A Mighty Wind Was Catherine O’Hara at Her Sweet, Silly Best

The news of Catherine O’Hara’s death at age 71 is sure to prompt fond remembrances of her work. Some will recall the outrageous characters she portrayed on the groundbreaking Canadian sketch series SCTV. Others will mention her playing tacky artist Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice or the formerly rich Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek, both women adjusting (poorly) to new, more humble circumstances. And probably most people will remember her as the forgetful but loving and determined mother from Home Alone.

But O’Hara’s best and most complicated performance might also be one of her less remembered ones. In the 2003 mockumentary A Mighty Wind, O’Hara reunited with actor/director Christopher Guest and fellow SCTV/future Schitt’s Creek co-star Eugene Levy to play Mickey Crabbe, one half of a famed folk duo. While A Mighty Wind has plenty of the dry humor and absurdism that made Guest’s comedies such classics, O’Hara also brought pathos to Mickey, showing off the actress’s silly side and her sweet side.

Folk in A

Like Guest’s previous mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman (1996) and Best in Show (2000), both of which featured O’Hara, A Mighty Wind examined the idiosyncrasies of an overlooked subculture, namely the 1960s folk music scene. A Mighty Wind follows the children of a famed record producer as they try to reunite the acts from their father’s heyday for a tribute concert. The bickering Folksmen Trio—consisting of This is Spinal Tap‘s Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer—pose problems for the organizers, as do the sprawling members of the New Main Street Singers, which include an old hand played by Paul Dooley and newcomers portrayed by Parker Posey, Jane Lynch, and John Michael Higgins.

But the greatest hurdle involves Mickey Crabbe and Mitch Cohen (Levy), who recorded under the name Mitch & Mickey. Both romantic and creative partners, Mitch & Mickey were the sweethearts of the folk world, their love memorialized by the song “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow.” At the climax of each performance, the two would pause the number to share a tiny kiss before playing the final chords. However, they had an awful break-up and went in radically different ways, Mickey to marriage and a suburban home and Mitch into madness, making a reunion unlikely.

When we first meet Mickey in the movie’s first act, O’Hara plays her much like the other folkie goofballs in the film. The first half of A Mighty Wind pokes fun at the intense sincerity of ’60s folk music, with its sweater-wearing players and its wholesomeness. But then, the film uncovers surprising lasciviousness among the players, such as the insults that the Folksmen shoot at each other or the New Main Street Players’ embrace of pagan rituals.

Mitch & Mickey Revisited

Mickey continues in that vein by sitting in her comfy living room and, in a Minnesotan accent that would be right at home in Fargo, sharing winsome memories about her time with Mitch. O’Hara sneaks panic into Mickey’s calm demeanor when she realizes that she’s agreed to perform the song without securing a commitment from Mitch, and that Mitch is unlikely to join. Stumbling over her words, taking quick sharp breaths to maintain her composure, Mickey starts muttering to herself about dark times around their break-up.

What follows is a series of talking heads describing Mitch’s post-break-up spiral, complete with images of album covers that show Mitch standing in a grave and looking like Charles Manson. Levy plays Mitch as a complete weirdo, who speaks his lines with tense discomfort and who constantly darts his eyes around the room.

Between the two, Levy gets the bigger and more attention-grabbing part. However, his character doesn’t work without O’Hara setting him up, preparing us for a genius and giving room for Levy to get weird. That’s true throughout the film, as when Mitch visits Mickey’s home and the two reunite for the first time in years. These moments let Levy do funny things like stare with confusion at the model trains constructed by Mickey’s husband Leonard (Jim Piddock), or ramble incoherently when trying to recall the duo’s first meeting.

Rather than simply stand aside, O’Hara finds more subtle and equally strange notes to play while portraying the “normal” one. O’Hara goes through a litany of grunts and facial tics when trying to get Leonard to stop talking about his company’s work with spastic bladders over dinner, finally declaring, in a calming mom voice, “Maybe that’s dessert talk.” She gets the punchline at the end of the first meeting story, describing in detail how Mitch stood up and strode across a concert venue to confront a rude heckler, only to end it by saying, “and he got pummeled.”

A Click At the End of the Rainbow

As much as O’Hara shows off her comedy chops with Mickey, she never stops treating the character like a real person. There’s genuine longing in her eyes when she watches Mitch tell stories about their past, and real fear as the tribute concert draws near.

That complexity all comes together during “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” an Academy Award-nominated number written by McKean and his wife, actress Annette O’Toole. Not only does O’Hara sing the track with Levy, layering warm harmonies over his more simple, almost spoken-word delivery, but she also relays Mickey’s hesitance as they get closer to the kiss during the tribute costume.

While Levy emphasizes Mitch’s fear that Mickey won’t want to do the kiss, O’Hara underscores her character’s sadness. She lets her head fall to the side and wears a forlorn expression when they reach the pause. Right before Mickey leans in to touch Mitch’s lips, she lets out a quiet click of the tongue.

Does the click acknowledge everything that she and Mitch could have had and let slip away? Does it underscore the false premise of the entire performance, recognizing that the two of them were never the Mitch & Mickey that people loved? Does it show a reluctance for even participating in the show, a desire to return to her quiet, normal life with her husband?

The movie doesn’t tell us, and O’Hara provides no answer. She just lets it sit there right before the kiss, adding complexity to what could have been a simple moment of catharsis.

Not Just Joking

When people remember Catherine O’Hara over the next few days, they’re sure to talk about her incredible comic timing and her constant presence on our screens.

But anyone who watches her play Mickey Crabbe in A Mighty Wind will know that O’Hara wasn’t just a hilarious comedian and a proper movie star. She was also an accomplished dramatic actor, someone who could bring layers to characters that others would play as just a joke.

Brandon Sanderson to Have “Unprecedented” Control Over Apple TV Cosmere Adaptations

Apple TV is staking a claim to the entertainment world’s next big fantasy adaptation: Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe. (Sometimes, dreams do come true!) The streamer has acquired the rights to Sanderson’s Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive books, two key pillars of his sprawling fictional fantasy universe, as well as some of the most popular genre titles released in recent years. 

The megapopular (and wildly prolific) author has sold over 50 million books and, in the process, has built a fandom so dedicated that he managed to raise over $41 million on Kickstarter to launch four books he wrote in secret. (All while still working on his other active series! George R.R. Martin, take notes!) Sanderson has long been resistant to the idea of studios or streamers adapting his works, but clearly, Apple TV has won him over. 

Per The Hollywood Reporter, Apple TV is planning to turn the Mistborn series into feature films and the Stormlight Archive books into a television series. But what’s perhaps most exciting for fans is how much control Sanderson will reportedly have over the onscreen adaptations of his fictional universe. According to the THR report, the Apple TV deal “gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe, will write, produce, and consult, and have approvals.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is certainly one of the more author-friendly adaptation deals in recent memory, and gives Sanderson more ability to direct the shape of his onscreen franchise than most. (Even Martin, whose Game of Thrones books have spawned three successful HBO TV series at this point and pretty much made him a household name, has openly feuded with some of the folks in charge of his shows.) 

Sanderson’s interconnected Cosmere universe currently spans more than 20 books, all united by a single creation myth (the murder of a cosmic whose power is subsequently broken into sixteen shards and spread throughout many worlds). But despite its shared foundation, the individual works within this universe are quite varied in terms of story and tone. The first Mistborn trilogy, which kicks off with The Final Empire, is essentially a heist story about a gang of thieves who want to rob an immortal emperor. Stormlight Archive boasts a much more complicated high-fantasy setting, complete with magical superstorms, Knights Radiant, and legendary monsters called Voidbringers. (You probably couldn’t turn Stormlight into a movie, is what I’m saying, and it’s a relief that Apple seems to understand that already.) 

There’s no timeline set yet for when we might see any of these projects on our screens, and it will likely take years for them to be done properly. But if you’ve somehow missed out on Sanderson’s works up until this point? Now’s almost certainly the time to dive in. 

Can the Rambo Prequel Return Depth to the Franchise?

Ask the average film goer to describe John Rambo, the character that Sylvester Stallone played across five films, and they’ll probably use words like “ripped,” “violent,” or “carrying a very large gun.” They probably won’t use words such as “PTSD” or “quiet,” even though those are the two best descriptors for the character’s first movie appearance, back in 1982’s First Blood. While that film certainly had its share of thrilling adventure sequences, it also had a sympathetic portrait of a man traumatized by the war in Vietnam and unable to reintegrate into society.

Those qualities were abandoned with the sequel Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985, giving the franchise its reputation as a jingoistic guilty pleasure. But with the upcoming prequel John Rambo, director Jalmari Helander is trying to recover the character’s more sympathetic roots.

“When I was 11, I saw First Blood for the first time, and it changed my life,” Helander said in a social media post. “Rambo wasn’t just a film to me — it stayed with me growing up and was a defining influence on why I wanted to become a filmmaker. As we begin production on the origin of John Rambo, we’re going back to the beginning. This is Rambo stripped down, raw and real — a survival story about endurance, persistence and lost innocence. It’s an honor to shape this next chapter with deep respect for the character and the legacy, and to bring audiences the start of John Rambo’s journey.”

The two most recent Rambo films, Rambo from 2008 and Rambo: Last Blood from 2019, were both stripped down and raw. But neither of them had any of the depth of the first movie, nor the depth that Helander describes, especially compared to First Blood. The first movie was a relatively small-scale affair, telling the story of how Rambo (Stallone) was simply minding his own business when the local police (lead by Brian Dennehy) decide to harass him. What follows is action set-piece after action set-piece, as Rambo uses his Special Forces skills to decimate the bully cops. But even at its most spectacular, Rambo has a grounded sadness, thanks to Stallone’s quiet, soulful performance and excellent direction by Ted Kotcheff.

John Rambo hopes to bring the title character back to that point. Noah Centineo steps into the title role, presumably to play the character during his days in Vietnam. This version will certainly have plenty of action, showing Rambo at the height of his powers. But it will likely also show the events that left him so mentally scared, leaving him the shell of a man we meet in First Blood.

If Helander and Centineo can handle those events with as much sensitivity as the 1982 film, then the character can once again stand for more than just big-screen action. The name John Rambo can also bring to mind a complex character, somebody who’s more than muscles and mayhem.

John Rambo is now in production.

Send Help Lets Rachel McAdams Go Full Bruce Campbell and it’s Amazing

This post contains light spoilers for Send Help.

Midway through Send Help, Rachel McAdams hunts a wild boar. Her character Linda Liddle lures the beast into a clearing and pounces from above, stabbing the creature with her spear. The boar bucks and charges as it fights back, continuing to drive toward Linda even after being impaled. As it rages forward, the boar spews blood and bile and foam, dousing Linda with viscera. The baptism only elates, and she greets the gore with wide, wild eyes and an open-mouthed smile.

If anyone didn’t realize that Sam Raimi-directed Send Help, the boar killing sequence would obliterate all doubt. Only the mad genius behind the Evil Dead franchise could construct a scene at once both so terrifying and so absurd. Raimi’s commitment to dread and disorder transformed his childhood friend Bruce Campbell into a B-movie legend. And with Send Help, he gets the Academy Award-nominated McAdams to unleash her inner chaos demon.

