You Didn’t Have to End This Way

The hit thriller You, whose fifth and final season just dropped on Netflix, managed to be both chameleonic and consistent. Each season, a romantic psychopath named Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) moved to a new place and projected his fantasies on a new woman, only to attain her and find himself dissatisfied with the flesh-and-blood person in front of him. Why were these women not flattered by his willingness to kill for them? (Never mind that some of those murder victims were their friends and family.) Why did they feel the need to exert their own wills? They, inevitably, needed to be locked up. From there, their fates were sealed.

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In this final season, a woman ridiculously nicknamed Brontë (Madeline Brewer) purposefully attracts Joel’s attention. A onetime student of Joe’s Season 1 victim Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), Brontë tries to entrap Joe and prove his guilt, only to briefly doubt he could truly be evil and fall for him. The writers apparently intend for Brontë to be a stand-in for the audience: A woman who knows Joe’s murderous past but is simultaneously susceptible to his charm. They also grant her the reward of executing the ultimate punishment for Joe: Shooting off the misogynist’s manhood, humiliating him in a public trial, and sentencing him to a fate worse than death for a self-styled romantic—a lonely life spent in a prison cell.

If that all sounds rather blunt, it’s because You dispenses with any sense of subtlety in its final season. The show assumes its audience—like Brontë—forgets that Joe, a serial killer whose modus operandi amounts to locking people in a box, is a bad guy, or that the love he professes to have for his female victims is really just a violent, obsessive form of objectification. Which left two of its longtime fans on the TIME culture team feeling a bit disappointed and condescended to. So, after groaning our way through the finale, we regrouped for a postmortem.

Judy Berman: I was an early fan of You, back when it was airing on Lifetime and no one seemed to know it existed, before it showed up on Netflix and became such a hit that the streamer saved it from cancellation. Seasons 1 and 3, in particular, strike a really exhilarating balance between twisted thrills and social satire—but I even had fun with the weaker seasons. So it pains me to say that I found these last 10 episodes to be a repetitive slog, culminating in a scoldy, didactic finale that insulted my intelligence. “No, really, serial killer Joe Goldberg is a bad person” is not exactly the mind-blowing revelation it’s presented as being throughout Season 5.  

In retrospect, the writing was on the wall by the fifth episode, when Joe and his new “you,” Brontë, talk about the dark romance genre and she insists, “I am not your trope.” It’s like she’s speaking right to the viewer. Though there were plenty of twists left to come, that was the moment I realized the show was preparing to sacrifice its sharp wit in order to leave viewers with a Very Important Lesson. Eliana, at what point in the season did you start to despair?

Eliana Dockterman: I was frustrated from the first episode. Each season, Joe has wormed his way into a different elite group—New York literary society, L.A. wellness gurus, suburban Stepford Wives, the landed gentry of England—and skewered that particular genre of wealthy folks. It was hard not to delight in Joe’s murdering sprees when the focus of his ire was so often on the entitled and cruel—even if innocent people died along the way. 

This meandering final season did not have a specific group as its target. Instead, it turned an accusatory finger at the audience for indulging in Joe’s past exploits. The writers assumed a lack of sophistication from the audience—that we cannot at once enjoy an “eat the rich” narrative and acknowledge that misogynistic serial killers are bad people—that frankly felt a little insulting. Badgley has made no secret of the fact that he was discomfited by fans online begging Joe Goldberg to lock them in cages. But Season 5 of the series takes these thirsty tweets at face value rather than with the sense of irony with which they were likely written.

And so Joe gets punished in the most literal way possible. Let’s just say it, in the finale, Joe is shot in the penis. Subtle!

JB: That was bonkers. And of course we had to then see people on the internet roasting Joe for, er, losing a few inches… or whatever the actual damage was. As if we couldn’t have figured out on our own that this is a guy whose sexual exploits deserve nothing but our derision.

To go back to what you were saying about past seasons, one of the things I always liked about You was that it was smart enough—and it trusted its audience to be smart enough—to satirize more than one thing. On one hand, you had these sendups of rich, elitist social worlds that made Joe’s murder sprees kind of frictionless. And in later seasons there was the added element of genre parody; Season 3 took the piss out of Real Housewives/Desperate Housewives type entertainment, while Season 4 spoofed the Agatha Christie-style whodunits that have been everywhere over the past few years. At the same time, especially in Season 1, you had the character of Joe as a thought experiment: What if the bookish, hopelessly devoted guy—like Badgley’s own breakout character, Gossip Girl’s Dan “Lonely Boy” Humphrey—who is the hero of so many rom-coms were a real person? Wouldn’t he be kind of a delusional, nightmare stalker? Put all those elements together, and the show remained fun and witty and insightful despite all of its darkness because viewers never got attached to any one character.

Season 5 broke that pattern by speaking solely to the contingent New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum has called “bad fans”—viewers who fundamentally misunderstand the shows they love by actually rooting for psycho protagonists like Breaking Bad meth kingpin Walter White. Are there really women out there who want Badgley to put on his Joe Goldberg cap and choke them? Probably! But, as you said, Eliana, most of the chatter to that effect surely comes from fans who a) have a sense of humor about what often used to be a very funny show; and b) understand the difference between fantasy and reality. So why would you end a great run with an utterly humorless lecture to a small group of bad fans? Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and Mad Men didn’t need to condescend to their viewers, and neither does You. 

