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The ‘Westworld’ Confusion Index is your guide to what we know, what we kind of know, and what we don’t know about Westworld, one of television’s more confusing shows. We will make mistakes, surely, because we rarely know what is happening or why (and whenever we think we’ve figured it out, they go and change it on us), but we will try to have at least as many jokes as mistakes. This is the best we can offer. Here we go.

What We Know

Everyone is Dolores

The biggest question floating around and through this first chunk of Westworld’s third season has been “Which host brains” — pearls, whatever — “did Dolores smuggle out of Delos and put into the bodies of the hosts she built in the real world?” We knew someone was inside Charlotte and Carlos and, as of this episode, Musashi the former samurai warrior who is now a Yakuza boss who does that thing only crime bosses and grandmothers do where they drape their jacket over their shoulders without putting their arms through. Which hosts did she pick? Clementine? My sweet dull boy Teddy? Hector the Handsome Safecracker?

Well, we have our answer. It was Dolores. All of them. Many Doloreses. Dolori. Clones of herself that she plopped into other hosts that she spread around a number of influential positions, from Charlotte as the top banana at Delos to Carlos the handler of Liam the Dummy to… I mean, who knows where else. They’re all her, which is a little hilarious to think about and just really the most conceited decision anyone could possibly make. I’m just mad the show didn’t give us a scene of her making this decision while saying “the only one I can trust… is me” as she looks dead into the camera and the screen cuts to black. A missed opportunity. Hopefully, the show uses its shifting timelines to address it eventually.

The implications of this stretch all the way around the show. It means she has plans for both Delos and Serac’s company. It means, I think, that she’s been the mole — as Charlotte — who is feeding him intelligence. It means everything so far is connected to her and through her and it means she’s been pulling a lot of strings in a very coordinated manner, like a puppeteer working a marionette. She’s in a primo position right now for whatever she has planned, too. She pushed William out of Delos and took his shares so she can take the company private and protect it from Serac. She stole all of Liam’s money using Carlos and Caleb and some poor banker’s blood. Things are building to a head and her plan seems to be coming together nicely.

My only question right now is, like, who is Bernard? Is Bernard Bernard? Did she put Teddy inside Bernard? It would explain why he’s so confused all the time. And it would be really funny, like if she created a dumbass adversary just to make this mildly interesting every now and then. I now hope this is true.

Shopping in the future looks cool

This is from when Dolores and Caleb were getting their fancy clothes for the masked prostitute charity ball thing. Dolores didn’t need clothes because we’ve seen her conjure a damn ball gown mid-stride on her way into an event. Caleb did, though. Caleb is not a suit kind of guy. And so, the shopping, kind of like a reverse Pretty Woman but with science.

I like this. This is how shopping should be. The only downside is that it really makes it tougher to do a good “repeatedly emerging from the fitting room in new, usually fancy but sometimes silly outfits” montage. Not as fun if you’re just cycling through them with a touchscreen. I’m sure we can figure a way around this. We have to.

Serac is still the biggest supervillain on the show, which is really saying something when you consider that another character has cloned herself five times in different bodies in an attempt to end humanity as we know it through a mixture of corporate subterfuge and murder

An incomplete list of supervillain stuff Serac did:

• Had a discussion with Maeve about how their interests were actually aligned
• Delivered a brief monologue about heaven and hell and how the concept of the afterlife is a con humans played on themselves
• Pressured a hostage into talking by showing him what would happen to his family if he didn’t
• Killed the hostage immediately after

I can’t help it, I love this guy. He checks every box of an evil mastermind. I half-expect him to poison a city’s water supply next episode, even if it has nothing to do with Dolores and their battle, just because he’s itching to do some bad guy stuff. He is somehow my favorite character on the show but my second-favorite rich guy on the show, coming in just behind Liam’s almost cartoonishly dipshitty buddy, the one who offered him designer drugs and went on a rant about how “all sex is commerce” and actually said the sentence “Tonight is not about dead girlfriends; it’s about unabashed self-gratification” which is really just such a perfect rich asshole friend thing to say that I have no choice but to adore it.

