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.

Yellowjackets – How the fuck is any of this real?

Yellowjackets: 3x03 Them's the Brakes.

 

 

Mari: I think maybe there are two versions of reality. Most of the time, the other one, the bad one is just hiding or waiting, but it’s all real.  

For a show that constantly walks the edge between embracing the mythological and yet leaving the possibility open that there are always rational explanations for what is happening, Them’s the Brakes is one of those episodes that seem to more fully embrace the idea of the latter. It’s not just that the excursion into hallucinations that bookends the episode – a sequence that is deeply reminiscent of Buffy’s Restless – is explained scientifically through a buildup of a gas (perhaps carbon dioxide) in the cave system that the girls are exploring. There is also the opening of the episode, in which Mari and Coach Ben discuss the surreality of their situation. It’s a great exhibit for Mari as a character, who may be widely hated because of how annoying she is, and yet has found a way of coping with the situation that feels more well-adjusted than most of the others. She’s tied up in the cave, with an injured knee, at the mercy of Ben, who seems on the edge of a breakdown, and yet she’s singing “Too sexy for this cave too sexy for this cave. I’m too sexy for this rope, to sexy for these ropes, too sexy to be murdered” to the tune of the Right Said Fred song. She tries to flirt with Coach, claiming a long-held crush (that she expressed with passive-aggressiveness in the past), ironically revealing that she must be one of the few remaining girls who hasn’t realised that he’s gay, or never bothered to think about that he might be. They’re eating bat (Coach says tastes like if a Cornish hen had a baby with a demon, and I find deeply uncomfortable, considering the bat virome). Ben darkly jokes that the others are now used to more substantial fare. Ben has an existential crisis about how he, a regular guy who became a TA to pay off his student debt after an ACL injury, ended up there, and Mari responds with a deeply surprising personal story about losing her baby cousin to cancer, and how in spite of the horror of it, the world just continued on without a break. It’s a very well worded story that does apply here: horrible things happen to regular people, and they create a break in reality, but only for those people specifically, while the outside continues on as if nothing had happened. Trauma changes, but rarely everything, all the time, and the contrast of the horrors with the mundanity of the normal is another source of disorientation and alienation. It’s a surprisingly insightful thing for a teenage girl to share, much less Mari, who has never appeared to have much care about how other people feel (beyond the joys of mocking them, or using sarcasm and cynicism to hurt them).

Coach lets Mari go, who promises that she will keep quiet about his continued survival, a promise that lasts about a second once the girls ask her in detail about her suffering and point out inconsistencies. Mari knows she’s a bad liar, and so she doesn’t even attempt it, and it also feels like she enjoys telling a secret and being at the centre of attention. The hunt for Coach that ensues reveals the power struggles within the group, with Shauna taking the lead when Natalie – who is eager to protect Ben – is hesitant to do so (and it’s interesting that Tai, who has claimed that she thinks she’s a better leader, stays in the back). Natalie is willing to defer to a majority opinion, but it’s becoming clearer that her control is slipping.

In the present, Shauna’s attempts at information control with Callie continue to fail, and Callie proves to be endlessly drawn to and fascinated by Lottie, who is all too capable of manipulating her feelings. She flatters her by telling her that she’s able to know herself deeper than others, exactly the kind of thing that a teenager so eager to be different and to be recognised by an adult for her coolness would lap up. Lottie gets her to partake in her favourite past-time, shoplifting (a nice tie in with what Lottie revealed as a teen). There’s a very dark edge to all of this, with Lottie being fully aware of the power she has and using it discriminately to manipulate Callie into doing her bidding. It’s unclear what she is grooming her for exactly, because we haven’t reached the point yet in the teen timeline to really know – is she like Travis and Akilah, with the ability to potentially commune with the wilderness where Lottie can’t anymore? In that case, Lottie would be very interested in what Tai and Van are up to these days. In any case, she overplays her hand when she puts Jackie’s heart necklace on Callie and Shauna sees – we know that at some point the pit girl wore it, that it has been handed around a lot. Before Shauna finally and furiously kicks her out of the house, Lottie tells her that “it never meant what you thought it meant” – as in, likely, that it designates a future victim of the ritual.

Tai and Van go on their own journey in this episode. Van finds out that her cancer is possibly in remission and Tai tells her about the dead waiter. It’s a harrowing scene, because it should be about Van getting a new lease on life, and instead Tai immediately interprets this as a sign that the wilderness has given them a gift in exchange for the sacrifice of Nat and the waiter, a soul for a soul. It’s not an interpretation that Van is fond off, who doesn’t seem eager to sacrifice anyone for her own survival, and also looks at Tai as if there is something about her that scares her. Also, this version of Tai seems different (Tawny Cypress has hinted that we are seeing more of dark Tai than we realise): Teen Tai was always hesitant to buy into Lottie’s spirituality, and it was Van who was a loyal follower. It’s probably safe to assume that whenever Adult Tai is shown to believe, it’s dark Tai who we’re seeing: and this Tai immediately lights a candle (always with the fire) and begins chanting “we hear the wilderness and it hears us”. Later, they watch old videotapes of Pee-wee's Playhouse and Tai sees an ad for an ice cream parlor that includes a comic version of the man with no eyes that she guesses she saw as a kid and then turned into the man she has been seeing after losing her grandma. It’s a rational explanation for her hallucinations, but Tai thinks it’s some kind of sign that she must follow, and so they go off to the closed and abandoned ice cream parlour in the middle of the night (these were the most Pretty Little Liars vibes the show has ever indulged). Through a broken window, they see a fox (always an animal with a lot of mythological baggage) with a rabbit in its mouth. It’s Van who interprets the scene: “You know what it wants. It wants more”. She’s endlessly terrified. 

