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I assume that silhouette-inducing panes of glass are a popular product at the Supervillain Emporium, albeit less popular than Persian cats and torture chairs.

I wanted to like MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING more than I did.

I guess the thing that bothered me most: DEAD RECKONING started a new storyline: the dark past of Ethan Hunt. We learn that before Ethan joined the Impossible Missions Force, he was facing murder charges. The villain of DEAD RECKONING and FINAL RECKONING, Gabriel, apparently murdered a woman Ethan cared about, someone named Marie, played by Mariela Garriga. We only glimpsed Marie in a flashback and Ethan finding her body, and could intuit that Gabriel, a villainous spy, had killed her and framed Ethan.

THE FINAL RECKONING does not elaborate any further on Marie or Ethan's origin story or what relationship or enmity Ethan and Gabriel had or how they met or why they turned against each other or why Marie died or why Ethan was facing murder charges. Marie only appears in the same footage of her death that was seen in DEAD RECKONING.

Something clearly went wrong here, and it really disappoints me because I came into the theatre eager to learn more about Ethan's past and emerged with nothing new about his history.

Dean Cain voted for Trump and supported Trump even in his second run, and is therefore a turncoat and a traitor to America. Dean Cain was nice to Temporal Flux that one time way back when, and therefore, I am honourbound to take a bullet for Dean Cain, albeit very grudgingly.

Anyway, Dean Cain was on Michael Rosenbaum's podcast, INSIDE OF YOU, and Cain at one point says that he and Sean Penn are completely at odds in politics and yet have a lot of respect for each other, and then suddenly, there's a hilariously abrupt cut where it's obvious that Rosenbaum mercifully cut out whatever politics Cain had to say.

I really enjoyed Floyd's comments on SLIDERS. I've never ceased to be amazed by how much he appreciated the entire history and legacy of SLIDERS and his place on the show despite coming in only at the end and after the original creators and vision had left.

I think the reason: Floyd loves performing and storytelling, and SLIDERS was a place where, even if the onscreen results may have been less than his talent, Floyd got to do a lot of performing and storytelling in a really creative and meaningful way.

I don't think Season 5 gave Floyd enough to do and I think a lot of viewers feel that way, given how much Quinn was missed and how well Floyd played the dual personas, going from mere mimicry to an almost transcendental bodily possession. I would have loved for Quinn to have been played by Floyd from Day 1.

America is a horrific, dystopian nightmare, but I'm kind of impressed by a 5% cash back credit card. I can only get 2% at the most.

I've been pondering what advice and tactics someone can engage in to survive in Trump's America, and so far, the best advice I can suggest is: don't get sick if you can avoid it.

Get COVID-19 vaccines annually. Get the flu shot. Get vaccinated or revaccinated for measles. Get the HPV vaccine. If you're walking into public places like grocery stores and whatnot, wear a mask. You don't want to get a cold for the privilege of stepping into a shopping mall, getting sick, and having to look at the co-pay for insurance or going for days or weeks or months away from work that could lead to unpaid time if you exhaust your sick days and vacation days. You don't want medical debt in Trump's America.

Get checkups. You don't want to need dialysis in Trump's America which could bankrupt you before the system abandons you. Stay in shape. You don't want to be dealing with high cholesterol or heart issues in this system. Get a good night's sleep. You don't want to be facing Trump's America dazed and disoriented.

Obviously, people have health issues that can't be prevented: diabetes, autoimmune issues, genetic conditions, chronic conditions, neurological disorders, and some may already have cancer and pain issues and pre-existing biological conditions. But don't leave the door wide open to any more health issues and be aggressive about managing the ones you already have. Get that door to illness shut as narrowly as possible within your means and resources as they are.

I find the TV show YOU really instructive, albeit in what NOT to ever do.

Spoilers for THUNDERBOLTS

I saw THUNDERBOLTS and it was good. It starts out a bit dark and bleak, almost like a Jason Bourne movie, but of course shifts into a more joking, lighthearted, AVENGERS-style comedy to offset the grimness. Despite that, the film has some surprisingly meaningful explorations of depression, trauma, loss and mental health. It's highly enjoyable with some fantastic action sequences.

I did feel the sense that the budget of the film trapped the movie on certain sets and locations. The Thunderbolts spend a large portion of the first third of the film in a secret government bunker of shadowy hallways that looks like every other secret government bunker of shadowy hallways in Season 5 of AGENTS OF SHIELD. They emerge from the bunker and spend the middle of the film running about back highways of Utah. The action then takes them to the former Avengers Tower and then the street in front of the Tower.

There is the sense of going to the theatre to watch a TV show where every episode/segment is written with the story confined to a specific set or location, and in a feature film, this can make the world outside the bunker or the highways or the general city block of Avengers tower seem vague, undefined, or even non-existent. Obviously, Ross being jailed and the lack of Avengers is why a black ops team like the Thunderbolts finds itself coming to the forefront of superhero missions, but the state of the larger universe is not really this movie's concern.

THUNDERBOLTS has a lot of fun interactions between Yelena and Bob, Yelena and Red Guardian, Red Guardian and Bucky, Yelena and USAgent, and USAgent and Bob (Ghost is kind of a non-entity), but we don't really get a sense of how the Marvel Cinematic Universe is doing without an active Avengers team and with President Ross in prison/isolation. THUNDERBOLTS exists largely in terms of enjoyable character banter and comedic action. The film does a great job of making the cast feel like an ensemble even though Yelena is the main character and the other characters pass in and out of focus as needed.