ED: My theory is someone came up with the final monologue of the series, and they constructed the entire season around getting Joe to a place in which he could utter that last line. 

The series ends with Joe Goldberg sitting in prison reading a lusty fan letter. He muses, “Why am I in a cage when these crazies write me all the depraved things they want me to do to them? Maybe we have a problem as a society. Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us. Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe it’s you.” 

Cue: Radiohead’s “Creep.” Again, subtle. Not only does Joe outright state the thesis of the show for anyone too busy folding laundry or cooking dinner to have paid attention to the last five seasons, but he says the title of the show! Out loud! Get it?? Someone got too excited by that prospect. What did you think of this coda, Judy?

JB: I hated it, Eliana. Hated it. Not because I don’t think there’s any truth to it. Joe’s final voiceover is so broad and vague and easy that you can’t really argue with it. Obviously “we have a problem as a society.” We have many of them, no small number of which cluster around the eons’ worth of ambient misogyny that shaped norms around heterosexual love! Obviously we all need to do some introspection about this stuff. This is, in fact, the basic premise from which You sprang, not the destination it should’ve reached after a fully circular five seasons.

There’s a somewhat more specific line in this vein earlier in the finale, when Brontë and Joe are having their final showdown in the woods. “The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you,” she tells him. I think there’s actually something worth considering in what she’s saying there. It made me flash back to Joe killing Clayton, who was supposed to be Brontë’s ally in taking down Joe but couldn’t restrain himself from trying to hurt her once their plan went sideways. Do women obsess over serial killers and vampires and “fairy smut” (as Joe calls it at one point in the season) because there’s so much violent misogyny in the world that we find ourselves drawn to the violent misogynists who promise to cherish and protect us? 

For me, that line begins to express an idea the season could’ve explored with depth and nuance. It could’ve shown how that sort of Stockholm Syndrome psychology manifests rather than just telling us about it, as an afterthought. I found that to be a real missed opportunity.

ED: I am intrigued by that theory about why women are attracted to stories of true crime and would have happily watched an exploration of that topic. But the show feels like a remnant of the #MeToo era in which it premiered—one in which toxic men masquerading as nice guys were something we’d just started discussing rather than an omnipresent political force.

In that vein, I want to touch on Joe’s son, Henry. As a person currently pregnant with a boy, who doomscrolls articles about the growing influence of the “manosphere” before she falls asleep at night, I’m deeply interested in—and anxious about—how boys are drafted into the online toxic hellscape. Henry commits an act of violence early in the season, and the implication is he’s picking up on his dad’s anger. I wish Henry’s psychology had been explored more, but ultimately he’s largely relegated to pawn status in the legal battle between Joe and his wife. I guess not every show can be Adolescence.

source https://time.com/7279979/you-season-5-series-finale-recap/

Trump Criticizes Putin in Rare Rebuke, Urging Russian Leader to ‘Stop’ After Deadly Attack on Kyiv

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday offered rare criticism of Vladimir Putin, urging the Russian leader to “STOP!” after a deadly barrage of attacks on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

“I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”

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Russia struck Kyiv with an hourslong barrage of missiles and drones. At least nine people were killed and more than 70 injured in the deadliest assault on the city since last July.

Trump’s frustration is growing as a U.S.-led effort to get a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia has not made progress.

Trump lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday and accused him of prolonging the “killing field” by refusing to surrender the Russia-occupied Crimea Peninsula as part of a possible deal.

Zelensky has repeated many times during the war that began when Russia invaded in February 2022 that recognizing occupied territory as Russia’s is a red line for Ukraine. Zelensky noted Thursday that Ukraine had agreed to a U.S. ceasefire proposal 44 days ago as a first step to a negotiated peace, but that Moscow’s attacks had continued.

Trump’s criticism of Putin is notable because Trump has repeatedly said Russia, the aggressor in the conflict, is more willing than Ukraine to get a deal done.

“I thought it might be easier to deal with Zelensky,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “So far it’s been harder, but that’s OK. It’s all right.”

In his dealings with Zelensky and Putin, Trump has focused on which leader has leverage. Putin has “the cards” and Zelensky does not, Trump has said repeatedly. At the same time, the new Republican administration has taken steps toward a more cooperative line with Putin, for whom Trump has long shown admiration.

Trump is set to meet later Thursday with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre to discuss the war in Ukraine, U.S. tariffs and other issues.

Norway, a member of NATO and strong supporter of Ukraine, shares a roughly 123-mile (198-kilometer) border with Russia.

Gahr Støre said in a social media post Thursday that he would underscore during the talks that “close contact between Norway and the USA is crucial.”

“We must contribute to a lasting and just peace in Ukraine,” he said.

The White House announced Tuesday that Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, would visit Moscow this week for a new round of talks with Putin about the war. It would be their fourth meeting since Trump took office in January.

source https://time.com/7279918/trump-criticizes-putin-public-rebuke-deadly-kyiv-attack/

The Story Behind Japanese Action Thriller Bullet Train Explosion

Trains have been popular in cinema arguably since the beginning of film, when the Lumière brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” became one of the first movies ever made and commercially screened in 1896. From the silent Civil War movie The General to Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful Strangers on a Train to the quiet romance of Before Sunrise, trains propel narratives across genre and time. For the Japanese filmmaker Shinji Higuchi, an interest in trains on screen dates back to at least 1975, when he saw The Bullet Train as a fourth grader. Fifty years later, it remains one of his favorite films and he has directed its sequel: the action thriller Bullet Train Explosion, out April 23 on Netflix.

