The baseball is a metaphor for the passage of time

Good morning, my friends! I begin this newsletter on a chilly Monday, knowing it will go out to you on Sunday, unless you’re in a different timezone, in which case please insert your own relevant day and time.

We continue to host a houseguest — and her cats — for the next week and a half, and aren’t we all excited to find out what she makes of The Last of Us tonight? For the record, she says she’s not squeamish, and also we are not in the habit of tying our guests to the couch with their eyelids propped open with toothpicks. Just because the lounge room is the warmest part of the house doesn’t mean being there is compulsory.

Honest.

Let’s catch up.

Hacks, season 4, episodes 7 and 8

I’m not sure why we got two episodes of Hacks last week, or why Google thinks the double drop happened a week earlier. I don’t ask questions, I just do what the streaming service tells me.

Fortunately these are two very enjoyable episodes. Because the show is better when Ava and Deborah are on the same team. We start with Deborah and Ava travelling to Vegas for the baptism of Deborah’s first grandchild, while her daughter DJ sets some boundaries.

Deborah doesn’t love boundaries anymore than she loves the Catholic Church (she and Pope John Paul II had beef in the ‘90s, apparently), so she’s not happy about any of this. But she doesn’t have to be! All she has to do is respect her daughter’s wishes, and to Deborah’s credit, getting to the point of agreeing involves hardly any drama and only one “spilling Eucharistic wine on the priest’s white vestments” incident.

I firmly believe that DJ, and also the writers, have been spending time in the subreddits dedicated to mother-in-law drama and narcissists. Aside from DJ using the vernacular of LC and NC, the red wine spillage is a cliche of the genre, although it usually happens at weddings, and the victim is usually the drama llama maternal figure. But I’m not mad! I see what they are doing, and as an aficionado of the short-form domestic thrillers posted to those boards, I’m into it. (For the record, I firmly believe at least a third of the posts are authors workshopping their plots.)

The second episode also dealt with family relations, as Ava receives a visit from her mother, who has come into some money via a class action against an MLM, and wants to pay for Ava to freeze her eggs.

That’s a plotline which is resolved through mature observation and communication, which seems fake in this show, but I’m not mad about it because obviously the showstopper subplot is Deborah’s friend Mayor Jo has gotten caught having sex with three professional ice hockey players. On a zamboni.

As a casual fan of ice hockey and a very serious fan of mayoral shenanigans, I love and adore this plotline. Hacks-wise, it marks a turning point for Deborah and Ava in figuring out what they want their show to be — which you think they might have worked out before it started airing, but they were in the middle of a mutually assured destruction scenario at the time. The pivot plays to Deborah’s strengths and past, while also adopting a slightly new format which is appealing to the very online and doing something that the other late night shows (Jimmies Fallon and Kimmel) aren’t. And they’re supporting women!

Riiiiight up until Deborah accidentally gets her boss fired, after she casually vents to the studio head she slept with last season. You know. The one Ava was blackmailing her about.

This cannot possibly go badly for anyone, right?

Cue the ominous synths of Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” and roll credits.

Poker Face, season 2, episode 4

Look, I won’t go so far as to say this was a bad episode of Poker Face, but I cannot sign off on a satire this muddled.

The cop culture stuff? Great. Especially the cops fighting to be the loneliest lone wolf who gets the job done.

Methed up gator who has tasted human blood? Sure.

Charlie getting a little too into animal liberation and befriending said alligator? Uhhhhhhhhhh.

There were a lot of good things in this episode, but my overall impression was of an incoherent story with too many ingredients.

MEANWHILE, THOUGH. Charlie is once again quoting Out of the Blue in her new CB radio, so I looked it up. I assumed — from all the talk of Dennis Hopper — that it was one of those countercultural trucker movies of the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. I WAS WRONG. It is a super bleak, nihilistic 1980 film about a teenage girl who is neglected by her alcoholic mother, sexually abused by her father and other men, and which culminates in her execution of a murder-suicide.

I’m fascinated by the links between this bleak film and Poker Face, which touches on darker topics but rarely lingers. Now that Charlie is seeking rather than running, will we learn more about her past? Or is it simply that Natasha Lyonne helped organise the restoration of the film?

…Okay, I was doing a quick google to confirm that it was a restoration that Lyonne worked on, and found this interview from a week ago where she discusses it directly.

The Last of Us, season 2, episode 6

This episode feels like a counterpart to “Long, Long Time”, the season 1 episode which focused almost entirely on the relationship between Bill and Frank. This, too, comes in the form of linear flashbacks tracing the evolution of a relationship — but it’s the years Joel and Ellie spent in Jackson between the end of season 1 and Joel’s last night on Earth.

With one key exception: a flashback to Joel’s adolescence, when we meet his father for the first time. Daddy Miller isn’t the worst parent of the 1980s, but mostly because he feels bad for hitting his kids with a belt when they step out of line and hopes that each successive generation will incrementally move towards breaking the cycle of violence.

Unfortunately, he is in The Last of Us.