What We Kind Of Know

This is building toward a big Serac vs. Dolores showdown at some point

I mean, yeah. This much is pretty clear, right? We’re looking at a coming battle between Serac/Maeve and Dolores/Dolores/Dolores/Dolores/Dolores, which should be a pretty fun fight. Everyone is evil and has bad intentions and is meticulously plotting their strategy while wearing futuristic designer clothes they concocted with the push of a button. There’s no good guy, except maybe Bernard, who at present is hopelessly outmatched and outclassed. Serac wants to control Delos to increase his ability to control human behavior through technology (again, just classic supervillain stuff); Dolores wants to, I guess, wipe out humans and replace them with robots. I don’t know. That one’s still a little murky. I dig it, though. This is turning into a fun little ride.

Paris is… gone?

I really did enjoy the very casual way the show revealed the fact that Paris was, at some point, apparently decimated by some sort of powerful weapon and no longer exists. I assume this will come up again at some point, if only to explain why it happened or as part of a long speech by Serac about why he became interested in controlling human behavior to protect us from ourselves, but a much bigger part of me hopes they never mention it again. Like if they just introduce the concept of a major city getting vaporized and then never get back to it. I would like that. For the chaos of it all.

What We Don’t Know

Is Maeve… okay?

She is. I’m sure she is. Letting Maeve bleed out and die for good in the same episode that Serac talked about getting her back to her daughter would be madness. And she’s the only one who can conceivably match skills with Dolores. And Maeve rules, from using her brain powers to make the Yakuza’s guns go haywire to gutting goons with samurai swords for the second season in a row to saying all kinds of cool action star stuff as she did it. Maeve will be back. I would bet all of Liam’s money on it.

But how will/could this change things? Will Serac get her more help? Will he jack up her settings to make her even more Keanu-y? Will the white goo she’s lying in — which looks an awful lot like the goo Delos used to make hosts, and Dolores now appears to have in bulk — mix in with her blood and make her some sort of Super Maeve? I don’t know. That’s the fun of this show. They might do anything next. I respect a show that can look itself in the mirror and say “Yeah, screw it, let’s get wild.” Westworld is that kind of show, very much so, for both better and worse.

Is this the last we’ll see of William?

Welllllllllllll things did not go too great for William, the one-time CEO of Delos and one-time Man in Black and current patient in an upscale mental health facility where his stay is not what you would call voluntary. Just bad all-around, starting with him maybe hallucinating the daughter he killed in a paranoid fit of violence and moving all the way to the thing where Dolores — as Charlotte — duped him into cleaning himself up for a big board meeting that was all a ruse to make him look unhinged and get taken away by big strong men who work for the facility so she could control his shares. Again, not great.

The question I have is this: Is that it? Is that the end of William, a once-powerful businessman who got so deep into a game that he drove himself cuckoo with a couple nudges? I doubt it. Even though Dolores described his current situation as “the end of the game,” I can’t believe the show will just leave Ed Harris in an asylum while all of this plays out. Let’s have Maeve break him out and give him a black cowboy hat and have him and Serac sit at a table in a gold-plated cocktail lounge for a conversation filled with the most evil sentences you’ve ever heard. Do it for me. I need this. Come on.

Click to download here.

Hey, everyone, it’s time for your favorite Sopranos podcast ever, Pod Yourself A Gun. The world’s ONLY Sopranos podcast (that’s not hosted by a former cast member nor by people who respect prestige TV). This week Vince and Matt are joined by comedian, podcaster, Cooking Channel TV show host and huge Sopranos fan Karl Hess as they discuss Sopranos season 2 episode 8 (208) “Full Leather Jacket.” AKA the most Seinfeld-ass episode of the Sopranos of all time. It’s mostly about how Richie Aprile gives Tony a jacket as a gift and Tony insults him by not wearing the jacket. Seriously, that’s like the biggest storyline in the episode. It’s bizarre and forgettable and a pleasure to talk about with Karl.

