Beyond Selidor

It's cold, it's rainy, and a flock of wood pigeons has descended on the back garden. Let's do this week's open thread.

Today's open thread concept came to me when I was thinking about how frequently I reread books (there are certain books within my line of sight right now that I'm pretty sure I have probably reread several hundred times), and how rarely in comparison I rewatch films or TV shows. I definitely rewatched stuff a lot more when I was a teenager — this was the 1990s, when video rental shops were still a thing, and my friends and I used to have sleepovers almost every weekend, where we'd borrow three or four movies and fall asleep in someone's living room while watching them. We had a rotating series of favourites that we'd watch again and again — the first Matrix film and The Fifth Element were firm favourites, as were a bunch of the classic 1990s slasher films, plus the usual suspects among 1990s teen romantic comedies, The Craft, etc. My sister and I also used to rent and watch the same films over and over again.

But other than a couple of Buffy and Angel rewatches at various points in the past twenty years, and Matthias and I occasionally rewatching previously viewed films as part of our New Year's Eve themed movie nights (e.g. all three LotR films), rewatching is definitely less common for me than rereading. I assume this is because it's much more of a timesuck — in general I read much more quickly than I can watch a film or a TV show, and I have more control over how much I read in a single sitting, whereas viewing is dictated by the lenghth of the film or the TV episode.

What about you? Do you return to longform audiovisual media for repeat viewings? Has this changed over time? Is this different to your approach to rereading books?

I mostly finished five TV shows in this past month, but left it until today to write everything up as the final episode of one show only aired on Friday. As is common with my TV viewing, it was a mixed bag of genres. The shows were:

The Lowdown, a tale of local political corruption starring Ethan Hawke as a local journalist and secondhand bookshop owner attempting, ineptly, to uncover the truth behind the suspicious death of one of the members of a wealthy, prominent family. It's run by the same showrunner behind my beloved Reservation Dogs, and written with the same blend of offbeat surrealism, slightly sentimental affection, and incisively sharp focus on the poverty, deprivation and racism festering in declining American cities and towns.

Season 2 of A Thousand Blows, Stephen Knight's take on the nineteenth-century East End. As with the previous season, it's a wild, lurid tale of audacious heists, rival criminal gangs battling for dominance, boxing matches offering opportunities for the show's impoverished characters to claw their way into financial security, and larger-than-life people with larger-than-life emotions, told with a comic book sensibility. As a standalone series, I would have enjoyed this, but as something following on from Season 1, I found it a bit lacking. It was as if all the previous season's character development was reset, and there was never any sense of real risk: characters felt protected by plot armour from suffering any consequences.

I Love LA, a comedy miniseries about a group of self-absorbed Gen Zers trying to make it in the entertainment industry (social media influencer, manager of said influencer, costume designer to pop stars, nepo baby daughter of successful actor), which was almost painful in its humour. It's brilliantly acted and written, but excruciating if you find secondhand embarrassment at the obliviousness of characters always on the brink of disaster hard to watch.

Season 2 of The Night Manager, which picks up close to a decade after the previous season (an updating of a Le Carré novel for the Arab Spring era) finished. This new tale of twenty-first-century spycraft deals with corruption, international arms dealing, and external attempts to meddle politically in Colombia, and is well written and well acted with its stellar cast, even if some elements strained credulity. It's a wild ride from start to finish — tense and engrossing, with some incredible and audacious twists. Bring on Season 3!

Spartacus: House of Ashur, a spinoff from the cult favourite Starz series about the revolt and subsequent crushing of enslaved gladiators in ancient Rome. I have to say I thought the concept was a bit far-fetched and ridiculous (a canon-divergence AU in which a secondary character — who died towards the end of Spartacus — gets offered a second lease of life in the afterlife, and lives again as a freedman, the client of Marcus Crassus, and the owner of the house of gladiators in which he, and Spartacus were previously enslaved), and I'm still not sure why the show exists, but I can't deny it was entertaining. It has the same wall-to-wall gratuitous violence (slow-motion, comic-book style punches and blows by sword and spear, rivers of blood spraying around the screen), nudity (equal opportunity) and sexposition, the same bizarre dialogue choices (all the characters speak without the use of definite and indefinite articles, and absent possessive pronouns, as if translating directly from Latin — I honestly wonder how the actors are able to speak such contorted lines without difficulty), and, underneath all the sex and violence, a serious story about the limits of respectability politics. (In other words, a marginalised person can expend all his energy adopting the trappings and values of those privileged in his society, swallow every insult, and do everything in his power to cater to their whims and give them what they want, and it will still never be enough for him to gain material comfort, safety, or their acceptance of him as their equal.) I assume it goes without saying that if you're looking for historical accuracy, or even a sense of internal narrative coherence, this is not a show I'd recommend: it's 90 per cent vibes, and you just have to go with that. In the show's final five minutes, it makes a narrative choice so wild and so left field that I was almost astonished by the audacity, making it clear that — if it does return for a new season — it will be operating not just in canon divergence, but in full blown alternate history.

