Venom 2 has found its screenwriter, according to Variety. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s Kelly Marcel, who wrote the first one. Her deal to return for the sequel is said to be “siginificant”, but the site wasn’t able to reveal the exact amount Marcel had been offered to play with the notorious symbiote story for Sony this time around.

If you’re asking yourself why the studio wouldn’t get some fresh blood in for the Venom sequel, the Fifty Shades Of Grey writer staying on might have something to do with star Tom Hardy. The two have been close friends for years.

Marcel first met Hardy when she was working on a stage musical version of Debbie Does Dallas for the Edinburgh Festival, and some of her first film gigs were doing uncredited rewrites on 2008’s Bronson and Mad Max: Fury Road, also starring Hardy. The actor’s ‘skribe’ tattoo is also a tribute to Marcel.

They’re good mates, is what we’re saying.

To enquire further would potentially be a bad idea, although Marcel has done the requisite amount of shop talk in the past.

“I get freaked out doing interviews,” she told The Guardian when she was promoting her work on Saving Mr. Banks. “I just want to sit in my shed and write shit.”

Sounds fair. No doubt she’ll be shed-bound and down with the further adventures of Eddie Brock and his alien BFF in the near future.

Venom 2 is likely to be the film that Sony recently plopped into its release schedule for October 2020, but we’ll confirm that when we can. Reuben Fleischer, who directed the first film, is extremely unlikely to return alongside Marcel, as he is said to be hard at work on Zombieland 2.

She’s back! After a Christmas/New Year break, Captain Marvel returns with a new “special look” trailer that offers quite a lot of new footage from the upcoming blockbuster ahead of its release in just a couple of months.

The next installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain Marvel sees human/Kree superhero Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) return to Earth to save the world from an invasion by shape-shifting alien baddies the Skrulls.

Set in the ’90s – way before Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark became Iron Man and SHIELD discovered a frozen Captain America – the film is a prequel that sees Danvers make first contact with a digitally de-aged Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) and Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg, in his first big-screen MCU appearance since Loki skewered him with a sceptre in Avengers Assemble).

You can watch the latest sneak peek below…

As well as giving us a better look at Jude Law’s Kree mentor Mar-vell and showing off a wisecracking side to Larson’s character that we haven’t seen much of before, the trailer also ties the film into the whole Avengers initiative a lot more, showing us where Fury got the idea from in the first place. “You think you can find others?” asks a baby-faced Coulson. “She’s just the beginning,” Fury replies.

And with Danvers’ spaceship-battling mega-powers on full display here, it looks like Thanos might finally meet his match when it comes to his and Captain Marvel’s expected showdown in Avengers: Endgame.

One thing’s bothering us, though – with Fury introducing Danvers to the “SHIELD logo” on that cap, it kind of renders the whole acronym gag from Iron Man a bit pointless. Unless, that is, Coulson somehow managed to miss the memo. Someone call the continuity police!

Captain Marvel lands in UK cinemas on 8 March 2019.

This is a spoiler-free review.

Project Blue Book is History’s new historical fiction drama series based on actual UFO investigations conducted by the U.S. Air Force in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although the show is heavy on the fiction, the characters are compelling, and the narrative covers UFO incidents based on real cases that demonstrated the Air Force’s UFO investigations were much more mysterious than they let on.

In the first couple of episodes, we get to know the main characters, Dr. J. Allen Hynek (played by Aiden Gillen of Game Of Thrones), his wife Mimi (Laura Mennel, The Man In The High Castle), and Air Force Captain Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey, Vampire Diaries). Hynek is a professor who gets recruited by Quinn to be a consultant for Project Blue Book, a programme set up to investigate flying saucers.

Hynek and Mimi, a young couple starting a family, are hesitant to take the offer, but Hynek has ambitions and sees this as an opportunity to help his career. Quinn is also ambitious, but it becomes clear his directives from above are not to discover the truth behind the flying saucer phenomenon, but to help Hynek conclude the sightings are simple misidentifications of mundane objects such as aircraft, stars, planets, or other things commonly seen in the sky.

Conflict arises when Hynek finds that the cases they are looking into are much more mysterious than Quinn would have him believe. The mystery regarding the true intentions of Quinn’s superiors offers an ample amount of intrigue. 

