Full spoilers follow for VisionQuest Episodes 5 & 6, which are streaming now on Disney+.

At this point, I'm fully on board with VisionQuest and the story of robotic reinvention it's telling. But as compelling as Paul Bettany's White Vision is, he's small potatoes compared to the series' real star, James Spader's Ultron. Episodes 5 and 6 go all-in with Ultron and his romantic obsession with the fair robo-lady Jocasta (T'Nia Miller), and the results are pretty darned impressive.

That's especially true of Episode 5, which is definitely the high point for VisionQuest so far. This one kinda, sorta takes the form of a bottle episode, as Vision and his fellow A.I. units find themselves locked in Ultron's attic prison and forced to observe his machinations from afar. This episode is cleverly constructed in how it presents bits and pieces of Ultron's conversations from different vantage points while still leaving the character's true motivations somewhat shrouded in mystery. As ever, the series gets a lot of mileage out of conveying complex digital processes through very hokey, analog representations. See also - the exorcism scene from Episode 4.

Visually, Episode 5 is a real treat. I really enjoyed the transitions between grainy video footage and more elaborately staged black-and-white environments. There's a very cozy feel to Ultron's conversations with Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) and Jocasta that serves to highlight the dialogue and the tense back-and-forth. Having Vision and his full-color comrades patrolling in the background only makes the whole effect work that much better. It's almost like watching a well-choreographed stage play unfold.

Ultimately, though, it all comes down to the terrific chemistry between Spader and Miller. Sure, the earlier Tommy/Ultron conversation is strong, but even that can't hold a candle to the pure scenery-chewing fun of watching Ultron and Jocasta take each other's measure. Miller is able to bring a whole new level of nuance and charm to her role in this more human form, and she expertly matches Spader's gravelly blend of menance and good humor. I almost didn't want their exchange to end, but at least that element carries over into Episode 6.

Both the Ultron/Tommy and Ultron/Jocasta scenes do a fantastic job of exploring the troubled psychology of this maladjusted creation of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. Tommy cuts right to the heart of the matter when he accuses Ultron of failing to understand connection. Yet paired with Jocasta, Ultron feels the pull anyway. He was already a fascinating villain in his original cinematic appearance, but the series has found newer and more complex layers to delve into. And now, though his intentions are entirely self-serving, he's no longer so clear-cut an antagonist.

Given how enthralling Episode 5 is, it should come as no surprise that Episode 6 is a bit of a comedown in comparison. After a bottle episode spent in purely digital space, it's a slight adjustment getting used to a more real-world conflict and the return of Paladin (Todd Stashwick). Part of me would be just as happy to see that character shuffled offstage, but Episode 6 does eventually justify his return. There's a fun little standoff between Vision and Paladin that unexpectedly leads to the two enemies becoming temporary allies, and the reveal that the Handler (Diane Morgan) is herself an oppressed AI unit is an amusing twist (as is the MCU origin of Tommy's Speed codename).

What this episode doesn't quite justify, however, is the sudden and inexplicable return of Faran Tahir's Raza. On some level, it's sort of neat seeing the very first MCU bad guy putting in an appearance nearly 20 years later, but why dust off that old chestnut in an Iron Man-free context? The character doesn't serve any particular purpose beyond providing Vision and Paladin with the necessary goons to battle, and he's taken out of the picture as suddenly as he appears. It comes across as continuity mining for the sake of continuity mining.

Fortunately, Episode 6 does still have a healthy dose of Ultron/Jocasta banter to fall back upon, and that's where the series continues to shine brightest. The interplay between the two characters really is the show's biggest selling point now. Every time it seems we've sussed out Ultron's motivations or that the character has bitten off more than he can chew with Jocasta, he surprises us again. We still don't know who the ultimate villain of the series is meant to be (Phineas Horton? J.I.M.?), but I'm having a blast on the road to VisionQuest's endgame.

Lupin: Part 4 is on Netflix now.

It’s been three years since Lupin’s last season — a less memorable, less focused entry — so you’d be forgiven for forgetting much of what transpired. The show’s fourth part features an extended recap narrated by the title character before kicking off in earnest, at which point it hits the “soft reboot” button, both narratively and stylistically. Its biggest change is a welcome one: it leans unapologetically into the soap opera underpinnings which have always made it tick. The result is a brisk eight episodes that, despite wheel-spinning near the season’s end, eventually find their way to the kind of ludicrous melodrama that makes the French heist series such a turn-your-brain-off delight.

Part 3 ended with a major cliffhanger, as gentleman thief Assane Diop (Omar Sy) — a devotee of Maurice Leblanc’s fictitious fraudster Arsène Lupin — found himself in prison, in a cell adjacent to his long time, opulent enemy Hubert Pellegrini (Hervé Pierre). How does the new season resolve this tension? Well, it doesn’t. Which is to say, it treats the whole thing like a gag in order for the show to move forward into unexpected territory. Four years have passed, and in that time, Assane has willingly remained behind bars — except for a brief escape where he bamboozled Pellegrini all the way into a shipping container bound for a Malaysian prison. Now on the verge of release for good behavior, it finally seems like Assane has turned over a new leaf. That is, until a slickly-executed pair of simultaneous heists, in his signature style, make the police suspicious, forcing him to go rogue in order to prove his innocence.

During Assane’s prison stint, his teenage son Raoul (now played by newcomer Théo Christine) has grown into a frustrated young adult in want of an absent father. Once a mere plot device and kidnapping victim, Raoul now becomes the series’ unexpected heart and soul, though the narrative, and Assane, keep shoving him to the side until those frustrations reach a boiling point. A winding conspiracy takes precedence, involving a copycat swindler and twists and turns ripped right from a daytime soap opera — a secret lineage, sudden deaths, equally sudden resurrections, and so on — forcing Lupin to unexpectedly turn to former foes for new partnerships in search of a secret treasure. All the while, his police frenemy Youssef Guédira (Soufiane Guerrab), a fellow Leblanc enthusiast, remains on his tail, but is less willing to offer him the benefit of doubt when his partner Sofia Belkacem (Shirine Boutella) is gravely injured.

Complicating matters further is the fact that, in Assane’s absence, his best friend and co-conman Benjamin (Antoine Gouy) has fallen for his ex-wife and Raoul’s mother, Claire (Ludivine Sagnier), adding yet another layer to the sprawling flashbacks of the various characters as teens and young adults. Was this pairing always in the cards? Of course not, but the fourth season also goes a long way towards re-writing the show’s basic DNA. These flashbacks involve both interpersonal drama and a surprising amount of setup for the contemporary conspiracies, as though the central plot of this season — involving a secret society with some icky blood-purity leanings, playing into the show’s modern, pluralistic re-imagining of Leblanc’s Lupin — had been decades in the making. Like Assane himself, the show is a bullshit artist of the highest caliber; it works to convince you that every twisting screw is part of some intricately devised puzzle dating back to its 2021 debut, when it’s all clearly been designed on-the-fly.

And yet, that design yields some clockwork thrills from time to time, between Assane’s continued weaponization of racial prejudice to pull off his galaxy-brained heists (one scheme in particular involves a flashmob of re-enactors dressed as an oft-forgotten Black French general) and the style with which the series presents each deceit. The editing is more judicious this time. To reveal how a given ploy was pulled off, it relies less on unseen angles and elements when episodes re-visit existing scenes, and more on parts of the image you might’ve missed in the first place.

The season’s broader themes of family allow Lupin to become a particularly silly bit of business akin to the later Fast & Furious films. Assane becomes increasingly torn between making up for lost time with Raoul and tracking down lost jewels with a newly-formed family of thieves who start out the season at odds. Among these is a mixed-race character named Adèle Kapoor (Laïka Blanc-Francard) who, in addition to expanding the show’s quickfire (if malformed) invocations of racism in modern France, becomes the center of a tech-infused update to the series with her skills as a hacker in the age of A.I. deepfakes. The less said about her backstory beforehand, the better, but that she’s on par with Assane as a Leblanc-inspired burglar and gives him a much-needed rival and dramatic counterweight.

The show’s new directions aren’t necessarily original — here you’ll find familiar gadgets, scenes and dynamics straight out of everything from Bond, Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible to the network procedural White Collar — but Lupin’s fourth part sublimates all these influences into something cheekily enjoyable. It rides a fine line between heightened, crisscrossing nonsense plots and intensified character-centric schmaltz, but when it counts the most, it manages to find just the right balance between the two, before leaving off in perhaps the most unexpected place this series could go. If there is a fifth season (and there really should be), the dilemmas facing Assane will probably make for damn good television, given the various pieces Part 4 moves gradually into place.

With intense performances, a heady atmosphere, and sharp writing, The Wolf Among Us’ gripping neo-noir saga rivalled the prestige TV dramas of the time when it first came out in 2013, earning acclaim as one of Telltale’s greatest yet. Now, with a long-awaited sequel in the works, it’s been given a fresh coat of paint that’s gussied up locations and added a slew of behind-the-scenes content to sweeten the pot. Some holdover annoyances haven’t been addressed, like the original’s stiff and occasionally uncanny animations, which get in the way of The Wolf Among Us Remastered feeling truly definitive. Still, this story remains a fantastic one, and the enhanced set dressing even manages to deepen its sinister mood.

For those who didn’t play the original, The Wolf Among Us thoughtfully adapts Bill Willingham’s beloved graphic novel series Fables, in which folklore characters covertly coexist with humans in a New York suburb aptly called Fabletown. Set roughly 20 years earlier as a non-canon prequel, Telltale’s adaptation artfully draws on classic noir storytelling, dropping you into the shoes of Sheriff Bigby (aka the Big Bad Wolf) to solve a bizarre but gripping murder. With a decapitated head on his stoop and little more to go on than a ribbon and an etched ring, the marshal must use his keen nose and perception to find the culprit… and he has to do it fast. With humans investigating the case and the social fabric of the mythical community at stake, failure could cause their secret society to collapse entirely.

On top of that already immense pressure, there’s one more important piece of subtext to consider: after centuries of violence as a storybook baddie, Bigby’s constituents don’t necessarily trust him to get the job done and, naturally, watch his every move. As such, he’s forced to lean on familiar faces like Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and Bufkin from The Wizard of Oz to chase leads as he unravels a web of complex issues spanning class consciousness, poverty, and abuses of power. It’s a journey that proves to be thoroughly engrossing.

To peel back the seedy underbelly of Fabletown, your time as Bigby is loosely split into segments. For the most part, you’ll have intriguing conversations from a third-person perspective, choosing from a handful of responses as a clock quickly ticks down. Through this system, you can lean on witnesses who seem to be hiding something, threatening them if they continue to hold back. Or, if all else fails, you can resort to physical violence (assuming that aligns with your own moral compass). Cleverly, the language used in these interactions draws on its fairy tale source material without ever feeling corny. So, despite including terms like Witching Well and Magic Mirror, the conversations remain emotionally charged – a tribute to the writing underneath and the resonant, enduring performances of its cast.

What’s most important is that your reactions here are not one-sided. As you make certain decisions, a threatening notification pops up stating that the character you’re interacting with will remember what you did (a staple of the genre). For example, say you make a promise to deliver something and don’t come through – well, they might have a few choice words for you the next time you meet. In this way, The Wolf Among Us is not just about solving the whodunit; it is also about choosing whether Bigby will shake off his villainous origins and prove his status as Sheriff and protector.

What’s neat is that the choice is mostly up to you. If you want to, you can cruelly push the citizens to get your answers, or try as often as you might to take their side, even if that means going against the legal institution to which you are professionally bound. By exploring this curious grey area, I began to understand why the residents of Fabletown act as they do, eventually allowing me to empathise with their actions, no matter how desperate or depraved they may be.

Amidst these social calls, you’ll occasionally control Bigby directly as he picks through dingy locations – such as dive bars and ornate offices – interacting with clues to advance the investigation. Just like in conversations, there are even more ethical quandaries to consider, like whether you should interrupt a wake like an unemotional jerk or kick in a door instead of knocking like a gentleman. As the confusing haze of right and wrong settled in, I frequently struggled to maintain my good-guy persona, especially when provoked. It would be so easy to smack an obvious bad guy in the head to get the answers I needed more quickly, but then wouldn’t I be just as bad as him?

Last but not least are the interactive sequences, which require you to complete a series of quick time events to survive some of the higher octane moments throughout the tale. You’ll rip out throats, jump across city blocks, and even set broken bones, with failure occasionally leading to a game over. Thankfully, frequent checkpoints drop you right back into the action if you miss a beat. The variety and frequency of these moments do well to keep you busy as you piece together the killer's identity, particularly as many of them arrive with mesmerising (and sometimes gruesome) animations.

Mirroring the flow of the original, The Wolf Among Us Remastered takes place over five episodes that are about two hours long (all included in this single package instead of being sold individually). For the most part, the choices you make feel impactful, which keeps the momentum chugging along nicely. That is, until the penultimate episode, when the pace suddenly dips and characters start needlessly reiterating their points of view. In earlier episodes, I’d look under every stone to figure out who the villain was, and I was fairly confident I understood what was going on by episode four, so everything slowing down right when I was ready for the payoff felt slightly disjointed.

I do get why they didn’t alter this chapter more substantially; this is a remaster, not a remake, and major story alterations could ultimately do more harm than good if handled poorly. Besides, there are still enjoyable chats throughout the episode, so the dragging is only a minor blip in an otherwise brilliant story, with a finale that certainly clawed me back. But when the rest of the tale is so tight and considered, it’s still a bit annoying to spend a couple of hours rehashing information you’ve already worked hard to uncover.

That dissatisfaction is also softened by the fact that the locations you visit are so intentionally designed and brilliantly reflect the personalities of their inhabitants. While Bigby's tiny, sparsely furnished flat fits with his lone wolf status, the local watering hole’s scrappy yet warm atmosphere matches its down-on-their-luck clientele. The remaster's design glow-up further bolsters that environmental storytelling, as everything from couch upholstery to pawn shop artefacts has been redesigned with far more detail. For instance, those familiar with Aunt Greenleaf's apartment will see that it’s now even witchier than before, with hanging tassels and strewn curios. Elsewhere, the infamous Puddin ‘n’ Pie remains seedy but stylish, featuring Art Nouveau-esque pendant lights and extravagant neon piping.