I feel as if the common thread tying together all these shows is character who think they are very clever constantly worsening their own situations due to their inability to think more than one step ahead, and making poor, reactive decisions instead of pausing and trying to think more strategically beyond their immediate circumstances.

It's been a good weekend after a tiring and emotionally difficult week. Saturday was filled with the kind of icy clear wintry skies that I love, and it was wonderful to wander around the market gathering vegetables, eggs, and other bits and pieces, before retreating to the house. I made a batch of ginger-, lemon- and honey-infused water to use as a sort of tisane on cold nights, and lay around catching up with podcasts and Dreamwidth comments. On my walk out to the pool this morning, almost every second window had a cat slumbering on the windowsill, and the hedgerows were filled with clouds of twittering sparows. I put in even more effort than usual in the pool this morning and at the classes in the gym yesterday, and my body feels pleasantly tired. Now, I'm sitting in the living room with softly foggy skies outside and a whisky-scented candle, while a noorishbynoor Bahraini-style dal simmers on the stove in the kitchen for tomorrow's dinner. Everything feels sleepy and slow.

I'll start things off with some very good news. Some of you may recall my post last week about Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with suggestions of ways to help. This included a fundraiser to buy large, expensive batteries for Kyivan families so that they had reliable sources of power in the wake of constant blackouts, and loss of heating and hot water in their homes. These batteries cost $3400 US apiece, and when I posted about the fundraiser last Saturday, the organisers had bought two so far. As of this week, they now have nine, and you can see some photos of Anastasiia Lapatina, the journalist who organised the fundraiser, with the delivered batteries, in her latest Substack newsletter update. Thank you to everyone who donated or spread the word of this fundraiser: you contributed to this, and you can see concrete proof of your actions. It's a small thing in light of the overwhelming horrors going on all over the world, but it is genuinely, unambiguously helpful. The fundraiser is ongoing, so please feel free to continue to share my original post or donate if you are able. Other concrete ways to help are the Ukrainian government's fundraising initiative for air defence or Come Back Alive's fundraising campaign for drones to use as air defence against other drones — helping civillians cope with the attacks on energy infrastructure is good, but preventing those attacks from happening at all is obviously better.

Reading this week has mostly been rereads, with the only reread of note being Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month poetry and short fiction collection. This was a project she undertook in 2010, when a friend spent the month of February sending her different samples of honey each day, and she wrote a poem or short story in response to the look, smell and taste of each sample. Each creative piece of writing is preceded by a description of the sensory experience of that specific honey, vividly captured so that the reader is brought along for the ride. Although this is an early piece of El-Mohtar's work, it has all the hallmarks that I've come to expect and appreciate in her later writing: lyrical, fairytale storytelling, with each item in the collection an exquisite, self-contained gem. Her writing is always a rich feast for the senses — one does not just read her stories and poetry, but rather tastes, smells, and touches the little worlds she creates within them — and this collection really plays to those strengths.

I'm also about a quarter of the way through Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan's adult fiction debut, in which a young woman with terminal cancer is offered a chance to save her life if she elects to be transported into the fictional world of the wildly successful series of fantasy novels of which she and her younger sister are fans. The only catch — she finds herself in the body of one of the series' villains, who is slated for execution, and must therefore rely on her knowledge of the series' plot, and wider genre knowledge in general, in order to wriggle her way out of things. Rees Brennan herself was diagnosed with cancer in her thirties, and went through a long, painful recovery, and the fear and rage of that experience is conveyed with real vulnerability, deftly sitting next to the book's gleeful, quippy humour. It's written with real affection for both transformative fandom and the way that experience of collectively engaging with fiction transcends the sometimes questionable quality of the source material (if a work of fiction is meaningful, that's all that matters), and I can tell it's going to be a wild ride from start to finish.

I've got laundry to hang out (in the kitchen, as outdoor laundry will not be possible until at least late March), and more reading to do, and then Matthias and I will be heading into one of the villages south of Cambridge for a Burns Night dinner in one of the gastropubs we frequent sporadically. I'm expecting tartan, bagpipes, and whisky, the latter of which will be a bit of a shock to the system as I have been refraining from alcohol for the past month. But it will be good fun!

