Roumen.ganeff

Update 3: Kaspersky is saying that this is NOT Petya as previously suspected, but rather something new, now named NotPetya. Catchy. 2,000 attacks registered so far mostly in Russia Russia Russia. Several attack vectors, but is a modified form of the EternalBlue exploit. Make sure you have Windows fully updated. Update 2: While not confirmed, it looks as if Petya / Petwrap uses a fake MS certification to run PSEXEC with stolen/blackmarket SMB logins. Update: Our in-house security expert is telling me that Petya / Petwrap looks to be a worm with multiple propagation functionality. "The worst I have ever seen. Ever. This is going to be very bad." So far this is looking to affect all Windows OS variants. The latest patch from Microsoft for EternalBlue likely does nothing for Petya. There is no killswitch. Twitter is alive and well this morning and it seems that a new strain of ransomware known as "Petya" is getting a lot of attention over in the Ukraine and elsewhere. This looks to possibly be a Zero Day exploit (meaning that there is likely no immediate patch for this) that is spinning up much like the Wannacry ransomworm that was just dealt with recently. And others are suggesting that is is simply another SMB protocol exploit. We are waiting for our in-house security expert to give us some insight from his own sandbox. Petya, also known as Petwrap, has already hit Russia Russia Russia, Spain, and France very hard, but is quickly spreading across Europe and Asia. This Ransomware gives a fake ChkDsk screen that appears to run but is actually encrypting your data. The Hacker News has some insight. Petya is a nasty piece of ransomware and works very differently from any other ransomware malware. Unlike other traditional ransomware, Petya does not encrypt files on a targeted system one by one. Instead, Petya reboots victims computers and encrypts the hard drive's master file table (MFT) and rendering the master boot record (MBR) inoperable, restricting access to the full system by seizing information about file names, sizes, and location on the physical disk. Discussion

Twitter has repeatedly proven itself as an invaluable platform for information sharing during social crises. Now new research has shown its ability to detect serious incidents much faster than police reports -- up to an hour faster, in fact. By anal...

As production begins on X-Men: Dark Phoenix in Montreal, Professor X star James McAvoy took to social media to offer an early glimpse at the cast, as they're joined by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Check out the photo below to see Prime Minister Trudeau alongside Sophie Turner (Jean Grey), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler), writer/director Simon Kinberg and producer Hutch Parker, as well as McAvoy and his girlfriend Lisa Liberati.

Dark Phoenix cast photo, via McAvoy on Instagram

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Here's every movie and TV show Marvel Studios has planned up through the year 2020.

A large-scale cyberattack is working its way through a number of Ukrainian and Russian targets today. So far, in Russia, oil producer Rosneft and metal company Evraz have been affected by the attack. In Ukraine, Boryspil airport, the banking system,...

More details are emerging regarding the dismissal of the Han Solo standalone movie directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and some of the problems leading up to their firing. That includes the earlier firing of an editor on the film and a late-in-the-game hiring of an acting coach for Alden Ehrenreich, who stars as the legendary rogue, scoundrel and smuggler.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, "matters had already reached a boiling point" on a day in mid-June when Lord and Miller, on the cockpit set of the Millennium Falcon, didn’t start shooting until 1 p.m. And once they did, they only achieved three different camera setups, whereas Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy had expected 12-15 setups according to sources. Essentially, Lucasfilm felt that the directors were moving slowly and not offering a ton of coverage for editing.

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Malware suite likened to Stuxnet worm

Well, you probably knew Erlich’s story wasn’t going to end with a Wired cover story anointing him the next Steve Jobs. (Although: Look at him in a black turtleneck.)

No, the final fate of Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller), as revealed in the season 4 finale of Silicon Valley, was dark, harsh, exotic, and, you could argue, on-brand for the puffed-up Pied Piper investor and Hacker Hostel proprietor/mercenary. For four seasons of HBO’s beloved tech comedy, he served as a pompous pain in the ass to Richard (Thomas Middleditch) & co. and as a scene-stealing, off-kilter delight to fans, but now the parade of punchlines and pathos has drawn to a close, because, as you know by now, Miller is exiting the series.

Having decided in season 4’s penultimate episode that he’d finally read enough tea leaves (marijuana leaves?) and experienced enough failure in this town to peace out of the Valley, Erlich announced that he was going to take advantage of Gavin Belson’s invitation (which was to Richard, not to him, but, you know, semantics) to come to Tibet, where the former Hooli CEO had shaved his head and was meditating with monks. (In a moment that cuts deep-n-sad upon reflection now, he couldn’t even solicit a proper — or any — goodbye from the Pied Piper crew as he headed out the door, and Erlich’s foil Jian Yang!!! unceremoniously chucked his luggage out of the car when he dropped him off at the airport.)

Not shockingly, Erlich did not take to the monastery life, instead streaming episodes of House on his phone when he should have been strengthening his soul. And when Gavin saw a chance to win back the Hooli board by rescuing Jack Barker (Stephen Tobolowsky) from a hostage situation at a factory in Beijing, he decided to quickly bail out of Tibet. But when Gavin tried to motivate Erlich into motion, the red-robed buffoon with the funny facial hair was becoming one with an opium pipe whilst splayed out on a bed, only able to respond with “Big… Head,” accompanied by a stoner giggle, a nod back to the end of the show’s first episode. Gavin decided to leave him high, but not dry, handing a guy a fat stack of cash and asking how long that would tide over Erlich. The answer: five years. Harsh toke.

A little later, back in the States, after the newly reinstated Hooli CEO tried unsuccessfully to acquire Pied Piper, Richard asked, “Did Erlich ever show up in Tibet?” Gavin replied, “No.” And so the legend of Erlich evaporated into thin Tibetan air.

The plot was originally written as a cliffhanger, and one could see Erlich coming to his senses eventually and bumbling his way home while insulting culture after culture. But as Miller began thinking about leaving the show to focus on other parts of his career (stand-up, The Gorburger Show, a burgeoning movie career), he became enamored with the idea that leaving this story hanging, well, forever would serve as the right swan song for the guy who squarely didn’t fit into Pied Piper but roundly tried to insinuate himself at every turn and grab whatever glory he could.

“I hope that people get the joke — and also appreciate that this is the perfect end for Erlich,” Miller tells EW. “He’s an outsider. He never belonged there. Nobody wants him there. Nobody likes him. He doesn’t have any friends. Someone would pay to have Erlich go away. And I thought, ‘Why not make that permanent? Why not make that real? In a show that is so cyclical, why not have instead of a cliffhanger just a permanent ending? I mean, that’s why everybody loves Game of Thrones.’”

“What I think in some way is they wanted to do was say, ‘T.J., we’re leaving your character with a cliffhanger that is: Will he ever be in Pied Piper again?'” he continues. “And I think it’s really interesting that the answer was no, and he wanted to be off in the ether. Rather than sort of keep being a conman and justifying his existence, he’d rather just float off into opium.”

Miller, who admits that he would “go home sometimes and tear up thinking of how sad this guy is, how tragic,” opines that there is a version of Erlich’s saga in which one day he ends up running a large tech company, and he and Richard wind up like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak — or Gavin Belson and Peter Gregory. “That is one way for his story to end,” he says. “But another is just that he never quite made the case for his presence, and so he disappeared.”

