20 TV Moments That Changed Lesbian Visibility Forever
Happy Lesbian Visibility Day, the one day a year us lesbians take our corporeal form and make mischief in the streets in our flannel and Birkenstocks while singing “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman at the top of our lady lungs! This year, one of the ways we’re celebrating here at Autostraddle dot com is by taking a look back at some of the TV moments that have changed lesbian visibility forever. This is not an exhaustive list, and I tried to leave out the bad stuff like the beginning of Bury Your Gays in 1976 when Executive Suite went all Hayes Code on poor lesbian Julie or how, in the mid-1990s, Picket Fences started the trend of re-shooting all sapphic kisses in the pitch black dead of night. As always, I’d love to hear your most life-changing lesbian visibility TV moments in the comments!
LA Law (1991)
The first lesbian kiss on television happened a little too close to traffic for my comfort; it still makes me nervous when I watch it on YouTube. Luckily C.J. Lamb (Amanda Donohoe) and Abby (Michele Greene) managed to get one peck and one longer, closed-mouth smooch off without getting plowed into by any cars. “He’s a Crowd,” an excellent name for a sapphic TV episode, is usually considered the first “very special lesbian kiss episode,” meaning nothing was ever going to come from it but ratings.
Courthouse (1995)
Let me just quote Autostraddle TV Team star Natalie here; she says it better than I ever could:
“Years before Gina Price-Blythewood would hire an unknown Lena Waithe as her production assistant on The Secret Life of Bees, she penned and co-produced shortlived series for CBS called Courthouse. From descriptions — since the show isn’t yet available for viewing anywhere, I cannot personally confirm — the show feels like a precursor to those Shondaland series we’ve come to love: Beautiful, highly talented people working in the pressure-filled crucible of a Clark County courthouse. And just like in Shondaland, the gays were represented. Judge Rosetta Reide and her housekeeper, Danny Gates, became the first-ever black lesbian couple on television.”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1995)
Jadzia Dax and Dr. Lenara Kahn kissed right on the mouth in the DS9 episode “Rejoined,” not because they were into each other, organically, but because they were both female joined Trill who were hosting symbionts of a male and female couple who used to be married. Those symbionts recognize each other and end up making out, so what we get is Jadzia and Lenara locking lips. Star Trek has always been notable for moving the diversity representation conversation forward, and this is no exception. In fact, lots of lesbian TV scholars — me among them — believe this was the genesis of sci-fi and fantasy shows being much more friendly toward lesbian characters than any other genres. It’s a trend that continues to this day!
Friends (1996)
Friends never did right by lesbians, using us almost exclusively as punchlines in a way that seeped into loads of other TV shows in the 1990s — however, Carol and Susan’s wedding was both the first lesbian wedding on TV and one of the only genuinely sweet storylines the show ever gave Ross’ ex-wife and her much better new spouse. It’s funny, yeah, but it’s also full of pathos. I’ve actually never not cried when I watched it, even as a kid.
Ellen (1997)
Ellen‘s “Puppy Episode” really needs to introduction or explanation; it was the biggest coming out moment in television history, made even bigger because Ellen herself came out at the same time. She became a hero to lesbians and a lightning rod punching bag to conservatives and their “family values.” Ellen’s career almost didn’t survive. Her show definitely didn’t. It still remains a watershed moment in lesbian culture, a sort of BCE/CE for representation.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2000)
Willow’s coming out kind of changed everything. It continued the trend of fantasy series being most friendly to lesbians; it kicked off the trend of teen shows being the ones to embrace lesbian characters most easily; it started the first longterm lesbian relationship on TV; it was the precursor to the modern Bury Your Gays phenomenon; and also it was just a really sweet moment in which one best friend told another best friend a scary truth, and her best friend just kept on loving her exactly the same as she always had done.
The Wire (2002)
It’s Omar Little that most people talk about when they talk about LGBTQ+ rep on The Wire. And, of course! Omar is one of the most important gay TV characters ever. And, in fact, both Natalie and I have him near the top of our Best Ever TV Characters lists. (Not just gay ones.) But let us not forget Kima Greggs, the lesbian detective who was allowed to be messy and complicated, to experience love and heartbreak because of her own charm and shortcomings, the rare Black woman who was given the kind of moral latitude usually reserved for straight white men. Kima wasn’t perfect, but she was compelling — and that’s the point. It’s 20 years later, and we’re still fighting about whether or not characters have to be “good” to be “good representation.”
All My Children (2003)
All My Children‘s Bianca Montgomery was a total game-changer. Daytime TV has always been even more heteronormative and conservative than primetime TV. Bianca wasn’t a Very Special Character who arrived simply to be gay and leave; she was a staple of the long-running series, someone viewers had watched grow up. Her falling for a girl, her first kiss, her coming out, her dating, her wedding, her children — viewers got to experience it all. Most viewers had no choice but to keep loving Bianca because they’d always loved Bianca. It was the greatest gift to kids whose parents watched soap operas.
The L Word (2004)
What can I say that hasn’t already been said? The L Word was ours. The first thing, in fact, that was all ours. We gathered around TVs in living rooms and bars, we sneaked the DVDs between other movies when checking out at Blockbuster, we hid them when they came in the mail from Netflix. We watched The L Word in groups like the World Cup, and we watched under the covers hiding from everyone but ourselves. It is a cross-generational cultural touchstone that gave us permission to laugh, cry, and rage together. Even the theme song will live forever in our lesbian noggins.
The Rachel Maddow Show (2008)
When Rachel Maddow made the leap from radio to TV in 2008, she was this brilliant liberal lesbian who filled a news niche for just a few of us. Now she’s a household name across the entire country and the anchor of all MSNBC’s political coverage. She is the most trusted name in liberal politics, to the point of reverence among many households. She never came out; she just was out. She normalized sardonic lesbian nerds in a way Daria Morgendorffer only dreamed of.
Glee (2009)
The problem with writing about the impact of Santana Lopez is that it deserves an entire book. Literally. A full college course could be taught on the way Santana changed the world. But for the purposes of this Lesbian Visibility Day, I’ll succinctly say that Glee was the cracking sound of the beginning of the avalanche of LGBTQ+ TV characters who followed the devastating blow to marriage equality caused by Proposition 8 in California, the first time Americans voted to take away the right for gay people to get married. Santana’s lesbianism wasn’t even in the plan; the writers just tossed in a throwaway joke about her making out with Brittney, at exactly the time Twitter made it possible to talk to the people who made TV, out of the mouth of Naya Rivera, who went all in on advocating for fans, at a moment when Fox was basically printing money off the Glee brand. Santana was lesbian TV’s John the Baptist; she knocked down the door for who-knows-how-many other sapphics to come out of the closet. She was an idol, an icon, and she will remain on of the most important lesbians in television history.
Pretty Little Liars (2010)
Before it was Freeform, it was ABC Family; and before it was ABC Family, it was the Christian Broadcasting Network’s The Family Channel, which was founded by one of the Religious Right’s most monstrous and homophobic figures, Pat Robertson. In 2010, in the episode “To Kill a Mockingirl,” Emily and Maya kissed in a photobooth. Pretty Little Liars was such an enormous ratings and social media success, ABC Family started modeling ALL shows off of it, which meant that Emily and Maya’s kiss paved the way for dozens and dozens more gay kisses as the network became the go-to place for lesbian characters in the early 2010s.
Orange Is the New Black (2013)
Orange Is the New Black was one of Netflix’s first real cracks at original programming, and wow was it hugely successful in the beginning. It was also one of the first non-prestige cable TV shows that didn’t rely on ad revenue, so outrage by the One Million Moms or whoever wasn’t an issue. That meant the series could be as gay as it wanted to be, and it went ALL IN. Orange Is the New Black had almost as many lesbian characters as The L Word, and it also featured trans lesbian Sophia Burset played by Laverne Cox. It went off the rails in the end, but the beginning was revolutionary.
East Los High (2013)
I’m simply going to quote Natalie again:
“Back when Hulu was still a fledging company and just starting to produce its own original content, there was East Los High. The show, which still retains the title of Hulu’s longest running series to date, made history after being the first English-language series with an all-Latine cast, writers and creators. East Los High‘s second season centered around the tumultous love affair between Jocelyn, a smart, talented aspiring journalist, and Camila, a dance team member with ambitions of making it in the music industry. The storyline earned Camila’s portrayer, Vannessa Vasquez, the show’s first Daytime Emmy nomination.”
Master of None (2017)
Master of None‘s “Thanksgiving” launched Lena Waithe into the stratosphere. She became the first Black woman to win an Emmy for outstanding writing in a comedy series, and afterward, she was given the keys to the kingdom. She has gone on to create dozens of other Black lesbian characters, in shows across genres and networks and streamers. She writes, she produces, she showruns, she acts, and she’s showing no signs of slowing down.
One Day at a Time (2017)
Netflix’s reboot of Norman Lear’s beloved comedy series not only brought a Latine family to the forefront of the comedy game, it also gave us lesbian teen Elena Alvarez, one of the first queer high schoolers who felt like us to us. (And not just because Penelope name-checked Autostraddle after Elena came out.) One Day at a Time became one of those rare shows full of lesbian jokes, where it never felt like lesbians were being punched down at — probably because the writers room featured plenty of queer voices. Elena’s struggles and triumphs felt as real to us as our own, and yeah, it didn’t hurt that we got to imagine Rita Moreno as our abuelita.
Black Lightning (2018)
Nafessa Williams portrayed TV’s first Black lesbian superhero, and she owned every minute of her time on-screen. Black Lightning struggled to give her the love story she deserved, favoring more screen-time for straight romances, but that didn’t change the fact that Thunder was a game-changing hero in our country’s current most-favorite genre on a network that built itself on superhero storytelling. She remains a radical lesbian TV character.
Steven Universe (2018)
Legend of Korra walked so Adventure Time could run so Steven Universe could give us Cartoon Network’s first lesbian wedding, between fan favorite gems Ruby and Sapphire. Steven Universe shocked fans when it revealed that Garnet was actually a fused lesbian couple. It delighted us to tears when it proclaimed lesbian love to be the answer to all of life’s big questions. And it knocked our boots off again when Ruby and Sapphire bonded together to save the world after saying “I do.”
Twenties (2020)
And now I will quote Autostraddle Editor in Chief Carmen Phillips:
“If you look at the very short history of black butches on TV (there’s been just 22 of them in all of television, according to Autostraddle’s database) then sure — there’s a leap to be made between Master of None and Twenties. If only because there’s so few too begin with! Even as television and film gets queerer with every passing year, there’s still not nearly as much growth as I think we’d all like for black masculine-of-center characters… what sets Twenties apart is, it’s the first time ever that a black masculine-of-center lesbian is the PROTAGONIST in her own comedy series on television. And we can add to that the fact that this series exists on [BET], a historically homophobic black network.”
Batwoman (2021)
Queer actress Javicia Leslie stepped into the cape and cowl in Batwoman‘s second season, making Ryan Wilder the first Black lesbian to headline her own superhero show and the first Black lesbian to become part of the Bat-family. And now, Natalie again:
“Until 2020, I’d never bought a comic book before, at least not for myself. But then came Batgirl #50 and the introduction of Ryan Wilder, officially, into DC Universe.. .and I bought my first comic book. Weeks before Javicia Leslie’s debut as Ryan Wilder on my screen, I was invested and had a small sliver of this forthcoming reality to call my own. A black woman was going to wear the cowl one day and I wanted some tangible representation of it.”
A League of Their Own (2022)
Prime Video’s A League of Their Own series truly did something special: It rebooted a beloved property that nearly completely overlooked Black women and lesbians in its original iteration and centered the story of a Black lesbian by giving her a fully realized world to inhabit. Max Champman had her own dreams, her own complicated family (including her queer and trans aunt and uncle), her own best friend, and occasionally she tossed a ball around with the Rockford Peaches catcher. Sure, yes, there were plenty of lesbians and gender non-conforming stars on the Peaches, and we loved them all! We own the ball field! Cliches are cliches for a reason! But it was Max’s story that resonated most with us, like a breathe of fresh air we’ve been needing to breathe for decades.
How Happy Could I Make These Yellowjackets?
Welcome back “How Happy Could I Make…” a semi-regular column wherein I deep dive on a randomly selected group of characters to see if I, one woman with mommy issues, could make them happy. Previous features have covered Iconic Mean Moms of TV and Disney Villains, and this roundup is in some ways a combination of the two! That’s right, it’s time I tackled our beloved Yellowjackets, and asked myself the question on everyone’s lips: Can I single handedly fix their trauma? Let’s find out together! Stingers up!
Other Tai
I will admit her scariness does make her hotter.
Absolutely the fuck not. I do not enjoy surprise wake ups, and being woken up to be led on a spooky walk outside where a man without eyes could appear?? Much like Tai, I have no idea what Other Tai wants, but I am 1,000% certain I simply could not give it to her, no matter how amazing her hair looks! Sorry to this terrifying woman!
Marriage Rating: -1,000,000/10
Natalie
Yes of course I ship Nat/Lottie I have EYES
I do not think it is out of the realm of possibility that Nat and I could have a fun night or something. Maybe even a good brunch! But a regular life? No, I don’t think so. Funnily enough, I think we are too similar!
Sure, I haven’t, you know, been in a plane crash and lived in The Wilderness™ nor do I have that resulting trauma to work through, but Nat and I both tend to withdraw when we need to reach out and ask for help. We’d have a few good times sprinkled with long periods of resentment and lashing out at each other for literally no reason. The good times would be good, I’ll say that. One thing is for sure — we would never run out of eyeliner, and that’s something.
Marriage Rating: 1/10
Misty
She is right about Starlight Express, I’ll give her that
Misty and I would have a gorgeous honeymoon phase bolstered by our love of musicals and general theater kid vibes. But after we saw everything that is currently up on Broadway and argued about Andrew Lloyd Webber (a few hits, too many misses, generally annoying), our gorgeous façade would crack — quickly. First of all, there is a bird in the house. I can’t live with a bird flying willy nilly in my home?? How could you ever sit down comfortably, knowing that at any moment a giant, long living, chatty dinosaur could just soar right in front of you? I am not about that life! And though I think her advice for dealing with cops is perfect, Misty is simply too needy. I would want to be alone one time and…well, we all know how Misty deals with being rejected.
Marriage Rating: 2/10
Shauna
I, too, would look at Callie like this
For the most part, Shauna and I would get along, I think! I have a tendency to be…a bit incurious, at times? Specifically when it comes to wondering about the internal motivations of other people — I’ve got a lot going on in my own head! Which means I would have almost zero questions about anything she wanted to get up to, no matter the time of night. If our minivan was missing and she wanted to get it back, well, go off sis! It’s possible I would bore her, and I know that when Shauna is bored she tends to act out in the worst ways imaginable. And look, kids are hard, I get that, but I cannot take part in raising a daughter with such bummer vibes! On the bright side, I would happily give her a break from cooking! Seems like it would be better for everyone if she took a step back from the stove.
Marriage Rating: 4/10
Taissa
We would go through so much conditioner.
For all the terror I feel watching any episode of Yellowjackets, there is one overpowering thought that I literally cannot help but fixate on, and that is: TAI ARE YOU ACTIVELY SENATOR ELECT RIGHT NOW OR WHAT???????? Girl! GIRL! We have bigger fish to fry! Some version of you has, and I hate to bring this up — killed your dog and made a spooky alter with its ding dang HEAD. Your family is in ruins and you are out here hitch-hiking to your ex’s place courtesy of registered voters??? No ma’am! No you are not! You are calling the outgoing Governor’s Office and you are stepping down! This instant!
…that being said, Tai is so stupidly hot I actually might be able to get over the whole Other Tai thing. And, as much as I need her to take a break from public office, I would be a banging political spouse! My charity lunches would be the hottest ticket in town, I guarantee it. Plus, if the whole elected official thing didn’t work out, the two of us are a dream team for your Mixed Chicks, your Sheas Moisture, etc. We’d never have to buy hair products again! A dream!
Marriage Rating: 6/10
Van
Noted Bill Pullman stan!
Sure, we don’t know a ton about Adult Van as of yet, but we have gleaned some pretty important details. One, her store is called “While You Were Streaming,” which is perfect and the greatest shout out to one of my favorite romantic comedies that is mostly about loneliness. Two, she lives in Oberlin, which is very similar in vibes to the Hudson Valley, where I grew up. Three, she mixes up pop culture metaphors when upset! I do that all the time! I want to ask her opinion on all the great hang out sitcoms of the last 20 years — I bet she loves Cougar Town as much as I do! Would she play Penny Can with me? Sure, she’s got her…stuff from her past, but one can only assume she is ignoring it in favor of getting hyper-invested in pop culture, and that frankly makes her perfect to me!
Marriage Rating: 9/10
Lottie
Sorry to be an online dyke but: MOTHER.
“Christina! She runs a cult! In the woods! How would you survive?!” I know, I can hear you yelling at the screen as you read this. First of all, fine, I am not really into like, ~*~intentional living~*~*~, or heliotrope as a shade of purple, or frankly, living in the woods. Consider this counterpoint: Look at her. I would do quite literally anything she wanted me to do, and for all her…erm, flaws? I do think she might be the only person on earth who could get me to open up! Maybe I don’t need therapy after all, maybe all I need is a sharing circle. Not to mention, I am quite good at making tea to all kinds of exacting specifications. I would move heaven and earth to keep her happy, and all she would have to do is frown a little petulantly and I would be putty in her hands. I mean, her hair alone! Granted, I did once have a dream where in I was brushing Shohreh Aghdashloo’s hair and even though we didn’t speak for the entirety of it, it was top among my hottest dreams. I guess it’s possible I’m “unwell,” but catch me hand washing silk caftans in the river or whatever — my wife needs her outfits!
Marriage Rating: 22/10
“Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies” Can’t Go Both Ways
The following review contains spoilers for the first four episodes of Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, now streaming weekly on Paramount+.
The first time I performed Grease, I was nine years old at Girl Scouts camp. We did a medley for our parents that included both “Born to Hand Jive” and “Cool Rider” (even though the latter, technically, was from Grease 2). Afterwards to celebrate, my mom rented the movie for the first time. I was hooked.
That fall, I wanted to be a Pink Lady for Halloween. Pink Ladies are not a common child’s costume and we’re talking pre-online shopping days, so my mom called a local professional costume shop. They had the coveted satin jacket, but I was so small that my mom ended up triple rolling the sleeves to make it fit. By fifth grade I had memorized the entire Pink Ladies Pledge and taken to performing overly dramatic renditions of “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” to an audience of my own reflection in my bedroom mirror after school.
Being Black and Puerto Rican and gay (though, I didn’t know that last part quite yet) didn’t stop me from seeing myself in the lily-white, straight halls of 1950s Rydell — not that it ever would have. In fact the only reason I mention this at all is to say, by all accounts, I am the core audience for Paramount+’s Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. I know that anyone reading this website wouldn’t assume that I’m some off-the-wall right wing pundit bemoaning the “wokefication” of Grease for finally including POC and queer characters, but I also want you to know that I’m not some staunch traditionalist. As far as I’m concerned there have been queer, Black, and Latina Pink Ladies since at least 1997, when I first put on the jacket.
Which is why it pains me that I don’t love this prequel.
In Rise of the Pink Ladies, it’s 1954 — roughly five years before Rizzo, Frenchy, and Sandy are going to rule the school — and horny Puerto Rican-Italian nerd Jane Facciano (Maris Davila) is spending the last hazy days of summer going at it in the backseat with her boyfriend, preppy jock Buddy (Jason Schmidt). Teens being horny is a backbone of Grease lore and Rise of the Pink Ladies is often its strongest when directly tackling the sexist double standards and purity policing forced onto teen girls. Jane, still relatively new at Rydell after moving to the California suburban high school from New York last year with her family, is made the target of a slut-shaming rumor campaign after Buddy lies about how far they went at the drive-in.
Meanwhile, Olivia (Cheyenne Isabel Wells), an aloof bookworm hot girl Chicana, is also left reeling after rumors swirl about a “relationship” she had with her English teacher last year — relationship put in quotations by me because a grown adult can’t have a consensual relationship with a teen girl, a fact that isn’t glossed over in the show but can never be emphasized enough. Nancy (Tricia Fukuhara), a Japanese student who dreams of a life as a fashion designer in New York, is left alone after her two closest friends dump her to become boy-obsessed. Cynthia (Ari Notartomaso) is a tomboy who dreams of being inducted into the T-Birds, no matter how badly they treat her. Cynthia’s obviously queer coded right away and the team behind Rise of the Pink Ladies has promised make good on queer characters in future episodes, which is one of the reasons we are gathered here today. While I get the sense that Cynthia’s episodes are still ramping up, it must be said that Notartomaso is already a scene-stealer right from the top, its impossible to take your eyes off of them.
When Jane announces that she’s running for class president against Buddy, she makes new friends in Olivia, Nancy, and Cynthia — with Olivia, whose brother is the head of the T-Birds, becoming her campaign manager. For Pink Ladies casting director Conrad Woolfe, in creating these archetypes, “Our North Star… was Rizzo. Stockard Channing is just so amazing, and that was the essence we wanted to pull for all of these characters, for all four of these Pink Ladies especially.”
And thus, the original girl gang is born.
On the surface, Rise of the Pink Ladies hits all the important nostalgic beats. So far there’s been a T-Birds’ mooning, a bonfire pep rally, Principle McGee (for now she’s Assistant Principle McGee), a sleepover in Frenchy’s pink Sandra Dee bedroom. The premiere episode alone includes homages to “Greased Lightning” and “Beauty School Dropout.” It doesn’t take long for a middle school aged Frenchy and Rizzo to make a cameo, either. If you’re a fan of poppy TV musicals about high school outcasts — High School Musical, Glee — there is a lot to love in music producer Justin Tranter’s work. It’s also beautiful to look at, with impeccably slick production design and choreography.
For me, this is also where the series begins to fall apart at the seams. I have yet to make it through even one single episode of Rise of the Pink Ladies without asking myself if a meteor is going to come any minute now and strike all the students of color (and their families!) before the prequel ends and the original series picks up. After a while, I started making a joke that around every shrub was a The Last of Us mushroom zombie that only ate the Black and brown kids. That there must be a reverse migration style mass deportation back to Mexico, Japan, and the Southern states. Because somehow Rydell goes from a beacon of 1950s racial harmony in 1954 to the all-white school we know it becomes in ’59.
If she was interested in telling an updated take on Grease that tackles school integration (and to be clear, I think if we’re going to return back to these classic namesake properties, we should be updating them) — I’m not sure why showrunner Annabel Oakes chose to focus on a prequel instead of setting her series in the 1960s, after the events of both original movies. In that situation, the linear progression of time could have done lot of the work for her. If we imagine a world where, say, after Michelle Pfeiffer’s Pink Ladies hang up their iconic jackets, the group disappears for a few years , only to be picked up again by newly arrived POC and queer students who are outcasts and find power in the iconic Pink satin — very little else of the show would have to change. Except that I would stop daydreaming about a zombie apocalypse worthy of a drive-in cinema.
One of Autostraddle’s writers, Drew, helpfully suggested that instead of letting the question of “where did all the POC exactly go?” get the best of me, I could compare the budding Grease-verse to the James Bond franchise. After all, there have been, and will continue to be, an infinity amount of Bonds, Qs, Ms and Money Pennies — and I’ve never required any of them to have continuity. What’s to stop Rise of the Pink Ladies from taking place in a multiverse where the infamous Frenchy (Jane’s little sister) is actually Puerto Rican and both the Pink Ladies and T-Birds have origins more closely aligned with the very real Mexican-American 1950s culture that birthed “Greasers” in the first place.
Except even that instance doesn’t solve what I believe to be Rise of the Pink Ladies’ greatest fault. The show is in a rush to pat itself on the back for a more (overtly) queer, POC-based adaptation, but seemingly has little concern about the factual realities that race plays in these characters lives. It would be one thing if (as is often the case in Broadway musicals), the racial-blind casting simply meant that race wouldn’t be brought up at all. Instead confusingly, if not upsettingly, Rise of the Pink Ladies seems to want to pick and choose when race matters.
At one point Hazel (Shanel Bailey, another knockout performer), a Black student who recently transferred to Rydell, shows interest in joining the Pink Ladies. In hushed tones during one of their classes, Wally (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper), a Black football player, warns as much as he chastises: “Hazel, you’re not getting mixed up with those Pink Ladies, are you? They like to stir up trouble. [Hazel says: so?] So trouble just might hit you differently than it would hit them.”
But following that same logic, would this worry of “trouble” not also be true for Nancy, who’s Japanese-American family would have been held in interment camps not barely a decade earlier? When Nancy would have only been in elementary school? Or for Olivia and her brother Richie, Mexican students living in a California that’s only had integrated schools for seven years at that point? Or even for Wally himself, who has a blonde, white cheerleader girlfriend? A full 13 years before Loving v. Virgina?
Later in a following episode, Nancy tells Wally, who is feeling down about losing a game, that you can’t look to others for validation. It’s a lesson that she learned as a child because “when I was little, kids used to throw rocks at me and call me a ‘dirty Jap.’ They blamed me for the war… I was still saying ‘pa-sketti.’”
Of course, that is horrifying. But it’s also fantastical to believe that young Black boy in 1954, less than a year before the murder of Emmett Till, would need to be told a story about the difficulties of racism. Let alone in the context of being hard on himself over a football game.