A busy work week like the one I described previously requires a quiet weekend, so that is exactly what happened. Gym, swimming, market shopping, and a loop around the river, market, and high street today with Matthias (we bought hot drinks from the coffee rig and browsed in the bookshop without buying anything), and otherwise no other excursions out of the house. I tried making these brown butter miso chocolate chip cookies as recommended by rekishi, and they were very delicious indeed! I've just taken more pine and red berry branches from the disassembled Christmas wreath, and they'll go on the fire in the wood-burning stove tonight.

Two nice things happened on Dreamwidth yesterday: fandomtrees reveals went live, and threesentenceficathon is open for prompts and fills for 2026. I wrote one Six of Crows Kaz/Inej ficlet and made a couple of recipe recommendations for the former (and got given so many soup recipes in response to my own request — I can't wait to try them out), and in general had an enjoyable time. I haven't had a chance to plunge into the latter so far, but I always enjoy it when I do. The first post of prompts is here — I think it's a great, low-pressure way to rekindle the creative spark, and the atmosphere is always so friendly.

I've read three books, and one serialised short story this week. All but one of these (the third in a really silly romantasy series that I'm grimly carrying on with for completionist reasons; it involves human women falling in love with the personified gods of the North, South, East and West winds, and is really not good) were excellent.

The other two books were The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Garth Nix), and The Stolen Heart (Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk). Booksellers is Nix's first foray into novel-length fiction for adults, and is set in alternative version of 1980s Britain in which the titular booksellers have a secret life acting as a sort of supernatural security service. Back when I was a book reviewer, I interviewed Nix in his Sydney office, which was packed to the rafters with all the books he used as inspiration — encyclopedias and folklore dictionaries, fiction of all genres, popular history, anthologies of folktales and mythology, etc — and I could see the varied, myriad works of this personal reference library put to good use in this novel, which is heaving with references and allusions from all sources. There's Arthuriana, British children's fantasy (such as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones), Terry Pratchett, Romantic poetry, local folklore, weird bits of London history, Cold War-era spy novels, and so on. It's the sort of book that will appeal to people who enjoy playing spot-the-reference to all the ingredients of this genre salad, and Nix clearly had the time of his life writing it.

The Stolen Heart is the second in Kurkov's series of historical mystery novels in which his hapless protagonist Samson (who fell by accident into a job working for the Soviet police force in 1919 Kyiv) tries to solve another bizarre mystery while struggling to survive the chaos around him. As with the previous book in the series, The Stolen Heart is written with a careful balance of humour and empathy, conveying both the terror and the absurdity of living in a place and time of violent, destabilising transition. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm confident that I'll enjoy its conclusion.

Finally, I read 'The Road Less Taken', a serialised short story by Amal El-Mohtar. The link goes to the final chapter of the story, with links to the previous six chapters gathered at the top of the page, so if you are interested in reading it, ensure you start at the beginning. The story interweaves a relationship breakup with the recent jewellery theft from the Louvre and the folktale of Thomas the Rhymer in a manner so clever that you will feel by the end that these three things are, of course, connected in reality! It's an Amal El-Mohtar story, so all her trademarks — the power of music and of female friendships, and food and cooking as a way to show love and care — are of course front and centre.

The most recent snowflake_challenge prompt is all about tropes: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)



( Fictional cities, and more )

In the time it's taken for me to write this post, the light has left the sky, although it's still silvery blue at 4.30pm, as opposed to total darkness. The Earth moves on its slow tilt back towards the Sun.

I am absolutely flattened by work this week, and next week promises to be more of the same. It's the point in the academic year when all the Master's and PhD students have to hand in literature reviews and project proposals, and all of them suddenly panic and realise that the classes I taught them (carefully timetabled to coincide with the point at which they were meant to start work on their literature reviews and project proposals) actually contained crucial, useful information and they probably should have been paying more attention and doing the suggested follow-up activities while what I taught them was fresh in their minds. Because they haven't done this, they all, of course, contact me at once, now. It's good to be needed — I wouldn't have a job, otherwise — but I wish they didn't all need me so much and all at the same time.

Anyway, let's use another snowflake_challenge prompt for the Friday open thread: Talk about your creative process.

I know a lot of you have already answered this in your own journals, so feel free to link to your posts in the comments rather than writing things out again. Or, answer in the comments if this is a brand new topic for you!

