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The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere — having one in your solar system will also serve as a stark warning of your technological capacity to ETs that comes sniffing around. 

Or at least that's how 20th century astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev and Carl Sagan envisioned our potential Sol-spanning distant future going. Turns out, a whole lot of how we predict intelligences from outside our planet will behave is heavily influenced by humanity's own cultural and historical biases. In The Possibility of Life, science journalist Jaime Green examines humanity's intriguing history of looking to the stars and finding ourselves reflected in them.

Harper Collins Publishing

Excerpted from The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.

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On a Scale of One to Three

The way we imagine human progress — technology, advancement — seems inextricable from human culture. Superiority is marked by fast ships, colonial spread, or the acquisition of knowledge that fuels mastery of the physical world. Even in Star Trek, the post-poverty, post-conflict Earth is rarely the setting. Instead we spend our time on a ship speeding faster than light, sometimes solving philosophical quandaries, but often enough defeating foes. The future is bigger, faster, stronger — and in space.

Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev led the USSR’s first SETI initiatives in the early 1960s, and he believed that the galaxy might be home to civilizations billions of years more advanced than ours. Imagining these civilizations was part of the project of searching for them. So in 1964, Kardashev came up with a system for classifying a civilization’s level of technological advancement.

The Kardashev scale, as it’s called, is pretty simple: a Type I civilization makes use of all the energy available on or from its planet. A Type II civilization uses all the energy from its star. A Type III civilization harnesses the energy of its entire galaxy.

What’s less simple is how a civilization gets to any of those milestones. These leaps, in case it’s not clear, are massive. On Earth we’re currently grappling with how dangerous it is to try to use all the energy sources on our planet, especially those that burn. (So we’re not even a Type I civilization, more like a Type Three-quarters.) A careful journey toward Type I would involve taking advantage of all the sunlight falling on a planet from its star, but that’s just one billionth or so of a star’s total energy output. A Type II civilization would be harnessing all of it.

It’s not just that a Type II civilization would have to be massive enough to make use of all that energy, they’d also have to figure out how to capture it. The most common imagining for this is called a Dyson sphere, a massive shell or swarm of satellites surrounding the star to capture and convert all its energy. If you wanted enough material to build such a thing, you’d essentially have to disassemble a planet, and not just a small one — more like Jupiter. And then a Type III civilization would be doing that, too, but for all the stars in its galaxy (and maybe doing some fancy stuff to suck energy off the black hole at the galaxy’s core).

On the one hand, these imaginings are about as close to culturally agnostic as we can get: they require no alien personalities, no sociology, just the consumption of progressively more power, to be put to use however the aliens might like. But the Kardashev scale still rests on assumptions that are baked into so many of our visions of advanced aliens (and Earth’s own future as well). This view conflates advancement not only with technology but with growth, with always needing more power and more space, just the churning and churning of engines. Astrophysicist Adam Frank identifies the Kardashev scale as a product of the midcentury “techno-utopian vision of the future.” At the point when Kardashev was writing, humanity hadn’t yet been forced to face the sensitive feedback systems our energy consumption triggers. “Planets, stars, and galaxies,” Frank writes, “would all simply be brought to heel.”

Even in the Western scientific tradition, alternatives to Kardashev’s scale have been offered. Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin proposed one scale that measures planetary mastery and another that measured colonizing spread. Carl Sagan offered one that accounts for the information available to a civilization. Cosmologist John D. Barrow proposed microscopic manipulation, going from Type I–minus, where people can manipulate objects of their own scale, down through the parts of living things, molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei, subatomic particles, to the very fabric of space and time. Frank proposed looking not at energy consumption but transformation, noting that a sophisticated civilization does more than bring a planet to heel, it must learn to find balance between resource use and long-term survival.

Of these — again, all white American or European men — only Sagan offers a measure of advancement that isn’t necessarily acquisitive. Even the manipulation of atoms, which may seem so small and delicate, requires massive amounts of energy in the form of particle accelerators, not to mention that this kind of tinkering has also unleashed humanity’s greatest destructive force. But Sagan’s super-advanced civilization could be nothing more than a massive, massive library, filled with scholars and philosophers, expanding and exploring mentally but with no dominion over their planet or star. (Yet, one has to ask: What is powering those libraries? The internet is ephemeral, but it is not free.)

Implicit in any vision of vast progress is not just longevity but continuity. The assumption of the ever upward-sloping line is bold to say the least. In the novella A Man of the People, Ursula K. Le Guin writes of one world, Hain, where civilization has existed for three million years. But just as the last few thousand years on Earth have seen empires rise and fall, and cultures collapse and displace one another, so it is on Hain at larger scale. Le Guin writes, “There had been…billions of lives lived in millions of countries…infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings…an endless repetition of unceasing novelty.” To hope for more than that is perhaps more optimistic than to imagine we might domesticate a star. Perhaps it’s also shortsighted, extrapolating out eons of future from just the last few centuries of life on two continents, rather than a wider view of many millennia on our whole world.

All of these scales of progress are built on human assumptions, specifically the colonizing, dominating, fossil-fuel-burning history of Europe and the United States. But scientists don’t see much use in thinking about the super-advanced alien philosophers and artists and dolphins, brilliant as they might be, because it would be basically impossible for us to find them.

The scientific quest for advanced aliens is about trying to imagine not just who might be out there but how we might find them. Which is how we end up at Dyson spheres.

Dyson spheres are named for Freeman Dyson, the physicist, mathematician, and general polymath. While most SETI scientists in the early 1960s were looking for extraterrestrial beacons, Dyson thought “one ought to be looking at the uncooperative society.” Not obstinate, just not actively trying to help us. “The idea of searching for radio signals was a fine idea,” he said in a 1981 interview, “but it only works if you have some cooperation at the other end. So I was always thinking about what to do if you were looking just for evidence of intelligent activities without anything in the nature of a message.” And you might as well start with the easiest technology to detect — the biggest or brightest. So the massive spheres Dyson popularized in his 1960 paper were the result of him asking What is the largest feasible technology?

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Relics,” the Enterprise finds itself caught in a massive gravitational field, even though there are no stars nearby. The source, on the view screen, is a matte, dark gray sphere. Riker says its diameter is almost as wide as the Earth’s orbit.

Picard asks, with hushed wonder, “Mr. Data, could this be a Dyson sphere?”

Data replies, “The object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.”

Commander Riker isn’t familiar with the concept, but Picard doesn’t give him any trouble for that. “It’s a very old theory, Number One. I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of it.” He tells him that a twentieth century physicist, Freeman Dyson, had proposed that a massive, hollow sphere built around a star could capture all the star’s radiating energy for use. “A population living on the interior surface would have virtually inexhaustible sources of power.”

Riker asks, with some skepticism, if Picard thinks there are people living in the sphere.

“Possibly a great number of people, Commander,” Data says. “The interior surface area of a sphere this size is the equivalent of more than two hundred and fifty million Class M [Earthlike] planets.”

In Dyson’s thinking, the goal wasn’t living space but energy — how would a civilization reach Type II? And Dyson’s writing was clearly speculative. In the paper, he wrote, “I do not argue that this is what will happen in our system; I only say that this is what may have happened in other systems.” Decades later, astrophysicist Jason Wright took up the search.

One of the great benefits to this approach, Wright told me, is that “nature doesn’t make Dyson spheres.” Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, where he is director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. But while the best known version of SETI is listening for radio signals (more on that in the next chapter), Wright focuses on looking for technosignatures — evidence of technology out among the stars. Technosignatures allow you to find those uncooperative aliens Dyson thought would make the best targets. We don’t even need to find the aliens, in this case, just proof they once existed. That could be a stargate, or a distant planet covered in elemental silicon (geologically unlikely, but technologically great for solar panels), or it could be a Dyson sphere.

Wright’s first big search for Dyson spheres was called Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies, or G-HAT. Or, even better, Gˆ (because that’s a G with a little hat on it). The premise was simple: Dyson spheres don’t just absorb energy, they transform it, inevitably radiating some waste as heat which we can see as infrared radiation. So, from 2012 to 2015, Wright and his team looked at about a million galaxies, searching for a Type II civilization on its way to Type III, having ensconced enough of a galaxy’s stars in Dyson spheres that the galaxy might glow unusually bright in infrared. (They surveyed galaxies rather than individual stars because, as Wright writes, “A technological species that could build a Dyson sphere could also presumably spread to nearby star systems,” so it’s fair to think a galaxy with one Dyson sphere may have several, and several would be easier to find than just one. Might as well start there.) None were found, but you know that because you would’ve surely heard about it if Wright’s search had succeeded.

Wright prides himself on the agnosticism of this approach. He doesn’t need aliens to be looking for us or to have any certain sociological impulses. They just need technology. “Technology uses energy,” he told me. “That’s kind of what makes it technology. Just like life uses energy.” That view makes demolishing a Jupiter-sized planet to build a star-encompassing megastructure seem almost comically simple, but Wright doesn’t even see the existence of a Dyson sphere as requiring massive coordination or forethought on the aliens’ part. It is truly, in his view, a low-intensity ask. He compared it to Manhattan, a fair example of a human “megastructure,” a massive, interconnected, artificial system. “It was planned to some degree, but no one was ever like, ‘Hey, let’s build a huge city here.’ It’s just every generation made it a little bigger.” He thinks a Dyson sphere or swarm could accumulate in a similar manner. “If the energy is out there to take and it’s just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn’t someone take it?”

Wright knows the objections: that this imagines a capitalist orientation, a drive to “dominate nature” that is by no means universal, not even among human societies. But for his research to work, this drive doesn’t need to be universal among the stars. It just has to have happened sometimes, enough for us to see the results. As he put it, “There’s nothing that drives all life on Earth to be large. In fact, most life is small. But some life is large.” And if an alien were to come to Earth, they wouldn’t need to see all the small life to know the planet was inhabited. A single elephant would do the trick.

Some hypothetical alien technosignatures might be less definitive. In 2017, astronomers detected a roughly quarter-mile-long rocky object slingshotting through the solar system. They realized that this object, called ‘Oumuamua, came from outside the system — because of its speed and the path it took. It was the first interstellar object ever detected in our system. While hopes or fears that it was an alien probe were not realized, it was a reminder that alien technology could be found closer to home, lurking around our own sun.

“We don’t know that there’s not technology here because we’ve never really checked,” Wright said. “I mean, I guess if they had cities on Mars, we would notice—if they were on the surface, anyway.” But, he pointed out, much of the Earth’s surface doesn’t have active, visible technology. The same could go for the solar system beyond Earth, too. There could be alien probes or debris, like ‘Oumuamua but constructed, moving so fast or so dark that we don’t see them. Maybe there’s an alien base on the dwarf planet Ceres, or buried under the surface of Mars. The lunar monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wright reminded me, was buried just under the surface of the moon. All those ancient interstellar gates sci-fi is fond of have to be found before they can be used. Don’t forget, until 2015, our best image of Pluto was a blurry blob. So much of what we know about even our own solar system is inference and assumption.

Skeptics love to ask Okay, so where is everyone? But we don’t know for sure that they aren’t — or haven’t been — here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-possibility-of-life-jaime-greene-hanover-square-press-113047089.html?src=rss

Following NVIDIA's open source release of the RTX Remix runtime, the modding community renewed its already admirable efforts to remaster classic PC games using the tool. While they had been working with the files included in Portal RTX (which was made by RTX Remix by NVIDIA's Lightspeed Studios), the full release of the runtime has improved game compatibility and introduced some much-needed fixes. It's not the full RTX Remix toolset yet, with the Creator Kit due to be available in early access soon, but it's more than enough to get a sneak peek at how great classic PC games will look.

Modder Adam Pasek, for example, focused on implementing RTX Remix into the first Torchlight game, originally released in 2009 by Runic Games. While top-down games are generally not believed to be best suited to showcasing ray tracing technologies, Torchlight RTX is a good example that's not always the case, as the result is rather lovely and doesn't clash with the stylized visuals at all.

Another surprisingly good showcase of RTX Remix was shared by YouTuber ALG46, who tested 2008's Mount & Blade, the strategy action RPG that put TaleWorlds Entertainment on everyone's map. Mount & Blade also works very well in the interiors and the castle's inner court, though the same cannot be said about the open area due to missing textures and other bugs. It's definitely still early days, as similar issues are encountered in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which looks great indoors but barely even works when going outdoors.

The current issues haven't stopped modders in their endeavor to remaster even older games, like 2002's third-person squad-based shooter game The Thing. In the below footage from YouTuber C311, the over-20-year-old title shows off the remastered dynamic lighting that now originates from the flares dropped by the player.

RTX Remix is composed of a bridge that sits between the original game's 32-bit process and the new 64-bit process. The D3D9 fixed function API is then converted into Vulkan thanks to DXVK, allowing access to the path traced renderer designed by NVIDIA with support for RTX Direct Illumination, ReSTIR GI, DLSS (both Super Resolution and Frame Generation), Reflex,  NRD, OMM, SER, and more. RTX Remix can also capture assets, converting them into the USD standard that can then be modified and upscaled to improve the quality of textures across the board (though this feature will only be available with the Creator Kit).

Right now, compatibility is limited to DX8/DX9 games with fixed function (no shaders), but NVIDIA is looking to add OpenGL support in the near future.

We're reunited and talking about some games! Games like Dead Island 2, which, it turns out, is a real game that exists and that people can play! And we did! This week's music:  Muna - One That Got Away

There's a major new update of QEMU, the open-source machine emulator, reports 9to5Linux: Coming a year after QEMU 7.0, the QEMU 8.0 release is here to improve support for ARM and RISC-V architectures. - For ARM, it adds emulation support for FEAT_EVT, FEAT_FGT, and AArch32 ARMv8-R, CPU emulation for Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52, support for a new Olimex STM32 H405 machine type, as well as gdbstub support for M-profile system registers. - For the RISC-V architecture, QEMU 8.0 brings updated machine support for OpenTitan, PolarFire, and OpenSBI, additional ISA and Extension support for smstateen, native debug icount trigger, cache-related PMU events in virtual mode, Zawrs/Svadu/T-Head/Zicond extensions, and ACPI support. Moreover, RISC-V received multiple fixes covering PMP propagation for TLB, mret exceptions, uncompressed instructions, and other emulation/virtualization improvements. Improvements were also made for the s390x (IBM Z) platform, the HP Precision Architecture (HPPA) platform, and x86.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mp1st reports that the Atomic Heart sales performs better than expected: Atomic Heart Sales Perform Above Expectations as Focus Entertainment Revenue Up 36% Year on Year Atomic Heart has apparently improved above expectations, according to a recent revenue report by the game’s publisher, Focus Entertainment....

"I See You" defies expectations. What begins as a typical crime thriller mutates into something more intricate and profound. Devon Graye penned the script, blending together social commentary on child abuse, infidelity, police corruption, and homelessness. At the heart of the film is the concept of phrogging -- when a person or persons secretly squat inside someone else's home. Director Adam Randall elevates the film with long static shots, emotional character close-ups, and methodical dolly glides. The camera work here takes on a life all its own. But let's not forget the film's chill-inducing score, courtesy of composer William Arcane, which punctuates the film's vital and mouth-dropping moments.

Initially, "I See You" arrived in theaters in late 2019 and grossed just over $1 million at the box office. But when the film hit Netflix, it went viral -- scoring top slots in the streamer's daily Top 10 list. As we revisit this harrowing movie, we're tackling its most disturbing moments, ranging from strange occurrences around the home to that mind-blowing third-act twist.

