Tag: sci-fi-movies-tv-games

Doctor Who goes full Black Mirror only to set up its most shocking twist

At first “Dot and Bubble,” the latest episode of Doctor Who, seems to be borrowing from Black Mirror’s bag of tricks. It’s set on Finetime, a planet where everyone is accompanied by a small spherical AI assistant called a Dot, which projects a “Bubble” around their heads. Within their individual Bubbles, people live their entire lives — group chatting, watching funny videos or performances by pop stars — and they do not seem to leave except to sleep. Even walking is mediated by the Bubble, telling them how many paces to move in each direction, guiding them to the office, back home, and to meals. It’s a very “kids these days and their damn phones!” kind of premise, but again: only at first.

The initially blunt metaphor only gets blunter when the monster of the week is introduced: terrifying slug aliens that are eating the denizens of Finetime alive, as they obliviously walk into their gaping maws because they can’t see past their bubbles. Our heroine for the week, the hapless Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), finds her Bubble’s feed intruded on by the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who spend the episode trying to remotely lead her to safety, in spite of her skepticism.

It’s a clever setup, one that hearkens back to fan-favorite Doctor Who stories like “Blink,” and tropes beloved by writers like Steven Moffat (who, surprisingly, did not write this episode): horrible things at the edge of one’s perception, a hard limit on the Doctor’s ability to intervene, and a world engineered for conformity, with safety dependent on characters’ ability to escape societal gravity. This canny structure clashes with the painfully patronizing metaphor at the heart of “Dot and Bubble” — which writer Russell T. Davies exploits to obscure what he’s really doing.

Image: Disney Plus

Because in between the seemingly lazy satire of the terminally online youth and the chilling thrills of its plot, Davies quietly drops pertinent details about Finetime and what is really happening here. Who are these people? What do they do? Why are they there? Each answer, delivered conversationally in an episode packed with a loud, candy-colored palette, louder social commentary, and one of the creepiest monsters of the season, barely registers. So when you finally get to the ending and the truth about Finetime is made clear, it’s like the floor opens out from underneath you, and “Dot and Bubble” immediately becomes one of the grimmest Doctor Who stories told in some time.

[Ed. note: This means spoilers for the very end of “Dot and Bubble.”]

In the end, there is no saving the people of Finetime. The first hint was in Lindy’s rapid dismissal of the Doctor’s warnings at the start of “Dot and Bubble,” and that she only began to listen when Ruby Sunday spoke to her. More hints piled up, leading to the answer of what brought the slug aliens to Finetime in the first place: the Dots. The Dots, in their algorithmic service to their users, learned too much about them, and grew to hate them. And it’s not because of their tech-addled brains blinding them to the real world; it’s because they’re fucking racist.

Lindy and the other Finetime survivors refuse to take the Doctor on his offer of safe passage away from Finetime, instead choosing to brave the wilds where they face certain death, just because of who the Doctor looks like. It’s here where the last tidbits fall into place: chilling glimpses of selfishness from Lindy, her lily-white friend group, the fact that Finetime is only inhabited by the young adult children of the 1%.

Image: Disney Plus

Up until now, Doctor Who has been pretty unconcerned with how the Doctor taking on the appearance of a Black man might change the dynamic of the show. On the one hand, this is understandable, desirable even — it would be crass and arguably retrograde to immediately subject the Doctor to racism the moment it became a possible story outcome. It also feels intellectually dishonest to act as if it would never matter. Davies, as the white showrunner who engineered this situation, chose neither trauma porn nor avoidance. Instead he chose specificity: This is how the Doctor’s job is harder now. There are some people who don’t want to be saved by him. There are some problems that cannot be solved by cosmically deep wells of compassion and empathy. There are some people with hearts so mean they will not even save themselves.

“Dot and Bubble” argues that its hero’s role is to stand in the gap and help even in the face of such shocking contempt, because life is precious above all, even hateful little ones — presumably because life can be redeemed, and death is final. It’s hard to accept this, and Gatwa’s performance suggests that maybe such idealism isn’t deserved here. He laughs at the insanity of the situation, and then screams in anguish. Who knows if it’s the right call, but he made one. He tried.

Joshua Rivera

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May 31, 2024
Atlas director says Jennifer Lopez’s dance skills were key to mech fights

A lifetime of scarfing down sci-fi, video games, and comic books brought director Brad Peyton to the job of said lifetime: directing Jennifer Lopez in a frickin’ mech-suit movie. Signing on for Atlas, now streaming on Netflix, was an easy yes: With two big-budget Dwayne Johnson vehicles under his belt, Rampage and San Andreas, Peyton was no stranger to A-list-driven spectacle. Still, the film was an intimidating prospect for someone with a deep appreciation for mech suits, mech tanks, oversized mecha, and all the made-up classifications in between.

“I was very aware of what had come out ahead of me,” Peyton tells Polygon. The director cites James Cameron’s Aliens and Avatar as obvious but undeniable milestones in the art of on-screen mechs. He knew that the Titanfall games put pressure on any new live-action attempt, having created full immersion into the experience of mech fighting. But when he started imagining how to rethink mechs, he returned to the first piece of mecha media that really blew him away: Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox.

Peyton can’t quite explain why Robot Jox was his holy grail, but in talking to him, it’s obvious: Like Gordon’s whiz-bang vision of the future, where Earth’s conflicts are settled by colorful mech duels, Atlas needed clear, well-defined logic that would ground the world-building, but also let him rip in the action department in a way that would delight his inner child. And at the end of the day, he needed to be original.

“My biggest thing was: I knew I had to separate from everything,” Peyton says. “I had no interest in repeating. I said, Pac Rim’s [mechs] are this big. In Avatar, they’re this big. In Titanfall, they’re this big. So mine is gonna be this big. This one might be square and blocky, so mine is gonna be circular. I come from animation. So a lot of it started with me sketching the silhouette and figuring how to make it unique and different.”

Atlas takes place in a relatively sunny future that still exists in the shadow of an impending apocalypse. Decades earlier, a rogue artificial intelligence named Harlan (Shang-Chi’s Simu Liu) fled Earth for an alien planet with the intent of one day returning to lay waste to humanity. When scientists discover Harlan’s whereabouts, Terran forces launch a mission to take the fight to the robot army’s doorstep. Leading the charge: Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), a data analyst recruited to go full Jack Ryan on Harlan’s ass. Of course, the attack doesn’t go as smoothly as the Earthlings would hope, and Atlas has to begrudgingly click into an AI-powered mech suit in order to survive an alien planet populated with androids who want her dead.

