This is a spoiler-free review of the first eight episodes of Maul: Shadow Lord Season 1. The first two episodes of the 10-episode season premiere on Disney+ on April 6, 2026.

As a longtime Darth Maul superfan, my feelings on the announcement of Maul: Shadow Lord were conflicted, to say the least. On the one hand, Maul’s extended story arc was arguably the highlight of Star Wars: The Clone Wars in its later seasons. Who wouldn’t want a continuation of that story? On the other, did we really need yet another Star Wars series set in the era between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope? Between Star Wars Rebels, Andor, and The Bad Batch, haven’t we said all that needs to be said about this particular era? Are we ever going to get that New Jedi Order-focused answer to The Clone Wars we’ve all been clamoring for since The Force Awakens came out?

It’s probably best to come into the new series with tempered expectations. No, Shadow Lord doesn’t exactly break new ground for the franchise in terms of setting or plot. But it gives us an even deeper dive with what has become one of Star Wars’ most fascinating villains, and establishes a solid new supporting cast besides. There’s a lot for Star Wars fans to like in Season 1.

Maul: Shadow Lord opens about a year after the events of The Clone Wars: Season 7, which culminated with Sam Witwer’s Maul battling Ahsoka Tano on Mandalore and escaping capture during the chaos of Order 66. The former Sith Lord has gone into hiding, seeing the rise of the Galactic Empire as an opportunity to both rebuild his shattered criminal empire and seek vengeance against those who wronged him. But is that all that motivates him?

He may be the title character, but it should come as no surprise that Maul: Shadow Lord isn’t solely about Maul himself. To do otherwise would be misguided on the part of creator Dave Filoni and his team, given that we already know the broad strokes of where Maul’s story is heading from here. Thanks to 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, it’s been established that Maul is ultimately successful in rebuilding his criminal empire, becoming the secret hand pulling the strings of Paul Bettany’s Dryden Vos and the Crimson Dawn organization. Then, years later down the timeline, you have Star Wars Rebels chronicling the last, tragic months of this villain’s life. If Shadow Lord were only filling in the blanks of Maul’s criminal career, it might not have enough to offer fans.

That’s where characters like Gideon Adlon’s Jedi Padawan Devon Izara and Wagner Moura’s Captain Brander Lawson helpfully step in. Shadow Lord is set almost entirely on the world of Janix, a neon-drenched, cyberpunk-y planet that has so far managed to stay outside of the Empire’s looming gaze. For Maul, Janix is a useful place to start rebuilding. For Devon, it’s a world where she and her master, Dennis Haysbert’s Master Eeko-Dio-Daki, can lie low and plan their next move. For Lawson, it’s a place to call home, and the worst thing that can happen to that home is for the Empire to suddenly pay a visit.

The series gets a lot of mileage out of exploring the constant push-and-pull between these characters and their conflicting desires. The show isn’t just about Maul punishing his rivals and laying the foundation of a new criminal empire. For a guy like Maul, who’s always been obsessed with mirroring Darth Sidious and acquiring his own Sith apprentice, Devon emerges as a desirable new piece on the playing board. The question becomes not just whether Maul can turn this headstrong young Jedi to the Dark Side, but how much he’s willing to sacrifice in the process. His story may be written, but hers isn’t, and that’s where a lot of the dramatic weight in Season 1 stems from.

As for Lawson, and more than Devon herself, he’s the closest thing we have to an actual hero in this murky conflict. He’s just a good cop trying to do the best he can for his city in a very tumultuous time for the galaxy. That said, Lawson has his own foibles and demons, so he never feels out of place in what is an overall very dark and bleak series. There are definitely some comparisons to be drawn between Shadow Lord and Andor in terms of the overall tone and the fact that one of the main characters is basically a beat cop operating under the Empire’s thumb.

But those comparisons only extend so far. Shadow Lord may be dark, but it doesn’t shy away from the more fantastical elements of Star Wars in the way its live-action cousin did. There’s the alien-heavy cast of characters for one thing, which in itself is a bit of a nice change for the Disney Star Wars era. But there’s also the fact that Shadow Lord delivers a steady stream of lightsaber battles and epic shootouts, where Andor tended to be grounded far more in the mundane world beyond the Jedi and Sith. The various trailers and clips released so far make it plain that Maul is all too happy to unsheathe his laser sword and go to town on criminal scum and Stormtroopers alike.

These action scenes are often reason enough to tune in all on their own, especially early on when the series is at its most straightforward and predictable. Seeing Maul unleash his fury on his enemies never gets old, especially when the fight scenes are this well done. The Clone Wars fans will know that much of the franchise’s best lightsaber choreography can be found in the animated realm rather than live-action, and Shadow Lord continues that proud trend. The series really goes to town once the Empire shows up and the Inquisitors pay a visit to Janix.

Shadow Lord is a real looker as far as Star Wars animation goes. If anything, it highlights just how far these projects have come from the early seasons of The Clone Wars, which don’t exactly hold up well in the animation department. The contrast between those clunky seasons and the fluid, detailed animation on display here is quite something. Nor is it just the detail that impresses, but the dynamic lighting and the watercolor-like texture that permeates so much of Janix and its inhabitants. Visually, some of the most memorable scenes come when Maul is playing the part of a Zen martial arts master, practicing his lightsaber moves with surprising grace or pouring tea to kick off a heart-to-heart palaver.

Shadow Lord also sounds great, thanks to both a rock-solid voice cast and the incredible score by Kiner Music. When it comes to the former, it goes without saying that Witwer’s Maul steals the show in every scene in which he appears. Witwer has truly made the character his own over the years, which is no easy feat considering that Maul was originally voiced by the great Peter Serafinowicz. His Maul is a complex bundle of seething rage, sage wisdom, and the occasional emotional breakdown. His vocal energy is unmatched.

Which isn’t to say the rest of the cast don’t get their moments to shine. Adlon strikes a nice balance with Devon, painting a convincing portrait of a haggard Jedi on the run who might just have the potential to slip into darkness. Moura’s Lawson is equal parts enigmatic and likable. And there are several supporting characters who really stand out. Richard Ayodade’s Two-Boots is one of the more memorable droid sidekicks of the Disney era, as is David W. Collins’ manic Spybot. There’s also Chris Diamantopoulos as rival crime boss-turned-ally Looti Vario.

Musically, the series easily rivals the best that Star Wars animation has to offer. Composer Kevin Kiner and his siblings have built a strong brand combining traditional Star Wars motifs and instrumentation with electronic elements and a generally more haunting and melancholic feel. At times, Shadow Lord feels like the Star Wars equivalent of Blade Runner, and that’s as much thanks to the ethereal score as anything else.

Clearly, Shadow Lord has a lot going for it, but it’s not all rosy for this Clone Wars spinoff. As much as the series works to ensure it isn’t just filling in the blanks of Maul’s saga but is instead telling a meaningful story, it does struggle at times. The early episodes are a bit too straightforward and predictable for their own good, relying mostly on the dynamic action to carry things along as Maul begins his campaign of destruction and slaughter.

It’s only after the Imperial characters arrive and the plot pivots around them that the series really settles into a better groove. That provides Shadow Lord with the shake-up it needs, immediately forcing all the main characters on the back foot. No longer is Maul simply building his little empire and courting a new apprentice, but he’s also confronting the fact that he may have bitten off more than he can chew. Lawson is faced with his own personal doomsday scenario, and Devon and her master find themselves contending with the very worst-case scenario for Jedi who have managed to survive Order 66. Midway through, the series morphs from an enjoyable but pretty surface-level Star Wars adventure to something with more heft and dramatic meat to it.

Daemons of the Shadow Realm debuts on Crunchyroll April 4. New episodes will follow every Saturday.

The premiere episode of Daemons of the Shadow Realm has everything you’d want in a premiere episode. It introduces compelling characters, gives them some big problems to solve, and presents a vast world with interesting mythology and history that’s intriguing enough to want to keep watching. It has more in common with Attack on Titan or even the pilot for Lost than, say, Demon Slayer, with some shocking twists that set the stage for a must-watch anime.

From the opening scene where we see a woman giving birth to twins that are said to “divide night and day” and “will command the Daemons someday,” Daemons of the Shadow Realm gives enough hints to its larger world of supernatural beings and untold dangers without outright spelling things out to the audience. When we jump forward in time 16 years, we learn that one of the twins, Yuru, is now a teenager working as a hunter for his isolated village. Meanwhile, his sister Asa is kept hidden in a cage, with most people in the village having never laid eyes on her.

There is an economic approach to worldbuilding and storytelling in this episode, slowly building up to a big reveal in the most efficient way. At every turn, it is clear there is more to this village than it lets on, from the way the adults constantly give each other secretive looks and the mentions of “the world below” to the seemingly single trader who brings trinkets and even shamans when needed, as well as the way Yuru and others look up at the sky and talk of dragons when seeing condensation trails of some unseen creature.

The show is adapted from the manga of the same name by Fullmetal Alchemist creator Hiromu Arakawa. Immediately, Arakawa’s style is felt throughout the episode, most notably in her recognizable character designs. The anime is produced by Bones Film, a subsidiary of the same studio that made both adaptations of Fullmetal Alchemist, and it shows in the vibrant colors, attention to backgrounds, and dynamic action.

And make no mistake: Once the bodies hit the floor, Daemons of the Shadow Realm kicks into high gear. In an instant, the premiere pulls a twist worthy of Lost, and whatever it was pretending to be up to that point goes out the window. It opens up a myriad of possibilities for what the rest of the show will be, raising some fascinating questions about the nature of the show’s world and how it works. The shift in tone is seamless, with the first half establishing how quiet and idyllic Yuru’s life is before taking that away with brutal fight scenes. The action is kinetic and hard-hitting, with the use of vibrant colors making the violence pop even more. We see a bit of the titular daemons, who act kind of like Stands in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and manifest different powers. Unfortunately, some of the 3D used in the second half of the episode doesn’t work, but at least it’s used in quick shots that don’t linger.

By the end of the episode, we have an idea of where the story might go (at least in its first story arc), the dynamic between the main characters, and the abilities we’ll encounter. At the same time, the doors are wide open for a show full of surprises; this isn’t Fullmetal Alchemist, and that’s okay. But much like that show, Daemons of the Shadow Realm is clearly an anime that’s more than meets the eye, with a fascinating and complex world worth exploring.

Full spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 2, which is streaming on Apple TV now.

Given Ed Baldwin’s penchant for risky moves, it was inevitable he’d go and do something bold for his old pal Lee Jung-gil, now in MPK custody for allegedly committing murder. The natural endpoint for the natural troublemaker is organizing a mission to bust Lee out of the M-6 jail in order to keep him from being extradited back to Earth for a trial that would, no doubt, lead to a conviction. The build-up, execution, and fallout from the slow-speed Hopper chase — give the guy a break, he’s in his 80s! — is just the kind of stuff For All Mankind does so well, and gives the necessary jolt to a season that struggled a bit out of the gate. Are we so back, FAM fam? I think we’re kinda back.

The episode opens minutes after the premiere left off, with Lee in handcuffs being perp-walked through the Happy Valley food court. It spends plenty of time dropping into pockets of conversations among the residents who don’t believe Lee could have killed a guy. As we’re reminded when Ed (Joel Kinnaman) tries to appeal to Governor Lenya Polivanov (Costa Ronin) to try Lee (C.S. Lee) on Mars, Lee was the one who saved the American crew’s life support systems all those years ago; without him, there would be no colony now.

But something fishy is obviously happening: Polivanov is insistent on Lee leaving Mars, and a concurrent investigation by lower-ranking MPK officer Celia Boyd (new cast member Mireille Enos) starts to surface that the Russian company/Helios analogue Kuragin is doing something unsavory and unsanctioned on the Martian surface at night. Whatever it is that they’re up to, it involves exploiting “Crater” labor, aka undocumented people who have made their way to Mars, and the murdered North Korean man, Yoon Tae-min, was one of those people. (At least no one can accuse For All Mankind for ever being too subtle in making connections to our real present day.)

Meanwhile, the other major thread in “The Hard Six” is that the search for life has gotten a major breakthrough via a Helios SEEKER probe sent to Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon: something’s creating proteins out there. The annoying engineer Walt Griebel (Christopher Denham) makes his smarmy return here, insisting on an emotionless by-the-book further exploration of arguably one of the biggest scientific discoveries ever – that life exists beyond Earth – by sending more “glitchy” probes. Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) insists on a manned mission, not wanting to give any other company an opening to make the actual discovery of extraterrestrial life before them. (Of course it’s NOT because she really, REALLY wants to go to Saturn. Nah, it’s proper science and a capitalistic boon that she cares about. Obviously, she does, and everyone else around her knows it. It’s quite funny to watch Kelly doing the song and dance for others around the conflict of acting like her stance is strictly for the Greater Scientific Good and completely unmotivated by her personal and professional excitement. How couldn’t she be!)

It’s at Baldwin family dinner where the two main narrative arteries reconnect. Kelly’s talked into fighting for her manned mission — and succeeds! — and Ed and his grandson Alex (Sean Kaufman) have it out. Lee’s arrest, which was speculated as being a romantic dispute (??) on the news, lit a fire in Alex and he wants to help Ed fight back. Ed gives a surly response: Alex never showed up for a Sons and Daughters of Mars meeting despite multiple invites and he should stick to running around his beach in his “little video games.” Though the rebuff seems meant to mark Alex safe from getting involved in the dicey plot he was hatching to save Lee, it was of course not a very nice thing to say, especially given Alex’s own health issues and the reasons why he was indulging in the VR beach at all. But Alex storms off, and he’ll almost definitely be laden with guilt over where he left things with Ed’s life in limbo at the episode’s close.

And back to the jailbreak: The last third of this episode is great, delivering the season’s first breath-holding flight action sequences – even if, like I already mentioned, the rovers are nowhere near as speedy as the kind of planes and ships Ed used to fly in his prime. But it’s the spirit that counts! Ed’s not even supposed to be flying, as we learned in Episode 1 during his check-up. But of course he would defy that mandate for one more major act of bravery to save (and repay) his friend from a worse fate, even if that means putting his own health on the line. Is he still alive when the MPK agents find him slouching in the seat of the Hopper? We'll find out next week! Hang in there, buddy!

Transmissions from Happy Valley:

• A Starbucks in the Happy Valley food court… at this rate, we’ll be getting a new chain reveal an episode.
• Related thought: If Mars is growing its own food now, did they hack the right climate for coffee beans, too? Frankly, I’m very hung up on this supply chain.
• There will always be something entirely uncanny about the weird Mars/Baldwin spaghetti.
• Apparently, Lee and Ed are the only two jailed people in Happy Valley, going off their cell numbers (A001 and A002).
• I’m acknowledging Miles Dale’s (Toby Kebbell) suspicious meeting with Palmer James (Myk Watford) where Palmer tries to get Miles to turn informant since that will definitely be a relationship that blows up at some point this season.
• Fun fact: Battlestar Galactica writer/producer vets Bradley Thompson and David Weddle wrote this episode. The fellas sure do love a heroic captain type talking about rolling some unlikely dice!

Warning: This article contains full spoilers for The Pitt Season 2, Episode 13!