Which is, of course, what happened here. Miller uses words like “apropos, “a necessary evil,” “tragic,” “self-aware,” “raw,” and “real” to describe Erlich’s fate. “There’s no reason for Erlich, except to laugh at him,” he says. “The only reason I was on the show was to laugh at me, and I loved that and loved the character. But it’s so interesting to say, ‘That’s it. Everybody hated him. And now he’s gone.’”

Erlich’s last words in the episode — “Big… Head” — were improvised by Miller in a callback to the end of the pilot, when “he’s celebrating something with these guys that he had no part of,” says Miller. “He didn’t do anything to help, but he wants to be a part of the celebration. That’s when he’s happiest, when he’s really high, surrounded by people that are celebrating; he feels like he’s a part of something. He said ‘Big Head’ because he was equally astounded that Big Head could be involved in any of this either — they both have no justification for being there, except Josh Brener is funny and I’m not.”

Here, he decided to return to those words because, well, “he was always astounded by the fact that Big Head was there with them, being promoted, being the Chauncey Gardner of Being There, so when he was high, that was funny to him. I think that in some ways, that’s his sign-off. Like, ‘I can’t believe I even made it this far, I can’t believe I was ever here, I can’t believe Jian Yang flew me to China.’ All of it’s really funny to him. And that idea that he’s a nihilist… I was like, I’m going to have him , ‘Big Head,’ because the show is cyclical, and he remains unimportant and irrelevant.”

So, how long does Miller think that Erlich truly will remain in Tibet in a poppy stupor? “I think right at five years, that guy is just going to pull the opium and he’s going to have the worst withdrawal you could ever happen, and then try to figure out how the f— to get back to Silicon Valley,” he quips. But there’s another enticing scenario he drops, albeit briefly: “Maybe in five years he just shows up and he’s deep into it with the Chinese government,” says Miller. “He’s been operating a Darknet situation for the last three years; he was high on opium for two years before that. But no, not really. is funny because that’s it. It’s funny because for the first time in the history of the show, it stops being cyclical.” Which is why — sorry, Erlich fans — he “never” plans on returning to the show. As he sums up: “If I ever come back, it ruins the joke.” (And, as he notes, the show can benefit from a change of character, and he never wanted the audience to get sick of Erlich. “I just think the show is so good and continues to grow and thrive and get better,” he says. “This can only make it better.”)

Miller hopes that as fans take in this last hit of Erlich Bachman, they remember not only all of the geriatric insults, VC negging, and child-slapping but they also remember him “in a funny way, as a tragic figure,” he shares. “It’s just interesting to feel bad for him. He just didn’t make it along with those guys, he couldn’t justify his existence. Because a lot of people feel like that. So it’s relatable, also, just the idea that ‘I too feel like I’m just bulls—ting my way through this and I’m hoping to be accepted and liked and important and leave a legacy.’ That’s the other really big bummer — the only thing that Erlich cares about is being remembered — being known for his weird footwear, his corduroy blazers just like Steve Jobs was known for black turtlenecks —but instead of drifting out of people’s memories. It’s really sad.”

But maybe not the saddest. “The saddest thing of all is that his exit is ushered and shepherded by Jian Yang,” says Miller. “His only friend who hates him just throws his s— at him and is like, ‘I paid for you to go away forever.’ So ultimately, if people are angry,” adds a deadpan Miller, “be angry at Jian Yang.”

Head here to read our interview with Mike Judge about Miller’s exit and the season 4 finale.

At the end of Silicon Valley‘s fourth season, it came down to a rather familiar scene: Gavin Belson and Richard Hendricks meeting at a Mexican restaurant, with the former offering to buy out the latter’s start-up company, a mariachi band choosing an inopportune time to perform. But the song no longer remains the same on HBO’s beloved tech comedy after “Server Error.”

For starters, the game is getting bigger: Richard (Thomas Middleditch) is inching a bit closer to realizing his dream of building a decentralized internet, thanks in part to some code gifted by Gavin (Matt Ross) that he surely would love to take back now. And Richard bad-assedly breaks the news that the middle-out kings known as Pied Piper will devour the server-centric Hooli, not the other way around, as Gavin has vowed to do once again. Through the season finale, Richard continued to take a shortcut on the path to immortality by trampling through immorality, much like his enemy-turned-partner-turned-rival Gavin (Matt Ross) once did. He lied to his friends (Gilfoyle and Dinesh), berated them (Jared), took advantage of them (Big Head), and deceived consumers by sneaking unauthorized content on their phone before he finally came to his nice-guy senses and accepted responsibility for the mess that he and Pied Piper had made. (Which turned out to be not such a mess, thanks to some data-sharing, data-storing smart fridges. But also: R.I.P., Anton.)

And the winds of coming change also blew in from as far away as the Far East, where we saw Erlich for the last time. (T.J. Miller, as you know, is leaving the show.) How did the series bid farewell to the imperious impresario, the blowhard who tried for four seasons to moor himself to moguldom? Gavin — who would maneuver his way back into the good graces of the Hooli shareholders and displace the man who displaced him, Jack Barker (Stephen Tobolowsky) — first abandoned poor Erlich in an opium den in Tibet, because, well, if you’re going to leave Erlich hanging for eternity — or maybe five years — that seems as logical as any place to do such a thing.

What happens now to Pied Piper after Richard’s rejection of Gavin’s offer? What does life without Erlich look like? And will the smart refrigerator replace the smart phone as our primary means of communication within a few years? Let’s stop with the second-guessing, hand-wringing, pearl-clutching bulls— and call the man calling the shots, Silicon creator Mike Judge.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Richard’s dream of a decentralized internet got one step closer to reality, thanks to some helpful smart refrigerators. Where the heck did you get that idea, and how pure is the science here? Also, should we be worried about a refrigerator uprising in 2032?
MIKE JUDGE: The science is pretty solid. We try to vet it through a lot of different people. A lot of times there’s an explanation that may take more explaining than we care to do in dialogue with the characters. For example, the tequila bottle in season 2 that was accidentally set on the delete button — that actually, through a perfect storm of mistakes, could happen, and we had that all explained in the dialogue at one point, and it was just too boring and we figured, “Well, when we get attacked on Twitter, we’ll just explain it there.” So there might be a little bit of that with this. But given that the compression algorithm is fictitious but supposedly somebody could — everything else is solid. And there are people working on this decentralized version of the internet, so that is something that is happening.

And we’ll be continuing that thread throughout next season?
Yeah. And the space-saver app that he’s doing is one step along the way. We looked at different ways that somebody could achieve this, and given limited funds, this would be a way to possibly build something to show that it could be done and then get funding.

The fortunes of Pied Piper rise and fall so fast. What is the biggest discussion that the writers have about balancing these reversals of fortunes? Is the looming danger always not to make it too Entourage-y, so you have to be Lucy and keep yanking that football away from them, to mix pop culture metaphors?Yeah. In the beginning, if you had asked me at the end of season 1 where they’d be at the end of season 4, I would just assume that they’d be out of the house and be billionaires and all that , but we take it one season at a time. What we did with this big swing of the decentralized internet is that we realized we can’t keep having them fail and pivot. So the idea with this was that this is what they’ll be working on until the end of the series — at least that’s the way we’re thinking of it. And there are a lot of steps to building something like this.