Raimi’s Helping Hand

Send Help has a delicious premise from screenwriting duo Mark Swift and Damian Shannon (Freddy vs Jason). McAdams’s Linda Liddle is the office weirdo, talented enough with numbers to be valuable to the company but too awkward to make friends. When condescending rich kid Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) inherits the company from his father, he callously denies her promised promotion but agrees to bring her on a business trip to China—provided that she can write up a report during the flight. Linda does not finish the report, in part because Bradley decides to mock her very sincere Survivor audition video and in part because the plane crashes, stranding the two of them on a deserted island.

There, Linda gets the upper hand as her much-mocked Survivor skills allow her to not only quickly make camp on the beach, but also nurse Bradley back to health. As they begin to realize that her skills—and his utter lack thereof—reverse the duo’s power dynamics, Linda and Bradley resort to increasingly disturbing tactics to keep control over one another.

While that set-up could make for a tense thriller, psychological never been Raimi’s bailiwick. From his debut The Evil Dead in 1981 through his genre-defining Spider-Man movies in the 2000s to his return to superheroes with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Raimi is all about bombastic, bloody violence—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by way of The Three Stooges.

Raimi started his career with the ideal leading man for his vision, having grown up with Bruce Campbell in his native Michigan. The tall, handsome Campbell accepted the punishment that Raimi dished out, whether it be smashing plates on his face, spinning around while strapped to a rig, or just laughing maniacally on camera for what must have seemed like hours.

Raimi’s tried to do the same with other actors. His Spider-Man films punished Tobey Maguire more than any other on-screen version of the wall-crawler and Alison Lohman spent all of Drag Me to Hell getting sprayed with rain, saliva, and blood. But no one has come close to matching Campbell’s commitment to the Raimi vision. No one, until Rachel McAdams in Get Help.

McAdams Makes Mayhem

When we first meet Linda in Send Help, she’s a mousy office lady, as oblivious to her co-workers’ cold shoulders as she is to the globs of tuna fish stuck to her face after lunch. McAdams leans into the bit, not just by obscuring her movie star looks with frumpy sweaters and ratty hair, but also by adopting the spindly posture of an old maid and making her million-dollar-smile feel discomfiting. On the island, McAdams gradually plays the character with more confidence and even glamour, showing that Linda has found her element.

Even more impressive than the character’s transformation is the fearlessness that McAdams brings to the part. In Send Help‘s most memorable scene, Linda paralyzes Bradley and threatens to do the unthinkable to him (don’t worry, we won’t spoil it here). As she explains to Bradley the process and her rationale, Linda’s sweet Midwesterner disposition becomes unhinged, her eyes widening after every sentence and her smile holding for a few seconds too long.

Elsewhere in the movie, Linda gets to luxuriate in a waterfall and, by the end of the film, events and elements seem to transform her into one of the Deadites from Evil Dead. McAdams remains completely committed throughout, never once showing restraint or self-consciousness. Whether she’s asked to look silly or scary, beautiful or bedraggled, McAdams gives it her all.

Impressive as her performance in Send Help is, McAdams’s work as Linda is all the more amazing in light of her full filmography. McAdams broke out playing queen bee Regina George in Mean Girls and solidified her star status in The Notebook, both generational films. Since then, she’s delivered incredible performances in thrillers such as Red Eye and romantic comedies like About Time, and she earned an Academy Award nomination for playing a reporter in Spotlight. Despite more than two decades of great work on screen, audiences are still surprised when she nails comedy beats in Game Night and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga or plays the nuances in a light drama such as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Bruce Status

Beyond the gunk and ooze, the pleasure of Send Help comes from watching a perpetual victim come into her own. There’s a power fantasy element that continues throughout the movie, even as Linda goes to extremes that the average viewer would rather avoid.

About the time that Bradley concedes that he’s underestimated Linda, we viewers have the same realization about McAdams. We’ve always known that she’s a good actress, and we’ve liked her almost everything. But when she guts a pig with gooey gusto, we realize that she’s ascended to another level. Sure, McAdams has always been funny and convincing and compelling on screen. But now, she’s put in a Bruce Campbell-worthy performance in a Sam Raimi movie, and that is truly something special.

Send Help is playing in theaters worldwide.

Amazon Will Adapt a Great Crime Comic With a Very Embarrassing Title

Most comic readers prefer to get their issues from a local shop instead of a faceless retailer. But there’s one series with a title so embarrassing, so shocking, that some sheepish fans would prefer the anonymity of Amazon over the discomfort of buying in person. That series is Image Comics‘ Sex Criminals, by writer Matt Fraction and artist Chip Zdarsky.

Soon, however, Amazon is going to spread the discomfort into the world of television. Prime Video plans to adapt Sex Criminals to live action, produced by writers Emily V. Gordon and Tze Chun and actor/comedian Kumail Nanjiani, the last of whom will also appear in the show.

Sex Criminals follows a young woman named Suze, who discovered during adolescence that time stops when she climaxes, literally. As she grew into adulthood and took a quiet job as a librarian, Suze just assumed that her weird trick was hers alone. But during a one-night stand with an actor called Jon, Suze learned that her new partner had the same ability. The couple decides to make money by sneaking into bank bathrooms, getting it on, and taking money during the time-stopping afterglow. However, their actions run afoul of a group of S&M-wearing secret police, who want to punish Suze and Jon for their crimes.

The series was a critical smash, regularly appearing atop best of lists and earning a Hugo Award nomination. Sex Criminals is a true dream team comic, as both Fraction and Zdarsky have done excellent work for the big two publishers in the past. Fraction wrote the classic Iron Fist and Hawkeye series for Marvel, and is currently writing a masterpiece in the making with Batman at DC, and Zdarsky’s Daredevil run may be even better than those by Frank Miller and Brian Michael Bendis.

With Sex Criminals, the duo have something truly special, a series that fully embraces the comedy of its high concept (just check out the special covers Fraction and Zdarsky did) while also keeping focused on character development. Suze and Jon are three-dimensional, emotionally rich figures, who feel like real and compelling people, despite its absurd presence.

That combination of high concept and nuanced character makes the production team behind the Sex Criminals show so compelling. Tze Chun broke out with his 2009 Sundance drama Children of Invention, a small-scale story about immigrants from Boston. From there, he has gone on to Nanjiani on big, wacky television shows such as Gotham and Once Upon a Time…. Likewise, comedian Nanjiani and his wife Gordon made the sweet indie comedy The Big Sick 2017, and they’re both big nerds, and Nanjiani has appeared in high-profile properties such as Eternals and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Together, the trio can bring Fraction and Zdarsky’s weird adventures into the mainstream, so that everyone can learn to love Sex Criminals. And, thanks to Prime Video, they can enjoy it in the privacy of their own homes, without embarrassment.

Sex Criminals is now in pre-production.

TV Premiere Dates: 2026 Calendar

Wondering when your favorite shows are coming back and what new series you can look forward to? We’ve got you covered with the Den of Geek 2026 TV Premiere Dates Calendar, where we keep track of TV series premiere dates, return dates, and more for the year and beyond. 

We’ll continue to update this page weekly as networks and streamers announce dates. A lot of these shows we’ll be watching or covering, so be sure to follow along with us! 

Please note that all times are ET. 

Note: These are U.S. releases. For upcoming British releases, head on over here.

DATESHOWNETWORK
Friday, January 30Yo Gabba GabbaLand Season 2Apple TV
Sunday, February 1Glitter & Gold: Ice DancingNetflix
Monday, February 2Below Deck Down Under Season 4 (8:00 p.m.)Bravo
Wednesday, February 4Is It Cake? ValentinesNetflix
Wednesday, February 4The Muppet ShowDisney+
Thursday, February 5Cash QueensNetflix
Thursday, February 5The Lincoln Lawyer Season 4Netflix
Sunday, February 8Super Bowl LX (6 p.m.)NBC
Sunday, February 8The ‘BurbsPeacock
Tuesday, February 10MotorvalleyNetflix
Tuesday, February 10The Artful Dodger Season 2Hulu
Wednesday, February 11Kohrra Season 2Netflix
Wednesday, February 11Lead ChildrenNetflix
Wednesday, February 11Love Is Blind Season 10Netflix
Wednesday, February 11Cross Season 2Prime Video
Thursday, February 12How to Get to Heaven from BelfastNetflix
Thursday, February 12Millon-Follower Detective Netflix
Thursday, February 12FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn BessettHulu
Thursday, February 12Can You Keep a Secret?Paramount+
Friday, February 13The Art of SarahNetflix
Friday, February 13Museum of InnocenceNetflix
Friday, February 13NeighborsHBO Max
Sunday, February 15Like Water for Chocolate Season 2 (8:00 p.m.)HBO Max
Sunday, February 15Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Season 13 (11:00 p.m.)HBO Max
Sunday, February 15Dark Winds Season 4 (9:00 p.m.)AMC
Wednesday, February 18Being Gordon RamsayNetflix
Wednesday, February 1856 DaysPrime Video
Wednesday, February 18Wild Boys: Strangers in TownParamount+
Thursday, February 19The Night Agent Season 3Netflix
Thursday, February 19Murder in Glitterball City (8:00 p.m.)HBO Max
Friday, February 20The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2Apple TV
Friday, February 20Strip LawNetflix
Friday, February 20PortobelloHBO Max
Friday, February 20Dreaming Whilst Black Season 2Paramount+
Monday, February 23Paradise Season 2Hulu
Monday, February 23The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins (8:00 p.m.)NBC
Monday, February 23The Voice Season 29 (9:00 p.m.)NBC
Monday, February 23CIA (10:00 p.m.)CBS
Wednesday, February 25Survivor Season 50 (8:00 p.m.)CBS
Wednesday, February 25Scrubs Season 10 (8:00 p.m.)ABC
Wednesday, February 25The Greatest Average American (9:00 p.m.)ABC
Thursday, February 26Bridgerton Season 4 Part 2Netflix
Thursday, February 26Crap HappensNetflix
Friday, February 27Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2Apple TV
Friday, February 27Celebrity Jeopardy! All-Stars Season 4 (8:00 p.m.)ABC
Sunday, March 1Actor Awards (8:00 p.m.)Netflix
Sunday, March 1Y: Marshals (8:00 p.m.)CBS
Wednesday, March 4Daredevil: Born Again Season 2Disney+
Wednesday, March 4America’s Culinary Cup (9:30 p.m.)CBS
Thursday, March 5Ted Season 2Peacock
Friday, March 6Outlander Season 8Starz
Tuesday, March 10One Piece Season 2Netflix
Wednesday, March 11ScarpettaPrime Video
Saturday, March 14The MadisonsParamount+
Wednesday, March 18Invincible Season 4Prime Video
Thursday, March 19Steel Ball Run JoJo’s Bizarre AdventureNetflix
Sunday, March 22The Bachelorette Season 22 (8:00 p.m.)ABC
Sunday, March 22The Faithful (8:00 p.m.)Fox
Sunday, March 22The Forsytes (9:00 p.m.)PBS
Sunday, March 22The Count of Monte Cristo (10:00 p.m.)PBS
Thursday, March 26Jo Nesbo’s Detective HoleNetflix
Friday, March 27For All Mankind Season 5Apple TV
Friday, April 3Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2Apple TV
Monday, April 6Star Wars: Maul – Shadow LordDisney+
Wednesday, April 8The Boys Season 5Prime Video
Wednesday, April 8The TestamentsHulu
Sunday, April 12The Audacity (9:00 p.m.)AMC
Thursday, April 16Beef Season 2Netflix
Wednesday, April 29Widow’s BayApple TV
Tuesday, May 12Devil May Cry Season 2Netflix
Friday, May 15Berlín and the Lady with an ErmineNetflix
Thursday, June 11Sweet Magnolias Season 5Netflix
Friday, June 19Sugar Season 2Apple TV

If we’ve forgotten a show, feel free to drop a reminder in the comment section below!

