone we care about is going to be shot in the face to put them down. The fact that the walking dead used to be someone who was loved.

I simply cannot. And yet I made it through season 1 of The Last of Us because it was just that good, and completely forgot how much of it I spent looking anywhere but at the screen.

(I say that one of the reasons I haven’t played the game yet is because it never goes on sale, and this is true, but ALSO. Zombies. And worse, fungus zombies.)

Anyway. The Last of Us is back, and unfortunately it is still just that good, and I spent the whole incredible, tense, mostly silent sequence in the decaying supermarket doing a Wiki dive into game lore. That’s how I know that the thinking/planning/hunting infected are called Stalkers, and that the story of Eugene and Claire is very different in the game and doesn’t involve Joel being in therapy.

I also know that Ellie and Dina’s dance is not quite a shot-for-shot recreation of the same scene in the game, but the TV version captured the aesthetic and mood. And the same people who complained in season 1 that Bella Ramsay wasn’t hot enough to play Ellie (who was, I remind you, 14 at the time) are now complaining that Isabela Merced is too hot to play Dina, even though they are probably also the people who, when The Last of Us Part II was released in 2020, complained that Dina was “too masculine” and “not hot”.

I love video games, but gamers were a mistake.

The important thing is that the scenes I could watch were great. Five years after the events of season 1, Joel and Ellie are safe and thriving — pillars of the community, in fact — and also miserable. A rift has sprung up between them, with Ellie resenting Joel’s over-protectiveness and Joel frankly throwing himself a pity party in therapy because his 19-year-old surrogate daughter doesn’t hang on his every word and wants to live alone.

What he can’t say is that there’s a deeper cause behind their estrangement: the lie he told at the end of season 1. That while Ellie was under a general anaesthetic, Joel murdered the doctors who were going to vivisect her in hopes of using her immunity to infection to end the apocalypse, and told her later that it was fine.

And that’s gonna come back to bite him, I assume horribly and violently, because the survivors are on their way to get revenge. Their leader is Abby, played by Kaitlin Dever, and I almost noted that her American accent was flawless before I remembered she is not actually Australian. (Abby was also declared by gamers to be “not hot enough” and also “a bitch”, and I really do think people should have to choose between playing video games and having access to the internet. No, I do not exempt myself.)

Maybe more important, in the short term, is that Joel’s therapist is played by CATHERINE O’HARA. Who frankly doesn’t get enough credit for her skill as a dramatic actress. Season one of The Last of Us was all about taking that character actor you love and putting them in a situation, and I’m glad the trend continues.

Will Ellie and Dina keep developing their romance? Will Abby get her revenge? Will Joel make a breakthrough? We have to wait a week to find out, but in the meantime, I’m shopping online for a copy of the games…

ER, season 13, episodes 1 and 2

My flatmate and I have been working our way slowly through ER for the last couple of years, and I have a hot take: this show made it a full 11 seasons before it really jumped the shark.

Yes, it became soapier over those years, and there was some truly regrettable stuff set in Africa. But it was, overall, good.

I’m not sure that’s the case any longer, and as if to drive the point home, season 13 is where ER ditched its opening titles and — at least in these opening episodes — any pretense of being anything but a soap.

This was the point at which it was overlapping with Grey’s Anatomy and clearly competing for the same audience, very much to ER’s detriment. (Horrifying realisation: season 13 also overlapped with season 2 of Doctor Who, with David Tennant and Billie Piper. Which cannot be true, because that was last week, and yet here we are.)

It doesn’t help that 2006 also seems like a rough time for television in general. We’ve gone past “montages set to popular indie pop songs” and into “we’re just gonna play the indie pop over this scene and the lyrics will compete with the dialogue”.

Anyway, you know the ER crossover I need? I need Dr Abby Lockhart in The Pitt. The no-bullshit attending who can sniff out an addict at a mile away, and who will support Trinity without taking any of her guff. Please.

Hacks, season 4, episode 2

Officially, Deborah and Ava have stopped sabotaging each other; it would be more accurate to say that this week they found a different way to sabotage themselves — first with their conflicting approaches to running a writers room, and then with a “retreat” in Vegas that was absolutely doomed from the start to be a series of HR violations.

It was fantastic. I’m still way too tense every time Deborah and Ava disagree, but I was also thoroughly entertained, even before the mayor of Las Vegas turned up to save Deborah from the cops and deliver the line I used for this week’s newsletter title.

More on cops versus firefighters in a moment.

What’s important is that by the end of the episode, the writers have bonded and are on their way to a solid opening sketch, and ALSO the network has decreed that a HR officer needs to be in the room with Deborah and Ava at all times. Needless to say, they are horrified. I’m delighted.

Bosch: Legacy, season 3, episodes 6-10

Bosch: Legacy wraps itself up. Mostly.

The shooting of Jimmy Robinson in episode 5 turns out to be a targeted execution because his last case had him up against the cartels; Bosch teams up with Jimmy’s by-the-book young partner to solve the crime because the LAPD aren’t interested in looking past the convenient patsy they already have in custody.

My favourite aspect of this subplot is Honey Chandler as the new DA, suggesting that the LAPD and DA’s office should actually investigate the crime and build a strong case against the perpetrator. Obviously the LAPD is like, “Uhhh, that seems uneasonable? And unfair? We are just a tiny police department, we cannot be expected to investigate crime?”

We also have a new story being introduced, as Honey quietly investigates a local councilman whose schtick is seducing young Black men and injecting them with narcotics before sex. Needless to say, this sometimes ends badly for those young men! (I believe this storyline is based on a real series of crimes in LA.)

That plotline goes unresolved, because — surprise! — episode 10 is in fact a backdoor pilot for a new spin-off, starring MAGGIE FREAKING Q. She’s introduced as a by-the-book detective who is deeply unimpressed by Bosch, and I respect the decision to depict Bosch, in the final episode of his own series, as a mansplaining, condescending asshole.

Ballard is here to bring Bosch into an old case which has been alluded to throughout both of his titular series: the murders of a number of Jane Does by a single perpetrator. This brings us full circle back to season one of Bosch: the murder of his mother, a sex worker, who went unidentified for some time after her death, and Bosch’s guiding principle: “Everyone counts, or no one counts.”

The Flower Girl murders are finally solved, and to my tasteless delight, given what just went down in Hacks, the perpetrator is a firefighter. Love that for us.

Join me in “summer”, I guess, for more problematic LAPD shenanigans.