( My answer )




What about you?

I've had this post written and locked for over 2.5 hours, hoping that the next snowflake_challenge prompt would be posted so that I could add it here and then unlock things, but it's getting to the point in the day when I close all screens and step away from the internet, the next prompt is still not posted, so I'm going to unlock things now and update ... who knows when?

We were promised apocalyptic storms and snow all weekend, but apart from a bit of sleet on the ground yesterday, and now some wind that keeps blowing our green bin out of the front garden and onto the footpath, the dire warnings were not necessary in this part of the world. Nevertheless, it was a weekend for hunkering down at home, although I was out at the sports centre for my classes yesterday and my swim this morning (nearly slipping over on the ice as I walked there both days), and Matthias and I did a quick run into town to return a bunch of library books this morning. The heating has been on almost constantly all week, and I supplemented it last night with a fire in the wood-burning stove. I added branches from the Christmas wreath, and the whole living room smelt of pine sap.

The combination of global politics and some difficult stuff with my family back in Australia have rendered me incapable of getting to sleep without watching dialogue-free cottagecore videos of Youtubers gardening, cooking and cleaning their cosy houses, but between that, and deliberately selecting yoga classes which feature kittens (my yoga teacher fosters cats, and tends to foster mother cats with new kittens when she does so), and ruthless avoidance of social media and news websites, I'm doing about as well as I can to manage the situation.

Last night Matthias and I picked the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein adaptation for our Saturday movie night. It's been over twenty years since I read Shelley's novel, but as far as I could remember, this was a pretty straight adaptation — some characters fleshed out and some details added, but in essence faithful to the ideas of the source material, unsubtle biblical and birth and death metaphors and Victoriana included. This was a real labour of love for del Toro, and he and the cast clearly had a fantastic time bringing the story to life.

This week's reading was two novels, and a couple of SFF short stories, one of which I found bafflingly unsatisfying (the characters' choices and motivations seemed to boil down to 'I love you so I'm going to order my underlings to stop torturing you' and 'I love you so I'm going to forgive the fact that your underlings tortured me and we are on opposites sides in a cosmic battle, and clearly your side is in the right'), the other of which I found hauntingly folkloric and charming.

The first of the novels was The Lantern Bearers, as I continue to make my way through Rosemary Sutcliff's works for the first time. This one is set at the moment in which the last Roman legions are withdrawn from Britain; our point-of-view character is a legionary who opts to desert rather than forsake his family and their farm in Britain, and then barely survives defending said family and farm against Saxon raiders, in an attack in which his father and most of their employees (their farm does not use slave labour) are killed, the farm is destroyed, and his sister is carried off by the raiders and later goes on to marry one of them and bear his child (with, it is assumed, not much choice in the matter). Aquila — the protagonist — is left embittered and broken, unmoored in the aftermath, drifting into the orbit of the remnants of the Romano-British order, pushed out into what is now Wales, struggling to hold back the tide. Here we are treated both to a retelling of some Welsh Arthuriana, and also a very painful personal story of the limits of revenge as a motivating factor, and how to survive and carve out a life when you are hollowed out by grief and loss. I liked it a lot, but found in this book that Sutcliff's appparent absolute lack of interest in the interior lives of women almost tipped over at times into actual misogyny, which I had to essentially push aside and ignore in order to enjoy and appreciate the story she was interested in telling.

Also, sentiments like:

'I sometimes think we stand at sunset. It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.'

are almost painfully relevant but also excruciatingly optimistic, given the state of the world. Ooof.

Finally, I picked up The Silver Bone (Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk), the first in a series of historical mystery novels set in post-First World War Kyiv. This one takes place in 1919, at a point when the city kept changing hands between White Russian, Red Army, and Ukrainian nationalist control, and Kyiv residents are just trying to keep their heads down and survive. Kurkov strikes a great balance between conveying both the terror (the novel begins with the protagonist's father's death before his eyes at the hands of a bayonet-wielding Cossack, an attack which he survives but costs him his ear), and the absurdity (all these different armies keep issuing different documentation and currency and the population struggles to know what to use, in the end settling on bartering things like fuel, salt and sugar, which at least remain useful no matter who is in charge). Via a convoluted series of almost comedic events, Samson (the protagonist) falls into a job working with the police while Kyiv is under shaky Soviet control, and, after overhearing (via an almost magical realist mechanism) the nefarious plans of a pair of Red Army soldiers who have commandeered most of his flat, he has his first case to crack. There's also a charming subplot about Samson's halting courtship of Nadezhda, an earnest, idealistic young woman who works in the Soviet bureau of statistics. In terms of historical mysteries, I would say this is heavier on the history and lighter on the mystery — a great evocation of a city and its people experiencing (as they are also, tragically, now) turbulent change. I'm very much looking forward to the following books in the series.