Here’s a bit more info on the episode, which premiered on March 5th, 2000. We were so innocent then! Some of the day’s headlines included: “Voters seem to choose Bush, Gore in primaries. Americans are largely content with the nation’s direction.” (St. Louis Dispatch).

SYNOPSIS:

“Although Richie is miffed at Tony for forcing him to build a ramp for the pizza-parlor owner he paralyzed, he decides to make a peace offering. Unhappy with their lowly status as Christopher’s lackeys, Sean and Matt decide to pledge their allegiance to Richie–through a violent, unexpected act.”

BADA B STORIES

-Richie wants to give Tony a jacket
-Meadow wants to go to Berkeley
-Carm wants a letter of rec to Georgetown for Meadow
-Matt and Shawn want respect
-Chris wants to marry Adrianna
-Tony wants Richie to build a ramp for Beansy

We hope you enjoy it! And please remember to give us a review and 5 stars on the Apple podcast app. (-written by Matt Lieb)

A new HBO docuseries, Atlanta’s Missing And Murdered: The Lost Children, aims to refocus attention upon the justice that never arrived for dozens of grieving families. Between 1979 to 1981, at least 30 African-American kids and young adults went missing or were discovered to be murdered in Atlanta. A 23-year-old suspect, Wayne Williams, was convicted in 1982 for two of the murders, and curiously, law enforcement swiftly declared the rest of the cases to be closed. For the dozens of other victims, their families never received the answers they sought, and this series digs deep into the investigation, along with the racial tensions that rose to a boil in at Atlanta during a time when the city hoped to become a Southern mecca of commerce and culture.

This five-part series — while highlighting interviews, transcripts, archival footage, and more — unravels the trial’s spectacle and suspect behavior of law enforcement (read the FBI’s main Atlanta Child Murders case file for the multi-agency investigation here). Sure, there was also the strange behavior of Wayne Williams, but the City of Atlanta can no longer turn its back on the shady shutting down of murder cases as they mounted at an alarming rate. The docuseries launches with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms reopening the overall case in spring 2019. Coincidentally and a few months later, David Fincher’s second season of Netflix’s Mindhunter reignited public interest in the Atlanta Child Murders as well. We spoke with two of the HBO series’ filmmakers, Maro Chermayeff and Sam Pollard, about how they unfurled this case’s twisted legacy.

I’ve been looking at the chronology of the case, which was shelved and then got reopened in 2019 while you were working on the docuseries. And then Mindhunter‘s dramatized take arrived in the middle of all of that. Can you walk me through your filmmaking timeline?

Sam Pollard: It really goes back to 2017. I had just finished a documentary entitled Maynard, about Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of a major Southern city (Atlanta), and I did a little segment in that documentary that looked at the Atlanta Child Murders and all the issues that Maynard Jackson had to face in dealing with that. And Maro and the people at Show of Force, they saw the doc, and they thought it was time to do an even deeper exploration of the Atlanta Child Murders and the City of Atlanta. So they put together a proposal, and we pitched it to HBO, which both of us have a long relationship with, and they gave us the greenlight. We were off and running in December 2018. And then in January after a lot of research, we did our first trip down to Atlanta to meet different people and get a lay of the land, and we started shooting in February. And what’s amazing is that we shot this whole series in a year and a half, which is something that rarely happens with documentaries.

Speaking of HBO, Watchmen recently brought the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to greater public awareness. After the season finale, officials announced the discovery of a possible mass grave in Tulsa. What’s your hope for this series?