Of these three main characters, Hynek and Mimi were real people. Project Blue Book was also a real project, and the cases they cover in the show were real cases. There was no Captain Quinn, but the character does accurately represent an attitude within the Air Force at the time that the whole subject was ridiculous.

The UFO cases are brilliantly reenacted. The real events might not have been as spectacular, but the UFO scenes elicit the fear, awe, and wonder one would imagine feeling witnessing such events. Gillen’s Hynek is also a great antagonist. He is intelligent, but relatable, and approaches each investigation with pure, open-minded, curiosity, as a good scientist should.

Hynek’s appeal makes Quinn’s dogged scepticism, and demands for mundane conclusions that much more frustrating, and leaves the audience wondering what the Air Force is hiding.

Hynek really was a college astronomy professor who helped the Air Force investigate UFOs, although he thought the entire subject ridiculous when the investigations began. Eventually, he found the issue to be worthy of serious scientific study and continued science-based research into the UFO phenomenon long after Project Blue Book was closed.

Hynek has claimed he also really did feel pressure to close cases without being allowed to conduct a thorough scientific investigation, saying he began to resent the Air Force’s “negative and unyielding attitude” that “everything had to have an explanation.” He once lamented, “I was a thorough sceptic, and I’m afraid I helped to engender the idea that it must be nonsense; therefore it is nonsense.”

The Air Force apparently wanted to put the kibosh on extraterrestrial musings because they felt there was nothing to the UFO phenomenon and it created a public relations nightmare. However, in the show, the Air Force appears to have something more to hide.

Again, IRL Hynek did not indicate he believed there was a group behind the scenes keeping information from him, even though there was some reason for him to believe this. When Project Blue Book was closed in 1969, a memo was put together by U.S. Air Force Deputy Director of Development Brigadier General C.H. Bolender listing the reasons why the Air Force should close the programme. Towards the end, he added: “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.” In other words, all of the best cases go somewhere else anyway.

The number of cases escalated above Project Blue Book, the nature of those cases, and the results of any investigations that the Air Force may have conducted have not been shared with the public. In the show, however, it appears Hynek will risk it all to find answers to these questions.

The extraterrestrial intrigue, the shadowy characters with unknown intentions, and the good cop/bad cop lead characters investigating mysterious paranormal phenomena lead to comparisons with The X-Files. However, the feel of the show is less X-Files and more historical fiction. It reminds me of a series from the late ‘90s called Dark Skies. Dark Skies was NBC’s answer to X-Files and was sort of historical fiction, but perhaps more accurately mythological fiction.

In Dark Skies, the main character is a congressional aide who in the first episode gets mixed up with Project Blue Book and an influential group of secret keepers called Majestic-12. Dark Skies relied heavily on existing UFO conspiracy mythologies, such as the legend of Majestic-12, which some believe to be a group of secret keepers brought together by President Harry Truman in 1947 to manage our UFO and extraterrestrial invasion problems. The portrayal of this group made of military officials, academics and leaders in the defense industry is similar to the group of secret keepers in the series Project Blue Book, although, besides military involvement, the make-up of the group of secret keepers in Project Blue Book, the show, is still a secret.

Whether or not Project Blue Book will delve into this UFO mythology is yet to be seen. There is a photo being circulated by History of Gillen’s Hynek viewing an alien in a container through a window. I asked the series creator, producer, and writer David O’Leary about this image, and he told me it is not what it appears. Since the show is based on reality, it is nice to know, for accuracy’s sake, the show will likely not go that far off into the deep end of alien conspiracies.

There are a few other facts that are off on the show, for instance, Hynek joined the U.S. Air Force’s UFO investigations in 1947 during their first foray into UFO research, Project Sign, not during Blue Book. He continued through their second UFO program, Project Grudge, and the last, Project Blue Book, which began in 1952. In the show, Hynek coins the term Unidentified Flying Object (UFO). Although the Air Force created the phrase at the beginning of Project Blue Book, the man who takes credit for it is Colonel Edward J. Ruppelt, Project Blue Book’s first chief.

