Few games have changed the trajectory of their respective series quite like Monster Hunter World, one of the biggest smash hits Capcom has ever created. World was a vibrant, expansive, and ambitious leap that paid off in spades. It makes sense, then, that eight years later the series would still be chasing that high. Even with the time that's passed, I find myself amazed that Monster Hunter Outlanders, essentially, manages to cram the experience of World into a mobile game. This mobile spinoff certainly isn't attempting to reinvent the wheel, but after six hours with the game, it's proving to be a surprisingly competent package, although I have some bubbling hesitations about the grind and encroaching gacha systems.

Anytime there's a mobile spinoff of a major series, the first question that comes to mind is how that game will be compromised, or truncated, from that full console or PC experience. And so often, those mobile games are simplifications of a larger idea, like Fire Emblem Heroes or Diablo Immortal. What I've found fascinating about Monster Hunter Outlanders so far is that it doesn't really simplify the overall gameplay loop and structure. Rather, it's sort of a reconfigured Monster Hunter that strings out progression to support the typical framework of a mobile game, one filled with nearly a half-dozen different currencies to keep track of at any given time. But it also very much feels like Outlanders wants players to engage with it like a full-fledged Monster Hunter, and even includes all the story exposition you'd expect to go along with it.

Like most Monster Hunter games, Outlanders begins with a big cinematic opening where a group of adventurers from the Adventurer's Guild are striking out to an uncharted part of the world – in this case, an island called Aesoland. This island is filled with Radiant species of monsters, beasts whose abilities have been enhanced by a mineral called Radiantite. This is, ostensibly, also the game's reasoning for creating new designs of classic series monsters and tweaking their abilities to match this game specifically, like the Pukei-Pukei focusing more on head or tail attacks, which are easier to target with Outlander's more streamlined lock-on system.

But I cannot stress enough how much Outlanders banks on the same formula as World; it's almost as if the same game was transposed onto different locations and story elements. Even the first area of the game, like World, is a heavily forested area with a lot of verticality for climbing or setting ambushes; intentionally designed to show you the ropes. If you've played any Monster Hunter game, you know that core gameplay loop of what to expect – you take missions or hunts, track down monsters in an instanced map, beat them, harvest materials, and then use said materials to craft more powerful equipment.

Complementing this, you have a moderately-sized open world that you can roam around and explore to take down smaller monsters, find crafting materials, and more. Outlanders also brings back many of the elements that have become mainstays since World: scoutfly trails to guide you to objectives, buildable objects on the map like towers and ziplines, and monsters that interact and fight each other like natural predators. All these elements click together just as well as they did in World, creating a compelling loop that feels like you're constantly doing something meaningful to that overall progress. Outlanders is also impressive in terms of presentation with environments that genuinely look stunning; playing on an iPhone 14 Plus, I had a consistent framerate with very few dips.

However, the differences start to surface as you dig deeper into the minutiae of how the game actually plays and what options are available in combat scenarios. Certain aspects of the combat have been streamlined to fit the mobile experience and accommodate a touchscreen control scheme instead of a controller (although there is controller support if you want it). Movement and actions aren't as intricate, although the game sports two different control methods: Adventure Mode and Classic Mode. The former is intended for new players and streamlines things down to three buttons, Attack, React, and Burst. From there, the game contextually handles a lot of what you're doing, like the React button allowing you to dodge when a monster attacks, or block if the time is right. Classic Mode, on the other hand, gives you full manual control, including traditional button-stringed combos.

What I've found so far, though, is that Classic Mode proves to be unfit for just touch controls, as it's too cumbersome to use all of these different options without a controller. Adventure Mode does, generally, feel good to use, but takes some of the vibrant friction out of the experience by streamlining so much. That means the ideal way to play this, if you can, is on Classic Mode with a controller – which then ultimately raises the question of why you wouldn't just play a console Monster Hunter. There are answers to that question, of course, like if you don't own anything else to play a Monster Hunter game on.

The other two major elements where Outlanders shifts that classic experience is with your ability to build a party of adventurers and how progression works. To try and fit the typical idea of a gacha game, Outlanders creates a group of distinct characters that take part in the story who you can then recruit and use as NPC companions. Recruiting means partaking in those traditional gacha pulls using currency called Rutacoins.

Each Adventurer has their own distinct moveset that builds on one specific weapon type, meaning playing as that Adventurer is different from just slapping any other weapon on your player-created character. This does create some incentive to try and get these various characters. Of course, the real key to this system is how easy or difficult it might be to pull Adventurers and upgrade them to be useful in combat. I was able to build a full four-person party fairly easily with the currency I earned from starting the game. Overall, I like the idea of being able to build a party with these distinct characters and play solo. The option is still there to group up with other players and friends, but the Adventurers make it easy to tackle quests and Contracts on your own. But I can already see hints of it being frustrating to pull repeat characters, let alone anyone new you might want down the line.

This leads to the area I'm not as hot on: the progression system. While almost all of the currency in the game is earnable from playing, as well as spending real money, I'm finding that the classic Monster Hunter progression loop feels a bit slower here. You need Zenny to pay for items, upgrades, and services. Rutacoins are for pulling characters and sidekicks (Palicos and the like). Research Points needed for the upgradable skill tree to unlock more buildable structures, for example. And as you might expect, there are additional materials necessary for upgrading a character or sidekick's level, unlocking their level cap, upgrading weapons, crafting items, and more.

Monster Hunter has always had a lot of elements to juggle in terms of progression, which is arguably the biggest barrier to entry for some people. In many ways, the series has been about busy work, sifting through menus, and meticulously crafting sets of armor and weapons. Those are elements of Monster Hunter I've always enjoyed, but even after a half-dozen hours, I'm feeling quite fatigued by the sheer amount of stuff in Outlanders. There's a lot of currency and whatnot to earn, and equally as much to figure out in terms of how to get things done, as well as hours of tutorials.

This has, ultimately, made the opening hours a bit more of a slog than something like Monster Hunter World or Rise. And even though I'm genuinely having a good time so far, my primary concern at the moment is how all that might affect the experience as a whole, especially as you get to the more difficult and complex hunts. I've played enough gacha games in my life to know that the fun can be brought to a grinding halt pretty quickly when resources become a wall you have to overcome.

Of course, it'll take time to make a final judgement, but my overarching sentiment on Outlanders right now is surprise: for how it still leans into that essential component of timing in combat, and for how uncompromised the visuals and world design are. Those insidious mobile elements that too many games fall into are still nipping at the edges, but I'm hoping the core experience is able to stave it off in the long-run. I'll be pouring more time into Monster Hunter Outlanders in the coming days for the full review coming soon.

The Mongoose is in theaters now.

There’s a scene in the 1971 sci-fi cult classic The Omega Man where Charlton Heston’s helicopter is crash-landing, and just before the moment of impact it flies into an embankment just below the camera’s POV… where the craft’s explosion happens safely off-screen. It was a cheapo move in 1971 – they clearly didn’t really blow up the helicopter – and it’s a cheapo move in 2026, too, when Liam Neeson’s The Mongoose – now, somehow, playing at a multiplex near you! – pulls a similar stunt.

Sure, in The Mongoose the helicopter doesn’t even blow up off-camera, but that’s not the point (the crash-landing winds up being played for a laugh instead). What I’m talking about here is the threadbare sense that such a moment evokes for the viewer, the “a third of the budget of this movie must’ve gone to Liam Neeson” feeling that permeates the not-quite high-octane, not-quite thrilling picture.

And yet, there’s a likability factor wafting around this story, thanks largely to Neeson’s disarming “yeah, I am taking a third of this film’s budget, and I’m gonna have fun doing it” affectation as he drives a stolen hotrod – do we still call them hotrods? – across various states while on the run from the police due to a crime he did not commit. Along for the ride, so to speak, are Ving Rhames, Marisa Tomei, and Michael Chiklis, all cashing in less than a third of the budget, presumably, but hitting their marks efficiently enough to get this thing over the finish line in a “Maybe just catch it on Prime Video eventually” kind of way.

The Mongoose tells its story through a mix of the chase Neeson’s Ryan “Fang” Flanagan is involved in and flashbacks to the former Special Forces soldier’s time in Afghanistan, specifically when he and his comrades (Rhames’ Tanker, Marcus Thomas’ Munch, and Ryan Morgan's Wiz) were captured by the enemy. Further flashbacks eventually fill in why Fang is on the run; specifically, his ex-wife Tara’s (Marisa Tomei) fiancé – “Todd something or other,” Fang growls – turns out to be not a nice person, and when Fang attempts to help Tara move out of the guy’s place, violence erupts. Next thing he knows, someone’s dead, and he’s stolen Todd something or other’s fancy, and quite fast, Ford Mustang. Other than that, all he’s got is a bullet in his leg, a vow to never be imprisoned again after his experience in the war, and the Mustang's built-in AI assistant, named Helene. “Is this, like, Siri?” Fang – and maybe Neeson too when he first read the script – asks.

