Category: Viral

Spoilers for The Falcon And The Winter Soldier will be found below.

After wrapping up its six-episode run, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier season finale is dominating social media thanks to Marvel fans enjoying the heroic reveal of Anthony Mackie’s Captain America. And make no mistake, Mackie’s Sam Wilson is Captain America now. The season finale did its best to cement Sam’s claim to Cap’s mantle as he earned the right to the shield not just in battle, but by directly challenging the government to fix the post-Blip situation that’s going south and ensure that Isaiah Bradley, the first Black Captain America, is finally honored and acknowledged for his service to his country.

That being said, Sam’s new Captain America suit is just downright badass, and the fans are loving the comics-accurate look after finally seeing the new Cap in action.

There was also lots of love for Sebastian Stan‘s Bucky. After spending several years and movies trying to make up for his actions as the Winter Soldier, Marvel fans were happy to see Bucky finally find peace, and more importantly, a family as he lets his guard down to embrace Sam’s community.

Despite being revealed as the “villain” of the series — although, like U.S. Agent, her motivations are cloudy — fans enjoyed Emily VanCamp‘s Sharon Carter having a diabolical turn as her character becomes a force to be reckoned with in the MCU.

And, of course, with any Marvel production, there’s always the lingering question of, “Hey, couldn’t one of the other Avengers lend a hand?” In this case, Spider-Man who had the events of the season finale go down literally in his backyard.

As for what’s next for the series, this last reaction sums up how everyone felt after seeing the new title card:

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE — Mythic Quest is so good at this

It is almost unreasonable how good Mythic Quest is at special episodes. The show’s first one, its moving and timely and uplifting quarantine special, was a certified dynamo, a bright comet streaking across the jet black sky, a flash of hope and emotion and laughs in a period when those were tough things to come by. I remember watching it about a year ago, early into the pandemic, and just staring at my ceiling for a while as the end credits rolled. It was powerful. I wrote a whole big thing about it. Mythic Quest is a good show.

And now it’s back with another special episode, a bookend to the quarantine story that also serves as a jumping-off point for the upcoming second season. The episode is titled “Everlight” and it debuted last weekend and I’ve already watched it twice. The gist goes like this: it is the first day back in the office for the staff of the fictional video game company that makes Mythic Quest, the game within the show, and to make things fun and exciting the company’s leaders, Ian (Rob McElhenney) and Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao), hold their annual big event, also called Everlight, in which the employees LARP it up in a battle of light versus darkness. There are metaphors galore here, with “the light” breaking through “a time of darkness,” and there’s also narration by the real and actual Anthony Hopkins, which is cool for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it allows me to share this tweet with you.

Anyway, like the quarantine episode, this sucker is big and ambitious and full of themes that play out small and large. It’s a tight half-hour that will make you laugh and feel good. This is no small feat. Not many shows know all of their characters this well this early into their run, or ever, if we’re being honest about it. Everyone hits their marks so well. McElhenney remains completely at home inhabiting an egomaniac with a secret tender heart. Danny Pudi is a blast as the company’s soulless money man. But the real key here, the secret sauce that makes this all work, is Charlotte Nicdao’s performance as Poppy.

I really don’t know how to describe this in accurate terms. She is so good at this, the comedy and the tender moments and even just the faces she makes in doing those other things. There’s a running gag in the episode about her not getting Ian’s sports references that killed me, mostly due to her timing on the responses to McElhenney’s annoyance. There’s another running gag about her throwing “fireballs” in the battle, which in reality involves her whizzing orange balls at people and them whizzing the balls back at her much harder. I am going to post a GIF of one of these moments now, but please know that this does not do the moment justice because GIFs do not contain sound and therefore cannot capture the delightful “oohawwbleh” sound she makes as she flails backward.

This is how you do physical comedy.

There are three main lessons I would like you to take away from this discussion. The first, again, is that Mythic Quest is a good show. It already was a good show. The first season was terrific, even before the one-two punch of special episodes, thanks to a workplace comedy vibe that has a lot in common with the best parts of The Office. The second thing I would like you to take away from this discussion is that the new season premieres in two weeks, which gives you plenty of time to catch up if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s so easy. Just go to the same place you went to watch Ted Lasso and then click like two times and blammo, there you go. You can binge it all this weekend, easily. I know because I did it. You are at least as good at binge-watching shows as I am.

