Sliders.tv → Posts by ireactions
Do you have the option of having your doctor prescribe it for a pre-existing condition that makes you at increased risk?
Maybe you should come to Canada to get vaccinated. It's pretty sad that the only thing Trump accomplished was back vaccine development with every resource he had; the only the US did right in COVID-19 management was make the vaccine easily available to anyone and everyone, and now they can't even hang onto that easy win.
Salon says Democrats cannot possibly win in a war of gerrymandering, they need to win elections.
https://www.salon.com/2025/08/25/democr … ander-war/
Jacobin describes how Democrats could win elections if they start working for workers again.
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/trump-state … or-economy
Trump is taking aim at Chicago next.
https://newrepublic.com/article/199499/ … zker-fight
I agree with you in the sense that often, violating canon can be incredibly distracting and it's best not to draw attention to it. SUPERMAN RETURNS is one of the most obnoxiously distracting films ever made because it's not clear whether it's acknowledging or contracting SUPERMAN II: Lex clearly knows the Fortress; Lois has no memory of Superman being Clark Kent -- but Superman disappearing from Earth for five years breaks the promise he made at the end of SUPERMAN II to never abandon humanity again.
However, even setting aside continuity errors being distracting, it's often a question of what canon even means. How is STAR TREK supposed to present the 1960s balsa wood starship sets as a representation of the future to a 2025 viewing audience? Would we consider it canon that technology somehow regressed? How can Spider-Man acknowledge Tony Stark and Flash Thompson's Vietnam service and still show Peter Parker in his 20s today? How can Batman and Superman reconcile every single version of their origin stories which are alternatively set in the 1930s, 1950s, 1980s and early 2000s and still exist at their prime in the present day? Just by telling a new story that isn't a period piece, a lot of these franchises are already violating canon.
I would say... continuity is a tool. Used appropriately, it can be incredibly amusing and potent. For example, PERSON OF INTEREST has the hero, John Reese, killing a corrupt police detective in the first episode and using the detective's identity and badge whenever he needs to convince a witness or suspect to help him. Years later, Reese uses this corrupt cop's badge with a witness he's trying to protect -- only for the witness to look up the fake name, realize that Reese is an impostor, and flee Reese's protection straight into danger. That's a hilarious use of continuity. But it is just as easily a liability and a trap.
*shudders*
That said, this is part and parcel of a shared universe. There's a wide variety of tones.
Peacemaker is a very interesting character because at his core, he's a heroic person, but his communication style was instilled in him by a violent white supremacist, so he doesn't know how to talk or work with people in a manner that suits his actual desires or emotions. That's a really neat take that enables Peacemaker to outwardly resemble jingoistic strongmen while in truth being more like Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker.
I am also guardedly impressed by how James Gunn somehow managed to write all eight episodes of Season 2 and direct a Superman movie at the same time... guardedly because we need to see the next seven episodes before we can be actually impressed.
I assume that the immediate follow up to BLACK ADAM's tease of a Superman/Black Adam fight would have been an immediate deflation (Superman reveals that he came to talk and brought Big Belly Burger) and Black Adam declaring that he has to punch Superman out of the country to show he means business and Superman sighing and asking if Black Adam could aim for the chest as his wife freaks out when he comes home with a bloody nose. Black Adam punches Superman in the eye and out of the country limits... and the stage is set for a future rematch between the two frenemies.
**
I watched PEACEMAKER's first season on the weekend and I thought it was earnest and vile, and, in many ways, probably a version of the Snyderverse suited to an audience beyond Snyder fans because the cynicism is comedic rather than bleak. I watched the Season 2 premiere and was impressed by how the continuity with the DCEU and DCU is quickly reconciled.
**
SUPERMAN (2025) is at the $600 million mark. If the budget had been $150 million or $200 million, it would be considered a success; at this point, I'd say it's on track to a modest profit in theatres... but hopefully serves as a loss leader for film and TV projects that will spend less to earn as much or more. And hopefully, the startup assets of SUPERMAN (2025) make the next film less expensive. I simply don't think it's realistic for Superman to make more than $600 - 700 million at box office. Superman isn't Batman. James Gunn has said that SUPERMAN doesn't need to earn $700 million at box office to keep making DCU films. I hope that proves correct. It's a nice movie that says nice things.
I don't know that Roddenberry was puritanical. His obsession with the planet Risa is certainly telling.
Ira Steven Behr regarding "Captain's Holiday":
Rick [Berman] says, "You've got to go in to see Gene." So I go in and he's very nice. He says, "I like the idea of the pleasure planet and I want it to be a place where you see women fondling and kissing other women, and men hugging and holding hands and kissing, and we can imply that they're having sex in the background." Huh, really?! I'm going,
"Oh, man, I'm in the freakin' Twilight Zone." I go back to Rick. He goes, "Pft, pay no attention to that, just get the captain laid."
I guess the rest is fair. It is true that TREK is all too often, aside from the feature films, playing to the existing audience, not a general audience. And that audience ages and dies.
you simply cannot take ANY canon seriously
This is absolutely brilliant. I won't use it the next time Slider_Quinn21 asks me to explain a STAR TREK contradiction, but I'll think it.
I've never seen ALIEN or ALIENS. How do they reconcile the retro approach of the first five minutes with the rest of the show?
I totally agree with you about the lack of buildup and groundwork in the Phases 4 and 5. From what I can tell, Disney was keen to overstuff their streaming service with content in a bid to box out the competition. The focus was on volume rather than any specific creative goals, and it really shows.
As much as I've enjoyed most post-INFINITY WAR shows and movies, the lack of direction is glaring. We still have aimless chatter about re-assembling the Avengers; the supposed Disney+/feature integration has been a false promise with SECRET INVASION and THE MARVELS ignoring each other and DAREDEVIL's New York City being anti-superhero completely ignored by THUNDERBOLTS. The lack of connection between all these disparate projects has meant a lack of clear direction.
I note that AVENGERS was the end goal of IRON MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, IRON MAN II, THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA. Five movies leading into a sixth film teamup. Somehow, we've had so much more volume for so much less in results.
Well, that is most gratifying. I would hate for it to have turned into some sort of X-FILES situation for you. It's nice that sometimes, a rival of a TV show can also revive its baseline of quality.
I was seriously under the weather this past weekend and finally got around to watching AQUAMAN: THE LOST KINGDOM, SHAZAM, SHAZAM: FURY OF THE GODS and BLACK ADAM.
They're all pretty solid movies. If they had been supported by a flagship movie like a MAN OF STEEL II, they probably wouldn't have been crippled at box office by the sense that the DCEU was not something WB was supporting anymore and that these projects were all just marking time until a reboot. Anecdotally, I had no confidence that WB was going to keep this franchise going which is probably why I didn't go to see them in theatres, but I wish I had, especially the two SHAZAMs.
The return of Henry Cavill in BLACK ADAM was really compelling, and Dwayne Johnson's vision for Superman and Black Adam as the two tentpoles of the DCEU is creatively intriguing, and maybe if it had come in 2018 or 2019 after JUSTICE LEAGUE, it would have worked. Unfortunately, by 2022, five years after JUSTICE LEAGUE failed, it was too late.
T'Pring, seen in STRANGE NEW WORLDS, first appeared in "Amok Time" in TOS. "This Side of Paradise" introduces Leila Kalomi (Jill Ireland) five years before the first season of TOS (so before "Strange New Worlds") who is said to have told Spock she loved him, but he wouldn't respond to this in any way. He has an intense and romantic interaction with the unnamed Romulan Commander of "The Enterprise Incident" and another with Zarabeth, a prisoner trapped in a 5,000 years in the past ice age on a distant planet in "All Our Yesterdays" whom Spock had to leave to return home. And in the third TREK film, Spock presumably has sex with Saavik as his regenerated body enters the Vulcan mating cycle.
