The television series Snowpiercer has had a rocky journey. The show’s first three seasons ran on TNT, but the network chose to not air the already-shot fourth and final season as part of the large number of tax write-offs that came with the Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
Luckily for us, the show found a new home at AMC, with that network saying they would release the final episodes sometime in early 2025. The network announced today, however, that we would be able to see the fourth season—as well as the three seasons that came before it—in mere months.
For those who need a refresher, the Snowpiercer series takes place seven years after the world has become an arctic wasteland and focuses on a 1001-car train of survivors that continually run on tracks laid across the globe. It’s based on the graphic novel series by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, and the film from Oscar-winner Bong Joon Ho.
Season three saw the train cars split into two factions, with one led by Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly), who wants to maintain the status quo, and the other by Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs), who wants to explore new territory.
Credit: AMC
“We can’t wait to share the final season of this thrill ride of a series with this vibrant fan community and new viewers starting July 21 on AMC and AMC+, with plenty of time built in to catch up on previous seasons on a variety of on demand platforms and AMC+ before then,” Courtney Thomasma, Executive Vice President of Streaming for AMC Networks, said in a statement shared with Deadline. “Snowpiercer is an entertaining drama with a great cast and seeing how the ride ends will be a highlight of summer viewing worthy of a 1001-car train.”
The first two seasons of Snowpiercer will start streaming on AMC+ beginning June 1, 2024, with the third season premiering on the platform on June 8, 2024.
The fourth and final season will premiere on July 21, 2024 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on AMC and AMC+.
The network also released first-look photos of the final season, which you can see above and below. [end-mark]
It's a smaller story, so it gets a smaller series: The Hollywood Reporter has the news that the next Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, will have a mere six episodes in its first season. The series is based on a trio of novellas, so presumably that makes a certain kind of sense.
The show was previously going by the slightly more ponderous title A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, but apparently has dropped those last three words, at least for the time being.
What's more, Owen Harris has joined the adaptation as an executive producer and director; he will tackle the first three episodes. Harris famously directed Black Mirror’s "San Junipero," several episodes of Brave New World, and—most importantly, in my book—four episodes of the criminally under-watched and entirely wonderful Mrs. Davis.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms recently cast its two leads, enlisting Peter Claffey as Ser Duncan the Tall and Dexter Sol Ansell as his young squire Egg. (Anyone familiar with the regularly recurring names of the world of Game of Thrones can probably guess what "Egg" is a nickname for. Here's a hint: There are a lot of Targaryens.)
Here's the official synopsis:
A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros… a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall (Claffey), and his diminutive squire, Egg (Ansell). Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes, and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.
George R.R. Martin is writer and executive producer for the series, which also has Ira Parker, Ryan Condal, Vince Gerardis, Owen Harris, and Sarah Bradshaw as executive producers
No premiere date has been announced, but the show is expected to arrive next year.[end-mark]
Prime Video's Blade Runner 2099 series was announced over two years ago—long enough that a person could be forgiven for thinking maybe it just faded away, as so many potential series do. But no: It's trucking along, and what's more, it has a pretty incredible star. Variety reports that Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh (Star Trek: Discovery, pictured above) has signed on to the series, and while all the plot details are secret, "sources say Yeoh will play a character named Olwen, described as a replicant near the end of her life."
Blade Runner 2099 is a slightly odd duck. As suggested by the title, it takes place 50 years after Denis Villeneuve's film Blade Runner 2049, but Villeneuve is not involved; instead, it's a project from original Blade Runner director Ridley Scott, and is also a sequel to that film. Scott is an executive producer, and Silka Luisa is the series' showrunner.
Luisa was the showrunner for Apple TV+’s The Shining Girls, a very good adaptation of the Lauren Beukes novel of the same name. She was also a writer and supervising producer on the first season of Halo.
And one more interesting person is attached to this Blade Runner: Jonathan van Tulleken is set to direct the first two episodes. Van Tulleken recently directed two episodes of Shogun, as well as four episodes of The Changeling.
Disney CEO Bob Iger, who earned $31.6 million last year, has gotten specific about the number of projects Marvel will release in the future, reportedly as part of Disney's "overall strategy to reduce output and focus on quality." Variety says:
“We’re slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three,” the Disney CEO said during the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday. “And we’re working hard on what that path is.”
It would be nice to be optimistic about this—Marvel has seemed a bit overextended of late—but Iger has a way of tamping down any excitement a person might feel. He said, in this same call, that some of the upcoming series are “a vestige of basically a desire in the past to increase volume.” Variety notes that he is including Agatha, the Kathryn Hahn-starring WandaVision spinoff, in that.
In the broader Disney scope of things, Iger also disappointed those of us who are always hoping for more original films, saying, "We’re gonna balance sequels with originals. Specifically in animation, we had gone through a period where our original films and animation, both Disney and Pixar, were dominating. We’re now swinging back a bit to lean on sequels.”
Were not Pixar original films some of the best animated movies of the last few decades? Can you have sequels without having great original films? These questions do not arise.[end-mark]
The second season of Wednesday is now in production—officially, and finally, given that the show was renewed in January of last year. Wednesday's immediate family—Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia, Luis Guzmán as Gomez, and Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley—have all been upgraded to series regulars, as has Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo, who plays Deputy Ritchie Santiago.
Also returning: Emma Myers as the irrepressibly chipper Enid; Hunter Doohan as Tyler Galpin; Joy Sunday as Bianca Barclay; Victor Dorobantu as Thing; Moosa Mostafa as Eugene Ottinger; Georgie Farmer as Ajax Petropolus; Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester; and Jamie McShane as Sheriff Donovan Galpin.
But wait, there's more! New series regulars, whose roles have not been all disclosed, include Evie Templeton (Disney's Pinocchio), Owen Painter (The Handmaid's Tale), incredible character actor Noah Taylor (Preacher), and none other than Rose Tyler herself, Billie Piper (Doctor Who, I Hate Suzie). Pipe is playing a character named Capri.
As was previously announced, Steve Buscemi will also be a regular. He is playing Barry Dort, principal of Nevermore Academy.
But wait, there's still more! You can also expect a pile of guest stars, including Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous) as Grandmama; Thandiwe Newton (Westworld) as Dr. Fairburn; Christopher Lloyd (The Addams Family), Frances O’Connor (The End), Haley Joel Osment (What We Do in the Shadows), Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse), and Joonas Suotamo (best known as Chewbacca). That is quite a mix: a pair of grown-up child stars, a star of the beloved Addams films, and Chewie? Okay, then.
According to Netflix, the first episode of season two is called “Here We Woe Again,” and is directed by Tim Burton from a script by series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. This time around, Jenna Ortega isn't just starring as Wednesday; she's also a producer.
Netflix released a cute little video with the cast announcement, which you can watch below. No premiere date has been announced.[end-mark]
This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, we are covering chapter 25 of Winter’s Heart. In this chapter, simply titled Bonds, Rand and Alanna confront each other over the difficulties of their shared tether, the Warder bond Alanna thrust onto Rand without his consent. At the same time, Min struggles with possessiveness over Rand and fear over a vision about Alivia. And Verin ascertains Cadsuane’s true intentions, leaving the reader to continue to puzzle over Verin’s.
Rand and Min have moved to a room in a different inn, where Rand sits playing the flute. They’re waiting for Alanna, who Rand can feel coming closer. The bond with Alanna feels wrong compared to the comfortable, natural presence in Rand’s head of the bond with Elayne, Min, and Aviendha.
Min is also upset because she had a viewing that Alivia is going to help Rand die. Rand points out that helping him die is not the same as killing him, but Min doesn’t see a difference.
“Sooner or later, I have to die, Min,” he said patiently. He had been told by those he had to believe. To live, you must die. That still made no sense to him, but it left one cold hard fact. Just as the Prophecies of the Dragon seemed to say, he had to die. “Not soon, I “hope. I plan not soon. I’m sorry, Min. I never should have let you bond me.” But he had not been strong enough to refuse, any more than he had been strong enough to push her away. He was too weak for what had to be done. He needed to drink in winter, till he made winter’s heart seem Sunday noon.