Which brings me to the third thing. Lord in heaven knows there are enough bleak and dark shows out there, deep dives into gruesome murders and gritty takes on classic stories and all that. Those are fine in moderation. But come on. It is spring and we are, hopefully, coming out on the right side of some real bad stuff and the sun is out and the leaves are popping. Give yourself a break. Let some damn light in. Watch and enjoy Mythic Quest, a good show that will make you feel good. Trust me on this. I would not lie to you.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — Kyra Sedgwick has a very fun story

Kyra Sedgwick is an actress who is probably best known for starring in the TNT series The Closer. Actually, no, scratch that. Kyra Sedgwick is an actress who was probably best known for starring in the TNT series The Closer because, effective immediately, at least in my brain, Kyra Sedgwick will forever be remembered for telling an incredible story about snooping around Tom Cruise’s house. That happened this week on The Drew Barrymore Show. I am going to tell you about it.

But first, some background: Kyra was at a party at Tom’s house in the early 1990s to celebrate the premiere of A Few Good Men, which co-starred her husband, Kevin Bacon. And so Kyra was walking around minding her own business, kind of, to the extent one can ever mind their own business in Tom Cruise’s house because, like, what are you gonna do, not snoop a little bit? Come on. I think even Tom knows a little snooping is going to happen. It’s like that scene in mob movies where the boss realizes one guy in the crew is a narc because he was the only guy who wasn’t skimming a little bit. If you tell Tom Cruise you didn’t snoop around at all, he knows you probably went through the drawers in his bedroom.

Anyway, so Kyra stumbled across a mysterious button above the fireplace and — like any of you would do if you found a mysterious button in Tom Cruise’s house, do not lie to me — she pushed the heck out of that button. As transcribed by USA Today:

“There was this, like, fireplace mantle, and I was looking around and there was this little button underneath the mantle,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh what is that little button?’ So I pressed the little button because I thought maybe something interesting will happen. Nothing happened and then I got a little nervous.”

Sedgwick said she told on herself because it didn’t “seem right” that nothing happened. She interrupted Cruise in the middle of a story to come clean.

“He goes, ‘That’s the panic button,’” Sedgwick said. “And so the cops came, they had to stop the screening… they had to see (Cruise). I think there were more than like five cop cars, it was something.”

A few notes here:

• I have a deep respect for Kyra Sedgwick now, not just for pushing that damn button, but for coming clean about it in the moment and for ratting herself out as a snooper on national television 30 years later
• It would not be very fun to be so famous that you have to install a silent alarm in your own home like you live in a bank vault or something
• Kyra Sedgwick has probably told this story at so many dinner parties and I bet it killed every single time

This last thing is not something we should gloss over. It is great to have a killer dinner party story. Everyone should have at least one they can tell well in a pinch. I have maybe three or four, just reliable stand-bys that I know will get at least a little laugh. None of them are anywhere near as good as “I was snooping around Tom Cruise’s house and set off the silent alarm that calls the cops,” though. Although, now that I think about it, maybe this isn’t that great a dinner party story after all because then the host would suspect you of snooping around their house. Real Catch-22 here. Kyra Sedgwick has given us so much to think about.

ITEM NUMBER THREE — It is time to correct a historical wrong

I know I bring up F9 almost every week. In my defense, there’s a good reason for this: I really like talking about F9. I could talk about it all day. I could talk about the history of the franchise and various fun little tidbits and how Vin Diesel wrote and directed a short film called Los Bandoleros that fills in the gaps in the series leading into the return of Dominic Toretto in the fourth movie. But mostly, I could talk about Han, the mysteriously wealthy street racer introduced and killed off in the third film, and then re-introduced in the fourth film through a glorious chronological two-step, and then killed off again in the sixth film after explaining how he got to Tokyo for the third film, and then re-introduced again in the trailer for F9, over a year ago, through some as yet unknown series of events that HAS BEEN KILLING ME JUST TELL ME HOW HE IS ALIVE AGAIN THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS.