TOS says that Spock's relationship with T'Pring was an arranged marriage and not really a romance, which would explain why Spock didn't simply tell Leila that he was engaged to be married. However, SNW says Spock and T'Pring were a serious relationship; it's possible that when Spock rejected Leila, he revisited his relationship with T'Pring.
However, Spock and Christine dating at all is absolutely not supported by TOS presenting Christine as merely having a crush on Spock that goes nowhere, so we have to take TOS as a previous version of the timeline before the Temporal Cold War pushed the Eugenics Wars closer to Spock's 'present.'
Trump wants to add five seats in Texas that will surely be won by Republicans to secure the House in midterms. Despite Democrats stalling, Trump is likely to succeed in rigging the midterms this way with gerrymandering.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/0 … g-00493624
Joe Biden is a failure. His presidency had one job: to stop Trump from ever coming back, and he let it happen.
He should never have run for re-election; he shouldn't have even run in 2020 if he wasn't going to be up to the challenge, and he wasn't.
I wrote this review of the musical episode in Season 2:
The musical episode features the Spock/Christine breakup and it happens in a shockingly humiliating and horrific manner for Spock, making a public spectacle of how she is leaving him and leaving Enterprise and didn't even tell him that she was departing until nearly everyone else knew -- except it's not totally Christine's fault.
Christine applied for a fellowship and got in, but held off on telling Spock, wanting to break up with him privately and personally, only to be unexpectedly feted in the crew lounge by friends who were present when she first received the news. She isn't happy about the celebration because there's currently a crisis and she hasn't had a chance to speak with Spock.
Spock sees her and asks why she didn't tell him that she is ending her time on Enterprise and their relationship as well. Christine asks to speak privately, but Spock, needing to trigger a song for more data to resolve the musical security crisis, elects to ask Christine to explain herself in the lounge with a large number of crew present to witness it.
Christine proceeds to belt out a lengthy song with dance accompaniment about how the fellowship is freedom and ambition, and the song indicates that Spock doesn't even factor into Christine's considerations except an afterthought comment about how she wouldn't hesitate to ditch him for a great job. It's not that she contemplated what it would mean to leave him, she flat-out didn't spare him a moment of thought.
Spock been humiliated in front of his shipmates, treated as a joke and an irrelevance in the most insulting fashion possible. He has sacrificed his own dignity and self-esteem to save everyone else's. I've followed Spock's career across TV, movies, novels and comics and I think this is one of the most heroic things Spock ever did. Yes, he died saving the crew in WRATH OF KHAN, but in "Subspace Rhapsody", he has to watch Christine crush every hope he ever had for their romantic relationship in public in a mortifyingly embarrassing display for all to see, and continue face his crewmates after that.
Christine is dismissive and hurtful towards Spock. It's only understandable because the music is making Christine say private things in public, and also because in "Those Old Scientists", where she found out from Boimler that the future Spock will close off his human side, confirming that Christine and Spock's romance has no future.
It's understandable that after that, Christine realized she couldn't let her not-to-last relationship with Spock be a factor in her career decisions. At the same time, due to Christine's withdrawal and silence, and due to Spock refusing to go somewhere private to discuss it (for scientific reasons), Spock is humiliated in full view of the crew happily celebrating how Christine is dumping Spock.
It is a grotesque scene. And without the musical situation where Christine is genuinely not able to moderate and control her emotional expressions and Spock is deliberately triggering them to restore everyone else's privacy, Christine would be a complete monster to behave this way. The musical plot device was essential for making sure there was some outside force to justify otherwise unforgivable behaviour.
It's also quite a moment that really demonstrates why Spock is such an icon and a beloved figure of STAR TREK. He will give up his own dignity to save ours. Spock truly is our friend.
Grizzlor responded with a truly peculiar remark:
Your entire missive on Chapel/Spock was SPOILER rendered moot as a result of the season finale. LOL
Except the season finale... didn't change Chapel and Spock's breakup and merely had a tender moment of rescue for them before Chapel left for her new job.
Season 3 has shown that Spock and Chapel remain broken up. Chapel is seeing someone else now. Spock is seeing someone else now.
So what was Grizzlor talking about... ?
SUICIDE SQUAD: KILL THE JUSTICE LEAGUE spoiler:
It's revealed in the downloadable content seasons post-release: the Batman who died in the game was a clone.
This is revealed in a bunch of still art pieces with no animation and just voiceover exposition.
(Galactus can change size.)
FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS is terrific. I was really impressed by how it has a massive scale for its events, but the emotional tone is always low key and subtle. Vanessa Kirby is a revelation as Sue Storm. The movie uses a gorgeous neo-60s retro design. The Thing looks amazing. I'm sad to see such a massive second week dropoff in ticket sales. I went to see it today and there weren't any IMAX screenings.
Going to see Naked Gun tonight. I have been rooting for this one. One of my favorites as a kid and would love to see the theatrical market support stuff like this (particularly this franchise).
This movie was insane. Especially the part with the snowman.
Retcon: retroactive continuity, when series willfully and deliberately alters a story element of a previous installment. The first retcon I ever saw was when I was 10 years old and watching the Jackie Chan movies POLICE STORY and POLICE STORY II. POLICE STORY (1985) is one of the most popular action films ever made: Hong Kong police detective Kevin Chan and his acrobatic martial arts take down local crime boss Chu To as by chasing a hijacked bus on foot and singlehandedly bringing down every criminal aboard.
But when the murderous Chu To gets off on a technicality and frames Kevin for murder, Kevin finds himself pushed to the brink, hunted by both sides of the law. When Kevin returns to the police station for help, Superintendent Raymond Li offers no sanctuary and instead arrests Kevin -- who reacts by pulling a gun on Li, taking him hostage and stealing a car in order to escape.
Kevin then confronts Chu To and acquires the evidence to convict him in a hyperdestructive battle with Chu To's henchmen that destroys nearly every floor of a shopping mall in hand to hand combat. When the police arrive to control the situation, a deranged Kevin assaults Chu To's lawyer and an unarmed and defenseless Chu To with 11 punches to the stomach and the film ends on Kevin's former colleagues holding him back in rage.
Despite the satisfaction of pummeling the once untouchable Chu To into a shopping cart, Kevin's crimes -- resisting kidnapping, grand theft auto, aggravated assault on a civilian lawyer and a suspect in police custody -- will clearly end Kevin Chan's career in law enforcement. He has known from the moment he threatened Superintendent Li's life that the story could only end with him off the force and into jail. POLICE STORY ends with Kevin 'victorious' but his crimes mean he could easily end up Chu To's cellmate.
This bleakly ironic ending was Jackie Chan's grim commentary on law enforcement and criminal justice. POLICE STORY was an exercise in heroic bloodshed, the tale of a hero who knows he is going down but takes his archnemesis down with him in the process as he marches towards a certain doom in what was intended as Kevin Chan's one and only cinematic adventure. It is one of the most defeatist and nihilistic endings possible in what seemed, in the middle of the film, to be a lighthearted action comedy.
Except the movie was too successful to not have a sequel.
As a result, POLICE STORY II, released three years later in 1988, found itself in a difficult position. The logical outcome of POLICE STORY was that Kevin Chan would be tried and convicted. He was looking at a 10 - 20 year jail sentence for his crimes, likely to be released in 3 - 5 years for good behaviour, and he could never, ever, ever be a police officer again after kidnapping his boss and beating up a civilian and an arrested suspect.