The dysfunctional nature and second-rate status of each cast member is played for laughs beautifully, whether it's Red Guardian as a Russian knockoff of Captain America, USAgent as the failed Captain America, Bob as a blundering civilian who stumbled into a group of superheroes, and Bucky as a former enemy of the state... although, I confess, at times, I forgot that Ghost was in the movie.

Bob is the standout of the film. Actor Lewis Pullman has a mild, gentle screen presence as the civilian Bob, a man inexplicably in a secret vault of dangerous weapons. The film initially misleads Marvel Comics fans into thinking he must be Bob, Agent of HYDRA, a hapless sidekick of Deadpool, but Bob is revealed as the Sentry, an ordinary man with addiction issues who was accidentally transformed into a godlike superhero.

Bob's grief over his horrific childhood of abuse and helplessness is the crux of the film, and Pullman excels in portraying a sad, lost, lonely man whose agony and drug use to blot out his pain has created an alternate persona, a bleak personification of emptiness and nothingness whom Bob calls the Void. The Thunderbolts' passage through the netherworld of the Void is a journey of torment and regret, and while it's never darker than you'd expect a Marvel film to be, the darkness is used effectively and evocatively and is surprisingly rich and moving.

The ending has the Thunderbolts team declared the new Avengers... which the credits immediately undermine with a series of newspaper headlines where the Thunderbolts are regarded as having no genuine claim to the name, challenged by Captain America (Sam Wilson) for the title, and generally viewed as undeserving pretenders. I'm not sure if this immediate undercutting was necessary as there currently are no Avengers and the MCU could do worse than this team, but I understand if there's a different cast in mind for the upcoming AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY and if Marvel didn't want to mislead.

A very enjoyable TV movie... which is confusing, because on actual TV, in DAREDEVIL, Mayor Fisk is declaring all vigilantes in New York City to be criminals whom police will hunt down. This is a stark mismatch with the head of the CIA assembling a press conference in New York City in front of the Avengers Tower to declare Yelena, Bucky, Red Guardian, Ghost and Bob to be "the New Avengers." One must, for now, assume that the anti-superhero municipal rule of DAREDEVIL is taking place in the Avengerless-vacuum before THUNDERBOLTS and is presumably resolved before this junket.

These narratives have a tendency to take time to cohere, if they ever do at all.

I was going to write a full review, but Slider_Quinn21's interesting question seemed more pressing.

I've learned a bit more about the pre-overhauled version of DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN and they hit a serious production issue after filming the first six episodes: Jon Bernthal quit after what seems to have been one day of filming, rendering the season impossible to complete and therefore unreleasable under the original circumstances.

What I've heard through my grapevine (and since my grapevine is not nearly as impressive as Temporal Flux's network for SLIDERS, take all of this with a grain of salt): the original plan for BORN AGAIN was that it had a very vague and distant relationship with the Netflix continuity, avoiding explicit tie-in but also avoiding outright contradictions.

Feige and Marvel weren't sure if the hypothetical Disney+ audience for BORN AGAIN would have even seen the Netflix shows. Feige's approach of "We'll decide in post" was highly present: they filmed scenes where Kingpin is clearly thinking about Ben Urich and mention of Foggy having died off-camera, murdered by a rogue police officer; they made no mention of Karen Page; they filmed Matt uneasy with Mayor Wilson Fisk but didn't show Matt declaring war on the mayor (and Matt's inaction towards a Fisk mayorship is, without explanation, truly bizarre in the context of Season 3 of the Netflix show). They were undecided.

One area where they were decisive: the Punisher as played by Jon Bernthal was a big part of the storyline. BORN AGAIN was to feature police officers with Punisher tattoos who were using lethal force like the Punisher but far less discriminately, shooting civilians and superheroes and calling it self-defense, and one of them had shot Foggy (off camera) when Foggy had tried to protect a client. These corrupt police officers would seem like a background element that would eventually step to the forefront of the show.

The plan was -- and this is the part where I suggest many grains of salt -- for Frank to show up in the middle of BORN AGAIN's first run of episodes and call Matt out for having retired from his Daredevil role, for not exacting vengeance on Foggy's murderer and every corrupt cop wearing the Punisher's tattoo. Matt would decide to become Daredevil again; Frank Castle would then return a few episodes later and, appalled by the murderous police officers killing in his name, adopt a less lethal approach alongside Daredevil.

Apparently, Bernthal signed on as a guest-star without having seen the scripts. He filmed his first scene in his bunker (which we saw, albeit with some revisions to alter the references to Foggy's murder to being Poindexter instead of a corrupt cop). Bernthal then read the subsequent scripts where Frank would step back from his lethal approach -- and he informed Marvel that he would not perform these scripts, that he would not participate in a softened and lightened portrayal of the Punisher, and he quit.

(This seems to have been misunderstood in the press with reporters saying Bernthal only filmed on BORN AGAIN after the strike and overhaul, but this is not the case: Bernthal's return was announced before the strike, and his first scene in BORN AGAIN was filmed before the reshoots. We can tell because all references to Bullseye from Frank are added via ADR and when Bernthal is off-camera. Some fans and reporters were confused because the post-strike directors have spoken of filming this scene; I think this must be referring to how Matt's side of the conversation was partially refilmed to refer to Bullseye and sections of Frank's dialogue have been added in post.)

