I had already seen four of the finalists here, and so it did not take lonmg to get through the other two – especially since I gave up on one of them 15 minutes in. Many thanks to the studios for including the shooting scripts for most of the episodes in the Hugo Packet, which is helpful for following the plot, but also for illustrating how much more a dramatic presentation is than just the words.

Two of these six are the climax of a season-line storyline, another is the first in a series and another is the second last (and perhaps winds up the main storyline for that show, the last episode being more of a coda). I have said it before: I do wonder if we would be better served by a Hugo for episodic fiction, and a Hugo for one-shot stories, regardless of length. Only one or two of these finalists actually works well as a standalone piece, and almost everyone who watched and nominated one of them will have watched and appreciated the entire series.

Anyway.

1) The Story and the Engine (Doctor Who) – of course, I must vote for Doctor Who anyway, but this is a very good episode (my second favourite of the season) and also takes the show to a place it had not been before, the largest city of Africa’s largest country, with a spider-god and a cameo from Jo Martin. Good stuff.

2) We is Us (Plur1bus) – a great setup for the season ahead, and probably the best single episode of a generally excellent show. Later episodes built on the premise, but this is very good scene-setting of our imperfect world being turned upside down.

3) All Systems Red (Murderbot) – I was one of the three people in fandom who bounced off the original Murderbot stories, but I really enjoyed the TV series, and the final episode of the main story arc (ninth of the ten) really combined tension, action and humour to take us where we needed to get to.

4) The Perimeter (Murderbot) – This didn’t work as well for me, dancing very close to Murderbot-as-cute-robot, which is a trope I hate. The show-runners were given the choice of two out of three episodes to have on the ballot, and decided to drop the first episode, Free Commerce; I would have preferred it to this one.

And just as a parenthesis, this is only the second time that the Nominee Diversity provision has been applied to a TV series since it was enacted into Section 3.8.6 of the Constitution. Would it really have been so awful to have three episodes of Murderbot on the ballot, which is what voters actually voted for? (Knowing full well that Doctor Who would probably have lost out.)

5) Cold Harbor (Severance) – not having watched a single episode of this show before, and being only vaguely familiar with the premise (the main cast find that they have been psychologically severed between different personalities for their work and non-work lives), I really enjoyed this although I did not understand everything that was going on (having the script to hand helped a bit, but not much). Fantastically well shot and directed; though I did wonder if Adam Scott is capable of wearing more than one expression on his face.

6) The Road to the Spear (Wheel of Time) – I watched the first ten minutes and realised that I did not have a clue what was going on, and was curiously distracted by the utterly wooden acting of Josha Stradowski as protagonist Rand al’Thor. So then I read the script, and I still didn’t understand what was going on. Better uses for an hour of my life than to finish watching it.

As they say, your mileage may vary.