Helene, like many of the other characters (“characters”) in the episodic The Mongoose, serves as a foil for the surprisingly at-ease Fang to toss one-liners at while out-driving the various police who are pursuing him by land and air. Fang is surprisingly chill about this situation, as he clearly has a death wish, having decided that he is not going to allow himself to be taken alive. As the chase drags on, he eventually finds temporary refuge through the help of some other vets, and soon Fang begins to take on a legendary man-against-the-system status, thanks no doubt to his war hero cred, as well as the “live” CNN coverage of the high-speed pursuit, which IRL TV personality Laura Coates awkwardly hosts.

On the side of the law, there’s Maurice Marvel Meredith as Major James Tilton and Chiklis as Major Walter Pope. Suffice to say, one’s the good cop and one’s the bad copy, and never the twain shall meet, but also, never the twain shall have anything interesting or realistic to do or say. Rhames, unfortunately, seems to be struggling to deliver his lines at times, even while his very presence brings a sense of good will to the film. Tomei, meanwhile, is always likable, but most of her scenes are essentially just her on the phone with Neeson’s character, even as she miraculously overcomes some seriously life-changing events over the course of 24 hours or so.

As for the Mongoose of the title, it’s the beach in Mexico where Fang and Tara had their best days together, and as such it’s the ideal that Fang has fixated on – his “retirement” – if he somehow can escape his current, dire situation. But what he also must escape is the guilt of the men he left behind in Afghanistan, and it is this thread that director Mark Vanselow somehow scores with by the time the credits roll, aided no doubt by some keenly picked, and timed, needledrops, and a couple of very cleverly edited shots in the final moments of the film. The Mongoose may be working just one level above a direct-to-video cheapie for a lot of its running time, but it’s still got some heart, too.

Crimson Desert’s biggest strength is in the sheer volume of stuff it throws at you, allowing you to spend hundreds or even a thousand-plus hours doing everything from hunting animals with a bow to developing a gambling addiction at the tavern. So it’s not very surprising that Crimson Desert’s first paid DLC, called Charting the Unknown, prioritizes adding more on top of its already staggeringly large repertoire. So far, the interesting new activities that mostly focus on oceanic adventures are exactly as compelling as you’d hope, with ship-to-ship combat, underwater exploration, and romance options being among the list of new worthwhile features. On the other hand, existing activities that have added content, like the extra story missions, have mostly been uninspired retreads that don’t do anything to improve upon their established shortcomings. When Crimson Desert came out, I said that its content was a mile long and an inch deep, and for better or worse this DLC seems to say, “Here’s another half-mile.”

The most disappointing part of the DLC so far has been the additional story missions, which are only accessible once you’ve completed the base game’s already dense main story (a feat which only 10% of Steam players have done, judging by the achievements system). At least the handful of missions I’ve completed at this point have mostly served as an expanded epilogue of sorts, with Kliff fighting more difficult versions of old bosses from the existing story, and Damiane and Oongka fleshing out their less substantial stories as well.

I’m not far enough to know if any of these quests eventually become more interesting, but most of their objectives have been an oddly bland retracing of your steps, like going back to spend time with a familiar character and share a moment fishing together or arm wrestle someone to gather information as an apparent callback to an identical moment in the original story. I did get to a new stretch of the map just before getting distracted by the separate seafaring content, so hopefully this part of the DLC will pick up the pace, but so far it’s been about as unimpressive as I expected given the low bar for storytelling in Crimson Desert.

Much like the base content though, most of the effort seems to have been put into things that aren’t related to the story. Although most of my time has been spent dipping my toes into the water-based ship-crafting feature that’s the focus of this expansion, it feels like I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg, with new resources to obtain, crewmates to hire, and even more activities to learn like harpooning fish and ship-to-ship combat before you can really begin your voyages properly.

It's going to take more time to fully engage with these new activities and judge whether or not they have the sea legs to keep me entertained for longer than a few hours, but at least right now I’m just impressed (yet again) by the fact that these systems exist in this adventure that’s already so damn packed with things to do. Gliding underwater on the back of a sea turtle and captaining your own pirate crew truly just feel completely bizarre in the context of Crimson Desert, and so far that’s been compelling enough to keep me moving forward even if some of the other added content isn’t great.

There’s still a ton I have to investigate, like additional base building and property management features, a challenging combat arena-style gauntlet, and my personal favorite – social links and romance mechanics for NPCs, which I’m very excited to check out once I’ve gotten my bearings (I’m just not ready to settle down yet, okay?!).

For all the stuff that’s been added, one thing that is the same since the last time I played is the number of bugs I’ve encountered in my brief time with the Charting the Unknown DLC. I’ve already had two hard crashes, one character wig out on me while I was trying to arm wrestle him (he was hilariously standing behind me during the match, arm bent unnaturally), and quite a few blurry or flickering textures that are impossible for me to not focus on during cutscenes. I’m still too early to tell if this is going to be a consistent issue, but in my time so far it’s been quite rocky from a technical perspective considering how much wonkiness I’ve encountered per hour played.

As expected with Crimson Desert, it’s going to take quite a bit of time to see and do enough to reach a definitive conclusion on Charting the Unknown, and I’m hopeful that the engaging and unexpected content that’s been added will be able to make up for some of the activities that feel like empty calories.

Ramayana: Rise of a Legend is in theaters beginning Nov. 5.

Hindi cinema has long looked to Hollywood as a benchmark for big-screen action; much of its 21st century style, for instance, was inspired by Mission: Impossible 2. Ramayana: Rise of a Legend re-imagines the resplendent Hindu epic as a CGI-laden blockbuster at a time when the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the de facto touchstone for big-budget adaptations. In that vein, Nitesh Tiwari’s undertaking does, in fact, resemble a Marvel movie. Unfortunately, that Marvel movie happens to be Thor: Love and Thunder, a much-derided film whose floating head VFX had to be famously reworked.

This resemblance takes hold in an early scene, in which the epic’s antagonist, Ravana (charismatic Toxic star Yash), prays atop a cliff to the creator-god Brahma, whose countenance takes the form of a disembodied constellation with an overly-expressive digital mouth. This excess fluidity is owed, in part, to the movie’s uncanny English dub, which was shown to press in the United States in lieu of the original Hindi version (which happens to be 18 minutes longer than this 162-minute cut). Rather than traditional dubbing, the filmmakers developed their own in-house Generative A.I. technology (fittingly called Brahma A.I.) to sync up the characters’ lips to the flowery English dialogue. Some are calling it the future of cinema, but in its current incarnation, the result resembles exaggerated mouth movements superimposed on still images for comedy sketches, à la The Annoying Orange.

This effect is befitting of such a robotic adaptation, one which briefly threatens to interrogate the several millennia-old text of the title (in the vein of recent Thai drama The Burning Giants, which critiques the violence at the heart of national myths) before locking itself into a didactic approach. It’s a rigid depiction of both the subcontinent-spanning plot, as well as the theme of “Dharma,” or sacred duty, which the characters verbalize ad nauseum and follow unconditionally, and uninspiringly. For the uninitiated — which is to say, Sony’s target audience for the English dub, whose Indian subtitle (“Part 1”) has been slyly replaced with “Rise of a Legend” to convince people they’re paying for a complete story — the plot concerns an ongoing war between demigods the Devas and demons the Asuras.

The film re-imagines the villainous Ravana as a kind of liberator gone mad. The Asura leader begins by praying for the power to free his enslaved clan, and his island kingdom of Lanka, from Deva oppression before conquering nearby cities through violent conquest with his ambitious siblings by his side.. This forces the demigods to turn to the protector deity Vishnu, who re-incarnates himself as the human-born Rama (Ranbir Kapoor), one of four princes of the kingdom of Ayodhya. Prologues pile up on prologues for nearly an hour, as Rama grows up learning the ways of war and wisdom, since his divine destiny is to defeat the Asuras for good.

However, the filmmakers’ decision to cleave the story in half leaves it hanging in suspended animation. It ends where the central plot of the Ramayana — Rama’s journey to rescuing his devoted wife Sita (Sai Pallavi) from Ravana’s clutches — finally kicks off in earnest, yielding an episodic experience where the central hero and villain are, at best, vaguely aware of one another’s existence. They never actually come into contact, leaving Ramayana: Rise of a Legend with the responsibility of establishing a protagonist and antagonist alluring enough that viewers with no pre-existing religious or cultural attachment will feel dutybound to return in one year’s time — or whenever the sequel is ready.

How does this work out? As far as Ravana is concerned, Kannada-language superstar Yash makes a meal of the character, imagined as an action anti-hero who dances in fiery worship of the destroyer god Shiva, and who nails his enemies with jackknife powerbombs, as vengeful gears turn slowly in his mind. Traditionally depicted with 10 heads side by side, the movie’s version of Ravana re-imagines this as a kind of fissure of personality, wherein 10 different versions of the demon king (some old, some young; some confident, some sniveling) converse and argue within his consciousness. He’s ruthless in one moment, but respectful in the next, making for the closest thing the movie has to complexity before it returns to the story’s binary good-versus-evil traditions. Add to this the fact that the movie’s Lanka is vibrant, energetic and sensual, compared to its stilted, austere Ayodhya, and it becomes hard to root for the ostensible “good guys.”