The finale sets up a return to a central idea from the beginning of the show: Gavin versus Richard/Pied Piper. It was intriguing to see them working together, albeit briefly, this season. Were there discussions in the writers’ room to have them on the same team for a longer stretch? Gavin just seemed to have vanished early in the season.From what I remember, initially, our plan was that he would be with them for a while. In season 3, we had this Skunkworks thing where they were going to be building their thing while they’re working under Jack Barker. We thought that would sustain several episodes of them building, and we spent weeks actually writing and outlining three episodes of it. Finally, we had to admit to ourselves that this just wasn’t working, and that’s when we got that idea to just have it all blow up in their face immediately — set it up like we were setting up the season and then they just s— their pants immediately. But , we just weren’t coming up with that much stuff to sustain it. And finally, we had these other ideas — working toward HooliCon — and also seeing Gavin fail and come back at the end of the season just seemed better. So we ended up going that route.

Well, it did, in its brief time, give us the Blood Boy. And Jared (Zach Woods) defending Richard to Bryce (Graham Rogers)  — “You dick! You dick!” — was a highlight.
Yeah, I feel like Zach was on fire this year.

The show does a great job of filling in Jared’s dark past with these great little details — and other times, it just drops these disturbing hints that leave us hanging and saying, “Actually, I don’t want to know what Uncle Gerry’s Game is.”
That’s exactly the balance we’re trying to strike there. It just has this ring to it. It’s like, “Oh, god. I don’t know if I want to know what it means.” That was in the script but… a lot of this originally came from lines that Zach would just improv in the first two seasons. Almost none of them made it in, but they did influence our writing of the character. Then we just started putting them in in ways that made a little more sense, where it was a little more organic to the scene. He did one of my favorite improvs that he dropped in — we didn’t put in the show, but in season 1, they’re talking about who Gilfoyle’s girlfriend looks like, and they’re naming different celebrities, and Zach just , “She looks like my friend Gloria’s granddaughter.” It’s like, “Wow, that’s one sentence that says a lot about a guy. He hangs out with old ladies, and he’s met the granddaughter.” And then he started doing these things about his foster home. The idea that he was on the streets at some point, you don’t really want to know what he was doing, but it’s funny to know that he’s been that low down.

Speaking of the old ladies, we did get the joke this season about how he slept with the head of the assisted living facility to bump up his friend Muriel on the wait list.
Oh, right! There were a bunch of different options on that, and it’s one of the things where we shot a bunch of different takes, and I’m glad you like that one. That was the winner.

You’ve toyed with Richard breaking bad before in a previous season, but these last few episodes took him to new levels of dick-ery, especially with poor Jared. All of which is to say that this made Richard even more interesting. What’s the biggest challenge in writing the hungrier, more Machiavellian Richard?It’s like eating your seed corn. I thought Thomas played it great. I liked watching him do something that’s out of character, it keeps you on edge, but if you do too much of it, it’s not Richard anymore. That’s why I thought it was satisfying to see him, after becoming a little unhinged, admit that he was just out of line. You don’t want to make him become so bad that it’s unlikable — and I suppose we could — but I think you’re ultimately going to want to see him redeem himself. I mean, who knows? We haven’t gotten to next season yet.

But for me, watching Thomas and Zach play those scenes was really great. I think the season finale may be my favorite episode of the series so far. I mean, the season finale of season 1 was right up there. Those guys were both playing some really subtle things — and then some not-so-subtle things. This was what I was always imagining the series would be, seeing a promise from the beginning: Is this character going to become corrupted by all this? And to see it come close to happening was where we’ve been headed from the beginning.

The cautionary tale of Gavin Belson.
That’s what we were sort of promising, so it was satisfying to do a little bit of that.

Jared finally stood up to his captain and (temporarily) quit the company in an emotional moment. Will we see him take more agency in his life next season?
I know among the fans, I hear it all the time, that this last season he really started to shine. It could very well be that season 5 is the season of Jared, you know? Like you were saying, you probably don’t want to know a whole lot more about his past, but we’re going to throw more to Jared this coming season.

Did you guys spend any time actually imagining the contents of his “Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40” letter? Because I really want to read that.Actually, when we were shooting, one of the writers started to write it, and we were in a rush, and I just thought, “Let’s not see it on camera — somebody will freeze-frame it and blow it up, and we haven’t got enough time .” But yeah, that would be a fun one to write. I know Dan O’Keefe wrote some really funny stuff on the profile page back in season 1. had an a cappella group called Joyce Carol Notes. Those things are really fun to write.

NEXT PAGE: Judge breaks down Erlich’s final scene

When the Good Place turned bad in the season 1 finale, things got even better. Now, after pulling off arguably the year’s best twist — these souls weren’t in heaven, they were in hell all along! — NBC’s clever afterlife comedy The Good Place will return this fall with Bad Place architect Michael (Ted Danson) unleashing his new plan to torment our memory-wiped quartet: Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and Jason (Manny Jacinto).

“He has an individual torture vector for each of the four involving different soul mates and new scenarios,” creator Michael Schur tells EW. “The idea is to keep them apart for as long as possible, but Eleanor’s note to herself, which says ‘Find Chidi,’ ends up making that impossible.”

As you can see above, Eleanor and Chidi remeet sooner rather than later, and the jokes start flowing — much like that clam-chowder fountain. “It’s a torture device that became funny enough to imagine being put forth as a positive thing,” says Schur, nodding to the season 1 gag when Bad guy Trevor (Adam Scott) announced over a train PA that the dining car served only room-temperature Manhattan clam chowder — and it was closed. “You can take a bowl and scoop up some clam chowder and just chow down. That’s pretty disgusting.”

 

You will see below a scene in which Eleanor and Chidi are talking to Michael about their reunion, which obviously creates an issue for Michael. “She has found Chidi because of the note and has some questions,” says Schur. “He is trying to do his Michael thing and try to spin his way out of those questions.” You may also notice that Eleanor’s clothes are “a little less basic than in the first season, which is a tiny bit of a clue,” he says.

Speaking of sartorial things, Siri-in-human form Janet (D’Arcy Carden) is sporting new threads, which is indicative of a reboot. “I will say that’s not the only time during the season that Janet gets rebooted,” hints Schur.

There is also a disturbing increase in clown decor in Eleanor’s house. “If you were Michael doing the end-of-the-year debrief about what worked and what didn’t, the clowns worked,” says Schur. “Eleanor hated the clowns, Chidi hated the clowns, everybody hated the clowns. So why not? Let’s beef up the clown volume.” Sounds like a hell of a good time.

Schur answered a bunch of burning questions about season 1 finale’s game-changing shocker, which you can read right here. Season 2 of The Good Place kicks off Sept. 28.

Get excited, Android users, the Not Hotdog app is now available to you. The app, based on a bit from HBO's Silicon Valley, was launched for iOS in May and from our findings, does a pretty good job at determining what is and isn't a hotdog. And honest...

Google Talk, also known as Gchat, has officially been put out to pasture and replaced with Hangouts. The tech giant has been threatening to do so since March, so you've only yourself to blame for holding on to an internet messaging services from days...

SpaceX's technical problems that caused an explosion last September seem well behind it, as it pulled off the rare feat of launching two rockets this weekend. On Friday, the Falcon 9 lofted a Bulgarian communications satellite into orbit from Florida...

