News Sublimation

Isabel J. Kim’s Debut Novel Sublimation Has Rights Picked Up for TV Adaptation

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 12, 2024

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Isabel J. Kim’s debut novel, Sublimation, has been picked up by Universal International Studios for a potential television adaptation. The book has yet to be released, though Tor Publishing Group has acquired the novel as part of a three-book deal with Kim.

Kim is a Shirley Jackson Award-winner who has written several acclaimed stories, including “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole,” which ran in the February 2024 issue of Clarkesworld.

Sublimation is her first novel, and here is the official synopsis for it:

In a statement, Kim described her book as “a story about identity in a world where it takes fifteen hours to fly across the world and a whole lifetime to live a culture. It’s about being able to see exactly what would have happened if you had stayed. It’s heavily influenced by how I grew up split between Korea and the USA, how there’s a lot of stories about immigration as a clean break and not a lot of stories about the messy return. It’s about how at some point during my adolescence, it started being cool to be Korean.”

“From the very first page, you feel drawn to these characters and this world that explores such rich themes through this paradoxical existence that Isabel has captured so sublimely,” Kelsey Balance, SVP, Global Scripted Series, Universal International Studios told Deadline. “It’s staggering that this is her first novel as it’s so compelling but also so fresh and creative. We can’t wait to bring her vision to audiences around the globe.”

The project is still in its early days, so no news on if/when the adaptation will make its way to the small screen. [end-mark]

The post Isabel J. Kim’s Debut Novel <i>Sublimation</i> Has Rights Picked Up for TV Adaptation appeared first on Reactor.

News Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Will Return With More Monsters, More Legacy—and Spinoffs

You can never have too many Titans

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 12, 2024

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One of last year’s best new SFF series is not over yet. Apple TV+ has renewed Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for a second season—and what’s more, it’s adding an unspecified number of spinoff series to the Monsterverse’s small-screen lineup.

That’s very vague, right? But the press release literally says “multiple spinoffs,” with no further details. Vagueness aside, the return of Monarch is very good news. Even if you have not been keeping up with the various Godzilla-related films of the last decade (I certainly have not), the series is a fascinating, character-driven drama with an appealing cast of both established actors and new faces.

The Russells elder and younger—Kurt and Wyatt—play the same character, Lee Shaw, in two time periods. In the 1950s, Shaw is part of a team that discovers titans. (Said team includes Mari Yamamoto as brilliant scientist Keiko Miura and Anders Holm as Bill Randa). Decades later, in the wake of the Titans’ battle in San Francisco, an older Shaw joins up with a younger generation of characters who have their own reasons to be invested in the secrets of the Titans and Monarch, the mysterious agency that has a connection to the giant creatures.

Monarch was co-created by Chris Black (Severance) and comics writer Matt Fraction, who also serve as co-showrunners. It is—and I cannot stress this enough—very good. It also stars Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe, Joe Tippett, and Takehiro Hira, all of whom I hope to keep watching for many seasons to come.

No production schedule has been announced for season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters or any of its mysterious spinoffs, but in the meantime, you can catch up on the first season on Apple TV+. [end-mark]

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Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

The Game Is Afoot — Star Trek: Discovery’s “Jinaal”

This week, the Discovery crew is off on a game-style quest.

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

If there was any doubt whatsoever that the fifth season of Discovery is a role-playing-game-style quest narrative, “Jinaal” beats those doubts to a pulp. We’ve definitely got ourselves a goal that will be found by our heroes being clever, by getting through traps, by figuring out riddles, and so on.

And it’s fun. Trek hasn’t really done this sort of straight-up game-style narrative before, certainly not on this scale, and while you can practically hear the dice rolling with each scene, it’s fun, dangit.

It helps that the episode does something that the Secret Hideout shows have been much better about than the previous wave of Trek TV shows, and that’s embracing the history on the microcosmic level as well as the macrocosmic. I love that they do things like last week’s use of the Promellians. The first wave of Trek spinoffs would have just made up an alien species rather than re-use one, but there’s no reason not to use one that’s already established. Especially since “Booby Trap” made it sound like the Promellians were a well-known extinct species, yet were only mentioned in that one TNG episode.

While this tendency can sometimes go overboard into the fan-wanky territory (cf. the third season of Picard), Discovery has generally made it work. This episode in particular makes very good use of Trek’s history, particularly the Trill both as developed on DS9 and also as seen on this show, particularly in “Forget Me Not.” And we also get some background on why the Progenitors’ technology was classified.

The clue on Trill is held by a joined Trill named Jinaal, whose current host is still alive on the world. It’s been eight centuries, and both host and symbiont are near the end of their lives—indeed, they’re clinging to life in part because nobody has approached them for their clue yet.

Discovery’s arrival is met with a riddle to prove that they figured out the clue on the Promellian necropolis last time—in particular that it initially appeared to lead to Betazed. Once Burnham provides that right answer, Jinaal’s current host is willing to talk to them, but the host who actually was there eight hundred years ago wants to talk directly to the Discovery crew. So they perform a zhiantara, first seen in DS9’s “Facets,” where prior hosts’ personalities can be temporarily downloaded into another person. The Guardians (including Gray, still apprenticing as a Guardian) perform the ceremony on Jinaal, transferring the older host into Culber.

As with “Facets”—and indeed every other science fiction story that involves characters getting a temporary new personality, a well Trek has dug into any number of times, from the original series’ “Return to Tomorrow” and “Turnabout Intruder” to TNG’s “The Schizoid Man” and “Masks” to DS9’s “Dramatis Personae” and “Our Man Bashir” to Voyager’s “Infinite Regress” and “Body and Soul” to Enterprise’s “The Crossing” and “Observer Effect”—this is at least partly an acting exercise for Wilson Cruz. And, to his credit, Cruz nails it, creating a fully realized character in Jinaal, who is crotchety, enigmatic, and more than a little manipulative.

He was a scientist who worked with the Romulan whose scout ship was found last week, along with a bunch of other scientists, after the Romulan found the Progenitors’ technology. This all happened at the height of the Dominion War, which—as we know from DS9—was a time of significant paranoia in the Alpha Quadrant. Because of that, and because of how dangerous the technology had the potential to be, the scientists all agreed to hide it and only have it be findable by someone who can figure out the clues and who could be counted on to use it for good.

Having this all happen during the Dominion War was very clever, as that was a time when worry about things like Changeling infiltration was at its height. And it’s remained a big secret since then simply because nobody knows where it is without the Romulan journal.

Besides his initial riddle and his general questioning of Burnham and Book about the state of the galaxy in the thirty-second century, there’s one final test. Jinaal claims to have hidden the next physical puzzle piece in a canyon occupied by a nasty predator animal that can cloak itself. Eventually, Burnham and Book realize that it isn’t just a big nasty creature attacking them, it’s a mother protecting its eggs. Once they realize that, they back off, which is what Jinaal was waiting for.

Having passed the compassion test, he gives them the final doodad. Culber then gets his body back and Jinaal can rest.

There are also three character-based subplots, two of which work nicely. Back at Federation HQ, Saru and T’Rina are about to announce their engagement, but Saru’s new career as an ambassador complicates matters for T’Rina’s chief aide, who advises Saru to convince his boss that they should postpone the engagement announcement. Saru goes along with this, thinking he’s protecting his fiancée, but T’Rina wastes no time in whupping him upside the head on that score. The Ni’Var President understands her staff’s need to be politically acute, but she refuses to let political concerns interfere with her personal life—a very logical decision, though logic and politics so rarely mix. It’s a nice little subplot, elevated, as usual, by brilliant performances by Doug Jones and Tara Rosling and their picture-perfect chemistry, as well as the script by Kyle Jarrow & Lauren Wilkinson, which illustrates the conflict potential when Saru’s compassion clashes with T’Rina’s logic.

On Discovery, Burnham charges her new first officer with getting to know the crew. Rayner resists this—he’s read their service records—but Burnham thinks there’s no substitute for talking to people. Rayner’s solution to this is to give each crewmember twenty words to tell him something about themselves that isn’t in their service record. It takes Tilly whupping him upside the head to remind him that his command style on the Antares isn’t going to work on Discovery. Mary Wiseman is particularly good here, showing us how far Tilly has come. (She’d better damn well be one of the stars of the upcoming Starfleet Academy series…)

The third character bit doesn’t quite work, mostly because it feels like some scenes are missing. Adira and Gray are reunited, and they apparently haven’t hardly talked since Gray went to Trill. Given the ease of holographic communication over absurd distances in the thirty-second century, this is surprising, but there it is. Gray and Adira are still obviously in love with each other and still are thrilled to see each other—but then they have a conversation that ends with them deciding to break up because the distance thing isn’t working. They’re both incredibly happy where they are. And yet, in the very last scene, they’re still hanging out on Trill, the mission itself long over. So are they broken up or not? It feels like there’s a scene or two missing there…

In that last scene, we find out that Mol, contrary to Discovery’s report that she and L’ak are on another world, is on Trill, having infiltrated the Guardians. That doesn’t bode well…[end-mark]

The post The Game Is Afoot — <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i>’s “Jinaal” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Star Trek: Discovery

Why Star Trek: Discovery Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek

After a rocky start, Discovery has become a sterling example of Trek’s ability to ask big, challenging questions while still being a whole lot of fun..

By Charlie Jane Anders

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Published on April 10, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

Back in 2022, I wrote a newsletter saying that you can love Star Trek: Strange New Worlds without putting down its sister show, Discovery. Which is true! I love both shows a whole lot. I also am obsessed with Lower Decks, which I rewatch pretty obsessively. I have a lot of love for Star Trek: Picard as well. And I’ve grown to appreciate Star Trek: Prodigy greatly since it moved to Netflix. We are truly blessed to have so much amazing Star Trek right now, and there’s no need to pick one show over the others.

And yet, I still feel the need to come out and say it: Star Trek: Discovery is my favorite Trek of the 21st century so far. 

The final season of Discovery launched last week, and I’ve been remembering why I adore this show so much. These characters have a special place in my heart, and I’ve been loving the exploration of Starfleet in the 32nd century, centuries after the other Trek shows. Discovery has become a thoughtful, expansive show that asks big, challenging questions, while also being a whole lot of fun. 

Minor spoilers for the most recent episodes of Discovery below… 

Discovery got off to a rocky start, to say the least. Annalee Newitz and I discussed the first season in the very first episode of our podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and there was a lot to talk about. Season one leaned into being a war story, something that Deep Space Nine had already done brilliantly, and then veered into the Mirror Universe, which is one of those settings that gets less interesting the more you see of it. The first season featured a lot of upheaval behind the scenes, with co-creator Bryan Fuller leaving early on and the replacement showrunners being let go. Season two served as a backdoor pilot for Strange New Worlds, while also unspooling a somewhat tangled storyline about black ops and A.I. from the future.

Much like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Discovery really hit its stride in its third season. That’s when the crew of the Discovery traveled forward into a far more distant future than Star Trek had ever explored before. The show gained a new lease on life and the Federation felt wide open once again, with so many new places and ideas to explore. 

Season three of Discovery tells a nuanced, brutal story about rebuilding the Federation after a huge setback—and questions how far our heroes are willing to go restore what has been lost. Season four is a rich story of first contact, in which aliens from outside the galaxy have unknowingly unleashed an anomaly that threatens civilized worlds, and we have to learn to communicate with them before it’s too late. Season five, without going into too much detail, is following up one of the most tantalizing stories from TNG, about the Progenitors, those ancient humanoids who seeded the galaxy with humanoid life long ago. 

(Side note: this trope of ancient humanoids who spread their DNA around the galaxy is sorta adjacent to all those “Ancient Aliens” memes. It seems to emerge from Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken, and it inspired the movie Prometheus as well. A huge part of my young-adult novel Victories Greater than Death is my attempt to deconstruct and subvert this trope, by having my ancient superscientists turn out to be basically eugenicists who wanted to breed humanoids to be part of a bizarre weapon. I originally wanted to have everyone refer to my ancient beings as the First Humanoids, but the She-Ra cartoon introduced some ancient creatures called the First Ones. So I decided to change them to the Shapers, which was honestly a little bit less catchy.)

Anyway, at this point, I should probably lay out some criteria. What makes for a good Star Trek show, in my view? 