The grounded futurism of Atlas’ Earth led Peyton and his creative team to extrapolate from current military tech for the mech design. Rounded edges and exhaust pipes are lifted from F-18 planes. The interior control panels were built for theoretical functionality.

“I had to understand all the tech from the inside out,” Peyton says. “Because of my experience on San Andreas, where I had to understand how a helicopter worked intimately to tell Dwayne what buttons to press and not to press — at least when he would listen to me! — I took that experience and wanted to make a similar experience for [Lopez]. I laid it out with the art department of why there are screens in certain places, why there are holograms in other places. And then on the day, I’m giving her little wires to be like, ‘That’s what this screen is. That’s where the screen is.’ So after going through the blocking, I pulled those away, and she had to memorize where they were.”

Image: Netflix

Drawings and schematics were only half of the equation. After drafting a design, Peyton set out to make his vision come to life. Coming at it from an animation background, that meant animating various walk cycles to see if the bipedal machine could move the right way.

“The first couple of designs we had when we animated them to see how they would work — very basic animation, walk, run, walk, jog, run cycles — looked so clunky and terrible,” Peyton says. The animation team found a groove when they clarified the dynamic between man and machine. “[The mechs] are intuitive devices. The concept that I came up with was, the soldier is the brain. He doesn’t have to be super strong. He’s not like a grunt — the machine is the grunt. He is the emotional cognitive device that syncs with this thing. So it has to be able to be as fluid as a person who’s been trained in it.”

As Atlas traverses the biomes of Harlan’s base planet — from snowy tundras to swamps inspired by Peyton’s love for Return of the Jedi — the film’s hero loosens up on her “no AI” stance and forms a cognitive link with her mech’s digital interface. Like a twist on the buddy-cop movie, the two bond for survival, which presents itself as more fluid mech motions. Early on, Atlas might be bumbling around a rocky cliff. By the end, she’s running, rolling, and slapping the hell out of robot assailants with mech-fu. The early walk cycle tests came in handy for the dramatic evolution, which Peyton was able to program into an enormous soundstage gimbal rig that stood in for the mech suit. Lopez was surprisingly well suited for the demands of the mech choreography.

“Her background as a dancer is what allowed her to really gauge that quickly,” Peyton says. “As much as she looks like she’s walking, [the mech] is walking her, and she has to react like she’s walking. So that training as a dancer allowed her to step right into it.”

Image: Netflix

It also helps that Lopez routinely performs for thousands all by her lonesome on a stadium stage. Peyton says Atlas turned out to be one of the most demanding shoots of his career, simply because for six to seven weeks, it was just Lopez performing solo on a gimbal rig that would be completely painted over with plate shots, VFX environments, and bursts of other action sequences shot elsewhere. Occasionally, voice actor Gregory James Cohan would dial in to perform the dialogue of Smith, her AI companion.

All the prep work required to realize a mech with the capacity for real action, and clicking in a star who was up to control it, was in service of jolting the audience, says Peyton. The first time we see the mechs in action isn’t in an act of valor; they’re caught in an ambush, mid-flight. The carrier ship goes down — and so does Atlas, in her rig. Peyton’s imagination swirled at the possibilities, as evidenced in the finished sequence. “[The mech] would be tumbling, it would be spinning, it would be hit by debris. What would it be like to be trapped in that tin can? What would it sound like? What would it feel like? And once I get through that experience, well then, how can I up the ante? Well, what if I fall through black clouds, and I’m falling into basically a World War II dogfight, but with mechs and drones? […] That’s just the first, I don’t know, 20 seconds of a two-minute sequence.

“That’s how I design,” he says. “I want to surprise you. I want to give you something you can’t see anywhere else.”

Atlas is streaming on Netflix now.

Matt Patches

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May 25, 2024
This remastered 4K Star Wars Phantom Menace trailer is pure hype

At this point, 25 years after its release, there’s no reason to debate the quality of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. A catastrophe for boomers and Gen Xers forever entranced by the spell of the original trilogy; a defining tentpole moment for millennials who rode the high of the 1997 Special Edition rereleases only to hit the turbulence of George Lucas’ bubbly new vision; a bedrock of a new era of storytelling for Gen Zers who have more love in their hearts for The Clone Wars TV show than anything in live action — it’s a film that means something different to everyone and, almost objectively, an inflection point for blockbuster moviemaking. Or, to put it another way: The Phantom Menace is.

But The Phantom Menace trailer… a masterpiece. And Lucasfilm is rightfully treating 1998’s biggest two-minute hype video, a preview that helped the notorious bomb Meet Joe Black make what little money it made back in the day, as an equally important part of the Star Wars legacy: With the movie back in theaters for a 25th anniversary rerelease, the studio has remastered its original trailer, which was produced and released so early that it was simply called “Episode I” instead of The Phantom Menace. LeAndre Thomas, project manager for video & digital assets at Lucasfilm, said on X that he and his team rescanned an original 35mm print of the trailer in order to remaster it in 4K. The new version was posted to YouTube on Sunday night, and was immediately watched by people who enjoy a good nostalgia trip.

In honor of a pristine new version of the Phantom Menace trailer arriving online, here are the top five moments that still make me think, Hot damn, this movie is going to be absolutely sick, Star Wars is so back, baby, hell yeah!!!!, despite knowing that it is not exactly a perfect movie.

5. The 20th Century Fox logo

Image: 20th Century Studios

I will never age as long as the Phantom Menace trailer is watchable with the click of a button. When the 20th Century Fox logo pops up in silence at the beginning of the trailer, I am a child in a dark movie theater, barely breathing. That logo is Star Wars to my brain, with an additional hit of dopamine arriving when Lucasfilm’s logo sparkles onto the screen a second later. Ah, to be young and alive at a time when getting fired up over a corporate logo was not only acceptable, but welcome! I still hold a grudge against Disney for acquiring Fox and opening The Force Awakens with just the Lucasfilm logo — at the end of the day, I am now a grumbly adult.

4. Darth Maul firing up the dual lightsaber blades

Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.

Who is that guy????? Tell me everything about that guy. Everyone in the old movies had one lightsaber, but he has two. Holy hell. (Equally important to the Sith presence in this trailer: Mace Windu’s laser stare bringing balance to the badassery of the Force.)

3. The cockpit of the podrace

Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.

There’s no reason to debate the quality of The Phantom Menace, but… the podracing sequence is unimpeachable. The first taste we get of the No. 1 best action sequence in all of the Star Wars movies (fight me) is from Anakin’s POV — a complete adrenaline rush as John Williams’ theme kicks in. The other images race by like scenery witnessed out the side window. Truly, I had no memory of how many times we see Jar Jar doing Jar Jar shit in the trailer, because it’s cut like the podrace. Spectacular.

