Yellowjackets – It doesn’t want them here.

Yellowjackets: 3x07 Croak.

We just need to find these people so we can go home.

Three seasons into Yellowjackets and it looks like the show is completely committing to the idea that what is haunting our survivors isn’t in fact a spiritual emptiness, isn’t the personified wilderness, but a combination of natural phenomena that they haven’t fully understood and mental health problems that have escalated out there, for a variety of reasons. What gets me the most about Croak is the proximity of everything – the fact that these bumbling, excited scientists under the guidance of their “mountain man”, who may be good at his job but doesn’t seem like an outstanding survivalist with any particularly impressive skill, have made it to just a few kilometres away from the village armed with nothing more complex than a map and a compass, and an emergency sat phone that they’re passé enough about that they break it in a tussle while high. The wilderness, over these past twelve or so months, has felt so remote, so inescapable, but it turns out that civilisation has never been quite that far away, and could have been reached if there had been a concerted effort. Instead, the two groups – and all the accrued histories and prejudices and baggage that come with them – clash. One group is a scientific team – successful in an attempt to record the Arctic banshee frog, a (entirely fictional) species of frog that goes into hibernation for seven years to emerge for a mating event that explains the screams and screeches. The other has succeeded in surviving horrible ordeals, has built a village out there, has organised around a shared religion. It’s a culture clash, in which one side comes armed with all the skills of seasoned hunters, and the other with one guy and a crossbow.

I like the opening of the episode, which follow one cute little frog like a Planet Earth episode. It seems like nothing, too small to have much of an impact, until it begins to scream, and joins hundreds of other frogs in a chorus. There is something infectious about Hannah and Edwin’s excitement to have captured them on their DAT recorder, to be the first to have done it, after dedicating their academic career to them. They’re in love with each other, and they love the same thing. Kodi watches, disaffected, like he’s watching a nature documentary about two weird humans, and he’s ready to demonstrate his survival skills (killing a rabbit with a crossbow) but reluctant to share anything else substantial about himself, making him suspicious to Edwin, who also doesn’t like Hannah’s attraction to his rugged manliness. In any other story, a character like Kodi would be associated with potential danger – the stranger who doesn’t provide details about his backstory, who is the only one bearing weapons and who is the only one who can get them out. In this story, we know that there are much more dangerous things lurking in these woods, and that this danger hunts in packs.

The proximity goes beyond the presumed closeness of a way out that must have been there this whole time, it’s also the moment when the three enter the camp, attracted by the scent of barbecue (oh Ben), to find something so overwhelmingly strange that they have no clue how to react. It’s the closeness to safety and home summarised by Van’s hopeful “we’re going home”. Ben’s head is right there on a table but if everyone stayed calm, they could probably just go home from here by following Kodi out of these woods. They’d have a lot to explain, and what would follow them around after the return from the wilderness would be much worse than the rumours that the surviving Yellowjackets have had to deal with, but all of them would have made it out alive at this point. It’s so close – but then there’s Lottie, screaming “no”, burying an axe in Edwin’s head. “They don’t belong. It doesn’t want them here” she says, after months of nothing but silence from the wilderness, after having had to use Travis and Akilah as a conduit because her own perceived connection to it was severed. I don’t think that there can be much doubt here that this is a psychotic break, the result of her meds running out all these months ago and something upsetting her balance so much that this violence that diminished any chance of all of them just walking out of there is inevitable. Kodi and Hannah run, and the girls immediately give chase, because even their harmless games have been practice for the hunt. Kodi gets one bolt away and hits Melissa. Instead of staying behind with her, Shauna tells Mari to look after her or else. Instead of staying behind as the group’s designated medical expert, Misty joins the chase.

It goes on for a while. Everyone splits up. Van and Tai stumble over the tent and Van has a heartbreaking, immediate instinct to call her mother from the sat phone before realising that it’s broken. Tai says that at least these provisions will help the village, and Van, again, heartbreakingly, pleads that they don’t need it because they can go home now. There is an immediate and obvious split in terms of what everyone thinks is happening going forward, a divide between considering the village home and trying to still get back to their actual home. They’re such obvious ideological splits that I kind of wish they had carried through more strongly into the adult timeline.
Misty loses her glasses in the chase but directs Akilah and Travis to try and push Kodi towards the cliff where, if he did fall, he would join the still missing Crystal – but they end up pulling him up instead, which, considering that with the sat phone broken he is the only tenuous link to the outside, is the correct decision here, but maybe not one that will work out, considering their rescue is still three months out. Hannah gives herself up, and Shauna seems to very much consider killing her, before Hannah mentions that she knows where some first aid supplies are stashed (and with Mari and Gen eventually realising that the only way to remove the bolt from Melissa is to push it all the way through, some antibiotics would definitely help). 

In the present timeline, Shauna listens to the DAT again on her own and focuses on the part we haven’t quite witnessed yet, Hannah’s very personal spoken letter to a child, trying to explain herself, like someone who knows she is going to die. She has already put the pieces together in her head, and she is about to do something drastic about it, but then Misty, Tai and Van join her in her mission. Tai evades questions about why she went to see Lottie on the day she died, but Van’s concerns are visibly growing. Once they’re all in a car together, Shauna explains that Hannah had a daughter when she was a teenager, a daughter Shauna has managed to track down (that she does this in the short span of time she is given here is one of the least believable things that have happened on the show). That daughter, Shauna is convinced, is the one who sent her the tape, meaning that someone must have brought it back from the wilderness, because as we learn later from Callie’s snooping, none of the three strangers ever made it back alive. They’re headed for Richmond, Virginia, but before they can make it, Misty gets a phone call from Walter telling her that the DNA under Lottie’s fingernails matches Shauna’s. There’s a hilarious sequences of everyone in the car frantically texting each other while Shauna drives, but it’s cut short by Van coughing up blood!
They drive Van to the hospital and it is not looking good. While Misty confronts Shauna about the DNA, leading to Shauna just driving away on her own (not beating the bad friend allegations), Van begins hallucinating in the hospital bed: first she sees herself in the bed transported back to the wilderness, and her younger self sets the bed on fire (poor Van, with the fire), telling her that every time she survived the impossible, it was an even trade. That very much plays into what Tai has been telling her this whole time, becoming more and more insistent that they need to bring more sacrifices – and in a second hallucination, Van tells a fully Dark Tai that she wants to speak to the real Tai, that she needs her instead, even though Dark Tai keeps insisting she is the one who can help her. It’s not looking good for the annoying patient in the next bed over.

