Ranking Every Season of Gilmore Girls

According to Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, there’s “no way” the show would get made today, but holy hell, are we glad it was. Dripping in cozy, small-town charm, Gilmore Girls paired its zany, quick-fire dialogue with some of the most emotionally honest relationships on TV.

Over seven long seasons and a revival, the series explored themes of ambition, family feuds, and the cost of wanting more for your children than you ever had, all while maintaining a genuine reverence for the minutiae of daily life. Still, over 150+ episodes, you’d think there’d be some real stinkers.

What’s incredible is that there aren’t any truly bad episodes of Gilmore Girls; they’re all entertaining on some level because if an episode was ever light on humor or plot, it could always choose from a stable of delightful supporting characters to save the day.

There was Taylor, the tyrannical overlord of Stars Hollow, whose obsession with civic law and order bit him in the ass over and over again. Hapless Kirk, popping up with another new scheme or identity. Mrs. Kim, Lane’s strict mother, who struck fear in the heart of her daughter but also came in clutch at the wildest of times. The list of fascinating oddballs could go on and on. So, while there were standout episodes over the years and certainly ones that felt a little too invested in just maintaining the vibe, it’s interesting to look at how well each season landed as a whole.

Here’s our ranking of all the seasons of Gilmore Girls, including the Netflix revival…

8. Season 7

This is the only season of Gilmore Girls without creator Amy Sherman-Palladino or Daniel Palladino as a showrunner or a writer, and it shows. Season 7 lacks the series’ fundamental spark, and its screwball dialogue often feels like someone else trying to write (fairly decent, as it goes) Gilmore Girls fanfic rather than the real deal.

Season 7 explores the inevitable end of both Lorelai and Christopher’s rushed marriage and of Rory and Logan’s fragile relationship, but it also ends the series entirely until Netflix’s revival 10 years later. And what are we left with when we think it’s all over? Rory goes off to cover Barack Obama’s election campaign, Lorelai and Luke get closer again but don’t fully get back together, and there’s a bittersweet last meal at Luke’s diner, where so many jokes have kept us going over the years.

Season 7 is an imperfect and uneven farewell to Stars Hollow and the Gilmore women, but at least it’s an ending. And we had no idea that we’d get another one a decade later…

7. Season 6

Fans started to feel like the show was running out of steam in season 6, which seemed to spin its wheels with a lot of filler.

Luke and Lorelai almost get married, then break up. Rory and Logan break up but make amends. Rory makes up with Lorelai and goes back to school. Luke gets a surprisingly annoying daughter he wasn’t aware existed, who feels like a contrived plot device deployed to drive a wedge between him and Lorelai so she can get back with Christopher and everyone watching can cry “oh no!” in unison. That’s about all season 6 has to offer in terms of major developments, as it serves as an attempted reset for a show that had run into narrative problems after so many years on the air.

The romantic tension between Luke and Lorelai is gone; there is virtually no spark left between Rory and Logan, and the many supporting characters of Stars Hollow have very little left to do, aside from Kirk, a perfect angel who never did anything wrong and became a very unlikely standout in the series as it unfolded.

Season 6 is definitely better than season 7, but it’s still far from the show’s best.

6. Season 3

Season 3 is definitely darker than the previous two seasons, which is one reason it divided fans who were used to the show leaning into its more lighthearted stories. This is where the fractures between the main characters really set in and expose who they think they are versus who they’re actually becoming.

Rory’s breakup with Dean and her blooming relationship with Jess are the backbone of the season: Rory chooses romantic chaos over sweet comfort and has to reckon with the consequences. As a result, we start to suspect that Rory’s glorious, successful future as an award-winning journalist is at risk because she has her mother’s impulsiveness.

Some of the episodes leading up to Rory’s choice are brilliant, particularly the kinetic Stars Hollow Dance Marathon in “They Shoot Gilmores, Don’t They?” But Rory’s will-they-won’t-they with the volatile Jess has built up so much tension that when they finally get together, the air goes out of the season and it never really recovers. We’re left to watch the inevitable fallout of a shitty teen relationship unfold.

Lorelai is also completely underserved in season 3, taking a backseat to Rory’s relationship drama, though her increasing conflict with Emily and Richard, particularly around Rory’s future, becomes more personal. Her interfering folks are no longer obstacles; they’re rivals.

Gilmore Girls’ third season is about how you don’t grow up all at once, but rather through a series of often painful decisions. It’s compelling stuff, just intermittently compelling.

5. A Year in the Life

Amy Sherman-Palladino’s triumphant return to Netflix’s Gilmore Girls revival series came with a caveat: these new installments wouldn’t necessarily be the snappy, tightly-paced stuff we were used to in the original run, but rather four feature-length episodes covering a year in the life of the Gilmore women. It turned out to be a rather melancholic reflection on the passage of time, which meant losing some of the pace that the old version of the show maintained. Still, A Year in the Life had payoffs to spare, offering an overload of nostalgia (and a surprisingly divisive ending.)

Pretty much everyone gets a moment to shine in the revival series. The episodes make room for most of the show’s iconic characters, big and small. We find a despondent Rory, whose career has flatlined in her 30s, having an affair with an already married Logan, while Lorelai isn’t sure if she and Luke will ever get married. Emily is grieving Richard and is clinging to Lorelai, but she ultimately embraces single life in the most Emily way possible. The whole thing ends with Luke and Lorelai tying the knot and Rory admitting she’s pregnant. We never find out who the father is, but she runs into basically everyone she’s ever slept with during the series, so it could potentially be any of them. Arguably, none of them would be worth keeping around at this point, though Jess remains the best fit for Rory after turning his life around.

More an emotional aftermath than a continuation of the original show, A Year in the Life wasn’t a hit with every fan, but it certainly wasn’t low on emotional depth. Whether it was enough to make for a satisfying ending to the series is honestly a matter of opinion, but we enjoyed it.

4. Season 4

The fourth season of Gilmore Girls feels massively unbalanced. It’s inevitable because Rory has to go off to Yale eventually, but the separation between the college and Stars Hollow makes for uneven stuff as we switch between some less-than-thrilling small-town events and the reality of Rory’s tough education.

For the first time, Rory isn’t the smartest person around. She’s surrounded by equally smart people. The constant affirmation from the denizens of Stars Hollow is gone. Rory is simply not getting the validation she craves, and how can she really achieve anything if there’s no one there to pat her on the back and tell her she’s such a special snowflake? Finding some semblance of safety in Dean’s (married!) arms is a real low point for her here.

Back in Stars Hollow, Lorelai has empty nest syndrome and pours all of her energy into opening the Dragonfly Inn. Luckily, the friendship between Lorelai and her best friend Sookie becomes so delightful that we can’t help but root for them as they girlboss the crap out of their new endeavor. This season also sets up the reality of a Luke and Lorelai relationship so well – it feels completely earned when they finally show each other how they really feel.

Though season 4 sets the stage for future seasons, it gets a little lost along the way and has too many low points to rank higher on this list.

3. Season 5

A string of relentless consequences, season 5 thrives on Rory’s spiral into being a fairly loathsome character as she gives up on her dreams after meeting Logan Huntzberger, a rich, privileged playboy who isn’t so much a romantic choice as a lifestyle that Rory decides to embrace after her dalliance with small-town Dean goes absolutely nowhere and she becomes overwhelmed by the pressure she’s put on herself to succeed.

Logan is glamorous and toxic (not to mention highly punchable), which effortlessly keys into Rory’s penchant for recklessness. By the end of the season, she’s dropped out of Yale and is living in her grandparents’ pool house as her potential dwindles in this depressing but rather more realistic season of the show.

Season 5 also thrives when it explores the new relationship between Luke and Lorelai. It’s sweet, but the cracks start to show because Lorelai still hasn’t reckoned with so many of her personal flaws. Elsewhere, Lane and Paris’ storylines become more compelling when Lane starts dating Zach, and Paris mourns old man Asher by jumping into a relationship with Doyle, whose personality immediately complements hers.

This season’s place on the ranking may rankle Logan haters (he is intensely problematic,) but the drama is rarely higher in the series than in season 5, with the unbearable divide between Rory and Lorelai seriously at its peak.

2. Season 1

Straight out of the gate, Gilmore Girls feels fresh and different, with the eccentric town of Stars Hollow coming off as remarkably dynamic given the low stakes of the season’s plots.

When we’re first introduced to the mother-daughter team of Lorelai and Rory in season 1, their rapid-fire banter easily finds its pace and we’re just along for the ride. Through Amy Sherman-Palladino’s sparkling dialogue, the pair takes us on an exhaustive tour of Stars Hollow and Chilton, and we meet so many kooky characters that our heads are spinning by the final episode. Luke, Miss Patty, Babette, Taylor, Sookie, Lane, Jackson, Paris, Tristan, Emily, Richard, Kirk …they’re all so, so much, but we cannot get enough!

There are also key conflicts in play where the comedy gives way to real drama: Lorelai is not happy about making a deal with her rich, estranged parents to ensure Rory gets the best possible schooling, and Rory is meek and out of place among the rich kids at Chilton.

Season 1 is great at building the world of Gilmore Girls, but it’s still a little rough around the edges. Rory is in her passive era here, more reactive than active – defined as a good kid admired by almost everyone around her. She’s just a little too perfect. But there’s also too much in the way of good stuff to be entirely bothered by it.

The pilot is spectacular, the explorations of class divide in “Kill Me Now” and “Rory’s Birthday Parties” still hit hard, and the evolution of Paris into one of the show’s top-tier characters truly begins in “Paris is Burning.” Some episodes haven’t aged particularly well (the awkward gender politics of “That Damn Donna Reed” stand out), but season 1 remains a terrific watch overall.

1. Season 2

The second season of Gilmore Girls is where the show really hits its stride, and it’s hard not to rank it lower as a result. Where season 1 was still focused on the basics, season 2 is much less interested in them, choosing instead to deepen the characters and introduce flaws in Rory that lay the foundation for her mistakes in later seasons.

No longer a wide-eyed newcomer at Chilton, Rory’s unlikely friendship with the neurotic Paris becomes one of the show’s quiet triumphs as they compete for attention yet truly see each other for who they really are. While Paris breaks her own back to be the best, Rory starts lying and misjudging people as her once-admirable intelligence begins to muddy her relationships. Meanwhile, Lorelai’s fear of commitment is infuriating but understandable; her romantic choices with Max reflect the arrested development that set in when she decided to have Rory at such a young age. Yes, Lorelai is witty and independent, but she is also low-key terrified of being alone, which is why people who hate Christopher always get a free pass.

Season 2 is not without its flaws. Sometimes it does coast by on cozy vibes, but the Rory-Dean-Jess love triangle is electric, and the tension building between everyone who knows that Jess and Rory are doomed starts in earnest. The pair’s first kiss in “I Can’t Get Started” is up there with the show’s most dangerous and thrilling moments.

That’s all, folks! Would you rank these seasons differently? As always, let us know in the comments!

Wuthering Heights Review: Bastardization of Brontë Still Makes for Bodice-Ripping Delight

In the 19th century, the French had a nickname for sex that translates to “the little death.” Something about the stillness after release. Well, in Emerald Fennell’s skewed but seductive reworking of Wuthering Heights, death is loud, violent, and might best be described as the biggest, er, pleasure. It’s an aphrodisiac; a lightly seasoned fetish where morbidity and mortality entangle themselves along a fog-strewn countryside.

This is clear in the movie’s opening moments where the presumable sounds of a man’s groping excitements turn out to be his final death rattles as we see him swing from a noose into view. As he reaches his final convulsions, a titillated public gawks on, holding its breath in anticipation. In an instant, the filmmaker seems eager to acknowledge her kinship with a fella who knows how to transfix the leering crowd.

Fennell’s lurid and dramatic reimagining of Emily Brontë’s literary classic is similarly stormy, aggressive, and distracted with kink. And its biggest turn-ons would seem to be the kind of lush excesses associated with studio melodramas of yesteryear. In the press, the writer-director has name-dropped James Cameron’s Titanic as a formative influence, and it’s definitely a touchstone in this Wuthering Heights’ more maudlin moments. However, the director and her department heads seem to take much and more gratification from emulating the lushness of Golden Age Hollywood romances of the 1930s, including most vividly Gone with the Wind and its blood-red sunsets being transferred from Tara to north Yorkshire. Yet there are wider, more perverse influences too.

Never mind the crumbling old house of the film’s title, the very landscape on which this ruin sags evokes the expressionism of Weimar Germany and the earliest onscreen oddities of the literary Gothic that the Brontë sisters helped pioneer. The drooping, jagged rock faces of the English moors loom over the shabby Wuthering Heights house to the point of virtually collapsing atop the damn thing. It’s as if both hearth and land have become exhausted after centuries of overstimulation.

This is not the Victorian England in which the Brontës lived, nor the feel-good fairytale land of modern streaming service bodice-rippers, which gloss the genre over with a veneer as hot as a season’s greetings card from Hallmark. Nay, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights lives in a seething, ancient decrepit place that only existed in the movies of yore, and in its best moments she transports viewers back to the kind of sweeping spectacle that can beguile and enrapture. At one point upon “moving up” in the world, Margot Robbie’s vain and capricious Cathy Earnshaw even enters a new bedroom that literalizes the basic conceit of German Expressionism, with the walls painted by her dithering husband to resemble her freckled skin.

The sumptuous designs—derived from what must be the fevered dreams of production designer Suzie Davies, costumer Jacqueline Durran, and cinematographer Linus Sandgren—conspire, casting a spell so blinding in its orgy for the eyes that it even distracts from whatever litany of sins the movie might conceal. Which for English professors and purists of the page, will surely be legion.

This is immediately apparent after the aforementioned opening prologue at a hanging witnessed by a young, nameless boy who will one day soon be known as Heathcliff (Owen Cooper as a child, Jacob Elordi for the rest of the picture). Gone is the framing device about a ghost on the moors and a lost love. This Wuthering Heights is instead a pitch black fairytale about a boy and a girl, with only the morality of the Marquis de Sade between them. Heathcliff is a wild, feral thing, who earns his name after he is adopted (stolen, really) by a drunk and hateful man from generations of squandered wealth, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes).

Earnshaw brings the boy home to his dying house on the moors, and to his daughter Cathy (initially Charlotte Mellington), whom he allows to name the vagrant. Young Cathy also quite visibly falls in love with the lad, despite the cruel patriarch using young Heathcliff as both a servant and glorified whipping boy. The old man even savors denying the child an education in basic reading and writing. Somehow, despite this unhappy childhood, Heathcliff grows up to be the strapping Elordi while Cathy blossoms into Margot Robbie at her most bewitching. As adults, the infatuation between Cathy and Heathcliff is inescapable to everyone. Yet they will not consummate.