Min tells Rand firmly that she will not let him die, and if he manages it anyway she will follow him and bring him back. They are interrupted by a knock at the door, and Min takes some time to arrange herself, draped over Rand on the bed. But when Cadsuane enters before Alanna, Min jumps up again in embarrassed alarm.
Rand greets Cadsuane insolently, prompting her to observe that his manners haven’t improved. She tells him that his presence in Far Madding has saddled her with many inconvenient companions—not just Alanna but Nesune, Sarene, Erian, Beldeine and Elza, as well as Harine, her swordmaster, and Shalon. When she mentions sending the Sea Folk to Rand, he forces himself to ask her, politely, to keep his presence a secret from them.
But when Cadsuane reveals that Narishma, Damer, and Hopwil have been bonded, Rand curses, prompting Cadsuane to slap him. Cadsuane orders Min to leave the room with her, so that Alanna can have a moment alone with Rand.
Rand asks Alanna why Cadsuane didn’t ask what he was doing in Far Madding, and Alanna says that she doesn’t think Cadsuane cares about Rand at all. She demands to know what he did to cause her to be unconscious for three days, and Rand explains simply that he let himself be bonded by someone he actually gave permission to. Alanna is outraged, demanding to know who it is and insisting that she’ll drag the woman before a court and see her birched. She insists that Rand is hers.
“Because you took me, Alanna,” he said coldly. “If more sisters knew, you would be the one birched.” Min had told him once that he could trust Alanna, that she had seen the Green and four other sisters “in his hand.” He did trust her, in an odd fashion, yet he was in Alanna’s hand, too, and he did not want to be. “Release me, and I’ll deny it ever happened.” He had not even known that was possible until Lan told him about himself and Myrelle. “Release me, and I’ll set you free of your oath.”
Alanna admits that she has dreamed of being free of him, and even asked Cadsuane to accept Rand’s bond from her. But Alanna declares that, however Rand was bonded, he is her responsibility now.
"That is as strong in me as the oath I swore to obey you. Every bit as strong. So I will not release you to anyone unless I know she can handle you properly. Who bonded you? If she is capable, I will let her have you.”
Rather than tell her, Rand asks how she is so certain Cadsuane has no interest in him—after all, she had Alanna bring her to him. But Alanna counters that she didn’t know Rand was in Far Madding, only that he was far to the south. She had to beg Cadsuane to bring her, expecting to have to Travel halfway to Tear to find him. She adds, warningly, that now that Cadsuane has taught Alanna to Travel, Rand won’t be able to elude her so easily.
Rand asks if the other sisters took the Asha’man the way Alanna took him, but she insists there was no pressuring that she knows of. She also tells him about Damer discovering a way to Heal stilling, and that all the sisters being held by the Aiel, even the Reds, have now sworn fealty to him. She urges Rand to accept the fact that he needs the Aes Sedai, that they can help end the rebellions against him and unite the lands for him. She reminds him that the treaty Rafela and Merana negotiated with Harine got him everything he asked for, and almost begs him to let them help him.
Rand realizes that his fear of being manipulated by the Aes Sedai has blinded him to any of these possibilities, and that he has been a fool. In his head, Lews Therin remarks that both a man who trusts everyone and a man who trusts no one is a fool.
Rand tells Alanna to go back to Cairhien, and to send Rafela and Merana, along with Bera and Faeldrin, to Haddon Mirk to negotiate with the rebels. These are the four who, along with Alanna, Min told him he could trust. Alanna is disappointed to be sent away from him so soon, but Rand tells her that if he is still in Far Madding by the time she finishes in Cairhien, she may return to him.
Alanna realizes that Rand isn’t going to tell her who bonded him, and asks Rand why he’s here. She promises to keep the secret, and he knows she would, but also knows that as a Green she would feel compelled to stay and help him, so he refuses.
She leaves, and Rand sits and ponders how to make Cadsuane interested in him, so that he can learn whatever it is she is supposed to teach him, according to Min’s vision.
Verin arrives at Aleis’s Palace after having been out. She is using the name Eadwin because she still has a warrant out for her exile, and although the people of Far Madding are respectful to Aes Sedai, they also have little reason to fear them, and the Tower usually keeps quiet if Aes Sedai are arrested and punished for some offense.
She finds Cadsuane in a sitting room, working on her embroidery while Elza upbraids her for letting Alanna go to Rand without them.
Elza was always very conscious of where she stood with respect to other sisters, perhaps too much so. For her to ignore Verin, much less confront Cadsuane, she must have been in a fine swivet. “How could you let her go?” she demanded of Cadsuane. “How are we to find him without her?” Ah, so that was it.
Cadsuane replies calmly that Elza can wait for Alanna to return, and cuts off more arguments with a raised finger. Elza leaves, and Cadsuane asks Verin to make her a cup of tea. Verin asks, carefully, if it was wise to let Alanna go, and Cadsuane replies that she couldn’t stop Alanna from going without “letting the boy know more than he should.” When Verin suggests confusion and worry over whatever Rand might be doing in Far Madding, Cadsuane replies that he can do whatever he likes, as long as he lives to see Tarmon Gai’don, and as long as Cadsuane can stay by his side long enough to teach him laughter and tears again.
“He is turning into a stone, Verin, and if he doesn’t relearn that he’s human, winning the Last Battle may not be much better than losing. Young Min told him he needs me; I got that much out of her without rousing her suspicions. But I must wait for him to come to me. You see the way he runs roughshod over Alanna and the others. It will be hard enough teaching him, if he does ask. He fights guidance, he thinks he must do everything, learn everything, on his own, and if I do not make him work for it, he won’t learn at all.”
She adds that she seems to be in a confiding mood tonight, and might confide more if Verin even finishes making the tea. She slips a vial back into her sleeve.
Was Verin going to poison Cadsuane? My first thought was that she was going to use forkroot on her, but would that even matter since they’re in Far Madding? I guess it would still put her to sleep, just as it would any non-channeler, but I can’t see how that would actually serve any ends for Verin; she doesn’t know how long Rand intends to be in Far Madding or what he’s doing there, and there are other sisters to worry about besides Cadsuane.
Not that I know what Verin’s ends are, of course, but she does seem to be trying to protect Rand in some fashion. She’s relieved and puts the poison away once she learns that Cadsuane’s intention is to make sure Rand makes it to the Last Battle and to teach him to be human again, which seems to support the idea that Verin’s goal is also to protect Rand. In the same way that she used her cobbled-together compulsion to make all the captive Aes Sedai decide to swear fealty to him, Verin seems determined to serve Rand in secret and through morally dubious means.
My best guess for Verin at this point is that at some time in her life she discovered something about the Dragon Reborn—some ancient text, or interpretation of the Karaethon Cycle, or even an interpretation of her own—that made her believe that the Dragon Reborn needed to be kept free from too much control by the White Tower. If Verin was also able to deduce that the Oath Rod could be used to lift the Three Oaths, perhaps she used it upon herself in secret, in order that she might have as many means as possible to do the work she deemed necessary.
There are some holes in this theory, of course, including the fact that I don’t think you can use the Oath Rod on yourself, but it’s the best one I can come up with, and if true, it wouldn’t make Verin that different from Moiraine and Siuan, who also spent the last 18ish years working in secret towards the goal of finding and guiding the Dragon Reborn, and who also employed dubious method and lied in every sense except the literal one to the sisters around them, so much so that Elaida was able to incite a good number of the Hall against Siuan when her duplicity was at last discovered. And Elaida herself has also been acting alone on secret knowledge around the Dragon Reborn, following what she believes her own Foretelling indicated about his coming.
The question of who should be directing the Dragon Reborn’s actions is a difficult one for everybody in this world. Most people feel frightened and helpless in the face of what the Karatheon Cycle says will come to pass at his hands, and despite the fact that he is very young, his power and the prestige that comes with his identity is not easy for anyone to face, even powerful, intelligent rulers. People seem to believe they must either stand against him because he is a danger to themselves and their nations, or that they must be bowled over by the very power of his identity.