Things have been growing really tense on The Pitt in recent weeks, which is exactly what one would expect given how close to the finish line we are. In Season 1, this was the period where all hell broke loose in the wake of the Pitt Fest shooting. Heck, Season 1's 13th episode marked the pivotal point where Robby (Noah Wyle) finally snapped and had his panic attack. Dramatically, it would seem 13 is the show's lucky number.

But surprisingly, Season 2's Episode 13 doesn't continue the process of ratcheting up the tension. Quite the opposite. There's almost a sense of emotional release to this episode as the day shift characters finally start to shrug off their respective burdens and allow the night shift to start taking charge. Even Shawn Hatosy's Dr. Abbot is back in action. It's an unexpected tonal swerve for the series, and not necessarily a welcome one. My hope is that this is all a deceptive calm before one final storm (we do still have two episodes left, after all), but that doesn't change the fact that "7:00 PM" feels a bit underwhelming compared to its immediate predecessors.

To be fair, it's hardly as though there's no drama to be had in the ER this week. This episode builds on last week's cliffhanger involving the return of Orlando Diaz (William Guirola), who clearly should not have run off back to his second job. Now Orlando is in even worse shape than before, facing potentially permanent brain damage as a result of a nasty fall.

My read on the situation is much the same as Robby's. Orlando was probably seeking a more permanent solution to his medical debt woes. Whether or not that proves to be the case (and given Orlando's current physical state, we may not find out), it's a sobering commentary on the absolutely deplorable state of American health insurance. The series may not have us quite as on the edge of our seats this week, but it can still channel a righteous anger.

Similarly, the show introduces another case of a patient struggling against an unfeeling, uncaring system with the teen suffering from a bad case of asthma. In this case, the boy's mother got summarily booted off Medicaid and has been fighting an uphill battle just to get him the meds he needs to live. This particular case seems to have a relatively happy ending, but it's still enough to boil the blood.

He may not be suffering from any panic attacks this time around, but this did still prove to be a pretty pivotal episode for Robby. He gets some very bad news about Duke (Jeff Kober), he butts heads with various student doctors who clearly want nothing more than to go home for the day, and most importantly, he really has it out with Dana (Katherine LaNasa). That last little brouhaha is easily the highlight of this episode, proving just how much one bad day can tear apart a rock solid friendship. Naturally, both Wyle and LaNasa are in top form during this scene, which plays out exactly like your two beloved parents fighting.

In the end, we're left to contemplate whether Robby has any real intention of returning to The Pitt after his sabbatical. Is he planning on making it permanent? Is he burnt out for good? Is he dying? Whatever the case, he's clearly panicking at the thought of leaving his ER in the state it's in. One would like to be as optimistic as Dana about the situation, but there's a nagging sense that Robby might be right to worry.

As much as this episode is a bit underwhelming as a total package (as always, "underwhelming" being a very relative term here), I'll give the show credit for finally coming full circle with Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson). This character started out as easily the most annoying and frstrating addition to the Season 2 mix, but he's finally evolved into a more human and fully realized person. Ogilvie's heart-to-heart with Whitaker (Gerran Howell) really cements that transformation, showing just how much pain and self-doubt lurks beneath the arrogant facade. At this point, I only wish Joy (Irene Choi) were fleshed out to the same degree. Though, in her case, you can't deny that she had a pretty badass exit scene last week.

The first three episodes of The Testaments premiere on Hulu on Wednesday, April 8, with new episodes arriving weekly thereafter. This is a spoiler-free review of the first season.

When Bruce Miller’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale dropped in 2017, we were three months into President Donald Trump’s first term. The show initially had a seismic impact on the zeitgeist as subsequent protests featured iconography and quotes from it, but attention waned as time went on and The Handmaid’s Tale’s cardinal sin was testing the resolve of viewers to watch heroine June Osborne/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) and her handmaiden kind weather the horrific slings and arrows of Gilead for six long seasons.

No, it wasn’t a fun watch, but Atwood’s cautionary tale and Miller’s interpretation of her text remains important storytelling about what resistance looks like in action. It’s also why Atwood wrote the sequel, The Testaments, based in part on her appreciation for what actress Ann Dowd did with the Aunt Lydia role. Atwood wanted to flesh out the character’s path to Aunt status, and now Miller is back with another richly made series adaptation, this time focusing on the grooming of the young women of Gilead into docile breeders under God’s eye.

Overall, The Testaments is an odd amalgam of Gossip Girl meets The Handmaid’s Tale, which is a bit disconcerting to process in the watching. The series is both fascinating and disturbing at how well it portrays the mundanity of fascist life. The stakes haven’t changed at all from the scenarios of The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s still disturbing to watch these young women navigate the benign norms of teen social orders and then see them act out the sadism of their patriarchal regime. What helps smooth out the rough tonal patches is the throughline of the outside resistance infiltrating the Gilead system as they plant moles who will give these girls an opportunity to take off their blinders.

Much like The Testaments book, the series is told from three perspectives. The pilot, titled “Precious Flowers,” and the second episode, “Perfect Teeth,” as well as several others are told through the eyes of Agnes (Chase Infiniti), a teen on the cusp of puberty and still designated as a Plum girl in training. More importantly, and unbeknownst to her, Agnes is the Gilead-kidnapped daughter of June (Moss) and Luke (O-T Fagbenle) from The Handmaid’s Tale.

The second narrator is Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a Pearl girl managed by Aunt Lydia (Dowd, reprising her role) and her equally restrictive teachers. Always dressed in austere white outfits, she is one of the female teens from the outside world who were either recruited into Gilead or taken by force, then retrained to be “godly” servants. On the surface, Daisy acts like a pious recruit who is tasked by Lydia to get to know her fellow students, but she’s holding back secrets of her own that get revealed – thankfully – sooner than later.

Aunt Lydia provides the third narrative perspective, particularly in the episode “Stadium,” where her pre-Gilead origin story is expanded upon from what we knew in The Handmaid’s Tale. Otherwise in this series, we’re observing an evolved, post-The Handmaid’s Tale Lydia who is far more weathered by the loss of her favorite handmaidens and has fully learned the hypocrisy of the Gilead patriarchy through ruthless loss, giving the character fresh motivation.

While many of the details of the season are under review embargo, what I can say is that the series is a satisfying, slow-building thriller. Characters are slowly defined by their actions in the present and through flashbacks about their lives before Gilead. The season does take its time creating urgency, which is going to tax less patient viewers; ultimately, there are rewards in observing these separate factions creep towards a united goal of undermining Gilead’s shaky hold on power.

Early episodes lay a lot of foundation for audiences to understand the doctrines and strict penalties imposed upon the girls of Gilead, and that’s important, as several of them will find reasons to rebel from within as they experience the darker sides of their world. Agnes, in particular, is eager to achieve the milestones of their society, yet she also possesses the internal musings of a rebel who’s not entirely sure about what everyone is asking her to give up and accept without question. Chase Infiniti is very good at playing Agnes’ warring morals as she barrels towards puberty to become a Green girl, eligible to be married off to a much older Commander. Halliday is an equally spirited scene partner for Infiniti as the two girls attract and repel one another in various situations as they decide if one another is to be trusted.

The Testaments is almost more sobering for exposing how fascist and patriarchal regimes start their control from the womb. There are fairly frequent sequences that had me wincing in disgust, but that’s because they cut a little too close to the bone in our current times. The truth is that Gilead remains some folks’ foulest desires put into action, where the most subjugated readily accept their subservience because so much work has been done to make sure they know nothing else. But all regimes fall, and that’s what Miller, Atwood, and this series are laying bare for audiences to witness and internalize. Their thesis remains that even the best laid authoritarian plans can’t quell the power of rebellion, and perhaps The Testaments is a potent reminder that the young, and women, can save us all.

The original Super Meat Boy was built all around speed and precision; regularly demanding players make unbelievable jumps at high velocity, land on a box the size of Meat Boy himself, jump again while maintaining momentum, all while avoiding saw blades, insta-death salt waterfalls, and all forms of other hazards along the way. That’s hard enough to do in 2D, so the idea of requiring that level of precision while also contending with a Z-Axis made the thought of a 3D Super Meat Boy seem like an unsolvable puzzle.

I’ll say straight up that even though the attempt is respectable, Super Meat Boy 3D does not completely solve this problem. Far too many of my deaths came from frustratingly jumping straight towards a wall or platform, only to find out that I was actually slightly behind or slightly in front of it, causing poor Meat Boy to jump towards nothing and turn into super meat paste. Fortunately, levels are so short and respawns are so quick that deaths are just a slight inconvenience, and much of that frustration is forgivable when you consider how well developers Sluggerfly and Team Meat have managed to preserve the spirit and unique feel of Meat Boy, resulting in an uneven, but nevertheless entertaining follow-up to an all-time classic.

If you’re unfamiliar with the 2010 Xbox Live Arcade original, Super Meat Boy was a 2D platformer about a cube of meat, chasing after an evil fetus in a suit and top hat, trying to save his girlfriend, who happens to be a cube of bandages. Levels were lightning quick, often lasting no more than 30-45 seconds, enabling the level design to focus on extremely difficult and hyper-precise platforming that you were expected to die over and over again to.

The easiest way to describe Super Meat Boy 3D then, is to simply point at the title. This is the same Super Meat Boy, but as a 3D precision platformer instead of a 2D one. The story of Meat Boy chasing Dr. Fetus is the same, there are once again five worlds, each world is capped off with a boss battle that mostly just requires you to dodge three phases of increasingly difficult hazards, there are Dark World versions of every level unlocked by getting A+ ranks on the Light World versions, and unlockable guest characters from a variety of other indie games gained by finding hidden bandages within a level.

It’s a formula that works to great effect once again, providing players of different skill levels with a layered set of goals with satisfying rewards that all serve to expand what would otherwise be a relatively short run time. The base goal of beating all of the light world levels took me about 4 hours, then I spent another four hours getting A+ ranks on all of those levels to unlock the Dark World levels, and now I’m in the middle of a Dark World playthrough, and after that I could look towards finding all of the bandages and unlocking all of the characters, which is a daunting task since not only do you have to find the hidden bandage in a level, but you also have to clear it without dying with the bandage in tow. So while the base game is fairly short, getting everything Super Meat Boy 3D has to offer will take quite a bit of time, and the completionist route has some tantalizing rewards in the form of more levels and characters that each approach levels in a different way.

The Dreaded Z-Axis

On the gameplay side of things, Super Meat Boy 3D does a great job of translating the feel and movement of Meat Boy into the third dimension. He’s super fast, stops on a dime, can either leap 50 yards ahead with a full press and hold of the jump button, or do the shortest of short hops with just a light tap of it, conveniently giving him just enough height to jump over a saw blade. The level design, especially in the harder stages demands a lot from the player, and fortunately the controls are tight enough to enable you to meet those demands.

That said, there’s certainly a learning curve when it comes to controlling Meat Boy in 3D. By default, Meat Boy’s movement snaps in 45 degree increments, even when using the control stick, meaning he basically can only run in 8 directions. For some levels, this is helpful because it prevents you from drifting to a side when all you need to do is or jump in a straight line. That slight amount of drift could be all that it takes to make you unaligned with an upcoming platform or wall. But on the other side of that, being restricted to only 8 directions can make movement feel imprecise and sticky. It’s a learning curve that I eventually overcame, but it never feels perfect, which is a word I would use to describe the controls and feel of the original game.

Sluggerfly and Team Meat smartly added a new air dash ability to Meat Boy’s limited repertoire of techniques that allows him to instantly halt his momentum and dash in a direction, which is great because it’s much harder to judge distance in 3D than it is in 2D, and having the ability to instantly correct yourself if you overshot a jump, or quickly latch on to a wall after leaping around a corner is a godsend. Not to mention it makes for great high risk movement tech since you can do a short hop into an airdash for a quick boost of speed that’s faster than just straight up running, which is especially fun when trying to find ways to shave off an extra second or two of your fastest times while going for A+ ranks.

The level design does a good job of introducing new hazards and types of platforming challenges at a steady pace to keep the game fresh. You’ll go from straight forward obstacle courses where you just need to hop on a bunch of platforms while avoiding all varieties of sawblades, to vertically oriented levels that have you sliding down walls and making leaps of faith through openings in the ground, to speed focused levels where you have to move fast to avoid getting exploded by missile turrets, etc. Every level has a distinct feel, and even while they might use the same traps or hazards, they always twist them in a certain way that makes them feel new.

Despite that though, the actual quality of levels in Super Meat Boy 3D is pretty inconsistent, and the bad ones are usually bad because of perspective issues. There is a little red ring that always appears underneath your character to let you know where they actually are, relative to the ground, but the ground isn’t always at eye level, and when you’re making giant leaps over large gaps in an attempt to wall cling to platform that’s off center, trying to find the right angle to approach from can feel like a guessing game that usually ends up in death. Dying is all part of the process in SMB3D, with each death teaching you a lesson about timing, or a trap that came out too fast for you to react to on the first go around, or how hard you should be pressing the jump button, etc. But deaths to perspective or camera issues don’t teach anything. They’re just empty lessons that do nothing but build frustration.

Spoilers follow for Invincible Season 4, Episode 5, “Give Us a Moment,” which is available on Prime Video now.

If you’ve been wondering what creator Robert Kirkman has been calling Invincible’s most brutal scene to date, look no further than this week’s climax. The current season’s fifth episode proves the show works best when contrasting moments of quietly affecting drama with physically wince-inducing scenes. It doesn’t always get this balance right, but it most certainly does here in what proves to be a pivotal entry — not to mention a much needed step up from Episode 4’s meandering underworld detour.

Last week’s cliffhanger saw Nolan returning to Earth for the first time since leaving as a barbaric conqueror. And while he’s done plenty of introspecting in the meantime — thanks in part to Allen, without whom he would’ve gladly embraced dying — this doesn’t change much for the people who once knew and loved him. “Give Us a Moment” kicks off with the anticipated reunion between father and son, as Nolan tries to gently recruit Mark while laying out the stakes: He can stay behind if he wants, but the Viltrum empire will make its way to him eventually, leaving him without much of a choice. The timing of this recruitment couldn’t be worse, since Eve was just about to come clean about her pregnancy, but she decides not to after a family dinner with the Graysons.

Since Nolan and Mark crossed paths after his departure, perhaps even more anticipated is the uneasy reunion between Nolan and his ex-wife Debbie, who’s been desperately trying to rebuild a normal life. Their confrontation is impeccably staged, with Debbie avoiding eye contact, and actress Sandra Oh doing the heavy lifting through her shuddering voice performance, letting out her mounting frustrations in ways that call Nolan’s ongoing arc into question. He’s apologetic, sure, but who is he really apologizing for?