Maro Chermayeff: I hope that people re-look at this case individually. Was this a serial killing with a single perpetrator? Was Wayne Williams guilty of these crimes for which he was found guilty? This isn’t a vindication. We’re not trying to get Wayne Williams out of prison. We’re trying to look at the story and contextualize it in this rising city. Atlanta’s like another character in this series, and we want people to look at what was happening to marginalize the community, how they were treated at this time, how they ultimately ended up finding somebody, got him in their crosshairs, and really stopped investigating the case. They decided that Wayne Williams did this, and this must shut down. There were a lot of other viable things involved, whether that was the Klan involvement, the pedophile rings in Atlanta, and it just didn’t get looked at in a significant way, and part of that is a race issue in a very divided city. Somehow, the children themselves and Wayne Williams all fell prey to this, and we thought it was really interesting how it was handled at the time and how the outcomes could have been different. That is what really intrigued us. We didn’t just want to tell the story of [children who had become numbers]. The mothers and the siblings have really suffered over the years. They hadn’t gotten the sense of conclusion and justice, and I hope for them that their time has come.

Sam: In some ways, some of the families of the victims, when they sat down to do interviews with us, this was the first time that they felt an opportunity to open themselves up after living with this over the years. It was just amazing and very gratifying to finally be able to listen to [the families] and hear about what they’ve gone through for all of these years.

You mentioned the City of Atlanta being a character. What does the series say behind the myth of it being the mecca of the South?

Sam: It definitely challenges it. It looks how complicated it is. For a lot of Black people, like myself who was 29, 28 at the time, I saw this as a city that there was a possibility of moving to because they had a growing Black middle class. But underneath that, you had core people, working-class people who were struggling to make ends meet. You had racism that was still a prevalent part of Atlanta. Right outside of Atlanta, the Klan was there. It was a city that had a lot of complicated layers to it, and I think we did a fantastic job, if I do say so myself…

Maro: [Laughs]

Sam: …of exploring all the different layers of the City of Atlanta.

Maro: Most of the approaches that we’ve seen are about the murders: here’s what happened, here’s the splash, and that doesn’t dig deep into what was going on in this community and culture that allowed this to fester in this way. We wanted to look at that.

The family members were clearly receptive to that exploration, like you said.

Sam: They all were fantastic. I don’t think in all my years of interviewing so many people that we had family members that were so willing to sit there and open themselves up to us. It wasn’t easy for some of them. If you could watch some of the outtakes with some of these family members, it makes tears come to your eyes.

Maro: It’s harrowing.

Sam: They were open to it, and I really thank them, we all do, from the team. We thank them for being willing to participate in the project.

Do you think with today’s streaming culture, and after Netflix’s Making A Murderer, that people might start fruitlessly rooting for a retrial?

Maro: I don’t think the goal for us or the chief of police and the mayor are not advocating for a retrial for anyone, including Wayne Williams. His lawyers have been doing that. They’re doing this for the cities and the families because they never had their cases tried. They were added onto two adults who Wayne was charged with and ultimately found guilty, and then halfway through that trial, they tacked on ten children through very questionable fiber evidence and potentially junk science evidence, which we, of course, break down. You’re taking a fiber out of someone who’s been in the Chattahoochee River? You know, how many companies and textiles have dumped into that river? It was really sketchy science. And they made it sound more and more complicated so that a jury would just be inundated. The trial is fascinating, but clearly, they wanted this to shut down, and Wayne did not have much of a chance at all.

I couldn’t make sense of Wayne’s behavior when he was a person of interest.

Maro: That’s Wayne’s downfall! He’s his own worst enemy to the 10th power. He just didn’t get it.

Sam: No.

Maro: And he didn’t have, at that time, really significant advisors to help him through the process. We did interview Tony Axam, who was a well-known, well-seasoned criminal defense attorney who was originally on that case. We talked to him extensively, a very smart guy, and Wayne fired him. And we always say, “Oh my god, what would the outcome have been if Tony had been there all the way through?” He would have never let all those things happen. As tough as his attorney was, she had never done a murder trial. You don’t take a case of that magnitude having never done a case. Every card just kept stacking up against him.

If you could both name the most baffling thing about this case, what would it be?

Sam: From my perspective, it was in Episode 5, after the appeals process, and you’re listening to all of these law enforcement people, who basically they don’t even remember the tapes. They don’t look after the tapes, and I’m like, “My god.” What incompetence.