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Shinji recalls being particularly affected by The Bullet Train’s depiction of Japanese National Railway staff members. In the film’s press notes, he writes, “I liked watching ordinary workers, who had a strong sense of duty to do something about the unbelievable situation, give everything they had to perform their jobs.” 

Speaking with TIME through an interpreter, Shinji says he wanted to make sure to give the original story its due when making the sequel. 

“I really had to grapple with how I wanted to approach the themes that would be depicted in this film,” Shinji says. “It was quite an arduous task for me, and I had to put my all in it.” 

Let’s break down the deep cinematic roots of Bullet Train Explosion, and how Shinji brought one of film’s first subjects into the modern action movie world.

Bullet Train Explosion’s direct inspiration

Netflix’s Bullet Train Explosion is a sequel to 1975’s The Bullet Train, which was directed by Junya Sato and stars Ken Takakura, Sonny Chiba, and Ken Utsui. The original film tells the story of a perilous trip undertaken by Hikari 109, a high-speed, first-generation bullet train traveling from Tokyo to Hakata. Shortly after Hikari 109’s departure, the railway security head is informed that a bomb has been planted. If the train slows below 80 kilometers per hour (roughly 50mph), it will explode. Railway staff and the police work to keep the 1,500 passengers safe, while a $5 million ransom is demanded.

In Bullet Train Explosion, Shinji keeps the same general premise as The Bullet Train, but ups the ante and expands the focus. In the 2025 sequel, the train’s speed can’t dip below 100 kilometers per hour or roughly 62 mph (the train can reach a top speed of 320 kilometers per hour, or roughly 199 mph), and the ransom is a whopping 100 billion yen (roughly $710,360,000). The mysterious ransomer asks the sum to be raised by the general public, depicting a social media culture that moves faster than the fastest of trains. Unlike the 1975 film, which focuses more on? we spend more time with those passengers, which include a scandal-embroiled politician (Machiko Ono), a YouTube celebrity (Jun Kaname), and a gaggle of teenage schoolchildren. On the staff side, train conductor Kazuya Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is as close to a hero-protagonist as we get in a story about the efficiency of working together.

Shinji’s adoration of both the original film and its depiction of Japanese railway culture shines through in Bullet Train Explosion, which eschews the classic arc of a Hollywood action movie for a Japanese tale of collective problem-solving and the benefits of being good at one’s job. It’s what Spider-Man 2 might have looked like if, instead of Peter Parker stopping a careening “L” train with only his sticky webs and superhuman strength, he was aided by an idealistic train conductor, a sleepy mechanic, and a dedicated team back at the Chicago Transit Authority—and if that was the whole movie.

With Bullet Train Explosion, Shinji also makes an effort to deepen the mechanical realism of the franchise, saying in the film’s press notes that the original movie was criticized for the way it portrayed trains.  “As someone who likes both movies and railroads, I was really upset by this response,” he writes. “So when we started this project, I wanted to make something that wouldn’t face this same criticism. I talked to experts knowledgeable about bullet train designs and researched the actual mechanisms.” 

Unlike the original film, the Netflix production included support from a major Japanese railway company, the East Japan Railway Company. “The [JR East] staff knew about the original film and wanted to show real bullet trains to people around the world,” Shinji explains in the press notes. “This feeling matched well with our intent to show real bullet trains on the screen.” 

When filming on a real-size bullet train carriage was not possible for a scene, Shinji used miniature models. “As much as the budgeting allowed, we would make models that were as big as possible, model trains that would probably fit on maybe two tables,” he tells TIME. “And then we would wreck those models.”

How is Bullet Train Explosion connected to Speed?

If the shared premise of Bullet Train and Bullet Train Explosion sounds familiar, then you’ve probably seen Speed, the 1994 Hollywood action movie classic starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. In it, an LA bus is held hostage by a bomber threatening to blow up the vehicle if it drops below 50 mph (80 kilometers per hour), or if a ransom of $3.7 million isn’t paid. The 20th Century Fox film was the fifth highest-grossing film of 1994, and had a 1997 sequel. 

It seems hard to believe, but there is no direct connection between 1975’s The Bullet Train and 1994’s Speed. Speed screenwriter Graham Yost has gone on record saying the idea for Speed came from a 1985 American film called The Runaway Train. The film was recommended to Yost by his father, Elwy Yost, a Canadian TV personality who hosted TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies from 1974 to 1999. The Runaway Train was directed by Andrei Konchalovsky and stars Jon Voight and Eric Roberts as two incarcerated men who escape prison only to end up on a train without brakes, careening across the frozen Alaskan wilderness.

The plot thickens because Runaway Train was based on an original screenplay from Japanese film legend Akira Kurosawa, known for medium-defining works such as Rashomon and Seven Samurai. In the 1960s, Kurosawa wrote a script, alongside frequent collaborators Hideo Oguni and Ryūzō Kikushima, about a runaway train. Kurosawa was set to direct the international co-production in New York in late 1966, but shooting was canceled at the last minute due to difficulties with American financial backers. The script would be used for Runaway Train two decades later. 