6. Phrogger Antics

Midway through the film, we learn two Phroggers are living in the guest room and attic space of the Harper residence. After the Harper family leaves for the day, Mindy (Libe Barer) and Alec (Owen Teague) sneak into their garage and wander around their home, awing at the luxury and gorgeous bay window view. Mindy confesses she wants to record how to Phrog, including things like picking the right home and the necessary steps to live undetected. She invites Alec along for the ride but he seems to have more covert intentions.

Perhaps the most disturbing moment occurs when Alec pulls back Greg's (Jon Tenney) bedding and urinates on him. But that's not the only strange happening. Alec also steals photographs from picture frames, misplaces silverware in the dryer, locks Greg inside Connor's (Judah Lewis) closet, and puts Jackie's (Helen Hunt) favorite flower mug on their roof. Alec argues with Mindy, claiming that the point of their phrogging should be to make homeowners question their sanity. Mindy disagrees, but ultimately she can't control her friend's behavior. As the film progresses, Alec's shenanigans get wilder, entangling himself with the family. He's nothing if not a total loose cannon.

5. Todd's Fate

Jackie has an affair with Todd (Sam Trammell), who makes an unwanted house call and admits he is truly, madly, deeply in love with her. While on the patio, Jackie's flower mug topples down from overhead and smacks Todd in the noggin. Head bleeding, he's led to the garage, where Jackie tends to his wound.

Since she needs to take her son to school, Jackie leaves Todd unattended in the garage. Moments later, an unseen assailant hits Todd's head with a wooden bat. He's knocked unconscious and dies on the floor. After the audience revisits the moment through Mindy's eyes, we learn who the culprit is: Greg. When Jackie returns home, Greg confronts her about what happened. They cook up a plan to bury Todd's body in the woods. At this point, Jackie believes her son Connor threw the mug, so they have no other choice but to dispose of Todd's body.

This twist is one of many in a film that yanks the rug from underneath the viewer. Greg, also a detective, feels hurt by his wife's infidelity, so you become empathetic to his plight and might even root for him. When the truth becomes exposed, it's hard to believe what you're seeing. In the cold light of day, Greg is a ruthless psychopath, unafraid of killing to get what he wants.

4. Bathtime

Home alone, Connor receives a cryptic text asking him if he knows what phrogging means. He replies in all caps: "TELL ME WHO THIS IS." But this fails to get a response. As Connor hunkers over his computer, a mysterious figure appears behind him wearing a frog mask. The person creeps closer and closer until they pounce. When Jackie and Greg return home from burying Todd's body, they find their son gagged and bound in the upstairs bathtub. Near his feet, they discover a green army knife, a trademark of the child abductor the police force is currently investigating. Of course, this makes it seem like Connor is their newest target.

Without further context, this moment is disturbing enough. The person in the frog mask knew Connor's phone number and easily slipped into the residence without setting off alarms. We learn that the phrogger in the frog mask is Alec, whose insidious actions can't be quenched. He devolves further, sinking his fangs into the Harper family's everyday life. With Connor's kidnapping, you wonder if Alec is the child abductor. The film works overtime here to tinker with perceptions -- misdirecting the viewer often. At this moment, Alec makes our skin crawl. He's not to be trusted.

3. Greg Reveals His True Nature

Eventually, we learn Greg is the child abductor -- charming his way into the lives of children before kidnapping them. In many cases, he kills the kids after holding them hostage inside an airstream in the woods. When Mindy discovers the location, she attempts to free two children. However, Greg jumps her before she can. He suffocates her and then loads her body into his car.

But he doesn't stop there! He takes Mindy back to his home where he shoots her. "You don't have to do this," Mindy pleads. "I do," Greg replies before shooting her. Greg is a chameleon, wearing different faces for each situation. In one moment, he's the wounded family man trying to do right by his son and learning to forgive his wife. But the next moment he's a cold-blooded killer with a total disregard for the sanctity of life. Terrifyingly, he can and will shoot you the first chance he gets. He never shies away from what he believes needs to be done.

2. The Missing Kid's Jersey

Before Mindy's death, she awakens in the back of Greg's car. Soon she realizes where she is and riffles through a duffel bag that was left in the car. In the bag, she discovers a bloody baseball bat, a jersey belonging to a missing kid (Justin Whitter), and a bag of green army knives. All these belongings undeniably link Greg to the crimes of child abduction and murder. 

While she realizes Greg's connection to the crimes, Greg continues driving out to his secret airstream. At this point in the runtime, you don't expect Mindy to become integral in exposing the truth about Greg. Despite her questionable phrogging practices, she shows a strong sense of morals amidst grave matters. With Justin's whereabouts still unknown, the revelation is downright chilling -- especially considering Greg is one of two officers on the missing person case. His closeness to the victim makes it far more than disturbing and unhinged.

1. The Twist Ending

"I See You" packs in the twists! By its third act, you think all the reveals are done. However, the film tosses in one final curveball. We learn that Alec is one of the young boys previously captured by Greg but he escaped. The reveal locks his weird demeanor into crystal-clear focus. Once Greg realizes someone has been living inside their walls, he returns to the house, unpacks his gun, and searches for the unknown culprit. Alec slinks up the hallway and attempts to wield an axe into Greg's back.

The two tussle and Greg knocks Alec to the ground. Greg grabs a knife and injures himself to frame Alec and Mindy. But then Alec is gone. Alec then appears out of the darkness with a handgun raised. "I know what you are," Alec says. Greg tries to convince him that what he did was because of his past. But Alec doesn't care -- and he shouldn't. What Greg did to him was reprehensible. Alec fires the gun, and Greg hits the hardwood. The "I See You" finale holds no prisoners -- keeping you guessing until its final moment. "I See You" manages to retool familiar conventions of home invasion elements to tell a uniquely disturbing story. No wonder why it was a hit on Netflix. From its tight script to potent camera work, "I See You" delivers a masterclass in storytelling.

Read this next: Horror Movies You Don't Want To Miss In 2023

The post The Most Disturbing Moments in I See You, Ranked appeared first on /Film.

Voice and motion capture performer Troy Baker has played many roles in seminal video game franchises. Having played characters like Booker DeWitt in "Bioshock Infinite" and Sam Drake in the "Uncharted" franchise, Baker is best known for his role as Joel Miller in "The Last of Us." No one could play Joel as Baker did in Naughty Dog's survival horror video game — Baker imbued the character with the perfect amount of nuance and complexity, painting Joel as a morally-grey protagonist capable of both cruelty and compassion. For someone like Baker to be so intimately involved with "The Last of Us," and to be a part of a franchise that evolved and gained immense popularity over the course of a decade, a live-action series adaptation was bound to evoke complicated feelings.

Although Baker did not reprise his role as Joel (Pedro Pascal reinvented the character in beautiful, interesting ways), he was deeply involved with Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin's HBO adaptation from the get-go. Baker is the host of the show's official companion podcast, where he sits down for a post-episodic discussion with the creators to grant greater insight into behind-the-scenes stories and tidbits. Fans of the video game were also delighted when Baker appeared in the penultimate episode of the first season, where he played the role of "buddy boy" James, a reluctant follower in David's (Scott Shepherd) cannibalism cult.

While Baker couldn't be happier about "The Last of Us" series at the moment, he was initially unsure about Druckmann's decision to make a live-action adaptation when he first heard about it, according to an interview with Deadline. Here's what Baker had to say about his initial misgivings.

A Story Worth Repeating

When Baker was first involved with the "The Last of Us" game, he knew he was a part of something special. "You never know if [a project] will be as good as you're hoping for it to be, but it was, and then it gets out in the world, and it just blows up and becomes this phenomenon," Baker told Deadline, in relation to his expectations of audience reception for the video game. It is one thing to hope for a strong, positive response, but to actually achieve it in a way that surpasses expectations is undoubtedly a special feeling, one Baker cherishes deeply given how invested he is in the world of "The Last of Us."

As a result, when Druckmann decided to make an adaptation, Baker was, in his own words, "against the idea of the show," as he was unsure whether it could match up to the critical acclaim that the game enjoyed. When he asked Druckmann why the game warranted a series at all, the latter said the following:

"Because I believe this story is good enough to get out to people who will never pick up a controller, and we need to bring this story to them."

Druckmann was right. As a first-person gaming experience, "The Last of Us" is uplifting, heartbreaking, beautiful, and harrowing all at once. There's something universal about a story centered on a hardened survivor tasked to protect a young girl who might be the key to human survival, wherein his reluctance gradually morphs into a fiercely protective brand of fatherhood with grave repercussions. The cordyceps-infected world feels especially poignant in the post-pandemic era and Druckmann recognized the potential of such a poignant tale as an emotionally resonant, high-stakes television series with a wider audience appeal. 

An Adaptation That Stays True To Its Roots

Baker has been open about his initial guardedness towards the adaptation in several interviews, but it's endearing to see how much he's grown to love and respect the series in its own right. Baker's misgivings were, however, not completely unfounded — there is no dearth of video game adaptations that have completely misunderstood their source material, leading to lackluster renditions that seem completely unrecognizable when compared to their roots. However, "The Last of Us" series has always been in good hands, as Druckmann's personal involvement ensured that the adaptation did not stray away from the essence of the games, while Mazin's creative ingenuity allowed the story to branch into new, but worthwhile directions.

In this interview with HBO Max, Baker explained how the relationship between the games and the series is not mutually exclusive, as both can be enjoyed as separate, yet shared experiences that enrich the world of "The Last of Us." He acknowledged that while the two are "retellings of the same story," there is beauty to exploring the games and the series separately, although the show does not actually require any foreknowledge of the games. This allows newcomers to discover a rich, layered post-apocalyptic world, and if they're willing to expand this experience as a gamer, they are welcome to. Conversely, fans of the video game can always have their playthroughs, but the series can be a source of newfound wonder for those who would love to see their favorite characters come to life in a different way.

Ultimately, Baker came to the conclusion that the HBO series "is the most accurate, truthful adaptation" of the original, while also saying that Pascal's Joel taught him truths about the character he had previously missed. Now, that's all the endorsement that matters. 

Read this next: How Ellie's Room Decor In The Last Of Us Points To The Larger Story

The post The Last of Us Actor Troy Baker Didn't Want The Game Turned Into A Series appeared first on /Film.

It must be intimidating for any actor to enter the fold of "Star Trek." In addition to the risk of being pigeonholed (Brent Spiner has spoken at length about that phenomenon), there is a lot to know beforehand. Given the franchise's vast history, and the hundreds of hours of drama it has already produced, it seems that some homework might be required just to have some context of whatever scene you might be acting in. 

The former aspect was a bugaboo for Ed Speleers, the actor cast as Jack Crusher in the third season of "Star Trek: Picard." Jack Crusher wasn't some mere ensign written to sit at a starship's helm and read lines about diverting power from life support to the shields or whatever. Jack Crusher was the son of Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), two of the main characters of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Additionally, the character's brain had been altered by a mysterious, inherited gene, giving him psychic superpowers. It would be revealed at the end of the series that it was a Borg gene. The gene would transform Jack briefly into a puppet of the season's true villain, a Borg Queen that Picard once knew. [Musical sting]

All of that was based on events of past "Star Trek" episodes. The Borg plot hearkens back to "The Best of Both Worlds" and the 1996 movie "Star Trek: First Contact." The brain gene is a reference to "All Good Things..." The mythology is dense. 

In the most recent issue of SFX Magazine, Speleers talked about what specific "Star Trek" homework he was given to fill in his character's backstory. No, it seems the 2002 film "Star Trek: Nemesis" was not included. 

Giving Up Acting

Speleers was frustrated by his casting of Jack. He said to SFX that his difficulties finding a handle on the character brought nothing but stress and had him questioning his craft altogether. He said that he was: 

"... almost being in tears because I couldn't quite find my way in with the part. [...] I was just incredibly frustrated. I nearly gave up. I think I had a big, melodramatic hissy fit moment where I was like, right, that's it, I'm giving up acting and giving up all of it!"

It was then that showrunner Terry Matalas gave Speleers a great deal of "Star Trek" homework to put him on track. Matalas compiled a list of pertinent "Star Trek" episodes and movies that would be vital to the construction of Jack. The e-mail, according to SFX, was called "Star Trek University." Speleers did not show the list to his interviewers, sadly, so Trekkies cannot peruse it, stroking their chins, quietly judging Matalas' choices. Speleers said:

"It was an extensive list of Star Trek episodes all the way up from TNG, then films going all the way back to 'The Wrath Of Khan' all the way through to 'First Contact.' They obviously left out 'Nemesis.' Don't look at that."

Stuart Baird's 2002 film "Star Trek: Nemesis" is one of the less beloved movies in the long-running "Star Trek" series, having made less money than any of the others, even accounting for inflation. Speleers was clearly goofing on the film's bad reputation. Whether or not Matalas actually warned the actor away from "Nemesis" much remain academic. 

Our List

It seems that Star Trek University made Speleers something of an expert, if not a Trekkie, as he said: 

"I can't say I'm a 'Star Trek' aficionado, but I feel now, having been put through my paces by Terry and everybody else — and also just being embraced by that cast and crew — I'm hook, line, and sinker a fully-fledged member of the 'Star Trek' fandom."

Since Speleers didn't say which episodes he was asked to watch, it might be a fun exercise to posit which episodes and movies would be best for explaining a character like Jack Crusher. 

"Next Generation" episodes that depict the romance/relationship between Jean-Luc Picard and Dr. Crusher will be key. "The Naked Now," "Allegiance," "Violations," "Attached," and "All Good Things..." all relate either to Dr. Crusher's late husband Jack (after which the new Jack Crusher is named) or the will-they-or-won't-they romantic moments between the captain and the doctor. "All Good Things..." also sets up Picard's Irumodic Syndrome, the brain drift that Jack inherited. 

Picard's background with the Borg is vital, of course, and watching "The Best of Both Worlds" was likely important, as was the 1996 film "Star Trek: First Contact," as Speleers said. As for tone, the third season of "Picard" is clearly yet another "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" retread, so that would be a good piece of homework to communicate a general vibe. "Khan" would also establish the Constitution-class starship that Jack said he was a fan of.

As for the Changelings pursuing Jack, Speleers might not need to know about them, nor the massive war they fought on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." It's possible that there was no actual DS9 on Speleers' syllabus. If he's interested, though, I could recommend some good ones. 

Read this next: Every Star Trek Series Ranked From Worst To Best

The post Picard Star Ed Speleers Was Given Star Trek Homework (Nemesis Was Not Included) appeared first on /Film.

It has previously been written in the pages of /Film that Dr. Beverly Crusher, played by actor Gates McFadden on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," rarely got her due. Apart from a scant few episodes where she served as the protagonist, her arc as a character was disappointingly flat, leaving her nowhere to grow and no dramatic struggles to face. The reasons for this are clear: Dr. Crusher had her s*** together. She was adult, mature, capable, and complete. From day one, her personal ethics were well-formed and she was staunchly unwilling to compromise. Writers, it seems, didn't know how to construct stories for someone who was more or less complete from the start, so they often relegated Dr. Crusher to a supporting player in other characters' dramas. 

The best ongoing arc Dr. Crusher was granted was her constant near-miss romance with Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart). The two were clearly attracted to one another, but professional propriety often kept them apart. Each of them had other romances along the way, but many Trekkies figured they would end up together. Also, early in the series, Dr. Crusher talked about her relationship with her teenage son, Wesley, but her parenting of him pretty much ended when he was old enough to ship off to Starfleet Academy. It was rare that Dr. Crusher was permitted to talk about her career, her personal interests, go on vacation, attend medical lectures, or impress her crewmates with a new medical invention. 

