The first trailer dropped in February, serving primarily as a means of introducing the basic premise and the main characters—and playing up the return to where it all started: the original Jurassic Park. It’s been fairly isolated because, as one character says, “No one’s dumb enough to go where we’re going.” But anything for science and the benefit of humanity, right? Even if it means trying to steal DNA from a pterosaur egg (possibly Quetzalcoatlus northropi) before the angry mother—aka “a flying carnivore the size of an F-16″—returns. In fact, the island is home to “the worst of the worst,” i.e., the most dangerous of the cloned dinosaurs, including the infamous raptors and a new aquatic dinosaur species, the mosasaur.
Some of the same footage and expository dialogue appear in this latest trailer, which honestly gives away much of the movie—although how many fresh twists could there be after so many decades? You know by now what you’re getting with this franchise. The trailer opens with a laboratory emergency in which a worker in a hazmat suit is fatally trapped inside an isolation chamber with what looks like a hungry T-rex. The poor dude pleads with his colleague to open the door before being eaten.
The rest of the trailer consists of our intrepid team—and the unfortunate shipwrecked family—dealing with various species of very dangerous dinosaurs, with ScarJo leading the way on the action. (But pro tip: maybe don’t put a baby dinosaur in your backpack, m’kay?) One assumes there will be several casualties and many narrow escapes before the survivors emerge with the much-needed DNA samples. And of course, there are plenty of stunning panoramic shots of this amazing world and the fantastic creatures in it.
Jurassic World Rebirth hits theaters on July 2, 2025.
Ars chats with series creators Paul and Chris Weitz about adapting Martha Wells’ book series for TV.
Built to destroy. Forced to connect. Credit: Apple TV+
In the mood for a jauntily charming sci-fi comedy dripping with wry wit and an intriguing mystery? Check out Apple TV’s Murderbot, based on Martha Wells’ bestselling series of novels The Murderbot Diaries. It stars Alexander Skarsgård as the titular Murderbot, a rogue cyborg security (SEC) unit that gains autonomy and must learn to interact with humans while hiding its new capabilities.
(Some minor spoilers below, but no major reveals.)
There are seven books in Wells’ series thus far. All are narrated by Murderbot, who is technically owned by a megacorporation but manages to hack and override its governor module. Rather than rising up and killing its former masters, Murderbot just goes about performing its security work, relieving the boredom by watching a lot of entertainment media; its favorite is a soap opera called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
Murderbot the TV series adapts the first book in the series, All Systems Red. Murderbot is on assignment on a distant planet, protecting a team of scientists who hail from a “freehold.” Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) is the team leader. The team also includes Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) and Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), who is an augmented human plugged into the same data feeds as Murderbot (processing at a much slower rate). Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) also serves as the team’s legal counsel; they are in a relationship with Arada (Tattiawna Jones), eventually becoming a throuple with Ratthi (Akshay Khanna).
As in the books, Murderbot is the central narrator, regaling us with his observations of the humans with their silly ways and discomfiting outbursts of emotion. Mensah and her fellow scientists were forced to rent a SEC unit to get the insurance they needed for their mission, and they opted for the cheaper, older model, unaware that it had free will. This turns out to be a good investment when Murderbot rescues Bharadwaj from being eaten by a giant alien worm monster—losing a chunk of its own torso in the process.
However, it makes a tactical error when it shows its human-like face to Ratthi, who is paralyzed by shock and terror, making small talk to get everyone back to safety. This rouses Gurathin’s suspicions, but the rest of the team can’t help but view Murderbot differently—as a sentient being rather than a killing machine—much to Murderbot’s dismay. Can it keep its free will a secret and avoid being melted down in acid while helping the scientists figure out why there are mysterious gaps in their survey maps? And will the scientists succeed in their attempts to “humanize” their SEC unit?
Murderbot figured out how to hack its “governor module.”
The task of adapting Wells’ novella for TV fell to sibling co-creators Paul Weitz (Little Fockers, Bel Canto) and Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass, Rogue One), whose shared credits include Antz, American Pie, and About A Boy. (Wells herself was a consulting producer.) They’ve kept most of the storyline intact, fleshing out characters and punching up the humor a bit, even recreating campy scenes from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon—John Cho and Clark Gregg make cameos as the stars of that fictional show-within-a-show.
Ars caught up with Paul and Chris Weitz to learn more about the making of Murderbot.
Ars Technica: What drew you to this project?
Chris Weitz: It’s a great central character, kind of a literary character that felt really rare and strong. The fact that we both liked the books equally was a big factor as well.
Paul Weitz: The first book, All Systems Red, had a really beautiful ending. And it had a theme that personhood is irreducible. The idea that, even with this central character you think you get to know so well, you can’t reduce it to ways that you think it’s going to behave—and you shouldn’t. The idea that other people exist and that they shouldn’t be put into whatever box you want to put them into felt like something that was comforting to have in one’s pocket. If you’re going to spend so much time adapting something, it’s really great if it’s not only fun but is about something.
It was very reassuring to be working with Martha Wells on it because she was very generous with her time. The novella’s quite spare, so even though we didn’t want to cut anything, we wanted to add some things. Why is Gurathin the way that he is? Why is he so suspicious of Murderbot? What is his personal story? And with Mensah, for instance, the idea that, yes, she’s this incredibly worthy character who’s taking on all this responsibility on her shoulders, but she also has panic attacks. That’s something that’s added, but we asked Martha, “Is it OK if we make Mensah have some panic attacks?” And she’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting. I kind of like that idea.” So that made it less alarming to adapt it.
Murderbot’s clients: a group of scientists exploring the resources of what turns out to be a very dangerous planet. Credit: Apple TV+
Ars Technica: You do play up the humorous aspects, but there is definitely humor in the books.
Chris Weitz: A lot of great science fiction is very, very serious without much to laugh at. In Martha’s world, not only is there a psychological realism in the sense that people can have PTSD when they are involved in violence, but also people have a sense of humor and funny things happen, which is inherently what happens when people get together. I was going to say it’s a human comedy, but actually, Murderbot is not human—but still a person.
Ars Technica: Murderbot’s favorite soap opera, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, is merely mentioned in passing in the book, but you’ve fleshed it out as a show-within-the-show.
Chris Weitz: We just take our more over-the-top instincts and throw it to that. Because it’s not as though we think that Sanctuary Moon is bad.
Ars Technica: As Murderbot says, it’s quality entertainment!
Chris Weitz: It’s just a more unhinged form of storytelling. A lot of the stuff that the bot says in Sanctuary Moon is just goofy lines that we could have given to Murderbot in a situation like that. So we’re sort of delineating what the show isn’t. At the same time, it’s really fun to indulge your worst instincts, your most guilty pleasure kind of instincts. I think that was true for the actors who came to perform it as well.
Paul Weitz: Weirdly, you can state some things that you wouldn’t necessarily in a real show when DeWanda Wise’s character, who’s a navigation bot, says, “I’m a navigation unit, not a sex bot.” I’m sure there are many people who have felt like that. Also, to delineate it visually, the actors were in a gigantic stage with pre-made visuals around them, whereas most of the stuff [for Murderbot] was practical things that had been built.
Ars Technica: In your series, Murderbot is basically a Ken doll with no genitals. The book only mentioned that Murderbot has no interest in sex. But the question of what’s under the hood, so to speak, is an obvious one that one character in particular rather obsesses over.
Chris Weitz: It’s not really addressed in the book, but certainly, Murderbot, in this show as well, has absolutely no interest in romance or sex or love. This was a personable way to point it out. There was a question of, once you’ve got Alexander in this role, hasn’t anybody noticed what it looks like? And also, the sort of exploitation that bot constructs are subjected to in this world that Martha has created meant that someone was probably going to treat it like an object at some point.
Paul Weitz: I also think, both of us having kids, you get a little more exposed to ways of thinking that imply that the way that we were brought up thinking of romance and sexuality and gender is not all there is to it and that, possibly, in the future, it’s not going to be so strange, this idea that one can be either asexual or—
Chris Weitz: A-romantic. I think that Murderbot, among neurodivergent communities and a-romantic, asexual communities, it’s a character that people feel they can identify with—even people who have social anxiety like myself or people who think that human beings can be annoying, which is pretty much everyone at some point or another.
Ars Technica: It’s interesting you mentioned neurodivergence. I would hesitate to draw a direct comparison because it’s a huge spectrum, but there are elements of Murderbot that seem to echo autistic traits to some degree.
Paul Weitz: People look at something like the autism spectrum, and they inadvertently erase the individuality of people who might be on that spectrum because everybody has a very particular experience of life. Martha Wells has been quoted as saying that in writing Murderbot, she realized that there are certain aspects of herself that might be neurodivergent. So that kind of gives one license to discuss the character in a certain way.
That’s one giant and hungry worm monster. Apple TV+
Chris Weitz: I don’t think it’s a direct analogy in any way, but I can understand why people from various areas on the spectrum can identify with that.