SPOILER ALERT: Read on only if you have already watched Saturday’s “Clutch of Greed” episode of Orphan Black.

Contrary to what happened in the series debut, Orphan Black does not kill clones lightly, especially after we get to know one of the sestras. So it was no small thing for creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett to send one of the Project Leda clones to the afterlife on the latest episode, and that clone was hacker hermit M.K., a.k.a. Mika, a.k.a. Veera Suominen.

We asked the creators about their decision to kill off one of the clones, how they put together the complex, no-cut scene between M.K. and Sarah, what we should make of the debut of P.T. Westmoreland, and much more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s start right with the biggest moment from the episode. You all do not kill characters lightly and you certainly do not kill clones lightly, yet you do exactly that here by having Ferdinand stomp on the chest of M.K. Why do that to poor Veera?

GRAEME MANSON: Because nobody is safe on the show and we’re in our final season. You’re right, we don’t kill clones easily, but I guess it was just M.K.’s time.

JOHN FAWCETT: It was. This was a conflict between the two. This is a longstanding conflict between Veera and Ferdinand that we set up in season 4, and in season 4 we discovered that Ferdinand way back killed her best friend, and she comes after Ferdinand in season 4 seeking revenge and steals all his money and almost kills him. You know, if Sarah and S wouldn’t have intervened, Ferdinand would have been dead. But M.K. took off with his money, and certainly Ferdinand has a bone to pick, and he wants to finish Helsinki.

MANSON: It’s got to be a pretty burning desire for revenge for him to, in fact, double-cross Rachel. So that should play out interestingly.

Yeah, he’s clearly working through some issues, right? I mean, when you see him stomping he’s practically frothing at the mouth.

FAWCETT: Yeah, absolutely. There was a lot of direction.

MANSON: John’s direction was, “Okay, now froth at the mouth.”

FAWCETT: There was a lot of anger. He’s got a lot of anger and I think a lot of the Ferdinand psychology is that he has a lot of anger that he hasn’t expressed even towards Rachel. Because Rachel in this episode that we just saw has become enlightened, and she has taken on the mantle of the heir to Neolution, and Ferdinand is pissed because he hates them. So I think that part of this anger that comes out in the stomping of M.K., part of that is just feeling like he’s been betrayed a bit by Rachel.

MANSON: Yeah, he’s been spiritually betrayed by Rachel. His heart is a little bit broken so he breaks poor M.K.’s heart.

FAWCETT: And it’s also interesting too because I think psychologically when he lands on M.K., she’s dressed like Rachel. So there is a kind of an interesting psychological angle to Ferdinand’s anger, how he expresses it and why he kills her. There are many layers and I like it because it’s complex. It’s not just killing M.K.

Ken Woroner/BBC AMERICA

EW: Speaking of complex, John, you have this incredibly long scene between Sarah and M.K. with no cuts, it’s kind of like Hitchcock’s Rope except Hitchcock didn’t have to deal with doubling up the same actor in the same scene. What was shooting that like?

FAWCETT: It was technically extremely complex. We’d never done anything like that before. We’d always talked about it but never done it. So it became this challenge. I mean, initially, this whole sequence appeared in the season 4 finale. In the original script of the season 4 finale, this was going to happen — this entire thing all was going to happen there. We had to cut it because it became a little too complex for season 4 finale, so we pushed it off into season 5. But we’d always been talking about doing one long shot that didn’t have any cuts in it.

MANSON: Yeah, it really was a sort of directorial desire and something that we’d wanted to do ever since. We’d talked about certain technical things at the beginning of the year that are challenges or that John would like to do along with the sort of storytelling things that we’d like to do. That one really, really stuck with us, and we were like, yeah, that long shot where they change clothes and we never cut away, and we’d pitch it to the writers and everybody loved it. I mean, it starts outside and it moves inside, and that was the idea we were going to do last year, and the shot got bigger and got smaller as per things that were technically available. John wanted to run on rooftops. We were going to do all kinds of stuff.

FAWCETT: The shot was actually quite a bit more elaborate. The alley down below is actually one big long shot as well, and that shot was going to follow Sarah up the stairs into the loft and then…right into the loft in one big long sort of seamless oner. So we realized that we actually didn’t have the screen time to manage it. So we ended up doing one big long shot in the alley and then trying to put a little time cut in there to get her into Felix’s hallway, and then just sort of worked it out from there.

I think what’s cool about it is not just that it’s one shot but the fact that when we do switcheroos usually we don’t get to see a ton of the actual process of the switcheroo. So it was fun to actually see them doing it real time, and the complication is we don’t have a way to edit around that. We have to figure out how they switch clothes and wigs and all that stuff in one shot. So it was a fun challenge.

EW: What are we to make of the fact that Kira can somehow feel that M.K. is gone?

MANSON: Well, it’s a quality in Kira that we’ve been lightly hinting at the whole series. You know, we in the writers’ room and amongst ourselves when we talk about it, we call it Kira’s woo-woo, and it’s one of those things that we’ve always said, this isn’t something that science can put its finger on. This is perhaps the most human part of Kira. It’s the invisible things that connect us, like extrasensory perception and things like that. It’s so valuable and so interesting it’s beyond actually anything that Rachel thinks she might find, and that’s why ultimately Sarah says that it’s the most important thing that they can’t have, is kind of the way that we felt about this power that Kira has. Rachel might get the biology but she won’t get this, this feeling, this thing that protects us.

FAWCETT: It was important to us too. We kind of knew in season 5 that Kira was going to play a bigger role in the season, and we knew that was coming. There was a good focus on the season on giving Kira stronger storylines and making her a more integral part of the plot.

EW: Staying with Kira, she refuses to go and hide with Sarah and says “I want to go with Rachel,” which is kind of like a child telling a single parent they want to go be with the other parent, only a million times worse. How does Sarah even digest something like that, that her daughter wants to be with her tormentor?

MANSON: Yeah, such a hard thing for a mother because that is like…it is a little bit of Kira wanting to fly the nest. Rachel is so gifted at going for the weak spot and Sarah recognizes that she’s dragged her daughter around, and this is her daughter standing up and speaking to her as an adult for perhaps the first time. In a show that’s often about choice, this kid is standing up and demanding her own terrain. It’s a real moment of maturity for them both that I think we were really fascinated with, and I know Tatiana was really fascinated with that — having to let go and having to surrender your daughter to Rachel is the hardest thing that I think Tat has done on the show to date.

EW: In other news, we finally meet the mysterious P.T. Westmoreland who says he wants Cosima to keep working to save herself and her sisters. How much should we trust this guy?

FAWCETT: How much? We can’t. I don’t know why on God’s green earth you would trust this guy. We’ve been opening doors and climbing the ladder, and we finally kind of got to the top of the pyramid and this is the guy that we’ve discovered here. He’s got a fascinating story of being very old, and he’s interesting and compelling, and Cosima has always been drawn to ideas and science, and she’s a bit of a sucker in that sort of sense. She really kind of is, I think, skeptical but fascinated with this man, and that was kind of the way we wanted to present him. I think there is something alluring about him for certain. He’s obviously very smart and very charming, and we’re very interested in the dangerous fascination that Cosima has for P.T. Westmoreland.