McFadden herself has expressed her disappointment in the treatment of her character. In a recent interview with Variety, she addressed her character's lack of things to do in the four "Next Generation" feature films, and how little history "Trek" writers felt they could explore with her.

Four Movies, No Doctor Story

By the time David Carson's "Star Trek: Generations" arrived in theaters in 1994, it seemed that Dr. Crusher was poised to explore some of her own history. The final episode of "Next Generation," called "All Good Things...," aired only a few months previous, and Dr. Crusher kissed Captain Picard. In a flash-forward, it was established that Dr. Crusher would marry Picard, divorce him, and become a starship captain. There was so much to explore. 

As it happened, the four movies are all about Picard and/or Data. The rest of the ensemble didn't really get big character moments, nor were any of their personal pasts much discussed. Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) might have received an upgrade to his eyes, but he never had a moment when he gets to talk about how he came to choose the procedure or how he felt about it. Crusher was ... just a doctor. When asked about this by Variety, Gates McFadden was frustrated. She said: 

"So much of the history of the character -- you didn't even see it. [...] Jean-Luc Picard could have this brand new love interest every time, and it was as if he and Crusher had nothing between them, or ever did. That was a huge part of the character that was just put away." 

McFadden knew she was part of an ensemble, and was happy to fill her role in that regard, but that didn't mean it wasn't galling for her as an actor. She said: 

"Well, it's no surprise to hear that [the movies were] very disappointing. It's always tricky when you're the actor. You want your role to be as wonderful as possible. But you're also not stupid, and you're very happy that the franchise is doing well."

Not Even A Love Interest

In "Generations," Picard is swept up by a bizarre spatial phenomenon called the Nexus, which is a thundering energy ribbon that floats freely throughout the galaxy. If any people become caught in it, they are transported into a dream dimension where time has no meaning and their deepest wishes are fulfilled. It was kind of like Heaven. When Picard is inside, he pictures his ideal future as a family man, where he's married to ... some lady. Not Dr. Crusher nor any of the people he had previously known, but some new person. In "Star Trek: First Contact," there is some sexual tension between Picard and the evil Borg Queen, I suppose. In "Star Trek: Insurrection," Picard has a lot of romantic chemistry with Anij (Donna Murphy), and there is no romance in "Star Trek: Nemesis." 

Dr. Crusher is left out of this equation. Gates McFadden liked some of the movies, but didn't care for her lack of role in them. She said: 

"'First Contact' was just an amazingly written film. My only sadness was that there had to be new female love interests. But then, that's Hollywood. So you just accept it and do the best you can do with what you're given. I mean, that's the job." 

By the time we see Dr. Crusher in the third season of "Picard," however, she has finally grown. She is a gun-toting badass who owns her own ship and made a business delivering black-market medicine to non-Federation worlds, all with the help of her adult son. It seems she was eventually granted a story worthy of the character. 

Read this next: 11 Reasons Why The Next Generation Is The Best Star Trek Show

The post Like Fans, Gates McFadden Was Disappointed How Star Trek Handled Beverly Crusher appeared first on /Film.

The OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock supports all the latest ports and connections, but its biggest selling point puts it above the competition.

A large-scale attack campaign discovered in the wild has been exploiting Kubernetes (K8s) Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to create backdoors and run cryptocurrency miners. "The attackers also deployed DaemonSets to take over and hijack resources of the K8s clusters they attack," cloud security firm Aqua said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The Israeli company, which dubbed the attack 

This article contains spoilers for the first season of "The Last of Us" and "The Last of Us Part 2."

They always say that if there's a question mark in a headline then the answer to whatever that question is "No." So let's get that out of the way right up front. Will the original voice and performance capture actor from "The Last of Us Part 2" video play the main antagonist, Abby, in "The Last of Us" season 2? I can pretty confidently say no.

Laura Bailey performed Abby Anderson in the video game and did a hell of a job, I must say. Abby is a complicated character, full of determined rage and surprising depth and Bailey absolutely captured that in her performance, but there's a slight complication in that she doesn't really embody the character and her unique physicality in the real world. 

In the same way that Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker are the perfect Ellie and Joel for the video game, Bailey likely wouldn't represent the best choice for Abby in live-action despite absolutely crushing it for the Naughty Dog game. Now, that doesn't mean we won't see Bailey pop up in "The Last of Us" season 2 in some other role. In fact, eagle-eyed fans already know she cameoed in the season 1 finale as one of the nurses about to dig into Ellie's brain to try to cure mankind.

Abby Or Not, Here She Comes

If you're looking at the image above, that's her! And luckily enough for Bailey, since this cameo covered her whole face, she can still be brought in just about any capacity in the coming seasons of the HBO show. You don't have to take my word for it, co-showrunner and video game creator Neil Druckmann told reporters just that, saying "She's got a mask on, so we can make her anything we want in the next season." 

Craig Mazin and Druckmann were very respectful in folding in much of the video game cast into the live-action series, with Ashley Johnson having a great moment as Ellie's mom, Troy Baker playing the despicable David's right-hand man, James, and Jeffrey Pierce (the original performer of Tommy, Joel's brother) getting to play Melanie Lynskey's top lieutenant, Perry. 

The only person who got to reprise their role from the video game was Merle Dandridge who played Firefly boss Marlene and I think that was mainly because her look was pretty much the model for the character anyway and the actress had actually aged into the role. 

But there is a precedent for the key voice actors from the game being brought in for substantial roles and it wouldn't surprise me at all if Laura Bailey found herself as a new character in the coming season, a possibility made even more likely that her brief cameo at the end of season 1 was more of an Easter egg for the game's fans (especially considering that scene's importance to the events of the next story) and not a full-on character.

Playing Abby Will Be A Double Edged Sword

Whoever ends up playing Abby is going to have to brace themselves for some vocal fan reaction. She's an incredible character and will be the role of a lifetime for whoever gets it because most villains don't get fleshed out to the extent that Abby Anderson does. There's so much to explore for a performer taking on this role and if Druckmann and Mazin stick to their guns with the character, it'll be one that will challenge the audience's perception of what makes a character good and what makes a character evil.

Without getting into too many spoilers of things (possibly) to come, the genius of the character is that she not only constantly reframes the audience's feelings towards her as the story goes on, but she also forces the viewer to reframe their thoughts on the protagonists of the story. 

Druckmann has said that the theme of "The Last of Us" is love. Sounds simple, but love inspires all sorts of behavior, from the noblest and pure to the most violent and angry. What Abby represents in all of her yoked-up glory is the same righteous anger that we've come to love about Joel and Ellie in the first game and first season of the adaptation.

This divided many gamers who were not only furious with her actions in the game but were even more upset that the game then makes you empathize with her by putting you in her shoes. You see she's not just a comic book villain with paper-thin motivations. From a certain point of view, she's just as heroic as Ellie and Joel, and boy howdy did a whole lot of gamers resent that.

Craig Mazin And Neil Druckmann's Biggest Challenge For Season 2 Is Casting Abby

But the thing that made "The Last of Us Part 2" so divisive is also what makes it a masterpiece. It's not every post-apocalyptic story that forces empathy for even the most hated characters.

The Abby of the game was a mixture of Bailey's performance and Jocelyn Mettler's face mixed together and brought to life by the talented designers and programmers at Naughty Dog. There have been calls from fans to have Mettler cast in the role and some other fans have suggested actresses Mary Krantz, Shannon Berry ("The Wilds"), and Katy O'Brien (who co-starred with Pedro Pascal in "The Mandalorian").

But ultimately, Mazin and Druckmann will have to find the best performer for the part, someone who can capture the nuance and soul of Abby as well as the look. They know what they'll need from their actor and they also know that if there's one crucial piece of casting for "The Last of Us" season 2, it's Abby Anderson. They can't get away with someone just "kinda" right for the role, they're going to have to find someone who is the perfect live-action embodiment of this character, just like they did with Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, and Gabriel Luna in the first season.

If I was a betting man, I'd say you'll be seeing more of Laura Bailey in the coming season, but she won't be playing her video game counterpart. Maybe they'll expand on her nurse cameo and jump off from there or maybe they'll cook up something even juicier for her, but I'm sure we'll see her again.

And the winner for funniest text of all time goes to @LauraBaileyVO for sending me this gem! pic.twitter.com/p3sfrLyNfn

— Neil Druckmann (@Neil_Druckmann) March 13, 2023

Read this next: How Ellie's Room Decor In The Last Of Us Points To The Larger Story

The post The Last of Us Season 2: Could Laura Bailey Return to Play Abby? Creators Weigh In appeared first on /Film.

The award-winning television series Mr. Robot captivated audiences with its intense portrayal of a vigilante hacker battling corporate greed and corruption. However, beyond the gripping story lies a wealth of information about cybersecurity that audiences can learn from. With cyber threats becoming more and more common in today's digital age, you need to know how to protect yourself and your private information. So what does Mr. Robot teach us? How you can apply these lessons to your own life?

This article contains mild spoilers for "Evil Dead Rise.""Evil Dead Rise," the latest installment in the now 40-odd-year-old "Evil Dead" franchise, is filled to the brim with evidence of writer/director Lee Cronin's bonafides toward being a fan of the series. While the film isn't merely a work of fan service, the movie is suffused with references to the earlier "Evil Dead" films, from Deadites screaming "Dead by dawn!" to a very particular clock being seen at a cabin in the film's opening sequence.

Yet Cronin isn't content with paying homage to just the "Evil Dead" series — in addition to multiple references to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," "Evil Dead Rise" contains some latent homages to numerous other horror films, including Lamberto Bava's similar demons-loose-in-a-high-rise splatter opus, "Demons 2." Most surprisingly, however, "Evil Dead Rise" appears to have a good deal in common with another Sam Raimi film, one that the director has all but disowned over the years: 1985's "Crimewave." While Cronin may or may not have intentionally threaded in references to that much-maligned film, it speaks to the movie's quintessential Raimi-ness that "Crimewave" and "Evil Dead Rise" seem to share some DNA.

Crimewave Is Demented, Bizarre, And Underrated

Raimi, co-star/producer Bruce Campbell, and producer Rob Tapert have made no secret about their feelings for "Crimewave" over the years. As recently as the SXSW panel for the premiere of "Evil Dead Rise," Campbell explained that the failure of the movie taught them to develop a "Crimewave meter" that allows them to say no to projects they can see going south.

It's most likely due to the bad vibes the Michigan-raised filmmaking trio has given the film over the years since its botched release and poor reception that the movie hasn't undergone a major reappraisal, because "Crimewave" isn't just a Raimi film, but an early Coen Brothers work as well, as the movie was co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen along with Raimi.

With a pedigree like that, it's nearly impossible for the movie to be dull or uninteresting, two things it decidedly isn't. "Crimewave" is indeed a demented slice of cinema, a combination of '40s film noir, Warner Bros. cartoons, and "Three Stooges"-style slapstick. The plot revolves around a dorky sap, Victor Ajax (Reed Birney), an employee of Trend-Odegard Security. His boss, Ernest Trend (Edward R. Pressman), arranges to have his business partner Donald Odegard (Hamid Dana) whacked upon discovering that Odegard plans to sell the business to Renaldo "The Heel" (Campbell) behind his back. The two killers Trend hires, Faron (Paul L. Smith) and Arthur (Brion James), are equal parts vicious and inept and end up killing both Odegard and Trend by accident. When Trend's nosy wife, Helene (Louise Lasser, apparently wearing her exact same wardrobe from the infamous Thanksgiving slasher flick "Blood Rage") witnesses the hit and the building's other residents (including Victor and his love interest) get mistakenly caught up in the proceedings, "Crimewave" goes enjoyably off the rails.

High-Rise Havoc

Although it's only really for the middle section of the film, "Crimewave" has a setting acutely in common with "Evil Dead Rise." During that section, a lot of overlap occurs with "Rise," which itself is set (save an opening sequence) inside a Los Angeles apartment building. In "Rise," the building is beset by a violent earthquake, while in "Crimewave," the night's events are exacerbated by a violent storm ("Storm! City in Chaos" reads a newspaper headline). In "Rise," Beth (Lily Sullivan) and the other residents of the cursed building can't make use of the main elevator once the demonic presence takes it over, while Arthur in "Crimewave" finds himself nearly captured by the police thanks to a precocious young boy insisting that the elevator stops at every floor.

Being made in between "The Evil Dead" and "Evil Dead II," "Crimewave" also contains large traces of Raimi's penchant for menace, including moments where Helene sees Faron threaten her via the building's security cameras in a very similar fashion to the possessed Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) berating her family through the apartment door's peephole in "Rise." As Victor and Nancy (Sheree J. Wilson) attempt to escape the exterminators, they find dead bodies suddenly blocking their path, a hazard that Beth and Kassie (Nell Fisher) also must contend with when attempting to escape their apartment building.

Finally, the building in "Crimewave" is filled with eccentric neighbors, one of whom happens to fortuitously own a pack of attack Dobermans, while in "Rise," Mr. Fonda (Mark Mitchinson) is a very handy fellow who not only owns a shotgun, but keeps a wood chipper and a chainsaw in the building's basement, something Beth makes good use of.

Crimewave Is In The Evil Dead Universe

Sure, all of these similarities may be mere coincidences rather than deliberate homage. Still, there's a good reason why "Crimewave" belongs in the discussion of the "Evil Dead" franchise, and it's not simply to do with Raimi, Campbell, and Tapert's involvement — it's that, canonically, "Crimewave" exists within the "Evil Dead" universe.

In the same faux issue of the Detroit Free Press that announces the storm in "Crimewave," there is another headline on the front page that exclaims "Military seal off Tennessee murder site. Time-space disturbance discovered." "The Evil Dead" was shot in Morristown, Tennessee, and although the series "Ash vs Evil Dead" retconned the fateful cabin to be located somewhere in Michigan, the original film and "Evil Dead II" kept Tennessee as the primary setting.

So, whether by intention or happenstance, "Crimewave" and "Evil Dead Rise" are at least tangentially connected. After seeing "Evil Dead Rise" this weekend, why not give "Crimewave" a try? At the very least, they'd make a killer double feature.

Read this next: 12 Underrated Slasher Movies You Need To Check Out

The post Evil Dead Rise Has a Lot in Common With Sam Raimi's Most Misunderstood Movie appeared first on /Film.

This post contains spoilers for the "Star Trek: Picard" series finale.

"Star Trek: Picard" has officially come to an end, closing out with a warm and wonderful scene of Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Michael Dorn, Marin Sirtis, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, and Brent Spiner hanging out in a bar, playing poker, and shooting the breeze. This was their moment of reunion and relaxation after an elaborate scheme involving Changelings, the Borg, and mysterious X-Men-like brain powers that Picard passed on to his son Jack (Ed Speleers), a son he didn't know about for the past 20 years. After all was said and done, Picard (Stewart) accepted that he was Jack's father, and he and Dr. Crusher (McFadden) seemed to have worked out their long-standing personal acrimony.

A long-standing drama with Jean-Luc Picard has been his solitude. He wasn't lonely, necessarily, but his professional station as a starship captain prevented him from fostering any kind of close personal relationships. He had been burned by a few romances gone awry in the past, and seemed content to remain unattached the rest of his life. In "Star Trek: Generations," the captain revealed that, since he had a brother, the family would at least continue without his input. When his brother and nephew died in a fire, he became distraught. In "Picard," audiences learned that he and Dr. Crusher, after many false starts, attempted a proper romance, had a single awkward tryst, and then split up seemingly for good. The tryst, however, resulted in Jack. Whether or not Picard wanted to start a family, he had one now.