With so much effort spent on the look, it’s a shame that not every detail received the same touch, and that there are still a handful of friction points on the technical side. Characters sometimes move as if on a swivel, and Bigby’s animations when finding clues tend to feel strangely rigid and occasionally robotic. In the 2013 original, these blips were passable, but in a 2026 remaster, the awkward animations and jerky movements stand out. That’s not to say they are so distracting that they undo all the impressive polishing elsewhere, just that I wish those edges had been similarly smoothed over in order to soundly mark this as the definitive version of the tale.

Harkening back to a simpler era of DVD extras, The Wolf Among Us Remastered also includes a gaggle of bonus features for fans who might want a peek behind the curtain of development. There’s a toggleable Noir game mode that lets you play out the tale in black and white, a digital gallery that compares old art stills with new ones, plus developer and cast interviews about the making-of. As someone who likes to sift through every scrap of lore, I found these additions certainly fun to pilfer through… even if the interface is a tad old-fashioned, leaning more toward sentiment than usefulness. The most compelling add by far is a handful of playable deleted scenes that, while rough around the edges, highlight interesting plot threads and deviations that are exciting to experience after the final credits roll.

The LEGO Star Wars Executor Super Star Destroyer, a scaled replica of Darth Vader's flagship, is the longest build in the company's history, measuring 53.5 inches – close to four-and-a-half feet in total. It displaces the LEGO Titanic from the top spot, which measured 53.1 inches. The difference between the two sets is .4 inches – a little over the width of a single, one-studded square tile.

It might be that the designers are bumping against the upper limit of how long a set can be while also remaining commercially viable. Since I built the Executor, it's been sitting on the work desk in my house, and nothing else can fit on that desk at the same time. The first thing you'll want to do, before you even think of buying this set, is make sure you have the room to display it. It is 7.5 inches high, 53.5 inches long, and 20 inches wide. To illustrate how big that is more subjectively: I could easily believe this build was a show display – the type of thing you might see at a LEGO convention or in a toy museum, under glass – rather than a set available for retail purchase, as this one is.

The LEGO Executor Super Star Destroyer comes in two separate boxes, spread out over 54 bags and four instruction booklets. The first thing you build is a tiny Imperial Star Destroyer Devastator. This is one of the first ships we see in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope when it's chasing after the Tantive IV, during the scene where Leia escapes with the Death Star plans.

I actually built a 4,784-piece LEGO model of the Devastator back in 2019, which came with a tiny model of the Tantive IV to highlight its disparate size. So when this new set shows how the Executor dwarfs even the Devastator, and makes it look miniscule by comparison? It illustrates the massive scale these ships possess.

After building the micro-Devastator, you build a minifigure-scaled bridge of the Executor. It's famous for being the location in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, where Darth Vader speaks to six bounty hunters – Boba Fett, Bossk, IG-88, 4-LOM, Zuckuss, and Dengar – and offers a bounty for the capture of the Millennium Falcon. He infamously fixes Fett with an intimidating stare: "I want them alive. NO DISINTEGRATIONS."

This is the first time all six bounty hunters have been packaged in the same set. LEGO is more likely to be completionist with its giant sets (like Avengers Tower or The Goonies). It doesn't justify the high prices, admittedly. But it's still nice that LEGO treats its prestige sets like standalone purchases rather than parts of a "collect 'em all' money scheme.

Next, you build the black stand. It is surprisingly durable; it will later be the only stable means by which you can move the model from one location to another. During the build itself, you use the black stand to turn the model upside down, to better access and construct the underbelly of the ship.

Finally, you begin building the Executor itself, starting with its foundational framework. But unlike other LEGO frameworks, which are expansive and airy to create the illusion of bulk, the LEGO Executor has a lean, compact build. A dense mass of multicolored Technic parts forms the model's triangular silhouette.

The work goes slowly and meticulously. This is not a build you can speed through, and it is very easy to miss a step or forget to insert this eye into that rod, which will cause the final build to fall apart, literally. I had to backtrack a few times to make sure it all fit properly, knowing the stability of one element relied upon the underlying stability of another.

Anytime there's an open hook or clamp, it means one of two things. Either you forgot to connect an element from the last bag, or there's another element, which you'll build several hours from now, that fits into it perfectly. As massive as it is, this set doesn't have any stray bits for the hell of it. Every brick is functional.

The build repeats at times, but it doesn't feel laborious. You'll build one layering plate, and you'll build its mirror counterpart an hour later. By that time, you've forgotten the process and it feels new again.

One important caution: Have steady hands, and do not, under any circumstances, drop a piece into the build itself. There's nothing more painful than trying to fish out an errant brick, while you hear it rattling about. In the process of getting one piece, another piece falls off, or a structure collapses into itself. If you try and repair that, another piece falls off or a different structure collapses.

I speak from experience. I made one mistake, and in the process of undoing it, it cost me an hour to rebuild what I had broken. And at the end of it – after putting everything back to where it should have been – I still had four pieces left over, and I couldn't figure where they went. I hope they're not too important, because I'm not digging under the hood again to figure them out.

This model's size is one thing, but its level of detail, painstakingly integrated into the build's top side, is quite another. Star Wars creator George Lucas called it "greebles"—the application of disparate mechanical parts to an otherwise smooth surface to give it texture. Because the ship is gray and because the "greebling" overlaying it is also gray, it appears, from a distance, like a monochromatic monolith.

But move closer, and you gain an appreciation for its scale. Where did the crew members live and spend their leisure time? Where did they man the guns? Where did they navigate and initiate the thrusters? Did they commute from one end of the ship to the other, or did they simply inhabit one part of the ship for their entire service, never seeing the whole?

According to canon, the Executor was larger than Manhattan, and over 280,000 crew members worked and died on it. The width of several tiles represents the length of several city blocks. A single piece of greebling represents a machine bigger than a building. This is a floating city in the sky, and to build it is to feel and appreciate its weight. And after you've finished it? The build's size and complexity render it contemplative. It somehow gets more interesting and engrossing, the more you look at it.

For more, see our picks for the best LEGO Star Wars sets available now.

LEGO Star Wars: Executor Super Star Destroyer, Set #75457, retails for $799.99, and it is composed of 6130 pieces. It is available for purchase now at LEGO.

Full spoilers follow for The Simpsons: "Treehouse of Horror XXXVII."

While it's best to go into modern "Treehouse of Horror" episodes with tempered expectations, the truth is that The Simpsons' track record with Halloween specials has improved a fair bit in recent years. "Treehouse of Horror XXXVII" is far from the strongest the series has ever delivered, but nor is it anywhere near the weakest. Its main flaw is in being a just plain decent episode in the immediate aftermath of the much superior "Treehouse of Horror Presents: The Revengening."

Unlike last week's special, which focused on one singular storyline involving Homer (Dan Castellaneta) and his compatriots being hounded by a bloodthirsty slasher villain with a surprising secret identity, this episode reverts to the traditional "Treehouse" formula. That means a cleverly animated intro sequence (in this case, a neat little claymation parody of The Nightmare Before Christmas) followed by three spooky shorts. My main takeaway from watching these two episodes back-to-back is that the series really ought to consider switching to the full-length episode format more permanently. But if the plan is to start doing both every year, then who are we to complain, really?

If there's no one particular standout segment in this year's "Treehouse," at least there aren't any weak links, either. The episode opens with the cleverly titled "Bride's Shed Revisited," as Marge (Julie Kavner) assembles a backyard shed that winds up switching out husbands at random. It's amusing to watch Marge lean into her dubious new power and cycle through the best and worst eligible mates Springfield has to offer, culminating in Survivor host Jeff Probst. I can even forgive the idea of Marge hooking up with Probst, since this episode is (as Lisa reminds us in the intro) strictly non-canon.

That's followed by "Dog Boy Afternoon," a very loose Pet Sematary parody that sees Homer accidentally kill both Santa's Little Helper and Bart (Nancy Cartwright) and inadvertantly cause their corpses to switch brains. It's a fun little segment that benefits both from the recurring gag of Homer drinking his way through morning and afternoon-themed liquor and the general body-swap comedy. There's also a surprising amount of gore here, particularly in the scene where Homer is ripped apart by hungry dogs. It's always nice to see these Halloween specials push the envelope in that regard.

Finally, there's "Vehicular Dad Slaughter," as teen versions of Bart and Lisa (Yeardley Smith) discover their dear old dad has been imprisoned in DMV training video limbo by Patty and Selma (Kavner). I like that writer Tim Long opted to jump forward in time for this segment, even if the segment could just as easily have been executed with the traditional characters. Patty and Selma also make for solid witchy antagonists here.

If there are any unifying themes to this year's special, it's the emphasis on exploring the Simpsons clan at different eras of their lives and in spotlighting Kavner's characters over the rest of the ensemble cast. Both work to the episode's benefit. The focus on Marge and her sisters might have given me pause in seasons past, as Kavner's voice has deteriorated quite a bit over the years (granted, the same could be said for several cast members of this nearly 40-year-old sitcom). But whether through some sort of digital AI assistance or just plain effort on her part, that's another area the series has improved upon of late. Kavner's Marge sounds closer to her old self these days.

Again, none of these three segments are good enough to rival the all-time "Treehouse of Horror" classics, but nor are there any stinkers this time. That's still only enough to make "Treehouse of Horror XXXVII" the second-best Halloween episode of Season 38.

Phantom Blade Zero has spent years looking almost too good to be true, especially coming from a studio that's best known for its mobile games. That’s why it's just about the biggest compliment I can pay it that after 50 hours performing picture-perfect kung fu, it's exactly as fun to play as it looks. This effortlessly smooth action game has some of the most satisfying and well-tuned combat I’ve played in a long time, a surprising number of secrets to discover and quests to complete in each of its beautiful levels, and a neverending supply of clever encounters full of unbelievably awesome moments. Its convoluted story and occasional performance issues may not live up to that incredible action, but it nails just about everything else, and there were only a handful of moments where I wasn’t absolutely thrilled to be slicing my way through the ranks of the Wulin.

Phantom Blade Zero plays like something straight out of a wuxia epic. As a metal-as-hell martial artist of mysterious origins with only 66 days left alive to exact your revenge, you set out on an odyssey across the ruined lands of the Phantom World, facing off against all manner of beast and badass along the way. The story here isn’t Phantom Blade Zero’s strong suit as it tries to do a bit too much, shoving in a whole bunch of mystical jargon, dozens of characters, and a needlessly complex timeline, very little of which ultimately pays off anyway. In the first couple hours alone, so much time is spent toggling back and forth between present day, several years ago, several months ago, and several days ago that I was exhausted by all the exposition before I’d even faced my first real boss fight. That said, there are enough likeable characters along the way, especially your unflappable hero named Soul, that I was usually able to forgive it for occasionally wasting my time with unnecessary flashbacks and lengthy explanations.

Besides, you’ll be spending most of your time exploring the world and squaring off against enemies big and small, and it’s pretty clear that Phantom Blade Zero wants you to spend most of your attention on this part of the adventure. And that’s a good thing, too, because by God is it good. It only took a couple minutes for the precise parry and dodge mechanics to feel natural, and the nuanced but not-overly-complex system of weapons, combos, special abilities, and upgrades are rolled out at an extremely smart pace, all of which are easy enough to slip into like a tailored set of flowing wuxia robes. I’m a complete snob when it comes to the feel and pacing of combat in these types of games, so the fact that this immediately felt like reuniting with an old friend made it instantly compelling, and it’s one of those intangible things that’s very hard to get right.

Even more impressive is that not only does the combat feel good right away, it does so across dozens of weapons, each with their own unique moveset. This game that doesn’t just encourage you to change up your weapon loadout at regular intervals, it actually requires you to mix things up since swapping your active melee weapon is one of the ways you can restore your posture meter with a single button press. And since many enemies, particularly bosses, can instantly drain your posture with certain attacks, you’ll be swapping between different options with regularity, forcing you to commit multiple movesets and special abilities to memory. Conveniently, Phantom Blade Zero makes it extremely easy for you to reclaim and reallocate points invested in leveling up weapons, so there’s rarely any reason to stick with a set loadout anyway – especially since you always seem to find the exact tool you need right before entering an area or encountering a boss where it would come in handy. For example, I noticed that I found a water cannon weapon only a few feet away from an area that led to a fire-based boss. Nice.

Beyond that, you’ll unlock a bunch of additional tools like grappling hooks and bows, which have utility both in combat encounters and outside of them since you can use them to reach certain parts of the map or break through barriers that are otherwise impassable. There are also trinkets that offer interesting buffs, like a significant damage increase when you’re at full health, and a skill tree with perks that let you do things like execute a dodge while in mid-air or increase the number of healing items you can carry. There’s a surprising amount of depth to the things you can upgrade and the ways to customize exactly how your Wulin warrior does his thing, and I spent much more time than I typically do in these kinds of games just testing out different weapons and swapping my equipment around as a result. At the very least, it’s worth doing so just to see the unique execution animations when you finish off trash enemies.

You’ll have plenty of time to try them all out as you get your steps in across Phantom Blade Zero’s eight maps, too. Each one is filled with foes to take down, side quests to complete, chests to loot, and secrets to discover. A surprising amount of the places to go and people to meet are completely missable, including the entirety of a very cool questline that sees you getting trained by none other than Donnie Yen as the mysterious gold-masked man (which is actually one of PBZ’s strongest subplots). While most of the side quests are pretty straightforward missions to go somewhere and collect some stuff for a small reward, they gave me more reasons to spend time exploring every nook and cranny, which I was happy to do. And unlike lots of modern games filled with icons on the screen telling you exactly where to go and what to do, Phantom Blade Zero instead makes use of hand-drawn maps that only give you a vague idea of your location in relation to key landmarks, allowing you to explore and fill in the gaps on your own.

If there’s one thing that consistently mucks up this journey, it’s that Phantom Blade Zero suffers from some pretty bad geometry. Soul gets caught on surfaces all the time, and even the tiniest bumps in the road can stop him dead in his tracks, which is pretty hilarious for a guy who can jump 40 feet in the air while doing 19 backflips. Not only that, there are invisible borders all over the place that make exploration janky at times, especially when platforming sections ask you to get to a specific ledge, only for you to discover there’s an invisible wall and you fall to your death. I died nearly 200 times over the course of my playthrough, and roughly half of those deaths were me falling into a pit or getting caught in the environment until I was able to get myself killed or reload my save file. In one case, I even lost about 20 minutes of progress when my supposed martial master couldn’t escape from some bushes. Oh, and enemies occasionally get stuck in the environment too, which just makes fights where it happens feel so lame.

