We’ve got a shiny new trailer for Star Trek: Section 31, the long-awaited spinoff film that brings back Michelle Yeoh’s magnificent Phillipa Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery. The film will give us the backstory for Georgiou’s evil Mirror Universe counterpart, where she was a despotic emperor who murdered millions of her own people.
As previously reported, Yeoh’s stylishly acerbic Georgiou was eventually written out of Discovery, but fans took hope from rumors of a spinoff series featuring the character. That turned into a spinoff film, and we’ll take it. Miku Martineau plays a young Phillipa Georgiou in the film. Meanwhile, Yeoh’s older Georgiou is tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets as part of a black ops group called Section 31, while dealing with all the blood she’s spilled in her past.
Any hardcore Star Trek fan will tell you that Section 31 was first introduced as an urban legend of sorts in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Apparently Ira Steven Behr—who came up with the idea of a secret rogue organization within Starfleet doing shady things to protect the Federation—took inspiration from Commander Sisko’s comment in one episode about how “It’s easy to be a saint in paradise.” The name is taken from Starfleet Charter Article 14, Section 31, which allows Starfleet to take extraordinary measures in the face of extreme threats—including sabotage, assassination, and even biological warfare.
The Wheel of Time returns to Prime Video in March.
Prime Video released a one-minute teaser for its fantasy series The Wheel of Time at CCXP24 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The series is adapted from the late Robert Jordan‘s bestselling 14-book series of epic fantasy novels, and Ars has been following it closely with regular recaps through the first two seasons. Judging from the new teaser, the battle between light and dark is heating up as the Dragon Reborn comes into his power.
(Spoilers for first two seasons below.)
As previously reported, the series center on Moiraine (played by Oscar-nominee Rosamund Pike), a member of a powerful, all-woman organization called the Aes Sedai. Magic, known as the One Power, is divided into male (saidin) and female (saidar) flavors. The latter is the province of the Aes Sedai. Long ago, a great evil called the Dark One caused the saidin to become tainted, such that most men who show an ability to channel that magic go mad. It’s the job of the Aes Sedai to track down such men and strip them of their abilities—a process known as “gentling” that, unfortunately, is often anything but. There is also an ancient prophecy concerning the Dragon Reborn: the reincarnation of a person who will save or destroy humanity.
In S1, Moiraine befriended a group of five young people—Egwene, Nynaeve, Rand, Mat, and Perrin—whose small village has been attacked by monsters called Trollocs, suspecting that one of the young men might be the prophesied Dragon Reborn. She was right: the Dragon Reborn is Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski) whose identity was revealed to all in the S2 finale. That second season was largely based on story elements from Jordan’s The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn. We don’t yet know which specific books will provide source material for S3, but per the official premise:
Severance returns to Apple TV in January for its sophomore season.
Severance was one of the most talked-about TV series of 2022, receiving widespread critical acclaim. We loved the series so much that Ars staffers actually wrote a group review so that everyone could weigh in with their thoughts on the first season, pronouncing it “one of the best shows on TV.” Needless to say, we have been eagerly awaiting the second season next month. Prime Video just released the official trailer at CCXP24 in São Paulo, Brazil and it does not disappoint.
(Spoilers for first season below.)
In the world of Severance, people can completely disconnect their work and personal lives. Thanks to a new procedure developed by Lumon Industries, workers can bifurcate themselves into “innies” (work selves) and “outies” (personal selves)—with no sharing of memories between them. This appeals to people like Mark (Adam Scott), who lost his wife in a car crash and has struggled to work through the grief. Why not forget all that pain for eight hours a day?
It’s no spoiler to say that things went… badly in S1 as a result of this process. As Ars Deputy Editor Nate Anderson noted at the time, “The show isn’t just bonkers—though it is that, too. It’s also about the lengths to which we will go to dull or avoid emotional pain, and the ways in which humans will reach out to connect with others even under the most unpromising of circumstances.” In the process, Severance brought out “the latent horror of fluorescent lights, baby goats, cubicles, waffles, middle managers, finger traps, and ‘work/life balance.’ Also cults. And vending machines. Plus corporate training manuals. And talk therapy. Oh, and ‘kind eyes.'”