In an interview with Variety, Stewart talked about Picard's personal relationships, as well as a secondary, alternate ending to the "Picard" series that no one will ever see.

Jean-Luc And Beverly

It's worth noting that Jean-Luc Picard was established throughout "Star Trek: The Next Generation" as hating children. He was uncomfortable with the teenage Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) on his bridge and was loath to take a small group of under-10s on a tour of the Enterprise. Being a father was never on his radar, so the appearance of Jack in his life allowed Patrick Stewart to explore a new facet of his character. He found himself finally facing Dr. Crusher in a more meaningful way. Stewart explained:

"I think that the relationship between Dr. Crusher and Picard was what mattered most in this. I read several accounts of parents who only learned that they were parents when the child was quite adult. What it produced in Jean-Luc was fury [...] with Dr. Crusher, because she had not told him. He had not pursued family life as an essential part of his own life; nevertheless, when the thing happened, he was cut out of it. He was isolated."

Stewart commented on the fact that Picard's life expanded in many new career directions as he aged, and how, when he discovered he was a father, those things immediately began to feel insignificant. Picard was finally forced to approach something personally:

"I think that was the toughest thing for him to swallow, that there had been 20-odd years in the life of his only son, and he had not known about it at all. Those 20 years were the years in which he had wandered through being promoted to an admiral, the desk job he had, retiring, becoming a lecturer and a winemaker -- all of these things became irrelevant as he dealt with the critical situation that was building up around the people he cared about so deeply."

The Question Mark

Throughout "Next Generation," Jean-Luc and Beverly often approached romance, but never actually committed. In the final episode of the series, Beverly kissed Picard, implying that a romance was still possible. In the following four movies, however, the romance was never mentioned. When asked about the lack of romantic subplots in the movies, Patrick Stewart merely shrugged, saying that he suspected the films' writers preferred question marks around the issue. He also pointed out that an early draft of the final episode of "Picard" ended with a relationship mystery. In his words:

"We'd had one idea for ending 'Picard,' which I think now would have been a mistake. But it would have ended the show with a huge question mark. I liked that in terms of how it could have sent our viewers minds racing and questioning and puzzling about what was this question mark exactly and what did it mean? We didn't do it." 

Of course, he was asked what the mystery was, but Stewart was sworn to secrecy, saying:

"I can't talk about it. I said I wouldn't talk about it, because it was a complicated situation. I went with what the producers wanted. I was not comfortable with it, but watching the final episode the other night, I realized that what they had persuaded me we should do was absolutely the best thing that could have happened."

Was Jack revealed not to be Picard's son after all? Was Jack actually Wesley in disguise? Perhaps the time-drift reincarnation of the original Jack Crusher, Beverly's first husband (and how weird was it that Beverly named her second son after her late husband)? Did Jean-Luc and Beverly get married? Was Beverly pregnant with another child? Was Jack a Q baby? Was he a Changeling? 

We'll never know.

Read this next: Every Star Trek Movie Ranked Worst To Best

The post Patrick Stewart Teases an Alternate Picard Season 3 Ending He's Not Allowed to Talk About appeared first on /Film.

At the beginning of the third season of "Star Trek: Picard," the title character (Patrick Stewart) was seen in his French château, packing suitcases of old trinkets and keepsakes, hoping to give them away. He once felt sentimental about such objects, but was determined to leave the past behind. He said out loud that he was not interested in having a legacy, preferring to enter the world and have further adventures. At that point, Picard was over a century old. 

Later, Captain Riker (Jonathan Frakes) was enjoying a drink in Guinan's Bar, admiring the trinkets the bartender was selling -- or, I suppose, giving away, as "Star Trek" takes place in a post-capitalist society. Bar denizens could take home palm-sized scale models of various famous Starfleet vessels. (Incidentally, the ships on camera are real-life collectibles that one can purchase through the newly launched Master Replicas toy line.) Riker notices Guinan still has multiple models of the Enterprise-D, the ship on which he used to serve. When he asks the bartender why, she tells him it's their least popular model. No one, it seems, wants "the fat ones." 

Later still, Riker and Picard tour the U.S.S. Titan-A, a ship once under Riker's command but which had been almost wholly rebuilt. The brusque Captain Shaw (Todd Stashwick) mentions that when he took command, he found Riker's old jazz collection on the ship's computers. Hating jazz, Shaw deleted the entire thing. Shaw then sends Picard and Riker to sleep on uncomfortable bunks typically reserved for younger officers. No one cares, old man.

Moving Back Into The Past

"Picard" season 3 seemed to be setting up a world where nostalgia didn't exist and no one felt especially sentimental about the past. Instead, it was about moving forward, finding the adventure, and -- as it would turn out -- relitigating the things that once made Picard happy. Most notably, Picard's relationship with Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) was enormously strained. The NextGen crew may reunite eventually, but they wouldn't necessarily like one another.

My above presumptions about the running theme "Picard" is derived from my knowledge of the classic "Star Trek: The Next Generation" writing structure. In many episodes, the show would cold-open with a vignette or scenario unrelated to the main plot. That cold-open would, however, connect in a thematic way to the eventual main thrust of the episode. If, for instance, the episode was about the movement of time, the opening conversation would be about how time seems to move differently when you're bored. 

If "Picard" spent so much time establishing that it was to be about the shedding of legacy and the lack of sentimentality about the past, then surely that would be the eventual theme of the season at large. "Star Trek" had seemingly reached a refreshing "let the past die" moment.

But the opposite proved to be true this time. 

Star Trek ❤ Legacy

One of the final scenes in the last episode of "Picard," called "The Last Generation," saw Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) wearing a Starfleet uniform, bearing the newly earned rank of ensign. Jack is the son of Admiral Picard and Dr. Crusher, and Jack himself is already a symbol of Picard's personal legacy, this time as a parent, continuing in a Starfleet trajectory. He mentions he was able to become an ensign after only just one year of Starfleet Academy, a program that usually takes at least four, and thanks nepotism for his expedited graduation. Picard's legacy helped him along.

Jack's first assignment is back on board the U.S.S. Titan-A, the central ship of the series. Only now, for unclear reasons, it has been rechristened. Jack will serve on board the U.S.S. Enterprise-G.

Quite the opposite of eschewing legacy, it seems that "Picard" is wholly obsessed with it.

Indeed, in a post-credits stinger at the end of "The Last Generation," the presumed-dead trickster god Q (John de Lancie) appears to Jack and tells him he will have to take on the brunt of Q's playful trial of humanity's worthiness, a mantle previously held by Picard. That was the premise of the pilot of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Jack is not just taking on the legacy of in-universe lore, but the legacy of "Star Trek" writers' old ideas. With "Picard," history begins to cycle through itself again.  

Hanging The Plaque

It's also notable that a great deal of action in the third season of "Star Trek: Picard" is centered on a starship museum. Relics of the past are put on display, and the characters spend a great deal of time wistfully looking over well-known vehicles from old Trek shows and movies. Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) ganders at the U.S.S. Voyager. The "Deep Space Nine" theme song plays when they look at the U.S.S. Defiant. Later, it's revealed that Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) has been secretly reconstructing the Enterprise-D for decades. It is used as the central attack vehicle in the season's climax. Previously established as unpopular and dismissed as "the fat one," the Enterprise-D also wants to reclaim its legacy. So much for letting go of the past. "Picard" is keen on letting it calcify.

Additionally, it seems the newer generations cannot be trusted. For a great deal of the third season, Jack slowly develops mysterious psychic powers that make him a badass fighting machine, and also allow him to insert his consciousness into the bodies of others.

It was said that Jack's abilities might have been genetically passed on to him from Picard, himself afflicted with a brain ailment, previously thought to be a fatal disease. It turns out, the disease was a Borg gene that didn't assimilate Picard, but left his son vulnerable. Thanks to the machinations of the plot, said Borg gene was spread to anyone under the age of 25. It was only older people on ancient ships that would be permitted to save the day. 

The Kids Aren't All Right

Moving past legacy and letting a younger generation take the reins and define themselves is not permitted in "Picard." The young are untrustworthy, vulnerable to corruption, and the people pulling the trigger. It is only by asserting one's established legacy that one can triumph. There is little in the way of balance on "Picard." All the younger people and ships seem to share names with older things. There are three characters named La Forge, and two named Crusher. When Crusher is assimilated by the Borg, he is not given the exact same name as Locutus, Picard's onetime Borg identity, but is instead called Võx, a similar, voice-related name. Even the Borg push forward the notion of legacy. The central battle seems to be who gets to leave their name behind, and not inventing new ones.

Notions of celebrity, of course, have long been a standing element of Star Trek, and tapping into old legacies happens frequently. Heck, look at the 1994 film "Star Trek: Generations," a film that invents multiple strange sci-fi conceits in an effort to get Captain Picard and Captain Kirk (William Shatner) -- two characters separated by 80-some years of history -- in the same room together. The crew of the Enterprise-D once met Scotty (James Doohan) in an episode appropriately titled "Relics." The characters on Star Trek have studied the history of Star Trek, and recognize the franchise's more popular characters. 

But "Picard" is far more direct. In "Picard," the present doesn't just draw from the wisdom and powers of the past, but -- for better and for worse -- renames itself to match. It seems we'd better make damn sure history doesn't soon forget the name Enterprise. 

Read this next: 13 Reasons Why Deep Space Nine Is The Best Star Trek Show

The post Picard Series Finale Ending Explained: Names Mean Almost Everything appeared first on /Film.

This post contains spoilers for the series finale of "Star Trek: Picard."

In the last episode of "Star Trek: Picard," called "The Last Generation," Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) has given himself over to the evil Borg Queen (voice of Alice Krige) who has assimilated him into the Borg collective. He is outfitted with a wicked, black robot costume and has a metal prosthesis is bolted to his face. His mind is more or less erased, and the Queen begins using his powerful psychic brain to control a massive fleet of distant starships by remote. 

Rather than merely blow him up and stop the attack, the cast of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" elect to fly the Enterprise-D into the heart of the Borg ship and rescue him. They hope to reason with the Borg Queen and appeal to Jack's seemingly erased humanity. Picard (Patrick Stewart), having once been assimilated before, is able to stand face-to-face with Jack, plug a wire into the back of his neck, and have a psychic conversation with him. Technically, he is uniquely qualified to pull Jack's consciousness out of the machine.

Jack, it should be noted, is Picard's son, a child he fathered some 20 years before with Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden). Dr. Crusher has been raising Jack alone, never having told Picard that he had a child. She did this because Picard is constantly in danger and his child would likely be at risk. Hence why he is named Jack Crusher and not Jacques Picard. 

It seemed a little unfair to Beverly, then, that Picard should be the one who is uniquely qualified to rescue Jack. Why dad and not mom?

Showrunner Terry Matalas, in a recent roundtable interview attended by /Film's Vanessa Armstrong, also sensed the injustice and declared that Jack, in keeping his mother's name, was doing the correct and logical thing.

Jack Crusher

While the show is called "Star Trek: Picard," and the title character should play a major part in a series finale, it did feel a little ... off ... to have Picard be the one to rescue Jack from the Borg Queen. Picard previously only had a relationship with the villainess, and it might be fitting that he confronts her after decades of animosity. But he had only met Jack a few days prior. The two had spoken a lot, and Picard had come to terms with the fact that he had an adult son, but their relationship wasn't particularly deep or even all that warm. Indeed, Jack had been told since he was a child that Picard was kind of a heel, being cold and neglectful. It would have made more sense that Jack resent Picard, returning to Dr. Crusher at the first available opportunity. 

Matalas spoke a great deal about how names -- and, by extension, legacies -- are a vital part of the third season of "Star Trek: Picard." What people call themselves, and what they insist others call them, speaks a great deal to their identities. In retaining the name Crusher, Jack was ultimately his mother's child and not his father's. Here's how Matalas answered when asked about how names come into play in the season finale:

"I have to sit back and meditate on that for quite a bit because it does ask a lot of questions about family. Picard and ... it makes me think about things, like I am glad that Jack never took the name Picard at the end, that he keeps his mother's name, and I think that that's super important."

Legacy

The first half of the third season of "Picard" was pointedly anti-legacy. Picard spent his first few scenes packing up all his old trinkets into boxes and shipping them out of his home. He and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) were not treated with rarified respect. Even the Enterprise-D is badmouthed in dialogue. Eventually, however, the themes did a 180, and legacy became incredibly important. Old characters reunited, references to the past piled up, and the Enterprise-D was rebuilt. Terry Matalas acknowledged this by saying Jack Crusher's line, "Names mean almost everything," reflected this shift. "First, it was really a nod to nepotism," he said, "because we knew we were flashing forward to the fact that Jack Crusher was going to be accelerated through Starfleet. You have to call it what it is. And so that started that." 

Matalas went on to say that legacy is everything for these characters, in both big and small ways. The name Enterprise is important for everyone in "Star Trek," of course, and he was careful to place it in the hands of a familiar, deserving character. In his words: 

"But it was also about the importance of the name Enterprise, and what that particular legacy was, for not only Starfleet, but for the fans. And in a lot of ways that was the last character missing from the scene. It was the final character added to the ensemble when we brought back the Enterprise-D, and the final character given to Seven of Nine. That was super important for us, for Seven and Raffi to be at the forefront of that legacy, of the Enterprise legacy."

Someone clearly wants to make a show called "Star Trek: Legacy."

Read this next: Every Star Trek Show And Movie In Chronological Order

The post Picard Showrunner is Glad Jack Crusher Kept his Mother's Name appeared first on /Film.

This post contains spoilers for season 3 of "Star Trek: Picard."

Once upon a time, fans of Brent Spiner's character Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" thought they would never get to see their favorite humanist android in live-action ever again, but the third season of "Star Trek: Picard" changed all of that. The character had already appeared in the series' first season and had given Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) his final goodbye before apparently dying for good, and Spiner was adamant that he had no intention of ever donning a Starfleet uniform again. Somehow, however, "Picard" season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas convinced Spiner to come back for one more go-round in outer space, giving fans the chance to see him interact with the whole gang from "Next Generation" one last time. 

So how did Matalas convince the esteemed actor to don the uniform (and makeup) one last time? It turns out that Spiner just wanted a few small modifications to his character, but once he heard that everyone else was coming on board it was pretty tough to say "no." Thank goodness, too, because Spiner gave us some of the best, most heartfelt moments in all of "Star Trek: Picard," and maybe even all of "Star Trek." 

More Human Than Human

When asked recently by TrekMovie what it took for him to take the role of Data once more, Brent Spiner was his typically dry self, cracking a joke about them throwing "hundreds of thousands of dollars" at him, before explaining that it was just a matter of having frank discussions with Terry Matalas about what they were going to do with Data. Once the two had hashed things out, Spiner was completely on board to come back and rejoin his friends on the Enterprise. He didn't want to repeat himself, and Matalas' plan gave Data a whole new dimension. Spiner explained:

"[...] it's taking the character to a completely different place, really, than he's been before. [Gene] Roddenberry when I first met him, he was describing the character of Data and what he wanted from Data was that Data would get closer and closer and closer to being human. And at the end of the day, he's as close as he can be and still not. And I think this kind of addressed that even more. It continues that journey of Data getting so very close to being human still he's not. He is still an android. He still has an artificial body. And he still has confusion about the human condition and what it means to be human. And that makes him, I think, even more human, because we all struggle with that."

From the beginning, Data has always longed to be human. He even got suckered into having flesh put on his android body by the Borg queen in "Star Trek: First Contact," nearly forsaking his friends and crew for a little android-on-Borg action. So his actually being made human, or as close to it as physically possible via Dr. Soong's cloning technology, is perfect.

