We have sci-drama, apocalyptic tension and hilarious humanity in the spotlight in this post, proof that streaming TV has something for pretty much anyone!
Want to see old friends on a bold new adventure? We can do that! What about going to the end of the world and finding that as well as heartache and loss there’s also life and new beginnings? Got you covered. And want a good old laugh at how difficult life can be but how good too, especially if you’re handy with observations made of rapier wit? Laugh away, my friends, laugh away!
It’s all there and all reviewed for your viewing pleasure …
Star Trek: Picard (S3, E1-2)
The gang is back in town!
The Next Generation gang that is; although only a few in episodes one and two of the final season of Star Trek: Picard, and certainly not at all together.
Episode 1, rather appropriately titled “The Next Generation”, kicks off with Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) under attack on a rather lovely Federation starship, the the SS Eleos, by forces unknown.
She’s in a desperate fight for survival, and while those doing humanitarian work such as Crusher is doing for the Mariposa Medical Movement – established by one time travelling member of the Picard cast, Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) and his 21st century love, Dr Teresa Ramirez (Sol Rodriguez) – usually aren’t pursued and fired upon with extreme prejudice, someone clearly wants her or the man travelling with her whose identity is rather sensationally revealed in episode 2 (he shall remain nameless in this review so the surprise isn’t spoiled).
She does manage to hold off the skeletally-faced bad guys but is wounded and before she, presumably passes out – she’s found later in a stasis pod so that seems likely – she manages to message good old Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) who is getting ready to head to Chaltok IV with his Romulan love Laris (Oral Brady), and tell him he’s needed and fast.
Goodbye romantically-tinged retirement plans!
Linking up with his onetime 2IC, Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), who hints everything may not be all loved-up with his Imzadi, deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), Picard fakes his way onto the USS Titan, captained by an arrogant and deservedly sceptical Captain Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick) who is not buying the tall tale Picard and Riker are buying.
He does, rather amusingly, point out that he doesn’t really want to heed the word of an admiral who’s retired and a captain with no command, both of whom have shown a propensity for taking recklessly adventurous action, damn the consequences, and for crushing spaceships, both deliberately and not.
While the average Trekkie’s affections most decidedly lie with Picard and Riker, watching Shaw point out how hilariously messy they have been in executing their duties is pretty fast, as well providing a sort of short-tracked Star Trek: The Next Generation 101 primer.
Eventually through means fair and foul – OK pretty much all foul with Shaw’s 2IC, Seven of Nine aka Annika Hansen which is why Shaw insists she calls herself onboard the Titan, doing her best to sabotage her career and help her friends get to where Beverly is – they’re reunited with their former crew member, meet her mysterious crewmate (spoilers!) and manage to successfully face this season’s Big Bad, Vadic (Amanda Plummer) who is after Beverly’s crewmate who has a huge bounty on his head.
Doing her best Nero impersonation (see 2009’s Star Trek film), all sorts of humourously playful iron fist in a velvet glove stuff, Vadic is clearly not just there for the bounty hunting but quite why she is there is going to have to wait for another instalment with episode two ending with her in pursuit of the Titan and Picard and Riker well truly having set the cat among the Starfleet pigeons.
While all this is going on – hell of a way to have a reunion with your old crew Beverly! – newly-minted Section 31 intelligence officer, Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd) is on the case, trying to find out who stole some rather nasty quantum weapons from the Daystrom Institute (the good money should surely be on Vadic right? But I wonder??), an investigation which leads her via an ex and a number of nefarious criminal types, including a sleazy Ferengi gangster named Sneed (Aaron Stanford) in search of someone called the Red Lady.
She doesn’t avert a terrible terrorist attack, alas but she is saved form certain death by her handler, hitherto masked by no visuals and voice modulation, who turns out to be none other than – ta-dah! Wield that spoiler-y bat’leth! – Worf (Michael Dorn), adding one more member of the old crew to the roster, those he has yet to get together with Picard et. al.
No doubt he will in time, as will Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) – he does appear indirectly in episode one and two via his daughter and Titan Crewmember, Sydney (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut) – and Brent Spiner as Lore (Data sadly is very dead) but for now we have four familiar faces back in two episodes that don’t go overboard on the nostalgia, doling out just enough to fuel a very contemporary storyline.