Maro: And what dishonesty: “I don’t remember.” Person after person doesn’t remember an entire investigation of the Klan that reads like a multi-thousand-page transcript? They don’t remember?

Sam. It’s amazing.

Maro. It’s just ridiculous. And then for me, you tell me now a 120-pound guy throws a body out of a moving vehicle, over a bridge, without even stopping a car, a body that weighs 50-60 pounds more than he does. And then when a body is found, two days later, he’s nabbed on the bridge, when even the coroner’s report says that the body had been in the river for 7-8 days. Tell me how that’s a smoking gun.

And there was a “clunk” on the bridge that someone heard randomly, which got introduced into evidence?

Maro: Yeah, they were asleep and heard a splash, and they were there to see if bodies were getting thrown over the bridge, so they have lights, they have the equipment. A body lands over the bridge into the Chattahoochee, in the summer with low water movement, and they can’t move a flashlight around and find that floating body? That might be there, five seconds later? Of course you would see it, it’d be right there, it would have barely moved. The whole thing, just…

Sam: …doesn’t make any sense.

Maro: Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense. All of those things! The next time I wanna throw something that’s double my weight out of a moving vehicle by myself while I’m driving, that’s when I should get the Emmy.

HBO’s ‘Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children’ airs on Sundays at 8:00pm EST.

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads and people are pushed to stay at home and practice social distancing, many musicians have opted to provide virtual entertainment for the isolating times. Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard hosts daily livestream concerts where he performs a range of covers and original music. Charli XCX previously curated a series of quarantine livestream events with special guests. Grammy-award-winning musician HER is following suit and launching Girls With Guitars, a virtual conversation with other female musicians.

Kicking off Monday at 8 p.m. EST, the Girls With Guitars livestream will be a combination of live performances and conversations. During each livestream session, HER plans to play music from her own catalog, as well as fan requests and covers. The singer will then invite an array of guest guitarists to perform and engage in a lively conversation about life and music.

Ahead of the Girls With Guitars series announcement, one of HER’s backup vocalists revealed the singer’s immense generosity. According to supporting vocalist Ajanee Hambrick, HER provided her entire crew with several months’ worth of financial support amid the pandemic. Because all tours have been halted for the foreseeable future, HER reportedly provided her whole team with some funds to get them through the lull in work opportunities for the next few months.

Girls With Guitars premieres 4/6 at 8 p.m. EST on Instagram live. Watch it here.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Bunny Day is still on in the Animal Crossing world, but much to the relief of players it did just get a bit harder to find eggs. The annual Easter-adjacent event is currently taking place on adorable Nintendo islands all over the world, but not all players were thrilled by the plethora of eggs found on their islands.

For those who haven’t played, the event is simple: eggs are hidden in various parts of the island and doing activities uncovers them. Hit a tree with an axe and a wood egg might come out instead of a piece of wood. Dig where X marks the spot and an earth egg may be there instead of a fossil. And so on. But the biggest complaint about the fortnight-long event is all the damn water eggs, which frustratingly would replace fish you worked hard to catch in streams, ponds and the ocean. A quick search for the term “water egg” on Twitter reveals a large number of some extremely popular tweets about the abundance of water eggs and how they were driving players insane.

The annoyance made for a lot of memes about eggs and the torture they were inflicting on people that just wanted to grind for some bells by fishing or chopping wood. But the frustration was real: for many players looking to make money and build new bridges or expand their homes it was actually harder to accumulate bells. And unless you were explicitly looking for them, the eggs made using Nook Miles Tickets to take trips to random islands far less profitable, or at least a lot more time-consuming if you found egg after egg in the water and not valuable fish.

It appears Nintendo heard your complaints, though, because on Monday morning the game updated to version 1.1.4, which according to Kotaku officially modified egg drop odds, as mentioned in the patch notes. Indeed, upon playing this morning the download was there and the odds do seem to have changed significantly. In trying to get an image for this post, for example, it took six tries to get an egg and not a fish. That’s much better fish-t0-egg ratio that I saw over the weekend when the Bunny Day event started.