Cathy is acutely, selfishly, aware of her beauty, and the effect it has on Heathcliff as well as the new neighbor, poor, clueless Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Mr. Linton and his young, impressionable ward Isabella (Alison Oliver) have moved into the luxurious estate across the moors, Thrushcross Grange, where every room is bedecked in crystal or pastels more perfect than the six-foot dollhouse Isabella has brought with her. In short order, Cathy has a marriage proposal from the kind but diffident wealthy man, and a choice to make between the desires of her heart—and flesh—which lean toward the dark, brooding silhouette of Elordi’s six-and-a-half foot frame, and Edgar’s comforts. Yet it is what occurs after she errs, causing Heathcliff to abandon the range for five years before returning as a man of mysterious wealth, where the real duplicities and depravity begin.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is less an adaptation of the novel than it is a lascivious daydream of what every young, repressed non-reader imagines when staring up at its stylized title on a dorm room wall, or while listening to the spooky synths of Kate Bush crooning about running along ‘em moors. It is Fifty Shades of Technicolor Rouge, wherein each fetid desire, and implicit moral corruption that’s simply suggested on the page, is made achingly, swooningly vivid in a movie that jettisons the multigenerational degradation and even supernatural underpinnings of the book in favor of an epically bad romance.

The thing has as much concern with literary fidelity as Cathy or Heathcliff do for their eventual spouses. Its sense of historical verisimilitude is also proudly abandoned for wondrous postmodern costumes with plunging necklines and 1980s music video accoutrements that suggest this has a better chance of existing in the same world as Coppola’s equally indulgent Dracula as it does our own.

The thing is that, for the most part, these liberties work. At its best moments, Wuthering Heights is a thunderclap of lurid melodrama flashing across the gloom of night!

It has indeed been decades since a major Hollywood studio has produced a populist and overwhelmingly romantic fantasy like this. As a Millennial, Fennell grew up with many of the aforementioned touchstones from the ‘90s and she succeeds in echoing their transportive qualities via the florid escapism of rainy rendezvouses and snapped corsets.

There has been plenty of chatter before release about Elordi’s casting in the film and whether he matches the ambiguous complexion described in the book as having a “dark” and “gypsy” like affectation. However, the choice of the looming Australian proves to be Fennell’s masterstroke. He brings a rugged dynamism to Heathcliff (he’s also the only member of the ensemble who bothers attempting a Yorkshire accent). Even the way he smokes his pipe while surveying Cathy’s pampered married life with smiling contempt burns to the touch.

When matched with a Robbie who’s willing to lean into every inch of her ethereal beauty, and in a role where she need not pretend to be oblivious of its effect, the chemistry begs to come with a warning label about handling with fire-repellent gloves. Fennell might shamelessly borrow from Selznick and Curtiz with grandiose shots of Heathcliff and Cathy on the moors, but when Elordi lifts the foot-shorter Robbie up to meet him by her corset, the crackle is all-consuming.

Even so, I suspect the relationship that will provoke the most discourse after release is not Heathcliff and Cathy’s, but what occurs when a vengeful other man decides to set his sights on Oliver’s poor, hapless Isabella. Heathcliff’s loveless seduction of an innocent was always among his greatest cruelties of the novel, but in this film it takes on perverse dimensions, particularly with Oliver playing the younger Linton with the pent up lust of a tumblr fangirl who spends her days reading Wuthering Heights fan fiction. Which is to say, she might embody much of the film and novel’s modern target audience, making the depravities of our Byronic womanizer take on a loaded context that transgresses lines you’re not entirely sure the movie is aware exists.

In fact, the film’s entire footsying with slash-fiction fancies while maintaining the dark malice at the core of Heathcliff and Cathy’s shared souls is where the picture runs into its biggest hurdles. Wuthering Heights ’26 approaches the end of its story with the conventionality of a standard BBC melodrama. But the thing about the Wuthering Heights is Cathy and Heathcliff are the worst, which makes their doomed dalliances pitiful but hardly aspirational. Yet 11th hour attempts to paint this with a Jack-and-Rose brush onscreen seem sudden, unearned, and smear the picture Fennell had so meticulously composed moments earlier. The final minutes of the movie, in fact, peter out when they should be crescendoing.

Despite warping and drastically reducing the scope of the story, it still feels too vast and unwieldy for Fennell to firmly get her arms around. That probably won’t matter though to most audiences, including ultimately myself. The filmmaker has such command of the tone and vibe she seeks that it is easy to become drunk on the sheer beauty of her and Sandgren’s cavernous compositions in the dilapidated ruins of Wuthering Heights’ carriage house. Sunlight steals through a hundred cracks in the ceiling, creating an unlikely halo around Heathcliff and Cathy, even in moments of exquisite damnation.

It’s not Brontë, and will likely be reviled in literature classrooms for generations to come. Still, one imagines the students will nevertheless swoon, or smirk, while partaking in this most decadent of infidelities.

Wuthering Heights opens in theaters everywhere Friday, Feb. 13.

Supergirl Super Bowl Trailer Reveals the DCU Krypton

There are some things that everyone knows about Supergirl and her cousin Superman. They possess the powers of super-strength, invulnerability, and flight. They become weakened by exposure to the green glowing rock known as kryptonite. And they hail from the planet Krypton, which exploded when Superman was an infant and Supergirl was a teen.

But what, exactly, was Krypton like? That’s a question that even comic book readers have trouble answering. However, we get some clues in the latest trailer for Supergirl. At the start of the teaser, we see images of young Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) alongside her father Zor-El (David Krumholtz) at a funeral, before the fate of their planet. While the specifics of Krypton are new to the DCU, elements do recall both previous Superman movies and even some variations of the comics.

The concept of Krypton developed slowly and across several different types of media. As a result, there’s rarely been one accepted depiction of the doomed planet. Superman #1 from 1939 first names the planet Krypton, but the first looks at Superman’s parents, Jor-El and Lara (or, Jor-L and Lora, as they were initially called), come in the daily newspaper strips that began that same year. Those strips, and eventually the comic books that followed, present Krypton as a planet filled with intellectually and physically advanced superpeople.

In the 1960s and ’70s, DC Comics began to further revise Superman’s home planet. First came the addition of a red sun orbiting Krypton, which rendered all of its residents no stronger than an average human. In 1972, the sun is named Roa, for a god worshiped by the Kryptonians, introducing a religious aspect to what was heretofore a society ruled by logic and science.

Important as these elements were, none were as influential as the depiction of Krypton in the 1978 movie Superman. Between the crystalline caverns made by set designer John Barry and the ornate robes created by Yvonne Blake, Krypton became a cold, logical, but regal place.

Superman‘s depiction of Krypton remained popular, even as DC Comics tried to establish an official version with the 1987 miniseries The World of Krypton, written by John Byrne and penciled by Mike Mignola. That series reasserts the Kryptonians’ focus on science, but also develops the planet’s religious side, presenting various factions who worship different deities.

Officially, DC Comics now accepts all stories as canon, which means that most modern depictions of Krypton tend to blend the 1978 movie version with the 1987 World of Krypton, while sometimes nodding to Jor-El’s headband or other Silver Age elements.

That blend of depictions can be seen in the trailer for Supergirl. The movie’s tan color palette may differ from the blue and silver of the 1978 movie, but the robes worn by Kara and her father certainly recall those that Marlon Brando sported as Jor-El. However, the funeral depicted has a religious feel, which seems more like something a cleric from The World of Krypton would lead.

By mixing together elements from the movies and the comics, the Krypton of Supergirl once again reminds us of the approach James Gunn has been taking since becoming Co-Head of DC Studios. He’ll use aspects of the comics and past movies when it helps to set the foundation. But instead of simply repeating what’s been done, he’s moving forward, which makes Supergirl and its image of Krypton something new to everyone.

Supergirl arrives in theaters on June 26, 2026.

The Mandalorian and Grogu Super Bowl Trailer Cost a Lot of Money for Nothing

Star Wars fans clamoring for a glimpse of The Mandalorian and Grogu during the Super Bowl were left blinking at the screen after an ad for the movie debuted with no new footage this past weekend.

Instead, the 30-second big game spot directed by Jon Favreau delivered a spoof of the classic Budweiser Clydesdales commercials, featuring Tauntauns in place of horses. Mando and Grogu both took turns handling the Tauntaun reins as they dashed through the snow. A gruff voiceover narrated the whole scene, which naturally ended with the line, “This is the way.”

While some viewers found this tribute to the iconic Budweiser commercials endearing, others were disappointed not to see a fresh trailer for the upcoming Star Wars movie, which is set to be released in May. It’s now been four long months since the last trailer debuted eye-popping footage of AT-ATs, Sigourney Weaver’s Republic character, a new Razor Crest, and more besides.

It’s certainly a cute ad, but that disappointment is understandable. This is the first time that Disney and Lucasfilm have had the opportunity to market a Star Wars film at the Super Bowl in over six years, and those spots don’t come cheap. At the low end, it costs $8 million to purchase 30 seconds of time, with some brands paying $10 million. That’s a lot of money to spend on a Mando and Grogu-themed Budweiser parody ad that probably cost a fair bit to create in the first place.

“I genuinely hope that 10 Mil didn’t go to waste and there’s an actual second trailer dropping today,” commented one viewer who definitely did not get their wish, while another thought it looked like an A.I. video. THR assures viewers that Favreau shot the spot in live-action with the Lucasfilm creature team, puppeteers, and ILM.

On the positive side, some said they appreciated the gag. “Thought Mando was gonna toss me a cold Bud Light,” one wrote; another admitted that “Nostalgia baiting with the Tauntauns: 100% effective.”

Yep, if there’s one thing Star Wars consistently finds effective, it’s nostalgia baiting with member berries, and this ad will surely have delighted a section of the fan base with its sense of fun. Anyone waiting for new The Mandalorian and Grogu footage, however, will just have to keep on waiting.

The Mandalorian and Grogu comes to theaters on May 22, 2026.

The Surprising Truth About TV Budgets and Viewer Engagement

Throw enough money at a new TV show, and it’s bound to be a success. That might be the thinking in some executive suites, but it’s not always true, and that seems to be driving some behind-the-scenes changes.

At a National Association of Television Program Executives panel this month, senior scripted programming execs ended up discussing the runaway success of Crave’s relatively low-budget queer hockey romance series, Heated Rivalry. The show, which has been adapted from Rachel Reid’s steamy Game Changers book series, has turned into an unexpected smash hit to the point where you’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard about it. Reflecting on the phenomenon, the execs all had thoughts on why it has garnered so much attention in an overstuffed TV environment.

Bell VP of Content Development and Programming Justin Stockman reckoned that Heated Rivalry benefited from getting sexy quickly without watering down its creative side. Suzanna Makkos, head of comedy for ABC Entertainment and Hulu Originals, praised the show’s fast pace. But Robert Schildhouse, president of BritBox, had a more interesting take.

“I think there’s a lot of theme here, whether it’s smut, or murder, or Christmas movies,” he said. “We see almost no correlation between budget and audience consumption and engagement. And we see incredible engagement on shows that cost very little.”

Schildhouse is likely privy to spreadsheets full of numbers we’ll never see, but we can look at examples that indicate he’s probably not wrong. There have been a number of costly shows lately that seem to have flopped in those key aspects.

Take Prime Video, which apparently had a disaster on its hands after launching The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Reports suggested that only 37% of viewers made it to the end of the first season, which is thought to have cost $465 million, in addition to the $250 million Amazon paid for the rights. If that wasn’t bad enough, season 2 reportedly performed 60% worse.

Then there’s the critically panned Citadel, a globetrotting spy series starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, which reportedly cost Amazon $50 million per episode to produce. Almost three years later, there’s still no release date set for its second season, despite spawning several smaller international spinoffs.

Even Marvel hasn’t consistently hit it out of the park with its expensive Disney+ shows, leading to a strategic rethink behind the scenes. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law reportedly had a budget of $225 million and became only the seventh most-streamed series on Disney+ in 2022, while Apple has spent a ton of cash on shows with smaller audiences like See and Foundation. The latter is still planning a long haul, but its ongoing production is said to have faced budgetary clashes.

None of this means that big-budget shows won’t become successes. Stranger Things, House of the Dragon, and The Mandalorian were all pricey. But when shows like Heated Rivalry and The Pitt, which reportedly only costs around $4 million per episode to make, are grabbing eyeballs and acclaim, it might be time to consider spending all that TV cash a little more wisely.

Rachel McAdams Always Deserved a Better MCU Role Than the One She Got

Anyone who’s watched more than a handful of Rachel McAdams movies knows she’s an incredible actress. Mean Girls and Game Night proved she had the right delivery and timing to make audiences laugh, Red Eye proved she could handle herself in the horror genre, and The Notebook and About Time proved she could move audiences to tears. But when Marvel came knocking for the first Doctor Strange movie, she was cast as …the lead character’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Christine Palmer.

McAdams did her best with the material and got to play an alternate version of the character in Sam Raimi’s uneven 2022 sequel, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but she was still largely there to support Stephen Strange in his quest to be a better version of himself. Even Raimi seems to understand that McAdams was cast in an underwhelming Marvel role, which is one of the main reasons she got the lead in his latest horror-comedy, Send Help.

“She was the perfect person because she’s such a brilliant actress,” he told Total Film. “I had a chance to work with her on my last film and saw how talented she was, and actually underutilized. And I promised myself that I would work with her again.”

Of course, there have been plenty of smaller supporting roles in the MCU for terrific actors over the years. Oscar-nominated Stellan Skarsgård had mostly “science stuff” to do around the main characters as Erik Selvig in Thor, its sequel, and a couple of Avengers movies. South Korean powerhouse Ma Dong-seok, Barry Keoghan, and Angelina Jolie were among the many Eternals competing for screen time in Chloé Zhao’s ambitious but misunderstood 2021 Marvel film. Sir Ben Kingsley was used as an MCU punchline twice before Wonder Man finally did right by him. The list could go on for a while!

Still, there’s something about “underutilizing” McAdams in the Doctor Strange movies that really rubs people the wrong way, and for good reason. It’s not just that she’s a brilliant actress who deserves better; she’s also pretty much perfect for a range of other notable Marvel roles. Close your eyes and imagine McAdams as Jean Grey. Imagine her as Mockingbird or Moira MacTaggert. While we’re at it, imagine her as a delicious Marvel villain, like Emma Frost or Morgan le Fay. It’s super easy (barely an inconvenience)!

In the multiverse, all things are possible. Though Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness wrapped up the relationship between Stephen Strange and Christine Palmer quite nicely, Marvel has never been shy about using the same actors for other roles, and there’s a lot of road ahead to recast McAdams in a juicier one. Frankly, it would be a real shame not to.