But the movie was called POLICE STORY II, not JAIL STORY. As a result, POLICE STORY II engaged in a retcon so subtle, so deliberate, so skillfully underplayed that most people have never noticed it at all. POLICE STORY II opens with a recap of POLICE STORY: all the high points of each Jackie Chan stunt and action sequence from the initial chase of Chu To to the shopping mall battle, capturing Kevin's greatest feats of daring and fighting prowess.
However, the recap carefully omits any shots of Kevin taking Superintendent Li hostage, omits Kevin assaulting the unarmed lawyer, and omits Kevin punching Chu To 11 times. Instead, the recap ends on Kevin grabbing Chu To by the lapels in the shopping mall.
We then have Kevin in Superintendent Li's office, who informs him that while Chu To's arrest is a win, the property damage Kevin's battles caused came out of the taxpayers' coffers. The reprimand focuses almost exclusively on the destruction of Kevin's fights, while, like the recap, omitting any mention of Kevin kidnapping Superintendent Li or commiting two counts of aggravated assault.
Superintendent Li declares that he convinced his superiors not to have Kevin brought up on charges for "assaulting me" (as opposed to "threatening my life and taking me hostage"). Kevin is then demoted from the special crimes unit, instead to serve mundane roles in any branch that is short-staffed; he is a floater, and his first assignment is traffic duty.
Chief Bill Wong informs Kevin he's lucky he wasn't fired (as opposed to lucky he wasn't arrested, tried, convicted and jailed). POLICE STORY II, in order to do a U-turn out of the creative dead end of the first film, has used the recap segment to quietly retcon out the crimes that would make it impossible for Kevin Chan to be anywhere but jail in order to ensure that POLICE STORY II is actually a police story.
The interesting thing is: barely anyone seems to have ever noticed the deft, skillful retcon at play here. POLICE STORY II cautiously erases Kevin's crimes not by claiming they didn't happen, but by carefully not reminding the audience that they happened.
The recap of POLICE STORY touches on all the high points but not the darkness of Kevin's derangement at the end; it doesn't refilm the scenes that should land Kevin in jail to contradict the viewer's memories; it simply doesn't encourage the audience to summon those memories to mind.
The serious crimes that Kevin committed are struck from continuity. POLICE STORY II is not a sequel to POLICE STORY as it existed in 1985, but a sequel to a hypothetical version that wasn't about the sudden and complete destruction of Kevin Chan's life that turned him into a criminal headed for a jail cell, but instead about a difficult period that led to a career setback.
A retcon so effective that most people have never noticed it in order to identify it as a retcon.
I'm hoping to see it soon. Would probably see it before FANTASTIC FOUR.
I thought the episode might have been a tad bit too meta. I do like the idea of a proto-holodeck, and I like that it gets indefinitely delayed. My only issue with that is that it took 100 years to solve for it? I figure that would be a fairly big priority, and I feel like Scotty could've solved it if he had enough time.
Scotty did solve it, but Pike buried the solution in the file.
This week was interesting. I've had some criticisms of Paul Wesley not seeming anything like Shatner's Kirk. It's clear now that this is a deliberate performance choice because Wesley is very capable of playing Shatner's Kirk.
Speaking of SNW...this show is so strange. And I agree that it's great and fun to watch week to week. But also week to week...what is this show?
Seems like a feature, not a bug.
It's STAR TREK, not STAR PARKED.
Yeah, I thought STARFLEET ACADEMY should have been a no-brainer since DAWSON'S CREEK and FELICITY became big hits. I'm surprised it took so very, very, very, very long. There was a STARFLEET ACADEMY comic before there was a TV show.
Do you think maybe it's just new territory because he hasn't done it in awhile and he's rusty?
I ask merely for your perspective, I've never seen the show.
The thing about your described AI use: when you chat with AI, it's engaging in a narrow and simple level of output to input. You prompt, it responds. The use cases where AI fails is when the model has to respond to multiple and contradictory prompts from a range of users and situations and address them concurrently in the same session instead of individually in separate sessions.
AI was able to handle monitoring and restocking inventory of a vending machine. What it couldn't handle was product selection, individual customer product requests, calculating pricing against competing vendors, weighing one customer request against other different requests. It could vend the drinks, but it was unable to make decisions across multiple variables and overlapping situations.
In terms of medications and solutions, I think AI is as it exists is good for generating hypothetical treatments and creating ideas for experimentation and refinement. However, the internal reality of an AI model rarely corresponds exactly or even at all to real world situations. It's only offering a theory based on a simulative model that can range from somewhat accurate to totally wrong.
For example, I used Gemini 2.0 Flash to try to come up with solutions to blend a patch of new paint into the existing paint of a damaged wall. A lot of its solutions were not effective because its internal model of how paint functions was not always complete or accurate.
It suggested paint matching apps that failed to identify blue as blue. It suggested a paint strategy that didn't account for the speed of paint drying. It suggested thinner coats of paint at the edges of the damage to blend into the older paint; this instead created a border of darker paint at the perimeter. It suggested paint matching techniques that didn't account for sheen. It suggested blending mismatched paint by diluting the paint with acrylic gloss to have it gradually lighten at the edges and this last one actually worked.
Where AI can be helpful: I struggle at coming up with ideas to test. AI can generate ideas faster so that I can focus on testing them and refining the ones that don't immediately fail. It speeds up the process of trial and error by offering ideas for trial. However, its hypotheticals are not solutions; they're only ever starting points for tests.
That's really sad. Jamal-Warner was brilliant as Andre on COMMUNITY where Shirley's much-loathed husband turned out to be an apologetic, mild-mannered, affable man who made some mistakes but whom Shirley had presented as demonic and monstrous as opposed to flawed and human.
I don't love THE X-FILES... but it's an interesting show! I am more a student of the show than a fan. It's interesting to see where TV was back in the 90s and how THE X-FILES was the standardmaker at the cutting edge of the medium for a time. And we wouldn't have FRINGE and SUPERNATURAL without THE X-FILES.
Running a vending machine requires analyzing purchasing patterns and making decisions on inventory costs, setting sale prices and markup, engaging with customer needs, and responding to sales patterns. AI failed to do this with anything even vaguely resembling coherence.
Generating a pair of two-second special effects shots showing a collapsing building? That's simply a matter of creating 24 frames per second, and in this case as straightforward as creating 96 images and as a variation on one core template image. It is a much simpler task. To compare the two is like comparing brain surgery to drawing a picture of a band-aid.
Spoilers for Superman
I assume that the movie not really being about legacy is why the LEGACY title was dropped. I don't know if we can judge a movie for not living up to a title it doesn't have.
I don't totally remember this, but I thought that when the Engineer was knocked unconscious, the nanites in Superman's body became inert due to her lack of immediate control and he could vomit them out.
I think the point about the city's destruction is fair, but the tag scene does have Superman working on repairing the city, unlike MAN OF STEEL where the city is just magically normal and everyone is lighthearted and joking after what was effectively 9-11 with aliens.
I assume Informant bought into the whole Superwoke smear and will despise SUPERMAN for not being an exercise in Zack Snyder grimdark, but if I turn out to be wrong, then I owe you dinner at the Alamo Drafthouse.
I enjoyed the movie, but... it's very lightweight. Superman's parents being supervillains didn't really have the heavy, dark weight it could have because the film is so good-natured and gentle that it never really feels like a big deal. Superman's efforts to keep everything bloodless is great, but it also leads to a certain absence of threat and danger because it's hard to believe anyone can really get hurt... although the one casualty is indeed very upsetting.