And back at the motel room, Callie talks to her father, telling him she has found a record of the disappeared scientists online, that they disappeared very close to where Shauna was lost, and that maybe Shauna isn’t a good person that bad things happened to, but straight up a bad person. Jeff is scratching and scratching, because the walls are closing in and it’s all too much. Shauna reunites with her knife and brings it to her calm and reasonable conversation, so I’m sure this will all end well.

Random notes:

RIP Melissa theories. I think I’m a little bit sad that we don’t get to see that particular reunion play out, because I for one would have very much liked to see the version of Shauna confronted with it.

This episode is full of little bits of information: the stash that Ben came across was from an earlier scientific team, Melissa and Gen never made it out alive.

Very in-character for Jeff to complain about their “poorly furnished” motel room! Also, “I appreciate that secrecy is your love language”.

Misty: I’m not family but we have a very intense trauma bond.

Lottie after killing Edwin has fully descended into herself, smearing herself with his blood, trying to commune with the wilderness. It’s horrifying – but Mari’s “go fuck your blood dirt, Lottie” still made me chuckle. With all of that, having Blood Bitch by the Cocteau Twins in the end credits is certainly a choice.

A bunch of options here for the DNA reveal: Walter could be straight-up lying, it could be one of those things where it’s familial DNA and this was actually Callie, Shauna may have fought with her but not killed her. Melanie Lynskey plays Shauna’s reaction as completely inscrutable, so very hard to tell.

Favourite Books I've Read This Year (in progress)

Non-Fiction: 

Manisha Sinha: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.
Wright Thompson: The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.
Richard Flanagan: Question 7.

Fiction: 

Colson Whitehead: The Nickel Boys. 

Trang Thanh Tran: They Bloom at Night.

Liz Moore: The God of the Woods. 

Liz Moore: The Unseen World. 

I read The Nickel Boys just before watching this year's cinematic adaptation by RaMell Ross, which will be somewhere on the top of my favourite films this year: this is a beautiful, painful book about two boys caught up in the horrors of a fictionalised version of the Florida's Dozier School for Boys, the same setting as 2023's The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. The transit from the gentleness, pride and support that Elwood Curtis experiences growing up under the tender care of his grandmother into the system of abuse and violence at the "school" he ends up in through no fault of his own is jarring - his inability to realise that the rules he has internalised all his life about fairness and equity do not apply here, his focus on truth and justice, doom him, as much as his friend Turner tries to guide him. 

Trang Thanh Tran's follow-up to She is a Haunting, this year's They Bloom at Night, is set in a fishing community on the Gulf of Mexico, where a mysterious algae has literally transformed life after a Hurricane. There is a sense that the world has already ended there in some way, that the cataclysm is in the past and the remaining inhabitants are slowly coming to terms with it: Noon, daughter of a shrimper, tries to solve mysterious disappearances in the town with the help of the corrupt harbourmaster's daughter Covey, but also begins realising that she herself has been transforming into something not entirely human anymore ("a story about a monster learning to love herself") - and the story is very much about the question of what is monstrous, in a world where truly monstrous acts are being committed by people because they fear what they do not understand. 

I came to Liz Moore's fiction after starting to watch the adaptation of Long Bright River, starring Amanda Seyfried. The two novels I picked up are The God of the Woods and The Unseen World, and the range between them is truly amazing. The first one is the story of two disappearances in a manor and summer camp - one in the past, the other in 1975. The lost children are siblings, son and daughter to the rich family that employs most of the people in this part of the Adirondacks, and in revealing the details of the investigation and the people connected to it, Moore tells a story about class (specifically the relationship between the blue collar workers and the rich who depend on their labour, in spite of their claims of "self-reliance", literally the name they've chosen for their estate) and misogyny, focusing on women struggling to be heard and to have agency over their lives. 

The Unseen World is a marvel that reminded me of the best of Richard Powers' fiction: the story of a single father raising a daughter, Ada, by himself. Ada grows up surrounded by her father's colleague at a computer research institute in the 1980s - her father is heading a team that is building an early version of artificial intelligence called ELIXIR. It's an unconventional education that centres curiosity that prepares her poorly for transferring to a regular school later on, where she struggles to understand the societal rules of teenage cliques. When her father begins exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's, Ada realises that he has kept secrets from her, and she begins a journey to try and find out who he really is. I'm excited that both of these books have been picked up to be turned into television shows. 

n+1: We Have Always Lived in the Convention, January 10, 2025.

coda.: The death of truth was by design, January 14, 2025. 

Vulture: There Is No Safe Word. How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades, January 13, 2025.

Atmos: The World’s Northernmost Coal Mine Closing Is Good News… Right?, January 14, 2025.

.coda: Trump, Museveni and the anti-LGBT agenda, January 31, 2025.

Wired: The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover, February 2, 2025. 

New York Review: Darfur: A War Within a War, February 2, 2025.

The Guardian: Wall Street Journal editorial calls Trump tariffs ‘dumbest trade war in history’, February 3, 2025.

.coda: Shattering the Overton Window, February 7, 2025.

n+1: Full-Throated Explicit Dehumanization, February 10, 2025. 

Undark: Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’, February 19, 2025.

.coda: How the West lost the war it thought it had won, February 24, 2025. 

Reactor: Severance Is the Future Tech Bros Want, February 26, 2025.

Atmos: On the Anniversary of Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier’s Release Sparks Reflection and Hope, February 27, 2025.

The New Yorker: The Subversive Love Songs of Lucy Dacus, March 17, 2025.

Vulture: My Cool Friend Michelle, March 18, 2025. 

Yellowjackets - Someone is trying to kill us.

Yellowjackets: 3x06 Thanksgiving (Canada).