Netflix’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Sequel Super Bowl Trailer Sends Brad Pitt to the ‘70s

Once upon a time in Hollywood, stuntman Cliff Booth helped past his prime actor Rick Dalton save Sharon Tate from the Manson Family. Now, once upon a time in the 1970s, Dalton is back, looking cooler than ever.

The first trailer for The Adventures of Cliff Booth has dropped, checking in with Brad Pitt as the titular daredevil. Set to the tune of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” and apparently shot on film that’s been rotting in the corner of an adult bookstore for 40 years, The Adventures of Cliff Booth trailer looks like something that Quentin Tarantino would have included in 2007’s Grindhouse. Which is shocking, because Tarantino chose not to helm his Once Upon a Time follow-up, turning the reigns over to Pitt’s Seven director David Fincher.

Once Upon a Time found Cliff at a particularly low point, having been reduced to driving Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) around all day and hanging out in a trailer with his dog at night. But Booth came with a legend built up around him, ranging from defeating Bruce Lee in a fight to maybe killing his wife with a harpoon. The latter incident, which the film and some cool narration by Kurt Russell leaves ambiguous, was enough to get Booth black-listed, resulting in his job with Dalton. That turned out to be a good thing, as he and Dalton were able to fight off an invasion by the Manson followers, sparing Tate (Margot Robbie) from her real-world fate.

The trailer for The Adventures of Cliff Booth doesn’t give us any indication that changing the course of Hollywood has helped Cliff’s fortunes. However, it does show that the incident enhanced his already considerable swagger. Over the course of the minute-long clip, we see Booth drop charming one-liners to a variety of colorful characters, played by character actors such as Elizabeth Debicki, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Holt McCallany.

Even more than Cliff’s style, it’s the look and feel of the movie that stands out. Tarantino has made his career on doing metatextual homages to genre films of the past, but he’s only writing the script for Cliff Booth. Conversely, Fincher has a reputation for exactness, a coolness to his style that lent dread and weight to even pulpy material like Gone Girl and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. As demonstrated by the heavy film grain in the trailer and the use of neon squiggles to censor things that cannot be shown during the Super Bowl, a little of Tarantino’s playfulness has influenced Fincher.

Will that make for a great movie? We won’t know that until the time of the movie’s release… a time still not made public.

The Adventures of Cliff Booth releases soon to Netflix and theaters.

Peak TV Seasons from 2016 You Need to Rewatch

As the new year rolled in, social media became obsessed with traveling backward; 10 years back, to be exact, to 2016. At first, this fixation might seem strange as few who lived through 2016 are likely to remember it fondly or be eager to relive it. It’s become clear, however, that the nostalgia people are craving isn’t for the year itself, but for what we were observing in pop culture during it.

2016 was a golden era for television. Not only did it introduce new shows that would grow into cultural landmarks, but many series also delivered their strongest and most confident seasons right when audiences were most receptive to them. Looking back, it makes sense why we keep returning to these seasons as they captured something fleeting about that moment in time.

What follows isn’t a ranking of the “best” shows of 2016, but a case for why these particular seasons deserve a rewatch, and why returning to them now offers a glimpse of a cultural moment we didn’t realize we’d miss.

Fleabag Season 1

I’m personally nostalgic for the 2010s because it was when actress/writer/producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge was at her creative peak. While she’s now off to more mainstream pursuits (including Prime Video’s upcoming Tomb Raider series), I’ll always be grateful for her contribution to the “women behaving badly in metropolitan areas” genre in 2016 when she gave us the first season of Fleabag. Waller-Bridge’s writing alone is scripture; the script is literally called Fleabag: The Scriptures, and it reads like gospel for anyone who’s ever coped with their self-awareness with more bad decisions.

Fleabag almost starts as a comedy, but it quickly becomes clear that the central character and her story are much more than a funny show about a woman spiraling. Since it first aired in 2016, no other series has been able to present characters grappling with grief and self-sabotage with the same level of precision and emotional resonance than Fleabag.

While its second season is universally regarded as a TV masterpiece, what makes Fleabag’s first season worth returning to now is it marked Waller-Bridge’s leap from stage to television. The show carries the thrill of what someone testing that medium could hold. In 2016, that kind of creative risk felt electric, and rewatching it now is a reminder of how fun it is for a genuinely talented writer to break into a scene and bend it around their voice.

Stranger Things Season 1

No matter how you felt about the series finale, there’s no denying that the first season of Stranger Things was captivating television. I remember being sick and binging all eight episodes in one day, completely pulled into Hawkins, Indiana. This initial season captivates viewers in a similar way watching Twin Peaks for the first time does. While it’s admittedly not a perfect comparison, both shows use mystery and looming stakes to establish the sense that anything can happen.

If you cheated and skipped season 1 while trying to refamiliarize yourself with the series, you have to go back. Rewatching parts of the first season also serves as a reminder of just how deeply Stranger Things was embedded in culture in 2016. Like yes, I did own a ringer tee from Hot Topic featuring the fairy lights and letters Joyce Beyers used to communicate with Will. That was the climate at the time.

Season 1 also stands apart in a way the later seasons simply can’t, largely because of how fresh everything felt. The mystery isn’t too confusing, the world hasn’t been over-explained yet, and somehow the stakes feel higher than ever. It was a phenomenon before it knew it was one, and that initial spark is impossible to recreate.

The Good Place Season 1

2016 really was the year of ambitious sitcoms, but few laid the kind of foundation that the first season of NBC’s The Good Place did, presenting a batch of episodes strong enough to support a series whose episodes and themes still resonate nearly a decade later.

The Good Place also stuck out among the sea of cookie cutter network offerings because of its creative premise. The show follows Eleanor Shellstrop, who isn’t exactly an outstanding citizen but somehow ends up in a utopian afterlife and must frantically learn moral philosophy to hide her identity. The series took its time to develop, with major twists not revealed until the end of the first batch of episodes. Season 1 also showcased the acting chops of its phenomenal cast. The show propelled the careers of William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, and D’Arcy Carden, who’ve all gone on to do amazing work.

The show also feels like a product of its moment, too. It was perfect for 2016 when a thoughtful and hopeful sitcom could still find an audience without being immediately written off. Creator Michael Schur has worked on many iconic sitcoms, but there’s a reason people point to The Good Place as a moment in TV history for its high-concept. It’s hard to imagine a show this gentle and philosophically curious given the same room to grow today, making it a nostalgic rewatch.

Girls Season 5

In 2025, young writers Benito Skinner, Ben Kronengold, and Rebecca Shaw swung hard with their series Overcompensating and Adults, exploring the awkward, hilarious, and isolating parts of young adulthood. While these series were all successful in their own right, they lack the restless self-reflection that writer/actor Lena Dunham poured into Girls.

Girls at large is a mandatory rewatch in general, but if someone told me they only wanted to revisit one season, I’d point them straight to season 5. It carried a certain veil of optimism and denial that perfectly matched the stage of life the characters were stumbling through. The relationships, locations, and careers the characters explored didn’t last, but the consequences of their choices in this season carried through to the end. It was also experimental in its formatting, making episodes feel more cinematic than usual.

Dunham, much like her lead character Hannah, didn’t always respond well to criticism. So when co-star Christopher Abbott left the show because it no longer interested him as an actor, she responded to that challenge by writing, in my opinion, two of the best episodes of television ever: season 5’s “Panic in Central Park” and “Hello Kitty.” The 2016 season of Girls was perfect in every way and laid the groundwork for the series conclusion the following season.

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 8

Many Drag Race fans view season 7 as the weakest installment of the U.S. franchise, so when the show returned, it needed to come back strong to shake off that lingering bad energy. Most people point to seasons 4 through 6 as the golden era, packed with iconic RuGirls who went on to become Drag Race superstars, regardless if they won or lost. But in that conversation, we often overlook what season 8 gave us.

The top four, Bob the Drag Queen, Kim Chi, Naomi Smalls, and Chi Chi DeVayne, remain one of the strongest lineups in the franchise’s history. Beyond the small-but-mighty cast, season 8 also featured some of the best challenge ideas Drag Race has ever showcased. Whatever AI-tools they use now to write and produce Rusicals could never hold a candle to “Bitch Perfect” from season 8.

Season 8 is often overlooked because it was short, but it also gave us one of the all-time best winners: Bob the Drag Queen. She wasn’t perfect, her runways weren’t always flawless, and her makeup has certainly evolved, but her star quality was undeniable, from her acting to the way she carried herself. Rewatching this season now, it’s clear how much talent and charisma it packed, which is why season 8 still feels special and worth revisiting.

Crashing Season 1

I guess Phoebe Waller-Bridge decided 2016 was the year to fully lock in, giving us two emotionally vulnerable and genuinely hilarious television gems. Although one may be far more widely celebrated than the other, that doesn’t mean her six-episode Netflix series Crashing doesn’t deserve its flowers.

Crashing follows a mismatched group of young people forced into adulthood, stripped of the buffer of being students. Faced with rising rent costs, the strangers decide to squat in an abandoned hospital where they form a chaotic, temporary family built on proximity and a lot of bad decisions.

I don’t think Crashing could work in 2026, but 10 years ago, being broke, emotionally reckless, and vaguely ambitious still felt romantic. In 2026, I’m sure our distaste of millennial cringe would completely change how Zoomers would absorb the show. Like Fleabag, however, Crashing grows funnier and smarter the longer it goes, capturing a very specific 2016 energy that still makes it worth revisiting today.

Netflix Presents: The Characters Season 1

Finding fans of Tim Robinson sketch series I Think You Should Leave who haven’t watched The Characters is a bittersweet discovery. It’s a shame they’ve missed it, but a thrill to introduce them to one of the funniest shows Netflix has ever made. Few comedy specials have topped the audacity of giving eight comedians 30 minutes each to star in their own sketch shows and just letting them cook.

Not every episode is a 10/10, and I definitely have my favorites (Tim Robinson and John Early, forever). But every single episode has at least one sketch so unhinged and memorable that it’s permanently burned into my brain. I will never forget Lauren Lapkus’ Todd Tyson Chicklet calling his mom a “binch” at Dick N’ Boners. It’s the kind of sketch that just rewires you.

The Characters also captured something from its era that feels rare now, which was a willingness to give up-and-coming comedians the space to fully showcase their voices. It trusted the weirdness of the actors’ comedy, and it trusted that audiences would appreciate that risk. All eight episodes deserve a rewatch.

Deborah Ann Woll Reveals How Daredevil: Born Again Won Her Back for Karen Page

Nobody stays dead forever in comic books. Nobody but Karen Page, apparently. Page died in a 1999 issue of Daredevil (written by Kevin Smith) and she’s stayed that way, as nobody cares enough about poor Karen to resurrect her. Deborah Ann Woll, who portrayed Karen Page for three seasons on the Netflix series Daredevil, had the opposite problem. She cared too much about Karen. She cared so much, in fact, that when Daredevil: Born Again showrunner Dario Scardapane approached her about reprising her role in the MCU, she initially turned it down.

During a Daredevil panel at the Rhode Island Comic Con, Woll admitted that, unlike her fellow panelists and castmates Wilson Bethel and Vincent D’Onofrio, she wasn’t so quick to agree to return for Born Again. “I have a lot of loyalty to this character and this story,” she explained, before adding, “on a personal level… I was a little bit hurt to have not been included the first time around.” That is, until Scardapane laid out his vision.

First introduced alongside Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson in 1964’s Daredevil #1, by Bill Everett and Stan Lee, Karen Page was a key part of the character’s supporting cast. However, by the time she had died in 1999, Karen was a fairly minor character in the series, and one not treated very well by writers.

In contrast, Page was an integral part of the Netflix series. First introduced as a secretary who gets caught in Wilson’s Fisk’s machinations, and later an employee of Nelson and Murdock, Page soon becomes a more complicated character who has her own storylines, separate from the title superhero. Much of the character’s success owes to Woll’s portrayal of Karen as a person who works through her past issues and, crucially, knows how to walk away from Matt’s self-destructive behavior.

Woll and her co-star Elden Henson made Karen and Foggy into fan-favorites. Yet, the original version of Daredevil: Born Again did not include those characters, one of many decisions that worried fans and stars Charlie Cox and D’Onofrio. When the show retooled midway through production and Scardapane came aboard as show runner, Karen and Foggy were reintegrated into the show… as long as Woll agreed.

“Darrio had some great ideas, and he really sold me on the story,” Woll recalled, which brought back her initial interest in Karen. “Even when I first got the job back in 2014, I needed to know who this character is,” she told the panel attendees. “Because if she’s just going to be someone’s girlfriend, I don’t want to do it.”

In the case of Born Again, Woll learned that Karen would indeed be absent from much of the middle part of the series, as Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead needed to use footage that was already shot for the show. However, she would be a key part in the first episode, in which Bullseye kills Foggy, driving Matt to run from his friends and his duties as Daredevil. Further, Karen would be an important character in the final episodes, helping Matt as he resumes his vigilante identity.

With Woll back for Daredevil: Born Again season 2, which Scardapane gets to produce without any of the previous showrunners’ baggage, Karen will likely have even more to do. This second season follows Matt and Karen as they put together a resistance against Mayor Fisk, who has instituted martial law on New York City.

Things may not be going great for Matt and Karen, but for herself, Woll is optimistic. “I’m glad to be back, it all worked out,” she concluded. And even if that means more suffering for Karen, at least it also means that somebody cares about her.

Daredevil: Born Again season two streams on Disney+ on March 24, 2026.

Supergirl’s Puppy Bowl Promo Continues the New DCU’s Cute Animal Focus

Avengers: Doomsday is not expected to premiere a new trailer during the Super Bowl, but that doesn’t mean no superheroes will show up this Sunday. Milly Alcock will be promoting Supergirl at the other big game this weekend, the Puppy Bowl.

Obviously, Supergirl has a pretty clear connection to the Puppy Bowl, as Superman established that Krypto is her dog. After arriving at the end of that movie to retrieve her unruly pup from her cousin, she immediately blasts off to space with him in tow, setting off the adventure that unfolds in Supergirl.

However, Krypton is hardly the only super-pet in the DC Universe. In fact, DC Comics is filled with critters with all sorts of powers, and it’s about time that they start showing up in the movies and TV shows.

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When Otto Binder, Curt Swan, and Sy Barry introduced Krypton the Superdog in 1955’s Adventure Comics #210, he was just an extension of the Superboy stories they were telling. Superboy chronicled the adventures of teenaged Clark Kent, when he lived on the farm in Smallville, before he went off to Metropolis. Like any Midwestern boy of the Eisenhower era, Clark needed a dog, and thus Krypto was born.