Shortly thereafter, he catches up with Art as well, who — in his own words, about only designing suits for heroes — turns down Nolan’s request for a new costume, while also letting him know what he thinks of his former friend. This new Nolan wouldn’t hurt his former pal, but Art doesn’t know that, and lets out a deeply-held breath the moment he leaves, as though he expected their reunion to go sideways. Without directly confronting it, this makes for a superb way to further highlight the dichotomy between Nolan’s soul-searching and making actual amends: People are still terrified of the villainous Omni-Man, and rightly so. On a secondary note, this chat also addresses a small but valuable change in design: Nolan’s new barefooted onesie, which he says keeps him grounded. And while that may be true, the reason it works in a visual sense is that it makes him appear more vulnerable. So, as much as he may receive well deserved dressings-down from former allies, he still occupies an empathetic presence on screen, à la Kill Bill’s the Bride or Die Hard’s John McClane.

As eager as Nolan is to make amends with Mark, Debbie and Art, he concocts seemingly altruistic reasons to stay away from Oliver, the only person who might actually want to see him. Spurned by his father’s rejection, the younger Grayson sibling decides to test his heroism by joining Mark on his interstellar journey to fight the Viltrumites, forcing an explanation out of Nolan in the process. He also insists on going in order to protect his mom, which is all kinds of heart-melting, and although it brings with it the realization that we don’t see much of what else is at stake for him, that we don’t really know much about his non-superhero life might just tragically suggest that, even at his tender age, he doesn’t really have one.

The Graysons are joined, on their weeks’ long voyage, by the Earthbound, mecha anime-inspired hero Tech Jacket, aka Zoe — a gender-bent version of Zach from Kirman’s Tech Jacket comics — who makes for a jovial presence, and whose transforming nanotech adds some interesting visual wrinkles to this week’s proceedings. But before we dive into any action, the show (as is its MO) presents us with another musical montage, this time set to the thoughtful sounds of Omar Apollo’s “Drifting.” The newfangled superhero troupe gets acquainted, but Nolan is left at an emotional distance, an image interspersed with a remorseful flashback of him first dating Debbie — which, in retrospect, is essentially him entrapping her for the purpose of breeding a genocidal heir.

However, before Nolan can deal with these emotional burdens, a crisis arises aboard their spaceship. The Grayson trio are separated from the rest of the team in outer space. It turns out a trio of Viltrum warriors have attacked, and among them is a ruthless, revenge-seeking Conquest, who Jeffrey Dean Morgan voices with a sinister snarl. This rematch with Mark breaks out quicker than expected, only now it comes with the added weight of Conquest having gravely injured Eve the last time they met, and having nearly killed Mark as well. He turns his sights on Oliver this time, nearly squashing his head like a grape, but this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the episode’s brutality.

While it’s not quite clear who the robotic figures shooting at the heroes are — more Viltrumites? Their alien slaves? Perhaps some kind of robots? — the fistfights themselves crackle with momentum and blood-curling impact, while emotionally charged character moments unfold between Nolan and his sons. The embattled characters eventually land on a desert planet, where Mark and Conquest engage in some of the most sickening violence on the show thus far, as our young hero tries to choke the life out of the aged soldier until his face turns gray and eyes fill up with blood. Conquest in turn spears his arm all the way through Mark’s torso before slowly disemboweling him, as the two remain locked in twitchy, squelching agony.

Jesus Christ.

By a hair, Mark emerges the victor before passing out. Even the most hardened viewers will likely find these images tough to swallow, and as an extension of both last season’s climax, and of Mark’s newfound commitment to doing whatever is necessary, it feels like the curling of a monkey’s paw. Sure, it’s the fight we might have wanted, but that it takes such barbaric form is sure to leave the season in a markedly different place next week.

Thankfully, the episode ends with a comedic button as Allen and Zoe, disguised together within the Tech Jacket suit, hide out on the surface of the Viltrumite ship (in Millenium Falcon fashion). Like Art letting out a sigh when Nolan finally leaves, it’s a much needed relief after some of the series’ most unrelenting, vicious intensity.

Spoilers follow for Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episodes 2 and 3, which are streaming on Disney+ now.

Adding a bit of added context to what is now a two-episode combo review: I wrote rough early versions of my Born Again Season 2 episode reviews as I watched the advance screeners for the season for the first time, so that both my reactions and any speculation on what’s to come are “pure.” But with Disney+ making the late decision to put out the second and third episode together – while all the rest of Season 1 will still be released one episode at a time – I will reiterate that the season improves after a slower start, and I can see why they decided they’d rather get through these first three quicker.

Jumping into Episode 2, after he saved Matt from offscreen in the premiere, we’ve got Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) back in the flesh and blood again. And he seems to be in a strange headspace, acting like the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen's own guardian devil and maybe his shadow of sorts? Dex’s decision to seek refuge in Clinton Church, and even ask to see Sister Maggie – Matt’s mother – is a fascinating turn of events, especially looking back at Daredevil Season 3, where Dex was impersonating Daredevil.

He truly seems to mean no harm to Matt and his loved ones, at least currently, as he targeted those AVTF agents coming for Cherry at the hospital. Having once literally stood in Matt’s DD boots, does he now want to walk his path in a less overtly monstrous, yet still decidedly lethal, way? Wilson Bethel has always been great as Bullseye and it’s exciting to see him get what feels likely to be a more expanded role this time out, after he was only at the beginning and end of Season 1 (thanks to only being added during that season’s extensive creative overhaul).

Episode 2 manages to make the AVTF even more hateable and to even more pointedly echo current events as we saw more of how they operate in that sequence where Soledad (Ashley Marie Ortiz) and Angela (Camila Rodriguez), the wife and niece of the late Hector Ayala/White Tiger, got caught up in an escalating series of events at the bodega. Everything we saw that AVTF guy do when stumbling upon some teens stealing booze only made things worse, including calling Soledad’s hand on his arm “assault” and hauling her away, making it very understandable why the locals were so up in arms. It also served to make it very satisfying seeing Daredevil beat the hell out of some more AVTF guys later on when they tried to take in Josie. I just wish Angela was a more fleshed-out character to give greater weight to her getting ahold of her uncle’s amulet and clearly aiming to take over the White Tiger identity, as she did in the comics.

The dream Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) has about Dex hunting her felt a bit weird, and played a bit goofy visually, especially on the heels of Heather’s Muse visions being introduced. Unless there’s some outside influence causing these things to happen, it’s a bit redundant to have both occurring simultaneously.

That dream pushes Vanessa to suggest to Fisk they leave New York entirely for their private island, in what is a questionable shift for her character. Her entire arc since we’ve met her has been about her becoming more of Fisks’s true match, his Queenpin if you will. This included last season where she was upset by Wilson suggesting they back away from their criminal activities for his mayoral image, and was proud of what she’d accomplished while he was gone and she took charge. To now have her switch to wanting them to flee feels off.

BB being the one making the Mayor Kingpin videos is hardly a surprise, given she was the most obvious character to be doing it, but that’s fine since they let us know so early in the season. And I liked her conversation with Daniel about Fisk, where it’s clear she’d like to get him to see why he should turn against his boss - even as he continues to only want to look at how he’s personally benefiting and ignore the actual awfulness going on around him.

Fisk knowing Matt is Daredevil is one of those plot points that can be fun but also tricky to navigate, because there are scenarios where one would presume he’d finally just reveal it. That being the case, it was gratifying to have Buck bring up the idea to Fisk here. Some may argue against Fisk’s logic that revealing it now would only complicate matters with the public, given Matt Murdock saved Fisk’s life, but I think it sounds like a credible concern. And like Matt himself said, in grim admiration, Fisk instead calling on the city to find the missing, oh-so heroic Matt is a wickedly clever way to make it much more difficult for him to stay hidden.

As for Episode 3, it was the stronger of the two new episodes, and it must be said that Born Again Season 2 sure is giving good billy club action! It felt like DD was already using that weapon more than ever in the previous episodes, but the third episode’s concluding action sequence went especially big on the billy in some rather thrilling ways. There was even an awesome, Sam Raimi-style point of view shot as the club flew through the air into the face of an AVTF a-hole.

For many reasons, this action sequence was the best one yet for Season 2, as Matt broke out all of Kingpin’s underground prisoners, including Jack Duquesne, the Swordsman. We not only got great Daredevil fighting moments here, but great Swordsman ones as well, as the two teamed up for a good old-fashioned oner, with Jack using pipes as his impromptu swords and once more showing how good he is in a fray too - for the first time since Hawkeye’s finale nearly five (!) years ago. Tony Dalton seemed to be having as much fun as Jack was, punctuated by his huge grin when Jack was handed a weapon to use by Daredevil. The end of the oner (yes, yes, there were plenty of spots where the hidden edits could be placed, as is usually the case with these things) had a very funny punchline too, with Daredevil yelling “MOVE!” to the freed prisoners.

As noted above, this episode was a step up for Season 3, bringing more forward momentum and excitement with it. The storyline with the half-sunken tanker was starting to feel too drawn out, so it’s good to have that sucker blown up at the end (though it sure sucks for the patsies Fisk was willing to let die after Mr. Charles suggested this out to get his weapons).

But wait just a second: Is Heather Glenn pulling a Tommy Jarvis?! For those who aren’t familiar with Friday the 13th lore, young Tommy killed Jason in the fourth F13 movie, and then we got repeated hints Tommy was potentially going to take on the Jason persona himself for a couple of movies - including seeing Tommy with a hockey mask in his drawer. All of which feels pretty reminiscent of Heather pulling that Muse mask out of her desk. Of course, all the Tommy as Jason teases never paid off, as he never actually went full psycho killer, so let’s see if Heather mimics Tommy fully or goes down a bloodier path.

Taking Heather in this direction is amusing but also feels rather random, as the writers attempt to figure out what to do with this character. Better served right now is Kirsten McDuffie, who was another one of Season 1’s undercooked new characters. With Matt off the grid, Kirsten is essentially getting to represent the lawyerly side of things that is usually a key part of Daredevil stories, stepping up on her own to defend Jack in court. Nikki M. James and Tony Dalton played well off each other, as they planned his defense and discussed how dire things are, with Jack evoking the Reign of Terror no less.

It was funny and a bit jarring to hear Matt go full Batman and use a fake, overly gravely voice to talk to Kirsten so she wouldn’t recognize Daredevil’s voice. I do feel like this is a place where maybe we just go with comic book logic/suspension of disbelief and let him talk more normally? But mileage will vary.

Though she’d been referenced a few times, it was pushing credibility to not have New York’s governor directly intervene with what Fisk was getting away with, so happily that was rectified here. Lily Taylor is a terrific choice to play Governor Marge McCaffrey, selling both the audience and Fisk on why she’d let things play out previously (including that old chestnut, voter popularity), but no longer was going to give him that luxury. And hey, it’s a Mystic Pizza reunion for Vincent D’Onofrio and Taylor!

Additional Devilish Thoughts:

• Why do Matt and Karen hide from Angie Kim when she comes to Josie’s, given she was part of the first big meeting of Daredevil’s resistance last season? Do they not trust her with the info that Matt (who, to be fair, she doesn’t know is Daredevil) is alive? That seems a weird line to have with her given they know for certain she’s anti-Fisk and presumably wouldn’t reveal anything.
• Cole’s alive?! It seemed like he was pretty dead when Matt’s apartment blew up with him inside in the Season 1 finale, and even accepting that he survived, I don’t know about him already being back in fighting shape just a few months later, with just a some facial scaring to show for it, but ah well, we can roll with it.
• It was good to have Matt and Karen ask a question we’re asking, which is where the hell is the Punisher, especially given we know he’s well aware of what Fisk is up to. Presumably his upcoming Disney+ special will answer that question.
• Kirsten taking note of so many things she heard as she was being brought into Fisk’s underground jail blindfolded was a little bit silly – it’s not like she has Matt’s powers to observe to such an extreme extent – but also still pretty fun, since you just knew it was going to pay off like it did, with Matt following the path she laid out for him.
• Buck remains a bit overly dry of a presence, but his interplay with Daniel, including trying his first street corner hot dog in a funny bit of interplay, and the reveal of his Special Ops past, adds some new layers.
• It’s not surprising, given the Sony of it all, that BB’s latest Mayor Kingpin video left out any footage of Spider-Man when showing various NYC vigilantes, but we did get a loose reference to him at least with her “Friendly Neighborhood Task Force” quip.
• Another cool thing about the final action sequence in Episode 3 was that it felt like Matt was using the full extent of his radar sense abilities in a way that isn’t always as centered in other fight scenes, with some visual nods towards him hearing and sensing things throughout the fight in a way that gave him a believable edge.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie hits theaters on April 1.

Illumination, the folks who brought you those sweet little yellow hench-dudes, is back with their second crack at one of the most iconic video game franchises of all time, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Their first Super Mario Bros. Movie was a real lesson in simple and efficient adaptation, but that’s a job that gets tougher when you expand from World to a Galaxy.

The great, and sometimes terrible, thing about adapting something truly beloved to the big screen is that it has the potential to be just as good a movie as it was in a different form. The trick in re-skinning these iconic books or comics or video games or whatever they were before they became movies is figuring out what made them popular in the first place and focusing on that. There’s no small amount of pressure in that decision. It’s an important one, the most important one in fact because if you get it wrong nothing else in the movie is going to work.

To that end, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie focuses squarely on all the stuff. This movie is packed wall-to-wall with Easter eggs and references and what seems like every character Nintendo as a company has ever dreamed up and rendered as, at minimum, 8-bit sprites. In fact, there are entire locations in this movie, crowded and bustling spots we didn’t get to see in the first film, that are used as devices for dropping countless characters on screen as blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos.

The look of the movie should make even the casual, old-school Mario fans happy as well. There are design elements with built-in, story-based reasons for existing that organically call up the original NES game’s side-scrolling look, even down to the 8-bit animation. The way Bryan Tyler’s score riffs on practically every iconic piece of music Mario Bros. games have ever featured is a cheat code to me grinning. There’s even a little nod to the 1993 film with a pair of characters travelling through a weird little digital wall and arriving in a clearly Blade Runner-inspired world on the other side. All the bases are covered where the references and Easter eggs and subtle-nods to hyper-specific corners of the Mario games are concerned.

And that’s cool! There were a handful of moments that had me saying, “Oh hey, look, it’s that guy! I remember beating that level when I was a kid!” out loud in the theater, probably annoying the guy sitting next to me. So that level of this video game adaptation is cleared. Job well done. But the Princess of making a truly good movie is in another castle.

Yes, Illumination, directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, writer Matthew Fogel and everybody else on the creative team made a fun-to-look-at collection of Mario’s greatest hits, but all of those bells and whistles just make a movie OK. Those are the things that show a pedigree, that the creators have done their homework and we can trust them with a brand and a bunch of characters that we care about.

But what you need to make a movie better than that is, quite simply, something to care about. There’s not traditionally a ton of story with Super Mario Bros. There’s lore of course, but nothing that you can really directly adapt into a whole movie. What was so savvy about The Super Mario Bros. Movie from 2023 was that underneath the Rainbow Roads and Kong Armies was a story about two brothers out to prove themselves as worth a damn, to prove all the doubters wrong and stick together while they’re doing it. It’s a simple and relatable (overly-familiar even) story we’ve all seen a hundred times, but it should be when you’re pipe-warping to the Mushroom Kingdom to fight a fire-breathing turtle. When those are the stakes, stick with an emotional plot we can get behind and not ask too many questions about, and just re-skin it as a Mario Bros. story. There’s a built-in connection to all audiences there, dressed up as a classic video game by people who clearly love it. That’s what carried the 2023 movie, but that’s also what’s very much missing in this one.