The first season ended on quite the cliffhanger, with several Lumon employees activating an “overtime contingency” to escape the office confines to get a taste for how their “outies” live—and some pretty startling secrets were revealed. S2 will naturally grapple with the fallout from their brief mutiny. Per the official premise:
Ncuti Gatwa officially begins his tenure as the Fifteenth Doctor in May, when the new Doctor Who season premieres.
Heads up, Whovians! We’ve got a newly regenerated Fifteenth Doctor in Ncuti Gatwa and a new season of the long-running British sci-fi series Doctor Who on the way. Judging by the latest trailer, we’re in for another wild ride of time-traveling hijinks, punctuated by an irresistibly charismatic Gatwa sporting some very colorful outfits with confident aplomb.
(Spoilers for most recent seasons and specials below.)
Look, I loved Jodie Whittaker’s incarnation of the Doctor, but her tenure was hampered by the unavoidable fact that showrunner Chris Chibnall just didn’t give her a lot of great material to work with. Among other issues, there was an unfortunate tendency toward didacticism and preachiness in the writing at the expense of genuine emotional resonance. While there were a number of notable episodes, and Chibnall gamely trotted out all the fan-favorite monsters and tropes, nothing ever fully captured the imagination in quite the same way as the show has always done at its best. Whittaker deserved better.
But then the BBC announced the return of Russell T. Davies—who revived the series in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor—as showrunner, setting up another reset of this beloved series. When Gatwa’s casting was announced, everyone assumed Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor would regenerate accordingly at the end of “The Power of the Doctor.” Instead, the newly regenerated Fourteenth Doctor was played by none other than David Tennant, everyone’s favorite Tenth Doctor—a little older with a few tweaks to his trademark look.
It was great casting for the 60th anniversary specials, in which Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor reunited with Donna Noble (Catherine Tate)—one of my favorite companions. Donna had her memories of the Doctor wiped by the Tenth Doctor to save her life since she had taken on some Time Lord knowledge that human beings just aren’t designed to carry. Donna now had a teenage daughter named Rose, and of course, a major crisis forced the Doctor to restore the erased knowledge to save London yet again. Donna should have died, but her Time Lord knowledge ended up being safely split between her and Rose instead.
The Doctor and Donna next encountered an abandoned spaceship filled with doppelgängers (Not-Things) in “Wild Blue Yonder.” In “The Giggle,” they faced off against the Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris), and during the climactic battle, the Fourteenth Doctor was shot. Fans expecting the usual regeneration were in for a surprise. The Fourteenth Doctor “bigenerated” instead, resulting in both a Fourteenth Doctor and Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, a separate physical entity.
Ncuti Gatwa is ready for his first full season as the Fifteenth Doctor.
YouTube/BBC
His new companion is Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson).
YouTube/BBC
“Space babies!”
YouTube/BC
The Doctor and the dinosaurs.
YouTube/BBC
Going full-on Bridgerton.
YouTube/BBC
“We are going to rock through time…”
YouTube/BBC
Sporting a snazzy tangerine-colored knit.
YouTube/BBC
Looking very Mod Squad, Doctor!
YouTube/BBC
Recreating a famous album cover because why not?
YouTube/BBC
The two Doctors teamed up to defeat the Toymaker and then figured out how to duplicate the TARDIS by drawing on the power of the remnants of the villain’s reality-warping domain. And Gatwa’s Doctor embarked on a fresh adventure with the 2023 Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road,” which also introduced us to his new companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson).
All of that brings us to season 14. All we really know about this new season is that it will have eight episodes, beginning with the Davies-penned “Space Babies” and “The Devil’s Chord.” Davies wrote six out of the eight episodes, in fact, closing out with “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” and the finale, “Empire of Death.” The latest trailer doesn’t give us much more than some exciting visual teases of what’s in store, including the aforementioned space babies, dinosaurs, a mysterious spacecraft—and all those outfits.
The Fifteenth Doctor is apparently something of a clothes horse. Each incarnation of the Doctor has always had a trademark “look,” but costume designer Pam Downe decided to broaden the scope for Gatwa, incorporating design elements from previous Doctors all the way back to Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor, whose style Gatwa particularly admired. That Regency-era burgundy velvet jacket is definitely a nod to the Third Doctor. There’s even a 1960s suit and Afro reminiscent of the Mod Squad or Austin Powers (with a sly allusion to The Beatles’ Abbey Road). Gatwa is clearly having a blast, which bodes well for the upcoming new season.