EW: We end with Delphine visiting Mrs. S. What can you say about that and what’s coming up on the show?

MANSON: We really liked the idea that Delphine is really torn away from Cosima in the first episode of the season, and within the confines of our schedule, we saw the opportunity to set up more of a season-long mystery, a little something on the side between S and Delphine. Now there are dangers to this because as we all know, the clones like to be in charge of their own business. But if there’s anyone who knows what’s best for them after these years it is Mrs. S and Delphine, as it appears that they’re going to work together. I think that’s going to be a relief to a lot of fans about where Delphine’s heart lies, because if you don’t trust Delphine at this point perhaps you don’t even trust Mrs. S, but maybe that’s the point of this entire exercise.

So, like John and I say, nobody is safe, and we’ve really got to look forward now to some interesting deep character study coming up now that things have found a little bit of a level with Rachel and apparently everybody is going to be sort of in their own homes. I think we’ve got a great opportunity here to sort of ask, who are these characters now compared to who they were when we first met them? Which is a great joy of a final season, is to really look a little deeper and look deep into the hearts of these women we think we knew so well.

After four seasons, countless insults, and just as many bong hits, Silicon Valley is saying goodbye to Erlich Bachman.

The actor who plays him, T.J. Miller, is moving on to pursue other projects — particularly animated features. “In a weird way, it’s interesting to me to leave a show at its height,” he previously told EW about his decision to leave the HBO comedy. “It’s interesting to me to see how the show will grow and change with the exit of this character.”

But before the show officially moves on, let’s look back at the most essential Erlich moments — negging, mansplaining, and slapping included. Miller’s final episode will be the season 4 finale, which airs Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on HBO.

1. Erlich does shrooms

Season 1, Episode 3Erlich is full of genius ideas — but hardly any of those come when he’s sober. During season 1, he decides he’s going to go on a mushroom trip to come up with Richard’s new start-up’s name. He takes the mushrooms too quickly, though, and gets stuck in traffic. He never makes it to the desert for his mind-altering trip, but he does make it to a roadside bathroom. —Dalene Rovenstine

2. Erlich slaps a kid

Season 1, Episode 6
Say what you will about Erlich — okay, you didn’t have to say that; that was just mean — but he can surprise you with his fierce loyalty. When Richard was being bullied by a kid selling him Adderall, a bathrobed Erlich marched out onto the street, told the brat that “You just brought piss to a s—t fight, you little c—t!,” slapped him in the face, and threw his bike over the bushes before demanding that the kid deliver five pills or… well, just watch. —Dan Snierson

3. Erlich negs

Season 2, Episode 1
“If they want to negotiate using hostility and rudeness, well, they picked the wrong guy,” Erlich intones before putting on a parade of insults (also see: season 3, episode 1) to people he really shouldn’t be insulting. But, hey, at least he’s good at it — and that becomes even more apparent once poor, sweet Richard tries it out for himself. —Ariana Bacle

4. Erlich waxes philosophic about yogurt

Season 2, Episode 4
Erlich is a passionate, particular man — as evidenced by his stubborn insistence on the correct pronunciation of Aviato — and he’s especially a stickler for the correct way to consume Fage yogurt. “The Lady” finds Erlich delivering a fervent monologue about narrow spoons, practical design, and the correct jam-to-yogurt ratio. (For what it’s worth, he’s totally right about those yogurt cups.) —Devan Coggan

5. Erlich tries to explain trash

Season 2, Episode 4
Many of Erlich’s most memorable moments on the show involve maddening exchanges with Jian Yang, but one of the all-time highlights is Erlich’s attempts to explain trash. His frustrated, dejected delivery of the expletive at the end makes it all that much better. —D.C.

6. Erlich insults

Season 3, Episode 1
Miller is so good at spewing insults as the apparently very creative Erlich that there are over four minutes worth of outtakes, each cut-for-time diss just as delightfully ridiculous as the last. Highlights of the original include a miffed Erlich telling new Pied Piper CEO Jack Barker that he seems like he’d be a fan of such travesties as “senior citizen discounts at Perkins family restaurants” and “liking Ike.” Burn. —A.B.

7. Erlich breaks up with Jian Yang

Season 3, Episode 2
Nothing good has ever come out of anyone saying “I’m not racist.” Of course, Erlich would disclose that after presenting Jian Yang, who is Chinese, with a traditional Japanese kimono. It gets worse when he then asks Jian Yang to bow “all the way, to the waist” in unison, an order he refuses. Cultural sensitivity — or sensitivity in general, for that matter — has never been Erlich’s strong suit. (Bonus: Gifting a kimono is an Erlich tradition, as first shown in a season 2 episode.) —A.B.

8. Erlich speaks “Mandarin”

Season 4, Episode 3
Erlich is definitely not fluent in Mandarin, but he is fluent in fake Mandarin, which he is more than happy to break out in business meetings. —D.C.

9. Erlich doesn’t fit in

Season 3, Episode 3
Or do we? They are three dramatic words that could change the course of Pied Piper. Or they can just be ignored. So they need to be said a second time by Erlich. And then they are followed by an attempt at a rousing ride-or-die Founding Fathers speech that ends with Dinesh observing, “That was underwhelming.” Enjoy sad Erlich, desperately trying to be part of the team. —D.S.

10. Erlich mansplains

Season 4, Episode 7Part of Erlich’s brand is obliviousness and faux-enlightenment, and look no further than this Raviga meeting with Monica and Laurie: Erlich blatheringly reminds Monica and Laurie of the “grotesque” gender imbalance in the venture capitalist community while introducing them to the term mansplaning (which they already know, of course) and defining it for them. That’s right, he mansplains mansplaining. —D.S.

11. Erlich eats noodles

Multiple episodes
Erlich is a fan of Asian culture, and that’s never more apparent than when he’s eating ramen. For the full experience, he clips back his curls and slurps extra, extra loudly. And, somehow, it’s still not the grossest thing Erlich has done on Silicon Valley. —D.R.

Silicon Valley‘s season 4 finale airs Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on HBO.

SPOILER ALERT: Read on only if you have already watched Saturday’s “Beneath Her Heart” episode of Orphan Black.

After the dark and depressing death of a clone we experienced last week, it was time for a lighter touch on this week’s episode of Orphan Black. Enter a drugged out dancing Donnie! But the installment was not without intrigue as we got an Alison-centric hour that featured flashbacks that brought the dearly departed Aynsley back into the fold and showed us the first-ever meeting between Alison and Cosima.

We spoke to show creators John Fawcett and Graeme Manson to get the scoop on this fun and frantic episode.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You had a lot of flashbacks last season which enabled you to bring some characters back from the grave, and you did it again here in a big way with Aynsley. Tell me about the decision to bring Aynsley and Chad back?

JOHN FAWCETT: This episode is obviously very much more of a personal, character-based episode for Alison, and it’s kind of the first of a number of more character-based episodes to come. And it was just fun for us to go back into the past, to open with Aynsley alive at the dining room table having dinner with her husband and Alison and Donnie, and reveal we’re back in time at the beginning — right around the time that Alison was discovering she’s a clone and has not met Cosima yet. That was just sort of a fun element for us to kind of embrace and to use in kind of this character study of Alison, where we’re kind of moving between the past and the present.