Yes of course there is a plot in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and it’s one that ought to have an emotional weight to it. Bowser Jr. wants to rescue his father and he wants to do it in an impressive way. In the process, the entire web of characters gets pulled together in a way that, from an A to B to C story point of view, makes sense. Mario and Luigi obviously have their history with Bowser that they need to move on from, Peach finds another adventure to go on that might give her answers about her past, Bowser himself deals with some issues he has with the type of father he was to Bowser Jr., and so on.

Any one of those dynamics could’ve done the trick, but the film is so crowded. None of those relationships have a chance to stand out from the others, and as a result, the movie doesn’t really give you a reason to care. Even a burgeoning, aww-shucks romance between Mario and Peach is brought up and forgotten. Toad actually says it best when he’s first introduced to Yoshi: “Some dinosaur shows up and he’s just part of the team now?”

Yeah, Toad, unfortunately that’s just going to be how it works with this sequel. This is the biggest challenge with expanding something like this. You risk missing out on some of the characters that were great the first go round in favor of tacking on the new ones. There’s just not enough room. I wanted more Donkey Kong, but instead I got a little bit of Rosalina.

It’s a double-edged sword, this movie. On the one hand, all of those Mario references are exactly what the movie needs, but on the other hand, there’s no focus to them and that issue even intrudes on the story as well. There are a few scenes that feel lifted straight out of other movies, one in particular that’s an obvious riff on two very popular animated movies rolled into one. It gives the impression that sequences were reverse-engineered to fit the references in as opposed to figuring out how to get the references to work organically in the story, but when other films have done it recently and, frankly, better, the strategy can backfire.

To get back to some positives for a moment, I will also say that the action is actually pretty good. This is something that Illumination really excels at. The Despicable Me series, Minions included, has some of the wildest animated action set pieces, and the fight scenes here are genuinely fun. Peach and Toad kicking ass in the casino feels closer to The Matrix sequels than a kids movie. The first encounter with Bowser Jr. has some three-against-one wuxia flavor to it as well. This fight is so intricate, in fact, that I found myself wondering how a guy who was just a plumber a few years ago got so good at fisticuffs. It obviously didn’t ruin the experience for me but it got dangerously close to exemplifying what happens when there’s no story to care about. If those are the threads you want to pull on, then you are not a fan of the movie.

Ultimately, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie suffers through the same pitfalls that a lot of sequels do, even though successful franchising is kind of Illumination’s whole deal, as most of their movies have at least one sequel. This one definitely gets bigger, as a good sequel ought to do. But if the title of The Super Mario Bros. Movie indicates a movie about the sibling plumbers, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie tells us this movie is about everything else. In the balancing act of working in every bit of Mario that fans might expect, while grounding the story in something relatable and worth caring about, the filmmakers leaned more towards the former.

Again, that’s not without its charm. Even the custom Illumination logo before the movie starts is an original Donkey Kong reference starring the Minions. They got me in a good mood before the lights were even all the way dimmed. And that’s what I meant when I started this review talking about the great and terrible potential inherent in these movies. The fact that this group of filmmakers clearly knows and loves the Mario Galaxy is great. The issue is that charm alone is what saves this movie from being really forgettable.

Every year, Samsung launches a new ‘Ultra’ phone, and while it would be nice to see something a little bit, well, different than the same glass slab that we get every time, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is still an attractive device.

Because while it does look remarkably similar to the S25 Ultra that came before, it’s still packing the most powerful mobile chipset on the market, and some excellent cameras. Samsung is really focusing on AI software this time around, but more than anything, the S26 Ultra is just a really good high-end smartphone, and that’s all it really needs to be.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra – Design and Features

The Galaxy S26 Ultra looks just like the S25 Ultra. It has the same squared-off edges and rounded corners, and even what looks like the same camera bump, with five lenses jutting out of the back of the device. But just because the device looks similar to its predecessor doesn’t mean it's ugly – the Galaxy S26 Ultra is still a gorgeous device, especially if you can get it in a brighter color.

However, it would have been nice if Samsung took a note from the iPhone 17 Pro Max that came out late last year. Because while the camera bump on the S26 Ultra is far from the most extreme I’ve ever seen, it did not feel great going back to a phone that wobbles any time I lay it flat on a table. That can be mitigated with the right case, but for a $1,299 phone like this, anything that feels annoying without an added accessory doesn’t feel great.

And, just like with other phones with a camera bump, the S26 Ultra is thin, measuring just 7.9mm thick. That’s thinner than the iPhone 17 Pro Max, despite having a similarly powerful SoC and some serious camera.

The device Samsung sent me for review is the Cobalt Violet colorway. At first glance, it looks like the same dark-gray-black color option that’s so popular on high-end phones, but under the right light it gives off a really cool purple tint. It does seem that even the brighter colorways for this phone are subtle, but you can always slap a case on the phone to make it stand out a bit more.

Also like its predecessor, the buttons on the Galaxy S26 Ultra are all found on the right side of the display. There’s a volume rocker at the top, along with the lock button on the side. Unlike something like the Galaxy Z Fold 7, though, the lock button does not double as a fingerprint reader – that’s instead built into the display itself.

Down at the bottom, you’ll find the USB-C charging and data port, along with the SIM tray and the S-Pen. There’s also a little slot there, but don’t get excited if you’re looking for a microSD slot – it’s just the speaker. You also won’t find a card reader in the SIM tray, like on past flagship Galaxy devices, so you’re going to want to make sure you get the right storage configuration when you buy the device.

Samsung is kind of known for putting excellent displays on its phone, and the Galaxy S26 Ultra is definitely no different. You get a 6.9-inch dynamic AMOLED display at 3120 x 1440, with a refresh rate up to 120Hz. It’s gorgeous. I’ve spent a few weeks with this phone at this point, mostly due to a bout of the flu, but in that time I’ve been glued to this screen. Colors are vivid and shows, games, and comics look excellent here.

The higher refresh rate can cause the battery to drain a little bit faster, of course, but these fast displays have come a long way in the last few years, to the point where they’re paired with some of the best battery life I’ve had in a phone in a while.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra – Software and AI

For the last two or three years, Samsung has been making a huge deal of the AI features built into its Galaxy phones, and I’m still not sure I see the hype. I even made it a point to turn on all the AI features when I was setting up the phone, and I haven’t really noticed the difference.

The most obvious thing it’s doing is the Now Brief, which has been around for a couple of generations at this point. At a glance, it tells me what the next thing on my calendar is, but I can click on it to get a feed of news, weather, and YouTube videos it thinks I’ll enjoy. However, I’m still not sure how intelligent this system is, as it recommends me playlists on Spotify, which I’ve never opened on the phone, instead of Apple Music, which I’ve used daily since I took the Galaxy S26 Ultra out of the box. Maybe it’s holding a grudge, who knows?

However, there are some more subtle features that Galaxy AI can help with. One of the big things is Call Assist, which can auto-screen calls. Since enabling it, I haven’t been notified about a single robocall, and it’ll give you a handy little transcript of any call it intercepts.

Beyond that, there’s of course a wealth of tools to do everything from writing your text messages to editing your photos. But these tools have been available for so long, and they work exactly like you’d expect them to here, with mixed results. The real star of the show for Galaxy AI is the stuff that’s less flashy, screening your calls, translating them and transcribing them. Same as it ever was.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra – Gaming and Performance

With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is obviously going to be a fast phone, but it seems to be tuned more for productivity than gaming. Because while the GPU in the chip is more powerful, the CPU performance improvement really is the star of the show. This chip also has a beefy NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which really does help all the AI features on the phone feel snappy.

For instance, in Geekbench, which tests pure CPU performance, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra performed in line with the Redmagic 11 Pro and OnePlus 15, which have the same chipset. In the single-core test, the S26 Ultra gets 3517 points, compared to 3683 from the OnePlus 15. Then, in the multi-core test, the Samsung flagship gets 11229 points, outperforming the 10100 points scored by the OnePlus 15.

Likewise in the Geekbench Vulkan graphics test, the Galaxy S26 Ultra gets 28270 points, compared to 27972 points from the OnePlus 15, which is huge for tasks like on-device video editing. However, the results are completely reversed in 3DMark.

The S26 is relatively stable in 3DMark, scoring 80.6% stability in the Steel Nomad Light stress test, meaning that over a 10-minute burn, results only fluctuated by about 20%. But that’s likely because the chip wasn’t being pushed as hard as it could have been.

In the Steel Nomad Light test, the S26 Ultra only gets 2245 points, compared to 2870 points from the OnePlus 15, a pretty massive 27% difference. Then, in the Wild Life Extreme test, the S26 Ultra gets 5758 points, compared to 7111 points from the OnePlus 15, which is about a 23% shortfall. I’ve tested and retested the Galaxy S26 Ultra in these tests probably dozens of times across a couple system updates, and gaming performance just does not seem to be the S26 Ultra’s strong suit. For a better option there, you'll want one of the best gaming phones.

That’s not to say that the Galaxy S26 can’t play games though. In my time with the phone I’ve been playing everything from Wuthering Waves to MTG Arena, and I haven’t really noticed any kind of performance slowdown.

Luckily, like any other Galaxy phone for the last couple of years, the S26 Ultra does come with a gaming overlay, which you can open over a mobile game by swiping from a little rectangle on the screen. From here, you can put the phone into a higher-performance profile, which should help with gaming performance.

The Privacy Screen

A lot about the Galaxy S26 Ultra seems like it was ripped wholecloth from the S25 Ultra, but the biggest new feature here is something altogether new – a built-in software-controlled Privacy Display. This will adjust the display’s pixels in such a way that reduces the screen’s viewing angle. In other words, it makes it hard for anyone to see what’s on your screen while peeking over your shoulder or sitting next to you. And, well, it works extremely well! I even actively asked my partner to try and look at the screen over my shoulder, and she couldn’t do it, which is huge if you’re either constantly dealing with sensitive information, or if you just have some nosy friends.

However, while it is effective, having it on gives the display this weird gray finish that washes out a lot of the colors. You can mitigate this by only enabling it when you have a notification or on certain apps, but it does make the phone a bit less pretty to look at either way.

I ended up turning off the display about a week into using the Galaxy S26 Ultra, but I typically don’t use my phone to do anything super sensitive anyways. The dimmer display started to be kind of a drag, but if privacy is your main concern, that’s a small pill to swallow to protect your information. Either way, it’s a genuinely useful feature as well as altogether novel, and something I'm sure plenty of people hope becomes a standard option on more phones going forward.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra – Camera

Not much has changed for the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s camera. You’re still getting a 200MP wide main shooter on the back, along with a 50MP ultrawide and a 50MP telephoto lens. Basically, the same layout found on the S25 Ultra from 2025. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Photos are nice and vibrant, capturing plenty of detail. Even at night, I was surprised by how well it maintains detail, even in darker parts of the scene. For instance, I found a ridiculously huge pile of snow in New Bedford a couple weeks ago, and took a photo when it was dark out. The snow pile itself was brightly lit, so obviously it looks fine, but even the windows in the background have all of their detail, with nearly no noise until you start zooming in on it.

The front facing camera is less powerful, with a 12MP selfie lens. It’s serviceable, to be sure, but it doesn’t take the best photos, especially if you’re not in the best light. However, I will say that the software processing in the background isn’t too extreme, but obviously there are AI tools built into the camera and gallery apps if you’re into that kind of thing.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra – Battery Life

The Galaxy S26 Ultra’s gaming performance is a touch disappointing, but at least it comes with some great battery life. Even with my heavy use, I can expect the S26 Ultra to last a good 30 hours before I need to plug it in again, at least from a full charge.

I hardly ever charge my phone up to full, though, and even when I’m only charging the phone up to 50 or 60%, I can expect the phone to last a strong 12 hours before I need to plug it in – and I’m one of those sickos that uses the always-on display.

If you’re a bit more conservative with your battery use, you can easily make the Galaxy S26 last two full days on a full charge. Samsung claims that the phone can get 31 hours of battery life, but honestly after spending about a month with the phone, I think it’s being a bit too safe there.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

The Drama will be released in theaters on April 3.

The tale of an engagement pushed to its limits, Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama is a jet-black, white-knuckle dramedy in which a secret upends a young couple’s domestic bliss. Although marketed as having a major plot twist, the film features no such thing, and practically flies out the gate with its uniquely disturbing premise. However, in the interest of letting eager viewers absorb its delights unimpeded, you’ll find a handy spoiler warning before we get into details – though it’s fair to say The Drama isn’t exactly the kind of movie you can spoil. It’s a weird, wonderful hybrid of cultural and aesthetic sensibilities, led by an immensely dialed-in cast who deliver some of their most natural and unnerving performances to date. The result is raucous entertainment that makes you laugh, cringe, and hold your breath at the audacious combination of sympathetic character drama and farcical intensity.

A discombobulated structure ratchets up the tension right from the word go, as enthusiastic English expat and museum curator Charlie (Robert Pattinson) writes his wedding speech, while recalling to his affable best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) how he first met and approached his now-fiancé Emma (Zendaya), a literary editor. As we cut sharply between then and now, the Boston couple’s meet-cute is revealed to be more of a meet-cringe, as Charlie lays out his borderline manipulative approach with a goofy smile. Not realizing that Emma is deaf in one ear, he was given a second chance at a first impression, which makes for an adorable wedding story. But as the movie ping-pongs between past and present, it never lets you feel at ease about who its characters are deep down.

Emma, meanwhile, writes her own speech with her headstrong maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim), Mike’s wife and Charlie’s college buddy. That she doesn’t seem to have old friends of her own isn’t really an issue, at least at first, but it starts to make unfortunate sense once the movie’s pieces click into place. After several days of wedding prep unfold in montage, The Drama finally slows and quiets down for an intimate dinner tasting, where Charlie, Emma, Mike and Rachel indulge in a drinking game of confessing the worst thing they’ve ever done. Charlie, Mike and Rachel get the gist of things, and make unpleasant but juvenile admissions from their teenage years. Emma, however, drops a bombshell about something she nearly did in high school, which — despite not actually coming to fruition — the trio of old friends find hard to comprehend, making her feel further like an outsider.

What follows is, by and large, Charlie’s story of coming undone as he’s unable to fully comprehend what Emma tells him, though not for lack of trying. Meanwhile, Emma begins picturing the gossipy conversations that her confidants might be having behind her back (“Do you want me to beat her up?” Mike asks in one hilarious daydream). As their nuptials draw nearer, these novel tensions keep bubbling to the surface, and the couple’s failures to fully communicate collide with a culturally-specific malaise — expounded upon in darkly funny, deeply disturbing childhood flashbacks. Their relationship gradually tears apart at the seams, culminating in one heck of a schadenfreude-filled wedding climax.

Borgli’s use of alternating sound and silence not only occasionally orients us within Emma’s aural point of view, but it also creates an uncanny soundscape, as unpredictable as his character’s outbursts, and their increasing emotional misalignment. Zendaya, whose film roles generally place a low ceiling upon her — her work on the TV show Euphoria is much more critically acclaimed — is a perfect fit for a young character whose most frequent modes involve witty banter and po-faced introspection on the verge of tears. Emma is a firecracker of a character, at least at first, but she gradually crumbles in on herself, resulting in the kind of dramatic big screen work few directors have ever afforded the Dune and Marvel star.