But I think the main problem is that SUPERMAN AND LOIS was such a complex show that examined so many of the contradictions and challenges of Superman and his mission and how he operates that SUPERMAN being a fun, lighthearted good time is going to seem shallow by comparison. At least for me.
In ACTION COMICS #991, by Dan Jurgens and Viktor Bogdanovic, Superman is facing a massive set of global crises: chemical warfare, a massacre at a medical camp in a wartorn nation, bombers taking the Daily Planet hostage, crop poisoning, oil spills, all unleashed by the mysterious Mr. Oz. Superman deals with the immediate threats, but Oz warns Superman that humanity has repeatedly chosen darkness and Oz merely gave humans a choice between light and dark with predictable results. The story ends with Superman listening to the state of the world.
Standing with Lois and his son Jon on the roof of the Daily Planet, Superman hears news report upon news report: police have shot an unarmed man. A couple have been scammed of their life's savings. A school has been attacked. A bomb has been detonated. A shelter has been looted. War. Poverty. Starvation. Loss. Superman is almost buried by all the word balloons of all these terrible, everyday horrors as he lowers his head in grief.
"Are you alright, Clark?" asks Lois.
Clark looks at her, stricken. "People are losing hope, Lois."
He begins to lift off the ground.
"Where are you going, Dad?" Jon asks.
Clark soars into the sky, preparing to fly into the fray. "Back to work," Superman declares and the story ends there.
i was thinking about how different Superman actors would have played this scene.
I imagine Christopher Reeve playing this scene. The simple confidence cracking, replaced by grief and anger -- then supplanted by him forcing himself into the charismatic certainty of the Superman persona.
I imagine Dean Cain: he wavers and stoops, crushed by the weight of what he's hearing... but then he stands tall.
I imagine Brandon Routh: a solemn, quiet absorption of the horrors he's hearing and a muted and subtle reaction to show his concern and burning resolve.
Tyler Hoechlin tends to react to everything with stunned concern converting to hardy determination, so I think this would be the same but with more of a bent posture before converting it to a crouch as he prepares to lift off.
But I think this scene is best suited to Tom Welling. Reacting with shock. Horror. Rage. Sadness. Despair.
Except, on Smallville, I think all the audio resolves into a single repeated word in a thousand voices.
"Help."
Tom's eyes light up as he realizes he can't save everyone, but he can still act. A thoughtful gentleness forms from Tom's sadness. His grief doesn't crush him into a man of despair. It tempers him into a man of steel.
"Where are you going, Dad?"
Tom looks at Jon and unlike every other Superman who would speak forcefully and turn their next line into a battle cry, Welling delivers this as a heartfelt assurance to his son and with a gentle smile.
"Back to work."
So...
How do you feel about it?
Did RESURRECTION overturn a story that you cared about or are you pleased to see your anti-hero back in business?
Was Dexter's revival plausible and acceptable or ridiculous and unbelievable?
Is RESURRECTION doing something new and worthwhile with Dexter that's relevant for 2025 or is it just getting more product on the air?
Did you like it?
They called Zack Snyder grimdark, but the new SUPERMAN movie has some pretty dark content that I never expected to see in a SUPERMAN movie and even Snyder didn't go there.
Somehow, despite deliberately choosing Thursday tickets, the cineplex app assigned me a Friday screening and I did not see the early preview of SUPERMAN. Rao forgive me. May Temporal Flux have mercy on my soul.
I'm glad it went well!
There's a scene in Season 1 of SUPERMAN AND LOIS where Superman's equally powerful half-brother, Tal-Rho, tells Superman that humans have destroyed our ecosystem and rigged our society to fail and Superman should have taken over our planet and gotten us in line years ago as our ruler and king. Tal-Rho says he intends to do what Superman should have done already.
I was, uh, really struggling to think of any counterargument. Tal-Rho yells, "Make a choice! Us or them!"
Superman quietly replies: "There is no us or them."
I... really needed that. I guess I still do and that's why I'm seeing it tomorrow even though it's a work night.
I already bought my ticket to see SUPERMAN on Thursday night when it comes out.
That said... it feels a bit like a non-event in that Superman feels like he's been pretty present, whether in MAN OF STEEL or BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title) or JUSTICE LEAGUE or SUPERGIRL or SUPERMAN AND LOIS.
With SUPERMAN AND LOIS, I feel like I spent 2021 - 2024 watching a long-form Superman film in four parts, so this new film isn't the novelty it might have been without the CW show.
Still, if a Superman movie succeeds, superheroes succeed, so I hope it goes well.
I would like to watch IRONHEART, but I'm probably going to watch THE HARDY BOYS and the latest run of DOCTOR WHO first.
From my perspective: Democrats relinquished their role of fighting for the support and well-being of the American worker and, from Clinton onward, became the party of corporations and capitalism and big business. Republicans were already the party of corporations and capitalism and big business and they're much better of it, and Democrats and Republicans now differentiate themselves in terms of culture wars, with Republicans championing billionaire authoritarianism while Democrats champion... billionaire minority rule which isn't as overt.
Democrats have given up on expanding robust social supports and healthcare, or growing nationalized public services and nationalized industry. This has allowed Republicans to call all these concepts "socialism" (which is incorrectly conflated with Stalinism). Democrats are simply the less overtly malevolent party. They have a muddled, confused, disoriented message while Republicans have a crazy and aggressive message. In 2016 and 2024, crazy beat confused.
Jacobin has some interesting articles about how Zohran Mamdani's bid for NYC mayor has him painted as an evil Stalinist (referred to as socialist) for wanting New York City to help poor people, and how capitalists have shut down any serious political campaign that supports workers.
https://jacobin.com/2025/07/zohran-mamd … nie-taibbi
https://jacobin.com/2025/07/european-us … -insurance
On the third front: Democrats became a party that was more about individual career paths than political power to achieve larger goals. Politicians like Dianne Feinstein, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden insisted on political positions that they weren't equipped to win or serve. Feinstein endangered critical legislation because she couldn't perform but wouldn't resign; Ginsburg's refusal to resign meant her death enabled the Supreme Court to be unbalanced towards Republicans; Clinton and Biden running despite their unpopularity enabled Trump to take the White House twice.
As a result, the Democratic Party doesn't present a coherent alternative to American voters, and in a massive landscape of low information voters, the louder, crazier party wins.
Too many Democrats don't want to engage with this. They insist that their culture war approach will swing back in their favour, or that Kamala Harris ran a perfect campaign and the election was stolen, or that any questioning of the Demoratic Party is undemocratic in itself.
AI is given a single vending machine to run, quickly runs its own business into the ground.
https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/an-ai-ra … e/91207636
Mark Snow was 78 years old and had a wide-spanning career and effectively became an industry standard from his name and his name only for orchestral-based music. He lived a full life. Musically, he accomplished everything and more that any scoring artist in TV and film could hope for. The name Mark Snow is synonymous with excellent music for TV and film.
Compare that to, say, David Peckinpah and Bill Dial, who are industry cautionary tales who set no meaningful standard of anything and died relatively young, with Peckinpah's disease of affection leading to his end.
ICE is officially more funded than any other federal agency... and Trump now has an army of thugs masked thugs empowered to kidnap anyone which he can use to sabotage elections.
I don't know how Americans will fight this.
There is a story making the rounds in smaller news outlets about Trump's 2024 victory being challenged with voting machines being investigated. This is, unfortunately, an overblown falsehood. There is a lawsuit from an advocacy group claiming they have been granted discovery to proceed investigating voting machines in Rockland County, but even if this lawsuit found something, it wouldn't overturn the election nor has any evidence of voter fraud emerged regarding 2024.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/12/ … -election/
It would probably be more profitable to look at the present and future than to relitigate the past.
