Y tu Luna también: Everything Will Be Fine: Season 1, Episode 8 – “Everything Will Be Fine” (2021)

*Episode premise spoilers, which include a major spoiler from the end of episode 7.*

Season finale! I’ve heard basically nothing about Everything Will Be Fine since shortly after it came out, so at this point, I’m guessing there’s not going to be a season 2. Which is a shame—in addition to being a great show, the finale opens the show up in really interesting new directions, and I’d love to show where they were going with it. There’s been no official cancellation, so hope springs eternal, but I’m not holding my breath.

At the end of episode 7, Andrea was brought home safely. And while Fausto read her a bedtime story, Julia and Ruy wound up kissing. Now, with Andrea in bed and the crisis behind them, all three adults celebrate her safe return in an atmosphere charged with elation, relief, and conflicted feelings.

I’m going to save the big spoilers from this episode for a separate post, but I like where the show takes things here. While it’s a big swing, I think the show does the legwork to make it work. As I said, it leaves room for a lot of interesting growth and expansion for the characters.

There’s also a large time jump in the episode—throughout the season, there have been throwaway references to the approaching pandemic, mostly as the radio or the news plays in the background, and once the dust settles from Andrea’s attempt to run away, we jump forward about a year. Now, we’ve skipped over the early months of the pandemic and reach that hopeful period when folks have gotten into the rhythm of things, looking out for themselves and each other, doing stuff remotely and wearing (cloth) masks with news of vaccines on the horizon.

This is an interesting choice as well, because it doesn’t really break down the big move following episode 7. Instead, we skip ahead and get a feeling for the characters’ new idea of normal, in terms of both the pandemic and the relationships between the characters. Not everything is spelled out easily, and while the show drops a lot of tidbits, we’re left on some level to imagine how everything has shaken out. As far as the feel and theme of the finale go, Ruy sums it up best: “It’s not about whether change is good or bad. Change merely is. It exists, period. And now, even change is changing.”

Oh, and did I mention there’s a lowkey but full-blown musical number toward the end of the episode? Another big swing—while music has been an important part of the series, it’s never been employed like this, with the major characters singing their feelings. I’m guessing I’m a little hampered here by the subtitles, which translate the lyrics in a very straightforward manner without rhyme or rhythm. Reading the translation, the song seems fairly on-the-nose and a little corny, but I don’t know how it comes off in Spanish.

On the whole, this is definitely my favorite behind-the-camera project from Diego Luna. It’s fun and messy and emotional, and the characters feel so complex and real. I love how lived-in the whole show feels, and I really like the different ideas Luna explores in the story.

Recommend?

In General – I would, as long as you don’t have issues with the content. This is an interesting, entertaining show—I’m glad that Y tu Luna también prompted me to watch it a second time.

Diego Luna – Yes. Luna’s direction is so confident and unobtrusive, quietly building the lives of these characters onscreen. And again, I’m not sure how much of a direct hand he has in the story, but I love that as well.

Warnings

Sexual content, language, drinking/smoking/drug use, scenes of violence, and thematic elements (including sexual harassment.)

Favorite Characters: Jod Na Nawood (Skeleton Crew)

*All the Jod-related spoilers*

It might be odd that Jod is the first character I’m writing about from Skeleton Crew. After all, the kids are the heart of the show, and I love all four of them for different reasons. But for my money, Jo is certainly the most interesting character on the show, and that’s why I want to start with him.

Our young heroes first encounter Jod when they’re thrown into the brig on a pirate spaceport. Jod is a fellow prisoner, and he rescues them with the aid of the Force. Wim is immediately thrilled to be meeting a real live Jedi, and Fern is just as immediately suspicious of the robed figure sedately intoning wise-sounding aphorisms.

Unfortunately for Wim, it doesn’t take long for Fern’s theory to bear out. In their escape from the spaceport, Jod has to be cajoled into rescuing SM-33, he takes some serious gremlin measures to get away when the ship is caught on a refueling line, and the kids soon learn that he has aliases for days. By the end of the episode, he’s pointing out that he never actually called himself a Jedi, Wim just assumed he was.

Within this, I love that Jod isn’t a Jedi, but he is Force-sensitive. Fern’s early suspicions extend to thinking his use of the Force is some sort of trick, and Disney-era Star Wars has already shown us that’s possible, with con man Haja Estree on Obi-Wan Kenobi. But a couple episodes later, we get confirmation that Jod really can use the Force. It’s not an easy “Jedi or fraud” dichotomy, and I like that. It’s reflective of the complexities of the character as a whole.

So we have Jod, loose cannon scoundrel and almost certainly down-and-out pirate captain, making a deal with four lost kids and their droid buddy to help them get home. He’s lured in by the legends of their planet’s eternal treasure, and for a while, Jod keeps up his end of the bargain—sort of. He does snoop around the ship for valuables, he does literally serve himself first when the kids are tired and hungry, and he does briefly joke that he’s considering trading them for livestock. But he also saves them from a tight spot, jumps into action when SM-33 goes haywire, and brings some major aggravated-dad energy when trying to wrangle the kids to look for clues on an ancient-pirate’s-hideout-turned-luxury-spa-planet.

It’s only a matter of time before Jod betrays the kids. When they finally get the coordinates to return to At Attin, the lure of eternal treasure leads him to challenge Fern as captain. “You can’t fight us, we’re just kids!” she cries as he holds a knife to her throat. “It’s not fair.” But Jod is undeterred. When he claims the Onyx Cinder, the kids narrowly escape getting captured by him, and he avoids a brutal dispatch from his former crew by leading them to At Attin, where the pirates invade and attack the bewildered civilians. He tries to boil his pursuers in acid, he kills his mutinous first mate who’s already incapacitated, and he cuts off SM-33’s head with a lightsaber.