2. Padme standing in front of a window, fade to Darth Vader exhaling over ‘every saga has a beginning’

Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.

Chills. Finally, Darth Vader’s tragic story will be told.

1. Gungans emerge from the fog of Naboo’s swamps

Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.

The greatest opening shot in a movie trailer ever. Lucas doing Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood with a brand-new alien race. Star Wars is art now. Nothing could possibly go wrong with any of this.

Matt Patches

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May 20, 2024
The best sci-fi movies to watch on Netflix this April

Greetings, Polygon readers!

This weekend sees the release of not one, but two sci-fi epics in the form of Dune: Part Two and Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver on VOD and streaming. If neither of those strikes your fancy, don’t worry; we’ve once again descended into the backlog of Netflix’s streaming library to bring you a trio of the best sci-fi movies to watch in April.

This month’s picks include John Carpenter’s 1984 sci-fi body-horror romance starring Jeff Bridges, an underrated post-apocalyptic blockbuster about mobile city fortresses duking it out for resources, and an anime adaptation of a cult-classic cyberpunk manga.

Let’s take a look at what this month has to offer!

Editor’s pick: Starman

Image: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith

The pitch “John Carpenter’s version of Close Encounters” conjures a far different image for fans of the Halloween director than what his 1984 film Starman turned out to be. The film kicks off with a sleek spaceship descending upon Earth in a frame not too far off from the opening of The Thing. There’s even a bit of body horror: When the alien creeps into the home of the recently widowed Jenny (Karen Allen), the entity uses bits of DNA of her deceased husband to recast his corporeal self — growing from baby to toddler to teen to adult Jeff Bridges in mere seconds. It’s sick! Then Carpenter gets all mushy in his most romantic film to date.

Starman is a sci-fi film through and through — the alien visits our planet after intercepting Voyager 2’s golden disc, and its arrival sparks a classic Spielbergian cat-and-mouse game between bumbling feds and the on-the-lam ET — but in having the alien assume the form of Jenny’s dead husband, Carpenter burrows deeper into human mortality than these screen stories tend to go. Allen, spiraling in an impossible situation, and Bridges, mixing his alien’s hyperintelligence with childlike wonder, have the chemistry to make a silly story sing. Jenny knows the man in her passenger seat isn’t her husband, but he is a second chance. Carpenter mines the dreamlike premise for all the sap, leaning on Jack Nitzsche’s unforgettable score to swell at just the right moments. Starman is pure Hollywood romance, and proof that boxing a director into one genre is the quickest way to limit greatness. —Matt Patches

Mortal Engines

Image: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

Director: Christian Rivers
Cast: Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving

An underrated post-apocalyptic blockbuster from many of the people who made the Lord of the Rings movies, Mortal Engines was a box-office bomb but deserved much better. Set in a future where cities are mobile and big cities hunt smaller ones, the story follows a young assassin (Hera Hilmar) who seeks to take out a power-hungry leader (Hugo Weaving). Along the way, she finds allies (Jihae) and maybe even a bit of love (Robert Sheehan).

But the characters or narrative aren’t Mortal Engines’ main selling point (although Weaving does fully and delightfully commit to an over-the-top villainous performance). Instead, it’s the fantastic production design and creative world-building that make Mortal Engines feel like a breath of fresh air in the sequel/prequel/remake-heavy sci-fi blockbuster landscape. Now that it’s newly on Netflix, check out one of the 2010s’ most undeserved flops. —Pete Volk

Blame!

Image: Polygon Pictures/Netflix

Director: Hiroyuki Seshita
Cast: Takahiro Sakurai, Kana Hanazawa, Sora Amamiya

Alongside the likes of H.R. Giger and Shinya Tsukamoto, Tsutomu Nihei is one of the most prolific artists associated with the subgenre of posthuman science fiction, emphasizing horrific man-machine hybrids and massive, desolate worlds set in the far future.

Nihei’s 1997 manga Blame! is inarguably his magnum opus — a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk saga about a mysterious warrior known as “Killy” wandering the metallic wastelands of an Earth overrun by a techno-organic virus. Adapted into a feature-length anime by director Hiroyuki Seshita (Knights of Sidonia), Blame! streamlines the manga’s story into a single adventure in Killy’s quest to find a means of undoing the virus that has reshaped the world and endangered humanity’s last remaining descendents.

While the film loses some of the evocative, wordless melancholy of the manga in its translation from page to screen, it lacks none of the scale and depth of its world-building and vistas. The action is punishing and electrifying, as Killy contends with monstrous killer androids and a ruthless antagonist hellbent on killing as many impure humans (i.e., everyone) as possible. Blame! is a worthy adaptation of the source material, as well as a worthwhile watch for anyone who considers themself a fan of dark sci-fi animation. —Toussaint Egan

Toussaint Egan

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April 20, 2024
Fallout’s violence and gore are part of its charm

Fans of the Fallout games won’t be shocked to learn that Amazon’s new TV show based on the franchise is gruesomely violent. This is a franchise known for its Bloody Mess perk, and for the VATS system, which lets players target and blow off heads and limbs. But the violence of the Fallout TV series still has the power to shock; viewers can expect multiple severed heads and lopped-off extremities in this post-apocalyptic world where mutated monsters feed on human flesh.

While the gore of Fallout may be uncomfortable to watch, it’s rarely (if ever) gratuitous. Instead, it’s done in the service of world-building. In many cases, it’s played for comedy and surprise, in the style of Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino films.

The first few minutes of Fallout may give viewers the incorrect impression that the show treats violence only with deadly seriousness. The first episode of the series starts with the nuclear destruction of Los Angeles. It’s a chilling scene, and since young children are involved, it sets a grim tone.

And yes, in later episodes, there are scenes that are difficult to watch. Puppies are incinerated at a research facility. Innocent Vault Dwellers are casually murdered. Body parts are sliced, crushed, and made into human jerky. In the show’s above-ground post-apocalyptic society, extreme violence is presented as a daily occurrence, and that society has the means to address it. Medicines that can instantly heal wounds are as commonplace as off-the-shelf replacement body parts.

Some of the show’s instances of violence are nods to the games. One big shootout plays like a VATS-powered killing spree, in which viewers watch in slo-mo as a bullet rips through multiple poor wastelanders. The show’s creators highlight that bodies are squishy and life is cheap in this world, but that its residents have adapted accordingly. Death and violence don’t seem to bother anyone all that much. Hell, becoming a brainless zombie is treated as something of an inconvenience in Fallout’s world.