[clears throat]

Sorry. Got a little worked up there. Anyway, it turns out I’m not the only one who can talk a lot about Han. So can series mastermind Justin Lin, the man who directed films three through six and created the whole Han arc. Turns out he wasn’t all that happy with the thing where Jason Statham’s character was welcomed to the Family with open arms in the eighth movie and given a loving spinoff with The Rock after he was revealed to be the one who killed Han as retribution for Dom and company leaving his brother on life support.

The fact that a few years later I was able to join and, in a way, evolve and correct that, that means a lot to me. And the fact that we as a franchise can keep evolving and growing, that means a lot. So being away, and the way I found out, I still don’t know what happened, but it’s okay because I got to come back. And one of the great things is that it feels a little poetic. Honestly, if none of that happened, Han wouldn’t come back. And so when I left [after Fast 6], I came in with Han, I’m leaving with Han. So if there was no justice for Han and I came back, I probably wouldn’t have brought him back. Again, it feels like everything happened for a reason. And I’m not here to judge anything, but I’m glad we’re able to put the right touches on it, and, like I said in January, “justice for Han” isn’t just this movie. I think how we treat this character as we move forward, that’s going to be the “justice for Han.”

God, I love this franchise so much. It’s basically a soap opera both on-screen and in real life, but one with rocket-charged Hondas and oiled-up Adonises strewn across the screen. And here’s the best part: This quote from Lin is actually two weeks old, and someone asked Jason Statham about it while he was out doing the press tour for his upcoming movie Wrath of Man, and Jason Statham said this about the whole Han situation.

“They better bring me back, because I need to put out that fire,” Statham tells EW with a laugh. “If he’s got any score to settle, it’s with me.”

Yes.

YES.

I need Han and Deckard Shaw to face off.

I need Han to get revenge once and for all.

I need it to happen… IN SPACE?

I don’t know. Maybe that last thing is asking too much. Or maybe it’s not asking enough. That’s the beautiful thing about this franchise. The limits to what can happen on-screen extend exactly as far as the limits of your imagination. It’s getting to the point where the whole thing is bordering on science fiction and I do not care because I love it very much.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Hey, look at that, some good trailers

Well well well, look at that, it’s the trailer for the second season of Ted Lasso, a wonderful show that kind of took the world by storm thanks to a combination of good vibes and mustaches. This is a terrific development, mostly because it means the second season is on its way. I mean, we knew it was on its way. Everyone said it was. And, like, I do not think the people involved in the show would lie to us about any of that, but it’s still nice to have confirmation.

Hey, speaking of things that are nice…

This is the trailer for Kevin Can F Himself, starring Annie Murphy from Schitt’s Creek. It looks pretty interesting, and Annie Murphy was so good in Schitt’s Creek, so let’s go right ahead and file this one under Reasonably Optimistic, too.

There have been a lot of trailers dropping lately, actually. Almost too many to keep up with. Things slowed down so much at the beginning of the pandemic that now, between the finished movies that were being held for theaters and the productions of shows and movies that kicked into overdrive once people figured out how to do it reasonably safely, we are headed toward an absolute onslaught of content. There are worse problems to have, to be sure, but I do wonder if it’ll all be kind of overwhelming at first. It’s going to be weird. I suspect more mustaches and good vibes will help with the transition.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE — This is all quite fascinating… to me

Bob Odenkirk is the best. He’s been the best for a while, too, between Mr. Show and Better Call Saul and now Nobody, the action movie from the writer of John Wick in which Bob Odenkirk basically plays “John Wick but still has a family and has a handler played by RZA,” which is a solid piece of business. He’s out doing press for Nobody now, which is nice because it means we’ve been getting a bunch of great Bob Odenkirk interviews to read. Like, for example, this one from GQ. It’s a really good one, serious in parts about the real-life home invasions that informed his portrayal of the characters, and funny in parts like, well, this.

What did “going too far” mean in this case? I know you spent the past few years doing some pretty intense physical training for this movie.