I am not sure how Bernthal was able to quit in the way that he did: one would think that he would have been contracted to be available for the whole of the BORN AGAIN shoot, given Feige's then-approach to treating TV like an extended film shoot rather than episode to episode.

Marvel TV may have booked him to film as-available without locking him into a first-position/availability-secured contract, thinking his schedule was open, only to learn that available or not, Bernthal was refusing to return after filming one scene and accepting the financial hit.

Alternatively, Bernthal may have spotted the impending writers strike would necesstiate that his contract be extended, and told Marvel that he would not be extending his availability past the strike because he wasn't happy with the scripts.

Regardless, Bernthal was out.

This meant that the six episodes filmed had set up the Punisher's return, hinted at from the corrupt police officers wearing his symbol as a tattoo, and established the Punisher's reputation and character as critical and central to the first season -- but they had only one actual scene with Bernthal, the scene where Frank and Matt argue over Matt's reaction to Foggy's death -- and they had no further footage of Frank and no way to address the Punisher arc now that they'd lost their Punisher.

These six episodes were now unusable and the season was unfinishable.

It wasn't the only reason for the overhaul. BORN AGAIN was also facing a lot of negative publicity where the pre-existing audience, the Netflix fans, were unhappy that the show wouldn't include Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson. I've heard that actors Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio were also unhappy, and while they didn't quit like Bernthal did, they were expressing a marked lack of enthusiasm for resuming post-strike, especially as the delay meant they could renegotiate. The project was in serious trouble: unreleasable because they couldn't complete what they'd filmed; unmarketable with a key actor walking out and two leads looking at the exits.

Feige and Marvel's solution: they hired Dario Scardapane to overhaul the show. Scardapane had been a producer (but not the showrunner) on the Netflix PUNISHER series. He had a good relationship with Bernthal, and was authorized to treat Bernthal as a creative partner in writing Frank Castle, which made Bernthal agree to return. They also hired Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson, which placated Cox and D'Onofrio, and enabled the show to resume filming and make use of the original six episodes filmed, albeit with reshoots and reworkings.

Without the overhaul, the six episodes as originally filmed would been an incomplete story, unreleasable, and a medium-sized writeoff for the company.

**

To me, doing DAREDEVIL with Charlie Cox but not Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson is like firing John Rhys-Davies from SLIDERS or doing AIRWOLF without the helicopter or SCREAM without Neve Campbell or COMMUNITY without Dan Harmon or a Venom movie without Spider-Man or serving a hot dog without the bun. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's clearly not, but it's like deliberately breaking your own ankle before a marathon.

Why would you do that? Who would want you to?

*sigh* Haven't had much time lately. Maybe tomorrow.

I don't believe manufacturing in China for US purchasers is sustainable under these tariffs. US firms simply can't buy the parts they need for assembly in the States. I wish this were not the case due to my own financial interests.

**

This Vanity Fair article interviews a number of Biden staffers on why the staff 'hid' Biden's decline, and the upshot seems to be: Biden was capable of doing his job in the White House in terms of making decisions and managing his team and monitoring their work, but he had lost his public performance skills and his full mental acuity and had clearly lost many steps, but the team allowed his day job competence to delude them into thinking he could campaign and debate effectively a gainst Trump.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/j … final-days

I really hope you're right, but I don't know if it'll be that simple. The world never seems as straightforward as the one we describe in our message board posts. Again, note my conflict of interest, and I'm pretty conflicted to begin with.

I normally refuse to watch video essays except for Amanda the Jedi, but I must see this video to which you refer!

Thanks for sharing this podcast. I'm afraid podcasts about dark and serious subjects just aren't for me. Listening in real time is too prolonged for me to process emotionally.

I tend to listen to podcasts when commuting, and commutes are a time where I need to be more meditative, such as listening to Rewatch Podcast dissect HEROES or QUANTUM LEAP.

I prefer to read about politics, whether reading thoughtful analyses of civil rights, deranged rants from crazy people calling anyone a liar for taken Kamala Harris electoral loss as historical fact of public record, mathematical breakdowns of why Trump's tariff scheme is inane, absurd rants about how someone Caucasian feels undervalued in a white-centrist society, interesting assessments of how 2024 was a close and competitive election that Kamala's blandly inept campaign for Uber executives lost, asinine claims that the mere existence of transgender people is a threat to the cisgender male or women in sports, and explorations of how billionaire wealth is what creates inequality.

I can read and choose what to absorb and what to dismiss, but podcasts just linger too long for serious subjects, even if I agree with the podcaster. I guess podcasts are like... my tablet. I never have news or anything serious on my tablet ever.

I mean, all movies are made in a rush. Panic is a part of the process. As for the panic -- this is just a personal opinion that is not borne out by box office, but I have highly enjoyed BLACK WIDOW, SHANG CHI, ETERNALS, SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, DR STRANGE II, THOR IV, BLACK PANTHER II, ANT MAN III, GUARDIANS III, THE MARVELS, DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE, and even BRAVE NEW WORLD was okay.

I recognize that financially, Marvel has struggled, but creatively, I've been very happy with WANDAVISION, LOKI, HAWKEYE, MS. MARVEL, MOON KNIGHT, WHAT IF (Seasons 1 - 2), SHE-HULK and AGATHA ALL ALONG. THE FALCON was mediocre, SECRET INVASION was unwatchable, ECHO was slow and boring, and WHAT IF Season 3 was weak, but overall, the material has really hit home with me.