Beyond a few relatively minor tweaks to history like these, the most exciting aspect of the show is that it is dramatising UFO cases in which investigators did not all feel there was a simple explanation. Despite the narrative the U.S. Air Force often portrays, even the military has never had a consensus on the UFO question. In fact, according to Ruppelt, the staff of Project Sign determined one explanation for some of the unidentified objects observed by credible witnesses might be extraterrestrial spacecraft. According to the Air Force, at the time of Project Blue Book’s closing, there were over 700 unsolved cases.

The minor deviations from reality in the first couple of episodes are not sufficient enough to cause concern. The insertion of some of the smaller facts, even if they are tweaked, is exciting for UFO nerds. I am curious where the storyline with Mimi’s mysterious friend is headed. Hynek, nor those close to him, ever indicated there was any real-life intrigue involving his family. I am hoping this is just a tool to represent some other aspect of reality.

In the end, even if the show begins to deviate from reality drastically, Hynek and Malarkey are such intriguing characters, and the mysteries sufficiently fascinating; that I think they show will do well. For those history nerds who want the facts, History has fortunately posted a host of articles on the real-life situations being covered on the show. 

Watching History’s version of Dr. Hynek attempt to solve UFO mysteries and potentially uncover vast conspiracies should be fun. As with any good historical fiction, it will hopefully also inspire viewers to learn more about a fascinating part of American history.

Project Blue Book starts on Wedneday the 27th of March at 2am on Syfy UK.

This is a spoiler-free review.

Project Blue Book is History’s new historical fiction drama series based on actual UFO investigations conducted by the U.S. Air Force in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although the show is heavy on the fiction, the characters are compelling, and the narrative covers UFO incidents based on real cases that demonstrated the Air Force’s UFO investigations were much more mysterious than they let on.

In the first couple of episodes, we get to know the main characters, Dr. J. Allen Hynek (played by Aiden Gillen of Game Of Thrones), his wife Mimi (Laura Mennel, The Man In The High Castle), and Air Force Captain Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey, Vampire Diaries). Hynek is a professor who gets recruited by Quinn to be a consultant for Project Blue Book, a programme set up to investigate flying saucers.

Hynek and Mimi, a young couple starting a family, are hesitant to take the offer, but Hynek has ambitions and sees this as an opportunity to help his career. Quinn is also ambitious, but it becomes clear his directives from above are not to discover the truth behind the flying saucer phenomenon, but to help Hynek conclude the sightings are simple misidentifications of mundane objects such as aircraft, stars, planets, or other things commonly seen in the sky.

Conflict arises when Hynek finds that the cases they are looking into are much more mysterious than Quinn would have him believe. The mystery regarding the true intentions of Quinn’s superiors offers an ample amount of intrigue. 

Of these three main characters, Hynek and Mimi were real people. Project Blue Book was also a real project, and the cases they cover in the show were real cases. There was no Captain Quinn, but the character does accurately represent an attitude within the Air Force at the time that the whole subject was ridiculous.

The UFO cases are brilliantly reenacted. The real events might not have been as spectacular, but the UFO scenes elicit the fear, awe, and wonder one would imagine feeling witnessing such events. Gillen’s Hynek is also a great antagonist. He is intelligent, but relatable, and approaches each investigation with pure, open-minded, curiosity, as a good scientist should.

Hynek’s appeal makes Quinn’s dogged scepticism, and demands for mundane conclusions that much more frustrating, and leaves the audience wondering what the Air Force is hiding.

Hynek really was a college astronomy professor who helped the Air Force investigate UFOs, although he thought the entire subject ridiculous when the investigations began. Eventually, he found the issue to be worthy of serious scientific study and continued science-based research into the UFO phenomenon long after Project Blue Book was closed.

Hynek has claimed he also really did feel pressure to close cases without being allowed to conduct a thorough scientific investigation, saying he began to resent the Air Force’s “negative and unyielding attitude” that “everything had to have an explanation.” He once lamented, “I was a thorough sceptic, and I’m afraid I helped to engender the idea that it must be nonsense; therefore it is nonsense.”

The Air Force apparently wanted to put the kibosh on extraterrestrial musings because they felt there was nothing to the UFO phenomenon and it created a public relations nightmare. However, in the show, the Air Force appears to have something more to hide.