And then there are the Aes Sedai. Many, perhaps even most, believe that Rand should be controlled and directed by the White Tower. And in truth, it’s easy to understand their perspective on the matter. As Alanna points out to Rand in this chapter, the Aes Sedai have thousands of years of experience leading the world, in fighting against the Dark and (at least in theory) in preparing for the coming of Tarmon Gai’don. Until very recently, Rand was a teenage shepherd with little knowledge of the world and no knowledge whatsoever of channeling, warfare, or the Shadow.
Though Rand has learned much in the short time since he discovered the truth of his identity, and has become in his own right a great swordsman and a good general, he owes so much of what he has done and accomplished to the fact that channeling and weaves seem to come naturally to him, without much need for study. Of course there is also the guidance he receives from Lews Therin and the teaching from Asmodean, but no one else knows anything about this, or would trust these teachers if they did. As a result, Rand appears to everyone to be—and in some ways kind of is—a young man with no experience doing any of the things he is trying to do, who accepts little help and only has a finite amount of time to accomplish his goals before the Last Battle arrives. And before he loses himself to taint-induced madness.
As a reader, of course, I’m going to see Rand differently than the outside world does, and it’s easy to get frustrated when people misjudge him or his intentions. But it is also important to remember that everyone else has important stakes in this fight as well, and I think Rand’s encounter with Alanna, and his realization that he has been letting his fear drive his choices, is a very important reminder of this fact.
Because Rand is the Dragon Reborn, the chosen one, he has been feeling and acting as though he is the only person in the world carrying the burden of the future. But that is not, in fact, the case. The Prophecies state that he must do certain things and be certain places in order for the Light to defeat the Dark, but that doesn’t mean that no one else needs to do anything, be anywhere, or make any choices. Rand feels understandably burdened by his identity and the fate that he believes is waiting for him, and as a result he is somewhat blinded by that sense of fate and duty.
The balance, one assumes, lies somewhere in between Rand having all the control and Rand being controlled by the Aes Sedai, and I doubt it will be an easy balance for either side to find. But perhaps Verin believes—either from something she’s read, her interpretation of the Prophecies, or for some other reason—that the Aes Sedai represent a threat to Rand and his success. I doubt she’d go so far as to think that the Aes Sedai have no place in Rand’s future or that he must be allowed to proceed with no checks or restraint from others, but she is certainly acting as though he must be protected from the Aes Sedai, and that it is important that the Aes Sedai serve him. She worked her cobbled-together compulsion on all the prisoners who were being held by the Wise Ones, after all, compelling all of them to pledge their service to him. It’s a fairly intense action for her to take, on women who weren’t even currently a threat to Rand, so I think it speaks to Verin believing that having Aes Sedai serve Rand is important.
That compulsion is no doubt at least partly responsible for the level of upset Elza feels over Cadsuane’s handling of Alanna. And it is interesting to consider how compulsion is a violation not unlike non-consensual bonding. In Rand’s case the bond has less effect on him than on other men, possibly because he is ta’veren, but for ordinary Warders, the bond can be used by their Aes Sedai to compel them to certain actions. Verin’s version of compulsion also makes a person believe that the actions she compels them to are their own desire, which adds in a little extra moral complexity.
Min’s viewing that the other Aes Sedai will serve Rand “each after her own fashion” probably refers to the compulsion as well. Verin’s weave required that the victim supply her own reasons for choosing to swear fealty, which might not align with Rand’s needs or desires at all, as indeed we saw when these sisters swore to Rand and he questioned them about their motives.
Alanna is not one of these, however, and since Min saw her as one of the Aes Sedai that Rand can fully trust, I suppose we must believe it. She certainly seems sincere, and seemed to be speaking plainly, when she reminded Rand that the Aes Sedai can be assets to him, if only he’d use them for more than a display of his power. Given how she phrases it and how adamant she is, not to mention Min’s vision, I’m inclined to believe what she says, as Rand seems to be.
What Alanna did to Rand is heinous, and her continued insistence on holding onto him in the face of that act even more so, but I don’t think she actually wants to hurt Rand, or that she intends to act maliciously. I think she really believes that Rand is her responsibility now; despite mentioning that she wants to be free of him and even asking Cadsuane to take his bond, she also refused to dissolve it, even with the very tantalizing promise that Rand will lift her oath of obedience from her. Unless Alanna turns out to be in the Black Ajah, which at the moment seems unlikely, this refusal to even entertain the prospect shows that she believes in what she says. And the fact that she holds Rand’s bond while Rand holds the binding oath over her does, in a way, make them more equal than otherwise. Perhaps this is even the reason why Rand offered to lift her oath in turn.
All that being said, however, the fact remains that Alanna did violate Rand. Despite the disapproval and disgust shown by her fellow Aes Sedai over her action, and despite his very measured and reasonable request for her to lift the bond, she continues to hold it. I believe it was Verin who thought that Alanna’s seemingly-impulsive decision to bond Rand might have been brought on by the effects of losing Owein. If true, this doesn’t excuse Alanna’s decision but does mitigate it, morally speaking. However, even if Owein’s death was a factor in her decision, Alanna has shown, both right after the bonding and here in this chapter, that she also believes that Rand should and must be bonded and controlled by an Aes Sedai. She does offer to release him to the other woman who bonded him if she deems that woman capable of controlling him, but that is as far as she will go.
Alanna believes, as many Aes Sedai do, that Rand must be controlled. She is willing to violate him if she must, just as nearly everyone is willing to use him if they must, and he is willing to use people in turn. Rand is wrong about the need to turn himself into a stone, and it is too bad that he can’t learn differently from the three women who love him, but you can see why he believes he must become cold and hard. To many he is more of an object than a person, or more of a symbol, or more of a threat. And that shows in how most people interact with him, even those who care about him. It’s not just about steeling himself to be a commander in wartime.
It makes me wonder how Cadsuane will teach him the lesson he so desperately needs to learn. Perhaps she will offer her own long experience, her own trials as someone whose primary task in life is to fight the war the Shadow—Cadsuane is a Green, after all—to show him that he can dedicate his life to this cause without sacrificing his humanity. If Rand can approach Cadsuane in the way she wants, perhaps she will meet him as an equal, allowing him to see her as one in turn, and to learn from her example, rather than from her discipline.
I was interested, too, in Alanna’s assertion the Asha’man were not coerced into accepting the Warder bond. She is careful to say only that she never saw Merise pressure Jahar and then to bring up the point that the men had little choice; they couldn’t go back to the Black Tower because they feared being taken for Rand’s attackers, and they couldn’t leave Cairhien because then they would be taken for deserters, so, Alanna points out, choosing the Aes Sedai was really their only option. She frames this as Rand’s fault, which in a way it is, and then suggests that Flinn’s discovery of how to Heal stilling made the whole thing worth it. But without seeing it that way, Alanna has actually pointed out that there can’t really be any true consent within the Warder bond, no matter if the potential Warder agrees at the time of bonding, and especially not if he has any reason to choose it besides a genuine desire to be a Warder.
In the case of Flinn, Narishma, and Hopwil, even if they weren’t verbally pressured by the Aes Sedai—and I imagine they were, at least a little—Alanna’s point here shows that they had little choice. Left behind by Rand in Cairhien, they had nowhere else to go but to the Aes Sedai. They may get protection from the exchange, but they were also trapped, and now that they have agreed, they cannot change their minds even if they want to.
Even if a potential Warder agrees to be bonded solely because he desires the life of a Warder, even if he goes to the White Tower specifically to seek out that calling, there can’t be any true consent unless both parties have the ability to withdraw that consent at any time. Once a man is bonded he cannot be released except if his Aes Sedai chooses to do so. He can be compelled to obey her through the bond, he can even be given to another sister. Such an act is frowned upon, of course, even taboo, and would result in punishment for the offender, but it is still possible.
Look at what happened Lan, after all. One of the conditions of his bonding by Moiraine was that she would never use the bond to compel him, and she did exactly that, going so far as to transfer his bond without his permission to force him to live and continue to serve in the fight against the Dark One. Her reasoning was that he was too valuable to waste in an empty death, and while I’m sure she also hoped to make him happy by ensuring that he ended up with Nynaeve, but I am just as sure that her primary desire was to make sure he survived to fight on once she was dead.