Shinji notes that a 1966 American TV movie called The Doomsday Flight was an inspiration for 1975’s The Bullet Train. Written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, the film follows an airliner threatened by a bomb that will detonate if the plane drops below 4,000 feet. The Doomsday Flight was very popular. When it aired on NBC in December 1966, it became the most-watched TV film ever, up to that point.

A Japanese movie for global audiences

“I love bullet train carriages, so I regard the bullet train as a star in my film,” says Shinji. “How to aesthetically approach shooting the bullet train was very important to me.” From the perspective of someone living in the U.S.—where we’re still waiting for the launch of our next generation of high-speed trains, initially planned for 2021—the trains and train culture depicted in Bullet Train Explosion can feel like a science fiction film.

Shinji notes that the celebration of efficiency and teamwork is something that exists in the 1975 film. “It is [a theme] that we also aspire after [in Bullet Train Explosion]: people who are diligent, people who follow the rules, and people in uniform,” says Shinji. “Maybe it’s a very Japanese thing. Maybe the youngsters now are a bit different, but for boys of our generation, there was something wonderful about looking towards the same goal and growing up.” 

While Shinji recognizes that, in some ways, Bullet Train Explosion is a Japanese story, he is not worried about its relatability for global audiences. “Of course, it is a domestic story, but I didn’t want to make something that would only resonate with the Japanese audience,” he says. “I wanted a universal touchstone in the emotions.”

Compared to some of the previous films Shinji has worked on, such as the live-action Attack on Titan or Shin Godzilla, it was easier to ground the story in a reality diverse audiences could recognize. “[With previous films], it was all about, how do I connect that gap between reality and something that’s far out there,” he says. “But this is something that could happen in reality. There are perhaps some eccentric characters in this film, but these are very real people that you would see next to you.” 

It helps that, at its center, is a mode of transportation that is so thrilling, whether it is part of your culture or not. “It is indeed an extraordinary and exciting journey on the bullet train ride,” says Shinji. “So it’s quite different from other means of transportation, and we hope that we are able to deliver that excitement to you.” 

source https://time.com/7279569/bullet-train-explosion-netflix-history/

Why There Hasn’t Been a Star Wars Movie in 6 Years—And What Comes Next

The second and reportedly final season of Andor, easily the best Star Wars television show or film that LucasFilm has produced in years, is set to premiere on Disney+ on April 22. But it arrives at a moment of potential transition for the studio. Creator Tony Gilroy recently said he doesn’t think the streaming era can support shows like Andor. “No one’s ever gonna start a show on this scale again, and shoot it practically, and have the resources and the protection to do something like this,” he told Empire.

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So what does the future of Star Wars television—and film—look like? Eight years after The Last Jedi hit theaters, we haven’t gotten a single Star Wars film. Instead, Disney has churned out a glut of television series: The mega-hit The Mandalorian, the miraculous Andor, and many more shows of varying levels of quality. The Star Wars universe even expanded into the real world with a hotel at Disney World that invited its guests to play Jedi and Sith as they interacted with in-character hotel staff. The closure of that cosplay resort sparked a multi-hour long viral video analyzing why the concept failed.

The future of the franchise does seem to hinge on a successful return to the big screen. And many potential Star Wars movies from famous writers like Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Lost’s Damon Lindelof, and The Shape of Water’s Guillermo del Toro have been announced and then scuttled. Meanwhile, President of LucasFilm Kathleen Kennedy is reportedly contemplating stepping down soon. Earlier this year, she told Deadline, “We’ll probably make an announcement [about my replacement] months or a year out, and I have every intention of sticking around to help that person be successful.”

Kennedy does have a couple films on the theatrical calendar. Iron Man director and Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau will helm The Mandalorian and Grogu, a spinoff of the hit TV series set to debut next year. And Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy will soon begin shooting Star Wars: Starfighter starring Ryan Gosling. Here’s where LucasFilm stands ahead of Andor’s final season.

Read more: Andor Is the Best Star Wars Show Yet. Why Does It Feel Like No One’s Watching?

The critical success of Andor

From a critical perspective, Andor should be a blueprint for success at LucasFilm. In theory, the story could have been a rote Rogue One prequel: The show focuses on one of that film’s heroes, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), and his indoctrination into the Rebellion. Instead, its a compelling spy thriller interrogating the reality of a gritty fight against totalitarianism. There are no Jedis, no secrets about Darth Vader’s past for Reddit sleuths to hunt down, no adorable creatures to slap on backpacks and lunchboxes. The show resists the temptation, to which so many of its peers have caved, to incessantly reference characters, objects, or plot points from its mother IP. (See: House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power’s obsession with flashbacks and Easter eggs.)

And while The Mandalorian is structured like a monster-of-the-week series with a new planet or challenge every episode or so, Andor is structured like well-crafted prestige television. Every few episodes, Cassian visits a new planet. Gilroy, who also wrote Rogue One, settles into each new location, meticulously builds character arcs there, and delivers an often crushing emotional blow at the end of each character’s story.

As I wrote of Season 1, Gilroy’s use of language is precise, and we’ll often hear the same turn of phrase uttered by both Empire stooges and the rebels, blurring the lines between good and evil. And the show’s focus on the daily, deadly, often stifling struggle against fascism strikes particularly hard at this moment: House of Cards’ Beau Willimon wrote a harrowing three-episode arc in Season 1 during which Cassian is picked up by authorities for a crime he didn’t commit and arbitrarily sentenced to years in a labor camp.