Jane’s mother, Kitty (Vivian Marie Lamolli), attempts to wave off her dark skin tone in public by passing as Italian instead of Puerto Rican. She ignores Frenchy’s bewilderment over hiding her heritage (“I thought I was calling my abuelo, nonno this whole time!”) and shudders when Richie bows and calls her Señora in public. When Jane decides to make boycotting a bigoted, exclusive country club for the fall dance part of her campaign platform, Kitty objects. This is the closest the show has gotten to tackling the complications of race head on — Kitty’s passing attempts are easy to write off as self-hatred in less deft hands, and to its credit Rise of the Pink Ladies instead takes time to show how they’re rooted in strategies of survival.
That survival, of course, also pays a steep price of loneliness and isolation. While visiting Olivia and Richie’s parents, who are so excited that Rydell’s next student body president might be Mexicana (they don’t quite get “half Puerto Rican” but hey, the heart is there!), Jane wistfully explains that she doesn’t know much Spanish. Rather than dig deeper into the ways that their relationship to race has strained Kitty and Jane’s relationship to each other, Kitty’s entire passing subplot is swept into a campy musical number between Jane and Buddy at the Frosty Palace, where Jane publicly “comes out” as Puerto Rican to applause from her fellow Pink Ladies. There was so much more to explore.
Rise of the Pink Ladies wants the privilege of deciding when and how questions of race matter, but that’s not how race works — not on a fictional television show where teenagers sing on cafeteria tables for fun, and not in life. Without any serious consideration to historical specificity and its impact on the lives of Rydell’s students of color, all Pink Ladies does instead is open up an unsatisfying — and distracting — Pandora’s box. Even if it is one shimmering in bright pink glitter.
Boobs on Your Tube: Maya and Carina Pull a Callie and Arizona on “Station 19”
Happy Yellowjacket Friday! Kayla not only wrote you a recap this week; she also made you a list of shows to watch if you love Yellowjackets! Also, on the recap beat is Drew, who both recapped Drag Race and interviewed Peppermint about her new comedy special. In brand new TV this week, Kayla reviewed Dead Ringers, Shelli reviewed Slip, and Netflix dropped the trailer for their new reality show, The Ultimatum: Queer Love. A.Tony wrote about how they’ll watch anything where survivors get justice. And Riese let you know where the cast of The Real L Word is now.
Notes from the TV Team:
+ I’m sure that Carmen will have plenty to say about last night’s episode of Station 19, but I wanted to take a second to note the passing of the torch behind the scenes: as Krista Vernoff hands over showrunner duties to Zoanne Clack and Peter Paige. I’m not as familiar with Clack’s TV work but Paige’s hiring feels like a real gift. A former actor on Queer as Folk turned creator/producer of The Fosters and Good Trouble getting to shepherd the next chapter of Maya and Carina’s love story? That feels like such a win. — Natalie
+ On Grey’s Anatomy there’s nothing explicitly gay (though we do get a Helm sighting, as she shows up at Teddy’s office to defend Intern Yasuda the love of her life and tells Teddy to do something about burn out culture among the interns, which I loved). But I wanted to note that Amelia is really mourning Kai. Addison showed up and gave one of my new favorite Addie/Amelia sisters scene. Honestly, if they just wrote Kate Walsh back into the show permanently I would be so happy. I genuinely think she could be a linchpin to this entire new era of Grey’s and if we have to break Addison up with her Private Practice husband Benjamin Bratt to do it, well that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. Henry’s about 10 years old now? He could move to Seattle with his mom.
Anyway, the last thing I wanted to say was that there were references to old Grey’s galore, including Addison’s love of Hot Chocolate juju, that so many of the doctors are mass shooting survivors, and at the end…. A NOTE FROM CRISTINA FUCKING YANG (!!!) with medical supplies, telling Addison to keep up the good fight. And yes, I did cry. — Carmen
+ Your Friday night TV plans are about to get a lot more exciting: Friday night WNBA games are coming, every week, to ION. — Heather
Station 19 615: “What Are You Willing to Lose”
Written by Carmen
As far as I’m concerned, this was easily a Top Two Marina episode — and there’s a strong argument that it’s not #2. Despite my proud Love Is A Lie badge that I carry around in my wallet at all times, there is nothing that gets me going quite like an epic Shondaland romance. And last night Carina and Maya proved once and for all, if they were any doubters left, that they deserved to be listed among the greats.
After their last fake!first date ended with delivering a baby to a woman who had gone on a real!first date with Carina not too long ago, Maya and Carina decide to try again. Carina’s exhausted though, so they scrap Maya’s original plans and decide to head to Joe’s Bar. The very same bar where they first met (and yes there was a shot-by-shot recreation! It was perfect!)
At Joe’s Bar they encounter Helm (has anyone else noticed that Helm or Kai always show up like mascots when an episode is going to be especially gay?), who is bartending for a Bachelorette Party that going on now hour 17 of partying. Of course, the bachelorette falls and busts her face open, which leads to Carina and Maya tending to her.
While taking care of the freaked out bachelorette, Carina tells her that if she’s marrying the person she’s meant to be with, the bruises on her face won’t matter. None of it will matter. Her person matters. Maya agrees, saying that the day she married her wife was at once the most grounding and best day of her life. Yes, this is when I started squealing into my elbow.
The bachelorette party realizes that Maya and Carina are actually married to each other!! Prompting the bride-to-be to declare that they’re the hottest couple ever (correct) and that she now regrets marrying a man (also correct!!).
Then, in what I do believe was meant to be a stand in and shout out to the Marina fandom directly, Helm tells Carina and Maya that they are hashtag Goals and role models of what’s possible. Which, in another world, would maybe be too on the nose? But in this moment? Just felt perfect.
(Also it’s reminiscent of when Helm thought Meredith Grey was Goals, Helm is a queer woman who falls in love with unattainable women over 35 and that is probably the most authentically lesbian thing about her tbh.)
Ok so then Maya jokes that they really can’t seem to get through a fake!first date with out a medical emergency, so Carina, still all caught up on their love confessions from just a little while earlier, lowers her voice and looks at Maya beneath her eyelashes and suggests maybe… they take the date back to their apartment, and take a hot shower. You know.
You know that means they have sex. Extremely hot sex. Calzona Season Six Shower Sex, but Maya goes down on Carina whereas in ye olden days of Grey’s Anatomy the camera cut away, which probably means this is the hottest gay sex scene we’ve had yet in Shondaland. Thoughts? Let me know in the comments.
Later, safe and warm and in their bed, Carina worries that their shower sex Means SomethingTM that she’s not ready for it to mean, that being back in their apartment is too soon. It’s all too soon. The last time she was here, she was so hurt. Maya hurt her. Maya left her alone.
And Maya — ok this is when, an episode that already had me near tears from joy, and then for a while, lust, and now in absolute just, devastating, emotional honesty — Maya holds Carina, hair still wet from the shower, and promises her this: She knows that the day she was committed, the day she yelled at Carina that “We’re OVER” — something died between them that day. She knows that. But this? This part that comes next. This part that they are rebuilding? It’s going to be stronger, more brilliant, than everything they had before.
I, for one, cannot wait.
All American 516: “My Name Is”
Written by Natalie
Back when Coop finagled her way into a law professor’s class, Skye was there. She took selfies, she brought snacks and she affirmed that Coop was up to the challenge that the class posed. This week, though, when it’s Coop’s turn to be the supportive girlfriend, she doesn’t return the favor.
For weeks now, Coop’s relationship has taken a backseat to her academic pursuits and when she runs into Layla in the kitchen, she’s got a full day of studying in the library planned. Coop’s plans surprise Layla; after all, Skye is giving the keynote presentation at LAInfluencerCon later that day. Coop tracks down Skye at Slausson Cafe — again, thanks to Layla — and the divide between the couple is apparent. Skye’s kept the news about her grandmother’s fall and her presentation to herself, knowing how busy her girlfriend is, but Coop insists that she wants to know what’s going on in Skye’s life. Coop promises that she’ll come to the presentation but later she runs into her professor who informs her that, thanks to another student dropping his class, she can now take the class for credit. It’s great news but there is one caveat: she must take the students’ place in a study group…a study group that, of course, meets that afternoon.
(Sidenote: Has anyone in the All American writers’ room been to law school or even applied to law school? Do they know anyone else that has? Because all I keep thinking, as I watch this storyline is: “That’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!”)
Coop misses Skye’s presentation…but, to make matters worse, when the couple reunites, it’s clear that she forgot about it entirely. Coop insists it’s not her fault — she had to be there for her classmates — but Skye wonders when her girlfriend will start to prioritize her. Coop urges Skye to calm down and stop acting like she doesn’t love her…and that, my friends, is when the wheels come off. You’ll recall that Coop had been reticient to say those three little words before so to hear them dropped, for the first time, in the middle of a fight? Skye knows she deserves better than Coop’s excuses and ends their relationship.
Meanwhile, Patience takes in Skye’s presentation and walks away even more frustrated about her social media future. Skye’s presentation encouraged more engagement on social media but all she wants to do is retreat and go back to being this “anonymous, boho indie singer.” Since they all need a bit of an escape, Layla encourages Patience and Olivia to pretend to be someone else and sneak into the quinceañera going on down the hall. They revel in their anonymity until the celebrant recognizes Patience and assumes that she’s the party’s entertainment. Rather than correct the misunderstanding, Patience takes the stage and finds happiness, reconnecting with the old Patience — the boho indie singer — as she sings during the father-daughter dance.
The Rookie: Feds 120: “I Am Many”
Written by Natalie
When Simone broke up with Dina (AKA DJ), it wasn’t for a lack of interest, it was all about timing. Simone was still new in her role as an FBI agent and she couldn’t give as much as she wanted to the job and still give Deena — or anyone — what they deserved in a relationship. It felt like a bit of kindness at the time but, apparently, DJ wasn’t comforted by Simone’s chivalry…no, she was big mad…and she’s been nursing a grudge ever since.
But now, Dina’s mom and Simone’s dad are growing closer — they’re even talking about moving in together — and the tension between the two daughters is becoming untenable. Their parents invite them to dinner in an attempt to mend fences and DJ begrudgingly agrees, while throwing a little salt in Simone’s direction. Unfortunately, Simone can’t commit to dinner plans, as she’s working on a case in Idaho, and DJ scoffs that, once again, work is Simone’s priority. But when Simone’s questioning of an inmate in Idaho doesn’t yield results, she returns to Los Angeles just in time for dinner.
Cutty announces that his relationship with Ruth is getting serious and they won’t allow their daughters’ messy split to threaten their future. Simone takes issue with the characterization but DJ thinks “messy” is the best way to describe it. The parents leave for dinner, hoping that in their absence, their daughters’ will be able to make peace with each other. When they’re alone, DJ’s coolness thaws and she extends some warmth to Simone…warmth Simone clings to after spending a day on death row with a mass murderer. The two share a kiss and the hope that this time their relationship will end differently. They fall into bed together but, later, Simone is roused from her sleep by a nightmare starring the Idaho inmate. She leaves DJ in bed and takes the FBI jet back to Idaho to question the inmate again.
Once the case is wrapped up, Simone returns home to find Cutty, Ruth, and Dina sharing dinner. Simone asks for a moment alone for DJ and she admits that she was doing too much when they tried to date the first time. Now, though, she recognizes that what she really needs is some balance — room for the professional and the personal in her life — and after their night together, Simone thinks maybe she and Dina can try again. But DJ pumps the brakes on Simone’s relationship talk and suggests that they just remain friends instead. Simone counters that offer with one of her own: friends with benefits. And, of course, because no one in their right mind says no to that offer from Niecy Nash, the two sneak away and kick off their new situationship.
A Million Little Things 511: “Ironic”
Written by Natalie
When you think about all the shows that have been cancelled prematurely and all the happy endings we’ve been denied, A Million Little Things‘ gay wedding feels like it should be a victory. But this wedding — this entire pairing, if I’m being honest — just feels hollow. There’s nothing bad about it necessarily. There are even some heartwarming moments. It’s fine. But it’s so anodyne that it hardly sparks any emotion (Gary’s speech notwithstanding). If Corporate Pride could write a storyline, this is exactly what it’d write.
But, okay…let’s recap…
It’s Katherine and Greta’s wedding day and things are off to an auspicious start. The wedding officiant and coordinator, Carter, continuously pesters his boss with updates about the day’s festivities (he even brings hand-painted sweatshirts). Theo digs through old family photo albums to ensure that his Best Man wedding day fit is better than his grandparents’ wedding party. The pictures spark memories of the earliest memories of Greta’s crush on Katherine — stories that Katherine didn’t even know — and it seems clear that Katherine’s father always knew his daughter and Greta were meant to be something more. And, of course, as is his wont, Eddie arrives and assumes that everything is about him.
But then, everything starts to go sideways. A “passing drizzle” turns into a torrential downpour and the boat that Katherine and Greta were supposed to get married on — heavy-handed homage to the Love Boat — is no longer an option. Does it make sense that Katherine, of all people, would plan a wedding on a boat without a contingency plan? No, it does not, but honestly, that’s some of the episode’s less troubling retconning. The group stumbles into a rundown nautical-themed bar to escape the rain and Delilah suggests having the wedding there. The friend group gathers and they all work together to transform the bar into a suitable wedding venue. But just as they’re starting to turn things around, more things go wrong: Greta’s suit has an unfortunate run-in with a toddler and finger paint and Greta’s parents arrive to unwittingly suggest that the worst wedding days result in the best worst marriages. Oh, and her mom brought lingerie for Katherine!
At the end of her rope, Greta’s ready to just call the whole thing off. Thankfully, Katherine’s there to be the voice of reason.
“If you’re asking me, ‘Do I want to get married in this tacky bar?’ the answer is no. But if the question is, ‘Do I always want to be able to say that I was married to you for as long as possible?’ the answer is absolutely yes. So I pick this dump of a bar today over any beautiful venue that we might be able to find two weeks from now. Because that way, for the rest of forever, I can say that I was married to you for two weeks longer than I would have been.
Yeah, that was one of those heartwarming moments…and it’s the perfect prelude to Katherine and Greta getting married (with Greta wearing Katherine’s father’s suit). Afterwards, everyone dances — to Lizzo, natch, because Corporate Pride — and has a great time celebrating. I try not to be annoyed by it all. But it takes Gary reminding me that this show has put Katherine through it…that she’s given the friend group — and this show — so much more than she’s been given. If anyone deserves a happy ending, however hollow, it’s her.
Good Trouble 506: “Once a Cheater”
Written by Natalie
When Angelica and Malika broke up, the love was still there. In fact, they’d exchanged those three little words for the first time minutes before they split. Malika lets her go but the love she has for Angelica remains…and so, even when other potential love interests present themselves, Malika demurs. She is in love and she’ll do whatever she can to win Angelica back.
Angelica has an issue with Malika’s polyamory? Okay, Malika decides, she’ll commit to monogamy in order to see where their relationship is going. Angelica doubts whether Malika has time for kind of relationship she wants? Okay, she’ll work on improving her work-life balance. She’s been transparent about what she’s doing — “you might notice that I’m here with friends, not working,” she points out to Angelica during Queer Night at Duoro — and why she’s doing it.
“My plan is to show her that I’m maintaining a work-life balance, so she’ll let me out of the friend-pen to graze in the relationship meadow,” Malika explains to Davia, as she looks ahead to dinner that night with her ex.
At work, Malika gets word that the vote on her Women’s Center is imminent. The vote is close, Lucia reports, and the councilman whose vote they need keeps ducking their calls. Of course, when Lucia finally gets intel on the councilman’s location, it’s when Malika and Angelica are in the car on the way to dinner. Since Lucia can’t leave her charity event, it’s up to Malika to solicit the councilman’s vote in his stead. But, surprisingly, it’s Angelica that comes up with the best way to approach the councilman — smartly using their shared love of the Lakers to lure him into a conversation — and Malika closes with her pitch for the Women’s Center. They manage to win the councilman over and, the next day, he rewards their lobbying efforts with courtside seats to a Lakers game.
Later, Malika rushes over to Duoro to apologize for the intrusion into their dinner date and shares the tickets as a great consolation prize. She reaches across the bar, as she acknowledges work intruding on their personal time before, and Angelica pulls her hand away. Malika’s been doing everything she can to win Angelica back except listening to Angelica. She said she wanted to be in Malika’s life as a friend. When they were at Queer Night, Angelica volunteered to help Malika find someone else. She never said she wanted to be anything more than friends but Malika wasn’t listening. So when Angelica says, her lack of work-life balance isn’t an issue anymore now that they’re just friends, Malika is absolutely gob smacked.
(In Malika’s defense, though, I’m not sure why Angelica would agree to that dinner invitation when Malika’s intentions were always so clear.)
But, on the plus side, things will undoubtedly improve next week because it’s Thanksgiving at the Coterie and THE MAMAS (and Callie) ARE BACK!
Fantasy Island Episode 210: “War of the Roses (and the Hutchinsons)”
Written by Valerie Anne
“My bonnie lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea, my bonnie lies over the ocean, oh bring back my bonnie to me.”
This week’s island guests are seemingly unrelated at first: a younger couple who wants a few days away to forget their fertility troubles, and an older couple who wants to enjoy their retirement. But of course, the island has a sense of humor, and it turns out these two couples are feuding neighbors. Of course, it all works out in the end, but one thing I wanted to mention about this that I enjoyed is that the younger couple eventually came to realize that they were only trying so hard to have babies because it felt like the next step, it seemed like it’s what all their friends were doing. Get married, move out of the city, have some kids. It seemed like the only path. But through all this they realize that actually they miss living in the city and don’t want to have kids yet. And they also decide that if they do ever want to have kids, there are other ways to grow their family, which I appreciate them saying.
As the guests leave the island after their stay, Elena catches Ruby staring out into the sea. Ruby admits she hasn’t heard from Isla lately, which she’s bummed about, because she thought they had something special. Elena expresses empathy for her pain but doesn’t come clean to Ruby about Isla being a mermaid nor about her telling her to leave Ruby alone. Ruby just smiles sadly and says, “You can’t catch a butterfly.”
But then when she goes to play gold later, she gets a magical hole in one, so her love affair with Isla might be over but her love affair with the island isn’t.
The Power Episode 106: “Sparklefingers”
Written by Valerie Anne
“Don’t let my brother see this, his whole worldview might implode.”
I’m finding listening to UrbanDox on this show very upsetting, which I know is the point, but he’s ranting about how men should be using their “bigger bodies” and “real weapons” to take their power back, and the men (and boys) are eating it up.
We check in briefly with our British lesbian, where Roxy’s dad is trying to use her like a weapon but she isn’t having it. She used her powers to kill the man who killed her mother, and her brother died in the process, she’s not interested in zapping random men just because daddy says so. Which honestly is impressive considering how desperate she was for her father’s attention in earlier episodes; growth!
Back in Seattle, Margot is enjoying her new spark, much to the dismay of her chief of staff. Margot decides to keep it hush hush that she has the spark, because as her CoS points out, she’s receiving enough death threats as it is. And this decision was wise, because the senator surprises her with a visit and a new rule he’s implementing where he’s testing women for EOD and registering anyone who has it. Margot is pissed; she knows damn well that a list starts as a list but is a slippery slope. Luckily she beats the test herself but she’s determined to stop the madness.
Jos’s storyline this episode made me raise an eyebrow. First, she almost sexually assaults her boyfriend. Then, he comes out to her as intersex, and even though he had surgery when he was little so he presents as – and, he clarifies, identifies as – a boy, he does have the skein and the EOD because he grew up with some extra estrogen. And Jos gets really mad at him. To her credit, after he’s done explaining the first half, that he’s intersex, she makes it clear that doesn’t bother her. She likes him, she doesn’t care about the rest. But when she finds out he has the EOD, she’s upset that they’ve been dating this whole time and despite her confiding in him that having the EOD was stressful, and not being able to control hers, and having the school quarantine her and tie her hands up etc, he didn’t tell her that he had the EOD too. Which is fair. But the way she goes about expressing this ends up sounding a bit like common transphobic rhetoric. Rhetoric that gets trans people killed. Which is maybe the point, because her boyfriend even says that if it got out that he was a boy with a skein it might get him killed. But it felt… I don’t know, it felt a little off to me. But maybe that’s because my view of this show has a whole shifted a little after I wrote my first review and a bunch of people who had read the book (which I have not done) told me that the book doesn’t have the “what if the playing field was more equal” or even a “a matriarchy would be better than a patriarchy” stance I thought the show was taking, but instead more of an “absolutely power corrupts absolutely” theory, which, frankly, isn’t what we need right now. And I started to see that in Jos’s scenes this week, but maybe I’m just feeling overly cautious. I’m willing to see it out.
To her credit, it does seem like later, when talking to her mom, Jos starts to realize that maybe she overreacted earlier. But I’m on edge about the whole show now.
Speaking of overreacting, by the end of the episode, we start to see how UrbanDox is causing problems. Margot’s son says some awful/dumb shit at dinner that pisses off his mom and sister, a man pulls a taser on a bartender and tells her she should know her place, and then later a man walks into a press conference Margot is holding and lights himself on fire right in front of her.
“Dead Ringers” Review: Rachel Weisz Playing Dysfunctional Twins in This Gory, Glorious Queer Nightmare Has Ruined Me
Author’s Note: The following Dead Ringers review contains some spoilers.
In Dead Ringers — the new Prime Video series that’s an adaptation of the David Cronenberg film from 1988, which was based on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland from 1977 — Rachel Weisz plays twin gynecologists seeking to revolutionize the way pregnancy and birth are handled in the medical world. A bloody and horny psychosexual thriller full of body horror, mind games, and sci-fi-ish strangeness unfurls its claws across the six-episode series.
The Mantle twins insist, early on, that their relationship is impossible to understand or describe, and that’s certainly true. They are different, but they are perpetually entwined, unable to exist without one another. At least seven times in the writing of this review, I accidentally wrote the wrong twin’s name. This is not because Rachel Weisz’s dual performances bleed together; she’s masterful at her physical, verbal, and energetic differentiations between the two. Rather, I keep mixing Beverly and Elliot up, because it’s what the Mantle twins want: not to be seen as two sides of the same coin, not to be seen as dualistic, but rather to be seen as composites of each other, as a fusion. This goes beyond notions of where do you end and I begin; the Mantles bring a whole new level of codependency and enmeshment to the table.
Beverly is quiet but passionate, and by the end of the series I read her as potentially contending with undiagnosed depression. Elliot is an addict. She crushes and snorts pills between appointments with her patients, concocts obscene sexual spectacles, such as when she convinces a father-to-be to take out his dick while his wife is peeing nearby. She’s ravenous in more ways than one, always pleasure-seeking to the max, always eating food as if she hasn’t eaten in days. Weisz makes great use of food as props, spending an entire scene gnawing like a toddler on a seemingly endless string of rope candy. At another point, Elliot crawls across a countertop while eating leftovers with her hands. Throughout the series, she’s like a Greek god feasting, her cup overflowing, and indeed she does fancy herself a god, her single-minded pursuit of creating life manic and illicit.
Dead Ringers does not shy away from the parallels their sisterhood has with romantic obsession. In fact, it leans into it. They like to twin-swap with abandon. Elliot seduces ones of their patients, a television actress named Genevieve (Britne Oldford), but she does so on Beverly’s behalf. This, we learn, is a little ritual of theirs. The charismatic and brash Elliot goes “hunting” for women for Beverly to sleep with. Normally, though, Beverly tires of these women and moves onto the next one. But something different balloons between her and Genevieve, and it freaks Elliot out to see her sister falling in love, to see that she might be replaced. Elliot functions in this love triangle with Genevieve and Beverly as if she’s Beverly’s jilted longtime lover, and while Dead Ringers never overtly crosses into incestuous territory, it also doesn’t NOT touch that line.
Body horror is bountiful throughout, and you’ll see birthing scenes unlike anything else on television. Dead Ringers doesn’t stigmatize pregnancy as something not to be looked too closely at but instead acknowledges that, yes, it is a necessarily violent and disturbing process — one that you should look at. Beyond its visual horror, Dead Ringers also finds the horror in family, in interpersonal relationships, in capitalism, greed, and the hunger for power. I love a “dinner party from hell” scene, and there is not one but THREE (arguably, four if including the finale’s restaurant scene where Beverly is asked to abandon her sister) here, each of them touching on different discomforts and demons. Doubling occurs throughout the series to disorienting effect. Sometimes we’re looking at the two Mantles; sometimes, we’re looking at just one and her reflection. Beverly and Elliot take turns (though Elliot, more often) releasing primal screams across the six chapters. There’s a very fun lack of inhibition to the story and its characters.
I’m not super interested in an extended compare/contrast between the movie — even though it’s a favorite of mine! — and the series, because a lot of the differences are obvious and because I think the series ultimately stands firmly on its own. Alice Birch, who penned the series, has clear reverence for Cronenberg’s oeuvre while also letting her own voice come through. This series is the gold standard for how gender-swapping adaptations should function; it should feel intentional and be an additive and expansive choice, not mere surface-level detail. Making the Mantle twins sisters rather than brothers (in the film, they’re played by Jeremy Irons) and also injecting more explicit queerness into the story opens up a new layer of narrative regarding gender, systemic sexism in the birthing field, motherhood, and pregnancy. Beverly’s difficulty becoming pregnant herself adds specific stakes to the work the Mantle twins are obsessed with. The series touches on abortion, infertility, menopause.
Beverly’s (in)fertility journey — and Elliot’s research — also feel distinctly queer. Genevieve speaks of impregnating Beverly, and it isn’t played for laughs. I feel this moment deep in my core, in the place where I quietly yearn for the possibility of conceiving with my partner despite its biological impossibility, but the Mantle twins likely wouldn’t consider it impossible. They don’t feel limited by biological rules or binaries. Elliot skirts laws and ethics to find a way to grow fetuses outside of human bodies all the way to infancy. Her scientific imagination — while deeply flawed — does reimagine bodies, birthing, and biology in very queer ways.
