The dad that stepped up

The Last of Us, season 2, episode 4

Partway through this episode, my flatmate remarked that it had been a while since we saw any Infected.

Cue the hordes of Infected on the subway, which I did not appreciate one bit.

I’ve been playing Fallout 4 for a few weeks. I have about 21 hours under my belt, and overall I’m enjoying it, while also appreciating what a great adaptation Fallout (Amazon Prime, 2024) was. That series doesn’t adapt any single game in the Fallout universe — those are only loosely linked — but takes place within the same continuity.

The Last of Us is more of a straight adaptation. And this fits the different games: Fallout games are open world, where you can go where you want, do what you want, and ignore the main plot all together if you prefer. The Last of Us is more linear, and the player has fewer choices about how things shake out.

But not no choices. Someone on Reddit (I know) was complaining that by this point in the story, Ellie “should” be a hardened killing machine, and the response was, “Uh, maybe how you play it.”

The video game is on my mind this week, because a lot of the scenes had that feeling: Ellie and Dina enter new spaces, search for useful items, learn things about their new setting, get into fights. Admittedly I’ve never played a game where you have to loot pregnancy tests, but The Last of Us has always, in a low-key way, been conscious of the biological needs of people with uteruses. Last season it was menstrual hygiene products; now it’s yeast infections and pregnancy tests.

This is a universe concerned with small things, which does make it a bit odd that Dina’s hair is always amazing and her clothes are … not pristine, but it doesn’t look like she’s been riding horseback and sleeping outdoors for a few weeks. It’s an odd production design choice in a setting where morning breath exists, but it doesn’t break my suspension of disbelief because in the moment, my attention is always on other things.

Like Dina being pregnant, and learning about Ellie’s immunity. I was spoiled for the former, and the latter was inevitable, but the tension in those scenes where Dina holds Ellie at gunpoint was palpable. No wonder they had to speedrun their relationship after that conversation.

Dina’s pregnancy points to another piece of worldbuilding: she’s probably only a couple of years older than Ellie, who is 19, but I doubt there’s reliable contraception around, even in the relatively comfortable Jackson. Admittedly this is a universe where things like “expiry dates” are flexible, where petrol is still usable after two decades but Dina has to take four pregnancy tests to be sure of an accurate result.

I’m a big fan of unconventional families, so I love that Dina and Ellie went straight from “Dina is pregnant with Jesse’s child” to “we’re all having a baby”. What will Jesse think? I’m not gonna risk spoiling myself by finding out, but in a universe where fungus zombies, cults and militia are roaming the wilderness, three heavily armed parents are better than two.

Matlock, season 1, episode 17

Here’s a confession. I put off watching the final three episodes of Matlock because I wasn’t ready for it to be over, and then I lost momentum and fell into a spiral of self-judgement and recrimination about how I can never follow through and complete a project.

Anyway, how’s your mental health going?

When we left our heroine, she was being confronted by Olympia, who has figured out she is a fraud.

We resume with Olympia handling this matter in the least hinged possible way. Is she reporting Matty to HR? Or the police? No, she’s locking Matty up in an empty office with a pen, a notepad and some drinking water.

I mean, you can see why they’re friends.

Also, because this show understands that what the people want is a semi-procedural drama with a hint of homoerotic subtext, Olympia gives Matty a pat down first. I was like, “Is this really necessary to anyone outside of Tumblr?” but Olympia found a burner phone in an ankle holster, so again, these people are (a) unhinged; (b) fated by the universe itself to be friends.

The B plot involves a heavily pregnant client who needs to divorce her abusive husband before she gives birth. The twist is that her husband is also a client of the firm, and in fact the firm handled both sides of their prenup.

In the real world, that alone would be enough to get the prenup chucked out, before you even get to the unconscionable clauses, but in Matlock we need something that ties thematically into the story. That means Olympia, having realised Matty’s real background is in contracts, needs to trust her with the case, and Matty figures out that the marriage can be annulled on the grounds of fraud.

Truthfully, this story of coercion and abuse is too heavy to be a B-plot in a story this zany, and the show barely pulls it off. It’s a challenging balancing act, especially as we also have to guide Olympia into a position where she can reluctantly trust Matty. And that means acknowledging that her ex-husband is the one who hid the fatal documents.

I know the awards buzz for this show is all about Kathy Bates, and she is absolutely brilliant, but I don’t think she’d be nearly as effective without Skye P. Marshall as a scene partner. Their relationship entirely carries this show, and now that it’s back in my life, I’m sorry that I’ll soon be losing it again.

Andor, season 2, episodes 7 to 9

I’m a few days late in writing up this week’s Andor, in part because I’ve been very busy at work, but also because at this point the series is so good that I feel a bit intimidated. It’s talking about genocide and sacrifice and trauma, and I’m out here making jokes about bougie Australian fashion brands.

Don’t worry, the Gorman jokes will continue until morale improves.

In lieu of a series of sensible and witty paragraphs, here are some miscellaneous thoughts arranged in dot points:

• I never for a minute believed that Syril would become the Good German so many wanted him to be, but he came closer than I expected — until he spotted Cassian. Syril’s obsession with Cassian is what brought him into Dedra’s orbit, and there’s a sense of everything coming full circle. Syril could have escaped the massacre, he could have changed sides and become a force for good — he could even have escaped back to Dedra’s arms and enjoyed a few years of Imperial comfort. Instead he chose his personal obsession, and wound up getting killed by a pacifist.