The film’s main event, however, is Pattinson at his idiosyncratic, pathetic best. Despite starting out as a YA heartthrob, his interviews have hinted at the kind of strange, awkward, self-effacing energy one rarely sees from his chiseled, square-jawed type — that is, until films like the Zellner Brothers’ Damsel, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love and Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17. As the flailing Charlie, Pattinson never once sacrifices verisimilitude in pursuit of exploring this sweaty-palmed weirdo, who, on paper, much more closely fits the profile for the kind of gloomy past Emma reveals.

Speaking of which, this detail is likely to rub some viewers the wrong way, given its overt political dimensions and demographic subversions. But the film is — for better or worse — not interested in the broader politics of its incendiary premise, beyond a mild self-awareness about how its focus is a statistical anomaly. That Emma is an unlikely culprit makes her feel all the more misunderstood.

Minor spoilers follow.

The harsh secret Emma reveals at her tasting is that, as a teenager, she planned and almost carried out a mass shooting at her school. That she didn’t go through with it is both a relief, as well as a major curiosity and uncertainty for Charlie (not to mention a point of irony for Haim’s prickly Rachel, who’s especially upset by this revelation despite her own unsavory admission). It’s a distinctly American backdrop, but one the Norwegian writer-director frames through a sardonic lens typical of a Scandinavian indie. Which is by no means to suggest that Borgli doesn’t take Emma’s plight any less seriously; in fact, her flashbacks (where she’s played with heartbreaking remove by young actress Jordyn Curet) are so swiftly interspersed with the “present” scenes that they feel practically contemporary, and as much a part of Emma’s fragile psyche as her wedding planning.

In his efforts to better understand Emma, Charlie becomes the center of some wonderfully poignant abstractions involving Pattinson spending brief time with the younger version of Emma, played by Curet. Although these may take on an unfortunate, unintended double meaning in light of a recent scandal involving Borgli (a resurfaced op-ed on age gaps from 2012), the images themselves are thoughtfully conceived, hinting at the fantasy of truly knowing your partner by facing every facet of their past, and questioning how you might have clicked (if at all) had you known a different version of them.

The Drama runs the emotional gamut as it rattles its audience through a tale of a woman who regrets being vulnerable for the very first time, and a man whose own cultural position as an outsider to the U.S. makes him especially skeptical of a defining part of her childhood. Borgli doesn’t necessarily engage with the movie’s racial optics, beyond acknowledging that they exist (Rachel, for instance, has a malformed view of her own husband’s life as a Black man), but the story’s dramatic contours are no less realistic in their emotional peaks and valleys. They are, at times, so lashing that it’s hard not to be awed by just how fine-tuned the dark comedy ends up being, resulting in nerve-shredding moments of disconnect fighting constantly with the characters’ genuine desire to stay together.

Darwin's Paradox! really taps into the joy and simplicity of a fun cartoon for its quirky alien invasion adventure. With a simple setup of an octopus clumsily trying to survive on land, it gives way to some wacky, slapstick platforming encounters that totally capture the fun, charming vibe of a Saturday morning cartoon. Developer ZDT Studio offers up a plucky puzzle-platformer that carries a lot of energy, but it often struggles to maintain those good times when it gets hung up on overly long, clunky encounters that drag down this otherwise fun jaunt.

Set in a stylized cartoon world that feels in step with Pixar's Finding Nemo, Darwin's Paradox! follows a clever and oddly lucky octopus who is thrust into increasingly zany encounters. After a mysterious, otherworldly presence encroaches upon their underwater home, Darwin and their octopus friend are whisked away to the surface and separated. But it's not enough that Darwin has to figure out how to survive on the surface – it's also a post-alien-invasion Earth, with creatures and machines settled in and planning further domination.

The setting and cartoonish tone of Darwin's Paradox! is a really fun and energetic take on a puzzle-platformer – and it's one of my favorite things about it. With no dialogue for any of its key characters, the story shows a growing escalation of bizarre encounters that Darwin finds themselves in. Along with navigating my way through a seemingly infinite warehouse filled with UFO-branded boxes, I also had to carefully sneak around an alien-occupied shipping dock to avoid the gaze of nearby enemies, which featured some cheeky references to publisher Konami's classics like Frogger and a more front-facing nod to Metal Gear Solid.

The characterization and storytelling are very light throughout its modest five-hour runtime. Still, Darwin's Paradox! and its take on a fish-out-of-water story plays well to the strengths of the lovable character, whose expressive emotions help make their journey feel more lively as the odds get ever hairier. Unfortunately, the modest scope can feel stretched at times, making some environments a bit lacking in personality and a few sections feel overlong. The ending is unsatisfying after a rousing final act, which felt more like a tease of a hopeful sequel than a proper conclusion.

Darwin's Paradox! is similar to the Little Nightmares series in its gameplay, focusing on careful platforming, stealthy movement, and problem-solving with environmental obstacles. It largely sticks to very familiar kinds of encounters and puzzles where you'll have to pull levers and hit buttons to proceed, but where Darwin's Paradox! differs is the slapstick comedy energy that it brings.

It trades the scares and high tension of Little Nightmares for the stylized, comical whimsy of Looney Tunes. This opens up some encounters where you'll use Darwin's abilities to sneak past or even fling yourself up to higher levels to proceed. Some of my favorite moments are when Darwin has to sneak past the invaders while they're doing martial arts training, or when taking on a disguise to try and blend in with enemies. Darwin's journey goes between both the surface and underwater worlds, which opens up a variety of scenarios that help mix up the pacing.

While that gameplay formula stays mostly lean throughout, with only a few sections introducing some game-changing abilities, I appreciated seeing Darwin's abilities get some decent mileage. Along with a camouflage ability to blend into the environment, Darwin can spit ink to hit distant targets or create clouds of concealment underwater. The ability that gets the most use is Darwin's wall-climbing, which allows them to scale walls and grip onto moving platforms.

The platforming throughout is fun and exciting. I enjoyed seeing the slower-paced, methodical encounters culminate in spectacle-driven ones where chaos erupts, and you'll have to Mr. Magoo your way out of certain situations. That said, the movement and precise platforming required to complete these sections can sometimes be a bit too clingy, leading to moments where I attached myself to objects I didn't intend to, which resulted in some sudden deaths.

There are also sudden difficulty spikes in some stages. Some of the more nuanced encounters end up being overpunishing scenarios that push the patience required for trial-and-error, leaving me feeling like Wile E. Coyote running into a brick wall. While there is a hint system in case you get stuck on a challenge, the clues are mostly vague, such as reminders to use the dash button or learn to mind your surroundings. Some of these challenging moments involve simply finding where to go or which objects to interact with.

In one of the more frustrating areas, I had to sneak past sound-detecting machines while hiding out in underwater brush and avoiding spotlights. Darwin's Paradox! generally doesn't give you too much to juggle in terms of complex encounters, but when it does, it can sometimes feel out of step with what came before. It was disappointing to see just how many imbalanced moments there were, which messed with the flow of what was largely an evenly paced experience otherwise.

Still, I appreciated the mostly chill tone, which gives you time to take in the fantastic details and comedy gags. I especially enjoyed finding hidden paths in each level that led to collectables. These not only add some extra context to the world but also toss in jokes, like a movie poster for an alien Snake Plisken knock-off that was popular with the invaders. These collectables add a bit more flavor to the minimalist narrative, which was appealing. There's also a set of unlockable costumes for Darwin, which includes a Solid Snake-inspired outfit.

From ARC Raiders to Escape From Duckov, extraction shooters seem to be enjoying something of a renaissance right now, to the delight of FPS fans like myself. But of all the newcomers to that space, none have captured my attention more than Marathon since I first played its early alpha over a year ago. Even through some of Bungie’s recent lows, the notion of taking the high-stakes looting deathmatch that is an extraction shooter and combining it with the unparalleled shooting for which the studio is known has always been an awesome idea. Now, having sweated it out for over 65 hours in Marathon’s most unforgiving maps and game modes, that rad concept turned out exactly as well as I was hoping it would, with absolutely stellar gunplay, a shocking amount of compelling lore to dive into, and a loot grind so hard to step away from that I’ve had trouble finding time to finalize my thoughts in between runs. There’s still plenty of room for tweaking – whether it’s balancing some of the playable Runners, adding a map or two, and especially cleaning up the war crime that is the UI – but this is already my favorite extraction shooter, and I have no doubt I’ll be playing it for some time to come.

I’ve always had a difficult time describing exactly what makes a Bungie gun feel so damn good but, whatever it is, Marathon’s got it. Maybe it’s the deliberate musicality to weapons, like that crisp snap from a rifle report, the metallic clink of a trigger, or those amazing hollow thuds when you land a shot. Maybe it’s the way recoil feels rhythmic, with pulse rifles kicking like a heartbeat and handcannons bucking theatrically. Maybe it’s the way the world reacts to your shots, with shields crackling and splintering and enemy NPCs staggering in place as you riddle them full of holes. Maybe it’s invisible qualities, like the almost perfectly tuned bullet magnetism and finessed projectile speeds, all working together to make you feel slightly better than you actually are. An old Bungie dev once told me that the secret to building a great shooter is in making four seconds of gameplay that feel perfect, then repeating those four seconds as many times as you can. I don’t know if this remains a guiding philosophy of the current team but, in any case, they really seem to have nailed just that.

With Bungie’s world-class gunplay making the migration to Marathon, it’s not surprising that some of the same flaws I associate with the studio have also made their way over, the chief of which is bad geometry. From getting caught on parts of the environment that feel like they shouldn’t impede me to the fairly hit-or-miss mantling, I find myself once again screaming during especially tense moments when my character can’t seem to climb up a ledge for the third time in a row, while my teammates suffer through an ambush without me. Movement in general can feel a little frustrating early on, like how you take severe fall damage from fairly moderate heights and constantly have to keep your eye on the “heat” gauge (effectively a stamina meter) or risk overheating and becoming a sluggish blob for a time. This becomes less of an issue once you’ve snagged a few perks from the upgrade tree, but I can also already imagine how bad it’ll feel to go back to not having them every time progress resets at the end of each season. In some ways, these limitations serve as interesting obstacles for you to work around, forcing you to approach vertical environments (especially during fights) with extreme caution, or making you think about how much running you’re doing – both to prevent overheating and also to remain undetected by enemy squads. But they can also be a bit irritating, especially when combined with awkward terrain that can frustrate otherwise smooth looting and gunplay.

As someone who adores PvP, one massively refreshing aspect of Marathon to date is how far it deviates from the group hug energy of ARC Raiders’ PvE-friendly community. Don’t get me wrong, cooperating with other players can be a good time, but one of the major drawbacks is that you don’t get to see the PvP shine when it happens so rarely. In a game like Marathon, with Bungie’s legendary FPS chops on full display, I’d be pretty disappointed if PvP encounters were as uncommon as they’ve become in ARC Raiders, because those gunfights are without question the best part of any match. And by God is Marathon an absolutely disgusting pit of vengeful players mercilessly shooting and stabbing everyone on sight – these are my people. The pressure of two teams squaring off in claustrophobic, dark hallways, as you try to outmaneuver one another makes for some of the most tense encounters I’ve ever had, and the loot reward you get for winning those firefights is worth the stress (after all, the best way to loot is to let someone else do it for you and then take it from their cold, dead hands).

The mark of a great extraction shooter is that “one more run” feeling, and a big part of that lies in how fun the long-term loot game and progression is. That relies on both the badass weapons and gadgets you’ll find, as well as the quest items you’re asked to collect if you want to unlock an upgrade or complete a mission you’ve been given. After dozens of hours, I’m still completely glued to my screen. I’m poring over dense menus and trees to figure out which map I’ll need to play to complete this quest or loot that item, then going into battle with a specific set of objectives in mind – only for it to all go to hell when I run into a rival gang and the shrapnel starts flying. Finding a prestige-tier weapon or piece of equipment that completely changes how you play, like a backpack that generates ammo from thin air whenever you score a kill, makes all the pain of defeat you’ll inevitably suffer worth the heartache. But even when you lose it all, you might at least clear a quest or manage to gather a few materials needed to buy an upgrade that makes you just a little less likely to get your ass handed to you in the future. Unlocking a perk that decreases how much heat you generate from running around, or reduces the fall damage you take, can be a pretty big game changer in the long run – so I almost always felt like I was moving the needle forward in some way.

If there’s one thing holding this awesome progression climb back, it’s the fact that onboarding is quite tough, as very little is explained to you. I certainly benefitted from having played loads of extraction shooters before, as well as the crash courses Bungie gave me during previous preview sessions – but even with all that, there are still lots of moments where you just have to puzzle through some of the more complex systems. With a whole bunch of confusing mod slots to fill and upgrade menus that demand quite a bit of your time to fully understand, it takes quite a few hours of playing to get the hang of some pretty basic stuff. Worst of all are the extremely poorly explained mission objectives while out in the world that are sometimes represented by a single floating icon. This is by no means at the same level of obtuseness as something like Escape From Tarkov, and some of this friction seems like it’s just part of the extraction shooter DNA, but I could definitely see some folks bouncing off Marathon because of stuff like this, and that’s not ideal.

There’s also an impressive amount of diversity in the small handful of maps currently available. Perimeter, the starting map, is a spread out series of structures that isn’t the most interesting map and has a lot of empty space, but is perfectly tuned for newer squads as they rotate from each of the miniature hubs and start to dip their toes into the kill-or-be-killed nature of Tau Ceti IV. Dire Marsh is a massive, sprawling swamp that’s a sniper’s dream, and ups the ante both in terms of the loot to be claimed and the caliber of the players it draws. Outpost is perhaps the best extraction shooter map ever made, with tons of loot and secrets crammed into its tiny, highly vertical design. It corrals players into near constant conflict as they race to acquire keycards and break into the vault-like facility where all the best goodies are kept. Extracting from each of these maps requires you to significantly level up your skills and understanding of Marathon’s challenging gameplay and mechanics, providing yet another ladder to climb as part of its already stellar progression systems. That said, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed at having only four maps to explore at launch, even though those four are pretty great across the board. Here’s hoping Bungie can stick the landing with the live-service model by providing a steady stream of new places to battle it out over time.

Marathon makes use of the hero shooter model, with different character classes that have pre-loaded abilities that compliment one another and appeal to different kinds of players. However, this is one area in which this shooter falls a bit short. Sure, you can turn invisible or hide yourself in clouds of smoke as the slippery Assassin, or heal and revive others as the support character Triage, but these archetypes are mostly generic shapes of characters that we’ve seen a bunch already– and are done a bit better in plenty of other games. They’re certainly not bad, and I’ve actually had a great time giving each a try to figure out which I jive with the most. But compared even to Bungie’s own Destiny, where each class has an extremely unique identity and a suite of interesting skills, Marathon just feels a little underwhelming in this regard. It’s also only been a couple weeks since Marathon came out and I already feel like certain Runners lag behind their peers, like how weak Recon’s ability to ping enemy locations is relative to Destroyer’s defensive shields and devastating shoulder-mounted rockets.

