Karen Gillan ended up playing two Nebulas (in separate timelines) as the MCU’s Infinity Saga wound down, and she also played dual roles in Doctor Who (as Eleventh Doctor sidekick Amy Pond and a fleeting soothsayer), and now she’s doing it again. This time, though, she’ll play two actual clones with no timeline or costuming shenanigans on display. Gillan will also be joined by Aaron Paul in the upcoming satirial sci-fi/thriller/action movie, Dual, from director Riley Stearns (The Art of Self Defense).
Hollywood Reporter reveals that Gillan will appear alongside the Breaking Bad and Westworld star to play an unwitting clone who unwittingly ends up in the worst fight-to-the-death ever: against herself. It sounds ridiculously morbid (with obvious wordplay), and it may be something that will go straight-to-VOD, which is going to happen more frequently than ever (and successfully, if you ask anyone recently endured the Trolls World Tour movie) in the coming years. From the synopsis:
The movie from director Riley Stearns will follow a terminally ill woman (Gillan) who opts for a cloning procedure to ease her loss on her friends and family. When she makes a miraculous recovery, her attempts to have her clone (also played by Gillan) decommissioned fail and lead to a court-mandated duel to the death.
The movie will also feature Jesse Eisenberg, who starred in Stearns’ The Art of Self Defense, an incredibly dark comedy that put an ominous twist on The Karate Kid template. Eisenberg’s role sounds like a smaller one, although Paul’s one of the headliners here, and there’s no indication of who he’s playing. Please, let it be clones, with one of them acting like a thinly veiled version of Jesse Pinkman. Nope, I’m still not tired of that character, even after El Camino, and Dual sounds like it plays with reality just enough to make something unexpected happen. Granted, this wish probably won’t happen, but I’m holding onto that hope.
Killing Eve’s third episode gave us a double helping of murder with a side of past childhood trauma. Villanelle stayed busy, offing not one but two targets (and an unfortunate witness), both of which changed the game in terms of character development and the show’s narrative future. But only one involved a baby in a trash can, and that’s the hit we’re focusing on this week.
The Trash-Can Baby After A Kill
Technically there were three murders this week on Killing Eve, and though one directly links back to the mystery of The Twelve, it’s the episode’s opening double-hit that feels like it’s foreshadowing a seismic shift in our main psychopath. Babies make everyone sentimental, even a globe-trotting assassin hardened by years of bloodshed and her own turbulent upbringing, but no one could’ve guessed just how up in her feelings Villanelle would get from hanging with a pair of cherubic cheeks.
But before their mommy-daughter date, Villanelle’s got to get rid of the kid’s real mother, a musician with obsessive-compulsive disorder over the cleanliness of her instruments. Villanelle’s offed many people who you couldn’t help but sympathize with. This woman ain’t one of them.
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She quickly lodges a tuning fork in the back of her skull before a baby monitor lights up, and Villanelle goes to investigate. She finds a nanny trying to soothe a wailing butterball, one who begs her to spare the child. Killing Eve has always been a darkly funny show but we could have never guessed they’d manage to get us cackling over an innocent maid pleading for her life.
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She flits between threatening to kill the house worker and the newborn, wondering why the woman would sacrifice herself for a child that wasn’t hers, before making the nanny’s brain her human bullseye and kidnapping the kid.
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It’s almost impossible to differentiate between sincerity and sociopathy when it comes to Villanelle and her choice to lunch with the baby doesn’t do much to define that line. She tells Dasha she’s practicing her character work and the two have a bitingly humorous squabble over Villanelle’s more manic tendencies and her recent managerial failings, but there’s something deeper at play for the notoriously closed-off killer. Psychopaths don’t get sticky-fingers for miniature poop machines. As with anything she does, there’s a method to Villanelle’s madness. While we’re thinking that over, here’s Dasha dumping the baby in the trash.
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Villanelle may not be ready to return to London and see Eve but she’s in no position to turn down a job, so she arms herself with the scent of a Roman gladiator returning from battle to meet his old foe, and carries out another hit — this time coming dangerously close to ending Carolyn’s life in the process. She bunks with Konstantin after the job, where the baby continues to haunt her. She’s seen the child reunited with its father on TV. She’s reminded of her own orphaned status, of her mother’s abandonment, of what led her to this life to begin with. She’s also reminded of the fact that she has no idea what she looked like as a newborn.