I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon watching the rain on the windows and the wood pigeons frolicking in the hedgerows over the road, as the weekend draws to its grey, windy close.

snowflake_challenge prompt 4 asks the following:

Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

Given that the last non-work website that I looked at was a somewhat grim political podcast, I'm going to reinterpret this as an opportunity to link a weird and wonderful piece of longform journalism that I've had bookmarked for a while: The snail farm don: is this the most brazen tax avoidance scheme of all time?

The title doesn't do it justice, and neither does my summary: a septugenarian who made his money in his family's shoe-selling business empire in the north of England, and has decades-long associations with the mafia in Naples (including hiding mafia members on the run in his properties in the UK) has for the past several years invested most of his time and energy in exploiting an elaborate UK tax loophole by which — if you claim to be running a snail farm on your property (including in residential blocks of flats or office buildings) — you pay no tax. In his telling, he's doing this purely to pass the time and keep his mind active in his later years. It's a wild ride.

This kind of written long-form journalism, essay or interview — with left-field subject matter and larger-than-life personalities — is my absolutely favourite type of nonfiction.

It's Sunday afternoon, and I've got one more day of holiday tomorrow before heading back to work on Tuesday. It's been a good, restful, and much-needed break, and I'm hopeful that the aftereffects will remain for some time once everyday life resumes. (I'm resolutely trying to redirect my mind every time it contemplates global politics, because the panic spirals are intense.)

This weekend has in many ways been one in which I gradually reset myself to standard weekend routines: two hours at the gym yesterday (after a month without attending either of my classes due to illness and then Christmas holiday closures; my legs hurt), trundling around the market with Matthias to get the week's fruit, vegetables, and other groceries, 1km in the pool this morning. I've kept up swimming and daily yoga pretty much throughout the entire holiday, so apart from the absolute arctic temperatures when walking to and from the pool, that wasn't too much of a shock to the system.

Last night Matthias and I watched our first film of the year, Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Benoit Blanc mystery. As with the previous two, this one is tropey good fun, stealing gleefully from just about every famous locked room mystery, and involving the murder of a truly unpleasant Catholic priest in a small American town. If anything, the skewering of contemporary US politics is even more blunt than in previous films in the series, but given — with the mystery solved, and everything revealed — the various unpleasant avatars of the far-right malaise get their well-deserved comeuppance, I was quite happy for this element to be front and centre. I felt as if Daniel Craig wasn't quite as invested in this third outing, so I wonder if it might be the last, but still found it enjoyable enough.

This year's reading is off to a good start. I deliberately saved Murder in the Trembling Lands, the twenty-first (!) book in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series of historical mysteries so that it would be the first book of the new year, and I'm glad that I did so. If you've not picked up this series by now (or lost interest at an earlier stage), there's not much here that will convince you to change your mind, but if you love it as much as I do, you'll find all the familiar elements present and correct: the great sense of place in Hambly's evocation of 1840s New Orleans, the complex network of relationships in Ben's family both by blood and by choice, the tenacity with which Ben and his besieged community of free Black residents of the city try to build and preserve and sustain their lives of fragile safety in the face of all the individual and systemic pressures trying to overwhelm them, a mystery that takes us back into buried secrets of Ben's, and other characters' pasts that refuse to remain buried and threaten to bubble up to destroy them, etc. In other words, a solid contribution to what is now a sprawling series — but one to which I am always happy to return.

I followed that up with a slender little book, The Wax Child (Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken), which is a lush, lyrical, almost dreamlike account of a horrific series of witch trials in Denmark in the seventeenth century. The writing is powerful and lush, interweaving the unfolding catastrophe rushing towards the accused women with excerpts from contemporary Danish books of witchcraft.

That's it in terms of reading and viewing for now (except to say that if you have access to the BBC, I highly recommend David Attenborough's latest documentary, which is a single, hour-long episode focused on the urban life of animals in London — with some surprising creatures and moments!). I've filled a few prompts for fandomtrees, I've caught up on both Dreamwidth and AO3 Yuletide comments, and I'm going to try to keep the remaining day-and-a-half of holidays slow and gentle. We're getting takeaway tonight, and will spend the evening vegetating in front of the TV. Tomorrow, I might wander into town to visit the public library, and then take the Christmas decorations down, and then the year will start to rush on, unfolding in front of me.

