Star Wars, and everything's the same but the Death Star has googly eyes

Last week, three of the people whose opinions I value most in the world told me that they enjoy this newsletter even though they don’t watch any of the shows I cover. What a gift! What an ego boost! What a terrifying thing to have to live up to!

Let’s go.

The Last of Us, season 2, episode 5

This week introduced a whole fresh horror (airborne spores that cause zombie fungus to grow in your lungs, no thank you), but the scariest thing was one 19-year-old woman and her mission of revenge.

I finally understand what Gail meant a few weeks ago when she said Ellie was a liar. Except that I think Ellie herself is trying so hard to believe she’s okay that there are times when she almost believes it.

This is a kid whose whole life has been filled with trauma. Orphaned within minutes of birth. Raised to be part of a fascist militia in a post-apocalyptic state. Losing her first love and discovering her immunity to infection at the same time. And that’s just her back story. Of course she’s broken. How can she not be?

And this is a world where, aside from her immunity, Ellie’s story is completely unremarkable. We finally learn Dina’s history, and she too lost her family and experienced (and committed) violence at an early age. She’s pregnant and joining her girlfriend on a mission of vengeance because she approves of revenge as a concept.

The kids are very much not all right.

But Ellie crosses a line this week. With Dina injured, but in the care of Handsome And Conveniently Present Jesse, Ellie is left alone. And when she finds herself outside the hospital where her quarry is stationed, she makes her move.

In doing so, she doesn’t just reproduce the torture that Joel experienced in his final hour, she (temporarily?) abandons her girlfriend. We don’t know if Dina is dead or alive, and it doesn’t seem like Ellie even spares her a thought.

That feels, uh. Bad. Being with Dina isn’t a cure for Ellie’s grief and trauma, but in Dina’s company, she seems to find the momentum to open herself to a wider emotional spectrum. Alone, her focus narrows. I don’t think Ellie would have tortured Nora if Dina had been with her.

But then, if Dina had been with her, she would have been dead of lung fungus, just like Nora. Ellie would have gotten her killed.

I sure do hope that’s not foreshadowing.

Meanwhile, the fandom keeps fandoming

Every time I tell Reddit to stop showing me one TLoU subreddit, another one pops up to be shoved in my face. This fandom has more splits than a gymnastics team. You’ve got The Sub For People Who Hated The Second Game And Want Everyone To Know How Much They’re Not Watching The TV Series. You’ve got The Sub For People Who Loved The Game But Hate The TV Series. The Sub For People Who Loved The TV Series For Pedro Pascal But Hate Bella Ramsay. And so forth.

“It’s not like the game, and therefore it’s bad” is a refrain I keep seeing, and I really hate it. Adaptation is complicated. Video games have their own pacing and narrative rules which don’t necessarily translate well to television. Sometimes, adaptation requires change, and that’s okay.

I remembered this on Sunday, when I saw Pride & Prejudice (2005) at the cinema for my flatmate’s birthday. I hated that adaptation back in the day, because it was Not Just Like The Book, and (worse) Not Just Like The BBC Miniseries With Colin Firth. And I was completely wrong. It’s not perfect, but it takes a great book and makes it into a good movie. I needed to relax and take it as it came.

These are lessons I’m going to try really hard to carry with me on Murderbot Friday.

An extra note about the fandom

A few hours after I wrote the above, I jumped on TikTok to catch up on the Australian White Feminist Influencer Drama (don’t ask), and instead wound up experiencing “The Last of Us is Zionist propaganda” discourse.

And. Like. I have 22 subscribers, none of those people are going to see this, but I feel compelled to say it anyway:

If a man is born in Israel, moves to the United States as a child and never returns, not even for his compulsory military service, it’s safe to say his work is not Zionist propaganda. And calling it such is, frankly, antisemitic.