Paul Weitz: I think one thing that one can identify with is somebody telling you that you should not be the way you are, you should be a different way, and that’s something that Murderbot doesn’t like nor do.
Ars Technica: You said earlier, it’s not human, but a person. That’s a very interesting delineation. What are your thoughts on the personhood of Murderbot?
Chris Weitz: This is the contention that you can be a person without being a human. I think we’re going to be grappling with this issue the moment that artificial general intelligence comes into being. I think that Martha, throughout the series, brings up different kinds of sentients and different kinds of personhood that aren’t standard human issue. It’s a really fascinating subject because it is our future in part, learning how to get along with intelligences that aren’t human.
Paul Weitz: There was a New York Times journalist a couple of years ago who interviewed a chatbot—
Chris Weitz: It was Kevin Roose, and it was Sydney the Chatbot. [Editor: It was an AI chatbot added to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, dubbed Sydney by Roose.]
Paul Weitz: Right. During the course of the interview, the chatbot told the journalist to leave his wife and be with it, and that he was making a terrible mistake. The emotions were so all over the place and so specific and quirky and slightly scary, but also very, very recognizable. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft shut down the ability to talk with that chatbot. But I think that somewhere in our future, general intelligences are these sort of messy emotions and weird sort of unique personalities. And it does seem like something where we should entertain the thought that, yeah, we better treat everyone as a person.
Murderbot isn’t human, but it is a person. Credit: Apple TV+
Ars Technica: There’s this Renaissance concept called sprezzatura—essentially making a difficult thing look easy. The series is so breezy and fun, the pacing is perfect, the finale is so moving. But I know it wasn’t easy to pull that off. What were your biggest challenges in making it work?
Chris Weitz: First, can I say that that is one of my favorite words in the world, and I think about it all the time. I remember trying to express this to people I’ve been working on movies with, a sense of sprezzatura. It’s like it is the duck’s legs moving underneath the water. It was a good decision to make this a half-hour series so you didn’t have a lot of meetings about what had just happened in the show inside of the show or figuring out why things were the way they were. We didn’t have to pad things and stretch them out.
It allowed us to feel like things were sort of tossed off. You can’t toss off anything, really, in science fiction because there’s going to be special effects, visual effects. You need really good teams that can roll with moving the camera in a natural way, reacting to the way that the characters are behaving in the environment. And they can fix things.
Paul Weitz: They have your back.
Chris Weitz: Yeah. Really great, hard work on behalf of a bunch of departments to make things feel like they’re just sort of happening and we’ve got a camera on it, as opposed to being very carefully laid out.
Paul Weitz: And a lot of it is trusting people and trusting their creativity, trying to create an environment where you’ve articulated what you’re after, but you don’t think their job better than they do. You’re giving notes, but people are having a sense of playfulness and fun as they’re doing the visual effects, as they’re coming up with the graphics, as they’re acting, as they’re doing pretty much anything. And creating a good vibe on the set. Because sometimes, the stress of making something sucks some of the joy out of it. The antidote to that is really to trust your collaborators.
Ars Technica: So what was your favorite moment in the series?
Paul Weitz: I’d say the tenth episode, for me, just because it’s been a slow burn. There’s been enough work put into the characters—for instance, David Dastmalchian’s character—and we haven’t played certain cards that we could have played, so there can be emotional import without telegraphing it too much. Our ending stays true to the book, and that’s really beautiful.
Chris Weitz: I can tell you my worst moment, which is the single worst weather day I’ve ever experienced in a quarry in Ontario where we had hail, rain, snow, and wind—so much so that our big, long camera crane just couldn’t function. Some of the best moments were stuff that had nothing to do with visual effects or CGI—just moments of comedy in between the team members, that only exist within the context of the cast that we brought together.
Paul Weitz: And the fact that they loved each other so much. They’re very different people from each other, but they really did genuinely bond.
Ars Technica: I’m going to boldly hope that there’s going to be a second season because there are more novels to adapt. Are you already thinking about season two?
Paul Weitz: We’re trying not to think about that too much; we’d love it if there was.
Chris Weitz: We’re very jinxy about that kind of stuff. So we’ve thought in sort of general ways. There’s some great locations and characters that start to get introduced [in later books], like Art, who’s an AI ship. We’re likely not to make it one season per book anymore, we’d do a mashup of the material that we have available to us. We’re going to have to sit with Martha and figure out how that works if we are lucky enough to get renewed.
New episodes of Murderbot release every Friday on Apple TV+ through July 11, 2025. You should definitely be watching.
Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here after they air. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: Going from a sudden shot of beatific Pedro Pascal at the end of the last episode to a semi-related flashback with a young Joel Miller and his brother was certainly a choice. I almost respect how overtly they are just screwing with audience expectations here.
As for the opening flashback scene itself, I guess the message is “Hey, look at the generational trauma his family was dealing with—isn’t it great he overcame that to love Ellie?” But I’m not sure I can draw a straight line from “he got beat by his dad” to “he condemned the entire human race for his surrogate daughter.”
Andrew: I do not have the same problems you did with either the Joel pop-in at the end of the last episode or the flashback at the start of this episode—last week, the show was signaling “here comes Joel!” and this week the show is signaling “look, it’s Joel!” Maybe I’m just responding to Tony Dalton as Joel’s dad, who I know best as the charismatic lunatic Lalo Salamanca from Better Call Saul. I do agree that the throughline between these two events is shaky, though, and without the flashback to fill us in, the “I hope you can do a little better than me” sentiment feels like something way out of left field.
But I dunno, it’s Joel week. Joel’s back! This is the Duality of Joel: you can simultaneously think that he is horrible for failing a civilization-scale trolley problem when he killed a building full of Fireflies to save Ellie, and you can’t help but be utterly charmed by Pedro Pascal enthusiastically describing the many ways to use a Dremel. (He’s right! It’s a versatile tool!)
Truly, there’s pretty much nothing in this episode that we couldn’t have inferred or guessed at based on the information the show has already made available to us. And I say this as a non-game-player—I didn’t need to see exactly how their relationship became as strained as it was by the beginning of the season to have some idea of why it happened, nor did I need to see The Porch Scene to understand that their bond nevertheless endured. But this is also the dynamic that everybody came to the show for last season, so I can only make myself complain about it to a point.
Kyle: It’s true, Joel Week is a time worth celebrating. If I’m coming across as cranky about it at the outset, it’s probably because this whole episode is a realization of what we’re missing out on this season thanks to Joel’s death.
As you said, a lot of this episode was filling in gaps that could well have been inferred from events we did see. But I would have easily taken a full season (or a full second game) of Ellie growing up and Joel dealing with Ellie growing up. You could throw in some zombie attacks or an overarching Big Bad enemy or something if you want, but the development of Joel and Ellie’s relationship deserves more than just some condensed flashbacks.
“It works?!”
Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
“It works?!” Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Andrew: Yeah, it’s hard not to be upset about the original sin of The Last of Us Part 2 which is (assuming it’s like the show) that having some boring underbaked villain crawl out of the woodwork to kill the show’s main character is kind of a cheap shot. Sure, you shock the hell out of viewers like me who didn’t see it coming! But part of the reason I didn’t see it coming is because if you kill Joel, you need to do a whole bunch of your show without Joel and why on Earth would you decide to do that?
To be clear, I don’t mind this season so much, and I’ve found things to like about it, though Ellie does sometimes veer into being a protagonist so short-sighted and impulsive and occasionally just-plain-stupid that it’s hard to be in her corner. But yeah, flashing back to a time just two months after the end of season 1 really does make you wonder, “Why couldn’t the story just be this?”
Kyle: In the gaming space, I understand the desire to not have your sequel game be just “more of the same” from the last game. But I’ve always felt The Last of Us Part 2 veered too hard in the other direction and became something almost entirely unrecognizable from the original game I loved.
But let’s focus on what we do get in this episode, which is an able recreation of my favorite moment from the second game, Ellie enjoying the heck out of a ruined science museum. The childlike wonder she shows here is a great respite from a lot of action-heavy scenes in the game, and I think it serves the same purpose here. It’s also much more drawn out in the game—I could have luxuriated in just this part of the flashback for an entire episode!
Andrew: The only thing that kept me from being fully on board with that scene was that I think Ellie was acting quite a bit younger than 16, with her pantomimed launch noises and flipping of switches, But I could believe that a kid who had such a rough and abbreviated childhood would have some fun sitting in an Apollo module. For someone with no memories of the pre-outbreak society, it must seem like science fiction, and the show gives us some lovely visuals to go with it.
The things I like best here are the little moments in between scenes rather than the parts where the show insists on showing us events that it had already alluded to in other episodes. What sticks with me the most, as we jump between Ellie’s birthdays, is Joel’s insistence that “we could do this kind of thing more often” as they go to a museum or patrol the trails together. That it needs to be stated multiple times suggests that they are not, in fact, doing this kind of thing more often in between birthdays.