We have always known Joel as a protector, but this episode casts that trait in a new light. Like Ellie, he is a liar.

Sometimes that’s noble: he lies to take a beating his father would otherwise give his brother. But other times — with Ellie at the end of season 1, and with Gail here — he lies to protect people from pain, and in doing so, creates more.

I understand the impulse, especially when you consider that Joel grew up with what was then called harsh punishment, but which we now call physical abuse. Joel’s not just protecting others, he’s protecting himself by deflecting blame. He’s still a kid whose dad hit him with a belt for doing the wrong thing.

And maybe it was better to let Gail think her husband loved her but did the right thing by ending his life when he became infected. Like so much in The Last of Us, this is a complex story with a lot of nuance, and what’s wrong in some situations is right in others.

But Ellie is a teenager. She’s still thinking in black and white. She already has questions about the encounter with the Fireflies when she was fourteen, and now she’s seeing how easily Joel lies.

“I hope one day I can forgive you.” It’s the last thing she says to Joel, and it gives me hope that one day she can forgive Abby, and herself, and the world.

Where’s the Matlock finale, Liz?

I still haven’t watched it, but I have a good excuse: I’m back to blogging about Star Trek: Voyager, and the episode I watched this week was a feature-length story with a very ‘90s take on slave uprisings. So first I spent a whole evening watching it, and then I wrote almost 2,000 words unpacking it.

Next week, I promise.

Murderbot, season 1, episode 3

I have this problem where I don’t think All Systems Red contains enough plot to stretch out into ten hour-long episodes, or even six in the more truncated streaming television model, but at the same time I dislike half-hour episodes of science fiction in the modern era. Yes, it’s very Classic Doctor Who, but Classic Doctor Who learned early on that ten-episode serials were a bad idea. (And respectfully, Murderbot is no “The War Games”. That’s not a diss. “The War Games” is unique.)

In the modern era, I associate short episodes with the family-oriented Star Wars series, like The Mandalorian and Skeleton Crew. The Acolyte tried to do an adult drama in 30-minute episodes, and the result was sophisticated concepts and a brilliant cast, combined with scripts that felt more like bullet points of ideas than completed stories.

The real root of my complaint might simply be that I want to spend more time with these characters, and I’m mad that we keep getting cut off by the end credits.

HOWMSTEVER. Episode 3 has introduced a new diversion from the books, and I low-key hate it: the treatment of Gurathin.

Like. We have two characters who are extremely autistic-coded. Murderbot looks like a white man, and its quirks are delightful and charming. Gurathin is a man of colour, and he’s a creep who sneaks into his boss’s room and sniffs her pillow. That’s … not great.

Hacks (again), season 4, episode 9

Only one episode this week. Is there some upcoming event in the US which makes it essential that the finale air on 29 May? Or possibly the 28th, I am once again refusing to learn how timezones work?

Anyway, this is a very funny episode which moves a lot of pieces on the board, but it also relies on Deborah and Ava being incredibly, impossibly naive. Ava vents to a journalist friend, and is shocked when her friend reports the story. Girl, this isn’t even the first time that has happened to you.

Deborah, meanwhile, is a seasoned professional with decades of experience, and yet she does not seem to realise how much power Studio Executive Bob has over her. You could play this as “Deborah has less experience in television than in live comedy”, and that’s true, but it hasn’t exactly been an issue at any other point this season. And I find it improbable that Deborah — who we learned back in the season premiere had someone removed from the organ transplant list after they crossed her — would be unprepared for studio litigation after she quit live on air.

In theory I’m in favour of Deborah and Ava pulling a Thelma and Louise as they flee the television industry, but in practice, this feels like set-up for a fifth season where we return to the status quo of seasons 1 to 3.

More Poker Face, season 2, episode 5

This is the good shit. No more methed up alligators, just some light shenanigans, a bit of murder, and comedy icon Carol Kane, the only woman whose curls rival Natasha Lyonne’s.

The episodic nature of Poker Face makes it hard to write about at length, because I am often sitting down and going, “Okay, where does this chapter fit in the larger story?” The larger story this season is Charlie’s search for community, and my general feeling is that she’s ultimately going to find it on the road. But in this case, it’s not the destination, but the Journey song you play along the way.

This has been a TV-lite week!

Rather than introduce our houseguest to ER midway through season 14, we’ve started and abandoned a couple of shows, and the flatmate and the guest are rewatching Andor.

And me? I’m reading Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector, an adult fantasy novel set in a world reminiscent of 17th/18th century Eastern Europe. The titular Kalyna is the latest in a long line of soothsayers, which makes it very unfortunate that she didn’t inherit the Gift. She gets by with a mixture of paid informants and cold reading, right up until she comes to the attention of important people and has to save the king from plotters. And meanwhile, her disabled father has had a vision of destruction…

Kalyna reminds me a little of The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman, another fantasy novel about an outsider caught up in schemes, but Specter’s world is steeped in Judaism the way many fantasy novels are steeped in Christianity. I’m already plotting to get my grubby paws on the sequel as soon as I’m done with this first book.