 

 
In the caves, the girls split up in two groups. Van, Akilah and Shauna go off on their own and navigate the narrow passages, even though it should be obvious to all three of them that this isn’t the right way. Akilah and Shauna lose their light, and in a big opening, Van’s flickers ominously. Then she’s all on her own, suddenly – she stumbles down a hallway, finds a red door, goes through it. It’s obvious that she has left the realm of reality at this point, even before she finds a cabin behind the door. She sits down on a rocking chair in front of the fire – maybe a comfortable spot for a storyteller to be in, a moment of rest. Akilah finds her way into a beautiful, flourishing wilderness, gorging herself on blackberries before she finds an enclosure of animals. A talking llama warns her that the sheep bite, that “everything with teeth bites. Everything will defend itself.” It tells her that the woods are calling her, and the screeching that has been haunting all of them starts up again. Shauna finds herself in a lake, peacefully floating in a white dress. A boy on the shore calls out to her – mommy – and she looks more happy and luminous than we have ever seen her, in either timeline. She tries to swim to shore but can’t. Van’s cabin begins to burn, arms emerge from the rocking chair to pin her in place. The soil around Akilah’s feet begins absorbing her. Shauna goes under the water. The three elements are perfectly chosen for the characters (and they all represent rebirth of a kind). All three of them, unsure whose dream it is or if they are all sharing the same one, find themselves in a classroom, wearing their soccer uniforms again. Lottie is at the front at the blackboard, which says “Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest” (a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote). The man with no eyes walks past the classroom. And next to them is Jackie, snapping a wrist snap band around her arm. She dares Akilah to try, and nothing happens. Van does, and it cuts her. Then she snaps it around Shauna’s neck (“you’re so jealous, you can hardly breathe”) and it begins cutting into her, killing her. Akilah can’t take it off, even though Lottie tells her that she has to safe Shauna, or else they’ll all die. And then the hallucinations end when Coach Ben pulls them all to safety, only to find himself facing the end of Natalie’s gun. No good deed!

Random notes:

Lottie tries to convince Akilah to talk to the wilderness but Akilah, queen of boundaries, just says that she’s good and doesn’t buy into it. Good for her. We’ll see how her approach changes after the vision.

The opening scene was just lols all around. Coach repeating the insults that Mari has levelled at him, Mari’s harebrained decision to mace him in an enclosed space, only to be maced in turn, Coach’s exasperated “you did this, you idiot”.

Misty sets out to prove Walter wrong about his claim that her friends aren’t faithful or true but obviously, in reaching out to Shauna to hang out, she’s chosen exactly the wrong person to humour her. They’re in Shauna’s minivan when her brakes stop working (a lot of people could have manipulated them, but I guess the show wants us to think, at this point, that it was a returned Melissa or whoever freaked Shauna out in the previous episode). Shauna goes off on Misty, and Misty ends up burning a picture that she has held on to at home. It doesn’t sound like a great idea for Misty to be set on revenge against you, considering how far she is willing to go.

It doesn’t even really matter if Ben gives such a reasonable explanation for the hallucinations (and maybe he too has wandered into the depths of the caves and that’s why he has been talking to someone) – these hallucinations will change the characters and how they perceive their situation. The hallucinations put each of them in a place of perceived happiness in safety, only to then undermine the feeling – Shauna will never see her baby grow up, Akilah’s dream of a pacified and peaceful wilderness is a fantasy, Van will never fully escape the fire, regardless of how many times she tries. The classroom scene is thornier, and I’m not sure what it means that Akilah goes through the ritual unscathed while it hurts Van and nearly kills Shauna (maybe that’s foreshadowing?). It does correspond with how complicit in Jackie’s death they each were. We’ll see where they go from here: within the episode, I think the closest direct connection is between how we see Van react to Tai’s insistence that this is the wilderness once again demanding a sacrifice and giving a gift in return. In Buffy, Restless worked both as an insight into where the characters were at that moment (unfortunately for us, we weren’t spared an insight into Xander) and hints at what was to come (Dawn).

Emerson was a “leader of the transcendentalist movement, believing in the inherent goodness of both people and nature.” It’s an approach that feels in opposition to the experience of the woods as a dangerous entity with demands, and the llama’s statement that everything with teeth will fight to survive – plus there’s the fox and all it represents, with a rabbit in its teeth. Once again, more questions than answers.

Links: 25/2/25

Politics: 

I think the two grimmest surprises about the second Trump presidency is the combination of the breakneck speed at which it is dismantling democracy paired with the fact that this dismantling is being executed by a kakistocracy (a government of the least qualified). 