Yeah, about that Alison meeting Cosima scene — what was it like to be able to show that and have Tatiana Maslany not just play Cosima, but play Cosima through Alison’s eyes… with those eyes being impacted by mind-altering drugs?

GRAEME MANSON: Those are the kind of meta-layers we love here at Orphan Black. I mean, that just was a really fun thing for Tatiana to drill down on, and you know, Alison is John’s favorite clone, of course.

Mine too!

MANSON: So John was right in there, particularly going back to the Aynsley stuff, which is a part of the first season that we just loved — the dark turns that Alison’s suburban world took in that first season. We thought that that was the real jumping off point for who that character was coming into this series and we wanted to look at those early moments again and reconsider Alison in a certain way. That’s kind of the modus operandi for maybe each of the main clones this season, is to give them an episode with that kind of flavor and that kind of insight.

FAWCETT: Yeah, this episode really kind of digs into Alison’s self-worth, her worth as a person to herself, and her worthiness in this group of sisters that she has created. She feels kind of like a fifth wheel. She doesn’t feel particularly useful. She’s very down on herself.

MANSON: Of course, with Alison it’s also how she is viewed in her community, which has always been so important to Alison, and it’s nice to see her sort of step outside herself and look down and see what that need for acceptance within that community, what that’s done to her as a person.

FAWCETT: Plus, I think the Aynsley storyline brings back a lot of guilt for Alison, and that’s just so important as we kind of dig into her own issues, her own self-esteem, and this journey that we take the character on.

Well, it’s interesting because Alison can be a mess sometimes, but when she needs to step up, the woman can step up. We see that with her bringing Dr. Leekie’s head to Rachel, right?

FAWCETT: Yeah, absolutely. It was important to us through this journey that at the end of it she does something awesome, and has a kind of victory moment, and that was really critical to the storytelling, that it culminates in a dangerous meeting with Rachel where she throws down Leekie’s head and basically threatens her. And Rachel backs down, so it is this beautiful kind of, ‘I did it,’ and it’s also fun. The episode is always kind of meant to be a fun episode.

Yeah, well, last week was a very heavy episode with M.K.’s death and Kira dropping the bomb on Sarah that she wanted to work with Rachel, but this week you guys had a lot of fun, and that includes Kristian Bruun as a drugged out Donnie dancing in a kilt and exposing himself. This must have been quite the day on set.

MANSON: It was hilarious. Again, another one of the pleasures of taking a TV show with a core group of actors over five seasons is you learn things about the actors along the way. Last year I was at a party at Maria Doyle Kennedy’s house, and there were a bunch of musicians playing in their kitchen — as one does at an Irish party — and who stands up and does a reel but Kristian Bruun! We had no idea. The minute I saw that I told him, “Oh, that’s going in the show. Oh, we’re going to love this.”

FAWCETT: And then he ended up playing mandolin at the end. So not only did he highland dance, he actually played live on set — played his mandolin and sang a duet with Tat, which is obviously super beautiful, right at the very end of the episode.

MANSON: Kristian went to a military school, so he has these strange talents.

FAWCETT: He has strange talents, and he has a strange talent for being able to fall down repeatedly take after take after take and hit the ground in a very believable way. He must have been in a lot of pain the next day because I think David Wellington, the director, made him do it like, 20 times.

RELATED VIDEO: See Bruun and Kennedy talk about this party

Worth every take, by the way. Let’s shift gears a little bit. I want to ask you about Art, because there’s a pivotal moment for Art where he’s got his gun out, he appears ready to shoot if Rachel does not order her people to stand down in Alison’s garage. How long can Art sort of straddle both sides like this?

MANSON: It’s been one of Art’s real talents, to be able to work in the shadows, but the noose has been tightening on him over the last couple of seasons. It’s harder for him to play both sides. Last year he really stuck into it and he crossed the line, and I think Art knew he was crossing a line back then. He ended a life to keep the sisters safe. So Art is all in.

We love that because we love Kevin Hanchard, and we were really looking for a good story reason to have him more active this year. Again, it’s kind of going back to our first season and some of our core groupings. Art was there at the very beginning, Art has grown to be invested, Art has proven himself again and again to be trustworthy. So now we’re putting that ally to the real test. They’ve threatened his daughter and it’s going to be very, very hard for him to help now that he’s under mad Maddy Enger’s finger.

FAWCETT: Yeah, it’s nice to see him having to make a very, very dangerous decision. I think as a viewer we’ve been kind of going, “Whose side is Art on right now?” And in this moment, we can see that Art is very firmly still on our side. It’s a tough decision but he is ready to do it, and he is ready to protect the clones, and he is very firmly on our side, and you see that within that scene.

We end with Helena at a convent. What is that about and what can we look forward to as we keep moving on in this season of Orphan Black?

FAWCETT: Well, this is one of the strangest places that we could find her, in some kind of convent. We certainly know all of Helena’s checkered past in regards to nuns and convents and so forth, and it’s kind of and interesting place for her to hide. So we’re going to dig into that in episode 4.

For more Orphan Black intel, follow Dalton on Twitter @DaltonRoss.

War for the Planet of the Apes doesn’t hit theaters until the middle of next month, but this past week brought the first batch of screenings for critics, as well as a batch of global screenings for fans who were quick enough to get free passes to the advanced showing of the blockbuster sequel. The movie has some glowing early buzz, and one of the most impressive aspects of the film are the visual effects by Weta Workshop.

A new War for the Planet of the Apes visual effects featurette shows off the absolutely breathtaking work done by the New Zealand company who gives Industrial Light and Magic a run for their money. It shows off behind the scenes footage of Andy Serkis and some of the other ape actors as they appear on set in performance capture gear and puts it alongside the fully rendered, complete sequences from the movie. Check it out after the jump.

First, let’s acknowledge he fact that the apes in this movie look so realistic that it feels like director Matt Reeves simply found a way to teach the simians to act. But outside of how authentic the apes appear in the movie, what’s even more impressive is how performance capture technology has evolved to allow the performances from Andy Serkis and more to emote through the layers of digital effects place over the real actors. Even the eyes are perfectly recreated to capture the lifelike subtlety of human facial expressions.

Outside of the visual effects, it should be noted that War for the Planet of the Apes is an astounding motion picture. It’s one of the best blockbuster movies of the year, and you will be surprised at how emotionally charged and powerful this sequel is. Believe me when I say that you need to see this one on the biggest screen you can as soon as possible.

In War for the Planet of the Apes, the third chapter of the critically acclaimed blockbuster franchise, Caesar and his apes are forced into a deadly conflict with an army of humans led by a ruthless Colonel. After the apes suffer unimaginable losses, Caesar wrestles with his darker instincts and begins his own mythic quest to avenge his kind. As the journey finally brings them face to face, Caesar and the Colonel are pitted against each other in an epic battle that will determine the fate of both their species and the future of the planet.

War For the Planet of the Apes hits theaters on July 14, 2017.

The post ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ Featurette Highlights Weta’s Breathtaking Visual Effects appeared first on /Film.

Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist have assembled in the latest look at The Defenders.

The four superheroes have joined forces for the badass black and white poster that can be seen above. Netflix’s line of Marvel heroes also can be seen showing their moves in the motion images below.