Want to know what big movies are coming out in 2026? We’ve got you covered here.

The Pitt Season 2 Episode 4 Review: First Week in July Syndrome

This article contains spoilers for THE PITT season 2 episode 4.

Near the beginning of The Pitt season 2’s fourth episode “10:00 A.M.,” deaf patient Harlow Graham (Jessica Flores) politely requests some eye contact.

“It’s okay to look at me. I don’t bite,” she says to nurse Donnie (Brandon Mendez Homer) via a hospital-provided American Sign Language interpreter. In trying to get information about Harlow’s condition, Donnie has committed a common social faux pas when communicating with the hard of hearing: he’s exclusively addressed the translator, not Ms. Graham herself.

It’s good that Harlow spoke up because I was ready to snap my fingers in Donnie’s face myself. My recognition of his accidental rudeness was not due to me being more empathetic than an emergency room nurse or having any experience communicating with deaf people but rather because I had just watched an episode of ER dealing with this exact topic.

Perhaps now is the right time to reveal that, concurrent with The Pitt‘s second season, I’ve been watching the show’s spiritual successor for the first time. While I caught a few episodes of ER here or there in my youth, I’d never actually sat down to consume all 15 seasons and 331 episodes of the hospital drama that put Noah Wyle on the map as an iconic fictional healthcare provider.

The experience of watching five seasons and counting of ER has been… a bit of a slog. Following a fresh (for its time) and creative first season, the series settles in to standard network schlock soon after, despite Wyle and company’s undeniable charms and (increasingly occasional) commitment to medical accuracy. But the watch has also produced several moments of incidental assonance with The Pitt season 2. One such moment arrives in ER season 5 episode 6 “Stuck on You” when surgeon Dr. Peter Benton speaks to deaf colleague Dr. Lisa Parks through her interpreter.

“Dr. Parks asks that when you speak to her you look directly at her so she can read your lips,” the woman cheerily tells Dr. Benton, who immediately works to correct his behavior.

“Stuck on You” premiered on November 5, 1998. Now, some 27 years later, ER doctors in Noah Wyle-starring medical dramas still need a helpful reminder now and then. Even in an environment that brings the nurse Donnies of the world into regular contact with a diverse cross-section of human beings and their medical conditions, there’s always something new to learn…even if some of your peers learned it nearly three decades ago.

Learning experiences abound in “10:00 AM” and not every doctor in the Pitt acquits themself capably. Despite his early status as the med student golden boy, Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) commits the trauma room’s cardinal sin by hastily removing a foreign body from a living person. The foreign body in this case is a shard of glass and the living person is Vince Cole, a 23-year-old parkour artist who fell through the skylight of a floral shop. Turns out that shard of glass was load-bearing and blood immediately begins to rush out form the wound, stopped only by an impossibly cool and somehow-not-science-fiction tool that injects microscopic sponges into the human body. Of course, Ogilvie wouldn’t have even been in that situation if radiology didn’t miss the obvious foreign object in their initial scan. Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) chalks it all up to “first week in July syndrome.”

Elsewhere in the ER, our beloved Pitt-sters continue to take L after L. Santos (Isa Briones), who is already in danger of repeating her R2 year, can’t focus during an examination of a patient alongside Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden). It falls to Mel, herself distracted by her incoming deposition (“Yeah, still counting down the hours. There are five left if you were wondering,” she helpfully notes for the audience), to make the diagnosis of bulimia, which often goes unrecognized in Black female patients.

Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) has to admit defeat with patient Willow Baptiste, whose superglued shut eyelid won’t yield to any known dissolving agents. Langdon submits to further indignity when the TikTok-famous “Dr. J” the patient insists on seeing turns out to be Dr. Javadi (Shabana Azeez). Dr. J fixes the situation but the cost might be too much to bear for poor Willow. Losing one’s left eyelashes hours before hosting a Fourth of July party is one of the season’s grandest tragedies yet.

Then there’s poor med student Joy Kwon (Irene Choi) who just can’t buy a break. Moments after bemoaning her $200,000 in med school debt, Joy accidentally gets poked with one of the shards of glass porcupine-ing out of Vince Cole’s body, drawing blood and making her a patient. New nurse Emma successfully draws Joy’s blood to test for pathogens but then drops the vial, which rolls across the floor and gets shattered by a passing gurney in almost cartoonish fashion. If it weren’t for Ogilvie screwing up just minutes later to lift her spirits, this very well could have been Joy’s final hour in the Pitt.

Many of the patients in this hour languish in a liminal space between diagnosis and solution. The doctors aren’t anywhere closer to figuring out what triggered Jackson Davis’ psychosis, even if Javadi is so eager to get to the bottom of it that she summons psychiatrist Dr. Jefferson (Christopher Thornton) to question Jackson while he’s still asleep. Meanwhile, Mr. Diaz’ diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) has been resolved but his nightmare is only just now beginning due to a lack of health insurance. The poor man all but slaps his loving daughter’s phone out of her hand when she announces she made a GoFundMe page. It’s not all bad news though as the flirtatious Mr. Montrose (Michael Nouri) does get his butt pain resolved courtesy of Dr. McKay’s (Fiona Dourif) bold rectal maneuver.

Truly, the only resident of the Pitt who could be having anything close to resembling a good hour is the increasingly impressive Dr. Whitaker (Gerran Howell). Not content to chalk Mr. Jean Samba’s condition up to simple exhaustion, Whitaker runs a few more tests and gets a result so troubling he immediately starts to tremble.

“ST elevation, V7, V8, V9. It’s a posterior STEMI. Worst kind of heart attack,” Whitaker tells Samba, who immediately confirms the diagnosis by flatlining. Thankfully Whitaker got to it early enough to save the man’s life and receives a well-earned attaboy from Dr. Robby for good measure.

Amid this moment of unambiguous heroism and success, however, The Pitt also begins to lay track for Whitaker’s inevitable downfall. Whitaker’s roomie Santos reveals to Javadi that Whitaker has been hanging out with the widow of a farmer who died in the Pitt last year following injuries from a propane tank explosion. Whitaker is adamant that the woman is just a friend and he’s looking after her, her farm, and her baby.

“Sure, just a friend. With farm benefits,” Santos says.
“What are farm benefits?” Javadi asks.
“Ever seen a miking machine?”

We don’t need to know what Whitaker is doing on that farm or whether it involves a milking machine to understand that this is not a healthy situation for the young man. Extending one’s emergency room obligations into husbandly duties for every lost patient’s widow is a recipe for burnout at best or exploitation and litigation at worst. But the qualities that drive Whitaker to make questionable house calls are also undoubtedly the same qualities that allow him to identify the worst kind of heart attack before anyone else. Is it worth trying to change Whitaker even if it means creating a less empathetic physician? That’s a question that Dr. Robby himself has been pondering for years.

One thing is for sure on The Pitt and it’s that you just cannot win. Whether you’re a first-year resident trying to do too much or a seasoned nurse not doing enough, some dickhead on the internet is going to critique your approach.

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

Lewis Pullman Has Hope That Sentry Will Live On Past Secret Wars

Ol’ Bob Reynolds went on quite a journey in the movie Thunderbolts*. When we first met Bob, played by Lewis Pullman, he was a gangly regular guy stuck in the middle of a firefight between Black Widow, U.S. Agent, and other heroes. Midway through the movie, Bob reveals himself as both the Superman-like Sentry and the evil villain the Void. In Thunderbolts* post-credit scene, he’s hanging out with the New Avengers, but he can’t become the Sentry again without releasing the Void.

That post-credit scene comes directly from the upcoming movie Avengers: Doomsday, which means that Bob will be around in that film and, probably, its sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars. But what about beyond Secret Wars? Pullman doesn’t have a strong answer, but he does have optimism.

“If we’re talking hope, I have great hope,” Pullman told Men’s Journal about his character’s future. “Like any good tool and team member, finding your place in the team and finding how you best serve the company within the toolbox is kind of up to the team and up to the team member. And so I have high hopes that [Marvel] can figure that dynamic out. Fingers crossed!”

Pullman’s desire to return as Bob makes a lot of sense. Bob’s story of a regular guy struggling with guilt and depression helped ground the fantastic world of the Thunderbolts in real emotion. Furthermore, his ability to become the Sentry adds a real powerhouse to the current MCU. Even if using his powers runs the risk of unleashing the Void, the heroes of Earth-616 will need all the help they can get to deal with Doctor Doom’s multiversal machinations.

However, those machinations may very well change the MCU forever, raising questions about the status of every hero, not just the Sentry. The 2015 comic book series Secret Wars by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić saw Doctor Doom remake the universe in his own image after saving reality from incursions, incidents in which multiple Earths collide with one another. Given the role Doom plays in Doomsday and the prevalence of incursions, already mentioned in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Captain America: Brave New World, it seems likely that Avengers: Secret Wars will follow that story.

Hickman and Ribić’s Secret Wars ended with a soft reboot of the Marvel Universe, as Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four had to restore reality after Doom’s recreation. Marvel used this plot to smooth out some continuity issues, but made no major changes. Sure, Sam Wilson leveled up to Captain America and Victor Von Doom briefly became Iron Man, but Steve Rogers and Tony Stark were still around and soon took on their familiar mantles once again.

The same may not be true of the MCU Secret Wars. As actors grow unavailable for their roles, Marvel needs a reason to give the world a new version of not just Captain America and Iron Man, but a new Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, getting new performers to take the place of Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr.

If Secret Wars is a drastic reboot that takes the MCU back down to ground zero, then we may not see Bob Reynolds again, at least not played by Lewis Pullman. But the Sentry is strong enough to withstand major threats, including the birth of a new universe, so maybe he will be in the refreshed MCU. At least, that’s what Pullman hopes.

Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters on December 18, 2026.

Starfleet Academy’s Karim Diané Breaks Down Star Trek’s Most Unconventional Klingon

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 4.

Klingons are one of the most iconic species in Star Trek. Over the course of the franchise’s 60-year run, they’ve evolved from deadly enemies to fierce allies and everything in between. ButJay-Den Kragg is not your typical Klingon. This has been obvious since his first appearance on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but the series’ fourth episode is where the character really begins to come into his own. (And, if we’re honest, so does the show he stars in.) 

The only Klingon student in the Academy’s first class in over a century, Jay-Den is essentially everything a traditional Klingon is not. He’s a pacifist studying medicine who longs to become a healer and help those in need. He won’t eat meat that hasn’t been killed in a fair fight (which includes replicated food!). He’s even nervous about participating in a debate class, because he views it as a form of conflict, something he has sworn to avoid. 

But “Vox in Excelso” is not just an hour that offers a compelling backstory for one of the series’ most appealing young characters. It also redefines what it means to be a Klingon warrior for a new era. Because it is Jay-Den who ultimately finds the strength to speak out on behalf of his culture, who guides the Federation toward a compromise that allows the Klingons to accept the help they need without sacrificing their honor to do so. And it is his outsider status — a life lived with a foot in both the worlds of the Klingons and Starfleet —  that helps him see a way forward.