Fallout also delves into body horror. One of the show’s more disturbing creatures, as seen in trailers, is a giant mutant axolotl covered in hundreds of human fingers. Adding an extra layer of grossness, we see one of those creatures vomit up the rotting contents of its massive stomach before it dies. It is extremely unpleasant! We see horrifying examples of human-mutant experiments. Giant mutant cockroaches run rampant, and they burst open with green gooey guts when stomped on.

All of this is to say that violence in the Fallout show is fast, frequent, and unrepentant. But it isn’t dreary or humorless in the way other post-apocalyptic worlds, like The Walking Dead or The Last of Us can be. Instead, it borrows a page from the Mad Max movies. Like the Fallout games, Fallout the TV series isn’t for the queasy. But for fans of black comedy and copious amounts of fake blood, it’s a hoot.

All eight episodes of Fallout season 1 are now streaming on Prime Video.

Michael McWhertor

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April 10, 2024
The Halo TV show making the humans the villains completely misses the point

It’s become increasingly clear that the Halo TV show has a villain problem. This may seem impossible for a series that’s supposed to be about a hostile race of aliens led by liars who exploit religious fanaticism, but instead the show can’t stop focusing on human bickering, bizarrely relegating the galaxy-conquering aliens to an afterthought for both the characters in the show and the audience.

I could talk about how Halo’s centering of humans as the bad guys behind every plot cheapens one of the few fascinating moral complexities of the Halo games and books — that the Spartans were built for fundamentally inhumane treatment of rebel fighters and then accidentally found justification in a surprise alien invasion. But it’s more fair and even more damning to talk about all of this on the Halo TV show’s own terms. And on those terms, I simply have no fucking idea why there are even aliens in this show to begin with.

In an effort to underline the badness of humanity, Halo has completely sidelined the Covenant, throwing the entire show off course and spinning wildly into space. Even the Covenant’s grand invasion of Reach in the show is just another human plot, one of a thousand ways the TV show wants to prove that the human bureaucrats are evil, something we’ve known since the earliest moments of the show’s first season.

But all this emphasis on humanity’s sins begs a critical question: Almost two full seasons into Halo, what point is it trying to make, exactly? Season 2’s seventh episode, “Thermopylae,” seems to offer some attempt at answering that question, when Makee (Charlie Murphy) pleads with Chief to stop helping humanity so that the two of them can settle Halo on their own and make it a paradise, rather than letting either side use it as a civilization-destroying weapon. Setting aside the silliness that is this version of Halo being so constantly tempted to recast Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) as the lead of a domestic drama, Makee’s statement still leaves a gap in our understanding of what this show is doing. If the point is “war makes monsters of us all,” then shouldn’t we see that equally in both the human and Covenant factions? And even more pressingly, why won’t anyone acknowledge that the Covenant are the ones who threatened extinction first and based their whole galactic conquest on the Prophets’ lie about a Great Journey that would take them from the galaxy?

Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus

We’re subjected to half a dozen scenes each episode of humanity’s reckless and evil leaders making civilization-shaping choices — particularly the ongoing machinations of Admiral Margaret Parangosky (Shabana Azmi), one of the worst and least compelling characters in recent TV memory, thanks to her consistently baffling decisions and seemingly lack of strategy and communication. (Put simply: She’s here to antagonize every other character, with no real character of her own.) Meanwhile we only get to see the Covenant’s side from the point of view of Makee and the criminally underdeveloped Arbiter. Sure, we hear them say that the Prophets might be full of shit and that the Great Journey might be a lie, but it remains a complete mystery why the alien’s genuinely compelling similarity to Earth’s own corrupt and lying authorities is drawn with such a faint line. Perhaps drawing those connections more clearly would help us make sense of why Master Chief has fought more humans in Halo season 2 than he has Covenant.

Despite the moment-to-moment conflict rarely making sense, or seeming to lead anywhere, it hasn’t stopped the show from introducing more plot threads or drip-feeding longtime series fans with new bits of recognizable lore. For instance, this latest episode gave us our most meaningful look yet at the Forerunners, though they haven’t been named quite yet. It also hinted at yet another alien faction that could soon arrive, but we’ll have to wait and see if that thread goes anywhere.

All these new introductions do little to lessen the feeling of narrative cheapness that surrounds Halo, however. As more ideas and plots get introduced, it only serves to underline how little sense any of this really makes. Sure, we know the Covenant are knocking on humanity’s front door, but the sudden diversion of every character in the show now converging on a need to capture “the Halo,” as they keep calling it, feels like it came out of nowhere. Which is a pretty astounding feat of messy storytelling considering it’s the object the entire franchise is named after.

Halo season 2 is now streaming on Paramount Plus. The season finale will be released on Thursday, March 21.

Austen Goslin

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March 14, 2024
3 Body Problem is the kind of TV epic we need

When Game of Thrones ended in May 2019, the hunt was well underway for a series that could match its blockbuster scale. HBO was already talking spinoffs with George R.R. Martin, while Netflix’s The Witcher, Disney’s The Mandalorian, Apple’s Foundation, Paramount Plus’ Halo, and Amazon’s mega-budgeted gambit on a Lord of the Rings prequel bubbled at various stages of development and production. Five years later, all the shows exist — but there’s no clear champion. Even reactions to HBO’s prequel, House of the Dragon, were more golf-clap acclaim than calls of the second coming of a franchise.

What the wannabe successors proved (that everyone seemed to know at the time except IP-hungry executives?) is that Thrones’ secret wasn’t scale, but substantive drama. A great show needs characters with big questions and big goals, but down-to-earth emotions. The balance of a continent could hinge on valiant knights and ancient prophecy and dragon battles as long as when those involved got mad, it felt like actual people getting mad. For all the finale-related flack, Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were afforded the time and space to adapt the human side of Martin’s sprawling narrative as well as its set-pieces. So it’s no surprise that while the rest of Hollywood chased tentpoles, Benioff and Weiss set their boyhood dreams of making a Star Wars movie aside (phew, crisis averted) to cash their chips on a deal where they could demand time and space and quality work that didn’t involve swordplay.

And they actually did it: Teaming up with veteran TV writer Alexander Woo (The Terror season 2), their new Netflix series 3 Body Problem, like Thrones, feels epic in scale while probing the messiness of human instinct. Movies like Interstellar and Solaris ventured into deep space to confront our innate spirituality, but 3 Body Problem season 1 sticks close to home to the benefit of its characters, who juggle romantic relationships and work-life stress and impending doom. Still, there is something extraterrestrial out there in the universe, a cosmic unknown. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo treat that promise like a chemical pipetted into a petri dish. Just a few drops of knowledge cause an instant reaction with consequences that will only be felt hundreds of years in the future.