And then Lan was raped literally as well as metaphorically by Myrelle, once the bond transferred to her and he was compelled by it to go find her. There is deeply rooted sexism in the idea that men in Lan’s position can be given the will to live through sex—any sex, apparently—and it clearly did Lan no good. But one thing that is good about his time with Myrelle is that Lan and Nynaeve were able to get married and establish their relationship before Nynaeve held Lan’s bond. This puts them on a much more even playing field as they figure out the parameters of their marriage, and makes the issue of consent much more palatable than it would be if Lan was already Nynaeve’s Warder before he was her husband.
I find that the more time goes on, the less I believe that Rand is actually fated to die in the Last Battle. The fact that he has been so sure of it has always felt like a narrative clue, but it also feels very significant that it is never actually said that Rand will die at Shayol Ghul. The prophecies only said that his blood would be on the rocks, which could mean anything, really: a non-fatal wound; the non-healing wounds opening up anew, the way they tend to whenever he’s in a difficult fight; and even some kind of blood ritual (not really a thing with channelers, but the cour'souvra is made using blood and spit, so anything is possible, especially if Rand is facing off with the Dark One himself). And as Rand points out, Min’s vision was not that Alivia would kill Rand but that he would “help him die” which could be literal but also might come from a more poetic reading. Maybe Rand will fake his death at some point, to fool the Forsaken or to get away from his allies; he’s practically done that already. Alivia seems to be very devoted to him, and you definitely need an insider or two if you’re going to fake your own death.
It would be nice if Rand survived the Last Battle, not least because it would show him that he was wrong to want to push away the people who love him, and that they were right to take a risk with him. Not that it would be wrong to choose the bond even if he did die—some joys are worth the pain—but it would be even better if he survived and they could all tell him they told him so.
And finally, I found it very clever of Cadsuane to act in a way that convinced Alanna that she wasn’t really interested in Rand, so that Alanna could in turn convince Rand of it. She’s a clever one, that Cadsuane, and I really like her even if she is mean. Honestly, I want her and Verin to be friends—I half expected Verin to figure out Cadsuane’s little mirror trick—and maybe now that Verin is certain of Cadsuane, they will be.
I also really want to know what it is that Verin did the last time she was in Far Madding that had her exiled! She’s such a tantalizing mystery, and I respect Jordan so much that he has kept it going all this time. It’s frustrating and it’s great.
Next week we’re catching up with Egwene and Elayne, who has some very interesting news of her own, in chapters 26 and 27. In the meantime, I am pleased to report that I have learned a new word today—swivet. Swivet sounds like it means a bird, or maybe a kind of chair, but it actually means “a state of nervous excitement, haste, or anxiety.” Love a good vocabulary lesson. Thanks Jordan!
Oh, and also, shout out to the book’s title in the quote from Rand about his need to become even harder. Love that.[end-mark]
May the Fourth was this weekend, and to celebrate the occasion, Disney released another trailer for Star Wars: The Acolyte, the upcoming series set in the time of the High Republic, which was hundreds of years before the events of the first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace.
The almost-two-minute clip is the same length as the first Star Wars: The Acolyte trailer we got, and it gives us more of Jedi Master Sol (Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae) as he looks to bring in a former student (Amandla Stenberg) who now thinks the Jedi’s proposed claim to maintain peace is a lie.
Here’s the official logline for the show:
In The Acolyte, an investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a respected Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae) against a dangerous warrior from his past (Amandla Stenberg). As more clues emerge, they travel down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems….
Leslye Headland (Russian Doll) created the series and is an executive producer along with Kathleen Kennedy, Simon Emanuel, Jeff F. King, and Jason Micalle. In addition to Lee and Stenberg, the series stars Carrie-Anne Moss, Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, and Jodie Turner-Smith.
Star Wars: The Acolyte premieres on Disney+ on June 4, 2024 with two episodes, which Headland directed. Subsequent episodes will release weekly.
Gunn went to Threads today and shared a first-look image of Corenswet as the Man of Steel, which you can take a gander of above. In it, we see Clark Kent’s alter ego casually pulling up his red, calf-high boots. Superman’s chill demeanor here is curious because behind him, a giant pink eyeball-looking thing appears to be wreaking havoc on Metropolis. Why is he so mellow? And why does his suit have a baggy, pajama-like look to it?
Those questions are intriguing, but perhaps the most burning question evoked by this image revolves around that giant orb floating above the city. What the hell is that thing?
One possible answer is that, even though it’s mostly giving off a pink hue, it’s the Emerald Eye of Ekron. In DC comics, the Eye used to be part of a gigantic mystical entity unsurprisingly called Ekron. The being lost one of their eyeballs at some point in time, however, and since then it’s been used as a weapon of vast power by villains up to no good.
This, of course, is just a guess—there’s only a wee bit of green in that image, and the Eye is part of the Green Lantern lore rather than Superman’s. One big reason why it might be the Eye, however, is that it is vulnerable to Kryptonite, the one substance that also hinders the Man of Steel. That fact tees up a situation where Clark could have to take on great personal risk and sacrifice to save humanity, which is something that Gunn likes to do to characters in his movies.
We likely won’t have the full answer until Superman: Legacy comes out, of course. Gunn isn’t sharing more details at this point—his only comment on the photo beyond the release date of the film was to credit Jess Miglio for taking the photo on set “entirely in-camera,” which means this is likely using the LED Volume technology that The Mandalorian made popular.
We’ll get to see more of Corenswet’s Man of Steel when Superman: Legacy flies its way into theaters on July 11, 2025. [end-mark]
It’s been a long haul, but you can’t keep a Furyan down. Today, we found out that the long-gestating fourth film in the Riddick franchise is finally going into production, with Vin Diesel once again taking on the role of Richard B. Riddick, a laconic Furyan who kicks ass across the galaxy even when he can’t see very well in a brightly lit environment.
The script for Riddick: Furya, as the fourth film is titled, has reportedly been completed as far back as 2021. The movie has been in development limbo since then, but according to Variety, it will start production on August 26, 2024 and will shoot in both Germany and Spain.
Here’s the synopsis for the upcoming feature, per Variety:
In Riddick: Furya, Riddick finally returns to his homeworld, a place he barely remembers and one he fears might be left in ruins. But there, he finds other Furyans fighting for their existence against a new monster—and some of these Furyans are more like Riddick than he could have ever imagined.
Writer-director David Twohy, who helmed the first three films in the franchise—Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and Riddick—is back once more for Furya. We don’t know yet who will be joining Diesel on the call sheet, and we also don’t know the scale or budget for the sci-fi feature, something that is up in the air given Universal Pictures only greenlit a scaled back budget for the third film after the financial flop that was The Chronicles of Riddick, which cost $120 million to make but only garnered a little over $107 million worldwide when it was released in 2004.
The third film, 2013’s Riddick, had a much more modest budget of $38 million and, with DVD sales and its almost $95 million global box office haul, likely made money for the studio. Despite this, it’s been over a decade since the Fast & Furious star has returned to the sci-fi franchise. Riddick fans won’t have to wait much longer, however—while we don’t have an official release date yet, we’ll likely see the movie in late 2025 or early 2026 given its August production start time. [end-mark]
The other day, my dad texted me a link to this John Hodgman piece weighing in—or I guess I should say “adjudicating”—on whether the Star Wars series is really sci-fi or fantasy. This was apropos of an argument we (dad and I; Hodgman was not yet involved) had over the holidays about the delineations between those two genres. I proposed that the delineations between science fiction and fantasy can be more aesthetic than substantive; he maintained that there are more fundamental differences. He prosecuted his case with a lot of references to Star Trek, a childhood favorite of his which he introduced to us, his own children, in turn. I, like an egghead, countered with many “yes, but” theoretical arguments. I love to play the egghead. My brother even-handedly tried to parse out the merits of both sides while dad and I continued to lob differently-worded versions of the same point back and forth across the dinner table. Mom and grandpa did not engage. The tone was occasionally pretty strident for such a goofy topic. You know, the way you argue with your family?