Again, IRL Hynek did not indicate he believed there was a group behind the scenes keeping information from him, even though there was some reason for him to believe this. When Project Blue Book was closed in 1969, a memo was put together by U.S. Air Force Deputy Director of Development Brigadier General C.H. Bolender listing the reasons why the Air Force should close the programme. Towards the end, he added: “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.” In other words, all of the best cases go somewhere else anyway.

The number of cases escalated above Project Blue Book, the nature of those cases, and the results of any investigations that the Air Force may have conducted have not been shared with the public. In the show, however, it appears Hynek will risk it all to find answers to these questions.

The extraterrestrial intrigue, the shadowy characters with unknown intentions, and the good cop/bad cop lead characters investigating mysterious paranormal phenomena lead to comparisons with The X-Files. However, the feel of the show is less X-Files and more historical fiction. It reminds me of a series from the late ‘90s called Dark Skies. Dark Skies was NBC’s answer to X-Files and was sort of historical fiction, but perhaps more accurately mythological fiction.

In Dark Skies, the main character is a congressional aide who in the first episode gets mixed up with Project Blue Book and an influential group of secret keepers called Majestic-12. Dark Skies relied heavily on existing UFO conspiracy mythologies, such as the legend of Majestic-12, which some believe to be a group of secret keepers brought together by President Harry Truman in 1947 to manage our UFO and extraterrestrial invasion problems. The portrayal of this group made of military officials, academics and leaders in the defense industry is similar to the group of secret keepers in the series Project Blue Book, although, besides military involvement, the make-up of the group of secret keepers in Project Blue Book, the show, is still a secret.

Whether or not Project Blue Book will delve into this UFO mythology is yet to be seen. There is a photo being circulated by History of Gillen’s Hynek viewing an alien in a container through a window. I asked the series creator, producer, and writer David O’Leary about this image, and he told me it is not what it appears. Since the show is based on reality, it is nice to know, for accuracy’s sake, the show will likely not go that far off into the deep end of alien conspiracies.

There are a few other facts that are off on the show, for instance, Hynek joined the U.S. Air Force’s UFO investigations in 1947 during their first foray into UFO research, Project Sign, not during Blue Book. He continued through their second UFO program, Project Grudge, and the last, Project Blue Book, which began in 1952. In the show, Hynek coins the term Unidentified Flying Object (UFO). Although the Air Force created the phrase at the beginning of Project Blue Book, the man who takes credit for it is Colonel Edward J. Ruppelt, Project Blue Book’s first chief.

Beyond a few relatively minor tweaks to history like these, the most exciting aspect of the show is that it is dramatising UFO cases in which investigators did not all feel there was a simple explanation. Despite the narrative the U.S. Air Force often portrays, even the military has never had a consensus on the UFO question. In fact, according to Ruppelt, the staff of Project Sign determined one explanation for some of the unidentified objects observed by credible witnesses might be extraterrestrial spacecraft. According to the Air Force, at the time of Project Blue Book’s closing, there were over 700 unsolved cases.

The minor deviations from reality in the first couple of episodes are not sufficient enough to cause concern. The insertion of some of the smaller facts, even if they are tweaked, is exciting for UFO nerds. I am curious where the storyline with Mimi’s mysterious friend is headed. Hynek, nor those close to him, ever indicated there was any real-life intrigue involving his family. I am hoping this is just a tool to represent some other aspect of reality.

In the end, even if the show begins to deviate from reality drastically, Hynek and Malarkey are such intriguing characters, and the mysteries sufficiently fascinating; that I think they show will do well. For those history nerds who want the facts, History has fortunately posted a host of articles on the real-life situations being covered on the show. 

Watching History’s version of Dr. Hynek attempt to solve UFO mysteries and potentially uncover vast conspiracies should be fun. As with any good historical fiction, it will hopefully also inspire viewers to learn more about a fascinating part of American history.

