Let’s do it, friends and listeners: let’s figure out what a Canadian is. Via the most direct means available: our underfunded Canadian arts sector!
Yeah yeah, gay hockey show. I’m glad everyone got wrapped up in it — it’s always a bit of a shock when something makes that big of an American cultural footprint before I find out it is, in fact, Canadian. (From Crave, no less.)
I think there’s something to discuss with regard to Heated Rivalry‘s depiction of queerness vs. its more durable placement as Yet Another Fetish Romance (this piece addresses that nicely). For me, the show mostly made me want to catch up with some other Cancon I’d been neglecting.
I started with North of North based on Kat G’s recommendation, and it’s wonderful. There’s a lot going on in the pilot, which made the premise feel a bit unsteady; but the series easily finds its feet within an episode or two. It’s bottomlessly charming, it has tons of story room for each of the main characters, and Anna Lambe is crushing it in the lead role.
(Also, in what will be a bit of a theme today, her costumes. Wow.)
Since I was in the CBC app for North of North anyway, I also went back to Skymed, which I started watching a while ago and fell out of. When I heard about Skymed I was like, great, someone’s finally done ER meets Airwolf, which is the greatest single line pitch I’ve ever thought of.
Instead it’s more like paramedic Melrose Place, so ymmv, but the grey-skied Canadiana of it all appeals to me, and I enjoy watching pretty much any show try to cram four major set pieces into each episode on no budget. And the cast is hella hot (and horny).
I’d cut off my left nipple to go make shows like these. Homegrown and hearty. That’s the way to do it.
The strangest possible thing
This is the part where I’m gonna talk about Stranger Things some. I’m aware that a lot of former fans are now at the “over-it-to-the-point-of-openly-mocking-it” place with this series. Also, that there will be some season 5 spoilers below. So feel free to skip to the links section, if either of those factors concern you. Or just leave altogether, I don’t mind!
My relationship to Stranger Things is way too bound up, it turns out, in real-world shenanigans for me to ever have a rational or thoughtful response to it. It was a breakup show and a coming-out show for me, and even though I watched the final season from a comfortable, “boy, this sure was something I used to love” distance most of the time, the series finale also accessed, unnervingly easily, some of that old deep tissue. Which means that before I knew it, I was blubbing like Jill Pole behind the gym in the first chapter of The Silver Chair. Iykyk.
A few notes on getting to the rightside up:
The critical blood lust was weird
By which I mean, TV critics who got on a weird kick (House of R; Vulture) that this season needed a hefty body count in order to give the story stakes and meaning. They made me wonder if any of us had been watching the same show all this time.
Stranger Things was never a body count show. Broadly speaking, one featured guest star goes down per season, and that’s about as gruesome as things get — and those deaths have plenty of impact on the main characters (Eddie/Dustin, Billy/Max, Bob/Joyce), even if it sometimes takes the characters a season or two to remember to feel that (cough Barb/Nancy cough).
This was also the Return of the Jedi season, made transparent by the fact that season 4 was the Empire Strikes Back season (in the Duffers’ own words), and underlined by the name-checking of Jedi in season 5 just to make sure everyone was paying attention. Return of the Jedi couldn’t even go through with killing off Lando, because Lucas (correctly) intuited that a main character’s death in the finale would cast too much of a pall on the trilogy’s ending.
Put the two points together and you arrive at what I considered a fairly easy calculation going into Stranger Things‘ finale: the emotional impact of main character deaths would simply have been too overwhelming to let the story then send these literal children off into their future in anything like a positive place. And at no point whatsoever did I believe that Stranger Things would end with the literal children being sent off into their future in a negative place.
It just isn’t, and has never been, that show. Stranger Things has always been fundamentally spooky-optimistic, not horror-nihilistic. What show were those critics watching?
I do not condone Dustin and Steve, but I do understand them
Look, it was rough seeing our boys go at each other this hard, all season long. And there were definitely times when Steve (who is, I believe, 20) was behaving poorly, given his (relative) age and wisdom.
All’s I’ll say is: I’ve known “the Dustin” in that situation — in that gender identity and at that age and under those kinds of circumstances — and being that guy’s friend sucks.
He is relentless. He is cruel. He gives exactly zero inches. He uses everything in his immense intelligence to harm the other, weaker party. He gives zero sign that the friend you knew is still inside him, at all. And he never, ever stops.
Everyone was locked in the QZ together for 18 months? I’m amazed Steve was still talking to Dustin when the season started, let alone (at least initially) trying to put up with him. As torturous as it was to watch them fight for three quarters of season 5, this was also one of the season’s storylines that felt the most deeply, personally real to me.
To reiterate: style. queen.