Not only did Krypto fit perfectly with the low-stakes nature of these early Silver Age tales, in which Superboy dealt with pranks and shenanigans more than he did fighting supervillains, but he also became an immediate fan favorite. DC responded by bringing in more and more superpets. Batman got Ace the Bat-Hound months later in Batman #92. Beppo the Supermonkey showed up in a 1959 issue of Superboy. Supergirl got a pet in the form of Streaky the Supercat in 1960’s Adventure Comics #261, and then Comet the Super-Horse two years later in Adventure Comics #293.

Together with Proty II, the shape-shifting glop of something who hung around with Chameleon Boy in the Legion of Super-Heroes, they formed the Legion of Super-Pets, a team that took care of problems when their owners were indisposed. And then there was the time that Comet turned into a human and Supergirl fell in love with him, but that’s been thankfully retconned away.

In addition to super-pets, DC has a host of other animal characters who aren’t companions to another hero. There’s the evil Gorilla Grodd and his noble opposite Solovar from Gorilla City. Detective Chimp, a chimpanzee in a deerstalker cap, may be even a greater sleuth than Batman. Giant apes Titano and the Ultra-Humanite battle the Justice League, while the squirrels Ch’p and B’dg and the former house cat Dex-Starr all exist in the Green Lantern mythos. And that’s not even getting into Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, superheroes from a universe filled with funny animals.

For a long time, super-pets and evil gorillas were embarrassments to superfans. Sure, they might show up in a kid-focused property like the various Krypto cartoon series that get produced. But you’d never see them in a major motion picture.

All of that changed with Superman, in which the arrival of Krypto was a key part of the first trailer. Krypto appears again in promotional material for Supergirl, but he’s not just there to carry over a popular character from one movie to another. Krypto’s return in Supergirl shows that James Gunn is ready to bring even the silliest parts of the DC Comics universe onto the big screen—and it’s not just the comic book fans who love it.

Supergirl arrives on June 26, 2026.

Blue Beetle Deserves to Return in the New DCU

Jaime Reyes didn’t set out to be a hero. As seen throughout the 2023 movie Blue Beetle, Jaime (Xolo Maridueña) was thrust into the role when a powerful alien scarab ended up in his possession and later bonded with him. Taking the name of Blue Beetle, the superhero identity of missing inventor Ted Kord, Jaime fights against Ted’s weapons-dealing sister Victoria (Susan Sarandon), protecting his family and putting an end to Victoria’s war machines. Yet, since that victory, Blue Beetle has never been seen again.

According to Blue Beetle director Ángel Manuel Soto, the story isn’t over. “I don’t think that chapter has been closed,” Soto told CBR. “I’ve had friendly conversations with [DC Studios co-head] Peter Safran and John Rickard. And I know James [Gunn] is a huge fan of Blue Beetle, and he’s said multiple times that Blue Beetle is part of the DCU.” If that last point is true, then it is more than time for Jaime to suit up again in the universe.

The Rise of the Blue Beetle

Blue Beetle fits particularly well in the new universe that Safran and Gunn have created, because he’s a legacy character with a weird backstory. The character Blue Beetle has been around since 1939, initially created by Charles Wojtkoski as part of the post-Superman superhero boom. The character was reimagined as the superhero identity of inventor Ted Kord in 1966 and then brought into the DC Universe in 1983, where he became a fan favorite as part of Justice League International, especially when paired with Booster Gold.

After Ted was killed in an attempt by DC editorial to drum up excitement for the 2005 company-wide event Infinite Crisis, Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner introduced Jaime Reyes as the new Blue Beetle. Jaime was a hero in the Spider-Man mold, a regular kid who loves his friends and family, and whose new superpowers add extra stress to his life.

Although the 2023 movie transplants Jaime and his family from El Paso, Texas, to Palmera City, Florida, it retains the core elements of the character. Rather than present Jaime as a lone hero who must do his own thing, the film positions him within the context of his family, which includes loving parents Alberto and Rocio (Damián Alcázar and Elpidia Carrillo), sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo), along with his conspiracy-minded Uncle Rudy (George Lopez) and his grandmother (Adriana Barraza).

More than just supporting characters, the Reyes family add weight to Jaime’s mission. Unlike most power fantasies, where the hero grasps the power given to him, Jaime takes time to consider how becoming Blue Beetle will affect them. In fact, it’s only when Victoria and her right-hand man Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo) threaten the Reyeses that Jaime fully embraces his role. And when the movie reveals Nana’s past as a Leftist revolutionary and ties Victoria to the real-world School of the Americas, then Jaime’s heroic journey becomes a continuation of his family struggle against oppression.

To his credit, Soto never lets these heady themes weigh down Blue Beetle. Its neon color palette and electronic score by Bobby Krlic infuses the requisite “neophyte discovers his powers” section of the movie with energy. Even better is Maridueña’s likable turn as Jaime, playing both the weight of his character’s plight and the pure delight of a teen who can suddenly fly.

The Search for Blue Beetle

As Soto notes, James Gunn has spoken highly of Blue Beetle. Although it went into production before he and Safran took over, it was released under their leadership, and Gunn took to the press to support it. Moreover, because it released after the events of The Flash, Blue Beetle sort of exists within the DCU.

Gunn, of course, has been dodgy on the details of the new DCU’s relationship to the previous incarnation. As Gunn told Den of Geek when speaking about Peacemaker‘s second season, nothing from the previous incarnation is canon until someone expressly declares it. Blue Beetle hasn’t shown up in any of the official DCU entries—we don’t even see the Golden Age or Silver Age incarnations in the Justice Gang mural from Superman. However, Gunn announced a Booster Gold TV series as part of his Gods and Monsters plans, and where Booster is, Beetle is not far behind.

For Soto’s part, he’s ready to go as soon as he gets the call, even if Jaime doesn’t come back in live action. “We have had conversations of how we can expand the adventures of the Reyes family via animation,” he revealed. “And if that’s something that finally happens, whether it happens or not, conversations have been had. It would be nice. I think that you can do so much with animation, and it’s also a fun medium that I’ve always wanted to explore. So if the movie gods and the people and our dear friends at DC and Warner Bros. see it fit, I would love nothing more than to continue to tell that story.”

That’s one prayer that we’d love the movie gods to answer. Jaime Reyes may not have set out to be a hero, but Blue Beetle proved that he is a hero. And the DCU will be richer with Jaime in it.

Blue Beetle is now streaming on HBO Max.

Send Help Screenwriters Reveal Plans for Lost Friday the 13th Sequel

One of the great tragedies of horror cinema is that the Friday the 13th franchise does not consist of 13 movies. Worse, it has been stuck at 12 entries since the release of the 2009 reboot film, simply called Friday the 13th. But if the screenwriters of that movie, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, had their way, we would have had a 13th Jason movie years ago.

Speaking to ComicBook.com about their current movie Send Help, directed by Sam Raimi, Swift and Shannon revealed some details about their planned sequel. “It would have been Friday the 13th Part 13. We had big ambitions for it,” Shannon recalled. “I think it was called The Death of Jason Voorhees. Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees.”

That title will certainly raise some eyebrows among F13 fans, because Jason Voorhees has died several times. There was the excellent Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which ended with Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) killing the masked murderer, a death that producers at Paramount intended to stick. And then there was Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which began with Jason getting blown up to little bits by the FBI… only to reveal that he is in fact a demon worm that hops from body to body. Heck, the whole franchise is based on the premise that Jason is dead, since it was his drowning as a boy at Camp Crystal lake that sent mama Pamela Voorhees on a killing spree for the first film.

However, it’s important to remember that, a.) strict continuity has never been part of the Friday the 13th franchise; and b.) that Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees would be a sequel to the reboot film. The 2009 movie paid homage to the first three films by opening with Pamela (played by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame) being beheaded at the end of her murder rampage. Then, it went into an extended sequence of Jason killing people while wearing a bag over his head, as he does in Friday the 13th Part 2, before he gets his hockey mask in the movie’s present day, replicating the arrival of the mask in the third film.

Even though the remake did well at the box office and, according to the screenwriting duo “everyone loved” the script for the sequel, it never happened because of legal trouble. For years, original Friday the 13th screenwriter Victor Miller has been locked in a lawsuit with producer Sean S. Cunningham, which has halted production of any new movies. Whenever it finally releases, the long-in-development television series Crystal Lake, starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela before young Jason’s death (or “death”), will be the first new entry since the 2009 movie.

For Swift and Shannon, that’s a shame because they had something really nasty cooked up for their sequel. “There were bigger kills. They were crazier,” teased Swift. “We had a really awesome zipline kill that I always loved,” added Shannon.

What does that mean? Swift and Shannon don’t elaborate. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to see some of those acts of violence in a thirteenth movie. But good luck rarely has anything to do with Friday the 13th.

Send Help is now playing in theaters worldwide.

Pillion: Alexander Skarsgård Keeps BDSM Love Story Uncut and Intact for Americans

On a typical film shoot, Alexander Skarsgård can appreciate the expected mode of prep work. You meet with your co-stars and scene partners regularly, you discuss the motivations and the underlying subtext of an exchange, and you rehearse as much as possible. Time permitting.

The thing about Pillion, Harry Lighton’s simultaneously elegiac and kinky love story between a dominant and his inexperienced submissive in a queer BDSM biker gang, is that things stray far from the typical path. And that trajectory created a unique opportunity for stars like Skarsgård, who plays the dom, and Harry Melling of Harry Potter and The Queen’s Gambit fame, who portrays the half-a-foot shorter sub.

“We didn’t dissect the scenes throughout the shoot or sit and talk about where we wanted it to go,” Skarsgård says. “But it was also not a case of us avoiding each other either. We hung out. It wasn’t, ‘I gotta be in my corner and you and yours,’ and then we clashed in front of the camera.”

Be that as it may, it remained a conscious choice on Skarsgård’s part to not meet Melling until two days before shooting. There were opportunities, as Skarsgård acknowledges: “I was in London for stuff or we could have had a Zoom.” But while he talked with Lighton beforehand, who rehearsed extensively with Melling since the latter plays the film’s heart and soul, the Swedish actor kept some distance. “There was something quite fun about having this discovery and letting this relationship play out in front of the camera.” And it’s a relationship that’s left a mark on every viewer who has seen it to date.

When we catch up with the director and his two leading men, it’s at the tail-end of a press tour that’s taken them from Cannes to London, and finally now back to New York City ahead of the film’s U.S. premiere. It is, in fact, the second time we have met, the first being briefly after the picture premiered in Gotham a few months ago during a raucous New York Film Festival screening. At the time, Skarsgård quipped, “It’s gonna be a good afterparty, guys,” following a round of catcalls.

But there’s been curiosity, too, about how the film would release into American cinemas this Friday following its UK premiere late last year. Rumors continue to circulate that it would be cut significantly to earn an R-rating stateside due to the generally more puritanical notions toward sex scenes in the MPA. And to be sure, Pillion has some memorable ones involving Ray (Skarsgård) and Colin (Melling).

“There weren’t any cuts as far as I’m aware,” Lighton confirms to us. “I know that the version which has been released in cinemas in the U.S. is the same one which was released in the UK, and that’s exactly the version I want people to see.” He goes on to add that A24 was always onboard of bringing a love story as unorthodox but honest as Pillion to the screen, noting, “I think anyone who read the script knew what it was about. It was a very explicit script. There’s like five paragraphs describing an erection in the script. So people knew what they were kind of getting into bed with.”

But what seems to most strike audiences who’ve watched Pillion isn’t so much the frankness of the sex scenes, but the quiet universality of a love story about a young, impressionable person, discovering something in himself that might be unorthodox but fills a need beyond just desire.

The film walks a careful line in this way since the first scene involves Colin as a young, lonely lad on Christmas Eve, singing in an antiquated barbershop quartet for his doting parents and a blind date going nowhere. So enters the leather-clad Ray, the Mysterio biker who picks Colin up and invites him to a fairly physical first date the next night. One reading might be Colin is indoctrinated into a subculture. Another interpretation, which is also Melling’s, is that he has found his tribe.

“I like to think of it as that thing when you don’t consciously know you want something, but when something happens in your life, you suddenly realize, ‘Oh wait a minute! This actually makes a lot of sense to what I’ve been looking for or what I’ve been wanting,’” Melling muses. “It’s not like he’s thinking secretly, ‘You know what I need to be in? I need to be in a sub-dom relationship. That’s going to make sense to me.’ But the fact that this opportunity gets presented to him, and the fact that clearly he’s so attracted to this man, and then this dynamic is presented to him, I think things start to click. Things start to make sense about how he wants to express himself and how he wants to experience love.”

Exploring that epiphany is one of the main attractions to the material for Lighton, a first-time feature director who came to the material as an adapter. While the Hampshire-born Lighton pulls from Adam Mars-Jones’ Box Hill novel, he also made bold changes to the story, including by setting the screenplay in a modern context as opposed to its literary 1970s roots.

“Primarily, I thought the change made Ray’s mystery more interesting to me,” Lighton explains. “If the novel’s set in the ‘70s, when I think about why Ray withholds his background from Colin, there is quite an easy explanation for me: it was probably because he’s in the closet, which was much more common in Britain in the ‘70s than it is now. So I like the fact that if you put it in a contemporary setting, it opened up all these new questions. It could be an erotic game on Ray’s part; it’s not necessarily because of some kind of homophobic landscape he’s in.”

Furthermore, a 21st century backdrop allows Lighton to interrogate what is considered “normal” and what might still be construed as taboo, even with ostensibly open-minded parents of a queer child. As opposed to the novel, where Colin’s parents attempt to ignore their son’s homosexuality, Colin’s mother (a touching Lesley Sharp) and father (Douglas Hodge) are supportive—up to a point.

“[I wanted to] explore where the limits of acceptance are and what is an acceptable version of homosexuality in some people’s eyes versus an unacceptable one,” Lighton explains. “We see the parents go from acceptance at the beginning to some version of rejection, which in a way is the reverse of the normal trajectory you go on in a queer film where parents initially aren’t supportive and then grow to support over the course of the film.”

A big reason for the parents’ reservations though is, of course, Ray, a figure who by design remains aloof and almost unknowable. Skarsgård admits he has his own personal explanation for the choices Ray makes in the movie, yet even those shifted as they filmed the thing.

Says Skarsgård, “I noticed that throughout the shoot [my motivations] kept changing. I didn’t really know how Harry was going to play Colin, and I felt that Harry’s reactions in those scenes informed my version of Ray. So I felt it was a journey of discovery. I kept kind of revising my thoughts on Ray, not that I had a fully fleshed out backstory, but I had some thoughts, and then I was like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s not the case?’”

The evolution of the characterization was part of the pleasure of the shoot. “It was not scary,” the Swede continues. “It was kind of exciting to be like, ‘Oh, I learned something new about the character today. That was surprising!’”