There are a few elements that seem really important. I love Star Trek when it explores humanism, using huge cosmic stories to show the resilience and ingenuity of human beings, and to explore what it means to be human. Exploration feels like a key part of Star Trek‘s DNA as well: not just traveling to places where no human has gone, but also finding vastly different forms of life and learning to understand creatures who are nearly incomprehensible at first glance. Finally, I like Star Trek when it explores the relationships among the crew, and lets us see how they help each other to grow and reach their full potential, something that Gene L. Coon was keen to explore on the original series and which became a key element in TNG. 

Resilience and ingenuity have been at the core of Discovery, especially since the third season. The crew are forced to grapple with a radically different future, one in which the Federation has suffered some huge setbacks, and they use their wits and pure inventiveness to help the Federation rebuild and regain its ability to travel at warp speeds. The fight against the oppressive Emerald Chain, which enslaves people and exploits whole worlds, includes many temptations to compromise the Federation’s values, and it’s gripping to watch our heroes struggle to stay true to their beliefs.As mentioned above, Discovery’s storylines have also involved the struggle to understand creatures whose way of thinking and communicating is vastly different from our own, which forms the climax of season four. 

At this point, Discovery has a robust cast of science geeks. Engineering is actually getting a bit crowded, what with Stamets, Adira, and sometimes the wonderfully deadpan Jet Reno all standing around being geniuses—and that’s before you add Tilly, who is capable of being an absolute science mastermind in her own right. If you missed all those scenes in TNG where Data, Geordi and the other crew debate scientific problems and technical solutions, then Discovery has been serving up huge chunks of catnip for quite some time now. 

A lot has been written about just how gay Discovery really is, from Stamets and Culber’s marriage to the T4T relationship of Gray and Adira to Tilly’s lesbian fungus fling. Plus, again, there’s Jet Reno. But the thing I really love about Discovery, going into its final season, is just how much beautiful romance there is across the board in this show—even besides the stuff I just mentioned. Saru has been having a whirlwind courtship with T’Rina, the president of Ni’Var, which is the reunified Vulcan and Romulan homeworld. And Captain Michael Burnham has a stormy on-again-off-again love affair going with Book, a smuggler she met when she first arrived in the 32nd century—I’m really rooting for those two to work out their problems, because they have ridiculous chemistry. I’m not used to seeing Star Trek put romance front and center for so many of its major characters, and I love it.

Finally, the thing I love about Discovery is how its characters have been allowed to change and grow, something the first two episodes of season five take great pains to remind us of. Out of the characters who’ve been there since the first season, none of them is the same person they used to be, and we’ve gotten to see them evolve over time. In particular, there’s a huge emphasis on redemption arcs, which is a subject close to my heart. Michael Burnham starts Discovery as a disgraced mutineer, and is now a highly respected captain with a twinkle in her eye. But a lot of these characters have been allowed to make terrible mistakes and learn from them, becoming better people as a result.

When people call Star Trek an optimistic show, I don’t think they’re just talking about fancy technology. I believe Star Trek’s true power is its optimism about people: our ability to keep being better than we were, and to choose kindness and understanding over brute force. More than any other Star Trek show right now, Discovery exemplifies this belief in our potential as a species, which is something that I personally really need right now.[end-mark]

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post Why <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i> Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek appeared first on Reactor.

News Game of Thrones

Say It Ain’t So: There Won’t Be More Jon Snow

The spinoff with Kit Harington’s sad-eyed Stark is no longer in the works

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 9, 2024

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There have been a slew of Game of Thrones spinoffs in the works since the original series had its finale in 2019. And while House of the Dragon is about to come out with a second season and The Hedge Knight just cast its Dunk and Egg, there have been other projects that have fallen to the wayside.

The most notable one was the Naomi Watts-starring series that took place ten thousand years before the original show, which shot an entire pilot before getting axed in 2019. And today, Jon Snow actor Kit Harington confirmed that the potential series centered around his character is no longer in development.

In an interview with Screen Rant, Harington had this to say about the project:

Say it ain’t so! That doesn’t mean, however, that we won’t see more Game of Thrones-related shows coming to a television near you. In addition to The Hedge Knight and House of the Dragon, a series centered on King Aegon is still in the works as is an animated show about the Sea Snake. [end-mark]

The post Say It Ain’t So: There Won’t Be More Jon Snow appeared first on Reactor.

News David Lynch

Netflix Turned Down Snootworld, a “Wackadoo” Animated Project from… David Lynch?!

Lynch created the script years ago with Caroline Thompson, screenwriter for The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Addams Family

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 8, 2024

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David Lynch, the mastermind behind Twin Peaks and the Dune movie (pictured above) that came before Denis Villeneuve’s endeavors, started working on a script about Snoots with Caroline Thompson (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, and 1991’s The Addams Family) over two decades ago.

“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge,” Lynch told Deadline. “I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”

I also now can’t stop thinking about Snoots and what the hell these magical creatures from Lynch’s imagination might be like.

According to Thompson, the script is “wackadoo.”

“It takes my breath away how wacky it is,” she told Deadline. “The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world.”

Lynch had some thoughts on why Netflix made the dumb decision to pass. “Snootworld is kind of an old-fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes. Old-fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”

Someone please make this and make Netflix rue the day they passed on it! I want to watch this lil’ Snoot get teenier and enter the quantum realm, or whatever world Lynch has concocted with his brain cells. Let Lynch be Lynchian! Bring on the Snoots! [end-mark]

The post Netflix Turned Down <i>Snootworld</i>, a “Wackadoo” Animated Project from… David Lynch?! appeared first on Reactor.

News evil

Hooray! Season 4 Evil Trailer Brings Us Witches, Hauntings, and the Birth of the Antichrist

The premiere date for season four just dropped along with the trailer

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 8, 2024

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The fourth season of Paramount+’s Evil will premiere in a few weeks, and while it’s a bummer that this will be the series’ final episodes, the trailer released today suggests the show will go out with a bang.

We’ve got witches! Creatures that leave big claw marks on walls! Leland and Kristen (played impeccably by Katja Herbers and Michael Emerson) going at it about the birth of their genetic progeny, who also is apparently the antichrist! Things are getting supernatural and staying on the right side of weird, and I feel good that the show will continue to be scary but also, as Reactor’s Leah Schnelbach notes in their first season review, “surprisingly nuanced and deep.”

New to Evil? Here’s the official synopsis of the show:

Herbers plays that “skeptical female psychologist” while Mike Colter plays David Acosta, a priest who has unholy thoughts about Kristen (and a succubus in her image that has camped out in his room). Aasif Mandvi plays the “contractor” Ben Shakir, who rounds out the investigative trio that the Catholic Church hires to investigate spiritual and/or supernatural cases. The supporting cast is also stellar and in addition to Emerson’s Leland includes Kurt Fuller as Dr. Kurt Boggs, Andrea Martin as Sister Andrea, and Christine Lahti as Kristen’s mom (and devil worshipper) Sheryl.

Season Four of Evil premieres on Paramount+ on May 23, 2024, with new episodes released every Thursday until August 22. That’s a lotta Evil! But if you need more/need to catch up, don’t fret: the first three seasons are now available on the streamer.

Check out the trailer for season four below. [end-mark]

The post Hooray! Season 4 <i>Evil</i> Trailer Brings Us Witches, Hauntings, and the Birth of the Antichrist appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Babylon 5 Rewatch

Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Soul Hunter”

A mysterious alien ship almost crashes into the station, and things only get weirder from there…

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 8, 2024

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“Soul Hunter”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 1, Episode 2
Production episode 102
Original air date: February 2, 1994

It was the dawn of the third age… Dr. Stephen Franklin reports on board, replacing Kyle, who is now working for the newly reelected President of Earth Alliance. His first patient is the sole occupant of a badly damaged ship that comes unexpectedly through the jump gate. Sinclair manages to wrangle the ship with a Starfury and a grappling line before it crashes into the station.

The sole occupant is an alien none of the Earth Alliance personnel recognize. Franklin works on him in the iso-lab where the atmosphere has been tailored to his needs. Delenn, however, recognizes him as a Soul Hunter, who is apparently the Minbari equivalent of the boogeyman. According to Delenn—who urges Sinclair to kill the Soul Hunter right there in the medbay—Soul Hunters are vultures who are attracted to death. They steal souls right at the moment of death. To Minbari, this is awful, as they believe that Minbari souls are melded together and reborn in the future.

The Soul Hunter—let’s call him “Rufus,” mostly because constantly typing “the Soul Hunter” to refer to him is annoying—wakes up at the same time that a shell-game grifter in downbelow is found out, chased down, and murdered. Rufus announces that he can sense the man’s impending death, and later Sinclair determines that Rufus woke up at the exact time of the grifter’s death.

Rufus then sits up and starts meditating and chanting, ignoring Sinclair’s questions—right up until Sinclair accuses him of being a thief. Rufus angrily retorts that his people preserve souls, they don’t steal them. They wish to preserve the great beings of society. The Minbari hate the Soul Hunters because they tried to save the soul of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader whose death precipitated the Earth-Minbari War. Sinclair informs Rufus that he must remain in the isolab until his ship is repaired, at which point he’s to leave the station.

After Franklin does the autopsy of the grifter, he and Ivanova supervise his body being cast out into space, as his family can’t afford to have him shipped home.

Delenn visits the medlab. She tells Rufus that she’ll tear his ship apart to find his collection of souls and free any Minbari souls she finds. Rufus tells her that he recognizes her as a Satai from the Grey Council, who was there when Dukhat died, and he wonders why she’s playing at being an ambassador when she’s so much more.

Rufus escapes, injuring one of Garibaldi’s security people in the process. A second Soul Hunter ship—this one intact—comes through the jumpgate. The second Soul Hunter—let’s call him Xavier—says that he’s here for Rufus, who is apparently deeply disturbed. After failing to preserve Dukhat’s soul, Rufus went a bit binky-bonkers, and is now killing people in order to preserve their souls. This is a violation of Soul Hunter law, and Xavier is here to arrest Rufus. Xavier is the one who damaged Rufus’ ship.

Rufus goes to N’Garath, a criminal kingpin in downbelow, who sells Rufus a level-five clearance that enables him to find and access Delenn’s quarters, all the better to kidnap her with.

Aided by Xavier, Sinclair, Garibaldi, and the security force search for Delenn. Xavier is able to sense Delenn’s impending death in a particular section, and, because he’s listed first in the opening credits, it’s Sinclair who finds Rufus and Delenn, the latter being slowly bled to death so that she’ll die semi-naturally and Rufus can take her soul.

Sinclair is able to stop Rufus by turning his soul-sucking machine on him, which kills him. Delenn is brought to the medlab, where she recovers, and Xavier departs, with Sinclair making it clear that Soul Hunters are not welcome on B5.

After she recovers, Delenn takes Rufus’ collection of souls and breaks the globes, releasing the souls.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Delenn’s line about how they (meaning the Minbari, or possibly the Grey Council) were right about Sinclair is another hint, along with the “hole in his mind” mentioned in “The Gathering,” that he’s important to the Minbari for some reason.

Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s deadpan and pessimism are both on full display in her interactions with Franklin.

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi’s security guard who is watching Rufus falls for the sick-prisoner trick and gets his ass kicked and his weapon taken, which probably got him fired.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn’s response to the presence of a Soul Hunter is to try to shoot him and to generally act batshit. We also get someone else who figures out that she’s part of the Grey Council, and just like G’Kar in “The Gathering,” she tries to kill him (though she did that part first…).

Looking ahead. Rufus sees what Delenn has planned for the future and is horrified. Delenn says before losing consciousness that the Minbari were right about Sinclair, the meaning of which will become clear before long…

Welcome aboard. The late great W. Morgan Sheppard plays Rufus, while John Snyder plays Xavier. Sheppard will return in “The Long, Twilight Struggle” in season 2 as a Narn warleader.

Trivial matters. This episode is Richard Biggs’ first appearance as Franklin. Though they are listed in the opening credits, we still have yet to see Bill Mumy or Caitlin Brown as, respectively, Lennier and Na’Toth.

This is the first mention of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader, whom we will later learn was Delenn’s mentor. It’s established that Dukhat’s death is what got the Earth-Minbari War started.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

“Typical human lifespan is almost a hundred years, but it’s barely a second compared to what’s out there. It wouldn’t be so bad if life didn’t take so long to figure out. Seems you just start to get it right, and then—it’s over.” 

“Doesn’t matter. If we live two hundred years, we’d still be human—we’d still make the same mistakes.”

“You’re a pessimist.”

“I’m Russian, Doctor.”

Franklin and Ivanova discussing philosophy.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The soul ends with death unless we act to preserve it.” Thirty years ago, I watched the first season of B5 and was not all that impressed. I don’t remember specifics, but I remember in particular finding each of the first two episodes to be awful.