And now dad’s fired another shot across my bow, courtesy of a cultural commentator with real-fake authority and fake-fake judge’s attire. Well, fetch my red shirt! Time to relitigate this argument in public, for if Star Wars has taught me one thing, it’s that throwing yourself in the path of a more powerful man in a dowdy black robe is a great strategy for winning a fight with your father.
May it please the court:
The Honorable John Hodgman, we should note, begins his short piece by noting that he also finds genre distinctions, or arguments about said, to be questionable or tiresome. Nonetheless, he delivers a verdict, finding that Star Wars is a narrative fueled by nostalgia rather than futuristic speculations, landing it much closer to Tolkien than Trek. This is a common enough differentiation between sci-fi and fantasy: that they look towards different horizons, the latter retro-gazing, the former speculating on what could be. Construed in this way, the two genres are not just different but full opposites.
And that is indeed a perfectly workable measure for explaining how sci-fi and fantasy stories have been traditionally classified. What bothers me, however, is the sense I get that assigning Star Wars the label of fantasy is a kind of relegation. That is, it’s not just that the fantasy label is a better fit, but that Star Wars is too unserious to deserve to be classified as sci-fi. Fantasy is fuzzy and frivolous, sci-fi is sophisticated and cerebral. (Plenty of people, I’m given to understand, think all genre fiction is fuzzy and frivolous, but that’s another matter.)
The emblematic example of Star Wars’ conceptual squishiness is that it misuses the metric of the parsec, referencing it as a measure of time rather than distance. Someone has likely explained this factoid to you before, probably one of those early figures in your life who tried to convert you to pedantry. We all had them. Mine were well meaning, good humored, and delightful. But we likely also overlook the parsec error, because we recognize that the real central concept of Star Wars is “the Force,” which has nothing to do with science and everything to do with feelings. Frivolous. Fuzzy.
Star Trek, by comparison, has very serious and grounded mechanisms like warp cores and transporters and dilithium crystals, which are also made up but could be totally scientifically plausible. Except that the scientific plausibility of dilithium-based technology, much like the parsec error, doesn’t matter. In fact, you could say it anti-matters (yuck yuck).
What is important about the starship Enterprise is not how it goes but where it goes. Star Trek may feature many, many episodes that revolve around fixing the warp core, but for the most part the concepts Trek wants to explore are really political and sociological, about interactions between the diverse crew and encounters with alien life. How many of these civilizations’ representatives are eager to sleep with Commander Riker? Better make a tally. For science. But specifically for the “soft” science of sociology.
To be sure, the sociological premises of Trek interact with its technological ones. For instance, the technology of the replicator helps to explain how the Federation’s egalitarian, moneyless society operates. But how does a replicator convert energy to matter? And why can’t it successfully replicate dilithium of sufficient quality to serve in a ship’s matter-antimatter reactor? Maybe it has something to do with how dilithium is also an energy source, and therefore the replicator’s process of converting energy to matter saps the dilithium of its potential energy? Or maybe it’s about dilithium possibly being a four-dimensional substance in a way that replicator technology can’t yet reproduce? To both the physicists and Trekkies out there, does any of that… make sense?
This kind of explanation, whenever sci-fi properties even bother to engage in it, substantively amounts to what is commonly called technobabble—or as I think of it, Ruddigore-ing! Meaning: this particularly rapid, unintelligible patter isn’t generally heard, and if it is, it doesn’t matter (matter matter matter matter). My eyes are fully open.
If Gene Roddenberry and his ilk really had a feasible and fully mapped-out mechanism for how their tech worked, they would have been on their way to the U.S. Patent Office, not NBC. But again, it doesn’t matter that the science is hokum, because what’s important is that said hokum permits us to engage in generative imagining. What would it be like to live in a society empowered by this kind of technology? How much would that change, and how could it change one’s relationship to their own identity and to others? That sort of thing.
I don’t wish to be too dismissive here and give the impression that all the science in sci-fi media is technobabble. Sci-fi writers show, rather splendidly, out how incredibly fruitful it is to engage with actual principles of physics and biology and programming. Heaven knows, Asimov got a lot of mileage out of simple conflicting booleans. Only, the “fi” half of the sci-fi requires audiences and writers to lean in to unproven, speculative territory.
The exact same sort of sociological speculation can and does occur in stories that are premised around the lack of common post-industrial technologies or around the existence of some magical force that has shaped society in much the same way that a microchips-and-circuitry technology would. A Song of Ice and Fire, when you get down to it, is the tale of a world whose dynastic politics were heavily shaped by the “technology” of dragons, and their subsequent, erm, obsolescence. Ditto pretty much every dragon-riding story, Eragon, Temeraire, The Dragonriders of Pern (which already casually straddles the border between sci-fi and fantasy in its premise), etc.
So: if we dispense with the technobabble and just say our space machine or what have you is powered by magic, what exactly do we lose? Just the flashing lights on the dashboard? I am willing to concede that we do lose slightly more than just that.
Because it’s often futuristic and therefore less likely to hold itself constrained by historical precedent, science fiction may, generally, be more inclined or more free to imagine radical ideas. The aforementioned moneyless society of Star Trek, for instance. But that is just a tendency and not a strict constraint. Fantasy stories set in alternate worlds are just as free to imagine strange, unprecedented societies as sci-fi set on alien worlds.
While a considerable bulk of traditional fantasy takes inspiration from medieval Europe, it’s disingenuous to say that worldbuilding that deviates from either European or other historical models is therefore “unrealistic,” as author and medievalist Shiloh Carroll points out in a critique of how the House of the Dragon showrunners have discussed the inclusion of elements like sexual violence in their show as necessary toward the interest of historical accuracy. Phillip Maciak had the same note for House of the Dragon’s parent series, Game of Thrones, in a review from back in 2011. We’re all, evidently, still waiting for someone to hear it…
Regardless, while they might trend in different directions, both fantasy and sci-fi are equally free to imagine whatever they will, empowered by the license of otherworldliness and the equally potent forces of either magic or super-advanced technology.
This is not an original argument, of course. J.R.R. Tolkien made this observation in his magisterial essay “On Fairy-Stories,” at one point in which he proposes that H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine better meets the criteria for what counts as a fairy story than some other tales that have traditionally made the cut. In justifying this claim, he argues:
“The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is to hold communion with other living things. A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story.”
To paraphrase that, Tolkien identifies the fact that sci-fi and fantasy fulfill a common wanderlust; to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; one could even say, to boldly go where no man has gone before! (How do you like them apples, Dad?)
We should not fail either to mention Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, the third of which is the most famous: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” There are a few ways to interpret that statement’s meaning, either as about the gullibility of rubes who mistake tech for magic, or as about the wonder of tech so powerful and with workings so obscure that it seems magical to everyone. I lean toward the latter camp, and reading Clarke’s third law in the context of the first two, oft elided, supports my inclination. Those read as follows:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Collectively, the three laws read as a commentary on the relationship between imagination and possibility, with Clarke arguing that imagination consistently expands our ambition about what could be possible, even to the point of achieving something that felt so impossible it was labeled as magical.
Clarke’s laws, then, muddle the idea that we can divide science fiction from fantasy on the grounds that sci-fi deals with the plausible while fantasy peddles the implausible. Both genres invite their audiences to flirt with unreality, they just use different pretexts to do it. For a more contemporary version of this same take, see China Miéville:
“[T]he boundaries between the impossible of the fantastic and Gothic on the one hand, and the impossible of science fiction on the other, are simply too fuzzy to be systematically maintained. What they share is as important as what distinguishes them. What they share is the starting point that something impossible is true.”
To go along with Tolkien, Clarke, and Miéville, we ought to put sci-fi and fantasy together in the same Wittgensteinian family of resemblances. Almost all members share the aquiline nose of fancifulness. The square jaw of obeying the laws of thermodynamics? Less prevalent.
But I promised that we would actually concede one major difference between the sci-fi and fantasy genres. And we will. Is everybody ready? Here it goes: people don’t relate to them in the same way.