Despite that, Phantom Blade Zero’s superpower – the magic trick it performs time and time again – is its way of making you feel like you’re the only person in the world badass enough to withstand its utterly insane flurry of swords against godlike monsters like it’s nothing. The truth is that the melee dance of combat encounters is just so finely tuned, with every attack telegraphed just enough to give you exactly the time you need to react, aided by an almost imperceptible musical rhythm that grants you a certain level of precognition for what’s going to happen next. Once I synced up with its tempo, I started anticipating attacks before I consciously registered them, leading me to perfectly block some lightning-quick attack I hadn’t seen before. There’s nothing specifically special about my reaction time or skill with action games – rather it's a testament to how incredibly well-balanced and smartly designed these unbelievably sick fights are. It’s without question the thing Phantom Blade Zero does best, and it’s an illusion I fell for repeatedly, from the opening sequence all the way to the final battle.

Something I admire about Phantom Blade Zero’s difficulty is how consistently it feels exactly right – not too unforgiving, but it rarely lets you feel like you aren’t in danger of getting your butt kicked. I’m typically someone who relishes a challenge from games like this and so played Phantom Blade Zero on its hardest difficulty exclusively, but found myself beating just about every major boss fight in two or three tries, plus a good chunk that I cleared in one go – and I didn’t mind that one bit! It meant that I rarely saw enough of a boss to know every tool in their murder belt, and refreshingly made me feel like the one to be feared rather than the other way around. It’s pretty damn cool to enter a room and watch a 10-foot-tall badass with an eight-pack swing around a blade and think, “oh, man. This guy’s totally screwed.”

Part of the way this Goldilocks level of difficulty is achieved is due to the interesting decision to not make you repeat phases of a boss fight that you’ve already cleared. If you get through a first phase that just makes the bad guy mad and then get killed after he turns into an even more hulked-out psycho, you’ll pick back up at the top of that second phase. I’ve been known to get annoyed at having to replay the first phase of a boss fight a dozen times just to get another run at the more challenging part, to the point where multi-phase boss fights in general can get on my nerves these days. By removing this annoyance entirely, it got rid of a lot of potential friction with some of these encounters

It also allows for more freedom in how these encounters are designed, like moments where a boss uses a cheap move that one-shots you instantly if you get hit by it. Normally, including insta-kill moves like that is a good way to send me into a rage, but because my progress was almost never set back far enough to bother getting mad about, I felt a lot more lenient toward that kind of thing. I mean, let’s face it, that crazy attack where you get impaled on a giant spear, then set on fire and smashed face-first into the floor probably should kill you right away, so it’s pretty neat that Phantom Blade Zero found a way to make a devastating moment like that exciting rather than irritating.

It’s also incredibly impressive that throughout the 50 hours it took me to reach credits, as I fought dozens and dozens of bosses, I was continually surprised by the creative enemies it threw at me. Sure, there’s the occasional big-guy-with-a-big-axe or dude-with-sword-you-swear-you-fought-already, but these are by far the exception, not the rule. At one point I found myself wearing a lion dancer mask, jumping around on poles to collect heads of lettuce to power up my fire blast, and in another section I fought a posse of warriors who worked together as one unit to throw preposterously intricate attacks my way – the main threat to my life there was getting caught with my guard down because I was too busy cackling. The boss fights are so consistently interesting, memorable, and numerous that I felt utterly compelled to seek out each and every one of them, which led me to turn this first playthrough into a full-on completionist run to avoid FOMO.

When I previewed Phantom Blade Zero a little over a month ago, one of my primary concerns was how it would perform, and thankfully the version I played for this review had a far more consistent performance. The framerate was much steadier, with only a few times I can recall ever noticing issues during combat. That said, there’s one map in particular where the framerate was consistently pretty terrible, specifically on a part of the map where something seems to not be working right. This feels like the type of thing that could pretty easily be identified and fixed, so I’d be surprised if a patch doesn’t arrive at or shortly after launch, but it’s worth shouting out since I suspect there are other lingering issues hiding about.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Yaga Season 1, Episodes 1-2. Both episodes are now streaming on AMC+ in the US and Crave in Canada.

For anyone familiar with the Eastern European folktale of Baba Yaga, you might have visions of a wicked old witch in the woods who lives in a hut made out of chicken feet. In reality, Baba Yaga is a complex character who can harness the role of both villain and mentor, depending on the story, and encompasses both good and evil.

Yaga, the new series from Kat Sandler, who wrote a stage play with the same title, is a modern retelling of the folktale of Baba Yaga itself. The first two episodes offer an alternate version of the traditional lore, as Yaga dives head first into seduction and horror, while sprinkling humor throughout amid many twists that make you question what’s real, what’s something else entirely, and what that “something else” even is. (Sounds weird, right? Good.)

The opening of Episode 1 sets the tone for where the show seems to be heading. It begins with narration from Baba Yaga herself, describing in detail how she has been perceived in tales “as wicked as the night and as wise and powerful as the sea” – a creature who eats children’s guts and bones and is too ugly to be desired by anyone. But there’s an underlying warning to her ramble.

Nighttime shots are mixed throughout the monologue, ending with Baba Yaga saying, “But the thing that really gets me… is this.” Cut to a man in a forest standing in the middle of a large bonfire, screaming while he’s being burned alive.

We then go straight into meeting the main characters of Whittock, a small Pacific Northwest-esque island town, and dive into the basics of the story: Charlie Rapp, played by Noah Reid (Schitt’s Creek, The Vampire Lestat), and Sergeant Carson, played by Clark Backo (Letterkenny, The Changeling), are forced to team up to investigate the disappearance of Henry Park, played by Hudson Williams (Heated Rivalry) – a billionaire playboy whose family is well-known in the town. Rapp was hired on by the Park family to find their son and seems to have questionable intentions for working on the case, which Carson is immediately suspicious of.

We next meet Logan Casey, Henry’s roommate – also played by Williams – who surprisingly looks just like Henry, albeit with a seemingly different demeanor and minor physical changes. Logan acts like he’s hiding something as Carson and Rapp look through the house, though he lets it slip that Rapp and Henry know each other, and Rapp doesn’t seem to appreciate the revelation.

The investigation continues in town, with Carson wondering if Henry’s actually even missing. Carson also accuses Rapp of flirting with basically every single woman he sees, and at first glance, it is possible to dismiss Rapp as a dumb flirt, but as you get further into these first two episodes, his eye-batting tendencies are revealed as a tactic to dig up more dirt (well, most of the time).

Eventually, Rapp meets a woman, Katherine Hargrove (The Matrix’s Carrie-Anne Moss) in an upscale bar. He immediately hits on her and she pulls him right into her orbit – feeling him out with sexy, teasing comments. As Katherine, Moss evokes an intoxicating, seductive quality where you just want to know more about her – and what she’s hiding.

Throughout the first episode, Rapp continuously texts Henry asking where he is and if he’s alright. In a sudden twist, the episode wraps with Rapp finally getting texts back from Henry saying, “STOP LOOKING FOR ME.”

Over the course of these premiere episodes, we see clues from the investigation come into play, specifically images from Henry’s bedroom pointing to people who Rapp and Carson have associated with, including an obscure witch-like symbol, expensive vintage watches, photos, and chicken feet.

Speaking of which, there’s also a consistent, somewhat odd, yet seemingly calculated theme throughout the episodes: chickens. From a chicken foot being tied to Henry’s bedpost, to Carson hitting a chicken with his car while driving through the woods and Rapp snapping its neck to put it out of its misery (which, in turn, haunts him with hallucinations), to even finding a chicken lit on fire and nailed to the door of Rapp’s motel room while he’s getting intimate with a woman named Angel, chickens are everywhere.

By Episode 2, Rapp admits to Carson that he’s definitely friends with Henry – we don’t know how close of friends though – while various people in town who the cop duo are questioning seem increasingly suspicious about the “disappearance” of Henry. Are all these town characters somehow in on Henry’s vanishing? Is there something else going on, something altogether darker?

One of those people is Katherine, who we find out is a professor at the university Henry attends, and who numerous people refer to as the “Boner Beast” due to her allegedly having sex with students. However, she rejects the nickname, stating she’s known as more specifically the “Bone Beast” due to her studies in osteology.

We get the biggest twist so far in the last part of Episode 2, where we see Rapp and Carson going undercover at a “dark solstice party” Henry is apparently hosting at his house – despite his “disappearance” – complete with masks, dark mood lighting, and electronic music. Soon we see what looks to be Henry standing at the upper level railing wearing devil horns while looking down over his partygoers.

As Rapp and Carson search throughout the party for him, we see another shot of someone who seems to be Henry upstairs in his room, having sex with a woman against his photo wall while wearing a leather dog mask – she’s wearing ethereal angel wings and the scene gives a sultry nod to the duality of light and darkness… an angel and a devil.

At this same time, Rapp runs into Angel, who offers a lollipop dipped into a powder, possibly ecstasy, which he willingly accepts. Carson grabs Rapp while reprimanding his insane choices, and they head upstairs to continue their search for Henry. Soon, Rapp hears faint moaning coming from one of the rooms. The person who we now believe to be Henry demands the woman he’s with to say his name while they are continuing to have sex, and she shouts out “Henry!” multiple times, causing Rapp and Carson to instantly look at each other, confirming their suspicions.

Rapp kicks open the door and Henry sees him and panics, running out of the room and shoving Carson in the process as he escapes into the hallway.

As Henry is in the hallway, someone who resembles him seems to magically split apart from his body and run down the stairs while the other one takes off the mask and goes into the bathroom. However, we’re seeing this through Rapp’s point of view, and the drugs he took earlier might be affecting his vision, so he doesn’t notice one of the people going into the bathroom and follows who he believes to be Henry running down the stairs.

Carson is still upstairs at this point and sees Logan come out of the bathroom, despite thinking it was Henry who ran in there. As she tries to grab him to talk with him, he pushes her face into the wall and yells, “Fucking stay out of this!” and runs into his room nearby. Carson follows, but finds him nowhere in the small room. It’s like he magically disappeared out of thin air.

Rapp makes his way outside at a slow-moving pace (due to him hallucinating from the drugs he took) when he sees a vision of Katherine in a white dress with a white mask over her face as she speaks softly to him. He comes back to reality when Carson calls his name, snapping open his eyes and then seeing a large bird flying across the sky, lit on fire – but we don’t know for sure if what he is seeing is real or imagined.

In the final shot of Episode 2, we hear a shriek followed by a lifeless, naked body lying face down on the nearby shore. We pull back to reveal that the person the body belongs to is Logan. It’s a grim ending with dozens of questions left unanswered. What do you mean Logan is dead? And was he ever really alive? And where did Henry escape to – or was he never really there?

It’s often hard to find a show that makes you linger on so many questions: Is Katherine Baba Yaga or is that too obvious? Are Henry and Logan actually the same person but magically split in two? Is Baba Yaga creating visions for Rapp? Was Henry the one burning in the fire at the beginning of Episode 1? We don't have answers yet, but I’m ready and waiting for more reveals from this supernatural story that has already sunk its iron teeth into me.

I’m taking a look back at each of the core Grand Theft Auto games and replaying them in the lead-up to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. What we’ll be putting together won’t be traditional re-reviews, and they won’t come with any new IGN score, but they will re-examine what made each GTA remarkable upon the time of its release. By the end of the project, using GTA’s previously six-star wanted level, you should be able to get an idea of where each of these games roughly rank in my long-term love for this series.

Our last stop in this series is Grand Theft Auto V: a game so nice, they released it thrice.

13 years. Three console generations. 230 million copies. Over $10 billion in revenue. The numbers that tell the story of Grand Theft Auto V’s longevity and success are wildly impressive and virtually unprecedented. The only other games even in the conversation are Minecraft or, depending on your criteria, about 200 different versions of Tetris. The numbers, however, don’t tell us why GTA V still sells more copies every few months than most games will ever total. They don’t tell us why people can’t get enough of it, and they don’t tell us why it’s special. So how did we get here? I guess it was the weather.

While GTA IV’s Liberty City sandbox was a dense, modestly-sized, and entirely urban environment, GTA V’s vision of the city of Los Santos was considerably more sprawling and varied. Yes, it retained a grid-like downtown district packed with tall buildings and a few particularly sizable skyscrapers, but Los Santos otherwise has a wholly different identity to that of Liberty City – and the map encompasses an area way beyond Los Santos itself.

The aesthetic shift is stark. Weather depending, the beating San Andreas sunshine gives vehicles a dazzling gleam, casts crisp shadows, and saturates the whole place with a sharp, sun-bleached vibe. It’s not the stylised orange tint that illustrated the oppressive heat of 1992 Los Santos in GTA: San Andreas, but it’s bright, effective, and a striking visual departure from the cold, drab, and gritty appearance of Liberty City.

It’s also such a different place to explore. The town is splintered into dozens of distinct districts that seamlessly blend from one to the next – from the affluent mansions of Vinewood Hills and Richman to the spectacle of Vinewood itself, glowing under a thin layer of grime and entertainment industry sleaze, and from the sun-kissed sand and beach bum backalleys of ageing Vespucci to the graffiti-tagged and struggling suburbs of South Los Santos.

Outside Los Santos, the countryside opens up to include desert, forest, mountains, and a handful of other small towns dotted around the map. It’s essentially a greatly expanded vision of the southern segment of GTA: San Andreas’ map – the section that features Los Santos, Mount Chiliad, and its immediate surroundings. It’s actually more than twice the size of GTA: San Andreas in its entirety, even if it doesn’t always feel that way, considering you can’t travel beyond the fringe of the county to find a fully-fledged San Fierro or Las Venturas. However, that’s more of a statement about how utterly special GTA: San Andreas’ map really is, rather than an indictment of GTA V in any real way.