Unfortunately, this becomes doubly true whenever Rama is on screen. The film’s depiction of him is an utter bore. An embodiment of virtue in the abstract, the heroic prince — who agrees to live in exile for 14 years so one of his brothers can take the throne — is spoken of as a kind and capable figure, but his people’s worship of him is a default setting, rather than something earned through benevolence. After all, Rama is a central figure in Hinduism, so more than enough viewers will bring their own baggage to the movie. But as a story, it’s as rote as can be, a flaw that infects its dramatic DNA: Rama’s relationship to Sita. While Pallavi is afforded a tad more action and autonomy than most actresses in the role, the promise of a sword-wielding Sita is often cut short, returning her quickly to a two-dimensional damsel who shares little chemistry with her husband. Much like Kapoor’s Rama, Pallavi’s Sita is graceful in posture, but there’s little underlying either of them as actual human beings.

Rama, who lacks anything resembling outward opinions or an inner life beyond his Dharma, acquires weapons and knowledge not through practice or learning, but through gurus psychically unlocking these hidden abilities, as though the film were operating on video game logic. Each new chapter sees him “leveling up” as he fights a different, malformed CGI golem in a new forest setting, though at least he deserves credit for using his unlimited magical arrows to get these eyesores off our screens.

Saddled with clunky English dialogue, Kapoor is the perfect actor for this version of Rama, but that’s not the compliment it seems. His po-faced approach snaps perfectly into place, alongside a dramatically dull incarnation of the mythic hero, whose duty toward violent reprisal, and whose adoration by his legions of fans, is a given. Kapoor, a fourth generation Bollywood star, enjoys exactly such a quasi-religious fandom, even if the Hindu nationalist factions the film has been courting with its marketing (which refers to these myths as “history”) has since turned on him for eating meat — a religious faux pas among Hindutva extremists.

Then again, with the movie’s attempts to stoke religious fervor being all but cancelled out, perhaps it makes sense to approach Ramayana: Rise of a Legend as a hermetically sealed experience, if only for a moment. This doesn’t do it any favors either; aesthetically, it’s a headache. While the grandeur of the costumes and archaic sets might draw one’s gaze in static moments, the cumulative effect of its many action scenes is often bewildering. Sure, some individual shots are big and bold in composition, but they’re frenetic and unfocused when strung together, with points of interest shifting in and out, left and right, and up and down at random. The fantasy fights lack the necessary physical and emotional weight to make a lasting impact, even before Rama’s fellow exiled brother Lakshmana (Ravi Dubey) delivers his umpteenth comic quip met by awkward dead air, adding to the Marvel-ness of it all.

Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman join hands for some booming compositions, but the music — much of which has been trimmed for the shorter cut, which features little singing or dancing — is tasked with scoring scenes and set pieces with no rhythm of their own. The film feels entirely off-kilter even before characters open their distracting, digitally-rendered mouths. That some of them sound like whiny, posh South Bombay youngsters is, perhaps, something only viewers who’ve spent time in India might really notice in the English version, but it nonetheless robs the dialogue-heavy drama of its potential grandeur.

There are fleeting pluses to be found throughout the runtime. The movie, for instance, features one moment of evocative suggestion — a harsh cut from a nightmarish vision to an empty throne, denoting the weight of Rama’s regal responsibility — but anything resembling moral dilemma is quickly swallowed by prescriptive plot developments, which leave little room for meaningful character arcs or emotional possibility. A climactic mid-air battle does, quite mercifully, manage to capture the imagination without much haphazard distraction. However, this scene doesn’t actually involve Rama at all. Its focus, instead, is a supporting character barely glimpsed up until that point, leaving Kapoor’s dreary protagonist to promise a more cogent narrative in the sequel.

The duology’s success is all but guaranteed in India and among its diaspora, given how deeply entrenched the Ramayana remains in Hindu and Indian culture (its release coincides with the major festival Diwali). However, to anyone not already attuned to the tale, it’s hard to imagine this version being a meaningful enough introduction to bring novice viewers back. It has neither the emotional hook nor the soul to compensate for its lack of visual momentum, and its reliance on a half-baked tech to appeal to a wider audience impedes what little drama exists at its core.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Yaga Season 1, Episode 3. Episodes 1-3 are now streaming on AMC+ in the US and Crave in Canada, with new episodes releasing on Fridays at midnight PT.

Yaga Episode 3 wastes no time diving right back into this eerie, witchy tale, while answering some of our biggest questions after last week’s debut.

We pick up right where Episode 2’s cliffhanger left off – on the beach with Logan’s body – prior to getting confirmation from the police that, yes, it is in fact Logan’s lifeless body (not Henry’s) and that blood was found near a window open in his bedroom. There’s a moment of confusion for the viewer as Rapp sees Logan’s eyes jump open, and we see that they are ice blue – like Henry’s.

By now, we know Rapp has been hallucinating more frequently and this is possibly either from the drugs from the night before (because he honestly looks like he’s still high) or something dark and ominous that’s happening to him.

We see a pattern in relation to “time” in Yaga. This is confirmed when Carson recounts what happened the previous night at Henry’s party where we learn that “a few hours” had passed between seeing Logan disappear into his room upstairs, and Carson finding Rapp on the beach. Originally, it seemed like some time had passed, but nothing substantial.

As we continue on with more unexplained moments in this story, Rapp tries to put a move on Carson in his hotel room, which she rejects. He then goes to lie down on his bed and falls asleep almost too quickly – Carson comes and kneels down next to the bed and we see the clock turn to 3:33 (not the first time we’ve seen this either), while intense, whispering voices begin to take over as she leans in to almost kiss him. Rapp gently opens his eyes and sees Pam, Henry’s ex-girlfriend, seductively pulling a white feather out of his mouth.

He suddenly jolts out of his actual sleep and awakens some time later in the day. We also notice a small circle tattoo on Carson’s wrist before they head over to forensics, which seems to be placed in the shot intentionally for us to refer back to later…

Going to the mortuary, we see Logan’s corpse – well, most of it. In the episode’s biggest WTF moment, we learn Logan’s penis was severed from his body and he was castrated. It turns out he was also stabbed with an ancient knife made out of Obsidian and human bone – which Katherine later classifies as an Aztec ceremonial midwife sacrificial knife, connected to deities with symbols representing sexual desire and fertility. All signs so far point to Logan being murdered, and Carson and the police on staff are searching for more evidence, especially as this new case potentially relates to Henry.

We see Carson walk up to a small church to meet Logan’s mom, Alice (played by Sarah Strange). The dark, moody shots and heavy music come together to create an emotionally beautiful scene of grief between the two women. They sit on a bench in the cemetery together and more is revealed about Logan that we hadn’t known before. That includes Logan changing his hair and working out constantly – like he was trying to become Henry himself, perhaps.

Alice reveals her hate for the Parks and shares how she heard a rumor that Logan and Henry bought one of Pam’s lame hens from her and joked they were going to sacrifice it. She then explains passionately how she could see everything affecting Logan, saying, “Everyday, I’d see that thing growing in him. That thing getting bigger and thicker and darker and pulling him further and further away from God, and closer and closer to the Devil.” Carson asks about Logan’s dad, but Alice dismisses the questions.

While Carson is with Alice, we see Rapp jogging on the beach. Pam happens to be running in front of him. He tries to catch up to her and, as he does, she all of a sudden splits into three versions of herself, distorted in Rapp’s view. She calls his name and he trips over a log, seeing more visions and a sinister mask staring back at him, as he peers up at Pam who is somehow immediately next to him with a cheeky comment.

Before Carson and Rapp decide to head back over to Henry’s house to check for more leads, Carson inquires if Henry and Logan were possibly in a relationship, giving Rapp unintentional fuel to speculate on Carson’s sexuality as well, which she avoids divulging.

As the duo begin surveying Logan’s room, you can see the pile of bloodied sheets next to the window, and they begin slowly uncovering more and more clues as they go along. Interestingly, they find drug powder in a canister with the same triangle symbol we saw from the previous episodes – a symbol known as the Triskelion – which has multiple interpretations. In Celtic mythology it is said to represent sacred femininity and the Triple Goddess archetype: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Baba Yaga in Slavic folklore is known as the “Crone,” so we’ll have to wait and see how that relates (if at all) as the series continues.

Carson and Rapp also notice the chicken foot hanging from Logan’s lampshade, previously in Henry’s room – and we can now pretty safely assume it’s from the chicken he and Henry were rumored to have sacrificed.

Just when they are trying to figure out how Logan disappeared from his room the night before, Rapp discovers the bookshelf is actually a secret door into another room… a small, eerie spot illuminated by red lights, despite the rest of the house having no power. A desk with a tape recorder and an archive of dozens upon dozens of cassette tapes are stacked on shelves.