Image: Netflix

The showrunner trio adapts Liu Cixin’s famed Remembrance of Earth’s Past science fiction trilogy with both reverence and an eye toward storytelling economics. The core drama of 3 Body Problem season 1, focused on a set of physicists out to understand what the hell is going on in the universe, weaves together people, places, and things from across all three books in order to be propulsively paced while easily digested. Die-hard readers may miss Liu’s dense “far out, man”-core style, but the pillar moments remain. Early episodes bounce from China’s Cultural Revolution to present-day London to virtual reality landscapes that hold the key to greater mysteries. The prickly politics of solving Earth’s perilous future simmer across timelines. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo don’t dumb any of it down as they tear through the plot, relying on genre conventions to keep it all watchable. (British mysteries like Broadchurch and Happy Valley feel as much part of the show’s DNA as any sci-fi series.)

Perhaps a 10- or 12-episode season would have made room for deeper character work, but the writers are pros at making every line of dialogue illustrative of their characters’ deeper motivations, and every silent gesture — staring at the stars, gasping at equations, even watching a kid play Mortal Kombat — speaks volumes. Unlike recent Netflix adaptations that have crammed long narratives into uncompromising run times by removing all downtime “filler,” 3 Body Problem is full of humanity’s quirks. The show has religious zealots, anxious nerds, quiet romantics, and Benedict Wong as a no-bullshit cop. There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo about quantum physics and gravitational interaction, but also one of the best on-screen meet-my-family awkward dinner dates in recent memory.

Doing the Lord’s work is actor Jess Hong, a relative newcomer and the nexus of all of 3 Body Problem’s narrative strands. In a cast full of Game of Thrones veterans and big-screen talent like Wong and Eiza González (Baby Driver, Godzilla vs. Kong), Hong takes on the burden of making all of the show’s otherworldly turns feel totally natural. Whether her character, Jin, is sipping a beer and making pub chat or navigating the immersive third level of the least fun virtual puzzle game ever invented, she reflects an authentic reality that’s increasingly tested by the show’s oddities. 3 Body Problem ultimately questions whether we deserve the planet we have so often fucked up. Hong’s Jin, in all her ups and downs, glimmers with the kind of humanity that we want to believe in.

Jess Hong as Jin
Photo: Ed Miller/Netflix

It really helps that Netflix didn’t skimp on 3 Body Problem, which, for all its character drama, goes big when it needs to go big. Benioff and Weiss’ clout has bought them the kind of top-tier production value that I thought only David Fincher commanded; flashbacks to the 1960s/’70s China feel rich in detail, while scenes set in the present-day drama have a refined look, rather than the cheap digital sheen that’s plagued so many post-Fincher Netflix projects. Anyone haunted by awful renderings of VR in movies and TV will be relieved by the show’s intentionally uncanny, often fantastical digital worlds that look like actual Unreal Engine survival-game backdrops. And when 3 Body Problem kicks into a high sci-fi gear, the show gets truly mind-bending — and often gnarly. The giddy provocateurs who orchestrated the Red Wedding are absolutely at the helm of this series.

I’m a little in awe of 3 Body Problem. Liu’s books are like a character study of humanity itself; there is inherently too much to chew on. But Benioff, Weiss, and Woo came ready to cook. Their adaptation is gripping from the start and already prioritizing the pieces needed for a coherent endgame. From the trilogy’s pages of information they’ve carved out a visual story, dazzling and frightening. There are nits to pick from episode to episode, leaps in logic that may not stand up to scrutiny, but it’s a show that, unlike the Game of Thrones imitators, swept me up. Most of those shows settled on escapism. 3 Body Problem feels like a true escape, an excuse to wonder about the vastness of the cosmos from the comfort of the couch and wonder, What if?

3 Body Problem premieres on Netflix on March 21.

Matt Patches

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March 8, 2024
The Halo TV series bailed on its best chance yet to actually take us to a Halo ring

Reach has fallen in the Halo TV universe. If you know anything about the lore of the Halo games, you know that the next thing that’s supposed to happen is Master Chief escaping from Covenant forces above Reach, his ship getting attacked, and then promptly crashing onto the series’ first Halo ring. In other words, this is basically the moment where the action starts. That is not what happened in the Halo TV series. Instead, Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and his friends took a reflective excursion to a backwater planet that felt a lot more like a detour than character development.

After escaping Reach, Chief and everyone else on the escape ship with him (which is basically all of the still-living series regulars except for Kate Kennedy’s Kai), visit Aleria, a small dirt farming planet with plenty of land to spare and nearly toxic soil. After an episode as big and exciting as the Fall of Reach, this feels like a very HBO-style respite: the kind of episode dedicated to taking stock of the characters we lost and examining the new shape of the world after a big shake-up. But those shows earn those reflective episodes with consistent quality before them, and they tend to make those quiet episodes feel ever bigger and more important than the loud ones. That was certainly not the case in Halo season 2’s fifth episode.

Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus

In defense of the Halo series’ entire premise, it has no obligation to follow the events of the games directly. Since the show’s announcement, the creative team behind it has been careful to specify that this series takes place in the “Silver Timeline,” which is completely separate from the canon of the games. So going somewhere other than Halo after the Fall of Reach isn’t really a problem. The problem is that the show once again fails the most basic and important test of doing interesting things with those changes.

The series seems convinced that the audience loves and cares about its side characters. But they’re just not interesting. During this episode the most coherent plotline we spend time with involves Soren (the wonderful Bokeem Woodbine, trying his best as always) and his wife searching for their child. We see them question various people around the village, and even find someone they think is keeping their kid from them. But by the end of the episode, they discover that he was actually kidnapped by the UNSC — an organization we almost exclusively know at this point as the military that loves kidnapping children. It’s a bland, “no shit” reveal that feels both too obvious and totally meaningless at the same time. Another of the episode’s plotlines involves Riz, a Spartan who was introduced just a few episodes ago, deciding that she wants to be a farmer now that she is too injured to be a Spartan.

With plotlines this boring, about characters that the show never really does a good job of convincing us to care about, it’s getting awfully hard not to long for the circular perfection and alien weirdness of the Halo rings that give this franchise its name. So why aren’t we there yet?

The answer seems to lie in the Halo show’s approach to the rings in general. The series clearly recognizes one of the great strengths of the first game was that Halo was profoundly mysterious. But the show is approaching that mystery in a very different way than the original game did.

Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus

For the game, the mystery of Halo was in how little information you had about both the alien ring and the video game’s world. Aside from the basic premise of humanity being on the back foot in a war against aliens, almost everything else was a black box. So when you crash-land on Halo in the game’s second level (a level also called “Halo”), the path is clear for the game to slowly reveal its secrets about Forerunners, the Covenant religion, the Flood, 343 Guilty Spark, and everything else that feels commonplace in the series today. The TV series, on the other hand, decided to make Halo a destination. Instead of giving us no lore, it’s been stacking up piles and piles of lore through its first two seasons and dangling the Halo ring in front of his via characters’ prophetic visions. This path to Halo isn’t inherently bad; a well-done buildup and reveal can make for a fantastic moment in a TV show. But like the Hatch in Lost, the key is that you have to show the audience why the thing is mysterious and important — you have to really prove it to us, not just have characters bombard us with insistent dialogue that it matters. And more importantly, the characters actually have to get into it eventually.

None of this is to say that the show has run out of time to make it to Halo, or even that it can’t be good once it gets there. But it is to say that the journey there so far has felt profoundly misjudged and way too slow, and it’s starting to feel like it might not happen at all. In this episode, Makee (Charlie Murphy) tries to convince the Arbiter to go to the Halo rings because she insists that the Prophets are lying about the Great Journey, telling the rest of the Covenant fanciful stories about its importance and transcending the physical realm, but never actually planning to take them along on their trip to divinity. Now, I’m not saying that the Halo series is the Prophets and we’re the rest of the Covenant, but I am saying that our lack of a journey to a Halo ring is starting to feel a little suspicious, and they’re running out of time to convince me we’re really going.

Austen Goslin

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February 29, 2024
Music has always been a huge part of Dune adaptations

The world of Dune is a wild one. On any given day you’ve got clairvoyant sisterhoods poking your neck, giant spicy worms, and Javier Bardem spitting on your floor — and I haven’t even started on the really weird stuff. Capturing the tone and flavor of this eccentric setting isn’t easy, and while I’m not opposed to getting a lengthy monologue from Virginia Madsen, the right audio direction can do a better job of laying the groundwork for a sci-fi epic. And music has always played an important role in the various adaptations of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe across movies, TV, and games.

The soundtrack to David Lynch’s 1984 Dune adaptation features a sweeping orchestral soundtrack by Toto. A special appearance was also made by Brian Eno, who recorded the more moody and haunting stuff. Dune is the only soundtrack Toto has ever worked on, and how they came to be involved with the movie is a much longer story that you can read more about in A Masterpiece in Disarray (David Lynch’s Dune — An Oral History).

The soundtrack for the ’84 film is just as epic as Hans Zimmer’s score for the 2021 movie, but takes a different approach. At the time, the work of James Horner and John Williams was dominating sci-fi at the box office, and the theme for the original Dune movie follows a similarly bombastic approach but avoids some of the more uplifting melodies (an explicit request from Lynch).

Much like the movie’s vibe itself, the score for the original is far groovier than the later adaptations, with a heavy reliance on synths punctuated with guitar riffs. The main title suite sounds like a rock opera version of “Ride of the Valkyries,” while the theme for Baron Harkonnen immediately evokes Mike Oldfield’s haunting “Tubular Bells.” However, if you just need the CliffsNotes, the score is best summarized with the sci-fi rock ballad “Take My Hand,” which plays over the movie’s closing credits and runs through the key movements in the score in under three minutes.

While Zimmer’s score for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies is certainly a drastic departure from Lynch’s film, you can still hear echoes of the ’84 soundtrack in it. In particular, the track “Stillsuits” pays direct homage to the opening measures of the main title of the original movie. The score isn’t a massive departure from Zimmer’s work on a myriad of other blockbusters, but makes a greater effort to feel unique.

I’m a pretty big Hans Zimmer fan, and while much of his work is guilty of sounding a bit same-y, I’d argue his score for the 2021 movie Dune: Part One is some of his best work. Zimmer’s identity is still very present in Dune, with aggressive instruments and percussion, but the score places a greater emphasis on vocals and unconventional instruments that sound otherworldly when layered together.

The score for Dune: Part One is best described as very dry and very old, thanks to its intentional use of woodwinds and hollow percussion to convey not only the arid environment of Dune, but its enigmatic atmosphere as well. Those words often sound like a bad thing, but here, it really works. The deep, heavy rhythms from tracks like “Armada” and “Leaving Caladan” are the most reminiscent of Zimmer’s previous work. However, it’s with tracks like “Sanctuary” and “Ripples in the Sand” where those feelings of mystery and wonder really manifest.

The soundtracks for the Dune video games are a whole other can of sandworms, but it’s important to discuss them because they not only occupy a critical place in video game history, but have been handled by some of the most prolific composers in the gaming industry.

1992’s Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty, by the now-defunct Westwood Studios, is perhaps the most famous game based on the Dune franchise, and is frequently cited as the game that popularized the real-time strategy genre. The soundtracks for Dune 2 and its 1998 remake Dune 2000 were handled by Frank Klepacki, who was also responsible for scoring every entry in the legendary Command & Conquer franchise.

Klepacki’s work on Dune 2 was intended to emulate the soundtrack for the original Dune adventure game by Cryo Interactive. And while solid, the soundtrack definitely bumps up against the technical limitations of producing music for a game with a file size of under 5 MB. However, when Klepacki revisited the classic score, he had the freedom to not only remake higher fidelity versions of his original Dune 2 soundtrack, but inject them with homages to Toto’s work on the ‘84 Dune movie. This is most apparent when listening to the Dune 2000 track “Rise of Harkonnen,” which is a remastered version of Dune 2’s “Rulers of Arrakis,” with an opening that’s an effective tribute to Toto’s Baron Harkonnen theme.

The most recent Dune game title, Dune: Spice Wars, featured a soundtrack composed by Jesper Kyd, whose credits include work on franchises like Hitman, Assassin’s Creed, and Borderlands, to name a few. While Kyd hasn’t cited any specific inspirations for his Spice Wars soundtrack, the score mirrors the style of the game, borrowing concepts and themes from across the existing franchise without sounding derivative. The two hours of music features ambient, dreamlike tracks that echo the work of Brian Eno on the ‘84 Dune film, while also including rhythmic synth beats that will feel familiar to fans of the classic Westwood titles.

Frank Herbert’s Dune was originally published in 1965, and it’s remarkable that almost 60 years later — and across its spectrum of adaptations — every composition manages to evoke similar feelings in its audience. Whether it’s the appropriately epic work from Toto, the more primal version produced by Hans Zimmer, or the stellar video game soundtracks, Dune has inspired a wealth of composers and musicians to provide a cohesive sense of identity to Frank Herbert’s strange and enigmatic universe.