After the server slam a few weeks back, one of my main complaints was that the UI and menus were an incoherent mess that I still felt like I was wrestling with after 20 hours. Now, having gotten quite far into the weeds with the final product, that frustration has only deepened with understanding. While certainly as stylish as just about everything in Marathon, the menus are a painful jumble of squares and rectangles that feel like they were designed with vagueness in mind. For example, it’s baffling to me that mods are represented by identical, nondescript icons, so you have to physically hover your cursor over them to even understand what they are. Managing your inventory, which quickly becomes a convoluted jumble of hard-to-identify items, can be quite frustrating for this reason – especially when you’re in the heat of combat and need to make a swap of some kind, but first have to figure out which absurdly generic item is the one you’re looking for. There are other small things, like how the controls handle swapping held items for ones you find, or moving things like mods from your weapon to your backpack that are just way more cumbersome than they need to be. This is the area I think needs to most immediately improve – it’s quite messy as of now.

While bad UI isn’t the most surprising issue in an extraction shooter – where that’s practically the industry standard – one area in which Marathon unexpectedly excels is through its lore and drip-fed story. After almost every mission I’ve had factions to meet or chat with, a few quick lines of dialogue thrown my way, or some lore unlock for me to read. I’ve found myself really interested in learning more about this creepy world and its bizarre inhabitants, like the bioscience AI Nona, who talks to you as a weird silk worm and asks you to unlock the hidden potential of your Runner shells. Once you reach level 25 and start getting pulled into the Cryo Archives and the endgame content, these loose threads and hints at the mysteries of this unsettling universe start to feel like they’re coming together. I won’t spoil the particulars, but longtime fans of the Marathon universe should be pretty pleased with what’s in store, and I’m really curious as to where they’ll go next.

Speaking of the endgame, I’ve spent a fair amount of time now diving into Marathon’s most harrowing mode yet, the Cryo Archive, and am happy to report that it’s one of the most intense and badass things Bungie has created in a long while. The special map requires that you bring some of your best loot into battle (a minimum ante of 5,000 credits worth of gear), and transports you to the first floor of the UESC Marathon ship from the original game. What starts out as a straightforward process of taking down beefed up NPC enemies and unlocking higher levels of security clearance to access other wings of the ship devolves into absolute mayhem when you inevitably encounter enemy players armed to the teeth and fighting for their lives. With the best loot currently available up for grabs, and a fairly high barrier of entry just to get into the map, this place is guaranteed to be packed almost exclusively with tryhards leaning all the way forward in their Secret Lab chairs with your demise occupying their every thought. Not only are you expected to outplay them all while surviving a constant stream of robot foes, but you’ll have to learn one of the most labyrinthine maps I’ve ever seen and figure out various puzzles to open up vaults or even extract out of the level. You’ll also need to contend with the possibility of eventually reaching the final boss in the center of it all, while also keeping your eye on the timer that ticks down from 30 minutes and will kill you if you don’t find a way out in that time. My runs in Cryo have been filled with devastating losses and overwhelming victories that made me feel like an absolute badass (and rewarded me for my sweatiness accordingly), and it’s been incredibly hard to step away from these past two weekends.

There’s also a ranked playlist that requires you to bring in a certain level of valuable gear (similar to Cryo Archive), and pits you against some of the most skilled players Marathon has to offer as you try to acquire a certain threshold of loot before successfully extracting. It’s an awesome addition, since it turns every map into the same cesspool of no-lifers that you find in Cryo, and offers some unique cosmetics and other incentives for risking it all in the name of glory. I’m not nearly good enough to seriously compete in this mode just yet, but could absolutely see myself practicing and grinding my gear to the level where I could compete here. The prospect of that climb lends a near limitless level of replayability for an aspiring cold-blooded killer like myself.

I should also mention just how good Marathon looks and performs, as even playing on my regular, ol’ Xbox Series X I almost never encountered connection problems, dropped frames, or technical issues. Really the only issue I’ve encountered were two or three crashes that happened while I was in the middle of a match, but I was able to load these matches back up and rejoin the action anyway. Not only are the frames rock solid, but environments are stylish as hell, with spooky and offputting loading screens that show weird metaphors for transhumanism and immortality – and gorgeous levels that have an odd, artificial feel to them. I will say that after playing more than a dozen hours in a single day I left feeling like I was losing my mind from prolonged exposure to that incredibly unsettling aesthetic, but hey, maybe that’s how I should feel about my life.

I shouldn’t be talking about the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie right now. In fact, I’m kind of sorry for even bringing it up. It’s 2026, Nintendo is firmly in a new era of cinematic adaptations of their popular video games, a second animated Super Mario Bros. movie is about to launch (which will almost certainly be a wildly successful product like the first), and a big-budget, live-action Zelda movie is in production as we speak. Dredging up an ancient Nintendo movie failure - one that is a thoroughly beaten Yoshi-shaped horse by now - feels both cruel and irresponsible, like being at your friend’s wedding and telling everyone about the time he threw up in front of the entire class in middle school. Everyone should have moved on by now.

But sometimes it’s important to think about where someone started so you can reflect on how far they’ve come, and video game movies have mostly improved since the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie was released to poor reviews, a very muted box office reception, and a lot of confused fans (with even more confused parents) over 30 years ago.

But hey, let’s start with some positives. Despite so much of Super Mario Bros. being a baffling interpretation of the source material, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo’s take on real-life Mario and Luigi going on an interdimensional road trip/rescue mission actually works. Their banter is frequently charismatic, endearing, and fun, even if it's mostly quips and catchphrases as hallucinatory nonsense unravels around them. They’ve got great chemistry and they’re believable as two Italian American brothers bickering and bantering as they attempt to run a failing, family-owned Brooklyn plumbing business out of a van that barely works. (And that’s even before they get pulled into an alternate universe and everything goes crazy.) If that setup sounds familiar, it’s because it’s essentially the same in the far more successful 2023 animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie – an interesting coincidence considering plumbing companies and broken-down utility vehicles aren’t ever really explored in the video games.

It’s a good thing that the dynamic between Mario and Luigi functions as well as it does since nearly everything around them increasingly seems to get more insane, bizarre, and distant from the source material. Super Mario Bros. plays out like someone quickly read the back of the box of a Super Mario game and cobbled together something that attempts to fill in the narrative blanks with total nonsense, wrapped in set pieces that mix the gritty New York street culture of the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie with Blade Runner’s dystopian future — none of which really makes any sense for Super Mario. Fantastical and psychotic things either happen as if they’re totally normal and commonplace, or they’re explained literally and in excruciating detail, a balance perfectly encapsulated by the film’s opening minutes where a voiceover gives us the history of the dinosaurs, followed by a flashback to a group of nuns receiving an orphaned egg… that hatches into a human girl. Why? No one knows, but it’s possibly because one of the writers saw a picture of Daisy and another picture of Yoshi and decided they should be the same species.

This is technically a movie review, so I am now going to attempt to explain the plot. Deep breath: Two brothers living in Brooklyn meet a woman whose job it is to dig up dinosaur bones under the Brooklyn Bridge, because obviously that’s where the most dinosaur bones are, and because the engineers who build bridges somehow didn’t find them despite there being so many bones down there. And also they have no problem with people digging for dinosaur bones under functional bridges because that seems safe and fine for everyone involved. The woman gets kidnapped by two vaguely Italian guys from another dimension and the two slightly less vaguely Italian brothers fall through a magical illusory wall to find her, landing themselves in a manic lizard-themed version of Manhattan where everything is covered in wet webs. From there, a villain leader who orders fast food using a gun pointed at his television makes everyone’s life slightly difficult because he wants the woman’s necklace, and he also does evolution experiments on his employees, which they all seem OK with. The brothers then have to save the woman, defeat the villain, and learn several things about dinosaurs that aren’t applicable to reality.

As the poster describes, this ain’t no game. It is also frequently barely a movie, more a byproduct of the sheer disdain that movie executives frequently have for films aimed at children, treating the audience like passive lab rats who will just consume whatever is dumped into the feeding tubes. Kids deserved and continue to deserve better. That said, Super Mario Bros. is occasionally a fun time for a kids movie despite the fact that dozens and dozens of its moments are completely unrecognizable as a Super Mario Bros. movie. It’s fast-paced, sometimes funny, and has likeable protagonists taking on a big, campy bad guy (played by none other than Dennis Hopper).

It’s also got lots of stuff that kids thought was cool in the early ’90s, like tyrannosaurs, big vehicles with unnecessary stuff glued on them like they’re from an action-figure line, fireball guns, a zipline, and… prostitutes? More importantly though, it had the benefit of being one of the earliest live-action video game movies ever made, which means audiences didn’t exactly have a strong point of reference for how these things should turn out (and also hadn’t yet suffered through the somehow even worse Double Dragon movie which was released a year later). Watching the Super Mario Bros. movie is sort of like eating a knockoff version of your favorite breakfast cereal. Yes, it has marshmallows and fun oat shapes and a silly character on the packaging, but it all just tastes so fucking weird. These aren’t General Mills Lucky Charms, they’re First Street Magic Shapes where the leprechaun mascot is replaced with a clipart blue dinosaur and an off-putting saccharine paste slowly builds up on the roof of your mouth the longer you spend consuming it.

I don’t hate this movie. I swear. In fact, I try to revisit it every few years and see if there are any redeeming qualities to it. It’s all just so profoundly strange, which – while that’s a more ambitious and occasionally interesting thing for a movie to be than “safe” – does make me wonder what percentage of people in the credits had ever actually played the game. Imagine if me and 200 dogs recorded a song about being astronauts. The end result would be equal parts fascinating and horrible, but real astronauts would sit around for decades wondering why the dogs and I ever thought we were qualified to tell their story. It’s possible that there were actually some people involved in making Super Mario Bros. who had played the games before, but they either never spoke up or were completely ignored, two entirely plausible scenarios for a movie that went both over schedule and over budget and, by all accounts, had a frequently contentious set.

There are nitpicky things to get annoyed about because they seem like the easiest details to get right from the games. Just basic stuff that anyone who had actually played a Mario game could have flagged. Why is Mario wearing yellow for a third of the film? Why is Luigi (who didn’t even bother growing a mustache or gluing one on) wearing red for two thirds of the film? Why are the power-up mushrooms replaced with a disgusting ceiling fungus that turns into a man? Why does Toad play guitar? Wait, the guitar guy was supposed to Toad? Just some of the many things to think about as the film flashes through its 104 minutes of run time at both a breakneck speed and an eternity, like that looping gif of the speeding vehicle that keeps looking like it's about to crash into a wall but never actually does. And if 104 minutes seems like a long time, it’s actually nothing in comparison to the 30 years that it took to see another Super Mario movie in theaters after the 1993 one did nearly irreparable damage to Nintendo’s relationship with Hollywood.

Did Mario fans deserve a better live-action Mario movie at the time? Probably, but it’s hard to imagine what that would’ve looked like in even the most capable hands. We had The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, a weekly series where two real adults in colorful Mario Bros. outfits introduced fun and silly Mario cartoons – all of which felt a lot more connected to the world established in the video games – so even back then, walking out of the theater after watching the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie had us feeling in our guts that something was off.

The 1989 Batman and 1990 Ninja Turtles movies successfully saw those characters make the jump to the big screen from cartoons and comics. The directors of these films used modest practical effects, physical sets, and a little thing called restraint to expertly pick and choose which elements to carry over from the source material to the big screen, resulting in two classic adaptations that fans still adore today.

This is very much not the case for the Super Mario Bros. movie, which sought to adapt games that were set in the completely fantastical and surreal Mushroom Kingdom, a place where turtles can fly, clouds can kill you with spike balls, and anthropomorphic bullets hover above you as you race to scale a large flagpole. No amount of time, money, or dedicated fandom could have nailed that world perfectly in 1993, or even in 2026, seeing as there hasn’t been an attempt at a live-action Super Mario Bros. movie since.

That’s not to give this messy film a free pass, however. Just because “let’s make a live-action Super Mario movie” is an inherently flawed premise today, or any other day in history, doesn’t excuse the dozens and dozens of completely unhinged and demented decisions that the 1993 movie makes with overwhelming confidence every three seconds, right down to the final scene where it has the audacity to end on a cliffhanger meant to be resolved in a sequel that no sane business man on Earth would ever greenlight. Not only did it never get a second film but you can’t even buy, rent, or stream Super Mario Bros. digitally by any legal means these days, presumably because Nintendo would rather have their recent Illumination animated movie of nearly the exact same name dominate your search results instead.

The Corsair Makr Pro 75 is a fascinating keyboard that combines the best design tricks from the enthusiast scene with the long feature list and polish we've come to expect from Corsair. The result is a keyboard that is well-built, easy to modify and eminently capable, but is any board from a mainstream brand worth a $250/£220 asking price?

As always, it depends. If you want to shortcut the usual process of finding the perfect gaming keyboard from an enthusiast brand, or going the DIY route with your full choice of materials, then the Makr Pro 75 is a dependable alternative that you can still modify down the line. But, despite the DIY branding, this is essentially just a magnetic switch gaming keyboard that comes fully assembled, and there are plenty of those on the market these days. The answer depends on your appetite for getting stuck into the whole mechanical keyboard scene – and exactly what features you want on your ultimate keyboard.

Design and Features

The Makr Pro 75 is a handsome keyboard with a bit more flair than your average mainstream offering, with a matte black aluminium chassis and a nice contrast between the white alphanumeric keys, black modifiers and Function keys, and lemon-lime Escape and Enter keys. The keyboard I received is an ISO-UK layout with the big enter and short left shift, but ANSI-US layouts and others are also available. As with other recent Corsair releases across multiple categories, the colour scheme and minimal Corsair branding is smart, and looks eye-catching without being overbearing.

This is a compact 75% size keyboard, so there is no number pad, the nav keys are redeployed into a single column along the right side of the board, and the right shift key has been shortened to provide some extra space for the arrow keys in the bottom right. Relatively few important keys are missing from my perspective, and front-facing legends show Mac equivalents – while a switch on the back swaps between Windows and Mac layouts. Finally, there's a multi-function knob in the upper right, which can control the volume as well as other functions – visible in Corsair's new web-based software.

The hot-swap switches beneath the backlit double-shot PBT keycaps are magnetic, allowing for the usual trendy FPS functions. These sort of switches are now almost table stakes amongst boutique gaming boards, but the features they unlock can still be transformtive if you're coming from an older mechanical keyboard (or indeed, a non-mechanical design).

The most broadly useful is rapid trigger, a tech that speeds up key presses and key releases by reacting to changes in direction, rather than the key passing through a set physical point in its travel. That speeds up your inputs in games of all kinds, although it can take some getting used to. SOCD is another key inclusion, a tech normally used in FPS games to improve counter-strafing on the A and D keys. This helps you regain accuracy before shooting in games like Valorant, and it was so transformative in Counter-Strike that it was banned by Valve. There are plenty of other features to research too, including adjusting the actuation point on a per-key basis, binding multiple functions to single keys, and full analogue inputs to mimic a gamepad.