As they dig in further, Carson and Rapp find out there’s a recording from the previous night in Henry’s bedroom – from when Logan was having sex with the woman wearing the angel wings. We hear Logan demanding to be called “Henry,” making us wonder if Henry was even at the party last night – despite his phone being traced to that location.

Rapp searches through Henry’s room, discovering – disturbingly – a wired bug hidden on his nightstand, which is triggered to record in Logan’s “secret office” whenever someone speaks in the room. Carson plays more of the recording from the prior night and they discover Pam is the one who was having sex with Logan, just hours before his death – making her officially a suspect in Logan’s murder.

As we’re processing that surge of information, Rapp’s eyes suddenly catch on a drop of blood on the floor next to the bed – he drops down and peers under, seeing something bloody smeared on the floor. He quickly pulls the bed back, pushing it out of the way, and as Carson comes into the room we see the Triskelion symbol drawn wide across the floor in blood, with three white chicken feathers near each point in the symbol – seemingly signifying a curse or some kind of spell. It’s even more eerie with the haunting music, which pulls you into its claws and feels like a spell wrapping itself tightly around you, right as Baba Yaga narrates through the end of the episode.

We see solid character development in this episode, with Clark Backo stepping more into her role as Carson and raising the question of where her boundary lies between professionalism and intrigue. Noah Reid as Rapp brings more grit to his role and shows a darker, more intense side to his character – I’m looking forward to seeing how both of these characters expand into this world from here.

Some lingering questions we now have going into Episode 4: Do Henry and Logan have the same dad and is that why Alice despises the Parks so much? Is Pam a witch or maybe Baba Yaga in disguise? Did Logan put the spell under Henry’s bed, and if so, why and who’s really behind it?

Full spoilers follow for Avatar: Seven Havens Season 1, Episodes 10-13!

One thing that’s abundantly clear in the final four episodes of Avatar: Seven Havens “Book 1: Survival” is that between all the mysteries, theorizing, and big plot questions – how are there two Avatars? What did Korra do to cause the Cataclysm? What happened to Pavi (Saheli Khan) and Nisha’s (Aishu Devan) parents? – the far more important question is, and has always been, how this will impact the relationship between the twins? And to answer that, the finale is a heartbreaker, featuring one of the darkest, most upsetting endings in the Avatar franchise, while still somehow providing hope, heart, and above all, humor.

The Long View

That’s a lot to tackle, and to be clear we do still get movement on the overarching mysteries of the series that should take us all the way through Book 4. That includes the reveal of what’s needed to heal the world… While fans sort of guessed what was going on, and there is likely much more to come, it turns out that the Seven Chakras that coincide with Seven Havens are directly tied to Pavi. Specifically, as the Faceless Queen Agam (Sakina Jaffrey) discovers during a spiritual alignment in Episode 11, “Battle of the Ruins,” Pavi’s chakras are all messed up. And once she’s able to face her fear of being revealed as the Avatar in the finale, “The Root Chakra,” she unlocks – guess what – her Root Chakra.

Both we, the audience, and Nisha are surprised that it’s Pavi who can unlock these alone; it was completely reasonable to speculate that the only way of stopping the fear literally bubbling under the Haven of Ellora was through Nisha and Pavi working together. Instead, the additional shocker is that somehow Nisha summoned that fear, killing her and Pavi’s parents in the process. Pavi was protected from the resulting rock slide by some sort of green energy, which took her leg… And Nisha, while able to hold back an energy dome about to consume the Haven in Episode 12, “The Dome,” is nowhere near as strong as Pavi, who single-handedly dispels the fear and begins to reconnect with past Avatars, as well as charting her path to her next destination, The Floating Isles (or Wilds – there are no closed captions on the screeners provided by Paramount).

(Side-note: there’s a ton of lore we could get into here, but we’ll save it for the section below.)

But in between all that, these episodes are really about two things: Pavi and Nisha, and how we react to fear. On the former, the show has managed to craft a powerful sisterly bond over the course of 13 episodes that feels real… Pavi is gutted by the revelation that Nisha killed their parents, but she’s far more upset that Nisha lied to her about it. And we’re left in a place where Pavi is finally owning up to her destiny, but seems harsher and more closed off (despite unlocking the Chakra) than the goofy weirdo who befriended rocks and bugs in the initial episodes. Meanwhile, Nisha is being cheered by the crowd in Ellora at the end, a flip on the fear of the Avatar that dogged her every move. But she’s just seen Pavi display more power than she ever has, and that clearly alarms her. They haven’t exactly changed positions, but it’s clear this resolution isn’t as simple as “hooray, fear cured!”

That gets to the second part, which we’ve been harping on all season: fear. The show hasn’t necessarily been subtle about how it’s reflecting our current world (or at least the world of several years ago when they were writing, developing, and animating this), but when a character says “We can’t just hide from this scary bubble” or “Freedom of choice is all I’ve ever wanted” they’re basically putting it out there what metaphorical levels the show is working on. And what works about it is that the series still functions as a rollicking adventure show and a sweet all-ages animated show while still being very blunt about where it leans politically.

And that’s what the best of entertainment should be doing, right? Commenting on our real world while also working as, you know, entertainment. Seven Havens has absolutely nailed that balance over 13 episodes. Not only that, but these final four address a number of fan “concerns” that have bubbled up. One of them has been about the “weak” bending, which one could venture comes from the fact that bending is disappearing from the world (as stated multiple times) and which we now know at least in part comes from these seven Chakras being blocked. But also, Pavi taking on the fear energy dome in the finale rocked. No pun intended on earthbending, but saving up your big bending stunts for the finale makes sense in terms of the build of a season.

The other question about the show has been why Pavi and Nisha are nine years old, with concerns raised that they’re trying to age down the Avatar series even further than has already happened. While one could point out here that it’s a children’s cartoon on Nickelodeon, and apologies this isn’t catering to you, an adult who watched the original series 20 years ago, this finale cemented that not only is this show going crazy dark and upsetting – with Pavi and Nisha’s parents abandoning Nisha, then dying in a rockslide caused by Nisha – but at the very least Pavi is starting to grow up by the end of the episode. Her hair is different, and Khan does a masterful job of maturing her voice. There’s been speculation about a time jump going into further seasons, and given the epic journey nature of the show (as also set up in the finale) that seems likely… They won’t be nine forever.

The Episodes Close Up

Okay, before we get too much farther, let’s recap the specific episodes (briefly), though they all work nicely together as a four-part finale. First up is Episode 10, “Ghosts and Spirits.” The thrust here is that Chancellor Kayoko (Jennifer Sun Bell) has been driven mad by the fear anomaly, and has the whole city under martial law. While Pavi deals with the metaphorical ghosts of her parents after discovering her childhood home, Nisha encounters the first spirit we’ve seen on the show, which leads her to the place we later discover she freaked out at and killed her parents. And in the midst of this, Agam discovers the duo and leads them to her hideout.

Then in Episode 11, “Battle of the Ruins,” Kayoko makes the exceedingly poor decision to redirect the bubbling pit of fear energy under Ellora to the hideout of the Faceless. We also discover definitively that Jae (Major Curda) never betrayed the Order of the White Lotus; he was just trying to not get arrested so he can free them later. We also get info on the Chakras from Agam, and they end up fighting the bubbling fear energy together, barely escaping in time.

Episode 12, “The Dome,” heads back to Ellora as Nisha solo tries to stop the energy, now in the form of (yep) a dome, while Pavi holds it back. Kayoko isn’t having any of it, and breaks Nisha’s hold, releasing the dome, which consumes our twins… Leading to a vision of their mother. Also, Jae and his boyfriend Datu (Topher Ngo) break up, which is a real bummer for ‘shippers but lets Jae be free to travel in the next episode.

And then we’ve got the finale, Episode 13, “The Root Chakra,” which we’ve covered a chunk of already. To touch on a few other points/where we leave folks, Pavi leaves for the next Haven with Jae by her side, while Nisha stays in Ellora with Karthik (Akshay Khanna). Kayoko is still possessed by the fear entity, which seems… interesting. Agam, meanwhile, seems to stay in Ellora, while she names Zi (Dianne Doan) the Faceless Queen, and the rest of the Faceless presumably head to Republic Forest, as planned.

So, lots more to explore when we get into Book 2, particularly with the twins separated and on very different paths. We still don’t know why or how there are two Avatars, what led to Nisha’s parents wanting to abandon her, how Korra caused the Cataclysm, or why Pavi’s Chakras are blocked. But if this first, excellent season is any indication, Books 2, 3, and 4 will all do what Book 1 did so well: lead with its heart on its sleeve.