That is, GTA V’s map remains a stunning achievement. It’s a world that – even after 13 years – I’m still spotting signs, storefronts, and subtleties that I don’t think I’ve overtly noticed before. Like all the best developers, Rockstar understands that true immersion emerges through accumulation: a single graffiti-tagged wall, bill-covered pole, or interesting piece of architecture might not be hugely remarkable on its own, but combined they become something else altogether. Funnily enough, a world full of thousands of such details can make an entire city so realistic you essentially stop noticing it. It’s almost counterintuitive; things don’t stand out, because they look so authentic, lived-in, and normal.

Streiht Up Menace

The smartest way Rockstar exploits this densely detailed map is through GTA V’s defining innovation: its trio of protagonists. You swap between Michael De Santa, a retired criminal becoming increasingly agitated at his otherwise comfortable suburban life; Franklin Clinton, an aspiring, small-time hustler looking for a real payday to get him out of his rundown neighbourhood; and Trevor Philips, a wildly volatile Canadian psychopath who was formerly partners with Michael.

The system is much more than a novelty. Switching between them allows Rockstar to prod us into different parts of the world to explore, without relying on a single character to experience everything. For a map this large, it makes a lot of sense.

For clarity, following the release of its single-player expansions The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, GTA IV also ultimately featured three protagonists – and three different lenses through which we could view and interact with Liberty City. Similarly, it was a really smart way of squeezing more value out of the map, and drilling down on parts of it Niko Bellic’s story never really took him to. But while you could certainly regard this as a first draft of a multi-protagonist approach, you can’t switch between them in real time in GTA IV; you have to pause and load into the expansions separately.

In GTA V, the transition between characters is far, far more rapid, and occurs after just a brief zoom out and back in again, dropping you into Michael, Franklin, or Trevor’s life in the middle of whatever they happen to be doing at the time – which may well be dropping a man off a bridge. The transitions give the illusion that these guys continue to exist beyond the missions in which they appear.

Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied)

GTA V’s missions are typically far more varied and layered than those in GTA IV. After experimenting with it in The Ballad of Gay Tony, GTA V introduced mission checkpoints and finally shed what had arguably become the most frustrating characteristic of the series – the need to completely start from scratch after failing a mission.

This is what allows GTA V’s missions to be longer and regularly more wild than ever. With checkpoints as a safety net, Rockstar could really push the boat out with what it asked us to attempt – free from the sometimes debilitating concern that messing up at the last minute will result in a long drive and a lot of backtracking over things we’ve already done.

Of course, the highlight here is the focus on multilayed heists, taking the fan-favourite Three Leaf Clover bank robbery mission from GTA IV and blowing that concept out to make it the central pillar of GTA V’s campaign. There are multiple big scores that can be tackled in overtly different ways, something made easy to experiment with thanks to the ability to easily replay missions from a list of those you’ve previously completed. With the exception of The Ballad of Gay Tony, in past GTA games, the only way to play the missions again was to start over from the beginning.

The heists are where the three-character structure becomes most effective. We’re not just passengers on these huge marquee missions; rather, GTA V builds elaborate on ramps to these heists focused on planning and preparation which typically draw on the different skills and traits of Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. It gives the heists, and the campaign as a whole, a sense of scale and variety that would’ve been difficult to achieve through a single character.

Higher Love

Beyond the multiple protagonists and the escalation in mission variety, GTA V also made major changes to the car handling and significant refinements to the shooting. Vehicles are certainly more approachable to drive in GTA V than they are in GTA IV; they brake hard and respond sharply to steering input. The result isn’t superficial or overly light, but it does feel very grippy. It’s a handling model that I think is particularly suited to sure-footed sports cars, although I have to concede a part of me prefers the way older vehicles feel with the “slidey cars” cheat on. It’s just more drift-friendly.

In terms of vehicle variety, however, GTA V is very much a welcome shift back to the broad spectrum available in GTA: San Andreas after things were scaled back significantly in GTA IV. As a result, one minute you could be fanging an 18-wheeler down the freeway, and the next kicking tyres and lighting fires in a fighter jet. GTA V dialled things up rather than back, so go ahead: land that jumbo on the beach and escape via a jet ski. Why the hell not?

Combat was polished too, with more nimble movement and more dependable cover shooting. The highlight for me is the sound of firefights, as guns bark and bullets thunk into car panels. It’s brilliant stuff. The integration of the weapon wheel, which functions similarly to Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3, also means you can carry way more hardware – as well as multiple weapons within a single class. The weapon wheel stores all of the weapons you collect and you’ll never lose them, even if they run out of ammo or you get busted.

Party All The Time

When GTA V launched on Xbox 360 and PS3 in September 2013, both of those consoles were approaching the end of their lifespans. With the Xbox One and PS4 arriving in November that same year, you could probably make a strong case that GTA V felt like the last great statement of that generation. Many people did. However, I think there’s more to it than that.

A couple of weeks before its September 17 release, I was fortunate enough to conduct the world’s first hands-on with GTA V for IGN. Revisiting and playing it again so extensively this week has very effectively taken me back to how blown away I was in that moment. I was stunned by what I was playing, and utterly convinced GTA V was outright good enough to upstage both Microsoft and Sony’s new consoles. In fact, I wrote never mind November; the next generation will start when Rockstar says it does. In 2013, that was a comment reflective of just how ahead of its time I believed GTA V was; that it was simply streets ahead of its peers, squeezing next-generation scope and ambition out of a console that first launched in 2005. Simply put, it felt like a new benchmark for an era that hadn’t even officially arrived yet. On September 3, 2013 – two weeks before GTA V came out – maybe that’s a bold claim. But with new and improved versions of GTA V going on to loom large over the generation to follow, and then doing it all over again for the generation after that – all to the tune of 230 million copies – I don’t think it was ever an exaggeration.

Verdict

Grand Theft Auto V was a game so preposterously future-proof upon its 2013 launch on Xbox 360 and PS3 that its subsequent ports to modern machines remain the benchmark for open-world action-driving games. At the conclusion of this GTA Legacy Review project I find myself too emotionally attached to the PS2 pair of Vice City and San Andreas to push past my adoration for the style and soundtracks of those period piece classics and place anything above them but, make no mistake, there are very few games I’ve played more than GTA V. Combining an enormous and extraordinarily detailed world, three compelling protagonists, a thrilling set of varied missions and heists, and the foundation for a world of multiplayer that is simply a whole separate discussion, GTA V is the peak of the series. At least for the next few weeks, that is.

For more reflections on the incredible Grand Theft Auto series, you can read our new Legacy Reviews of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto 2, Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto IV.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Avatar: Seven Havens Season 1, Episodes 7-9!

Whoa, doggy (and we can say that because non-hybrid dogs exist in the world of Avatar)1 After last week’s episodes of Seven Havens seemed to settle into a nice, comfortable rhythm, this week’s trio literally and figuratively tossed the table with some huge story moves and big additions to the mythology while somehow also managing to be the most effortlessly funny episodes thus far. At least a portion of that is due to the show’s first two-part episode, which you know has to be big — and it is — but thanks to the continued impressive balance of ongoing mysteries and emotional storytelling, Episodes 7-9 are a thrilling roller-coaster ride from start to finish.

Oh, and also we get to see Korra and Asami again, so commence freaking out, everyone!

The Long View

To talk broad strokes before we get into the specifics of the episodes: As we’ve stated in previous recaps, the metaphor Seven Havens seems to be going for is how in our own world, countries are closing borders and refusing to work with each other to fix larger problems — i.e. the environment — while also amping up fear of the other. In this case, that “other” are the Havens other than Ellora, which is the main one we’re spending time in this season. But it also extends to the ostensible villains — raiders known as the Faceless, and more specifically the Avatar, as for hundreds of years people have believed Korra caused the Cataclysm that wrecked the world.

This week, with Envoys visiting from other Havens (more on that below), we get to see this distrust in action. It’s enormously simplified for the child’s cartoon we’re watching (no shade there) to the other Havens needing food and Ellora wanting benders to protect them from the red diamond Anomaly that has been growing and attacking Ellora at a regular rate. We’re not talking complicated, multi-faceted trade deals here, and that’s fine. But the thrust is clear for the viewer: These Havens, of course, would be stronger together, but it’s easier to give in to fear, the real theme of this season, than join up. Alone, the Havens are in survival mode; together, they might have something greater, but through pride, tradition, or whatever excuse they want to give, it doesn’t happen.

And for any viewers frustrated about these moves, there’s a key moment late in Episode 9, “The Envoys: Part Two,” when Commander Karthik (Akshay Khanna) talks about how they were raised to hate the Avatar. While it’s been a decade or so in our time since we’ve last seen the Avatar, and we know that Pavi (Saheli Khan) and Nisha (Aishu Devan), our twin Avatars, are good, It’s been 225 years since Avatar: The Legend of Korra. That’s over two centuries, and every character we’re watching on TV was born and raised in a world that doesn’t just hate and fear the Avatar, but has also been taught to distrust each other. Heck, their parents, grandparents, and probably even great-grandparents were born and raised the same. They don’t know any other life, and society has developed solely based around these precepts. It’s less about breaking programming than completely reconceptualizing history and learning. That’s hard, folks!

And speaking of Karthik, let’s take a small but related side-trip to talk about what happens towards the end of Episode 9. Pretty much since he first popped up, fans have pointed at Karthik as likely turning evil, getting corrupted, or perhaps being the head of the evil (or at least morally grey) Red Lotus instead of the Order of the White Lotus, which turns out to be 100% totally not true. In fact, in a shocker, it’s Jae (Major Curda) who betrays Karthik and the Avatars. We’ve watched Jae struggle with what we mentioned above, being raised in a society where the Avatar is seen as the ultimate evil. In Episode 9, he does turn against them, tells everyone about the White Lotus, gets Karthik arrested, and becomes Commander of the Bending Brigade himself. While it’s possible this might be revealed as a long range plan to do the right thing, at least at the end of this week, it’s a punch in the gut, and a real emotional surprise to see a character we’ve been following and believed in stick to the status quo instead of growing, changing, and learning.

It’s also, to be clear, very smartly done and more realistic: In real life, people rarely break out of their programming; they may be challenged, and they could even flirt with changing their minds, but sadly, more often than not they stay with what’s comfortable rather than truly evolve. So, boo to Jae! Hooray to the writers of Seven Havens. Also, boo to the writers — how dare you do this to Jae?! Life is complicated.

The Episodes Close Up

Anyway, there’s lots more to get into, so let’s do some brief recap. First up is Episode 7, “What Lies Beneath,” which does not include appearances by either Harrison Ford* or Michelle Pfeiffer. Instead, when Pavi decides to try and connect with the Anomaly to try and chase down more memories of her missing parents, she blasts a hole in the massive red crystal, revealing tunnels under Ellora. It turns out there’s a lot under the city, including a factory that was built by none other than Asami Sato. Thanks to a “mover,” we get to see both Korra and Asami, older, happier, and not in the Spirit World (where we last left them at the end of Legend of Korra).

(*What kind of bender do you think Ford would be? Is there cranky old man bending? Is that a thing?)

Also lying beneath? The Faceless, who we discover are aiming to live free rather than have life prescribed for them by the dictates of Ellora. Specifically, if you have bending ability, you join the Bending Brigade. That’s what Jae wants and what he believes in, but not Uki (Kimberly Woods), who was seemingly kidnapped last week but has actually been part of the Faceless the whole time. She leads Jae to the Faceless Queen, Zi (Dianne Doan), who later turns out not to be the Faceless Queen, though we’ll get there in a second.

That’s because so many other things happen in this episode! Pavi, first of all, discovers a bubbling pit of red energy, which grabs her and transports her back to Republic City, where we see the beginning of the Cataclysm. It sure looks like Korra in the Avatar state is tearing Republic City to the ground while releasing Spirit Energy tentacles. She’s definitely not, of course, and we’ll likely get a lot more info on this in subsequent episodes and seasons. But it confirms the suspicion that a lot of theories have rested on, and without getting too in the weeds on this: Back at the end of Legend of Korra, the doors between the Spirit and Human world were still open, and there was a lot of controversy about the use of Spirit Energy as batteries (think nuclear energy and you have the general idea). Given the Avatar is always about finding balance in the world, it’s probably fair to posit based on this one scene that things became very out of balance because of Republic City using Spirit Vine energy. Korra tried to stop it, and possibly the Spirit World crashed into the Human world.

We discover that the song Pavi and Nisha remember being sung by their parents is sung by people from the Eastern Outskirts in a lovely little moment where Uki pauses their tense showdown to offer up info on the ditty. Pavi and Nisha have a rift growing between them, and we end with two groups of Envoys — one from New Ba Sing Se and the other from Akasha — travelling towards Ellora like an Avatar version of Mad Max: Fury Road. We just needed Chong wailing on his dramyin while flames pump in the background to complete the picture. So shiny. So chrome!

Then it’s time for the two-parter, “The Envoys.” In the first part, the focus is on the summit between New Ba Sing Se, Akasha, and Ellora, which gets broken up by an attack by the Faceless, revealing the Faceless Queen is none other than… Agam (Sakina Jaffrey), the friendly cook/baker who has now not-so-curiously shown up in nearly every episode. Meanwhile, Nisha gets tested by the White Lotus representatives from New Ba Sing Se, Akasha, and what sounds like Nutha (NOTE: there are no closed captions on the screeners provided by Paramount+, so we might have the spelling wrong)... and fails.

That leads us into the game-changing second part, which doesn’t have a cold open before the title sequence, so you know it’s a big one. We almost immediately discover Agam’s motivation: Her father was taken against his will as a bender in the Brigade. In response, Agam created the Faceless as a way of being free and following their own destiny. Her destiny? To lead them to Republic Forest, which functions not just as a complete recontextualization of the main location in Legend of Korra, but also the mythical safe haven all post-apocalypse stories must have.

Nisha, frustrated by her failed Avatar test, steps up to take down Agam, who reveals herself to be some sort of combo sandbender/mudbender, and an advanced one at that. So naturally, Nisha reveals herself as the Avatar; and just as she does, the red diamond Anomaly busts through. The Faceless escape in the resulting panic, Pavi manages to lure the red diamond away, and in the aftermath, Jae betrays the White Lotus, resulting in their arrest. New Ba Sing Se and Akasha withdraw their aid, while the Chancellor of Ellora essentially puts the town under martial law.