Project Blue Book starts on Wedneday the 27th of March at 2am on Syfy UK.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune remake has been pretty slow to get going. Adapting Dune is one of those cinematic white whales, one that infamously devoured years of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s life only never to actually go before cameras, and a 1984 film that actually did get filmed but which director David Lynch ultimately ‘Alan Smitheed’ himself from. But what Legendary is planning for the Dune franchise might actually stand a chance, with Villeneuve possibly planning to split that first book into two movies or more, rather than make the usual mistake of trying to pretend it has a complete story that can be told in three hours. So far the cast includes Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides and Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, but other than those two, there hasn’t been much to report on the casting front.

Until now. Dave Bautista is becoming what Jodorowsky would refer to as a “spiritual warrior” if he were still embroiled in making Dune. Bautista will play Glossu Rabban Harkonnen (via Variety), known by the charming name of ‘Beast.’ Ol’ ‘Beast’ Rabban is the nephew of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the corpulent, oozing, impossibly wealthy villain and noted sci-fi Donald Trump lookalike. Think of ‘Beast” as the “Eric’ of the Harkonnen family sewer: a patricidal brute and innefective governor and businessman. Apples and trees, kids. Or spice and worms. Whatever.

Bautista will be the third actor to take up the role. Rabban was played by Paul L. Smith (who also played Bluto to absolute perfection in Robert Altman’s gleefully bizarre Popeye) in the 1984 David Lynch film and by Laszlo I. Kisch in the better than expected made for TV version. If Villeneuve indeed takes several movies to tell the story of the first book, Bautista may get to dig into the part in a way others didn’t. Bautista previously worked with Villeneuve on Blade Runner 2049.

Bautista has time in his sci-fi franchise schedule at the moment. There’s still no word on when Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 will start filming as Disney continues to search for a replacement, and based on some of his comments, the actor probably isn’t in much of a hurry to put the blue body paint on for his employer. Don’t be surprised if Disney finds a way to actually off Bautista’s Drax somewhere in the course of Avengers: Endgame.

There is no release date set for Dune.. This movie isn’t anywhere near filming, and it will likely take a solid two years from the start of production until release. 2021 is an optimistic projection. But the sleeper must awaken eventually.

All things must end, and we’re getting pretty close to curtains o’clock for Telltale’s The Walking Dead game. Even before Telltale Games went through its infamous ‘majority studio closure’, this current crop of zombie-laden episodes had already been ominously dubbed The Walking Dead: The Final Season.

Luckily for fans – especially those who’ve been playing The Walking Dead game since its first decision-based episode dropped in 2012 – this is one of Telltale’s projects that will actually get completed. While the likes of Game Of Thrones: Season Two and Stranger Things were ditched midway through development, when Telltale hit all that trouble, Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment production company stepped in and finished off The Walking Dead video game series.

Two episodes of The Walking Dead: The Final Season are already available to play, leaving just two episodes in the pipeline before the walker-stuffed game is put to bed for good. Episode 3 is the penultimate one, entitled Broken Toys, and you can watch the brand new trailer right here…

As 18th episode overall of The Walking Dead game, and the second-to-last one in the run, Broken Toys will surely set the stage for a dramatic conclusion to this six-year yarn. We’re expecting the usual tough choices, a smattering of scary bits and those sometimes-a-bit-tricky quick-time events. We’re particularly worried that Clementine and AJ may not make it through to the end of the series, but we’ll just have to keep playing to find out if our suspicions are correct.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season episode 3, Broken Toys, will arrive on PC (via the Epic Games Store), Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One on January 15th 2019.

This review contains spoilers. 

Proof that the end-of-year festivities are done and the hangover of January is well begun, on Saturday night BBC Two aired Ken Loach’s blistering critique of the UK welfare system I, Daniel Blake. On Sunday night, BBC One followed up with prequel ‘I, Fantine Thibault’, a similar story but with more baguettes.  

I jest. There were actually very few baguettes in Les Miserables part two, an episode worthy of the title. A bit of pain de campagne would have served starving Fantine well, not that the poor wretch would’ve been able to chew it. The 19th century French welfare system consisting solely of a greasy sign pointing to the local sex work tunnel, a jobless Fantine was forced to sell her hair, teeth and eventually, body to make ends meet. 

Ends, continually stretched by swindling innkeepers the Thenardiers (Adeel Akhtar and Olivia Colman), did not meet. Having deposited her beloved daughter Cosette in their care, Fantine was preyed upon by the couple, whose demands for ever higher payments left her destitute. 