The discovery has proven exciting for audiences, too, even those from a family of filmmakers. When we meet with the Pillion trio, it’s only about a week since Skarsgård’s father, Stellan, received his first Oscar nomination for Sentimental Value, a beautiful movie that Alexander has been fielding questions about all awards season. So it seemed prudent to ask: what was Stellan’s review of Pillion?

Dropping his voice down an octave, and adding a well studied layer of scratchy gravel atop his cadence, Alex leans back in his chair to imitate a father’s posture, and exclaims, “‘This is the movie of the year!’”

For more than a few audience members, he’s not wrong.

Pillion is playing everywhere now.

The Best and Most Memorable Super Bowl Trailers and Teasers

The big game is rarely about the big game. Yes, the Super Bowl easily draws more eyes than any other television event, but not everyone is watching to see the football. That’s especially true of nerds, who couldn’t care less about the San Diego Pie Pans scoring more touch backs than the Cheboygan Sea Anemones or whatever. Those nerds just want to see the nerdy trailers.

Fortunately, the one leads into the other. Because the Super Bowl is such a major television event, studios will shell out big bucks to advertise their films. Moreover, because they know that they have so many eyes on the screen, they do their best to make the movie palatable to everyone, even those who do care about the Pie-Pans and Sea Anemones. So let’s take a look back at some of the most compelling, memorable, or downright strange trailers of Super Bowls past.

Independence Day (1996)

Most of the 30-second clip that 20th Century Fox aired during the Super Bowl contains exactly what you’d expect from the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. No shots of stars Jeff Goldblum or Will Smith, just lots of ominous images of shadows looming over various locations, with random extras looking up in awe. Of course, this builds to the movie’s money shot, a beam blowing up the White House. It’s effective and exciting, but the best part of the clip comes right at the end, when it declares, “Enjoy the Super Bowl… It may be your last.”

Daredevil (2003)

20th Century Fox really thought they had something back in 2003. The Daredevil clip that aired during the Super Bowl for that year promises superhero action, with lots of shots of Ben Affleck as the Man Without Fear bending backwards to dodge a throwing star or swinging from a building. Between the brightly-lit action sequences and techno-infused soundtrack, the clip presents Daredevil as a good time, a continuation of the studio’s superhero hit from a year earlier, Spider-Man. It’s such a good clip that we almost believe it… but of course, we’ve seen Daredevil and know that the dour, plodding mess is a far cry from the movie teased here, let alone Spider-Man.

Troy (2004)

To see how much Hollywood has changed over the past two decades, just contrast the current marketing campaign for Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey to the Super Bowl teaser released in 2004 for Troy. Greek mythology takes a back seat to dreamy movie stars, as the names Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom flash on screen, proceeded by shots of each respective A-lister staring out from behind locks of hair. Troy‘s less-than-legendary box office receipts aren’t what killed the movie star, but the clip sure seems like it comes from a different era.

Batman Begins (2005)

In 2005, Batman‘s name was mud. Okay, we nerds loved the Dark Knight, but the average cinema goer still had the bad taste of George Clooney in Batman & Robin in their mouth. In fact, when this writer found himself at a Super Bowl party that year, he had to demand that everyone be quiet as soon as the teaser for Batman Begins started playing. Yes, there were chuckles and snickers, but between the bits of the Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard score and images of Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne assembling the iconic bat-suit, something changed. By the time 30 seconds had ended, Batman had gone from a big joke to something that everyone wanted to see.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

When the first Transformers movie released in 2007, Paramount didn’t even bother buying a Super Bowl ad for the update of the ’80s toy franchise. Two years and $709.7 million in box office returns later, the studio wasn’t going to repeat the mistake. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen got a full press push, including a Super Bowl spot that highlighted returning stars Shia LaBeouf and Josh Duhamel, but especially the incoherent action that director Michael Bay provided throughout the 2000s.

Star Trek (2009)

To this days, Trekkies continue to bemoan how J. J. Abrams turned the voyages of the starship Enterprise into something that felt like a space dogfight out of Star Wars. Whether or not that’s a fair assessment of Abrams’s approach to the franchise, it sure describes the way Paramount advertised the 2009 reboot Star Trek. The 30-second spot is all cut after cut, pausing a moment for someone to say something meaningful or recognizable so we know that we are indeed looking at Kirk and Spock and Bones, but then moving onto the next action set piece. Nerds might have hated what they were seeing, but regular folks sure were thrilled.

Fast & Furious (2009)

Traditionally, the Super Bowl is the domain of jocks. But, as this list shows, Super Bowl movie ads are for nerds. No franchise brought the two together like The Fast and the Furious, especially after its reassurance with 2009’s Fast & Furious. The TV spot for that Justin Lin-directed fourth entry doesn’t foreground the excess and absurdity that would become hallmarks of the series. However, it does invite the viewers to celebrate the return of Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner and especially Vin Diesel as Dom Toretto, who had been largely absent since the original movie.

Avengers (2012)

Superhero movies certainly existed and did well at the box office before the MCU. But 2008’s Iron Man ignited a passion for cape and cowl pictures, even if the average moviegoer couldn’t quite imagine a shared universe movie. If Marvel Studios felt the weight of expectation, you can’t tell by their Super Bowl ad for The Avengers. The clip is all celebration, giving the viewers looks at their new favorites together for the first time, and even teasing a bit of the great oner of all the Avengers assembled. By the time the clip ended, there was no question that Marvel would rule the cinemas for the rest of the decade.

Logan (2017)

No matter how many times Marvel resurrects Wolverine and Professor X, Logan remains a powerful, moving take on the superhero genre. The pathos of the project is clear even in the trailer that 20th Century Fox aired during the big game. Instead of simply repeating the somber first trailer, which used Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt,” the Super Bowl trailer contrasts lots of onscreen chaos with the sounds of “Amazing Grace.” The combination works, foregrounding the weight that Hugh Jackman’s Canucklehead carries throughout the film, and his ongoing search for forgiveness.

Mission: Impossible—Fallout (2018)

There’s nothing particularly unique about the fact that Paramount debuted a trailer for Mission: Impossible—Fallout during the Super Bowl. What is unique is the trailer itself, easily one of the best trailers ever made. It’s not just that get glimpses of the base jumping stunt that the ever-reckless Tom Cruise performs as Ethan Hunt. It’s that we also get to see Cruise hang off a cliff face, that we get to see Hunt and Ilsa Faust stare one another down. It’s that we get to see Henry Cavill apparently reload his biceps before throwing a punch, and we get to hear Angela Bassett deliver the words, “That’s the job.” How could anything on a football field compete with such awesomeness?

Top Gun: Maverick (2020)

Like the Mission: Impossible franchise, Top Gun: Maverick distills Tom Cruise‘s movie star persona into pure blockbuster spectacle. However, unlike Mission: Impossible, a lot of time had passed between the original movie in 1986 and the 2020 sequel. As a result, general audiences were skeptical of another patriotic plane movie. That is, until the trailer played… in the first commercial break after the singing of the national anthem. By the time the clip finished, even the biggest skeptic was ready to watch Tom fly fighter jets against faceless pilots of some unidentified enemy nation.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

Here’s what the average viewer knew about Sonic the Hedgehog before he made the jump from video games to movies in 2020: he’s blue, he’s fast, and he’s got attitude. Rather than try to further educate the public, the Super Bowl trailer for the first Sonic movie plays up those qualities. The first half consists of real-world athletes talking about the one person who can best them, before revealing that person to be Sonic himself, voiced by Ben Schwartz. Only then do we get a smattering of clips from the film, including a healthy dose of Jim Carrey returning to Ace Ventura mode to play Dr. Eggman. Clearly, the gambit worked, as the Sonic franchise has been a steady earner for Paramount, certainly nothing they need to be embarrassed about anymore.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 4 Review: Seven

The following contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 4. Note: The episode is available to stream on HBO Max now. It will have its HBO premiere at 10 p.m. ET on Sunday, February 8.

Events begin snowballing rapidly in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ fourth episode, which sees the truth come out about Egg’s background and Dunk face some potentially deadly consequences for doing the right thing. From Dunk and Egg’s reunion to their preparation for the hedge knight’s trial by combat, “Seven” is full of richly charged emotional moments that ask what it means to be a true knight or to fight against injustice. How much good can one person do against a system that is rigged against those without power? It’s not clear, but Dunk — brave, dumb, gloriously sincere Dunk — is sure going to try.

He certainly has his work cut out for him. Not content with having Dunk arrested for attacking a member of the royal family, Aerion Targaryen is also working overtime to pin Egg’s disappearance on him, insisting that he kidnapped the kid from the inn where they met. Young Aegon was technically meant to be squire to his brother Daeron (Henry Ashton), the messy drunk from the series’s first episode, who chose a bender over participating in the Ashford tourney. (Hey, his nickname isn’t Daeron the Drunken for nothing!) Left to his own devices, Aegon decides to fake it until he makes it as Dunk’s squire.

To his credit, Egg does genuinely regret the harm his lies have caused. Or maybe only a monster is incapable of resisting Dexter Sol Ansell’s giant eyes full of tears, who can say? Not Dunk, apparently, who, although giving peak disappointed dad vibes, can’t stop himself from singing the lad’s praises when he’s brought before Prince Baelor.

Given that this show is called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, we don’t spend as much time with Baelor Targaryen as some of us (read: me) might like, but gosh, it’s hard not to wish we could. Thoughtful, deliberate, and serious, he’s a fascinating figure and appears to have summoned Dunk to his presence not to berate him but to try and find a way to save his life. He may be heir to the Iron Throne, but even he can’t prevent Aerion from insisting on a trial. The hedge knight did strike the king’s grandson, and in defense of a girl who is being — however unfairly — branded a traitor.

So he encourages Dunk to request a trial by combat, in the hopes that he’s a good enough fighter to save himself. Aerion, a huge jerk, turns the tables by insisting that they engage in something known as a trial of seven, an ancient, rarely invoked Andal custom in which seven champions face off against one another, in the hopes that the gods favor those seeking to punish the guilty. In short: It’s all extremely extra, which seems rather up this particular Targaryen’s alley. (A throwaway line from Daeron reveals Aerion literally thinks he’s a dragon in human form, which is objectively bonkers, but not a surprising amount of crazy for this family.)

The morning of the trial dawns, and it turns out that Dunk has more champions than he realized. Thanks in no small part to Aegon, who has apparently been running around all night looking for people who either hate his family or are just out for a good time. For his part, Aerion’s champions include his father, Prince Maekar, and his brother, Daeron, alongside Ser Steffon Fossoway, who traded his honor and his promise to help Dunk for a lordship; as well as three members of King Daeron’s Kingsguard who are ordered to fight: Donnel of Duskendale, Roland Crakehall, and a third man, whose name hasn’t really been mentioned on the show, but who is called Willem Wylde.

Standing for Dunk are the newly knighted Ser Ramun Fossoway; the badly injured Ser Humfrey Hardying, who really wants to kill Aerion for breaking his leg; Hardying’s brother by marriage, Ser Humfrey Beesbury; the one-eyed madman Ser Robyn Rhysling; and everyone’s favorite hot mess, Ser Lyonel Baratheon, who is super hype to take part in the first trial by seven in a hundred years. Unfortunately, thanks to Ser Steffon’s betrayal, Dunk doesn’t have the numbers he needs and is told that if he can’t rustle up one more champion, it’s all forfeit and he’ll be found guilty of his crimes with no fighting involved.

Dunk gives an exceptionally rousing speech, exhorting someone, anyone among the various spectators and gawkers looking on, to step up and do the right thing, to be the kind of true knight that Westeros was once famous for. Thankfully, someone answers, but it’s probably not the person that most viewers expected.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has been very deliberately holding itself apart from the larger shared universe it exists in. Sure, there are more than a few references that will make hardcore fans of George R.R. Martin’s world do that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme, but for the most part, it’s been happy to be its own thing, a simpler, smaller-stakes story. So when this episode finally pulls out composer Ramin Djawadi’s iconic Thrones theme music — and actually lets it play out this time, albeit remixed a bit for this series — as Prince Baelor Targaryen takes the field, it pretty much hits like crack cocaine.

Not sure that there could be a more badass way to end this episode than with Baelor riding onto the field to stand alongside Dunk against multiple members of his own (admittedly awful) family. It’s the sort of big, genuine hero moment that’s rarely given to anyone in the Targaryen clan, and certainly not in a way that is presented as so unquestionably good. Because that is, as it turns out, what Baelor is. Good.

Sure, you don’t get the sense that he particularly likes his nephew — Bertie Carvel is a master at making sure his character is deliberately side-eyeing Aerion whenever they happen to be in the same room — but this isn’t a vengeance thing. It’s a justice thing. It’s the right thing. If only it weren’t exactly the kind of move that this universe usually loves to punish.

New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.

The Pitt Season 2 Episode 5 Review: Banished to Scut Purgatory

This article contains spoilers for THE PITT season 2 episode 5.

We’re five hours into Dr. Frank Langdon’s (Patrick Ball) first shift back at the Pitt, and the prodigal son’s return is not proceeding how he hoped.

Sure, Langdon probably expected a lukewarm reception at best, given how severe his infraction was. But the muted response of his peers combined with the freezing cold shoulder from his former friend and mentor Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) is starting to take its toll. Now with the arrival of “11:00 A.M.,” some of these microaggressions against Langdon finally begin to blossom into macroaggressions.

Fittingly, the inciting incident here is the return of a prodigal patient. First introduced in the season 2 premiere, harried office worker Debbie Cohen (Mara Klein) initially presented with some acute leg pain, a condition harmless enough that Robby relegated her to Langdon in triage. It doesn’t seem so simple now though, with the rash having extended beyond the Sharpie borders that Langdon drew on Debbie’s shin. If Langdon and nurse Donnie’s pained reactions in the closing moments of episode 4 weren’t revealing enough, the opening moments of episode 5 confirm that this advancing cellulitis is Very Bad. To borrow a euphemism I love from nurses on TikTok: Ms. Cohen is about to meet everyone in the hospital.

While no one would accuse any episode of The Pitt of dragging its feet, the ticking clock nature of Debbie’s rapidly spreading rash imbues this installment with an even more intense sense of urgency than usual. Langdon, Robby, and a host of other doctors, nurses, and surgeons rush in and out of Ms. Cohen’s trauma room no fewer than seven times. And each time, we learn something more troubling about her condition. The cellulitis was on the dorsum of the foot and now it’s spreading to the leg. Her maximum heart rate is good…until it’s not. Suddenly the patient has a bulla (blister) developing and is entering into septic shock.

In a morning already marked by multiple “zebra” cases, the Pitt is now home to necrotizing fasciitis a.k.a. honest-to-goodness flesh-eating bacteria.