The patch doesn’t seem to have altered all of the egg drop numbers — there are still plenty of earth eggs to dig up and stone eggs are flying out of stones like crazy — but one of the biggest frustrations with the event seems to have been nerfed. It’s an understandably difficult problem to parse for Nintendo, as there are dozens of Bunny Day designs needed to craft and players must have a way to accumulate all those eggs. But not altering the core gameplay of Animal Crossing while pulling off the special event has proven more difficult than many anticipated. Still, it’s good that they’re listening to players and making quick changes when things go wrong, as it’s the fourth patch of the game in a few weeks.

There’s still a lot of gaudy egg creations to craft if you want the big Bunny Day prize, but how attached you are a clearly-costumed bunny named Zipper is your call now. At least we can all go fishing again.

(Spoilers from the current The Walking Dead season will be found below.)

In this week’s pseudo-finale of The Walking Dead (the actual season 10 finale has been delayed), Beta has made his way toward the Alexandrians’ hiding spot (strangely, a hospital that was set in Atlanta in season 5), while Aaron and Alden are being held at gunpoint by a mysterious, bad-ass person in a mask.

Those two storylines, however, were mostly table-setting, prepping the series for the big showdown in the season finale, whenever it eventually airs. However, there were three other storylines in this week’s episode, “Tower,” that provided some emotional closure — or something akin to it — for several characters. Foremost among them are Lydia and Negan, who had begun to bond in the earlier half in the season before Carol released Negan from jail in order to kill Lydia’s mother, Alpha. Recall, however, that it was Negan who saved Lydia’s life after she was attacked by Margo, Gage, and Alfred (note: Two of the three of those characters are now dead, because karma is real).

Lydia and Negan’s relationship, however, was clearly going to suffer after Negan kidnapped Lydia and locked her in a shack while he cut off her mother’s head. That’s just common sense: If you decapitate someone’s mother, her daughter is going to be upset with you. Nevertheless, there are layers at play here. Alpha was an abusive mother, and Lydia hated her. However, she was the only mother Lydia had ever known. Negan — who has been the abuser in other relationships — understands the dynamic, and in one of the most powerful scenes of the last several seasons, Negan invites Lydia to hit him, to take out her anger and sadness on him.

She acquiesces, but the punches and the “I hate yous” eventually turn into an embrace, as Negan comforts a crying Lydia while crying himself. Yes, Negan: The swaggering villain who beat Glen and Abraham to death with a baseball bat is now the comforting, father-figure that The Walking Dead needs now that Rick and Hershel and Morgan are gone. After bonding with Daryl last week and coming to an uneasy truce with Carol, Negan appears to have wormed his way inside of the Alexandrians’ inner cycle, especially since he is already well-liked by Judith Grimes. The redemption arc is complete. Negan is fully transformed.

Speaking of Judith, she also had a big heartfelt scene with Daryl this week. The two embarked on a scouting mission in the hopes of isolating a Whisperer and gaining some information. The mission largely failed — Daryl ending up killing a Whisperer — but it brought Daryl and Judith closer together. With Michonne now out in search of Rick, and with Rick gone, Judith is feeling sad about being orphaned by her parents. She understands it, but she feels alone. Daryl, however, provides her with some comfort, delivering more lines in one speech than he has basically all season long. While Daryl could not promise Judith that he wouldn’t die and leave her, he could promise her that “there are a whole bunch of people back there who would do anything for her … you got a whole lot of family.”

Twelve-year-old Cailey Fleming gives an excellent, tearful performance, the kind that warrants her high per episode fee.

Meanwhile, Carol gets forgiveness for Connie’s situation and a pep talk from an unlikely source: Connie’s sister, Kelly. First off, Kelly believes that Connie — who is missing, but who will probably return in the season finale — is still alive and out there, though she is apparently the only one who believes that. “She’s not dead,” Kelly says. “She’s not. She can survive anything.”