This week has brought the biggest shift in US foreign policy since WW2. Pete Hegseth, US Defence Secretary, declared that Europe would have to be responsible for its own security (putting in question NATO's Collective Defense obligations) including funding Ukraine. Vice President Vance claimed the biggest threat facing Europe is suppression of freedom of speech and met with Germany's AfD leader after his speech, a party that Elon Musk has also loudly supported during its campaign for the 2025 federal election (it ended up with 20.8% of the vote coming in second behind the Christian Democrats). The most obvious expression of the US shift has been its shift towards supporting Russia: "The US has sided with Russia to oppose a United Nations vote condemning the war on Ukraine on the third anniversary of the illegal invasion.", is supporting peace negotiations that exclude Ukraine, Trump has called the Ukrainian President a "dictator" and has claimed that Ukraine is responsible for the war. The backdrop to this is negotiations about a rare earth minerals deal between Ukraine and the US in exchange for security assurances.

 

Internally, it has only taken a few weeks for the Trump administration to attack LGBTQI+ communities, give Elon Musk's DOGE free reign over a series of apparently random and potentially dangerous (and AI powered) cuts to government departments, and ramp up the deportation of migrants, including to Guantanamo Bay. Mother Jones published an article today detailing a new "lavender scare" in US Government departments ("In the US Department of Agriculture, multiple people have been asked to report the names of LGBTQ employee resource group leaders to higher-ranking officials"). An early executive order has ended funding for gender-affirming care for children under 19, and order that is currently being fought in court by individual states and organisations representing families and doctors. Trump has fired leading figures in the military including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations and the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff. Forbes summarises other cuts to departments here, including mass firings in the Federal Aviation Administration responsible for aviation safety. I think beyond the horrible consequences that this all has for Americans, there is a genuine chance that right-wing extremist politicians in other polities will be licking their lips at the prospect of repeating this if they come to power in their respective countries.

Yellowjackets - They’re coming.

Yellowjackets: 3x02 Dislocation.

Some of the best tension of these past season of Yellowjackets has come from the way that the adults are integrating or denying who they were in the past. On top of the “outrun” column, there’s Taissa, who could not have had her career if anyone had known what truly happened out there. She lost Van along the way, she got married, she had a kid, she ran a successful campaign. Teen Taissa is in the process of discovering her passion for politics and very much embracing that she thinks she would make a better leader than Nat – it’s an ambition that from the beginning was about winning against someone else. The fact that she never quite makes it there is what’s so interesting – back before the crash, the head coach chose Jackie over her. In the woods, the girls chose Nat. Out in the world, now, she won the race, but never assumed power. Taissa’s ambition has been repeatedly thwarted, and at the same time, she is haunted by apparitions, a connection to the past (a past that predates the crash by years) that she tries to deny, but can’t.
Then there’s Shauna – who, in spite of everything, has held on to her family, mostly by making them complicit in her actions. Shauna’s desperate attempts at a veneer of normalcy, this repression and annihilation of self (and what else has her friendship with Jackie been if not that), has always been shown to have a literal body count. Shauna is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but the clothes have always fit poorly, and whenever she has tried to suppress her worst instincts, someone had to pay eventually (she started small with a backyard rabbit, and it’s been an escalation ever since). Her sharp teeth always come out eventually. It’s relatively harmless in this episode: she tries to self-discipline herself into being a better mother and wife, but the good intentions cannot outlast how boring and annoying the two jackass bros are that Jeff is having a career-defining dinner with. She dismantles them furiously and precisely (“Joel, you painful little boner. Do you really think that I give a shit what you think of me. I promise me, you absolutely do not exist, you fucking nothing.”) – a verbal kind of dissection, that only costs Jeff the chance of a lifetime, but nobody’s actual life. She was most herself at the end of It Girl, when she was endlessly entertained to see herself to perfectly mirrored in her daughter’s attack against her bullies.

Nat – now without an adult mirror, which makes her the most tragic among the girls because we already know how it ends – never managed to outrun what happened in the woods. She tries with drugs, but she always had the tether of Travis, that deliberate choice to not leave everything behind and start with someone who didn’t completely know her. Nat has assumed the responsibility of leadership but she doesn’t really want it (which is indeed as per Conclave a very good trait for any leader to have). She is inherently a protector – she is, for one, desperately protecting the secret that Ben is still alive, when she steers Misty away from one of his traps, who figures it out anyway. She doesn’t have Taissa’s keen sense of politics, that everything is important out there, because her focus is on the big picture of survival, not the minute details of dynamics within the group.