“You ever see nec fash?” Robby asks the young surgeon who finally comes downstairs to investigate. The man has not, having just graduated medical school two weeks ago. And few of us have probably seen it either, on television or anywhere else. Robby promptly asks for another surgeon.

In addition to operating as a tension-ratcheting narrative device, Ms. Cohen’s leg also serves to force Robby and Langdon in the same room for an extended period of time, with predictably disappointing results. Robby is still fuming over his acolyte’s betrayal and is displaying little effort in hiding his loathing. At the moment though, Robby might be just as frustrated with himself for failing in his primary goal of the day: to keep Langdon away from him.

“Did you bring Langdon back here?” he asks Dana.

“No, Al-Hashimi did. You banished him to scut purgatory. He did everything you would have done with that cellulitis patient. If you think he missed something, tell him.”

There is almost certainly nothing Robby would have done differently than Langdon. Very few doctors would see a simple foot rash and jump to the conclusion that, within hours, it will evolve into a condition so gnarly that a stunned surgical resident will take photos of it like he’s at a concert. Indeed Nurgle’s blessings rarely arrive when expected. Robby might have sent Langdon to scut purgatory but the Pitt itself might is the real purgatory – a liminal space where larger-than-life forces conscript mortals to confront the same problems over and over.

For his part, Langdon is clearly starting to feel the restricting weight of it all. (It’s probably not a coincidence that one of the patients introduced in this episode is literally handcuffed.) The most heartbreaking moment for him isn’t Robby’s disgust – that’s personal, it’s understandable, it’s even potentially fixable. What hurts worse is Whitaker (Gerran Howell) reflexively logging in to the hospital computer to order meds for a patient before Langdon can. Realizing the questionable optics, Whitaker swears he hastily put in the order because the patient was technically assigned to him, not because he was afraid of Langdon abusing the drugs. Still, it’s a sign that Langon’s “junkie” brand isn’t going away any time soon.

Elsewhere in the Pitt, the doctors start to come up against their respective brands for better or worse. Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) continues to shed his early goldenboy status and gets a (literally) shitty lesson that medicine isn’t all the reciting of facts from med school. Sometimes it’s disimpacting an old woman’s stools…and then not getting out of the way of the ensuing poop-alanche. After coming off a particularly tough hour that saw her poked with broken glass, Joy (Irene Choi) comes through with a clutch suggestion to lower the uninsured Mr. Diaz’ untenable hospital bill.

“If the system doesn’t work for you, you’ve gotta work the system,” she tells Dr. Garcia after revealing her family did a similar trick when her grandmother fell ill.

Even Dr. Robby’s medicine ubermensch brand begins to take some hits this hour. While he has his usual “hell yeah” moments of heroism (his hopping on the phone with Ms. Cohen’s employer to report, in no uncertain terms, that she will not be coming to work that day and she will not be fired for that is awesome), his clear disdain for Langdon, Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), and anyone keeping him from his beloved motorcycle trip is an increasingly bad look. So much so that his current hospital lady friend Noelle Hastings (Meta Golding) playfully dubs him “Motorcycle Mike.”

Unshakeable as some of these labels may seem, the ER always provides many an opportunity to rise above them. This hour alone sees the arrival of new patients Gus Varney, a prisoner severely wounded in an assault; Alex, a dumbass kid burned with dry-ice by his brother; and Roxie Hamler, a home hospice patient with a history of lung cancer who just suffered a seizure. Alex, bless him, provides a rare moment of comedic relief for Langdon and the audience, revealing that he was trying to get branded with the family crest (literally just the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team logo). He also says “You goonin’ me?” to his brother, accidentally revealing that the show’s writers’ room has no contact with any members of Gen Z.

Of the new crop, Roxie undoubtedly provides the biggest potential for dramatic resonance going forward. She also might prove to be a redemptive tool for the doctors assigned to treat her. For now, that’s Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) and night shift nurse Lena (Lesley Boone), who is moonlighting as Roxie’s “death doula” for her family. But one would hope that Robby and Langdon at least stop by to meet her and get some much-needed perspective.

Based on the final moments of “11:00 A.M.,” however, it might not even take Robby and Langdon that long to reconcile or at least work better together. If the two can’t put aside their differences to save a flatlining Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.), then Motorcycle Mike might need that sabbatical even more than previously realized.

New episodes of The Pitt season 2 premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.

Avengers Doomsday – Halle Berry Teases ‘Wait and See’ About How She’d Update Storm

Halle Berry is not expected to appear as Storm in Avengers: Doomsday. That is the official, oft-repeated party line about the upcoming superhero event film. Nonetheless, it does seem a curious omission when so many other beloved actors from the original line of X-Men movies are expected to make their Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in the December release—including James Marsden, Ian McKellen, and Alan Cumming. In fact, the very appeal of reunions was in the air when we sat down with Berry and Chris Hemsworth to discuss their new film due out later this month, Crime 101.

“It’s fantastic,” Hemsworth says about sitting across from old pals like Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. for the Avengers: Doomsday table read. “[There’s] the old guys like myself, the people who kind of kicked it off, and then new folks coming in. It’s just such a joy. It’s like a high school reunion in a way, catching up with old friends and new friends.”

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Yet when we raise the prospect about Berry not being among those new friends, the Oscar-winning actress laughs, “Chris is going to fix that.” Her Crime 101 co-star seems more than game to entertain the possibility, agreeing, “I’m going to fix that.”

Whether that’s an actual tease of what to expect in Avengers: Doomsday or a bit of playful banter is not immediately clear. However, what is abundant is that Berry still has things she’d like to do with Storm, and she seems comfortable musing we might see them yet in the MCU. This includes the prospect of Storm getting a visual makeover that could be as colorful (and comic book-y) as Hugh Jackman and James Marsden’s new threads as Wolverine and Cyclops in MCU pictures.

“I think Storm could use some updating, change her [look] a little bit,” Berry says. But when pressed for details she simply adds, “I don’t know, you’re going to have to wait and see. But she should definitely up her game.”

Whether that game includes Avengers: Doomsday remains unknown, however that Marvel event stands in some ways as the culmination of an entire quarter-century’s worth of superhero movies. While the Marvel Studios brand already had a kind of crescendo seven years ago in Avengers: Endgame—the last time Hemsworth co-starred with Evans and Downey—Doomsday will be using the multiverse to not only merge the 2010s era of superhero movies with the current status quo of the MCU, but also presumably every previous era of Marvel movies. Hence the return of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men line-up from the 2000s.

In some ways it’s validation for the path Berry and her colleagues forged on that first X-Men 26 years ago, the first modern superhero movie. However, the star does not look back on it that way.

“I didn’t see it as a risk,” Berry says of the original X-Men. “Maybe I was ignorant to the situation, but I saw it as a wonderful opportunity. I was such a fan of X-Men and what the story was about, and what this mutant life [meant]. I related to that, growing up on the outside as a woman of color, so I didn’t see it as a risk. I saw it as a great way to help people understand the differences in each other.”

It’s a difference that will be explored further, including hopefully with Berry, in Doomsday and beyond. In the meantime, expect more of our conversation with Hemsworth and Berry ahead of Crime 101’s release on Friday, Feb. 13.

Star Trek: Captain Sisko’s Best Return Happened in the Comics

This post contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5.

This Sisko has returned! Just… not in the way you might expect. The fifth episode of Starfleet Academy, “Series Acclimation Mil,” was indeed the much-vaunted “love letter” to Deep Space Nine, the oddball ’90s series that has become a favorite among Star Trek fans. The episode managed to pay loving tribute to the show in general and Captain Sisko in particular, complete with shots of his uniform, an appearance by Cirroc Lofton as a now-grown Jake Sisko, and even a recording of actor Avery Brooks’ voice. However, Sisko himself did not appear—heck, Brooks’ likeness didn’t even show up on screen.

Disappointing as that might be for DS9 fans tuning into Starfleet Academy, the TV series isn’t the only place to find Captain Benjamin Lafayette Sisko. Sisko’s return was a major part of the Star Trek ongoing comic book series that IDW launched in 2022. Written by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing and illustrated by various artists, Star Trek gives Captain Sisko the homecoming he deserves.

As “Series Acclimation Mil” recounts, Sisko was chosen by the Prophets—aliens who lived within the wormhole outside of Deep Space Nine, and who were worshiped by the people of Bajor. At the end of the series, Sisko gets called away from the mortal plane by the Prophets, and is never heard from again. Within Starfleet Academy, he makes his presence known to Jake, but there’s no official record of his actions.

The Star Trek comic book series imagines something different, in part because of plot points from other shows. In the Next Generation season six episode “Rightful Heir,” we meet a clone of Kahless the Unforgettable, the mythical warrior king venerated by Klingons. That episode ends with a question of faith, indicating that the clone and those involved with creating the myth understand that Kahless is not a god. However, in the comic, everything has changed. The Kahless clone has decided to prove his worth by slaughtering the god-like beings of the Star Trek universe. And, as anyone who has watched The Original Series can tell you, Star Trek has a lot of god-like beings.

As god-like beings themselves, the Prophets worry about Kahless’ rampage, and so they bring Sisko back to the mortal plane to deal with the destroyer.

A lot of what follows could be dismissed as mere fan-service. On his new ship, the appropriately-named USS Theseus, Sisko assembles a team of all-stars, including Dr. Crusher and Data, Tom Paris from Voyager, and Scotty from TOS (still in the 24th century after the TNG episode “Relics”). Even Enterprise is represented in the form of Ensign Sato, a human-Andorian related to Hoshi. Across the issues that follow, the team meets other fan favorites—which eventually leads to a sister series called Star Trek: Defiant, following a team led by Worf that includes Lore, Spock, Ro Laren, and B’Elanna Torres.

And, of course, the series makes time for interpersonal moments that one would expect. Sisko’s disappearance at the end of Deep Space Nine, in which he abandons not just Jake, but also his new wife Kasidy Yates and his newborn daughter, always rubbed some people the wrong way, particularly Brooks himself. Issue #1 of Star Trek addresses that problem, making “Jake” the first word that the reconstituted Sisko speaks. Not only do we get a better idea of how little agency Sisko had in his disappearance, but we get a beautiful reunion between father and son in the form of a hug the two share on the station’s promenade.

Were Star Trek just moments such as these, it would be an enjoyable, but cloying comic. But the fan-service moments are secondary to a satisfying Star Trek adventure, one that combines the promise of exploration with the philosophical quandaries that made the franchise great.

As demonstrated in their work for DC and Marvel, especially the Guardians of the Galaxy and Kang the Conqueror runs they did for the latter, Kelly and Lanzing understand how to pepper their big, high-concept stories with plenty of action. The “When the Walls Fell” arc that runs across issues 25 through 30 is a particular highlight. The storyline takes full advantage of a rift and time and space to further play with Trek lore, bringing aboard a young Kirk and even taking a dip into the Kelvin timeline, while staying focused on Sisko’s conflicted feelings about his allegiances to the Prophets and Starfleet.

To its credit, “Series Acclimation Mil” refuses to deify Sisko. The episode is keenly aware of fans’ reverence for Sisko the character and Brooks’s performance, but it retains a playfulness that never lets the nods become too serious.

However, the Star Trek comic series does one better. Not only does it once again show us Sisko the man, it shows us Sisko the man in a complicated relationship to the gods. It brings him back into the Star Trek universe, but never in a way that feels expected or comfortable. The Star Trek comic a strange, idiosyncratic riff on Star Trek storytelling, just like Benjamin Sisko himself.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Writer Resolves a Deep Space Nine Mystery

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5.

Technically speaking, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “Series Acclimation Mil” is a Sam-focused episode, an origin story of sorts for the first Kasquian student ever to attend the institution. But its traditional coming-of-age tale, in which she must figure out the sort of person (hologram?) she wants to become, is a story that looks to the past as much as the future. Old school fans will doubtless love this episode’s connections to underrated franchise gem Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but the hour is at its best when it’s using its legacy to help define its future.

Ordered by her makers to help them better understand the lives and motivations of organics, Sam (a.k.a. Series Acclimation Mil) finds herself undertaking a research project into the life of former Starfleet captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks). His career was full of many notable achievements, but ultimately concluded in mystery, as he seemingly sacrificed himself during the series finale “What You Leave Behind.” But his spiritual form appears to live on — he wakes up in the Celestial Temple and is told his work as an emissary for the non-corporeal pantheon of beings known as The Prophets was just beginning. Determined to earn a spot in a class called “Confronting the Unexplainable,” Sam decides to solve the mystery of his disappearance, and in the process, begins to define herself. Along the way, Starfleet Academy takes a very unique opportunity to pay homage to what’s come before.

“We were just massively intentional,” co-writer (and former Star Trek: Lower Decks star) Tawny Newsome tells Den of Geek. “It’s Sam’s story, and she’s a new character from a new species of aliens that we are just introducing in canon. And we also have to honor this massive legacy character that has been largely overlooked in modern Trek and is the only reason we have characters like Michael Burnham, [Beckett] Mariner, or even Sam. That’s a huge thing. Then we are bringing back in the flesh Jake Sisko, another massive legacy character who’s been overlooked and underutilized and under-loved in my opinion. There’s so much to honor and to uphold.”

At the same time, “Series Acclimation Mil’s” is also an episode about moving Sam’s story forward.

“It was so important because Sam herself is an Emissary,” Newsome says. “She is a bridge between worlds, as Jake Sisko puts it, written by my incredible co-writer, Kirsten Beyer. She is the bridge between the Kasquians and the organics. And she didn’t necessarily choose that, but we’re seeing her rise to the challenge, and that to me so clearly mirrored what Mr. Brooks did as Sisko. He didn’t necessarily choose to be the Emissary to the Prophets, but he sure did an incredible job for them and for the Bajoran people and for his crew. It was a no-brainer that as soon as we started calling Sam an Emissary in the writer’s room, I was raising my hand like, “Ooh, oh, oh, oh, I know who we need to talk about.”

The hour’s Sisko-focused subplot doesn’t exist simply for nostalgia’s sake. It’s through her research into the captain’s life that Sam begins to understand her own agency and purpose — something that’s both true and valuable whether or not she ever truly figures out what happened to him.

“I say it in my last monologue to Sisko: I have to learn how to do things my own way,” Kerrice Brooks, who plays Sam, says. “You did things your own way. You found your own way to be an Emissary, so I guess I have to find my own way to do it too. And I think that’s what I took away from [her] trying to reach out to him.”

For Brooks, Sam’s search for Sisko is as internal a process as it is an external one. And, for her, the question of what happened to him isn’t as important as what knowing him, even in this roundabout way, has done for her own story.