We’re at the halfway point of the season, so it’s only fitting that the episode ends in a shock, a complete turn of events. This is also a point where, as emotionally wrecking as events in the past are, things in the present begin to coalesce into a more cohesive narrative – and they do with a change in dynamics, where Tai and Van’s story begins to intersect with Shauna’s.
Thanksgiving (Canada) is written by Libby Hill and TV critic royalty Emily St. James, and the title opens up a few questions about the timeline for our stranded Yellowjackets. I had previously thought that we were somewhere between late Spring or Summer, but either that’s incorrect, or poor Coach Ben spends a lot more time in captivity than is shown on screen. His first days after Melissa’s cruel act of cutting his heel begin Natalie’s daily ordeal of delivering food and being asked, over and over, to kill him. He pleads and begs, he tries to get under her skin by saying he laid the fire to make them suffer, which Natalie reads as the desperate lie that it likely is. It’s horrifying, both the despair on his face and the effect it has on Natalie. It’s one of the greatest acting showcase – both Steven Krueger and Sophie Thatcher – that she show has provided, and the repetition wears Natalie down, the prospect that they will have to continue doing this for however long it takes until Akilah’s vision eventuates (a vision that Natalie, ever the pragmatist, doesn’t believe in – she appreciates it because it gives everyone hope, but I don’t think she derives any hope from it herself). I wonder if the task has been assigned to her, as a kind of punishment for having kept his secrets for him, or if she volunteered because taking on burdens, even the heaviest and most unbearable ones, is what Natalie has always done, and would feel to her as part of her responsibility as leader. In any case, in the end she cracks and resigns, putting “feeding Coach” back on the chore wheel for someone else to take on.
Van and Tai talk about how the nights are getting colder, and how that means they will probably spend another winter out here, with all that implies. Tai is hopeful that they are better prepared this time (it’s interesting how they talk around the idea of having to resort to cannibalism, how neither of them directly addresses it), but there is also a sense of resignation here, as if the group collectively has decided that the wilderness may save them if everything falls in place but that beyond extracting visions from Akilah, and trusting that her vision about Coach is accurate, there is nothing much else they can do to affect their own rescue. We know that last time they tried, so early on in their ordeal, it was almost like a curse descended on them for it – Van still bears the scars – but it’s an odd dynamic for a group that feels so changed since they managed to survive the last winter. They are better resourced and knowledgeable about the wild, they have structures in place that utilise their skills. They could try, by themselves – before the weather changes – but they don’t. Beyond the title of the episode, there’s nothing definite here about enough time passing to bring them into early October, but if that is in fact where they end up – the time to get themselves out of the woods has definitely passed. What’s staggering about this passage of time is to think that Ben suffers, mostly alone, filthy, without any kind of comfort, for so many weeks.

After Natalie passes on the job, Mari realises that Ben hasn’t been eating his meals. He is trying to starve himself to death. There is no way that any of this can end well, or that the inevitably won’t happen one way or another. Misty delays it by organising a team to force-feed him, a scene that is almost as cruel and violent as those that show the Yellowjackets actually hunting someone, and worse somehow because in Misty’s mind, she’s saving Ben again. Akilah forcefully tries to induce more visions, which feels like her version of trying to find an out: maybe, if there’s something more concrete, they’ll at least know when, or how, they’ll be able to tell Ben and give him hope, but all she comes away with is memories from before, and a weird, almost comic version of a bear. It’s clear that everything amounts to Natalie making a decision, once again something terrible that she will have to bear, both in terms of what she actually has to do and what the fall-out will be from taking away the only hope that the group has found. She takes a knife to the animal pen, where Ben is suffering. When she hesitates, he guides her hand. There’s no doubt here that he wants to die, or blames Natalie for what she does, but the amount of psychological suffering Natalie is going through – what it does to her, to have to do this – explains why Natalie was the most broken among them in the future. I think it explains it more than Travis’ death – but Travis (who comes very close to telling Nat that he served Akilah up to Lottie out of self-preservation) is the one who understands her reasons, and keeps a look-out while she kills Ben.

The fall-out of Natalie’s choice feels like the final puzzle pieces falling into place for what we know will happen in these woods before some of them (but who else, except the ones we know?) are rescued. Natalie was a rational, pragmatic leader, capable and always weighing different options and making the best decision. After killing Ben, some of the girls suggest just getting rid of her outright as vengeance. Tai proposes another trial. Instead, Lottie decides that Shauna should now lead them – Shauna, who has changed in these months too, as observed by Tai and Van, as if her relationship with Melissa has crystalised something in her. Shauna decides that they will give the wilderness what it wants, and it isn’t a trial or a murder: instead, they will have a feast to honour Coach Ben. There is a dividing line between survival and ritualistic cannibalism, and at this stage, there is no reason to carve up and consume the body for food. This is a purely ritualistic act, disguised as a connection to the wilderness, but also in a deeply fucked-up ironic way the exact thing that drove Ben away from them in the first place. Instead of punishing Natalie physically, Shauna assigns her the task of butchering Ben – and Natalie can’t exactly refuse, both because her options have run out and because Shauna isn’t asking her to do anything that she herself hasn’t done for the group before. It’s always been clear that having to carve up Javi has damaged her, and inflicting the same cruelty on Natalie now is probably what Shauna would comprehend as justice. She isn’t even particularly cruel about it, instead teaching Natalie what to do and how to make it more bearable, in a first act of leader as the group that almost feels measured if it weren’t about the consumption of Ben.

So much about the decisions that have been made by the young Yellowjackets has been about moving the boundaries of what is thinkable, and this feels like the final transgression before the hunt begins again. They eat, together, but not at a banquet table like they did for Jackie. Lottie begins to evoke the wilderness, to scream at it for a response, and finally, there is one: as they all scream together, there’s rustling in the woods, and two strangers (I think it’s two, although it’s difficult to make out) walk into camp. The first thing they see is Ben’s head. Oh boy!