On this rewatch, I actually really liked “Midnight on the Firing Line,” but “Soul Hunter” is, if anything, worse than I remember.

Part of what I dislike about the episode relates not so much to the episode itself, but the pre-show hype that B5 had online. Creator J. Michael Straczynski spent a great deal of time promoting the show in advance of its debut on the various online bulletin boards of the era, particularly GEnie and CompuServe, and one of the things that he said would be the hallmark of the show was that it would that it would be scientifically accurate, unlike most other screen science fiction.

And then we get this episode, which starts with a damaged ship coming through the jump gate that, somehow, is on a collision course for B5. At this point, my disbelief needs the Heimlich maneuver, because, as Douglas Adams reminded us, space is big—really big. There’s no reason for the jump gate to be all that close to the station. In fact, it makes sense for there to be a certain distance for safety reasons. Yet somehow, this badly damaged ship winds up on a collision course with the station—which is, in astronomical terms, incredibly tiny—and it’s so close that Sinclair is barely able to grapple it in time (after missing twice) to keep it from crashing.

After that, we get the entire concept of Soul Hunters, which is exactly the kind of fantastical thing that Straczynski was supposed to be avoiding. True, we’ve already got telepathy, which is equally fanciful, but the use of telepathy in science fiction is pretty well established, from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (which, as we’ll see, is a huge influence on the use of telepathy in B5)to Professor X and Jean Grey of the X-Men to the Ghosts in the StarCraft game, so one can forgive it a bit more readily.

But this episode presents the swiping and storing of souls as a real thing that Rufus does. Now, you can argue that it isn’t really what he’s doing—but he’s doing something. His soul-sucking vacuum cleaner enables him to see something in Delenn, so it obviously functions on some level. (Also, does he really need to carry that big-ass soul-sucking vacuum cleaner around every time he does this? Is that really practical?) Heck, the whole idea of “sensing death” is pretty much nonsense, too.

There’s some fun foreshadowing of the connection between Sinclair and the Minbari and of Delenn’s true purpose, and nobody ever went wrong casting W. Morgan Sheppard, but these are very minor good points in an episode that is just awful. It doesn’t help that there’s no sign of Andreas Katsulas or Peter Jurasik, and an episode without G’Kar and Mollari doesn’t bear thinking about.

Next week: “Born to the Purple.” [end-mark]

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News Quantum Leap

Quantum Leap Will Leap No More

The past will just have to take care of itself

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 8, 2024

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That’s it for Dr. Ben Song and his adventure with the Quantum Leap program. Deadline reports that NBC has cancelled their Quantum Leap reboot after two seasons.

In an interview in February, not long before the second season finale, star Raymond Lee seemed to hint that the end of the line might be approaching, saying, “Everything that we’ve worked towards in the past thirty-some-odd episodes, it’s all building toward something that’s going to be a very, I think, healing end. Or a beginning.”

The rebooted series premiered on NBC in September 2022, and stars Lee as Dr. Ben Song, a physicist in charge of restarting the Quantum Leap project from the original series—who then takes himself off on a totally unauthorized Leap. Caitlin Bassett plays as Addison, Ben’s love interest (and the hologram who helps him navigate the past), and Ernie Hudson is Herbert “Magic” Williams, the head of the whole operation.

Lee posted about the cancellation on Instagram, saying, “If and when another group gets a hold of the accelerator and its capabilities, may they find us floating in time, still striving to put right what once went wrong.”

Meanwhile, Law & Order: SVU was renewed for its twenty-sixth season. [end-mark]

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News A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: A Hedge Knight

Game of Thrones Prequel The Hedge Knight Casts Its Dunk and Egg

The casting would seem to indicate that production is moving forward of the Game of Thrones spinoff

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 5, 2024

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Almost a year to the day that we found out that the Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, was moving forward at HBO, we have news on who will be taking on the roles of the series’ two main characters, known to those who know as Dunk and Egg.

The show is based on a series of novellas that George R.R. Martin put out in the universe of A Song of Ice and Fire (check out our readalong we did of it in 2013 here) and centers on Ser Duncan the Tall (a.k.a. Dunk) and his faithful squire who answers to the name Egg. Peter Claffey, whose credits include Bad Sisters and a part in the upcoming third season of Vikings: Valhalla, is taking on Dunk, while Dexter Sol Ansell, who recently played Young Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, will play Egg.

The two actors, based on their headshots above, also fit in well with the look of the characters we know from the books.

Here’s the official logline for the show:

The series is written and executive produced by Martin and Ira Parker. Other executive producers include Ryan Condal (co-showrunner of House of the Dragon), Vince Gerardis, Owen Harris, and Sarah Bradshaw.

No news yet on when the series will go into production or make its way onto HBO. [end-mark]

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News Avatar: The Last Airbender

Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender Has Another Change in Leadership

Showrunner Albert Kim is leaving the series

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 5, 2024

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The long-awaited Avatar: The Last Airbender debuted in February to generally mixed reviews; there were things to like, but it wasn’t quite what fans were hoping for. Emmet Asher-Perrin wrote, “It’s imperfect, but it’s enough for hope’s sake.” It was also popular enough that Netflix immediately renewed it for two more seasons.

Behind the scenes, though, there’s been a bit of a shuffle—again. Once upon a time, the original creators of the animated Avatar were on board the live-action adaptation. In 2020, they parted ways with the project, with Michael Dante DiMartino saying, “whatever version ends up on-screen, it will not be what Bryan [Konietzko] and I had envisioned or intended to make.”

Enter Albert Kim, an executive producer and writer on Sleepy Hollow, who joined the project as showrunner for the first season. Now, though, he’s stepping down. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Sources say Kim’s intention was to lay the foundation for season one of Avatar: The Last Airbender after stepping in for the beloved franchise’s creators.”

Variety notes that Kim also has many more opportunities on his plate: “According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, Kim wanted to explore new opportunities following the multi-year development process on Last Airbender and has signed a deal with Disney to work as an executive producer on the Percy Jackson series while also developing new projects for that company.”

The two people stepping up to the showrunner role were both hired by Kim. Christine Boylan was a co-executive producer (and writer) on the first season, while Jabbar Raisani already wore three hats: executive producer, director, and VFX supervisor.

Boylan has a lot of SFF on her resume, working as a producer and writer on Once Upon a Time, The Punisher, Cloak and Dagger, and the Constantine series. Raisani’s background is largely in visual effects (for shows including The Flash, Game of Thrones, and Stranger Things), but he was also an executive producer for Netflix’s Lost in Space.

Netflix hasn’t said anything about when Avatar will return for its second season, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see how the changes behind the camera ultimately influence the show. [end-mark]

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News Among Us

More Among Us Casting Announced, Including Patton Oswalt & Debra Wilson

which one is Benoit Blanc playing?

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 4, 2024

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The series adaptation of Among Us has had a lot of casting announcements over the last few weeks! Today we have even more actors among us who are lending their voices to Among Us.

Among them, according to Deadline, are Patton Oswalt (credits including Manhunt and Ratatouille), Debra Wilson (Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League), Phil LaMarr (MADtv), and Wayne Knight (Jurassic Park, Seinfeld).

Here’s a reminder of what the series (and the game) are all about:

What color is the murderer?! With this round of casting, we have four new suspects. Here are their descriptions:

Oswalt will voice ‘White’ – Contest Winner
No trauma, no drama
Task: Someone else will get to it.
Fun Fact: wealth can be a personality trait

Wilson will voice ‘Yellow’ – Ship Cook #1
Indignant, opinionated, prankster
Task: pizza
Fun Fact: Best friends with Brown

LaMarr will voice ‘Brown’- Ship Cook #2
Chill, supportive, accountable
Task: also pizza
Fun Fact: Best friends with Yellow

Knight will voice ‘Lime’ – Engineer
Doomsday prepper, conspiracy theorist
Task: Getting stuff pretty much mostly fixed-ish
Fun Fact: Afraid of intimacy

The animated series comes to us from Owen Dennis, who has an overall deal with CBS Studios. No news yet on what network or streaming platform will house the series, much less when it will premiere. [end-mark]

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News Star Wars: Tales of the Empire

Star Wars: Tales of the Empire Trailer Sees Morgan Elsbeth & Barriss Offee Grappling with the Dark Side

and is that Lil Grievous we see?

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 4, 2024

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We’ve got another Star Wars animated series coming our way! This one, Tales of the Empire, centers on two characters we’ve seen before in the Star Wars universe, specifically in Ahsoka and The Clone Wars.

We get a glimpse of both these characters—Morgan Elsbeth and Barriss Offee—in the trailer released today. If you’re confused because these two characters live in different time periods, don’t fret: the series, which is comprised of six shorts, takes place in two respective timelines. In Morgan’s case, it’s well before the events of Ahsoka and chronicles how she becomes involved with Thrawn and the Empire. For Barriss, she’s being recruited to the Dark Side, with the end of the trailer showing her meeting her new boss… Darth Vader!

Here’s the official synopsis:

The voice cast for Tales of the Empire includes Diana Lee Inosanto as Morgan Elsbeth, Meredith Salenger as Barriss Offee, Rya Kihlstedt as Lyn (a.k.a. Fourth Sister), Wing T. Chao as Wing, Lars Mikkelsen as Thrawn, Jason Isaacs as Grand Inquisitor, and Matthew Wood as General Grievous.

Tales of the Empire is created by Dave Filoni (no surprise there, especially since it features two characters he created), who also acted as the supervising director. He along with Athena Yvette Portillo and Carrie Beck executive produced the show.

All six episodes of Tales of the Empire will be unleashed on Disney+ on May 4, 2024.

Check out the trailer below. [end-mark]

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Featured Essays Batman: The Animated Series

We Are All Alone With Ourselves: The Tragic Villains of Batman: The Animated Series

The surprising depth of Batman’s animated villains.

By Paul Morton

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: Warner Bros. Animation

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Credit: Warner Bros. Animation

Great dramatists are great and versatile lawyers. They make the best case possible for each of their characters. The Batman movies are not good dramas. Tim Burton is not a good lawyer. Christopher Nolan, Todd Phillips, and Matt Reeves should be disbarred. 

Burton’s villains are perverse freaks. The wild fetishism of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman demands admiration, but Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Danny DeVito’s Penguin are cut-out grotesques. The villains in Nolan’s trilogy, produced in the decade following 9/11, are quasi-military terrorists, not one of whom would ever be mistaken for a freedom fighter. The more recent takes on the Rogues Gallery—Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and Paul Dano’s Riddler—suggest a different set of real-world evils, both of them banal: the incel and the mass shooter.  

Can the superhero genre—a genre predicated on the good vs. evil binary—do the work of great drama? Yes, and it has, several times in the comics, and at least once on television, in Batman: The Animated Series, which premiered on Fox in 1992. The show, which borrows freely from Citizen Kane and film noir, is remarkable for its aesthetics. Like Sam Spade, its Batman is only a degree less troubled than his villains. 

And those villains are extraordinary tragicomedians. The show’s version of the Joker, unlike Heath Ledger’s, is a man, not a symbol. Mark Hamill’s raspy huff rises to a whiny falsetto within a single line; he is enjoying his perversions, and his disappointments register on his elongated face. He conjures the same sympathy one would grant any unhappy child. Baby Doll, a retired child actress debilitated by a physical condition, retreats into a demented version of the character that made her famous. Mr. Freeze, entrapped in a sub-zero suit, robbed of his beloved wife, has accepted a fate which denies him physical touch. He responds in turn by actively denying his obvious humane instincts.

It requires a particular magic to capture abject loneliness in a genre defined by silly costumes and power fantasies, to make loneliness something both human and superhuman. Baby Doll stares straight into a funhouse mirror where she sees the sophisticated adult woman she can never become. Mr. Freeze sits alone in his frozen cell, contemplating a woman twirling in a snow globe, the image of the wife he cannot save. With only a few notable exceptions—among them “It’s Never Too Late,” an episode in which Batman successfully works on the conscience of an aging drug kingpin— the show acknowledges the fear that we will never be any better than what we are now, that in the end, we are all alone with ourselves.  

“Mad as a Hatter” tells the story of Jervis Tetch—here voiced by Roddy McDowall—a hideous man. He falls in love with his assistant Alice, who is herself in love with what we would now call a Chad figure. Tetch becomes the Mad Hatter, and his plot involves mind control, both of random citizens of Gotham, whom he dresses up as foot soldiers borrowed directly from Lewis Carroll, and of Alice herself, whom he transforms from a sweet young woman into an automaton. Batman, as always, wins the battle. In the episode’s final moments, the Mad Hatter lies defeated, trapped under rubble, left to look on as Alice falls into the arms of her lover. McDowall recites the doggerel of the “Lobster Quadrille” with quiet resignation born of frustrated sexuality: “Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.” 