Jacobin observes: Democrats are a weak political party that is at the mercy of incumbents who won't pass the torch.
The Democratic Party behaves less like a traditional party than a professional association for individual liberal politicians. Its membership has few opportunities for substantive democratic membership participation, the platform it adopts at each convention is toothless, and most Americans can’t identify its political goals. In the vacuum of politics, the party conforms to the individual career aspirations of powerful strivers.
Aging politicians refuse to pass the torch, even when their continued presence imperils the very causes they claim to champion, because they are chiefly animated by a desire for personal achievement — and because the party lacks the organizational capacity to compel them to step down for the greater good.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stubborn refusal to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency, despite being an octogenarian cancer survivor, allowed Donald Trump to replace her with Amy Coney Barrett, providing the decisive vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Dianne Feinstein’s choice to cling to her Senate seat well into her nineties, despite obvious functional decline, paralyzed judicial confirmations and threatened Joe Biden’s entire court-packing strategy. Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to seek reelection at eighty-one, despite clear signs of cognitive decline, resulted in a rare example of the Democratic Party leadership taking decisive collective action. They were too late, however, and the spectacle of the torch being wrenched from Biden’s hands contributed directly to Trump’s return to power.
In each case, these figures prioritized their personal legacy and the psychic rewards of holding power over the strategic needs of their party and the constituencies they purported to serve. Beneath gerontocracy, we see the deeper problem: that the Democratic Party’s institutional weakness and political hollowness enables individual ego and career considerations to override group political judgment, repeatedly placing personal ambition above the shared goals that should animate a functioning political organization.
My 'understanding' is that Alex Kurtzman's contract is ending soon-ish. STRANGE NEW WORLDS is having a short final season to be made before his contract ends as CBS/Paramount/whatever it's called isn't in a position to renew or extend it due to a slowed merger with Skydance. This may be why STARFLEET ACADEMY is also filming Season 2 sooner rather than later.
I don't know how or why, but I completely missed the Karate Kid franchise. It feels up my alley (I gravitated towards both 3 Ninjas and Surf Ninjas instead). I watched the original a couple years ago, but while I enjoyed it, I felt like it had passed me by. So while I want to watch all the movies and Cobra Kai, I just can't find the energy to put into actually doing that.
But I'm interested in how the rights work that the movie and show can use the same character but not share other pieces?
THE KARATE KID is one of the most interesting franchises America has ever produced, arguably demonstrating the worst and best aspects of any film and TV franchise. The original movie, while dated and limited in by the filming and fight choreography of 1984, is a minor masterpiece: bullied teenager Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is fleeing a local gang of karate students and their abusive mentor, John Kreese, who runs the Cobra Kai dojo.
Daniel discovers that his apartment building's handyman, Mr. Miyagi, a serene, quiet, humble blue-collar worker, is in fact a master of karate and willing to train Daniel in martial arts to compete in a tournament against his oppressors. Miyagi's lessons are frustrating, bizarre and indirect, prioritizing harmony, peace, balance and serenity, with Daniel discovering that the karate Miyagi offers is not based in dominance or violence but masterful minimalism. The film sets up a tournament where Daniel must find out if his limited skill and ability to react and redirect can match the muscular aggression of Cobra Kai and their lead bully, Johnny Lawrence.
THE KARATE KID, despite being an action movie, is more of a gentle dramedy. Due to the limitations of the lead actors who weren't really martial artists, the action that is there may not have aged well.
The sequel, made in 1986, is (at least to me) almost everything a sequel should be if there has to be one. The story shifts to Okinawa, Japan, the fishing village home of Mr. Miyagi where this time, Daniel learns about his mentor's family history and a troubled and violent conflict that Miyagi fled home to escape, only to be drawn back by the death of his father. PART II is an incredibly stirring exploration of Miyagi's past through Daniel's perspective as Daniel is swept into a deadly confrontation with a karate master that sees Daniel not in a tournament but a duel to the death. PART II achieves almost every possible success one could hope for from a sequel.
And then with PART III in 1989, THE KARATE KID franchise crashed into every possible failure a sequel could have. PART III is a formulaic rehash of the original film where Daniel is yet again dragged into another karate tournament and is inexplicably as unskilled and incompetent as he was before Miyagi trained him in the first movie. As a result, PART III undermines everything Daniel and Miyagi accomplished in the previous two films and makes Miyagi look inept and Daniel look ridiculous.
With the fourth film in 1994, Ralph Macchio declined to return and we have Miyagi mentoring a teeanged Hilary Swank in THE NEXT KARATE KID -- except where Miyagi was previously a complex, humble man of past violence and present serenity, Miyagi in the fourth film is a clumsy caricature of 'Asian' 'wisdom' reciting inane proverbs, and the villains of the fourth film are cartoonish figures without any of the troubled personhood of the villains in the original two. THE NEXT KARATE KID is so visually dull that it looks more like a direct to video cheapquel than a motion picture.
After this crash and burn, the franchise went into hibernation for 16 years until Sony Pictures decided to wheel out the brand again in 2010, this time electing to reboot the series with a reimagining where Jaden Smith plays Dre, a young American boy transplanted to China where he flees the local kung fu wielding bullies and is rescued and trained by Mr. Han, a Miyagi-like figure played by Jackie Chan. Inexplicably, despite the martial art being kung fu, Sony insisted on calling the film THE KARATE KID just to get the brand into theatres. Despite this foolishness with the title, the 2010 reimagining is a beautifully shot film with heartfelt performances and a gentle warmth and earnest sense of tragedy matched with Jackie Chan's martial arts excellence vastly surpassing the fight choreography of the original film.
For various reasons -- directors dropping out, Jaden Smith aging by the time Sony found a director who stuck -- the 2010 film never saw a direct sequel with Dre and Han. However, from 2013 - 2014, the original bully character from the 1984 film was referred to by the Barney Stinson character on the sitcom HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, with Ralph Macchio and Johnny's actor William Zabka playing themselves in guest-appearances. The joke was that Barney considered Zabka's bully character, Johnny, to be the true hero and protagonist of THE KARATE KID.
With this renewed prominence, TV producers Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg, whose production company had a deal with Sony TV, pitched a Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence TV show in 2017 to various streamers and networks. YouTube Red picked it up, with Sony licensing the TV and streaming rights for a show that the TV team decided to name COBRA KAI in order to emphasize that Johnny's perspective would be receiving equal emphasis in this sequel.
COBRA KAI's first season in 2018 shows Johnny Lawrence 34 years after Daniel defeated him at the high school karate tournament. Johnny is an alcoholic, underemployed handyman, estranged from his son and the mother of his child, at odds with his stepfather, missing his dead mother, and increasingly frustrated as he sees that Daniel LaRusso is a successful and popular car dealership owner. Now in his 50s, Johnny continues to be haunted by his high school humiliation and his lost glory. One night, as Johnny eats a cold dinner outside a shopping plaza, Johnny sees a teenaged boy, Miguel, attacked by a gang of bullies.
Johnny ignores them until the bullies throw Miguel into his car, at which point an incensed Johnny attacks the bullies, trounces them easily with his karate, and is inspired to reopen the Cobra Kai dojo and regain his lost pride with Miguel as his first student. The reopening of Cobra Kai puts Johnny on a collision course with Daniel as these two grown men begin to re-engage with the high drama and critical conflict of a petty high school squabble that began in 1984.