In the midst of all this, we get two eye-opening visions via the red diamond: Nisha sees a rock with an anomaly crystal sticking out of it; and Pavi is taken to a starfield, where something that is not Rainbow Road forms, leading her to the red symbol of Ellora with six additional circles stretching out into space. As we discussed last week, it’s seeming more and more likely that the goal here is for Pavi and Nisha to unlock the Chakras of the planet, starting with defeating “fear” in Ellora via the Root Chakra — likely specifically tied to the crystal seen in Nisha’s vision. Each “Haven” is actually a place where the Chakra is locked, which will send Pavi and Nisha out into the world once they realize what their “Avatar bringing balance” mission is actually all about.

Those are the broad strokes of the plot, but we skipped over something we mentioned earlier: how funny these episodes are at the same time — Jae calling hay his “nose nemesis,” the “who’s that?” as Pavi tells the citizens of Ellora that everything is going to be okay, and we’ll get into this more in the next section, but everything with the Pudding Guy (Eric Bauza) is laugh out loud funny. And isn’t that one of the big draws of the Avatar franchise, that goofball moments can sit right alongside “heck yeah” moments like Nisha saying “I’m the Avatar?”

It’s thrilling to have this feeling back, and this group of episodes definitely feels like Seven Havens firing on all cylinders. It’s also wild to think there are four more episodes to go next week, when “The Envoys: Part Two” in particular has big penultimate-episode-of-the-season energy. We’ll see you back here then (though there’s more article after this, so hang out one second, will you?)!

Avatar Easter Eggs, References, And Connections

We didn’t mention this last week, but while we’re throwing theories out there, there’s been a lot of hay (my nose nemesis!) made out of the fact that Pavi and Nisha are animated with diamond pupils instead of the oval-esque pupils the rest of the characters have. How does this connect to the Red Diamond? And does it connect to Raava and Vaatu (the spirits of order and chaos, respectively) who both have diamond-ish patterns in them? The show has been slow playing the big mythology moves, but with the introduction of the Spirit energy tentacles this episode, it seems likely this does tie to the two spirits in some way. How? We’ll just have to wait and see.

After Pavi opens up the hole in the crystal in “What Lies Beneath,” we get a mention of a rare sect of earthbenders who can feel things under the ground. While it didn’t start with Toph in The Last Airbender, this is a seismic sense (sort of like sonar) that she taught to Aang and passed down to her daughter, Lin Beifong, who appeared in The Legend of Korra. Does this mean that Pavi and Nisha are tied in some way to the Beifong family tree? Maybe!

Businessman Varrick invented “movers,” aka movies, back in Legend of Korra, and it looks like they developed from black-and-white/sepia-toned to color movers at some point, as we get to see Korra and Asami in all their older glory underneath Ellora.

On the lockers next to the main chamber under Ellora, we get to see a Korra action figure, as well as posters for Aang, Kyoshi, and Kuruk. Notably, Kuruk is getting his own spin-off (as announced at New York Comic Con), albeit from his younger days as a 14-year-old wild child in Avatar Kuruk: Waves of Chaos.

After Pavi connects with the Anomaly under Ellora, we see the older Korra using her glider — which was introduced in Legend of Korra Book 3 — to head from Air Temple Island to Republic City. There, while the Spirit energy tentacles are causing the Cataclysm and Korra is clearly in the Avatar state (check out her white eyeballs), it’s notable that Republic City is otherwise empty. Perhaps this cataclysm wasn’t as cataclysmic as everyone thinks?

At the end of Episode 7, as mentioned, we get that Mad Max scene. Some additional details are that the former Earthbending city of Ba Sing Se has somehow been inverted; they now live on Feather Mountain (a new location), and are airbenders – and historians – riding on Flying Bison? Meanwhile, Akasha (another new location) is the one place that has figured out how to keep using technology from Korra’s time, which means they have a riff on Link’s Master Cycle Zero from Breath of the Wild. Adding in the teases of spirit energy, if the whole world was relying on it and that caused the Cataclysm, it’s likely Akasha has figured out an alternative energy source that nobody else has access to. They’re also, per the dismissive Flying Bison rider, clearly younger.

Let’s talk about the biggest, most important addition to the lore: Pudding Guy. In The Last Airbender, there was a Cabbage Merchant who constantly had his cabbages destroyed either directly by Team Avatar or as a side-effect of their adventures, followed by him holding his cabbages to the heavens and screaming “My cabbages!” Then in Legend of Korra, the son of the Cabbage Merchant, Lau Gan-Lan, formed a company called Cabbage Corp, which was constantly destroyed. In the absence of cabbage, we’ve got our new “guy” for Seven Havens, and that’s Pudding Guy. He keeps making pudding, singing little songs about his pudding, and then having it wrecked by the Avatars. Is it cabbage pudding? Perhaps. But get ready for plenty more “My pudding!” to come.

In “The Envoys: Part One,” as noted above, we get an additional Haven showing up as part of the Order of the White Lotus: Nutha. While the spelling may or may not be off, Nutha is the name of a Southern Water Tribe citizen who plays a big part in “The Rift” trilogy of Avatar graphic novels. The rep from Nutha is a waterbender too, so it fits.

We also mentioned Republic Forest earlier. Republic City was the height of technology and innovation, so as New Ba Sing Se seems to be an inversion (going from earthbending to airbending), the city is now Republic Forest. As a side note, in the chamber under Ellora where Pavi, Nisha, and Jae see the mover, there are banners for all four bending nations. It seems likely that the cooperative ethos of Republic City spread through the whole world… at least before the Cataclysm.

Oh, and turtle ducks show up! They’ve been in every iteration of Avatar. They’re cute! That’s all we’ve got on this one.

A Talent for Murder is in theaters October 22.

Many a low-level employee has felt like a tyrannical boss or nightmare client is one inconvenience away from killing them, and have also felt the desire to do the same to them in turn. That impulse is the driving tension of A Talent for Murder, a new not-quite/not-quite-not murder mystery thriller from director Anton Corbijn.

Adapted from the Joanna Murray-Smith stage play Switzerland by the playwright herself, A Talent for Murder is a not-quite/not-quite-not chamber piece (you may notice a running theme here) about a young employee of a New York literary agency sent on a mission to Switzerland to track down famed novelist Patricia Highsmith (a fictionalized take on the real person) at her home and convince her to write one more book starring her most famous creation, Tom Ripley. Such affairs would not typically involve the threat of murder... but if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have much of a movie, now would we?

Alden Ehrenreich stars as Edward Ridgeway, who’s been ordered to get Highsmith (Helen Mirren) to sign a contract for one more Ripley book or he'll face the unemployment line. Highsmith is predictably highstrung (hah), irritable from the start, and domineering to the end. She wants nothing more to do with the talented Mr. Ripley, the suave sociopath who’s paid her bills for so long and is most known to audiences for being portrayed by a young Matt Damon in 1999. Not one to be deterred so easily, the seemingly naive Edward manages to worm his way into staying for one night at Highsmith’s hideaway house, giving himself time to see if he can pitch the plot for a new novel to the insular author, who may or may not have killed the last hapless employee saddled with the same objective. To say that there’s more to what’s going on here would be stating the obvious, but it would also, perplexingly, be overstirring the pot.

For when Edward and Highsmith reconvene to begin plotting a novel that would excite the author enough to actually write it, A Talent for Murder unspools into what actually takes up the majority of the runtime: a dramatization of the hypothetical book they’re discussing. This story within a story has some parallels to the “real life” plot, what with a young man with more ambition than he lets on charming his way into the life of a woman who’s his ticket to potential profit, and enlists Ehrenreich into a double role by playing the Ripley analogue that Edward and Highsmith are crafting. It’s a neat idea at first glance until you realize that it’s essentially like watching a narrated pitch meeting for the more straightforwardly satisfying thriller that A Talent for Murder wants to be. The metafictional conceit is a double-edged sword that winds up slashing both plotlines, ensuring the “real” story is lacking in suspense and rendering the “fake” story devoid of stakes.

That’s not to say A Talent for Murder doesn’t have its merits. Mirren and Ehrenreich have solid adversarial chemistry, and the latter acquits himself admirably playing two characters who begin to bleed into each other as the movie marches on. Olivia Cooke proves herself a reliable if somewhat unchallenged performer by the unambitiously written but fancifully named Clementine Balfour, a woman Edward meets on the train into Switzerland whom he mentally recycles into the love interest/con victim of the same name that makes for the second lead of the novel. The location cinematography from frequent Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator Robbie Ryan is gorgeous and colorful, and the film’s costume and production design is first rate. To quote a common meme, the film has “great gowns, beautiful gowns”; what it’s ultimately lacking in, sadly, is surprise.

Despite featuring two plotlines and plenty of room for intrigue, the “story with a story” concept robs the film of urgency. No matter how much murder and mayhem Edward and Highsmith’s character may get up to in his quest for Clementine’s fortune, what is actually happening is two people sitting in a room talking about a novel that does not exist. The multiple layers of abstraction result in a film that struggles to convey the looming dread that drives the best minimalist mystery fare. Typically a movie or play in this style features multiple big twists that completely recontextualize the scenario — think something like Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth or Ira Levin’s Deathtrap. But A Talent for Murder lacks punch by never having a massive "rug pull" moment to hang its hat on.

With the caveat that I haven’t seen the play this is based on, I can’t help but feel that a significant contributor to A Talent for Murder being too leisurely for its own good is a playwright who is too precious about adapting her own material. Although this is not Murray-Smith’s first film credit, she’s not a screenwriter by trade, having spent much more time in the world of theater. The energy required for a great mystery film is similar but not identical to that needed for a compelling stage play, and that mismatch of form is the biggest anchor holding the film back, even if it’s not enough to sink it entirely.

This is a standalone review that covers only Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode. You can find our campaign review here, with multiplayer impressions to follow after launch.

Extraction shooters feel a little like a modern trend, with some heavy hitters like Marathon and Arc Raiders shaking the table within the last year or so, but they’ve been a growing experiment in the shooter space for the past decade or so. Call of Duty dabbled in it with the original DMZ back in 2022 (you could argue they were late to the party then), and its return in 2026 is timely. But with so much high quality competition on the market, is it welcome? I’ve only dipped my toe in since its “pay to play on time” launch on Tuesday – about five or so hours of vehicle hijacking, SAM site hacking, and target elimination on my docket so far – but this bigger, better DMZ makes a great first impression.

The PvPvE dynamic of extraction shooters often lives and dies by how well the mission and level design encourages you to explore, rewards you for overcoming challenges, and guides you to interact with others in order to keep those spoils. The fictional Korean Hajin region your exploits take place in is well suited for this. Its dense pockets of urban development – a village in the north, the dangerous main city in the east, an isolated prison out west – are separated by rocky forests concealing all sorts of militarized checkpoints and other points of interest hiding loot to shove into your pockets. Parts of it look a little samey, the consequence of modern urban development where (at least from the outside) most buildings look the same, especially compared to some of DMZ’s big sci-fi competition that go above and beyond to look striking at first glance.

The map is so big that you could spend the entirety of your approximately half-hour runs in only a fraction of it. Battle Royales (like CoD’s own Warzone) move players around by having an encroaching death cloud forcing everyone into a smaller and smaller area. DMZ instead entices squads to adventure with its Dynamic Operations.

Dynamic Ops are spontaneous missions that appear as you travel across the battlefield which come in lots of forms, from securing a package to blowing up a target to escorting a VIP. Many of them are multi-stage affairs that have your fireteam moving from point to point as NPC enemies ramp up a more coordinated defense against you. These all get rewarded by supply drops that grant you loot, the value of which escalates based on how many of them you're successfully completing. I prefer this sort of objective chasing to the more standard task lists in other games like this (which also exist here, in fairness) because it makes for more engaging individual runs. I’ll prepare the best I can beforehand, but can’t be ready for every possible string of operations once I deploy.

There are many actions and events, like aforementioned supply drops, that are broadcast to everyone within earshot, hypothetically to tempt other players to be nosy (and potentially belligerent), but my skirmishes with others have been pretty limited so far. It’s still technically the early access period, so a wave of operators is set to crash against me in the coming days, but I found that most people have opted to mind their own business. It would be a mistake to confuse this passivity with pacifism though – this isn’t the Arc Raiders playerbase, which spent many of the opening months of that game more interested in helping than hurting. Whenever another player was in eye or earshot, it was assumed that a fire fight was to follow. It’s just unclear at this point how much of that was motivated by them wanting what I had versus just coincidentally being in the same place at the same time.

Hajin is also a pretty lively place. Enemy patrols speed down roadways, sometimes as lone jeeps and other times in large caravans. Helicopters and drones streak across the skies looking for interlopers like me, or occasionally other NPCs from rival factions tearing the map apart. A train runs on a schedule, and you can absolutely hitch a ride on it to get from place to place. Squads of enemies could be posted up anywhere. Weird exploding robot dogs can sniff you out as you slink from building to building. There was always at least a base level of tension with every step I took or round I let off, because there was just enough going on around me that any push I made could be the one that knocks over the house of cards I was hiding behind.

Clashes with the NPC denizens of the DMZ start pretty tame, but ramp up as you and your squad make yourself more notorious by killing enemies and completing objectives. As enemy units start to don armor, pull up in more durable vehicles, and use higher grade weaponry to take you down, fire fights can get desperate quickly. There's an instinct for people in pick-up groups to run out on their own, potentially to get first dibs on loot perhaps, and they almost always regret it – it doesn’t take much for enemies to get the drop on you, as you are only where you are and they are potentially anywhere and everywhere else.

Call of Duty’s top tier military shooter gunplay, toeing the line between the lethality of simulations and the snappy speed of arcadey romps, feels at home in DMZ as well. All of the new tweaks, like the way your weapons interact with your surroundings or movement adjustments, feel like it had roaming gunfights in an open world in mind. Being able to cancel out of mantles so you aren’t stuck in an animation when you least want to be feels like the kind of quality of life inclusion that Warzone demonstrated was needed for a long time. That said, the smattering of guns lack much in the way of real identities outside of the normal archetypal framings that have existed in gaming forever (shotgun, assault rifle, sniper, etc.).