This is more than a proto-incel fantasy. The Mad Hatter is doomed; as Batman says, even if he had won the battle on his own terms, he would not have joined the dance. And he is of a piece with the show’s other villains, victims either of capitalist overlords, psychosis, self-loathing, bullying, or simply the cruel laws of human existence. 

In “Birds of a Feather,” the Penguin attempts to reinvent himself, not as a crime boss, but as the sophisticated fellow he believes himself to be. After his release from prison, he returns to a now empty criminal hideout, where he is greeted by Batman who informs him he is under the detective’s surveillance. “Just what I need,” the Penguin says, “a bat in my belfry.” Meanwhile, Veronica Vreeland and Pierce Chapman, a high-society couple, plot to convince the Penguin to attend one of their soirees. It’s Gotham City’s version of radical chic.

The show’s creators wanted to model the Penguin on the version played by Burgess Meredith in the 1960s television show, a dandy with a monocle, top hat, and long coattails. But Warner Bros. had toys to sell, and they ended up designing a version based on what was then the most recent live-action iteration of the character, the mutant version played by DeVito. This Penguin is short, enormously rotund, with flippers and a long-beaked nose. The creators found a way around the problem by casting Paul Williams, who endowed the character with a posh manner and precise diction, at odds with his physical appearance, thus marking him as a permanent aspirant.

“Penguin was actually trying to go straight and I took the view that Batman was the villain in that show,” the episode’s director Frank Paur told me. “He couldn’t see the change in him. He would just show up and tell him, ‘I’m going to wait for you to fuck up and then I’m going to beat the shit out of you.’” The show’s version of Batman has several motivations—a devotion to justice, comfort with a life of violence, a belief in civic duty, a commitment to noblesse oblige, a horror of death, a need for solitude, a fear of loneliness, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. He spends most of the episode at a watchful remove. He is fatalistic, and knows this story won’t end well, but he wants to see how it will all play out.

The Penguin is only half-delusional. He plays the role of a proper gentleman, forcing his portly body to stand as straight as possible. Vreeland takes him to a fine restaurant where he horrifies fellow diners by swallowing raw fish whole, and to the opera where he stands in the balcony and howls along with Pagliacci. She compliments his “rapacious wit” and calls his long beak a “fine Roman nose,” eliciting from him a sweet boyish smile. She grows to like him, particularly after he saves her from ruffians in an alleyway; he notes that he associated with a “much higher class of riff-raff” in his criminal career. He has a genuine flair for old-fashioned chivalry, a quality lacking in her world.

At the actual party, the Penguin shows up with a necklace which he hopes to gift to Vreeland. Batman appears just one more time. Love has changed him, the Penguin declares. But of course, it has not. When he overhears Vreeland and Pierce talk about their actual plans for the Penguin, he grows enraged, falls back on his true nature, and seeks revenge. The denouement, and the Penguin’s humiliating defeat, occurs at the opera house. As he is taken away, Vreeland tells him that in truth, she really had grown fond of him. “I suppose it’s true what they say,” he tells her, in an attempt to regain a semblance of dignity. “‘Society is to blame.’ High society that is.”

Batman himself has contempt for the class into which he is born—as well as a willingness to take advantage of his privilege. Unlike his enemies, he can pass. It’s not that hard for him to maintain a secret identity. According to Brynne Chandler, who collaborated on the script, the original dialogue was different. It was Batman who enjoys the final word, and who offers the Penguin comfort, and, with his trademark irony, a sense of solidarity. “It’s for the best,” he says. “She’s not our kind, dear.”

The actor who would have spoken these words was Kevin Conroy, who found inspiration for his performance in a past as traumatic as Bruce Wayne’s. A gay man, born in 1955, he had grown up in a stern, Irish Catholic household, the son of an abusive, alcoholic father who committed suicide, and the brother of a mentally ill sibling. He trained at Julliard, but despite his great talent, his sexuality cost him major roles.

He had bigger problems. The early part of his career coincided with the first decade of the AIDS crisis, and he spent many hours by his friends’ deathbeds, all while remaining the primary caregiver of his mentally ill brother. When he discovered the firm, raspy voice that became his trademark, he was hit by a sensation. “It seemed to come from thirty years of frustration, confusion, denial, love, yearning,” he wrote in an autobiographical comic published shortly before his death in 2022. His Batman, accordingly, is no slummer and he has empathy for all his foes. 

Batman: The Animated Series was meant to appeal to a wide audience. Action narratives for the kids. Innuendo and satire for the adults. But none of the above eludes the former’s intelligence. Children have a more sophisticated sense of humor than they are often credited with, and they have an acute knowledge of pain.

The simple, terrible question in Batman: The Animated Series is pre-political. Will you be all that different at 50 from what you were at five? The child fears that nothing will get better, and the adult recognizes that their eccentricities can at best be tempered and their failings managed. Superhero stories have a habit of mistaking a certain concept of “dark”—ultra-violence, graphic sexual assault, dorm-room philosophy, Holocaust references—for “serious.” Batman: The Animated Series is quite serious, and it swallows whole the implications of the saddest convention of the superhero genre: most heroes remain heroes, and villains, villains. “Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound.” In the early 1990s, it was the rare show that stood up for its audience of bastards.[end-mark]

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Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

Secrets, Sequels, and a Synth Named Fred — Star Trek: Discovery’s “Red Directive” & “Under the Twin Moons”

Reviewing the premiere episodes of Star Trek: Discovery’s fifth season — spoilers ahead!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 4, 2024

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The start of the fifth season of Star Trek: Discovery is unique in many ways, but probably the biggest one is that it establishes that the same person will be in command of the U.S.S. Discovery for the second season in a row, which has never happened before. The hallmark of the inaugural show of the Paramount+ era of Trek has been a new captain every year: Lorca for season 1, Pike for season 2, Saru for season 3, and Burnham for season 4.

But Burnham’s still in charge in season 5. And that’s an indication that—for once—nothing has changed on Discovery. They’ve finally found a status quo, and it’s one that works.

So, of course, it’s the last season. Sigh.

There’s only one really significant change, and it doesn’t come to fruition until the end of the second of the two episodes that went live today: Saru is being promoted to the role of Federation Ambassador-at-Large, and so will no longer be Burnham’s Number One. This is a good move on several levels, as it never sat right with me that Saru took a subordinate position to Burnham on Discovery after doing such a good job as her captain in season 3. Not that Burnham didn’t also deserve the promotion, but Saru didn’t deserve a demotion, either. They made it work last year, mostly because Sonequa Martin-Green and Doug Jones make a really good team. But Saru is, bluntly, the best thing to come out of Discovery, and he deserves better.

And he’s getting it! Not only is he being promoted, but his relationship with T’Rina has deepened to the point that she hits him with a marriage proposal. Being Vulcan, she of course phrases the proposal in the most pedantic and bloodless manner possible, which Tara Rosling manages to make incredibly adorable.

Saru’s last mission comes from Kovich, a classified mission that’s a Red Directive. Not to be confused with other directives that are prime or omega, this one is not defined, but is obviously a shut-up-and-go-do-it-now-please mission that you go on and do not fuck around. (It’s Trek’s latest red thing. The original series had red alerts, redshirts, and the Red Hour, DS9 had Red Squad, the 2009 movie had red matter, and season 2 of this very show had the Red Angel.)

In this case, an eight-hundred-year-old Romulan ship has been found that has a Tan zhekran on it that needs to be retrieved. Established in Picard’s “The Impossible Box” as a Romulan puzzle box, this particular Tan zhekran has something very valuable and very classified on it. In fact, it’s so classified that even Vance doesn’t know the specifics.

Unfortunately, two ex-couriers named Mol and L’ak have gotten to the Romulan ship, and the Tan zhakren, first. Played by, respectively, Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis, I’m honestly not sure what to make of these two yet. I’m getting a Bonnie-and-Clyde vibe from the two of them that’s kind of a mix of Spike and Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Pumpkin and Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction, though as yet they’re nowhere near that level of interesting. (Their names are also interesting, as “moll” is a name given to a female companion to a criminal, and “L’ak” is similar to “lackey.” Makes you wonder if there’s a bad guy they’re working for…)

They take the Tan zhakren and some other stuff, and head out in their own ship, with Discovery and the U.S.S. Antares giving chase, a thrilling sequence that has Burnham in an EVA suit on the hull of L’ak and Mol’s ship, the Antares using a tractor beam, and a game of chicken among the participants. However, the ex-couriers get away, and do so in a manner that leaves dozens of warp trails behind, only one of which is the real one.

But Burnham knows this courier’s trick from her year as one between “That Hope is You” and “Far from Home,” and she puts in a call to the courier she knows best: Book.

Book is still doing his community service, helping out the worlds that were ravaged by the DMA last season. More to the point, this summoning is the first time Book and Burnham have spoken since the end of last season. Martin-Green and David Ajala continue to sparkle in their scenes together, but Book’s betrayal last season has twisted everything. The scenes are beautifully played and written, as Burnham and Book obviously still love each other deeply, but Burnham absolutely cannot trust Book anymore, and Book knows full well that he doesn’t deserve to be trusted, and it puts the pair of them in a weird place. That place remains weird, as Book stays on after the first episode, assigned by Vance his own self to be a consultant on the mission, since he knows how couriers think.

Book’s arrival signals the season story kicking in: chasing after the contents of the Tan zhekran. Mol and L’ak take the stuff they looted from the Romulan ship to a centuries-old Soong-style synth named Fred (which is fabulous). Fred has Data-like makeup, and his serial number is later established as starting with “AS” for Altan Soong, the cyberneticist son of Data’s creator, Noonien Soong, established in Picard’s “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1.”

Played with Spiner-esque curiosity-filled deadpan by J. Adam Brown, Fred is a collector of ancient things, and he’s thrilled at the twenty-fourth-century artifact. He’s also easily able to open the Tak zhekran, which contains a diary, written in Romulan. Being a synth, Fred is able to read the entire thing in half a second. He’s also not willing to pay a fair price—or, indeed, any price, and the negotiation turns into a fight, which ends with Fred and his security dead. (Why Fred doesn’t have the super-strength and speed seen in other synths like Data is left as an exercise for the viewer.)

Book figured out that Fred would be the fence in this little adventure, and so Discovery and Antares head there, but by the time they arrive, Fred’s dead, baby—Fred’s dead. Luckily, Fred is a synth, so they send the body up to Discovery, where between them, Stamets and Culber are able to extract his memory, including his speed-read of the diary. Which means they also have the text of the diary.

This is followed by another thrilling action piece, and it’s to the show’s credit that both action sequences in “Red Directive” are actually plot relevant. And character relevant, as in both sequences, we find out a lot about Antares Captain Rayner, played by new series regular Callum Keith Rennie, a Canadian actor who is, I believe, contractually obligated to appear in every show that films in Canada at least once. Rayner is a Starfleet captain of many years’ standing who is, in many ways, still acting like they’re in the middle of the Burn, when Starfleet was just trying to keep the tattered remains of the Federation together, unlike Burnham, who spent most of her life in the twenty-third-century version of the Federation.

That conflict comes to a head during the motorcycle chase through the desert at the climax of “Red Directive.” L’ak and Mol are heading to a cave system. The notion of phasering the caves to block off the entrance is floated, but there’s a 30% chance that it’ll cause an avalanche that will wipe out the city and kill thousands. Burnham rejects the plan, but Rayner thinks it’s worth the risk for a Red Directive mission and Antares fires on the caves. There’s no avalanche, and Rayner proudly declares, “70% for the win!”

But the problem is that they gave Mol and L’ak an idea. They do what bad guys have been doing in heroic fiction for ages: they cause an avalanche, meaning our heroes have to spend time saving lives, giving the bad guys the opportunity to escape.

That’s not the only consequence. The two ships are damaged when they both crash nose-first into the surface to break the avalanche and have to return to HQ for repairs. Rayner is the subject of an inquiry that includes Vance and Rillak (always good to see Chelah Horsdal as my favorite on-screen Federation President, whom I got to write a story for in Star Trek Explorer, cough cough). At first, he’s encouraged to retire, and he does lose his command, but Burnham convinces him to replace Saru as her first officer.