“I think he responds in his own way, even though I don’t know how conscious she is of it, but in that search for him and in talking to him on her own, it’s kind of like you’re talking to the spirit. You download whatever you can receive,” Brooks says. “For Sam, it’s a matter of her opening up to receive. And the only way to open herself up is to find herself. And to find herself, she’s got to explore.”

Though the episode technically leaves the question of Sisko’s ultimate fate unanswered, the folks behind the scenes feel as though “Series Acclimation Mil” is a confirmation that the beloved character lived on past the ending we saw onscreen (and may still, in some way).

“I think Jake does tell us,” Newsome says. “As we all know, Mr. [Avery] Brooks requested at the end of Deep Space Nine to add that line saying he would come back because, as an actor, he said, ‘Don’t make me a Black man who leaves his family.’ And so we honored that by having Jake insist that, ‘Yeah, maybe I can’t prove it scientifically. Maybe it’s not in the Starfleet records. But he was there, he didn’t miss those moments.’ I think, in a way…technically we don’t answer it. But in our hearts, it’s answered for me.”

This view is bolstered by the return of Cirroc Lofton, who originally played Sisko’s son Jake on Deep Space Nine. Since Starfleet Academy is set hundreds of years after that series, his character’s presence is presented as something of a historical artifact — a presence in a museum archive, a hologram hidden within a book — that nevertheless helps Sam better understand the man his father was.

“This was an opportunity for me to revisit this character as an adult, having lived now 47 years and gone through all of these things,” Lofton says when asked about returning to the Star Trek franchise after so long away. “One thing I admire about Avery Brooks is that he was so conscious of the material and the work he did throughout our time on Deep Space Nine. He was always involved in making sure that things were accurate, that it was believable, that this is what his character would do. For example, we did an episode where Sisko went back to Vegas in the 1950s, and he was adamant that he wouldn’t be in the casino because Black people weren’t allowed in the casinos at that time. And so he always made sure to instruct, inform, and deliberate on what was going to be put on screen.”

To hear Newsome tell it, Lofton himself played a key role in how this episode came together in the first place.

“Cirroc has been a part of this episode’s creation from before it was even an outline,” she said. “It was literally just a pitch, and then I immediately took Cirroc to lunch. It might’ve broken an NDA or two, but I was like, ‘I have to make sure that I’m doing this right. I have to make sure we’re getting your blessing. We’re getting Mr. Brooks’ blessing before we even proceed.’ It was very organic. It was just a lot of us going to lunch or having a drink at a con and talking about the best way to do this, both for Jake and for Benjamin.”

As an episode, “Series Acclimation Mil,” wrestles with many of the same questions Star Trek has addressed over its 60-year run, finding new ways to express much of the same hope and optimism it always has. But for the creators who brought this story to life, it was also a labor of love, meant to honor those who have come before.

“For me, this was an opportunity to approach this creative process in the way where I actually have an input on what’s being done,” Lofton said. “It’s a deliberate way of performing. I learned that from watching Avery perform, and I finally got a chance to do the same in honoring him.”

And, for Lofton, too, the answer to the question of what happened to Sisko is clear.

“In my head canon, he was there,” he says. “And whether he appeared in visions or in dreams, he was always in communication with Jake. I felt like that was also translated in the episode as well, that he was this ever-present being that was just watching over [his son], and that’s what he feels like in my life, because he’s always been there for me, so it resonated.”

The episode ends on a philosophical note. While Brooks doesn’t appear in “Series Acclimation Mil,” despite the many references to the character he once played, his voice does. As Sam thanks whatever aspect of Sisko that may be listening to her, she hears back a snippet of something that sounds like a mission statement for much of this episode — and the larger franchise itself.

“Divine laws are simpler than human laws, which is why it takes a lifetime to be able to understand them,” a voice that is clearly Brooks’s reads. “Only love can understand them. Only love can interpret these words as they were meant to be interpreted.”

Googling this quote isn’t going to tell you much — that way leads frustration and madness, I can confirm — but it is Brooks, from an album many fans may not be aware he made. And its inclusion was very deliberate.

“The snippet is from Avery Brooks’s album that he recorded,” Lofton explains. “The album is called ‘Here,’ which is a play on words on Paul Robeson’s biography, which was called ‘Here I Stand.’ And so Avery did a jazz album, and in there is some spoken word and those words you may find in poetry, ancient poetry of someone by the name of Rumi.”

“The album isn’t widely available,” Newsome adds. “Cirroc literally had to meet me at a dumpling restaurant and handed me a physical CD that I put on my laptop and then sent to production. The whole process of bringing this episode to light was very analog, very personal, and very heartfelt. It could not have happened without literal handoffs between loved ones to make this possible.”

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 5 Review – Series Acclimation Mil

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is finally starting to hit its stride as the series hits the midpoint of its first season. After last week’s largely excellent “Vox in Excelso,” the show switches up the vibe entirely with “Series Acclimation Mil,” a Sam-focused hour with a decidedly youthful feel and a deftly handled story that mixes familiar coming of age tropes with a love letter to what is perhaps the franchise’s most underrated installment. Written by Kirsten Beyer and former Star Trek: Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome, the episode is a delightful blend of old and new, using its plentiful connections to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to honor the stories that have come before, even as it uses those same threads to inform where the franchise is headed next.

Everybody’s undoubtedly going to be talking about the hour’s Benjamin Sisko focus, the glimpse into his son Jake’s future, the mostly-still-unanswered question of what really happened to him, and the gorgeous spoken word coda from none other than Avery Brooks himself at its end. And, of course, the revelation that Sam’s professor is also the new Trill host of the Dax symbiote that played such a key role in Deep Space Nine. There’s a lot to dig into in terms of larger Trek lore. But, even without all that, “Series Acclimation Mil” is also just a really satisfying story of a young woman learning how to navigate the conflict between the duty that’s been thrust upon her and the things she really wants.

The overall vibe of the episode is fun and bubbly, complete with colorful onscreen graphics, text descriptions, and fourth-wall-breaking asides to the audience. It’s all very reflective of what we know of Sam’s character thus far, and gives the show the kind of definitive POV and tone that its earlier episodes largely lacked. It’s genuinely charming and engaging enough to make you hope that the show finds a way to do something similar for the rest of its cadets. Yes, there’s a lot of exposition dumping, involving the history of Sam’s people, their curiosity about the experiences of organics, and why she’s been sent to Starfleet Academy in the first place. But because it’s all deployed in the service of deepening our emotional connection to and understanding of Sam, it’s surprisingly effective. The tension between a young woman and her parents — or makers in this case — when it comes to who she’s supposed to be, is precisely the sort of universal coming-of-age story that resonates in any universe or timeline, and one that this series is uniquely equipped to tell.

It helps, of course, that Kerrice Brooks is a literal ray of sunshine throughout, with an infectious demeanor that fully conveys Sam’s excitement and wonder at the situations she finds herself in, from drinking and bar fighting to recreating classic New Orleans dishes she can’t actually eat herself. Sam’s makers insist that she must gain admission to a course called “Confronting the Unexplainable” to remain at the Academy, as they are, for some reason, convinced it will hold the secrets of the organic experience. In an attempt to impress Professor Ayla, she learns about the life (and mysterious disappearance) of Deep Space Nine’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, and in the process, ends up questioning both what it means to be an Emissary of her people and the duty that comes along with it.

Longtime Trek fans will, of course, enjoy the ways this episode connects to the franchise’s past, from the return of Cirroc Lofton as an adult version of Sisko’s son Jake to the various items from the Earth-based Sisko Museum recreated in virtual form. There’s even a Bajoran children’s book that recounts his role as an Emissary of the Prophets. Thankfully, the hour smartly doesn’t attempt to really answer the question of what happened to Sisko at the end of Deep Space Nine. (Several characters seem to draw their own conclusions, but the show itself doesn’t put its foot down one way or another, and viewers can decide for themselves how they feel.)

Instead, the journey is more important than the destination, and it’s a lesson for Sam about what it means to carry both a destiny and a personal identity, and finding a way to thread the needle between the two. As she follows in the footsteps of the man she’s sort of adopted as a role model, it helps her not only understand that she’s something more than a conduit for the hopes and dreams of those who made her, but someone capable of making her own choices for her own reasons. And for a being who’s something like 200 days old, that’s no small thing.

The hour’s more young adult vibe means we also get the chance to see the students just, well, being students. Thus far, Starfleet Academy seems to work best when it leans into the inexperience of its protagonists. Though this episode still just cannot seem to help itself when it comes to reminding us that Caleb is some kind of genius hacker, the majority of it focuses on the sort of escapades one might expect from a show with this name. The gang’s trip to a cadet bar night is the highlight of the hour, full of the kind of dumb hijinks most of us probably remember from college.

Unfortunately, the episode stalls out whenever we switch back to its more adult-focused B-plot, which involves a complicated rehearsal for a fully ridiculous diplomatic dinner that War College Commander Kelrec has set up with a visiting alien chancellor. Pretty much everything about this subplot is awful, from Holly Hunter attempting a very weird posh accent and dinner guests being forced to talk to one another through cone shaped mouth trumpets to a strange blob fish-based main course that occasionally passes gas in a deeply uncomfortable way. We really all could have survived not knowing what Chancellor Ahke and the grown-ups were up to this week, is what I’m saying.

Thankfully, none of the blobfish stuff is remotely relevant to the rest of the episode, which concludes with a Sam who’s confident enough to claim agency over her own fate in a way she never realized was possible before. Its positively lovely to see Lofton’s Jake get the chance to give her the same sort of heartfelt pep talk he so often received from his father, and the confirmation that, no matter what actually happened to him, Sisko’s legacy still lives on in so many ways — through Jake’s book, through Dax’s instruction, and now through Sam herself — is ridiculously moving. But more importantly, “Series Acclimation Mil” isn’t a nostalgia fest for its own sake. It’s a story that makes use of the franchise’s past to truly inform its present, and it’s a lesson we can only hope the rest of the season will follow.

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.

Could Avengers: Doomsday Be Adapting This Forgotten Marvel Team?

Because of Marvel‘s strangely sparse way of advertising Avengers: Doomsday, fans have had to turn to other leaks and announcements to learn more about the upcoming multiversal adventure. So desperate are they, that even an Italian presentation to cinema owners caught their attention. As fans poured over what amounted to little more than a cast announcement, one thing stood out. The announcer seems to describe one set of heroes as “The Mighty Avengers.”

For readers of Marvel Comics in the mid-2000s, around the time that the New Avengers were a going concern, that phrase stands out. More than just a moniker describing the strength of the combined heroes, the Mighty Avengers signified a team of mainline heroes who went on big, blockbuster style adventures, despite the dark circumstances surrounding their formation. It’s those circumstances that have led Marvel to basically ignore that line-up of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and it’s those circumstances that make their potential return in Doomsday so interesting.

A Different Assemblage

Mighty Avengers #1, written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by Frank Cho, felt like a throwback to the Silver Age when it released in 2007. It’s not just the use of thought bubbles, which had been almost completely replaced by internal monologues conveyed through caption boxes. Rather, it’s the construction of the issue. In the main timeline, the Mighty Avengers battle monsters who emerge from the underground, in a manner reminiscent of Giganto from 1961’s Fantastic Four #1. In flashbacks, we see Tony Stark and Carol Danvers pick members of their new team, staring at a giant monitor filled with portraits of Marvel’s mightiest.

Cho, an artist best known for his cheesecake pin-ups, renders the heroes as bright and idealized, with colorist Jason Keith providing extra pop. Cho uses wide panels and near-splash pages to convey the awe of the battles, as befits a team full of heavy hitters such as Ms. Marvel (the moniker Danvers used before taking the name Captain Marvel), Sentry, Wonder Man, Iron Man, the Wasp, and the God of War Ares.

Fun as it is, the pop-art nature of Mighty Avengers #1 is more than a mere nostalgia play. Rather, it serves a thematic purpose, both for Tony Stark and for Marvel Comics. The formation of the Mighty Avengers comes as part of The Initiative storyline, the follow-up to the Civil War storyline. As in the MCU movie that bears its name, the Civil War in Marvel Comics saw Iron Man and Captain America come to blows over the issue of superhero registration.

However, writer Mark Millar, who served as architect for the Civil War event, was much more willing than Kevin Feige to have fans hate the belligerents. Framing himself as a futurist who saw what the people would demand, Stark demanded that his fellow superheroes unmask and register with the government. He went so far in his quest that he hunted down other heroes, he enlisted Reed Richards to create a secret prison in the Negative Zone for those who would not register, and created a clone of his recently-deceased ally Thor to help him carry out his plan. His actions even led to the death of Steve Rogers, a death that lasted quite a while by comic book standards.

In short, things looked pretty grim for Iron Man at the end of Civil War. Thus, The Initiative offered a chance at redemption, as Stark—who took the place of Nick Fury as director of SHIELD—starts to give the world its superheroes again. And the flagship of The Initiative was the Mighty Avengers.

The Mighty, The Fallen

As fun as the first issue of Mighty Avengers is, the series never forgot its relationship to the superhero Civil War. In fact, Marvel published another Avengers book at the same time, New Avengers, which focused on a team of heroes who kept up the fight, despite refusing to register. These heroes—led by Luke Cage, and including Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Wolverine, Iron Fist, Doctor Strange, and Clint Barton in his Ronin guise—did their good deeds knowing that the Mighty Avengers would arrest them on sight.

Indeed, both series gave plenty of time for the characters to wonder about the morality of their decisions. As the more street-level heroes, the New Avengers saw themselves as the authentic group, a position that Marvel seemed to endorse by having Cage and company discover a hidden Skrull attack long before the Secret Invasion crossover began in earnest. For their part, the Mighty Avengers insisted that they were doing the necessary work of superheroes, that they put aside their own personal feelings about secret identities and government regulations to save the world.

At its best, Mighty Avengers operated something like a superhero deconstruction. Bendis and Cho, the latter eventually replaced by the ever-reliable Mark Bagley, would serve up a heaping helping of two-fisted action. Issue after issue pit the team against monsters and Ultron and symbiotes, to say nothing of the Skrulls. At the same time, the series would stop for the heroes to consider their moral positions.

Those qualities only increased after the Secret Invasion forced the heroic factions to work together, especially when Norman Osborn, the respectable businessman who spends his evenings as Spider-Man’s archenemy the Green Goblin, becomes the world’s hero after ending the Skrull attack. During the Dark Reign event that followed Secret Invasion, Osborn used his influence to exercise control over the United States, essentially turning heroes into his tools.

A Mighty Good Time

We know that Avengers: Doomsday will feature two versions of the Avengers. The Thunderbolts have become the New Avengers, led by Bucky, but under the influence of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Although he lost government backing with President Ross turned into the Red Hulk in Brave New World, Sam Wilson has his own Avengers that he leads as Captain America. This group, which the Italian leak described as the Mighty Avengers, includes, of course, Captain America and Joaquin Torres as the Falcon, as well as Ant-Man, Thor, and, surprisingly, Loki.