Joel is thoughtful and attentive in his way—a little better than his father—but it’s such a bittersweet little note, a surrogate dad’s clumsy effort to bridge a gap that he knows is there but doesn’t fully understand.
Why can’t it be like this forever?
Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Why can’t it be like this forever? Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Kyle: Yeah, I’m OK with a little arrested development in a girl that has been forced to miss so many of the markers of a “normal” pre-apocalypse childhood.
But yeah, Joel is pretty clumsy about this. And as we see all of these attempts with his surrogate daughter, it’s easy to forget what happened to his real daughter way back at the beginning of the first season. The trauma of that event shapes Joel in a way that I feel the narrative sometimes forgets about for long stretches.
But then we get moments like Joel leading Gail’s newly infected husband to a death that the poor guy would very much like to delay by an hour for one final moment with his wife. When Joel says that you can always close your eyes and see the face of the one you love, he may have been thinking about Ellie. But I like to think he was thinking about his actual daughter.
Andrew: Yes to the extent that Joel’s actions are relatable (I won’t say “excusable,” but “relatable”) it’s because the undercurrent of his relationship with Ellie is that he can’t watch another daughter die in his arms. I watched the first episode again recently, and that whole scene remains a masterfully executed gut-punch.
But it’s a tough tightrope to walk, because if the story spends too much time focusing on it, you draw attention to how unhealthy it is for Joel to be forcing Ellie to play that role in his life. Don’t get me wrong, Ellie was looking for a father figure, too, and that’s why it works! It’s a “found family” dynamic that they were both looking for. But I can’t hear Joel’s soothing “baby girl” epithet without it rubbing me the wrong way a little.
My gut reaction was that it was right for Joel not to fully trust Gail’s husband, but then I realized I can never not suspect Joe Pantoliano of treachery because of his role as betrayer in the 26-year-old movie The Matrix. Brains are weird.
Kyle: I did like the way Ellie tells Joel off for lying to her (and to Gail) about the killing; it’s a real “growing up” moment for the character. And of course it transitions well into The Porch Scene, Ellie’s ultimate moment of confronting Joel on his ultimate betrayal.
While I’m not a fan of the head-fake “this scene isn’t going to happen” thing they did earlier this season. I think the TV show once again did justice to one of the most impactful parts of the game. But the game also managed to spread out these Joel-centric flashbacks a little more, so we’re not transitioning from “museum fun” to “porch confrontation” quite so quickly. Here, it feels like they’re trying hard to rush through all of their “bring back Pedro Pascal” requirements in a single episode.
When you’ve only got one hour left, how you spend it becomes pretty important.
Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
When you’ve only got one hour left, how you spend it becomes pretty important. Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Andrew: Yeah, because you don’t need to pay a 3D model’s appearance fees if you want to use it in a bunch of scenes of your video game. Pedro Pascal has other stuff going on!
Kyle: That’s probably part of it. But without giving too much away, I think we’re seeing the limits of stretching the events of “Part 2” into what is essentially two seasons. While there have been some cuts, on the whole, it feels like there’s also been a lot of filler to “round out” these characters in ways that have been more harmful than helpful at points.
Andrew: Yeah, our episode ends by depositing us back in the main action, as Ellie returns to the abandoned theater where she and Dina have holed up. I’m curious to see what we’re in for in this last run of almost-certainly-Joel-less episodes, but I suspect it involves a bunch of non-Joel characters ping-ponging between the WLF forces and the local cultists. There will probably be some villain monologuing, probably some zombie hordes, probably another named character death or two. Pretty standard issue.
What I don’t expect is for anyone to lovingly and accurately describe the process of refurbishing a guitar. And that’s the other issue with putting this episode where it is—just as you’re getting used to a show without Joel, you’re reminded that he’s missing all over again.
One last trailer for From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.
We’re about three weeks out from the theatrical release of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas. So naturally Lionsgate has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for what promises to be a fiery, action-packed addition to the hugely successful franchise.
(Some spoilers for 2019’s John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.)
Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D’Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina, now played by de Armas.
Huston returns as the Director, Ian McShane is back as Winston, and Lance Reddick makes one final (posthumous) appearance as the Continental concierge, Charon. New cast members include Gabriel Byrne as the main villain, the Chancellor, who turns an entire town against Eve; Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Nogi, Eve’s mentor; Norman Reedus as Daniel Pine; and Catalina Sandino Moreno and David Castaneda in as-yet-undisclosed roles.
The first trailer was released last September and focused heavily on Eve’s backstory: Having been orphaned, she chose to train with the Ruska Roma in hopes of avenging her father’s brutal death. Wick only made a brief appearance, but he had more screen time in the second trailer, released in March, in which the pair face off in an atmospheric wintry landscape.
This final trailer opens with Eve looking up while directly in Wick’s crosshairs. Much of the ensuing footage isn’t new, but it does show de Armas to her best deadly advantage as she takes on combatant after combatant in true John Wick style. Her vow: “This isn’t done until they’re dead.”
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina hits theaters on June 6, 2025.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Andrew: We’re five episodes into this season of The Last of Us, and most of the infected we’ve seen have still been of the “mindless, screeching horde” variety. But in the first episode of the season, we saw Ellie encounter a single “smart” infected person, a creature that retained some sense of strategy and a self-preservation instinct. It implied that the show’s monsters were not done evolving and that the seemingly stable fragments of civilization that had managed to take root were founded on a whole bunch of incorrect assumptions about what these monsters were and what they could do.
Amidst all the human-created drama, the changing nature of the Mushroom Zombie Apocalypse is the backdrop of this week’s entire episode, starting and ending with the revelation that a 2003-vintage cordyceps nest has become a hotbed of airborne spores, ready to infect humans with no biting required.
This is news to me, as a Non-Game Player! But Kyle, I’m assuming this is another shoe that you knew the series was going to drop.
Kyle: Actually, no. I suppose it’s possible I’m forgetting something, but I think the “some infected are actually pretty smart now” storyline is completely new to the show. It’s just one of myriad ways the show has diverged enough from the games at this point that I legitimately don’t know where it’s going to go or how it’s going to get there at any given moment, which is equal parts fun and frustrating.
I will say that the “smart zombies” made for my first real “How are Ellie and Dina going to get out of this one?” moment, as Dina’s improvised cage was being actively torn apart by a smart and strong infected. But then, lo and behold, here came Deus Ex Jesse to save things with a timely re-entrance into the storyline proper. You had to know we hadn’t seen the last of him, right?
Ellie is good at plenty of things, but not so good at lying low. Credit: HBO
Andrew: As with last week’s subway chase, I’m coming to expect that any time Ellie and Dina seem to be truly cornered, some other entity is going to swoop down and “save” them at the last minute. This week it was an actual ally instead of another enemy that just happened to take out the people chasing Ellie and Dina. But it’s the same basic narrative fake-out.
I assume their luck will run out at some point, but I also suspect that if it comes, that point will be a bit closer to the season finale.
Kyle: Without spoiling anything from the games, I will say you can expect both Ellie and Dina to experience their fair share of lucky and unlucky moments in the episodes to come.
Speaking of unlucky moments, while our favorite duo is hiding in the park we get to see how the local cultists treat captured WLF members, and it is extremely not pretty. I’m repeating myself a bit from last week, but the lingering on these moments of torture feels somehow more gratuitous in an HBO show, even when compared to similarly gory scenes in the games.
Andrew: Well we had just heard these cultists compared to “Amish people” not long before, and we already know they don’t have tanks or machine guns or any of the other Standard Issue The Last of Us Paramilitary Goon gear that most other people have, so I guess you’ve got to do something to make sure the audience can actually take the cultists seriously as a threat. But yeah, if you’re squeamish about blood-and-guts stuff, this one’s hard to watch.
I do find myself becoming more of a fan of Dina and Ellie’s relationship, or at least of Dina as a character. Sure, her tragic backstory’s a bit trite (she defuses this criticism by pointing out in advance that it is trite), but she’s smart, she can handle herself, she is a good counterweight to Ellie’s rush-in-shooting impulses. They are still, as Dina points out, doing something stupid and reckless. But I am at least rooting for them to make it out alive!
Kyle: Personality wise the Dina/Ellie pairing has just as many charms as the Joel/Ellie pairing from last season. But while I always felt like Joel and Ellie had a clear motivation and end goal driving them forward, the thirst for revenge pushing Dina and Ellie deeper into Seattle starts to feel less and less relevant the more time goes on.
The show seems to realize this, too, stopping multiple times since Joel’s death to kind of interrogate whether tracking down these killers is worth it when the alternative is just going back to Jackson and prepping for a coming baby. It’s like the writers are trying to convince themselves even as they’re trying (and somewhat failing, in my opinion) to convince the audience of their just and worthy cause.
Andrew: Yeah, I did notice the points where Our Heroes paused to ask “are we sure we want to be doing this?” And obviously, they are going to keep doing this, because we have spent all this time setting up all these different warring factions and we’re going to use them, dang it!! But this has never been a thing that was going to bring Joel back, and it only seems like it can end in misery, especially because I assume Jesse’s plot armor is not as thick as Ellie or Dina’s.