• You can really tell what kind of asshole an Andor fan is by which American politician they compare Mon Mothma to in a derogatory way. I’ve seen multiple variations of a post that goes, “Saw Gerrera gives everything for the Rebellion, and then Hillary Clinton/Nancy Pelosi/Elizabeth Warren/Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez/Liz Cheney turns up and makes a speech.”

• The funny thing about Saw is that he’s basically Boba Fett — incredibly cool and fairly useless. He gets a lot of people killed for very minimal gains, and ultimately his main contribution to the Rebellion is keeping Jyn Erso alive until she’s old enough to leave him and make it on her own. And he didn’t even successfully raise her to be a Rebel!

• I recently read The CIA Book Club: The best-kept secret of the Cold War by Charlie English, which is largely about the program to smuggle censored media and printing presses into Poland in the 1980s. (A rare moral win for the CIA, largely because the hawks ignored the program as too nerdy to think about, and it was largely driven by emigrés rather than Americans who thought they knew best.) What struck me about the Solidarity movement is that it was an alliance of wildly different people — anti-Soviet socialists, liberal intellectuals, democrats, outright fascists — and that was part of its success. Andor reflects a lot of real world situations, from Palestine to Nazi-occupied France and more, but the evolution from scrappy rebel cells to a legitimate alternative government made me think of Solidarity in particular.

• (Does Poland’s subsequent slide to the far right echo the fall of the New Republic and the rise of the First Order? In that case, is Pope John Paul II the Emperor Palpatine in this situation? I will be contemplating these questions in Specifically Catholic Hell, thank you.)

• Last week I said that Luthen was probably going to be taken out by Cassian and/or Mon. I was wrong! And I think it’s much more interesting that he has the self-awareness to see that his era is over and it’s time to go out with a bang.

• NOTE: If Kleya also dies, I will be devastated, she is the mean admin assistant/rebel of my heart.

• Bix takes herself off the board and politely declines to be fridged, and I appreciate that. I really hope we simply never see her again, save for maybe a director’s cut of Rogue One with a final coda where Bix and all the survivors meet on Ferrix to pour one out for Cassian.

• The introduction of the Force healer, and Bix’s reaction to her, gives Cassian a vaguely messianic vibe which I do not support. The whole point of Cassian is that he’s a dude who makes choices and sacrifices, just like all the other nameless rebels. At the same time, I am always here for non-Jedi Force users.

• The big clunker of this arc, for me, is the introduction of KS, the droid from Rogue One. It was absolutely essential and had to happen sometime, it just felt a bit strange to go from genocide and shellshock to comedy droids.

Put out your brightly patterned linen smocks, ladies.

Hacks, season 4, episode 6

Is this a safe space to share my theory that Chappell Roan wrote “Casual” about that time she dated Ava Daniels? It is? Okay, good.

For the last few weeks, I’ve sort of been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and for Ava to concede that blackmailing Deborah was not in fact a winning girlboss move, but kind of a legitimately terrible thing.

But Deborah can’t even take the moral high ground gracefully, so by the time she has manipulated Ruby into telling an embarrassing story about Ruby, I was like, “You know what? Ava should have gone harder.”

I sort of have a problem with this season, in that Deborah and Ava keep hitting rock bottom and making it up to each other, and then getting out the shovels and digging more. I think that Hacks has always been this show, but maybe after three and a half seasons I’m ready for a new status quo. Or at least a status quo that will remain in place for more than a week. It reminds me a little of The Bear, which is also about professionals in a niche industry who can’t get out of their own way long enough to succeed. And that’s stressful!

I know you’re thinking, “Liz, if you want a show where everyone is super professional and has no internal conflict, Star Trek: The Next Generation is right there.” But that’s not quite what I want. I want people to stop being dicks to Ava Daniels, even though she very frequently deserves it.

All this said, it feels like we’ve hit a real rock bottom this time. Ava cracks and briefly quits, and also throws a steak at a window before getting dumped. Iconic. (The writers, ordering for “Mrs Table” at Ava’s expense? Assholes.)

Deborah, meanwhile, nearly experiences a consequence of her thoughtlessness that affects an innocent being: one of her beloved dogs gets out and is almost attacked by a coyote. For a woman who is explicitly not invited to help her daughter give birth, that’s a big deal! (THE COYOTES SYMBOLISE DEBORAH’S IMPOSTER SYNDROME. Which I just realised is exacerbated by Ava’s blackmail, nice.)

I really hope that, now that Ava and Deborah have shared terrible car champagne and some honesty, we can move forward. A certain amount of wheel-spinning is inherent to every season of Hacks, but what if — work with me here — what if it wasn’t?

Recurring bit that I love: iconic women of comedy supporting Deborah. This season feels particularly interested in giving real women in comedy their flowers, from Carol Burnett and Rosie O’Donnell to Kristen Bell’s cameo last week. Even this week’s mention of Cher, who went from folk singer to sketch comedy star before returning to music and briefly rebranding as a dramatic actress. I think Hacks is at its best when it sets itself in the wider pop culture landscape.

Poker Face, season 2, episode 1

Five Cynthia Erivos, no waiting!

I’m gonna be honest. Work was really busy this week, and about halfway through this episode, I thought, “This is very good, and I don’t think I have the stamina to keep up.” This is why I haven’t yet watched the other two episodes that have dropped. Sometimes you just need to rest your little brain.

I will say that the “Previously” reminded me that season 1 gave Natasha Lyonne some of the worst hair I’ve ever seen on television, and I’m glad that there are strong signs the hair and make-up department have discovered conditioner this year.