It's unavoidable to have at least a few mediocrities like the FALCON and ECHO shows and the BRAVE NEW WORLD movie, and an occasional disaster like SECRET INVASION. Looking at all of the movies without fixating on the mediocre and terrible, I feel Marvel is doing great creatively.

That's clearly a minority opinion, and Marvel clearly isn't doing great financially. I am sorry that people haven't enjoyed a lot of these films and TV shows. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm enjoying Marvel as much as ever. Of course, I was ready to declare war on them over BORN AGAIN, but then they rehired Deborah Ann Woll and you know that I will always defend anyone who hires Deborah Ann Woll.

I'm sort of half-watching THE DEFENDERS while doing some design work.

The main problem: THE DEFENDERS is all about the machinations and grand plans of the Hand organization, and the creators clearly have no idea what this organization wants or why it does anything. It seems to me, just from an outside perspective: DAREDEVIL's Season 2 showrunners, Marco Ramirez and Doug Petrie, featured the Hand in their season and made them a mysterious and vague clan of evil ninjas with lots of ominous foreshadowing (references to the "Black Sky," a giant hole in Hell's Kitchen, disturbing resurrections) -- with the belief that someone else down the line would have to be the one to offer some explanations.

The imagery of ninjas and a vaguely Japanese aesthetic were viewed as sufficient definition, except the Hand even as originally created in the 1980s is based in exoticizing Japanese culture and history as ceremonially barbaric.

Then IRON FIST took hold of the Hand storyline, and didn't seem to know what to do with them either, at least not effectively. The Hand were presented as the enemy of Danny's people, of the mystical city of K'un Lun, except Danny seems as much an enemy to K'un Lun as the Hand in stealing the Iron Fist, and we can never see K'un Lun onscreen, so we have no idea why the Hand is opposed to them. The Hand is one mysterious organization defined by their opposition to another mysterious group, the city of K'un Lun. So again, due to the vagueness of K'un Lun, the Hand remained vague in Iron Fist. A distant ninja cult of different factions of unclear goals again.

Then the Hand returned to Ramirez and Petrie for their stewardship of THE DEFENDERS, and Ramirez and Petrie now had to come up with some answers for who the Hand were and what their goals were. Since IRON FIST's Harold Meachum had been ageless and immortal as the result of a deal with the Hand, they decided that the Hand's grand prize was immortality. And since IRON FIST had mentioned dragons a lot, they decided that the prize was acquired through a dragon corpse. They decided that the dragon corpse was holding up New York City and that the city would collapse if it were removed... but these 'answers' only created more issues.

The AVENGERS movie succeeded in convincing audiences that New York City was under threat from aliens thanks to New York City background plates and stock footage showing the metropolis under attack. But THE DEFENDERS never convinces us that Alexandra Weaver and Elektra and Madame Gao and others, wandering around corporate hallways and boardrooms, can actually destroy New York City. There is no visual connection between their conversations and digging and the idea that the NYC skyline will fall. There's no sense of urgency: it's never explained at what point in the ongoing extraction that the city will start sinking. THE DEFENDERS never makes it clear how close or far the city is from the end.

It also seems to me that extracting one dragon body is probably one of the smaller scale enterprises for a centuries old organization like the Hand where their immortal members have not been urgently waiting on fresh dragon corpses.

Looking at another shadowy organization of mysterious goals, the Syndicate on THE X-FILES: despite the common knowledge that its mythology was confused and improvised, I would say that it was coherent on a macro level even if, at the micro level, things got confused. The broad strokes: the aliens are the original inhabitants of Earth who left in the Ice Age, transformed into parasitical viruses that manifest as black oil, infected most sentient life in the universe, are planning to return to Earth to use humans as broodmares and (re)colonize the planet -- all that is pretty clear and an obvious criticism of Americans as colonists who destroyed Indigenous Peoples.

However, broadly, THE X-FILES knew what the Syndicate and the Colonists wanted and what the metaphors were (government corruption, Colonization, a select elite securing their own safety and security while the rest of humanity would be infected by Colonists who would rip apart each human host to birth their offspring). I do not feel Marco Ramirez and Doug Petrie even got the broad strokes worked out for the Hand.

The various rival factions of the Hand are confusing: it's never clear who's with whom. It's not clear why the Hand are so desperate for more immortality when they just spend their days having ponderous conversations. Is Madame Gao's ambition really to just limp around warehouses as hypnotized slaves package heroin? Alexandra's motive is because her immortality is failing, yet there is no panic or desperation in Sigourney Weaver's performance.

Yes, the Hand has no shortage of ninja henchmen and expensive real estate, but what are they doing with any of it? Ripping out dragon bones and incidentally destroying New York City seems like it's on the level of a working brunch for an organization of this scale, not the sum of their ambitions, except to see them onscreen, they seem to have very few ambitions.

What made Colonization on the X-Files compelling: it declared that Americans would soon be on the receiving end, from aliens, what European settlers had inflicted upon Indigenous peoples via the alien colonists.

What metaphor might there have been for the Hand?

To me, Daredevil's defining dialogue is when Fisk beats him into the ground, ranting, "This city doesn't deserve a better tomorrow! It deserves to drown in its own filth!"

Daredevil replies, "This is my city. My family."

So I think -- I would want the Hand to be the opposition of Daredevil's philosophy, where as far as they're concerned, New York City only exists for them as part of their machine. I guess, if we have to stick with the plot: all the industry and pollution (and nuclear waste?) of New York City has been deliberately guided by the Hand over the years to create chemical reactions to make the dragon body more volatile and powerful and, when extracted, it'll create an explosive chain reaction beneath the city.