Beverly often repeats the sentiment that pregnancy isn’t an illness. The twins have supposed feminist intentions behind their research and vision for a new birthing facility that prioritizes genuine health and wellness for mothers, but their lofty ambitions are undercut by the unsavory bedfellows they must keep in order to make the clinic financially possible. These are not just unlikable characters; they’re diabolical ones. Yes, even Beverly, whose soft spoken and literal hair-pulled-back demeanor belie her tacit approval of Elliot’s methods and the fact that Elliot would not “go hunting” on her behalf if it were not something she desired.
The penultimate episode switches gears into a full-tilt Southern gothic mode, the Mantle twins arriving at the wealthy estate of a family full of twin sisters. It’s eerie and strange throughout. The true story of “the father of gynecology” — a white man who performed surgeries on slaves without anesthesia — is told first by a man who considers himself an intellectual descendent of this torturer. He obviously skews the history in favor of a tale of scientific achievement and discovery. The story is retold, then, in a dream sequence Beverly becomes lost in, turning this racist piece of history into something like a spoken word artpiece (Birch is a playwright, and that influence comes through in much of the series). It’s affecting in the moment but doesn’t reverberate through the rest of the narrative in the way it should. It doesn’t downplay the racist brutality of modern gynecology’s history, but this dream sequence choice also doesn’t really allow for any real reflection by the characters, almost like tacking something on as a footnote rather than really tackling it. The series would feel incomplete without this haunting scene, but at the same time, I wish it were doing more. Beverly is a passive observer of the horror, and even though she hallucinates literal blood on her hands, the series doesn’t push this one step further, even as it is willing to go way beyond other boundaries and not just explore but truly revel in discomfort elsewhere in the story. Dead Ringers gets its hands dirty in many ways, but in others, it leaves things in a more intellectual space that can make the series feel a little too loaded with ideas without meaningful follow-through.
Which brings me to this: At times, the pacing of Dead Ringers is wonky. I wonder if it would be less noticeable if released weekly rather than as a streamer where viewers will likely watch the installments back-to-back, as I did with the screeners. But at times, it feels like you’ve missed something, begun the wrong episode perhaps. The timeline clips along rapidly, and more breathing room (perhaps an 8 or 10-episode order?) is desired. This pacing doesn’t completely undermine the viewing experience, and arguably it does make the whole thing seem that much more nightmarish, this sense of being dropped into the middle of something and having little by way of a grab handle to reach for. I imagine it’s a show that rewards rewatches and closer looks.
Any issues with the writing, though, are mitigated by the performances — not just from dueling Rachel Weiszes but also Oldford as Genevieve and Jennifer Ehle as evil lesbian Big Pharma overlord Rebecca Parker — as well as visceral, ambitious direction throughout. Impressive directing turns — particularly from Karyn Kusama (of Jennifer’s Body fame but also of Yellowjackets pilot fame), Karena Evans (who in addition to her work on Drake’s music videos also directed the pilot of P-Valley), and Lauren Wolkstein (queer fav who has directed episodes of Queen Sugar and Dare Me) — needle into body horror, psychosexual tension, and fraught images, use of color and sound immersive throughout. (On the topic of sound, I anticipate startling any time I hear two vibrations emit from a phone for the foreseeable future, much like I couldn’t hear the ding of an elevator for a while without thinking of Damages, a show that feels visually and tonally connected to this one though much different in scope and structure.)
The ending deviates from the film and brings back a mysterious seed planted early on in the series to dizzying effect. Elliot and Beverly commit the ultimate act of twin-swapping, their identities collapsing, and Dead Ringers making its final descent into this nightmare in a haze of blood and turmoil. While imperfect in some of its plotting, Dead Ringers is a nasty little treat about two dazzlingly destructive (and dykey!) twins who will be on my mind for a while.
In conclusion, the series is basically this tweet in a nutshell (and I mean that as a compliment):
https://twitter.com/sophiefkemp/status/1641128946287755286
“Yellowjackets” Episode 205 Recap: Van and Taissa’s Reunion Does Not Disappoint
Welcome to the Yellowjackets 205 recap, which is also the exact midway point of the season. TIME, WHAT A CONCEPT! “Two Truths and a Lie” was written by Katherine Kearns and Sarah L. Thompson and directed by Ben Semanoff. If you’re new around these parts, here’s the drill: My recaps are long and do not move in chronological order. You’re welcome to share your own theories and dissections (and disagree with me!) in the comments, where the conversations are always the highlight of my week! You can also ask me questions about what I think about anything I didn’t touch on or to elaborate on things! Seriously, I love to be all up in those comments! Let’s chat! Catch up on past recaps, and in honor of Jeff Sadecki, take the Wife Guy Quiz I made last week. Without further ado: Yellowjackets 205 recap let’s goooooo!
This is an episode about, as its title suggests, lies and truths — sometimes confessed willingly, other times uncovered. And in one particular instance, the truth is so much deadlier than any lie.
I typically like to end with my favorite or the most potent parts of an episode, but I simply cannot delve into any aspect of “Two Truths and a Lie” without talking about VAN PALMER, ALL GROWN UP.
After last week’s brief tease of Lauren Ambrose’s Adult Van, we get to learn a little more about this character. Van owns a video rental store called While You Were Streaming (if you recall, last season, she recounted the entire plot of While You Were Sleeping to the other girls on the expedition that got cut short by wolves) and lives above it. She’s out here loving Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and giving local women their gay awakenings by showing them 90s hits like the Parker Posey-starring Party Girl (a fun easter egg, as it was directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, who also directed the season two premiere and last season’s “Doomcoming”). We watch as Van goes about her day leading up to Tai’s abrupt arrival. Her home is full of 90s paraphernalia, she listens to “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes, she has a sprinkle donut and a Mountain Dew for breakfast. Overdue bills accumulate on a rainbow rug.
“yeah, check it out, it’s #5 on Autostraddle’s top 50 lesbian movies of all time list“
I read a theory last week that Van is a product of Tai’s fractured mind, isn’t really there, is surrounded by 90s movies and touches because she’s being remembered the way Tai remembers her — a film dork in the 90s. I do think we can squash that theory with this opening sequence in which we see her move throughout her day without Tai’s perspective present. But beyond that, I think this is a clear instance of where it might be tempting to reach for a supernatural answer when the reality is sitting right there (and is actually much more unsettling). Listen, no judgment on the donut + Mountain Dew breakfast combo — I respect it, but it also undeniably seems like something a 16 year old would throw back. Yes, Van is stuck in the past. But that’s not because she’s a spectral presence or caught in some sort of upside down. She’s stuck in the past and experiencing a bit of arrested development because she experienced something horrific and prolonged during formative teenage years.
When you add in the fact that Van had a bad mother, it further supports this story. The Van we meet is grown, but she’s also reaching toward the past. She explains VHS tapes and VCRs to the teens who wander into her store, baffled how these thick boxes could possibly be movies. We also learn she does work digitizing other people’s filmed memories, see her intently watching, on the precipice of tears, a stranger’s wedding on a small television. Van isn’t just stuck in a past; she also surrounds herself with other people’s stories and lives — whether that’s immersing herself in cinema or in the home videos of strangers. It’s clear that this is some sort of coping mechanism. All of the Yellowjackets we’ve met as adults have their own special ways of reckoning with the past — most of them, not the healthiest — and this is hers.
More troublingly, she also seems to have an oxy addiction. More on that in a moment!
Taissa shows up on Van’s doorstep the way we see her do at the end of last episode, and the scene continues. Tawny Cypress gives an amazing performance throughout the episode, but here in the quiet beginning of this reunion, I was immediately struck by how she made her face, her entire demeanor seem somehow younger. She looks like a scared, young girl. And that’s a fitting transformation given her history with Van.
“You haven’t changed,” Taissa later says, seeing what we all see, a woman frozen in time. Van asks why she’s here, notes that it has been “a really fucking long time” since they’ve seen each other. She accurately guesses that Tai is sleepwalking again, but Tai doesn’t want to talk about that just yet. She presents Van with the tip and strip novelty pen from last episode, and now we know why she wanted to keep it. Taissa reminisces on how the two of them apparently swapped the fancy guestbook pen at Jeff and Shauna’s wedding for one like this. According to Van, Mrs. Taylor (AKA Jackie’s mom) almost had a stroke. “I can see her bosoms!” Van mimics in a goofy voice. Indeed, Van hasn’t lost her sense of humor.
This stands out to me for a few reasons. Firstly, oh god thinking of Jackie’s mom at Jeff and Shauna’s wedding…I bet she paid for it! And micromanaged the whole thing! We don’t technically need to see her character ever again from a story perspective — that great episode on Jackie’s birthday from last season tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the Taylors — but wow I would love to see her again. Secondly, this reveal is interesting from a relationship timeline perspective. It implies that Tai and Van made it out of the woods with their relationship intact and were in fact still together shortly after, which is when Jeff and Shauna got married. So then: If it survived the wilderness, when and why did their relationship end? And why was it bad enough that they haven’t had contact in so long?
“hear me out: what if we just put this sleepwalking discussion on pause and watched Jennifer’s Body, no trust me, it’s having a cultural renaissance, Carmen Maria Machado wrote about it“
But, have they really not had any contact? Because Van also knows about Sammy. When Taissa shares the gory details of the Biscuit altar, her first question is: “Did Sam see?” Has Van met Sammy? Met Simone? In some ways, Van and Taissa seem to know each other so well, the aftereffects of many years of intimacy. But in others, they’re distant. Taissa finds a bottle of oxycodone in Van’s medicine cabinet labeled for V. Palmer and confronts her about it, which Van correctly points out is none of her business. But she explains they were for Vicky Palmer, her mother, who got cancer a few years back and lived with her until she died. “Cancer scared the bitch right out of her,” according to Van. “People reassess their choices when they know they’re going to die.”
The only time we previously witnessed any context for Van’s home life was in the pilot, when we see her trying to wake up her passed out mother on a couch and, when unsuccessful, slaps her across the face. Adult Van’s words here (as well as Taissa’s, who notes she knows Van’s relationship with her mother was “complicated”) further paint a picture of parental neglect or perhaps worse. Again, this likely contributes to her chosen coping method of obsessing over movies and living in a carefully constructed past. Tai says something about her own regrets after they discuss Vicky, and it pushes Van over the edge. She mixes a High Fidelity reference with a Seinfeld reference: “I’m mixing my pop culture metaphors, because I’m fucking upset.”
Van just wants Taissa to do what she came here to do: to ask for her help. But Tai says she can’t bring herself to ask for help, because she doesn’t want to hurt any more of the people who she loves. It’s a devastating moment, and Cypress and Ambrose are so good here, especially when their characters start spiraling out. The scene really underscores the difference between comfort and healing. Tai seeks comfort in Van; she seeks familiarity. She knows Van understands the sleepwalking, and it’s nice to not have to explain something and to not be judged for it or turned away in fear (Van suggests Tai sees a sleep doc, and Tai responds flippantly like what is she gonna do, ask about the symptom that apparently makes her behead dogs?). But it isn’t necessarily healing for Taissa to return to Van. It’s destabilizing for them both. It’s reopening old wounds. Taissa is indeed putting Van at risk by being here, and perhaps it isn’t intentional, but she at least subconsciously knows that Van also won’t turn her away, even though she does know the worst of what she’s capable of when she’s “The Other One.”
And sure enough, The Other One shows up. Taissa falls asleep on the couch, and Van tucks her in sweetly. She heads to the trash can to fish out the pill bottle and take some, an easy thing to see coming given the fact that she’d held onto the pills in the first place. Taissa pops up behind her, silently, and pulls her in for an aggressive kiss. “What do you want?” Van asks, calling her The Other One. All she responds with is: “This isn’t where I was supposed to be.” She walks away.
When The Other One mouthed “go to her” two episodes ago, did she not mean Van? Did she mean someone else? Lottie perhaps? After the appearance of the eyeless Queen card last episode, I do sense some sort of connection between Tai and Lottie. It seems The Other One didn’t want to go to Van, but Taissa did. Again, there’s familiarity there.
In the past, Taissa isn’t sleepwalking anymore. Van attributes this to Taissa’s new participation in Lottie’s blessings. Shauna can’t believe Tai has bought into this, but Tai says: “happy wife, happy life.” Later, Akilah makes fun of Tai for being “totally whipped.” It’s clear that Taissa is placating Van with her presence at these little rituals, but it’s also true Tai seems to be getting something out of them if the sleepwalking has indeed paused.
We finally see one of these Lottie blessings in full, and some things come into focus. Everyone sits in a circle as Lottie asks everyone what they feel, what they hear. Van describes the cold. Travis describes the sound of the wind through the tree. They’re basically…just doing grounding exercises?! Perhaps Lottie picked up on some of these when going through mental health treatments or therapy before the crash — or perhaps she’s just pretty intuitive. But yeah, I think there isn’t necessarily something supernatural to these rituals; they’re just straightforward grounding exercises and a form of meditation that allows the group to briefly forget their dire circumstances and focus on their environment in a present way. Of course there are mental health benefits to that! It isn’t magic; it’s group therapy. Perhaps Tai isn’t sleepwalking simply because she’s more grounded. But the ritual gets a little creepier when Lottie starts talking about the baby, and the group chants “we can’t wait to meet him” Shauna listens from the sidelines, obviously confused and afraid by what this group investment in her baby really means.
We’ll come back to Teen Shauna and her friendship with Tai in a bit, but let’s go ahead and jump over to Adult Shauna. The domestic chaos continues! Despite being let into her parents’ murder coverup, Callie is still meeting up with “Jay” as part of her little teen rebellion era. They go bowling, a scene that opens with Vancouver-based band Necking screaming out their song “Big Mouth.” I immediately had to check them out, and you should, too. I’ve noticed the world of Yellowjackets opening up a little more with moments like this, which was harder to do in season one due to COVID filming restrictions. Anyway, here’s Callie, a high schooler, and “Jay”, a smarmy cop, bowling in the middle of the day. Perhaps they read my piece about bowling being peak romance.
Callie tells Jay that if she gets a strike, he has to kiss her. Despite already crossing a lot of ethical lines with her, Jay seems unwilling to let things go that far, but he takes the bet after eyeing her low bowling scores. Callie bowls the strike, and he has to dodge her kiss and explain he’s taking things slow. When he goes to the restroom, the waiter brings their check, and Callie sees his name as M. Saracusa. She does the thing she gave her mother a hard time for not doing last season and GOOGLES THIS MAN, immediately learning he’s a cop. Later, she intentionally feeds him false information and tells him she found out her mom is sleeping with her father’s best friend, Randy Walsh. Poor Randy, always the scapegoat!
Callie confesses to her parents that she has been talking to a cop and accidentally told him about the affair but that she “fixed it” by telling the Randy lie. Jeff is incredulous; this is exactly why he didn’t want to involve their daughter in a murder conspiracy. Shauna, on the other hand, thinks it’s actually a pretty good idea to make the cops think it was Randy. Callie, rather bleakly, is thrilled by the thought that she has done something helpful. Callie keeps trying to get her parents’ attention, and regular acts of teenage rebellion aren’t cutting it! Her mom didn’t care she was lying about staying with a friend in order to have sex with her boyfriend. Her mom doesn’t care about her whereabouts enough to know she’s hanging out in bars and bowling alleys with an older man. But her mom does care about this, about making sure she’s still covering her own tracks, and hey, even if that means making her teen daughter an accessory after the fact, that’s cool! So many of the Sadecki family’s problems would be fixed if they all were just honest with each other, and doesn’t that feel right for a suburban family pretending everything’s fine all the time? In the case of this particular family, the stakes of avoiding the truth are murderously high.
“his go-to drink was FIREBALL?”
Shauna latches onto Callie’s strategy and has Jeff arrange for her to meet with Randy at the motel, knowing the cops will be following her. Sure enough, Kevyn and Saracusa are right there on her tail, watching as she enter’s with Randy, who wasn’t told much by Jeff, but don’t worry he got some chips to share! Randy thinks this might have something to do with “the FBI” (Walter/Misty) interviewing him about Nat’s disappearance, but Shauna of course doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “I didn’t tell them about the b-mail,” Randy says, prompting Shauna to threaten him. I love when domme-y Shauna jumps out. “Don’t you dare think about me,” she asks after she instructs him to jerk off in a condom in the bathroom. Randy, unfortunately, can’t deliver, but he lies and fills the condom with lotion. Saracusa is so convinced Shauna’s affair was with Adam that he sniffs out the truth (literally — Randy used strawberry lotion). Kevyn points out this means he’s been made by Callie, and Saracusa says, as if he’s a cop character in a hardboiled detection novel: “She might be good, but I’m better.” I highly doubt it, Saracusa!!!! No one is more conniving than a teenage girl!
In addition to learning more about Adult Van after last week’s reveal, we also see some of the aftermath of Javi miraculously showing up again — though I wouldn’t say we necessarily learn much in this department. But that’s the point: Even the characters are still in the dark about how he possibly could have survived. Javi isn’t talking, and Travis doesn’t want to pressure him (Travis is also pissed at Nat, who cops to planting the bloody shorts). One of the JV girls, perhaps jokingly though it’s unclear, wonders if Javi actually died out there and this is his ghost. I’ve seen people speculate about Javi being an apparition or being caught for some time in some form of “upside down” or “alternate plane.” But as the resident Nothing Supernatural To See Here advocate, while I think it’s a mystery as to how Javi could have survived out in the wilderness alone, I don’t think he’s a ghost or that he got trapped in another dimension. I think he isn’t talking because he’s traumatized, and I think he has somehow found a way to hide out near or even under the cabin. He has obviously been in close enough proximity to steal bear meat.
“She told me not to come back,” Javi says to Coach Ben. When asked who he means, he says: “My friend.” He’s also drawing some creepy woodsy drawings, but we already know he has been coping via making art in the wilderness, like the wolf figure he carved last season. Who told him not to come back? Well, earlier in the episode, when Travis is trying to get him to talk, we do briefly see him look at Lottie and her look back. I said it last week, but I do think it’s possible Lottie was helping him hide for some reason, which would explain why she was so insistent he was alive. It’s also possible sleepwalking Tai could be involved here?
In addition to being an episode about truths/lies, this is an episode about friendship! There’s a really sweet scene between Taissa and Akilah (who yes, is still secretly talking to and hanging out with her pet mouse, whose safety I am worried about!). Akilah and Taissa talk openly about Lottie’s rituals, and Akilah says she started going because she saw Tai going. She then shares a story from before, about how her and one of the other JV players had a routine before every game involving “Easy Lover” and lucky socks and lucky shinguards. Tai teases her because the JV team lost a lot, and Akilah says “maybe we would have lost more without it.” Regardless, it was their special pregame ritual, and they could pretend it made a difference, that it made them play better or the other team play worse. “It’s not like we really believed in it, not deep down, but we still did it before every game.”
Taissa is more receptive to this than she usually is about even Van’s faith in Lottie’s rituals, and it makes sense. Akilah is putting this into words Tai understands. Pregame rituals. Lucky socks. It’s true that high school sports are steeped in superstition. I used to have my little prematch tennis rituals, too. And you don’t believe in them, but you also do. Team sports demand communal ritual, an almost supernatural level of connection between teammates. Sometimes it felt like my doubles partner knew which way I was gonna move before I did — and we didn’t even like each other! I think Yellowjackets is such a fascinating exploration of the human psyche’s attachment to patterns, to signs, to making sense of the inexplicable. Again, Teen Lottie is out here leading a grounding exercise! Of course it’s going to make them feel connected to something bigger than themselves. Even skeptic Tai is experiencing benefits.
On that note, I always love the little glimpses into Teen Tai and Shauna’s friendship. Tai was the first person to figure out Shauna was pregnant and also was going to assist her in having a self-administered abortion before Shauna realized it was too risky. Again in this episode, we see them connecting on this intimate level, but they also have some tension in their friendship due to Taissa’s increased involvement in Lottie’s wilderness circle. Shauna is fucking scared, and she should be. She’s about to have a baby in the woods, stranded, malnourished, unable to receive medical attention or any kind of real support. The only support that has existed for her has been Tai’s emotional support. She’s rightfully freaked out by Lottie’s obsession with the baby and by there being pressure on her as someone who is bringing a child into this fractured community of mostly teens. Lottie is making the baby into a symbol of hope, and that isn’t fair to Shauna. I don’t blame Shauna for getting mad at Lottie whispering to her pregnant belly while she sleeps. Lottie says it’s good to talk to them in utero, and Shauna says: “yeah, so they learn to recognize their mother’s voice.”
But hear me out: IS Lottie doing anything nefarious here? It’s important to remember that these are teens. Their knowledge is going to vary vastly when it comes to pregnancy, birthing, child-rearing. Maybe Lottie legitimately thought she was doing something good for the baby. Maybe Lottie really does see the baby as a symbol of hope and doesn’t want to steal it but just wants to cling to something that feels like change after so many months of the same.
“She’s obsessed with my baby Tai,” Shauna says after Taissa follows her into the wilderness. And she’s not wrong, but it’s hard to tell if something genuinely evil is happening here, and I’m leaning toward no. I think two things can be true: Shauna is correct to be alarmed by the team’s investment in her baby, and Lottie isn’t necessarily being fucked up by clinging to the baby. They’re both dealing with some heavy ass shit! Yes, Shauna’s situation is more obviously hard, but Lottie had to quit anti-psychotics cold turkey. She’s going through a struggle other people can’t see.
Shauna isn’t necessarily scared of Lottie so much as she’s mad at Tai. “I don’t need your fucking prayers; I need you to have my back,” she says. She doesn’t need Lottie to behave differently; she needs Tai to be there for her. And she could probably handle Lottie being weird toward her unborn baby if Tai were still on her side about things. “You’re supposed to be on my side, not Team Lottie,” she also says during this scene, suggesting a line has been drawn between Team Lottie and Team Shauna, a dichotomy I’m interested in seeing play out, because I think I previously thought things would be more Team Lottie vs. Team Taissa, as they were last season when Taissa decided to leave on her failed expedition.
“what are you gonna do, Shauna?! have a friendship breakup with me like you did with Jackie and then turn me into Pad Tai?!”
“THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I’M GOING TO DO BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS DELICIOUS”
Before they can come to any real conclusions about their friendship, Shauna exclaims in pain and a snow squall simultaneously blows in. The two have to navigate their way back to the cabin in the freezing cold and with limited visibility. Taissa ends up reciting Lottie’s chants from the blessing earlier, utilizing the mantra to push through this moment. Again, it’s typical grounding stuff, a way for Taissa to focus and sharpen her mind while under intense physical and mental stress. Taissa and Shauna making it back to the cabin in this snow storm as Tai chants these words isn’t proof of something supernatural on their side; it’s proof that these kinds of anxiety management techniques are powerful. Given her conversation with Akilah, the fact that she isn’t afraid to fall asleep anymore, and her love for Van, it makes sense that Taissa is newly invested in these techniques, even if she doesn’t believe in their mystical power. But it also means she’s going through a bit of a friendship breakup with Shauna, and friendship breakups with Shauna tend to be, well, lethal.
SPEAKING OF LETHAL FRIENDSHIP BREAKUPS. You know what I’m about to talk about…
Misty and Crystal. Yikes! Our two little cannibal freaks start out the episode strong by engaging in a classic game of Which 3 Famous People — dead or alive — Would You Like To Meet? Misty replies: Plato, obviously. Eric Nies of MTV’s “The Grind” so he could teach her how to dance. And…she hesitates, briefly, before confessing…Jack Kevorkian. “What he does is so brave,” she says. Crystal agrees, saying her family had to put down their pet beagle and so why do humans have to suffer in near-death more than beagles do? Plus, she adds, young Kevorkian was kind of hot?
Of fucking course these two are bonding over loving Dr. Kevorkian!!!! They’ve already bonded over enjoying the taste of human meat. They’re two horny theater geeks, and I know em when I see em, because baby I WAS ONE. Misty’s teenage idolization of Kevorkian makes me wonder if she has been engaging in some casual Kevorkian behavior at the nursing home where she works. It’s easy to conceive of, right?
After Crystal is charged with having to dispose of the shit bucket, Misty says she’ll accompany her. They’re best friends after all! Along the way to the cliff where they’ll dump the bucket, they confess rapid-fire secrets to each other. Misty says she hates deodorant and just pretended to be all out after the crash. Crystal says she let a boy finger her backstage during the dress rehearsal for Bye Bye Birdie, and Misty says she walked in on her parents having sex and wasn’t grossed out. Again, horny theater geeks.
Crystal says her real name is Kristen and that everyone got it wrong at practice but she didn’t correct them because they gave her the nickname “Crystal the Pistol,” and she’d never had a nickname before, never felt like she really belonged. I have a warped sense of status and rules when it comes to high school sports vs. high school theater, because I went to a performing arts school where sports bore little influence, but I know from others that as competitive and toxic as theater can be, varsity sports often come with a different kind of social status and hierarchy. The approval Crystal got on the field was likely different than the approval on the stage; high school athletes are often treated like gods.
Here, Crystal connects with Misty on a cellular level. Neither of them really experienced the high of popularity until these pivotal moments. For Crystal, that was receiving a nickname. For Misty, it was the plane crash.