It was an hour of cruel coincidences and avoidable tragedy. We watched Fantine neatly stripped of everything she had. She lost her child, her job, her beauty, her dignity and, had Valjean not interceded on her behalf, would also have lost her freedom. Will she next, left feverish and coughing blood at the cliff-hanger, lose her life? 

And will Jean Valjean—now living under a false identity as a kindly factory owner and mayor—lose his liberty? The ongoing debate about moral philosophy (Does evil exist? Discuss, through gritted teeth) he engaged in with Javert this episode ended with a race to Arras, where a stranger faces a life sentence for Valjean’s crimes. Will he save another’s life by giving up his own?

Les Miserables leant in to its natural pantomime in episode two with the introduction proper of the Thenardiers. As Cosette’s wicked stepmother, Olivia Colman proved herself once again an essential livener to any drama. Her knack for comic expression and Albert Square vowels here brightened up dark scenes of childhood neglect and domestic violence. Adeel Akhtar’s evil Del Boy too, made for more grotesque entertainment.  

Speaking of the grotesque, the carnival wagon scene in which Fantine’s teeth were yanked from her head was an early entry in the Most Toe-Curlingly Horrid Screen Moment of 2019. (However many witchity grub smoothies are regurgitated by former Atomic Kitten members next December, I’m A Celebrity is going to have to go some to outdo the line “Help me hold her still, mother.”) 

There was more bodily pain in Valjean’s flesh-burning by the very coin he stole at the end of episode one. That sort of imagery is the meat of this heavily lessoned drama. Valjean’s episode two story was filled with crucifixes as a reminder of his redemption through the Bishop’s charity. The candlesticks too, not sold but retained as a talisman of Valjean’s moral epiphany, filled the same symbolic function.  

West plays Valjean’s conflicts well, and is all the more convincing without dialogue than when justifying his moral stance to Javert. Not a great deal chattier than he was last week, his scenes involve plenty of tortured prayer and injured looks, both of which West does expertly. Lily Collins is game as Fantine, but feels as though she’s holidaying in the part rather than inhabiting it. Ruffle that crop with some product and she could be drinking a matcha coconut latte in a pop-up cafe rather than expiring in bloody degradation. That said, her encounter with those odious braying toffs was still hideous enough to make you want to set fire to a polo ground. 

Like any good pantomime, this adaptation’s lessons are all written in fat crayon. There are goodies and baddies, sympathetic beauties and unsympathetic nasties. Subtlety is a foreign language here, but the drama is gripping and its lessons (Cooee! Working parents need flexible hours and accessible childcare) continue to be relevant. 

Read Louisa’s review of the previous episode here. 

Warning: while this episode is free of spoilers, it does contain some plot details for Brother.

2.1 Brother

A world without a Star Trek TV show regularly airing new episodes is a slightly darker world. Thankfully, we are now back in a slightly lighter timeline: Star Trek: Discovery is coming back!

For those who were frustrated with the action-oriented frenzy of the first season, Star Trek: Discovery season two is not going to totally assuage those frustrations. There is a commitment to the wonder of scientific exploration in certain parts of this season premiere – most notably, in the delightful introduction of Tig Notaro’s Engineer Denise Reno – but this first episode is weighed down (with little pay off thus far) by the angsty mystery of Michael’s mysterious, absent brother.

For an episode called Brother, the story is not as focused on the relationship between Michael and Spock as you might think. Really, this episode is about Captain Pike, and his integration into the Discovery crew. And, in this ambition, it shines. After a season spent with Lorca, the addition of a captain who so openly espouses the Starfleet values is a breath of fresh air – for the crew, and for viewers. I’m not sure we needed another white human dude to take over command when we have a perfectly good Saru right there, but I digress…

Pike comes on board the Discovery and immediately informs Saru that he will be taking command because there is an imminent threat to… um, everyone, I guess? That threat is seven red bursts that occurred in perfect synchronisation thousands of light-years away from one another. This mystery will no doubt drive much of the plot this season, and I am very into it as a season structure, though I would have liked it even more if it was not framed here as a threat, but as a great scientific mystery.