The teaser at the end of Thunderbolts* suggested that the two Avengers groups do not get along, which matches the status quo at the start of the last major Marvel event, Avengers: Infinity War. In that movie, the two groups bury the hatchet almost immediately, as the threat of Thanos renders any other concerns unimportant.

One would think that the multiversal collapse and the coming of Doctor Doom would certainly also make Bucky and Sam get over their hurt feelings and combine their two groups. But if Doomsday and Secret Wars follow the model set by the Mighty Avengers comic, then the tensions are going to linger for a while.

That might be bad news for the people of the MCU. But for us MCU fans, more Mighty Avengers action is always a good thing, especially if the movie can replicate some of the bold action of the comics.

Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.

The Moment Review: Charli XCX Movie Is Not Nearly as Brat as It Needs to Be

What does it mean to be brat? The generational riddle wrapped in a TikTok quandary has befuddled talking heads and boomers for the last 18 months (which amounts to a couple of epochs in social media years). But the general definition passed down by Charli XCX herself is that it’s “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things, sometimes… It is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile.”

Youth in revolt.

It’s a great ideal, but an even better idea for a marketing gimmick. And that uneasy tension between those aspirations and the general assholishness that comes with commercialism has bedeviled pop music since time immemorial, and seems likely to gnaw at Charli too, as judged by the “brat” credit card laid out for free at every table of the Alamo Drafthouse screening room Tuesday night. Replicas of a literal prop in the movie, they are as empty and devoid of value as the queasy green paint slapped across their faces. They’re a brand intended to sell you something and nothing, which in this case is a movie ironically decrying the commercialization of music, art, rebellion, and the brattishness that Charli XCX espouses.

As an exercise in post-modern irony, the resulting movie of The Moment is bold—or at least it desperately wants to be so. From another perspective, it’s just self-satisfied enough with its metatextual quality to grate. Personally, however, the film largely amounts to a missed opportunity.

There is something always delicious about public figures willing to play themselves as fools, and Charli’s fictionalized version of herself in The Moment is needy, insecure, and just tragic enough to dimly recognize her own vapidity. It doesn’t stop her, though, from letting her label, handlers, and other music industry users in co-opting the “brat summer” of 2024 when the film’s faux-documentary is set. The sycophants turn a movement in the movie into a regular Madison Avenue Ad Men’s Frankenstein Monster, unleashed this time on the Snapchat generation. Yet the movie from writer-director Aidan Zamiri lacks the humor, imagination, or fanged menace to let this creature do anything too mean, or for that matter funny, during its rampage.

A tonal blending of ostensible cringe comedy, slow-burn horror perfectly in line with the film’s own A24 branding, and the uncanny valley of severe navel-gazing, there are intermittent scenes of ruthless schadenfreude in The Moment. This begins with the film having more than a passing resemblance to cult darling mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap in the film’s opening.

The time is early summer 2024, and Charli is introduced rocking out in what looks like the ruins of a derelict nightclub. Strobing, chic lights throb over music-video ready imagery and rapid editing, evoking the essence of Charli’s onstage and online persona. This turns out to be a soundstage where the pop star is building the look of her upcoming concert tour, and ground zero for real-life filmmaker Zamiri to do something a little playful. During the opening, the logos of production companies and distributors that made his film possible, including 2AM, Studio365, and A24, flash by in their patented brat-green stylings. Shades of the commodification of Charli’s music—including this movie—are already manifest.

Yet structurally what this self-skewering means proves elusive, as the mockumentary setup of the film turns out to be inexplicably filming the making of another more typical concert film-within-a-film, this one directed by industry veteran and sycophant extraordinaire, Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård). Johannes apparently has a penchant for making the streaming-ready gloss-ups you might associate with a Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber. Confusingly, though, The Moment becomes a documentary about Skarsgård’s attempt to make this even thinner slice of onscreen superficiality. Of course the narrative muddiness of this nesting doll structure wouldn’t matter if the film’s satire of the modern music industry was as sharp or funny as it thinks it is.

Zamiri certainly conjures the anxiety and dread that sustains so many comedy and horror movies this decade. Charli’s steady corruption by the banalities of fame and capitalism come across as a slow-motion car wreck while her handlers seduce her into selling “brat credit cards” to marginalized LGBTQ kids on IG and TikTok. Meanwhile Johannes slowly pushes out Charli’s most protective inner-circle, including BFF creative director Celeste Collins (Hailey Benton Gates), all so he can vibe-shift the upcoming concert tour’s nightclub aesthetic into an insipid paean to self-empowerment, and replace the word cunt on Charli’s concert stage to the more parent-friendly b!tc#. “The song is literally about cocaine,” Celeste protests when told to think of the potential children demographic. “What if the cocaine is a metaphor?!” Johannes suggests, without much rhyme or reason to explain for what.

Sequences like the above have an obvious but effective bite, as do almost all of Skarsgård’s overcaffeinated, strained smiles that appear too acute to not be based on a person or 12 the Swedish actor has met along the way. The film also gets mileage out of other celebrities willing to play themselves, be it I Love LA’s Rachel Sennott as a jelly cokehead needling Charli in a bar’s bathroom, or Kylie Jenner as the superficial ideal for empty fame. The fact Kylie shows up in a bikini and 4K-ready makeup at a spa as the devil on Charli’s shoulder, convincing her to sell her soul to the suits to extend brat summer’s 15 minutes, shows a fair amount of self-awareness and self-deprecation.

Then again, the Jenner-Kardashian brand is a testimonial for fame as an end unto itself, so whether symbolizing supposed perfection, or celebrity-life rot as in The Moment, it all plays the same. For Charli XCX, though, the film is meant to clearly be a cautionary tale of the road taken by so many other pop stars. It seeks to weaponize and mock the whole media cycle of the brat meme, yet like a carefully curated marketing campaign, the film refuses to go in for the most thrilling or provocative kill.

Not nearly funny enough to work as a comedy, or scary enough to be an unnerving thriller, there is the possibility for The Moment to still be a subversive, transgressive satire. The third act—after movie-Charli goes full sellout—indeed flirts with something as triumphantly nihilistic as the ending of Network from 50-odd years ago. Near the end, Johannes, Charli’s record exec overlord (Rosanna Arquette), and a fleet of hangers-on, begin contemplating life without Charli.

Alas, the movie lacks the courage of its convictions. It footsies with doing something truly blunt, honest, or volatile, but by Charli’s own definition, it’s unable to achieve full brat. Or, to use a different music mockumentary’s slang, it fails to take things to 11.

The Moment is in theaters Friday, Feb. 6.

An A24/Texas Chainsaw Massacre Pairing Actually Makes a Lot of Sense

Soon, the buzz will be back… from the people who gave you The Witch and Hereditary? Yes, believe it or not, A24 is currently in talks to create a television series based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Glen Powell is currently set to executive produce, as is Kim Henkel, who co-created the series with the late Tobe Hooper. J.T. Mollner, who made last year’s satisfying Stephen King adaption The Long Walk, will direct.

At first glance, that collaboration seems unlikely, and not because of Powell. The name A24 is synonymous with “elevated” horror, scary movies with high ideas and ambitions beyond grossing out viewers. With its garish name and (completely made-up) true crime pretensions, 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an exemplar of the sort of nasty, low-brow stuff that elevated horror was supposed to replace. However, the Texas Chainsaw series has always had a self-aware, dare we say even intellectual streak, behind all of its blood and guts.

Nowhere is the franchise’s self-awareness more apparent than in the second entry, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 from 1986. Partly out of spite for being forced to return to his most famous movie, partly out of frustration that no one saw how funny the first movie was, and partly because he had a huge budget (at least by the standards of the Cannon Group), Hooper made his sequel into an over the top comedy.

The film barely cares about continuity from the first entry, swapping out the hitchhiker from the first movie (Edwin Neal) with Bill Moseley as Chop Top. Instead, it goes for over-the-top sequences, culminating with Dennis Hopper as a vengeful sheriff who bellows a sermon while wielding multiple saws. And just in case anyone didn’t get the joke, the film’s poster pays homage to The Breakfast Club, with Leatherface and Cook standing in for Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson.

However, Texas Chainsaw 2 isn’t the only entry with a brain in its about-to-be-bashed-in head. The first film operates as a dark mirror on America’s involvement in Vietnam, when the country essentially ground up its young people in the same way the Sawyers turned teens into BBQ. Later entries continued to find allegories in the ultra violence, as in the school shooting themes running through 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Even Powell’s involvement makes a bit of sense. Not only is the handsome star a Texas native, but he’s following in the footsteps of fellow A-listers from the Lone Star State, as Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger both appeared in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).

For its part, A24 has never shied away from grizzly images and plots. The head trauma in Hereditary, Midsommar, Talk to Me, and Bring Her Back alone is as bad as anything in a TCM movie, and that’s just the work of two filmmakers.

Most importantly, both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A24 have changed the face of horror for the better. Together, they may be able to make something special; something gross, weird, and smarter than you’d think, but also special.

The Underrated Muppets Who Deserve More Love

Among the many joys of the new Disney+ special The Muppet Show is the chance to catch up with some of our favorite characters. Sure, Kermit, Fozzie, and Miss Piggy may sound a little different. But they’re still the same beloved variety show performers that we’ve been following for years.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment of the special is that it’s only one episode, which means that we can’t spend too much time with any of the second and third-level Muppets. That’s a shame, because Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and the Muppet performers have created a host of lovable characters in a cast that goes far deeper than the regular big names.

Until The Muppet Show gets a full revival season, we’ll celebrate those underrated Muppets here.

Beauregard

Were Beauregard just a standard dumb guy, he would still be wonderful. Performer Dave Goelz imbues him with such an innocent sweetness that we find ourselves laughing with him instead of at him, especially when he gets to do absurd bits like his tour of London in The Great Muppet Caper. But Beauregard gets even better within The Muppet Show milieu, where he serves as the janitor. Even more than behind-the-scenes guys like Scooter, Beauregard reminds us that it takes many hands to pull off a performance, and the people off-stage are just as weird as the people on the stage.

Lew Zealand

Lew Zealand, originally performed by Jerry Nelson and now by Matt Vogel, began as one of the many one-off weirdos on The Muppet Show, a guy who could do one thing and would stick to that one thing, even if it wasn’t very interesting. Namely, Lew Zealand would throw fish. However, Lew became so much weirder and so much more interesting when he moved off the stage and into “normal” situations. We never fail to laugh when flying fish start popping out of crowd scenes, and his devotion to using paper towels in jewel heists goes beyond any sort of logic into a whole new level of weirdness.

Clifford

The many failed attempts to revive The Muppet Show past the early eighties aren’t exactly a point of pride for Muppet fans, but that doesn’t mean they lack charm. One of the more interesting experiments involved Clifford, the cool catfish-looking Muppet who took over hosting duties for Muppets Tonight. Performed by Kevin Clash, Clifford brought a different energy than the constantly-frazzled Kermit, which helped set apart Muppets Tonight from other iterations. Since that show came to an end, Clifford has been a background player at best, but it would be nice if new projects put him back in the spotlight.

Pepe the King Prawn

While Clifford has been largely forgotten since Muppets Tonight, Pepe the King Prawn has only grown in prominence over the past years, to the point that he may not even belong on this list. Still, we’re including him just because he’s not from the franchise’s most successful era and, therefore, doesn’t always get the attention he deserves. And he really does deserve attention, as performer Bill Barretta has created an infectious character, a guy whose self-confidence goes far beyond the limits of his stature. Need proof? Just go to social media, where you’re sure to find plenty of clips featuring Pepe charming, or attempting to charm, anyone who might find him attractive.

Zoot

Zoot doesn’t do much. Zoot doesn’t say much. But when he does, it always matters. I’m not just referring to the note he sounds (or attempts to sound) at the end of every episode of The Muppet Show. I’m also referring to the one-liners and reactions he gets to give. Take the moment when he jolts awake in The Muppets Take Manhattan. Yes, bandmate Floyd Pepper gets the more prominent joke (“Go back to sleep, nobody’s landed”), but it’s the combination of relief and annoyance that performer Goelz plays that suggests that Zoot’s very still waters do indeed run deep.

Bobo the Bear

Like Pepe, Bobo the Bear debuted in Muppets Tonight and continues to appear in projects. However, unlike Pepe, he doesn’t have a frequent social media presence or a following. And yet, he remains a delightful member of the Muppet cast, precisely because he has the exact opposite energy as Pepe and Clifford. Performer Bill Barretta somehow makes Bobo’s desire to just be part of the gang into something endearing instead of annoying, and his genuinely good attitude makes for a nice, calming presence amongst the overall chaos of the various Muppet shows.

Big Mean Carl

Most Muppet fans first encounter the franchise as children, and, as they age, the fans talk about these characters as a source of warmth and comfort. But there’s another aspect to some Muppet characters, an aspect that many young children first watching the Muppets know well: some of the Muppets are scary. Over time, guys like Sweetums reveal themselves to be big softies, and that’s why we need characters such as Big Mean Carl, first played by Goelz and now by Barretta. There’s an affability to Carl that softens his big meanness, but you never know when he’s going to suddenly swallow a bag-pipe.

Digit

Speaking of scary Muppets: Digit. Digit made his first appearance in The Jim Henson Hour as the show’s technical advisor, and has only made a few background appearances since. Yet, you’re certain to notice Digit every time he shows up, and not just because of Goelz’s strong puppeteering. Digit has a completely unique look, one that has only become more distinctive—and disturbing—as we move away from the ’80s video art that initially inspired his creation.

The Amazing Mumford

Despite Congress’s attempts to gut it, Sesame Street continues to live on, which means that the Muppets for Henson’s other great series get plenty of screen time. One notable exception is the guy who feels like he should have made a few more visits to the Muppet Theater, the Amazing Mumford. Played by Jerry Nelson, Mumford is a magician whose tricks don’t always go right, most memorable for his magic phrase, “A la peanut butter sandwiches!” His indefatigable desire to put on a show makes him unique to Sesame Street, and he needs more attention.

Marvin Suggs

The Muppet Show is a vaudeville-esque show, so it follows that many of its lesser cast members would be performers with one hook for their act. But, with apologies to Crazy Harry, the weirdest and most wonderful of the bunch is Marvin Suggs. Dressed in a flashy flamenco outfit and performed by Frank Oz, Marvin would simply play musical numbers for his audience. It’s just that his instrument was the Muppaphone, a xylophone-like instrument consisting of ball Muppets that say “ow” in different tones when struck. It’s a bizarre bit, and we never get enough of it.

The Muppet Show is now streaming on Disney+.