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An unnaturally bulbous head or not, Villanelle seems determined to reacquaint herself with her roots by episode’s end. Again, she claims she needs to know her origins because “knowledge is power,” and she wants to keep enough of it to ensure The Twelve can’t control her life, but it’s odd that this desire to find her family comes after another job gone sideways. Is Villanelle getting sloppy, as Dasha claims, or is she finally breaking free of whatever hold her employers have on her and discovering what she really wants from this life of crime?
Big Thief have apparently been looking through their vaults lately, because the group has been sharing some previously unreleased material that didn’t make their recent albums. Earlier this month, they released Demos Vol. 1 — Topanga Canyon, CA — Feb 2018, a collection of demos shared to benefit their touring crew, who, like many others in the music scene, have been financially impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Now, the group is back with another song that didn’t find its way onto a record, as Big Thief has shared “Love In Mine.”
The finger-picked acoustic guitar track is a gentle and lovely tune, especially with Adrianne Lenker’s beautifully retrained vocal performance. Lenker sings the poetic lyrics, “Whatever comes / Whatever leaves / What we leave behind / Like cicada shells / Will be hollowed / And eaten by the hills.”
The group shared the song and wrote, “Listen to ‘Love In Mine,’ an outtake that is very dear to us from the Two Hands session. We all felt this song was one of the strongest songs/captures in the Two Hands batch but we could never quite get it to fit in a sequence. Happy to be sharing it now.”
Listen to “Love In Mine” above, and revisit our review of Two Handshere.
Westworld’spenultimate episode answered a few nagging questions but if you thought all of the loose ends would be tied up before the show’s action-packed season three finale — well, you’re too damn trusting to be watching this series in the first place.
We know more about Caleb. We know more about Serac’s genius brother and his tragic end. We know what William believes he needs to do in order to save the world. And we know that the sickest burn for a host is to call him a “can opener.” But there’s still plenty we don’t know — like Dolores’ endgame, the nature of the A.I.s, why Caleb is so important, what timeline we’re operating in … Okay, real talk: We know absolutely nothing. But here’s us brainstorming with the help of Reddit’s brightest theorists.
1. Brain-Powered
We’ve spent most of this season wondering about the show’s new villain. Is Serac a living human being, is he a projection of Rehoboam, is he dead and we’re just seeing him in flashbacks? He’s only interacted with Maeve up until this point, so it seemed likely that theories of simulations and alternate timelines might explain his mysterious absence during pivotal moments. But after this week’s episode, we’re starting to wonder if there was ever a line to be drawn between creator and creation in the first place.
After meeting Solomon and learning more about Serac’s brilliant but troubled brother Jean Mi, fans are viewing these massive A.I. machines in a new way. Solomon seems to have inherited schizophrenic tendencies and an inability to discern which reality is most likely to happen, much like his “father,” while Rehoboam is pragmatic and focused on one solution he believes can prevent the end of humanity. If Solomon is Jean Mi – which is implied since Serac had both shut away in the Sonora facility – then Rehoboam might be Serac. In other words, Serac has uploaded his consciousness into the program and is controlling it, which explains why out of the millions of alternate paths, Rehoboam seems fixed on this current one. It’s Serac’s influence, his very human inability to see more than one solution, that’s contributing to Rehoboam’s rule of law. And isn’t it odd that both machines are shaped like the pearls that power the consciousness of hosts?
Fans were finally treated to a bloody showdown between Dolores and Maeve who are fighting for … reasons? Honestly, the adversarial nature of their relationship is one of the more confusing narratives this season but we’re gonna roll with it for now. Dolores looked to be down for the count before she activated an EMP that shut down every powered being in the facility, hosts included. With the lights turned off, many Redditors wondered what that meant for the “outliers” currently trapped in Sleeping Beauty’s cryogenic nightmare. Did they die? Unlikely since they’re technically still human, just more frozen. In fact, turning the switch off might mean the people in those pods – and there were quite a lot of pods – will soon wake up and we can’t imagine they’ll be happy to discover an omnipowerful A.I. condemned them to eternal rest because of their “f*ck the establishment” natures. Serac’s probably going to be sorry he kept these people alive, especially if one turns out to be his psychotic brother.
People who not only understand but actually enjoy playing chess are hella smart. Case in point: This Redditor who explained the episode’s titular meaning. Apparently, a “passed pawn” is a piece on the chessboard with no enemy directly in front of it that can be upgraded to a more valuable piece. There are narrative illusions and then there are the metaphors that Westworld comes up with. Subtle, they are not. Caleb seems to be the stand-in for this pawn theory, a man who’s finally coming to terms with the truth about his past, who’s been positioned to lead a revolution while Dolores faces down her mortal enemy. Other characters seem to have more present and immediate threats as well: William wants to eradicate the hosts, Charlores has it out for her maker, Maeve needs to kill Dolores to be reunited with her daughter, etc. The only character without a real nemesis is Caleb, which might make him the most dangerous player on the board.