Season 14 of Doctor Who premieres on BBC and Disney+ on May 10, 2024, in the US and May 11 in the UK.
A Vault Dweller navigates a post-apocalyptic wasteland in Fallout, based on the bestselling gaming franchise.
Amazon Prime Video has dropped the full official trailer for Fallout, the streaming platform’s forthcoming post-apocalyptic sci-fi series. It’s based on the bestselling role-playing gaming franchise set in a satirical, 1950s-style future post-nuclear apocalypse. There’s plenty for gaming fans to be pleased about, judging by the trailer, but casting national treasure Walton Goggins (Justified) as a gunslinging Ghoul was quite simply a stroke of genius.
The first Fallout RPG was released in 1997, followed by several sequels and spinoffs. According to the game’s lore, modern civilization is destroyed in 2077 by a global nuclear war between the US and China. Survivors live in various underground vaults (fallout shelters). Each iteration of the game takes place somewhere across a post-apocalyptic US metro area and features a Vault Dweller—someone born and raised underground—as the protagonist. The first game takes place in 2161 and features a Vault Dweller from Vault 13, deep in the mountains of Southern California. The Vault Dweller must complete various missions to save the residents of Vault 13, which takes said protagonist to in-world places like Junktown; a merchant city called the Hub; and Necropolis, filled with Ghouls, i.e., humans badly mutated by exposure to nuclear radiation.
The series was announced in July 2020, with Westworld writers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy serving as executive producers. In January 2022, it was revealed that Nolan would direct the first three episodes but that two other writers—Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner—would be the showrunners. Todd Howard, who directed several games in the franchise, is also an executive producer and has said the series is not an adaptation of any particular game, but it is set within the same continuity. Per the official premise:
Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. Two hundred years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind—and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.
In addition to Goggins, Ella Purnell stars as a young Vault Dweller named Lucy, who must venture out into the wasteland on a mission to save her community in Vault 33. Aaron Moten plays a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus; Kyle MacLachlan plays Lucy’s father, Hank, who is a Vault Overseer; Mike Doyle plays Mr. Spencer; Moises Arias plays Lucy’s brother, Norm; Michael Emerson plays an enigmatic wanderer named Wilzig; Johnny Pemberton plays Thaddeus; Cherien Dabis plays Birdie; Dale Dickey plays Ma June; Matty Cardarople plays Huey; Dave Register plays Chet; Rodrigo Luzzi plays Reg; and Annabel O’Hagan plays Steph. Sarita Choudhury and Leslie Uggams also appear in the series.
Nuclear weapons have devastated Los Angeles.
YouTube/Prime Video
Ella Purnell stars as a young Vault Dweller named Lucy.
YouTube/Prime Video
The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) is a mutated gunslinger and bounty hunter.
YouTube/Prime Video
Aaron Moten plays Maximus, a squire with the Brotherhood of Steel.
YouTube/Prime Video
Hey, it’s Michael Emerson of Lost fame, playing an enigmatic wanderer named Wilzig.
YouTube/Prime Video
Kyle MacLachlan plays Lucy’s father, Hank, a Vault Overseer.
YouTube/Prime Video
Sarita Choudhury looking fierce!
YouTube/Prime Video
A glimpse of the Ghoul when he was still Cooper Howard, trying to save his daughter from a nuclear blast.
YouTube/Prime Video
“I’m simply going to harvest your organs.”
YouTube/Prime Video
Look out for Gulpers!
YouTube/Prime Video
“There you are, you little killer.”
YouTube/Prime Video
A teaser dropped in January, chock-full of details instantly recognizable to longtime fans of the games. The new trailer opens with a pre-apocalypse Goggins in a snazzy suit, pitching “a veritable Camelot of the nuclear age”: underground vaults housing residential communities, “because if the worst should happen tomorrow, the world is gonna need you to build a better day after.” The worst does happen, of course, and we catch glimpses of a devastated Los Angeles in the wake of a nuclear war, including a ruined Santa Monica Pier and Griffith Observatory. Then we see Lucy preparing to leave her Vault, despite warnings that “it isn’t like the Vault out there; it’s big.”