In the adult timeline, Shauna returns home at night after her day of detective work. Jeff is up and quizzes her about where she was, and then Shauna remembers that he doesn’t know yet. Callie overhears that Lottie is dead, and is devastated and horrified – and remembers the intercepted tape that was addressed to her mother, and hands it over. For all the suspicions about cut break lines and the phone that was left for her at the bar, this is the first piece of concrete evidence that someone is following her. Shauna decides to evacuate the house and move her family to a motel, and she contacts Taissa to talk to Van, the only person conceivably able to play obscure and obsolete media. The phone call finds Tai and Van in a luxurious hotel room, receiving a massage, awaiting a many-coursed room service meal, and it also falls right into a crisis of conscience for Van, who realises that this is not a normal or healthy way to cope with what has been happening (“Lottie’s dead and Shauna is melting down, and you don’t seem to give a shit about anything but self-care!”). As she tries to retrieve the DAT player buried deep in the boxes of belonging she packed when she moved in with Tai, she has further doubts – a mysterious, ancient and very much disconnected phone rings in one of the boxes and she seems to hear Tai’s desperate voice through it, asking for help, and later that night, Tai wakes up from a nightmare screaming for help, and then visibly and horrifyingly changes back to the calm, collected Tai we’ve seen most of this season. The implication here is that Dark Tai has fully taken over and violently suppresses actual Tai – but it’s even more horrible to think that Van has deluded herself this whole time about who she is in this new and blossoming relationship with. Shauna secretly meets Tai and Van in their car to listen to the tape (it’s much longer than what we get to hear), and it’s someone testing the tape, and then girls screaming at the end. “The only people that even know about this are either us or dead.” All we have to explain this now are theories.
Meanwhile Misty is still on her own and still reeling from Walter and Shauna teaming up on her to take the investigation away. She gets someone to analyse the samples from under Lottie’s fingernails (DNA results that are worthless without something to compare it to – but we know that Walter has a sample from Shauna, at least). Walter has a limousine deliver the two bin bags from Lottie’s apartment to her and some kind of making-up gift, which yield a Chinese food container from a place that Lottie wouldn’t have been caught dead eating at. In casing the place, Misty discovers that – Lisa! – is doing delivers for them (I was so excited to see the great Nicole Maines again)! Lisa, who we last saw when she narrowly escaped the syringe of fentanyl that ended up in Natalie. In character, Lisa agrees to have a chat with Misty, in spite of the fact that she tried to kill her (she was also very forgiving of Natalie stabbing her). This solves one mystery: she was the recipient of the $50,000, along with a “sorry” note from Lottie, presumably for having taken her money and recruiting her into a cult. It’s the kind of gesture you would expect from someone who is trying to right her past wrongs, but doesn’t answer if Lottie’s fall was accidental or not – but Lisa does tell Misty that Natalie was meeting with Taissa that day, the same Taissa who is now very clearly no longer herself.

Random notes:

Emily St. James debut novel Woodworking was just released, and sounds amazing. Reading her television reviews at the A.V. Club was a formative experience for me, and I’m excited to see her make the jump to writing for one of my favourite TV shows.

Vulture interviewed Steven Krueger about Ben's character arc here.

I think this episode was another great showcase of how closely Lauren Ambrose’s performance mirrors Liv Hewson’s. This has been such perfect casting!

Another shout-out to Sam Hanratty, who also achieves a small beat of perfection with Misty this episode. She grieves Ben deeply, steals a final kiss from him (that is very much in character inasmuch as it’s good nobody watches her do it), but then has a moment where she very consciously composes herself, almost becoming the Misty that we know, the version of her that Christina Ricci plays so perfectly. It probably didn’t come down to just one moment, but it’s still awesome.

Callie has learned so much from her mother. She hugs her, which surprises Shauna, but only to put a recording phone in her bag before the meeting with Van and Taissa, a recording that Shauna doesn’t bother to delete before returning the phone back to her. Callie says she is doing these things to understand Shauna, and this would also fit in well with what has been established about their dynamic – the only way to get close to Shauna is to adapt her strategies of deceit.

So… that Digital Audio Tape. It’s a format that would have been a great technological advance on analogue cassette tapes in terms of audio quality but then obviously never went anywhere in popular uptake because it was overtaken by CDs. Narratively, it feels like it was convenient to have an obscure format in there because it ties Van into the story and it means that Callie definitely had no way of figuring out how to play it for herself (I think at a pinch she would have figured out a simple cassette tape). My wild theory about this is that it feels like the kind of medium that, say, someone who goes into the wilderness to investigate birds or other animals may use to record them at a high quality, the same kind of someone who may stumble across a group of teenagers lost there. If that is the case, it doesn’t look good for these two strangers. I can’t quite work out the timelines here (are we at the 19 month mark yet? I think we’re still at least 3 out), as in, is this the rescue rescue, considering that pit girl hasn’t happened yet? And what exactly did they record on there, what part of their experience out there did they want to document? Or is this simply a recording that the strangers made as they approached the camp, documenting what we did actually see on screen, but not really incriminating them in any real way? That would open all kinds of other questions, like, maybe someone from that research team is the mystery person following them around, and it’s not Melissa after all. The Hilary Swank mystery continues.

As a side-note, this little plot about obscure recording formats made me sad that we never got a second season of Archive 81. I could watch hours of seeing tape lovingly restored by someone extremely capable.

Yellowjackets - None of this is who we are.

Yellowjackets: 3x05 Did Tai Do That?

I like that you’re not afraid of the bad parts of yourself anymore.

The most interesting part about the adult storyline in this episode is the blurring between past and present that occurs. There is, of course, a constant awareness of the past for these adult Yellowjackets: it haunts them in various ways, none of them have found healthy or sustainable ways of coping with what happened to them and what they did, and they are also still dealing with the very real fall-out from it. Since Travis’ death and Lottie reinvolvement in their lives, the past has been with them in an undeniable way, and I don’t think that there’s much of a question that Lottie’s death now connects back to it in some way. Misty mixes memories of past and present Lottie when she identifies the body and retrieves her affects through blackmail from the morgue, and her coping mechanism with that grief is to become a citizen detective again. There is no way that this was in fact an accident (if it was, it would be one of the great ironies of the show), as the police think, and nobody is better suited to uncover what happened than the woman who has trained for this her whole life. The other side to Misty’s immediate decision to investigate is that investigating a death is not that different from covering up your own involvement: it gives her opportunities to remove evidence and cover up clues, if we were still to believe that she had something to do with it - and follow the logic that she had a very good reason to want Lottie dead, considering how Natalie, as close to a true friend as Misty had, died. Misty suspects Shauna, and Shauna accidentally teams up Walter, who sees this as an opportunity to get back with Misty, who loves nothing more than a challenge (but perhaps he has underestimated how much Misty dislikes him now, for showing her the truth about her friends). The competition is comedic, but it leads to one of the most emotional moments we’ve seen adult Shauna involved in. The other way that past and present can mix in an irretrievable mess is in dementia, and Lottie’s dad – who lives in a penthouse, and apparently gave Lottie a home when she was released, opening up all kinds of questions about why Lottie pretended to be homeless to Shauna – can’t tell the two reliably apart anymore. As Walter, Shauna and Misty get to work on the penthouse to find clues, he wanders the halls haunted and confused, ending in a moment where he confuses Shauna for his teenage daughter. Seeing what must have been a very difficult relationship in the past, with Lottie’s dad cruel about her mental illness, or just ill-equipped to handle it, Shauna finally grieves the loss, and steps into Lottie’s life to give him a moment of closure. It's a rare act of kindness from someone who we see, in the scenes set after the conclusion of Coach Ben’s trial, act incredibly cruel. Shauna says “sometimes it’s hard to show love the way we want to”, which is an insight into her and a moment of connection that we’ve rarely seen from her (pertaining to her relationship with her husband, Callie, and maybe also Melissa in the past?).
The investigation doesn’t result in much. Misty finds a withdrawal slip for $50,000 in Lottie’s jacket, opening the question of who the money was for (I suppose we’re meant to guess it’s for the mysterious maybe Melissa, to be revealed in the future). There’s the mystery of Lottie’s pretend homelessness, which gained her access to Callie. Also, Walter retrieves one of Shauna’s hairs from her hat for future DNA analysis in case of crimes committed by or against her, which may or may not prove relevant.
Tai and Van are initially part of it, with Van reacting much more emotionally to the reveal that Lottie has died than Tai, which is interesting in contrast to each of their reactions to Tai drawing the card to become Coach’s executioners. We’ve seen Van’s devotion to Lottie’s whole thing in the past, but she’s definitely soured on it since, so it’s a surprise to see her so horrified by the meaningless death and to see Tai so emotionally distant, once again tasking us with asking what Tai we are seeing. Later, they go to meet Simone and Tai’s kid in the park, but in a conversation that Simone and Van don’t overhear, Sammy asks his mum if she is still herself and seems to come to the conclusion that she isn’t, with his fear of her a better indicator of what’s really going on than Van’s deliberate blindness. Van does ask Tai where she was in the hour she kept her waiting before their date, and from what we’ve seen in the past, it’s very possible that (other) Tai Did Do That.