I covet every single one of Holly’s looks, especially the Cleric costume, but even the throwaways.
Give Amy Parris the Emmy for Holly’s costumes alone. Everyone else is just bonus material.
So kind
Millie Bobby Brown’s delivery of her final scene with Mike, her voice breaking on “thank them for being so kind,” destroys me. I don’t think those of you who are normal will ever fully understand how hard kindness rips to those of us who were trained early on to expect the other thing.
The tape
Without getting too much into the weeds on this, Robin and Will’s thing about imagining (or, actually watching) a home movie of oneself young and happy, as a means of unlocking your purest self from back before you started being afraid of the ways in which you were different… well, that was also one of the other things about this season that hit me super, duper, extra hard.
Partly because my own gender journey (ugh, trite) so specifically involved this exact process — albeit, not a home movie, more of a detailed memory exercise that became a 10,000-word chapter in my novel — that it was kind of unnerving to hear my own words coming out of Maya Hawke’s mouth. (I mean… does everybody go through this? The exact same way??)
Partly because my own childhood was so wound over in staticky VHS that I can see it. I can see that tape, some of which is real, and a lot of which is just what I can imagine, when I think back to those years when It All Happened. But regardless: I know exactly what that tape looks like, and who the child it’s filming is, was, and will be.
Partly because somewhere in my own confusing brew of Stranger Things signifiers, the locating of one’s own power (for Will) now connects (for me) to that skinny androgyne stumbling out of the woods back in season 1, buzz cut and dressed in a t-shirt. And since Eleven sort of Kicked The Whole Thing Off (along with all the other things that Kicked The Whole Thing Off) for me, queerwise, that makes Will’s story in season 5 an embellishment of, an embroidering of, and a means to more deeply understand, my own.
I note that Stranger Things started in 2016. It was the year Bowie died, and then Prince, and I was listening to a lot of both of them that summer, when Stranger Things aired its first season. The finale leans heavily on both artists in key emotional moments, and the circularity of the whole thing — intentional or not — really whalloped me one. I return to what I said at the top: My relationship to Stranger Things is way too bound up in real-world shenanigans for me to ever have a rational or thoughtful response to it. It was a breakup show and a coming-out show. And the finale — particularly, those final moments, and their meaning — put me in a mental infinity loop across the discrete parcel of the last nine years, and everything that rose, abode, and fell in that time. That means a lot more to me than a show. What a time it was. What a journey we’ve all been on.
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Links 2K26
New year, new links! All that “special coverage” at the end of last year means it’s been a while since I’ve done these:
- The Screen Anarchists (of which I am one) have posted their top ten films of 2025. (Screen Anarchy)
- Sarah Welch-Larson did an interview with Rian Johnson, following up on her piece about questions of faith and the church in Wake Up Dead Man (Seeing is Believing)
- Hey, while we’re near Rian Johnson, Joshua Rivera finally brain-dumped his near-decade of a pet peeve: people misunderstanding The Last Jedi‘s most famous line. (Kotaku)
- Since Firefox joined the A.I. death brigade, I’ve been experimenting with other browsers. It’s been… iffy. But YK Hong’s reset on what a browser is actually for is a good thought-starter. (Liberation Toolbox)
- People still have (some of) the power. There’s not much to be optimistic about, newswise, Americawise, but this piece by Rebecca Solnit made me feel a little more like the ground wasn’t falling out from under all of our feet. (Meditations in an Emergency)
- A friend of mine recommended this Gaza emergency fund over the holidays, if you have any dollars left over as of January 8. (The Sameer Project)
And finally, MUBI. Lol, MUBI. “Art-house cinema [is] niche for a reason”: Will Tavlin chronicles MUBI’s colossal 2025 fuckup (my words, not his) and how they got there.
Look, I get it, no liberation under capitalism, all money is dirty money. But there’s something unique (and, if I’m honest, kind of hilarious) in how badly MUBI misjudged the intrinsic nature of their own audience and therefore, their business model, when they took Sequoia’s money in the middle of a highly visible, highly politicized, genocide.
Amazon never claimed to be about anything other than clearcutting the bookstore business and then, everything else. Starbucks never made us read a vision board instead of announcing loudly and proudly that they were purpose-built to gobble up local coffee shops and, by extension, third spaces altogether.
MUBI — like a lot of cultural institutions — at least claimed to be about something more, even if they were lying through their teeth when they did it. That kind of hypocrisy crushes a reputation, in this sector if nowhere else. I’d rather give money to Amazon at this point (which, to be clear, I still generally don’t). MUBI reminds me of that line from ALIENS, the one about whether humans or the aliens are worse. You don’t see the aliens fucking their own community for a goddamn percentage.
See you next week!