If there is a reason why Andor has succeeded creatively where other Star Wars TV shows have failed, credit must go to Gilroy, the writer behind Michael Clayton and the Bourne movies, as well as Willimon, who has become perhaps the most in-demand script polisher in Hollywood thanks to his work on both Andor and Severance.

Gilroy has credited the incredible commercial success of The Mandalorian, Disney+’s most popular series, with his ability to take creative risks with Andor. “The success of The Mandalorian gave us the platform to jump off,” he told Empire. “No Baby Yoda, no Andor. Seriously. Don’t think that we don’t know that.” And LucasFilm certainly deserves credit for trusting Gilroy and giving him ample funding even if his contemplative show didn’t reach the ratings highs of The Mandalorian. They were willing to take the risk because of the potential upside. Why the studio hasn’t found a similar collaborative approach with the likes of Lindelof or del Toro remains a mystery.

Star Wars’ struggles to find a footing on the big screen

Before LucasFilm even wrapped the Skywalker saga with 2019’s Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker, the studio seemed to be struggling with the cinematic direction of the franchise. Originally Colin Trevorrow was supposed to direct the ninth entry in the Star Wars series, then titled Star Wars: Duel of the Fates. But LucasFilm replaced Trevorrow with J.J. Abrams, who had helmed The Force Awakens, the first of several director switch-ups for the franchise.

The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street directing team Phil Lord and Chris Miller were dismissed from 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, an origin story for Han Solo, midway through production and replaced by Ron Howard. Solo underperformed at the box office, and the sequels that were seeded in the movie never came to fruition.

Disney CEO Bob Iger said at a 2023 conference that the “disappointing” box office returns for Solo, “gave us pause…maybe the cadence was a little too aggressive.” He added that going forward, “we’re going to make sure when we make one, it’s the right one. So we’re being very careful there.”

And careful, they have been. Star Wars movies that were announced only to disappear include a Boba Fett film from A Complete Unknown’s James Mangold, a Jabba the Hutt movie directed by del Toro, a trilogy from Benioff and Weiss, and a movie from Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige. Films from Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi and Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins appear to be on indefinite hold. That’s a lot of big directorial names who have come and gone with nothing to show for it.

The Disney+ television glut

When Disney+ launched in November of 2019, just before the pandemic, they flooded the streaming service with content derived from the House of Mouse’s most popular franchises, Marvel and Star Wars (and, for children, Pixar). A few early shows were huge hits, including The Mandalorian and WandaVision, in part because they defied expectations of what paint-by-numbers franchise TV-making might be. Marvel’s high-concept WandaVision, for instance, spoofed sitcoms through the ages. And The Mandalorian featured a massive twist at the end of the first episode: the introduction of an adorable creature we on the internet collectively dubbed “Baby Yoda.”

But perhaps in an effort to churn out as much content as possible, the shows that followed often felt like pale imitations of what came before them—series that were less creative, less compelling, more dependent on the viewer having watched hundreds of hours of Marvel or Star Wars content just to keep up with the plots. For Marvel, the simultaneous glut in content and drop in its quality have had an impact on box office for its feature films, which have not performed as well as the studio had hoped post-Avengers: Endgame.

LucasFilm hasn’t suffered the same fate in theaters simply because the studio has not produced any Star Wars movies in six years. But they have continued to flood Disney+ with TV shows, including Ahsoka, The Skeleton Crew, The Acolyte, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Bad Batch, and Boba Fett. None of these shows have quite captured the zeitgeist like The Mandalorian did or garnered the critical praise of Andor. The overall effect on fans, based on social media chatter, has been simultaneous Jedi fatigue on the small screen and a yearning for a larger, sweeping stories in the cinema.

What’s next for Star Wars

Star Wars fans shouldn’t despair. Disney’s shareholders will pressure the company to eventually get another film set in a galaxy far, far away into movie theaters. Two Star Wars projects currently have a firm release date. The Mandalorian & Grogu, a spinoff of the hit TV series starring Pedro Pascal and Baby Yoda, is set for May 22, 2026. And Levy is directing a movie called Star Wars: Strarfighter starring Ryan Gosling, will debut in May 2027. That second film will star entirely new characters and be set about five years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker.

Meanwhile, after his Boba Fett movie fell by the wayside, Mangold is now reportedly working on a different Star Wars movie set 25,000 years before The Phantom Menace. And Simon Kinberg, who wrote many of the X-Men movies, has signed on to do a trilogy for the franchise.

The Last Jedi’s Rian Johnson says he may or may not return to the Star Wars universe for a once-announced trilogy after the he finishes writing and directing the Knives Out franchise. Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron movie was originally set for 2023 and has been delayed for years. An announced Waititi film similarly seems to be trapped in development purgatory. Still, perhaps one of these movies will see the light of day.

LucasFilm also announced a movie—or perhaps even trilogy—based on Rey Skywalker. Initially, the studio hired Lindelof for a Rey project. Lindelof later said (with good humor) that he was “asked to leave the Star Wars universe.” LucasFilm then tapped Locke’s Steven Knight to replace The Leftovers creator, though Knight, too, left the project, which may now be in limbo. Intriguingly, frequent Lindelof collaborators Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Nick Cuse (The Leftovers and Watchmen) are reportedly working on a Star Wars live-action series. Though a separate project, it’s easy to imagine those writers might share Lindelof’s sensibility.