“I love you so much that it transcends the time-space continuum, which is why I call you ‘bestie’ a term not really used to describe a best friend in 1996”
Misty seizes this moment of connection, and takes it too far. There is a heady feeling that comes with being let into someone’s secrets. But then Misty tells a truth that cannot be untold. One that I, to be honest, had almost forgotten about, despite it being such a striking image, because it remains one of the single most unhinged acts of teen anarchy of the entire series. Misty tells Crystal that no one liked her before the crash and that people started treating her as useful after it, so she destroyed the emergency transmitter. Not only was Misty willing to do something so wildly chaotic, dangerous, and life-altering just to keep being liked, but she also thinks this kind of secret is on par with the other confessions she and Crystal have been making to each other. This is a recurring theme in this series: the collapsing of stakes and tendency for characters to either extremely downplay or extremely exaggerate problems, choices, points of difference. Characters are myopic and often ignorant of the specific contexts in which they’re operating. We see this across the timelines and among many of the characters. Jeff cares more about an affair than he does about murder. Teen Shauna wants Jackie to feel lesser-than and banishes her from the group, which in their previous lives would have been dramatic, sure, but wouldn’t have been deadly. Taissa thinks she can just show up on Van’s doorsteps and have a normalish reunion between exes.
Misty thinks she can tell a deep, dark secret and it’ll make her friendship with her new best friend all the deeper.
What it does instead, of course, is push her away. Literally. Crystal’s face falls and she asks, in shock, “you’re the reason we never got rescued?” Misty tries to pivot quickly and play it off like she was joking, but Crystal replies, baldly: “You’re not that good of an actress.” In any other context, these words would be mean girl shit. “You’re not my best friend; you’re a psycho,” Crystal says, and she tries to get away from Misty, who closes in on her and offers to do anything for her, anything to make her not tell the others. Crystal asks if she’s going to poison her. “No,” Misty says. “I’ll fucking. Kill you.” Samantha Hanratty is positively venomous in this delivery; it’s the most vicious we’ve seen Misty ever since she axed Ben’s leg off with a smile on her face. Crystal startles and backs off the cliff, falling to her death. Later, when Misty descends the drop-off and approaches Crystal’s lifeless body, she makes a desperate bid and tries to perform CPR while singing “Stayin’ Alive” to stay on beat. Her efforts are futile, and she parts with the words “I’m sorry, bestie.”
🎶 “you could drive a person crazy / you could drive a person mad” 🎶
The moment calls back to the beginning of the episode, when Misty and Walter are riding in a car together and “Stayin’ Alive” is playing. Misty turns it off. At the time, we’re led to believe she’s just annoyed by Walter’s music choices and presence, but we uncover later on why the song might be triggering. Walter offers to put on Les Mis or Phantom, and Misty says she needs to focus. But Walter wants to play the titular game of Two Truths and a Lie, and he offers up three things about himself: that he once owned a small business that sold artisanal goat cheese made by a goat named Billy, that there’s a nonzero chance Barry Manilow is his father, and that he has a ton of stock in Taco Bell despite never having been because the beans upset his stomach. Misty makes her guesses, but it turns out all three are truths, which coincidentally only makes me further believe Walter is a capital L, LIAR.
Misty accuses him of breaking the rules, and he says: “There’s only ever one rule: win.” As I said last week, I think Walter is up to something diabolical with Misty. Someone in the comments last week put forth one of my favorite Yellowjackets theories at the moment, which is that Walter could be a cannibal hunting Misty. Sometimes, cannibalism is used in literature and pop culture as a means of survival or monstrous punishment; other times, it’s seen as a form of ascension, a forbidden fruit whose consumption equates to power and luxury. If Walter ascribes to that latter view of cannibalism, wouldn’t the ultimate form of cannibalism be to cannibalize a cannibal? The ultimate ascension, the mark of a true apex predator. References were made last episode to Sweeney Todd, Walter seems to have specific eating habits, and living on a boat would make it easy to get away with illicit acts.
“I’m not letting you in until you take back what you said about Kim Deal being overrated!!!!!!!!”
Misty and Walter find the compound and have a conversation with Nat through the gate. Nat admits that, yes, technically she was kidnapped but she’s running her own operation here and she doesn’t want Misty to interfere. Misty is shocked to learn Lottie is here, running this cult: “Lottie as in Lottie? Lottie who was committed to a mental institution in Switzerland?” Later, she tells Walter she’d kept tabs on everyone but somehow missed this, underscoring just how low Lottie has managed to lay in recent years. “You and your Hardy Boy can go home,” Nat tells Misty, and as brief as it is, I sure do enjoy seeing Juliette Lewis and Elijah Wood in a scene together!
“Maybe Lottie is jealous of what Natalie and I have,” Misty says to Walter after Nat turns them away. Van isn’t the only one stuck in the past. Misty still sees things in the crystalline way of high school social politics. Here is where Walter finally says he knows her tale about Adam Martin’s mother was a lie and that he thinks she probably killed him to help a friend. “Your friendships are a little more complicated than most,” Walter says, again highlighting that tension throughout the show of collapsed stakes and the skewed headspaces of its characters. Misty is defaulting to simple social structures by thinking Lottie is jealous of her relationship with Nat, when really Misty’s “friendships” are not simple at all, are not really functional friendships in the first place, and are also full of murder, kidnapping, and lies.
Nat, meanwhile, has been trying to figure out what the fuck Lottie is up to, and SAME. Nat attends a workshop in which Lisa and Lottie both encourage her to access her darkest thoughts as a means of healing. Nat quickly clocks the slash on Lottie’s hand, and even though Lottie dismisses it as an accident, the way Nat asks suggests she already knows Lottie has been defaulting back to her old ways of slashed palms and blood sacrifices. Eventually, Nat unlocks Lottie’s cabinet of secrets in her office. She bursts into a room full of Lottie’s acolytes in an attempt to expose their leader. She found files on all of them, including information on their personal lives, financial information, everything a cult leader might need to manipulate and control their followers. “She’s preying and profiting,” Nat says. “She is clinically insane, and her delusions have hurt people.”
The followers are unfazed. They know this already, have willingly turned over their information. Lisa says Nat should know better than anyone that we shouldn’t define people based on their pasts. With Adult Lottie, it’s harder for me to conceptualize innocence. Whereas I think Teen Lottie could just be misguided and wrong but not manipulative, it’s more difficult to give the same grace to Adult Lottie. But I also can see how her past may, while not defining her entirely, influence her desire for control over and devotion from others. Especially if she’s carrying guilt. And Nat has many times implied Lottie’s actions caused harm in the past.
Lottie tells Nat that what she’s really after isn’t in that cabinet but in her mind. Nat wants to know what really happened to Travis and what he meant by saying she was right, and Lottie does, too. “I want to understand what Travis was going through,” Lottie says. Nat replies: “You know what he was going through. You started it.”
Despite what Nat said last season about Travis not believing in Lottie’s mysticism, we’ve been given so much evidence to the contrary. Nat blames Lottie for something. What did Lottie start? What power did she hold? She convinces Nat to participate in some EMDR, and Nat reflects on the last time she saw Travis alive. We watch as she looks out onto a beach, but it turns out to just be a cheap painting of a beachscape in a grimy motel room. Nat informs us that at this point it had been a while since she and Travis had seen each other. He had a new job, was seeing someone. “Part of me wanted to ruin it, and another part of me just missed him,” she recalls. It’s a devastating bookend to the Tai and Van reunion in the episode, this one another charged reunion between two former lovers that goes more steeply south. Nat overdoses, and in her near-death experience, she sees the crash site, only none of them survived. It’s just burned corpses in a plane, and the Antler Queen enters. “We weren’t alone out there,” Nat tells Travis in the memory. “I saw it. I felt it. We brought it back. Travis, we brought it back with us.”
This is what Travis thought she was right about. That there was something out there they all brought back with them. Nat leans down, places her head in Lottie’s lap, and becomes Teen Nat. Lottie, frightened, remains an adult, but turns and sees her own shadow as the approaching Antler Queen. I don’t think it’s any stretch of the mind or an oversimplification to conceive of this “darkness” the group brought back with them as TRAUMA. They all keep searching for evil curses to blame, but maybe the curse was just their fucking terrible circumstances. They keep searching for monsters, but maybe the monsters were themselves. Inconceivable circumstances will sometimes make you do inconceivable things.
increasingly, I’ve been on Team Lottie Is Not Actually the Antler Queen, but I must admit this is compelling evidence to the contrary
Yes, they brought things back from the wilderness. And I don’t think it’s reaching to define those wilderness leftovers as just extreme psychological baggage and damage. They’re being haunted, and I think there are several ways to interpret that. I know the timeline and timing of things has been a hangup for some people: Why would so much be coming to a head specifically 25 years after getting out of the wilderness? Well, I did the math, and it places a lot of the characters at 40-43 years old, and it could be as simple as them entering new stages of their lives, the past suddenly potent and present.
I know it frustrates some viewers, this teetering between what can be explained and what cannot, what could be supernatural but also might not be, but I love it. I want to be confused and conflicted, because these characters are. It doesn’t feel like we’re being kept in the dark for the sake of narrative manipulation; it feels like we’re being kept in the dark because the characters are, too. To demand definitive answers makes us like the vultures in-universe who want the surviving Yellowjackets to detail their trauma, to explain everything that happened out there in plain and digestible language. I like luxuriating in the ambivalence, in the television static.
We end things, fittingly, with a guttural scream. It’s from Shauna, who is clearly in labor. What fresh horrors will next week bring?
Last Buzz:
- Okay…did not mean to bring so much of my own high school shit into this recap, but here we are! I did sports and I did theater, and both feel especially relevant to this particular episode!
- Programming Note: Yellowjackets is off next week and returns the following week.
- It is indeed one of the best lesbian movies of all time, but I also like to think Van’s personal relationship to The Watermelon Woman would hold special significance due to when it came out. The film came out in February 1996, which is just a few months before the crash. Whether it was one of the last movies she saw before the crash or she saw it for the first time shortly after getting out of the wilderness, it probably meant a lot to her as a teen!
- Did people say “bestie” in 1996? I polled four queers who were teens in 96, including my fiancé, and they all unequivocally responded “no.” It would have more likely been “bff.” I’m willing to forgive this anachronism because “I’m sorry bestie” is indeed funny in this context of literal murder, and Samantha Hanratty’s line reading is delightful. Also, I’m just generally not a super stickler for such things! I just hope lines aren’t being written in for the sheer purpose of social media replay possibility.
- Misty only begins to do Two Truths and a Lie and says she does not like monkeys and she thinks we’re asking the wrong questions about the moon landing, and I am willing to bet both of these are her TRUTHS.
- Nat is obviously a very capable hunter in her youth, but she also misses sometimes, as with the moose, and I see this episode as Adult Nat hunting Lottie but then wildly missing the mark that’ll actually bring her down.
- I love that visual transition from the snow squall into the static of the television. TV static has become even more of a recurring visual cue this season. It’s both nostalgic and haunting.
- It is a little frightening to hear Taissa call Shauna’s baby “the hungry one.”
- The “number two” card is the shit bucket chore card, and that feels like fitting humor for teenagers.
- Okay, sorry to be this person, but here’s the aerial shot of Dead Crystal (RIP!):
And…uh…is anyone else seeing what I’m seeing?
GUYS, I’M JK slash mostly just making fun of how characters keep forming the symbol with dots that could kind of make any shape. But again, I do think it’s human nature to want to find patterns, so I don’t blame them.
Sex, Memories, and Queer Love Come Together in the Multiverse of Roku’s “Slip”
See Mae.
Mae was bored.
Bored Mae made a mistake.
Bored Mae made a mistake that launched her into a multiverse of love, sex, and relationships so she could find her way back to herself and the true love she may have lost.
Slip — written, directed, and starring my imaginary mentor Zoe Lister-Jones — is a Roku original series where we meet Mae, a museum curator, who we learn sees her life as dull and repetitive. Where some folks would see a career on the rise, a quiet marriage, and an overall vibey life, Mae is seeking a change. Instead of addressing all the things she slips, cheating on her husband after an event one night with a musician who has a high bun and can probably touch the ceiling.
The night kicks off a series of hella unfortunate events for Mae. She wakes up the next morning and she’s married to the high bun! She’s rich, he’s famous, and they have the most gorgeous Brooklyn apartment I think I’ve seen but she’s still unhappy. She is the only one in this new universe who remembers her previous life, everything is different — her homes, her partners, her style, and her jobs or lack thereof. The only constant is Gina (Tymika Tafari who let’s fucking face it is a GOTDAMN STAR OKAY?!), who has been her best friend since she was a child and remains so in every universe. Then she discovers the way to launch into a new universe is to orgasm, and realizes that she has to keep coming with different people to find her way back to her old life and herself.
I love Zoe as an actress, Fawn Moscato in New Girl is one of the greatest characters of all time. I also really, REALLY enjoy Zoe as a writer (we are NOT going to talk about The Craft ‘tho), she has a thing with time and memories, and, so do I. Bits of my memories are foggy and I have lost time both trying to erase and chase them and in Slip I feel like Mae is doing a lot of the same. Listers’ 2021 film How It Ends, is so underrated and a film I really love revisiting. It hits on time and memories times a million. Losing them, finding them, figuring out how to move through them, and all of that is also present in Slip. Mae is trying her best to comb through the memories of the life and love she thought she didn’t want in order to figure out how to not just get it back, but to hold onto it.
Time is such a thing, you never know how much of it we have left. And memories have the power to control your feelings, throwing you forward in smiles or backward in tears. Mae uses the power of time and memory and grabs bits from each life in every universe to finally figure out what she needed and wanted in her original one.
Yes, it gets gay, and not just like for a smidge of a second but for a whole episode! The television gods are listening to us and giving the girlies some depth this summer as a treat! Emily Hampshire plays her wife, Sandy, in one universe and it’s pretty dope. Without spoiling it I really like how they capture that queer relationships are full of love, passion, friendship, and flirtation — but that they also have their not-so-perfect moments too. Shout out to my bestie Zoe for giving us some well-roundedness (it’s a word, I didn’t look it up but — it’s a fucking word). I just dig how their connection isn’t fraught with trauma and we see such an expanded world for them that we don’t often see when it comes to lesbian couples on TV.
In each of Mae’s relationships in these worlds, each one isn’t just teaching her a lesson, but it’s trying to force her to reckon with all the feelings that launched her into this whole thing in the first place. It’s sort of letting her live in the world of “The grass is greener on the other side”, making her look at the issue of comparing her life to those of others and realizing it may be good for them but it ain’t for her.
All in all, I feel like Slip is the age-old story of not knowing what you have until it’s gone but told in a far more unique and layered way. We all make mistakes and have to live with them but thank goodness we don’t have to keep making mistakes to get back to the thing we want most. It’s also about making sure you know you and that you dig you, and wow I never actually thought I’d quote RuPaul again but if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gon’ love somebody else?
https://youtu.be/Xg2Lynfu0Qw
I’ll Watch Anything Where Survivors Get Revenge, Make Their Own Justice
I’ll Watch Anything is an Autostraddle TV Team series in which we tell you what type of movies and TV shows we’ll watch, no matter what. This week, A.Tony’s here to tell you why they will watch anything where someone (who by A.Tony’s standards) deserves to get revenge and makes sure they get it.
When I was some younger than middle school age, I was sitting in my grandma’s office in a big red plush recliner watching TV. A commercial for a new movie starring Kimberly Elise and Loretta Devine and Clifton Powell came on. I cannot remember anything else from the commercial except: a young black girl singing a nursery rhyme, Kimberly Elise angry and crying as Clifton Powell apologized for some thing in the past, and best of all, Kimberly in a pink church dress standing in a megachurch all anger and uncontained grief, pointing a small silver gun at Clifton with his hands up in remorse, and then a loud shot, gasps and screams within the megachurch, as the screen goes black.
As we know, cops aren’t going to save anybody and in the case of my communities, they are more likely to kill us than to avenge us. (Though I recognize it as propaganda now, that’s why Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was my SHOW for years: because it functioned in a completely unrealistic world where cops would actually fight to get justice for people like me, for the sexually abused.) People like me are not allowed to have revenge. And media that portrays someone who looks like me, loves like me, presents and moves through life like me, is extremely rare and if I’m reflected it’s more likely in a story about death (not just the final one, but the ones leading up to the grand finale as well) than any kind of life).
Movies that fall under this category for me (off the top of my head) include:
Candyman (I’m a fan of both)
Carrie (OG)
Colombiana
Enough
Eve’s Bayou
Fear Street Trilogy
Halloween Ends
Hush
It: Part One
Jennifer’s Body
John Wick
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Perfect Stranger (Halle Berry’s)
Orphan Black
Piggy
The Purge (OG)
Scream movie series
sweet/vicious (please return to me)
Teeth
The Strays
Us
The aforementioned Woman Thou Art Loosed
“I don’t plan on being a better person. I’m becoming worse everyday.” – Moon Dong Eun
The thing about being a survivor is healing is just really fucking ugly. Every story that tells you different, it’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they are showing you one snippet of not everyone’s journey. True, not every survivor dreams revenge. But it’s also true that some survivors do not have more joy than not, especially since access to resources for proper healing are not equal for everyone. Some people have therapy to ground them, I have Helena’s wings.
“Some hatred resembles longing. It’s impossible to get rid of.” – Moon Dong Eun
One of the only ways I survived a long period of abuse was by imagining a metal baseball bat, all the people who never helped me and God watching, and the inability for cops to get there in time.
“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, fracture for fracture. The one who inflicted the injury must suffer the same. I don’t know. That sounds too fair to ne.” – Moon Dong Eun
It did not stop the hands. Or the teeth. Or the other teeth. Or the tongue. Or what was scooped out of me. But it got me from one moment to the next.
“The pain, I assure you, will be exquisite.” ~The Man Who Has The Sweets (no I will not write that movie’s name here, thanks).
As of late, The Glory is my strongest obsession and also led me to watching Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (which I’ve only seen titled as Lady Vengeance, a small fact that I can’t help but obsess over) for the first time. One thing I love about The Glory, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and The Handmaiden are that revenge isn’t just a group project, its often seen as a right.
So often, revenge stories are seen as John Wick doing all the work himself. And, to be fair, he is taking motherfuckers out left, right, sideways, backwards, and in other dimensions — I will not take that fact away from him. But, so much of what he’s able to do after a certain point, is dependent on others helping him. And that’s something I need as a survivor. The knowledge, the understanding, the belief that I’m not in this alone. I was alone in the abuse. I do not want to be alone in the recovery.
There’s that whole American “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” ideology even in revenge stories, when really, they’re just highlighting one person in order to blur our vision of everyone who gets them there (art imitates life, I guess).
“You think you’re tricking me? You’re the one being tricked.” ~Lady Hideko
I’m also about, the not super haunting type of revenge too. Like, Mean Girls and Do Revenge, where, let’s be honest the person doing the revenge got outed by a popular girl and I wholly support whatever they decide to do to get back at them. Even John Tucker Must Die (which is an incredibly misleading title) was on repeat for at least three years (back when we had cable) because I loved seeing John’s face when he figured everything out. To be honest, that revenge felt like lopsided even to me, but I’m not against lopsided revenge all the time. Gone Girl? Amazing Amy was amazingly wrong BUT I love the ride she takes me on so I’ll allow it.
“There will be no forgiveness and so there will be no glory either.” – Moon Dong Eun
Growing up in both a religious school and a religious family, we’re always told, “Turn the other cheek”. And for the longest time, we weren’t even really allowed to talk about anger. To an extent, we still aren’t. Keeping anger inside you with nowhere to go makes you…dangerous. But in the wrong ways. That danger rarely goes out to the people who deserve it, but can manifest in your closest relationships, how you hold and hurt your body, and even just your ability to make i from one day to the next. Revenge movies gave me a place to be angry and to live and hope in that anger for two hours at a time. I look at how, quite frankly fucked up, I am now. I’m a little terrified of what I may have become if I hadn’t had even that.
19 Shows To Watch If You Like “Yellowjackets”
So you adore Showtime’s thrilling supernatural horror mystery series Yellowjackets and you’re looking for other shows like Yellowjackets, or shows that embody some aspect of Yellowjackets that you yearn for. Well, great news: here are 19 shows that might satisfy that primal urge.
1. The Wilds (Prime Video)
If you like high school girls, including a lesbian athlete, struggling for survival in nature after being thrust out of a flying object that had promised to take them somewhere else altogether, try The Wilds. This teen drama finds eight teenage girls abandoned on a desert island after their plane crashes en route to Hawaii for “Dawn of Eve,” an empowerment retreat they’ve been sent to by their parents. The girls embody and eventually betray their obvious archetypes as they attempt to piece together a path towards survival when it seems rescue is, at best, not around the corner. (Stream The Wilds on Prime Video)
2. Class of ’07 (Prime Video)
If you like a diverse group of women with complicated emotional relationships to each other stranded in an isolated area with no hope of immediate rescue forced to eventually consider cannibalism, try Class of ’07! Class of ’07 is like… Yellowjackets, but make it comedy! Set at the ten-year high school class reunion at an all-girls Catholic private school, Class of ’07 answers the question “what would happen if there was an apocalypse of sorts during your high school reunion and you ended up basically on an island, forced to confront the adolescent trauma you’re all still living with while surrounded by the people who caused it?” The cast is incredible (and full of queer actors), there is one queer character, and it’s a delightful, dynamic little watch. (Watch Class of 07 on Prime Video)
3. Wreck (Hulu)
If you like queer horror with touches of humor and a mystery that centers friendship, grief, and growing up, try Wreck! It’s a slasher set on a cruise ship that contains a lot of class commentary and genuine thrills. There’s a killer twist, and a below deck conspiracy that’s suspenseful without becoming overly complicated. The show’s central friendship is between a lesbian and a gay boy, which is frustratingly hard to find on television! It’s easy to inhale this series in a weekend. (Watch Wreck on Hulu)
4. Welcome to Eden / Bienvenidos a Edén (Netflix)
Cr. LUCIA FARAIG/NETFLIX © 2021
If you like the challenging dynamics that arise from a group of young people, including queer women, unexpectedly separated from civilization in an isolated location, unwittingly dabbling with hallucinogenic drugs and struggling to find a pathway forward after their friends begin disappearing or dying, you should try Welcome to Eden! This Spanish-language thriller finds a group of escape-hungry teens lured to a remote island for what they’re promised will be the party of a lifetime, only to learn they’ve actually been recruited to join a cult headquartered on the island. (Watch Welcome to Eden on Netflix)
5. Pretty Little Liars (Freeform)
(Photo by: ABC Family/Eric McCandless)
If you like complicated, unnaturally attractive teenage girls being taunted and extorted and blackmailed by a mysterious person or group of people who do not reveal their identity, try Pretty Little Liars. A year after the queen bee of their social group goes missing, four former best friends who wear really ambitious outfits to school are drawn together and pushed apart by relenting messages from the mysterious “A” who threatens to expose their secrets. As the show proceeds over the course of seven seasons, those original secrets feel increasingly silly compared to their new secrets: so much murder and deception, so little time! Very similar to Yellowjackets in that you never really know who to trust besides the core four, and you’re also not really sure who’s dead! (Stream Seven Seasons of Pretty Little Liars on HBO Max)
6. Dare Me (USA)
(Photo by: Rafy/USA Network)
If you like homoerotic elite high school sports teams containing girls with a lot of psychological baggage and a story that involves the slow unpeeling of a central mystery, try Dare Me. Unfortunately only given one season at USA, this series based on a Megan Abbot novel follows a cheer team under the leadership of a new, boundary-less coach whose own personal unraveling aligns with that of many of her damaged, self-destructive charges. “Dare Me takes a still heightened but significantly more grounded approach to its tales of teen violence and small-town drama,” Kayla wrote in her comparison of the show to Riverdale. “It still dresses up its darkness with glitter, but that mask is very intentional, a piercing juxtaposition of the thrills and terror of high school sports.” (Stream One Season of Dare Me on Netflix)
7. The Leftovers (HBO)
If you like Jasmin Savoy-Brown in a supernatural prestige cable drama centered on a town deeply impacted by a tragic event in which some residents lost more than others and some of them eventually formed cults, try The Leftovers. The show is set three years following the “Sudden Departure,” an unexplained global event in which 2% of the world’s population suddenly disappeared. Savoy-Brown joins us in Season 2, as the show shifts its focus and moves its main characters from Mapleton, New York to a town in Texas that didn’t lose any residents during the Rapture but now faces a new tragedy that engenders emotions including chaos and panic. (Stream all three seasons of The Leftovers on HBO Max)
8. Westworld (HBO)
If you like a show that spawned active, engaged reddit fan boards of fans attempting to unravel the show’s central questions through piecing together its various clues, try Westworld. Westworld takes place in the future in a Wild West themed amusement park populated by androids and patronized by rich people who enjoy killing and raping the androids without consequence. But then the androids start becoming sentient and shit gets very complicated. A perfect first season is followed by two more that didn’t hit quite so hard, with a fourth debuting this year. (Stream Westworld on HBO Max)
9. Station Eleven (HBO Max)
If you like a story in which past trauma remains a vivid presence in the still-tenuous present or are just interested in viewing the best television show I have ever seen, try Station Eleven! Station Eleven grapples with the world built in the aftermath of a flu that wiped out civilization entirely in 48 swift hours, weaving together stories of interconnected characters across time, flashing between the day the pandemic first hit and the ensuing few years and then what remains 20 years later, focusing specifically on The Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who perform Shakespeare in a loop around the now sparsely inhabited Great Lakes region. (Stream Station Eleven on HBO Max)
10. Killing Eve (BBC / AMC)
(Photo by: Gareth Gatrell/BBCAmerica)
If you like weirdly charming sociopaths like Misty Quigley who enjoy commiting murders, try Killing Eve! This delightfully deranged thriller follows Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), a British intelligence investigator who becomes obsessed with a very beautiful and fashionable assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) who in turn becomes obsessed with her. Season One is a perfect season of television and by Season 3 we are mostly here for the outfits and the sexual tension although I believe some spy stuff is still technically happening on some level. (Stream Killing Eve on Hulu)
11. The Haunting of Hill House & The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix)
If you like haunted lesbians who aren’t really sure what’s real and what isn’t, try The Haunting of Hill House and its follow-up series, The Haunting of Bly Manor! Both seasons of this supernatural horror series take place in houses that hold both their present residents and the very creepy history of its previous inhabitants who continue to hover around literally and figuratively. Also, there are queer women in both who are often not entirely sure what is happening in their lives: relateable! (You can stream The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor on Netflix.)