“I’m definitely not a traditional man,” Karim Diané, who plays Jay-Den, told Den of Geek, when asked about crafting such an unconventional take on a familiar kind of character. “I’m not this macho guy who goes to sports games or plays football on the weekend. I am the opposite of that. I like to think that I’m…soft. Gentle in my tone and in the way I carry myself. I think maybe that’s what I just naturally exude. And I’d like to imagine that that’s what brought me to this role. But full credit to Noga and Alex [Kurtzman], who wrote this character this way and left it up to me to find it. To find him. The challenge for me was finding his voice and getting comfortable in the way he looks. But the softness kind of comes naturally to me.” 

For Diané, playing Jay-Den has also been about finding a balance between embodying the kind of Klingon Trek fans were familiar with while finding a way to create something new.

“I’m new to all of this, right?” Diané said. “So I really had to look to the people [who were] leading me. I looked to Doug [Aarniokoski], my director, who really, really helped bring out this character. I looked to Michael Dorn [who played Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine], to really know what the standard of a Klingon is. But then I also had to look to myself, and just really trust that my natural sensitivity and softness are okay to bring to this character.”

Jay-Den’s quieter, conflict-avoidant character isn’t the only way that Starfleet Academy is shaking up the story of one of the franchise’s foundational alien species. Klingons have apparently had it rougher than most since the Burn, spending the better part of the last century as a people without a homeland, living on the verge of extinction and shuffled from place to place in the wake of Qo’noS’ destruction. 

“It was all very intentional,” showrunner Noga Landau said when asked about reimagining Klingon society in a post-Burn world. “We are big Klingon fans in the Starfleet Academy writers’ room. And we obsessed about every detail with the Klingons, even down to the warrior stew. We just wanted everything to be perfect. And honestly, the question we asked ourselves was, what haven’t we done with the Klingons yet in Star Trek? What is a new story? What thrusts this mighty empire of warriors into a very new situation that sheds light on who they are to their core?” 

The Klingon diaspora has caused its people to double down on the sanctity of their remaining culture and traditions, the things that connect them to the home they once knew and the history they still share. These beliefs often draw them into conflict with the Federation — their resistance to admitting weakness or accepting help in any form runs the gamut from rejecting lifesaving Starfleet technology to refusing the gift of a new home planet —  and illustrate why Jay-Den has such difficulty feeling as though he belongs in a society that privileges its standalone warrior ethos more than ever. (Though, if you want to get technical about it, Klingon healers aren’t particularly rare, historically speaking.) 

“Honestly, our main point in making the episode was to remind the audience of the power of the Klingons,” Landau said. “And in this story, it’s also about the power of these people who are refugees. There are so many people who walk the earth right now who live as refugees, and there are so many people who walk the earth now who are descended from refugees. I would say for most people alive today, if you look back far enough, you will find an ancestor who’s a refugee. The strength it takes to survive being a stranger in a strange land is everything you need to understand who you are, and it’s a universal story that we told with the Klingons. It was important that everyone who watches this episode sees themselves in the story of the Klingons. Because it’s about strength and it’s about never letting go of who you are.”

A big part of Jay-Den’s story in “Vox in Excelso” is about allowing him to find and accept his own strength. For all that he was raised in a warrior culture, he’s learning that there are different ways to be strong than in combat, and more than one way to fight for the things you believe in than throwing a punch or wielding a blade.

“This message is so important to me because, again, I’m not a warrior,” Diané said. “I hate sports. I hate fighting. I’m not into any of those things. And for so long, people have tried to make me that. So it’s really exciting for me to be [part of this episode] because it really shows that you don’t have to be that. You don’t have to pick up a weapon. You don’t have to pick up a spear. But you can still impact and change an entire world with your voice and your energy. That message is really, really important to me.” 

“Vox in Excelso” ends with the Klingons safely established on a new homeworld, Jay-Den’s parents safe, and the young cadet seemingly having settled into a much more confident identity. And, according to Diané, that new sense of self-assuredness is only going to get stronger as the season continues.

“He continues to grow in every single way. And I feel like I continue to figure this character out as Jay-Den is figuring himself out,” he said. “Even moving into season 2, I feel like every one or two episodes, you’ll see a shift in him. I’m becoming more comfortable using this deep, deep voice that he speaks in. Stylistically, you might see his hair change in different ways, or that he has new ways of expressing himself physically. His speech becomes quicker and more comfortable. Truly, where we’re at in Episode 4 is just the seed. He continues to blossom moving forward.”

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

The Batman: Paul Dano Wants to Return as the Riddler on TV

Riddle me this, riddle me that. Who’s afraid of being typecast in genre superhero parts and never being allowed to make respectable cinema alongside auteurs such as French filmmaker Olivier Assayas? Certainly not Paul Dano, who took time out from promoting his work in Assayas’s new comedy thriller The Wizard of the Kremlin to express interest in reprising his role as Edward Nashton aka the Riddler from the Matt Reeves movie The Batman.

When French chat show Clique TV asked if Dano would do a Riddler television show in the vein of The Penguin, the actor responded in the affirmative. “Why not, if we can do something really good?,” he answered, before expounding on that qualification. “You’ve got to keep the bar high.”

He’s right about the high bar set by The Batman and The Penguin. The Batman was a hit with audiences and critics; we here at Den of Geek called it “one of the best superhero movies ever made.” Although The Penguin had a more mixed critical reception, it was nominated for several awards and netted a Primetime Emmy for Cristin Milioti. Even in an age of superhero saturation, Reeves, his stars Dano and Robert Pattinson, and their co-creators managed to make something fresh and special with The Batman.

For Dano, The Batman reached that level of quality because of the psychological complexity of its characters. Where most depictions of the Riddler imagine him as a genius who just wants to test his wits against the Caped Crusader, Dano sees a deeper connection between the hero and the villain. “This was a guy who was an orphan like Batman,” he explained to Click TV, “who had a really traumatic upbringing and was obviously unwell. What I really liked about this was what he thought was his connection to the Batman… I liked that twist on it, that the villain saw himself in line with the hero.”

As his answer suggests, Dano has put a great deal of thought into the construction of Nashton. In fact, he developed the character so much that he also wrote a six-issue prequel comic for DC, illustrated by Stevan Subic. That story showed how Ashton was orphaned and how he came to hold the Wayne family and the gangster Carmine Falcone responsible for the death of his parents, a belief that eventually drives him to become the Riddler.

The series would provide a strong foundation for a Riddler show, should Reeves and WB ever call for one. However, such a show seems unlikely at the moment. Even though the first part came out in 2022, The Batman: Part II is still in preproduction, with major stars such as Scarlett Johansson and Sebastian Stan just now being cast. Furthermore, the mainline DC Universe has shifted since the release of the first film, and DC Studios head James Gunn and Peter Safran have several unrelated Bat-projects in the works, including the movie Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Still, Gunn has been very open about loving Reeves’s work and insisting that he’ll green-light projects if they have a quality script. Thanks to Dano, a potential Riddler project has already solved the two biggest problems facing a new show, providing both a great story and a compelling star.

The Batman: Part II releases in theaters on October 1, 2027.

The BBC’s Adaptation of Lord of the Flies Looks Positively Feral

The BBC’s making a little bit of history this winter with its forthcoming The Lord of the Flies series: The four-part drama is the first of its kind. Although a pair of feature film adaptations of William Golding’s iconic 1954 novel exist, the story has never been told on the small screen before now. And if the first trailer’s anything to go by, this take is shaping up to be remarkably (and probably disturbingly) accurate. 

Even if you haven’t actually read The Lord of the Flies, it’s better than even odds you already know the story. The book’s cultural impact is undeniable, influencing everything from the works of Stephen King (who named his town of Castle Rock after a fort in Golding’s novel) to popular modern-day television series like Yellowjackets, which is, in many ways, a gender-swapped take on the original story. (Heck, you can probably argue that Survivor and all the shows it spawned owe a debt of gratitude to this book.)

A cynical, cautionary tale of young boys and the capacity for violence they carry within them, The Lord of the Flies follows a group of shipwrecked British kids, who find themselves stranded on an island — with no adults — in the middle of the Pacific Ocean after an airplane crash. As they struggle to survive, factions form within the group, and their attempts at civilizational order rapidly dissolve, leading to violence, chaos, and, yes, even death. 

The new BBC adaptation hails from writer Jack Thorne, the man behind last year’s surprise smash drama Adolescence, which also dealt with similarly complicated themes of toxic masculinity, herd behavior, tribalism, and violence. (Albeit it in a much more modern and contemporary situation.) In truth, it’s hard to imagine anyone making TV today who’s likely better equipped to tell this particular story at this precise moment in time than Thorne is, but that also means the show itself likely won’t be an easy watch. 

The trailer certainly seems to bear that out, showing us a group of boys that’s increasingly fractured and confrontational, with many of the various castaways looking wilder and more feral as the clip goes on.

The series’ cast is made up of over thirty young actors, most of whom are unknowns making their professional onscreen debuts. Each of its four episodes is titled after one of the characters at the core of the story: Ralph (Winston Saywers), the group’s initial leader who prioritizes democracy and order; Jack (Lox Pratt), leader of a rival faction who loves hunting and violence; Piggy (David McKenna), logical, loyal, a believer in order who is the brains behind many of Ralph’s best ideas; and Simon (Ike Talbut), sacrificial, sickly, and repeatedly coded as the most morally correct character in the book. (He’s literally a Christ allegory, because Golding is many things, but subtle is not one of them.) 

The Lord of the Flies will premiere on Sunday, February 8, on BBC One, with episodes airing weekly on the channel. All four installments will drop on BBC iPlayer on launch night. Unfortunately, this series doesn’t have an American distributor just yet, which means curious U.S. viewers will have to wait a bit to see where the show ends up. 

Wonder Man Proves Iron Man 3 Deserves More Love

This post contains spoilers for Wonder Man.

Like President Ellis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, fans have refused to learn the Mandarin’s lesson. In 2013’s Iron Man 3, the Mandarin tried to “educate” the president through acts of terrorism, teaching the country something about its history or foriegn affairs or… Well, listen, it isn’t clear what exactly the Mandarin was trying to say because, of course, he was just a front, a goofball actor called Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) hired by weapon manufacturer Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) to create a false threat and drum up support for arms purchases.

Brilliant as that reveal was, some fans hated it and rank Iron Man 3 at the bottom of their lists. Despite being helmed by ’80s action veteran Shane Black, who co-wrote the script with Drew Pearce, viewers hated the movie’s mix of War on Terror deconstruction, precocious kid story, and jokey take on established characters, especially making Iron Man’s usual arch-enemy into a gag.

And yet, those of us who love Iron Man 3 continue to try to educate the naysayers. And with Slattery’s return and redemption in Wonder Man, we may have received our best lesson yet.

The Trouble With the Mandarin

Introduced by Stan Lee and Don Heck in 1964’s Tales of Suspense #50, the Mandarin has long been Iron Man’s arch enemy. The Chinese-born son of a wealthy national and an English aristocrat, the Mandarin possesses a scientific knowledge to rival Tony Stark and 10 magical rings, each granting him different powers. The Mandarin’s battles with Iron Man became classic clashes of civilizations, with the latter representing American know-how and the former standing in for Eastern traditions. To underscore the point, Lee and Heck based the Mandarin directly on Fu Manchu, a long-running racist caricature and exemplar of yellow peril tropes.