Avatar Easter Eggs, References, and Connections

Before we get to the Easter eggs and references, it’s important to recognize the untimely, awful passing of voice actor Eric Bauza at age 46 on October 25. While Bauza didn’t voice any of the main roles on the series, he was, as always, a utility player. In these final four episodes alone he’s credited with Jin-Woo, Townsperson, Elloran Citizens, Kosal, Pich, Faceless, Faceless Bandits, Faceless Kids, Firebender, Guard #2, Benders, Guards, and Ellorans – just to give you an idea of how important this legend was to the series. And not only that, but he also stood out as Pudding Guy in the previous chunk of episodes, a delightful addition that seemed to be the heir to The Last Airbender’s Cabbage Merchant. What they’ll do with that role in subsequent seasons is TBD, but Bauza leaves a gap in the world of Avatar that can’t readily be filled.

Not to make an abrupt turn, but let’s talk about those blocked chakras. This was first introduced in The Last Airbender and explored when Aang was injured by Azula, and was unable to access the Avatar State. Here, while Pavi goes HAM on that red energy dome in the finale, she does not enter the Avatar State at all, likely because her Chakras are blocked. But we do get a strange red glow around her, and that greenish glow that protected her from Nisha’s rock slide in the flashback, which seems to be something new.

Speaking of something new, when Pavi does finally unlock her Root Chakra, she sees constellation versions of the previous Avatars Kyoshi, Roku, Aang, and finally Korra (aka, the four Avatars before Pavi and Nisha). Without getting too deep in the weeds here, at the end of Legend of Korra, thanks to a big fight between Raava and Vaatu, the spirits of order and chaos, Korra’s connection to the Avatar Cycle was severed, then begun anew. So whatever Pavi is seeing in this Rainbow Road/constellation deal is something different (or, since Korra went on many adventures after the final season of Legend of Korra, perhaps she experienced something different first).

As for Easter eggs, these episodes are remarkably light by comparison to the rest of the season, but we do have a few. Jae proudly declares “I will always be Team Avatar” in Episode 11, giving us our first glimpse of this show’s, well, Team Avatar – something we’ve gotten in both The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra.

In Episode 12, Pavi makes an absolutely ridiculous mud mask for Nisha to disguise her – which works, as an Elloran refers to her as “old man.” This is just part of a long tradition of Team Avatar having the absolute worst disguises that, somehow, beyond all reason, always actually disguise them.

And one blink and you’ll miss it Easter egg, as everyone flees the energy dome in Ellora at the beginning of Episode 13, sees a citizen quickly walk in front of the camera holding – what else – an armful of cabbages.

Spoilers follow for Nocturne Episodes 1 and 2, which are available on Apple TV now.

Apple TV’s new thriller series, Nocturne, aims to draw audiences in with just the right balance of the familiar and the unexpected. The show asks what happens when a boy thought to be the victim of a serial killer returns alive, and follows the criminal mastermind as he maneuvers law enforcement during their race to save any other victims who may still be out there. Over the course of these first two episodes, viewers are left with questions — a mix of plot-driven intrigue, interest in character development, and a touch of side-eye around potential logic gaps or plot conveniences.

Nocturne is based on Lars Kepler’s crime novels (The Sandman and Lazarus), and adapted by Rowan Joffe and John Hlavin for TV. These debut episodes lay the groundwork for convicted killer Jurek Walter’s unfolding scheme to free himself (he is astonishingly well played by Stephen Graham), set against multiple law enforcement officers’ attempts to a) stop him from doing more harm and b) find any of the still-living victims. Jurek was convicted of a series of brutal killings, which devastated a small town. He managed to get a jury to buy into an insanity defense, or we must presume he did, as he’s in a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison. (Side note: how he pulled that off is a nagging question, as nothing in his demeanor suggests an insanity defense would fly… If it’s simply that he’s a sociopath, wouldn’t that apply to all killers? Moving on.)

From a technical perspective, the show does a beautiful job of dropping us in this world. The opening shot of Episode 1, “Lazarus, Come Forth,” establishes a sense of foreboding, danger, and claustrophobia that will become a refrain throughout the series. We get the sense that the creature we are encountering is not unlike a lion in a cage. The camera moves down a cold, concrete hallway toward cells that feel (purposefully) hidden and forgotten — the shot is all the more suffocating because the dark walls of the cell entryways initially obscure the sides of the frame. This is our introduction to Jurek, and it’s notable that the series starts by putting us in the mindset of the killer. He feels trapped and eager to get out. For some yet-to-be-revealed purpose, his gritty, simultaneously menacing and soothing voice whispers to the patient next door, luring the man to seek freedom by any means necessary, even with violence (in this case, against himself). This is Jurek’s central arc across the first two episodes.

He is brilliant and adept at psychological warfare. He also seems to believe he’s entitled to his freedom, or at the very least that there is some legal loophole that will get his conviction overturned if only he can expose the lie that former homicide detective Jonah Lynn (Liev Schreiber) told to seal Jurek’s fate. Jurek taunts Jonah towards the close of the first episode with an offer of “the truth for the truth” when Jonah and Special Agent Quinn (Poorna Jagannathan, lately of Lanterns) visit him. In other words, Jurek will help them find more of his victims, specifically Felicia Frost — the missing sister of Michael, the boy who’s come back from the dead — if Jonah confesses to lying in court. This raises the stakes for everyone, including Agent Quinn, who’s already taken a risk by bringing a retired cop she doesn’t know this close to her case. If his old lie blows it up, that’s on her, with a missing girl’s life on the line.

While some crime dramas give the audience only as much information as the characters searching for answers have, this one puts the audience a step ahead. It’s an interesting choice, and may ultimately be a misdirect. Here’s what appears to have happened: a hospital worker named Karl (Rory Culkin) is assigned to the team that oversees Jurek. Their first encounter, like others in the series, is crafted with impressive tension: Karl searches for a missing weapon beneath Jurek’s metal bed, gets caught by his pant leg, and can’t free himself before Jurek comes to from a sedative — the trapped animal motif plays throughout. Before the scene is over, Jurek has pressed a note into Karl’s pocket, urging him to smuggle it out to his lawyer (more on the questions this raises in a bit).

The note Jurek hands Karl seems to set everything in motion: the strong implication is that, lawyer or no lawyer, it contained Jurek’s instruction to an accomplice to free Michael. Jonah is actively drawn back into the case when Michael turns up alive, as the children’s mother, Ida Frost (Chrissy Metz), and the residents of the town trust him more than anyone else in law enforcement. Also advocating for his participation is FBI agent Saga Bauer (Zazie Beetz), his goddaughter, the child of his deceased partner, and someone he effectively raised. (She eventually goes undercover as a patient in Jurek’s secured ward in order to ascertain who is leaking messages and endangering lives.)

The reality is, Jonah has clearly never given up on finding the remaining missing persons associated with the case: as Agent Bauer discovers via his giant murder board, he’s been methodically searching an enormous grid, single-handedly, for years. The case is deeply personal for both of them. Jonah carries guilt for having quit the force after the (seemingly unrelated?) accidental death of his wife and child. And Jurek (or rather his accomplice) was responsible for kidnapping Bauer’s stepmother, Rebecca. It’s also implied that Bauer’s father committed suicide after his wife’s disappearance. Through Agent Quinn’s vocal skepticism, the show addresses the inappropriateness of having either Jonah or Bauer involved in the investigation, given their personal connections to Jurek. The story excuses the conflict of interest (not to mention that Jonah is no longer an officer of the law) by pointing to their familiarity with the case and the ticking clock on saving Felicia. The dynamics and interwoven tragedies all tied to Jurek stretch credulity, but the production value and strength of the performances are enough to keep the viewer engaged through a good deal of character, plot, and relationship table-setting. At its core, this is a battle of three savants with real stakes: two on the victims’ side, deploying their individual skills to best a mysterious, murderous genius. That brings us to the tightrope the series walks.

When crime dramas lean on preternatural intellect, whether it’s Sherlock Holmes or his foil, Moriarty, they run the risk of reading as a lazy sort of magic trick, where the detective or killer effortlessly “knows things” they’d need to in order to keep the story moving. Indeed, Jonah’s near-instant recognition of where Michael was being held, and Jurek’s Derren Brown-level ability to read people (pegging Karl’s guitar playing and Jonah’s partner’s violent alcoholism), open the door to the kind of conveniences that could lose a modern audience as the series unfolds. It already causes one to wonder: if Jurek is in possession of that kind of mental acuity, why did he get caught while his partner went free? Fortunately, Graham, who stunned the world with Adolescence last year, is deeply compelling, allowing us to give ourselves over to his performance.

That isn’t to undercut the potent talent of the rest of the cast, or the visual storytelling. The show is beautifully shot, with well-crafted production design. It immerses us in a rustic exterior world that vacillates between gray and worn, and comfortingly familiar. The forest landscapes are striking, but dense and dangerous in a way that mirrors the cold, stifling confines of the hospital Jurek is housed in.