I mean, Neil Druckmann has talked about how living in Israel impacted his family, and how violence and the morality of vengeance were the sorts of things his family discussed at the dinner table. No one can separate themselves from their context. But “cycles of vengeance are ultimately destructive to everyone, innocent and guilty alike, and humans should find another way to live” is a theme that can arise in a lot of ways, and is also the opposite of the line currently being pushed by the Israeli government. This is a lot more nuanced than the silly “the Wolves are Israel and the Seraphites are Palestine” line being trotted out on TikTok.

Poker Face, season 2, episodes 3 and 4

We were behind on Poker Face, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s already a throwback. You’re worried about spoilers? You mean for an episode that feels like it’s meant to be watched as a weekday afternoon rerun when you’re in the waiting room at your doctor’s surgery?

That’s not a criticism, it’s what makes Poker Face such a joy. Natasha Lyonne takes a hit from her cotton candy-flavoured vape and tells a small child, “I see my Hunter S. Thompson references are lost on you, and that’s a shame. That’s why we need to keep books in Florida libraries.” Then she gets in her 1969 Plymouth and drives away to find vape batteries and a crime to solve.

The victim in episode 2 is Katie Holmes; the murderer is her husband, Giancarlo Esposito. (That’s not a spoiler, it’s the cold open.)

Is it, you know, too soon? To have a story where Katie Holmes is trapped in an unhappy marriage with an isolated, eccentric, much older man? Who cares! They’re both very good, as is Lyonne’s directing — she reproduces Rian Johnson’s vintage style, but with her own pizzazz, and I could watch Holmes drunkenly rant about cultural appropriation all day.

Episode 3 breaks the format and brings this season’s opening arc — with Charlie on the run, pursued by mobsters, same as season 1 — to a swift close. I appreciate that, because it was already feeling repetitious. Now Charlie is free and ready to settle down somewhere. Which she is completely incapable of doing, and I’m eager to watch her realise that.

Hey Liz, did you enjoy the Matlock finale?

Uh, look. The night I had set aside for Matlock, I accidentally played Fallout 4 until late, and then watched one episode of SVU. (Season 6, episode 12, “Identity”, which earned itself the highest praise I can give SVU: It was way less transphobic than I expected. Not transphobic at all, in fact.)

Andor, season 2, episodes 10 to 12

I am delighted to report that I have quibbles with the Andor finale.

The quibbles are that, after all this time building up Mon Mothma as a complicated and three-dimensional character, she’s back in the expository position where she started way back in Return of the Jedi; and that while I am delighted that Bix escapes, and lives, and has a baby — presumably Cassian’s — I have not forgotten that she left Cassian to be a rebel on her own. She can absolutely do both, and it’s hard to convey the complex life of a single mother who is also a freedom fighter on the run in one moment of a montage, but it just feels like Bix spent season 2 in The Girlfriend Box and never quite broke free.

These are my only complaints, and I’m delighted to have them because if Andor was perfect, I would be even more devastated that it’s over, and that sooner or later the surviving characters are going to turn up in other, lesser Star Wars stories.

I am intensely delighted by Dedra’s fate: the true believer in fascism is crushed under its wheel. Fascism doesn’t allow people to take initiative, and it has no room for even small failures. Even before Krennic realises Lonnie has accessed Dedra’s files — and thereby learned about the Death Star — she was marked for removal. That she ends up labelled a Rebel and sent to the same prison that radicalised Cassian, where no doubt she will be assembling Death Star components, is a delicious irony.

Even better (or worse): after the Rebels win, she is absolutely going to be freed. I hope we never see her again, but I absolutely do not believe Dedra is going to have a change of heart and settle down to live a quiet life in a democratic state.

Interestingly, Dedra at last becomes a parallel to Rey: an orphan, a scavenger, making her own way in a galaxy that doesn’t care for her, guarding her talents and ambition like gold. I love this very deeply.

I also love that episode 10 gives us Luthen and Kleya’s backstory: that he was a soldier, she a war orphan he adopted, and he became the only person in a galaxy far, far away who had any qualms about raising a child soldier. Now that soldier is an adult woman, and her final acts for the Rebellion are switching off Luthen’s life support and passing the Death Star information on to Cassian.