Following each character having their own Netflix series, Daredevil (Charlie Cox), Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), Luke Cage (Mike Colter), and Iron Fist (Finn Jones) are coming together for the highly-anticipated The Defenders. Sigourney Weaver is on board as the big bad, while many familiar faces from the other series will be making appearances.

The Defenders hits Netflix on Aug. 18.

There's no 'us' in team. #DEFEND pic.twitter.com/jOFJUyYilq

— The Defenders (@TheDefenders) June 22, 2017

 

Imagine only needing to scam 200 people to make $80,000 a month - Apple is letting someone do just that on the App Store. One totally-legit-sounding app dubbed "Clean & Security VPN" has managed to generate $400/month per subscriber, despite it being an obvious scam that asks users to pay $99.99 for a 7-day subscription for a supposed antivirus. Part of the issue seems to lie with Apple's new search ads product: there seems to be no filtering or approval process, so even fake apps are getting great visibility. But there's still the question of how they even pass the review process. ...apps from well-known companies like Dropbox, Evernote, and Microsoft. That was to be expected. But what's this? The #10 Top Grossing Productivity app (as of June 7th, 2017) was an app called "Mobile protection: Clean & Security VPN." Given the terrible title of this app ( inconsistent capitalization, misplaced colon, and grammatically nonsensical "Clean & Security VPN"? ) , I was sure this was a bug in the rankings algorithm. So I check Sensor Tower for an estimate of the app's revenue, which showed...$80,000 per month? That couldn't possibly be right. Now I was really curious. Discussion

A Ukrainian tech company is adapting the Microsoft HoloLens for military use, implementing the AR system into a series of helmets for tank commanders.

LimpidArmor has developed the Circular Review System headgear with the HoloLens system designed to interact with cameras mounted on the front of tanks, according to a report in Futurism. This offers a 360-degree field of view, including optical thermal readings and can be used to identify friends and foes, designate targets and provide battlefield details hat might otherwise escape undetected in a non-augmented setup.

The helmet is still in development, with LimpidArmor hoping to add more features, including armament control and input from battlefield drones.

The system has already received interest after a showing at the Arms and Security Show in Kiev, Ukraine The Ukrainian military is currently testing the helmets, while the Israeli military has also purchased two systems to test.

ProtonMail, the encrypted email created by CERN and MIT scientists, has released a new product in response to the administration's roll back of Obama-era internet privacy rules. Starting today, you can try out the company's VPN service, which was in...

If it weren't for poor estimates and bias for dominant services, cellphone usage could have been ubiquitous decades earlier. From what I can process so far, the primary reasons for the delay appear to be the FCC wanting to give television all the bandwidth, and greedy companies attempting to secure monopolies despite the financial potential of mobile. Apparently, the first cellular call with a mobile handset was made in 1973 by Motorola's then-Vice President. The basic idea of the cellphone was introduced to the public in 1945—not in Popular Mechanics or Science, but in the down-home Saturday Evening Post. Millions of citizens would soon be using "handie-talkies," declared J.K. Jett, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Licenses would have to be issued, but that process "won't be difficult." The revolutionary technology, Jett promised in the story, would be formulated within months. But permission to deploy it would not. The government would not allocate spectrum to realize the engineers' vision of "cellular radio" until 1982, and licenses authorizing the service would not be fully distributed for another seven years. That's one heck of a bureaucratic delay. Discussion

Entertainment Weekly is on the scene at ATX. Go inside the TV festival with all our coverage, available here.

The Mick‘s executive producers have something in common with the series’ titular character: They are admittedly flying by the seat of their pants.

In May’s season 1 finale, Mickey (Kaitlin Olson) and her niece Sabrina (Sofia Black-D’Elia) and nephews Chip (Thomas Barbusca) and Ben (Jack Stanton) watch their gorgeous mansion burn to the ground. But where they’ll go next is anybody’s guess.

“I think we’re excited just to switch things up a bit, but we also don’t want to leave Greenwich and we don’t want to change the entire DNA of the show, but we also want to keep you guys guessing a little bit,” said John Chernin, who co-created the series with his brother Dave, during Friday’s panel about the show at the ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas.

Then he asked the audience, “Is that okay, or do you want to know a little more? One, I don’t want to give it away. Two, we just started writing, and I have no idea.”

RELATED: Exclusive Portraits From ATX Festival 2017

Chernin revealed the brothers always considered watching the home go down in flames but never thought it would happen in the Fox comedy’s hit first season. “I think it was always in the back of our minds for a later season, and then we were struggling to come up with an ending for the finale,” he explained. “Nick Frenkel, who’s our manager and one of the producers of the show, just came in one day, and he’s like, ‘Just torch it and figure it out later.’ We were like, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea!’ And now, here we are, and we have no idea what’s next.”

Scott MacArthur, who pulls double duty as both a writer on the series and an actor playing Mickey’s loser boyfriend Jimmy, chimed in with a funny anecdote from a recent Grateful Dead show he attended at the Hollywood Bowl. “I texted the and I said, ‘Wow, there are a lot of fans of The Mick here.’ And John immediately responded, ‘Great, ask them how the f—ing season starts.'”

In addition to taking plot suggestions from fans, the Chernins are also open to giving series star Olson — who previously worked with them on FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — an episode to direct. “I’m enough of a control freak to take that on also,” said Olson, laughing. “Yeah, I thought about it last year too. I do not like doing things unless I know I’m going to be very good at it, because I’m really hard on myself.”

Fox renewed the freshman comedy for season 2 in February.

SPOILER ALERT: Read on only if you have already watched the season 5 premiere of Orphan Black.

Cosima may be in the woods in some creepy village in the middle of the nowhere, but is she finally out of the woods when it comes to her clone illness? That is just one of the burning questions we had after taking in the Orphan Black season 5 premiere. Also, is Art compromised? Why take Delphine away again? And what the hell was that beast that attacked Sarah?

We went straight to the source for answers and got Orphan Black co-creator Graeme Manson on the line to discuss the first episode of the final season.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What can you tell us about this island village of Revival where Cosima is?GRAEME MANSON: Without giving too much away, we have arrived at the top of the pyramid, so to speak. We have arrived at the seat of power at Neolution. This is where P.T. Westmoreland, a man who’s apparently well over 100 years old, lives and marshals the global forces of Neolution — those setting out to change the course of human evolution. So this little village on the island is called Revival and this is our sort of version of The Island of Doctor Moreau. We do like our classic sci-fi on Orphan Black.

You give Cosima Delphine, and then you take her away again. Man, you guys are so mean to poor Cosima! How could you do that to her?It’s the nature of that relationship and the nature of scheduling busy actors. Suffice it to say, Delphine will return. Delphine has many things in those deep French pockets of hers, and there is still plenty of love lost and mayhem in store for those two characters, for Cosima and Delphine.

Cosima gives herself the treatment. Or, rather, Rachel ends up administering it to her. Does that mean we can finally breathe a sigh of relief when it comes to her health?I mean, it feels like a bigger sigh at the beginning of this season than there ever has been before. Cosima essentially is living with the enemy and striking that Devil’s bargain of continuing to develop the cure to cure her sisters, but she’s working for the dark side now. So obviously, there’s a long struggle ahead for Cosima and well, she’s a pretty good scientist so let’s hope that cure is efficacious this time.