The Hand leaders find merely walking on the streets of New York City to be intolerable and look forward to how after a few centuries, what was once the city will become a natural landscape. They both look down upon the common people while seeding their self-destruction. The Hand are hastening the reactions and sending their most expendable and devoted to create a pipeline that, upon extraction, will cause an underground collapse.

The Hand also offer the Defenders a deal to comply. Matt is offered the resurrection of his father. Luke is offered evacuation for his social circle in Harlem. Jessica is offered the chance to have her memories of Killgrave erased and to live without grief and pain. Danny is offered the chance to return to K'un Lun, resurrect everyone the Hand killed and rule it on their behalf.

I assume the they're all extremely tempted despite their consciences until Frank Castle shoots down every Hand representative, at which point Matt grudgingly thanks Castle.

MATT: "I was seriously about to cave, Frank."

FRANK: "I know you were, Red. You're only human. You going to have any issue with me taking out half the room?"

MATT: "This is some sort of death and resurrection cult, so... probably fine."

In Season 1 of THE PUNISHER, a traumatized soldier turned bomber publicly threatens Karen Page. Frank Castle goes ballistic. "This piece of shit's going after Karen. Nobody goes after her! Not on my watch! Karen!" He proceeds to intervene, exposing himself after having faked his death, getting shot, nearly getting blown up, also being severely beaten just to rescue Karen and contain the bomber in a walk-in freezer.

His absence in Season 3 of DAREDEVIL where Fisk was gunning for Karen and she was hunted by both assassins and the FBI is bizarre... unless you assume he was slightly off camera, killing ten assassins for each one Karen evaded on camera.

Spoilers

As far as I can tell, Mohan Kapoor was accused of sexual harassment by someone over Twitter. There have been no charges filed. No proof was posted, not even the supposed photos he sent. Anyone can pretend to be anyone on Twitter. Anyone can say anything on Twitter. Just because someone tweets it doesn't mean it's true or that they're who they claim to be. I'm not saying that the accusation is true or that it's false; I'm just saying that 'posted on Twitter' is not 'verified and credible' in itself.

As for Yusuf Khan showing up, I think it made sense! They had a bank robbery story, they needed a civilian ally, and this character was effective.

And from another thread:

I see where this is going. Please do not use AI video generation to create new episodes of SLIDERS.

*shudders*

Wouldn't stop you, begging you not to.

Thank you for sharing this, DarkTempTrez. I'm not on Twitter, but I wish everyone joy of it.

I should note: there's also some continuity confusion in the transition from Season 3 to BORN AGAIN: Fisk in Season 3 was totally defeated and jailed. In HAWKEYE, he's free and an active crime boss again. In ECHO, he's unsteady but still free. I delve more into the continuity here:

https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php … 094#p17094

So, the Punisher in DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN.

Frank's appearance is richly layered, laden with emotion and subtext, with Frank's worldview being an absurd belief in an eye for an eye while yet speaking fundamentally to Matt's grief and struggle to recapture who and what he used to be.

What's absurd: the Punisher's scene is a reshoot. Jon Bernthal was approached by the original producers of BORN AGAIN and he flat out refused. He only returned when the retooling with Dario Scardapane, a former PUNISHER producer, led to Bernthal being re-approached, this time with an offer of creative input as well as a PUNISHER Disney+ special that Bernthal will write.

https://ew.com/jon-bernthal-daredevil-r … e-11698647

Some will often brag about how pleased they are to see people rounded up and imprisoned as illegal immigrants. They don't seem to realize that mass incarceration isn't about safety or stopping criminals. It's about corporations that earn profit from each prisoner added to their headcount.
https://afsc.org/newsroom/ice-signs-mas … new-jersey

Compassion isn't just allowed, it's essential.

Thank you for sharing this.

I totally agree with everything you said. I can see why and how they ended up making the choices that they did, but it's created all the issues you describe. The decision to maintain the Netflix style of vague allusions to superheroes without naming them specifically has left DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN feel like a separate universe that's similar to the MCU but not actually the MCU, like SUPERMAN AND LOIS being adjacent to the Arrowverse.

My suspicion: cameos and such in the films may have been added in reshoots, given Kevin Feige's attitude of shaping film (and TV) narrative in post, with the process of commissioning scripts and teleplays, having production take over completely with no writer involvement, then having post-production and reshoots happen at which point Feige would become more involved.

However, for DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, the post-production/reshoot resources were devoted to revising a lightweight legal drama to be closer to the grimdark Netflix series and to bring in Karen and Foggy while still having them absent for the bulk of the first run of episodes. This may have made it difficult to add more MCU connections... which is probably why it was foolish and absurd to have even attempted a Disnified-Daredevil in the first place given that they had to reshoot it and hammer it back into the Marvel Netflix mold.

I really agree that Anthony Mackie or someone should have been present in WANDAVISION, HAWKEYE, MOON KNIGHT, ECHO, MS. MARVEL, MOON KNIGHT, SECRET INVASION, AGATHA ALL ALONG, ANT-MAN III, THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER, SHANG-CHI, DR. STRANGE II, ECHO and AGATHA, and also present in DAREDEVIL. The shared universe feeling is severely lacking without that.

Speaking as an AGENTS OF SHIELD person, I wouldn't be upset or offended by Agent Phil Coulson showing up and claiming that Tony Stark revived him with the second Snap and making no mention of the LMD from the end of AGENTS OF SHIELD. AGENTS OF SHIELD has been off the air for nearly five years. It's safe to imagine that SHIELD has, in five years, changed from how we last saw it in the series finale.