I know: groundbreaking. But really. Technobabble may be, for all intents and purposes, the same excuse as “it’s magic,” performed with slightly more elaborate hand-waving, but science-y explanations flatter the sensibilities of some readers who may otherwise have a more difficult time getting on board with a premise that isn’t legitimized by a rational explanation. (As evidence of this dynamic, I submit the classic Dropout, née College Humor, sketch “Why Can’t You Use Phones on Planes?”) We live in fairly rationalist societies—and we should keenly note here the difference between “rationalist” and “rational”—so we like to be reassured that we are not engaging with bald-faced flimflam. The rationalist, scientif-ish explanation places its impossibilities on a continuum with the scientific and technological advances of the modern era. Sure, it’s not possible now, but it could be in the future! This concern has even bled over into fantasy and its sweatily rationalized and rule-bounded “Hard Magics,” whence the Larry Niven corollary “any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science”
The reverse also applies, with the fantasy genre’s monarchs who are destined to reign over all appealing to a human liking for neat and “natural” hierarchy. Even Ursula K. Le Guin, who consistently problematizes hierarchy across her work, indulges some in this trope with the character Lebannen from the Earthsea series, whose ascension to the throne parallels a cosmic return to natural order at the conclusion of The Farthest Shore.
Both of these gestures are different sorts of appeal to legitimacy, the legitimacy of scientific rationality on one hand, and the legitimacy of tradition and historicity on the other. Both have the effect of offering their audience some form of comfort to counterbalance any ensuing strangeness. But people do relate differently enough to these forms of legitimacy that it would be disingenuous to write them off the same thing. As with many labels, the distinction being made is not so much to do with the qualities or inner workings of the things described; rather, they evoke the different ways we feel about the things described. And feelings matter, since they inflect the way that we read—or write.
Because its genre boundaries are defined by the somewhat persnickety standard of rationality, sci-fi has to be a little more choosey about what it will admit to its club. Hence, when Star Wars flubs the definition of a “parsec,” science fiction apologists must rush to disavow it as mere fantasy.
At least, that’s the way it is for now.
Look, can’t we all agree to believe that the whole parsec thing, spoken as it is by gorgeous idiot Han Solo, is just a bit of fast-talk aimed at some desert yokels?
Moreover, can we agree that the Star Wars universe, with its light-speed spaceships, laser-based weaponry, and beep-booping droids, all equally dubious and equally science-y, is as much science fiction as any other good old space opera? Yes, it also has “the Force,” which just goes to show that magic-y concepts, like the Vulcan mind meld or “the Voice” from Dune, fit perfectly comfortably alongside technological ones is speculative fiction. They are all pulling together, doing the same work of making the impossible possible.
There’s a line in the denouement of the musical My Fair Lady where Eliza, a lower-class girl who has been trained in upper-class affectations, explains what she has realized about class distinctions. “You see, Mrs. Higgins,” Eliza tells her erstwhile tutor’s mother, “apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and flower girl is not how she behaves but how she is treated.”
We can and should apply Eliza’s epiphany to a liberal swath of topics, including the matter at hand. Star Wars is as much science fiction as John Hodgman is a judge. They’re both wearing the right pajamas. The rest is all about how they are treated. As for the treatment of fantasy, or of fantasy elements in whatever genre they might lie, we might do ourselves some good by treating them less literally—they are impossible!—and permit ourselves thereby to take them more seriously. It would be a mistake to take Le Guin’s Lebannen as a literal pro-monarchy gesture, and as much a mistake as to overlook that Darth Vader isn’t just powerful because he wields the Force. His literal, “magical” Jedi powers to move objects with his mind and terrorize the cream of the British Actors’ Guild is less significant than the symbolic, thematic power he is revealed to occupy in the narrative. He's powerful because he’s a father.
My own dad is also a father, and as such is unlikely to cry uncle anytime soon. That’s alright, though. If he did, it would only mean an end to the fun. He’s the reason I was introduced to Star Trek and Star Wars, and hopped from there to other genre fiction. His influence is probably also to blame for so much of my logic being grounded in references to musical theater. The Force is strong with that one. Dad, argue again soon?[end-mark]
Is there a single good idea in this entire trailer? We've got supe-killing viruses. We've got wrathful gods. We've got Homelander (Antony Starr) bearing milkshakes. We've also got gallons and gallons and gallons of blood, and also some murderous farm animals.
In season four, as Prime Video's official summary says, "the world is on the brink":
Victoria Neuman is closer than ever to the Oval Office and under the muscly thumb of Homelander, who is consolidating his power. Butcher, with only months to live, has lost Becca’s son and his job as The Boys’ leader. The rest of the team are fed up with his lies. With the stakes higher than ever, they have to find a way to work together and save the world before it’s too late.
Oh, wait, maybe there's one reasonable concept in the mix: As one character says, "If we're ever going to win against monsters, we need to start acting human." Surely this statement has no real-world relevance whatsoever.
For this go-round, The Boys’ cast includes Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Susan Heyward (as Sister Sage) and Valorie Curry (as Firecracker). The inevitable Gen V crossover also comes to pass this season, with Asa Germann and Maddie Phillips making appearances.
The Boys, which is based on the comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, was developed by showrunner Eric Kripke. The fourth season premieres on Prime Video with three episodes on June 13th, with weekly episodes to follow.[end-mark]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzFXDvC-EwM
According to a recent Vanity Fair piece, "Megalopolis has been taking shape inside Francis Ford Coppola’s mind for nearly half of his life." The famed director made the movie entirely out of his own pocket, meaning he also had full creative control—no studio to answer to. The film makes its premiere later this month at Cannes, and a short peek has been released ahead of that premiere.
And it's very short, focusing only on Adam Driver's unfortunately coiffed character, Caesar Catilina, who can stop time—by yelling, "Time, stop!" which is perhaps not the most artful way to do things, but sure. After saving himself from hurtling over the lip of a building (sir, put on some better shoes for this moment!), he snaps his fingers, and time resumes.
It is a little confusing that time stops but Caesar doesn't fall, given that the time stoppage appears not to affect him; one can only assume that his time-stopping somehow stops the... air? from moving? I'm probably not supposed to ask this many questions.
Coppola posted the clip to YouTube will the following text:
Here is an a clear, concise analysis of Megalopolis: “A man balances precariously on a ledge high above a once-grand city in the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and the movie that follows is – at least in part – about an entire civilization teetering on a similarly precarious ledge, devouring itself in a whirl of unchecked greed, self-absorption, and political propaganda, while a few bold dreamers push against the tide, striving to usher in a new dawn. The man is called Caesar (Adam Driver), like the Roman general who gave rise to the Roman Empire, Cesar the labor leader who organized California’s farm workers in the 1960s, and a few other notably great men of history. But he is also clearly an avatar of Coppola himself – a grand visionary witnessing a once-great thing (call it cinema if you must) withering before his very eyes and determined to revivify it. And, after decades of planning, Megalopolis the movie is the powerful elixir he has produced: a sweeping, big-canvas movie of provocative ideas and relentless cinematic invention that belies its maker’s 84 years of age. Coppola seems to have been born-again by a strike of filmic lightning, and the movie – no, the experience (complete with in-theater “live cinema”) – that has emerged feels at once the work of a film-school wunderkind unbowed by notions of convention, but also the work of a wizened master who knows much about life and the ways of the world. To paraphrase Coppola himself speaking decades ago about his Apocalypse Now, Megalopolis isn’t a movie about the end of the world as we know it, it is the end of the world as we know it. Only, where Apocalypse left us in a napalm-bombed fever-dream haze, Megalopolis, surprisingly and movingly, bestows on us a final image glowing with hope for the future.”
Do you want to know who wrote this "clear, concise analysis," as presumably it wasn't Coppola, unless he's writing about himself in the third person? I kinda do.
The film also stars Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones) as the socialite daughter of a powerful and, inevitably, corrupt mayor played by Giancarlo Esposito (The Mandalorian). The cast also includes Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman.