In either respect, Kelly tells Carol that she understands why she behaved the way she did in trying to take out Alpha. Kelly then gives Carol a pep talk. “I heard the stories about you from the old days. We all have. You just go off. You do the thing that only you can do. That’s your superpower. You can’t give up everything about yourself because bad things happen. I gotta believe that.” Carol, it seems, will be able to move past this, as well, especially if Connie returns in the finale.

In addition to the three big emotional scenes between Negan/Lydia, Daryl/Judith, and Kelly/Carol, we also learned a lot more about Princess, who — it has to be said — is a much better character on the television series than in the comics. On the series, she’s just as obnoxious and over-the-top as in the comics, but here she also shows some vulnerability and heart, so much so that (despite all of her massive screw-ups in the episode) she gains the affection of Yumiko, who invites Princess to travel along with them to meet Stephanie in Charleston. Princess (who hasn’t seen anyone in over a year) is a little off-kilter because of the isolation, but she is good people and will make a great addition to The Walking Dead cast. I love her.

Unexpectedly, after the episode, we did see a promo for the season finale, which still doesn’t have a release date. That promo, however, ended up giving a few key points away. For instance, we see that Alden and Aaron escape from The Whisperers with the apparent help of the masked person. We also see that Maggie does indeed return, in what looks like is probably a brief scene in which she receives a letter from Alexandria updating her on how they’re doing and asking for help. (Related: Negan may have fully transformed, but he’s going to have to convince Maggie of that next season). For some reason, Virgil also returns. Gabriel also tantalizingly teases “the others.” This promo, in fact, looks less like a teaser for the finale, and more like the promised cliffhanger for the end of the finale, which will tease other communities we may meet in season 11.

It’s funny to think that Birds of Prey, once considered an under-performer at the box office, is currently the fourth highest-grossing movie of 2020. Not that it should have been labeled a “disappointment” in the first place. Birds of Prey has made nearly 2.5 times its budget, and as director Cathy Yan pointed out to the Hollywood Reporter, “There were also undue expectations on a female-led movie, and what I was most disappointed in was this idea that perhaps it proved that we weren’t ready for this yet.” It may not have made $780 million, like another fourth-wall-breaking comic book character, but by any other measure, Birds of Prey is a financial (and critical) success.

Speaking of that R-rated, fourth-wall-breaker: in the same chat with the Hollywood Reporter, Yan was asked about the comparisons between Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), and whether she was bothered by them.

“It didn’t disgust me that people were comparing us to Deadpool. I love Deadpool; I think it’s a great movie, but we were very much trying to do our own thing,” Yan answered. “I can’t underline enough how it was a risk. I do have to thank the studio for supporting a movie that was never going to be four-quadrant. It was R-rated the entire time, and we never talked about changing the rating to get more people into the theater.”

Yan continued:

“I’m very proud of how the movie performed and the way that it could speak to the people who really responded to it. It was always going to be this weird, quirky movie — by design — just like Harley Quinn.”

Birds of Prey is available on VOD; Harley Quinn season two is out, as well.

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

While many musicians have decided to postpone their record releases due to the coronavirus pandemic, Laura Marling has opted for the opposite. Originally slated for a summer release, Marling announced her seventh studio album, Song For Our Daughter, will instead arrive next week. Along with making the album’s early release reveal, Marling shared the record’s lead single “Held Down.”

In a statement, Marling detailed the theme surrounding her upcoming record:

“It’s strange to watch the facade of our daily lives dissolve away, leaving only the essentials; those we love and our worry for them. An album, stripped of everything that modernity and ownership does to it, is essentially a piece of me, and I’d like for you to have it. I’d like for you, perhaps, to hear a strange story about the fragmentary, nonsensical experience of trauma and enduring quest to understand what it is to be a woman in this society. When I listen back to it now, it makes more sense to me than when I wrote it. My writing, as ever, was months, years, in front of my conscious mind. It was there all along, guiding me gently through the chaos of living. And that, in itself, describes the sentiment of the album — how would I guide my daughter, arm her and prepare her for life and all of its nuance? I’m older now, old enough to have a daughter of my own, and I feel acutely the responsibility to defeat The Girl. The Girl that might be lost, torn from innocence prematurely or unwittingly fragmented by forces that dominate society. I want to stand behind her and whisper in her ear all the confidences and affirmations I had found so difficult to provide myself. This album is that strange whisper; a little distorted, a little out of sequence, such is life.”