Kyle: Personally I think the “Ellie and Dina give up on revenge and prepare to start a post-apocalyptic family (while holding off zombies)” would have been a brave and interesting direction for a TV show. It would have been even braver for the game, although very difficult for a franchise where the main verbs are “shoot” and “stab.”
Andrew: Yeah if The Last of Us Part II had been a city-building simulator where you swap back and forth between managing the economy of a large town and building defenses to keep out the hordes, fans of the first game might have been put off. But as an Adventure of Link fan I say: bring on the sequels with few-if-any gameplay similarities to their predecessors!
The cordyceps threat keeps evolving. Credit: HBO
Kyle: “We killed Joel” team member Nora definitely would have preferred if Ellie and Dina were playing that more domestic kind of game. As it stands, Ellie ends up pursuing her toward a miserable-looking death in a cordyceps-infested basement.
The chase scene leading up to this mirrors a very similar one in the game in a lot of ways. But while I found it easy to suspend my disbelief for the (very scripted) chase on the PlayStation, watching it in a TV show made me throw up my hands and say “come on, these heavily armed soldiers can’t stop a little girl that’s making this much ruckus?”
Andrew: Yeah Jesse can pop half a dozen “smart” zombies in half a dozen shots, but when it’s a girl with a giant backpack running down an open hallway everyone suddenly has Star Wars Stormtrooper aim. The visuals of the cordyceps den, with the fungified guys breathing out giant clouds of toxic spores, is effective in its unsettling-ness, at least!
This episode’s other revelation is that what Joel did to the Fireflies in the hospital at the end of last season is apparently not news to Ellie, when she hears it from Nora in the episode’s final moments. It could be that Ellie, Noted Liar, is lying about knowing this. But Ellie is also totally incapable of controlling her emotions, and I’ve got to think that if she had been surprised by this, we would have been able to tell.
Kyle: Yeah, saying too much about what Ellie knows and when would be risking some major spoilers. For now I’ll just say the way the show decided to mix things up by putting this detailed information in Nora’s desperate, spore-infested mouth kind of landed with a wet thud for me.
I was equally perplexed by the sudden jump cut from “Ellie torturing a prisoner” to “peaceful young Ellie flashback” at the end of the episode. Is the audience supposed to assume that this is what is going on inside Ellie’s head or something? Or is the narrative just shifting without a clutch?
Andrew: I took it to mean that we were about to get a timeline-breaking departure episode next week, one where we spend some time in flashback mode filling in what Ellie knows and why before we continue on with Abby Quest. But I guess we’ll see, won’t we!
Kyle: Oh, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for a bevy of flashbacks I knew were coming in some form or another. But the particular way they shifted to the flashback here, with mere seconds left in this particular brutal episode, was baffling to me.
Andrew: I think you do it that way to get people hyped about the possibility of seeing Joel again next week. Unless it’s just a cruel tease! But it’s probably not, right? Unless it is!
Kyle: Now I kind of hope the next episode just goes back to Ellie and Dina and doesn’t address the five seconds of flashback at all. Screw you, audience!
Cena, Brooks, Holland, Agee, and Stroma are all back for S2, along with Nhut Lee as Judomaster and Eagly, of course. Robert Patrick is also listed in the S2 cast, reprising his role as Chris’ father, Auggie; since Chris killed him in S1, one assumes Auggie will appear in flashbacks, hallucinations, or perhaps an alternate universe. (This is a soft reboot, after all.) New cast members include Frank Grillo as Rick Flagg Sr. (Grillo voiced the role in the animated Creature Commandos), now head of A.R.G.U.S. and out to avenge his son’s death; Tim Meadows as A.R.G.U.S. agent Langston Fleury; and Sol Rodriguez as Sasha Bordeaux.
Set to “Oh Lord” by Foxy Shazam, the teaser opens with Leota driving Chris to a job interview, assuring him, “They’re gonna be doing backflips to get you to join.” It turns out to be an interview with Justice League members Green Lantern/Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl/Kendra Saunders (Isabel Merced), and Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn), but they are not really into the interviewing process or taking note of Chris’ marksmanship and combat skills. They even diss poor Chris while accidentally keeping the microphone turned on: “This guy sucks.” (All three reprise their roles from Superman and are listed as S2 cast members, but it’s unclear how frequently they will appear.)
The other team members aren’t faring much better. They saved the world from the butterflies; you’d think people would treat them with a bit more respect, if not as outright heroes. Leota is “living in the worst level of Grand Theft Auto,” per John Economos; Emilia Harcourt has anger management issues and is diagnosed with “a particularly severe form of toxic masculinity”; and Vigilante is working in the food service industry. There’s not much detail as to the plot, apart from Chris going on the run from A.R.G.U.S., but the final scene shows Chris walking through a door and encountering another version of himself. So things are definitely about to get interesting.
The second season of Peacemaker will premiere on Max on August 21, 2025.
We have our first teaser for the upcoming third season of Foundation.
It’s been nearly two years, but the third season of Foundation, Apple TV+’s epic adaptation (or remix) of the Isaac Asimov series, is almost here. The streaming platform released an action-packed teaser of what we can expect from the new ten-episode season: the onset of the Third Crisis, a galactic war, and a shirtless Lee Pace.
(Some spoilers for first two seasons below.)
Showrunner David S. Goyer took great pains in S1 to carefully set up his expansive fictional world, and the scope only broadened in the second season. As previously reported, Asimov’s fundamental narrative arc remains intact, with the series taking place across multiple planets over 1,000 years and featuring a huge cast of characters.
Mathematician Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) developed a controversial theory of “psychohistory,” and his calculations predict the fall of the Empire, ushering in a Dark Age period that will last 30,000 years, after which a second Empire will emerge. The collapse of the Empire is inevitable, but Seldon has a plan to reduce the Dark Ages to a mere 1,000 years through the establishment of a Foundation to preserve all human knowledge so that civilization need not rebuild itself entirely from scratch. He is aided in this endeavor by his math prodigy protegé Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell).
The biggest change from the books is the replacement of the Empire’s ruling committee with a trio of Eternal Emperor clones called the Cleons—a genetic triune dynasty comprised of Brother Day (Pace), Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), and Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton). Technically, they are all perfect incarnations of the same man at different ages, and this is both the source of their strength as a team and of their conflicts. Their guardian is an android, Eto Demerzel (Laura Birn), one of the last surviving androids from the ancient Robot Wars, who is programmed to protect the dynasty at all costs.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here after they air. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: We start this episode from the perspective of a band of highly armed FEDRA agents in 2018 Seattle, shooting the shit in a transport that somehow still has usable gasoline. Maybe it’s just the political moment we’re in, but I was not quite emotionally prepared for these militarized characters in my post-apocalyptic escape show to start casually using “voters” as an ironic signifier for regular people.
“LOL, like we’d ever let them vote, amirite?”
Andrew: We’ve spent so little time with FEDRA—the post-collapse remnant of what had once been the US government—since the very opening episodes of the show that you can forget exactly why nearly every other individual and organization in the show’s world hates it and wants nothing to do with it. But here’s a reminder for us: casual cruelty, performed by ignorant fascists.
Of course as soon as you see and hear Jeffrey Wright, you know he’s going to be A Guy (he’s an HBO alum from Boardwalk Empire and Westworld, among many, many other film, TV, vocal, and stage performances). He just as casually betrays and blows up the transport full of jumped-up FEDRA jarheads, which is a clear prestige TV storytelling signifier. Here is a Man With A Code, but also a Man To Be Feared.
Kyle: Yeah, Isaac’s backstory was only broadly hinted at in the games, so getting to see this big “Who This Character Is” moment in the show was pretty effective.
What I found less effective was Ellie playing a very able A-Ha cover when she discovers the abandoned guitar room. In the game it serves as a welcome change of pace from a lot of frenetic action, and a good excuse for an endearing guitar-playing mini-game. Here it felt like it just kind of dragged on, with a lot of awkward dwelling on close-ups of Dina’s creepily enamored face.
I’ll…. be….. gone….. in a day or… twooooooooo.
Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
I’ll…. be….. gone….. in a day or… twooooooooo. Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Andrew: You know what, though, I do appreciate that the show at least made an effort to explain why this 30-year-old guitar was still in pristine condition. I don’t instantly buy that the silica gel packets (which Ellie, wisely, does not eat) in the guitar case would have lasted for that long, but at least she didn’t pull a mossy guitar straight off the wall and start tuning it up. Those strings are gonna corrode! That neck is gonna warp!
I do also think the show (and the game, I guess, picking up your context clues) got away with picking one of the goofiest songs they possibly could that would still read as “soulful and emotionally resonant” when played solo on acoustic guitar. But I suppose that’s always been the power of that particular instrument.