I was at a party, and Tim Olyphant and I were talking, and he always kills me. He just makes me laugh. I said, “I’m training so hard for this movie.” And he looks at me and he goes, “Just get a stuntman to do it.”

And it was the first time it even occurred to me that I could do that! So I stood there, silently thinking, “Well, yeah. Of course you could do that.” Anda then I thought, “What’s the point of that? I want to do this.”

This is… cool. It’s cool. All of it is cool, too. The thing where he chose to do his own stunts is cool, the thing where he was at a party with Timothy Olyphant is cool, the thing where Timothy Olyphant told him to just use a stuntman is cool, and the thing where he calls Timothy Olyphant “Tim” is cool. That last one, especially. I do not think I’ve ever heard anyone call Timothy Olyphant “Tim” before. It is very cool that Bob Odenkirk calls Timothy Olyphant “Tim.”

And it gets even better because that wasn’t the only cool name-related thing involving Bob Odenkirk this week. He and the major players from Nobody, including RZA and Christopher Lloyd, teamed up to live-tweet a viewing of the movie in as spoiler-free a way as possible. The whole thing was interesting and informative if you’ve seen or were watching the movie, but that’s not the point right now. The point right now is that, if this tweet is to believed, Bob Odenkirk calls RZA “Bobby.”

I want to know everything about all of this at once. Is this a “Bobby” as in Bobby Digital, one of RZA’s many Wu-Tang aliases, or is this a “Bobby” as in Robert Diggs, RZA’s given birth name? I can’t decide which option I like more. Either way it is extremely cool. There’s something very fascinating about the idea of Bob Odenkirk just casually calling RZA, who has been known as the RZA for over 30 years now, by his government name, though. It would be like if someone was telling you their friend Dwayne was stopping by and then the doorbell rang and The Rock was standing there.

Now I need to know if Bob Odenkirk calls The Rock “Dwayne.” This will haunt me all weekend.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Lori:

I realized this week that a year stuck mostly inside has made me rusty at interpersonal communication. I was out at a restaurant for the first time in forever (vaccinated, WOO-HOO) and when the waiter gave us our check and said “Have a nice day,” I almost caught myself replying “I love you, too.” I had seen this happen in sitcoms but never in real life. It reminded me of your fascination with the “we’re not so different” scene that’s in action movies but has never happened in the real world. Does this happen to you a lot, where something from a movie or television show occurs in real life and throws you for a loop? Please take this the right way but I feel like it does.

Oh God. Oh my God. I don’t have time to possibly take offense to your mostly correct implication that I am a weirdo who watches so many movies and television shows that I process real-life events through a prism of television tropes because your waiter story reminded me of my own waiter story from about 10 years ago. I stopped at a Red Robin outside of Philly on my way home from law school for the summer. I was so fried and sleep-deprived from finals and operating at maybe 30-35 percent. I ate my meal and started heading out and a very nice waiter held the door for me. As I was going through the door, he said “Have a great day” and my broken, mangled brain told my mouth to say “Yup, sweet dreams.” It was lunchtime. Not that there would have been an appropriate time to say that. But still. Yeesh.

I have not been back to that Red Robin since.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Italy!

A hospital employee in Italy has been accused of skipping work on full pay for 15 years, local media report.

I love him.

He was reportedly paid €538,000 (£464,000) in total over the years he is thought not to have been working.

Six managers at the hospital are also being investigated in connection with the alleged absenteeism.

To be clear, I do not, in theory, support swindling the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars that could otherwise be used on worthwhile public programs that benefit the less fortunate. But also, I am so proud of this guy. Do you realize what he did? He pulled a reverse “Stephen Root in Office Space,” where instead of the company stopping his paychecks and waiting for him to quit, he just quit and waited for them to stop paying him. It’s beautiful. I kind of do not want to know anything else about this. I feel like it can only get worse from here.

Okay. Okay. Let’s look at one more blockquote. Carefully.

The police have also accused him of threatening his manager to stop her from filing a disciplinary report against him.

That manager later retired, police added, and his ongoing absence was never noticed by her successor or human resources.