You can also drop into story missions, which are quest chains that include more structure, resembling the campaign missions without the more cinematic story elements. These were pretty rowdy and unique, like an escort mission where our squad had to wheel an injured general out of hospital, bed and all, while enduring swarms of enemy combatants. There's a finite number of these and the possible rewards are more limited, with less incentive to explore the places around you and no enemy players to pirate or evade. But they serve as a great tasting platter of the pace Dynamic Ops keep and a good tour of the various locations you'll need to get familiar with on the map.

In between missions, you tend to all of your gear and progression from the safety of your FOB. Weapons, crafting ingredients, and consumables that you procure out in the field can be sorted through here, all of it put at risk when you equip it and redeploy. When you unlock the 3D printer and gunsmith areas, crafting new toys and upgrading weapons becomes the main way you spend your plunder to enhance your chances in Hajin. The value proposition of spending in-game money on upgrades is still hard to parse for me this early on. You can easily blow tens of thousands of won to trick out a weapon, but there hasn't been an obvious benefit to doing so that outweighs the risk of throwing all of that hard earned money down the drain if you die while using it. That’s the kind of knowledge that only comes with reps, I imagine.

Similarly, Operators have individual sets of trait trees that you upgrade with points they earn in the field. These don’t appear to be novel to any individual fighter; there's no Ghost-specific ability where he gets unique buffs while saying something very British. Instead there are pools of passive traits across three categories, all operators have a choice between the same handful of major traits, while the 15 or so minor traits that fill out the trees are randomized. What makes an operator special seems to be limited mostly to how they look and sound, which was a bit of a bummer.

These traits can be pretty meaningful in the field, though. One of the randomized traits I acquired for Valeria, Ammo Scavenger, doubled the ammo I got from ammo packs and made conserving my shots basically a thing of the past. The faster revive speed all operators have access to in their Survivalist tree has been the difference between clutch plays and total wipes on more than one occasion. There's definitely some kind of character building to be had here, but you really can’t know where it’s all leading until the next group of traits to choose from are revealed. And all that is before accounting for the fact that I'm not sure there's a way to reset or reallocate these trait points outside of abandoning the operator all together if you fail to extract with them (as opposed to spending some cash to get them back into the fight).

My first steps into the new Korean War have been intense so far, and I know I’ve only scratched the surface. Hajin is a region brimming with promise, even if most of it has the kind of design you have to live in for awhile to be able to find its unique charms. There are zones I’ve yet to see and some secrets I'm sure to encounter while I stalk, slide, and shoot my way through it. I’m sure it will get rowdier as the general public starts to pile into the servers on launch day, but for now I really dig the emphasis on the E in the PvPvE structure of these runs. Dynamic Operations have kept me moving and earning, while the factions at war in the region buzz around the map, at first dutifully watching their posts and eventually doggedly hunting me down.

I’m just as eager to spend more time out in the field as I am with my nose in the menus of gunsmithing and operator leveling to tease out what nuance there can be found between the battle. I’ll be back with my final, scored review of DMZ once I’ve done a whole lot more of both.

Clayface opens in North America on October 23 and internationally on October 21.

It takes the film a while to find its groove, but once it does, Clayface delivers just the sort of nasty but fun body horror I was hoping it would.

Director James Watkins has fashioned a gritty throwback to not only the hardboiled revenge thrillers and low-budget horror flicks of the ‘50s and ‘60s but also to the cult classics of the ‘80s and ‘90s that paid homage to them. (Shades of The Fly, Darkman, and Johnny Handsome can all be found in Clayface.)

Based on the DC Comics character and working from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, Clayface follows rising young movie star Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a Gotham City native whose sketchy, hardscrabble background calls to mind that of Mark Wahlberg. Now a successful film actor, everything is going Matt’s way — until he runs afoul of Gotham’s most vicious and powerful crime lord, Markos Szabo (David Dencik), whose goons carve up Matt’s pretty boy face as punishment.

Disfigured and distraught, Matt finds no recourse from either the law or from multiple surgeries until he seeks out assistance from Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie). Caitlyn’s similarly down on her luck, with her cutting edge research having been recently ripped off by her former partners. When Matt comes to her volunteering to be a human test subject for her experimental, AI-infused nanobot regenerative tech, she reluctantly says yes. All seems to be going well at first, but this movie ain’t called Clayface because Matt’s new skincare regimen worked out great.

Harries has a young Malcolm McDowell quality to him, as in impish good looks that hint at an inner darkness. The actor never overplays his scenes despite there being plenty of opportunities for him to have gone big. As sympathetically played by Ackie, Caitlyn is more misguided than mad scientist despite being responsible for the physical monster Matt becomes. But while her nanobots have infiltrated and altered Matt, the film suggests they’ve merely unlocked and amplified a very bad side of him that was already there.

When Matt’s pursuit of his attackers and those who have betrayed him finally comes, it allows the film to finally embrace its inherent absurdity and capitalize on the nastiness it was keeping at bay while it was trying to make Matt sympathetic. Once Matt is no longer the victim and becomes the gooey Angel of Death we’ve been waiting for, the film gets a newfound jolt of energy and unleashes some of its most clever, thrilling and darkly funny sequences (following the earlier airplane bathroom scene seen in trailers and a creepy sleep study sequence).

Watkins has previously helmed genre films like The Woman in Black and Speak No Evil, in addition to the iconic “Shut Up and Dance” episode of Black Mirror. He and his creative team — including cinematographer Rob Hardy, production designer James Price, editor Jon Harris, Makeup Designer Nicole Stafford and Legacy Effects — make great use of Matt’s power to shapeshift, but also find the humor and tension in those situations, with Matt using his skills as an actor to literally inhabit a slew of different characters one after another.

As Matt’s condition worsens and his desire for revenge fully consumes him, he devolves morally and physically into something truly monstrous. Clayface’s comics and cartoon-accurate final form isn’t revealed until the film’s closing moments, but it effectively caps off Matt’s tragic downfall.

Although it carries the banner of James Gunn’s DC Studios, Clayface could just as easily have been set outside of the DCU. Aside from taking place in the DC Comics locations of Gotham City and Coast City, there’s nothing on display here that screams DC Comics. Still, Clayface proves that the DCU can offer more than just superhero fisticuffs and save-the-world plots. The question remains how large of an audience there will be for them.

Ever since I was a child, I've always been fascinated by space. I would look up at the night sky and dream of one day becoming an astronaut, endlessly exploring the cosmos. Then I got older and decided that being stuck in a small spacecraft for months on end probably wasn't a great idea (thanks, anxiety). But my love for space still lives on, and when I saw that LEGO announced a replica of the Hubble Space Telescope, I knew I had to have it.

LEGO partnered with NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), the two agencies responsible for building the Hubble Space Telescope, to create an accurate replica commemorating the 35th anniversary of its launch. You can purchase the LEGO Hubble Space Telescope now from Amazon and the LEGO Store.

LEGO is no stranger to making space-themed sets, with plenty of other NASA replicas available including the massive Artemis Space Launch System and the Mars Rover Perseverence, as well as sets based on popular space franchises like Star Trek and the recent Project Hail Mary. But, what I really want is for LEGO to bring back some of the classic 90's space sets like Exploriens and Spyrius – those were the best.

LEGO Hubble Space Telescope is built in three major sections spread across nine bags: the stand, the back portion that houses the instrument bay, and the narrower shaft on the front. This was a very relaxing set to put together, and pairs rather nicely with a space-themed synthwave playlist.

You begin by putting together the stand on which Hubble will be displayed. Unlike most LEGO stands, this one uses some interesting techniques with interlocking Technics pieces to create an angled post that allows the Hubble to "dock" when it's on display, helping to stabilize the unit.

At the base of the display are three translucent printed pieces depicting some of Hubble's most iconic Deep Field images: Pillars of Creation, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and the Butterfly Nebula. These are some of the coolest unique pieces I've seen LEGO make, and they look great integrated into the stand. It also includes a small plaque (which is unfortunately a large sticker on a flat piece) on the side of the support arm that provides information about Hubble, including its overall dimensions, weight, launch date, and the dates of key service missions.

While building this set, I actually learned quite a bit about the Hubble and its inner workings. Over the last three decades, it has recorded more than 1.7 million observations of our universe, producing some absolutely stunning imagery, as it circles in low-earth orbit. The instruction manual includes quite a few interesting facts about the Hubble Telescope, as well as a diagram of all of the scientific instruments recreated inside this LEGO model.

After finishing the stand, you move onto what is arguably the most important section of the Hubble: its large bottom half that houses many of its critical systems and instruments. While I expected this portion to be interesting to put together, it was fairly repetitive, as it's a lot of symmetrical sections and repeated instructions.

It didn't help that much of what I was putting together wasn't recognizable. If it weren't for the diagram in the instruction manual, I would have no concept of what I was building until the outer panels were attached. After all, most of the important components of the advanced camera and spectographs are represented by just four brown corner wall panel pieces.

Because each side is nearly identical, it's easy to get the orientaton mixed up if you're not careful. I think this is why LEGO added (what seemed to be) a random green piece on only one of the sides to help ensure you don't misplace any pieces.

After building the interior and some of the instruments, you add the panels to three of the four sides. The final side is intended to be removable, so you can look inside the bottom section and see the camera, mirrors, sensors, and baffle.

Building Hubble's upper shaft is mostly just putting together four long outer panels. Like the bottom half, the outer paneling is mostly rounded grey pieces and can get quite repetitive. These panels are all long and not very thick, so attaching them to the rest of the build requires some tact, as pressing too hard can cause them to break apart.

One interesting portion of the upper section, though, was the suspended secondary mirror, which clicks into to the panels as they are attached. These panels also lock into one another in a very satisfying way. Additionally, there's a single removable panel here that allows you to peek inside at some more of the components.

At the very end of the upper shaft is the aperture door, which features a hinge that allows you to open or close it, just like on the real Hubble Telescope.

Once the two halves of the Hubble's body are put together, all that's left is the finishing touches. This includes attaching the two communication antennas, which can be folded down or extended and rotated in any orientation, as well as building the two large solar arrays.

Thankfully, the solar arrays aren't giant stickers, as I feared when I saw the initial photographs of this set. Instead, they are thin plastic sheets with the printed solar panels on one side, and shiny silver on the back. Once attached to the telescope's body, they can be easily articulated to face any direction.

The entire time I was putting this set together, I kept wondering just how it was going to rest on the stand. It turns out, there's a small hole in the center of the body that the stand inserts into. But, because this set is a bit top-heavy, it can be slightly wobbly when on the stand when it's not stationary.

Overall, the finished product looks great on display. LEGO did an excellent job recreating the Hubble Space Telescope's iconic design and this set is a must for space enthusiasts.

LEGO Hubble Space Telescope, Set #11382, retails for $139.99 and is composed of 1,252 pieces. It is available to purchase from Amazon and the LEGO Store.

Matthew Adler has written for IGN since 2019 covering all things gaming, tech, tabletop games, LEGO, and more. You can follow him on the site formerly known as Twitter @MatthewAdler and watch him stream on Twitch.

This review contains full spoilers for Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 6, which is streaming on Apple TV now.

The Slow Horses always find themselves in dire situations in season finales. To that end, the closer of Season 6 is no different. They’re chased and hunted and shot at again and again. They scheme (well, Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb does) to save their behinds — remember, Moscow rules. Reece Nesmith (Lenny Rush) gets his hero moment, pulling off a Chekov’s harpoon. In a moment of stillness, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) has it out with his dear old dad, Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), who might have a soft spot for his son after all. The mess with the Russians closes with Clayface Jane (MyAnna Buring) dead and MI5 handing over a fall guy that isn’t Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke, who shamefully only gets three seconds of distant screentime this episode).

And yet, even with the endless game of survival the agents play against their agitators, this finale doesn’t feel particularly novel for a series that has given us 11th-hour twists and feel-bad yet satisfying endings for its five prior seasons. Yes, it closed on a huge cliffhanger that sets Slow Horses up for Season 7 (due out next year — get those theories cranking about what, exactly, took River down), but it was all just a little too clean and conventional in a show that has typically embraced the mess.

To neatly tie up all of the loose ends, the show had to make a few leaps. The most egregious is Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas, who nevertheless has given a fantastic performance all season). It’s a bit of a stretch to believe that Diana, after an entire season of quadrupling down on denials and obfuscation, would finally decide to come clean and admit to treason, and even more of a stretch to think that Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) would be the one to convince her how to play it. It was hardly surprising, although nonetheless satisfying, that Damien Cantor and Peter Judd were made to be patsies for the Russians essentially financing a hit on their own soil, but it was somewhat curious at how easily the Home Secretary accepted Diana’s finger pointing as fact. It still seems Diana will face some consequences, based on the teaser for next season which seems to be Shirley (woohoo!) and Ho-centric, but one would think an accusation of treason would come with a heftier investigation rather than just taking the First Desk at her word.

Cantor (Harry Lloyd), in retrospect, was a somewhat disappointing bad guy. In the end, he only mattered in the context of giving the main characters a headache for a couple days. He never showed off his media influence, aside from one viral interview and that he could eat dinners in fancy restaurants alone. We never get a sense of how his news outlet operated in society, though there were plenty of inferences to be made, of course, but Slow Horses has never shied away from being explicit with an antagonist’s ugliness. Even just last season, Ho’s honey trap and her Libyan terrorist group, seeking revenge for Britain’s heavy hand in their country’s destabilization, had far richer characterization. Here, Cantor was a fairly one-note villain-of-the-season (he barely even speaks during his first appearance in Episode 1), motivated by winning a Russian media distribution contract that was mentioned in a single scene.

Pivoting to the rigamarole of Slough House, their chilling at the posh safehouse by Harkness and his goons. Their flee-and-hide routine in the final showdown in Diana’s holiday home and along the lakeshores has its share of exciting moments. (Also, how the hell did River find his way there?) Having them break off into teams was functionally necessary for these scenes, but the compartmentalization often impacted the momentum of things and came off like a stop-and-start game of fight tactics. No offense, but I don’t want Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave in my TV show, thanks. But RIP Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley), gone too soon but sticking by her word to be the group’s distraction. Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar) also had a scary brush with mortality, but it also wasn’t hugely surprising to see her alive by the end; it would have been too much to kill her off, even for Slow Horses.