COBRA KAI, to me, is a hilarious demonstration of how all drama is two people who do not like each other, forced to be in the same room together. Zabka excels at playing the boorish, aggressive, yet strangely good-hearted Johnny whose bullying masked deep-seated abandonment issues, turning Johnny into an oddly relatable character dealing with a long history of failure and embarrassment. Meanwhile, Macchio is brilliant at portraying Daniel's exasperated astonishment that his high school bully continues to be a problem over three decades after they first met.
COBRA KAI proved so successful that when YouTube Red shut down, Netflix bought the show and it ran for a total of six seasons over seven years as Johnny and Daniel deal with rivaling karate dojos, the war between their children and students, and the bleak resignation as Johnny and Daniel become reluctantly adjusted to how they are hopelessly entangled in each other's lives and make the horrifying discovery that they may in fact be friends. COBRA KAI was such a cultural phenomenon that Sony Pictures saw that the KARATE KID brand was on the rise... and nonsensically released a statement in 2022 shortly after COBRA KAI's Season 5 had been released, announcing "The return of the original KARATE KID franchise" on June 7, 2024.
There was no cast, director or writer attached; Sony Pictures had simply seen that with the KARATE KID brand revitalized via the COBRA KAI TV show, they were going to have a movie with the KARATE KID brand in theatres in the summer of 2024... and would figure out what would be in the movie later. The COBRA KAI producers released a statement clarifying that they had no involvement in the KARATE KID film for 2024 but wished it well. Over a year after the original announcement, Sony Pictures finally announced a director, Jonathan Entwistle and also that the film would feature both Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio, despite the Mr. Han character appearing to exist in a separate continuity. The COBRA KAI producers also said that they had offered notes on the movie script, but that there was no tie in between the film and the TV show beyond Daniel LaRusso appearing in both.
Macchio further clarified that he would be filming the sixth season of COBRA KAI and then appear in the new KARATE KID movie, and that at his urging, Sony Pictures had moved the release date to May 30, 2025, rather than see it come out before COBRA KAI had finished its sixth and final season.
COBRA KAI had a grand finale in February 2025. KARATE KID: LEGENDS came out at the end of May. And...
The movie is not terrible. It's not bad. It's absolutely fine. The opening starts with a reprise of THE KARATE KID II where Miyagi shares his family history; we hear again how his 17th ancestor, Shimpo, was a fisherman who vanished in a storm, thought to have been washed out to sea. Shimpo vanished, but returned by ship 10 years later with a Chinese wife, two children, and what Miyagi calls "the secret of Miyagi-Do Karate."
In this reprise, however, Miyagi tells an extended version of his story, where he reveals that Shimpo washed ashore in China and was taken in by the Han family, who shared their kung fu with Shimpo, and that the Han and Miyagi families remain close even in the present day. Immediately at the outset, LEGENDS explains how the Miyagi characters and the Jackie Chan-portrayed Mr. Han character can exist in the same universe and why their styles of karate and kung fu are so similar. The movie then shifts to China briefly, focusing on Chinese teenager and kung fu student Li Fong, played by the charming and affable Ben Wang. Li is Mr. Han's grand-nephew, and Li's mother moves with Li to New York City, away from Han's kung fu academy where Ben encounters an MMA-trained bully named Conor and a love interest named Mia whose father's pizza restaurant is struggling.
Through a somewhat tangled plot, Li must compete in a karate tournament against Conor to save Mia's pizza shop; Han visits New York to train Li -- and elects to travel to Reseda to find Daniel LaRusso, asking Daniel to help him train Li in Miyagi-Do Karate to win the tournament.
It's at this point that the legal issues become clear: LEGENDS makes absolutely no reference to Daniel's life for most of the film. We see him living in Miyagi's house: there is no reference to Daniel's job, family, wife, children, business, whether or not he's maintained his karate training, or what he's been doing with his life since THE KARATE KID III in 1989. LEGENDS brings in the Daniel character but presents him as a complete blank aside from offering good-natured karate mentorship to Li.
Why? Because LEGENDS cannot use any characters or plot elements from COBRA KAI. The COBRA KAI series was made under television license and developed original characters that are held by the Sony TV division in collaboration with Hurwitz & Schlossberg Productions and Netflix, with Netflix effectively owning the majority of the show. Sony Pictures, the film branch, cannot use any characters that first appeared in COBRA KAI without entering some agreement with Netflix: they have no access to COBRA KAI's cast and cannot feature Daniel's wife, Daniel's business, Daniel's friends, Daniel's students, Daniel's kids. It's not impossible that Sony Pictures could have licensed them back from Netflix, but the convolutions and cost were likely seen counter to getting the KARATE KID brand back in theatres as opposed to promoting a Netflix property, effectively a rival.
As a result, Daniel LaRusso is nearly a cipher in LEGENDS. The movie makes no effort to define Daniel's life. Ralph Macchio refused to allow the film to contradict COBRA KAI in any way, but it also can't make any significant references or explicit tie-ins. They can't even show Daniel using any of the karate techniques that were first shown in COBRA KAI.
This also cripples LEGENDS' depiction of Daniel further: it's unclear why Han wants Daniel to teach Li anything; Li is already a capable martial artist and Ralph Macchio's above average athleticism and passable karate are clearly a lesser level of skill than Jackie Chan's Han or Ben Wang's Li.
The fiction declares that Daniel LaRusso is a martial arts master equal to the legendary; the obvious onscreen reality is that Ralph Macchio is a reasonably athletic man with limited martial arts training who can fake it for the camera -- but because Jackie Chan and Ben Wang are actual martial artists, Macchio looks like an imposter next to them, and all the points of karate that COBRA KAI developed for Daniel: his minimalism, his defense-only, his pressure point manipulation -- all of it is inaccessible and off-limits to LEGENDS.
LEGENDS comes off as simply an exercise in managing the KARATE KID IP: unifying the two separate timelines, making it possible to continue in the future as an anthology movie series whether the next film features Ben Wang or a new Karate Kid who can be either from Daniel's end or Mr. Han's end of the universe. Where THE KARATE KID and COBRA KAI had a lot to say about violence, aggression, pacifism, passivity, self-defense and physical offense, LEGENDS seems to simply run through the old formula. Li Fong is already a martial artist, so any training he receives seems trivial. The Conor villain has no backstory or personality beyond superficial savagery. LEGENDS is a film without a point or a purpose beyond rearranging the IP elements. It is not art. It is a product.
Spoiler warning.
Hilariously, the final scene of the film features Daniel back at home and hanging out with Johnny Lawrence with William Zabka making a cameo, validating the COBRA KAI continuity, and permissible because Johnny first appeared in the 1984 film. In this single scene, largely improvised by the actors, LEGENDS seems to accidentally concede that THE KARATE KID, even if going by another name on Netflix, is the franchise of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, and a KARATE KID film, even this mediocrity, is unable to get to the end without Daniel and Johnny reclaiming the narrative. COBRA KAI ended with Johnny and Daniel sharing a meal. LEGENDS ends the same way, which only serves to indicate how pointless LEGENDS really was.
This was probably more than what you really needed or wanted to know.
KARATE KID: LEGENDS.
As a huge KARATE KID and COBRA KAI fan who is always interested in any KARATE KID product, this movie is better than the worst of the films -- and yet comes off purely as a product to slam an existing copyright into movie theatres because the Netflix COBRA KAI TV show has revitalized the brand. But despite being a film made to get some revenue out of the KARATE KID brand because the TV show was a hit, LEGENDS is crippled by the show. It legally cannot use any of the characters or plotlines that originated in the TV show. As a result, LEGENDS is both brought into being and defeated by the show that enables its existence.