If Coulson were resurrected with the LMD version not referred to despite AGENTS OF SHIELD, Coulson's return would only offer proof of my personal belief: that Phil Coulson is one of the greatest superheroes of the 21st century, a figure of action and calm who will always return in our darkest hour and he will save us all.

It would demonstrate that Coulson's cool under fire, his steadiness in the face of magic books and Ghost Riders and killer robots and exploding Earths and impending death are significant and essential. Agent Coulson showing up isn't upsetting, it's validating. And I'd find some way to make the continuity work.

In fact, I would have found it very amusing if Coulson showed in in WANDAVISION and explained that Stark resurrected him. Followed by Coulson getting slashed in the chest in HAWKEYE to discover that under his skin is robotic hardware for a Life Model Decoy.

Followed by Coulson determining in MS. MARVEL that he wasn't resurrected and his LMD memories were altered to make him think he was the real Coulson.

Followed by THE MARVELS where Nick Fury explains to Coulson that he was resurrected but the trauma put him in a coma and Fury brought in Dr. Strange to tether Coulson's consciousness to the LMD copy and merged their memories so that Coulson could eventually get his real body back.

Followed by AGATHA where Agatha tells Coulson that magic doesn't work that way and he's obviously a robot whom Nick Fury found more controllable if he thought himself a man. Followed by AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY where Nick Fury tells Coulson that Agatha was messing with him and Nick will never try to 'control' Coulson because Coulson is so self-controlling that it's unnecessary.

Followed by AVENGERS: SECRET WARS where the real Coulson and the LMD meet each other and it's explained that every previous explanation is partially true and Coulson's consciousness has been split and must be recombined.

Or you could just have the real Coulson back in WANDAVISION and a digital comic explaining that the Snap merged the LMD and biological Coulson into one being. That's fine too.

I think it would be fine if Coulson and SHIELD came back and they weren't the same Coulson and SHIELD from the TV show. It's the nature of spies to reinvent themselves for every era, and if some parts of their history aren't acknowledged -- well, throughout history, spies have been honoured and spies have been hanged, but for the most part, spies have been ignored.

DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN is good, but it's struggling with a lot of issues that are not the fault of showrunner Dario Scardapane, but issues nonetheless. Spoilers.

I've watched the first two episodes of DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN and what seems to have happened here: allegedly, the first six episodes were shot with Foggy killed offscreen in some explosion, Karen not mentioned at all, immediately dismissing the Netflix setup and switching to lightweight courtroom drama and goofy superhero comedy, while showing Fisk as Mayor of New York.

Why? What I've heard -- unsubstantiated -- is that Kevin Feige wanted a Charlie Cox series, but he wanted a lightweight and fun adventure, and wanted Daredevil without the angst of the Netflix show or the characters who added to the darkness. In addition, Henson and Woll would have, in returning to the show, been able to negotiate higher salaries that a newer cast couldn't demand.

It's been rumoured that Feige approved this version of the BORN AGAIN series from showrunners Matt Corman and Chris Ord, signed off on it, the first six episodes were filmed, Feige watched them and was horrified at how utterly unreleasable the series was. I'm not clear on what was wrong, but the rumours are that it started with Foggy dying off camera in an explosion and then shifted to non-traumatic courtroom antics.

Feige shuttered it when the writers' strike hit, planned to remount, and the BORN AGAIN series was now further mired in ridicule and mockery. It was already being criticized for not rehiring Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson, for dismissing the previous three seasons, and now it was being mocked for creating a fresh start only to produce something so bad that Feige didn't want to release it. It was a PR quagmire.

Feige hired former PUNISHER producer Dario Scardapane, who declared that Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson had to be rehired, full stop. Supposedly, Feige conceded that rehiring them would reverse the negative publicity surrounding the project and conceded it would have been cheaper to just hire them in the first place.

And in a more concrete area of fact: Feige and Scardapane both noted: due to the budget and production schedule, Marvel was in no position to simply throw out the six episodes filmed without the Karen and Foggy characters. Scenes could be reshot; sequences could be re-edited, but these six episodes with no Karen or Foggy had to be used.

Scardapane proceeded to rehire Deborah and Elden and shoot a new first episode where this time, Foggy dies onscreen instead of off-camera, and this time, Foggy dies in front of a terrified Karen at the hands of Bullseye whom Matt hunts down and beats into the ground and then throws off a four story building, executing him, only for Bullseye to... survive it.

(It is not explained how Bullseye survived being thrown off a four story building by Daredevil, but Season 3 of the Netflix show ended with him receiving a metal alloy being grafted to his skeleton that would make him superhumanly resilient.)

Scardapane then scripted the first episode to have Karen move to San Francisco in grief and frustration with how Matt went silent with her after Foggy's death and wasn't there for here, and when Matt regained his senses and finally reached out, Karen had decided to move, returning briefly only for two scenes to see Bullseye sentenced.

Scardapane's script then rebuilt a new version of the original plot with the Kingpin becoming Mayor of New York City (as opposed to already being mayor), and with the heavy context of (a) the history of the Netflix seasons now specific instead of vague and (b) Matt reeling from Foggy's death even as he's astonished by Fisk's return and rise to power.