Schreiber is delivering a grounded, understated portrayal of a grieving man who is just a bit too tired to fully fight against terrible ideas (Bauer’s undercover operation) and far too invested to stop himself from digging, with or without permission. One moment that stands out is when Agent Quinn tells Jonah she’s sorry for the loss of his wife and child; he nods, and unbearable pain flashes in his eyes for an instant before he moves on. Beetz is convincing and deeply affecting as a chameleon-like agent willing to harm herself (physically or otherwise) to close a case. It’s clear that this particular operation may drive her to a breaking point for multiple reasons: Jurek’s uncanny ability to read others and play on their weaknesses, her own stepmother’s disappearance (which he is connected to), and, not least of all, that it taps into the trauma of a woman who was the child of a mentally ill mother and addict father. That fear comes through as she prepares to enter the ward, right after visiting her mother. Beetz gives the sense that Bauer is unsure whether she’s crossing a line she won’t be able to come back from, where fact and fiction are too close. Bill Camp is also endearing as Chief Ellison, particularly as he talks about what the Frost kids meant to the town; he looks vulnerable, like a man who knows he is out over his skis, but wishes he wasn’t.

It took a moment for me to recognize Culkin as the compassionate nurse, Karl. Physically, his hair is doing a great deal to support the transformation, but this is also a side of the actor less seen on screen. There was one moment, when he first sees Jurek on the security cameras, in which I was left to wonder if he had some nefarious intent. But for the most part, he reads as a man of incredible kindness and skill with patients whom most of society writes off and exiles. That said, it’s odd that an employee who demonstrates an extraordinary amount of empathy is tapped for a job that puts him right in the crosshairs of a person known to exploit those instincts, and in a dangerous environment that requires a certain degree of toughness. Additionally, Karl, who is clearly driven by financial need (he accepts the new job the moment he’s informed that it comes with a raise and tells Jurek he can’t afford to lose it), inexplicably risks his career for a dangerous criminal he just met.

So, that leaves us with a couple of options: this is a piece of plotting that doesn’t logically track, or Karl isn’t who we think he is. If it’s the latter, perhaps Karl was “sent” into the hospital with purpose. It’s strangely convenient that Jurek’s day nurse went missing (and is likely dead), making room for Karl to take over. Theoretically, the patient who injures himself in the opening sequence could have gotten word to Jurek’s partner to get rid of the day nurse and make room for Karl. But how could Jurek have known that the exact right personality type for his purposes was working a few floors above him, let alone that he’d get the job? Was Karl a plant, then, and Jurek’s accomplice? That doesn’t square with their first encounter, where, with no witnesses, Jurek treats Karl as a stranger and insists he is still a human deserving care. And if someone else on staff was steering Karl, Jurek already has a partner on the inside, so why would he need Karl? Those are just a few of the questions that may or may not pay off at the close of the series. There are smaller dangling threads as well. For example, Jonah finds footprints both in the building where Michael was held and outside the missing day nurse’s home, so why in the world would he hold them back from the FBI? Ostensibly, he’d do anything to find Felicia, so that type of behavior simply doesn’t track. Ironically, the serial killer is doing a better job of asking for help and relying on a partner.

That said, the series works in no small part because Graham is simply impossible to look away from. He’s playing a killer who appears to have a (forgive the Dexter reference) code that makes sense to him. He says he “wants people to pay for their crimes.” Yes, that was in reference to Jonah’s “lie,” but the way he looks at the nurse who is rude to Karl reminds me of Hannibal Lecter’s deep disdain for bad manners. Graham’s depiction of Jurek is utterly magnetic and mercurial; when Jonah and Quinn visit, he breaks into a fit of giggles at the idea that she’s a “special” agent, as if the word itself is a joke, and moments later he’s commanding the room, telling them with understated menace that they’re only there because he brought them there. He really does seem to own them. The minute he’s off the screen, I crave more time with him.

This entirely serves the series, because it allows us to believe that others could fall under his spell, even Bauer, a smart, capable, stony FBI agent with oceans to lose. There is a deep irony that he’s maneuvering and clawing his way to freedom, given his brutal kill method of burying victims alive. He complains that he’s been in solitary, but his partner has kept a child in the dark so long that the boy went temporarily blind. There’s also a very small possibility that he is, in some way, innocent, and that he has been “made worse” by his circumstances. Either way, for those on both sides of the law, this is a story about freedom, loss, redemption, and revenge, and the first two episodes have given me enough to stick with it for now.

Full spoilers follow for South Park Season 29, Episode 4!

This season of South Park America started off well enough, but there's been a real struggle to build any real momentum over the long haul. It often feels like the writers aren't sure whether to fully commit to the idea of doing more classical standalone episodes this year or try to build an overarching narrative. And so we're left with a season that constantly reminds us that "November is coming," without anything more insightful to add than the constant allusions to Grand Theft Auto 6.

To its credit, Episode 4 tries to build on the foundation of the previous chapters and establish a more coherent conflict for the embattled South America. This time around, rising beef prices and high demand have robbed South America Elementary of its precious sloppy joes. It falls on Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and yes, Little Randy, to save the day and find a solution to the town's woes.

The results of these efforts are mixed, at best. The South American beef storyline relies a little too much on hitting the same gags over and over again. Seeing rich snobs devour South American beef and promptly explode in a shower of buttery diarrhea is funny the first couple of times, but it gets old pretty quickly without any real escalation. The same goes for the constant "South American beef" wordplay. I will say, though, that I got a big kick out of the heated steakhouse rivalry and the conflict between Ruth's Chris, Sizzler, and Texas Roadhouse. The same goes for the prolonged dig at rich, suburban wannabe cowboys.

Again, I just wish all of this built to something a little more memorable, coherent, and politically insightful. It feels like there's so much worth lampooning in American politics right now, and yet the series is being oddly subdued and wishy-washy. After such a Trump-heavy Season 27 and 28, it seems like Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and their team are loath to return to that well. And so, despite the fact that we're literally one week away from the midterm elections in the U.S., South Park has oddly little to say on that front. Maybe it would have been better if the series waited a little longer before coming back.

What South Park does have right now, though, is Little Randy. I was hoping that particular twist from Episode 3 would carry over, and boy does it. It's a lot of fun seeing Randy embrace his new role as a beer-chugging fourth grader, and in watching Stan deal with the constant embarrassment of having his father hanging around. Amusingly enough, he's the only one who seems to actually resent Little Randy's presence.

I especially enjoyed Randy's attempts to cement his new status in the friend group, crowning them "Goonies" and referring to Cartman as "Chunk." Cartman's line, "Why does your dad keep talking about gooning?" is easily the highlight of the entire episode. As much as the series may be struggling on the political and topical humor front right now, there's a lot of potential to mine with Randy's latest little crusade. Hopefully these next two episodes can take full advantage of that potential.

Every year there’s a new iPhone, and while the iPhone Duo is a huge departure from what Apple has done in the past, the iPhone 18 Pro Max is nearly identical to last year’s model. Apple didn’t do much to drastically change the Pro Max, but instead tweaked some things under the phone to make it a bit more useful.

The most obvious improvement is the A20 Pro, which is significantly stronger than the A19 Pro in last year’s phone. But the most useful improvement has been to Siri. The improvements Apple has made to its ‘Apple Intelligence’ has made Siri more useful than it has been since the company first tried revamping the assistant with AI back in 2024.

So, if you’ve already upgraded to the iPhone 17 Pro last year, there isn’t much reason to upgrade again. But if you’ve been on the fence and need an upgrade, you could really do a lot worse than the iPhone 18 Pro Max.

Design and Features

When I say that the iPhone 18 Pro Max looks just like the iPhone 17 Pro Max, I mean it. Even if I put the two phones on a table next to each other, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out which is which. They both measure 0.34 inches thick, even though the 18 Pro Max is a bit heavier, at 8.78 ounces, compared to the 17's 8.22 ounces. The only way I can tell my iPhone 17 Pro Max from the iPhone 18 Pro Max is that the Pro Max Apple sent me for review has the new Black colorway.

But while the phone’s chassis being unchanged might sound like a bad thing, it really is a case of not fixing something that’s not broken. The best part of the iPhone 17 Pro Max was its camera shelf, which virtually eliminates the phone wobbling when it’s put down on a table. For some reason, other phone manufacturers really haven’t adopted this design language yet, but I’ll just say every time I use an Android device lately, I miss the camera shelf, however absurd that may sound.

The rest of the iPhone 18 Pro Max’s layout is also unchanged. On the right side of the phone, you still get the power/lock button, along with the capacitive Camera Control Button. And just like on the 17 Pro Max, the camera button is extremely easy to hit on accident, so be mindful of it.

Over on the left side is the volume rocker and the Action Button, which I have set to enable or disable Do Not Disturb mode. You can go into the settings and swap it to one of 12 different actions, or just disable it entirely. But I like to keep it on DnD, so that I can make my phone stop blowing up when I’m overwhelmed.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max’s display is also unchanged, at 2868 x 1320, and with a gorgeous OLED panel. Everything I watch or play on the phone looks incredible, with absolutely vibrant colors. It’s also rated for up to 3,000 nits of brightness, which means it gets bright enough to use outside comfortably. The only other phone I’ve used that comes close is the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, but that shouldn’t be too surprising, given that Samsung manufactures a lot of Apple’s displays.