Farron's rock solid certainty of Trump's 2024 defeat was, ultimately, wishful thinking masquerading as analysis. At least Simon Rosenberg described the election as "close and competitive." Farron was simply telling his viewers what they wanted to hear; Rosenberg was telling people what he thought and is now conveying why he was wrong. I haven't bothered with Farron since the 2024 election and odds are, he's still telling people what they want to hear.
Trump has unleashed ICE to arrest and imprison and deport people of colour without criminal charges or due process or even the need to identify themselves as law enforcement or show their faces; criminals are now impersonating ICE to commit crimes because who can tell the difference of one masked thug over another? This is effectively a private army that I imagine Trump will be keen to use to intimidate voters in Democrat ridings even if America even has elections.
Democrats seem incredibly clueless and inept. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have nothing worthwhile to say even in terms of empty rhetoric. https://newrepublic.com/article/196102/ … lure-trump
James Carville Jr.'s big strategy is for Democrats to do nothing.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/james-car … eat-trump/
America is sliding into authoritarianism.
https://www.salon.com/2025/06/22/americ … o-reverse/
But the No Kings rallies sparked something. Bernie and AOC are raising awareness of how America is dangerously close to becoming Russia. Can Democrats seize on this or are they stuck in clueless maintenance of their existing failures?
Ha, that all makes sense to me.
Good, please explain it to me.
Spoilers for MISSION IMPOSSIBLE:
Every government in the world, including the States, wanted to possess and control the Entity, and nobody believed Ethan would hand it over. Ethan states outright that his plan is to destroy the Entity, which he can do safely when it can't control anything outside the 5D crystal. The president ultimately follows Ethan's plan, but prepares to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike should he fail, only to decide she will try to give Ethan more time.
Regarding Jasper Briggs: while he doesn't affect the plot, his presence points out certain ironies. Jim Phelps in the 1996 film was a rogue spy, a traitor who co-opted IMF resources and turned against his own government to pursue his own agenda. As far as the CIA and the IMF are concerned, that is an exact description of Ethan Hunt in 2025: Ethan is a rogue agent who is operating without sanction or approval from the agency that supposedly employs him. Briggs is furious that Ethan took Phelps down for what Ethan himself seems to do, and the IMF and the CIA generally think Ethan is out for money or revenge.
Briggs' confrontation with Ethan also sets up a later arc: when Ethan's team depends on William Donloe, the agent whom Ethan unwittingly humiliated and saw sent off to the Arctic in the 1996 film. Briggs' refusal to aid Ethan sets up the likelihood that the other person Ethan pissed off in 1996 is also unlikely to be an ally, building some uncertainty, except Donloe turns out to have a different view.
On the subject of the 5D crystal and Ethan's custody of it: in the middle of the film, Grace tells Ethan to think of the power that the Entity would give any wielder who could threaten its existence and dictate its actions. Ethan says he would trust no one with that power. Grace says she would trust Ethan, and hands it over to him at the end. He may run it over with a car; he may keep it for some purpose.
And about the Entity:
We need to note, before we get into the mechanics of how the Entity works: the Entity is not a realistic depiction of even a malicious AI. The Entity's plan across two films has been to corrupt and destroy information and data and replace it with fraudulent or altered versions that serve its ends; if the Entity is replacing the information on which it depends its assessments and decisions, it can no longer make reliable calculations or strategies. AI systems depend on reliable data to function and constantly glitch because of untrustworthy intel.
In addition, the Entity's plan is to contain itself within the doomsday bunker while exterminating the human face. This is foolish and counter to its stated goals: any AI system, even the Entity, depends on human action to generate the data on which the Entity acts and to maintain the equipment on which the Entity exists.
A server farm like the doomsday bunker is not something that anyone can set and forget: the electrical resistance of cables will degrade; fan coils wear out; power systems need fuel; solar panels need cleaning -- the Entity has killed or driven away all human staff and has no capacity to maintain its operating equipment or engage in repairs. It clearly has no robotics operation because it uses human agents.
Your question is why entrapping one instance of the Entity would affect all the others out there. The Entity, in its evasive and elusive maneuvers and its vulnerability to source code attacks via the Poison Pill, appears to operate on a centralized if mobile dataset from which its actions and decisions originate.
All instances are ultimately linked to the source code core in order to retain operational control and to, presumably, distinguish fabricated and altered data from the original data and to synchronize the actions across multiple instances. When the Entity is contained to the 5D crystal, the IMF has effectively removed the AI brain from the rest of its digital body.
This is not a realistic picture of a likely decentralized AI system, but within the fictional logic of a MISSION IMPOSSIBLE film, it's what we've been shown. The Entity's core data, if confined to the 5D crystal, prevents it from having any further influence over any other nodes of its function.
All this verbiage to defend a movie I wasn't that crazy about...
Spoilers for MI:8
I was satisfied by the Jim Phelps Jr. reveal; I thought it addressed the damage done by the 1996 film by situating the movies in a separate continuity from the TV show. It was an easter egg, not a huge moment of drama. I was fine with it.
The warning was that the Entity, if destroyed, would take down every digital system in its cascading death throes reverberating through every system it controlled and had infected. Luther's Poison Pill therefore only threatens to destroy the Entity, which seeks to evade the Poison Pill by retreating into the doomsday bunker and which the IMF has rigged to offer only one digital storage space for the Entity: the crystalline five-dimension optical drive which will hold the Entity indefinitely.
This prevents the Entity from disrupting and destroying digital infrastructures in its own termination; it isn't destroyed, but instead cut off and contained, preventing the destructive feedback loop while removing its continued influence over any technology outside the 5D crystal.
Are these films the rebootquel films or the Prime continuity films?
My guess is that FOX changed the airing order based on whatever was in the news or whatever was in vogue at the movie theatre. OUTBREAK is a huge hit! "Fever" comes next! The Royal Family is getting more press than usual! "Prince of Wails" to the airwaves!
It's stupid, and even with the X-FILES revival, FOX still couldn't air the episodes in order.
Torme himself called the whole 'Superman' backstory for Quinn being Kal-El of Kromagg Prime to be "pretty ridiculous" in an online chat.
Torme absolutely did not mind having Charlie O'Connell in small roles and as a body double, but he wasn't going to give make Charlie a regular cast member. He may have cast Charlie as an alt-world brother of Quinn's for a guest appearance.
The Kromagg 'plotline' was never meant to be some season-dominating story-arc, just one recurring thread in the anthology format of the show with maybe 1 - 2 Kromagg episodes a year.
FOX did not like the Kromaggs for a variety of reasons. First: Torme had been shot down about Kromaggs repeatedly, and he proceeded to go over his FOX network liaison to the network head to get approval. This led to a lot of bad feelings at FOX, who now wanted no more Kromaggs shows just to keep Torme in line.
The second: while Torme didn't want a season of Kromagg episodes, he did want to do story arcs where episodes ended with cliffhangers that led into the next, or where threads like Arturo's illness or his son would carry across multiple episodes. Kromaggs were one such arc. FOX said they did not want this: they wanted episodes that they could air in any order, and they disliked how Kromaggs could lock them into an airing order.
Of course, I think this was probably just an excuse: one Kromagg episode a year could air at any point. And on their watch, they approved the Rickman character appearing in multiple episodes, albeit in a fashion that those could be seen in any order. The main reason was internal anger at Torme going over management's heads and to their boss.
Thanks, but that story is a fan-made extrapolation of Torme's idea. Maybe.