Thus, it’s easy to understand why Marvel would be reluctant to bring the Mandarin into their mainline universe. And it’s easy to understand why they would go for Black’s twist in Iron Man 3, revealing that the guy who seemed like a Southern-fried Osama bin Laden was in fact a doofus English actor and prolific drug user, who posed no threat to anyone but himself.

But it’s also easy to understand the sense of betrayal fans felt. After all, the MCU built itself on faithfully adapting the comics. Where superhero movies of years past seemed almost embarrassed by the source material, turning Batman into an ’80s action hero who killed his enemies and dressing the X-Men in black leather, the MCU gave us a Thor who spoke like a Shakespearean extra, an earnest Captain America in star-spangled duds, and a proper crossover Avengers movie. How dare they back down now?

Even after giving us a more traditional Mandarin in the form of Xu Wenwu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, played by the incredible Tony Leung, fans remained unhappy, dismissing Iron Man 3 as an embarrassment. But now, Wonder Man has come along to show them how wrong they are.

A Wonderful Return

In what must be a nod to the MCU’s founding father Robert Downey Jr., the Trevor Slattery of Wonder Man has done a 180 from where we first met him in Iron Man 3. Not only is he clean and sober, so far along his recovery process that he can watch Simon (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) enjoy a drink and not even feel the sting of temptation, but he’s also a great actor. Trevor’s getting gigs, but he’s not free of the past. More frustrating than the many questions he must answer about his time as the Mandarin, Trevor’s being blackmailed by the Department of Damage Control, forced to help them reveal Simon’s ionic powers.

Across Wonder Man‘s eight episodes, Kingsley plays Trevor as a three-dimensional person. He still has some of the pretentiousness and air-headedness that made him so much fun in Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi. But it’s grounded with real weight, as Trevor deals with the consequences of his actions, his respect for Simon, and, finally, finds a way to take hold of his legacy as the Mandarin.

The end of Trevor’s arc makes the audacity of Iron Man 3 all the more satisfying. Iron Man 3 was the perfect culmination of Tony Stark’s arc, which began in the first movie with him as a reckless playboy who lives lavishly off the money his weapons provides for him and continues as he becomes a selfish hero. Tony seemed to reach the end of that arc at the climax of The Avengers, when he flew through a wormhole to detonate a nuclear bomb in the emptiness of space instead of in New York, but Iron Man 3 showed there was still one step left. The overwhelming fear he felt after the trauma of The Avengers drove Tony toward relapse, once again turning to weapons manufacturing to feel safe, even if it endangers people worse.

The Mandarin mirrors Tony’s desire for safety through weapons. Killian created the Mandarin to scare Americans so much that the U.S. government has to approve his Extremis project. And it worked, because the Mandarin a collection of scary signifiers, despite his references to very real sins of America’s past and present. Killian is betting that Americans won’t face those sins and will instead choose to attack the Mandarin with Extremis, even if they blow themselves up in the process.

In other words, the central conflict represented by the Mandarin is the same internal conflict within Tony. What happens when something is too scary? What happens when you’d rather blame a bad guy than deal with your own problems? Tony Stark is a hero because he acknowledges his role in create weapons and creating Killian, because he learns to accept that he and his loved ones can never be safe, and even gives up being Iron Man (at least until Avengers: Age of Ultron two years later).

Through the misdirect of the Mandarin, Iron Man 3 gives thematic weight to the good guy/bad guy battle, resulting in a movie both rich and theme and character. Sure, we lose some comics accuracy in the process, but it’s a pretty good trade-off.

The Teacher Has Been Taught

Nothing in Wonder Man gets as heady as Iron Man 3. The series works as a quiet character comedy set in the world of Marvel heroes, with relatively low stakes, despite Simon’s powers and the presence of Damage Control.

However, when put in context of Iron Man 3, Trevor’s actions in Wonder Man mirror the heroics of even Tony Stark. When Trevor puts on the Mandarin costume in episode eight and once again appears on screen, declaring “I did that” to draw attention away from Simon’s potentially career-ending use of powers, he’s doing something that it took three full movies for Tony Stark to figure out. He’s taking responsibility for hurting people with his abilities (acting instead of weapons manufacturing) and he’s making it right by helping someone else.

Finally, the Mandarin learned his own lesson.

Wonder Man is now streaming on Disney+.

James Gunn Absolutely Shuts Down Speculation About Robert Pattinson’s Batman

We have Batman at home. That seems to be the thought among fans waiting for Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Why find a totally new Batman for this mainline DCU movie when we already have Robert Pattinson playing the Dark Knight in the Matt Reeves movie The Batman? Pattinson earned praise from audiences and critics alike, prompting many to call for him to reprise the role for The Brave and the Bold.

But when one brave fan contacted DC Studios co-head James Gunn via Threads to ask about the possibility of bringing Battinson into the DCU, they received a blunt and absolute answer. “No.” wrote Gunn, and like fellow cinematic great David Lynch, refused to say more.

For those who have been following the production of The Brave and the Bold, Gunn’s answer comes as no surprise. At no point have Gunn, Reeves, Pattinson, or anyone else involved in the project even hinted that The Batman would become official cannon to the DCU. On the contrary, all have been completely clear that The Batman, the HBO series The Penguin, and the upcoming sequel The Batman: Part II exist in their own continuity, separate from Superman, Peacemaker, and, yes, Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

That division helps preserve the vision that Reeves brought to the first film. The Batman certainly has its stylized elements, as demonstrated by the evocative red lighting, the emo-noir voiceover narration, and every single thing that Colin Farrell is doing as Oz Cobb. But, as the name change from Oswald Cobblepot to Oz Cobb also demonstrates, The Batman takes place in a relatively grounded world, in which Bruce Wayne is the only person who decides to put on a costume and fight crime.

Conversely, The Brave and the Bold takes place within the DCU, which Superman established as having metahumans for three centuries. We already know from a brief cameo in Creature Commandos that the DCU Batman has fought the supervillain Doctor Phosphorus. Moreover, The Brave and the Bold deals with Batman and Robin, which means that not only does this version of the Dark Knight exist in a world of superheroes, but he’s old enough to have a son who also has become a superhero. Given that The Batman takes place in year two of the Caped Crusader’s adventures, it’s hard to see how that character could become a veteran and a dad so soon.

More to the point, Gunn’s refusal to rely on just one Batman reflects his approach to adapting DC Comics. Gunn has always said that the DC Universe is rich and varied enough that not every project is for every audience, that mainstream fans can enjoy Superman, grown-ups can watch Peacemaker, and upcoming projects like the animated/puppet hybrid Robin film Dynamic Duo will appeal to kids.

If there’s one character who can stretch across all those takes and genres, it’s Batman. The viewing public understands that the campy ’60s Batman portrayed by Adam West, the more realistic Batman played by Christian Bale, and the animated Batman voiced by Kevin Conroy are all variations of the same character. The existence of one doesn’t rule out the other.

So, in short, there’s no real reason to expect that Pattinson will be the only Batman in the movies. Gunn has answered, so stop asking, and just enjoy all the wonderful Batmen we get.

The Batman: Part Two releases to theaters in October 1, 2027.

Masters of the Universe Toys Reveal Updates to Classic Characters

Even the most dedicated fan of Masters of the Universe knows that the franchise began as a toy line, and that the initial cartoon existed to entice kids to buy those toys. Yes, Masters of the Universe has expanded into multiple cartoon series, comic book runs, video games, and now a second (and hopefully more successful) feature film. But they all sprang from the desire to sell He-Man action figures.

Today, most fans would say that the toy connection remains a primary appeal of Masters of the Universe. So it’s quite fitting that the first good look we’re getting at some of the major characters for the upcoming Masters of the Universe film comes from toy promotions. Via Entertainment Weekly, these toys show us Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man, complete with iconic costume, Kojo Attah as Tri-Klops, Sam C. Wilson as Trap Jaw, and Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn, with sinister sorceress duds.

While far more detailed and articulate than those Mattel debuted back in 1982, these new figures carry the same spirit of the originals. They capture the franchise’s unique blend of sci-fi with sword & sandals fantasy, complete with the most idealized bodies this side of a Greek statue. The figures allow for a variety of poses, but they lend themselves best to the tense, crouching position that was the standard for the 1982 toys, accentuated even more here by the array of accessories that accompany the new versions.

The toy announcement is just the latest movie by Mattel and Amazon MGM to assure fans that this film will adhere to the franchise as they know it. The 1987 Cannon movie starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella certainly has its supporters, but the movie deviated from the lore established in the cartoon and toys. Man-At-Arms and Teela bore little resemblance to their Saturday Morning counterparts, and new additions such as Gwildor and Blade replaced beloved members of the supporting cast.

Not so with the 2026 movie. As seen in the toy-line, Man-At-Arms (Idris Elba) sports green tights covered with gold armor and sports a blue helmet atop his mustachioed head. As Teela, Camila Mendes wears a gold vest over white pants and carries a staff-like shotgun. Most impressive of all might be Brie’s Evil-Lyn design, with its extravagant, pointed headpiece, flowing cape, and jagged breastplate (hopefully its more comfortable than the one that Meg Foster wore in 1987, which reportedly left her bruised). EW‘s shots show the actors holding their figures, demonstrating that Masters of the Universe 2026 is fully bringing the toys to life.

Such fidelity to the source material does not rule out levity. As demonstrated by the trailer released last week, director Travis Knight, co-founder of LAIKA and director of Kubo and the Two Strings, and his team of writers inject plenty of self-aware humor into the proceedings. It’s just that the jokes come from a deep love of all parts of the Masters of the Universe mythos, making even old Gen Xers feel like it’s 1982 again, and they’re playing with toys in their bedroom.

The Paradise Season 2 Trailer Takes Us Outside the Bunker at the End of the World

It won’t be just another day in Paradise when the eponymous Hulu series returns for its second season this winter. The series, which follows the fallout from a devastating climate disaster that destroyed much of the Earth as we know it, will finally move outside the restrictive bunker setting that has defined so much of its premise. Season 2 will send Sterling K. Brown’s Secret Service agent Xavier Collins back to the surface on a quest to find his wife, and finally allow us to see how the rest of humanity has survived during the years he and the rest of humanity’s elites were below ground.

For those who are unfamiliar with Paradise — and consider this an exhortation to fix your life immediately if so — the show’s concept is a fascinating (and frightening) one. Set three years after a supervolcano caused a devastating climate disaster that destroyed much of the planet, a select group of 25,000 people (mostly political figures, billionaires, those who work for them, and people with particularly specialized skills) have been living in an underground bunker city beneath a Colorado mountain. Creepily reconstructed to resemble the real world, Truman Show-style, the aspirationally named Paradise is hardly the utopia it was promised to be. But it turns out that it may not actually be all that’s left. 

Fresh off of solving the mystery of the president’s murder at the end of last season, Xavier Collins is now headed into the unknown to look for his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), who was presumed dead in the cataclysm. But, according to the show’s most generally unreliable figure — villainous billionaire leader Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) — she just may have survived, along with a not insignificant number of other folks who’ve essentially been left to fend for themselves in the years since the world as they knew it ended. And while the season 2 trailer doesn’t weigh in on whether Teri’s alive, it does introduce several intriguing new faces, including Shailene Woodley, as a survivalist who rescues Xavier after his plane crashes.