It seems that Coppola has pulled from everything he's ever read about or experienced in order to make this film—a list of influences he gave to Vanity Fair includes everyone from Shakespeare to Hitchcock to Moses to H.G. Wells, along with 9/11 and Roman history. It does not yet have U.S. distribution.[end-mark]
“Mind War” Written by J. Michael Straczynski Directed by Bruce Seth Green Season 1, Episode 6 Production episode 110 Original air date: March 2, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… A Starfury wing tries to stop an unidentified ship. The ship doesn’t return the hail, but then energy waves come out from the ship and destroy all the Starfuries. That same ship then winds up at B5. Its occupant, Jason Ironheart, rents a room on the station and when he’s alone, suffers a bad headache that also shakes his cabin up.
Sakai exits the shower in Sinclair’s quarters and informs him that she has a meeting with Universal Terraform. She goes to the meeting—which Winters is hired to telepathically audit—and agrees to go to Sigma 957, which has indications of Quantium 40, which is used in jump gate construction (and of which there’s also a shortage). But they’re not sure, and they need a detailed survey, which is where Sakai comes in.
However, there’s a wrinkle: Sigma 957 is in territory that is disputed, and they need the permission of the Narn Regime to do it. G’Kar and Sakai discuss the matter, with G’Kar urging Sakai not to go. She, however, goes anyway, and G’Kar contacts the Narn homeworld to request a couple of ships pop over to Sigma 957.
Two Psi Cops arrive, Bester and Kelsey. They are searching for Ironheart, who was one of Winters’ instructors at the Psi Corps Academy. Winters has not seen him, but Bester and Kelsey insist on a mind probe—which is invasive and painful—to verify. Sinclair and Ivanova observe the probe—though the cops give them the option to depart, which they decline—and are completely disgusted. They’re equally disgusted with Bester’s dismissal of why they’re seeking out Ironheart: it’s need-to-know, and Sinclair doesn’t need to know.
After Winters is excused, Ironheart approaches her. He knew the cops were on him, and he waited until after they probed her to make contact.
Ironheart volunteered for an experiment to increase psi-rating. There are a very rare few who are powerful enough to not only be telepathic, but also telekinetic, but most of those are also batshit insane. They succeeded in increasing Ironheart’s psi-rating to the point where he’s a telekinetic and also a much more powerful telepath. So much so that he knows that the intent is to use him as a weapon. He expresses concern to Winters that Psi Corps is becoming far more influential with EarthGov.
His conversation with Winters is cut short when he gets another headache, and this time the entire station feels the vibrations of what Kelsey refers to as a “mind quake.” Garibaldi traces the source of the quake to Blue 16—which is now surrounded by some kind of energy field they can’t get through.
Sinclair angrily tells Bester that he really needs to fucking know now, and Bester relents, telling Sinclair the same thing Ironheart told Winters. Bester fears that Ironheart is no longer truly human. Bester also mentions something Ironheart left out of his explanation to Winters: he’s a killer—not just of the Starfury crews we saw at the top of the episode, but also of the head researcher of the procedure. The cops also can telepathically insert a safeword into Ironheart’s mind, which will shut him down.
Winters—who was able to get out of Blue 16 before Ironheart sealed it off—approaches Sinclair and drops the other shoe: Ironheart wasn’t just her instructor, they were also lovers.
Sakai arrives at Sigma 957. While she’s scanning from orbit, a ship appears briefly with her in orbit. Its very presence disrupts every system on her ship, and she loses power and her orbit is decaying. However, the ships G’Kar sent show up and rescue her before she crashes.
Ironheart meets with Sinclair, who reluctantly agrees to let him go before he completely transforms into another state of being. (His reluctance is borne of Ironheart’s murder of the chief researcher, which Ironheart insists was only because he wanted to make sure nobody else was experiment upon. I guess this guy didn’t take notes? And anyhow, what about those poor Starfury pilots?)
Bester and Kelsey intercept them, and try to telepathically insert the safeword, but it doesn’t shut him down. It does weaken him enough that Kelsey pulls a weapon on him. In response, Ironheart vaporizes her. Then Bester fires on him, and Ironheart retaliates, but since he’s played by a more famous actor, he’s only knocked out.
Ironheart escapes to his ship, which then explodes in a plume of light. Ironheart telepathically tells the B5 crew that he’s going off to become one with the universe or whatever, tells Sinclair that he’ll see him in a million years, and tells Winters he’s giving her a gift.
Later in her quarters, Winters is able to move a penny with her mind.
Bester agrees to a cover story that keeps the truth of what happened to Ironheart out of the record—it’ll just be that his ship blew up—and Sinclair won’t report Bester’s incompetence in letting the station be endangered and Kelsey killed. It’ll all be on Ironheart. Bester agrees, and apes the salute from the Village in The Prisoner and says, “Be seeing you” like they did in that show for no compellingly good reason.
Sakai confronts G’Kar, who explains (a) that no one on B5 is what they appear to be, including G’Kar himself, and (b) there are beings in the universe who are to hominid sentient life like humans and Narn as hominid sentient life is to an ant. They can no more know what those beings at Sigma 957 are than the ant they see on a flower knows what Sakai and G’Kar are.
Nothing’s the same anymore. The cops communicate silently with telepathy right up until they arrive in Sinclair’s office, at which point the commander very angrily tells them to use their voices, please, and to stay the hell out of his head.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s disdain for the Psi Corps is, if anything, reinforced by the behavior of the Psi Cops. She’s sufficiently revolted by the probe of Winters that she offers the telepath a glass of water afterward, despite her disdain for telepaths in general and Winters in particular.
The household god of frustration. In the department of, “I’ll take Things That Have Aged Embarrassingly Poorly for $100, Alex,” Garibaldi is on an elevator with Winters and the Universal Terraform dude, and he thinks spectacularly inappropriate thoughts about (based on where he’s staring) Winters’ ass. Winters elbows him in the nether regions, prompting Garibaldi to declare that he’s in love.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar tries to warn Sakai, and does send help for her, which can be viewed as him being compassionate, or him making sure that the commander of the station’s girlfriend doesn’t get hurt, which would make G’Kar’s life more difficult.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. We meet our first Psi Cops, and also get a notion of the telepathic ranking system. Most commercial telepaths (like Winters) are P5s. All Psi Corps instructors are P10s, and all Psi Cops are P12s. Psi Cops have much more latitude than other telepaths, and are in charge of maintaining the rules within the Corps.
Looking ahead. The beings Sakai encounters will later be revealed to be one of the older species in the galaxy known as the First Ones, who will play a large role in the overarching plotline. (The Vorlons, we will eventually learn, are also among the First Ones.) The Sigma 957 aliens will next be seen in “Voices of Authority” in season three.
G’Kar’s comment that not everyone it what they seem is meant to be prophetic, and he singles out Mollari, Delenn, Sinclair, and himself. Mollari’s persona as a clown will eventually be revealed to hide a certain viciousness, as well as a certain nobility, both of which are well buried at this point. Delenn’s being a secret member of the Grey Council has already been exposed to the viewer three times, in “The Gathering,” “Soul Hunter,” and “The Parliament of Dreams.” Sinclair’s missing twenty-four hours will expose what he hides even from himself, and this very episode begins the process of showing that there’s more to G’Kar than the mustache-twirling villain he’s been portrayed as to date.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Winters explains to Sinclair how much more immersive sex between telepaths is, way way way beyond the physical.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I am both terrified and reassured to know there are still wonders in the universe—that we have not yet explained everything.”
—G’Kar waxing philosophical to Sakai.
Welcome aboard. Julia Nickson officially makes Sakai recurring with her return appearance from last week’s “The Parliament of Dreams”; she’ll be back for her third and final appearance at the end of the season in “Chrysalis.”
William Allen Young, Felicity Waterman, Don Dowe, and Michael McKenzie all compete for who can be more wooden and boring as, respectively, Ironheart, Kelsey, the Starfury leader, and the Narn captain. (Dowe wins by a nose.)
But the big guest is the debut of Walter Koenig as Bester. Obviously best known for his role as Chekov on the original Star Trek, the role of Bester will continue to recur throughout all five seasons of the show.