Before he can take over, Burnham and Saru have a final adventure together. Kovich has decided to read Burnham in on the full story. I said earlier that the season’s story is a chase, and that’s an appropriate way to refer to a season that is a sequel to TNG’s “The Chase.” The Romulan ship belonged to one of the background Romulan science officers in that episode, and he knows what the power source is of the Progenitors, the humanoid beings who apparently seeded the galaxy with humanoid life.

Now here’s where I have to confess that I really didn’t much like “The Chase,” as it was a giant wink at the viewer in desperate search of an interesting plot that it never found. I’ve got very little patience with taking the time to explain something that doesn’t need explaining, which is all “The Chase” was.

But since we do have the Progenitors (a term first heard from Kovich in “Red Directive”), it is also true that whatever they did to, in essence, create humanoid life is pretty powerful stuff, and is something that could be abused.

The diary leads them to a Promellian necropolis. (The Promellians were established as a long-extinct species in TNG’s “Booby Trap.”) This is a straight-up video-game adventure, as Burnham and Saru have to get through various security features and figure out puzzles and clues and things. And scripter Alan McElroy has a little fun, because you wonder if this is Saru’s swan song. I mean, he’s just accepted a marriage proposal, it’s his final mission, and he and Burnham have several conversations about the adventures they’ve had together, and you realize that Saru’s fulfilling every dead-meat cliché in the book. He’s the partner at the beginning of the cop buddy movie who’s one week from retirement and then gets killed to piss off the main character. We even find out he has a nifty nickname—coined by Reno and used by Book, he’s apparently referred to in his post-vahar’ai state as “Action Saru.” And it is the last season…

Luckily, McElroy is just toying with us. Saru not only survives, but proves his “Action Saru” chops by using his spines to blow up some of the security drones. And he’s returned to T’Rina in one piece, and with a new clue.

I’m liking this direction for the season. The stakes are high, but not a threat to the entirety of the galaxy as we know it. It’s a quest narrative of a type we’ve seen a thousand times before and twice at our weekly role-playing game, but we’ve seen it so often because, dammit, it works. More to the point, the threat isn’t so over-the-top insane with a high body count, as every other threat Discovery has thrown at us has been. It’s therefore a less exhausting storyline, which is all for the best.

The clue they find will send them to Trill, thus giving Adira a chance to be reunited with Gray.[end-mark]

The post Secrets, Sequels, and a Synth Named Fred — <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i>’s “Red Directive” & “Under the Twin Moons” appeared first on Reactor.

News Outlander: Blood of My Blood

Outlander: Blood of My Blood Casts More of Jamie Fraser’s Blood Relations (and Others)

The prequel series is shaping up with more core characters cast

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 3, 2024

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The prequel series Outlander: Blood of My Blood is moving ever forward, and Starz announced today a slew of new actors joining the project.

The show, which centers on the parents of Outlander’s Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) as well as the parents of his love Claire Fraser (Catriona Balfe), unfolds in separate timelines (for part of it, at least).

Here’s the official synopsis for the series:

As the synopsis reveals, we already know who will be playing those four core parts, with Harriet Slater and Jamie Roy playing the Frasers and Hermione Corfeld, and Jeremy Irvine taking on the roles of Claire’s parents. Today we got four more actors to add to the call sheet.

Brian McCardie (Rob Roy), Jhon Lumsden (Torchwood: The Story Continues podcast), Sara Vickers (Watchmen), and Peter Mullan (Ozark) are in Blood of My Blood as well. McCardie (who also played a completely different character, Sir Marcus MacRannoch, in Outlander’s first season) is playing Isaac Grant, the leader of his clan in 18th century Scotland; Lumsden plays his son, Malcolm, who is a potential suitor to Slater’s Ellen Mackenzie; Vickers is Davina Porter, a housekeeper and mom to Brian Fraser (a.k.a. Jamie Fraser’s grandmother); and Mullan is taking on the role of Red Jacob MacKenzie, Laird of Clan MacKenzie and father to Ellen, Dougal, Colum, Janet and Jocasta.

No news on when Blood of My Blood will come out, but the ten-episode season is now in production in Scotland. In the meantime, we also have the back half of Outlander’s seventh season to look forward to, as that’s set to premiere on Starz in November 2024. [end-mark]

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News The Witcher

The Witcher Casts Leo Bonhart and More for Season Four

Sharlto Copley is really settling in to his villain era

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 3, 2024

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A certain bounty hunter is soon(ish) to arrive on a screen near you. It’s been a minute since we had any news about The Witcher—now sans Henry Cavill, and with Liam Hemsworth in the lead role—but Netflix has just announced three new cast members, and one of them plays a pretty major (and ugly) role in Ciri’s future.

As was rumored last summer, Sharlto Copley (District 9; Boy Kills World, pictured above) has been cast as Leo Bonhart, whom Variety describes as simply an “infamous bounty hunter.” It’s a bit mild as a description, given all the things he does to Ciri, but in the interest of spoilers I’ll just leave it at that.

Two other actors have also joined the show: James Purefoy as Skellen, and Danny Woodburn as Zoltan. Skellen is a member of the Nilfgardian Secret Services who is connected to Bonhart; Zoltan is a dwarf and pal of Geralt’s. You might recognize Purefoy from Pennyworth and Altered Carbon, while Woodburn has been in everything from Lois & Clark to Seinfeld to Legacies.

The third season of The Witcher appeared on Netflix last summer; the fourth season is expected to begin filming in the next few months. According to Variety, the (rather vague) description for the new season says:

You can watch The Witcher and its assorted spinoffs on Netflix. [end-mark]

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News Dead Boy Detectives

The Trailer for Dead Boy Detectives Shows How It’s Connected to The Sandman

Like Holmes and Watson, except dead

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 3, 2024

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Ah, the unpredictable life of a ghost detective. This particular pair, the Dead Boy Detectives, were created by Neil Gaiman in The Sandman, then branched out into their own tales. The adaptation of their story was originally a Max series, but moved over to Netflix. The afterlife is nothing if not uncertain!

But it’s just as well that Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) will be practicing their trade on the same streamer as The Sandman, because now, the show gets to make it explicit that the two series are connected. And this trailer does so via a little visit from Death (Kirby, who used to go by Kirby Howell-Baptiste). Apparently they’re hiding from her. They don’t want to go back to hell. Who would? (Funny how this is a frequent problem for characters in this universe.)

Here’s the synopsis:

I genuinely do not know what to make of the way they’ve chopped up My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade” in this trailer. It feels a bit too epic for what we’re seeing on screen. The tonal result is all over the place. Which, to be fair, might be the point.

Dead Boy Detectives was developed by Steve Yockey (The Flight Attendant), who is co-showrunner with Beth Schwartz (the Arrowverse). The boys solve supernatural crime starting April 25th on Netflix. [end-mark]

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News The Big Door Prize

The Big Door Prize Will Take Things to the Next Stage in Season Two

What mysterious pronouncements will the Morpho make next?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 3, 2024

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Apple’s underrated, extremely endearing The Big Door Prize asks one big, not at all simple question: What would happen if you knew the potential of your life? In order to learn this info, you have to put all your personal details into a weird machine (the minute it asks for Social Security Numbers, I’d be done). The answer comes in the form of a little blue card with a single word on it. Maybe two or three words, max.

Then what?

That’s basically the premise of the show, which follows an excellent ensemble cast as their lives are upended by the Morpho machine and its little blue cards of destiny. Some people chase their Morpho-assigned destiny hard; some sort of sit back and go, “Huh.” As one does.

Here’s the synopsis for season two:

The Morpho itself is a pretty sci-fi premise, but things got even further from ordinary reality at the end of the first season, when it turned out that Dusty is not the only person with a mysterious little blue mole. This teaser hints at maybe more surreal, or supernatural, or plain old inexplicable happenings—and whatever is coming in “the next stage.”

The Big Door Prize returns to Apple TV+ on April 24th. [end-mark]

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News criminal

Prime’s Adaptation of Ed Brubaker’s Criminal Adds Captain Marvel’s Directors

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have joined the series

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 2, 2024

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More crimes are coming to Prime Video. In January, the streamer ordered up a series based on the Eisner Award-winning comic series Criminal, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Brubaker is co-showrunning the series alongside author Jordan Harper (Everybody Knows).

And now the series has a pair of directors with their own comic-book adaptation history. Deadline reports that Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, the co-directors (and co-writers) of Captain Marvel (pictured above), will direct the first four episodes of the show. The pair are among that interesting list of directors who made their name with a lauded indie (in this case, Half Nelson) and went on to direct a mega-franchise film. Since Captain Marvel, they’ve directed films and TV, including episodes of Mrs. America and Masters of the Air.

In 2019, Brubaker told Deadline, “Criminal tells the interweaving saga of several generations of families tied together by the crimes and murders of the past.” The series began in 2006; the first ten issues told one story about a pickpocket and a heist (collected as Criminal Vol. 1: Coward) and one about a soldier investigating his brother’s murder (Criminal Vol. 2: Lawless).

Almost ten years ago, Jake Hinkson argued that Criminal is “the crime epic we really need,” writing:

Looks like he’s going to get his wish—though it remains to be seen how gritty the adaptation is. Criminal is apparently in preproduction in Portland. The cast has yet to be announced. [end-mark]

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News Interview with the Vampire

Interview with the Vampire Trailer Sees Louis (and Molloy?) Remembering Monstrous Things

Memory can fool you, as Louis and Molloy are about to learn

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 1, 2024

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Memory is the monster. That’s the message, at least, from the latest trailer for the upcoming second season of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

The biggest thing Louis (Jacob Anderson) doesn’t seem to recall from season one, is what the heck happened to Claudia (played in season two by Delainey Hayles) as he recounts his life to the reporter Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) while his paramour of seventy years, Armand (Assad Zaman) sits supportively(?) by his side.

What the latest trailer also suggests, however, is that Armand is possibly manipulating Louis and the younger vampire’s attempts to recall the past. It also shows that Lestat (Sam Reid) had a continued influence on Louis beyond New Orleans, and that Molloy has some recall problems of his own when it comes to his earlier interview with Louis back when he was a young man.

Your memory can fool you! And uncovering the truth, if the background music in the latest trailer is anything to go on, can be a dangerous thing.

The trailer also treats us to more glimpses of Claudia and Louis’ time in Paris with the coven of vampire actors there. Want more context as to what we’ll see in the upcoming episodes? Here’s the official synopsis for season two of Interview with the Vampire:

AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is created and showrun by Rolin Jones, who also executive produces along with Mark Johnson, Mark Taylor, Christopher Rice, and the late Anne Rice.

Season two premieres on AMC and AMC+ on May 12, 2024.

Check out the trailer below. [end-mark]

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News The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

AMC Offers a Quick Peek at The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon—The Book of Carol

Everyone is always trying to find everyone else on these shows

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 1, 2024

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Everybody gets a “Book of” these days. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Boba Fett.) This summer, Carol (Melissa McBride) returns to the world of The Walking Dead in—take a deep breath—The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon—The Book of Carol.

It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? But even a person who gave up on the original TWD many, many seasons back might feel a small twinge of excitement at the little teaser that AMC released for this series. Carol was always one of the best parts of the original series, and now she’s back, having turned up in the very end of Daryl Dixon‘s first-season finale. And she seems very determined to find her friend.

AMC released a short clip that follows up on that last scene—one that begins with Daryl (Norman Reedus), who is, per usual, in a nasty spot of trouble. (Good thing all the guys on his side have really good aim.) The focus then switches to Carol, who tries to play nice with a bunch of strangers, asking about a bike that once belonged to Daryl. The strangers are not forthcoming, and Carol switches tactics—with the help of a conveniently placed crossbow.

The logline for the season doesn’t say much that isn’t implied by these scenes: “The new season picks up where The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon left off, with both confronting old demons while Carol struggles to find her friend and he struggles with his decision to stay in France, causing tension at the Nest.”

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon—The Book of Carol premieres this summer (they haven’t gotten more specific yet) on AMC and AMC+. [end-mark]

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News Orphan Black: Echoes

Orphan Black: Echoes Arrives in June

Krysten Ritter stars in the sequel series

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 1, 2024

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Clone Club: we’re back! Or at least we will be in June, which is when the Krysten Ritter-starring Orphan Black sequel Orphan Black: Echoes premieres. The series has a new teaser, sort of; this is pretty much the previous teaser, just shorter, and with the date added at the end. But AMC has bestowed upon us a short synopsis:

This is extremely in keeping with the plot of the original series, which starred the incredible Tatiana Maslany as a whole bunch of clones who discovered a whole bunch of secrets about their origins. But how far in the near future are we? Could anyone from the previous series turn up? Is that too much to wish for? What is Helena up to these days, anyway?