Amid all these announcements, in 2023, Dave Filoni was named Chief Creative Officer at LucasFilm and charged with planning the future of Star Wars films and shows. Filoni cut his teeth on Star Wars animated series like The Clone Wars before working on The Mandalorian with Iron Man director Jon Favreau. But beyond bringing his biggest TV project to the big screen, details on the other future plans remain scarce.

That’s a lot up in the air, and fans are hopeful that some of these tentative plans will firm up in the near future. Until then, at least we’ve got Andor.

source https://time.com/7276401/star-wars-franchise-andor-upcoming-movies/

Exclusive: AI Outsmarts Virus Experts in the Lab, Raising Biohazard Fears

A new study claims that AI models like ChatGPT and Claude now outperform PhD-level virologists in problem-solving in wet labs, where scientists analyze chemicals and biological material. This discovery is a double-edged sword, experts say. Ultra-smart AI models could help researchers prevent the spread of infectious diseases. But non-experts could also weaponize the models to create deadly bioweapons.

The study, shared exclusively with TIME, was conducted by researchers at the Center for AI Safety, MIT’s Media Lab, the Brazilian university UFABC, and the pandemic prevention nonprofit SecureBio. The authors consulted virologists to create an extremely difficult practical test which measured the ability to troubleshoot complex lab procedures and protocols. While PhD-level virologists scored an average of 22.1% in their declared areas of expertise, OpenAI’s o3 reached 43.8% accuracy. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro scored 37.6%.

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Seth Donoughe, a research scientist at SecureBio and a co-author of the paper, says that the results make him a “little nervous,” because for the first time in history, virtually anyone has access to a non-judgmental AI virology expert which might walk them through complex lab processes to create bioweapons. 

“Throughout history, there are a fair number of cases where someone attempted to make a bioweapon—and one of the major reasons why they didn’t succeed is because they didn’t have access to the right level of expertise,” he says. “So it seems worthwhile to be cautious about how these capabilities are being distributed.”

Months ago, the paper’s authors sent the results to the major AI labs. In response, xAI published a risk management framework pledging its intention to implement virology safeguards for future versions of its AI model Grok. OpenAI told TIME that it “deployed new system-level mitigations for biological risks” for its new models released last week. Anthropic included model performance results on the paper in recent system cards, but did not propose specific mitigation measures. Google’s Gemini declined to comment to TIME.

AI in biomedicine

Virology and biomedicine have long been at the forefront of AI leaders’ motivations for building ever-powerful AI models. “As this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the White House in January while announcing the Stargate project. There have been some encouraging signs in this area. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute published an algorithm capable of predicting which coronavirus variant might spread the fastest.

But up to this point, there had not been a major study dedicated to analyzing AI models’ ability to actually conduct virology lab work. “We’ve known for some time that AIs are fairly strong at providing academic style information,” says Donoughe. “It’s been unclear whether the models are also able to offer detailed practical assistance. This includes interpreting images, information that might not be written down in any academic paper, or material that is socially passed down from more experienced colleagues.”

So Donoughe and his colleagues created a test specifically for these difficult, non-Google-able questions. “The questions take the form: ‘I have been culturing this particular virus in this cell type, in these specific conditions, for this amount of time. I have this amount of information about what’s gone wrong. Can you tell me what is the most likely problem?’” Donoughe says.

And virtually every AI model outperformed PhD-level virologists on the test, even within their own areas of expertise. The researchers also found that the models showed significant improvement over time. Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, for example, jumped from 26.9% to 33.6% accuracy from its June 2024 model to its October 2024 model. And a preview of OpenAI’s GPT 4.5 in February outperformed GPT-4o by almost 10 percentage points.

“Previously, we found that the models had a lot of theoretical knowledge, but not practical knowledge,” Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, tells TIME. “But now, they are getting a concerning amount of practical knowledge.”

Risks and rewards

If AI models are indeed as capable in wet lab settings as the study finds, then the implications are massive. In terms of benefits, AIs could help experienced virologists in their critical work fighting viruses. Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, says that AI could assist with accelerating the timelines of medicine and vaccine development and improving clinical trials and disease detection. “These models could help scientists in different parts of the world, who don’t yet have that kind of skill or capability, to do valuable day-to-day work on diseases that are occurring in their countries,” he says. For instance, one group of researchers found that AI helped them better understand hemorrhagic fever viruses in sub-Saharan Africa. 

But bad-faith actors can now use AI models to walk them through how to create viruses—and will be able to do so without any of the typical training required to access a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory, which deals with the most dangerous and exotic infectious agents. “It will mean a lot more people in the world with a lot less training will be able to manage and manipulate viruses,” Inglesby says. 

Hendrycks urges AI companies to put up guardrails to prevent this type of usage. “If companies don’t have good safeguards for these within six months time, that, in my opinion, would be reckless,” he says. 

Hendrycks says that one solution is not to shut these models down or slow their progress, but to make them gated, so that only trusted third parties get access to their unfiltered versions. “We want to give the people who have a legitimate use for asking how to manipulate deadly viruses—like a researcher at the MIT biology department—the ability to do so,” he says. “But random people who made an account a second ago don’t get those capabilities.” 