Apple has also shrunk the Dynamic Island on the display, so you have less of the display area blacked out at the top of the display. It is still there, and it’s still visible, but I don’t really notice the difference until I have the 18 Pro and the 17 Pro next to each other. There have been phones that have eliminated the need for a camera cutout, and the iPhone still isn’t there, but hopefully by shrinking it, Apple is getting closer to getting rid of it altogether.

Siri Is Better

I have had some problems with Siri for a few years now. For some reason, around 2022 or 2023, Apple's voice assistant stopped working for me most of the time I tried to use it. And it's not like I'm constantly trying to talk to the little robot in my phone or anything, but it got so bad that I couldn't even yell at my phone to skip a song on Apple Music reliably when I was in the shower.

But with the improvements to Apple Intelligence in iOS 27, Siri has dramatically improved. I am no longer asking it to set a timer, only to have it hang and then ask me if I want to query ChatGPT. It just sets the damn timer. I don't want to give Apple too many roses for this, because in a lot of ways, Siri has simply regained functionality that it had a decade ago.

Of course, Apple has also worked in a bunch of AI features, as well, which will let Siri scan through your messages or photos to help you plan events or find information. And, I'm sure that's useful for a lot of people, and it does appear to work well, but I'm old and too used to doing everything manually, and even this new version of 'Apple Intelligence' hasn't converted me to automating everything I do on my phone.

Camera

For the most part, the camera system in the iPhone 18 Pro Max is exactly the same as the iPhone 17 Pro Max, with the only real difference being the addition of a variable aperture. The aperture on the 18 Pro works just like it does on a regular camera, with a mechanical shutter that widens or narrows to control the amount of light in the shot.

For most people, this probably won’t make much of a difference, and the auto aperture setting is going to work fine. However, if you like to have more control of your photos, Apple has added ‘Pro controls’ to the camera app, that lets you dial in the aperture for your shot. It works extremely well, but I still don’t think I’m going to abandon my DSLR and rely on the iPhone cameras. Though, it should come in handy at events like CES, where I typically need to take photos on my phone in the interest of time.

The camera itself is still great, though, and photos look great without really needing to spend a lot of time finding the perfect shot. It’s just nice that Apple has added some finer control for anyone that wants it.

Gaming and Performance

The iPhone 18 Pro Max is powered by the A20 Pro, along with 12GB of RAM, and it is surprising just how much performance Apple was able to squeeze out of it. In every test I’ve run on the new Pro, it far surpasses its predecessor.

In GeekBench 7, the iPhone 18 Pro Max gets a single-core score of 3867 points and a multi-core score of 11,204 points, compared to the 17 Pro, which gets 2,865 and 7,120 points, respectively. That’s a massive 44% improvement to multi-core performance, and a 29% improvement to single-core performance.

Even compared to the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra the iPhone 18 Pro Max is 24% faster, with the Android device getting 2,725 points for single-core and 8,786 points for multi-core.

When it comes to gaming, the GPU stapled to the A20 Pro is also impressive, with the 18 Pro scoring 8001 points in the Wild Life Extreme test, compared to 4795 from the 17 Pro Max and 5758 points from the Galaxy S26 Ultra. That makes the 18 Pro Max 33% faster than Samsung’s 2026 flagship.

Just like the 17 Pro, the 18 Pro Max is cooled by a vapor chamber, and it's even slightly larger this year. But, even though it has more surface area, the iPhone 18 Pro isn't more stable than last year's model, coming in at 66% in the 3DMark Steel Nomad Light stress test. That's just a bit worse than the 17 Pro Max, which got 69% in the same test last year, but with how much faster the A20 Pro is, I'll take it.

Apple also included a bigger battery this year, with 5,567mAh of capacity, compared to 5,088mAh in the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Apple claims that this battery will last through 30 hours of regular use, and while I don’t have a reliable way to benchmark battery life, I believe Apple’s numbers.

I have been pushing this phone for around three weeks now, and I usually only put it on the charger every other day, and the phone hasn’t died on me yet. Obviously, if you’re taking a lot of photos or playing a heavy game like Where Winds Meet, that number will go down, but even then I don’t imagine the phone dying in the course of a day.

This is a standalone review that covers only Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode. You can find our campaign and multiplayer review here.

Extraction shooters can feel a little like a modern trend, with some heavy hitters like Marathon and Arc Raiders shaking the table within the last year or so, but they’ve been a growing experiment in the shooter space for the past decade or so. Call of Duty dabbled in it with the original DMZ back in 2022 (you could even argue they were late to the party by then), and its return in 2026 is timely. I’ve logged quite a few bootsteps through the bombed out streets, scattered woodlands, and high security bases of this big new mode over the last week, and after hours of vehicle hijacking, SAM site hacking, and target elimination, I can say this bigger, better DMZ is a welcome newcomer to the extraction shooter slate.

The PvPvE dynamic of extraction shooters often lives and dies by how well the mission and level design encourages you to explore, rewards you for overcoming challenges, and guides you to interact with others in order to keep those spoils. The fictional Korean Hajin region your exploits take place in is well suited for this. Its dense pockets of urban development – a village in the north, the dangerous main city in the east, an isolated prison out west – are separated by rocky forests concealing all sorts of militarized checkpoints and other points of interest hiding loot to shove into your pockets.

Parts of it look a little samey, the consequence of modern urban development where (at least from the outside) most buildings look the same, especially compared to some of DMZ’s big sci-fi competitors that go above and beyond to look striking at first glance. But the map is so big that you could spend the entirety of your approximately half-hour runs in only a fraction of it. And where Battle Royales (like CoD’s own Warzone) move players around by having an encroaching death cloud forcing everyone into a smaller and smaller area, DMZ instead entices squads to adventure with its Dynamic Operations.

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

There are many actions and events, like aforementioned supply drops, that are broadcast to everyone within earshot, hypothetically to tempt other players to be nosy (and potentially belligerent). Despite those lures, open skirmishes with others have been pretty limited, as I’ve found most people opt to mind their own business. The influx of players at launch hasn't really changed the main emphasis on the E in the PvPvE structure of these runs, though human enemies can regularly play spoiler to otherwise solid runs if you’re not diligent.

It would be a mistake to confuse passivity with pacifism – this isn’t the Arc Raiders playerbase, which spent many of the opening months of that game more interested in helping than hurting. Whenever another player was in eye or earshot, it was assumed that a firefight was to follow, even though there is a specific truce ping that allows you the extend the olive branch to other players who you know are around but can’t (or don't want to) see in person. Like in all extraction shooters, the most tense PVP moment in DMZ happens when you’re waiting for your ride home and other players have decided that the extraction heli isn’t big enough for the both of you.

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

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

Lieutenants are high-level boss challenges that really stand out as maybe the single most difficult thing you can attempt during any given run. They exist in specific regions, but where one in the forests lies in wait for unsuspecting operators to pass through their zone before springing their assault, another is dressed head to toe in armor with a mini-gun and will roam a piece of the city in hopes to stop you mid mission. They are better off avoided unless you’ve brought high-end gear with the specific purpose of hunting them.

The secret sauce of what makes the extraction shooter so appealing is the level of agency each player has to play how they want in a higher stakes PvP setting. You can go into every encounter guns blazing, or you can tip toe through them, taking the long way and hopefully having your patience and preparation rewarded. You can make racking up “objective completes” and bagging top tier loot your mission, or you can try to hunt down every human player you can. I like engaging in a bit of PvP, but my nearly 40-year-old eyes and reflexes frankly can’t keep up with the kind batshit action that goes on in the standard multiplayer modes (or even Warzone). In contrast, DMZ has created a great sandbox that serves all varieties of playstyles adequately.

There's always a way to jam up sightlines or to find some cover and take a breath. Every building has multiple points of entry, so sieges or chases through them always require some level of decision making. Sub-missions are always an option, where you can hack a tower for a UAV scan or SAM site coverage to support you in your main objective, but only if you’re willing the take on the added risk. I always felt like I could “yes, and” what was happening at any given moment, and thats not true for many of DMZ’s contemporaries.

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

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

In between missions, you’ll tend to all of your gear and progression from the safety of your FOB. Weapons, crafting ingredients, and consumables that you procure out in the field can be sorted through here, all of it put at risk when you equip it and redeploy. When you unlock the 3D printer and gunsmith areas, crafting new toys and upgrading weapons becomes the main way you spend your plunder to enhance your chances in Hajin. You can easily blow tens of thousands of won to trick out a weapon, but I found that the investments can be worth it in order to differentiate playstyles, like if you want a quieter load out with suppressors or a certain sort of optics to make mid-to-long range encounters more beneficial. I didn’t find the more money I invested automatically made my loadout feel more powerful, though.