Allowing Data To Age

The other thing that had to be addressed was Data's appearance, because he's an ageless android and Brent Spiner is, well, human. Spiner and Terry Matalas discussed the decision around Data's aged appearance on The Ready Room, including how his makeup would appear. They decided to go for a much more toned-down look than the bright silver of Data in "The Next Generation," since he's now made of organs and tissue instead of cybernetics and metal. There's still a little bit of electricity about him, however, or as Matalas called it, "a sparkly kind of robotic glow that kind of mimics a little bit of Data, a little bit of human." Soong apparently decided to make the body look older because of the wisdom it contains, as Data, Lore, B-4, and Dr. Soong are all technically programmed into the same mind. 

While I'm sure it was nice not to have to sit in the makeup chair for lengthy amounts of time to play Data again, getting to do something new and engaging with the role was a lot more important, and thankfully, Matalas and the writers of "Star Trek: Picard" managed to give him (and us) exactly what was needed. 

"Star Trek: Picard" is streaming exclusively on Paramount+.

Read this next: 11 Reasons Why The Next Generation Is The Best Star Trek Show

The post Star Trek's Brent Spiner Swore Off Playing Data — Here's Why Picard Changed His Mind appeared first on /Film.

The benefits of community solar are grabbing the public's attention. On Thursday, the US Department of Energy, or DOE, announced efforts to expand the network of community solar projects across the nation and increase access to renewable clean energy for more people, including renters, as part of the Biden administration's Investing in America agenda.

This post contains spoilers for season 1 of "Perry Mason"

For a long time, John Lithgow had a rule about not doing episodic TV. Before he accepted what is arguably his most memorable role to date — Dick Solomon in "3rd Rock from the Sun" — the two-time Oscar nominee was committed to film and stage work. But since he found major success with his '90s sitcom he's been showing up in all manner of projects, and in the age of prestige TV, Lithgow is cropping up all over the small screen. From "Dexter" to "The Crown," the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art grad has now fully embraced TV, and for a brief moment, blessed the grim, pulpy first season of HBO's "Perry Mason."

Playing lawyer and mentor to Matthew Rhys' Mason, Elias Birchard "E.B." Jonathan, Lithgow only lasts four episodes before his character dies by suicide. But in those four episodes, the actor was given a lot to work with, playing a man who suddenly finds himself at the tail end of a successful career and not quite ready to leave his wonder years behind. E.B. is the man tasked with defending Emily Dodson, the woman accused of conspiracy leading to the kidnapping and death of her infant son — I told you it was grim. But as the pressure mounts, he is threatened by the Los Angeles district attorney with false claims of larceny and facing disbarment, and having lost funding for Emily's defense, urges his defendant to fight her case in court, before ending his own life.

In other words, E.B. Jonathan was a man with a lot on his mind, and for John Lithgow, not only did that provide with him with a compelling character to try to deconstruct, but it also provided a way of empathizing with him.

'The Fear And Panic Of Growing Old'

Throughout his career, John Lithgow has consistently taken unpredictable roles, to the point that it's become somewhat of a calling card. From starring in "3rd Rock," replacing Christopher Walken as the maniac villain in, "Cliffhanger," portraying Winston Churchill in "The Crown" and his numerous roles in Shakespeare productions, Lithgow has never pigeonholed himself. And, in the late stages of his career, his four episode-run in "Perry Mason" allowed him to articulate many of his own thoughts and fears about his particular place in life.

In an interview with Mumtaj Begum, the 77-year-old reflected on his recent roles being "old men" and how that's forced him to explore, "variations on age and the fear of age and the fear of growing old and losing your viability." But whereas you might think an actor with such a diverse career would find that kind of thing limiting, he actually finds it to be the opposite, saying his, "career is more interesting now than it's ever been." He added:

"E.B Jonathan is a man who used to be on top of the world. He used to have all these connections, he used to win cases, he used to get people off, and he hasn't for years. He desperately needs this [Dodson] case and when it turns into a big case he feels like he's landed a big one. And then when it starts going wrong, and when he realizes he can't even get the simplest thing for his clients, his despair and his panic is another fascinating thing to play. It's just it's very, very rich [...] it's the very, very high emotions of the fear and panic of growing old. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to have access to that fear myself, so why not put it to good use."

Lithgow Isn't Slowing Down

E.B. Jonathan is a tragic character, unable to reconcile his own opinion of himself as a perfectly capable lawyer with the unwelcome fact that he's clearly overwhelmed by his latest case. That's a great tension for any actor to play, but to see someone like Lithgow portray it is one of the best parts of "Perry Mason" season 1. For the few episodes that Lithgow is around, he plays E.B.'s internal struggle as believably and sensitively as you would expect from an actor of his caliber and experience.

That said, it's odd to hear that the actor found such a personal connection to his "Perry Mason" character, only in the sense that there's absolutely nothing to suggest that Lithgow is past his prime. The man is on an unprecedented run, coming off "The Crown" and going straight into "Perry Mason" before taking a starring role opposite Jeff Bridges in Fox's "The Old Man." As the actor told GQ recently, "You get to be my age and you finally get to work with a lot of people you've been waiting to work with for a long, long time. And the payoff is simply wonderful. And in this past year, it's been Jeff [Bridges] and De Niro and DiCaprio and Julianne Moore." Hardly someone who's struggling in his career.

Still, playing a character who's reflecting on a long and successful career clearly had major parallels with Lithgow. Thankfully, he's keeping a lot busier than E.B. Jonathan and shows no signs of being overwhelmed by it any time soon.

Read this next: The 18 Best Crime Dramas In TV History

The post John Lithgow Has a Very Personal Connection to His Perry Mason Character appeared first on /Film.

These days, we get a lot of stories about games adding ray tracing, but last week Capcom went the opposite direction, removing ray tracing from the PC versions of the Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 remakes. It turns out this wasn’t an intentional move on Capcom’s part, as they would later provide an update, saying they were “aware of an ongoing issue with the raytracing option not appearing in the graphics menu and presets.” They promised a fix, but didn’t say when it would arrive.

Well, Capcom didn’t leave fans waiting too long. Today the official Resident Evil twitter account announced that a patch returning ray tracing to the Steam versions of Resident Evil 2 and 3 is now available. Capcom still hasn’t really explained why ray tracing went MIA. If it really was just a mistake, it was a pretty major thing to let slip, but stranger things have happened I suppose.

Rolled out last year, the “next-gen” updates for Resident Evil 2 and 3 provided some nice, if not overly-flashy, visual upgrades to a pair of excellent survival horror games. If you haven’t played either of the games, you owe it to yourself to give them a try. Here’s what I thought about Resident Evil 2…

“Resident Evil 2 is a polished, respectful remake of a survival horror classic that probably would have benefitted from a slightly more daring approach. Hints of a braver revamp are sprinkled throughout, but it doesn’t take the risks necessary to join the canon of truly great video game remakes. Make no mistake though, if you loved the original Resident Evil 2, you’ll likely love the remake, and new players who can tolerate a few old-school quirks ought to have a gruesome good time as well.”

And here are my thoughts on Resident Evil 3…

“Resident Evil 3 is the franchise’s best action-driven entries ever. A beautifully-balanced combination of white-knuckle mayhem and satisfying old-school tension, Resident Evil 3 is compulsively-munchable popcorn entertainment that, unfortunately, disappears all too quickly. If you’re looking for value, there are certainly meatier games out there, but few that will leave you licking your fingers as happily as this one.”

Resident Evil 2 and 3 can be played on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, and Switch (via the cloud).

Developers behind the free and open-source Godot Engine have announced support for AMD's FSR 2.2 & other improvements in the latest build.

Godot Engine developers are working to improve performance in 3D rendering bottlenecks and performance issues in the background while developing games, adding AMD FSR 2.2 support too

The Godot Engine is currently in version 4.0. The developers are working hard to develop the upcoming version 4.1, adding upgrades and performance fixes plaguing the game engine, especially in 3D rendering and shadowing. The Godot development team recently shared their outline for the next version of Godot Engine in a blog.

The Godot team plans to release version 4.1 later this year, creating more scheduled releases. Right now, the team is working on performance and usability, which include:

Performance upgrades and fixes:

• Identify bottlenecks in 3D renderings, such as the main scene shader

  • When users render profiles on desktop and mobile, the depth pre-pass, shadow pass, and opaque pass take too long to process, especially in high-complexity scenes. The team is working to fix this performance issue and is working on it now. They ask if the community wants to assist with this task and extend the offer. The vertex shader is causing unexpectedly higher hindrances in the vertex shader. They discern that the issue is related to memory-bound vertex shading. The group has standard solutions that will allow for limitations of the cache to halt further problems.

• Time-slicing DirectionalLight3D shadows

  • As DirectionalLight3D shadows are camera-dependent, every frame must be updated. The process, when creating shadows, raises several draw calls and adds additional strain to the GPU for each frame. The Godot team expects to include an additional "time slicing" that will permit future splitting to happen in fewer frequencies.

• Background pipeline compilation

  • Godot 4.1 is expected to fix a well-known "Vulkan pipeline compilation stall." The team will transfer the pipeline compilations to background threads to work simultaneously with the regular rendering, which the team feels will assist with any stalls in processing renders.

Usability:

• GL Compatibility renderer - 3D

  • The Godot Engine version 4.0 included a lower-processing renderer that "targets OpenGL 3.3 / OpenGL ES 3.0 / WebGL 2 devices." The group created the GL Compatibility renderer with mobile and low-end processing systems as the focus. This allows those systems to run more efficiently than the standard GLES3 renderer introduced in Godot version 3.x and is still used today. Godot Engine 4.1 will finalize the 3D renderer that is currently inactive in version 4.0.

• AMD FSR 2.2 and TAA improvements

  • The Godot Engine development team will introduce AMD FSR 2.2 as a replacement to the Temporal Antialiasing (TAA) currently in use, as it provides more features and a streamlined upscaler that is not offered in the current TAA. However, the team does not plan to drop TAA altogether, as it will use the TAA to work with different effects, such as SSAO, SSR, shadows, and more.

The Godot Engine is an all-in-one free game engine with cross-platform capabilities to allow game developers to easily make games, whether they be in 2D or 3D. You can find out more information on the Godot website.

This article contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets."

After last week's episode finally gave us our first look at Lauren Ambrose as Adult Van, episode 5 of season 2 picks up right where we left off with our favorite cinephile. We're given a tour of Van's apartment and video rental store, set to the soundtrack of "What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes because nothing screams "LESBIAN!" like the sound of Linda Perry. In a surprise to absolutely no one, Van's house is a maximalist pop culture wonderscape, further proving that if I were one of the Yellowjackets, I'd be Van (a Buzzfeed quiz also confirmed this but whatever). She's got rainbow rugs, she's got an amazing race car VHS tape rewinder, and her apartment is located conveniently above her store. Some curious youngsters are fascinated by her shop. "These boxy things are movies?" Remember kids, physical media FOREVER.

An eager customer comes in to return her copy of "Party Girl," a lovely metatextual moment as the director of that film, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, also directed the first episode of season 2 (and "Doomcoming" in season 1). The eager customer exclaims her love of Parker Posey to which I can only nod and say, "Same, bestie." Van takes the time to recommend Cheryl Dunye's brilliant "The Watermelon Woman," and again I can only laugh about how hard this show is coming for me with the depiction of Adult Van.

The episode then catches up exactly to last week, with Taissa showing up unannounced. There's something heavy in the air the second they catch eyes. This isn't some warm and fuzzy love. This is awkward ... and then Taissa passes out before cutting to the opening credits. HERE WE GO AGAIN!

Good Morning From The Middle Of Nowhere

Okay, I know that the forest is supposed to be a terrible sign of danger, but every establishing shot looks beautiful enough to be on a deeply screwed-up "Wish You Were Here" postcard. And yes, I am immediately reminded that Jeff and Randy used a postcard to start their blackmail scheme. The snow looks like it's starting to melt a little bit, but I'm not buying this as a sign of spring. I'm from the Midwest. I know a warm day fake out before mother nature dumps a pile of snow in my lap and flips me the bird when I see it!

Taissa wakes up with the ropes still around her arms. She didn't sleepwalk! Some time has definitely passed in the cabin, however, because Shauna is very pregnant. Taissa heads outside to join Van for some of Lottie's "woo woo bulls***" but Shauna is too logical to join. Taissa claims she's only attending because Van is convinced Lottie's influence is what stopped the sleepwalking. "Happy wife, happy life," she jokes.

Lottie is outside delivering some breathing exercises to the group. Reminder: she's the one girl who has actually been to therapy and she's basically parroting mindfulness exercises and sensory grounding techniques. If it works, it works, but also ... these poor girls are getting advice that is no different than Instagram "therapy" infographics. Lottie wants them to "nurture [their] relationship with nature," seemingly inspired by Shauna's impending birth. Lottie is very convinced it's a son and gets them all to chant about how they can't wait to meet him. If Shauna does a son, it's gonna be REALLY hard to convince anyone that Lottie isn't magic, even though her odds are about the same as calling for "red" while playing roulette.

Javi's Still Weird. Akilah's Still A Delight

Javi is still acting a step above comatose and the girls have no problem speculating in front of his face. "What if he did die and that's his ghost?" Melissa suggests. Yes, this character does have a name! They also assume Javi is the one who stole their extra bear meat, but I'm not convinced. I'm still on team Pet Sematary. Travis has no issue with Javi's silence, but all the issues with Nat's planting of bloody clothes. Javi does eat soup so he's not a zombie at least. "Please, just tell me where you were, Javi?" he asks. Javi looks directly at Lottie and then eats his soup in silence. What does she know?!

"Maybe he wouldn't be so f***ed up if I found him sooner, so that's on you," Travis barks at Nat. Look, I get his anger, but also ... you gotta admit this is beyond comprehension, Travis. He should be dead. I think this is what Jordan Peele was talking about when he wrote, "What's a bad miracle?" Afterward, Coach Ben finds Javi's collection of ominous arts ... and he finally speaks! "She told me not to come back," he says. When Ben prods as to who he's talking about, he simply says, "My friend," and then walks back to being a total weirdo.

Meanwhile, Akilah is still parenting her mouse. She tells Taissa about a pre-game ritual she used to have, and Taissa mocks her because the JV team sucked. I love the scenes with Taissa and Akilah. "It just felt good, like we could pretend it made a difference," she says. Using a sports superstitions is a fantastic way to connect to the religious following of Lottie. Having hope in something is better than not having any hope at all.

No More Miss Teen Angst

In the present day, a riot girl band is playing at the bowling alley. I choose to believe this is a reference to "Josie and the Pussycats" to continue our Parker Posey film appreciation in this episode. Trash 'Stache cop makes a reference to "The Big Lebowski" on his undercover date with Callie, clearly forgetting she's 17 and his joke is lost on her. She makes a kissing bet that he takes, thinking she's gonna suck at bowling. She, of course, hustles him, but he avoids kissing her. I'm still sticking by my theory that this whole investigation gets destroyed because he's an idiot. 

Anyway, Jay heads to the bathroom and Callie sneaks a peek at the bill to see that his name isn't Jay. She googles him and it looks like those "local cops do good" press releases to try and humanize the police just backfired! Callie is noticeably weird in the car after her realization and NotNamedJay, continuing to suck at his job, asks leading questions about Callie's mom and the affair. She plays his dumbass like a fiddle because she is Shauna's daughter after all! She puts on the waterworks and claims she found out who her mom has been sleeping with ... and names Randy. LMFAO CALLIE, ARE YOU NUTS?! RANDY?! Hey, I guess this means we're getting more Randy this season, so I'm thrilled.

