Those were the voyages
'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' wraps up a bumpy season, plus the return of 'Only Murders in the Building,' 'The Girlfriend,' 'Alien: Earth,' and more
This week's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as my impression of you sounds like a vampire...
Too canceled; didn't hear
Alan Sepinwall
Tuesday saw the launch of the What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier, with the story of what happened with the never-released second season of Too Long; Didn't Watch, with cameos by Natasha Lyonne, Max Greenfield, Pamela Adlon, and more — including a celebrity who shall not be named, because they didn't do the required reading. We'll be back on Tuesday with an Ask Alan video, plus some early thoughts on Sunday night's Emmy results.
(Speaking of the Emmys, this may be my own bias talking, but it feels like The Pitt might have a very big night. At last week's Creative Arts Emmys, Shawn Hatosy won the drama guest actor trophy in a field that included a bunch of far more famous actors like Giancarlo Esposito, Forest Whitaker, and Jeffrey Wright. The voters often go for the most popular person in the guest categories, so Hatosy's win suggests some pretty broad support for The Pitt. At the same time, though, there weren't any Severance actors in that category, and Severance had the biggest Creative Arts haul. So we'll see.)
Where's my Arconia?
Only Murders in the Building returned to Hulu earlier this week, dropping the first three episodes of Season Five. I got screeners of everything from the new season other than the finale, and watched them out of a mix of affection for the show's great early days and an attempt to figure out if I had something new to say about the show beyond my Season Four column:
Alan Sepinwall
In the end, I didn't. Only Murders is what it is at this point. Lots of guest stars — Renee Zellweger and Beanie Feldstein were my favorites of the new group — and a mix of whimsy and melancholy that's ever-so-slightly less effective with each passing season. The second episode, chronicling Lester's entire employment at the Arconia, with cameos from past characters, is very good (even if the timeline doesn't make sense with the age of the character), and I never minded watching it. But that first season really was lightning in a bottle, never quite to be recaptured.
I need to be back in the arms of a Girlfriend
Alan Sepinwall
As a critic who doesn't have time to watch everything, it can be easy to fall into a self-selecting rut, where the only shows I'm watching and reviewing are the kinds of shows I inherently gravitate towards. That's even though I know that some of my favorite shows ever — like Gilmore Girls, or the one I wrote a recent book about — were in no way designed with a viewer like me in mind. So periodically, I try to sample shows that aren't inherently my tempo, just in case they're another of those exceptions.
Prime's The Girlfriend doesn't nearly reach the level of those classics, but I nonetheless felt satisfied by the time I finished it. It's a psychological thriller starring Robin Wright as a well-to-do American expat in London, whose son begins dating a woman played by Olivia Cooke. She assumes Cooke is a nefarious gold digger; Cooke assumes Wright is wildly overprotective. Each episode goes back and forth between their POVs to provide context each doesn't have about the other, and even if one is initially worse, by the end, both are doing some wild things to try to stop the other. Wright and Cooke both understand the assignment, and it's a well-executed version of the kind of televised beach read it's trying to be. And an efficient six episodes.
I don't wanna grow up, I'm an Alien: Earth kid
Alan Sepinwall
After last week's flashback to the many ways the crew of the Maginot died, this week's Alien: Earth brought us back to all of the show's ongoing subplots. "The Fly" offers a particular focus on how the show's adults are mistreating the Lost Boys, when Boy Kavalier, Dame Sylvia, and company are supposed to be protecting them.
How are people feeling 3/4 of the way through the season?
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recaplet: "New Life and New Civilizations"
Finally, this hugely disappointing Strange New Worlds season concludes on a mixed note, with a finale featuring lots of big ideas that are executed to varying degrees of success.
By far the best part of "New Life and New Civilization" was the stretch where Batel used her new powers to allow her and Pike to experience the long and happy life that will be denied them due to their respective destinies. It's very much a riff on one of the greatest TNG episodes ever, "The Inner Light," where Picard experienced someone else's lifetime in the space of a few minutes — with a splash of the Nexus from Star Trek: Generations — but the fact that this is specific to Marie and Chris, and that we gradually understand what's happening and why, made it feel distinct enough to work. Anson Mount in particular was used to great effect in a season that's often struggled with what to do with him.
The actual plot about the Vezda trying to escape their prison was less effective. Part of that is, again, that so much of it hinges on the cruel fate Ensign Gamble, who we didn't get to know well enough for any of this to matter. And part is that it feels like a rehash of the Prophets versus the Pah Wraiths in the final stretch of Deep Space Nine, which wasn't the stronger aspects of that series, either.
Kirk and Spock's mind-meld on seemed designed to explain how two men of such opposite temperaments became best friends, and to stoke the fires of anyone who has ever read or written a piece of K/S fanfic. But it stretches the boundaries of how the franchise has shown mind-melds to work, if not outright breaking the rules(*). More importantly, though, it feels too simplistic to say that they became close because they now share all their memories and thoughts from their entire lives up to this moment. The two of them learning to trust and love each other (however you choose to define the latter term) is powerful if it comes out of a period of working together and recognizing how their contrasting natures make them a great team. If it's because of, essentially, magic, it doesn't carry nearly the same weight.
(*) La'an being able to do the Vulcan nerve pinch, on the other hand, was fine, because we've seen a couple of human characters pull it off in previous shows.
This was one of the season's better episodes, but that speaks more to the problems of the season than it does to the finale's effectiveness. It just feels like everything went astray this year. Somebody on one of my social media feeds said that it's like a guy who gets a single laugh in a wedding toast deciding to quit his job to pursue a career as a stand-up. That said, the show's track record of being good is twice as long as this mostly bad stretch. So I'll hold out hope that this was an aberration and the remaining season and a half are a return to form. But this was so disappointing overall.
That's it for this week! What did everybody else think?