Misty, the other big focus in this episode, has changed the least. She doesn’t think she has to. For her, the time in the woods was the first time she felt connected, which makes it even more tragic that the viewers can see how much she was deluding herself about it. At most, the other girls occasionally entertain her to keep her away from them. They consider her an annoyance, and very much not part of the group (she is not part of the leadership group for one, in spite of her medical knowledge). Walter is the one who tries to tell her in the present time that this has always and will always be the case, but she is in no space to receive the message. She gets phone calls only when all other options run out and only when somebody needs something. Nobody checks in on her and her grief over Natalie’s death. It says something interesting about the dynamics of Yellowjackets that it is so impossible to trust Walter’s care – he is right about everything he says, but he is also a newcomer who is trying to isolate Misty from people that she considers her friends. He shows genuine care and consideration but it is impossible not to see all of his actions as suspect, as a part of a bigger plan. It’s the kind of inherent mistrust that ultimately got Adam killed, who turned out to be harmless, and at the same time, Adam’s harmlessness is exactly what makes Walter even more suspicious, because what are the odds of two interlopers being innocent bystanders.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Lottie, and how different young Lottie and older Lottie feel. Courtney Eaton’s is a lot less hardened, and yet her actions in this episode make her feel so much more terrifying than Simone Kessel has ever been in the role, almost as if the Lottie who has made a whole business out of essentially running a cult has become a cynic in the process. There is nothing disingenuous about young Lottie, who feels like it is of vital importance to know what the woods want but has lost her connection to them. She is using Travis in a terrible, scary way, giving him drugs, making him experience visions that he cannot deal with. In his final one, he prophesises that something is coming – ominous and mysterious, enough to fuel Lottie to ask more of him. She is pushing him, so much that Travis resorts to throwing Akilah under the bus (Akilah, who is kind and gentle, and finally caring for actual alive animals). He claims that It is now closer to her, which is why the animals trust her, but it is obvious that this is just a ploy so he can finally be free of the experiment. This Lottie is a true believer, whereas older Lottie always felt like a scam artist, an opportunist who used her experience in the woods to create a business model, with just enough genuine belief that she wasn’t easy to uncover. The older Lottie is dangerous because she has become more experienced at manipulating people not currently in a life and death situation, but it’s almost like her heart isn’t all the way in it anymore, or whatever she seeks from the process has been corrupted.
Lottie shows up at Shauna’s doorstep after being released from the psych hold for what happened at the end of last season – and it seems like her goal is specifically Callie, whose power she recognised when she met her the first time. Like with Travis, back in the day, she is looking for a conduit, and Callie’s curiosity about what happened in the wilderness is her way in. I’m not sure why Callie is so curious – it’s doesn’t seem like she would be particularly scandalised if she did know that the cannibalism rumours were true, and maybe it’s just a way for her to feel closer to her mother, to try and comprehend her more beyond the glimpses she has given her of her true nature. Shauna's ploy to get Misty in as a babysitter to keep the two apart goes horribly wrong in all kinds of ways – Misty realises she’s not there to hang out with her friend, that she is being once again used, Callie gives her allergy medicine to make her fall asleep, Lottie is all too eager to get her claws in her (when Jeff and Shauna return, Callie is literally braiding Lottie’s hair). 

 

In a way, this whole episode is about dynamics of the past repeating in the presence – with Misty, who is never truly treated like a friend, with Van and Taissa falling back into old patterns, with Lottie returning to pursue her obsession with It at any cost. Teen Shauna – who starts the episode digging up the body of her baby, to rebury it in a private place far away from any Yellowjackets rituals – returns to the grave to grieve, only to find that someone else has put flowers there. It’s Melissa, who seems deeply fascinated by and drawn to Shauna. She sees Shauna’s resilience, but not her rage, her violence. She somehow disregards all of it, and even with a knife to her throat kisses her. And Shauna kisses her back, still with the knife at Melissa’s throat. What would it take for a person to be so obviously in grave danger, to be so clearly physically threatened, and to still desire and want in that way? When adult Shauna hears who picked up the phone at the restaurant, she is absolutely terrified. I think maybe Melissa had a glimpse of who she really was, without any masks on, and still wanted her, and what could be more terrifying than that? Worse, maybe Melissa made it out alive!

Random notes:

Mortimer IS a great name for a duck, but again, just happy for Akilah that it’s alive ducks and rabbits now, not dead mice.

Coach Ben eventually does get Mari out of the pit, after making her pop her own knee in (the time-honoured tradition of Yellowjackets body horror). He then ties her up and drags her back to his cave because she’s seen him, and he is trying to figure out what to do about that. She gets some cocoa and kindness, but Ben is off in the shadows having discussions with himself (I’m guessing he’s still seeing his boyfriend, his escape from last season). He also denies having even known that the cabin burned down.

I really like that Sarah Desjardins is getting more to do this season, and it just makes it clearer how good the casting progression from Sophie Nélisse to Melanie Lynskey to her is.

Lottie doesn’t outright lie to Callie, she’s just evasive, like she knows that Callie eventually has to find out the truth and embrace it.

The phone left for Shauna in the toilet cubicle rings with an ominous “Queen of Hearts” ringtone – the card is the one that designated the victim of the hunt, and the one that both Nat and Shauna have drawn in the past.

Shauna denying she’s the kind of person who would ask for a manager only to then having to resort to asking for a manager to get a description of who picked up the phone is perfect. She would ask for the manager! Callie is right! It was also great for Shauna, objectively the most dangerous person in the room, to say about Lottie that “I cannot in good conscience let this dangerous person stay with us.”