There is a certain light-heartedness and comedy about the two investigation teams trying to thwart each other in their attempt to find the truth that is very much in contrast with what happens in the past, which again, with the exception of Shauna’s moment with Lottie’s dad, carries all the emotional weight of the episode.
With the verdict of guilty that they arrived at last episode through Shauna’s manipulation, the question is now what to do with Ben, who they all seem to agree can’t just keep being a prisoner in the animal enclosure forever. Shauna (and Melissa, of course) want to burn him as a fitting punishment for his alleged crime, an idea so beyond the pale that it horrifies everyone else: it shows how far-gone Shauna is, but also what Shauna is capable of. Lottie thinks that Travis’ little sketch of three dead that he showed her after the trial (from the title we know he was drunk the whole time) is what the wilderness wants, not the kind of horrifying and deeply sad musing of a boy who comprehends what is happening to the group and how they’ll go further into the darkness. Natalie, who is carrying the burden of leadership heavily and is closest to Coach (along with Misty), argues that a firing squad would be more humane. They draw cards, with Van naming the King of Hearts as the “suicide king”, and Tai ends up with it. This is an interesting episode for Tai, who seemed very happy to step up as prosecutor but now doesn’t want to bear the consequences of if, the very real difference between trying to have Ben convicted and being the one chosen to kill him. Van seems less conflicted but wants to create a scenario in which Tai can psychologically cope with killing someone, and comes up with the genius idea of awakening Other Tai to bear the burden – which, regardless of whether we think that this is a wilderness-influenced real thing that is happening to Tai or mental illness is such a bad idea! It’s a very real, perceivable mental coping with an impossible situation, literally splitting yourself in half and outsourcing the (necessary or unnecessary) evil parts like some kind of Severance procedure. They try to do it through sex, because that’s worked before (what a great idea, to mix the two – I guess these are the seeds for why they ended up splitting up, eventually), they try to bring a “mindful” blood sacrifice when Tai kills a trapped rabbit, but nothing works. Misty delivers a last meal, crying and grieving, calling Ben kind and decent, “first boyfriend and amputation”, then Coach is taken away with a hood over his head and tied to a tree, pleading for his life, pleading for their souls (“What kind of monsters have you all become?”), asking how they could have turned into this. 

In the meantime, Akilah has acquiesced to Lottie’s intentions of using her as a medium. They return to the cave with Travis, to induce another vision. Akilah passes out and almost dies, and upon waking (and it really feels like a close call that Lottie deliberately made, willing to risk Akilah’s life for that supposed connection to the wilderness) retells a vision of a giant Coach, tied up across a cliff, providing a bridge to the shining lights of civilisation beyond. It’s such a clear, easily interpreted vision that I would once again ask if it isn’t a little too convenient, and if it was, what a genius ploy by Akilah to save Ben from his fate. At the last moment, when Other Tai, who does end up emerging at the decisive moment, shoots, Lottie saves Ben, because he’s their bridge home. He has purpose. Although in the end, maybe a quick death would have been an easier out for poor Ben, because at nighttime, Melissa and Shauna come into the enclosure with a knife, and Shauna dares Melissa to cut the Achilles heel in his one leg so he can’t make a run for it.
There’s something happening between Shauna and Melissa that very much mirrors Van and Tai’s attempts to bring out Other Tai: Melissa is also dealing with something dangerous that she can’t possibly fully understand, talking about how awed and impressed she is by Shauna no longer being scared of the bad parts of herself. She’s a conduit for whatever Shauna is becoming, because Shauna has always needed someone else along for the ride: but now she’s the one in control, and Melissa is reflecting back to her whatever she needs to see, the same way Shauna used to prop up Jackie. Again, how scary for Melissa that she seems to comprehend this and yet is running towards it instead of away. 

Random notes:

Rid of Me is my favourite PJ Harvey song from my favourite PJ Harvey album, and it was very much used in the perfect way at the end of the episode. Notably, Juliette Lewis did a cover of the song a while ago (using it would have been too meta, I’m guessing)!

Coach offering to handfeed the little baby goat, to rehumanise himself as much as possible in a situation that he knows will end badly, was such a quiet moment of sadness. He’s self-flagellated for not providing for the girls and leaving them, and he’s trying to prove that he can nurture something, to make up for his past mistakes, but only Akilah can see it. It’s fitting that Akilah inadvertently saves him in the end with her vision (we see the vision, but it’s also a very handy vision to have had if you didn’t want to see him die…). I would love for Akilah to have found a way to claw back agency in that fucked up relationship by manipulating Lottie in this very effective way, but it's just a hunch.

Van likening Other Tai to Stefan Urquelle is both hilarious and fitting and horrifying, considering how serious the idea of playing into what’s happening to Tai to avoid the mental consequences of murder is.

