Joel Fry-days: Alice and Steve: Season 1, Episode 5 (2026)

*Spoilers for episode 4*

Oh man, here we are at the penultimate episode! I had definite misgivings about this show early on, but it’s really come around for me. It features continually excellent performances from Joel Fry, so that obviously helps, but beyond that, I’m liking the show itself too. Let’s get into it!

First, the main spoilers from episode 4. Alice had been staying with her mom while Daniel needed space, and at her mom’s urging, she shows up at the house to win him back. It’s while Marni’s there, which of course doesn’t help. It all ends in a pretty devastating argument between them. Meanwhile, Izzy gets some concerning medical news and calls Steve to go with her to the doctor, despite their breakup at the start of the episode. It turns out her tests came back normal, with one notable exception: she’s pregnant.

Izzy and Steve invite Alice and Daniel to a fancy restaurant, where they drop the baby bombshell. After an initial outburst, Alice fights a losing battle to hold back her emotional reaction and act happy for Izzy.

Our character of the week is Dom, played by Tyrese Eaton-Dyce. While Alice had already had Izzy when she and Daniel met, Dom is the child that they had together. He gets less focus than Alice, Izzy, and Daniel. In this episode, he struggles to let himself enjoy spending time with his crush Rome when he’s stressed over everything that’s going on with his family.

For a while, I thought this was going to be a bottle episode, set entirely in the restaurant. But this only makes up the first half of the episode, with the second half devoted to various character combinations—largely Alice/Daniel and Izzy/Steve, though there’s also a bit of Dom/Rome, with the mother-daughter relationship between Alice and Izzy looming large even when they’re not sharing the screen together.

In some episodes, it’s felt like Alice’s anger/desire to punish Steve has outweighed her love/concern for Izzy, but here, her relationship with Izzy comes to the forefront. It feels like this is the first time in the series that we’ve seen Alice make a genuine effort to put someone else’s feelings first, even if that’s incredibly hard for her and she’s only semi-successful. She stands up in the middle of the restaurant and shouts for someone to take their drink order, she goes to the bathroom when her “happy” tears are getting out of control, and she reminisces about vaginal tearing. But despite all that, she actually is trying, and there are some good moments between her and Izzy here.

Daniel doesn’t like this turn of events any better than Alice does, but no surprise, he does a much better job of putting a good face on it. He asks after Izzy’s health and assures her it’ll “be lovely to have another little one running around the house.” As for his own reservations, he waits and voices them to Steve when Alice and Izzy are both away from the table. Shoutout to Daniel as the dad who stepped up! Joel Fry plays all of this wonderfully, navigating Daniel’s tension/apprehension but playing nice for Izzy’s sake.

To make matters even more difficult, this whole conversation is happening against the backdrop of the existing friction in Alice and Daniel’s marriage. They’re the first two to arrive at the restaurant, both under the impression that they’re just meeting Izzy, and Alice asks, “Is she parent trapping us?” At first, Daniel smiles along with her joking, but then she starts making light of their fight, which he doesn’t appreciate. So even before Steve and Izzy arrive, things are tense between the two of them, and yet they do still care about each other. There’s a good moment where Daniel sees Alice struggling to cope with the baby news and isn’t sure if he ought to reach out with a comforting gesture.

In the interactions that are just between Alice and Daniel here, there’s a bit of a theme of them starting to reconnect and then getting derailed. Daniel feels Alice doesn’t prioritize their relationship, and she’s not doing a stellar job of convincing him otherwise. Although it’s clear that Alice does want to resolve matters with Daniel, she keeps getting them off track, whether it’s by joking about something he takes seriously or coming in with some brutal honesty that just makes him feel worse. By the end, he’s retreated into his own worst habits—avoidance and a tendency to get a little petty/passive-aggressive.

One more episode to go! Will any of these messy, damaged folks work it out? At this point, I’m not quite sure what “working it out” would look like for them. Guess we’ll see!

Y tu Luna también: Maya and the Three: Episode 4 – “The Skull” (2021)

*The only way to talk about this miniseries involves spoiling the identities of “the three,” and that starts here. This is your official warning.*

I skipped reviewing episode 3, but you should watch it anyway—while episodes 1 and 2 are entertaining and magnificently animated, episode 3 is the one that first made me sit up and go, “Oh, this is really something special.” Those spectacular qualities only continue in episode 4.

The true prophecy Maya uncovered involves one great warrior from each of the four nearby kingdoms coming together to do battle with the gods. She has claimed the title of the little eagle warrior, representing Teca, and in the last episode she found her rooster wizard of Luna Island, a nervous motormouth named Rico. Traveling to the Jungle Lands in search of the great skull warrior, Maya and Rico are confronted with a broken, untrusting archer named Chimi, who’s exactly what they need.

I need to point out once more that, while Maya and the Three does a fine job of including characters with disabilities, that same inclusion isn’t extended to the actors. Chimi, voiced by Stephanie Beatriz, is certainly the most prominent example of this. Chimi has albinism, and she was thrown out of the kingdom as an infant, as those around her feared the curse of “el monstruo blanco.” (Side note: people with albinism have low vision. There isn’t a single acknowledgement of the fact that the greatest archer in the land is most likely legally blind.) She was raised in the jungle by the animals, and as such, she’s more than a little feral. She’s prone to growling, barking, and howling, she often moves on all fours, and she has a habit of sniffing people when she meets them.