The interesting thing about Melissa is that she seems so normal, maybe because we don’t know her at all – it feels like it would take a particular kind of talent to have spent all that time in the wilderness and to not have stood out at all, to just have successfully kept out of all the drama. She could by anyone!

Misty telling Walter that he doesn’t know what friendship looks like – ironic. But also sad. Maybe a little kindness would go a long way with Misty, if it came from someone she wanted it from.

Taissa returns to the restaurant to pay the bill, but then realises that the waiter who was chasing them has died of a heart attack. She dashes again and ends up at a backyard church, where she burns a matchbox – none of which she tells Van, who spent that time at an emergency room to get her foot fixed. They begin the episode happy (having hooked up after their adventures, Van is doing solo karaoke and has never looked more like Liv Hewson’s Van), but it goes sideways when she steps on a glass on the ground. Also, something about their catchup after their daily chores tickled me – we know that Taissa is lying to Van by omission, but I also got the sense that Van was doing the same – and if she didn’t spend that time at the doctor’s, she could have been at the restaurant to leave the mysterious phone for Shauna…)

Bikini Kill's Rebel Girl is in the end credits, the most fitting song on the most fitting show. Picking who the narrator of the song could be from our cast of characters, or perhaps it's the viewers themselves, is a choose-your-own adventure story (take care Melissa!).

Yellowjackets – Fucking sacrifices and miracles.

Yellowjackets: 3x01 It Girl.

They could never go home again, because of what they’d done, because of what they became.

It’s such an interesting choice for Yellowjackets, after a long break, to come back to late Spring/early Summer. It may have only been three months in the 1990s timeline of the show, with the team now roughly six months off from being rescued, but in terms of vibes, this feels completely different from where we left off. When we saw them last, it was the depth of winter, and the season took its toll: first Jackie, then the elimination of all other food sources except Jackie. In the final scenes of the last episode, the cabin burned down, which left them all (except Coach, who legged it - sorry - to a hidden cave, seeing the writing on the walls) without shelter and in severe peril. Yellowjackets, in It Girl, doesn’t show us how difficult it was to discover from the loss – instead, it throws us right into the new routine of life in the wilderness.

The opening scene works as a perfect mirror image to one of the most famous moments in the show: the wintry, creepy hunt, the trapped pit girl. Everything else that has happened on the show has worked to recalibrate the viewers' sense of what the scene means: the confirmation of cannibalism in season two, the introduction of a self-made religious spirituality that relies on rituals. We know now that the girls (and Travis) hunt both for food and because they have created a system of belief that has mythologised the idea of sacrificing a chosen victim. The hunt that starts this episode cannot be that hunt, because it is spring, but it comes with the same adrenaline-spiked fear and sense of doom before it is revealed to be a game. In that sense, even the (mostly harmless) games carry undertones of danger and horror. This one is a kind of capture the flag situation (the flag is a bone) in which the Yellowjackets determine who will serve the other half during their Summer Solstice festival. It also features the pent-up dynamics that will surely dominate the season: Shauna is furious at Mari, the kind of feud that can happen in isolation because there is no way of escaping another person when you’re both trapped in the same situation. It is also a continuation of one of the elements that generally plays into how the Yellowjackets have organised themselves, and arguably survived out there so long: they (mostly) are a soccer team used to competition and success, and have therefore self-selected for taking any game they play a little too seriously, and falling back, on principle, into a hierarchy.

What makes this entry into the new season interesting is that it’s kind of a soft launch: the change of season has brought ample food, and through their differing talents, they have managed to build a self-sustaining community that actually, at first glance, looks pretty neat. Tai has made use of a book on shelter-building and created very solid-looking structures that look more fitting and less haunted than the cabin that used to be their home (that I find the circular entry to one of them slightly creepy is probably a me-problem, not a comment on A-frame architecture). There is game in the woods. The girls are keeping rabbits and ducks. Without the constant struggle to survive, they are back to filling their time with games. Their love for rituals persists, but it’s not really about figuring out the right input into the black box of the woods to ensure survival anymore, but to fill the time meaningfully to avoid boredom. They are, as much as that is possible under the circumstances, thriving.

The downside to no longer having the uniting demand of bodily survival with them at all times is that the pettier, smaller irritations of co-existing with other people that aren’t selected for compatibility become less bearable. There’s Mari – part of the group, but generally considered as annoying, so much that most of the girls comprehend why Shauna loathes her so much – and there’s Shauna, who has survived the trauma of losing her best friend, eating her best friend, and losing a baby. Shauna is isolated because she doesn’t buy into what everyone else is doing to pass the time, and so the show brilliantly contrasts Van’s vainglorious retelling of their survival, the introduction to the Summer Solstice, with her lonely and furious diary writing that contradicts everything that Van is saying about how brave and strong they are. It’s fitting that goalie Van has become the storyteller of the group – she seems more confident and at ease than she ever has (Liv Hewson is so great in these scenes and clearly having a blast). It calls back the old days of Van retelling the films that they can no longer watch, except now the stories are about themselves, they have become the heroes. Van is the one who has physically survived the most, who should be dead three times over, and yet is here now to tell the tale of impossible survival. She is also the one who might just be missing the least, unburdened from her drunk mum, supported by her girlfriend, with no more need to hide. Shauna, on the other hand, has lost everything, and has always been too removed from the group dynamics (Jackie was her connection) to now thrive in them.