Alice Jovanée

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February 25, 2024
Frank Herbert always thought Star Wars was a Dune ripoff

Much like the mystical religions spread by its Bene Gesserit, the influences of Dune spread to every corner of the universe of science fiction. In some stories, the inspirations are woven so tightly into the fabric of the story they’re nearly impossible to pick up, maybe even for the author themself. In others, the homages to Dune are unmissable, occasionally to the point of being distracting. And then there’s Star Wars, the most blatant ripoff of all — at least, according to Frank Herbert.

The Dune author didn’t talk much about George Lucas’ landmark science fiction film before his death in 1986, but he answered a few questions about it over the years, and he always seemed at least a little annoyed at the similarities between the two stories.

The first public comments he seems to have made about the movie come from an interview with the Associated Press from 1977, the year A New Hope was released. The article is pretty straightforward shit-stirring, but it’s clear that while Herbert hadn’t yet seen the movie, he did have some thoughts about its similarities to his seminal series, which was already three books in.

Herbert starts by saying an editor for the Village Voice had called him and asked if he had seen Star Wars, and whether or not he was going to sue. It’s a strong lead-in, but apparently that’s what was top of mind of Herbert.

“I will try hard not to sue,” Herbert told the Associated Press. “I have no idea what book of mine it fits, but I suspect it may be Dune since in that I had a Princess Alia and the movie has a Princess Leia. And I hear there is a sandworm carcass and hood dwellers in the desert, just like in Dune.”

Herbert goes on to brag, rightfully, about the ubiquity of Dune, both in popular culture and even as a college textbook on subjects like “architecture, psychology, writing, English, human living, space analysis, and some I’ve forgotten.” Herbert doesn’t get too specific in this early article, but it’s clear the movie’s reported similarities to his own work didn’t sit quite right with him. And later it would be even clearer that they stuck in his craw, one way or another.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Now, with decades of hindsight and years of interviews, it’s easy to see that Star Wars, particularly the first film, is an amalgamation of many genres and stories, including (but not limited to) science fiction, mythical fantasy, and the samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa. There’s also an entire expanded universe of history in the Star Wars galaxy that borrows from all over the sci-fi canon, and has helped inspire just as many future writers.

But if you consider the time when Star Wars was just one tremendously successful summer blockbuster, it’s easy to understand why Herbert might have had a bone to pick. And as the years went by, it’s clear that he thought quite a bit about the subject, enough to count the similarities between the titles.

“Lucas has never admitted that they copied a lot of Dune, and I’m not saying they did,” Herbert said in 1985, during a speaking engagement at UCLA. “I’m just saying there are 16 points of identity between the book Dune and Star Wars. Now you’ve had stat — what is it? It’s 16 times 16 times 16 times… over 1, the odds against that being coincidence? There aren’t that many stars in the universe.”

Herbert’s frustrated quote stemmed from a question about whether or not Lucas ever bought Herbert dinner — a reference to a long-standing joke of Herbert’s that even if Lucas didn’t blatantly steal his ideas to make Star Wars, he at least owes Herbert dinner for the coincidence.

But Frank Herbert was one to lose out on a war of pettiness. A year before that UCLA interview, he published Heretics of Dune, the fifth book in the series and the second to last written by him. Late in the book, which is mostly about the future of humanity after the death of The God Emperor, Herbert has a small, inconspicuous passage that certainly feels like a reference to Star Wars. He doesn’t seem to have ever said that officially, so we’ll let you judge:

In the time of the Old Empire and even under the reign of Maud’Dib, the region around the Gammu Keep had been a forest reserve, high ground rising well above the oily residue that tended to cover Harkonnen land. On this ground, the Harkonnens had grown some of the finest pilingitam, a wood of steady currency, always valued by the supremely rich. From the most ancient times, the knowledgeable had preferred to surround themselves with fine woods rather than with the mass-produced artificial materials known then as polestine, polaz, and pormabat (latterly: tine, laz, and bat). As far back as the Old Empire there had been a pejorative label for the small rich and Families Minor arising from the knowledge of the rare wood’s value.
“He’s a three P-O,” they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances.

Austen Goslin

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February 17, 2024
How to watch the Doctor Who holiday special

The Fifteenth Doctor is finally here — at least, for a one-off Christmas special.

After making an appearance in the third anniversary special through a bit of “bigeneration,” Ncuti Gatwa is at last stepping up to the plate as The Doctor. He’ll be joined by new companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who lives a quiet life with her grandma and mom until The Doctor shows up. In “The Church on Ruby Road,” they’ll both come face to face with mysterious goblins, and have to riddle their way out of a Christmas adventure.

Though it’ll be a bit before the new season of Doctor Who premieres, we’ve been waiting an awfully long time to see Gatwa as The Doctor. So it’s understandable if we’re all excited to watch the Christmas special as soon as we possibly can — and here’s how.

How to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special on Disney Plus

As with the anniversary specials (and all Doctor Who seasons moving forward), Doctor Who will be streaming its Christmas episode on Disney Plus. That means we can probably expect the same sort of release schedule: Disney will be releasing the special concurrently with its broadcast in the U.K., meaning if you’re watching it on Disney Plus, the new specials will drop on Christmas at 9:55 a.m. PST/12:55 p.m. EST.

Can I watch the Christmas Doctor Who special on BBC?

Yup! You’ll be able to watch Doctor Who’s 2023 Christmas special on BBC One and the BBC iPlayer in the U.K. starting at 5:55 p.m. on December 25 (that’s Christmas).

What do I need to have watched beforehand?

As with the Doctor Who anniversary specials: Technically nothing — the franchise has been going for 60 years and counting, so there’s a lot of Who you could catch up on, but how could you even pick where to start?

But it’s probably helpful to have at least watched the anniversary specials, particularly the last one, “The Giggle,” which features the handoff between David Tennant’s Tenth/Fourteenth Doctor and Gatwa’s Fifteenth. Suffice it to say, Gatwa’s Doctor gets introduced in an unorthodox (and, frankly, less than stellar) way, which will no doubt be a bit of backstory for the special. Plus it’s just fun to get a sense of what Gatwa is bringing to the role already — he’s a star!

If you do want to revisit any older Doctor Who, you’ll want to check out the Russell T. Davies section, as he’s the new (returning) showrunner; so you’re looking for series 1 through series 5. Those won’t be viewable on Disney Plus, though, only Max.

Is there a trailer so I can watch Ncuti Gatwa already?

There is! Here’s an early Christmas present, ya rascal:

And here’s a special look at his new Sonic Screwdriver:

Zosha Millman

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December 24, 2023
Furiosa trailer takes Mad Max fans back to the Fury Road

It’s time to return to the Fury Road in search of Valhalla in the new Mad Max spinoff, Furiosa. The prequel got its first trailer on Thursday that showed off the early tribulations of the future-Imperator. Furiosa is set for release on May 24, 2024.