Overall, the keyboard is great out of the box from a build quality and design perspective, which is what you'd expect given the premium price. Still, I can't help but think that the core appeal of a DIY keyboard is in the actual building; even if you start with a fully assembled board as many do, it's fun to take something that's altogether basic and make meaningful, obvious changes as you go. Maybe a new set of keycaps in a different material or profile, maybe swapping out switches for a new typing experience or more responsive gaming, or maybe accessorizing with a new cable or a hand-crafted keycap that says something about you as a person. Here, the keyboard is so capable already, that while you can make changes (or replace broken components), you're not going to get that warm satisfaction of tweaking something and thinking "yup, that's exactly what I wanted."

Performance and Software

The Makr Pro 75 is a pleasant keyboard to use, even it if doesn't quite deliver the same level of pure typing pleasure as the best boutique boards I've tested. The keycaps feel a little slick, and the sound profile isn't quite as deep and satisfying, despite the eight layers of sound dampening and gasket-mounted switches. The layout, at least, is beyond reproach, offering plenty of desk space without eliminating any key that I needed for work or web surfing on the regular, and I found it easy to write up long articles in comfort.

In terms of gaming performance, this board is top-notch. As I mentioned before, a huge proportion of new mechanical keyboards now sport magnetic switches like those in the Makr Pro 75, but the combination of all these features with an 8000Hz polling rate and similarly high-class peripherals (like the Logitech X2 Superstrike mouse) results in a very gratifyingly immediate experience.

You'd be surprised how much impact a great keyboard can have on clicking on heads in Counter-Strike 2, for example. That sounds like something that would mostly depend on your monitor and your mouse, but the keyboard plays a vital role in the movement side of the equation, and having a great keyboard makes it easier to smoothly strafe out from behind a corner, stop on a dime, let off a shot or two and start moving back beind cover. Other games and genres can be more or less keyboard-sensitive, but for a component that should last years and years, you're sure to have plenty of time to reap the benefits of a comfortable, reliable and responsive keyboard.

The Makr Pro 75 uses the same web-based software as the Galleon 100 SD we looked at earlier, offering an easy way to make changes to keyboard settings, key bindings, lighting effects and so on. We've only recently covered that software and time is short, so suffice it to say, this is an extremely polished online tool that is intuitively laid out, powerful and reliable. I would go so far as to say that this is the gold standard for other keyboard makers to aim at, and one of the best reasons to choose a Corsair board over a (likely cheaper) alternative from a smaller brand. And yes, having all of your functions in one app, versus the two that the Galleon requires, is definitely an improvement.

Will is former deputy tech editor for IGN, specialising in PC hardware, sim racing and display tech. He has been publishing about games and technology since 2001 (age 12). Will was formerly Deputy Editor at Digital Foundry. He is currently playing BattleTech Advanced Universe.

The first episode of For All Mankind Season 5, “First Light,” is now streaming on Apple TV. Beware: Spoilers ahead!

Another season of For All Mankind begins, and another 10 or so years into the future we go. Breezing through the fallout of the Goldilocks asteroid heist at the end of Season 4 — Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), still kicking around on Mars, is found guilty in absentia — and a decade-plus of sociopolitical shifts in the house style of newsreel clips, the opener “First Light” teases the season’s major conflict to be over how well, if at all, the second-term “Earth first” strongman succeeding Al Gore in the White House, James Bragg, can wrangle Mars to be an obedient colony that sends over its mined iridium resources without much of a fuss.

The rest of the episode, however, mostly avoids any opening salvo between home base and the burgeoning Happy Valley colony. It spends its 59 minutes instead showing how inescapably human people living in a society are, even on another planet.

One of For All Mankind’s greatest strengths has always been its care for the human element (“hi, Bob”) in a phase of space exploration that was risky and dangerous. Now, Mars is solidly developed with its multicultural citizens from the U.S., Russia, and North Korea living in harmony, mostly. It has a Domino’s, boring high school graduation ceremonies with catered canapes, a labor movement that meets once a week to quibble over wording in petitions, and smartphones that light up with news alerts. And, as we learn near the end of the episode, its first homicide, the body discovered by Alex Baldwin (Sean Kaufman), Kelly Baldwin’s (Cynthy Wu) restless now-teenage son who doesn’t know what to do with his life now that his three total peers are moving on to higher education paths back on Earth while he's stuck watching the ocean through a VR headset on Mars.

It’s all fascinating on paper, but in practice, the season premiere feels somewhat sluggish, like a massive ship making a slow, lumbering turn before setting its new course. In triangulating the coordinates for this stretch of the 2010s, the episode becomes overly laden with plot to the point that nothing — even the murder mystery! — quite leaps out, even though schemes are surely afoot. Even though his DNA was found under the dead man’s fingernails, first man on Mars Lee Jung-Gil (C.S. Lee) seems an unlikely candidate, and I'm curious to see how this season stress tests the Martian legal system.

Much like its aging protagonists, with Ed very sick and wearing an ankle monitor from his sentencing (but still cool as hell) and Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) reading the paper from jail after a life in and out of Russian protection, a certain vigor is inevitably gone. Ed might still be cracking jokes as a semi-senile old man (and Kinnaman still carries the show, performance-wise), but he’s grappling with the fact that his remaining time is short. The instigator from last season, Toby Kebbell’s Miles Dale, is a buttondown-wearing family man these days who leads the aforementioned talky meetings at the restaurant he runs with his former co-conspirator Ilya Breshov (Dimiter D. Marinov), who Dale yells at for trying to lowkey bribe a police officer. All of the troublemakers have been quelled!

Even Dev Ayesa’s (Edi Gathegi) Helios is years outside of the “move fast and break things” phase of a bold space startup. Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), now the CEO, laments Dev doing a TV interview about Meru, his new vision for a 1 million-person sustainable Mars colony, because it didn’t go through the proper channels. The new energy potential lies in two spots. One is with The Youth: Alex and Lily (Ruby Cruz), Miles’s daughter doing her own secret rebellion spraypainting “Free Mars” on corridors at night. The other is in Kelly’s tedious work plumbing the Korolev Crater searching for alien life, still holding out that a breakthrough might finally come after 10 years of toiling away. It’s coming soon, girl, I can feel it!

In that time Kelly has been toiling away drilling hole after hole into red rock — and Talladega Nights and Breaking Bad still got made — Happy Valley has grown immensely, and the production design remains incredible. The colony infrastructure looks like a good run on Surviving Mars, with clear domes and modular cube homes sprouting out of the red soil, and it’s incredible catching the quiet detailing in the evolution of the tech being used. The space suits are now sleeker, the ground transportation swaggier (see: Alex’s gift bike from Dev), the insides of traversal ships blinker and more futuristic with arrays of buttons and metal frames. A show like this simply can’t be made well without fine tuning these kinds of details that elevate the baseline of speculative fiction, and the crew here has done exceptionally well by their craft.

Transmissions From Happy Valley:

• The broadcast reels are a staple of season openers of course, but A.I. Al Gore now that we’re firmly in the age of generative A.I… feels kinda bad, man.
• Glad to see that journalism and film are also considered viable college majors in alternate c. 2012! Let’s circle back on that in Season 6!
• Also glad to know flash mobs were still a fad in this alt-history!
• A John Lennon and Jay-Z “Grey Album”... no thank you!
• Ed gets the line of the episode: “Easy on the sauce there, my dumpling.”

Warning: this review contains full spoilers for The Pitt Season 2, Episode 12!

The Pitt may be an engrossing watch, but it sure doesn’t qualify as escapism. This is not a series I can recommend to anyone looking to turn on, tune in, and drop out for an evening. Watching the series is nothing if not a stressful experience, and that’s only become more apparent with the most recent episodes. Now you have Episode 12, a chapter wherein I could practically feel my blood pressure rising in real time.

It’s actually impressive how much the series has managed to ratchet up the tension in Season 2 without having some all-encompassing disaster like Season 1’s Pitt Fest shooting as an instigator. It’s more like a death by a thousand cuts this time around. You’ve got the ongoing turmoil caused by the hospital turning off its network, the steadily increasing flow of incoming patients, and the fact that multiple doctors and nurses are now reaching their respective breaking points. One sympathizes very much with Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) and her recent panic attack. It’s a wonder half the ER isn’t in the same state by now.

Above all, the subplot involving the drugged-out golf nut choking Emma (Laëtitia Hollard) fuels the tension in Episode 12. Luckily, Dana (Katherine LaNasa) is there to give said golf nut the treatment he deserves, but that opens up a whole new can of worms when it becomes clear her methods weren’t 100% legal. And while it might have been nice for this subplot to focus a bit more on Emma herself in the immediate aftermath, there’s no denying that LaNasa really rises to the occasion as the show explores her new predicament.

Even before this week, I felt that LaNasa was probably the show’s acting MVP. “6:00 PM” simply clinches that title. She’s great throughout this episode, fully conveying Dana’s rage at the patient and her disgust at a system that would punish nurses for having the nerve to defend themselves. We also get several terrific scenes between Dana and Robby (Noah Wyle), as it becomes clear even their warm friendship has its limits. It’s been a hellish day, and it’s obvious both characters are on the verge of snapping. Unfortunately for them both, there are still three episodes and three hours left to endure.

It’s also worth noting that it feels like the Langdon (Patrick Ball) situation has finally hit critical mass. The series has been a bit slow to dig into the meat of that conflict, but it’s making up for lost time now. Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) now knows the full scope of his crimes, and she’s started giving him the full Santos (Isa Briones) treatment. It’s interesting to see Robby forced to defend Langdon at one turn and then really lay into him while arguing with Dana on another. More than ever, I’m eager to see where the series leaves things with Langdon by the end of the season. At some point, maybe he’s better off finding a new home and a fresh start at another hospital (though I’d hate to see Langdon written out of the series in Season 3).

In general, Episode 12 isn’t one of the show’s more memorable hours on the medical front. We get another fireworks-related injury and a fairly underwhelming subplot involving an elderly couple that takes up more screen time than I’d like. Only at the end, when it becomes clear that another previous patient isn’t out of the hole just yet, do things start to pick up on that front.

But, in any case, “6:00 PM” mostly makes up for the lackluster medical cases with strong character moments, both humorous and dramatic. It’s always fun watching Javadi (Shabana Azeez) fawn over Mateo (Jalen Thomas Brooks), and we get a nice, overdue little brouhaha between Whitaker (Gerran Howell) and Santos. But even though their “fight” is one of the more entertaining moments of an otherwise tense episode, let’s not forget it was preceded by a shot of Santos contemplating cutting herself again. Even at its most lighthearted, The Pitt is always ready to dial up the darkness again. Let’s hope we all survive this final stretch.

Full spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episode 1.

Daredevil: Born Again returns with a premiere intended to better establish the new status quo in New York following the big events in Season 1’s finale. And it’s successful on that front even though – rather than hitting the ground running – it feels like the table setting that it is.

Season 1 ended with Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) imposing his full corrupt will upon New York, with all masked vigilantes targeted by his men and martial law declared in the city. Obviously it’s purposeful to then have the second season begin with a surprise look at such shiny happy people in NYC, seemingly living their best life. But even understanding BB Urich (Genneya Walton) is making what amounts to full propaganda videos for Fisk and why – the better to protect her own investigations against him – it still feels we could get a more straightforward look at how things are going with Matt’s burgeoning resistance group from the end of Season 1.

We see Matt (Charlie Cox) in contact with Cherry (Clark Johnson) and Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) now chatting with BB (I don’t think those characters ever met in Season 1) but still, have their ranks grown significantly yet? And jokes about “Where’s Spider-Man?!” aside – along with knowing Jessica Jones shows up at some point this season – has Matt made any attempt to reach out to the other vigilantes in the city, given they’d be targets of Fisk? None of that is said.

Matt Murdock officially considered missing and possibly dead is a bit funny and also a bit semi-frustrating because, man, this version of Daredevil simply cannot go very long existing as both his everyday lawyer persona and his costumed alter ego in his full horned costume. Think about it - in Season 1 of the Netflix series, Matt was a lawyer the whole time but only got the full Daredevil costume in the back half of the season finale. In Daredevil Season 3, Matt was publicly believed dead for much of the season and he never wore the full costume. In Born Again Season 1, he was working as a lawyer again, but had given up being Daredevil (again) until around the last third of the season. And now he’s all in on Daredevil, but Matt Murdock, Attorney at Law, is once more out the window. So congratulations to 2016’s Daredevil Season 2 for the one time we got the lawyer Matt Murdock by day, Daredevil by night dynamic for the entire season! You are truly a unicorn.

That being said, Daredevil’s “new” costume looks awesome! It’s obviously supposed to be his regular costume painted black, with some red showing through underneath, which is a cool touch. And, finally, after 11 years, he has the comic book DD logo on his chest! Honestly, given they waited this long to give Matt the Double Ds (sorry, sorry, that bad joke is a must), it would have been nice to see it happen or at least learn whose suggestion it was that Matt go for a bit more branding. But regardless, it’s great to see.

Matthew Lillard is a welcome addition to Born Again, as he is to any project he shows up in. And it was a nice touch to see his CIA agent “Mr. Charles” act so relatively restrained in his first scene when he’s on the phone with a colleague versus when he burst into Fisk’s meeting with the Attorney General and was going much more Full Wacky Lillard – essentially insinuating that Mr. Charles knows the power of performance. And there’s intrigue in learning Fisk is now making deals with the CIA to help smuggle weapons, implying a whole new can of worms has been opened for the Kingpin.

Matt and Karen suddenly being a full couple works thanks to everything established in the Netflix series. We know these two have long shared an attraction and flirtation, and even toyed with becoming something more before, so it tracks that in the midst of such a tense scenario, they’re finally acting on these feelings. And given everything she’s gone through, and what the current stakes are, Karen much more actively training to fight makes a lot of sense too.

Not that it wasn’t already part of the show, but using Fisk and, by extension, his Anti-Vigilante Task Force as a parallel for our current administration and for the use of ICE is more pointed than ever here. No doubt some will bemoan superhero stories treading in such waters, but anyone familiar with comic book history knows this feels very much in line with how they’ve often operated in terms of reflecting current events, as we see the AVTF’s brutal tactics and get lines like “Task Force took him, which means nobody finds him,” or have restaurant owner Ariana (Annie Parisse) call the ever-violent Powell (Hamish Allan-Headley) a fascist to his face.