Listen to “Held Down” above. Below, find Marling’s Song For Our Daughter tracklist.

1. “Alexandra”
2. “Held Down”
3. “Strange Girl”
4. “Only The Strong”
5. “Blow By Blow”
6. “Song For Our Daughter”
7. “Fortune”
8. “The End Of The Affair”
9. “Hope We Meet Again”
10. “For You”

Song For Our Daughter is out 4/10 via Partisan/Chrysalis. Pre-order it here.

Golf’s schedule was already in chaos due to the coronavirus pandemic, and now we officially know one major will not happen this year due to COVID-19. The PGA announced on Monday that the British Open, originally set for July at St. Andrews, will be canceled as the golf calendar has been altered by the spread of the disease.

Reports surfaced early Monday morning that the event would not take place, and soon after it was officially announced that the Open would not be held while other events saw their dates moved around as well. It was later announced that the tour would start in mid-May with no fans in attendance, while at least one major would be skipped this year.

The new schedule is a considerable shift in the traditional golf calendar, especially with the Masters taking place in fall. In fact, the only major golf event this year that still has its original date is the Ryder Cup, which is still scheduled for September 25-27.

Reports that the British Open would be canceled surfaced last week, but the official word did not come until the rest of the calendar was altered by the PGA. The Masters had already been postponed, as it was scheduled for April 9-12. That event will now take place at Augusta on November 12-15, while the U.S. Open runs September 17-20 and the PGA Championship is currently scheduled for August 6-9. But with the uncertainty still surrounding just how long COVID-19 will impact our ability to interact with others and assemble in crowds, there just wasn’t enough dates left on the calendar to get all four majors in this year.

Marvel Cinematic Universe fans weathered years of back-and-forth before Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers passed Captain America’s shield to Sam Wilson in Avengers: Endgame. By the time it happened, the departure felt like it had been timed just right, especially with an incredible payoff after the seed with Thor’s hammer had been planted way back in Age of Ultron. The decade-long experience for Evans, however, almost didn’t happen. He did, in fact, turn down the role when Marvel Studios first approached him for 2011’s The First Avenger. Then he reconsidered after some advice from Mom Evans.

That tidbit arrives near the end of a lengthy Esquire interview (to promote Evans role in Apple TV+’s upcoming Defending Jacob). Writer Brady Langmann met with Lisa Evans after a few hours with Chris, much of which was spent with the actor unable to comment upon reports of his involvement as the singing dentist in a Little Shop Of Horrors remake. Lots of “jazz hands” and uncomfortable expressions apparently went down, but the feature did produce this wonderful revelation from Lisa, who convinced him to seize an opportunity for which most actors can only dream:

“His biggest fear was losing his anonymity He said, ‘I have a career now where I can do work I really like. I can walk my dog. Nobody bothers me. Nobody wants to talk to me. I can go wherever I want. And the idea of losing that is terrifying to me.’ … I said to him, ‘Look, you want to do acting work for the rest of your life? If you do this part, you will have the opportunity. You’ll never have to worry about paying the rent. If you take the part, you just have to decide, It’s not going to affect my life negatively — it will enable it.’”

And the rest was history. Just think, we would have never received that killer ending line from Evans if not for his persuasive mother, and mom is always right. Now, Evans can not only let his Smug Flag fly for Rian Johnson, but he’s also taken on a challenging dramatic role (with Defending Jacob), in which he plays an Assistant District Attorney and father of a young murder suspect. Talk about a rough position.

In the meantime, Evans did make it clear to Esquire that he can’t really talk about the possible Little Shop Of Horrors yet. Up until this point, he’s only addressed those reports with a surprised (?) tooth emoji on Twitter.

(Via Esquire)