Lucy first encounters a hardened Ma June, who laughs derisively when Lucy naively asks what’s happened in the last 200 years. (Frankly, she thought all the Vault Dwellers were dead.) Lucy also has several run-ins with the Ghoul formerly known as Cooper Howard. Pretty much everyone she meets seems to want her dead, although the robot Mr. Handy helpfully informs her it just wants to harvest her organs. Maximus gets his share of screen time, both in and out of full Brotherhood of Steel armor, and we get a glimpse of the Brotherhood’s airships, as well as a mutant monster called a Gulper. It’s a violent, chaotic wasteland, but apparently, “there’s always somebody behind the wheel.”
All episodes of Fallout will premiere on Prime Video on April 11, 2024.
Netflix’s new sci-fi series 3 Body Problem makes its world premiere tonight at the SXSW Film & Television festival in Austin.
The countdown continues for the hotly anticipated debut of 3 Body Problem, Netflix’s eight-episode sci-fi series adapted from the award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, the first book in his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Those attending the SXSW Film & Television Festival in Austin will get to see the series’ world premiere tonight. The rest of us have to wait until later this month, but in the meantime, the streaming platform has released a final trailer.
(Some spoilers for the novel below.)
The 3-Body Problem‘s narrative is told in a nonlinear fashion, jumping between a young astrophysicist, Ye Wenjie, who witnesses her father being beaten to death by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and Ye’s return to Tsinghua University as an established professor many years later. During the earlier timeline, Ye figures out a means of sending an interstellar message to possible extraterrestrial civilizations and receives a response from a planet called Trisolaris. (As its name implies, the planet has three suns, which wreak havoc on Trisolaris via unpredictable “chaotic periods”—hence the novel’s title, which refers to a classic problem in celestial mechanics.) Despite being warned that the aliens intend to invade and conquer Earth, Ye responds to the message and invites them to do so, disillusioned by the state of the world.
The Trisolarians depart on their 450-year journey. Meanwhile, there have been complicated developments on Earth as people learn of the pending arrival of aliens. There is a secret society of scientists, political leaders, and other scholars who share Ye’s sentiment about the state of humanity, which, over time, splits into three competing factions. Some members continue to support the full destruction of humanity; others plan to help the aliens in exchange for the survival of themselves and their descendants; and still others regularly play a VR game called Three-Body and attempt to find a computational solution to the actual three-body problem that plagues Trisolaris. That’s a recipe for tension and conflict, which plays out in various ways throughout the novel.
The Netflix series was created by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss (Game of Thrones), and Alexander Woo (True Blood). Per the official premise:
A young woman’s fateful decision in 1960s China reverberates across space and time into the present day. When the laws of nature inexplicably unravel before their eyes, a close-knit group of brilliant scientists join forces with an unorthodox detective to confront the greatest threat in humanity’s history.
Zine Tseng stars as the young Ye Wenjie, with Rosalind Chao playing the older version. The cast also includes Benedict Wong as Da Shi, an intelligence officer who is investigating the mysterious deaths of scientists; Liam Cunningham as Thomas Wade, the charismatic leader of a global intelligence operation; Saamer Usmani as Raj Varma, a naval officer; and Jonathan Pryce as a wealthy eccentric named Mike Evans who helps set up a secret society. Ben Schnetzer plays the younger version of Mike Evans, while Marlo Kelly plays Tatiana, who was raised in Evans’ organization.
The “Oxford Five” are John Bradley as Jack Rooney; Alex Sharp as Will Downing, a sixth-form physics teacher; Jess Hong as Jin Cheng, a brilliant theoretical physicist whose curiosity is both a strength and a weakness; Jovan Adepo as Saul Durand, another physicist; and Eiza González as Auggie Salazar, a pioneer in nanotechnology (comparable to the character of Wang Miao in the novel). Sea Shimooka plays Sophon, an avatar in the show’s mysterious VR game.
The first teaser was released last June, followed in November by an exclusive clip showing Jack Rooney trying on a mysterious VR headset—only to learn from the avatar Sophon that he wasn’t “invited.” Netflix debuted the official full trailer for 3 Body Problem at CES in Las Vegas in January, and it focused heavily on the central mystery surrounding the deaths of 30 scientists in a single month, as well as people starting to see numbers representing some kind of countdown before their eyes.