The most interesting revelation from that sequence was the curtain-pull on Harkness’s motivations. From that came an actual moment of uncertainty: if he would still go and kill Reece after Cantor called him off. He holds himself to the terms of the job after all. Harkness might have explained away killing Jane as an act of stopping the dangerous pursuer, but it certainly felt bigger than that as he offered River a drink in the aftermath of it all. River letting him get away bookends that short interaction in a meaningful way (and now the show can still deploy Harkness in future seasons).

The last scene back at River’s grandad’s house — where, in a sweet gesture, Sid kept her promise from the last episode, leaving a light on for River — was almost a lovely moment for an agent who’s had a terrible last few days. That final scene of River going for tea, then wine, then collapsing raises a ton of questions, of course. There’s the paranoia around Sid: Did she lure him there? Is she bad after all? More likely, I think, Jim and Jane planted something on one of the objects he touched, knowing that he would return to the house and getting their job done from beyond the grave. Jim did grab the crowbar in Episode 3 when they first broke into the house, and River made a whole show of the residue when he grabbed it. But that seems too obvious. Even though Season 6 laid its tracks maybe too bare, I’m still prepared to be made a fool by Slow Horses again.

When it comes to translating One Piece into a video game, developers have typically taken the action route, leaning on flashy battles and wild Devil Fruit powers as pirates sail the high seas. That makes One Piece: Grand Gourmet’s Sanji-centric restaurant builder with the full roster of characters from across the series is an inspired choice. But while I adore the premise and appreciate revisiting the major locations and feeding nearly every character, working to win over residents of the Grand Line often feels as shallow as the lovestruck chef it's based around.

After a storm separates them from the rest of the crew, Sanji and Luffy find a restaurant ship being terrorized by a group of fake Straw Hat pirates who are posing as (and giving a bad name to) the restaurant of Sanji’s mentor, the Baratie. The duo sets sail to beat the fakers in culinary battles and clear the Baratie's name throughout the Grand Line and beyond. Taking a chronological path from the early Romance Dawn days in the East Blue all the way to a taste of the latest arc in the manga and anime, Grand Gourmet is packed with fan service in lieu of a meaningful original story. While I wish there was more meat on the bone, I enjoy Grand Gourmet embracing Sanji’s ethos that everyone who needs food will be fed, and it turns out, everyone the Straw Hats ever met is hungry.

Seafood, They Eat It

Your floating restaurant starts small and empty, with only a kitchen, a table, and Sanji’s chef skills to cook for hungry customers. Feeding people brings in valuable cash you can use to build out the restaurant with more tables, attractions, and decorations to improve the space's comfort. The more comfortable the accommodations, the happier the customers, and the more they will spend on food. Ironically, comfort is an unfortunate word for this metric. The crimes I must have committed to the concept of interior design have to be the most stressful and sloppy places to attempt to enjoy a meal. I love the idea of building a restaurant that pulls elements from various islands and lets you run wild with the decor, with Sanji cooking delicacies from across the globe, but that tantalizing proposition falls flat in execution.

Each new region brings a set of restaurant fixtures themed to the current story arc you’re sailing through, be that new flooring, lamps, benches, or landscaping. For example, the Thriller Bark set features horror-themed decor, plus a spot to plant the stray zombie friends who accompany the living visitors on the ship. Instead of rewarding you for making an aesthetically pleasing, well-organized dining room, Grand Gourmet doesn’t care about actual comfort. Instead, it incentivizes you to cram every square inch with lamps, benches, and shrubbery to boost stats. Neither Crocodile nor Eustice Kidd ultimately cares what their assigned seat looks like. And because of the limited space and clunky reorganization tools, these areas remained cluttered catastrophes that still somehow made a boatload of money.

Some elements also move beyond the typical restaurant vibe to make the ship a more appealing destination, but they aren’t without their own faults, either. My favorite fantastical attractions are meeting spots for giant sea kings or land crabs, which add cool elements to the ship's deck and showcase the eccentric animal designs of the One Piece world. It’s fun to collect fish to store in an aquarium or keep the pets of visitors in animal-friendly environments. However, once you have the features and creatures in place, there’s not much else to do with them. They’re yet another money-collecting attraction that doesn’t affect their surroundings besides providing a small bump of comfort.

Meal Prep

Like the interior design, the restaurant’s food has promising building blocks but lacks the finesse to make planning a proper meal worth the trouble. Sanji draws inspiration from his fellow crewmates and restaurant visitors, letting him make everything from simple dishes like rice or spring rolls to fantastical concoctions based on legendary characters or events from the One Piece world. Piecing together a balanced meal of up to four items lets you sell products at a higher price, and you can increase it further by pairing them with other food endorsed by the same Straw Hat crew member. Except, like the design elements, it’s disappointing that diners are never picky about what you specifically serve them; it only matters that you put the food out.

The best course of action is to serve what’s going to rake in the most cash every time, which the automatic meal tool already does effectively. I wish there were incentives for putting together a regional meal or a group-inspired platter to break up the monotony of only pairing the priciest products. This extends to the fake Baratie boss battles, which put Sanji in a Food Network-esque cooking competition, in which the automatic meals were still plenty successful. You can always put together bespoke plates of food and decorate a meal with different figures, plates, and utensils to spice up the meal-planning experience – there’s just not any reason to do so outside of having a little fun.

Learning to cook new foods is critical to building the restaurant's reputation and fighting fake Baratie, but whether or not you’ll unlock a crucial recipe is a crapshoot. Some foods are key to turning a customer into a fan of the restaurant, which lets them follow you to new regions, but it's nigh impossible to know who might know which recipe. Nothing points you toward who to impress and what food they are capable of inspiring. You have to be lucky enough to have the right items on hand, and the right people on board, to crack a novel recipe. Unlocking a specific food is often dumb luck, and while it can be frustrating to figure out, much of what you need falls into your lap at the right time. The moments when things don’t come together feel bad, though, especially when your favorite characters have to be left behind when the time arrives to move forward on the journey.

Pressureless Cooker

While Sanji handles the cooking responsibilities, Luffy sets out to explore with the rest of the pirate crew. The action itself is simple, but I looked forward to searching each new region because it’s one of the few tasks that enables the restaurant to consistently flourish in meaningful ways. These idle activities cost Berry, affinity points, or coins to send the crew to important One Piece islands, villages, and bases – the price is worth it, though, as exploration rewards you with new faces to visit the restaurant, giftable items to create new fans or increase profitability, and precious ingredients for new kitchen concoctions. Some rewards are level-gated while others require a specific crew member to bring them home, giving me a great reason to level up every member of the Straw Hat crew whenever possible (once you’ve found them somewhere in the vast ocean, that is).

Each crew member helps out the restaurant in a way only they can, and these are some of the best realized parts of Grand Gourmet. Sanji, of course, cooks all of the meals; Franky, the shipwright, creates new furnishings and can expand the square footage of the ship; crafty Ussop makes decorations and utensils to modify meals; and the swordsman Zoro trains the Straw Hats, allowing them to level up further for expeditions and other activities. My favorite crew member is the money-hungry Nami, who not only bailed me out financially multiple times but also negotiates a half-price discount on new amenities once a day, giving me a neat loophole to buy expensive ship upgrades on the cheap. Every member of the pirate crew brings a fun element to the ship, even if everything doesn’t necessarily help the cause of beating the fake Baratie.

Running a business isn’t cheap, especially when serving hundreds of hungry mouths in the middle of the briney deep, but I’m disappointed by the lack of pressure or punishment for spending far outside my means. Every shop, buffet, and employee hired to help the cause has daily overhead, which put me deep in financial trouble almost every day. (Don’t get me started on how much it was to add Blackbeard to the payroll.) Each sunrise, my Berry count went negative, and I had to crawl through the day. Because no friction challenged my poor financial management, I never needed to find a better way to run the company. The only time anyone cares how shallow my pockets are is when I'm spending money during the day, and even then, someone usually bailed me out immediately, filling my coffers far more than necessary.

With no reason to think too hard about the business management side of things, what has instead kept me playing Grand Gourmet (even after the close to 20 hours it took me to roll credits) is seeing damn near every single named One Piece character running around the ship and interacting with each other. It’s fun to see old comrades share a table or bitter rivals chat about characters they relate to. Some meetups are surprising and funny, like two villains discussing “work,” which may or may not involve poisoning people with synthetic Devil Fruits. There are also references to its own lack continuity, which make for interesting meetups between characters who may not exist in the same place or lifetime.

Each character has an affection rating that, when raised to a specified level, can give your staff new items to craft or more customers to invite, making them important to interact with beyond just the fun of having them aboard. Grand Gourmet looks great too, full of small details on the hundreds of character sprites that are truly impressive. Almost every character’s design is recognizable and unique, with many featuring special animations that bring each person to life, like Akainu firing up a giant magma fist while helping to create a new dish. These flourishes don’t happen often, but do inject some much-needed panache to the normally mundane way everyone strolls around.

While almost every character the anime has produced is here, it’s a shame the same can’t be said for the memorable music, voice cast, or sound effects from its long history. Instead, the soundtrack is limited to a handful of nondescript background themes on a short loop paired with a painfully small sample of sound effects, which makes it feel like an early iOS game (which isn’t a huge shock given this game is so deeply tied to developer Kairosoft’s mobile game lineage). A big part of One Piece’s appeal lies in its audio design and music, so it’s a bummer that Grand Gourmet has none of that.

Full spoilers follow for VisionQuest Episodes 3 and 4, which are streaming now on Disney+.

VisionQuest is turning out to be quite the pleasant little surprise. What initially seemed like an obligatory but unneeded follow-up to a loose end from WandaVision is rapidly developing into a series with plenty of heart, soul, and depth of its own. It never pays to count out Paul Bettany's synthetic hero.

Mind you, entertaining as the first two episodes were, my one real reservation with VisionQuest out of the gate was that it was a bit difficult to connect with this version of Bettany's character. As he himself says, he has all the memories of the original Vision but none of his soul. Given how poignant and utterly human Vision was in his past MCU appearances, seeing a cold, aloof, emotionless copy of that character takes some getting used to.

But that problem quickly starts to fade in Episodes 3 and 4. Already, White Vision is making great strides in terms of understanding his emotions and internal conflict and embracing this side of himself he doesn't quite understand. Compared to the Loki series, which basically relied on a quick-and-dirty speedrun to transform the 2012-era Loki (Tom Hiddleston) into something more resembling his post-Thor: Ragnarok self, this feels like a more coherent and purposeful way of bridging the gap between two wildly different versions of an MCU character.

Certainly, Bettany has a lot more to work with in these two episodes, both comedically and dramatically. His malfunctioning processors give the actor some welcome opportunity to deploy a bit of physical comedy in Episode 3. And both episodes make the most of the rapidly deepening bond between Vision and Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica). By all rights, their relationship should feel rushed, but somehow it all works anyway. By the time Vision is coaxing his son on how to reboot him in the hotel swimming pool, he feels well on the road to reclaiming that lost humanity that was so vital to the original character. That process continues in Episode 4, where Vision pointedly stops drawing such a hard distinction between his past and present selves.

I also appreciate how well the show's writers are succeeding in not making Agatha All Along required viewing. This isn't a show you want to watch without at least having seen WandaVision, but it also does a fine job of explaining everything you need to know about Tommy's bizarre existence without making his brother Billy's (Joe Locke) parallel journey into mandatory homework. It helps the series stand on its own two feet a bit more, rather than simply being the final act of a trilogy.

Another big plus in VisionQuest's favor is that it features such a lovable supporting cast of AI goofballs. James Spader's Ultron doesn't steal the show to quite the degree he did in the first two episodes, but he remains one of the absolute highlights of the series. Ultron is great for both periodic comedic relief and the sorts of knowing observations on human nature that used to be Vision's purview. But we also get to see the character finally take a more purposeful step onto center stage late in Episode 4, as he manipulates his way into taking the wheel (literally) and predictably betrays his family at his first opportunity. The prospect of an Ultron fully in control and back in the physical world is a very exciting one heading into Episode 5.

Speaking of Vision's family, we get a lot of great scenes involving F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire), and even D.U.M.-E. (Henry Lewis) and U (Jonathan Sayer). The series is doing a fantastic job of fleshing out and enriching these characters that used to be nothing more than disembodied voices or slapstick workshop tools. Episode 4 is particularly strong when it comes to exploring their own emotional journeys and how much they parallel what Vision is experiencing.

None of this is to say the series isn't still experiencing some growing pains. Episodes 3 and 4 feel a bit clunky in how they handle the transition from a conflict mostly built around Paladin (Todd Stashwick) to one centered around Jocasta (T'Nia Miller). The former character basically drops out of the picture after running afoul of the latter. Still, I'm enjoying the show's take on Jocasta so far. She's nothing if not sympathetic so far, and she holds a lot of potential as both a villain and the object of Ultron's fascination. All in all, these two episodes do a lot to set up a compelling conflict for the second half of the series.

Note: This review contains some minor spoilers for the book.

The first book in a new series called The Dell Chronicles, HL Bernabe’s Cooking Up Magick sets out to be a cozier fantasy version of The Lord of the Rings. And in many ways, it does pull directly from J.R.R. Tolkien’s world. The main character, Paisley, is a halfling who gets swept up on an adventure with a pair of dwarves, but unbeknownst to her, there’s also an evil overlord that has just returned after centuries – and she’s the only hope the world has to actually stop him.

The similarities to The Hobbit and LOTR pretty much end there though, and you don’t get nearly enough detail in the first book to effectively flesh out this alternate version of Middle-earth. What you do get is a lovable main character who is surrounded by an interesting cast of characters. There’s cooking, there’s magic, and there’s even a bit of romantasy thrown in here, but Cooking Up Magick doesn’t serve up enough of any of it to fully bring its story to life.

Wicker is in theaters on October 23.

As we’ve learned from stories like Edward Scissorhands, Pinocchio, and Lars and the Real Girl, few things teach us more about what it means to be fully human and alive than creatures crafted by an artist's hands and the desires of one desperate for connection.

A lonely Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) rebels against the limits, forced and chosen, of her lot in life and entreats a Basket Weaver with mystical skills (Peter Dinklage) to craft her a husband made of wicker (Alexander Skarsgård). Despite its unusual premise, Wicker is surprisingly straightforward in its sweetness and condemnation of small cruelties. There are darker elements to the fantasy, including implied violence, visible gore, and the stark reality that frequent death was a fact of this time period, but these ultimately highlight moments of beauty and affirm the need to savor life’s pleasures, be they exultant or sensual. On the whole, the film is warm and charming with real pathos, largely due to the exemplary cast led by Colman, who seemingly effortlessly elevates both the bawdy comedic beats and moments of sorrow and joy. In lesser hands, the humor might have read as pedestrian, and the relationships distant and unrelatable.