Back at home, Callie confesses to her parents what's been going on with Jay. "A f***ing cop?!" Shauna screams. "How old is he?" Dad exclaims. Jeff, never change. I love you. It's not great to learn the cops are tracking them, but Callie giving Jay bad intel is fantastic. Her parents agree that she did good, and Callie is SO excited. She was made for a life of crime!

Shauna And Randy Have A Hot Hotel 'Date'

Shauna meets up with Randy at the motel where everything that happens is bad and the owner tells no one, and the cops show up because of course they do. "You look f***ing amazing!" Randy screams. I hate how much this show makes me love aint-s*** men. Jeff doesn't have all the details and assumes this has something to do with "Natalie and the FBI thing," which, it doesn't. Shauna then cuts to the chase and hands him a condom to jerk off into so it looks like they had sex. Honestly, this scene is magic. I love how "Yellowjackets" can effortlessly weave in hilarity with, yanno, cannibalism. Melanie Lynskey's delivery of "don't you dare think about me" as he retreats to the motel bathroom is gold.

Sadly, Randy can't cum and no amount of pumping up the ol' "Randog" will do it, so he fills the condom with complimentary lotion and calls it a day. 

• 1) I'm shocked this motel has free lotion.
• 2) These cops are gonna find that.

Annnnnd after Shauna and Randy leave, they do! "Without a warrant, nothing is admissible," Kevyn says. Uh, yeah. This is why I'm still convinced this whole investigation is gonna blow up in your faces! NotNamedJay discovers the lotion because it looks like lotion in a condom and not splooge. NotNamedJay is proud of his discovery because it proves his theory that Shauna was sleeping with Adam and killed him (which she did) but the fact they're on this wild goose chase at all means, as Kevyn says, "The kid intentionally gave you bad intel." BUSTED, YOU DOLTS!

Sherlock And Moriarty Are On The Rocks

Misty and Walter are on their drive, listening to Tropical F*** Storm's cover of "Stayin' Alive," likely a reference to the "Saturday Night Fever" jukebox musical that definitely exists. Walter proposes they play two truths and a lie, but tells all truths so that Misty can learn more about him. He's trying to get her to be more honest about herself but she only gets through "I don't like monkeys" and "We're asking the wrong questions about the moon landing" before they find the entrance to the compound. They show up to rescue Natalie and Misty is shocked to that Lottie "committed to a mental institution in Switzerland" Matthews runs the compound. 

Natalie refuses to come with them because she's working on her own thing from the inside. Misty is devastated, and Walter is not a very comforting presence. He wants her to let it go, but Misty is torn up by Natalie's refusal to come home and her "failure" for not knowing what Lottie has been up to. She starts to spiral out of control and Walter interrupts by mentioning he knows that Misty doesn't actually know Adam Martin. He correctly deduces that she killed Adam to help a friend and says that she's charming and impulsive — traits of most serial killers." And yet, he doesn't run. 

Walter likes Misty "regardless of her extra-curricular activities." Misty grabs her bags and leaves, telling Walter to go I can't tell if it's because she's scared of his detective skills or if she's afraid she's going to kill him. He drives away but I doubt this is the last we'll see of Walter. With nowhere else to go, it looks like Misty is about to join the cult too.

'We Brought It Back'

Inside the compound, Natalie makes a scene and accuses Lottie of scamming her followers after learning she has their phones, bank information, and information on all of their families. She thinks it's a huge gotcha, but everyone gave that information to Lottie willingly. Nat screams that she's clinically insane, and the cult turns on her.

She and Lottie talk it out, but Lottie's mention of Travis brings Natalie to her knees. "You know what he was going through. You started it," she accuses Lottie. She says, "I know," and convinces her to try a technique with flashing lights. It's a weird version of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, but it helps Natalie unlock what happened the last time she saw Travis alive.

The two were doing drugs together in a beachside hotel as adults, and Natalie overdosed. As she lost consciousness, she saw a version of the crash site where they didn't make it, and the vision of the Antler Queen enters the plane. EMTs deliver Narcan, and Nat comes back. "I saw it. I felt it. We brought it back." Lottie looks genuinely terrified of everything Nat is saying, which has completely reshaped how I feel about teen Lottie. Natalie has an answer to what Travis' card reading, "Tell Nat she was right," is all about. "The whole time there was something, some darkness out there with us or in us. It still is. That's what I was right about." Natalie lays her head in Lottie's lap, and the image shifts to her teenage self. 

Lottie turns her head and sees the Antler Queen's shadow on the ground. Perhaps the question these last two seasons shouldn't have been "who" is the Antler Queen and instead "what" is the Antler Queen.

Unhappy Wife, Unhappy Life

Back at Van's apartment, she's digitizing a wedding video and I'm fighting the urge to point out all of the Easter eggs in her apartment. Thankfully, fellow /Film writer Erin Brady will have a piece focused solely on this area, so keep your eyes peeled. Van is upset that Taissa has shown up unannounced after all this time, but those "first love" vibes are still strong, and she doesn't need Taissa to say a word to know that the sleepwalking is happening again. Taissa isn't ready to tell the truth, so she gifts Van the striptease pen as a distraction. She loves it, of course, because she hasn't changed a bit. She asks, "Remember when we swapped that fancy guest book pen for one of those at Shauna's wedding?" This means they're together at least long enough after the rescue for Shauna and Jeff to get married, but the photos in Shauna's house show Sophie Nélisse in the wedding gown, which implies they got married young.

Taissa spends much of their reunion deflecting, just as she used to do as a teenager. I love how as adults we like to pretend that we're all grown-ups and beyond who we were in high school, but the way our personalities are somewhat fixed from childhood is wild to process, and "Yellowjackets" does a great job of reminding us of that. 

After Taissa finally showers, she notices Van has oxycodone in her cabinet. She claims it was for her mom. "At least you were talking again," Taissa says. Implying that they were together long enough post-crash for Van to be on her own and separated from her mom. "Cancer scared the b**** right out of her," Van jokes. "Maybe you don't have to be dying to have regrets," Taissa says. I can only echo Van when she screams, "No, you don't get to do this."

A Difficult Reunion

Tawny Cypress and Lauren Ambrose are absolutely fantastic as they bicker with one another. Van references both "High Fidelity" and "Seinfeld" in a flurry, and snaps back with, "I'm mixing my pop culture metaphors because I'm f***ing upset!" God, I am so much like Van it physically pains me. I can't wait to talk about this episode in therapy this week! Watching Van and Taissa argue is depressing and magnetic. This is obviously no shade to Taissa's wife Simone (who is probably still in a coma), as she deserves so much better than what she's been given, but Taissa and Van have "it." There's something about them that just works. Maybe because what we're seeing is who Taissa really is, and not the political facade she puts on to impress Simone. Van offers to help, but Taissa is afraid to ask for it. "I don't wanna hurt any more of the people I love."

Taissa eventually sleeps on Van's couch, and it's a familiar setup for the two. Van stays up all night to monitor and Tai hopefully sleeps. When she has a free moment, Van digs the medication out of the garbage and takes it. Oh no, does she have an oxy dependency? Taissa wakes up and comes after Van and kisses her, aggressively. We've seen this look before. She's not awake. "Oh, you're the other one, aren't you?" Van asks. "This isn't where I'm supposed to be," Taissa says. GIRL, WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?! 

Ugh. I feel like this is leading toward a reunion at Lottie's compound.

The Ballad Of Misty And Crystal

Crystal pulls the "pour the bathroom bucket" chore card, and Misty volunteers to help. On their journey, they share secrets, like how Crystal dumps poop randomly in the woods when she doesn't feel like heading to the cliff and that she got fingered backstage during a production of "Bye Bye Birdie." Relatable, except mine was during "Godspell" because I'm a blasphemous monster. It's then that Crystal reveals a massive secret ... her name is actually Kristen, but she never corrected anyone because she was afraid they wouldn't like her anymore. This moment of vulnerability inspires Misty to share a secret of her own, and suddenly everyone watching is clenching their entire body because we know where this is heading. Misty admits that people didn't like her before the plane crashed and that "some people never find someone they trust enough to share their darkest secrets." OHHHH NO. 

Kirsten swears on her mom's life (shout out to Carol) that she won't tell anyone and Misty confesses she destroyed the plane's transmitter — meaning, she's the reason they're all trapped. Kristen is understandably terrified. Misty tries to play it off, but she's "not that good of an actress." Kristen tells Misty, "You're not my best friend, you're a psycho." Kristen is playing with fire, and we can all tell where this is going. Misty threatens to kill Kristen if she tells anyone, but that isn't a concern after Kristen backs away and falls off the cliff onto the frozen dumping ground below.

Misty goes down and tries CPR, complete with "Stayin' Alive" chest-compression training. No wonder she turned the song off when Walter played it in the present timeline. "I'm sorry, bestie," she says. RIP Kristen. You were a real one ... and you're probably going to be eaten.

Can You Keep Them In The Dark For Life?

Shauna wakes up from a nap to Lottie touching her pregnant belly and whispering to her womb. "It's good to talk to them in utero," she defends. "Yeah, so they learn to recognize their mother's voice" Shauna snaps back. Lottie's fixation on the baby is W-E-I-R-D, but Taissa weirdly defends her. COME ON, TAI. NOT YOU TOO!

Shauna storms out and Taissa follows, and the two have it out. Shauna sees the two factions of survivors aligning across the lines of following Lottie and screams at Taissa for abandoning her for the prayer club. Taissa tries (and fails) to justify her actions, and quips that everyone is excited about the baby. Shauna dives into a long overdue speech about her pregnancy:

"If anyone should be excited it's me, but I'm rightfully freaking the f*** out about having a baby in the middle of the f***ing woods, and newsflash: having a bunch of psychos praying for me in some weird f***ing tree cult isn't making my life any easier."

I've said it for over a year now, but Sophie Nélisse is a powerhouse. 'I don't need your f***ing prayers, I need you to have my back!" Taissa confesses that she's finally not afraid to fall asleep and that she's not going to apologize for doing what she needs to survive. Shauna is struck with labor pain, and the weather harshly pivots to a blizzard. WHAT DID I TELL YOU EARLIER?!

Taissa and Shauna get a little lost in the snow, and Taissa repeats the exercise Lottie had them all do earlier to listen to nature. Again. This is a grounding exercise. YOU'RE JUST CALMING DOWN. Taissa and Shauna make their way back to the cabin, as does Misty who now has the perfect cover of losing Kristen in the storm. Shauna's now in labor, and "Mother" by Danzig starts to play. Is this my favorite needle drop of the season so far? Yes. Yes, it is.

Buzzworthy Moments And Additional Thoughts

After my last episode, I had some readers ask me how I write these because it feels like I'm writing them in real-time, but I don't format the recaps in chronological order. The answer is that I watch the episode and type notes with my reactions as they are happening and then go back to arrange each "story" in the episode together. Those "real-time" reactions are exactly that. These are unfiltered thoughts given structure so you all don't think you've come across the ramblings of a mad woman because otherwise, each week would just be an all-caps wall of "OH MY GODDDDDD!" and that sort of unhinged behavior is reserved for the dying star known as Twitter.

• I desperately need to know what kind of woman Tammy is, because I must know the kind of woman willing to marry Randy.
• While we're talking about Randy, did you know that in porn they often use a combination of Ceravie face wash and cream of coconut whenever they need to simulate splooge on screen? Don't ask me how I know that.
• Look, I agree that we need to have serious discussions around the right to die with dignity, but knowing that Misty has a future in elder care, her adoration of Jack Kevorkian makes me SO nervous. How many people has she killed?!
• I have a bad feeling that something deeply messed up is going to/is going on with Javi which becomes the reason why Travis develops a drug dependency as an adult.
• Seeing Lottie's look of terror when she sees the Antler Queen's shadow appears has completely rocked my world. What does she know that makes her that scared?! What nightmare awaits us all?!

Until next week, "Yellowjackets" hive. Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!

Read this next: Every Yellowjackets Main Character, Ranked

The post The Past is Catching Up with the Yellowjackets, and It's Scarier than Cannibalism appeared first on /Film.

This post contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Yellowjackets" season 2.

The girls of "Yellowjackets" are survivors, and in season 2 of the hit Showtime series, Shauna, Taissa, Van, Misty, Natalie, Lottie, and the rest of the team have gotten the daily rituals of life in the wilderness down to a science. They hunt and forage, but they also take the ritual part of daily ritual seriously; Lottie (Courtney Eaton), the vision-stricken girl who makes a compelling case for a supernatural presence in the forest, puts drops of her blood in their tea and guides them through meditations each morning.

In the most recent episode of the series, we also see the girls partake in a new daily ritual, one that initially seems pretty clever. Back in season 1, the group found playing cards in the abandoned cabin they holed up in, and now we see that they're using the cards to rotate chore duty. When Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) grabs a two, it apparently means she's on bathroom duty, tasked with emptying the group's waste bucket over the edge of a cliff. On their own, the chore cards seem like another creative innovation from a group that's stepped up and found ways to stay (mostly) civilized even under the most brutal circumstances. In the context of the entire series, though, the return of the playing cards is a lot more ominous than it seems.

'No Queens In That Deck'

The deck of cards first appears in episode eight of season 1, when Travis (Kevin Alves) can be seen playing with them. "There's no queens in that deck," Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) tells him, in a throwaway line that feels like anything but. The moment has inspired fans to speculate that the four queens have a symbolic meaning that foreshadows the rest of the girls' time in the wilderness. Whether they refer to four different girls taking up the mantle of Antler Queen, four who are sacrificed to feed the others, or even four who become predatory hunters like the ones we saw in the pilot's cold open, the offhand statement certainly seemed significant.

We finally saw one of the queens return in the fourth episode of season 2, when cult leader Lottie (Courtney Eaton) is stricken by a vision of a queen of hearts card. She's looking through a deck of "gratitude entries" (basically a list of things she's thankful for) when she suddenly sees a queen of hearts card, creased and dirty, with the queen's eyes scratched out by what looks like a black pen. Lottie blinks hard and the image vanishes; it was another vision (or hallucination).

Fans of the series, including Reddit users like logicallymagical, have posited that the missing queen cards hint at a system by which, perhaps in a future moment of hunger and desperation, the girls will choose who becomes their prey. The very first scene in the series features a group of bundled-up survivors led by an Antler Queen chasing down a frantic girl who eventually falls into a spiked pit. That girl ends up feeding the group -- and setting the stage for all of our questions about how the group would ultimately devolve into cannibalism.

A Method To Their Madness

At the time, the scene looked like a ruthless, frenzied hunt, but could there actually be some order to the chaos? If the girls use playing cards to decide who's hunted -- perhaps with the missing queens used to choose predator or prey -- their cannibalism could feel less like an unspeakable act and more like, well, a team sport. Some of the show's key horror elements so far have ultimately been reframed as a demonstration of practical survival skills (see: eating Jackie), so it wouldn't be a surprise if the cards turned out to be the method to the girls' apparent madness.

Before this week, the queen cards speculation seemed like a bit of a stretch, but now that we know for sure that the survivors use the cards to pick chores, they seem like they could be one Doomcoming-like collective freakout away from deciding that, actually, being hunted is a chore, too. Lottie even seems to have referenced the group's potential future dynamic to Natalie at the compound, when she explains that in winter, bees kill off potential future queens. Plus, promotional materials for this season may have both purposely and accidentally reinforced the card-drawing theory.

