We’re over two months into 2024. It’s rainy. It’s cold. And as we anticipate whatever new music, movies, books, and beyond that the new year has in store for us, The Triton reflects on some older stuff that’s resonating with us right now. Winter is a lonely season. We hope something on this list might keep you company during these rainy days. Stay safe. Stay dry. Enjoy.
— Finnegan Bly, Assistant Editor, Arts & Culture
Fargo Season 5 by Hulu/FX
Released: November 21, 2023
For fans of: mystery/thriller
I have been hearing about Fargo for a long time from my parents and friends, but it was just in 2023 when I decided to sit down and watch the movie as well as the new season. The movie was undeniably magnetic, transfixing me with its dark plot and shadow of comedic relief provided by everyone’s Minnesotan accent. With the premise of the show being based on the movie, and the most recent season having a female lead, I was immediately intrigued. The seasons are also not related so you can watch them in any order.
In this most recent season, we follow the main character, Dorothy “Dot” Lyon, played by Juno Temple. The show opens up with Dot and her daughter Scotty in a Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meeting for Scotty’s school, where everyone is fighting and screaming at each other in a very over-the-top scene. The premise of this scene is undeniably hilarious, and Dot ends up assaulting a cop in a misunderstanding and getting arrested. This introduces the conflict of the season: Dot is on the run from someone who has access to the police’s records and is now put in danger because her fingerprints are in the system. The show later introduces Jon Hamm’s bone-chilling character of Dot’s abusive sheriff ex-husband, Roy Tillman. He is accompanied by a comedic Joe Keery who plays his idiot son, Gator Tillman, working for the police department.
The show then transforms into a story of how Dot is trying to escape the grasp of her old life while maintaining her new domestic duties as a mother and wife. During my viewing of this season, I found myself deeply invested in the portrayal of every character with standouts being Jennifer Leigh who plays Dot’s rich mother-in-law, and Sam Spruell who plays an insane role you just have to watch to see. Overall, I recommend this series and season as it was one of my favorites for 2023.
—Alessandra Breall, Contributing Writer, Arts & Culture and News
Among Us by Innersloth
Released: June 15, 2018
For fans of: spending a lot of time alone in their room.
I chose Among Us as one of my top picks for 2023 because I have recently been engaging with a lot of media that was popular back during the height of the pandemic in 2020. The rainy, cold season we’ve been experiencing in San Diego fueled this winter binge. I think there’s a reason why people chose to engage with the media they did when they were excluded from social settings and interactions with others. I believe the types of outlets we chose to use during that time were not only culturally significant, but for many people, it was their first experience of what it was really like to be isolated from other people and learn to navigate how to be alone. For my generation, I think the COVID-19 lockdowns taught people how to be more in tune with themselves at the cost of formative years of learning how to communicate with your peers face-to-face.
Upon returning to popular lockdown media, I found a nostalgic element I didn’t expect. When I play Among Us, or any mobile games really, I feel myself being transported back to my childhood room where I spent hours alone just trying to pass the time. I have always been someone who cherishes my alone time, so when I get time in my day to relax in my room and know that no one is coming in to bother me, I feel very at peace. Going into my second year of college, I think I like to be transported to what feels like simpler times in my life like my junior year of high school during COVID-19. It is easy for me to do this when I play games I was playing at the time. I try to stay away from most video games nowadays to stay productive with my degree and hobbies, but now and then I like to engage in relatively easy tasks that I know will remind me of a time in my life when I felt like I had fewer responsibilities. So yes, one of my top picks for 2023 is the mobile game, Among Us, based on nostalgia for a global pandemic that I despised at the time.
—Alessandra Breall, Contributing Writer, Arts and Culture & News
The Wager by David Grann
Released: April 2023
For fans of: adventure books, and history
David Grann’s stunning, sweeping work of narrative nonfiction demonstrates his incredible capacity for highly detailed research and beautifully crafted prose storytelling. The Wager follows the voyage, shipwreck, and subsequent return home of castaways of the British ship HMS Wager, which sank off the coast of southern Chile in 1741. Through meticulous research into the written accounts of the Wager’s crewmembers, Grann tells a compelling story of individual survivors of the ships crew as they are marooned on a rocky island and must survive.
The Wager balances high seas adventure, tales of heroism, historical analysis, and interpersonal plot with alacrity, and the intimacy with which Grann recounts the story makes it easy to forget that the book is not, in fact, a novel. If you want to replicate the feeling of snuggling in at home while a storm rages around you, despite San Diego’s unimpressive winters, The Wager is for you.
—Tate McFadden, Editor, Arts & Culture
Murder at the End of the World by FX
Released: November 14, 2023
For fans of: Agatha Christie, The Glass Onion, true crime
Hulu’s thriller Murder at the End of the World is a return to an old-school set-up. Revived by movies like Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, the closed door murder mystery is having a moment. Murder at the End of the World, is a fun contemporary play on the old formula.
When a murder takes place in the isolated Icelandic compound of a reclusive Elon Musk-esque billionaire, hacker and amateur detective Darby Hart is tasked with discovering the person behind the chilling act. While the initial set up sounds a lot like the second Knives Out film The Glass Onion, Murder… takes itself far more seriously, treating the threat of its subject with an addictive grimness.