Kyle: Both the game and the show have leaned heavily on the ’80s nostalgia that Joel passed on to Ellie, and as a child of the ’80s, I’ll be damned if I said it doesn’t work on me on that level.
Andrew: It’s also, for what it’s worth, exactly what a beginner-to-intermediate guitar player is going to know how to do. If I find a guitar during an apocalypse, all people are going to be able to get out of me are mid-2000s radio singles with easy chord progressions. It’s too bad that society didn’t last long enough in this reality to produce “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”
Kyle: Not to cut short “Guitar Talk,” but the show cuts it off with a creepy scene of Isaac talking about high-end cookware to an initially unseen companion on the floor. The resulting scene of torture is, for my money, way worse than most anything we’re exposed to in the games—and these are games that are not exactly squeamish about showing scenes of torture and extreme violence!
Felt to me like they’re taking advantage of HBO’s reputation for graphic content just because they could, here…
Andrew: Definitely gratuitous! But not totally without storytelling utility. I do think, if you’re setting Isaac up to be a mid-season miniboss on the road to the Dramatic Confrontation with Abby, that you’ve got to make it especially clear that he is capable of really nasty things. Sure, killing a truckful of guys is ALSO bad, but they were guys that we as viewers are all supposed to hate. Torturing a defenseless man reinforces the perception of him as someone that Ellie and Dina do not want to meet, especially now that they’ve popped a couple of his guys.
Because Ellie and Dina have unwittingly wandered into the middle of a Seattle civil war of sorts, between Isaac and his militarized WLF members and the face-cutting cultists we briefly met in the middle of last episode. And while the WLF types do seem to have the cult outgunned, we are told here that WLF members are slowly defecting to the cult (rather than the other way around).
Welcome back to “Jeffrey Wright discusses cookware.” I’m Jeffrey Wright. Today on our program, we have a very special guest…
Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Welcome back to “Jeffrey Wright discusses cookware.” I’m Jeffrey Wright. Today on our program, we have a very special guest… Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Kyle: I will say I appreciated the surprisingly cogent history of the “chicken and egg games” beef between the two factions, as discussed between torturer and torture victim. Definitely a memorable bit of world-building.
But then we’re quickly back to the kind of infected attack scene that now seems practically contractually obligated to happen at least once an episode. At this point, I think these kinds of massive setpiece zombie battles would work better as a light seasoning than a thick sauce that just gets dumped on us almost every week.
Andrew: People in and from Seattle seem to have a unique gift for kicking up otherwise dormant swarms of infected! I know we’ll get back to it eventually, but I was more intrigued by the first episode’s reveal of more strategic infected that seemed to be retaining more of their human traits than I am by these screaming mindless hordes. Here, I think the tension is also ratcheted up artificially by Ellie’s weird escape strategy, which is to lead the two of them through a series of dead ends and cul-de-sacs before finally, barely, getting away.
But like you said, gotta have zombies on the zombie show! And it does finally make the “Dina finds out that Ellie is immune” shoe drop, though Dina doesn’t seem ready to think through any of the other implications of that reveal just yet. She has her own stuff going on!
Kyle: Yes, I’ve had to resist my inclination to do the remote equivalent of nudging you in the ribs to see if you had picked up on the potential “morning sickness” explanation of Dina’s frequent vomiting (which was hidden decently amid the “vomiting because of seeing horrifying gore” explanation).
Andrew: It does explain a couple of things! It does seem like a bit of a narrative shortcut to make Ellie extremely invested in Dina and whether she lives or dies, and given this show I am worried that this zygote is only going to be used to create more trauma for Ellie, rather than giving us a nuanced look at parenting during an apocalypse. But it is sweet to see how enthusiastically and immediately Ellie gets invested.
A question for you, while spoiling as little as you can: Are we still mostly just adapting the game at this point? You’d mentioned getting more Isaac backstory (sometimes the show expands on backstories well and sometimes it doesn’t), and some things have happened a bit out of order. But my impression is that we haven’t gotten a full departure a la the Nick Offerman episode from last season yet.
How do we keep getting into these messes?
Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
How do we keep getting into these messes? Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Kyle: At this point it’s kind of like a jazz riff on what happens in the game, with some bits copied note for note, some remixed and thrown into entirely different temporal locations, and some fresh new improv thrown in for good measure.
I’m definitely not a “the game is canon and you must interpret it literally” type of person, but the loose treatment is giving me a bit of whiplash. The reveal of Dina’s pregnancy, for instance, is not greeted with nearly as much immediate joy in the games. That said, the moment of joy Ellie and Dina do share here feels transplanted (in tone if nothing else) from an earlier game scene that the show had mostly skipped thus far. It’s like free association, man. Dig it!
The show also spends an inordinate amount of time discussing how pregnancy tests work in the post-apocalypse, which for me pushed past world-building and into overexplaining. It’s OK to just let stuff be sometimes, y’know?
Andrew: It’s jazz, man. It’s about the zombies you don’t kill.
However it’s been rearranged, I can still tell I’m watching a video game adaptation, because there are stealth kills and because important information is conveyed via messages and logos scrawled in blood on the walls. But I am still enjoying myself, and doing slightly less minute-to-minute missing of Joel than I did last episode. Slightly.
The episode ends with Ellie and Dina hearing the name of someone who has the same name as someone who knew Abby over a WLF walkie-talkie they nabbed, which gives them their next objective marker for Abby Quest. But they’ve got to cross an active war zone to get where they’re going (though I couldn’t tell from that distance whether we’re meant to be able to tell exactly who is fighting who at the moment). Guess I’ll have to wait and see!
Kyle: Personally, I’m hoping we see the moment where the newly out-and-proud bisexual Dina finally realizes “what’s the deal with all the rainbows.” Show your post-apocalyptic pride, girl!
It looks like Marvel has another critical and box office hit on its hands—and deservedly so—with Thunderbolts*, a follow-up of sorts to 2021’s Black Widow and the final film in the MCU’s Phase Five.
Yes, the asterisk is part of the title. Yes, I found that choice inexplicable when it was first announced. And yes, having seen the film, the asterisk makes perfect sense now as a well-timed joke. I won’t spill the beans because that would spoil the fun. Instead, I’ll simply say that Thunderbolts* is a refreshing return to peak Marvel form: well-paced, witty, and action-packed with enough heart to ensure you care about the characters.
(Some spoilers below.)
It’s basically the MCU’s version of The Suicide Squad (2021) with less over-the-top R-rated violence. In fact, that film’s director, James Gunn, was originally attached to direct Thunderbolts* but bowed out because he felt the projects were just too similar. Yet the PG-13 film definitely boasts that irreverent Gunn sensibility, with a vibe on par with the director’s delightful Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Thunderbolts* might not reach the spectacular box office heights of last year’s R-rated Deadpool and Wolverine, but so far I’m optimistic about the MCU’s future.
Black Widow introduced us to Natasha Romanoff’s (Scarlett Johansson) backstory as a child recruited for training as an elite assassin, along with her adoptive sister (and equally lethal assassin) Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). Thunderbolts* finds Yelena working as a hired mercenary for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), but she’s still grieving the loss of Natasha, and her heart just isn’t in.
Yelena’s existential ennui leads her to seek out her adoptive father, Alexei/Red Guardian (David Harbour), the Russian super soldier counterpart to Captain America. He’s not doing much better, working as a limo driver and living off takeout, and tells Yelena that Natasha found the secret to fulfillment: be a superhero.
Ars staffers reflect upon the things they love most about this masterpiece of absurdist comedy.
Credit: EMI Films/Python (Monty) Pictures
Credit: EMI Films/Python (Monty) Pictures
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is widely considered to be among the best comedy films of all time, and it’s certainly one of the most quotable. This absurdist masterpiece sending up Arthurian legend turns 50 (!) this year.
It was partly Python member Terry Jones’ passion for the Middle Ages and Arthurian legend that inspired Holy Grail and its approach to comedy. (Jones even went on to direct a 2004 documentary, Medieval Lives.) The troupe members wrote several drafts beginning in 1973, and Jones and Terry Gilliam were co-directors—the first full-length feature for each, so filming was one long learning process. Reviews were mixed when Holy Grail was first released—much like they were for Young Frankenstein (1974), another comedic masterpiece—but audiences begged to differ. It was the top-grossing British film screened in the US in 1975. And its reputation has only grown over the ensuing decades.
The film’s broad cultural influence extends beyond the entertainment industry. Holy Grail has been the subject of multiple scholarly papers examining such topics as its effectiveness at teaching Arthurian literature or geometric thought and logic, the comedic techniques employed, and why the depiction of a killer rabbit is so fitting (killer rabbits frequently appear drawn in the margins of Gothic manuscripts). My personal favorite was a 2018 tongue-in-cheek paper on whether the Black Knight could have survived long enough to make good on his threat to bite King Arthur’s legs off (tl;dr: no).
So it’s not at all surprising that Monty Python and the Holy Grail proved to be equally influential and beloved by Ars staffers, several of whom offer their reminiscences below.