12. Lost (ABC)
If you like large groups of people forced to build a new world for themselves on a strange unidentified patch of land with supernatural qualities after a plane crash that left many of them in a compromised medical state and also one of them is pregnant, try Lost! Lost, which was enormously popular during its run and had a brilliant first season and a sprawling and brilliant ensemble cast, is considered a definitive entry in the Stranded on a Desert Island cannon. Like Yellowjackets, Lost also employs a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards to gradually unwind its central mystery. (Stream seasons 1-6 of Lost on Hulu)
13. Cruel Summer (Freeform)
(Photo by: Freeform/Frank Ockenfels)
If you like a dark thriller produced recently but set in the mid-90s and loaded with nostalgic call-backs that is about high school popularity politics and a town grappling with an unexpected disappearance, try Cruel Summer. In a small Texas town, the very popular Kate Wallis disappears without a trace and awkward outcast Janette Turner takes over her life — but when Kate turns up a year later, new questions must be asked. The show hops between 1993, 1994 and 1995. (Stream Cruel Summer on Hulu)
14. The Society (Netflix)
If you like a bunch of high school students going on a little trip that turns out to actually be a prequel to having to create their own society with limited resources and a lot of pre-existing tension, try The Society. The senior class of West Ham, Connecticut, heads off on their senior camping trip, but a storm defers the journey. When the busses return them home, however, home has changed insofar as nobody is there anymore, just them, and roads to the outside world have been closed. Unfortunately, the show’s renewal was snatched back from the world by COVID, so we only get one (1) season. (The Society is streaming on Netflix)
15. Good Girls (NBC)
If you like watching suburban Moms and allies undertake low-key heists through which they discover new things about themselves, try Good Girls! This crime dramedy follows three Moms in suburban Michigan struggling to pay the bills who plan a big supermarket robbery heist only to find themselves involved in something much bigger than they expected involving a mob gang who was using the supermarket as a front. As the series continues the stakes raise and they find themselves involved in an increasingly dangerous and thrilling journey. (Good Girls is streaming on Netflix)
16. The A-List (BBC/Netflix)
If you like teens on a sinister island with a supernatural mystery, try The A-List. This British teen thriller is centered on Mia, who arrives at summer camp on Peregrine Island expecting to be Queen Bee, only to find a challenge from the very sinister Amber. The creators called it “mean girls meets Lost.” There’s also Alex, who is genderqueer and has a little thing with Petal, a cheerful little hippie who joins Alex for explorations into the mysterious monsters in the forest. (You can stream The A-List on Netflix.)
17. Wayward Pines (Fox)
If you like Juliette Lewis and an all-star cast in a creepy fish-out-of-water thriller where the water is not exactly what it seems and there are a lot of flashbacks, try Wayward Pines. Based on the Blake Crouch trilogy (which I also highly recommend!), Wayward Pines finds secret service agent Ethan waking up after an accident in a strange, seemingly perfect small town in Idaho where he’s gone hunting for two federal agents who’ve gone missing. (Lewis is only in the first four episodes, but by then you’ll be hooked anyhow.) (You can stream the two seasons of Wayward Pines on Hulu.)
18. Creamerie (Hulu)
If you like considering the possibility of matriarchy with one (1) grown man and a lot of humorous negotiations between charismatic women who are usually slightly panicked in an ambient way, try Creamerie. This dystopian comedy finds three dairy farmers building a life eight years after a mystery virus killed all the men and now their town is now mostly under the control of a wellness cult who have created a “reproduction protocol” to repopulate society. One of the three sisters at the center of the story, Alex, is gay, and has a very complicated relationship with (You can stream Creamerie on Hulu.)
19. Riverdale (The CW)
(© 2020 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.)
If you like a group of troubled teens in a dimly-lit town with low-key Twin Peaks energy and also like being able to read Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya’s recaps of a television program after you have finished watching it, try Riverdale! Like so many thrillers on this list and elsewhere, Riverdale had a perfect first season and was more uneven from there, but it also added a queer storyline for Cheryl Blossom and Toni Topaz and remained fun and weird with plenty of intrigue to keep you on your feet.
Netflix’s “The Ultimatum: Queer Love” Trailer Is Here and the Lesbians Are Ready to Be Extra
Netflix’s habit of creating heterosexual dating shows based on lesbian cultural practices is storied and deep, and nobody is more thrilled than we are that they are finally embracing the true audience for over-dramatic, over-emotional, interconnected, commitment-chasing dating shows with the launch of The Ultimatum: Queer Love. Featuring a cast of queer couples — all lesbian or bisexual women or non-binary people — and debuting May 24th, we simply cannot wait to feast our eyes upon this inevitable drama! They’re giving Ultimatum to the lesbians bless us everyone!
The Ultimatum: Queer Love Trailer
Who Is Hosting and Who’s in the Cast of ”The Ultimatum: Queer Love”?
Courtesy of Netflix © 2023
The show is hosted by JoAnna Garcia Swisher, an actress best known for her roles in Are You Afraid of the Dark, Freaks and Geeks, and Reba. She is married to basketball player Nick Swisher. She is not gay and, according to Wikipedia, she is a “devout Catholic.” It is very confusing why she is the host of this program. One could argue it makes absolutely no sense at all.
The participants in The Ultimatum: Queer Love are Vanessa Papa, Aussie Chau, Mildred Woody, Yoly Rojas, Mal Wright, Raelyn Cheung-Sutton, Tiff Der, Xander Boger, Lexi Goldberg and Sam Mark.
What is “The Ultimatum”?
Courtesy of Netflix © 2023
The first season of The Ultimatum followed a handful of humans in their very early twenties who’d been dating their partners for 1-2 years and were allegedly ready to issue their partners astounding ultimatums: marry me or it’s over!!!!! To test the strength of their love, members of each couple were allowed to date other people participating in this experiment and then they all came back together to ask “where do we go from here?”
This is a great format for the queer community because we love to make premature commitments as prematurely as possible. Also as a people we tend to be dramatic, hot and unhinged, and that is reality television gold!
Courtesy of Netflix © 2023
The Ultimatum: Queer Love trailer was initially supposed to debut at the end of tonight’s also hotly anticipated LIVE Love is Blind reunion that Netflix had us OUT HERE WAITING FOR LIKE A BUNCH OF FOOLS but as anybody who is intimately familiar with the Netflix error screen can tell you, that is not how it went down.
Anyhow, luckily they still got this trailer up so that’s one point for Netflix on Sunday April 16th, although I am unclear if they will ever rebound from the ten million points they lost for the Love is Blind Reunion debacle.
When is The Ultimatum: Queer Love Coming Out?
Courtesy of Netflix © 2023
May 24th only on Netflix! The episodes will be released as follows:
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Week 1(Wednesday, May 24th): Episodes 1-4
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Week 2 (Wednesday, May 31st): Episodes 5-8
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Week 3 (Wednesday, June 7th): Episodes 9-10
The Real L Word Cast: Where Are They Now?
Friends, do you remember? The slouchy beanies, the vests, the forearm tattoos, the creamed corn wrestling, the feather earrings, the clam power, the hated wind, the shower sex, the debs, the cursed strap-on — do you remember The Real L Word? I personally could never forget, because I recapped every episode of this g-dforsaken program when it aired, beginning in 2010 and up until it mercifully concluded in 2012. Not only that, but we made very popular parody videos, featured cast members in our Autostraddle Calendar, and, well, it sure was a weird time to be gay and alive and in your twenties and bopping between New York, Los Angeles, and Oakland!
In the years immediately following the program’s airdates, most of its cast members enjoyed healthy careers as professional lesbians — showing up at parties and Prides as “hosts.” They were primed to become influencers before the term “influencers” even existed and indeed, many of them now are. We’ve also got a lot of babies and real estate licenses!
It’s been over ten years since the final season of this cursed show gave its final bow on Showtime. One thing that’s terrifying for commoner Los Angeles residents is that with enough wealth in this town, you can pretty much look 25 forever and indeed, they all look exactly the same as they did on the show. That aside, however, major changes abound!
The Real L Word cast: Where are they now?
Whitney Mixter
Legendary ladykiller Whitney Mixter was the primary focus of The Real L Word‘s entire run, notorious for her clam power, problematic hairstyle and habit of asking herself questions and then answering them. She dated myriad women who often resembled each other and had a particular amount of drama with Romi in Season One, a side-character who was then upgraded to main cast for the second and third seasons. But of all her many paramours, it was Sada who truly stole Whitney’s heart.
Whitney Mixter and Sada Bettencourt married on the series finale of The Real L Word in 2012 and appeared on Vh1’s Couples Therapy in 2014 to work through the myriad problems that had already threatened the sanctity of their marriage. After their tumultuous ride on Couples Therapy, the couple decamped for the Bay Area to be closer to Sada’s mother, who was ill. While in Oakland, Whitney worked in real estate and Sada began her career as a personal trainer. Following the death of Sada’s mother, they returned to Los Angeles, and in September 2016, Mixter filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. “At the end, I think we just got to a point where it was exhausting, and it was time to call it quits,” Mixter told Go Magazine in 2017.
After returning to Los Angeles, Whitney continued working as a party promoter and doing some acting and production work, as well as moving forward in her real estate career. But, as the erstwhile conceptual leader of a strap-on that squirts sperm into a vagina, Whitney Mixter’s number one life dream was always to have kiddos — so, at the age of 37, she embarked upon her solo motherhood journey.
She gave birth to her first child, Mecca Silas Moon Mixter, in October of 2020 and is currently in a relationship with “heartworker” Nina Grae, who has devoted her life to using her “speaking, written and singing voice to liberate, heal and inspire folks from all walks of life.” Whitney remains pals with many of her Real L Word co-stars, including fan favorite best friend Alyssa.
Sada Simone
Sada has continued offering fitness training as well as working as a hairstylist and makeup artist at Hairbae Beauty Bar. She’s in a relationship with musician Troy Spino. They have one child together, and Sada is currently pregnant with their second.
Romi (Klinger) Imbelli
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpu-d6Yumlh/?hl=en
Romi had a pretty unforgiving initial journey into the spotlight as a major player on all three seasons of The Real L Word, including her infamous strap-on sex scene with Whitney. She also appeared as an Autostraddle Calendar Girl in December 2010. Romi ended the series by marrying her boyfriend Dusty, legendary composer of the song “Dirty Knees.” The show made it seem like Romi and Dusty tied the knot in Las Vegas on the same day as Whitney and Sada’s ceremony.
By the spring of 2013, Romi and Dusty had separated and divorced. She later married a chef named Charles and had a baby girl, Frankie, with whom she moved to Texas, though she and Charles later divorced. Romi is now a “social media builder,” makeup artist, brand ambassador, and life coach. She hosts a podcast called The Eff It Madres with her best friend Carla M Zuniga. Romi appears to be currently dating filmmaker James Haven, who is Angelina Jolie’s brother! They’ve known each other since Romi was 20 years old.
Nikki & Jill Goldstein-Weiss
Nikki Weiss and Jill Goldstein were planning their wedding for much of the first season, and they indeed married in a private ceremony in Malibu in October 2010, which was featured on the cover of Curve Magazine. Their first son was born on their two-year wedding anniversary in October 2012, and they now have two sons. Nikki beat breast cancer in 2013 and is now an activist for breast cancer awareness. Jill gave birth to their second child, Adler, a few years later. Through Nikki Weiss & Co, Weiss continues to manage leading directors in the feature and commercial world. Jill remains a writer — she does treatments for commercials, music videos, award shows and NBC Universal’s branded entertainment group.
Mikey Koffman
https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck6SUuVvUCT/?hl=en
Iconic LA Fashion Week promoter Mikey Koffman was best known on the program for LA Fashion Week and also for her delightful girlfriend Raquel. These days, Mikey remains the CEO of Endless Road Entertainment, a firm that “leads the way in Creative Event and Video Production and Event Medical Services.” Also Mikey is an EMT? Mikey married their partner Stephanie in November 2022, and she remains pals with Rose Garcia.
Tracy Ryerson & Stamie Karakasidis
https://www.instagram.com/p/CX-fiGQrbhQ/
In The Real L Word’s first season, Tracy was a 29-year-old former model who’d realized she liked women in her mid-twenties, and she’d been dating 38-year-old stand-up comic Stamie Karakasidis, who had three kids with her ex, Julie.
Tracy and Stamie are still together! They grew their family in 2018 when Tracy gave birth to baby Milo! Tracy works as a Film & TV Producer for Wayfarer Studios. Stamie identifies as a Los Angles Real Estate Wealth Advisor and is a co-founder of mewd vitamins (Multi-Vitamins for Teens.) They’ve also produced 20 episodes of a podcast called The Stamie & Tracy Show.
Tracy and Stamie remain friends with Nikki and Jill.
Rose Garcia
In The Real L Word’s first season, Rose was presented as a “player” full of edit-friendly catchphrases about seducing and dating ladies. She was often fighting with her then-girlfriend, Natalie, and also had a cute dog!
I actually ran into Rose at a Generation Q premiere event in 2019 and she was quite honestly a delight. Predictably, Rose remains a boss bitch, heading up the Garcia Real Estate Group and working as a “crowd motivator” and “living the Real L Word life everyday.” She hosted parties at Dinah and appears with her hot girlfriend Sofia at power lesbian events across Los Angeles. In February 2023, Rose revealed she had been diagnosed with Late Stage Ovarian Cancer the year prior and had undergone surgery in January, and was now approaching chemo with optimism, hope, and the support of her family and friends.
Kacy Boccumini
Kacy & Cori’s difficult experience trying to have children was the emotional core of the second and third seasons of The Real L Word, and they experienced a brutal miscarriage in 2012. The couple broke up in 2017.
43-year-old Kacy Boccumini came out as a trans man on Instagram in May of 2021 after the pandemic enabled him to get in touch with himself through writing and Zoom Al-Anon meetings. He also thanked Nikki Weiss-Goldstien for her help and support through his coming out process! Kacy was diagnosed with with MS in 2013 and was working with a doctor to ensure physical transition that won’t worsen their MS. He told The Advocate that the doctor he visited to get his hormone treatments was in the same building where he used to take Cori for her fertility treatments. He works as a writer, director and the host of the podcast “The Stories We Tell,” which is about the way we read movies.
Cori McGinn
Since her time in the reality television spotlight, Cori has taken a step back from the public eye but she has a super-adorable dog, knits a lot, and works for Warner Brothers Entertainment in Los Angeles. Her personal Instagram is private, but she has a public account for her knitting projects.
Sajdah Golde
https://www.instagram.com/p/CY4Gx94lreZ/?hl=en
Sajdah Golde joined the cast in Season Two. She worked as a field organizer for political campaigns, dated a girl named Chanel, had a fantastic best friend named Marissa, and said funny things about girls and dating. She also notably tweeted during the project that she regretted getting involved at all!
Sajdah launched a magazine called Black Out for Black LGBTQ+ folks in 2013, which possibly only did one issue. She graduated from law school again in 2016, this time with a Masters of Law in Taxation. She’s now the president of taxation Law Firm Goldemind.
Claire Campbell Moseley
Claire appeared on The Real L Word’s second season as an entrepreneur who wanted to “start a website about lesbian life” and move to Los Angeles, leaving behind her girlfriend Vivian in favor of seeing “what’s there” with her ex-girlfriend Francine. Upon landing in Los Angeles, they immediately began fighting. Claire once memorably noted of her cast members: “It’s cool, I look good. You all look fake and crazy. Bye.”
Now, Claire has left these halcyon days behind her. She’s the founder of custom pocket square shop O’Harrow Clotheirs, which she launched in 2013 out of her Silver Lake Blackhouse. Claire and her new haircut look fantastic on Instagram, traveling the world in curated outfits. She currently works as the marketing Manager for vape kings PAX. In 2017, she was listed as one of Elle Magazine’s Hottest Singles, but she appears to now be dating a girl named Anna.
Francine Beppu
Aforementioned ex of Claire, Francine, modeled for the Autostraddle calendar while being filmed for The Real L Word‘s second season, in which she had a nice storyline with her mom and some big fights with Claire!
In 2015, Francine moved back to Hawai’i and soon thereafter began working with the Hawai’i LGBT Legacy Foundation, eventually becoming its president. She currently lives in Honolulu and works as the VP of Network Strategy for the NMG Network.
Kiyomi McCloskey
The third season of The Real L Word introduced dueling Los Angeles / New York storylines, but the New York cast was basically just Kiyomi McCloskey’s band, Hunter Valentine, and mostly focused on Kiyomi, with some screentime for temporary bandmate Somer and a sliver for additional bandmates Vero and Laura. Hunter Valentine lost Vero in 2013 and then Aimee in 2014, while the band was a part of Make or Break: The Linda Perry Project. Hunter Valentine released its last EP in 2016.
Kiyomi began the show with one girlfriend and ended the show with a new girlfriend: castmate Lauren Bedford Russell. The duo stayed together for four years before parting ways — although they remain friends!
In 2019, Kiyomi married her girlfriend of five years, model Meghan Garland, at Whitney Houston’s former estate in New Jersey, which was written up in Brides magazine and amazingly did include a custom bottle of Smirnoff with their actual faces on it. The couple parted ways in June of 2022. Kiyomi is still living in New York and working as a real estate agent as well as doing a bit of Influencing.
Somer Bingham
Local favorite Somer Bingham was briefly a member of Hunter Valentine and thus was shuffled onto The Real L Word, but by the time the show aired she’d returned to focusing on her own band, Clinical Trials.
After The Real L Word, Somer attended noted event A-Camp, where she created an independent campaign to be recognized as A-Camp Intern Somer. She and her wife, Donna Rizham, had a daughter in 2014, and Somer still makes music and is currently a producer-songwriter-musician “trying to balance nihilism, creativity & motherhood.” She wrote a very important piece for Autostraddle about how to remain punk while having a kid.
Laura Petracca
Hunter Valentine’s drummer, Laura, followed up her time with the band by returning to Toronto and the culinary career she’d begun there, working as a sous chef at Leña before taking the lead as Executive Chef at The Rabbit Hole in Toronto. She also has a girlfriend, and they look very happy!
Vero Sanchez
The former bassist for Hunter Valentine now identifies as an artist/songwriter and runs The Bowery Vault in East Nashville, “an inviting space where people can explore fashion along with creating a great sounding room where artists and audiences can connect.”
Lauren Bedford Russell
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cgcq7_3vOuS/?hl=en
The L.A. crew for Season Three contained series mainstays Whitney, Sada, Romi, Cori, and Kacy, as well as newcomer Lyon Jewelry CEO Lauren Bedford Russel, who was “best friends with benefits” with Amanda Dunn, who was moving to Los Angeles to live with Lauren when the season opened.
Lauren is now an ambassador for environmental platform OnlyOne and owns Design & Renovation firm Bedford Renovations. She’s pretty withdrawn from social media at this point, but from what is out there it would appear that she really enjoys being underwater!
Amanda Leigh Dunn
In 2013, Amanda was part of the team that started Brooklyn lesbian bar The Dalloway with America’s Next Top Model star Kim Stolz, which unfortunately closed a year after opening. Amanda is the head of Design & Development for House of Rolison, a real estate development firm that promises to “create avant-garde and innovative housing projects” and “transform places into real living spaces.” She’s in a relationship with House of Rolison’s Managing Partner, Taylor Hahn.
“RuPaul’s Drag Race” Episode 1516 Recap: Mother
This is a recap of RuPaul’s Drag Race episode 1516, the season 15 finale. Spoilers below.
It is still RuPaul’s drag race. It doesn’t matter how many years in a row a trans person wins the main season and All Stars. As long as RuPaul is alive, in charge, and hosting, it will be her creation — for better or worse or worst.
Since spoilers got out for season three, the finales of Drag Race have been the most overly constructed episodes of the season. There are exceptions — I’m thinking rose petals, I’m thinking dead butterflies — but for the most part the finales are for celebration, not excitement.
But this year there sure was a lot to celebrate. First of all, this finale features one of the show’s best top fours, led by a frontrunner who from day one frankly felt too good to even be there. We’re also experiencing a moment of transphobia and violence toward drag that makes this kind of mainstream festivity feel worthwhile.
From the opening moments, this capital P Purpose was emphasized. One of the eliminated queens, Aura Mayari, included a big fan that read “Drag is Not a Crime” with her entrance look. And in Ru’s introduction, she echoed this sentence with an added: “But looking this sickening should be.”
On the one hand Ru’s just-vote liberalism should feel more digestible given our current moment. There is something powerful in the shots of crowded gay bars all around the country, many in states where drag is on the precipice of being banned. But any temptation to be in solidarity with Ru inspired within me a sadness — a sadness that my expectations had been reduced to these crumbs.
It makes me so happy that Ts Madison was introduced alongside the other core judges. It’s so exciting that after all these years the biggest platform for drag has finally embraced so many trans performers and icons. But 2018 was not long ago. I will never forget how the show treated Peppermint. I will never forget that these changes happened despite Ru and his cis producers, not because of them. Trans talent was simply undeniable.
But for now let’s get to the first two finalists! We begin with Anetra. She gives an emotional thank you to her dad and then performs a song called, “Lotus.” Anetra is an undeniable talent, but I think her clarity of drag identity peaked with the premiere. I think she still has some years to go before realizing her full potential and that felt evident in this song. It was totally solid! She’s an incredible dancer! It just lacked a certain spark and uniqueness for me.
Not lacking in any spark was Luxx Noir London. Her song “It’s Giving Fashion” was so much fun! The red jumpsuit to red bodysuit reveal was great and I just had a blast with this one. Carson says she gave all the F’s: fashion, face, and ferocity. I would add the most important F: faggotry. Her boyfriend says, “I love everything about them,” and I have to agree.
We then take a break for the first annual Giving Us Lifetime Achievement Award. This year’s recipient is Bob Mackie and of all Ru’s charades this is actually the one that felt the most genuine. I love when we pay tribute to our queer elders, especially when they’re alive, even when those elders are cis white gay men. Ru gets choked up and it makes for a nice moment. I hope this really does become an annual tradition.
Back to our top four! Mistress Isabelle Brooks is dressed as a slutty nurse to perform “Delusion.” It’s a lot of fun! It’s not the best song or the best performance but it’s totally solid. She also says, “Move over ‘Let Loose,’ ‘Delusion’ is coming through,” and I love that she remains shady to the end. It’s also really meaningful to see her chosen family there including her drag mom Chevelle Brooks who tells her that she made her proud, Houston proud, and herself proud.
Thankfully, the alphabet didn’t force anyone to have to follow Sasha Colby. While her Harry Potter references in the intro were a choice, once she started performing “Goddess,” it quickly became clear why she’s the best. Coming out as a snake, the backup dancers moving her braids like snakes, her looking like a SNACK. She’s an incredible dancer and also incredible at flicking her tongue and both are equally important to me. She also has her chosen family there and has a little education moment with Ru about the Hawaiian word māhū. After seasons and seasons of Ru creating forced biological family reunions, it really is so nice to see queer families in this space.
With the solo performances complete, Ru declares the final lip sync. It’s Sasha vs. Anetra. This was clearly pre-planned and not based on the performances thanks to a detail we’ll get to later. Anetra is great and this decision is fine, even if based on the solos I do think Luxx was robbed. I look forward to seeing young queens Luxx and Mistress back on TV in a future All Stars season.
This is when the show took my cognitive dissonance down with the speed of a death drop. A video montage begins with various people reciting the Declaration of Independence. We’re watching a video and performance in support of drag and apparently nothing says drag like the words of Thomas Jefferson. It gets worse. One of the people in the video is a police officer. He’s given more screen time than the drag king. And the video ends with this mix of assimilationist gays and Kevin Bacon saying, “I am American.”
This goes into a performance by Orville Peck and the season’s music producer of the Wig Loose songs with backup lip syncing from the non-finalist season 15 queens. Well, except Sugar, who does not lip sync and just stands there. Anyone else I might’ve wondered if it was in protest, but let’s be reasonable.
If there’s anything the current backlash to decades of progress should reveal, it’s that we cannot assimilate ourselves to freedom. This kind of pro-America, pro-police, gay-people-are-just-like-you bullshit does nothing except reinforce the institutions and values that have oppressed us for centuries. This is not the time to compromise — it’s the time to refocus on what matters most.
RuPaul is RuPaul and I don’t expect her to bring radical politics. But the inclusion of a cop in this jingoistic montage was a step too far. Nearly three years since the June 2020 protests, fifty-four years since Stonewall, this shouldn’t need to be said. But, to be clear, there is no justification for being a police officer. Any LGBT individuals who choose to be police officers have prioritized their own power and the power of a fascist institution over the lives of other queer people. We are past the point of ignorance. I don’t care who a cop is fucking — a cop is a cop.
Who does Ru think is going to enforce the drag bans she’s supposedly fighting against? Cops — including the gay ones. It won’t matter if a cop is taking pleasure in their own bigotry or just following orders. The outcome will be the same.