Dammit. The threat part took most of the fun out of this. This is why you shouldn’t read to the end of things. Get to the good part and then bail right away. I don’t even know why you’re still reading this article. You should have closed the tab after that Kyra Sedgwick story. I appreciate that you didn’t, of course, but it was a real risk on your part. Be smarter than this next week.

Paper Route Empire and Maybach Music connect on “Plenty Cake,” the money-hungry new single from the former’s DJ-Q, which features opulent verses from Young Dolph and Rick Ross. The truck-ready beat is classic Memphis, but that doesn’t stop Floridian Rick Ross from demolishing a verse in which he lists his luxury cars and name-checks his favorite foods (lemon pepper chicken wings and peach cobbler!). Dolph comes in after to remind listeners that Memphians are built different and that he gets “plenty cake” himself, choosing to spend his spoils on chains, scallops, and lobster.

The track popped up with little fanfare on Dolph’s streaming pages this morning, trusting longtime listeners to fall in line in relatively short order. The strategy has served Dolph relatively well in the past; the Memphis mogul reserves promotion for music video budgets and other indie label overhead, choosing to let the work find the people and generate dollars organically. It seems to have worked out because he recently announced his retirement from rap to let the other members of his label, like Key Glock and DJ-Q, shine on their own.

Meanwhile, guest rapper Rick Ross is reportedly working on a joint album with Drake, looking to expand his own empire — from which he doesn’t seem to have any plans of retiring anytime soon.

Listen to DJ-Qs “Plenty Cake” featuring Rick Ross and Young Dolph above.

Skepticism is my default setting when confronted by big promises and splashy game trailers. I’ve been hurt before. So have you. But I so wanted to believe the promises that puppet Fernando Tatis Jr and Coach made about the long-awaited Stadium Creator in the next-gen version (and only the next-gen version) of MLB The Show 21 that I allowed myself a glimmer of hope. Yet while Stadium Creator in MLB The Show 21 is a whole damn meal on its own, offering plenty of options for amateur stadium designers and fans of games like Minecraft, I’m struggling to love it with my whole heart. And I’m not sure that that’s the fault of the game.

Before I unpack that, let me do the thing where I give a general read on that most basic of questions so you can hurry on out of here if that’s all you’re looking for: should you buy MLB The Show 21? It depends! If you’ve got an XBOX Series X or XBOX One, no, don’t buy it. Just get or use Game Pass and play the game there (the first time the series is available on Microsoft platforms). If you’re on a PS4, I don’t know that the game’s improvements justify the expense. Road To The Show seems like it has been deepened with a more customizable and versatile experience with your created player (who can be a two-way star). The overall gameplay, by way of an influx of animations, is smoother. So that’s something. Enough of a something? Eh.

For PS5 players, who like XBOX Series X players get the full breadth of the dev and design team’s love with the shift to next-gen, the answer is a clear yes, but it’s mostly because of the addictive experiences at your disposal in Stadium Creator. If you’re not into that, then this may not be a necessary game for you.

I, and many others, have complained for years about the lack of stadium creation and customization in MLB The Show. It’s something we got in a more limited tech time with EA’s much-missed MVP Baseball series, so the expectation was understandable. To their credit, San Diego Studios (a Sony operation that produces MLB The Show) could have caved to criticism years ago, delivering a surface experience to shut us all up for a minute. But they didn’t. They waited. They put in the time (two years in development) to deliver something that feels, not revolutionary, but at least evolutionary with the potential to improve in subsequent years.

As far as what you have at your disposal now, Stadium Creator offers 30 templates (including options that look a LOT like Jack Murphy Stadium and Ebbets Field) and hundreds of options to create funzos where you can bounce homers off of the head of a T-Rex 285 feet down the line from home plate with floating space ships swapped in for bleachers. The time of your life can be had while engaging in a little imagination that breaks the laws of reality. If that’s the limit of what you’re looking for, this is going to give you everything you want. And I hope you get weird with it for as long as that keeps your attention.