The fights on Born Again continue to be a strong element, albeit not quite reaching the very high bar of the Netflix series. There’s a slightly stylized approach here that feels like it’s embracing comic book aesthetics more, complete with some fun shots of Daredevil’s shadow looming in the opening fight on the tanker. And the final scene, as Daredevil went to rescue Cherry, was very well done, with a great added piece of tension provided by Cherry’s heart attack and how his worry for his friend led to Matt being nearly fatally distracted as he fought the AVTF. The fact that Bullseye of all people ended up saving Matt is curious, to say the least – their last encounters were Matt beating Dex up in prison and then stopping him from successfully killing Fisk – but also innately exciting to ponder what Bullseye’s angle is…

Other Thoughts From Hell’s Kitchen:

• BB’s pro-Fisk videos were given a counterpoint with a look at that “Mayor Kingpin” video with its Anonymous-style vibes. Whoever is making them is doing a decent parody of D’Onofrio as Fisk!
• Heather (Margarita Levieva) was one of the aspects of Season 1 that never fit, as she and Matt never had chemistry as a couple and some of her negative reactions to Daredevil and embrace of Fisk felt forced. So it would have perhaps been best to simply write her off. Fingers crossed she works better in her new dark side role though, as she’s changing up her psych evaluation of Jacques Duquesne (Tony Dalton) to help get him convicted. Her still being haunted by visions of Muse feels a bit extraneous at this point, but again, we’ll see how it goes.
• Speaking of Jack, more Tony Dalton is never a bad thing, and fingers crossed we get him freed and in his own full costumed look at some point this season, after the iPhone-shot glimpse from afar in Season 1.
• There were a couple of small, appreciated touches here with Matt as Daredevil to underline that sure, he’s a superhero, but he’s still human and vulnerable. This included his labored breathing when he surfaced from the tanker and the big swig of water he took upon returning home from the conflict. Often superhero stories skip over tiny things like that, but Daredevil is just like us… he gets freaking thirsty after a hard workout!

All six episodes of Bait Season 1 are available now on Prime Video.

On the silver screen, the actor playing 007 has been Scottish, English, Irish and Australian, with a few different hair and eye colors, but the character has always been a white man serving the British Crown. Every new Bond film brings with it conversations, both for and against, about this status quo; these have been happening so long that Idris Elba has even aged out of being repeatedly fancast. And since we’re currently in a period of Bond limbo, as Daniel Craig passes the torch to whoever’s picked by the Bezos regime, it only makes sense for a British Asian star like Riz Ahmed to throw his hat in the ring.

Not so fast.

Enter Bait, the zany six-episode series in which Ahmed fictionalizes this outcome, and dispenses with all the familiar, well-worn tropes of the discourse while finding hilarious new dramatic layers. It begins with Ahmed’s character, the up-and-coming actor Shah Latif, screen-testing for the iconic role and giving us a taste of what a South Asian James Bond might look and feel like. He’s not a bad actor, but he flubs the try-out and snatches this promise away from us.

What follows is part domestic sitcom and part industry drama, in which Latif becomes torn between community commitments and the Hollywood ladder, as he slyly positions himself as a favorite in the media. However, the show isn’t as straightforward as it might initially seem, because at this point in his career, the 43-year-old Oscar nominee (who also serves as the series’ writer and EP) knows full well what pressures the spotlight brings. Thanks to the directorial talents of Bassam Tariq, who directs the first three episodes, fissures gradually form in the series’ fabric and in Latif’s psyche, yielding a saga of self-destructive ambition. By the end, it isn’t really about the idea of an Asian Bond at all, but rather how being subsumed into these cultural conversations can tempt a person, or even break them.

Tariq last directed Ahmed in the feature Mogul Mowgli, a surrealist hip hop drama steeped in similar notions of fractured postcolonial identity. Bait is practically a stylistic sequel, with scenes of familial mayhem taking on chaotic hues, as wide lenses warp spaces that ought to be safe and comfortable, like Latif’s family home, when chatter about his audition hits the airwaves. Gossiping aunties become secondary villains, as the show’s backdrop contorts to fit the idea of a traditional Hollywood hero who has to contend with Eid celebrations, an ex girlfriend (Ritu Arya) with pointed opinions about why Bond should never be South Asian, and a hustler cousin (Guz Khan) who hopes to establish London’s first Muslim rideshare app. Whether or not Latif, or Ahmed, will ever play 007, this is what authentic dramedy looks and feels like, even when it comes wrapped in complete absurdity.

The more Bait seems to establish a tonal baseline, the more it departs from it in hilarious, occasionally jaw-dropping ways. By the second episode, it starts to fly off the handle until the show eventually loops back to become a story about mistrust, self-loathing and psychosis – all within the body of a unique spy saga unto itself – answering the question: What happens to a man when an identity like Bond is projected onto him and he isn’t ready for it?

Minor spoilers to follow.

It sounds nonsensical on paper, but a major supporting character in Bait is a severed pig’s head voiced by none other than Patrick Stewart. Take all the time you need to fully digest this, because the show certainly doesn’t give you any before it yanks you into this bizarre-but-gripping subplot.

At the end of the first episode, Latif’s family home is vandalized in a racist hate crime, as a pig’s head is thrown through his window, a frightening image that lodges itself into his subconscious in unexpected ways. By the second episode, he’s having full-blown podcast conversations with the deceased boar about having already usurped the role. It is, on one hand, a fantasy about the media circus that tends to follow such announcements, but it’s also a darkly funny break from reality that, fittingly, takes the form of another mid-century British hallmark, William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies.

The allegories in Bait remain broadly similar to those in Golding’s novel — “This is how the world works” — only here Tariq and Episodes 4 through 6 director Tom George refract the story through the lens of a swiftly-moving, ever-shifting media landscape. The only respite Latif finds is a romantic rendezvous with his former flame that plays out in alluring long takes as they traipse across London’s nightlife (it’s hardly a breather), and by the time the show gets to Episode 5, it becomes a balls-to-the-wall meta commentary on the whole idea of the Hollywood spy movie.

Latif, having been convinced his family has been kidnapped as reprisal for the potential casting, finds himself paranoid and on the run, as George departs from Tariq’s loopy, wide-lensed camera work and instead employs a more relevant contemporary aesthetic: the post-9/11 voyeurism of the Bourne films, with long lenses that peer in on Latif from a distance as he charges through a train station. He’s even approached by a former ally who turns out to be working for the British government, and who hopes he’ll toe the line of government propaganda should he play the part.

Is any of this “real,” in the strictest sense? Who’s to say. The warping and filtering of real discourse through formalistic comedy-drama blurs the edges of reality in delightful ways, until all that’s left is the underlying suspicion that people want Latif to fail — or only want him to succeed for their own benefit. That he constantly has to put on false identities to navigate shifting allegiances makes Latif more Bond-like than he realizes, making Bait not only a show about the hypotheticals of South Asian Muslim Bond, but a pitch-perfect satire of why such a thing may not fit the escapism of the 60-plus-year-old IP in the first place, given how close to reality the concept already skirts for someone like Latif.

A frequent retort in the “against” column, for a non-white Bond, is that people of colour ought to have their own figures in mainstream media, but whether or not this argument is introduced in good faith, Bait responds to it by having its cake and eating it too. It creates a unique, culturally-specific story that only these particular creatives could tell, but it also circles the fantasy of an Asian Bond in so close a manner that audiences who really want it can practically reach out and touch it. What’s more, it kicks off any ensuing debates about representation for them.

Which is by no means to suggest that Bait is a close-ended show with no room to foster conversation. If anything, it’s the opposite: It opens up new avenues by building off the same handful of dimensions and bullet points that have already been discussed ad nauseam in the media and online. Its main focus isn’t just how the story of Bond would change given the presence of an actor like Latif, but how Bond would change Latif’s own story, for better or worse, and it’s a rip-roaring hoot along the way.

The race for office and gaming chair supremacy continues unabated as ever more technology is packed into what used to just be a place to sit while you work or play. With the Hbada X7 Smart Ergonomic Chair, we may have just hit peak chair technology, at least for now. With an impressive suite of powered features, including an auto-tracking lumbar support system, a dual-core mechanical massage, a graphene-heated backrest with red light therapy, and a dual-fan ventilated cooling seat cushion, this chair feels less like standard office or game room furniture and more like a high-end luxury vehicle seat. It’s an ambitious, tech-heavy powerhouse designed for those who spend most hours at their desks and are willing to pay a premium to minimize the fatigue of prolonged sitting. Unfortunately, a few caveats, like build quality in certain areas and a relatively short warranty put a bit of a damper on what's otherwise a clever bit of ergonomic engineering.

Hbada X7 Smart Ergonomic Chair – Features, Assembly, and Setup

Unlike many other premium chairs, the Hbada X7 only comes in a single configuration in a choice of grey or black. The former retails for $1499.99, while the latter is an additional $10, though both are often on sale for less. Either way, you're likely paying more than other recent premium chairs like the LiberNovo Omni, although the Hbada X7 does make a good case for the upsell with its extensive feature set.

At its core, the Hbada X7 is equipped with what the company calls the world's first AI-powered fully automated smart lumbar tracking system that uses pressure sensors, a compute chip, and precision motors to dynamically adjust to your posture and weight in real-time. It features an "8D" dual-core bionic hand massage system with three intensity levels and a graphene heat therapy system enhanced by what's listed as medical-grade red light technology to help relieve back pain and stimulate blood flow and cell metabolism. To keep you cool, the chair boasts a Cloud Ventilated Seat Cushion equipped with dual high-speed fans offering three adjustable wind levels. There are also multi-directional adjustments that include a "4D" dual-axis neck pillow, 720° full-posture mechanical armrests, and an integrated cable control system for one-touch height and seat depth adjustments. Wrapped in a strong but high-elasticity DuPont mesh, it also includes a 140° floating recline with an auto-gravity sensor, smart posture memory that remembers your preferences, and a 45-minute sedentary reminder that proactively massages.

Surprisingly, this much chair comes in a single large cardboard box of 30 x 21 x 20 inches. Not surprisingly, it has an 80 lb shipping weight, which definitely puts a massive strain on the box and makes it awkward for a single person to maneuver. Fortunately, despite being one of the densest-packed chairs I've received, internally it's packed and padded well, so there's a low chance of damage from rough shipping even if the box itself doesn't fare so well.

While I always prefer to build furniture with at least one other person, since this chair is mostly assembled, I can see one person being able to put it together. You have to assemble the wheel base and gas cylinder, attach the arms to the seat cushion, attach the backrest to the seat cushion, place the backrest on the gas cylinder on the wheel base, and then attach the headrest to the backrest.

The included instructions don't match up exactly to the current iteration of the chair, but they were easy enough to figure out. The hardest parts for me were inserting the wiring from the lumbar support into the backrest interface, which was a tight fit for my hands, and then lining up the screws on the headrest with the holes in the backrest. Otherwise, no major issues in the three times I had to build it. More on that shortly.

The assembly and heavy reliance on internal electronics bring up a crucial point regarding long-term reliability. I'll note that unlike some other premium chairs, such as those from Herman Miller, which offers a generous 12 year warranty for the high cost of entry, Hbada only offers three years. While that's not bad, there's a lot of technology packed into this chair, and, if there's an electrical issue with something like the lumbar, it will no longer be adjustable. In fact, I had two notable issues myself.

With the original chair I received, everything worked fine except for the battery interface, requiring me to keep the chair plugged in in order to use most of its features. When the replacement arrived, its backrest wouldn't lock into place. The third time, as they say, was the charm, as that chair worked, and continues to work, perfectly. In any case, it highlights the need for a good warranty with a sophisticated product such as this one.

As you can see from the photos, it's a bold design once finished. Despite featuring the modern mesh material aesthetic, the Hbada X7 looks thicker and more imposing because of all the electronics packed into it. I wouldn't call it elegant, but it does look pretty high tech.

Hbada X7 Smart Ergonomic Chair – Comfort and Performance

An ergonomic chair is only as good as its adjustability, and the Hbada X7 offers extensive adjustability: headrest height and rotation, multi-directional lumbar support (up/down and front/back), armrest placement, seat height and depth, and backrest recline angle adjustment. It's important to note, however, that for this latter feature, there's no tension control knob, and the armrests remain fixed relative to the seat rather than moving with the reclining backrest.

As long as you take the time to set it all up right and fall within a height of 4'11" - 6'5" and the 330 lb maximum weight, you should find the chair quite comfortable, although, as always, the farther away you are from any of the extremes, the better the experience. For my 5'9" and 210 lb frame, the only adjustment that really let me down was the seat depth, which can only slide forward or backward within a very small range of about two inches. It's one of the most significant areas that I suspect very tall individuals won't like.

The 720° armrests are incredibly adjustable in just about any way imaginable, and can even be angled up so you can enjoy support when holding something in your hands like a gaming handheld or tablet. Unfortunately, both the armrests and headrest suffer from one of my chair pet peeves, and that's not staying locked in place once set. Sometimes, when grabbing the chair in the wrong place and simply rolling it to a different spot, it will cause them to move wildly out of position. You also have to be really conscious of how you get out of the chair, because, if you're like me, and like to push up on the armrests when getting up, they might suddenly tilt down. It's kind of the deal you make with the devil for so much adjustability, but I really would have loved for the Hbada engineers to have put more thought into solving such a common problem with chairs like this.

The large 5200mAh battery will get you at least three days of use depending upon how much you use the more power-heavy features. The included AC adapter has a magnetic connector for the chair's charging port, which will both charge the battery and anything you have plugged into the adjacent USB-C port. The battery can also be removed and charged via its own USB-C port.

On the left side of the chair is the hardwired remote. With the remote, you can power the chair on or off, turn automatic lumbar support tracking on or off, set the massage function to one of three levels, set the fan to one of three levels, set the heat to one of three levels, and adjust the lumbar support intensity. It's quick and intuitive.

Although Hbada mentions the X7 as having the "World's First AI Smart Lumbar-Tracking," I didn't necessarily find it particularly intelligent. Instead, it senses the amount of pressure placed on it from your lower back and moves the lumbar to meet it. In other words, if you move forward, the lumbar moves forward. If you move backwards, the lumbar moves backward. You can easily make this tracking less or more sensitive as needed, or turn it off entirely. It's a neat feature that does work well, marketing hyperbole or not, and, as a technophile, I do like the robotic nature of the lumbar meeting my lower back when I first sit down.

Unless you turn the feature off, the chair will automatically massage your lower back with its dual rotating cores after 45 minutes as a type of sedentary reminder. It's a nice feature for sure, and the massage itself, especially at the highest intensity, is surprisingly powerful. It's something I love to make regular use of as it genuinely therapeutically kneads the muscles of my oft-tired lower back.

Make what you will of the science behind the 630 - 750nm wavelength red light therapy, but the associated graphene heating function, which goes from 113℉ - 129.2℉, is undeniable. It's another great way to make long hours of sitting more comfortable and keep lower back muscles feeling healthier. I rarely get cold, but it's also obviously good for warming up as well.

The last significant feature is the cooling. This time, instead of the functionality coming from the lumbar, the air blows from the seat. Somehow, Hbada has found a way to trump all of the other chairs with this type of feature I've used by not just moving air, but making it feel like actual air conditioning. It's wild how cool it can feel, especially at the highest setting.

The elastic DuPont mesh material is a bit rough, but it does feel strong and durable, and you won't be sliding around on it. Its weave is also what helps the cooling, red light, and heating work so well, although I'd be careful about any beverages that might spill and make their way through to the electronics.

Overall, this is among the most adjustable and comfortable chairs I've used. With mild scoliosis and some additional damage from decades of heavy workouts, it can be really hard for me to find a chair that's suitable for the unique needs of my back. While I do like to make liberal use of my standing desk, sometimes I just need to sit. With the X7, it's actually something I can look forward to doing, rather than just enduring, for longer periods.