Trivial matters. Bester is named for Alfred Bester—and will later be revealed to have that same first name as well—the author of The Demolished Man. The first book to win the Best Novel Hugo Award when the awards were created in 1953, it’s one of the definitive science fiction novels dealing with telepathy. While J. Michael Straczynski has said that it was just a tribute to Bester—who, among other things, was friends with B5’s creative consultant Harlan Ellison—and there was no other connection, the Psi Cops as established here and seen throughout the show are pretty much exactly like the telepathic police force in The Demolished Man.
At one point, Ivanova asks of the cops, “who watches the watchmen?” which is one translation of the phrase from Juvenal’s Satires, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” It’s more commonly translated as “who guards the guardians?” but the one Ivanova used is the one Alan Moore used for the seminal comic book miniseries Watchmen. Straczynski would later write two of the Before Watchmen prequel miniseries in 2012 for DC.
Winters will later be revealed to be a sleeper agent, with another personality buried inside her mind, which will be brought to the fore in “Divided Loyalties.” How Ironheart, with his suuuuuuper telepathy, managed to miss this is left as an exercise for the viewer.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I give you a gift.” This introduces two very important parts of the B5 storyline, to wit, the Psi Cops and the First Ones (who don’t have that name yet).
In particular, we’re introduced to Bester, who will go on to appear in a dozen more episodes (and was scheduled to appear in a Crusade episode, but the series was cancelled before it was filmed), and become a very important recurring character. He creates quite a strong impression here, though a big part of it is seeing a very familiar actor in a most unfamiliar role, as Bester is absolutely nothing like Chekov. Which is fabulous, as he’s a very effective villain.
Certainly more so than his sidekick, as Felicity Waterman is dreadful as Kelsey. In that, she’s matched by the episode’s primary focus, which is Jason Ironheart—a dopey name for an awful character. William Allen Young plays him with all the charisma of a dead fish, utterly failing to convey the anguish and torment the script calls for, which takes the episode out at the knees, sadly. Not that the script helps overmuch, trying to make Ironheart out to be a tragic figure and a victim, hoping we won’t notice that (a) he slept with one of his students, and (b) he committed several murders, only one of which he was able to even remotely justify. Indeed, the glossing over of the death of the Starfury group at the top of the episode is galling. And having Bester imitate the denizens of the Village in The Prisoner was a little too cutesy. (I remember one friend saying after this episode aired in 1994 that it’s never a good idea to reference a show that’s better than yours.)
The B-plot does, at least, have better acting in it, as G’Kar finally gets a bit more depth, and we’re introduced to the rather important notion that there are much older, much more powerful species floating around the galaxy that are a fair piece farther along on the evolutionary road than we are.
Back in 2021, Paramount Pictures bought the rights to Gabrielle Zevin's then-upcoming novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow—long before it sold almost 3 million copies worldwide, became a staple of book clubs, and was a Goodreads Choice winner and Amazon's Best Book of 2022. Zevin wrote a draft of the script, which then went to Mark Bomback (who has some experience with adaptations, writing 2019's The Art of Racing in the Rain).
And now, Deadline reports, the film has a director: Siân Heder, whose CODA (pictured above) won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay in 2022. She has also directed episodes of GLOW and Orange is the New Black.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about two childhood friends, Sam and Sadie, who find each other again in college, and begin to collaborate on the creation of video games—games in which they express everything they can't say to each other face to face. Since it was first announced, the adaptation has been described as "a modern love story about two friends," which is true but not quite sufficient. The novel covers decades and is as smart about deep friendship as it is about creation and loss and failure. It's going to be quite a challenge to put on screen.
And a challenge to cast, too. It will be very interesting to see who plays Sam and Sadie. No production timeline or premiere date have been announced.[end-mark]
Late in its second season, in an episode aired in 2008, our old friends at MonsterQuest tackled the tale of the Chupacabra. They examined the sightings in Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s, and not only looked at actual physical evidence found both there and in Texas from 2005 through 2007, but subjected it to scientific analysis.
This is prime cryptozoology. Cryptids like Bigfoot are an article of faith. There is no physical evidence to support their existence. No bodies, no bones. Plenty of casts of large, broad feet, but no one has captured or killed the animal that supposedly made the tracks, blurry videos notwithstanding.
The Chupacabra is a rarity. It has not been caught alive, but witnesses have preserved bodies of a creature that they claim is the cryptid. MonsterQuest applies actual science to the evidence, backed up by the prestige of university laboratories. New York University and Texas A&M are the real deal.
The episode does a good job of summing up what’s there. It covers the sightings in Puerto Rico, with video and photographic evidence and an interview with an eyewitness who claims to have encountered one on the balcony of his apartment. It was his height, he says, standing on two legs, with oval red eyes and four long fangs. Farmers claim that this creature or creatures slaughtered hundreds of livestock, including goats and chickens, draining them of blood but leaving the bodies.
The Latin American Chupacabra looks like a cross between a kangaroo and a gargoyle. The one sighted in the United States is quite different: a smallish quadruped with grey, hairless skin and—one trait it shares with the other variety—prominent fangs. One was shot and killed by a farmer in Elmendorf, Texas, and another by a man in Pollok; a farmer in Cuero found the carcass of yet another. Both farmers had had extensive predation among their livestock, with the animals drained of blood but not otherwise consumed.
Cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard and wildlife expert Lee Hales mount an expedition in Texas to trap one of these creatures, using camera traps, a cage, and a chicken for bait. (Poor chicken.) I think that’s mostly for show: as usual in these hunts, they don’t find what they’re looking for. The point is to make a display of trying. They do manage to trap a possum and a rather ticked off armadillo.
The main event is their examination of the bones of the animal killed in Elmendorf, and lab analysis, including DNA, of the various specimens. They even manage to sample a hair from a supposed nest of Chupacabras in Puerto Rico. Much is made of the fact that all of the Texas specimens are nearly or completely hairless, and that their skin is peculiarly tough, “like an elephant’s.”
Consensus is that the animal is some form of canine. There’s some fuss over the size of the fangs and the lack of hair, and some attempt to determine whether the hairlessness is due to disease, most likely mange. The kicker is the DNA. In every case but one, the genetic material is that of a domestic dog. That includes the sample from Puerto Rico. The exception, the Cuero specimen, is a hybrid of coyote and Mexican wolf.
When I saw the photos back when the story was new, I figured it was either a dog or a coyote with severe mange. I have seen coyotes in Arizona with the disease, and that’s what they look like. Weird leathery skin and all.
What’s interesting about the episode is how determined the witnesses are to believe that what they saw was a cryptid. Even the DNA evidence doesn’t convince them. In Puerto Rico, they speculate that a dog was out stealing chickens and ended up in a Chupacabra nest.
In Texas, same story. That couldn’t have been a dog or a coyote/wolf hybrid. It couldn’t have had mange. Nobody has ever seen mange that severe. It must be some sort of mutant. It has to be something unique and different.
And then there’s the question of why the Latin American version is so different from the one in the United States. The episode makes a point of talking to an expert in popular delusions. Benjamin Radford, author of Hoaxes, Myths and Manias, describes the way in which the media spread myths and fear. People tell stories, stories travel, people see what they want or expect to see. A shadow in the night becomes a creature out of legend—even if that legend is as recent as last year.
The legend that spread from Puerto Rico described a vaguely reptilian biped. In the United States, people shot animals that were supposedly preying on livestock, and those animals turned out to be hairless canines. Not naturally hairless—none of them tested out as the Mexican breed, the Xolo. According to the labs that examined the specimens, the animals had at some point had a full hair coat. I.e., mange or something similar.
The last question, which the episode never manages to answer, is how or why the supposed Chupacabra’s victims were drained of blood. It doesn’t explain the odd puncture wounds on the dead animals, either. Dogs and wolf hybrids don’t drink blood, and they eat their kills.
So that remains a mystery. Maybe Princeton’s Chupacabra site is right in connecting it with cattle mutilations in North America outside of Texas, but that gets us into UFOs and aliens and various paranormal speculations. In short, nobody knows.[end-mark]