The show straddles two stories: the Icelandic closed-door mystery and the story of Hart’s first mystery, as she tracks down a serial killer who targets women through the deserts of the American west. In a show handled with less detail-oriented care, it would feel jarring and sloppy, but writers Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij create a delicately entangled show full of suspense, intelligent commentary on the true crime genre, and perfectly crafted characters.
—Tate McFadden, Editor, Arts & Culture
The Bear Season 2 by Hulu/FX
Released: June 22, 2023
For fans of: stress, Gordon Ramsey, high production TV à la Breaking Bad
It’s a lot for me to commit to a TV show. TikTok has completely destroyed my attention span, so anything that asks for my undivided attention for an hour is an impossible ask. Somehow, Hulu’s intricate, high production TV hit The Bear gripped me like nothing else last summer. I binged through Season 1 and 2 within a week (this is the closest I’ll ever get to a weekend watch).
The show follows a professional chef as he tries to revive his dead brother’s ailing sandwich shop. Antics, tense familial relationships, and lightly criminal activities ensue from there, all delivered via cinematic shouting matches. There’s something beautiful and cathartic about watching grown adults scream at each other over minute culinary details standing in for personal traumas and repressed rage. But at the core of The Bear is a tenderness and humility made compelling and realistic only in the complicated, ugly personalities of its characters. It helps that every actor is bringing their A-game while the camera work and set design consistently left me gawking. But the thing that hangs in my mind is Jamie Lee Curtis’ unhinged performance in episode 6, “Fishes,” which depicts possibly the most stressed-out family dinner imaginable. The show might be worth watching just for her.
—Finnegan Bly, Assistant Editor, Arts & Culture
Follow the Cyborg by Miss Grit
Released: February 24, 2023
For fans of: St. Vincent, Japanese Breakfast, Mitski
A sense of rupture permeates the experience of living within the margins of normatively binary identities. In an automatic effort to snap a person’s identity into the either or, marginal identities are erased: to be nonbinary and to be mixed-race is to embody an identity repetitiously torn by an incompatible cisgender, white gaze. Follow the Cyborg, the debut concept album from Margaret Sohn’s rock project Miss Grit, follows this estrangement from identity by relating their experience as a nonbinary, mixed-race Korean-American to the orientalist tropes of the exoticised Asian cyborg.
There is a sense of surrender in the first few songs, with Sohn playing their part as a cyborg, an artificial re-construction of a human. “I’ll be all I’ve consumed/I’m what you asked/I’ll be the perfect blue,” Sohn sings on the opening track, tersely wrestling with gendered and racial expectations. The album remains languid in this conflict until the third track, “Nothing’s Wrong,” where Sohn belts, “Where do you belong?!” a question directed at themself. The titular refrain, “nothing’s wrong,” fails to placate and Sohn repeats it until its meaning explodes into its inverse.
Follow the Cyborg’s most obvious sonic influence is St. Vincent, especially the experimental guitar work of Strange Mercy. Sohn’s incorporation of science fiction tropes and elements of slowcore and shoegaze also recall the more electronic moments of Japanese Breakfast’s sophomore album Soft Sounds from Another Planet. Sohn, however, extinguishes the warmth of either of those albums. There is a commitment to their cold embodiment of the cyborg, which makes their eventual rejection of it all the more cathartic. On the title track, set to a deep pulse and a disco beat, Sohn sings on the chorus, “I’m a living girl/A real living girl/Your real living girl.” It feels like an exuberant, if ironic, embrace of the cyborg, until Sohn flips the gender of their chorus in the song’s final moments, “I’m a living boy!” It’s simple, and it’s been done before, but the energy with which “Follow the Cyborg” lands makes it feel like a revelation.
As a queer, mixed-race Korean-American, I hold this album close. Follow the Cyborg uses its heady concept, its cold exterior and robotic vocals, to articulate a deeply personal (and human) lived experience. “I didn’t ask for this,” they mumble on “Lain (phone clone),” voice alone. Suddenly, a bass synth summons a drum kit and Sohn sings loud, “Hold up your hands if you can’t hold up the act/Hold up your hands if your two lives overlap.” It’s a simple, stadium-ready rock chorus, but to me, it feels like electric community.
—Finnegan Bly, Assistant Editor, Arts & Culture
Shadow and Bone Season 2 by Netflix
Released: March 16, 2023
For fans of: Shadows, bones, Emmy-nominated special visual effects
Within a month following its release, I watched the second season of Shadow and Bone fourteen times! While the first season of the show was an excellent adaptation of the book of the same name by Leigh Bardugo, it was after watching the second season that my passion for the Grishaverse was revived. My experience of the show was improved by the addition of beloved characters not present in the first season—including my favorite, Wylan Van Eck, who was brought to life by the perfect casting choice of Jack Wolfe. I was also very excited by how the show deviated from its source material, making me eager to know what other changes would be made further down the line as a result. The ending of this season’s last episode “No Funerals” still gives me chills when I go back for a rewatch, due to how it hints at the plots of both the Six of Crows and King of Scars duologies, other books by Bardugo set in this universe. I would do anything to get a third season that covers the King of Scars plot, and to see a Six of Crows spin-off, which already has a first season written. Unfortunately, both the spin-off and the third season of Shadow and Bone were canceled, but a powerful fan campaign persists. Billboards advocating for both shows have been placed outside of Netflix’s Los Angeles and London offices.
—Alorah Atondo, Lead Editor, Copy