I noted that Lottie has pictures of the Yellowjackets in their uniforms on her nightstand, which now makes her only the second person apart from Misty to have the keepsakes out in the open, indicating she may have had a very different relationship to the past than Shauna and Tai.

Before Tai lines up for the shot, Nat puts Jackie’s necklace around Ben’s neck – I wonder what Lottie meant when she said that it doesn’t mean what you think it means. If Lottie thought that Ben had to do with them being saved, it’s not necessary about being a sacrifice, it just means that it indicates someone essential for survival, I guess? The same way that they would have probably died if they hadn’t eaten Jackie.

I loved that moment between Shauna and Lottie’s dad, and it’s great to see Melanie Lynskey shine through all the facets of it. Also, jfc Liv Hewson.

Van definitely clocks Melissa and Shauna, maybe more than anyone else, but will adult Van ever bring this up? Did everyone eventually realise but just never thought to mention it? I think it’s also very interesting that Shauna and Tai have been shown to be close in the past (even though the show hasn’t gone there for a season at least), considering how far removed from each other they seem to be in the wilderness now. Are they still remembering things selectively?

Yellowjackets – I’ve already lost.

Yellowjackets:  3x04 12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis.

 

I think this is the first week where I’m genuinely fascinated by the structure of the episode, but can’t judge how successful it is, because there are more questions than answers yet again and if it all works out, so to speak, in a symmetrically satisfying way, depends on how future episodes unfold. We have a straight-forward trial here, a court thriller that follows all the dramatic up and downs that viewers may be used to from other court dramas (my guess is that the girls know about them from Law and Order, but I’m not entirely familiar with early- to mid-90s television – sorry, Nurse Dana from The Pitt – to judge). We have a less-than-straight-forward murder-mystery in the present timeline, not a who-dunnit as much as a “who will end up dead” that is only resolved in the final minutes of the episode.

Let’s begin with the present first. There is a jarring contrast between the cohesiveness of the past, especially with everyone engaged in the same undertaking of a trial, and the individual storylines of the adults, but if there is a glue that holds them together it’s the idea of mysterious forces being at work. Jeff and Shauna once again take on the lighter load – Jeff is convinced that the brake failure, which was an accident, according to the mechanic, not sabotage – is a result of a “karmic deficit”, that he’s convinced he can fix by “racking up karma points”. It’s a glaring but funny example of what happens when simple people adapt concepts they don’t fully understand into a pre-existing worldview, and it means that the Shipmans will donate some hilariously useless items (like burned copies of Rush Hour), and do some volunteering hours at a local nursing home (which obviously turns out to be Misty’s workplace). Callie is out, and still fuming because Shauna threw out Lottie. At the nursing home, Jeff emerges as the easygoing, charming guy that all the residents immediately take to, and generally has a great time (even though Randy, here on court-order, once again gets outshone). Shauna has a much more difficult time because Misty is trying to extract a genuine apology from her that she is unwilling to give, in great part because she doesn’t believe she’s done anything wrong, and she’s never the kind of person that just does it because it would make everyone’s life so much easier. She ends up trapped in the freezer (previously narrowly avoiding death when Misty fantasises about stabbing her with a knife – a rare show of restraint) – an unsolved whodunnit – and hallucinates Jackie.

Jackie: Maybe this is how it’s always going to end for you. Frozen and left for dead. Just like me.

Jackie taunts Shauna – she’s the most interesting thing about her, she never turned into the person she wanted to be. The irony is, of course, that the Shauna that emerges during the trial is a lot closer to that person than the Shauna who is making tapioca pudding in a nursing home to make Jeff feel that their karma is improving, and that Shauna is terrifying and the reason that everyone is so afraid of her. Randy frees her, and Shauna ends up finding a shelter cat, adopting it, and comes up with a plan to pass it off as a long-lost cat she’s seen on a neighbourhood flyer, like a short-cut to what Jeff is trying to accomplish by doing actual good. It’s a hint that she won’t tolerate this feeling of someone coming after her for much longer – but also, it leaves her with an unaccounted period of time for when Lottie must have died.

Tai and Van are on their own horrifying journey, now kind of on the same page that the wilderness is still asking them to feed it sacrifices. They steal a pack of cards and place the Queen of Hearts on the ground for a random stranger to find – and when someone actually pockets it, Tai feels confirmed in her zeal, but Van gets more and more agitated as they trail the man, and come one unlocked door away from actually killing him. The whole thing is a reminder of how the belief system of the wilderness looks removed from the context of being stranded there – unhinged, insane – and also maybe further confirmation that the Tai who believes enough to be willing to kill for it is not the Tai that we know, but the other one. Van stops them from going through with it because she doesn’t want to live on the lives of strangers, and Tai instead takes her out for the romantic date that she described in detail all that time ago. But again, it leaves a gap, an unaccounted period of time, in which Tai may have done something to Lottie, who she conveniently called earlier and was dismissed by.

We don’t know much about Lottie’s movements before Misty opens the link to a police photo of her dead body at the bottom of some basement stairs, with candles everywhere: after leaving Shauna’s house, she picked up some money from the bank, fervently and desperately practiced an apology in the mirror, and then presumably met whoever ended up killing her (Misty is the third person who left the nursing home early and isn’t accounted for). The episode served us up two people who could have easily died – Tai and Van’s rando, Shauna – but in the end, Lottie’s the one whose time is finally up.

Ben returns to camp with his captors. The only ones who have stayed behind are Travis and Lottie. Akilah is already pondering what the shared dream means, and she is vulnerable right now because Lottie wants to debrief her, and this might have just changed her mind on the wilderness. Natalie is the one who decides that there will be a trial, the only reasonable and fair way to resolve the conundrum, and she also decides that any verdict will require a two-thirds majority, because everyone – including Ben – is well aware what a guilty verdict would mean. They won’t keep Ben locked up for the duration of his sentence in the duck pen. A guilty verdict means death, which considering what they all did to survive the harsher winter times, is a less shocking certainty than it otherwise might be. Past actions and decisions always determine what remains thinkable and doable in the present.
Tai is eager to be the prosecutor, because we already know that she wants more power, that as much as the episode presents Shauna as the one who should have been upset about Nat’s elevation to leader, she is the one who really wants it, and feels entitled to it. Considering all of that, it’s surprising that she does a fairly poor job at it in my opinion. Misty, who initially is very hesitant to take up her role in the defence because of what she perceives as Ben’s betrayal, grows into it quickly and competently. If it weren’t for Shauna’s ability to compel people, which partly derives from both the fear they all have of her and her suffering, it’s likely that she would have won the case for Ben. Misty, who has been sidelined for a while now, cut out off the leadership council and maybe no longer required as much as she used to be now that they are living through the safer seasons of spring and summer, shines. Nat compels her into the role because it means that she may save his life, but more importantly, Misty believes in his innocence. 