This enabled Scardapane to (a) use the six filmed episodes, but reshot in parts and with new scenes added and all re-edited to be adopt a more serious tone and (b) account for how Foggy and Karen weren't in these six episodes, which were filmed without them, and which could not simply be discarded.

Karen will apparently be back once the six episodes are used up, and Foggy is apparently back in Season 2, despite his character being dead as of the Season 1 premiere. It is unclear if Foggy will be back as a regular or as a guest-star in flashbacks.

In the first episode, Karen feels like a token presence, appearing just to be thrown away. But the power of Deborah Ann Woll's performance is palpable. Elden Henson, one scene in a bar and one scene outside a bar, establishes himself as Matt Murdock's emotional tether to humanity and decency without which Matt risks becoming the self-destruction, suicidal force of rage and misanthropy he was in Season 3. The moment he takes a bullet in the chest and dies is the moment Matt Murdock starts to spiral.

When watched without the behind the scenes context, the way Karen and Foggy are dismissed seems tokenistic, having them appear just to get rid of them. When watched with the understanding of how much Dario Scardapane struggled just to get Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson in the show at all, and how he has to wrangle six episodes they're not in that he still has to use -- it's very clear how much Scardapane appreciates these characters.

There are some... continuity issues from poor Dario Scardapane inheriting a confusing setup. Originally, it wasn't really clear if the Netflix show was really in continuity with the MCU beyond rehiring Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio. Scardapane declared that the Netflix show was canon, period. That's splendid, but it creates some difficulties.

In Season 3 of the Netflix show, Fisk confessed to criminal conspiracy and was sent back to jail. He did so because Daredevil threatened to release evidence that Vanessa Fisk had ordered the death of Agent Ray Nadeem, which would send Vanessa to jail even if Fisk stayed free; Daredevil further threatened that should anything happen to Karen Page or Foggy Nelson, Matt would release the footage of Vanessa ordering Nadeem's murder.

In HAWKEYE, Fisk is walking free. It's unclear how he isn't in jail beyond a reference to the Thanos snap in INFINITY WAR. The audience is left to assume that key witnesses or investigators and evidence vanished during the Snap that eliminated 50 percent of all life in the universe, leading to Fisk's freedom, and he was able to ensure he remained that way even after the missing people were restored. It may be that Matt was one of the people erased, and the evidence was lost during his disappearance.

The uneasy truce is referred to in BORN AGAIN: Fisk tells Matt that he had nothing to do with Foggy's death, saying, "I kept my promise." And Fisk promised to stay in jail... unless the Snap led to circumstances where the authorities simply had to release him. Another very real possibility is that Captain America (or someone with his level of authority) freed Fisk because without someone in charge of organized crime, the body count would be higher without Fisk than with him.

I guess we can go with the idea of the Snap causing evidence and witnesses to be lost, but because the Netflix seasons are now definitively in continuity, it's very strange to go from Season 3 where Fisk is in jail to BORN AGAIN where Fisk is winning the New York City mayoral election in a landslide.

Given the lawless world we see, I see no plothole where the Fisk's criminal past is a liability in politics, but his freedom from jail is a peculiar continuity point that is never explained on camera.

BORN AGAIN is much closer in style to the Netflix show than HAWKEYE or SHE-HULK, but it creates another oddity: soon to be Mayor Fisk declares that he is a changed man and that he will not tolerate costumed vigilantes like Daredevil running around the city.

This is a bizarre comment in a world where Captain America, the Winter Soldier, the Hulk, She-Hulk, Hawkeye, Captain Marvel, Kamala Khan, Spider-Man and Thor are running around. Fisk, as mayor, has no jurisdiction over state and federally-backed superheroes, especially ones who work closely with the US Army and SWORD, even if SHIELD is currently a covert operation unknown to the public. Furthermore, any authority Fisk might have to curtail superheroes ceased when, following Endgame, the Sokovia Accords were repealed.

Fisk claiming he won't tolerate superheroes in his city might make sense in a world where Daredevil in Hell's Kitchen is one of the few superheroes around, but it makes little sense in the larger context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One has to assume he's referring to street-level superheroes only, and obviously, Dario Scardapane is mimicking how the Netflix show treated New York City like a little sub-universe where the Avengers are never seen, but now that DAREDEVIL is in a Disney+ show, that disconnect seems... well, disconnected. There is no larger reference to other superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far.

Scardapane also makes an effort to do something unexpected in Matt and Fisk's first faceoff. Despite the massive enmity and hatred between them, Scardapane chooses to depict Matt and Fisk as frenemies rather than bitterly antagonistic. Fisk declares that he is genuinely changed by what happened in ECHO, that he is no longer the Kingpin, and truly seeking to serve his city.

Matt declares that he was raised to believe in redemption, but also in retribution should Fisk's change of heart prove false. This is a very interesting and not invalid turn from their previous savagery and loathing, and it's clear that after many years and Matt's breakdown over Foggy, Matt would welcome Fisk seeking redemption.

However, the seeming (but unsubstantiated) reason for the change: there were six episodes filmed with Fisk already Mayor of New York City with Matt having accepted it and not actively trying to bring Fisk down. When BORN AGAIN had a vague connection to the Netflix series, this might have been tolerable, but the presence of Karen and Foggy would make it bizarre that Matt wouldn't devote himself to destroying Fisk's mayoral term after their history of bloody opposition.

Note that in the Season 1 finale, Fisk savagely beat Matt while screaming, "I wanted to make this city something better than it is. Something beautiful. You took that away from me! You took everything! I'm going to kill you! This city doesn't deserve a better tomorrow. It deserves to drown in its filth! It deserves people like my father! People like you!"