At the same time, while Chimi is a girl of few words, she’s perfectly lingual and can speak with stark intensity about the betrayals she’s suffered. When Maya starts to relate her own tale of woe from the first two episodes, Chimi is quick to note that Maya’s gripes ignore everything she’s been blessed with. It’s one of the first experiences that makes Maya reckon, just a little, with the way she’s centered herself and recognize that her life hasn’t been such a struggle after all. And I really like that.

I should also mention that, while Beatriz is of course best known for Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the first projects of hers that come to my mind are this show and Encanto. And from them, I’ve learned that she can absolutely make me cry. The two characters are very different—Mirabel is an eager open book, and Chimi is a deeply-guarded badass—but both are nakedly vulnerable when they break down. Even in voice acting, these scenes are so intimate to witness.

Meanwhile, we also get Rico. After watching this show for the first time, I looked up Allen Maldonado and realized he played Dre’s assistant Curtis on Black-ish. If he was funny on that show, he’s stellar here. Like Chimi, Rico was badly hurt in his formative years, but his trauma manifests in an entirely different way. He plays the clown, constantly talking and cracking jokes, skirting around the fact that his lack of confidence as a wizard isn’t due to any deficit in his abilities—rather, he’s scared of what he’s capable of. Plus, he just gets great lines. During a tense audience with the leader of the Jungle Lands, Maya refers to him as her “insolent partner,” and he awesomely adds, “See? I’m insolent until proven guilty!”

Not a whole lot of Diego Luna/Zatz today. He’s just in one scene, but it’s a good one. While his opinion on Maya has been evolving pretty much from the moment he met her, she’s still understandably stuck on the whole “let me take you to the underworld so Lord Mictlan can sacrifice you” thing. So even as he starts going rogue from the gods, offering to help her instead of capture her, Maya can’t trust it. And yet, you can feel the love/hate vibe they have going on, and it’s really delightful. Their scene in this episode is a great mix of sharpness and softness.

Oh, and in a string of other insults, Maya calls Zatz a “bat hombre,” which tickles me to no end. 

Other Doctor Lives: W1A: Series 1, Episode 1 (2014)

*Premise spoilers*

It’s time to return to this bureaucracy-based comedy of errors, moving on from Twenty Twelve to W1A now. Despite a completely different setting/subject matter and only a few of the same characters, the two shows have much the same sensibility. The particular crises the characters are facing come from a different field, but they deal with them in much the same ineffectual way.

Post-Olympics, Ian gets a job as Head of Values at the BBC. His first day is an overwhelming swirl of meetings, expectations, and stuffy fish-out-of-water-ness. As he struggles with the open office plan, he’s handed his first dilemma: an upstart from Cornwall who’s arguing that Cornish voices and issues are underrepresented at the BBC. Elsewhere, plans for a new food competition show are imperiled when one of the prospective hosts falls through.

We’ve got some new characters of the week to introduce. We’ll start with Anna Rampton, Head of Output. She’s played by Sarah Parish, who I’ve seen in a number of things but who I’ll always associate with the Rachnoss Queen from Doctor Who’s “The Runaway Bride.” Anna is steering the ship with regard to this new show, Britain’s Tastiest Village. After discouraging reports from the show’s producers, they meet with another potential host to pitch the series. She’s also involved in some of the same senior meetings that Ian is.

As for Ian, he is just floundering here. He’s enthusiastic about his impressive new job, but he can’t get his footing. He’s thrown into meetings and has crises dropped into his lap before he even knows what’s going on, and when he is slightly prepared, he’s immediately preempted by more pressing concerns. There’s a fun sequence of him trying in vain to find somewhere to work, but every open computer has a sign on it that says something like “THIS IS NOT A HOT DESK!” and “FUCK OFF.”  When he tries to listen to the Cornish guy’s grievances, Ian doesn’t even know where to go where they can both sit down. I also like a bit where he tries to arrange for the intern to unobtrusively pop in while he’s leading a meeting to bring him a cappuccino.

Over the course of Twenty Twelve, it became obvious how many of the characters had particular repeated dialogue quirks—not flashy enough to be a catchphrase, but lines that came up over and over again, peppering their speech. I’m already seeing it with some of these new characters, like one who keeps saying, “I’m not being funny or anything,” to emphasize her point. It got more than a little old on the original show, and I suspect the same will probably happen here.

Some good narration from David Tennant today! Here are my favorite bits:

• Ian’s new job is described as “Head of Values at the BBC, a key and very senior new post, specifically credited in the light of recent learning opportunities at the corporation.”
• “Meanwhile in Tommy Cooper, the daily senior team damage limitation meeting, chaired by Director of Strategic Governance Simon Harwood, is already underway” – I just love that the senior team comes together for a “damage limitation meeting,” and they have to do it every day!
• After giving lengthy introductions to everybody else on the senior team, I like that Tennant wraps it up with, “...and two other people.”