The Monty Python troupe famously made Holy Grail on a shoestring budget—so much so that they couldn’t afford to have the knights ride actual horses. (There are only a couple of scenes featuring a horse, and apparently it’s the same horse.) Rather than throwing up their hands in resignation, that very real constraint fueled the Pythons’ creativity. The actors decided the knights would simply pretend to ride horses while their porters followed behind, banging halves of coconut shells together to mimic the sound of horses’ hooves—a time-honored Foley effect dating back to the early days of radio.
Being masters of absurdist humor, naturally, they had to call attention to it. Arthur and his trusty servant, Patsy (Gilliam), approach the castle of their first potential recruit. When Arthur informs the guards that they have “ridden the length and breadth of the land,” one of the guards isn’t having it. “What, ridden on a horse? You’re using coconuts! You’ve got two empty halves of coconut, and you’re bangin’ ’em together!”
That raises the obvious question: Where did they get the coconuts? What follows is one of the greatest examples of nerd-gassing yet to appear on film. Arthur claims he and Patsy found them, but the guard is incredulous since the coconut is tropical and England is a temperate zone. Arthur counters by invoking the example of migrating swallows. Coconuts do not migrate, but Arthur suggests they could be carried by swallows gripping a coconut by the husk.
The guard still isn’t having it. It’s a question of getting the weight ratios right, you see, to maintain air-speed velocity. Another guard gets involved, suggesting it might be possible with an African swallow, but that species is non-migratory. And so on. The two are still debating the issue as an exasperated Arthur rides off to find another recruit.
The best part? There’s a callback to that scene late in the film when the knights must answer three questions to cross the Bridge of Death or else be chucked into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. When it’s Arthur’s turn, the third question is “What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?” Arthur asks whether this is an African or a European swallow. This stumps the Bridgekeeper, who gets flung into the gorge. Sir Belvedere asks how Arthur came to know so much about swallows. Arthur replies, “Well, you have to know these things when you’re a king, you know.”
The plucky Black Knight (“It’s just a flesh wound!”) will always hold a special place in my heart, but that debate over air-speed velocities of laden versus unladen swallows encapsulates what makes Holy Grail a timeless masterpiece.
Despite their appearances, rabbits aren’t always the most innocent-looking animals. Recent reports of rabbit strikes on airplanes are the latest examples of the mayhem these creatures of chaos can inflict on unsuspecting targets.
I learned that lesson a long time ago, though, thanks partly to my way-too-early viewings of the animated Watership Downand Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There I was, about 8 years old and absent of paternal accompaniment, watching previously cuddly creatures bloodying each other and severing the heads of King Arthur’s retinue. While Watership Down’s animal-on-animal violence might have been a bit scarring at that age, I enjoyed the slapstick humor of the Rabbit of Caerbannog scene (many of the jokes my colleagues highlight went over my head upon my initial viewing).
Despite being warned of the creature’s viciousness by Tim the Enchanter, the Knights of the Round Table dismiss the Merlin stand-in’s fear and charge the bloodthirsty creature. But the knights quickly realize they’re no match for the “bad-tempered rodent,” which zips around in the air, goes straight for the throat, and causes the surviving knights to run away in fear. If Arthur and his knights possessed any self-awareness, they might have learned a lesson about making assumptions about appearances.
But hopefully that’s a takeaway for viewers of 1970s British pop culture involving rabbits. Even cute bunnies, as sweet as they may seem initially, can be engines of destruction: “Death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.”
—Jacob May
Can’t stop the music
The most memorable songs from Monty Python and the Holy Grail were penned by Neil Innes, who frequently collaborated with the troupe and appears in the film. His “Brave Sir Robin” amusingly parodied minstrel tales of valor by imagining all the torturous ways that one knight might die. Then there’s his “Knights of the Round Table,” the first musical number performed by the cast—if you don’t count the monk chants punctuated with slaps on the head with wooden planks. That song hilariously rouses not just wild dancing from knights but also claps from prisoners who otherwise dangle from cuffed wrists.
But while these songs have stuck in my head for decades, Monty Python’s Terry Jones once gave me a reason to focus on the canned music instead, and it weirdly changed the way I’ve watched the movie ever since.
Back in 2001, Jones told Billboard that an early screening for investors almost tanked the film. He claimed that after the first five minutes, the movie got no laughs whatsoever. For Jones, whose directorial debut could have died in that moment, the silence was unthinkable. “It can’t be that unfunny,” he told Billboard. “There must be something wrong.”
Jones soon decided that the soundtrack was the problem, immediately cutting the “wonderfully rich, atmospheric” songs penned by Innes that seemed to be “overpowering the funny bits” in favor of canned music.
Reading this prompted an immediate rewatch because I needed to know what the first bit was that failed to get a laugh from that fateful audience. It turned out to be the scene where King Arthur encounters peasants in a field who deny knowing that there even was a king. As usual, I was incapable of holding back a burst of laughter when one peasant woman grieves, “Well, I didn’t vote for you” while packing random clumps of mud into the field. It made me wonder if any song might have robbed me of that laugh, and that made me pay closer attention to how Jones flipped the script and somehow meticulously used the canned music to extract more laughs.
The canned music was licensed from a British sound library that helped the 1920s movie business evolve past silent films. They’re some of the earliest songs to summon emotion from viewers whose eyes were glued to a screen. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which features a naive King Arthur enduring his perilous journey on a wood stick horse, the canned music provides the most predictable soundtrack you could imagine that might score a child’s game of make-believe. It also plays the straight man by earnestly pulsing to convey deep trouble as knights approach the bridge of death or heavenly trumpeting the anticipated appearance of the Holy Grail.
It’s easy to watch the movie without noticing the canned music, as the colorful performances are Jones’ intended focus. Not relying on punchlines, the group couldn’t afford any nuance to be lost. But there is at least one moment where Jones obviously relies on the music to overwhelm the acting to compel a belly laugh. Just before “the most foul, cruel, bad-tempered rodent” appears, a quick surge of dramatic music that cuts out just as suddenly makes it all the more absurd when the threat emerges and appears to be an “ordinary rabbit.”
It’s during this scene, too, that King Arthur delivers a line that sums up how predictably odd but deceptively artful the movie’s use of canned music really is. When he meets Tim the Enchanter—who tries to warn the knights about the rabbit’s “pointy teeth” by evoking loud thunder rolls and waggling his fingers in front of his mouth—Arthur turns to the knights and says, “What an eccentric performance.”
—Ashley Belanger
Thank the “keg rock conclave”
I tried to make music a big part of my teenage identity because I didn’t have much else. I was a suburban kid with a B-minus/C-plus average, no real hobbies, sports, or extra-curriculars, plus a deeply held belief that Nine Inch Nails, the Beastie Boys, and Aphex Twin would never get their due as geniuses. Classic Rock, the stuff jocks listened to at parties and practice? That my dad sang along to after having a few? No thanks.
There were cultural heroes, there were musty, overwrought villains, and I knew the score. Or so I thought.
I don’t remember exactly where I found the little fact that scarred my oppositional ego forever. It might have been Spin magazine, a weekend MTV/VH1 feature, or that Rolling Stone book about the ’70s (I bought it for the punks, I swear). But at some point, I learned that a who’s-who of my era’s played-out bands—Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, even Jethro (freaking) Tull—personally funded one of my favorite subversive movies. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, key members of the keg-rock conclave, attended the premiere.
It was such a small thing, but it raised such big, naive, adolescent questions. Somebody had to pay for Holy Grail—it didn’t just arrive as something passed between nerds? People who make things I might not enjoy could financially support things I do enjoy? There was a time when today’s overcelebrated dinosaurs were cool and hip in the subculture? I had common ground with David Gilmour?
Ever since, when a reference to Holy Grail is made, especially to how cheap it looks, I think about how I once learned that my beloved nerds (or theater kids) wouldn’t even have those coconut horses were it not for some decent-hearted jocks.
—Kevin Purdy
A masterpiece of absurdism
“I blow my nose at you, English pig-dog!” EMI Films/Python (Monty) Pictures
I was young enough that I’d never previously stayed awake until midnight on New Year’s Eve. My parents were off to a party, my younger brother was in bed, and my older sister had a neglectful attitude toward babysitting me. So I was parked in front of the TV when the local PBS station aired a double feature of The Yellow Submarine and The Holy Grail.
At the time, I probably would have said my mind was blown. In retrospect, I’d prefer to think that my mind was expanded.
For years, those films mostly existed as a source of one-line evocations of sketch comedy nirvana that I’d swap with my friends. (I’m not sure I’ve ever lacked a group of peers where a properly paced “With… a herring!” had meaning.) But over time, I’ve come to appreciate other ways that the films have stuck with me. I can’t say whether they set me on an aesthetic trajectory that has continued for decades or if they were just the first things to tickle some underlying tendencies that were lurking in my not-yet-fully-wired brain.