 

 

The trial itself is a very instructive state-building exercise that serves as a reminder of how different these girls have become. Creating institutions for a court trial feels like the kind of thing you’d do in a place that has become a home. It’s far removed from sheer survival. Doling out the roles is reminiscent of how they’ve shared power and assigned responsibility previously, and there’s the ominous emergence of Natalie’s judge robes: the antlers, the white clothes, both of which we have seen in the infamous sacrifice scene before. But maybe the fact that Natalie loses the robes when she turns from judge to witness is just as potent a reminder that clothes, like roles, are currently switched: the girls have been wearing each other’s clothes for months, they have rotated responsibilities. Just as much as we have no way of knowing who ends up wearing Jackie’s necklace in the pit, we don’t know who will wear the antler crown come the time for her sacrifice.
The trial lacks one thing that most trials have: evidence. There are no forensics, no traces to be examined. It’s a trial that is entirely about the question of whether the girls believe that Coach did it, and if there is enough reasonable doubt that someone else could have done it. In the context of their community, the more important fact is that they need him to have done it, because if he didn’t, any of the people that Misty, in her defence, suggests as alternate perpetrators, could have. For the already precarious unity (the trial also reminds us again that they are divided on matters of faith) of the group, Coach must be responsible. He’s the outsider, with no viable connections left, as much as Natalie covered up for him and Misty still loves him. It’s much more scary to believe Misty when she suggests that Shauna may have done it because Nat was chosen leader, or that any of the non-believers may have done it because they didn’t buy into Lottie’s cult (her saying about Melissa that she “could go either way probably” made me laugh out loud).
The crux of the trial is maybe not really the question of who set the fire, but that it is a judgement on Coach Ben as someone who has failed them in other ways (ways that he is deeply ashamed and embarrassed about – which I think is why he barely pleads for his innocence). He didn’t step up as the obvious leader when he was the only adult in a group of teenagers. He left when Shauna was giving birth because he didn’t feel cut out to face what it would mean to help her and fail. He’s stood on the sidelines, for the majority of time, increasingly horrified by how far the group was willing to go to survive, but equally amazed and awed at their resilience without him. The climax of the trial, when Misty calls on Ben to testify, is deeply emotional and sad – it begins with Ben reluctant to partake, reluctant to try and win sympathy. He says he never wanted to be a teacher or a coach, that he doesn’t even like teenagers. In her expert questioning (I think Misty has always been scarily impressive with her medical knowledge, but she truly shines here, considering what we’ve seen of her social skills previously), she gets him to tell his own story of having grown up as an underdog, without support, discovering that he wanted to support and help the team when they too were underdogs (he mentions covering up their party before the away game and also having seen Van and Taissa and not ratted them out). He seems resigned to his fate – and I don’t think he ever has any hope that the trial will go his way – because he is so ashamed of ultimately having let them down in precisely the way that he was let down in his youth. The statement makes the ultimate result of the trial even sadder – because initially, he has a simple majority in his favour that doesn’t suffice to save his life, but then Shauna, who was never going to change her mind through any kind of process, goes to work. When she starts, the woods appear to be in concert with her, demanding another sacrifice. One by one, they fall, until there’s a majority for his guilt. Melissa whispers into Shauna’s ear – “that’s fucking power”. And it’s fucking terrifying.

Random notes:

To start off with, I have to do this, and I think it should be done whenever television or film uses music by Ace of Base, which fits timewise but should categorically no longer pop up – here’s a Vice article from 2013 on why. One of the founding members “started his career as a neo-Nazi skinhead”. The Eels and the Cranberries were very good choices though.

The really sad thing for Coach Ben is that the two only people he has built a kind of relationship with, who would have voted for his innocence, aren’t even allowed to cast their vote.

I think there’s also a very quick note in there about how the trial changes the course in the future, by setting a precedent. One of the alternate theories that Misty presents is that Crystal has done it – Crystal, who Misty knows died well before the fire, but everyone else still considers missing. It would have been a convenient explanation that could have saved them all from having to convict Coach, but nobody jumped on the opportunity. 

I also found it interesting that the girls adopt the language of court dramas perfectly, in exactly the way that viewers of television learn about things that for most of us have little do with our daily lives and yet give us the illusion of competence, but there are moments where it's broken up by their specific relationship with the wilderness creeping in - most obviously with the robes, but also when Lottie begins with a re-worded swearing in for the witnesses that Nat cuts short by resorting to what she remembers from TV.
 

Most of the outstanding acting moments in the episode happen in the past (especially Misty and Ben), but I also wanted to shout out Lauren Ambrose’s performance in the episode: from her deep ambivalence and increasing horror at what Tai is willing to do to get more time with her, to the genuine moment of giddiness and happiness of their date. There’s an ominous moment when her hand shakes as she buys the pretzels that would confirm Tai’s conviction that they are buying more time with each sacrifice they make.

Presence

Contains spoilers for Presence, a film that I think is most effective the least the viewer knows about it beforehand.

I’ve always been a fan of haunted house stories. I like all the ways in which the conventions of the genre can be taken apart and reassembled into new forms. Presence, marketed as a horror film, spends a lot of its runtime camouflaging its true identity: it’s not really a horror film because there’s a haunted house and a ghost, it’s a horror film because it has a serial killer in it. The horror is not in the haunting, which for most of the film has a gentle touch – it’s a feeling of wrongness and unease as the pieces of the puzzles fall together and the real story emerges.
The gentleness is what floored me, because it is there from the beginning but not really comprehensible in its full tragic reality until the end. The film begins in an empty house, introducing how Soderbergh will spend the entire film: both behind the camera and directing, from the point of view of the “presence” that wanders the empty halls, looks through windows but unable to go beyond the confines of the outside walls. A realtor and a family enter, and with them all the dynamics of the family, seen from the outside, like an enigma that must be decoded. They are strangers but in watching them interact, they will reveal themselves to us. The mother (Lucy Liu) isn’t interested in the house itself, only in its location, within a prestigious school district that will allow her son (Eddy Maday) to swim competitively in a highly rated programme. The daughter (Callina Liang) catches the eerie details of the house, like an old silver-nitrate backed mirror. The son is on the phone with a friend, a bit too loud, a bit too braggy. The dad (Chris Sullivan) tries to hold it all together. Something traumatic has occurred prior to the move that has affected the daughter. Maybe it’s too early for the great change, or maybe it’s just what she needs. They buy the house; they do some minor renovations. One of the painters refuses to enter a room, and a conversation hints that this has been an ongoing problem, for now unnamed. We watch bits and pieces, snatch pieces of conversation, try to make sense of them. Then the family moves in.