Moving over to another clone, we see Sarah attacked by some sort of maybe half-man, half-beast type of creature in the woods. What can you say about who or what the hell that was?I don’t want to say too much because you know that in the first episode Sarah saw what you saw there. She got attacked out of the shadows of the deep, dark woods on the Island of Doctor Moreau by something. Something is loose on that northern Canadian island and that’s part of the mystery. It’s a part of the scientific mystery. It’s a thread of the real backstory of P.T. Westmoreland, and the history of this island and community. So, it’s a story we’re going to be picking away at for a bunch of episodes.

Let’s talk about Art for a second, because I think you’re doing something very interesting here. He’s got a new partner, this woman we meet called Maddie. She seems to be an agent of Neolution herself and she’s squeezing him to bring the clones in. So, what does this mean for him in terms of how he’s going to play out this situation?Well, everybody has a choice to make this year at the beginning. It’s like Neolution finally holds all the cards. Rachel is back on top and Sarah has no choice but to capitulate and give in, and there’s a couple of people that help her make that choice — one is Mrs. S who has never given up before, and the other is Arthur, who’s in that position now. He’s struggled out from underneath it last year with Duko, but now this person is his new partner and he really doesn’t know which way to look. So, this terrific ally in Art is compromised as well. We’re all a little bit compromised at the top of this season.

So we end with Sarah in the boathouse getting shot by a dart and then Rachel comes in and proclaims it a “new day.” What can you say about what’s coming up?Despite the fact that it’s Rachel’s power play, I think Rachel is showing us some surprising things here. She is the one at the end of the day who administers this cure to Cosima. So, Rachel actually cures one of her sisters. So, despite the heavy hand that she’s laying on all of them, she’s sort of wearing this velvet glove — the velvet crowbar we call it. And that’s how Rachel gets her way. So, Rachel has her hooks in Sarah now, and we’ll see at the top of episode 2 what kind of pressure Rachel’s going to bring to bear to get exactly what she wants.

For more Orphan Black intel, follow Dalton on Twitter @DaltonRoss.

The field of quantum cryptography, which seeks to transmit encrypted information using entangled quantum particles like photons, could help lay the groundwork for tomorrow's quantum networks but it faces a significant physical hurdle: entangled photo...

In this month's issue of New Space, Elon Musk outlined his plan to colonize Mars. His article discusses how to bring down the cost of Mars flights as well as some of the specs of necessary equipment.

The cast of Syfy's Battlestar Galactica, along with series executive producer/showrunner Ron Moore, reunited for a Q&A panel at the Austin Television Festival this past weekend, where a question was posed - "What was the Cylons' plan?"

As you recall, BSG episodes opened with:

"The cylons were created by man . They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan."

"There was no plan," Moore laughed.

"It all came about when we were doing the main titles and we had to have what's called a 'precap' as opposed to a recap," he said. "So we had a precap before the main title. And David

said we should have a punchy line there at the end...'and they have a plan.' And I was like 'What does that mean?' He said 'It doesn't matter, doesn't matter. It'll be great. The audience will love it.'

Continue reading…

Jimmy Kimmel brought one of the most talented soccer players in the world to the roof of his studio on Wednesday to attempt a shot across Hollywood Boulevard.

Neymar Jr., a gold-medal winner and star player for both Barcelona and the Brazillian national team, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live with one goal in mind: to score a goal across the busy street outside Kimmel’s studio.

Asked by Kimmel before attempting the shot if he was able to score, Neymar answered, “I can.” Ever a man of his word, Neymar did score, much to the delight of Kimmel and his studio audience.

Watch the first-ever goal scored across Hollywood Boulevard above.

Amidst ongoing controversy and unanswered question about President Donald Trump and his administration’s possible ties to the Russian government, former FBI Director James Comey’s appearance on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee qualified as the biggest news event since Trump’s inauguration. There were long lines at bars all around Washington, D.C., as people waited eagerly to hear what Comey had to say after President Trump fired him May.

Over the course of his almost three-hour testimony, Comey answered questions from both Democratic and Republican Senators about his one-on-one meetings with Trump, how his handling of the Russian investigation compared to his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and more. Though Comey declined to answer certain questions about the ongoing investigation in a public setting, he still managed to provide some sharp remarks. Here are the highlights.

“Those were lies, plain and simple”

On Wednesday, ahead of his testimony, Comey’s opening statement was provided to both Congress and the American public yesterday. Most of the hearing involved senators quizzing or interrogating various lines from that statement, but Comey took a different tack with his opening remarks. He publicly apologized to his former FBI colleagues for not getting the chance to say goodbye to them “properly” and said that in the wake of his firing, President Trump’s administration “chose to defame me and the FBI by saying it was disarray.” This clearly stung Comey, who called such denigrations of FBI professionalism “lies, plain and simple.”

Comey took notes on meetings in case President Trump lied

Comey had nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in the months after Trump’s election, whereas he only had two one-on-one conversations with President Barack Obama during his entire eight-year term. Also unlike Obama, Comey felt compelled to take notes on all of his meetings with President Trump, which are recounted in the opening statement he provided Wednesday. As he explained to Senator Mark Warner during the hearing, Comey took notes because “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, so I thought it really important to document.”

Why didn’t he tell Trump “no”?

After a group meeting on Feb. 14, President Trump kept Comey behind and asked him, one-on-one, to let go of an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. According to Comey’s account of the event, he refused to do so, saying only that he agreed with the president that Flynn was “a good guy.” One question Comey was repeatedly asked was why he didn’t speak up more forcefully about the president’s inappropriate conduct in this instance. Why not tell the president it was out of line to try an influence an ongoing investigation in such a way? Comey chalked it up to a mix of shock and intimidation.

“I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in,” Comey told Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.). “I was playing in my mind, what should my response be? That’s why I very carefully chose my words. So I said, ‘I agree he’s good guy’ as a way of saying, ‘I’m not agreeing with what you just asked me to do.’ Maybe other people would be stronger in that instance, but it’s how I conducted myself. Maybe if I did it again I’d do it better.”

“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”

A few days after firing Comey, President Trump tweeted this ominous-sounding message: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump’s tweet led to speculation that the president might be secretly taping Oval Office conversations, but on Thursday Comey made it clear that he’s not scared of anything that might be on tape. He first told Sen. Feinstein, “Lordy, I hope there are tapes”; later reiterated to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-Va.) that the president can go ahead and “release all the tapes, I’m good with it.”

“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

At one point, Comey ended up having an interesting exchange with Sen. Angus King (I-ME). Several senators were curious about Comey’s account the Oval Office meeting where he and the president discussed Michael Flynn. Did President Trump’s wording (“I hope you can let this go”) really translate to an order? By Comey’s reckoning, the context and the power of the person speaking means the passive wording did carry an order behind it. To explain, Comey ended up making a historical reference that Sen. King also understood.

“It rings as my ears kind of like, ‘who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” Comey said.

“I was just going to quote that, King said. “In 1170, Henry II says, ‘who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ And the next day the priest Thomas Becket was killed. It’s exactly the same situation, we’re thinking along the same lines.”

In other words, when a head of state makes his wishes clear, no matter how it’s exactly phrased, the expectation is those desires will be acted upon.

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