Tai realises that the conflict between Shauna and Mari could spiral out of control especially because it so petty, because the reality of their situation means that even minor things can become thrown hugely out of proportion (“Maybe out here, it’s all life or death” she says, foreshadowingly). Natalie, their chosen leader, is ill-equipped to handle it – it’s exactly the kind of “dumb girl shit” that she has never cared about and done everything she could to avoid. It’s a reminder that Nat may have been part of the team but didn’t used to be friends with any of them. Tai is already playing the politics, but Nat has become their leader in part because she is so reluctant to. The only person that still talks to Shauna is Melissa, who, as Shauna says acerbically, didn’t even have a personality prior to now (I think this is the first time she’s spoken, but it’s great to see another background face becoming foregrounded, it’s always been weird to have so many unnamed characters just hanging out while stuff was happening). And Melissa, clearly aware of girl dynamics, knows that nothing binds more than having a shared enemy, and plays right into Shauna’s hatred of Mari. 

It escalates during the festivities: Shauna, deeply resentful of having been on the losing side of the capture the flag and having been chosen to “serve” the others (plus, she’s also still the only capable butcher of meat, which must hurt every time she has to do it, and remind her of her trauma), spits in Mari’s venison stew. Maybe it’s also not the best idea for the others to recreate the set-up of their first feast so faithfully and make Shauna attend, considering who the centre piece was last time. Mari runs off, and right into a “bambi” trap that Coach, now roaming the woods by himself, has built. Will Mari survive long enough to be the girl in the pit twice?

Yellowjackets continues to be a show of two different paces across the timelines, but hopefully, the balance will work out a bit better this time around. The adult timeline focuses on the fall-out of Nat’s death last season, and how it reverberates through everyone’s lives. Taissa and Van (who are living together to but in separate rooms – and not fucking yet, the show wants us to know) and Shauna are attending a memorial service that serves as a stark reminder of legacy for all of them. It’s deeply depressing: Nat’s mum gives a short and loveless eulogy that time-travels all the way through the years, a summary of Nat’s unhappy, horrible childhood. Shauna considers how pathetic her own legacy is – a bad mum, a bad wife, nothing much apart from her survival in the woods. Taissa is the first State Senator who impeached herself before assuming office. Van is dying of cancer. Misty is absent – because, it becomes obvious, nobody has bothered to check in with her, and the only person looking after her is Walter, who has given her a key to Natalie’s storage unit. Misty was the one who spent so much energy on trying to save Nat only to end up being the one who killed her – everyone else seems fairly unaffected by the loss, save for how it reminds them of how their own eulogies would be written. It triggers something in all of them, but only Misty’s spiral is a form of genuine grief and tribute to Nat. She goes through the items in the storage unit and steals Nat’s leather jacket (which she promptly puts on over her cutesy cat-sweater-outfit), then drinks seven whiskeys in the bar, gets into a fight with some harmless dudes, and tries to set them on fire. It feels like what Nat may have done while grieving a loved one. In the end, Walter is the only one who comes to rescue her, and we know Misty isn’t one to easily forgive grudges or being kept on the sidelines.

Everyone else’s reaction to the loss is about self-reflection, or mitigating, in a really fucked up way, what they perceive as shortcomings in their eulogies. Shauna ends up connecting with Callie (who seems to be in the process of becoming a focus point of the season) when she reacts to her Carrie-esque revenge for some “dumb girl shit” with awe instead of reprimands. It’s a very different method of parenting than Jeff would probably propose in light of everything that Callie has come to find out about her parents, and done herself in reaction to it. It’s intriguing though as an insight into what comes natural Shauna, who was never very good at traditional parenting and is now maybe finding a way through it by focusing on what she has in common with her daughter (who seems less disturbed than figuring out who she is herself, which is definitely interesting).
Taissa convinces Van to go on a fancy date with her. I’ve always found adult Taissa the least like her younger version – it’s a deliberate choice for a character who was so driven to be successful that she had to deny everything that happened. There are also hints here that the split between her and Van happened because of that ambition (Taissa having started her career in politics where it may have been difficult to be out). The attraction between the two is powerful because it calls back the Tai that used to exist, the free and capable person back in the wilderness, who didn’t have to hide herself (and is celebrated for being the "handy lesbian") – Van knows who she is at her most transgressive, and still loves her. The question is if that is the best or the worst version of Taissa that Tai is trying to get back by pulling Van into it with her. It’s also something to consider that Van – who seems to be flourishing in those sunny months in the woods, who seems to have found the perfect place – ended up moving away from it all into a very solitary life that was deeply nostalgic about the past through videos, but disconnected from all the other survivors. It’s an imaginary past of stories, not the real thing. Lauren Ambrose’s performance here is perfect because she is so cautious and reluctant about Taissa, but the second that she sees a glimpse of the old Tai coming back – when they dine and dash at the fancy restaurant – she’s right back in those woods with her first love, and it becomes impossible to resist even if it’s already so clear that it’ll end badly (Taissa’s hallucinations return right on cue).