Staying at home over Christmas certainly meant Matthias and I were able to finish up a lot of TV shows this past month: six in total (plus a three-part BBC documentary about 1990s/2000s girl bands which was very good, but didn't say anything you wouldn't have expected from a documentary on that topic, so I don't have a lot to say about it myself).

The other shows were:

House of Guinness, a glossy, soapy historical drama about the quartet of 19th-century siblings who were heirs to the real-world brewing empire. This is another Steven Knight vehicle, with all his hallmarks: stylised comic book sensibility, anachronistic music, very broad-brush engagement with the politics of the era (in this case 19th-century Ireland), and larger-than-life characters whose various attempts to deal with their considerable problems just keep escalating the situation and spawning new problems. I enjoyed this, although I felt the tension was slightly dampened by the fact that most of the characters were insulated from any serious consequences due to their wealth and social position.

The third season of The Diplomat, a blackly comedic geopolitical thriller starring Keri Russell as a career American diplomat who, after postings in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, ends up posted as the ambassador to the UK. She's expected to be ceremonial and decorative in a cushy job, but suddenly lands at the centre of an international political conspiracy and scandal reaching into the highest levels of power, and struggles to deal with her embassy's, her country's, and her own personal responses to the fallout. The balance between comedy and political thriller is much more on the political thriller side of things this season, although there are still some hilariously awkward moments, but ultimately what I felt it was really about, at its heart, is the appalling tension between the undeniable benefits and utter indignity of being an ally of the United States from the 'democratic West' (quote marks because geographically some of the countries I'm including here are located in the Asia-Pacific part of the world), even when its government is led by people who at least aspire to the ideals of the post-WWII international order.

Season 10 of Shetland, which I'm continuing to enjoy with the new leads. The mystery this season had an almost Icelandic saga feel to it (cycles of grief, buried secrets, and revenge in a small, isolated community), the landscape and settings remained as starkly gorgeous as ever — and more fun to me this time because literally every Lerwick location was now familiar, and Matthias and I had a great time spotting various landmarks.

The Beast in Me, a psychological thriller in which Claire Danes plays a critically acclaimed author suffering from writer's block and struggling under the weight of grief at the death of her young son, which ended her marriage. She's living in upstate New York alone with her dog in the family home, which is quite literally falling apart around her, when she becomes tangled up in the saga and scandal involving her new neighbour — a wealthy New York property developer accused of murdering his wife. This has an excellent cast (the neighbour is played by Matthew Rhys with brittle intensity), and the story is tightly told, if a bit too conveniently wrapped up at the end.

Season 3 of Dark Winds, the historical mystery series set in the 1970s and starring Zahn McClarnon as a Navajo Tribal Police officer investigating various murders that take place in his community. This was, as always, excellent, with a stellar cast, a tremendous sense of place, and a really subtly written undercurrent of the ongoing effects of intergenerational, colonial trauma, what justice really means in such a context, and the limits of such justice. It always takes ages for new seasons of this show to make their way to the UK, and I'm already impatient for the fourth season.

The final season of Stranger Things, which I'm counting as a December show, even though I only watched the final episode last night. I have to admit that I was losing patience with the show by the last season (I had no idea the fourth season wasn't going to be the last, found watching it something of a slog that I was doing for completion's sake, and then realised with a great deal of irritation that there was no time in the final episode of Season 4 to wrap up all the various plot threads, at which point Matthias informed me that there was to be an entire additional season), and when I discovered that most episodes of the fifth season were going to be the length of short films, it felt like a self-indulgent last milking of the cash cow. So my expectations were low: it was bloated with characters, overloaded with the weight of its mythology, and the idea that it would be able to find satisfying ways to wrap things up, conclude convincing character arcs, and tie up all the various dangling interpersonal character relationship threads seemed to me far-fetched — but I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed several of the middle episodes, the more clichéd emotional beats seemed perfectly calculated to appeal to me (the conclusion of Will's story this season in particular really hit me in the heart), and for the most part I felt the whole thing was handled in a satisfying way. I've never felt the slightest bit fannish about this show, so my investment is quite superficial, but on that level, although I was losing patience last season, the destination was, overall, worth the journey.

So much distance in between
But we're running towards the same dream
Now we're running towards the same dream



It looks as if the very Sultan + Shepard place (i.e. earnest sincerity) in which I've been for much of 2025 is going to be the mood I carry into 2026.