In either case, my brain has developed into a huge fan of absurdism, whether in sketch comedy, longer narratives like Arrested Development or the lyrics of Courtney Barnett. Or, let’s face it, any stream of consciousness lyrics I’ve been able to hunt down. But Monty Python remains a master of the form, and The Holy Grail’s conclusion in a knight bust remains one of its purest expressions.
A bit less obviously, both films are probably my first exposures to anti-plotting, where linearity and a sense of time were really besides the point. With some rare exceptions—the eating of Sir Robin’s minstrels, Ringo putting a hole in his pocket—the order of the scenes were completely irrelevant. Few of the incidents had much consequence for future scenes. Since I was unused to staying up past midnight at that age, I’d imagine the order of events was fuzzy already by the next day. By the time I was swapping one-line excerpts with friends, it was long gone. And it just didn’t matter.
In retrospect, I think that helped ready my brain for things like Catch-22 and its convoluted, looping, non-Euclidean plotting. The novel felt like a revelation when I first read it, but I’ve since realized it fits a bit more comfortably within a spectrum of works that play tricks with time and find clever connections among seemingly random events.
I’m not sure what possessed someone to place these two films together as appropriate New Year’s Eve programming. But I’d like to think it was more intentional than I had any reason to suspect at the time. And I feel like I owe them a debt.
—John Timmer
A delightful send-up of autocracy
“See the violence inherent in the system!” Credit: Python (Monty) Pictures
What an impossible task to pick just a single thing I love about this film! But if I had to choose one scene, it would be when a lost King Arthur comes across an old woman—but oops, it’s actually a man named Dennis—and ends up in a discussion about medieval politics. Arthur explains that he is king because the Lady of the Lake conferred the sword Excalibur on him, signifying that he should rule as king of the Britons by divine right.
To this, Dennis replies, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”
Even though it was filmed half a century ago, the scene offers a delightful send-up of autocracy. And not to be too much of a downer here, but all of us living in the United States probably need to be reminded that living in an autocracy would suck for a lot of reasons. So let’s not do that.
—Eric Berger
Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Andrew: And there we are! Our first post-Joel episode of The Last Of Us. It’s not like we’ve never had Joel-light episodes before, but Pedro Pascal’s whole “reluctant uncle” thing is a load-bearing element of several currently airing TV shows and I find myself missing it a LOT.
Kyle: Yeah, I’ve said here in the past how the core Ellie/Joel relationship was key to my enjoyment of the first game. Its absence gently soured me on the second game and is starting to do the same for the second season.
But I was also literally mouth agape during the hospital scene, when Ellie said she had an opportunity to talk to Joel on the porch before he died but passed on it. Anyone who’s played the game knows how central “the porch scene” is to recontextualizing the relationship between these two characters before they are parted forever. I was hoping that we’d still get that scene in a surprise flashback later in the series, but now that seems unlikely at best.
Andrew: (I am not watching that video by the way, I need my brain to stay pure!!)
Kyle: I suppose Ellie could have just been lying to a nosy therapist, but if she wasn’t, and their final conversation has just been retconned out of existence… I don’t know what they were thinking. Then again, if it’s just a head fake to psych out game players, well, bravo, I guess.
Tommy is torn between love for his brother and the welfare of the community he’s helped to build. Credit: HBO
Andrew: Ellie is a known liar, which we know even before Catherine O’Hara, world’s least ethical therapist, declares her to be a lying liar who lies. If the scene is as pivotal as you say, then I’m sure we’ll get it at a time that’s engineered to maximize the gut punch. The re-strung guitar ended up back in her room in the end, didn’t it?
We’re able to skip ahead to Ellie being semi-functional again because of a three-month time jump, showing us a Jackson community that is rebuilding after a period of mourning and cleaning that it didn’t want viewers to spend time on. I am struck by the fact that, despite everything, Jackson gets to be the one “normal” community with baseball and sandwiches and boring town-hall meetings, where every other group of more than 10 people is either a body-mutilation cult or a paramilitary band of psychopaths.
Kyle: We also saw the version of Boston that Ellie grew up in last season, which was kind of halfway between “paramilitary psychopaths” and “normal community.” But I do think the Last of Us fiction in general has a pretty grim view of how humans would react to precarity, which makes Jackson’s uniqueness all the more important as a setting.
We also get our first glimpse into Jackson politics in this episode, which ends up going in quite a different direction to get to the same “Ellie and Dina go out for revenge.” While I appreciate the town hall meeting as a decent narrative explanation of why two young girls are making this revenge trek alone, I feel like the whole sequence was a little too drawn out with sanctimonious philosophizing from all sides.
Even after an apocalypse, city council meetings are a constant. Credit: HBO
Andrew: Yeah the town hall scene was an odd one. Parts of it could have been lifted from Parks & Recreation, particularly the bit where the one guy comes to the “Are We Voting To Pursue Bloody Vengeance” meeting to talk about the finer points of agriculture (he does not have a strong feeling about the bloody vengeance).
Part of it almost felt too much like “our” politics, when Seth (the guy who harassed Ellie and Dina at the dance months ago, but attempted a partially forced apology afterward) stands up and calls everyone snowflakes for even thinking about skipping out on the bloody vengeance (not literally, but that’s the clear subtext). He even invokes a shadowy, non-specific “they” who would be “laughing at us” if the community doesn’t track down and execute Abby. I’ll tell you what, that he is one of two people backing Ellie’s attempted vengeance tour doesn’t make me feel better about what she’s deciding to do here.
Kyle: I will say the line “Nobody votes for angry” rang a bit hollow given our current political moment. Even if their national politics calcified in 2003, I think that doesn’t really work…
Andrew: SO MANY people vote for angry! Or, at least, for emotional. It’s an extremely reliable indicator!
Kyle: Except in Jackson, the last bastion of unemotional, mercy-forward community on either side of the apocalypse!
Andrew: So rather than trying the angry route, Ellie reads a prepared statement where she (again lying, by the way!) claims that her vengeance tour isn’t about vengeance at all and attempts to appeal to the council’s better angels, citing the bonds of community that hold them all together. When this (predictably) fails, Ellie (even more predictably) abandons the community at almost the first possible opportunity, setting out on a single horse with Dina in tow to exact vengeance alone.
Kyle: One thing I did appreciate in this episode is how many times they highlighted that Ellie was ready to just “GO GO GO REVENGE NOW NO WAITING” and even the people that agreed with her were like “Hold up, you at least need to stock up on some better supplies, girl!”
Andrew: Maybe you can sense it leaking through, and it’s not intentional, but I am already finding Ellie’s impulsive snark a bit less endearing without Joel’s taciturn competence there to leaven it.
Kyle: I can, and I can empathize with it. I think Tommy is right, too, in saying that Joel would have moved heaven and earth to save a loved one but not necessarily to get revenge for one that’s already dead. He was pragmatic enough to know when discretion was the better part of valor, and protecting him and his was always the priority. And I’m not sure the town hall “deterrence” arguments would have swayed him.
Look on the bright side, though, at least we get a lost of long, languorous scenes of lush scenery on the ride to Seattle (a scene-setting trait the show borrows well from the movie). I wonder what you made of Dina asking Ellie for a critical assessment of her kissing abilities, especially the extremely doth-protest-too-much “You’re gay, I’m not” bit…
Ellie and Dina conspire. Credit: HBO
Andrew: “You’re gay, I’m not, and those are the only two options! No, I will not be answering any follow-up questions!”
I am not inclined to get too on Dina’s case about that, though. Sexuality is complicated, as is changing or challenging your own perception of yourself. The show doesn’t go into it, but I’ve also got to imagine that in any post-apocalyptic scenario, the vital work of Propagating the Species creates even more societal pressure to participate in heteronormative relationships than already exists in our world.
Ellie, who is only truly happy when she is pissing someone off, is probably more comfortable being “out” in this context than Dina would be.
Kyle: As the episode ends we get a bit of set up for a couple of oncoming threats (or is it just one?): an unseen cult-killing force and a phalanx of heavily armed WLF soldiers that Ellie and Dina seem totally unprepared for. In a video game I’d have no problem believing my super-soldier protagonist character could shoot and kill as many bad guys as the game wants to throw at me. In a more “grounded” TV show, the odds do not seem great.
Andrew: One thread I’m curious to see the show pull at: Ellie attempts to blame “Abby and her crew,” people who left Jackson months ago, for a mass slaying of cult members that had clearly happened just hours ago, an attempt to build Abby up into a monster in her head so it’s easier to kill her when the time comes. We’ll see how well it works!
But yeah, Ellie and Dina and their one horse are not ready for the “Terror Lake Salutes Hannibal Crossing The Alps“-length military parade that the WLF is apparently prepared to throw at them.
Kyle: They’re pretty close to Seattle when they find the dead cultists, so from their perspective I’m not sure blaming Abby and crew for the mass murder is that ridiculous
Andrew: (Girl whose main experience with murder is watching Abby brutally kill her father figure, seeing someone dead on the ground): Getting a lot of Abby vibes from this…
We loved the show’s wicked humor, great characters, and mix of cases-of-the-week with longer narrative arcs.