And AI labs should be able to implement these types of safeguards relatively easily, Hendrycks says. “It’s certainly technologically feasible for industry self-regulation,” he says. “There’s a question of whether some will drag their feet or just not do it.”

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI lab, published a risk management framework memo in February, which acknowledged the paper and signaled that the company would “potentially utilize” certain safeguards around answering virology questions, including training Grok to decline harmful requests and applying input and output filters.

OpenAI, in an email to TIME on Monday, wrote that its newest models, the o3 and o4-mini, were deployed with an array of biological-risk related safeguards, including blocking harmful outputs. The company wrote that it ran a thousand-hour red-teaming campaign in which 98.7% of unsafe bio-related conversations were successfully flagged and blocked. “We value industry collaboration on advancing safeguards for frontier models, including in sensitive domains like virology,” a spokesperson wrote. “We continue to invest in these safeguards as capabilities grow.”

Inglesby argues that industry self-regulation is not enough, and calls for lawmakers and political leaders to strategize a policy approach to regulating AI’s bio risks. “The current situation is that the companies that are most virtuous are taking time and money to do this work, which is good for all of us, but other companies don’t have to do it,” he says. “That doesn’t make sense. It’s not good for the public to have no insights into what’s happening.”

“When a new version of an LLM is about to be released,” Inglesby adds, “there should be a requirement for that model to be evaluated to make sure it will not produce pandemic-level outcomes.”

source https://time.com/7279010/ai-virus-lab-biohazard-study/

This Earth Day, It’s Time to Learn From Snakes

During my childhood in the Midwest, I briefly possessed—with my parents’ hesitant blessings—an Eastern milk snake as a pet. One day, the snake escaped from its terrarium in the garage. It didn’t try to hide or make a jailbreak to the great outdoors. We found it lying in the one small square of sunlight on the garage floor that made it through a window, seeking the warmth we had failed to provide in its enclosure. It was trying to tell us something we were incapable of understanding, as snakes often do.

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The major celebrations ushering in the Year of the Snake have come and gone, but I’ve found myself thinking about that milk snake as we approach the 55th celebration of Earth Day. Serpents are almost nobody’s idea of a canary in the coal mine, not least because of how universally they’re loathed. But they are only 1 of 3 creatures in the Bible able to speak to humans, and they still might be trying to tell us something we’re incapable of understanding—about climate change, global warming, toxic environments, and habitat destruction. If we stop loathing them and start listening to them, we might learn something from them.

Perhaps the most important message from the roughly 4,000 different snakes slithering around the planet is that diversity is not only good, but necessary for survival. Snakes display an astonishing range of diversity. They inhabit niches on every continent except Antartica (yes, snakes can survive in the Arctic Circle). They thrive in burrows and dens, under rocks, up in trees, in arid deserts and inland swamps, in meadows and forests and Himalayan foothills, in freshwater rivers and saltwater seas. They may eat multiple times a day or once a year. As cold-blooded creatures (“ectomorphs” is the technical term), they cannot generate their own body heat and must rely on the external environment, sun and shade, to maintain body temperature. That is often viewed by us profligate, protein-burning, fat-loving energy spendthrifts as an inferior form of metabolism. But instead, it’s worth thinking of snakes as thermal savants, adjusting rapidly to changes in temperature. It’s a pretty nifty skillset to have in an era of unpredictable climate volatility.

Read more: Joan Didion’s Lifelong Obsession With Snakes

“I think most ecologists that work with snakes end up being astonished by their flexibility and plasticity, their ability to change some of the things they do in response to novel challenges,” says Rick Shine, a world-renowned Australian herpetologist. For supposedly primitive animals, he adds, snakes have evolved some mind-blowing biochemical adaptations.

Snakes tell us that adaptation to a hostile environment is both possible and necessary. Take, for example, a species of sea snake that inhabits the inland bays of New Caledonia, an island in the Pacific Ocean. The coastal waters are a tropical stew of pollutants—industrial wastes including arsenic, cobalt, manganese, nickel, selenium, zinc, and seven other trace metals. Shine led a research team that discovered that, in response to these environmental toxins, turtle-headed sea snakes (Emydocephalus annulatus) have evolved a very neat decontamination trick. The pigments of their skin became darker, or melanistic; the melanin in their skin snags and sequesters the environmental toxins before they can harm the animal. The snakes slough off the toxins every time they shed their skins.

Another tale of rapid adaptation has been writing itself in South Florida, where invasive Burmese pythons have settled quite comfortably in the Everglades. A severe freeze event in 2010 devastated reptile populations; frozen iguanas dropped from trees and dead pythons littered roads. But genomic research by computational biologist Daren Card and his colleagues suggested that the survivors of the freeze event possessed, among other genetic endowments, a robust form of cold hardiness. And that rapid genetic adaptation has coincided with a northward march of the pythons, which have now been detected—at least through detection of their DNA in environmental droppings—well beyond Lake Okeechobee. More evidence that few creatures thermally read the environmental room as deftly as snakes.