This final trailer focuses a bit more on the backstory, namely the detection of the famous WOW! signal in 1977 with a glimpse of Ye Wenjie’s personal tragedy during China’s Cultural Revolution. The older Ye Wenjie tells us that “they are coming,” as others wonder who “they” might be. Of course, it’s aliens, bringing the threat of impending war as Dinah Washington croons “This Bitter Earth” in the background, lending an almost elegiac mood to the trailer. At one point, Ye Wenjie asks Jin how she will be remembered, and Jin replies, “As someone who fought back.”
All eight episodes of 3 Body Problem will hit Netflix on March 21, 2024.
Star Trek: Discovery returns for its fifth and final season after a two-year hiatus.
It’s been two years since we had new episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, which debuted in 2017. Now Paramount+ has dropped the official trailer for the fifth and final season of the spinoff series.
(Spoilers for prior seasons below.)
As previously reported, Sonequa Martin-Green plays Michael Burnham, an orphaned human raised on the planet Vulcan by none other than Sarek (James Frain) and his human wife, Amanda Grayson (Mia Kirshner)—aka, Spock’s (Ethan Peck) parents. So, she is Spock’s adoptive sister. As I’ve written previously, the S2 season-long arc involved the mysterious appearances of a “Red Angel” and a rogue Starfleet AI called Control that sought to wipe out all sentient life in the universe.
The big reveal was that the Red Angel was actually a time-travel suit worn by Michael’s biological mother. She had accidentally jumped 950 years into a bleak future in which Control had achieved its nefarious goal and had been traveling through time, leaving signals (in the form of the visions), hoping to alter that future. In the S2 finale, Michael donned a copy of her mother’s suit to lead Discovery over 900 years into the future. The crew of the Enterprise told Starfleet that Discovery was destroyed in the battle and was ordered never to speak of the ship or her crew again.
In S3, Michael, Discovery, and her crew arrived in the future and found that Control’s plan had been thwarted: Life still exists. But the galaxy was very different thanks to something called The Burn, a catastrophic event that caused all the dilithium in the Milky Way to explode and destroy much of Starfleet in the process. In the aftermath, with no warp drive possible, all the planets had become disconnected and were no longer governed by the Federation. Michael did, however, manage to locate one sole Federation liaison on a remote space station with the help of a new ally, Book (David Ajala).
The Discovery crew reunited with what was left of Starfleet, figured out what caused The Burn, and managed to defeat a rival syndicate known as the Emerald Chain, inspiring planets to start rejoining the Federation. Burnham finally became captain of Discovery after Saru (Doug Jones) opted to return to his home planet of Kaminar for a spell. And we bid a sorrowful farewell to Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh).
S4 opened with the plucky crew—including Saru as first officer—helping rebuild the Federation and celebrating the reopening of Starfleet Academy. They soon encountered a “gravitational anomaly” five light-years in diameter that destroyed Book’s home planet of Kwejian as it moved through the galaxy. It turned out to be a powerful technology belonging to an alien species with interconnected minds called 10-C, whose language employed mathematical equations. In the S4 finale, the aliens ultimately agreed to turn off their technology, thereby sparing Earth and other Federation planets.
The fifth season was already in development by March 2020, and the plan was to film those episodes back-to-back with S4. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and put those plans on hold. Filming didn’t happen until 2022. While S5 was originally meant to air last year, once Paramount decided to pull the plug and make it the final season, they needed to shoot additional footage in order to wrap up the series properly. Per the official premise:
The fifth and final season will find Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery uncovering a mystery that will send them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries. But there are others on the hunt as well… dangerous foes who are desperate to claim the prize for themselves and will stop at nothing to get it.
In addition to Martin-Green, Jones, and Ajala, much of the main cast is returning for S5: Anthony Rapp as Stamets; Mary Wiseman as Tilly; Wilson Cruz as Dr. Culber; Blu del Barrio as Adira Tal; and Callum Keith Rennie as Rayner. Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis will reprise their recurring roles as Moll and L’ak, respectively. Returning as notable guest stars in S5: Oded Fehr as Starfleet Commander-in-Chief Charles Vance; Chelah Horsdal as Lair Rillak; Tara Rowling as T’Rina; David Cronenberg as Kovich; and Tig Notaro as Jett Reno.
The first two episodes of the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery will premiere on Paramount+ on April 4, 2024; the remaining eight episodes will air weekly after that through May 30.