Picard‘s third and final season is off to a damn good start in “The Next Generation” and “Disengage” (get it? Of course you do!) which neatly balance seeing old faces with a punchy new narrative which you know is going to get bigger and badder as time goes on but which for now is building bit-by-bit with the nuanced, take it easy approach that has made this Trek series such enjoyable viewing.
The opening episodes set things up nicely, with just enough answers to offset the burgeoning mystery, and it will fascinating to see where this darker version of TNG: The Next Generation (see what I did there? Yeah, you did) goes, and whether it can keep sustaining the delicate balance between the past and the present and whether Picard’s legacy will be one of saving the galaxy, even if, as he tells Laris, he is not overly concerned with having a legacy.
Maybe he isn’t but you can bet season 3 will take his adventures out with a bang not a whimper since this is likely TNG’s swansong and we had better, like Captain Shaw, buckle up and hold on for dear life!
Episode 3 “Seventeen Seconds” premieres on Paramount+ on 9 March (10 March in Australia)
The Last of Us (S1, E6-7)
So it turns out even in the apocalypse, you CAN have nice things.
If you’re an inveterate viewer of The Walking Dead, you will be well accustomed to the idea that an idyllic town or a well-guarded sanctuary will be bloodily and violently ripped asunder before episode’s end, the idea being that the only outcome in a fallen world can be death and destruction.
It makes for good drama sure but it’s also nihilistically hopeless and ultimately wholly dissatisfying storyline-wise, pivoting on the idea that humanity, once broken can never rise above its baser instincts again; thankfully in the two most recent episodes of The Last of Us, where Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) find themselves in the snowy, largely infected-free expansive of Wyoming, actually arrive in a guarded, prosperous town which is actually allowed to remain intact, its 300 inhabitants, which includes Joel’s long-lost brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his new wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) are actually to stay alive and keep having water and electricity and Christmas trees and good food.
Glory be – turns out you can more than survive the apocalypse!
Exhibit #2 for thriving not just surviving in a zombie hellscape are Florence and Marlon (Elaine Miles and Graham Greene), a First Nations couple who outlived the fall of civilisation because they moved to the middle of nowhere many years before everything went south – for the record, the hilariously taciturn but delightfully charming Florence did not want to – and who, unfazed by being held at gunpoint by Joel and Ellie, who don’t threaten them (they just want intel on where on a map of endlessly forested white they are), help our cross-country trekkers to find the nearest centre of population.
No, no Laramie or Cody which, like all former urban centres, are fungal no-go zones, but a settlement across the “River of Death” – Ellie has a ball throwing that one around, her sense of humour intact three months after the horrific events of Kansas City – which has a fearsome reputation for killing people.
Turns out they are vigorous about defending their patch, even going so far as to have fungi-sniffing dog who they use to vet the health of interlopers and who, it turns out, LOVES Ellie furthering bolstering her immune superhero status, but only to protect their super hidden place of sanctuary where it turns out, yay for narrative fulfilment, Tommy lives!
Let the family reunion begin although Joel isn’t exactly thrilled that Tommy wants to stay put and that he’s married and Maria is pregnant and … honestly, still mired in the grief of losing his daughter twenty years earlier, Joel hates everything.
So traumatised all over again is he by Tommy’s newfound blissful domesticity which, again, does NOT burn to the ground Walking Dead style, that he evens tells Ellie that he’s going to stay out in what was Jackson Hole, now with added fort, and send her off with Tommy, convinced he’s not up to the job, beset as he is by panic attacks.
He’s stuck way back somewhere when it all went to shit, as is Ellie in her own way whose backstory we see in episode 7 as Joel recovers from a stab wound to the stomach courtesy of vigilantes who are patrolling the university in Colorado where they were told the Fireflies and their scientists would be.
They’ve moved on, but of course they have, leaving wild lab monkeys in their wake and a narrative trail that is sending Joel and Ellie off to Utah next – this is courtesy of a pinboard map where all the multi-coloured pins lead to Salt Lake City – but before that Joel has to survive his wound which he does while we see what took Ellie, once a FEDRA trainee, to the “dark side” of the Fireflies.