Echoes also stars Keeley Hawes, Amanda Fix, Avan Jogia, Rya Kihlstedt, and James Hiroyuki Liao, with Reed Diamond in a recurring role. Anna Fishko (Fear the Walking Dead) is creator, writer, and executive producer on the series, and original Orphan Black co-creator John Fawcett is on board as director. The opening titles feature Julien Baker:

Orphan Black: Echoes premieres June 23rd on AMC, AMC+, and BBC America. [end-mark]

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Column

The Curse’s “Green Queen” and the Plight of the Sacrificial Lamb

This dark satire about terrible people plays around with genre elements in a number of disconcerting ways…

By Dan Persons

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Published on April 2, 2024

Image: Showtime

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Image: Showtime

In Luis Buñuel’s brilliant The Exterminating Angel (1962), a group of affluent operagoers gather in a mansion for some socializing, a late-night supper, and a little bit of entertainment. But once they’ve enjoyed a piano performance by one of the guests, they discover they cannot leave their hosts’ salon. Nothing dramatic—no barricades, hostage-takers, or force-fields—they just all, as a group, spontaneously decide it’s not time to go home. Nor will that time arrive the next day, nor the day after, nor, it’s suggested, for weeks. Starvation will set in, social niceties will crumble, and a closet full of expensive vases will be turned into impromptu toilets, but for better or worse—mostly worse—some indefinable force of the universe has become intent on keeping these people captive, well past the point of endurance.

Buñuel had no fondness for the moneyed elites. In films like The Phantom of Liberty and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, he concocted viciously whimsical scenarios to expose their greed, self-involvement, and hypocrisy. In The Exterminating Angel he provides no overt explanation for why this particular clutch of people are damned in this way, just an implicit suggestion that some power beyond our ken has espied them, has taken their measure, and has decided it’s had enough.

But, if you think about it, the engine of these people’s torment is much more proximate.

In the first episode of The Curse (2023), Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder), approaches a young, black, immigrant girl, Nala (Hikmah Warsame), as she tries to sell cans of soda in a New Mexico parking lot. Asher’s been filming a pilot with his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), for a new reality show, Fliplanthropy, and at the goading of his producer, Dougie (Benny Safdie), attempts to show his generosity by giving the child some money, no strings attached. Problem is, he only has a hundred dollar bill in his wallet. After the B-roll is logged, he summons the child back, apologizes, offers to come back with twenty dollars, and snatches the bill out of the girl’s hand. Without missing a beat, Nala stares Asher dead in the eye, and says, “I curse you.”

At face value, that bit of hexing would seem to be what’s referenced in The Curse’s title. The idea is reinforced when, later in the episode, Asher discovers that his Factor_-style order of chicken penne has mysteriously arrived sans chicken, and upon subsequent questioning, Nala claims her curse—based, she says, on a TikTok trend called “tiny curses,” in which the jinx isn’t supposed to be much more than annoying—was centered on chicken and “spaghetti.”

It doesn’t take all that long, though, for a viewer to intuit that Ash isn’t alone in laboring under a curse. The big difference is that while his appears to involve some kind of cosmic intervention (he later finds the vanished chicken in a firehouse bathroom), others have been burdened with whammies that are more earthbound. The TV show Fliplanthropy is supposed to be a showcase for Whitney Siegel, and her campaign to bring “passive housing”—homes that purport to minimize energy waste—to the poverty-stricken community of Española, New Mexico. It never seems to occur to her that the local Indigenous population may not have much use for the boxy, mirrored monstrosities Whit wants to build (fancying herself some kind of conceptual artist, Whit insists that the buildings’ exteriors literally reflect the community). Nor is she all that eager to concede that she and Ash are so cash-strapped that the funding for her project has come from her wealthy parents, a pair of notorious slumlords. Nor does she pause to consider that the, um, “-lanthropy” part of Fliplanthropy (awful name, that) comes not from supporting local businesses, but from importing the gentrifying likes of a Canadian coffee franchise and an upscale jeans store into the town’s decaying strip mall. Whit is in fact so blinded by her saintly self-image that when a wealthy but conspicuously conservative client (Dean Cain, playing, essentially, Dean Cain) expresses interest in purchasing one of her homes, she can’t see past the Thin Blue Line flag on his car to realize that the man sincerely supports many of the social causes that Whit makes a pretense to care about.

If Whit is the self-deluded model of the just-throw-cash-at-the-problem liberal (when the jeans store becomes the target of shoplifters, Whitney tells the cashier to charge the shrinkage to her credit card, with predictably disastrous results), Fliplanthropy’s producer Dougie is all too aware of the burden he carries. Having fled New York in the aftermath of a drunk-driving incident that killed his wife, he puts up a cocky, confident façade, while attempting to slough off any remnants of the Big Apple by bedecking himself in turquoise. It doesn’t conceal what we see: That he carries a breathalyzer in his car’s glove compartment, and that too often it tests positive; that prior to Fliplanthropy getting the greenlight from HGTV he’s been using his vehicle as an improvised hotel room; and that the weight of his responsibility goads him into such bizarre actions as begging Nala to inflict a curse on him, or lecturing teens on the evils of alcohol, then buying them beers after getting them to turn over their car keys.

Ash has his own issues, aside from the phantom chicken curse. He’s socially awkward and near devoid of a sense of humor—taking a corporate comedy course, the best he can do is to bleat like a goat. He is so devoted to Whitney that he loses his cool on camera when a TV interviewer dares to ask a question about her parents, and then to quash the damning footage offers to betray his colleagues at the Tribal casino where he used to work. The security video he subsequently provides, while succeeding in indicting a state gambling official, also shows him laughing at the plight of a gambling addict. And he’s got a micropenis, the reveal of which leads to a cringey sequence where he and Whit make love via the services of a vibrator and a fantasy stud named Steven.

In short, and to put it as delicately as possible, what we’ve got here is a trio of righteous shits. But it turns out, not all shits are created equal.

Per IMDB, Luis Buñuel expressed regret that he wasn’t able to take the characters of The Exterminating Angel all the way to the extreme of cannibalism. However disenchanted the director may have been with the outcome, the restriction did lead to a telling moment in the film: The trapped partygoers, starved, thirsty—not to mention awash in the stench of unwashed bodies and unflushed excreta—have irrevocably turned on each other. Full-on violence is imminent—as is the potential for, yes, cannibalism—when a flock of sheep, apparently stockpiled by the host on the night of the party for some kind of prank (a bear cub is also somewhere on the premises), wander into the salon. Immediately, the prisoners fall upon the passive beasts, not just as a solution for their hunger, but also as a way to displace the brutality they’ve begun to turn on each other.

Throughout the course of The Curse, it becomes agonizingly clear that the friendship between Asher and Dougie, dating back to their youth, was anything but. As they reminisce about the past, it turns out that Dougie was an especially nasty and emotionally manipulative bully, dispensing cruelties that Ash has transmogrified into typical, childhood hijinks. And Dougie has far from outgrown that malicious aspect of his personality. He scolds his friend for never inviting him to the shabbat observances Ash and Whitney hold, despite Dougie evincing no particular devotion to his faith; leveraging Ash’s curse-induced paranoia, he has a whole roast chicken delivered to Ash’s plate when they dine out; and when Nala refuses to grant Dougie’s self-destructive wish, he jealously watches the oblivious Ash entering his home, while muttering under his breath, “I curse you.”

Most dismayingly, under the guise of drumming up some dramatic tension for the series, he goads Whitney into turning against Ash, a suggestion Whit seems not so reluctant to embrace. She’s clearly chagrined at how Ash’s social ineptitude clashes with her carefully-groomed façade of empathy and social awareness, something not helped when she witnesses the video of him mocking the gambler. (In a reflection of the relationship between Ash and Dougie, Whit also has a lifelong “friend,” Cara [Nizhonniya Austin], an Indigenous artist who clearly sees through Whitney’s bullshit.) A devastating failed pregnancy and Asher’s emasculated role in their lovemaking hasn’t elevated Whit’s opinion of her husband; that her father is similarly graced with an inadequate member may also have something to do with it. (And as an aside, let me just say that while I understand that cringe comedy gotta cringe, the whole micropenis thing may be a little too on-the-nose. Or on the whatever… sorry.) So in the penultimate episode, when Whitney insists Asher watch the confessional where she unsparingly unloads on him, we know that whatever way the relationship ends up—and in this case it’s with Ash tearfully declaring his undying love after watching the devastating footage—her well of sublimated contempt for him is deep, and likely everlasting.

All of which may go to explain the discombobulating events of “Green Queen,” The Curse’s final episode.

[Hey. There are significant spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned, me buckos.]

It starts out pretty much of a piece with the rest of the series. Approximately one year after the events of the previous episode, Whit and Asher are appearing via remote on The Rachel Ray Show to promote their just-premiered—and pointedly re-titled—series, Green Queen. It doesn’t go especially well, with Whit and Ash delivering frozen grins to the camera while Vincent Pastore cooks meatballs and Ray asks questions that don’t especially allow Whit to present the show, and her life’s work, in the best light. Ash, for his part, contributes little except to ineffectually direct Ray’s attention to Whit’s burgeoning belly. Because, yes, she’s successfully pregnant, and due any day.

Notwithstanding the botched promotional appearance, and Whit’s dissatisfaction that their show—already renewed for a second season—has been relegated to HGTV’s streaming service, the imminent arrival of a little bundle of joy appears to have worked wonders in terms of Ash and Whitney’s reconciliation. Whit busies herself prepping an unpressurized nursery within their passive home, while directing the handyman to conceal the control panel, lest anyone touring the joint get the wrong idea that eco-friendly abodes might somehow be bad for newborns. Ash meanwhile unveils a premature and unusual “push” present to his wife: Gifting the distressed home that the couple were planning to flip to Abshir (Barkhad Abdi), the father of Nala and her sister Hani, all three of whom just so happened to be squatting on the property when the Siegels acquired it. And if Abshir’s reaction to the good news doesn’t quite reach the effusive heights Ash and Whit were anticipating—he delivers clear signals that he plans to cash out as soon as the paperwork is signed and sealed—the couple rationalizes it as just a personality quirk of the man, so overwhelmed is he by their generosity.

Secure in the afterglow of their perceived goodness, the couple bed down for the night, after singing a Hebrew lullaby to Whit’s fetus. In the morning, Whit awakens to discover Ash sound asleep.

On the bedroom’s ceiling.

Something clearly has gone horribly wrong. Or perhaps, from another perspective, something’s gone exactly right, as if the universe has noted Ash’s general lack of gravity, and decided to make his shortcoming literal. Whatever the reason, the Earth’s natural pull has been reversed for Ash and Ash alone, and in a brilliantly surreal sequence—this episode, as with many of the others, was directed by Fielder—Asher and Whitney struggle to decipher what is going on. Ash, not exactly mastering the inverted physics—he keeps falling upwards—thinks the newly unmodded nursery is to blame. Whit, for fear of being caught up in whatever sadistic force has plagued her husband, crab-walks her way out of the building. Complicating matters: Whitney has gone into labor.

Things go from bad to worse. Determined to drive his wife to the hospital, Ash—in a turn that would’ve pleased Nabokov—instead winds up snagged in the branches of a tree. Dougie arrives just as Whit and her doula depart, and just before the fire department turns up. Nobody listens to Ash’s very precise description of what’s befallen him, with Dougie deploying a drone to get some second season footage of what he thinks is Ash’s crisis of fatherhood; while the firefighters follow the playbook for a treed bear, sawing through the branch despite Ash’s hysterical pleading. To the shock of Dougie, the firefighters, and a small gaggle of bemused onlookers, the tree branch goes one way, and Ash goes the other, tumbling up toward the heavens. The last we see of him is as he—or maybe his corpse—leaves Earth’s atmosphere, heading toward the infinite. Dougie—once again realizing his own negligence too late—sobs at the loss, while Whit delivers a healthy boy via C-section, all the while inquiring about her husband. The final shot is of firefighters and neighbors milling around in front of the accursed house, as the camera slowly tracks into the mirrored doorway. Cut to black.