Much of the excitement leading up to this second season has been in seeing how Discovery chooses to represent and use Spock’s character within this narrative. Lower your expectations for this first episode. As previously mentioned, this is much more about bringing Pike into the fold, and checking in with some of our favourite characters from last season – most thoroughly, Tilly and Stamets, who get the best, character-driven scene of the episode together – than it is about Spock.

There is a Spock-shaped hole in this first episode, as Michael is desperate to see her brother, remembering moments when she first came to live with Sarek, Amanda, and Spock following the deaths of her parents. We get flashbacks to Little Spock, who is, as far as I can tell, an adorable brat. These flashbacks should be about Michael – how she feels moving into a new family on a strange planet without her parents – but, instead, they are about Spock, a character we don’t know in the context of this TV show.

It’s not enough to rely on an assumed interest in this iconic character. Discovery needs to make an argument for why Spock is important to this story. For me, the show does not accomplish this in the season premiere.

Visually, Star Trek: Discovery continues to look great, giving us some of the best science fiction visuals on TV. At times, Discovery can get caught up in that spectacle, losing track of its story, but, even then, there is a sense of fun in its action sequences that wasn’t there in season one. This sense of fun is reinforced by the character of Sylvia Tilly, who continues to be a total delight that makes any scene instantly more delightful just by her presence. 

As we move further into the season, and Spock no doubt becomes a larger part of this story, I hope Discovery remembers that there is just as much, if not more, potential in its new characters as there is in characters like Pike or Spock, who carry the heavy weight of prior canon with them. They’ve had their time in the Star Trek narrative, and while I am eager to see their ‘familiar’ faces popping back up in this world, this show has always been at its best when it’s not trying to play on nostagia, but rather forging its own, bold path.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 arrives on January the 18th on Netflix UK.

HBO has kept any and all story details about its upcoming Watchmen TV series under wraps. And with good reason. No comic book adaptation (or sequel, or prequel) comes with quite the weight of expectations that anything with the Watchmen name on it does, and showrunner Damon Lindelof has gone out of his way to make it clear that he isn’t looking to desecrate the work of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but rather to build on it.

HBO has now revealed a whopping five seconds of footage from the Watchmen TV series and, while it’s not a lot to go on, it’s still pretty exciting.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, it’s part of HBO’s 2019 preview video, and the Watchmen stuff starts at about thirteen seconds in…

Now, I suppose we could go as crazy on this as five seconds of footage will allow. There’s the disturbing masked police officers (wearing the colours of the Comedian) for starters, or the fact that the cowboy hat in the shot of the police station sure looks like a smiley face, or the creepy Rorschach wannabe. But those should all be saved until we get some more footage with some more context a little later on.

Anyway, none of that is as big a deal as the 1.5 seconds of Jeremy Irons we get.

Whoever this character is, he’s wearing purple, and he’s hanging out at Gila Flats, the location where Dr. Manhattan was born. SlashFilm had previously reported that Irons was playing an older version of Adrian Veidt, and based on his fashion sense here (Veidt always favoured purple) that definitely appears to be the case. If he’s back at Gila Flats, he could be trying to resurrect Dr. Manhattan, or maybe trying to replicate the event that caused Dr. Jon Osterberg to become something much more than human.

In any case, this is most definitely a sequel to the graphic novel (whether the movie and its controversial ending are considered canon is another matter, I suppose) not some kind of re-adaptation, something that showrunner Lindelof had alluded to when he first started talking publically about the Watchmen gig. And given Irons’ age, it’s a safe bet that this takes place in the present day, rather than a mere few years after the original.

Ah, but where does this leave the current print sequel, Doomsday Clock, in Watchmen continuity? That comic begins 10 years after the conclusion of Watchmen, with Adrian Veidt trying to track down Dr. Manhattan…who has been quietly meddling in the affairs of the DC Universe for the last few years. Even though that comic begins with Veidt in 1996, he arrives in the DC Universe of the present day, so depending on how it ends, who survives, and if they go back to their appropriate universes, maybe this TV series can still exist alongside it.

Or not.

There’s no premiere date for Watchmen yet, but we expect it around mid 2019.