It turns out, her journey from establishment to revel figure came about one fateful night when her former roommate and BFF Riley Abel (Storm Reid) comes back, sneaking in the window and defying FEDRA patrols, and takes her off for one last magical night together in an abandoned shopping mall.
They have a blast once Ellie gets over the fact that Riley has now joined the Fireflies, and spend their precious last hours before moves to Atlanta QZ on assignment, riding merry-go-rounds, playing pinball games and goofing off in Halloween to music courtesy of Ellie’s treasured Walkman.
It’s the night that fond farewells are made of – it’s given even more luminous loveliness courtesy of the fact that Ellie and Riley kiss, something that Ellie’s apologies for until Riley makes it clear she’s totally cool with her BFF’s move; quite why being gay is still such a fraught thing is addressed by one of the show’s co-creators in a fascinating piece of insight that makes perfect sense since the world stopped in 2003 – and it only ends when an infected bursts out of nowhere and bites them both.
We know how it ends – Ellie survives while you presume Riley does not though the story seamlessly implies rather than shows what happens down the line – but it heartbreakingly intense, the close bond between them clear from the get-go, yet more proof of the emotional resonance that fills every last frame of this utterly brilliant videogame adaptation.
Another standalone episode effectively, episode 7 “Left Behind” (episode 6 where Joel and Tommy reunite, rather awkwardly if emotionally is fittingly titled “Kin”) reinforces how beautifully this show integrates flashback and current narrative threads, and how it is building, through rich characterisation and pitch-perfect storytelling that balances despair and hope to a winning degree, one of the best apocalyptic shows to come down the end of the world pike in quite some time.
Episode 8, “When We Are in Need” premieres on 5 March on HBO (6 March in Australia on Binge).
Shrinking (S1, E5-6)
t’s a time for reckoning for the hilarious gang from Shrinking.
Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) has to confront the fact that his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) is crushing on his live-in patient Sean (Luke Tennie), a US Army vet with major PTSD issues, that his relationship with his gruff mentor Paul (Harrison Ford in sparklingly taciturn mode) is not as warmly supportive as it once was, this his dead wife might not have loved or even like him when she died, and that perhaps he and his colleague and close friend Gaby (Jessica Williams) night — MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD! — have serious, lust-fuelled feelings for each other.
That’s a lot of reckoning, all delivered with the show’s trademark mix of sharply-written dialogue, character-driven comedy and a willingness to throw the absurd into the everyday, but he’s not the only one grappling with some big things coming home to roost.
Paul finally faces up to the fact that he has to let his daughter Meg (Lily Rabe) know he has Parkinson’s, a brave if reluctantly taken decision that he regrets almost instantly when Meg, as he fears, swoops in to take over his life, treating him like a decision-challenged invalid in the process.
Points to him for finally coming clean but while it’s good to clean the air, Paul feels his life has just taken a much-feared descent into over-monitored decrepitude.
While he’s trying to work what to do next, with Meg about to land to take over care, Alice is not sure what to do about Sean; sure he’s older but she LIKES him and at a party one night where Jimmy’s BFF Brian (Michael Urie) is going to surprise propose to his boyfriend Charlie (Devin Kawaoka) – that happens but not as planned, thanks to Jimmy vomiting on a piano, and it’s quietly, impossibly, warmly romantic and very funny thanks to a stoned-out Paul (long story but connected to Meg and gummy pot) – she goes to kiss him and …
…it’s a big NOPE from him with Sean rightly pointing out he is too old, leaving Alice to say “Fuck!” a lot and ponder how it is she’ll come back from this massive emotional embarrassment.
All of these big reckoning moments point to how well Shrinking, likely one of the cleverest but rampantly overlooked sitcoms out there at the moment, brings together the poignantly silly and the quip-heavy light and funny, resulting in a highly intelligent, buoyantly emotionally literate and very funny show that brings the tricky business of family, friends and relationships into consistently entertainingly sharp relief.
Episode 7 “Apology Tour” streams on AppleTV+ on 3 March (4 March in Australia)
This is a great behind-the-scenes video with two of Shrinking’s stars …