Based on the short story The Wicker Husband by Ursula Wills-Jones and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson (Save Yourselves!), Wicker is set in a generic medieval village where all the townspeople are known only by their trade (if male) or their husband’s vocation (if female). The one exception is the Fisherwoman, who has either rejected, or been rejected by, the traditional confines of marriage and as such is known by her profession. The townspeople limit her participation in their world to the periphery, ostensibly due to her potent scent (an occupational hazard). But it’s the Fisherwoman’s refusal to fit into the tightly bound structures their culture demands — which the seaside village’s matriarch, the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), enforces with an imperious smile — that truly drives her to the edges of their community.

These social constraints feel claustrophobic for everyone, most notably the Fisherwoman, who responds with rebellion, and the Tailor’s Wife, who tries to control others as much as she herself feels confined. That suffocating undercurrent is reinforced by the visual storytelling: The town reads as small and hastily constructed, and the interiors are often dim and candlelit even in daylight, shrouded in mystery (in the Basket Weaver’s workshop) or stifled by the darkness of ignorance (in the villagers’ homes). For the length of the film, we too feel trapped in this deeply flammable village (everything seems to be made of hay or wood!). By contrast, the Fisherwoman’s cottage, set apart from the village, is isolated but surrounded by space, fresh greenery, and a sense of liberation. When the Wicker Husband gets his hands on it, the cottage evolves into something artistically shaped and deeply cared for, a reflection of how he sees his wife; it’s as if the Basket Weaver has passed his artistry on to his creation.

The Wicker Husband himself is stunning, as are all of the Basket Weaver’s designs (even the most ghastly of them), particularly set against the grimier village, where most things and often people are covered in dirt or filth. Weta Workshop built the Wicker Husband with CGI enhancements to appear delicate and precious. When he is damaged, the audience understands that the harm illustrates our own failure to care for something of value. Though eerie, he has the essence of Skarsgård’s natural beauty, and is at once a thing other than human and something more. The actor’s placid tones reflect the character’s innocence, perfectly capturing the Wicker Husband’s ability to point out what isn’t working in the human world simply through his ignorance of it or non-participation in it.

Initially, the Fisherwoman’s purchase of her husband and companion is an act of defiance. She is taunting the villagers, turning their tendency to strip away humanity and objectify themselves and one another on its head. In a reversal of roles, she keeps her title as Fisherwoman while her mate is known simply as the Wicker Husband. This is particularly repellent to the Tailor’s Wife, largely because she longs for the freedom and purpose the Fisherwoman enjoys. In reality, work is both a necessity and a gift for the Fisherwoman, who lacks the privileges of those more embedded in society’s conventions. It gives her meaning but leaves her mostly friendless and often filthy. This exiled, misunderstood woman finds, in the prickly arms of a man made of wood, the acceptance and care missing from much of her village life. The Fisherwoman develops deeper affections for her Wicker Husband than she anticipated and in doing so falls prey to the frailties of real attachment, including jealousy and mistrust, even toward a husband she theoretically “owns” (and who could double as furniture).

The actors ground us in this heightened fable. Early in the film, in a glance of no more than 30 seconds, Colman and Debicki convey the entire shared history of two women who understand, envy, and loathe one another. More saliently, it’s here, with one double take from Colman, that we understand Debicki’s casual mean-spiritedness has sealed the town’s fate: The Fisherwoman will have her say, and with it, a husband the likes of which they cannot imagine — one who will challenge their way of life. Colman brings us into the Fisherwoman’s exuberance as she discovers the nightly joys the Wicker Husband offers, without making it so comical that we’re held at a distance from the character. She delivers a performance that gives the audience catharsis as she moves from deep vulnerability and self-sabotage to a woman who takes the gift she’s given and runs with it.

In a sense, the film asks the viewer to examine how much good we allow ourselves before we damage it, often out of fear that it isn’t real or earned and will therefore betray us. The Fisherwoman, who’s been told she’s not worth much, must wrestle with granting herself permission to feel pleasure (often in spades) and with believing that the sweet can, at the very least, equal the bitter in life. Through witnessing her unorthodox relationship, the whole village is faced with the same inquiry. This is the film’s most interesting idea.

Thematically, Wicker hits at patriarchy with the subtlety of a cudgel. Even in name, the women are reduced to property. The Tailor’s Wife is petty, passive-aggressive, and destructive, in no small part because her natural genius is underused at best and entirely suppressed at worst. We see villagers’ lives imperiled because no one has the will to say that those in charge of critical infrastructure are drunk, incapable, or (often) both. Everyone pays a price for these encrusted traditions. The film is an overt morality play, but with enough surreal humor to keep it from feeling laborious or patronizing.

To its credit, Wicker is seeded with more than just an indictment of utterly ruinous bias. It examines, lightly and with a lot of whimsy, why we all as men and women stay loyal to the restrictions that create pain and discomfort for us, be they social norms or internal limitations. It also asks about the bounds of nature itself, as the Basket Weaver defies the “no” life has given this village's residents. He’ll help them reach for their deepest desires so long as they’re willing to name what they want (whether anyone agrees or not) and care for the small miracles he provides.

Dinklage’s Basket Weaver stands apart from the town but, unlike the Fisherwoman, not in opposition to it. In that sense, he serves as the audience’s surrogate: a somewhat objective observer or Greek chorus who at times goes so far as to monologue or narrate events and who casts the final judgment. Dinklage brings a sense of delight to the role, embodying the Basket Weaver’s love of creating within challenging frameworks, and of doing more than he ever thought himself capable of. He also endows the character with empathy without overplaying his hand. His compassion is reserved chiefly for outsiders like the Fisherwoman, and he disdains the villagers’ inability to extend it to her or even themselves.

It takes a man made of wicker to show this town what it is to be complete and fully human. His way of seeing the world, free of the polluting influence of cultural programming, serves as an (often unwanted) mirror for the villagers, exposing the insanity of mundane life. Ultimately, the film celebrates the rewards of being bold and going for what you want (be that family, vocation, both, or something else altogether) without the need for approval. Though the storytelling in Wicker is fairly direct, Fischer and Wilson have steady hands, and the technical elements combined with the talented cast create an imaginative, immersive, and relatively quick (about an hour and 45 minutes) visit to a universe just to the left of our own, granting us enough distance to see ourselves more clearly.

I love LEGO sets based on retro game consoles. They combine two of my favorite things: video games (for obvious reasons) and LEGO sets, with impossibly clever construction mechanics and plenty of Easter eggs.

The latest retro system to become a buildable set is LEGO PlayStation, a near 1:1 scale model of Sony’s original hardware. Now, it may seem like a foregone conclusion today, but the success of the PlayStation was no sure thing when it launched in 1994 in Japan and in 1995 in the US. Many electronics companies had dabbled in the world of video games and failed quickly, with nothing to show for it.

But young me? I was a believer in PlayStation from the start. I remember buying the little gray machine at launch and pouring hundreds of hours into games like Jumping Flash, Battle Arena Toshinden, Street Fighter: The Movie (the game), Twisted Metal, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Doom, Resident Evil 2, Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey, Medal of Honor, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII through IX (remember when three mainline Final Fantasies could come out in a single generation?) and on and on. Man, what an incredible library.

The PS1 provided all the gaming I needed through the latter half of the '90s. I didn’t buy another console until the PlayStation 2 came out after the turn of the millennium.

LEGO PlayStation comes with 1,911 bricks divided into 14 paper bags and takes around six hours to build. Despite the mostly gray exterior, it’s a fun, surprisingly colorful construction from start to finish. It uses a number of clever building techniques along the way, and includes a few delightful Easter eggs.

Even the box for this set is an Easter egg of sorts. It calls back to the box of the original PlayStation.

The process of the build is about what you'd expect: you start by completing the base of the console, and then build your way to the top. But inside of the machine, you first lay down the red, yellow, and blue PS logo, and then build and insert all sorts of colorful little chips and electronic components — many of which you immediately cover up. Unlike the real console, however, you can see some of these "electronics" when you lift the lid.

Also hidden inside the console are two dioramas that slide out on smooth tracks. These are like secret drawers that feature colorful micro-scale worlds for Ape Escape and Gran Turismo, two popular games from the platform. While I didn’t play either of those games back in the day and would have preferred nods to, say, Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid, they’re still a fun inclusion and I’m sure many fans will appreciate them more than I do.

The set includes one small sheet of stickers. I’ve complained about stickers in LEGO sets before (particularly in LEGO Jurassic Park Jeep Wrangler and LEGO Winnie the Pooh), but they’re more of a minor irritant here. All of the stickers go on the dioramas, which are hidden by default.

All of the most important and visible images on this set — the PlayStation and Sony logos, and the controller’s face button shapes — are pre-printed on the pieces. This is a huge relief for me personally, as I can’t line up a sticker on a LEGO piece perfectly to save my life.

The finished product looks remarkably like a 1:1 representation of the original hardware. If you view it from a distance, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was an actual PS1. I dug up my original PlayStation to compare the two devices (I could only find my DualShock controller, not the original). The LEGO set looks incredibly similar to the real thing from almost every angle. The main difference is the LEGO set lacks the RCA ports in the back, which isn’t a big deal (see the slideshow below for more comparison pics).

Even the Power and Open buttons on the finished set “work.” Pressing Power lifts a little green translucent rod into view, right where the green power light is on the original hardware. Pressing the Open button releases a latch that, thanks to a spring-loaded mechanism, raises the disc lid, just like it does on the original.

I have a few minor complaints about LEGO PlayStation. My Open button sticks when I press it all the way in, so the lid won’t close unless I fiddle with the button to make it pop back out. The controller also looks a little janky, but I understand it’s hard or impossible to make an exact replica LEGO version of something so curvy.

If you’re a gamer of a certain age and have fond memories of playing then-newfangled CD-based games on an original PlayStation, I can wholeheartedly recommend this set. It would also make a fine gift, if someone you know falls into that category.

LEGO PlayStation is available for $179.99 at the LEGO Store and PlayStation Direct.

Capturing Bigfoot is playing in select theaters and is available to rent or buy on Prime Video starting October 20.

Bigfoot is alive and was born in Yakima, Washington.

Keep your hairy suits on; the mythical creature is not alive alive in the same way you and I are. However, he remains alive in the public imagination. One of the primary reasons for this, as seen in director Marq Evans’ fascinating documentary Capturing Bigfoot, has to do with a short film made way back in 1967 by a group of Washingtonians that supposedly captured footage of the creature walking with a memorably lumbering gait in the remote woods of California. The infamous Patterson-Gimlin film, named for two of its creators, Roger Patterson (who died in 1972) and Robert “Bob” Gimlin, has continued to endure over the decades, picked apart by doubters just as it is still held up as almost a sacred document by believers.

It’s a subject that’s ripe for deeper analysis, and Capturing Bigfoot – which premiered back at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival, where it already began to make waves in the Bigfoot community – not only delivers on that front, but also in its look at the people who made the 1967 film. It’s a solidly entertaining watch, bringing to light the reality of what's out there lurking in the woods, but it also offers something more in how it gets at the deeper, more painful, and yet still beautiful psychological mysteries living inside the human mind.

While Evans gives plenty of attention to the Bigfoot of it all and the hold it has over so many, critically, he’s not making a film that’s solely about the creature. Instead, that is, if anything, merely the entry point to something far more illuminating. With patient, incisive filmmaking and thoughtful care, Evans uncovers not only the truth about the Patterson-Gimlin film – and the being it “captured” – but also infinitely more valuable revelations about the people who made it and those who now have to live with its legacy. While this all builds to a genuinely stunning revelation by showing what is essentially the most significant “deleted scene” in Bigfoot cinema history, it's the journey of getting there that makes Capturing Bigfoot a consistently compelling gem. You come to see all of not only who Roger Patterson was, but the impact his film had on his son, Clint, as he sorts through his father’s legacy. Is Roger a trickster who lied to his son and everyone he knew? Is he a filmmaker in his own right who made an enduring work of cinema? Or is he just another struggling hustler who was trying to carve out his piece of the ever-elusive American dream?

Ultimately, the Patterson patriarch was trying to tell a story that, yes, he could use to make some money, but it became much more than that. To both those who knew him and many who didn’t, his film became something that provided so much over the years. We hear this not just from Clint, but also those like the late Bigfoot expert (and academic) Jeffrey Meldrum, who attended a screening of the film as a child shortly after it was made. The experience left an impact on Meldrum and gave him something to believe in as an adult, so to then hear it may have all been premised on a lie is a psychologically difficult thing to reckon with. As Meldrum says at one point, sounding more than a little anxious, he feels like he’s being led “up to a precipice and you’re just about to push me over the edge.” When he later watches new footage that upends everything that he’d come to believe about Bigfoot, we see in his eyes that so much of his worldview and life’s purpose is crumbling.

Even as this could all seem rather silly or, even worse, cruel or exploitative, Evans never looks down on his subjects or seeks to take advantage of them. There is a compassion to the filmmaking, even as the subjects are made to confront the lies that surround them and have shaped their lives. Evans asks the tough questions when he needs to and doesn’t shy away from the more thorny reality of what actually happened, but he also works to understand what it was about the film and Bigfoot that still means so much to many of those he talks to.

Whether the Patterson-Gimlin film is a fake or not, it’s not going to stop people from believing in Bigfoot or anything else that they need to. It’s not about what makes factual sense, but what makes emotional sense and allows such folks to feel like they have some agency over the stories in their lives. There is a painfully tragic dimension to this, as such ideas are inherently built upon buying into a delusion, but it’s also a deeply human, occasionally darkly humorous, and potentially dangerous reality of our world. Even as Capturing Bigfoot doesn’t fully dive into the more expansive implications of this, it does reveal the darker truths and lies that can exist within all of us. There will always be the things we build our lives around and hold closely to. This one just happened to take the form of a giant, hairy cryptid. Thus, while the physical being may not be real, there will always be more Bigfoots. Bigfoot is dead. Long live Bigfoot.