The eight-episode second season will not only follow the pair’s search for Teri, but it will also explore how those living outside the bunker have survived the years since The Day that changed everything. And back in Paradise, its citizens — including Xavier’s children — must deal with the aftermath of everything that has happened, and all the secrets Sinatra still hasn’t told them. Which sounds as if they go well beyond the existence of the bunker. 

Plus, in true Paradise fashion, it looks like we’re not quite done with the stories of President Cal Bradford or Agent Billy Pace just yet, since both James Marsden and Jon Beavers appear in the trailer. (This isn’t as weird as it sounds; Marsden had a major role throughout the series first season, even though his character technically died in the opening moments of its pilot.)  

Where Paradise goes next is anyone’s guess — but if its bonkers first season is anything to go by, the journey’s going to be just as thrilling as the destination. 

Wonder Man: Who is Doorman in the Marvel Canon?

This post contains spoilers for Wonder Man.

Unlike most stories in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Wonder Man isn’t about a titanic struggle between superheroes and supervillains. Instead, most of the show’s eight episodes follow actor Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) as he tries to land a part in the big screen remake of the ’80s action movie Wonder Man. However, there is one super-person who creates problems Simon: DeMarr Davis a.k.a. Doorman.

As seen in the show’s fourth episode, DeMarr (Byron Bowers) was an actual door man at an LA club who gained the power to turn his body into a teleportation portal after interacting with some goo. Thanks to star Josh Gad (playing himself), DeMarr hits the big time as Doorman. But his fame ends suddenly when an accident strands Gad in DeMarr’s portals, prompting studios to adopt the Doorman Clause and banning super-powered people from sets across the country.

In Wonder Man, Doorman’s story is at once funny, tragic, and weird. The Marvel Comics version of Doorman is just as funny and tragic, but so much weirder.

Great Lakes Avengers, Assemble

Everything you need to know about Doorman can be found in his first appearance in 1989’s West Coast Avengers #49, written and penciled by John Byrne. In that story, Hawkeye and the West Coast Avengers (already a b-tier team) go to Milwaukee to investigate a team calling themselves the Avengers. There he meets Mr. Immortal, Flatman, Dinah Soar, and Big Bertha, all of whom have powers. However, the powers are so lame that when Hawkeye joins the team and names them the Great Lakes Avengers, it’s a serious upgrade.

And even among that lot, Doorman has the least to do. He simply stands around waiting until one of his teammates needs to get somewhere, and then obliges by teleporting them along.

As you might guess, the Great Lakes Avengers exist to be mocked. Outside a few background mentions, they’re largely absent from comics after their first appearances, only to resurface as jokes in a couple issues of Deadpool and Thunderbolts in the late ’90s.

Perhaps the biggest indignity came in 2005, when the Great Lakes Avengers got their own miniseries by Dan Slott and Paul Pelletier and added to their roster Squirrel Girl, another risible hero. The series was well-received by critics and readers, but only one character broke out as the star: Squirrel Girl, who soon became a supporting player in New Avengers and eventually had her own fan-favorite series.

Open to Doorman

In almost all of these examples, Doorman is the least impressive member of the unimpressive team. And yet, in each instance, he continues to do his best, simply happy to help where he can.

We see that quality on display in the aforementioned 2005 miniseries by Slott and Pelletier. Part parody of cynical event comics such as Avengers Disassembled or Identity Crisis, in which superheroes die after their worst secrets come to light, each issue of the GLA miniseries saw another member of the team come to a horrible end. The mounting casualties depress his teammates, but Doorman tries to stay positive, even while putting together a memorial for his fallen comrades.

So devoted to his team is Doorman that he doesn’t even get too upset when he punches the big ticket himself and arrives in the afterlife, because at least he gets to reunite with his old pals. It’s there that Doorman encounters the cosmic entity Oblivion, who reveals that Doorman’s mutant abilities connect him to the Darkforce Dimension. Oblivion makes Doorman into the new Angel of Death, which requires him to collect the souls of the departed, but also allows him to return his buddies to life.

For the most part, Doorman’s Angel of Death role never comes up again, besides a couple issues of the Great Lakes Avengers ongoing that ran between 2016 and 2017. Instead, when the GLA do show up, they exist just to be dumped on. The one great exception is a surprisingly heartfelt story that Slott and artist Paul Grist did in the 2005 GLX-Mas Special. When DeMarr visits his father for the holidays, he has to listen as his dad harangues him for wasting time as a Z-list hero.

Although hurt that not even his father respects him, DeMarr knows that his powers have value, and we see him not just shepherding others into the great beyond, but even taking time to lend a hand to Santa Claus. The story ends with a gut-punch, as DeMarr reveals to his father that he actually came for him, that his father died hanging Christmas lights earlier that night. And so those powers, which don’t seem to matter, allow Doorman to help his father one last time.

At that moment, DeMarr proves to his father, and to the readers, what he has known all along. That he truly is a hero.

The Least Does the Most

The MCU and Marvel Comics Doorman may have very different origins and stories, but they both capture everything wonderful about Z-list superheroes. Guys like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man are easy to love, with their titanic battles, genre-defining creators, and influential power sets. Doorman and his fellow Great Lakes Avengers are easy to mock, people whose silly costumes and unusual abilities don’t do much more than get kittens out of trees or stop runaway cars.

But as Doorman’s story reveals, sometimes, that’s enough. Sometimes, it’s more important that someone’s doing what they can to help somebody, even if they get it wrong, even if they look ridiculous in the process. The Marvel Universe is big enough for every type of hero—as long as someone opens the door for them.

Every episode of Wonder Man is now streaming on Disney+.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 4 Review – Vox in Excelso

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 4.

Fourth time’s the charm, or so it appears forStar Trek: Starfleet Academy. While the franchise’s latest series has certainly struggled a bit out of the gate — its first three episodes have, thus far, ranged from largely forgettable to painfully frustrating — it finally finds something that feels like solid ground in “Vox in Excelso”.  An hour that deftly connects to the world of Star Trek’s past and hints at the promise of its future, the episode is one part character study, one part post-Burn lore dump, and one ode to the power of friendship. In short, exactly the kind of story this show is uniquely equipped to be telling and, hopefully, a sign of where it’s heading in the weeks to come.

An installment that focuses on young Klingon cadet Jay-Den Kraag, this week sees the Academy kids learning about debate techniques, which at least has a more direct real-world application than that weird laser tag game from last week. Caleb, to the shock of absolutely no one at this point, is a stunningly good debater, because of course he is! Who could have foreseen that prison would not only make him physically ripped but also teach him the finer points of constructing arguments and force him to memorize Federation bylaws? (Sigh.) Anyway, he demolishes his classmates because we’re simply not allowed to see him fail at something yet, and poor Jay-Den has a panic attack at the podium, because it turns out he fears public speaking and seems to associate arguing with conflict, a thing he has sworn to avoid.  Not a particularly Klingon-esque character trait, but Jay-Den is not what one might call a typical example of his species. 

But what does that even mean at the moment, anyway? Probably not what most of us expect. It turns out that, in the years following The Burn, the Klingons essentially have been decimated as a species and are close to extinction. Their homeworld of Qo’noS has been destroyed — conspiracy theorists insist the Klingons did it themselves for unexplained (and inexplicable) reasons — and the surviving clans haven’t been on what you might call great terms with the newly reconstituted Federation. (For the nerds among you: None of this does anything to clear up the ongoing question of whether the Klingons ever actually joined the Federation at any point)  As a people, they’d rather die than accept anything they see as charity or help from others, and they’re willing to stand on that principle even if it means that their entire race is wiped out. 

Lacking a true homeland of their own, the Klingons have doubled down on the sanctity of their culture and traditions, which offers an important insight into why Jay-Den’s chosen path, one that eschews violence in favor of healing, is so shocking at this particular moment. He grew up with his family on a refugee planet, where his brother encouraged his interest in Starfleet and didn’t judge him for his dislike of the warrior ethos their father insisted he follow. His death — a tragedy that could have been prevented by access to the same sort of Federation tech the Klingons have rejected since the Burn – shapes much of Jay-Den’s life, solidifying his decision to embrace pacifism and seemingly driving a wedge between him and his parents. Now, those same parents are aboard a missing transport ship that has suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure, and neither Jay-Den nor the Federation knows if they, or the other members of eight of the other surviving Klingon houses, are alive. 

It’s a lot for poor Jay-Den to process, as the only member of his species currently enrolled at the Academy, which means that, of course, it’s time for his debate class to take up the subject of the Klingon diaspora. Should Klingons be forced to accept asylum from the Federation? Should they be allowed to live in whatever way seems best to them, even if their choices essentially ensure the death of their species when given a long enough timeline? Who gets to make these choices for them? Suddenly, everyone has opinions! It’s more than a bit uncomfortable to watch these kids treat the right to self-determination of Jay-Den’s people into a thought experiment. Still, almost everyone comes prepared with what appear to be generally cogent and thoughtful arguments, so it could be a lot worse. 

New friendship alert: After Jay-Den’s debate with Caleb gets both heated and surprisingly personal — the boys don’t come to blows, but it feels like a near thing — the Klingon gets some advice from a surprising quarter: Darem. A character who started the series off as a self-centered rich kid, he’s nevertheless managed to display some real growth and vulnerability, and his reaching out to Jay-Den is both unexpected and strangely meaningful. He teaches him some Khionian breathing techniques to help him focus, and the two have some intriguing chemistry with one another. (Maybe shared breathing techniques just almost always make me think of romance, but they’re more interesting together than Darem and Genesis are, I said what I said.) It ultimately helps Jay-Den and Caleb find a way to a better understanding together. 

Compromise is the lesson of the day in more ways than one. Thanks to a surprisingly warm pep talk from Cadet Master Thok, Jay-Den comes to a deeper understanding of his father, who just may have pushed his son away to set him free from a culture that would otherwise not respect his choice of a peaceful future in the only way he knew how. Similarly, Jay-Den, Ake, and Admiral Vance must come up with a way to meet the surviving Klingon clans on their own terms to gift them the homeworld their people need. The ruse — that the Klingons somehow defeat the Athena and several other Starfleet ships to claim and conquer the Qo’noS-like planet the Federation was planning to just hand them in the first place — is laughably thin. But it allows the Klingons to save face and the Federation to show it’s capable of humbling itself in a way we haven’t really seen all that much of in post-Burn society. But, hey, we definitely got confirmation that Ake has for sure hooked up with a Klingon warlord, so here’s hoping that an episode that dives into her backstory is coming sooner rather than later. 

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

Absolute Batman and Wonder Woman Crossover Establishes Diana as the Best Hero in the New Universe

Most superhero crossovers follow a predictable pattern. Two heroes meet, have some sort of misunderstanding, fight, and then become friends. Doesn’t matter if Batman is meeting Superman, the Hulk, or Elmer Fudd—it’s always the same.

The first meeting between Batman and Wonder Woman in the Absolute Universe is almost the same, but there’s one big difference. Like Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, the DC Comics Absolute Universe reboots familiar characters and launches them into a new, darker reality. Here, Batman was raised in poverty by his mother after his public school teacher father was killed in a shooting. Here, Superman arrives on Earth as an adult and is met with suspicion and hostility by almost every human except the Kents. Here, Wonder Woman is raised in Hell by Circe, far from Paradise Island.