Yeah, Jod is a bad guy. He’s ruthless, duplicitous, and self-serving. He doesn’t challenge Fern because he knows it’s the only way to take charge as the one grown-up in the room, he’s not secretly working against the pirates the whole time, and he doesn’t have an eleventh-hour redemption. But I think it’s important that we see just how awful he can be, because it draws such an interesting contrast in the moments where he does pull his punches.

For all of Jod’s casual violence, he goes out of his way not to hurt the kids. When he challenges Fern, he definitely threatens her and scares her, and he grabs her and holds a knife to her throat. But he doesn’t hit or shove her once, and he never gives her so much as a superficial cut with the knife. The whole time they’re “fighting,” he repeatedly tells her to yield, even pointing out that she needs to physically say the words to make it official. Once she does yield and he becomes captain, there’s no reason for Jod to order SM-33 to take the kids prisoner. It wouldn’t be hard for him and 33 to kill them, and it’d be easy to simply leave them for dead in a boobytrapped pirate’s lair. Taking them prisoner would be a hassle he doesn’t need, but that’s the order he gives anyway. Similarly, when they all get to At Attin, Jod is quick to threaten the kids and their parents with his newly-acquired lightsaber, but again, he doesn’t actually hurt any of them. He tells the other pirates to stop attacking, saying they use the civilians as forced labor, and he seems genuinely upset when the Onyx Cinder is shot down with KB inside.

None of this is to say that Jod is really “good.” Clearly, he’s not. But I love that it’s not entirely black and white, that there are certain lines the dangerous pirate doesn’t want to cross, even when it gets in the way of his treacherous plans. I like really his backstory, growing up as a starving street kid who’s briefly taken in by a Jedi on the run. As he tells the kids, she was only able to teach him a little before “they” caught her, forcing Jod to watch as they killed her. His experience of the galaxy is one where everyone is out to get you, and the “pinpricks of light” can’t outweigh the danger. In Jod’s mind, everything is kill-or-be-killed, meaning he has to look out for himself first because no one else will. His past trauma and deprivation don’t make his actions right, but it makes them understandable. What an excellent character to add to the larger universe of Star Wars!

Other Doctor Lives: Criminal Record: Season 1, Episode 7 – “The Sixty-Twos” (2024)

*A few spoilers.*

The penultimate episode of Criminal Record is a big one, for both for the series and Peter Capaldi/Hegarty. We go deep in this flashback episode, and Capaldi gives a terrific performance.

June confronts Hegarty, this time armed with some damning evidence that can’t be explained away. At long last, he tells her what really happened during the investigation into Adelaide’s murder.

Aside from a bit of voiceover at the beginning and a concluding present-day scene, the whole episode takes place in the past, following Hegarty as he leads this fateful investigation. What plays out is less an evil cabal conspiracy and more a picture of how a grief-stricken Black man was thrown away as a result of distracted police work and exterior pressure.

The episode takes its time establishing all the circumstances that came together here, what brought Hegarty to push Errol into a false confession. Thanks to recent civil unrest, the top brass is itching to “make an example” out of Adelaide’s killer and clears the path for everything to be fast-tracked. Hegarty’s head isn’t where it should be—this is all happening six months after his wife died by suicide, and his long hours make it even harder for him to be there for his daughter. Throughout the episode, we see his attention drawn from the case by Lisa’s calls and texts, asking when he’s coming home and letting her sadness, anger, and resentment out on him. And when his eyes are off the ball, his misgivings about the case fall further down the list of priorities and his cronies cut corners in his stead.

At different times, we see Hegarty trying to do his actual job, following the investigation where the facts lead instead of cherry-picking facts to fit the convenient suspect. As soon as it’s mentioned that Errol was covered in Adelaide’s blood, he says, “That doesn’t mean he stabbed her, does it? Holding her in his arms.” He side eyes the idea that Errol habitually carries a knife, pointing to police records—“This guy’s been stopped and searched nine times. Nine times. Never once has he been carrying.” When one of his colleagues sneers, “Born liar, that one,” Hegarty responds, “Doesn’t make him a killer.”

But he keeps dropping the ball. Hegarty’s understandably distracted by his troubles at home, he’s not watching to catch what his cronies are missing, and as more pressure comes down to close the case fast, he gets increasingly desperate to bring charges any way he can.

In a really weird way, this story reminds me a little of episode 7 of The Acolyte—all the little things that go wrong, all the small mistakes and misunderstandings that lead up to a huge miscarriage of justice. In this analogy, I’d say Hegarty ends up being kind of a mixture between Sol and Indara.

As with Hegarty’s search for Lisa in episode 6, what’s important here is that it explains his behavior without excusing it. Hegarty’s motivations in this episode aren’t evil, and the struggles he’s dealing with are human and sympathetic. But really? Insert the Toymaker sarcastically shouting, “Well, that’s all right then!” Because yes, Hegarty is distracted by serious, difficult things going on at home. But he’s a detective, and when his personal problems make his police work sloppy, when he lets pressure from above push him into going against his ethics (not to mention the law,) other people pay a massive price for his grief-stricken, stressed-out mistakes. Hegarty shouldn’t have been leading this investigation in the first place, because he’s not fit to be there right now. His work is too consequential, and careless oversight costs lives.

Capaldi really takes us on a journey in this episode. From basically the start of the show, his performance has had me raising my hackles, with good reason. But here, we get a very different picture of Hegarty. We glimpse the kind of integrity he can have as a police officer, we see how he responds when he’s getting squeezed from every direction, and we ultimately witness how his corruption arc probably began. Excellent work from Capaldi all around!