Sardapane could revise and re-edit and shoot some new scenes, but he couldn't completely replace those six filmed episodes, so this enemies-to-frenemies adjustment was to justify why Matt won't kidnap and murder Fisk in a fit of rage during episodes 2 - 7, something Matt would have been angry enough to do in the Netflix show.

The situation is... difficult and Dario Scardapane is really struggling. It's astonishing that BORN AGAIN is tight, focused, emotional, or even coherent, given the circumstances.

In terms of President Lex Luthor: he was pretty effective as president, resolving near-wars and conflicts with diplomacy, cleverness, technology and relentless support for metahumans and the Justice League, with Luthor leading the war effort in OUR WORLDS AT WAR against Imperiex and saving the Earth. (There was some question as to whether or not Luthor had prior knowledge of the attack, and he was cleared by telepathic scan, but it may have been rigged.)

In the end, Lex was defeated not because of his presidential performance -- he was excellent -- but because he couldn't let go of his obsession with Superman, made false claims that Superman was drawing a Kryptonite asteroid to Earth, and then put on a crazy supersuit to attack Superman and a variety of heroes, leading to Superman punching Lex out of the suit and out of the White House with Lex buried in charges of illegal orders and falsifying evidence to declare Superman an enemy of state.

The overall sense was that if Lex had focused on his job instead of his weird hatred for Superman, he probably would have served two terms in adulation instead of not even finishing one and crawling out in infamy.

The world has gotten so crazy that Luthor and Wilson Fisk seem like sensible options as leaders: compared to Trump, they're actually competent. However, we have to consider that they may not actually be better; they may simply hide their sociopathy better.

Lex Luthor is an egotistical narcissist who needs to act out his petty vendettas against anyone whom he feels has ever slighted him whether it's someone at a Smallville bake sale who was a little brusque or Superman himself. Regardless of how long Lex held it together as President of the United States, he would have snapped sooner or later whether in his duties or in his obsession with Superman.

Wilson Fisk is a career criminal who used crime to bolster his sense of weakness and insecurity that came with poverty and being uncultured; he once murdered a man for interrupting a date and making him feel awkward and started a gang war over this slight; he ordered numerous murders when creating his empire including Karen Page; he ordered allies murdered to frame Daredevil; he killed Ben Urich for investigating him; he ensured Agent Ray Nadeem went into debt by eliminating his sister in law's insurance coverage in order to make Nadeem's credit score prevent him from being promoted above Fisk's control; he steered Benjamin Poindexter into sociopathy by getting him fired from the FBI and murdered Poindexter's friend Julie Barnes to keep Poindexter pliable and unstable; he ordered Agent Ray Nadeem's death; he engineered the death of Maya Lopez' father to control her and kidnapped Maya's grandmother.

That's just some of what we know. It's a safe bet he's done more.

Maya's powers clearly affected Fisk's mind in some way at the end of ECHO.

But whether or not Fisk is a changed man, whether or not he's pretending or whether or not he's fooled himself -- it's really irrelevant. We have to assume Fisk will, given enough time, turn on New York City and seek to destroy it, even if he convinces himself that he's serving it. And to prefer him over Trump is not really a moral judgement on anyone. They're both bad. But one is competent.

Episode 2: "Any Day Now"

The sliders arrive in a San Francisco dominated by the colossal, unfinished skeleton of a bridge stretching across the Pacific. This Trans-Pacific Unity Bridge is a 30 year project for a bridge to Asia. The Golden Gate Bridge is abandoned while this incomplete, decades-in-the-making bridge has consumed San Francisco's resources for a generation. Sections of the incomplete bridge keep detaching and collapsing. 

The prevailing cultural attitude is to be persistent and to shame anyone seen to abandon or give up on any pursuit or goal, which makes the sliders feel really weak, worthless and guilty about fleeing their homeworld.

Arturo, while leafing through a pamphlet about the bridge, determines that the bridge project is unworkable and always has been. His rant sees him reluctantly pulled into an anti-bridge fringe group seeking a spokesperson to argue that the bridge is a collective delusion and a waste of time and resources. Quinn, accompanying the Professor, determines the whole bridge project has been a scam since it started and finds the original lead engineer who knew the bridge was hopeless.

Meanwhile, Rembrandt and Wade, wandering the streets, spy a troupe of street singers whom Rembrandt eagerly joins. Rembrandt is engaged to perform at a celebration event for the start of the next construction wave for the bridge. Wade, accompanying Rembrandt through the pre-event setup, sees how people have devastated their livelihoods on business plans and investments in anticipation of the post-bridge economy, yet convince themselves that the completed bridge will cover all their losses.

At the concert, Rembrandt sings a song about lost dreams and moving on, and then the event organizers show a celebration video -- except Wade has replaced it with one provided by Quinn and Arturo where the original bridge engineer reveals that the bridge was never workable and is totally unachievable. The populace react with dismay and grief, and as the sliders leave the concert, they hear about a new project: an under-ocean tunnel from San Francisco to Asia, for which the city has great enthusiasm. The sliders groan and, exasperated, they slide out, having made their own peace with giving up and walking away.

I don't have time to write the full stories, but over time, I'm going to write short summaries for nine more episodes of a season of SLIDERS (2025) with a season finale.

I think, inevitably, the first season ends with the sliders going home to confront their problems, face their fears, address their issues, and they will live to regret it. (Haha!)