These changes have resulted in big numbers at comic book shops, with Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta coming in as the top seller almost every month. That trend will surely continue with Absolute Batman #16, which released yesterday. But it’s that issue’s co-star Wonder Woman, who comes out as the best hero of the Absolute Universe.

Absolute Darkness

The story in Absolute Batman #16 actually begins in December’s Absolute Wonder Woman #15, by writer Kelly Thompson and illustrator Hayden Sherman. “The Mark of Hecate” sends Diana to Gotham City, where she has learned of murders that appear to invoke the goddess Hecate. Although she has not yet met any of the other heroes in the Absolute Universe—which include Flash, Martian Manhunter, and Green Lantern, in addition to Superman—Diana knows about Batman and, instead of sneaking around his city, forms a gigantic magic bat-signal to call for his help.

As the duo investigate, we readers learn that they were actually staged tby Veronica Cale and Jack Grimm aka the Joker, two members of the powerful rulers of the Absolute Universe—this reality’s Justice League. More importantly, Batman and Wonder Woman form a bond, one cemented by the gift that Diana gives to Bruce. The Hiketeia medallion (named for a classic story by Greg Rucka and JG Jones) allows Bruce to summon Diana to wherever he is, three times.

That medallion returns in Absolute Batman #16, as Batman hopes that his new friend can help his old friend. His childhood pal Waylon Jones has been transformed into the Killer Croc by Grimm, and no science can revert him. Diana has magic that can restore Bruce’s friend, but the two heroes must first journey to the underworld and face off against a centaur.

Both issues are top-level superhero storytelling—and, yes, do feature the heroes fighting one another—and both contain compelling reimagining of the central characters. But even in the Batman book, Absolute Wonder Woman stands out as the best character of the new universe.

Absolute Empathy

During their first conversation in Absolute Wonder Woman, Batman questions Diana’s decision to show herself to the public. Some may learn about Bruce battling a king-sized Bane in the middle of a football field, but Diana was fighting kaiju on live TV, a high-profile battle that went far beyond local news.

Diana rejects Batman’s belief that super-people need to remain hidden. “Love is transformative, and I don’t know how to show that to people without living it,” she explains.

That statement captures everything great about the Absolute Wonder Woman. Like the other Absolute heroes, she looks much darker, far edgier than the standard Wonder Woman. Not only is she more physically imposing, she also has a magic arm covered in rune tattoos, carries a Final Fantasy-sized sword, and rides a skeletal pegasus. Yet, she’s devoted to empathy and respect, something absent from the Absolute Universe.

The Absolute Universe comes from Omega Energy contained in Darkseid, the big bad of the DC Universe. As explained in October’s Absolute Evil one-shot, this is a universe in which goodness is unnatural and evildoers ordinarily have power. That is why the Joker and Cale call their organization the Justice League, because those who do good disrupt the balance and order of their universe.

That evil bent infects the heroes of the Absolute Universe, who want to do good, but do so in an often unsettling way. Absolute Batman still wants to free Gotham City from crime, but must do so by dispensing extreme violence. Absolute Martian Manhunter frees people from Darkseid’s misery by putting them through psychedelic, and often unwanted, experiences. Absolute Green Lantern must undergo a strange testing process that purges her of all fear. Even Absolute Superman slowly learns to care about humanity, and is still isn’t ready to trust them.

Because this world lacks open expressions of goodness, Wonder Woman’s empathy and kindness shine like a beacon through the coldest night. She’s a witch from the depths of Hell, and that suffering only makes her love life more, makes her more determined to help anyone she can.

Absolute Wonder

Wonder Woman’s refusal to go back to the shadows catches Batman off-guard, but he doesn’t mock it. Instead, after pausing to think for a moment, he allows, “We all have our own paths,” which sounds dismissive until he adds, “Though I think my father would have preferred yours.”

“Then I will take that as the compliment it is,” she responds. The statement isn’t just Diana’s way of saying “thank you.” It’s a recognition that Bruce’s father matters, a recognition that the work he did continues, even if Bruce doesn’t think that it continues with him.

In Absolute Batman #16, Diana repays the compliment by using her magic on Bruce. As he sleeps, she sprinkles dust on him, which allows him to visit Thomas Wayne in the afterlife. In the form of a child, Bruce hugs his father, and thanks Thomas for saving him when the gunman attacked the school, but Thomas insists he misunderstands. “For me, ‘saving you’ was what I did every day before that one. Teaching, being your dad.” Thomas explains that his work has found its culmination in Bruce, who helps the city in ways he never could.

Thanks to Diana’s magic, Bruce comes to learn that Thomas likes his way as well, that Batman’s methods matter just as much as Wonder Woman’s. Diana’s act of kindness resonates even stronger with us readers. Even amidst a world dominated by evil, made dark and frightening, Wonder Woman stands for kindness. Her absolute empathy makes her the most wondrous part of the Absolute Universe.

Absolute Wonder Woman #15 and Absolute Batman #16 are now available at your local comic book shop.

Wonder Man Welcomes Back One of Marvel’s Most Dangerous Companies

This article contains Wonder Man spoilers

In the fourth episode of Marvel’s Wonder Man, the world turns black-and-white as we explore events that led to a key incident in Hollywood’s recent past.

“Doorman” introduces us to DeMarr Davis (Byron Bowers), a club doorman who is loyal and trustworthy, but whose career is stagnating. All that is about to change when he takes out the garbage one night and gets more than he bargains for.

When DeMarr heads out to the alley at the back of the club, Wilcox, he discovers that the usual dumpster is full. Noticing one next to it that seems viable, he approaches cautiously and throws his garbage bag in, as the camera pans down to reveal a large “Roxxon” logo on the front. For Marvel geeks, it’s time for the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme, because that’s a company we are very familiar with!

DeMarr looks down and sees some very suspicious dark liquid oozing from a crack in the Roxxon dumpster. It appears to have created a kind of glittery, undulating sinkhole in the ground where it’s landed, and so he does what any normal person would do in such an “oh hell no” scenario – he sticks his damn hand into it.

The “good” news is that the gooey hole gives DeMarr some superpowers and subsequent fame. The bad news is that those superpowers eventually become scary and unpredictable. As a result, Hollywood decides the only safe way for the industry to function going forward is to ban superpowered individuals from working in it.

Roxxon’s Dark Past in the MCU

Anyone familiar with Roxxon’s Marvel Cinematic Universe history would have stayed well clear of whatever ended up in that dumpster. The company first popped up in the original Iron Man film in 2008, where it was established to be in the vicinity of Stark Industries’ headquarters. At that point, Roxxon remained a largely hidden threat, but in several popular Marvel TV shows, the company strayed from the shadows and became a rather more substantial evil corporation.

It was in Agent Carter that Roxxon finally emerged as a major recurring antagonist. In the post-WWII-set series, it competed with Howard Stark, stole Stark technology, and performed dangerous experiments with Isodyne Energy’s extradimensional substance, Zero Matter. We even met Roxxon’s villainous CEO, Hugh Jones (Ray Wise), in the series and saw the effects of the unstable Zero Matter on real people (it wasn’t good!).

Roxxon was back at it in Marvel’s little-seen Freeform show Cloak & Dagger in 2018, where the company was the main corporate antagonist. Roxxon’s dangerous New Orleans drilling operations into an unstable underground energy source caused a catastrophic explosion that killed several people and directly caused Tandy Bowen (Dagger) and Tyrone Johnson (Cloak) to develop powers. Tandy manifested light-based abilities (forming daggers), and Tyrone gained shadowy, portal-like abilities.

The Future of Roxxon in Wonder Man

Roxxon has more consistently embodied the human cost of corporate negligence as the MCU has evolved. It lurked in episodes of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Runaways, but in Wonder Man, it’s clear that Roxxon’s evil presence lives on in the MCU, and the company doesn’t seem to have strayed far from its former dodgy extradimensional matter experiments.

DeMarr Davis found that out the hard way. In the pages of Marvel Comics, DaMarr was a mutant with familiar portal-based powers. He could use Darkforce energy, much like Cloak. But in Wonder Man, Roxxon seems to be behind DeMarr’s brief highs and very low lows. Though the series doesn’t explore the details of the matter that DeMarr is exposed to, it wouldn’t be a huge leap to assume it’s related to Roxxon’s Darkforce dabblings in one way or another.

We suspect it’s not the last time we’ll see Roxxon’s dark dealings show up in the MCU. It’s one of the rare villains that never seems to die. But who will be the superhero that steps up and finally takes Roxxon out of the picture? Perhaps that avenue can be explored in a second season of Wonder Man if we get one, but more likely, Roxxon will pop up like just another Hydra head somewhere else in the future.

Netflix’s Take That Docuseries Makes a Bold but Confusing Choice

A highly anticipated new three-part docuseries from Bros: After the Screaming Stops co-director David Soutar has finally hit Netflix, and it’s turned out to be a decent watch. Cobbled together from 30-odd years of archival footage, Take That charts the rise and fall and rise again of the UK boy band, who first took some of their issues public back in the 1990s when cracks started to appear in their glossy image.

We have been here before. Take That members Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Mark Owen, and Jason Orange had previously agreed to appear in a 2005 documentary called Take That: For the Record. It proved compelling viewing, with the lads even reacting on camera to an apology video from former bandmate Robbie Williams. After For the Record was released, Take That decided to get the band back together, and they were soon hitting the road (and the charts again) for a sellout tour.

But within a few minutes of watching Netflix’s Take That, something feels off. Admittedly, the archival footage is edited together extremely well. Rare and unseen “home video” clips provide a deeper look into the band’s past and their interactions. We can see what life was like for the boys back then, and it seems genuinely daunting. The endless screaming, the lack of privacy, the feelings of inadequacy, and apparent bullying from their manager – it’s all there.

It’s what’s not there that feels off. There are no new on-camera interviews with the band, and a text epilogue informs us that any new parts of the audio were contributed by only three of the band members. Neither Robbie Williams nor Jason Orange contributed to these new interviews; their audio appears to have been spliced in from older ones. With none of the band telling their sides of the story on-camera, there is a distinct lack of the raw and unguarded responses and recollections we saw in For the Record.

As a result, Take That fails to connect with its audience in the way you’d expect. Netflix documentaries come thick and fast these days, but from Mr. McMahon to The Greatest Night in Pop, their savvy on-camera interviews have largely allowed people to tell their side of the story while also letting viewers see their body language and facial expressions as they do so. Which is not to say that some of the revelations from Gary, Mark, and Howard aren’t deeply personal. Gary’s recollection of the fallout from his first post-Take That era is particularly distressing, but ultimately, many of the band’s recollections lack an edge because they don’t capture the context of nonverbal communication.

While entertaining, Take That chooses to limit its connection and trust with the audience for reasons unknown. Fans of the band are sure to enjoy the new docuseries, but it still feels like a missed opportunity to really, honestly see them open up about the past at this stage of their careers.

Faces of Death Trailer Brings the Infamous ’80s Horror Franchise into 2026

You don’t have to watch Stranger Things to know that the 1980s were a scary time. There was Satanic Panic, rumors about poisoned Halloween candy, and Thatcher and Reagan. But nothing scared kids on the playground more than rumors about a movie that showed real-life images of people dying. That movie was Faces of Death, and it’s coming back in 2026 to traumatize us all over again.

The first teaser for the 2026 update of Faces of Death recalls those primal fears. The teaser has no narrative and instead features random images of horrible things. A bear drags away a limp man. A truck levels a bystander. A hammer slams into a skull. Between the whimpers of pain and cries for help, we hear a voice musing about death, asking, “The end of the beginning? Or the beginning of the end?”