Mari’s in the pit, but not in that pit yet. Callie intercepts a videotape addressed to her mum that was left at the door, and she hides it. The woods emit unnatural sounds in response to a ceremony for the dead, and now everyone can hear them.

Random notes:

The song choices in this episode were excellent as usual. Cat Stevens for the beautiful little village in the woods where rabbits are frolicking in their enclosure, Bush for Van and Taissa being fucked up together, the Runaways’ Cherry Bomb for Misty grieving the loss of Nat in the only appropriate manner, Cake's (a band for people who grew up loving Daria!) I Will Survive, uncensored.

I kind of like the gendering between the survival of the team vs the survival of Coach, who is building traps in the woods and stumbles over a cache of essentials that he turns into a trap straight away – you wouldn’t think that keeping ducks and rabbits ever even occurred to him.

In light of everything, it’s interesting that Misty’s room has Yellowjackets memorabilia visible – everyone else was so busy covering up what happened, Misty is the only one actually proud of who she became in the woods. It’s too meaningful for her to hide.

In season three, things continue to not come up Randy for Randy, who is now delivering intestines for a version of DoorDash.

We find out that adult Lottie is now in a facility in an aside – young Lottie, in the flashbacks, continues to be reluctant about her role as a spiritual leader but is trying to at least help Travis, who is very much in the deep end after the loss of his brother and everything else.

I think the waiter having a heart attack after chasing Tai and Van is a clear case of horrible, unintended consequences following whenever the past is evoked – they’re not even aware of the damage, but it follows them like a curse.

The Newsreader - 1989

 

 "I just feel working together, you know, you me and the story, that was the happiest time of my life."

There is a moment in The Newsreader’s final episode of the third season, titled The Fall, that will haunt me for a while. Dale Jennings, who has spent the season torturing himself by listening to the increasingly cruel viewer messages, has finally broken down. He shows up for the nightly news drunk, dishevelled. He gives a performance in front of the camera that is an act of sheer self-destruction: mocking himself, reflecting all those messages about his lack of ease, his inability to be a regular bloke, his robotic tone of voice and facial expressions. It’s a broadcasted breakdown, a horrifying performance of a man who has been broken in the world that he lives in, and by the ambitions he had for himself. It’s a cry for help – it’s so clear that he needs to be supported and cared for, but instead, his boss – Lindsay (William McInnes), who finally ascends to full villain status here instead of caricature of a high blood-pressure, low-functioning alcoholic propped up by old boys networks – uses the opportunity for further beat down on him. Dale, fed up by his antics, has tried to have him removed, and the ploy has failed, leaving Lindsay to seek revenge. He’s blackmailed him with all the stories he’s bought up and buried that show Dale’s relationships with other men. He’s repeated the taunts of the dissatisfied viewers, mocked his style of delivery, that we know he has worked so hard for, that is the result of him trying to eradicate any perceived weakness or softness. In this moment, where Dale seems to be at the brink of complete self-annihilation, Lindsay looms over him in front of the make-up mirror like some kind of devil, mocking him further, playing into all the self-destructive thoughts that he already has about himself. He wants to annihilate, dominate completely. He puts his heavy hands on his shoulders. In this moment, Lindsay personifies all the horrible traits that The Newsreader has spent three seasons portraying: a sexist, racist, homophobic man who cannot be removed from his position of power because he drinks and plays golf with the boss, who will do everything he can to prevent change. If The Newsreader is a portrait of Australia – maybe limited in scope to the late Eighties, but these histories have branches well into 2025 – then Lindsay is a culmination of the worst parts of it, a stubborn dam that stands in the way of change and progress toward something better. For Dale, he represents personal ruin with his vindictiveness, his instinctual hatred of everything that Dale is as a person.

This is a season of extraordinary performances by everyone, but Sam Reid manages something that is truly magnificent. He captures what happens to a person who is trying hard to become someone else, someone more accepted and palatable. He denies himself, but this self-abnegation has physical and mental consequences. The more desperate he gets as he internalises the feedback, seemingly willingly torturing himself with only the worst parts of it, the more his bottled-up desperation and grief becomes obvious in his body: tight, contained in the way that all the bits of himself he’s pushed down seem to dent the surface. Reid’s physical acting is a feat: the way he holds himself, the way his voice becomes stranger and stranger in his broadcasts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more accurate or difficult-to-watch showcase of what homophobia does. His performance is all the more impressive in contrast to what he does with Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, who could not be more different from Dale.
It's even more effective because she show frequently takes Dale out of that environment and into one where he can be himself: Helen knows him, and loves him unconditionally. In this third season, as much as they should be in professional competition now that their shows air at the same time, The Newsreader has deliberately decided that they would not be separated, that they would deliberately and consciously prioritise their friendship. In the past, the tension has been between what they wanted and needed from each other, but now all the pressure is coming from the outside, and their (now only platonic) love for each other is something that nothing can undermine or kill anymore. With Helen, Dale is warm, comforting and comforted – the tension leaves his body, the burden of performance is lifted. This season could have been about what happens when their individual ambitions clash, with Helen despairing when she realises that the network she now works for (a fictionalised version of Channel Seven) has decided to pit her against her old workplace. Instead, the season is all about how Dale can free himself and become the person he is with Helen in other contexts, and if that is at all possible while working in broadcasting.