This segment acts as one of many reminders that Drag Race will always be a bad platform for great performers. The vast majority of what makes the show worthwhile happens despite the people in control.
One such performer is last year’s winner, Willow Pill! She comes out to her song from the previous finale, “I Hate People,” and gives a really lovely speech. She mentions that it’s been a difficult year for her and gives a reminder that it’s okay to go through a rough time. Then she introduces Kornbread dressed as Beast from Beauty and the Beast who raps about all the queens. Her rap includes Luxx and Mistress, and not Sasha or Anetra. which is why it seems the top two was preordained. Malaysia then wins Miss Congeniality, which seems totally random. Mistress looks as annoyed as she should be.
The show could not win me back after its little pro-cop stunt, but it certainly tried! My love Jinkx Monsoon comes out and sings “When You’re Good to Mama.” I didn’t get a chance to see Jinkx in Chicago on Broadway, so I was thrilled to get a chance to see her do this number. Ru then shows a clip from season five of her saying that her dream is to perform in drag on Broadway. That got me!
Finally, it’s time for the top two to lip sync to “Knock on Wood” by Amii Stewart. Anetra is wearing a white bodysuit covered in crystals with a beating red heart and Sasha is in a big black velvet coat dress. When the song starts Sasha takes the coat off to reveal a purple and pink dress.
They’re both exceptional performers, but Sasha Colby is Sasha Colby. This only becomes clearer when they both do their reveals. Anetra pulling the red string of her heart is fun, but Sasha cracks open her dress and emerges in a bikini that shows off all her perfection.
It’s undeniable. Sasha Colby is crowned the winner of Drag Race season 15. She ends the season by saying: “This is for every trans person past, present, and future because we are not going anywhere.”
After Jinkx performed, she quipped to Ru that she might be Mama, but Ru will always be mother. I hope that’s not true. Let’s shake off the mother we’ve been given and, in a grand queer tradition, choose a new one. Ru has evolved as much as she ever will. It’s time to move on. It’s time for a new mother.
Give us what we deserve. Give us Sasha Colby’s Drag Race.
Teleport Us to Mars!! Here Are Some Random Thoughts:
+ My favorite opening look was Salina’s dress with the slice of cake removed.
+ Loosey was dressed as a literal villain. It was certainly a choice!
+ During Luxx’s intro, she says that while she leads with confidence, she still has feelings. This seems like a response to the racism and hate she’s received online. The Drag Race fandom really can be the worst.
+ Mistress notes that Sugar and Spice are only five days younger than her even though they’re her daughters.
+ I loved seeing Kerri Colby and Kylie Sonique Love dancing together during Sasha’s number.
+ Wild that Michelle asked Sasha why it took her so long to be on the show. Ma’am. Ask your friend RuPaul Charles?? Anyway, glad Ru got a bit less transphobic so we could get a season of television with the one, the only, Sasha Colby.
+ And that’s another season! Thanks to everyone who read my recaps. My frustrations with RuPaul and the show aside, it does still feel meaningful to see all these talented performers on TV. I hope a cis person never wins Drag Race again.
Boobs on Your Tube: Fantasy Island’s Lesbians Want to Be Part of Your World
Happy Yellowjackets Day, friends! Kayla’s recap is ready for you! Lots of other good TV stuff this week, too! Kayla checked on Riverdale’s new gay biker, Lizzo, and also with Riverdale’s whole crew more generally. Valerie Anne reviewed The Power, which they are liking an awful lot! Drew reviewed Tiny Beautiful Things, which she wishes had been a little more fully realized. Kayla reviewed Beef, which stressed her out a little but which she also loved. Carmen wrote about how she’ll watch anything where Black girls kiss. Heather wrote about the BIG BISEXUAL REVEAL on Ted Lasso. She also wrote about The Owl House’s beautiful series finale and made a list of other cartoons you might enjoy. HBO dropped Jodie Foster’s True Detective trailer. And Amazon announced A League of Their Own really is ending with four final episodes.
Notes from the TV Team:
+ Food Network’s Tournament of Champions wrapped up its fourth season this week by crowning a new champion. Unfortunately, Chefbian Britt Rescigno fell just short of taking her Cinderella run in the tournament all the way ’til the end. But while Rescigno didn’t win, there was something really heart-warming about the New Jersey chef’s finish: she won effusive praise from her opponent, Maneet Chauhan, and TOC host, Guy Fieri. Even Rescigno teared up as the judging panel, which included Iron Chef (and noted Chefbian) Cat Cora and Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud, celebrated her food. I can’t wait to see what Chef Britt does next. — Natalie
+ The second season of Single Drunk Female kicked off this week on Freeform and while I’m still loving the show, it’s getting decidedly less gay in its second season. Sam’s sponsor, Olivia, is decamping to Maine to stay with her sister. Mercifully, this means we won’t have to see her annoying wife again, but still… that means this show is less gay and that Sam will be without the person that’s most contributed to her sobriety. The entire second season of Single Drunk Female is available to stream on Hulu but I’ll be watching week to week on Freeform and will update you with any gay happenings. — Natalie
+ Gotham Knights had a brief sweet scene where Harper and Cullen talk about how Harper took a risky mob job to earn enough money for Cullen’s top surgery because even after they escaped their abusive home, Harper could tell her brother was still trapped. Nothing else interesting to report on that show’s front. — Valerie Anne
Fantasy Island 209: “Gwenivere of Glendale”
Written by Valerie Anne
I feel…foolish that I did not see this coming. I was too distracted by the well-lit lesbians (and her name literally translating to “island”) to come up with the MOST OBVIOUS THEORY.
Ruby wakes up with a song in her head, a tune she’s whistling on the way to work. Elena asks her what it is, but Ruby isn’t sure, it’s just been bouncing around her head. She’s also been sleepwalking, but happy wandering. She feels…joyful; Elena posits she might be in love, and Ruby can’t disagree.
The guest of the week is Tiny Jane from The Bold Type as a woman named Gwen, and her fantasy is to be a princess because she dropped out of med school and can’t decide what to do next. She ends up in a medieval time and in situations where she has to rely on her medical training. She almost bails at one point, explaining to Elena that a professor told her she couldn’t hack it. Elena says, “You let one man’s opinion determine your reality?” so Gwen gets her shit together and saves the day.
But on to the gay stuff!
Ruby walks the beach at night, and almost walks directly into the ocean, but Isla runs up to her and wakes her up and brings her inside to safety. The next day, they opt for the pool instead, much to Isla’s dismay. But Ruby is wary of the ocean; she says she felt like she was looking for Isla. Changing the subject, Ruby tries to define the relationship but Isla says not to overcomplicate things, to just enjoy what they have without labels. Isla tries to show her how much fun it can be even without a title by having an underwater kiss about it.
Later, Ruby and Elena have one of those conversations where they’re both talking and neither of them are listening. Elena is overthinking a conversation she had with Javier, while Ruby is wondering aloud if her girlfriend can hold her breath a little longer than is normal, if the song stuck in her head was not unlike a siren song…if mermaids exist. Elena’s face briefly twinges at the word “mermaid” but she’s quick to dismiss Ruby’s concerns, saying mermaids aren’t real, even on Fantasy Island.
However, we later see Elena oceanside, and Isla emerges from the water. Elena tells Isla that she won’t let her take Ruby, that Ruby is too important to the island. Isla protests, saying the island needs them, but Elena says that they need the island more, and repeats her demand: stay away from Ruby. Isla huffs and swims off, a pink tail splashing as she goes.
Now, until a commenter mentioned the mermaid theory last time I wrote about this show, I was 200% convinced Isla was a manifestation of the island. Her name was a red herring (or a pink herring?) and for some reason I never considered that there could be fantasy creatures on fantasy island, which is ridiculous considering the character I write about the most is a 20-something lesbian who was elderly when she landed on the island. But of course Isla is a mermaid, of course she is. Because in my experience, all roads lead to me being #HornyForMermaids.
That night, Elena finds Ruby waiting on the beach but Isla doesn’t show. So Elena invites Ruby for a girls’ night, and Ruby drowns her sorrow in the suite of endless cheese. The next morning, the song in Ruby’s head is gone and Elena is pleased with herself, but if she stole my lesbian romance from me, I will riot.
Survivor 4407: “Let’s Not Be Cute About It”
Written by Anya
This episode kicks into gear at the challenge — which is a (somewhat convoluted) immunity and reward challenge. In this challenge, the tribe is split into two teams of five, meaning there will be not one but two individual immunity winners (one from each team). On top of that, who survives the longest, their entire group gets immunity. So, yes, at the end of this challenge, out of the eleven contestants remaining, only four will actually be able to be voted for. On top of all that, the only people allowed to vote are those in the group whose individual immunity winner did not last the longest. So, out of eleven people, only five will be able to vote, and only four will be eligible for receiving votes.
It has to be said. I think this is getting a little silly. It’s hard to keep all these advantages and twists and turns straight! It used to feel like a twist felt like a sharp turn in the road — now there are so many that it’s just like we’re on the Long and Winding Road.
Anyway, there were some fun parts of this episode! Last episode, we saw Frannie scale a seemingly vertical wall like it was nothing, which was our first clue that she would be, as we say in the industry, a challenge beast. And sure enough, she was! She won individual immunity, and what’s more, she stood on the beam holding another beam with a ball on it for the longest amount of time (beating the other group’s winner, Brandon), winning immunity for her entire tribe.
So the only people eligible to receive votes are lover boy Matt, Yam Yam, Jaime, and Lauren. Only after winning immunity for her group does Frannie realize that she may have endangered the very presence she seeks to protect — her guy Matt!
After yet another twist that I’m not even gonna go into because it ends up not really making a difference, we get to tribal. In a surprisingly emotional tribal, Matt ends up going home. Frannie is absolutely devastated, and at this point I have to admit that I have really come around to Fratt/Mannie — they seem pretty in love! But sadly, Matt is now gone, which I’m hoping ushers Frannie into her ruthless, no holds barred, villain era.
9-1-1 613: “Mixed Feelings”
Written by Natalie
While on shift, Hen and the Station 118 crew are called to a local hair salon where the stylist wields fire, instead of scissors, to give clients their “fire cut” (which, as it turns out, is a real thing). But when the stylist’s would-be client, Cherie, gets frazzled by the approaching flame, she knocks the torch over, starting a fire. But it’s not the fire that causes Cherie’s injuries, it’s the water from the overhead sprinklers: she’s allergic to water (also, an actual thing). As Cherie’s loaded into the ambulance, her mother looks on, exasperated. She laments not having a candid relationship with her daughter but Hen urges her not to be too hard on herself.
“Kids are utterly unpredictable when they’re trying to figure out who they are. The best we can do is show up for them when they need us,” Hen tells her. Unbeknownst to Hen in that moment, she’ll spend the rest of the episode struggling to take her own advice.
After dropping Cherie off at the hospital, Hen and Chimney are heading back to the ambulance when Karen calls, worried when Denny doesn’t arrive home on the school bus. According to his friends, Denny hasn’t been taking the bus home for months. Before the worry can truly set in, Denny appears in front of Hen, accompanied by another paramedic, following a car accident he was in with his biological father, Nathaniel. Unbeknownst to his moms, Denny’s been meeting with his bio dad for months…and when they confront him about his choices, he has the audacity to get mad at them.
Thankfully, Hen’s mother, Toni, is there to act as an intermediary. She helps Denny to recognize that his mothers’ anger and disappointment is justifiable and, if he wanted to build a relationship with his biological father, he had to go about it the right way. But Toni defends Denny’s desire to have a relationship with his biological father to his parents. She reminds Hen about how she was the same at Denny’s age: longing for a relationship with a father that wasn’t there. Toni assuages their greatest concern — that Denny’s actions are a response to some failing on their part — assuring them that they are great parents and their son’s love continues unabated. Denny just needs this, Toni notes…and so, as the great parents they are, Hen and Karen decide to give him what he needs.
They approach Nathaniel at the hospital — he’s still recovering from his accident injuries — and he quickly jumps in with the apology. He admits that he never expected things to go this far but that he grew ennamored with having a son and allowed that to cloud his judgment. Nathaniel’s girding himself for Hen and Karen to announce that he can never see Denny again but they surprise him: for Denny, they’ll find a path forward. They remind him, though, that he has lost their trust and will have to work to earn it back.
As Denny, accompanied by his grandma, steps in to visit his bio dad, Karen turns to her wife and asks, “Are we ready?”
“Not even a little bit,” Hen answers, grasping her wife’s hand as they watch their son embrace Nathaniel.
A Million Little Things 510: “The Salesman”
Written by Natalie
The wedding day is almost here! Invitations have been sent out, RSVPs are rolling in and now, all that’s left, is for Katherine to finalize the seating arrangements for the big day. Greta’s of no help — she takes more joy in sowing chaos (and annoying Katherine) than helping plan everything — so Katherine’s mom volunteers Greta to take her shopping while her daughter works. The invitation comes as a surprise to Greta, Katherine and me…since the last time we saw Katherine’s mom, she wasn’t exactly warmly embracing her future daughter-in-law. But who needs conflict on an hour-long drama, right?
Before Greta leaves, Katherine offers a warning about her small, but scrappy, mother. She advises, “There are a few items on the grocery list that are for my mom’s place. She will try to pay. Do not let her. She’s on a fixed income, and she’s really stubborn about money, okay?”
The warning doesn’t prepare Greta for what comes next. As she’s loading their parcels into the trunk, Katherine’s mom hands Greta a check. Per her fiancée’s instructions, Greta demurs, insisting that the groceries are on them. But no, Mrs. Kim gives the couple money for their wedding: $5,000. Greta thanks Mrs. Kim for the generous offer but acknowledges that Katherine wouldn’t take her mother’s money. Of course, that’s why the small, but scrappy grandmother chose to give it to Greta instead. The two play push-pull with the check until a stranger intervenes on Mrs. Kim’s behalf. Knowing she’s won, she assures the stranger she’s okay and says that they can go home now. Well played, Mrs. Kim, well played.
Meanwhile, Katherine searches for a new dry-erase marker for the seating chart in Theo’s backpack and happens upon an unsent invitation for Delilah Dixon. Theo admits that he doesn’t want the woman who broke up his parents’ marriage and caused his mother so much pain at the wedding. Katherine admits that she used to carry around the same anger but she encourages him to stop keeping his anger pent up inside. She picks up the phone to call Delilah and explain the mishap but Theo volunteers to do it instead, in person. Delilah applauds Theo’s honesty and assures him that if her not being at the wedding makes his mother’s wedding day better, then she won’t go. Ultimately, Theo relents and insists that he and his mother both want her there.
Later, Greta tells Katherine about her mother’s gift. Katherine insists that Greta give the money back but Greta assures her, she tried. Katherine calls her mother into the room and tries to return the check herself but encounters the same resistance. Her mother stands firm: she’ll decide how to spend her own money.
“I thought you would never be happy again,” she explains. “But you have made my daughter the happiest I’ve ever seen. That is why I want to help pay for wedding.”
It’s cute, I suppose…and it’d be a far more emotional scene if the show had devoted any time to showing how Mrs. Kim went from running out of the room at the mere sight of her daughter with Greta to asking Greta to call her 장모 (jang-mo or “mother-in-law”). But, hey…this show is clearly not invested in affording this couple the depth they give to Gary and Maggie…and there are only three episodes left so… 🤷🏾♀️
Good Trouble 505: “I Gotta Feeling”
Written by Natalie
Since season one of Good Trouble, one of my absolute favorite things about the show has been the friendship between Malika and Alice. And, for most of last season, I’ve been lamenting its absence, particularly when their storylines — Alice’s re-emerging feelings for Sumi and Malika’s embrace of her queerness — would’ve benefitted from the interaction. But this week, we finally got it…they’re finally back together and hanging out…and it makes for my favorite episode of Good Trouble in a very long time (the Mariana/Evan stuff notwithstanding).
Leaning into her promise to reconnect with family and friends, Malika invites Alice out for drinks. Alice assumes the invitation is for her and Sumi but Malika clarifies: she just wants some one-on-one time to catch-up with her bestie. Alice seems thrown by this and tentatively asks Sumi for permission to go out. Of course, Sumi is unbothered: she insists that spending solo time with their friends is a good thing. She encourages Alice to go out and have a fun girls’ night out.
But soon, one-on-one time turns into something else. Malika spots Gael, with only a NannyCam video of his daughter to keep him entertained, and invites him to join her anId Alice on their night out. Am I a little bummed that I won’t get the conversation between Alice and Malika that I’ve been longing for? Yes…but also: all the Coterie Queers together for a night out?! This is great. And then, when they show up at Duoro for drinks, it turns out the bar is hosting Queer Night! Just when I thought I couldn’t love this episode more, they give me what I want: more gays.
But there might be one too many gays for Malika because, of course, Angelica is at Duoro. You can tell right away that Malika’s undone by Angelica’s presence — she 100% called to make sure Angelica wasn’t working tonight before going there for drinks — and so Malika doesn’t pay attention to Alice’s request not to post pictures of their night out. Later, Angelica tracks Malika down and asks if she’s having a good time. Malika admits that it’s her first queer party as a queer person and Angelica volunteers to be her wing-woman. I understand that this is meant to build the romantic tension between Malika and Angelica but this is exactly what Alice should be doing…it’s her right, as the lesbian best friend, to scope out women for her newly single, newly out hot best friend. It’s Rule #451 of the Gay Agenda.
That said, Angelica does appreciate the dual role of a good wing-woman: first, to find potential suitors for your friend and second (and often underappreciated), to rescue said friend when things go awry. When she spots Malika’s eyes starting to glaze over when she’s talking to another woman, Angelica swoops in and pretends to be Malika’s girlfriend to pull her away. The moment feels real (and sobering) for Malika who points out that she’s out with her friends, instead of working. Angelica admits that she’s noticed and Malika adds, “no job is worth…losing you.” But before Angelica can respond, a drunk Alice intercedes, allowing Angelica to make her escape.
From the moment that Malika invited her to drinks, Alice has been frazzled by the prospect of being without Sumi…and, as the night goes on, it becomes clear why. Alice is still carrying the scars of their last break-up — Sumi cheating on her with her friend, Meera — and spends the entire time worried that history will repeat itself. If they stay close, Alice has reasoned, Sumi can’t find someone else. So, at first, she’s constantly checking in with Sumi…but then, when she learns Sumi also opted to go out with her friends, Alice drowns her sorrows in tequila. She returns to the Coterie, drunk, and searches Sumi’s loft for someone else. Sumi refuses to have a fight while Alice is drunk but promises that they’ll continue this conversation in the morning.
(Sidenote: I’d forgotten how much I love drunken/stoned Alice but, my goodness, do I love her. So fun.)
True to her word, Sumi confronts Alice the next morning and Alice admits that she doesn’t trust Sumi when she goes out with her friends. Sumi notes that she’s apologized for her mistakes already and, at some point, Alice is going to have to genuinely forgive her. She promises to check in with Alice when she’s out with her friends and Alice, happily, accepts that compromise.
The Power 105: “Scarlet Minnow”
Written by Valerie Anne
I wish I could give my mother an electric shock and have her suddenly understand me better.
Of course the day after I review the first four episodes of this show and applaud it’s multiple LGBTQ+ storylines and characters, we have our first episode without any of them. This week focuses mostly on Tatiana and Margot, though other characters intertwine in their stories. (Including Jos who I’m not counting out as potentially being bi just yet, because she’s Gen Z and played by a queer actor.)
We learn Tatiana was married off to her now-husband when she was still a teenager, and she thought it was going to be in exchange for a fast track to the Olympics, so she agrees, but instead the man decides he doesn’t want his wife in the Olympics and her dream is crushed. Her mother is unsympathetic so Tatiana storms out of the house, screaming at her mother and telling her little sister Zoia she hates her, even though she doesn’t mean it, just so this whole situation will maybe hurt a little less.
In the present-day, Tatiana’s husband has banished all the young women from the house, but she has managed to keep her assistant. She finds her assistant secretly playing with her sparks and corners her, demanding she give her the spark, and so her assistant does just that.
At the same time she receives hers, her sister Zoia gets hers too, in a very different way. She has been sex trafficked and she’s being held, pregnant, with other women; they manage to get the spark from the girl who delivers them snacks, and so they pass the spark around and fight their way out of captivity.
Also receiving her spark today is Margot; after a day of interviews – including one with Tunde – she has a bonding chat with her daughter Jos, who explains that her mother doesn’t understand what it’s like. That sometimes it’s scary but also in a lot of ways it’s the opposite; she can go for a run with both earbuds in, walk in the dark without holding her keys between her fingers, not have to worry about what she wears to a party. She feels empowered, she has let go of so much tension and stress she hadn’t even realized she had been carrying and she’s thrilled her sister might be able to grow up in a world where she never knows that constant fear.
Margot decides she wants the spark, so Jos presses her hands on her collarbone and passes the gift, from daughter to mother. And now maybe Margot will not only be the face of this movement to stop horrifying legislation like forcing people with the spark to register themselves as a weapon, she’ll be able to fully embody the movement.
Station 19 614: “Get It All Out”
Written by Carmen
This week on Station 19 it is Carina and Maya’s first date. And yes, Carina and Maya are wives. But as you’ll recall, they are taking it slow to rebuild their foundation, so today they are on a first date and Maya cannot seem to get her name right (when she called Carina, “Karen” I laughed). In the middle of giving Karen/Carina a tour around the firehouse to meet her friends, Carina gets a phone call that a patient is both stuck to a vending machine and simultaneously also in labor, so they take Ben Warren and an ambulance and off they go.
The trapped patient is the same woman who was flirting with Carina a few episodes back and invited her out for drinks. Now just for a very quick moment I do have to say that at the time, I erroneously noted in my recap that Carina accepted this woman’s invitation — at the time, she had not, at least not on camera. But this week we learn that in fact she did accept this woman’s invitation off camera, so please excuse me while I give myself a pat on the back.
Ok this woman is in labor and also her hand is stuck inside a vending machine. The whole time Carina is tending to her, Maya is picking up vibes and mostly tries to play it cool but the whole time her eyes are darting and she’s slyly asking follow up questions about these “drinks” they had — because she swore she knew all of Carina’s “friends.” But it mostly goes well, the woman both survives and also delivers her baby, and everyone goes home to the fire house.
At the fire house, Maya tells Carina the big secret we all know she’s been carrying — that last week she received intel that the Chief is sleeping with Boris Kodjoe, in hopes that she will pass it along to the Union, setting off a set of dominoes that ends in her being given her job as Captain back by nefarious means. The thing is, Maya so wants to be Captain again. But as she tells Carina, “not like that.”
Carina is so grateful for this moment of intimacy between them, this moment of growth for Maya, that she smiles so bright it lights up a dark firehouse. And they say a lot of very sweet things to each other after that! Words of trust, and partnership, but to be honest with you I couldn’t keep track. I was too busy watching how they look at each other. How their bodies move together as if they are two sides of one coin. In moments like this, it’s hard to argue that there is any better couple on television. They are so sweet, so gentle, (so hot), and so, so perfect.
Grey’s Anatomy 1914-15: “Show Your Love” & “Mama Who Bore Me”
Written by Carmen
OK so I have to say, I’m a little mad at the writers of Grey’s Anatomy right now. There was once a time this season when things were looking up and more importantly, they were looking gloriously gay. Even though Helm was working at Joe’s Bar now, we were seeing her more regularly than we ever did when she was a Surgical Resident. We had a new sapphic intern in Yasuda. And yes, we were slow walking Amelia and Kai’s relationship a bit, even back then — but it seemed promising! After all, they had reunited the couple the season before, even though by pretty much every measure they should have broken up for good (Kai doesn’t want kids in their life, and Amelia has Scout). I could handle a little slow walking, I assumed that once Meredith was gone for good, we’d circle back around and gain momentum on all the other storylines.
Well my friends, it is almost May and there’s only a handful of episodes left this season, And still it feels like very little has gotten done! Yes, Helm and Yasuda have shared some flirtations, but we’ve really not moved past a Dance It Out at the intern house party. And Kai and Amelia have been long distance dating for an entire season. Until this week, when Kai shows up at Amelia’s door.
First of all, and we obviously need to get this out the way now — but Kai? Akfdajflakfdja. Never been finer. E.R. Fightmaster is a gem of a person, so I hope they don’t mind a little thirsty objectification, but my god. I just. Whew. You know? Ok. OK. Okay.
So Hot Doctor Kai shows up at Amelia’s door, and adorable Amelia’s first thought is that Meredith sent them. Because Maggie is leaving Seattle, and obviously Meredith just left Seattle, which means Amelia is going to be left alone, triggering all of her abandonment issues. I thought they were going to more directly tie all of this to Amelia’s sobriety, but I appreciated the graceful and elegant hand they took here. Anyway, Kai and Amelia spend the next 24 hours in bed — only leaving to get food — because, of course they do. Hot queer people have sex. And we love that for them. (I’m not joking here! There’s a long history of forced celibacy on queer characters on network TV. I love that if nothing else, Kai and Amelia will always be hot for each other.)
In bed together, Amelia’s crying because she’s obviously sad, but also she’s grateful for how she’s never felt this free and open in a relationship, like someone knows all of her inside and out. That she doesn’t have to hide what’s dark, and trust me there’s a lot of dark. Kai holds her and E.R. Fightmaster better be acting because as the camera zooms in, you can see a little tear as they wrinkle their nose and look away.