It's difficult to convey in words that the way the presence moves through the house, the way the camera does, communicates emotions. It’s a gaze imbued with meaning. It observes, it follows, it seems to try to understand. In retrospect, the first two moments in which it touches – always inanimate objects, as it seems to be unable to interact with anything currently held by a human – are deeply emotional. While Chloe, the daughter, takes a shower in her walk-in, it picks up school books from her bed and puts them on her desk, as if to remind her to take a break, or to take a chore off her shoulders. It tidies after her in a specific way that feels deeply familiar and caring, profoundly gentle. When she realises, she is scared, but it’s only one of many moments where she knows that there is something else in the house with them before anyone else does. In a later moment, the son, Tyler, retells a story of cruelty against a female classmate without seeing that his lack of empathy is glaringly obvious – and the presence moves furiously up the stairs to wreck his room (the only moment in the film where the presence acts violently), focusing on his trophies, as if intending to destroy all these signifiers of his vanity and selfishness. At this point, Chloe is convinced that the presence is her friend who passed away before the move, looking over her – but it’s only with the realisation in the end, when we know the true identity of the ghost, that this moment of anger receives the more meaningful interpretation of the presence’s shame and regret.  

There is also a sense here that the people the presence observes are frequently captured in important emotional moments – discussions between the father and the mother about their daughter, who is struggling with the loss of her friend, hints of some kind of white-collar crime the mum committed (and justifies, in a disturbingly frank and drunken conversation with her son, as being right because it was done for him, as if putting the emotional weight of her crime on him proves her love), the dad considering a separation for legal reasons, a breakdown into tears outside on the patio that the presence watches through the windowpane, incapable of crossing the threshold. And yet, in spite of this witnessing, the full story never emerges because it’s a one-sided observation, and it can never capture the whole thing. Maybe that sense is a combination of the limitations of the presence and the divisions within the family – especially the mother, who is so open about her favouritism for her son and her annoyance at her daughter. It comes into full view whenever the dad voices his frustrations at their lack of care and closeness, like in a foreshadowing conversation he has with his son in which he tells him that he knows that there is a better man inside of him, that it “wouldn’t kill him to stand up for his sister” for once (it’s almost as if Soderbergh relishes the irony of this – after his son’s death, he must replay that sentence in his head again and again).

Story-telling wise, it’s interesting that there are two narrative threads that unfold, each with the potential from drama, but one of which turns out to be a misdirection, just another random thing that occurs at the same time. The white-collar crime story is never fully told, it’s more of a backdrop that explains why the parents may be distracted enough from what is going on in their children’s life to realise in time that danger is lurking. The trauma of having lost a friend, and having known another girl who died under similar circumstances, is the actual key to the events. It’s not only the explanation for Chloe’s emotionally vulnerable state – her mother’s frustration at medications not working or the trouble of finding a new therapist for her – but also reveals itself to be the true horror of this horror film. Tyler befriends the most popular guy at his new school, Ryan (West Mulholland), who seems to be popular for his attractiveness and the fact that he provides drugs across the district and beyond. Chloe begins a relationship with him that looks to be based on empathy – he is the only one asking questions about her feelings, about how she feels after the loss of her friend. It seems to be a genuine emotional relationship, a moment of true connection outside the distance of her mother, the presence of a brother who teases and annoys her, the inability of her dad to say the right thing, as much as he tries (Chris is very much a good dad, but overwhelmed and unsupported). But then it turns intensely creepy and concerning – the presence intervenes when Ryan tries to drug her drink – and it all comes to a head when the parents leave town and leave the two teenagers to their own devices. Ryan drugs Tyler, and then Chloe, and brings out the Seran wrap, revealing that he’s responsible for the deaths of her friend and other girls – he’s a serial killer obsessed with controlling girls and watching them die. The time loop closes when the presence manages to wake Tyler, who runs upstairs and tackles Ryan through the window. They both die – the family moves out, and the mother catches a glimpse of her son in the mirror, revealing that the presence was him, the whole time, dislocated in time the way that the medium that came to the house earlier explained, with unfinished business and disoriented as to his identity and purpose, but now finally able to leave that he's saved his sister.

I had watched Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone a few days before Presence, which feels like an odd kind of coincidence now. There is a similar twist to the haunted house narrative there, where the ghosts of the kids that a serial killer has murdered previously do everything in their power to help his current victim escape. And then there’s Nickel Boys, with its POV camera that is so effective at conveying the horrors of institutional racism and violence at a reform school in the Jim Crow South, and even more effective by juxtaposing that violence against the gentleness of care that the protagonist receives from his friend and his grandmother. The Jonas Mekas-like scenes from his childhood have the same sense of gentleness that the presence’s care for his sister conveys – Tyler is unstuck in time and unsure of who he is anymore but the love has remained.  


2024, directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Callina Liang, Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland, Julia Fox, Natalie Woolams-Torres, Lucas Papaelias.

Reading List: February.

Non-Fiction: 

 

Richard Overy: Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-1945.

Steve Coll: The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq.

 

Fiction:

 

Taran Hunt: The Immortality Thief.

Hayley Scrivenor: Girl Falling.

Sara Gran: Come Closer.

Virginia Feito: Victorian Psycho.

Virginia Woolf: The Years.

Heather O'Neill: When We Lost Our Heads.

 

Films: 

Clementine (2019, Lara Gallagher).

Nosferatu (2024, Robert Eggers).

Charlie Says (2018, Mary Harron).

Companion (2025, Drew Hancock).

Nickel Boys (2024, RaMell Ross).

 

Shows: 

 

The Listeners, Season One.

The Newsreader, Season Three. 

Apple Cider Vinegar, Season One. 

Girls5eva, Season One, Two, Three.

 

Other: 

 

Rona, Clairo, Beabadoobee, Barry Can't Swim, Charli XCX live @ Laneway.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch @ Queen's Theatre.