It would have been easy to kill Kleya here. She has been a breakout character in season 2 — I read that it was the actress’s first job out of drama school, and when the writers realised what she could do, they expanded her role — and nothing makes a mark like a big, heroic death. (Just ask Cassian Andor.)

But if Bix is put in the Girlfriend Box, Kleya escapes it entirely. She ends the series alive and safe, realising what she has helped to build, and with very good chances of surviving to see the New Republic.

I really appreciate how the very existence of Rogue One saves us from a big, flashy finale. We have the outstanding episode 10 — in which Cassian Andor doesn’t even appear — and the fraught, compelling 11. And then The final episode is people talking, pieces moving into place, the tragic and heroic inevitability of sacrifice looming over everything, up until the final shots which recreate scenes from Rogue One.

I’ve always been a fan of prequels in general. Yes, they can be tedious box-ticking exercises, and it’s too easy to get bogged down in fan service, but a prequel at its best gives a deeper and greater context to the original story. Andor pulled that off, while avoiding the common prequel traps, and managed to say something significant about the current political moment. Outstanding.

Murderbot, episodes 1 and 2

Anyway, I loved Murderbot.

No, I was surprised, too. Earlier in the day I stumbled across this lukewarm review from Wired, which confirmed all my fears.

Or so I thought.

I won’t lie, the first act is rough. The comedic pacing in the first scene is non-existent, and the whole “PreservationAux team chooses their SecUnit” scene wasn’t much better.

But by the time you get to the planet, and the actual opening scene from the book, it suddenly hits its groove. I was afraid this meant that we’d have a stark “everything based directly on Wells’s work is good, everything new is bad” situation, but I very quickly forgot what was new and what was based on the book.

I was watching with two friends, my flatmate and a houseguest, and they also enjoyed it. For the record, it was not me but my flatmate who declared that The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon is clearly Strange New Worlds: “I could see it was meant to be a Star Trek, but it was stupid, soooooo…”

Our houseguest said she could see a Firefly influence, which is interesting, because I cannot, but everything made sense to her when I explained Wells’s background writing tie-in novels for Stargate. Murderbot feels very much like a series that understands its place in the wider context of science fiction and media, and also in conversations about queer identities and neurodivergence.

Does it still bug me that they cast a cis white actor as Murderbot? Yes, but having seen the weird way reviewers are talking about its pronouns and sexual identity, I’m glad that a famous straight white man is carrying the burden.

There was a conversation on Tumblr recently — or, rather a conversation a few years ago that crossed my path the other day — about how movies like To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar were important to queer culture because the straight A-list actors involved were able to use their social capital to play drag queens and trans women, and in doing so made it safer for queer actors. I hope we can look back and see Skarsgård doing the same thing here.

The rest of the cast are great. Honestly, Wired’s complaint about the PreservationAux team being neurotic feel more like a nerd going, “Ummmmm, there are FEELINGS in my science fiction and I am expected to pay attention to them?”

I will say, however, that I’m on the fence about Mensah being given a panic disorder. Yes, it adds a layer of complexity to a character who often seems ultra-competent and impervious, but I think Murderbot really depends on her ultra-competence (even as it rolls its eyes and protects her). And it feels a bit undermining to go, “Here’s an older Black woman in command! And HERE’S her big weakness! She really needs this white robot to save her!” I feel like I could go either way on this.

I will say that I find it odd that the PreservationAux team are depicted as “hippies”, complete with singing and holding hands to build consensus and painting their hub. In the books, these are basically Star Trek characters dropped into a cyberpunk capitalist hellscape. But I don’t know how that is going to play out, and it might, for example, be a choice designed to distinguish them from ART’s crew in future seasons.

All in all, I’m very glad that I enjoy the series so far, and I will not be reading the books to refresh my memory and give rise to further nitpicks until the season is done.