Of course we can see where this is going, Kai is going to be the latest person to leave Amelia. They’ve been offered a chance to lead a research lab in London, and they cannot turn it down. The next day Amelia and Kai work on a case together at Seattle Grace and Amelia decides to fight for their relationship. She asks Teddy if Kai could have a lab in Seattle, and Teddy says yes! But Kai? Kai says No. Amelia and Kai work right now, precisely because they are long distance (not London long distance, but still!). They are part time. And the other half of the time, Amelia gets to be with Scout. Kai still doesn’t want kids in their life.
And cue my frustration! Because… did we not quite literally just do this last year?? Why reunite Kai and Amelia, and put them through a year of long distance, only for them to be in the exact same position they were a year ago? It makes no sense.
(Maybe all is not lost? E.R. did post this adorable photo? But I’m having a hard time with hope.)
Riverdale Has New Queer Characters but Is Being Weird About Some of Its Old Ones
“Sex Education” is the horniest episode of Riverdale to date, and that’s a high bar to surpass! I mean, less than three (3) minutes in, and we have Cheryl Blossom scooping the sweet juicy fruit of a papaya — LITERALLY.
The episode truly begs the question: WHY NOT JUST MAKE EVERYONE BISEXUAL YOU COWARDS? Indeed, the entire point of the episode seems to be that any pairing goes. There’s something for fans of Barchie, Bughead, Varchie, Vughead, and all the lovely little heterosexual ships that sound like nicknames for weed strains. The plot is thusly: The teens of Riverdale receive a rather incomplete, school administration-approved sex education lesson and are then sexually awakened by a spoken word and dance performance by Toni Topaz at The Dark Room, the town’s local beatnik hangout, prompting them to have sexy dreams and also a real-life makeout party under the tutelage of makeout maestro Veronica Lodge. As a reminder in case any of that was confusing, the characters are indeed high schoolers again and also are in 1955, because of a magic comet that made them time travel and forget their previous lives.
As a result of this decision to be set in 1955, Cheryl Blossom and Kevin Keller have been re-closeted. It’s a strange and dissatisfactory choice on a lot of levels, but the one that gets me the most is that it’s just kind of boring. Kevin is way more closeted now than he ever was in the previous timeline, and Cheryl’s arc seems to be following more or less the same exact one as before in terms of her closetedness being a direct result of her mother’s homophobia and family’s general bad vibes. It’s just unfolding faster this time. Recloseting these characters doesn’t add any depth to them, and it just seems like the writers think the only compelling conflict a queer character can struggle with is being in the closet.
Of course, it’s easy for Riverdale to just use the 1955 of it all as an excuse for these choices, but that doesn’t hold up, because even the show knows there were indeed queer people in the 50s who acknowledged and acted upon their own queerness even though it was dangerous to do so. Toni Topaz is allowed to live somewhat openly though still covertly as a queer woman, and so is Kevin Keller’s new love interest Clay. Toni and Clay are both Black and because of the ways racism and homophobia can touch would in actuality have less power to express themselves freely than Cheryl and Kevin. So I’m having a hard time accepting historical context as the reason for recloseting Cheryl and Kevin.
On the upside, in addition to Clay, Riverdale has introduced another NEW queer character in Lizzo, a high school dropout who rides a motorcycle and has a flirtatious dynamic with Toni. After Lizzo catches Toni inviting Cheryl to a poetry reading and being promptly rejected, Lizzo teases: “Same old Topaz, always going for the straight-laced, square girls.” We don’t get much Lizzo in the episode, but we see her watching Toni just as intently as literally every character during her performance. It’s possible a Toni/Lizzo/Cheryl love triangle is being set up.
But for now, Cheryl is too entrenched in the closet to be a part of any real love triangle. Thrown off by her obvious attraction to Toni, she doubles down in the other direction and agrees to go on a date with Archie, who has been convinced to ask her out by her twin brother Jason under the orders of their evil mother. When Cheryl realizes it’s her mother behind the Archie setup, she uses it against her, coming home with a giant hickey and insinuating she and Archie had hot, dirty sex to shock and silence her mother. Meanwhile, she breaks down crying, her diabolical Blossom act just that, a performance. Now, all of this could make for an interesting narrative about compulsory heterosexuality, burgeoning queer desire, and the psychic damage homophonic parents wreak on young queer people, but only if this were the first season of a new show introducing us to new characters! I know the characters of Riverdale have had their memories wiped, but we haven’t. We’ve already seen Cheryl struggle to come out, come out, and then struggle in its aftermath. Watching it again with some 1950s aesthetics and contexts slapped on it doesn’t feel fresh.
Veronica’s makeout party specifically only pairs boys with girls, which technically makes sense for a mostly straight group of teens in the 1950s, but this is Riverdale! It picks and chooses when and how it wants to be “logical” and “historically accurate” and “sensical.” A horny makeout party seems like the perfect setting for some lite gay kissing experimentation. I mean, if we’re gonna recloset queer characters, then why not shake up some sexuality details across the board? It has been heavily implied that Betty has bisexual leanings in the regular timeline, but 1950s Betty only cares about the fact that her boyfriend Kevin doesn’t seem interested in her (because he’s gay, Betty!). The only time Clay/Kevin and Cheryl/Toni get to kiss is in a fantasy sequence. In real life, Kevin and Cheryl are still trapped in cover-up hetero relationships and still denying parts of themselves.
All of the characters’ sex dreams melt together into one gooey glob of erotica, which in and of itself feels queer as hell. Cheryl watches as Veronica and Archie make out. A makeout between Cheryl and Archie, I have to admit, is upsettingly hot, perhaps especially because we know it isn’t real at all. The characters’ desires twist and turn, swelter and swell. It’s a fun, indulgent montage that actually goes beyond fan service and is more like sexual chaos, one of the most realistic parts of the episode in terms of the feral nature of teenage sexuality despite being a fantasy sequence. It contrasts well with the real makeout party later, which is full of awkwardness and discomfort, also a believable depiction of teen horniness. But there’s just something missing that holds this ultra sex-obsessed episode of Riverdale back — perhaps because it still feels so confined to certain limitations of sexuality and desire, even as it supposedly mixes pairings up with abandon. I’m stuck on the recloseting of certain characters, especially when others are more liberated. I come to Riverdale to watch the unexpected, the wild. Not to see things I’ve already seen before.
“Yellowjackets” Episode 204 Recap: Survival Games
Here we are! Yellowjackets 204 recap! “Old Wounds” was written by Julia Bicknell and Liz Phang and directed by Scott Winant. As always, your theories, speculations, deep dives on symbolism, etc. are very welcome in the comments, where I’m an active participant! I really do consider the comments sections on these recaps to be supplementary texts to the recap itself, so even if you don’t want to hop in yourself, reading them is rewarding! You can backread past recaps and their comments sections, which to me sounds like the perfect way to pass time before the next episode of Yellowjackets 💫 Okay, let’s jump in!
First and foremost, we must address a very fun aesthetic detail in this episode: the theme song! It’s the usual song “No Return,” but in this main title sequence, it’s covered by 90s icon Alanis Morissette, whose song “Uninvited” is also featured in season one. It’s a slight but perceptible shift, Alanis’ rendition a little more aching and haunting than the original while still preserving that sense of rage and turmoil. I love it as a one-off stunt! Alanis’ penchant for visceral, angry, emotional gut-punchy lyrics and sounds fits very well in this universe.
“Old Wounds” really does feel like a transitional episode for this season of Yellowjackets. With the exception of two big character reveals at the end of the episode, not a ton happens. But characters are in motion, Taissa quite literally spending the entire episode traveling to a specific place, Misty traveling with Walter to a new place, Nat and Lottie in both timelines moving into a new space with each other that isn’t trust or understanding but something of a turning point and a clear line drawn between them, Shauna entering into a new relationship with Callie built on radical honesty. Everyone’s reopening the titular old wounds and creating new ones in the process.
Let’s start with Misty and Walter actually, because I’ve only really touched on them briefly in previous recaps and I have a new fun theory I want to bat around. Misty and Walter road trip out to the Catskills in pursuit of the purple cult, not yet knowing Lottie’s connection to it. On the way, Walter tells Misty she can put on some music and pulls out a bunch of cassette tapes featuring showtunes. Misty, reasonably, concludes he’s a Yellowjackets Fanboy, given the 90s nostalgia of the tapes and the fact that showtunes are Misty’s favorite. But Walter shoots this down, saying he of course knows about the Yellowjackets stuff but also doesn’t care about it.
“That was like 30 years ago,” Walter says. “Twenty five,” Misty interjects abruptly, which I laughed at, because for someone putting up a huge act that she’s annoyed that he’s a Yellowjackets freak, she sure does enjoy the Yellowjacket spotlight. Whereas for other characters that time was formative in a traumatic way, I think for Misty it was formative in an empowering way.
Walter, who I do not trust for reasons I’m about to lay out, says he just happens to love musicals. SURE, WALTER! Misty pretends she doesn’t care much about musicals, too, which we know is a lie. They put on music from Evita, and then in a very good transition, we jump back to the past and see Misty and Crystal singing Evita together in the cabin, to the apparent annoyance of everyone else.
Musical banter aside, something Walter says stands out in this car scene. Misty has been trying to get ahold of Taissa and Shauna still, and both are ignoring her calls. She’s also determined to save Nat from whatever fate has befallen her. Walter takes all this in and says: “It’s good to have a friend that’s relentlessly got your back.” Could this be a hint at Walter’s own motivations? Could Walter be protecting a friend by trying to get closer to Misty? An obvious explanation would be that he knew Adam Martin, hence his deep-dive on Adam theories and questioning of Misty’s downvoting. But wouldn’t that also mean Walter’s showing his hand too much by poking around about Adam explicitly?
What if Walter knew Jessica Roberts? In the comments of last week’s recap, someone pointed out that in the season premiere there was a thread on the Citizen Detective forums that read: “The Parsippany Poisoner — what are the cops missing?” This reasonably sounds like it could be about Misty’s poisoning of Jessica Roberts. We learn in this episode that Walter is independently wealthy — a multi-millionaire in fact — due to a settlement with a construction company whose faulty scaffolding led to an accident resulting in a metal plate in his head. Jessica Roberts’ clientele were primarily wealthy people trying to cover up their own messes or expose the messes of their enemies. Even though Walter seemingly prefers to do his own sleuthing, it does seem like he’d be more likely to know or be friendly with someone like Jessica Roberts over moody artist boy Adam, right?
In any case, we know Walter is after Misty for something. He cast himself as the Moriarty to her Sherlock last episode, suggesting rather baldly that he has diabolical intentions. Then, in “Old Wounds”, there’s another hint at his intended dynamic with her. After a bit of a wild goose chase trying to track down the cult, Walter insists they should check into a bed and breakfast for the night and reconvene in the morning. A split-screen sequence shows Misty and Walter going through their separate rooms, placing the TV remote in plastic bags, inspecting TVs, lightbulbs, and phones for any evidence of tampering. They’re equally paranoid, equally alert. Indeed, the sequence seems like it’s largely intended to show how similar these two are.
And that’s why one key difference between them stands out starkly. It’s quick, but near the end of the montage. We see what they each like to put on their phones before bed: Misty sleeps to bird sounds, and Walter sleeps to cat sounds. She’s the prey; he’s the predator. We’ve never really seen Misty go up against a formidable foe. Jessica Roberts thought she could out-maneuver Misty, but she didn’t take Misty seriously as a threat, playing into a lot of assumptions about how Misty looks and moves through the world. But Yellowjackets consistently makes it clear that plenty of people are capable of violence and destruction — from teenage girls to Jersey housewives. Walter is moving at the same speed as Misty, his whole bumbling nerdy weirdo thing not necessarily an act but also not at odds with his more nefarious underpinnings, much like Misty is genuinely this quirky little freak who can also kill.
any time I see any kind of doppelgänger on screen, my first instinct is to wish they would make out with each other — can anyone tell me if this is a uniquely “me” thing or if you also suffer from this unwell affliction????????
Speaking of Jessica Roberts, who I miss dearly for the sheer reason that she was scary and hot, a possessed Taissa breaks into her apartment to rifle through the files she collected on the Yellowjackets at Taissa’s request last season. She pulls a file we can reasonably assume is for Van, the scene playing out in a fractured, nightmarish way with no dialogue, Taissa split in two, her sleepwalking self clearly in control, scowling, almost taunting the helpless Taissa. Even though Sammy called this version of Taissa “The Bad One” last season and we know just the kinds of disturbing things sleepwalking Taissa gets up to (RIP Biscuit), I’ve been avoiding calling these bifurcated identities Good Taissa and Bad Taissa, because I think this show rarely deals in cut and dried moral dichotomies like that. If it ever gets confusing which version of Taissa I’m writing about, that’s probably intentional! Sometimes, the lines are blurred on the show, too.
An Interlude: DID WE JUST GET CONFIRMATION THAT JESSICA ROBERTS WAS GAY? Because in that fractured Taissa sequence, which uses a staticky television device kind of like the one used when Ben was flashing back to Paul, she looks at a photo on the wall of Jessica Roberts with another woman who has har hand wrapped around her face and appears to be wearing a wedding ring. Another picture that’s less in focus shows the two of them with a guy wearing winter gear and smiling for the camera. Jessica always pinged for me, but also Rekha Sharma played the character as hot and mysterious, and sometimes that just automatically registers as gay for me personally (I call this the Kalinda Sharma Effect: Sexy&Cryptic = GAY).
Taissa wakes up in a car without gas, having seemingly driven for a while. She gets out and keeps walking, like she’s being pulled toward something. A truck driver picks her up on the side of the road, says he voted for her, and jumps to clarify when Taissa picks up a pen on the floor of his truck and it turns out to be a tip n strip novelty pen. The moment feels, briefly, ominous, but Taissa dispels it with a joke.
Meanwhile, Teen Taissa is engaging in controlled sleepwalking sessions under the supervision of Van. Tai has been finding trees marked with the symbol in her sleep, and Van has been mapping them out on top of Nat’s thorough hunting maps. She thinks they should talk to Lottie, but Taissa is still a skeptic. It’s undeniable that something strange is happening to her, but does she really need Lottie’s guidance and rituals introduced? I think she’s right to think that could make things worse and more out of control for her.
Over in the land of suburban chaos, Shauna has convinced Jeff that a tow company simply found the minivan on the side of the road and returned it, opting not to inform him that she nearly shot a man for…fun? Shauna has moved on from all that, is talking about going to Kohl’s because they’re having a sale and maybe she could get Jeff some of those odor-resistant socks he likes so much. You know, just cute little wifey things. Jeff drops that the cops know about the affair, and why wouldn’t they, because Shauna was running around with her young lover in public places, it’s a small town, people talk. Shauna fires back at him that he was running all over town in a ski mask blackmailing people. They’re slightly different situations given that Shauna might be a murder suspect, but sure Shauna, let’s make a 1:1 comparison about these little dalliances with danger. Also, while I’m not necessarily defending him, Jeff blackmailed them to get out of a tricky situation. Shauna was just sort of doing what she wanted. Callie announces, with no room for question or pushback, that she will be sleeping at Ilana’s again.
We know, of course, that Callie has not been sleeping at Ilana’s. Shauna should really know, too. But alas, Shauna naively thanks Ilana’s mom Michelle for letting her stay over so much when they run into each other in the Kohl’s parking garage. Michelle tells her Callie hasn’t slept at their house in weeks. This sends Shauna on a search party in Callie’s room, where she discovers a condom in a drawer, which perhaps in another family on another show would spark conflict, but these are not the trivial sorts of suburban drama that the Sadecki family deals in, at least not lately. Also tucked in that drawer is the real cause for concern: the fragment of Adam’s burned driver’s license that Callie plucked out of the charcoal grill after Jeff and Shauna once again did a piss-poor job of cleaning up their mess.
“sometimes, when two people really love each other………..it’s okay to eat their flesh, especially if they died of totally natural causes in the wilderness”
Callie is texting with Jay to meet up, still unaware he’s a cop, when Shauna rolls up on her in the minivan and asks her to hop in so they can have some fun. That “fun” consists of Shauna driving Callie out to the middle of nowhere and then confessing to murder. She tells Callie the full truth, even that Adam was not really the blackmailer even though that’s the cover story she used with Tai, Nat, and Misty. The scene is a comedy masterclass by Melanie Lynskey, whose line readings at every turn here both stokes tension and lands laughs. “He’s not a bad person, okay?” Shauna says to Callie about Jeff. “He’s just a bad criminal.”
Callie is confused as to why her dad thought he could blackmail the Yellowjackets, prompting Shauna to say the following:
“Because they did, they” *pause* “we did things out there that” *pause* “we’re really ashamed of and” *pause* “sorry, I know, maybe one day I can talk to you about it but for now, can that just be enough?”
I’m emphasizing the pauses, because I am struck by the intention and caution in Shauna’s wording here. She says “they” before she adjusts to “we,” which could just be rooted in general guilt or a sense of wanting to distance herself from her past or could signal an even deeper disconnect. Does Shauna become dissociative in the wilderness? Is her identity as bifurcated as Taissa’s but just in less obvious ways? It’s almost like she’s having to remind herself she was a participant.
Callie promises she won’t tell anyone about what Shauna has just unloaded on her, but she also doesn’t come clean about talking about the affair to a stranger. Later, at the Sadecki household, Jeff tells Shauna he’s trying to get over the affair and take the high road but maybe he’s not totally over it, and for that he’s sorry. Oh, Jeff! I do love how Jeff and Shauna are more focused on the affair and its aftermath than, you know, murder. Their domestic chaos is a blended smoothie of regular conflict (affair, lies, sexual dissatisfaction, poor communication) and operatic conflict (murder, covering up murder, blackmail, a sordid past that involves ritualistic killing, a shared dead person in common, and a prior baby’s unknown fate). Shauna says she thinks they’re going to be okay, all of them, the whole family. Jeff is slightly confused by this, so Shauna clarifies: She told Callie everything.
Jeff, understandably, is like uhhhhhh what? He’s horrified that Shauna would make their daughter their accomplice. It’s their one job as parents to protect her. Right on cue, Callie enters and confesses to her father that she has been lying about going to Ilana’s and has been drinking in a park with a friend (again, she neglects to share her secret of an older man to whom she has been spilling her guts). She offers to help with dinner and starts chopping cucumbers. It’d be a quaint image of suburban domesticity if not for all the shit beneath it. Seeing Callie wield a kitchen knife hits different when we know about her mother’s aptitude for knife skills. What exactly has Callie inherited from Shauna?
While Jeff might see Shauna’s decision to tell Callie the truth as poor judgement, I think Shauna knows exactly what she’s doing. Telling Callie is an insurance policy. Even though Jeff has indeed proven his loyalty over and over and was very willing to go to prison for her no questions asked last season, he now can’t turn on Shauna, because doing so would mean putting Callie at risk, too. I think Shauna relishes the idea of them all caught up in this mess — her mess — together, like one big happy crime family. After all, we saw Shauna’s true colors last episode. Shout out to the commenters who pointed out that after Shauna gets back into her minivan in “Digestif,” her stomach literally gurgles. She was hungry for a kill, and she leaves unsatisfied. Telling Callie isn’t a lapse in judgement or an impulsive decision, even if Shauna stumbles her way through that confession. It’s all very calculated. Jeff and Callie are bound to her, and she holds all the power.
Over on the compound, Nat is lurking around corners, clearly trying to out-maneuver Lottie. She asks for the keys to the car so she can join Lisa in taking honey to the farmer’s market. Lottie either doesn’t think Nat is manipulating her or is unthreatened by it; she hands over the keys easily. In the car, Nat questions Lisa about the nature of the cult, but Lisa remains unfazed. She explains that they all wear purple because of Charlotte’s philosophy that everyone should be on equal ground since some people on the compound come from a lot of money and many do not (this explanation, of course, obscures the fact that Lottie meanwhile wears bright orange). Lisa insists there are no rules at the compound, but when they pull up to Lisa’s mom’s house because Lisa wants to visit her pet fish, she asks Nat not to tell anyone. “Oh, so no rules but you can’t see your family?” Nat asks. Lisa specifies that Lottie merely discourages contact. Again, from Nat’s perspective it’s easy to see these explanations as the fodder of Lottie’s manipulations.
I saw an interview with Juliette Lewis where she said she is trying to move like a cat this season, and I can see it! but I also maintain that she often moves her body like there are no bones in it
We learn a bit more about Lisa and her background from her visit with her mother, who is clearly against her participation in Lottie’s compound and wants her to come home. She asks if she has been taking her medication, and Lisa says she has had help weaning off of it. We learn that she is depressed and has attempted suicide in the past, and her mother seems to hold this against her as proof she’s not able to care for a goldfish. Nat snaps at her mother, but Lisa tells her she’s making it worse. In the car, Lisa apologizes, and Nat spits out her goldfish into a cup of water. “Here’s your fucking fish,” she says, cementing a new dynamic between the two that isn’t quite friendship but also is a far cry from stab-you-in-the-face-with-a-forkship.
They go to a bar together with the fish, and Nat says fuck what her mom says. Lisa says she was there when she had a gun to her head. “Do you still wanna kill yourself?” she asks. “Not today,” Nat says, pushing a shot of whiskey away. It’s a genuine moment of connection between the two. They aren’t downplaying their shared history of suicidal thoughts and attempts by speaking so plainly. They’re actually supporting themselves and each other in ways Lisa’s mother fails. They’re holding onto their agency. Nat might not be at the compound to intentionally heal, but she’s clearly getting something out of this relationship with Lisa if she’s able to push the booze away.
sorry to be homosexual, but the way Lottie puts on this sweater and pulls her braid out from the neckline? sensual
Back at the compound, Adult Lottie is having visions. Last episode, we saw her see the bloody death of her bees. Near the end of “Old Wounds,” we see her flip through affirmation cards written by her acolytes and then come across a Queen card with its eyes scratched out. Last season, a deck without Queens in the cabin was referenced. This season, we know the girls use a deck of cards to determine chores. The eyeless Queen appears in the main title sequence this year, and now it’s haunting Lottie. She closes her eyes and the card turns back into an affirmation. But when she flips it to another, the Queen shows back up. Is this another old wound? Does the fact that the Queen doesn’t have eyes somehow connect Lottie and Taissa, who we know follows a “the one without eyes”?
But a key piece of information about these visions comes earlier in the episode, when Lottie meets with a psychiatrist. Only, it isn’t her regular psychiatrist, who is on sabbatical. “Interim psychiatrist” immediately had my horror senses tingling. I don’t think I trust this woman, and I don’t think Lottie does, either. Lottie wants to up her meds, because she wants to stop these visions, which she hasn’t had in decades, from happening. She says:
“The last time it was, became something different, can’t happen again. You know I’ve worked really hard, and I’ve built something that’s, that’s helping people. It’s helping me. Can’t go back.”
Here, we get a sense that Lottie very much does not want these visions. Not only that, but she doesn’t believe in them. When the psychiatrist — AGAIN, WHO I DO NOT TRUST — suggests that she reframe the way she thinks of these visions and try to unpack their meaning, Lottie is confused by the insinuation. “Nothing,” she says when asked what they could mean. “Because they’re not real.”
I’ve been having some difficulty this season squaring Adult Lottie with her teen self. It’s true that none of the teen and adult versions of each character are in perfect alignment, and in fact, they’re all morphed to the point where overlaying them on top of each other doesn’t create a straightforward doubling but rather a composite image. They aren’t just grown up versions of their younger selves; they’ve been changed, in all the usual ways that people change as they grow up but also in extreme ways due to this traumatic experience during formative years. I’m less interested in the places the teen and adults touch but rather where they diverge, as with teen Shauna being scared of the unknown last episode but adult Shauna making it explicit that she gets off on uncertainty. Still, I’ve been tripping over how to place the two Lotties in conversation. “Old Wounds” though provides the most clues as to her arc by establishing her adult relationship with her prophetic abilities.
I have a growing suspicion that one of Lottie’s visions goes horribly wrong. She tends to have visions that portend death or near-death experiences, and so far we’ve mostly seen her be right about her instincts. Adult Lottie’s attitude about her visions contrasts Teen Lottie’s though, and I also can’t stop thinking about the fact that Lottie doesn’t speak for a while after she gets out of the wilderness. Here, though, is where I’m also hazy on Adult Lottie’s motivations. Hearing Lisa talk to Nat, it does sound like Lottie holds a lot of power over her acolytes and gives them an illusion of freedom. She may also be helping them in some ways, but it comes at a cost, and she also preserves control — it’s not an equal relationship. If it were, she’d be wearing purple, too. Teen Lottie, similarly, has a hold on certain followers — only back then, she wasn’t always asking for it, just going with the flow. Adult Lottie’s determination to help other people seems somewhat grounded in guilt and not merely just a power trip, though I think those things go hand in hand. Whatever happened before, she doesn’t want to happen again. And yet, she might be living in the past even more than Misty does. The compound’s structures mimic the wilderness. Great meaning is given to rituals; everyone has to dress the same; contact with the outside world is limited. Lottie has found a way to construct a version of the wilderness in which she’s in control (and also that she profits from).
Which brings us to the central conflict in “Old Wounds,” which also adds some background to the relationship between Nat and Lottie as their adult selves. Back at the cabin, Teen Nat and Teen Lottie end up in a one-on-one wilderness survival match that, by my reading, is born out of not just the growing divide between Lottie Faithfuls and Lottie Skeptics in the cabin but also just boredom. Like, a one-on-one hunting match? That tbh sounds fun for 90s teens who haven’t had access to electricity or a mall in many months. And isn’t that also what the most disturbing part about “pit girl” from the pilot is? It seems like a game.