Helen (Anna Torv once again doing her best work, even though her whole career is made up of great performances) is in a seemingly more precarious situation at the beginning of the season. Dale wins the Gold Logie, Australia’s greatest television award. Helen is only nominated for and loses an award, after skilfully and painstakingly saving her career with her work as a foreign correspondent (we see her covering the Lockerbie disaster at the beginning of the series). Her new gig is a nightly Public Affairs show – clearly work that suits her more, with a journalistic focus on deeper storytelling – but going up against the number one rated show is a gamble, and one that takes a while to pay off. Not unlike her old workplace, she once again has to negotiate between her keen instincts for a good story and the requests of a network that only cares about the numbers, and is hesitant to take any further risks. She finally seeks psychological help for her inability to manage her emotions – the scenes between her and her therapist are some of my favourites this season – but it also comes with the shock of being diagnosed as borderline, when all she wants is a medication or treatment that will fix her. Instead, the therapist provides tools she can use, and Helen grudgingly finds them useful. Her show becomes successful when she trusts her instincts – but it’s Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson) who is the true catalyst for change this season, who shines. Last season, she was asked to choose between working for Helen and marrying Rob, a decision that she knew would likely lead to an eventual end to her career. Lindsay doesn’t give her maternity leave, so once she gives birth, she loses her job – but she still proves to be the once character with the best instinct for a developing story, and the impressive rolodex of contacts to pursue them. Tim from Camera has been working for a different channel in China, but with the outbreak of the student revolts 1989, his press credentials have been revoked. He returns to Australia with his partner (professionally and privately) to ask his former network to send him back there, knowing that the revolts are likely to erupt soon into one of the big stories of the decade. Lindsay doesn’t see the potential, because if he was ever good at what he does, his time has long passed. Noelene takes the story to Helen, who hires her as a producer on her new show. A few weeks later, she is the only one with exclusive footage from the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

There is a really interesting and considered way in which the personal themes of the season align with the general political environment of the late 1980s, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. All these stories they are covering are about a clash of new ideas and demands against regimes eager to suppress them, and in telling them, the journalists themselves are up against conservative networks unwilling to support them. Their personal ambitions – especially Noelene’s (and Dennis’, back at Dale’s workplace), come up against the implicit racism of their environment, where their vision and ability is not being taken seriously.  

There is more of an arc to the news stories in this season, more coherence maybe specifically because there is a clear arc towards the end of the USSR and the lead up to it. These world events and who has the better coverage of them determines the ratings, but the quieter moments of the season are more resonant: Helen’s story about mental hospitals, when she reckons with her own history and ends in a surprisingly emotional appeal for more empathy, right after she herself has been terrorised by the press by a leaked story that Lindsay was all-too-willing to plant out of his personal hatred for her, Evelyn Walker’s meddling after the passing of her husband that ends in a satisfying and effective take-down of Lindsay whose hubris doesn’t allow him to take her seriously, her daughter’s relationship to Dale and the false allyship of someone who thinks that the answer to his existential struggle is to frame his bisexuality as a personal defect to overcome – these are all more quiet beats throughout the season that hit hard. One of the most eloquent storylines is only one episode, following last season’s about the protests during the Bicentennial: Once again, Helen is approached by activist Lynus (Hunter Page-Lochard) with a story about an Aboriginal former VFL player who quit the game because of racism. The story would be a response to sport reporter Rob’s (Stephen Peacocke) claim that there is no racism, only brotherhood, in Australian sport, and his flubbed reaction to an Australian rugby team intending to play in South Africa in spite of the apartheid boycott. Like last season, the story is cut – because footy is the “crown jewel” of Channel 7 and footy is like a religion in Australia, because the white protagonists on the show, even when they’re outwardly sympathetic, won’t risk anything for stories about Australian racism and First Nations people – and because Helen’s poor information control retraumatises the player willing to talk, showing how little she considers his well-being. When Rob meets his former fellow player in a bar, he explains to him what it was like to be taunted by racist fans without any support from his white “mates” (the story echoes that of legendary player Nicky Winmar, but there are several examples from just the last ten years), and how empty Rob’s claim of brotherhood is. While the show covers world-changing events that changed the course of history, nothing much has changed for First Nations people in Australia since the late Eighties.

At the end of the season, Helen is confronted by Noelene about her unwillingness to extend the privilege she enjoys to advocate for colleagues who aren’t male and white. Instead of advocating for Dale to get a producer spot on her team after his breakdown and firing, she uplifts Noelene: and Dale, freed from the pressure, finally free from the anvil over his head, reports from Berlin after the Fall of the wall: a different man, figuring out who he is, visibly happy.

2021-, created by Michael Lucas, starring Anna Torv, Sam Reid, Michelle Lim Davidson, William McInnes, Chum Ehelepola, William McInnes, Marg Downey, Stephen Peacocke, Maria Angelico, Philippa Northeast, Chai Hansen.