As the name implies, Furiosa focuses on Imperator Furiosa, the main character from Mad Max: Fury Road originally played by Charlize Theron. This movie takes us back to her younger days and puts Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit, The Menu) in the role instead.

Along with Taylor-Joy, the movie stars Chris Hemsworth as some kind of villainous master of ceremonies in the wasteland, and a Young Immortan Joe. The story appears to give us a full origin of Furiosa, from when she was taken from her family to when she joined up with Joe to lead the War Boys.

Returning to the franchise for the fifth time is also director and Mad Max creator George Miller, who is now 78 years old but clearly still kicking it. Miller co-wrote Furiosa with Nick Lathouris, who has been involved with Mad Max since the first movie in 1979 and also co-wrote Fury Road.

Austen Goslin

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November 30, 2023
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes the Watchmen approach to a Godzilla show

The rise of franchise-first pop culture has made what was previously a genre stumbling block into everyone’s problem: Exposition. Specifically, the stuff we call “lore.” When every big show or movie has to connect to something else, those connections aren’t always graceful. Especially when you need to work in how your villain was in the Amazon with your mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Apple TV Plus’ extremely good mystery-thriller based on Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse, deftly dances around every major pitfall modern mega-franchises happily dive into. The series packs the frame with fascinating little details that unobtrusively build out the world of the show without having characters explain much of anything. It’s thoughtful in its visual design in a way that recalls HBO’s Watchmen, another show full of extensive references to a prior work, carefully building out a story that stood on its own.

The similarity is more than superficial. Both shows are very interested in the background construction of a political and cultural apparatus predicated on one massive, divergent event in history. Both shows have clearly had writers do a ton of mapping out the ways in which their fictional worlds were similar and the ways in which they diverged, and instead of having characters recite endless factoids better served by a wiki, they merely depict the characters living in that world. It’s for the viewer to notice the ways in which it is different.

Image: Apple TV Plus

The early episodes of Monarch are filled with details like this. Passengers on a commercial flight are sprayed down by men in hazmat suits after an international trip, airline corridors have clearly marked Godzilla evacuation routes, and installations of military weaponry stand ready for another Titan appearance.

This, coupled with the show’s noteworthy focus on human drama about two siblings whose father kept them from each other, gives Monarch a thematic richness that surprises and delights. If the big, cacophonous MonsterVerse movies use their kaiju as a metaphor for humanity’s disregard for the planet on a grand scale, then Monarch personalizes that devastation. Not just by showing what it’s like to try and adhere to normalcy after surviving a spectacular catastrophe, but in showing how the men and women who chased these monsters over generations shattered their families to pursue their reckless work — work that would in turn shatter the planet.

Monarch is less openly about thorny, difficult topics than Watchmen was. You won’t find, for example, provocative explorations of race in America. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show for these times. Much like Watchmen found new relevance in its revisitation of a comic book from 1986, Monarch finds depths to plumb in the haphazard cinematic universe that was jury-rigged around Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla remake. In it, we can see a consideration of humanity’s struggles to navigate a collective disaster, a casual reflection of our inability to solve great crises without militarism, and the way institutions warp fear of collapse into an excuse to control more of our lives. The story may be set in 2015, but few genre shows feel more 2023.

Joshua Rivera

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November 18, 2023
Gen V is the rare show that’s shorter than it should be

Gen V’s first six episodes are remarkably tight. The Boys’ spinoff series immediately establishes its place in the larger universe, and quickly introduces us to an entire cast of characters, a unique superhero university, and a secret conspiracy in just a few short hours. Despite its relatively large cast of characters, Gen V manages to give each one time to shine in their own storylines, letting them all have problems — both personal and superpowered — that just make for great television. All the while, all of the teen drama seamlessly filters back into the conspiracy thriller literally underneath the school, as the kids discover the mysteries of The Woods. But Gen V’s last two episodes run into a unique problem: They move too fast.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Gen V season 1.]

Gen V’s seventh and eighth episodes cover a lot of ground very quickly. After the cliffhanger twist of episode 6 (that Cate has been manipulating the group the whole time), the gang learns that Indira Shetty’s ultimate plan with The Woods is to create a virus that will kill anyone with Compound V in their system. Cate decides she’s flipping sides completely. She kills Shetty, who had been manipulating her, and frees the kids from The Woods, telling them that they’re better than humans and that humans don’t deserve to live — a message Sam gets on board with fast. For Marie, Jordan, Emma, and Andre, however, all of this is too much bloodshed to stomach, and they start fighting Cate, Sam, and the kids from The Woods. As chaos breaks out at God U, the powers that be finally call in a little assistance, and Homelander shows up to put a stop to everything.

If this all sounds a little harried, that’s because it is. What started as a carefully plotted series, full of scenes of teens working out complex (and not so complex) emotions and dealing with the moral ramifications of having powers, suddenly devolves into a massive CGI brawl. The huge fight feels out of step with everything that’s come before it. It’s exactly the kind of ending you might expect from a Marvel movie that takes a left turn into punching just as the third act begins.

Image: Prime Video

That’s not to say that Gen V’s first season shouldn’t have ended in a fight — just that it shouldn’t have ended in a fight this quickly. The fight should have been set up better, allowing the teenage characters’ emotions the space to bubble over until all they knew how to do was fight their way out. It’s a bad time for the show’s first emotional shortcut. The eight-episode season abandons the delicate pacing of the show’s fantastic early chapters to rush through plot points and motivation in the back half.

But with just a couple more episodes, which would ultimately give the season a very standard 10 episodes, it might have been much easier to swallow the way that Cate and Sam’s systematic abuse caused them to turn to wanton violence, or why their friends couldn’t talk them out of it and decided to fight them instead. Episodes 7 and 8 feel like the microwave version of Gen V. They’re still pretty good, but not nearly as great as the slow-cooked setup.

The good news for the show is that the too-quick ending doesn’t take away from how great the rest of the season was. And all things considered, there are much worse problems to have than leaving people wanting more — Gen V is the rare show that could be improved with more rather than less. Regardless of the chaotic frenzy that ended season 1, the setup for Gen V’s second season is easy to see and exciting to think about. The core of the heroes being trapped feels like great fodder for a prison break, and Cate and Sam having to figure out what to do now that they’re not under anyone’s thumb should be fascinating. Despite the season’s sudden ending, this series is still filled with fantastic characters, and the deftness of the first half of the season has earned the creative team some benefit of the doubt going forward. But let’s hope season 2 gets all the episodes it needs to do its story justice.

Austen Goslin

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November 4, 2023