In the ensemble poster for the new season, a queen of hearts card is on display behind present-day Van's (Lauren Ambrose) shoulder, woven into a circle of twigs that also includes a dead bird, a jawbone, a deer skull, one of Lottie's cult members' necklaces, and some sort of weapon. "Yellowjackets" cast member Sophie Nélisse also added fuel to the playing card theory fire during a Bustle interview, when she complimented co-star Melanie Lynskey with what definitely sounds like a reference to an out-of-context spoiler for a future episode.

The Queen Of Hearts May Not Be Who You Think It Is

If all of that isn't enough, last week's episode also included a sly literary reference that has more than a little to do with the queen of hearts. When Lottie hallucinates a trip to the mall with her teammates, she runs into Laura Lee (Jane Widdop), the Christian girl who died trying to fly a rickety plane to safety last season. Widdop shared behind-the-scenes photos from the day of the shoot to their Instagram, and captioned them "laura lee x alice in wonderland core." Once Widdop mentions it, it's hard to unsee the references to Lewis Carroll's classic in the scene, which sees Lottie at a topsy-turvy tea party of sorts.

If Laura Lee, with her blonde hair and blue outfit, is a stand-in for innocent Alice, that means someone at the table has to be the Queen of Hearts, the tempestuous ruler who's prone to declaring, "Off with their heads!" Lottie obviously seems to have the most power over the group at this point in the series, but she's disoriented here, and her classmates are making jokes at her expense. Nat, meanwhile, is dressed in black with bright red lipstick, a departure from both her typical style and everyone else's relatively casual dress. Could she be the Queen of Hearts? If so, whose head does she want on a platter?

Those Chore Cards Could Come Back In A Big Way

Despite the many clues pointing to the importance of the queen cards and their eventual role in the girls' hierarchy, there are still some major details that won't be confirmed until the show finally plays its hand. Did the deck in the cabin really come without queen cards, or did one of the girls take them? Does the person who draws a queen card have to shed someone else's blood, or, as Lottie did in episode four when she cut her hand in sacrifice, give some of their own? Does the symbolism behind the cards also mean we'll see the rise and fall of four antler queens by the time the girls make it out of the wilderness?

The answers are uncertain, but the introduction of the chore cards, shuffled and presented by Mari (Alexa Barajas), certainly pulls this assortment of clues into focus. Whether it's the harsh winter, Lottie's visions, or some combination of the two that ultimately push the girls to the brink, it seems likely that the cards -- especially the queen of hearts -- will come back in a big way. Suddenly, drawing bathroom duty twice in a row doesn't sound so bad.

New episodes of "Yellowjackets" stream Fridays in the Showtime app, and air Sundays on Showtime.

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The post Let's Talk About The Ominous Queen of Hearts in Yellowjackets appeared first on /Film.

This article contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets" season 2 episode 5.

There's something not quite right about Misty Quigley (Samantha Hanratty/Christina Ricci). She's a stereotypical nerd; book smart but socially ostracized with no clue how to relate to others. As the Yellowjackets' equipment manager, she is only technically part of the champion soccer team, but that still means she's on the plane to nationals when it goes down over the Canadian wilderness. 

As we learn more about Misty, it becomes apparent that her unpopularity isn't just because she's awkward. Something is very wrong with Misty Quigley, as she relishes "nurturing" the incapacitated coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger), with one attempt to do so ending with her accidentally poisoning all the other survivors with psychedelic mushrooms. In the present, she's an elder-care nurse and has been shown denying her patients treatment if they displease her. I've compared her to Annie Wilkes from "Misery" before and like her, Misty is hiding some dark secrets.

As the flashbacks in season 1, episode 2, "F-Sharp," showed, Misty actually liked being stranded in the woods. Thanks to her Red Cross training, she finally had an important part to play on the team once they needed first aid. When she overheard two of her teammates praising her, she finally felt like she belonged. This means that when she found the plane's emergency transmitter, she smashed it; the others may have been eager to get back to their lives, but Misty wasn't.

This had to come back up sooner or later. On tonight's episode, "Two Truths and a Lie," it did — with tragic consequences.

Besties For Life

In the 1996 storyline of "Yellowjackets" season 2, winter is here. That means the stranded survivors are stuck in the cabin they found last season. With them trapped inside, they've got no choice but to enjoy each others' company. Still, after the mushroom incident, the other Yellowjackets weren't about to trust Misty — except for Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman). The resident theater kid, Crystal annoys her teammates by humming and singing to herself. Since they're both unpopular, she and Misty start to hit it off in episode 3, "Digestif." Crystal offers to be Misty's acting coach before the latter does a monologue from "Steel Magnolias" for Shauna's (Sophie Nélisse) baby shower. Their friendship continues to grow until "Two Truths and a Lie," when Misty shows her true colors.

While disposing of the cabin's toilet bucket over a nearby cliff, the two new "besties" start sharing secrets. Crystal's secret is that her real name is Kristen — everyone misheard her name on the first day of practice and she didn't bother to correct them. She got a new nickname, "Crystal the Pistol," out of it and was worried people would like her less. Misty, who's used to people not liking her, empathizes with Crystal. Impulse control has never been Misty's strength and sure enough, that empathy causes her to make a terrible decision.

A Cliffhanging Truth

Crystal embraces Misty and declares, "You know how lucky we are? Some people never find someone they trust enough to share their deepest secrets." Then, on cue, Misty tells Crystal about how she destroyed the emergency transmitter. Misty soon learns why some secrets are worth keeping because this revelation is the end of her new friendship. As Crystal (accurately) surmises, Misty is the reason for all the pain the Yellowjackets have endured since the day after the crash. 

Misty, whose smile briefly vanishes when she realizes Crystal is angry, tries to play it off as a joke, but Crystal isn't buying that: "You're not that good of an actress." Misty desperately pleads with Crystal not to tell anyone, then when supplication doesn't work, she goes into Classic Misty mode. Wide-eyed and unblinking, she slowly marches towards Crystal and says if she reveals the truth, "I'll f***ing kill you." The threat comes true immediately because Crystal takes one step too far back and tumbles off the cliff. Misty is horrified, but when she gets back to the cabin she lies that she and Crystal lost each other in the show. Shauna then goes into labor, so the others don't have time to search for Crystal's body yet. 

In the present day, Misty has carried Crystal's love of musicals on, as shown by the song selection while she's driving with Walter (Elijah Wood). Her reluctance to get close to him is also paralleled by the disastrous end to her friendship with Crystal. While Crystal is definitely dead, this isn't necessarily the end of her presence in "Yellowjackets." There's a good chance her still-living teammates are about to get a lot more comfortable with desecrating (and dining on) the dead. 

New episodes of "Yellowjackets" air on Showtime every Sunday.

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The post Yellowjackets Season 2 Finally Follows Up on a Lingering Season 1 Plot Thread appeared first on /Film.

This article contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets."It's always been a tight race between Juliette Lewis and Tawny Cypress for the most emotionally searing performance from the adult cast of "Yellowjackets." Cypress' Taissa became the biggest success of the survivors after returning from the wilderness, creating a beautiful family with her loving wife, Simone (Rukiya Bernard), and winning a seat in the New Jersey state senate. But her dark side, which was awakened by those woods but did not disappear when she escaped them, has also caused her to fall the furthest. The near-feral state of unconscious savagery and self-division Taissa has descended to over the course of season two has broken up her family, jeopardized her career, and seriously threatened her sanity.

Nearly all of adult Taissa's scenes are hard to watch these days, which can't be said about adult Natalie's (Juliette Lewis). Sequestered at Lottie's cultish wellness compound Camp Green Pine, Natalie has become a constant and delightful source of caustic disruption, as in the most recent episode when she bursts into a silent group meditation session, screaming about documents she just stole from Lottie's office. But when Natalie does go to that tortured place, Lewis' anguished intensity can be almost too much to bear. And nothing has been worse for Natalie than the death of Travis (Andres Soto/Kevin Alves), the boy she fell in love with in the wilderness who became the dead body at the center of one of "Yellowjackets'" grimmest mysteries. 

We learned more about Travis' death earlier this season from Lottie, who was actually there when it happened, but episode 5 has finally given us the answer to the question that's haunted Natalie the most: what is the meaning of Travis' final note, "tell Nat she was right?"

'Right' About What?

At the end of the season 1 episode "The Dollhouse," Natalie and Misty (Christina Ricci) discover Travis hanging from a crane in his lofty, rural farmhouse, surrounded by flickering candles and that pesky symbol that keeps cropping up everywhere. They're too late to save him, but they do find the cryptic note, which Misty takes to be a kind of suicide letter. Natalie insists that Travis would never kill himself, despite all the indicators pointing to the contrary. Now we know from Lottie that Natalie was right. Travis wanted to push himself as close to the border between life and death as possible to, per Lottie, "confront the darkness to see what it wants." He always meant for Lottie to lower him down before things got critical, but the button jammed — at least that's her story for now — and Travis ultimately succumbed to that darkness.

The desperate nature of Travis' end-of-life bid for freedom testifies to how extreme and unending the haunting must have been. To put your life at such high risk in so rash a manner in order to actually save your own life is an inconceivable calculation to most of us. But try seeing Travis' final act through Taissa's eyes. Constantly hunted by the horrifying man with no eyes, stripped completely of the grounding force of her support system, and psychically cleaved in two because of it. The extraordinary lengths Travis went to rid himself of his demons probably don't seem so extraordinary to Taissa at this point. 

Which makes the million-dollar question all the more urgent: what exactly was Nat "right" about?

'We Brought It Back With Us'

After Nat bad vibes everyone out of Lottie's group meditation session at the end of season 2 episode 5, something shifts in their dynamic. Nat looks genuinely rattled by her own instability, and Lottie gets angry with her for the first time. "Travis said you were right about something," she says, "and it was obviously important enough to leave you a message about it. Don't you want to know what that is?  [...] I want to know what he was going through." Nat snaps back: "You know what he was going through. You started it."

This is the chicken/egg scenario that underlines the entire series: did the girls awaken something supernatural when they crash-landed in the woods, or did that supernatural something compel them into the woods in the first place? It's all very "Lost," and so is what happens next: some light EDMR therapy. 

The episode closes on Lottie rapidly flashing a pen light into Nat's eyes and asking her probing questions about Travis. Lulled into a trance state, Nat dredges forth a volcanic eruption of repressed memories. "What do you see?" Lottie asks. Nat sees the crash site, but "none of us survived." She sees the Antler Queen, a deeply distorted vision of herself as a kind of glowering, black-eyed wraith, and in a memory of her final night with Travis, whispers: "I saw it, I felt it, we brought it back. We brought it back with us."

Natural Or Supernatural?

In the '90s timeline, Nat is one of the last holdouts who refuses to believe there's anything in those woods besides snow, trees, and bears ... even though she's been attacked by an otherworldly, snow-white moose, induced into a cannibalistic fervor, and witnessed hundreds of dead birds dropping out of the sky, among other increasingly commonplace happenings.

But in the present timeline, having escaped the woods, it seems that before Travis, before Taissa, and certainly before Shauna and Misty, who remain un-haunted by spectral visions of the past, Nat was the first to sense that they hadn't escaped completely. This is what Nat was "right" about. Moments before his death, Travis confided to Lottie that he felt "the wilderness has come back to haunt him." As ever, the creative team behind "Yellowjackets" have made discerning the source of those hauntings impossibly complex.

Take the image of Nat the black-eyed wraith. It's immediately preceded by a vision of the chainmail-veiled antler queen sweeping through the fuselage of the eviscerated plane, suggesting it could be Nat. But the image is of Juliette Lewis, not her younger counterpart Sophie Thatcher; how could '90s Nat take the form of a Nat that wouldn't develop for another 25 years? Is adult Nat imposing her very much real-world-derived grief on the past, or is she accessing a legitimate memory? Is the antler queen we saw from the pilot the manifestation of some dark-hearted supernatural menace, or simple hunger, exhaustion, and isolation driving a bunch of teenagers to acts of desperate violence?

Among an ensemble of incredible characters, Natalie has become the soul of "Yellowjackets." So if we're ever going to get answers to these questions, I'd keep my eyes on her.

New episodes of "Yellowjackets" stream on Showtime every Friday and air on television every Sunday.

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The post Yellowjackets Finally Revealed The Truth About Travis' Death, and It's Worse Than We Thought appeared first on /Film.

This article contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets" season 2. Of every character in season 2 of "Yellowjackets," the bubbly, eccentric Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) is perhaps the strangest. She pops up in the middle of the season 2 premiere and unexpectedly develops a connection with Misty (Samantha Hanratty), and it's immediately clear the two are destined to be BFFs.

When Crystal confides in Misty how she "ate" her twin sister in the womb, Misty's riveted, and she's never seemed happier than when Crystal encouraged her to try acting. The two are perfect for one another, which only further raises the question: where's Crystal been this whole time? Why are they only now hitting it off, when they've been stuck in the same cabin together for months? Both the character of Crystal and the actress playing her are completely new, but she's hardly alone. A handful of other background characters have technically been there the whole time, but are only now starting to get full scenes focused on them. 

You can't blame the show for trying to do this — as the group dwindles over their 19 months in the wilderness, these minor characters must be fleshed out eventually — but it's unavoidably awkward. Every time Mari, Akilah, Gen, or Melissa get a moment to shine, it just reminds audiences of how irrelevant they were throughout season 1. For someone as weird and outgoing as Crystal, it's particularly jarring for the season 2 premiere to try to trick us into thinking she's been there the whole time. It's the same problem that impacted another beloved puzzle box mystery show.

A Familiar Problem

"Yellowjackets" isn't the only show to awkwardly introduce new characters who the rest of the cast is supposedly already familiar with. Multiple seasons of "The Sopranos" featured major storylines around the introduction of someone that everyone in Tony's crew supposedly already knew from years before, and "Scrubs" once snarkily insisted that Kim (Elizabeth Banks) had actually been working alongside JD for five years already; he just didn't notice her because she wore a wedding ring. However, it's a lot harder to pull this off when you're dealing with a small group of isolated people. Just ask the writers of "Lost."

In season 1 of "Lost," there were 48 survivors in the main group, and "Lost" focused on 15 of them. That meant that there were nearly 30 survivors just kind of hanging out at the beach, staying away from all the drama. Season 1 took advantage of this dynamic with the reveal that Ethan (William Mapother) was not actually one of the survivors, but a member of a mysterious hostile group from another section of the island. The writers knew we couldn't keep track of those background characters either, so they were able to hide the enemy from us in plain sight. 

The first background survivor to suddenly step into the spotlight was Leslie Arzt (Daniel Roebuck), a high school science teacher who almost immediately blows himself up with dynamite. His death is shocking but mostly played for laughs, as he was lecturing the group about handling dynamite safely when he accidentally sets it off. The writers seemed to understand that the audience was not going to care about this guy who barely existed throughout the first 20 episodes, so they didn't spend much time on the other characters grieving his death. 

Lost's Big Misstep

It's with the third episode of season 3, "Further Instructions," that "Lost" attempted to introduce Nikki and Paulo, two survivors who've never done anything of note for the first two seasons. The two characters kept offering to help the main group, even acknowledging a few times how strange it is that they've been around for so long without ever helping with anything. 

But even with the meta winks, fans simply couldn't get over how these characters popped up out of thin air, so after a half-season's worth of backlash the writers decided to bail on Nikki and Paulo entirely. They gave us "Exposé," an episode that dives into the two lovers' pasts as murderous diamond thieves. It's a "Twilight Zone"-inspired tale about two people consumed by greed, who are then punished for their sins thanks to an absurdly dark, not-particularly-plausible plot twist that results in them accidentally being buried alive.