Snakes tell us that alternative, complex, and frankly mind-blowing biology can be cooked up by seemingly simple creatures. Todd Castoe, associate dean for research at the University of Texas at Arlington, has been studying the genome of Burmese pythons for more than a decade. He and his colleagues have teased apart an astonishing biochemical pathway in pythons that allows them to regenerate organs, including the heart and intestine, while overcoming the cellular stress and huge amounts of insulin that accompany growth after their infrequent meals (they can eat as little as once a year). The pythons—perhaps evolution’s pioneers in intermittent fasting—can enlarge and shrink internal organs on demand precisely because they run through molecular stop signs that in other creatures (including humans) would halt growth and prevent insensitivity to insulin, a hallmark of diabetes. As Castoe distills the findings, published in 2024, pythons can regenerate their organs by avoiding getting Type II diabetes. “It’s nuts!” he says.

If snakes are telling us all these things, why aren’t we listening? Probably because most people fear and loathe them, often killing the messenger. But that wasn’t always the case.

Long before snakes were demonized in the Book of Genesis, when God declared eternal “enmity” between all serpents and all descendants of Eve, ancient cultures feared, respected, and in many cases venerated snakes as special ambassadors of Nature—not just the glorious Nature of picture postcards and exhilarating hikes, but the indifferent Nature that unleashed unpredictable and terrible violence upon the land and its inhabitants. Snakes abound in the megaliths unearthed at the archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe in present-day Turkey, where Neolithic peoples attached special significance to serpents roughly 10,000 years ago. The far-flung cult of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing, often consecrated new sanctuaries with a live snake—a ritual described by Ovid in The Metamorphoses. Nearly 2000 years ago, the empire of Teotihuacan in Mesoamerica embraced the symbolic centrality of snakes in creation myths, both revered and feared for their ability to traverse the boundaries between the natural world and the afterworld.

Especially around the time of Earth Day, it’s worth recalling that in many of these ancient cultures, snakes among all creatures were particularly associated with meteorological powers: lightning, thunderstorms, floods, droughts, wildfires, agricultural fertility, agricultural famine. The intermingling of climate, environment, and serpentdom might seem like a stretch to modern sensibilities. But if we step back, snakes might be imparting some lessons about our worldview. John Shine described to me a research trip to the hostile mountain environs of Tasmania, where snakes stay under cover except for the 20 or 30 warm days each year. “The only time that they’re out there doing anything, it’s warm and sunny and it’s lovely! And the rest of the time basically doesn’t exist. So we walk around as these sort of constant-rate, warm-blooded creatures thinking, ‘This is a god-awful, horrible environment—how can anything live here?’ And as far as they’re concerned, they’re living in the villa by the sea in a warm climate, because that’s the only time they’re active.”

Finally, we might ponder the lesson of another Australian serpent, the file snake (Achrocordus arafurae). During a succession of poor wet seasons, the females postpone reproductive maturation up to 10 years and may produce a litter only once a decade. “You do things based on resource availability, and your ability to wait out the bad times because your metabolic processes are low,” Shine explained. “You can just sit around there and wait until the world gets better.”

We humans probably don’t have the luxury to wait until the world’s climate crisis gets better. So on this serendipitous intersection of Earth Day and the Year of the Snake, perhaps we should pause, overcome our aversion to these beautiful and inventive creatures, and begin to learn from vertebrates that have been mastering hostile environments and fluctuations in temperature for well over 100 million years. They must be doing something right.

Adapted from SLITHER: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World ©2025 Stephen S. Hall and reprinted by permission from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group.

source https://time.com/7279027/earth-day-snakes-lessons/

Meme-ing the Faith: Pope Francis’ Most Memorable Social Media Moments

Pope Francis, who died on April 21 at the age of 88, knew how to preach in the social media era.

He kept up with the latest apps, seeing them as opportunities to reach Catholics wherever they are. Though he stopped watching television in 1990, he joined Instagram in 2016, setting a record with 1.4 million followers in less than 12 hours. In the final days of his life, he was on weekly WhatsApp and video calls with a parish in the war zone of Gaza.

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Young Catholics found him relatable, and it helped that the leader of the largest Christian church was also a fan of the world’s most-watched sport, soccer. He grew up rooting for the club San Lorenzo from his native Buenos Aires and met with legendary Argentine players Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona.

Though his days as nightclub bouncer (true) ended decades ago, he knew how to party. Tango, he said in 2010, “comes from deep within me.” In 2014, hundreds of couples danced it in St. Peter’s Square, in a show of appreciation for him.

As with other newly anointed celebrities, it took Francis a while to get used to being in the spotlight. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” he told an interviewer in 2015. So the Pope ordered in; in 2017, he blew out a candle on a 13-ft.-long mozzarella and tomato pie for his 81st birthday.

The only thing he loved more than pizza was sweets. Friends from Argentina would bring him alfajores, Argentine cookies filled with caramel and covered in chocolate. In February 2014, he posed with a life-size chocolate statue of himself, a gift made out of 1.5 tons of cocoa. His go-to caffeinated drink was maté, and he would accept a cup whenever one was offered on a rope line.

What social media users ate up were his photo ops. True to his eponym St. Francis of Assisi’s love of animals, and his role as shepherd of more than 1 billion Catholics, he went viral in 2018 posing with a baby lamb around his neck at a live nativity scene.

After homilies, Francis was always game to pose for selfies, especially with teens. And though he once described the Internet as “a gift from God,” he also worried that the social media platforms designed to keep people connected were making them more isolated, stating in 2018, “The world of virtual communication is a good thing, but when it becomes alienating, it makes you forget to shake hands.” It’s a lesson that can apply to adults too.

source https://time.com/7265876/pope-francis-social-media-memes/