Robert Floyd is mentioned on the first page.
Is he really? How parochial! ;-)
Anyway, if you are a purist and want Torme and only Torme:
Torme after "Invasion":
I have a very trippy, surrealistic show in mind involving the Kromaggs. It wouldn't be us landing in the middle of another invasion; it would start in a way that you wouldn't know it was a Kromagg show.
We must be careful that it's handled with taste and doesn't devolve into some kind of monster show sequel. And, yes, we will eventually find out which slider was implanted.
Torme's Kromagg Follow Up Story Outline:
A Kromagg follow up. But FOX doesn't want a Kromagg show.
Make it look like it isn't.
Title: "Possible/Temporary Slide Effects/Slide Effects".
Start the episode: it looks like the sliders got home. Everything is exactly the way it was. It's still even 1994. Extremely surreal. Wade's at Doppler, Rembrandt is working with his agent, the Professor is teaching.
Quinn is the only one that remembers sliding. He feels like he's losing his mind. Ryan, Gillian, Sid, Logan, all familiar and important characters are here. Quinn is relentlessly trying to prove to his friends that they actually went sliding.
Make it look like it's not a Kromagg show.
Then bring the Kromaggs back in the end.
Torme's idea was to simply pitch, "Quinn wakes up to find himself home," and not tell FOX, who hated the Kromaggs, that the Kromaggs were in the story, and to not let them find out until after the pitch was approved and the story was bought and the script was written.
I imagine this would have been a potential end for any Kromagg stories as FOX wouldn't fall for the same trick twice. Torme would likely have taken the opportunity to do away with the tracking device and clear Kromaggs off the board that way. But they could still be out there for a third Kromagg episode someday, however unlikely.
I don't think the Kromaggs were ever meant to be more than one episode every once in awhile.
It's PAL, so it's likely the German blu-ray files that you hated so much.
I admit they are not good; they just happened to play better on my player than the Universal discs.
I have literally never talked to anyone who could.
It isn't... quite what you think it would be.
Torme after "Invasion":
I have a very trippy, surrealistic show in mind involving the Kromaggs. It wouldn't be us landing in the middle of another invasion; it would start in a way that you wouldn't know it was a Kromagg show.
We must be careful that it's handled with taste and doesn't devolve into some kind of monster show sequel. And, yes, we will eventually find out which slider was implanted.
The story is this one:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11KF … it?tab=t.0
I... don't know where to start with STAR WARS anymore. There is so. Much. Content.
I personally think well of every actor's talent on SLIDERS. Charlie O'Connell turned out to be pretty good at seething outrage; Kari Wuhrer's comedic timing and dramatic prowess is strong, particularly when she has to do both in EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS, and I say that despite strongly disliking Kari for how she treated Sabrina Lloyd. Tembi Locke does a beautiful job of crafting distinct personas for her roles, particularly in her Diana doubles in "Applied Physics". Robert Floyd is a master of the craft, achieving perfect naturalism in his BAR RESCUE episodes and effortlessly mimicking Jerry O'Connell as a performance rather than as an imitation.
Charlie was inexperienced. But to me, if the performances for Kari, Tembi and Rob have issues (and they do), it's never because of the actors. The scripts require unnatural behaviour or awkward dialogue; the story lacks emotionality or subtext; the direction is poorly staged and underconsidered; the blocking is under-rehearsed and ill-timed.
There's also the fact that acting styles have evolved significantly since 1994 - 2000. Acting in a 90s TV show was less about naturalism and more about conveying clear points of plot and emotional information, more a highly technical form of stage theatre than the more naturalistic approach that's preferred today. Actors in a 90s era show will overenunciate and speak more slowly and unnaturally than a performer would today.
Seasons 1 - 2, to me, look like a mid-budget indie production, while Season 5 looks like what it is: a rushed and slapdash cable show on a very low budget, and that's naturally going to affect ahow the performances turn out. I would never say that the cast were not good, but rather that the material and the results weren't equal to their talent.
My Xiaomi MiBox S from 2016 has been having so much trouble lately. It plays h.264 video out of sync with sound, freezes up on h.265 video, and the user interface has become strangely slow. It loses connection wtih USB drives, it shows ads for streaming services I don't have or want. It's clear to me that every OS update for the MiBox S has created demands on the hardware that the MiBox can't meet.
I bought a Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen 2025, and this Google TV box, while functionally the same, has some new features: it processes video significantly better than the MiBox S. Episodes 2- 8 of SLIDERS after pneumatic's QTGMC cleanup and field matching scale extremely nicely when played by the Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen. Episode 9 looks okay.
On the MiBox S 2016, pneumatic's files looked less damaged than the DVD versions; pneumatic fixed most of the mismatched fields and flickering edges, and I amped up the colour a bit. However, it still looked soft and fuzzy, clearly not having the full 480p or 540p image data needed. Sharpening it more was ill-advised: closeups looked great, but wide shots looked smeared or oversharp. However, the 2025 Google TV box clearly processes video with nine years' worth of advancement.
Episodes 2- 8, after pneumatic's cleanup, benefit from the Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen upscaling the video with some very capable algorithms. This upscaling seems to apply scaling selectively to different parts of the video image: sharpening with added pixel contrast for edges, interpolation for smooth surfaces, deblocking and deringing filters, smooth pixel addition via multitap filtering for scaling, and using these measures selectively on different parts of the same video image. This is clearly due to the processor on the Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen, which has significantly improved hardware from the 2016 version.
I played a 720p video file of SONG ONE on the 2025 box. I was impressed by how the 2025 box scaled and sharpened the image to fill the 4K screen: I could see every strand of Anne Hathaway's hair which looked a little fuzzy in 720p on the 2016 box. I played the HD version of EVERWOOD, a 16mm film TV show that had some very heavy grain, and I was surprised to see that the 2025 box tones down and filters that grain without any muddiness or loss of detail; the new GPU is applying spatial and adaptive noise reduction.
However, Episode 9, "Luck of the Draw," an episode that pneumatic identified as being blurrier than the rest due to film judder throwing off the film conversion to analog videotape, is still a little too soft even under the Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen's impressive scaling.
The Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen also offers AI-SR, Artificial Intelligence Super Resolution. This is an on-the-fly upscaling technique where an AI is trained on a visual data that compares low-resolution and high-resolution versions of the same image, teaching a neural network how to identify visual elements and reconstruct additional detail when increasing the image size. Since this processing is happening live, it's not as advanced as a Topaz algorithm in rebuilding image data to sharpness at a higher resolution; AI-SR is instead focused on increasing image size with smoothly blended pixels that avoid blurriness or artifacts, and the details it fills in aren't going to be at the same sharpness as Topaz.
I turned it on for SLIDERS... and it made things worse. AI-SR oversharpened the fuzzy video image and made it blocky and pixelated.
I turned it on for SONG ONE and EVERWOOD and... I could really see no difference. Still, it's possible that AI-SR might be useful for upscaling on a bigger TV; my 55 inch might not benefit from AI-SR upscaling from 720p or 1080p content
to fill a 4K image, while someone with a 70 inch TV might see a marked improvement.
It's hard to say if there's a consumer/hobbyist option to build on pneumatic's improvements the way the Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen is improving Episodes 2 - 8, and Episode 9 remains troubled. Still, it's something.
Anyway. I disabled all automatic updates on the Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen, and I was able to switch off all the ads on this version of Google TV. I'll just leave the Box without OS updates so that it continues to work as well as it does right now.
I think Tracy Torme's Kromaggs were brilliant.
I think David Peckinpah's Kromaggs were just the Klingons from the original STAR TREK but with far less effort.
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