It’s a pretty damn audacious finale, and yet, not all that surprising. As Jordan Peele has successfully explored how the separation between comedy and horror can be a mere matter of degrees, so Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder—the joint authors of The Curse—manage to take comedy’s natural proclivity for hyperbolics and nudge it over just enough for it to qualify as genre television. It’s there in the ambiguity of whether Nala’s curse is an actual phenomenon or just a figment of Ash’s imagination; it’s there in the weird coincidence that the distressed property Ash has bought is the one that Abshir and his daughters are crashing in. There’s shock in the way the narrative takes a sudden turn to full-on fantasy, but in many ways, the show sets us up for the moment long before it arrives.

The question, though, is why Ash is singled out for this punishment? I’ve read analyses that suggest that, with Whit bringing a new life into the world, the passive house has determined that Ash has become a threat to its perfect balance, so much waste that must be ejected. That may be a part of it, but I don’t think it’s all. Something else is going on, something that reaches beyond Ash’s failures and damns all of The Curse’s main characters.

There is no doubt the show’s main trio are horrible people (Whitney’s artist friend, Cara, who has built a career upon putting her Indigenous heritage up for sale to gullible Caucasians, is better only in the regard that she’s fully aware of the con she’s running). But there’s an aspect that sets Ash apart. Dougie is an alcoholic and a cruel manipulator, forever trying to exorcise the guilt over his wife’s death and forever backsliding into his worst aspects. Whitney is in some ways worse, an entitled rich girl desperate to escape her parents’ shadow (while taking their money), oozing performative empathy for her less-fortunate, Indigenous neighbors while telling herself that her pricey glass houses (hey, I just discovered there’s a metaphor there!) are the key to rescuing her town. (And let me just note here that if you doubted Emma Stone’s Oscar win this year, you need only watch as she navigates the various shades of Whitney’s awfulness. Her spoiled daughter tantrum when her parents try to steal some of her spotlight is, in and of itself, award-worthy.)

Both Whit and Dougie are deserving candidates for the universe’s condemnation, so why just Ash? It is, I think, because both Dougie and Whit are in profound states of denial, desperately seeking any conduit that will siphon off the cognizance of their responsibility. Asher is the perfect target: He mistakes Dougie’s meanness for amiable joshing; he looks at Whit exerting a power dynamic over him and thinks it’s love. He’s guileless and vulnerable—the perfect shlimazel—and it would not be at all shocking to discover that, because of that, Whit and Dougie harbor a deep and abiding hate for him, however repressed. He is their sacrificial lamb, ready to relieve them of their sins.

There’s another thing, though. I’ve been saying that it’s the universe that passes judgement on Asher, but that’s not really true. It’s actually Bennie Safdie and, more pointedly, the person who plays Ash, Nathan Fielder, who have condemned him to the void. Granted all storytellers—filmmakers, writers, etc.—are the puppet masters of their creations, but sometimes the creator’s invisible hand becomes not-so-invisible. Fielder’s filmic career—notably with the “reality” TV series Nathan for You and The Rehearsal (the latter of which was more cringe than even I could handle; I didn’t get past the first episode)—has frequently cast him as the sad-sack target held responsible for his social awkwardness. Like Buñuel toying with his hapless aristocrats, like Nabokov acknowledging the author’s active participation in their characters’ fates, you can sense Fielder casting final judgement on Ash for his spineless acquiescence, banishing him to the great beyond for sins that are not fully his.

It’s a rare situation when you can detect an artist saying, “Okay, this has gone far enough,” to their creation. The Curse is a social satire that indicts high-profile do-gooders for their hypocrisies, but it’s also a demonstration of how the artist can make their presence overt within their works, and speak to the audience directly about their feelings. The best of art forms a bond between creator and spectator; with the likes of The Curse, that connection becomes even more intimate.

Benny Safdie has indicated that The Curse could continue on to subsequent seasons, although it’s hard to figure out how that will happen now that one of its main characters has been evicted from the narrative. Then again, a universe that can suddenly eject a person off the face of the Earth is just as capable of ejecting him back. Had I my druthers, I’d be more inclined to continue on without poor Ash, to see how Whit and Dougie cope with their own curses once their convenient whipping boy is gone. I’m not a TV exec, though, I have no control. Maybe you are, or maybe you just have thoughts about what The Curse’s startling finale means, and what could be in store for its characters in the future. If you do, we have a comments section below, ready for your thoughts. Just be cordial and friendly when you post—let’s restrict the cringe to the TV screen.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Curse</i>’s “Green Queen” and the Plight of the Sacrificial Lamb appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Babylon 5 Rewatch

Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Midnight on the Firing Line”

The Centauri agricultural colony on Ragesh III is the victim of a surprise attack!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 1, 2024

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“Midnight on the Firing Line”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Richard Compton
Season 1, Episode 1
Production episode 103
Original air date: January 26, 1994

It was the dawn of the third age… The Centauri agricultural colony on Ragesh III is the victim of a surprise attack, with the identity of the attackers left a mystery to the viewers.

On B5, new first officer Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova is informed of one of Sinclair’s eccentricities by Garibaldi, in this case that he spends some time every day in the observation dome with his link turned off. Ivanova goes to observation to inform him of the attack on Ragesh.

In the casino, Mollari tries to inveigle Garibaldi for a favor, but is interrupted by his new aide—also his entire staff—Vir Cotto, who informs him of the Ragesh attack. Mollari calls for an immediate emergency session of the council; he also receives apologetic condolences from Delenn and G’Kar, though Mollari is suspicious of the latter, despite his insistence on being ignorant of what has happened.

Ships in the area have been attacked by raiders. Garibaldi and one of his people take a couple of Starfuries out to investigate the latest attack.

New telepath Talia Winters reports in to Ivanova, who brushes her off.

Security footage comes in from Ragesh, revealing that the attacking ships are Narn, and they’re now occupying Ragesh. Mollari confronts G’Kar, and they almost come to blows. However, Mollari bumped into Winters en route to confronting G’Kar, and she was able to sense his murderous rage, so she warned security, who separate the ambassadors before they can kill each other. Later, in the ambassador’s quarters, Mollari apologizes to Sinclair, while the latter says that he’s agreed to call the emergency council session he wanted. However, Mollari has more skin in the game, as it were: his nephew Carn, is on Ragesh. Mollari pulled some strings to put him in charge of the agricultural colony in lieu of military service. He swears that if Carn dies, he will stop at nothing to go to war with the Narn.

Sinclair invites Kosh to attend the meeting, and he agrees to do so, but makes no commitment as to how he will behave.

Vir informs Mollari that the Centauri government has decided that there will be no response. Ragesh is too distant and too unimportant a part of the Republic to be worth dedicating the resources necessary to retake it. Mollari is livid and instructs Vir not to tell anyone what the government decided. He will try to talk the council into taking action against the Narn, and hope that the council’s action will embarrass his government into taking some as well.

Winters asks Garibaldi why Ivanova is being so standoffish. Garibaldi suggests meeting up with Ivanova at the bar when she’s off duty, and she might be more approachable. He also invites her to his quarters to share his “second favorite thing,” which sounds incredibly creepy.

G’Kar meets with Sinclair and making it clear that the Narn are out for Centauri blood, hoping to avenge their years of being subjugated by them. G’Kar also reminds Sinclair that the Narn sold weapons to Earth during their war with the Minbari, but Sinclair counters that the Narns will sell to anyone who’ll buy. The commander also is less than impressed with the Narns’ sneak attack on a civilian target.

Sinclair is instructed by a senator to abstain from the vote. There’s a presidential election about to happen, and Earth can’t afford to act as the galaxy’s police—at least not until after the election.

Garibaldi has turned up a connection among all the ships that were raided: they all bought their transport routes from the same company—which, it seems, has a leak. Sinclair decides to lead the Starfury contingent to protect what they believe to be the next target, leaving Ivanova to run the council meeting. Sinclair also tells her that he couldn’t find her to tell her the instructions from Earth, ahem ahem, so she’ll just have to vote yes to sanctions against the Narn…

In the council meeting, G’Kar reveals two things that kneecap Mollari’s plan. One is that he knows full well that the Centauri government’s official response is to do nothing. How can he ask the council to take an action his own government won’t take?

The second is the revelation that Ragesh was a Narn colony which was then taken from them by the Centauri when they conquered the Narn. The attack was simply taking back their world, and as “evidence” he provides a recording made by Mollari’s nephew Carn saying that they welcome their new Narn overlords and everything’s hunky dory and pay no attention to that gun to my head.

G’Kar moves that the motion to sanction Narn be dismissed, and it passes.

Sinclair and the Starfuries (totally the name of my next band) drive off the raiders, but doesn’t chase them, instead checking an asteroid field in the opposite direction, where he finds the command-and-control for the raiders.

There’s a Narn on that C&C base—as Sinclair said, the Narn will sell weapons to anyone. But they also leave someone behind to make sure they know how to use the weapons properly. That Narn also has data crystals that prove that—Carn’s testimony to the contrary—the attack on Ragesh was wholly unprovoked. Sinclair gives G’Kar an ultimatum: pull out of Ragesh, or he will show this evidence to the council. G’Kar chooses door #1.

Winters meets Ivanova in the bar, and the latter explains that her mother was a low-level telepath who refused to join Psi Corps. So she took the option of suppressing her telepathy with drugs. Those drugs changed her forever, and eventually drove her to suicide. So Ivanova is never likely to look kindly upon any member of the Corps.

Garibaldi has convinced Delenn to join him for his second favorite thing: a viewing of Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, complete with popcorn. It’s not clear what Delenn is more baffled by, the cartoon or the popcorn…

The episode ends with the announcement that President Luis Santiago has been reelected.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair is a legacy, as his family have served in the military going back to the Battle of Britain. His grandfather, also in EarthForce, advised his grandson to trust what you see over propaganda. Because of that, early on before it’s revealed who’s behind the attack on Ragesh, Sinclair believes firmly that the Minbari weren’t responsible, because what he saw during the Earth-Minbari War showed him that the Minbari would never engage in a surprise attack on a helpless target.

Ivanova is God. Ivanova says she’s voting for Marie Crane for Earth President over the incumbent Santiago because the latter has a weak chin and she doesn’t trust someone with a weak chin.

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is, it turns out, a Daffy Duck fan. Despite this, he never once tells Mollari that he’s despicable…

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Earth’s first alien contact was with the Centauri Republic. The Centauri made a lot of wild claims to what they perceived as gullible humans, including that humanity was an offshoot of the Centauri. (When Garibaldi reminds Mollari of this, Mollari dismisses it as a clerical error.)

Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. The Narn obviously targeted Ragesh to see how the Centauri would react. It’s a gambit designed to see if war is feasible. That the Centauri declined to respond likely meant it was a successful one, even though they had to give up Ragesh.

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Any humans who are discovered to be telepaths are given three choices: join the Psi Corps, go to prison, or have your telepathy tamped down by drugs.

The Shadowy Vorlons. Sinclair visits Kosh when he’s out of his encounter suit, but he’s hiding behind a screen, though something is glowing back there. Kosh also seems to teleport into his encounter suit…

Looking ahead. Mollari tells Sinclair that Centauri sometimes dream of the moment of their death. In Mollari’s case, it’ll be being strangled by G’Kar while he strangles G’Kar. He had the dream when he was young, and was gobsmacked when he first met G’Kar and recognized him from his prophetic dream. This event Mollari dreamt will be seen down the line, more than once…

Welcome aboard. Paul Hampton is back from “The Gathering” for his second and final appearance as the senator. Peter Trencher plays Carn.

Trivial matters. With Tamlyn Tomita, Johnny Sekka, and Patricia Tallman declining to return after “The Gathering,” we meet two of their replacements: Claudia Christian as the new first officer and Andrea Thompson as the new Psi Corps telepath. In addition, this episode marks the first appearance of Stephen Furst as Vir.

Richard Biggs, Bill Mumy, and Caitlin Brown are all listed in the opening credits as playing, respectively, Dr. Stephen Franklin, Lennier, and Na’Toth, but they do not appear and the episode gives no indication who they are.

Both Delenn and G’Kar have new makeup/facial prosthetics. In Delenn’s case, there’s less of it, as they’re no longer trying to make her look more masculine (or at least more androgynous), and just in general, she looks more “traditionally” feminine. G’Kar’s has simply been refined a bit, one hopes in a way that made it easier for Andreas Katsulas in the makeup chair…

This episode has the first reference to spoo, a meat dish popular among the Centauri and Narn (and also “oops” spelled backwards). J. Michael Straczynski also had a food called spoo in an episode of She-Ra: Princess of Power that he wrote.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I’m in the middle of fifteen things, all of them annoying.” There are some ways in which this feels like a do-over of “The Gathering.” You’ve got character introductions (in this case to Ivanova, Vir, and Winters), you’ve got Garibaldi investigating things, you’ve got the senator telling Sinclair to do something he doesn’t want to do, you’ve got G’Kar and the Narn being the bad guys and plotting evil things of evil, you’ve got Sinclair bopping off on his own and leaving his first officer in charge of a council meeting, you’ve got a council meeting where, once again, G’Kar doesn’t apparently have a seat, instead leaving poor Andreas Katsulas to wander around during it.