The original Faces of Death from 1978 was written and directed by John Alan Schwartz and starred Michael Carr as Dr. Francis B. Gröss. Although presented as real material, Faces of Death is in fact fictional, the story of Dr. Gröss sharing his collection of footage featuring people and animals dying. Over the video of everything from car accidents to executions to Holocaust scenes, Gröss delivers vaguely philosophical narration about the nature of humanity.

Faces of Death is part of the Mondo (Italian for “world”) horror subgenre, exploitation takes on documentary travelogues. Where mainstream travelogues would introduce the viewers to Scandinavian saunas or Japanese kabuki, the Mondo films purported to reveal some nasty or taboo aspect of a subculture. 1962’s Mondo Cane, considered one of the progenitors of the subgenre, takes audiences around the world, showing them animals being slaughtered for food, Australian women in swimsuits giving CPR to young men, and everything in between. Nasty as the material gets, an authoritarian narrator describes it all in perfect calm, helping the viewers excuse their lust as intellectual pursuits.

Faces of Death and its fellow Mondo movies appealed to audiences in part because such lascivious material was hard to find in the ’60s and ’70s. So hard, in fact, that most of them had to stage the “real” events they documented, a trick made easier by the grainy film stock of the time. But that’s not the case in 2026, when horrible things are both all too real and way too accessible.

If there’s anyone who can deal with that challenge and make Faces of Death relevant in 2026, it’s director Daniel Goldhaber. Goldhaber not only directed the 2018 screenlife movie Cam (written by Isa Mazzei, who co-writes Faces of Death), but he made 2022’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, turning a nonfiction anarchist instructional document into a riveting fictional drama.

Clearly, Daniel Goldhaber is the best person to help ’80s kids to recall the terrors of the playground and make them real for adults in 2026, forcing us to stare into the faces of death once again.

Faces of Death releases in theaters on April 10, 2026.

Why Isn’t There More ’00s Nostalgia for Nip/Tuck?

Back in the ’00s, the likes of Lost, The Sopranos, Arrested Development, Deadwood, and Six Feet Under were making waves, and prestige TV was becoming a real thing. But while those shows were all becoming respected in their own right and gaining forever fans, Ryan Murphy’s medical drama Nip/Tuck was doing something very different over on FX.

An instant cable hit when it debuted back in 2003, the show focused on the McNamara/Troy plastic surgery clinic and its doctors, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (the late Julian McMahon), as they met patient after patient (and in some cases lover after lover) who wanted to change something about their physical appearance.

It’s hard to overstate how provocative the show felt back then. This was long before Murphy became the uber TV producer he is today, when his graphic, lurid shows are like buses. If you wait around long enough, there’ll be another American Horror Story, Monster, or The Beauty along any minute. In the ’00s, Nip/Tuck was very much pushing the boundaries of television with its chaotic storylines and queasy surgery scenes. It was also hugely influential, not just informing Murphy that there was a hunger for this kind of content – a hunger that has allowed him to feed audiences ever since – but also informing creators just how far they could go on the small screen. Glossy and morally ambiguous, Nip/Tuck paved the way for shows like Dexter and True Blood, while also inspiring a swathe of series that focused on the vanity and excess of the rich and connected. You could probably think of five or more of those that are currently streaming somewhere right now.

So why is Nip/Tuck rarely in the conversation when we’re getting nostalgic about the ’00s? Some would say the show made that bed back when it was airing. It largely blurred the line between satire and sincerity, often making it difficult for the audience to tell whether it was critiquing vanity culture or revelling in it. That ambiguity became part of its appeal, but also one of its most enduringly controversial aspects. Still, it was anchored by strong performances from Walsh and McMahon and was sharply written. It was transgressive and often refused to moralize where other shows might have tried to take sides or even shied away entirely from taboo topics.

The taboo of plastic surgery has arguably faded since the show hit our screens, though. There are more open conversations around body image on social media and in pop culture. Murphy admitted as much in a recent panel at New York Comic Con, where he mused that “people sort of flaunt [surgery] more and are talking about it” since the Nip/Tuck days, adding, “It’s an evolution in some strange way.”

We can also accept that many of Nip/Tuck’s storylines simply have not aged well. Sure, there were nonsensical serial-killer plots and tiresome celebrity cameos. Many of the episodes had obligatory shocks that no one would bat an eye at these days. We’ve come a long way in that respect – a couple of Murphy’s more recent series have featured Ed Gein having sex with a corpse and Bella Hadid snapping necks in a Parisian café. But some of Nip/Tuck’s stories and characterizations have absolutely aged like milk. The indefensible transgender tropes, the sensationalized incest, and the use of sexual assault as a plot device. Awful and gross.

This mixed bag of positives and negatives led to Nip/Tuck being remembered by audiences as a fascinating but deeply flawed artifact of early prestige television. It was definitely entertaining and must-see TV in the moment, but it ended up becoming more of a case study in how TV tested boundaries before it fully understood the responsibility that came with that freedom.

Wonder Man Is the Perfect Set-up for Marvel’s X-Men

This post contains light spoilers for Wonder Man.

In the world of Marvel Comics, Simon Williams is about as high-profile as you can get. He inherits a munitions factory from his rich industrialist father, puts on green and red tights to become Wonder Man and battle the Avengers, and later becomes one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. He fully embraces the attention the Avengers gives him, regularly appearing on late night television (including David Letterman) and eventually becoming a Hollywood stuntman, all while showing off his Wonder Man powers.

The Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) of the MCU is the exact opposite. Over the eight episodes of the Disney+ series Wonder Man, Simon has to keep his powers a secret. It’s not just that using his powers would violate the Doorman Clause that prevents super-people from acting in major productions. It’s that he’s being hunted by Agent Cleary (Arian Moayed) and the Department of Damage Control.

The difference between the two takes may be more than just creative liberties. They may be the perfect way to bring the X-Men properly into the MCU.

Feared and Hated or Praised and Adored?

When Jack Kirby and Stan Lee debuted the X-Men in 1963, they were just another set of costumed heroes in a Marvel Universe already filled with them. The only difference was they were mutants, born with their abilities instead of getting them from a radioactive spider or a gamma bomb. Over time, mutation became a key part of the X-Men franchise, something to set them aside from the Marvel heroes. The X-Men fought to save a world that feared and hated them, following Professor Charles Xavier’s dream of peaceful coexistence between humanity and mutants and opposing Magneto’s vision of mutant supremacy.

That “Mutant Metaphor” allowed the X-Men to become remarkable commentary, with the X-gene serving as a stand in for all sorts of social differences, from race and sexuality to disabilities and citizenship. However, the Mutant Metaphor also posed a problem: why is it that citizens in the Marvel Universe love the Avengers and the Fantastic Four and hate the X-Men?

That problem has only become more pronounced in the MCU. Because the universe began with jet-setting Tony Stark revealing himself as Iron Man, the heroes of the MCU have always been celebrities, with even Spider-Man being viewed neither a threat nor a menace (save for the a couple of scenes in No Way Home) and instead as Stark’s scion. Heck, Ms. Marvel, the first official mutant in the MCU, is a superhero super-fan who attends an Avengers-based convention. How can feared and hated mutants exist in this kind of world?

The Cost of Power

Wonder Man points to an answer.

Even though the fourth episode “Doorman” changes the titular character from a mutant born with teleporting abilties to someone who gets them from interacting with some weird goop, it shows what can happen when a random person has powers they don’t understand. Moreover, series illustrates the government’s interest those types of superpowered people. While someone like Valentina Allegra de Fontaine can use her intelligence resources to use superpeople to her own ends, Damage Control—which basically functions like the Department of Homeland Security in the MCU—sees them as a threat. They’d rather hunt down these potential dangers and lock them away in prisons.

Much of Wonder Man shows how people live in such a reality. Simon’s superpowers have nothing to do with his acting abilities or his day-to-day relationships. Although one gets the sense that maybe the event that gave him his powers, some sort of accident that occurred when was a child, led to his father’s (Béchir Sylvain) death and to tensions with his older brother Eric (Demetrius Grosse), but the show doesn’t really spend time on that part. Instead, the series is about how Simon lives every day terrified that someone will learn what he can do. And when they do, he’ll, at best, lose his job, and, at worst, be thrown in prison.

Wonder Man does a great job showing how someone with powers can be demonized, even while Rogers: The Musical is still a Broadway hit. The depiction of Simon’s struggles makes us believe that Damage Control would go searching for, say, a guy who shoots concussive blasts from his eyes or a girl who can move things with her mind.

Make Way for the Mutants

Speaking of that last point… it’s no accident that Wonder Man is co-created by Destin Daniel Cretton, the man who is directing Spider-Man: Brand New Day. We know that Brand New Day will see Spidey (Tom Holland) team up with the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), possibly against the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), but we also know it will involve Agent Cleary and Damage Control looking for Sadie Sink’s character. We don’t yet know who Sink is playing, and rumors have ranged anywhere from Frank Castle’s acolyte Rachel Cole to the wasp goddess Shathra.

But if Sink is indeed playing Jean Grey of the X-Men, then we understand why Damage Control would be looking for her. We understand the struggle that Jean and other mutants face precisely because of Wonder Man, not because it made Simon Williams a star, but because it made him an outcast.

Every episode of Wonder Man is now streaming on Disney+.

Chris Pratt Still Stands By Star-Lord’s Infuriating Infinity War Scene

One of the most infuriating moments for audiences watching Avengers: Infinity War is when Star-Lord, aka Peter Quill, violently reacts to the news that his girlfriend Gamora has been killed by Thanos.

During the iconic Marvel scene, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy are seconds from removing Thanos’ gauntlet and thus preventing the mad Titan from completing his plan to snap half the universe away. However, when Star-Lord finds out that Gamora is gone, he loses it, and Thanos manages to retain the gauntlet.

Star-Lord actor Chris Pratt is more than aware that the scene in question enraged people. In a new interview with Out of Order’s Scene Stealers, he rewatched the key Infinity War moment and told the host he looks at it differently now, but that after the film was released, people would angrily approach him on the street and ask, “Why’d you do that, man?!”

“What’s wild about this scene is that people eviscerate Quill because of his responsibility for essentially getting Iron Man killed for that moment,” he said. “You know that human moment where people hate this character for a while, and I really felt that.”

Pratt went on to defend the scene, explaining that if Star-Lord hadn’t messed up his own plan, the movie would have been 30 minutes long. “We got [Thanos]. That’s not a movie. You know what I mean? So, looking at it now, I kind of feel the weight of and the ramifications of what happened to the character of Quill because of that. I’m still happy that it happened, but I didn’t understand that it would be iconic.”

In the midst of promoting his new sci-fi movie Mercy, which has been shown none by critics and audiences, Pratt also revealed that he’d previously auditioned to play “so many” characters in the MCU, but one meeting with Marvel’s head honcho Kevin Feige appeared to seal the deal when it came to finally being cast as the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

According to a visibly emotional Pratt, he was out of shape when he attended the Marvel meeting, and Feige had eventually cut to the chase, slapping a Zero Dark Thirty-era buff selfie of Pratt down on the table and asking him if he could be that fit again.

“He wanted to talk to me and see me react to the picture and basically ask me if I could be a hero for him.”