Gaining experience is pretty easy as everything you do in the field gives you some amount of it. Progressing through the account level unlocks list was pretty breezy at first, helpful because a lot of recipes for some core equipment like grenades and ammo boxes are early rewards. At around half way up I found things slowed down quite significantly, but I also didn't find many late level goals to be enticing enough to turn up the grind. There's powerful kit, like a pistol that you can shoot downed teammates with to revive them, but I'm not torching all my spare time to sprint to level 64 to get it.

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

These traits can be meaningful in the field, though. One of the randomized traits I acquired for Valeria, Ammo Scavenger, doubled the ammo I got from ammo packs and made conserving my shots basically a thing of the past. The faster revive speed all operators have access to in their Survivalist tree has been the difference between clutch plays and total wipes on more than one occasion. There's definitely some kind of character building to be had here, but you really can’t know where it’s all leading until the next group of traits to choose from are revealed. And all that is before accounting for the fact that there's no way to reset or reallocate these trait points outside of abandoning the operator all together if you fail to extract with them (as opposed to spending some cash to get them back into the fight).

All of this created an environment where I was never champing at the bit to get my build “right.” Everything I picked worked at least a little bit. But I was also pretty detached from the whole process once I realized you really only had one shot at it per operator. I haven't maxed out any operator skill trees or account level reward path yet, but there are no substantial carrots left to tempt me down them either. Regardless of the trait investment, how good or bad I did in a run came down to how few bullets I ate in the process, and these trees, though valuable in specific cases, really didn't change that.

Ali G: Who Iz I? is on Prime Video now, and maybe in a theater near you, though probably not for much longer.

Once the genesis of Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary career, white Rude Boy poseur Ali G now marks its whimper of an ending. Released on Prime Video just five days after its theatrical release, the actor’s directorial debut Ali G: Who Iz I? barely holds together as either cinema or practical joke — let alone where the two have met in the past, by way of his exceptionally enduring Borat. His efforts this time feel especially feeble, landing somewhere in the realm of an unfocused Matt Walsh documentary, where the result isn’t so much laughter, or even provocation, but puzzled annoyance. Fifteen minutes in, one of his unsuspecting targets sums it up succinctly when shown a presentation meant to offend her: “I don’t care.”

Cohen’s latest borrows characters from both HBO’s Da Ali G show as well as his Showtime series Who Is America? in an attempt to weave a political portrait of the modern United States, all wrapped in a flimsy narrative. Like the riotous Borat sequel Subsequent Moviefilm, Who Iz I? is nominally about the wannabe British Rastafari facing fatherhood, when he learns that his longtime girlfriend Julie (Morgana Robinson, taking over for Kellie Bright from the narrative comedy Ali G Indahouse) is pregnant with their child. An attempt to get a third season of his HBO interview series off the ground finds him flying across the pond to LA, where his arrival catches the attention of another Cohen character, Showtime’s Dr. Nira Cain-N'Degeocello, an outdated send-up of liberal academia who hopes to nail him for “cultural appropriation,” despite speaking over people himself.

Along the way, both characters interact with various bystanders in Cohen’s signature prankish style, but his instigations prove limp. There just doesn’t seem to be enough footage to string together a film of everyday subjects responding with outrage, indignation, or even the strained politeness underlying the original Borat from 2006. Two decades later, everyone seems bored by this commonplace, microcelebrity tomfoolery, whether or not they recognize the man behind the makeup. They mostly don’t, though at least one of them, involved in the movie’s confoundingly scattered climax, appears to have gone along with it for the daily rate. Perhaps this is why Cohen feels the need for heavy-handed explanations, in the movie’s opening and closing, of how his mockumentary format works.

The caricatures Cohen portrays feel tame in comparison to a world increasingly divided by political fissures, though given how much the movie’s first half is concerned with “cancel culture” and “DEI” — things even the U.S. government uses as phantom boogeyman — the movie’s mission statement is too askew to root for in the first place. While it does eventually set its sights on those in power, it opts for low-hanging fruit in the form of penile humor that its subjects mostly ignore, forcing Cohen to cut awkwardly around non-reactions.

However, setting aside the movie’s asymmetrical political bent doesn’t yield much of interest to begin with, because Who Iz I? is really only about America on the surface. What it’s really about is Cohen, or rather Ali G, in a way that threatens to be interesting for the briefest moment. Will the character wrestle with his own irrelevance when he fails to secure airtime? Not so fast! Instead, the hamstrung plot grows increasingly obsessed with Dr. Nira’s attempts to find dirt on Ali on make him persona non grata, as though wayward online criticisms of Cohen’s shtick had gotten under his skin and he were trying to pre-empt objections to the movie through Cohen-on-Cohen discourse. If anyone was trying to silence Cohen’s comedy, they’ve clearly been unsuccessful, since he managed to make this movie — though its failures are a product of its own inability to strike while the iron is hot. A three second Cameo from Rachel Dolezal isn’t going to cut it in 2026.

This is largely in line with the film’s M.O. Few gags or targets stick around long enough to let the absurdities land. The Ali G character isn’t so much deployed to prod at people’s politics as he is to be a clownish presence waving his arms for attention, while Cohen also portrays an exaggerated mishmash of what he pictures his critics are like, or what they believe. At the very least, this yields a revealing portrait of artistic insecurity, if an unintentional one. Who Iz I? is a film that takes no risks and has nothing to say, all in service of misguided self-preservation, as Cohen fails to read the tea leaves of a culture that has, for better or worse, long left him behind.

This is a non-spoiler review for the Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 premiere, "Risky Business," which airs on Paramount+ with the Premium Plan on Friday, October 30.

Uh oh, Dexter's got that itch again. The itch to kill? Nah, that never went away. I'm talking about the more frustrating itch. The midlife crisis urge to be reckless.

In the first episode of Dexter: Resurrection's second season — which I really wish had just been given a whole new subtitle — the Bay Harbor Butcher (Michael C. Hall) is feeling a little under-appreciated for what he believes are his life-saving endeavors, and he might be looking for a spotlight of gratitude (think of the parade he imagined for himself at the end of the very first season). "Risky Business" makes for a good start to this new batch of episodes, introducing both an ansty protagonist and a few new Big Bads to contend with. Of course, one episode only gives us a small glimpse into the upcoming season and it's not enough to fully judge what's ahead, but if Dexter's "I'm over 50 now" inner turmoil and restlessness are treated differently than his past bouts of self-reflection and unease, Season 2 could be a very interesting take.

To quickly recap the journey of the series: Seasons 1 through 4 of the original show were groundbreaking. Seasons 5 through 8 were uneven, and at their worst had really bad creative turns. Dexter: New Blood was good and landed very well as a revised ending for the saga. Resurrection, while initially eliciting eye rolls because of the titular resurrection, wound up being a true return to form for the series, feeling the most like the early seasons of the first show.

One thing that remains true though, Dexter-wise, is that the story stumbles when Dexter doesn't learn from his mistakes. Sure, he's flawed and driven by a mad desire to spill blood. He stretches himself too thin and will also kill an innocent person in a pinch in order to escape capture. There's also a self-destructive element to him that we accept. It's enticing. What we don't want is him to be a bonehead who resets anew every season. So far, in the wake of "Risky Business," we're safe. After dealing with Peter Dinklage's Leon Prater and his gruesome gallery of both murderous memorabilia and actual maniacs in Resurrection Season 1, Dex has realized that he's a big deal. Too big to be toiling away as a ride share driver, for sure, and maybe even too big to let poor James Doakes (Erik King) go down as the Butcher. Perhaps things need to get a bit more... public.

While Dexter is busy feeling time's encroaching talons, we catch up with Harrison (Jack Alcott), keeping the Morgan family cop tradition alive as an NYPD rookie. How will Harrison deal with his dad pushing things to the edge? Ultimately, where will his loyalties lie, once again, if push comes to shove and Dexter starts kicking up dirt? Because there's darkness on the horizon. Not only is wise Detective Wallace (Kadia Saraf) still around, and taking notice of Harrison's new career, but madmen like the New York Ripper (Wallace's white whale from last season) and the hot-off-the-presses Five Borough Killer are making things super slicey and dicey out there. Fun casting alert for those two, by the way, with "first-ever on-screen Hannibal Lecter" Brian Cox as the Ripper and a stoic, menacing Dan Stevens as FBK.

The juice of "Risky Business" involves Dexter tying up Prater's loose ends, which means Eric Stonestreet's Al Walker returns to get some more time in the sun. Here, Stonestreet shows a much more dangerous, horrifying side to his Rapunzel killer, playing even more against his Modern Family persona. I won't go into any more guest star/adversary/obstacle details than what I've already divulged, but "Risky Business" plays well, sets the table nicely, and even has some inspired '80s punk rock needle drops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lupin: Part 4 is on Netflix now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Streiht Up Menace

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

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

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

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

Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied)

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

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

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

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

Higher Love

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

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

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

Party All The Time

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

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

Verdict

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

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