There's also a fun little "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern" vibe to the episode, as it reveals that the two have been having their own little soap opera storyline that constantly weaves in and out of past "Lost" storylines we've already seen. While Jack and Locke were having intense arguments about the nature of free will, Nikki and Paulo were apparently just out of screen, going through their own equally dramatic conflicts. The only difference is that Jack and Locke are main characters, and Nikki and Paulo aren't. Just like with the famous play, Nikki and Paulo's lives are casually thrown away by the more familiar characters we already know and love. It's a dark, meta reflection on how much perspective matters, and how the most important things in your world could just be a footnote in somebody else's.

Crystal, We Hardly Knew You

"Exposé" was a bizarre episode, one that frustrated millions of fans who just wanted "Lost" to address its dozens of other more pressing plot lines, but it was also sort of brilliant. Did it retroactively condemn every Nikki/Paulo scene into clear-cut filler material? Yes. But it still gave that filler storyline one hell of a farewell. It's also a delightfully mean-spirited episode, one that would bode poorly for Crystal 16 years later, who exists on a show that's basically "Lost" but way darker. From the moment she was introduced, the question was raised: would Crystal get her own "Exposé"-inspired episode? It wasn't clear. All we knew was that present-day Misty had no friends, and a present-day Crystal had never been mentioned. We didn't know how or when, but Crystal's tragic fate still seemed sealed. 

In the end, Crystal did not get an entire episode dedicated to her backstory. "Yellowjackets" has always been far more sprawling of a show than "Lost," spreading itself a little thin with at least four or five different major stories going on at once. In Crystal's farewell episode, we only get a handful of scenes with her, and they're all from Misty's perspective. That might sound disappointing, but at least "Yellowjackets" made the most of the little time it had with her. (And of course, considering how much backlash "Exposé" originally got, denying Crystal a spotlight episode is probably the smart choice.)

Crystal/Kristen's Demise

From the moment we get that lingering shot of the snowy cliff, it's obvious Crystal's going over, but it's not until Misty tells her about breaking the transmitter that we understand how. Poor Misty thinks she's finally found a friend that can truly accept her, flaws and all, so she decides to take a risk that could bring them even closer together. But even Crystal, who admitted to Misty two episodes prior that she too enjoyed the taste of human meat, has limits. She may have just said that she and Misty were lucky to have found each other like this, but Misty doesn't get that Crystal's just making the most of a bad situation; she wouldn't actually prefer to be stuck out here for months on end, so the reveal that Misty broke the transmitter does not go down gently. 

The emphasis is on Misty, who's learned the hard way that nobody will ever accept her for who she is. If even Crystal can't forgive her for what she did, then surely nobody can, so Misty will have to keep her guard up for the rest of her life. In other words, even when Crystal's getting shoved off a cliff, the show still isn't focused on her. This is all underscored by the earlier reveal that Crystal's name isn't even Crystal, it's Kristen. The other teammates just misheard her and she's been too shy to correct them. Kristen's always been misunderstood by those around her, and now she's going to die with the group never even learning her real name. She was tragically overlooked in real life, and now she's been tragically overlooked by the show as well.

Who Handled It Better?

Kristen's storyline definitely has parallels to Nikki and Paulo's, but there's also plenty of contrasts. "Lost" dove deep into Nikki and Paulo's lives to give them one last hurrah, whereas Kristen's death mainly serves to add extra context to Misty's present-day storyline with Walter (Elijah Wood), who reveals that he knows more about Misty's criminal actions that he originally seemed. Will Misty kill Walter just like she killed Kristen? That's the main question invoked in Kristen's final moments. 

When it comes to which show handled this narrative issue more smoothly overall, it's hard to say. "Lost" benefitted from a larger group of survivors, so it made more sense that there were so many background characters that never got much to do. With "Yellowjackets" there are less than 20 people who survive the initial plane crash, so the treatment of the background characters sticks out far more. There's also the issue that "Yellowjackets," unlike "Lost," is all about the group growing smaller. It shouldn't take too long before the number of survivors reach the single digits; if the show didn't start developing the background teammates, that would feel increasingly weird too.

The Problem With Listening To Fans

Although "Lost" would famously make a series finale that did not give the fans everything they said they wanted, season 3 in particular made a lot of its storytelling decisions based on outside influences. They introduced Nikki and Paulo because fans were always asking what those background survivors were up to, and then they killed off Nikki and Paulo because the fans ended up hating them. It was a failed storytelling experiment overall, serving as a nice lesson in how fans don't always know what they actually want. 

The effect of the fans' influence on "Yellowjackets" season 2 isn't clear yet, although there definitely were plenty of complaints about the lack of focus outside of the main four survivors. Expanding the story to focus more on Van and Lottie makes sense, but the significant shift in focus on Kristen and the other background teammates may have been an overcorrection. 

Where "Yellowjackets" clearly stands ahead of "Lost" is with their resolution of Kristen's character arc, which we know was resolved without any of the fans' influence. Kristen dies in "Two Truths and a Lie" because that's when the writers intended for her to die; her death scene wasn't hastily written into the show in response to fan backlash. Even if Kristen's presence on the show was a little too awkward for many viewers to fully get on board, the whole thing still feels more organic than the way "Lost" handled the situation 16 years earlier. "Yellowjackets" may have inherited a lot of the island drama's flaws, but they've also seemed to have learned a little from its biggest mistakes.

Read this next: Every Yellowjackets Main Character, Ranked

The post Yellowjackets Has Inherited One of Lost's Most Awkward Character Problems appeared first on /Film.

"Yellowjackets" spoilers follow.

We first got hints that Misty was a fan of musicals in season 1 of "Yellowjackets" when she listened to the "Overture" and "The Music of the Night" from "The Phantom of the Opera." She also teased Nat by listening to "Mr. Mistoffelees" from "Cats" while driving. In season 2, we discover that Misty's relationship with musicals has a lot to do with Crystal, a theatre nerd who also survived the plane crash. 

Walter, the other half of her detective duo, also enjoys musicals. During their road trip to find the cult, Walter gives Misty a set of cassette tapes that include "Singin' in the Rain," "The Wizard of Oz," "Les Miserables," "Rent," and more. Misty dismisses "Starlight Express" before she turns on "Rainbow Tour" from "Evita": "Oh, let's tell the story of Cinderella, except every character's a train? Ugh." In flashbacks, we see that she and Crystal sang along to the political musical while stranded in the cabin. 

Misty appreciates blockbuster musicals that were popular during the 1990s — particularly those written by Andrew Lloyd Webber — the most. This is fitting because mentally and emotionally, like the other Yellowjackets survivors, she is still stuck in the past and can't escape her traumas. Another major reason that Misty still attaches to musicals is that they remind her of Crystal, the one true friend Misty made in the wilderness. In the shocking new episode, Misty threatens to kill Crystal after revealing she destroyed the plane's emergency box, then she backs her new friend off a cliff.

Misty's love of theatre amplifies the best and worst parts of her personality. It makes sense that Misty would be an overdramatic theatre kid, drawn to the heightened emotions and intense bonds you make with your cast members. There also are references to particular musicals that emphasize aspects of Misty's character and motivations.

Learn To Be Lonely

The Phantom of the Opera and Misty are eerily similar. Both are isolated outcasts who feel rejected by society. They are unhinged characters who will go to extreme — and often violent — lengths to satisfy their desperate need for acceptance: Misty destroys the plane emergency box so her team can use her survival skills, and Phantom tries to imprison Christine Daae as his bride in his underground lair. 

They are intelligent and skilled manipulators. Fittingly, "The Music of the Night" plays when Misty takes the private detective Jessica hostage and prepares to interrogate her. During this song, the Phantom kidnaps Christine from her dressing room and tries to seduce her with his elegant singing voice. Misty's investigative skills and cleverness are also reminiscent of the Phantom, who haunts the Palais Garnier with magic tricks that cause chandeliers to crash, pianos to play by themselves, and opera singers to croak. They are both sneaky characters who will do whatever it takes to get what they want.

Misty and Crystal's bonding over theatre is very similar to how the Phantom's only way of finding understanding and friendship is through his vocal lessons with Christine. Misty's eyes light up when Crystal suggests they practice harmonizing together or work on a "Steel Magnolias" monologue for Shauna's baby shower. Much like music in "The Phantom of the Opera," theatre is a way for Misty to feel accepted and get the attention she craves so desperately. When Misty reveals her true self to Crystal, she is (understandably) not as accepting as Christine, calling her a psycho and rejecting her as a friend.

God, That's Good!

One of the reasons that Walter was drawn to Misty on the Citizen Detective forums was because she dropped a "Sweeney Todd" reference — a dark, bloody musical by Stephen Sondheim about a sociopathic character who does not hesitate to kill others for his own selfish desires. Misty's dark side connects with the demon barber of Fleet Street. Stranded in the wilderness for 19 months and witnessing tragic deaths, Misty can relate to the significant trauma in Sweeney Todd's life. He wrongfully serves in a labor camp for 15 years and loses his wife and child. 

We know Misty resorts to cannibalism to survive, and "Sweeney Todd" is famously about people's bodies being put into meat pies. The city of London unknowingly finds this secret recipe scrumptious. Manipulating the pies relates to Sweeney and Misty's creepy enjoyment of playing God; they both relish in the power of selecting who lives or dies — and whether they suffer in the process. There is a wellspring of rage beneath Sweeney and MIsty that allows them to commit violent acts without flinching.

Sweeney kills many barbershop customers with his razor, practicing for his sweet revenge on Judge Turpin. These victims are also the new ingredient for Mrs. Lovett's pies. In "Yellowjackets," Misty watches a rat drown instead of saving him. As a nurse in a retirement home, she often withholds medications from crotchety patients. The stone-faced Sweeney does not hesitate to slit his clients' throats, caring about nothing but his own thirst for revenge. Misty easily cauterizes Ben's leg and disposes of Adam's body because she is more excited about getting attention and earning people's friendship. Misty also values protecting her own reputation over Crystal's life, hissing "I will f***ing kill you" before edging her off the cliff.

Read this next: Every Yellowjackets Main Character, Ranked

The post Misty's Love of Musicals on Yellowjackets is More Twisted Than We Thought appeared first on /Film.

This post contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Yellowjackets" season 2.

The second season of "Yellowjackets" has been so jam-packed with intriguing mysteries and exciting payoffs that it was easy to forget that one of its most recognizable motifs has been conspicuously absent. We've seen neither hide nor tail of The Antler Queen, an image that haunted the show throughout its first season before being revealed as Lottie's (Courtney Eaton) Doomcoming costume — until now.

The latest episode of "Yellowjackets" brings the Antler Queen back to the forefront in a big way, but also asks viewers to reconsider our established theories about the figure. In a breakthrough moment, present-day Lottie (Simone Kessell) treats Nat (Juliette Lewis) with a sort of hypnotic regression, asking her to focus on her voice and watch a blinking flashlight in order to remember her last moments with Travis. It works, perhaps too well.

Nat remembers overdosing in a hotel room with Travis, but she also remembers seeing a disturbing alternate version of the plane crash. In it, everyone is dead, and the Antler Queen steps through the wreckage and towards their charred corpses. "We weren't alone out there," Nat says ominously. "I saw it. I felt it. We brought it back." She apparently doesn't have to tell Lottie what she means; the cult leader's focus is interrupted by a creaking noise, and when she turns, she sees a shadow of an antlered figure spreading across the floor. The Antler Queen is back, baby.

Natalie And Lottie Confront The Darkness

This new riff on a familiar image makes for a cool horror moment, but the Antler Queen's return goes much deeper than that. Until now, viewers have conceptualized her as a real person; we see her in the opening of the show's very first episode, feasting on the flesh of a girl the survivors trapped and killed together. She seems like a mysterious and powerful leader, but one who's made of flesh and bone. When Lottie dons the antlered outfit for Doomcoming, it seems like the mystery is solved.

Except, the latest episode of "Yellowjackets" posits that the Antler Queen isn't one person, but a "darkness" that more than one of the girls can feel. "The whole time there was something, some darkness out there with us. Or in us. It still is," Nat tells Lottie after the hypnosis. "That's what I was right about." Travis, you might remember, left a note asking whoever found it to "tell Nat she was right." In his final days, he also became obsessed with the idea of chasing a near-death experience in order to "confront the darkness" and find out what it wants from the survivors. When he tells Lottie about this in episode two of the new season, a quick shot of Lottie as Antler Queen appears on screen.

That's not the only blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot associated with the Antler Queen this season. When Nat ODs, an extremely short shot shows a distorted version of adult Nat with black eyes and a knit cap. Is she related to the Antler Queen, or just communing with her? "Yellowjackets" has officially reopened the Antler Queen mystery, and this time, it seems like the answer will be a lot more complex than hungry teenagers with a penchant for playing dress-up.

The Antler Queen Isn't A Who But A What

The Antler Queen may have only made her grand re-entrance at the end of episode 5, but she's been hiding on the fringes of the show for quite some time. Lottie's compound features some prominent antler-themed decor, including a wall mount that Nat clocks above the entrance to Lottie's cabin. The wilderness chic seems pretty in line with the aesthetic of a place where residents are asked to slaughter their own chickens, but former Antler Queen Lottie also believes in the power of objects and symbols, so there's no way the antlers are there by coincidence. Plus, Lottie is clearly still performing rituals, and hearing calls to spill blood in the name of some unseen presence.

Still, the latest Antler Queen developments seem to have evolved the central mystery surrounding the figure; it's no longer "Who is the Antler Queen?" but "What is the Antler Queen?" The series has already presented us with two different spirit-like entities that haunt the woods, and it now feels like good old AQ could be a third. But while the hunter seems like a classic unquiet spirit and the man with no eyes is a mysterious and off-putting dream entity, the Antler Queen seems to be something closer to a goddess, a being whose relationship with the girls is more personal and powerful than either of the other haunts.

A Powerful Entity Never Actually Left The Survivors

This theory is reinforced by some of the actions we see in the scenes surrounding Antler Queen mentions this season. Just before Nat recovers her memories, we're shown a scene in which the girls use manifestation in an attempt to make it out of the winter storm. "I feel our friends coming back to us. I feel our friends wanting to find us," they chant, and eventually, it works. "Yellowjackets" often meaningfully cross-edits its scenes, so it's not a leap to assume the Antler Queen revelation is somehow related to their seemingly magical moment. Plus, when Travis and Lottie talk about the darkness they brought back, it isn't just the Antler Queen imagery that flashes before Lottie's eyes, but also a shot of her leaving a bear heart in the woods as a sacrifice.

We associate the Antler Queen with Lottie because she dressed up as her last season, but Lottie also has the closest relationship with whatever darkness lies in the woods. Perhaps she's not actually the Antler Queen, but a vessel for her messages. It's also worth noting that back in season 1, Lottie had a recurring vision of a deer shedding its antlers, and Nat and Travis actually saw that happen in real life, meaning all three of them actually have pre-existing ties to the unsettling imagery. The last question, then, is what the figure wants. It seems to be too soon to tell, but she's clearly closely tied to death or near death. There's one more thing we know about her, too: decades after the survivors made it back from the wilderness, she's clearly not done with them yet.

New episodes of "Yellowjackets" are available in the Showtime app on Fridays, and on Showtime on Sundays.

Read this next: Let's Explore The Biggest Mystery In Yellowjackets: Who Is The Man With No Eyes?

The post Have We Been Thinking About the Antler Queen on Yellowjackets All Wrong? appeared first on /Film.

Before Windows, there was MS-DOS. It’s a somewhat-meaningless name these days that you may have seen on old PCs, old software, or browsing sites like this. But what is MS-DOS? Why did old computers have it, and what happened to it when Windows came along?