And you’ve got epic rants from Mollari, though the Centauri gets much more focus here than he did in the pilot, which is all to the good given that Peter Jurasik was the best thing about the prior episode.

The Centauri/Narn conflict is one of the bedrocks of B5, and it is very much on display here. While G’Kar is still being written as a one-note mustache-twirling villain, Katsulas imbues him with a palpable sense of outrage and fury. He’s matched by Jurasik, whose anger both at the Narn for their surprise attack on a civilian target that includes his nephew and at his government for their spineless response drives the episode.

Stephen Furst’s Vir is another character like G’Kar who will improve as the series goes on, but his introduction, alas, creates very little impression beyond “oh look, it’s Flounder from Animal House with worse hair and sharper teeth!” (The Centauri had massive incisors initially, though that makeup choice was dropped after the first season or so, probably as a favor to the actors.)

By contrast, Claudia Christian creates an instant, excellent impression as Ivanova with her cynicism, her sarcasm, her fatalism, and her bluntness. Though she also has a tendency to speak without contractions in this first appearance which comes across as mannered, and which will also be dropped before long.

As for Winters, there’s nothing to really distinguish Andrea Thompson from Patricia Tallman’s Alexander beyond hair color, at least so far.

This is a stronger opening to the series than “The Gathering” was by far, setting up one of the show’s core conflicts as well as establishing some of the character dynamics. And Garibaldi is, at least, portrayed as competent in this one, actually solving the case and not faffing about the way he was last time, plus we get his Daffy Duck fandom, which is delightful.

Next week: “Soul Hunter.”[end-mark]

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News Doctor Who

The Next Season of Doctor Who Is Going to Introduce Us to Space Babies (and Much More)

Space babies! Dinosaurs! The Beatles!

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 1, 2024

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There’s a new trailer for the upcoming season of Doctor Who, and it’s full of hints, excitement, dinosaurs, Ncuti Gatwa in some incredible outfits, talking space babies, and, yes, Jinkx Monsoon. But the BBC has also released the intriguing list of episode titles, along with the writers and directors of each episode. This basically amounts to a list of hints that we’re all going to read into, for better or worse!

• “Space Babies,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Julie Anne Robinson
• “The Devil’s Chord,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Ben Chessell
• “Boom,” written by Steven Moffat, directed by Julie Anne Robinson
• “73 Yards,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
• “Dot and Bubble,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
• “Rogue,” written by Kate Herron and Briony Redman, directed by Ben Chessell
• “The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Jamie Donoughue
• “Empire of Death,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Jamie Donoughue

It is pretty much impossible to see a Steven Moffat-penned episode with a single-word title and not think of “Blink” (even though he already wrote at least two more one-word-named episodes). The other non-Davies writers, Kate Herron and Briony Redman, are an interesting pair: Herron was the director of the first season of Loki, and Redman has so far only written short films—but she and Herron are listed on IMDb as the co-writers of the Sims movie.

As for the directors: Julie Anne Robinson has directed episodes of Bridgerton and The Good Place; Ben Chessell was director for four episodes of the excellent Aussie series Deadloch; Dylan Holmes Williams directed four episodes of Servant; and Jamie Donoughue has directed A Discovery of Witches and The Last Kingdom. All are newcomers to Who.

A sparse few details have been announced about the first two episodes: Golda Rosheuvel (Bridgerton) guest stars in “Space Babies,” and Jinkx Monsoon appears in “The Devil’s Chord” as “the Doctor’s most powerful enemy yet”—who the Doctor and Ruby encounter while visiting the ’60s and meeting The Beatles.

Along with Gatwa as the Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday, a very long list of actors will appear on this season of Doctor Who: Michelle Greenidge, Angela Wynter, Anita Dobson, Aneurin Barnard, Yasmin Finney, Jonathan Groff, Gwïon Morris Jones, Bonnie Langford, Genesis Lynea, Jemma Redgrave, Lenny Rush, Indira Varma, Callie Cooke, Dame Siân Phillips, Alexander Devrient, Bhav Joshi, Majid Mehdizadeh-Valoujerdy, Tachia Newall and Caoilinn Springall.

It’s going to get crowded in the TARDIS. (Just kidding! Just kidding.) Doctor Who premieres May 10th on Disney+. [end-mark]

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News Among Us

Among Us Cast Now Includes Alums from Legion, Yellowjackets, and Orange Is the New Black

Honestly, cast Dan Stevens in anything, we’re down

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 27, 2024

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The adaptation of the mobile game Among Us has added some additional voices to its roster. We found out earlier this month that Elijah Wood, Randall Park, Yvette Nicole Brown, and Ashley Johnson were voicing various guys on a starship where a shapeshifting alien has taken root. And today, we’ve got three more names to add to the list playing characters identified by a color of the rainbow who may or may not be an evil alien in disguise.

According to Deadline, Dan Stevens, Liv Hewson, and Kimiko Glenn are lending their voices to the animated production. Stevens’ previous credits are varied, and include the lead in FX’s Legion (pictured above), starring as a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing dude in Godzilla x Kong, and taking over the voice of Korvo on Solar Opposites. Hewson broke out in Yellowjackets, where they play the teenaged version of Van, and Glenn starred on Orange is the New Black as Brook Soso.

The goal of the Among Us game (and presumably, the show), is to uncover who on the spaceship has been replaced/taken over by a nefarious alien who, à la Mystique from the X-Men comics, can shift to look like whomever they want.

Here are the descriptions of each of the newly cast characters, per Deadline:

Stevens will voice ‘Blue’ — Doctor
Knowledgeable, charming, so hot
Task: physical and emotional care
Fun Fact: also has a doctorate in poetry

Hewson will voice ‘Black’ — Geologist
Stoic, coarse, rock-like
Task: supervising the ore shipments
Fun Fact: prefers rocks to people

Glenn will voice ‘Cyan’ – Gemologist
Healing through crystals
Task: supervising the vibes
Fun Fact: the vibes are bad

I’m into it! The show comes from Owen Dennis and is in production under CBS Studios’ Eye Animation Productions. No news yet on what streamer, however, the series will eventually end up. [end-mark]

The post <i>Among Us</i> Cast Now Includes Alums from <i>Legion</i>, <i>Yellowjackets</i>, and <i>Orange Is the New Black</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News The Spiderwick Chronicles

Unicorns, Fairies, and Ogres, Oh My! The Spiderwick Chronicles Trailer Gives Us Magical Beings & A Mission to Save Humanity

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 26, 2024

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We have another trailer for the adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles, and this one features the home that the Grace family moves into (there’s a tree in the middle) and the quest that the Grace children must take on—find all the pages in their dad’s field guide on magical creatures (unicorns and fairies are real!) before the shapeshifting ogre Mulgarath gets them and destroys humanity, as ogres are apparently wont to do.

Here’s the official synopsis for the series:

The Spiderwick Chronicles is based on the popular middle grade books by authors Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi and was originally supposed to air on Disney+. Disney passed on the series, however, saying that it was too dark for their brand (and also based on IP they don’t own). Roku, however, picked the show up for our viewing pleasure.

In addition to Slater, the series stars Joy Bryant, Lyon Daniels, Noah Cottrell, Mychala Lee, Jack Dylan Grazer, Alyvia Alyn Lind, and Charlayne Woodard. It’s co-showrun by Lock & Key and Star Trek: Discovery alum Aron Eli Coleit and She Hulk director Kat Coiro.

The eight-episode first season is set to premiere on the streaming platform on April 19, 2024.

Check out the latest trailer below. [end-mark]

The post Unicorns, Fairies, and Ogres, Oh My! The Spiderwick Chronicles Trailer Gives Us Magical Beings & A Mission to Save Humanity appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

All You Need to Know About That [REDACTED] Reference in Star Trek: Discovery’s Season 5 Premiere

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery has premiered… Spoilers ahead!

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 4, 2024

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Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery, Season Five.

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery has premiered, and the overarching challenge facing Captain Burnham and her crew has its roots in an episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I’m talking, of course, about the Progenitors, who we first met in the April 1993 TNG episode, “The Chase.” In that episode, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) reunites with his old archeology teacher, Richard Galen (Norman Lloyd), who wants him to leave Starfleet and come with him on an expedition to finish his research on a secret project that, when revealed, will shock sentient life to its core. Picard refuses, and Galen subsequently dies when his shuttle is mysteriously attacked.

The captain realizes the attack has something to do with his mentor’s work and goes on an interstellar search to find out why. He and his crew uncover that Galen was gathering DNA chains—“seed codes,” if you will—from planets across the known universe, all of which appear to have connected sequences that can only come from someone intentionally coding them as such billions of years ago. The Klingons, the Cardassians and, in the end, the Romulans, are also looking to find the missing pieces of the code on other planets, and for the most part, the species work to one-up each other (except for Starfleet, of course) and try to hoard the codes they find.

Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) gets the last sample on an almost-lifeless planet while the others fight and puts the code together. When she does so, an automatic message plays on her tricorder from “The Progenitors,” a four-billion-year-old species who has long since died out, but who sprinkled their DNA over multiple planets so that life in their humanoid likeness would rise after they were gone.

The message ends with the Progenitor being happy that all these species came together to unlock the message. “It was our hope that you would have to come together in fellowship and companionship to hear this message,” the recording says. “And if you can see and hear me, our hope has been fulfilled. You are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish, that you too would know life, and would keep alive our memory. There is something of us in each of you, and so, something of you in each other. Remember us.”

The rub, of course, is that the different species spent more time fighting each other than working together, though the last scene, where Picard talks to the Romulan captain, suggests that maybe this knowledge will slightly improve relations for the better.

The concept is a heady one, but is something that hasn’t been explored much in Trek since then, suggesting that those who heard the Progentior’s message didn’t do such a great job in remembering their words. The episode, however, stuck with Discovery showrunner Michelle Paradise, and she and her writers’ room wanted to bring the concept back to the franchise.

“We were originally exploring the Progenitors in Season Four,” Paradise said in a roundtable discussion that Reactor attended. “And back then we were thinking that we would have them toward the end of the season, but as we really got into exploring the season itself, the Ten-C felt like enough, and it felt like it was just too much story. But the idea of exploring the Progenitors—Where we come from, where did life come from? How do we all look the same but different?—really stuck with us, and so it felt like a really wonderful jumping off point for the fifth season, even before we knew it was our final season, in terms of what our characters were going through and where we wanted to take them emotionally.”

As we see in the season’s first two episodes, Burnham and her crew have a chase of their own related to the Progenitors—it’s up to them to collect all the pieces of another message from the species who started it all over four billion years ago, before the two rogue actors, Moll and L’ak, do.

The first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery‘s fifth and final season are now streaming on Paramount+. Subsequent episodes drop weekly, with the finale airing May 30, 2024. [end-mark]

The post All You Need to Know About That [REDACTED] Reference in Star Trek: Discovery’s Season 5 Premiere appeared first on Reactor.

News Earth Abides

George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides Will Be a Limited Series for MGM+

A lone man will once again face a changed world

By Molly Templeton

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Published on March 26, 2024

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The adaptation wheel goes round and round, and once again it’s landed on a science fiction classic about a man existing in distressing conditions. George R. Stewart’s 1949 novel Earth Abides is the latest book to move from “in development” to “actual series happening,” with MGM+ planning a six-episode limited series based on the post-apocalyptic novel. Vikings’ Alexander Ludwig (pictured above) is set to star.

We do love the post-apocalypse (The Last of Us, Fallout, The 100) and we sure do love terrible viruses (The Last of Us, Station Eleven). The official description of the show’s take on these perennial favorite horrors, per The Hollywood Reporter, goes like this:

The best part of this description is definitely “brilliant but solitary young geologist.” I hope he really loves a good rock.

The show has as its showrunner Todd Komarnicki, the writer of the movie Sully. He and his team are clearly moving fast on this one; production begins next month, and the show may premiere later this year. [end-mark]

The post George R. Stewart’s <i>Earth Abides</i> Will Be a Limited Series for MGM+ appeared first on Reactor.