Zombies never really go out of style, but they were an especially hot commodity on television in the 2010s, spawning the blockbuster series The Walking Dead (2010-2022) as well as quirkier fare like Netflix’s comedy horror, The Santa Clarita Diet (2017-2018). iZombie, a supernatural procedural dramedy that ran for five seasons on the CW, falls into the latter category. It never achieved mega-hit status but nonetheless earned a hugely loyal following drawn to the show’s wicked humor, well-drawn characters, and winning mix of cases-of-the-week and longer narrative arcs.
(Spoilers for all five seasons below.)
The original Vertigo comic series was created by writer Chris Roberson and artist Michael Allred. It featured a zombie in Eugene, Oregon, named Gwen Dylan, who worked as a gravedigger because she needed to consume brains every 30 days to keep her memories and cognitive faculties in working order. Her best friends were a ghost who died in the 1960s and a were-terrier named Scott, nicknamed “Spot,” and together they took on challenges both personal and supernatural (vampires, mummies, etc.).
Created by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright, the TV series borrowed the rough outlines of the premise but otherwise had very little in common with the comics, although Allred drew the nifty opening credits (set to a cover version of “Stop, I’m Already Dead” by Deadboy & The Elephant Men). The location shifted to Seattle.
An over-achieving young medical student, Liv Moore (get it?)—played to perfection by Rose McIver—decides to attend a boat party on a whim one night. It ends in disaster thanks to a sudden zombie outbreak, resulting from a combination of an energy sports drink (Max Rager) and a tainted batch of a new designer drug called Utopium. Liv jumps into the water to flee the zombies but suffers a scratch and wakes up on a beach in a body bag, craving brains.
Liv is forced to break up with her human fiancé, Major (Robert Buckley), to avoid infecting him and becomes estranged from her best friend and roommate, Peyton (Aly Michalka), hiding her new zombie nature from both. And she ends up working in the medical examiner’s office to ensure she has a steady supply of brains. Soon her boss, Ravi (Rahul Kohli), discovers her secret. Rather than being terrified or trying to kill her, Ravi is fascinated by her unusual condition. He tells Liv he was fired by the CDC for his incessant warnings about the threat of such a virus and vows to find a cure.
The brainy bunch
Med student Liv Moore (Rose McIver) wound up a zombie after attending an ill-fated boat party. The CW
The show’s premise stems from an unusual side effect of eating brains: Liv gets some of the dead person’s memories in flashes (visions) as well as certain personality traits—speaking Romanian, painting, agoraphobia, alcoholism, etc. This gives her critical insights that help Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) solve various murders, although for several seasons Clive thinks Liv is psychic rather than a zombie. It’s Ravi who first encourages her to get involved when a kleptomaniac Romanian call girl is killed: “You ate the girl’s temporal lobe; the least you can do is help solve her murder.”
Every show needs a good villain and iZombie found it in Liv’s fellow zombie, Blaine (David Anders)—in fact, Blaine is the one who scratched Liv at the boat party and turned her into a zombie. He was there dealing the tainted Utopium. Zombie Blaine switches to dealing brains, which he naturally acquires through murderous means, creating a loyal (i.e., desperate) customer base by infecting wealthy sorts and turning them into zombies. What makes Blaine so compelling as a villain is that he’s as devilishly charming as he is evil, with some unresolved daddy issues for good measure.
Over the course of five seasons, we fell in love with iZombie‘s colorful collection of characters; relished the way the writers leaned into the rather silly premise and (mostly) made it work; and groaned at the occasional bad pun. (Major’s last name is “Lillywhite”; Blaine’s S1 butcher shop is called Meat Cute; when Ravi and Major take in a stray dog, Ravi names the dog “Minor”; and at one point there is a zombie bar called The Scratching Post.) Admittedly, the show started to lose some momentum in later seasons as subplots and shifting relationships became more complicated. And without question the series finale was disappointing: It felt rushed and unsatisfying, with fewer of the quieter character moments that made its strongest episodes so appealing.
Yet there is still so much to love about iZombie, starting with the brain recipes. Brains are disgusting; Blaine and Liv briefly bond over the metallic taste, gross texture, and how much they miss real food. It doesn’t help that zombies can’t really taste much flavor and thus douse their repasts in eye-watering hot sauces. No wonder Liv is constantly trying to find new ways to make the brains more palatable: stir fry, instant Ramen noodles, mixing the brains in with microwaved pizza rolls, deep fried hush puppy brains, sloppy joes, protein shakes—you name it. Blaine, however, takes things to a gourmet level for his rich zombie customers, creating tantalizing dishes like gnocchi stuffed with medulla oblongata swimming in a fra diavolo sauce.
Good guys, bad guys
“Full-on zombie mode” came in handy sometimes. The CW
The writers didn’t neglect Liv’s love life, which she mistakenly thought was over once she became a zombie. Sure, Liv was always going to end up in a happily-ever-after situation with Major. But count me among those who never thought they really worked as soul mates. (Maybe pre-zombie they did.)
The clear fan favorite love interest was S1’s Lowell Tracey (Bradley James), a British musician who found he could no longer perform live after becoming a zombie—since pre-show adrenalin tended to trigger Full On Zombie Mode. He was Liv’s “first” as a zombie, and while they were superficially very different, they bonded over their shared secret and the resulting emotional isolation. And he bonded with Ravi over their shared hatred of a rival soccer team.
James’ smartly soulful performance won fans’ hearts. We were all rooting for those crazy kids. Alas, Liv soon discovered that his brain supply came from Blaine after she accidentally had a bite of Lowell’s breakfast one morning. In a desperate bid to win back her trust, Lowell agreed to help her take out Blaine; it helped that Liv was currently on Sniper Brain. But when the critical moment came, Liv couldn’t take the shot. She watched through the gun sight as Lowell put his hand over his heart and took on Blaine alone—with fatal consequences, because sensitive artist types really aren’t cut out for fights to the death. Howls of protest echoed in living rooms around the world. RIP Lowell, we barely knew ye.
Lowell never got the chance to become a recurring character, but others were more fortunate. Jessica Harmon’s FBI agent, Dale Brazzio, started out as an antagonist investigating the Meat Cute murders—Major and a zombie police captain blew it up to take out Blaine’s criminal enterprise—and ended up as Clive’s romantic partner. Bryce Hodgson’s comedic S1 turn as Major’s roommate in the mental institution, Scott E., was so memorable that the writers brought the actor back to play twin brother Don E., part of Blaine’s drug (and brain) dealing enterprise. Others never graduated to recurring roles but still made the odd guest appearance: Daran Norris as the charmingly louche weatherman Johnny Frost, for instance, and Ryan Beil as nebbishy police sketch artist Jimmy Hahn.
You are what you eat
Liv on frat-boy brain crushed it at beer pong. The CW
And let’s not forget the various Big Bads, most notably S2’s Vaughan du Clark (Steven Weber), amoral playboy CEO of Max Rager, and his conniving temptress daughter, Rita (Leanne Lapp). They provided all manner of delicious devilry before meeting a fitting end: Rita, now a zombie due to Vaughan’s negligence, goes “full Romero” during the S2 finale and eats daddy’s brains in an elevator before being shot in the head.
Perhaps the best thing about iZombie was how much fun the writers had giving Liv so many different kinds of brains to eat—and how much fun McIver had weaving those very different personalities into her performance. There was the rich shopaholic Desperate Housewife; an amorous painter; a sociopathic hitman who was a whiz at pub trivia; a grumpy old man; a schizophrenic; a kids’ basketball coach; a magician; a dominatrix; a medieval history professor fond of LARP-ing; and a ballroom dancer, to name a few.
Liv on agoraphobic hacker brain dominates an online gaming campaign, while she becomes an ace dungeon master on Dungeons & Dragons brain, much to nerdcore Ravi’s delight—although perhaps not as much as he enjoys Liv on vigilante superhero brain. (He found Liv on PhD scientist brain more annoying.) And sometimes the brains are used for throwaway humor: Lowell accidentally eating a gay man’s brain just before his first date with Liv, for instance, or Liv, Blaine, and Don E. hopped up on conspiracy theory brain and bonding over their shared paranoid delusions.
If I were forced to pick my favorite brain, however, I’d probably go back to the S1 episode, “Flight of the Living Dead,” in which Liv’s adventurous former sorority sister, Holly (Tasya Teles), dies in a skydiving “accident” that turns out to be murder. Back in the day, Liv was among those who voted to kick Holly out of the sorority for her constant rule-breaking and reckless behavior. But after eating Holly’s brain in hopes of finding out who killed her, Liv learns more about where Holly was coming from and how to bring something of Holly’s insatiable lust for life into her own existence. “Live each day as if it were your last” can’t help but strike a chord with Liv, who took her former ambitious, over-achieving life for granted before that fateful boat party.
Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.