After Ben makes a comment about the girls eating him, Mari tries to come for him. When Nat stops her, Mari then turns on Nat and says it’s her fault they’re all hungry. She thinks Nat’s refusal to come to Lottie’s blessings is why Nat hasn’t found any game to hunt. Mari, Akilah, and Van are all in agreement that Lottie is to thank for the dead birds, which we learn they indeed have eaten without getting sick. Mari takes it so far as to say Lottie told the birds to hit the roof.
Nat suggests the contest. Both she and Lottie will go out and hunt, and whoever brings back the most food wins. Misty lays out the rules, saying they’re not allowed to get help and that they have to be back by sundown. Mari insists Lottie doesn’t need a gun, so it goes to Nat. They both head out into the snowy wilderness for what is surely a Bad Idea.
Lottie, with only a knife, approaches a tree with the symbol on it. She touches the symbol. “Fuck me,” she says, and it’s a funny but also unnerving reminder that she’s just a kid who really has no idea what’s going on. She’s making up this shit as she goes, and I don’t think that’s intentional. I don’t think she’s faking anything exactly; I just don’t think she knows what she’s doing any more than any of the rest of them. She might have visions, but she has no control over them, no way to call to her instincts when she needs them, like now. She also cuts her palm and lets her blood fall on the tree trunk altar. We do see Adult Lottie repeat this ritual at the end of the episode, saying: “Can this just be enough? Please?” So maybe Adult Lottie does give more credence to visions and mysticism than her therapy session suggests. She still thinks something requires blood. But she’s also obviously scared of what heading down this path means.
Back to the contest. Nat finds actual animal tracks. They belong to the moose from last episode, which wasn’t a hallucination after all. But the moose is dead, frozen beneath the surface of the rock-solid lake. She breaks the rules of the game to gather others at the cabin in an attempt to hoist and pull the moose out. They try really hard, but they fail. As the moose slips into the depths of the lake, Nat plunges in, too, Travis having to pull her out. It’s a devastating moment. There’s so much weight on Nat’s shoulders as the group’s hunter.
While Nat’s on her wild moose chase, Lottie’s hunt takes a much stranger turn. She comes across Laura Lee’s plane, suddenly in one piece. Leonard the teddybear (RIP) sits on the front seat, and she greets him. Then she opens a hatch at the back of the plane and discovers a tunnel that she lowers herself into, closely resembling the industrial-looking tunnel we’ve seen her navigate before. Until, suddenly, she’s in an elevator.
Its doors open into a 1990s mall.
Nat’s bleached hair in this fantasy sequence makes sense but GOOD GOD CAN SOMEONE TELL ME HOW HER HAIR IS STILL BLEACHED IN THE WOODS
Seeming like part memory and part hypothermia-induced hallucination, the mall scene features Lottie coming across a food court table full of the Yellowjackets, their faces suddenly done up, their winter rags replaced with real clothes. Laura Lee is here, and she got Lottie some Chinese food. They think she looks hungry, cold. Van says she saw a coat for sale at Abercrombie, and Lottie mumbles something about not having a credit card. “When did that ever stop you?” Nat asks. If you recall, Lottie copped to a bit of a shoplifting tendency in season one. Specifically, she would steal clothes from T.J. Maxx and then return them for T.J. Maxx bucks. Here, we see bits of Lottie’s prior life seep in — not just in the sense of the other Yellowjackets’ 90s hair and the mall setting but how this particular shame comes up in the fantasy. She was a rich girl who stole clothes in her pre-crash life; clearly, she is someone with specific control issues.
We don’t have a ton of context for how Lottie functioned in the group of girls prior to the crash; she wasn’t the queen bee like Jackie, but she also seemed popular, hardly an outcast. At the cabin, she’s a divine leader to some, a nuisance to others. Here in the mall sequence, she loses her power. Only Laura Lee seems genuinely interested in helping her; the others seem to be quietly mocking her. This could all just be stemming from regular ass teen girl insecurity, especially since Lottie’s history of mental illness likely makes her especially sensitive to anyone calling her crazy. Indeed, even the characters who support her, like Van, seem to be judging her in this mall sequence. Sometimes when I get lost in the weeds of trying to analyze moments like this, I have to remind myself that it can be as simple as normal high school-level stakes and contexts. Is it possible that Lottie’s desire to be liked for more than just her social status as a rich girl before the crash is at the root of her impulse to want to be seen as a healer, a prophet, someone who can guide others?
What constantly surprised me about the hierarchies of Yellowjackets is that they’re never particularly fixed. The only real sense of order at the cabin is one that’s disorderly. Nat is the hunter, Lottie is the priestess, Shauna is the holder of the knife, but power between them — as well as Tai and Misty — shifts with the wind. Jackie was once a queen bee, but now she has been consumed by all of them; nothing remains of her but disconnected bones. It’s why it’s difficult for me to conceive of a real person behind the costume of the Antler Queen (and, in fact, some have speculated she is not a real presence at all). Lottie is a vision-having, mystical leader who some — like Mari and Akilah — revere. But the mall fantasy also just reduces her to a regular teenage girl who’s insecure and isolated.
Laura Lee snaps Lottie out of the hallucination and back to reality. The other girls eventually go find her in the place where the hunter’s plane used to be, and they bring her back to the cabin, barely conscious. Nat has had her turn warming up in the bathtub with hot water, and she suggests they put Lottie in, too. Then the two have a quiet moment together. Nat blames herself for suggesting the contest. “Good game you fucking loser,” Lottie says, surprising Nat. “You ended up with nil, the same as me,” she says, before adding “good game.” I always love when these flashes of their previous lives as ruthless soccer girlies pop through. Even though it doesn’t explicitly come up frequently, their high school athlete backgrounds are often on my mind. Varsity team sports — and soccer in particular — encourage brutality, competition, mind games. It’s impossible to sever that context from their behaviors in the woods and from the Rubik’s cube of a power struggle they’re constantly locked into out there.
Speaking of fantasy sequences, Ben’s still seeking solace in his mental visitations with Paul. In reality, he tries to read a copy of The Magus, a novel about a schoolteacher on a Greek island who becomes bored and lonely to the point of contemplating suicide and is eventually put through a series of psychological games. ANY OF THAT SOUND FAMILIAR? Ben, maybe you should put that particular book the fuck down.
He does, blessedly, but then he slips into that fantasy space with Paul, and it’s unclear if what we’re watching is a memory or something Ben has constructed in his imagined alternate timeline where he never got on the plane. It doesn’t matter really. Even if it’s a memory, it’s a fantasy. In it, Ben finds a box containing memories of Paul’s past boyfriends and becomes insecure. He doesn’t have a box like that; he just has soccer cleats and trophies. “This is my past, and you Ben are my future,” Paul says. It is, of course, devastating, because right now Ben can’t really seem to imagine a future for himself at all and instead only has his past and a reimagined alternate timeline of a life to cling to. I really like the conversation in the comments last week touching on the fact that in 1996, the fear and stigma of HIV would no doubt be forces in Paul’s life, perhaps making him unable to see a real future for himself as an openly gay man before the wilderness was even a factor. While the episode largely feels like filler and placesetting, Ben’s and Teen Lottie’s respective fantasy sequences are standout moments that break away from the straightforward action of the episode and provide something meatier, if brief. Getting into any character’s head makes for a dizzying and dazzling experience on this show.
Teen Tai hopes to appease Van by helping her search for where she believes the final tree with a symbol should be. Just when they’re about to give up, they see a figure flash by. They chase him down, and it’s Javi, who they bring back to the cabin but who refuses to speak right away. “Lottie knew he was alive, but Taissa knew where he was,” Van says, hoping she can finally prove to Tai and also reveal to the others that Taissa is somehow connected to the wilderness. Again, this draws a connection between Tai and Lottie, bringing me back to that eyeless Queen card Lottie sees and the eyeless figure Tai follows.
Where has Javi been this whole time? His survival seems like an impossibility, and yet there have also been clues that he has been hiding right underneath their noses this entire time. The shit in the piss bucket last episode. Missing meat in this episode. If Javi has been here all along, how and why? Shauna told him to run; if she were secretly helping him hide somewhere, she wouldn’t be so upset about the missing meat. Could Lottie’s “feeling” that he was alive this time have actually been more concrete knowledge? Or was Javi just somehow surviving without direct help, and again, HOW?
can’t explain it, but the way Lauren Ambrose sips this coffee is gay — Now That’s What I Call Acting™
Adult Tai finally arrives at her destination at the end of the episode: a video rental store called WHILE YOU WERE STREAMING, run by resident While You Were Sleeping superfan Van. There has been a ton of lead up to their reunion, and for now all we get is this quick tease, a moment of recognition and between the two of them. The adult Yellowjackets have spent much of this season apart, and now some are moving their way back to each other, Misty getting gradually closer to Nat and Lottie, Taissa and Van reunited after what seems like a very long time based on Van’s reaction.
With the exception of Javi and Van both showing up at the end of the episode, it’s a relatively quiet one, the pieces moving around on the board. Several threads are getting closer to touching, and next week marks the halfway point of the season, so that feels right. Between now and then, I’ll be listening to the Alanis cover of the theme song on repeat.
Last Buzz:
- I could watch a full hour of Walter and Misty arguing about Broadway Opinions.
- Mari is still hearing a dripping noise, and she tasks Akilah — who is very adorably studying for the SATs — with helping her search for the source. But no one else really hears it, so what’s going on here? Does it have something to do with Javi? Something else?
- During the search for the drip source, Akilah discovers a mouse and decides to pocket it. This mouse is officially her pal, and I am worried about its fate.
- I do love this show’s ability to imbue the simplest of objects with horror and suspense, like we see here with the novelty pen (though the tension there quickly dissipates) and the Queen card. Yellowjackets uses its props very well.
- Nat clearly wants to get into Lottie’s locked cabinet in her office.
- Read more about the Alanis-ified theme song!
- All of the Staff Picks at While You Were Streaming sound very fitting: Bound, Mean Girls, Footloose, Trainspotting, Wayne’s World, Into The Wild, Varsity Blues.
“The Power” Gives the Upper Hand to the Girls, Gives Us the Gays
This review will include mild spoilers for the first four episodes of The Power, mostly about the gay and trans characters.
Prime Video’s The Power imagines a world where, after generations of oppression, nature decides to even the playing field a bit and gives women their power back.
And I do mean that literally. Teen girls around the world start to realize they have the ability to shoot sparks from their fingertips thanks to a brand new organ that developed in their collarbone; and of course this happening all over the world all at once causes a bit of pandemonium.
Based on Naomi Alderman’s book of the same name, the show follows a variety of different characters all over the world as this power awakens. Tatiana, the first lady of Moldova, who grew up an Olympic gymnast with an abusive mother; Tunde, a Nigerian vlogger with dreams of being a journalist who goes to Saudi Arabia to document the revolution; Jos Cleary-Lopez (played by queer actor Auli’i Cravalho) and her mother Margot who is the mayor of Seattle.
Angry teen girl with mommy issues, yes please!
AndAnd I’m delighted to report that there is not one, but two different storylines that involve LGBTQ+ characters.
The first is Roxy, the lesbian daughter of a British mob boss. At first, when her father offered her a job in the countryside and suggested she could find a nice boyfriend “…or girlfriend, whatever” I wasn’t sure if he was just stereotyping her because she’s more like her rough and tumble half-brothers than her hyper-feminine mother. But then she ends up making out with a girl in the alley so they wasted no time letting us know exactly what’s up. Roxy is desperate for her father’s approval (her father who, by the way, accused Roxy of being “too emotional” to handle the business when he literally punched a wedding cake because it was green mere moments ago) and when she discovers her spark, she tries to use it to prove she can be just as useful as her brothers.
I hope Roxy learns she shouldn’t have to beg for her father’s love.
She’s not a particularly likable character, on purpose, even though sometimes you can’t help but root for her. But what’s great about that, and what more shows should do, is that you don’t have to like Roxy just because she’s gay. Too often in shows I find myself trying harder than I should have to just to defend or like a character because they’re the only queer character; but not in The Power! Because there are more queer characters to choose from!
In the Bible Belt of the United States a Black girl named Allie finds herself in a foster home with older white foster parents. The man is abusive, and at the same time Allie’s spark is unlocked, she gets a voice in her head; a voice she identifies as God, a voice I identified as sci-fi icon Adina Porter. She uses her powers to escape, and eventually finds herself at a girls’ home run by rebel nuns. (Not to be confused with Warrior Nuns.) They were nuns that supported things like human rights for LGBTQ+ people and therefore not allowed in the church properly, so they started their own nunnery. Among these nuns is Sister Maria, a trans woman played by Daniela Vega, who is gentle and kind to Allie, and all the girls.
Nuns who actually believe in “love thy neighbor” WHAT A CONCEPT
The head nun, Sister Veronica, is wary of these new powers, but Allie’s voice encourages her to take charge, and before long the voice in her head confirms she has found her family, as the girls start to follow her lead when she uses her powers to do things like bring a bird back to life and stop a girl’s seizures that usually last for hours after only a few minutes.
Among the girls in this new found family of Allie’s is Gordy and Luanne, who decide one night to experiment with their powers…sexually. Gordy is gender non-conforming and adorable, and Luanne is fat and beautiful, and I love them so much, your honor. They are not hugely developed as characters yet, but I’m hoping that changes as Allie continues to build her relationship with the girls. But the scene they did have in the chapel while all the girls were unwinding and enjoying a metaphorical sigh of relief away from the prying eyes of the nuns was very sweet and cute and JOYFUL.
I love a little Christian rebellion!
If I hadn’t just lived through how media the world over handled the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I might have found the response to the outbreak of girls with powers a little far-fetched, but as we unfortunately know all too well, the fact that it started with news outlets declaring it all a hoax is quite believable. And maybe my own sheltered, naïve, teen self might have found the immediate outlawing of the powers, forced quarantining, people outing each other, and capital punishment a bit overdramatic…but unfortunately it doesn’t look all that different from the anti-trans and anti-abortion laws plaguing us today.
To that end, at times the metaphors seem a bit on the nose — for example, when Jos says, “A whole chapter on the French revolution, when am I going to use that in my life?” juxtaposed with the women of Saudi Arabia having a literal revolution; or how Margot’s (straight, white, cis male) boss says things to her like “calm down” and “don’t get hysterical” — but it’s also cathartic in a way. To be reminded that there’s a spark in all of us, and just because they tell us we’re not allowed to use it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Doesn’t mean we can’t. And the parts that might sound redundant to folks who are constantly reading about and engaging in topics like these might be new to some people who don’t. Like when Tunde’s new friend Nourah says “I want change, but I’m not fighting to leave.” It’s something you hear people in Florida or Texas say all the time; and maybe this will reach the ears of people who don’t doomscroll on Twitter 24/7 like I do.
One of my favorite aspects of the spark these teen girls find themselves with is that the organ exists in older women, too, but they need a teen girl to jump start it for them. It reminds me of how I feel when I see Gen Z influencers on TikTok just saying no to established systems; no to gender constructs, no to staying in the closet. In using their voice, they’re reminding so many of us of older generations who have grown a bit weary that just because our voices are hoarse from years of yelling doesn’t mean we can’t still be heard.
I have a few things I want the show to address. I want them to address non-binary people and where they fall in all this; and my preference would be they all have sparks regardless of sex assigned at birth. I want one of the younger girls at the group home to spark — either on purpose or accidentally — Sister Maria and I want her to have a spark, too.
Overall I’m enjoying the show, enjoying seeing the interpretations of how this sudden movement might look in different parts of the world. It’s not unbelievable how quickly things escalate — from full rebellions in some areas to mandated separation in others (aka a “no girls on the bus” policy.) It’s interesting to see who embraces their powers and who doesn’t; how some people will use it to get revenge, some to defend themselves, some will abuse the power, and some just use it to start their generators or make a fire to keep warm. It begs the question: what would you do if you suddenly found you had more power than you realized?
15 Queer Cartoons To Watch if You’re Mourning “The Owl House”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been tearing up about The Owl House series finale for almost a full week now. In a good way, because it was a perfect sendoff. And also in a sad way, because it’s over. If you’re feeling the same way, maybe you could use a little list of other animated series to check out while your heart mends? Below I’ve chosen 15 of my all-time favorite queer cartoons! Please share yours in the comments!
The Legend of Korra
Where to watch: Netflix
Who it’s for: Gays who like badass, complicated women; Avatar-style magic; and a slow-burn romance with an endgame sapphic sendoff.
Steven Universe
Where to watch: Hulu, Cartoon Network (with ads)
Who it’s for: Fantasy fans who love expansive lore; found family feelers; trauma healers; and gay + trans characters for days and days.
Danger & Eggs
Where to watch: Prime Video
Who it’s for: Weirdos who know their queer pop culture and want to vicariously attend the best Pride parade ever.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
Where to watch: Netflix
Who it’s for: Anyone who likes epic fantasy and sci-fi and has always wondered what it’d be like if The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars was canonically queer.
Adventure Time
Where to watch: HBO Max, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video (rent or purchase)
Who it’s for: Nerds who are in it for the long haul and who are ready to embrace an entire zoo of wacky, wonderful characters in a post-apocalyptic bizarro world.
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts
Where to watch: Netflix
Who it’s for: Music lovers, hypebeasts, and queers who never get tired of plucky heroines with hearts of gold.
Pinecone & Pony
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Who it’s for: LGBTQs who want to show their inner child the kind of love they wish they’d grown up with.
OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes
Where to watch: Hulu, Cartoon Network (with ads)
Who it’s for: Teen Titanheads and queers who remember Nicktoons in the afternoons.
Magical Girl Friendship Squad
Where to watch: fuboTV, Tubi
Who it’s for: Anyone who believes Broad City would have been better with MAGIC.
The Dragon Prince
Where to watch: Netflix
Who it’s for: D&D players, epic fantasy fans, anyone who wants some legitimately good queer disability rep.
Dead End: Paranormal Park
Where to watch: Netflix
Who it’s for: Folks in fandom, autistic gals and pals, and anyone who’s fascinated by those secret tunnels underneath Disney World.
The Legend of Vox Machina
Where to watch: Prime Video
Who it’s for: Grown-ups who love Dungeons & Dragons and fully-realized characters set inside a seemingly endless fantasy world.
Star Trek: Lower Decks
Where to watch: Paramount+ or with a Premium Subscription to YouTube, Roku, or Prime Video
Who it’s for: Fans of Star Trek or any of the best workplace comedies.
Harley Quinn
Where to watch: HBO Max
Who it’s for: Gays who love comics, a little bit of blood, deep irreverence for source material, and deadpan humor.
Arcane
Where to watch: Netflix
Who it’s for: Video game gays.
“A League of Their Own” Officially Ending With Four Final Episodes
Update: Despite the success of A League of Their Own by all knowable metrics, and the #MoreThanFour campaign, Prime Video announced yesterday that the series will officially end after four final episodes.
Vernon Sanders, head of television, Amazon and MGM Studios, said in a press release: “We’re deeply proud of the work that Abbi, Will, the cast, and crew have done reimagining A League of Their Own which has produced an incredibly loyal fan base as well as achieved numerous, well-deserved recognitions and accolades. After hearing what Abbi, Will, and the writing team have planned for the new story within this wonderful series, we are excited for our fans to see what comes next.”
Below is our original post from March 14th, when The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news, which was contradicted by co-creator Will Graham and which launched the fan campaign to save the series.
Well, a whisper of the news we’ve all been waiting for finally arrived today — and it’s not great, bob: Amazon Prime Video has renewed A League of Their Own… for a paltry four final episodes. Lesley Goldberg broke the story at The Hollywood Reporter this afternoon, noting that the announcement follows “months of renegotiations with Sony to lower the show’s licensing fee and after the cast had to sign new deals given the order is for half the episodes that were featured in season one.”
I don’t mind telling you that this news has broken the hearts of our entire team here at Autostraddle. Over the last several years, we’ve watched networks and streamers cut down gay show after gay show, with impotent excuses, but this is, by far, the most egregious cancellation. We are at a boiling point, in the United States, with anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, and not only do we know for a fact that positive representations of LGBTQ+ people open real-life hearts and minds, we also know what a huge difference nuanced, relatable stories about LGBTQ+ people mean to the community itself. Sometimes stories are the only safe place we have to land. (There’s no place like home, you know?) A League of Their Own was a triumph of actually diverse — not just the buzzword — queer storytelling, highlighting Black women, Latine women, fat women, and trans and gender nonconforming characters.
It also doesn’t make a lick of fiscal sense. Look at this chart co-creator Will Graham shared about the series’ ratings just this week:
Fascinating to see #ALeagueOfTheirOwn having highest week of online engagement 7 months after release, with no new push from @PrimeVideo. It's beautiful to see new people who continue to find the show. People should be paying attention, this isn't normal. pic.twitter.com/hop9siqHiC
— Will Graham (@WillWGraham) March 12, 2023
A League of Their Own has an astronomical 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It brought home trophies from the Independent Spirit Awards, GLAAD, HRC, the NAACP Image Awards, and was a Critics Choice darling. And there’s absolutely no way it cost as much to make as some of Amazon’s other shows, most of which, by the way, received WAY more support and advertising from the streamer. Also it’s AMAZON; they have more money than god.
Will Graham tweeted this after The Hollywood Reporter’s article went up.
Just to answer the questions: The stuff that came out today is a leak and it isn't official, which is why we aren't saying anything. So if you want to see more episodes or more seasons of this show, now is your moment. People are listening.
— Will Graham (@WillWGraham) March 14, 2023
We’ll absolutely be there to cheer on our faves in their final four episodes, if that’s all they really have left — but wow, way to whiff an easy home run, Prime Video.
Is Jodie Foster Giving ‘Lesbian Body Heat to Stay Alive’ in “True Detective” Trailer?
How long has it been since Jodie Foster was on our TVs? Too long, friends. Too long. But fear not! — for she has returned in full force in the trailer for HBO’s True Detective: Night Country! She monologues with that voice. She swears. She wears a bunch of layers and tromps around in the snow. She says riddles (again, with that voice). Her name is Liz. She gets real close, face-wise, with her nemesis(?). They stomp some more in the snow. They glare. They snap at each other. They step closer. They glare harder. THEY CUDDLE CLOSE IN THE FROZEN NIGHT USING ONLY THEIR BODY HEAT TO KEEP EACH OTHER ALIVE. The all-time greatest trope in history. See for yourself.
I know, I know, all the other sites are talking about grit and horror and whatever, but that’s why you’re reading Autostraddle dot com — because you want someone to scrub through these trailers frame-by-frame and uncover the sapphic secrets hidden within. If you didn’t catch it, I got ya:
Anyway, I can’t even tell you what the real plot of this thing will be. Looks like maybe a monster or a cult is snatching up Alaskans in the dark and leaving their shoes behind? And also perhaps it could be one of the other “kind of people who come to Alaska” who is doing the snatching. Such as: serial killers? Someone from the The Assassin Brotherhood? Either way, Jodie is PISSED and decides that taking herself into the Alaskan wilds in the middle of the night is a smart idea. (That’s not even a good idea when there’s not a body-grabbing monster in your midst!) All I know is my Gay TV Senses are tingling!
“Ted Lasso” Confirms That Bisexual Character’s Bisexuality!
When our TV Team started wondering if Ted Lasso was really, finally going to go there with Keeley in season three, we all agreed that obviously Keeley has been bisexual from the second she arrived on-screen and has simply remained bisexual without confirmation to the audience this entire time. Consider the facts: She almost never sits normal, with her feet on the floor and her back straight in a chair. She has a tough exterior which hides ooey-gooey feelings. She owns more — and more fashionable — outerwear than even Joseph and his Technicolor Dreamcoat. She balances ambition and loyalty with ease. And she’s absolutely been through at least one pop punk phase. When real life queer pal Jodi Balfour signed onto Ted Lasso to play a character named Jack, we really felt it was only a matter of time.
AND WE WERE RIGHT.
In Season 3, Episode 5, “Signs,” it all happens!
Recapping this whole season, or even this whole episode, is outside the scope of this post, but here’s the highlights: In Season 3, Keeley seems like she’s in a love triangle with Roy and Jamie (even though Roy is her true love, I believe, and maybe that’s because Roy Kent is the only man I personally love in this whole world). Keeley’s bestie Rebecca is having a hard time over at AFC Richmond, and usually Keeley would be right beside her to help her work through it, but right now Keeley’s got her hands full at her new PR firm. There’s drama with an employee, just as Jack — Keeley’s big investor — arrives to see how things are going. Jack offers Keeley some good advice about how to fire someone compassionately, but it doesn’t work, and Keeley’s canned employee returns to the office with a literal lamb that keeps pooping all over the place. Jack and Keeley don’t let it get them down; they have a laugh and some booze and clean up after the lamb.
Keeley forgets about her work stress for a minute, about Jamie and Roy, about everything besides the fact that Jodi “Jack” Balfour is there, making eyes at her. Keeley doesn’t even question it, doesn’t hesitate, she leans right in for a kiss. They make right out and then, later on, take off each other’s clothes behind frosted privacy glass!
Look, are Keeley and Roy going to end up together? Yes, of course they are. Is this storyline an attempt to placate Keeley/Rebecca shippers? Maybe. Probably. Is making out with your boss a good idea? Abso-fucking-lutely not. But, you know, not every kiss is forever, despite what the jewelry ads say. Sometimes sex is just good fun, a happy diversion, and Keeley deserves a reprieve from the drama. Plus, I am never going to protest Jodi Balfour showing up and confirming that someone’s gay. I’ve been rooting for that since before AFC Richmond even existed.
I think Jodie Balfour only filmed two episodes of Ted Lasso, but I could be wrong about that. Maybe the love triangle will become a love square. Maybe the person who’s here, there, every-fucking-where is actually Keeley Jones! BELIEVE!