As invincible as Dolores often appears, this episode really drove home the fact that she can be beaten. Maeve nearly killed her before she was able to cut the power and their tense battle had most fans holding their breath. If Maeve had crushed Dolores’ pearl, would that be the end of the girl in the blue dress? Probably not. In fact, there’s still one pearl unaccounted for and fans think it might be Prime Dolores, the original consciousness of the host. Is she squatting in a flat in Berlin, raging out to some techno beats and cooking schnitzels? Eh. But there’s some weight to this idea that there may be one more trick up the host’s sleeve.
We know, we know, we’ve theorized about FutureWorld before, but this latest episode laid even more groundwork for the idea that the timelines on this show are just screwing with us. After all, we still need to account for that post-credits season two scene set in the future that shows the A.I. creating fidelity tests that involve William. Add to that Solomon’s throwaway line that caused Dolores to give him a knowing smirk and, well, who’s to say Caleb isn’t a human replicant reliving his memories. What that means for Dolores’ master plan, we still don’t have a clue.
There are so many moving parts on Westworld, it’s hard to keep up with all of the Easter eggs the creators are dropping in random places. Like the opening credits scene. Should we have guessed Dolores would lose her arm since the host in the show’s intro seems to be missing one as well? We guess. But really, that’s putting a lot of pressure on our observational skills.
With the Academy relaxing the eligibility qualifications for next year’s Academy Awards, there’s nothing in the rulebook that says a video of Jake Gyllenhaal doing a shirtless headstand can’t win Best Picture. Oh… there is? Well, it’s still a great video, and we have Tom Holland to thank for it. The Spider-Man: Far From Home actor challenged his co-star to the “heavy breathing” feat, which went viral for extremely obvious reasons. But as Gyllenhaal revealed on Tuesday’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he was originally going to refuse Holland’s challenge, until Ryan Reynolds beat him to it:
“I think he beat us all with his [‘no’] response,” Gyllenhaal said of Reynolds. He was also going to refuse until Reynolds beat him to it, which forced him to crush the challenge while showing off his ripped lats.
Thank you for your service, Jake Gyllenhaal. After filming his video, he challenged his sister Maggie, Hugh Jackman, and 50 Cent (name a more iconic trio) to take part in the challenge — Maggie went through with it, but “Hugh Jackman and 50 Cent did not respond at all.” At least at first. Gyllenhaal eventually emailed Jackman, who replied:
“I said, ‘Come on, man.’ And he said, ‘I hope you’re well.’”
Now that the feud is over, Jackman and Reynolds are in cahoots against Gyllenhaal.
SXSW was one of the first major events to announce it was being canceled in light of the coronavirus pandemic, and following that announcement, some ticketholders became upset. The festival revealed they would not be offering refunds, but would instead allow tickets for this year’s festival to be exchanged for future events. This rubbed some people the wrong way, and now SXSW is facing a class action lawsuit over its ticketing policy.
The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Western District Of Texas Austin Division on April 24 by two plaintiffs, Maria Bromley and Pauta Kleber. The complains reads in part, “SXSW has, in effect, shifted the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic onto festivalgoers, […] individuals who in these desperate times may sorely need the money they paid to SXSW for a festival that never occurred.”
A SXSW spokesperson offered their reasoning for their ticketing policy, telling Billboard they just don’t have the money to issue refunds:
“When Mayor Steve Adler issued an order on March 6, 2020, prohibiting SXSW from holding the 2020 event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we understood and agreed with his tough call. The pandemic and the cancellation have caused a tremendous loss to our business, our staff, the City, and its citizens. We are still picking up the pieces after spending a year to program what would have been a remarkable event that required significant time, energy, and resources to produce.
Due to the unique nature of SXSW’s business, where we are reliant on one annual event, we incurred extensive amounts of non-recoupable costs well in advance of March. These expenditures, and the loss of expected revenue, have resulted in a situation where we do not have the money to issue refunds. SXSW, like many small businesses across the country, is in a dire financial situation requiring that we rely on our contracts, which have a clearly stated no refunds policy. Though we wish we were able to do more, we are doing our best to reconcile the situation and offered a deferral package option to purchasers of 2020 registrations.”
Meanwhile, fans aren’t out of options when it comes to quarantine entertainment, as artists are continuing to host livestream concerts from their homes.
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