Much like the laws of reality, the laws of physics are also suspended with Stadium Creator, though. To pull off some angles, sections merge with each other in unappetizing and pointy ways demanding you stack a section on top of another one and crush a few hundred NPCs or cause them to sort of phase into each other. None of this means a damn thing in an actual game, but it’s still aesthetically unpleasing when you’ve sunk a ton of time into these projects. But, I mean… you also can’t alter foul territory, add on-field features, take out a generic batter’s eye, or build a dome. This means that while you can get close to replicating stadiums of the past with a lot of trial and error (a lot), you’re ultimately going to fail at true authenticity and perfection. And for someone like me that was pretty much all in on this with the hope that that wouldn’t be so, that’s a problem.

I get it. Mine is a micro niche folded into another micro niche. But we’re conditioned to think that everything is meant to be tailored to our wants. Algorithm curated playlists and streaming recs, ample chances to alter a food order to your liking, and on and on. Hashtag campaigns like #ReleaseTheSnyderCut even started working. It’s hollow, but as consumers, we get our way a lot or are at least led to believe that’s what’s happening. And it’s broken our brains a little. Broken mine, because I’m somehow feeling disappointed in something that is probably 95% what I was hoping for (being able to play these stadiums online with friends would be nice, by the way. My little Canuck friend that I mentioned last year is just heartbroken that we can’t battle on our obscure and bizarre stadiums).

Am I going to sit here, arms folded, mourning my inability to make an exact replica of Palace Of The Fans from the early 1900s? Maybe! But no, not really.

Truth be told, I spent 20 hours and came away with a half dozen false starts and one not-terrible tribute to Tiger Stadium (above). I know where all the warts and weird bits are. The things I had to do to make things work to the point where I’d be satisfied. And while it was often frustrating (I see you flashing red section that’s a half-centimeter over the wall, and would it KILL them to put in an undo button?), it’s also been on my mind all week and I can’t wait to do it again. So I guess the takeaway is something about the journey being the reward? No, that doesn’t sound right. Take wisdom from the Rolling Stones song about not always getting what you want? Nah.

How about this: while I was looking for authenticity and annoyed by the inconsistencies in my creations, didn’t I just stumble onto true authenticity because imperfections are part of the charm of old stadiums? Nah. Maybe I should borrow a line from the theme song to Mystery Science Theater 3000: “repeat to yourself it’s just a game, you should really just relax.”

With any Marvel Cinematic Universe project, there’s always the question of whether an end credits scene will link the project to future movies and/or TV shows. And with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, one major question going into the finale was this: Who is the Power Broker? Well, the show decided to combine both the end-credits scene and the identity of the Power Broker — the facilitator of the super serum used to power-up the Flag Smashers — who was revealed to be Sharon Carter. Given her mysterious phone call (to Batroc) in the penultimate episode, Sharon’s newly nefarious ways do not arrive as a complete surprise, but the manner in which the announcement was made was something. No longer does Sharon even vaguely resemble the friendly “nurse next door” to Steve Roger’s apartment or even Agent 13 or Peggy Carter’s great-niece.

As viewers now realize, Sharon believed that she got the shaft from Steve Rogers and the U.S. government. I’m not talking about anything related the fan backlash to Steve and Sharon’s kiss, either. Nope, this was actually some rude (and apparently clueless) stuff on Steve’s behalf. Oversights are bound to happen when you’re trying to save the world from cosmic threats and a genocidal maniac, but seriously, Steve found the energy to travel back in time to spend decades with his true love, and he couldn’t help clear Sharon’s name first? She put her butt on the line to bring Steve and Sam their gear during Captain America: Civil War, and this earned her fugitive status. MCU lore held that she got snapped by Thanos and resurrected, but she actually seems to have fled (years ago) to Madripoor, where she became Queen of the Sketchy Art Dealers.

She did, however, truly take things too far. During this series, Sharon didn’t hide her disillusion from Sam: “Look, you know the whole hero thing is a joke, right?” She was brutal to Bucky: “You buy into all that stars and stripe bullsh*t. Before you were his pet psychopath, you were Mr. America. Cap’s best friend.” Yet Sharon put on a sugary face in the show’s end credits scene. She graciously accepted a full pardon and declared herself honored to go back to her work for the government (as Agent 13?). Then she stepped outside and made a phone call:

Confirmed: Sharon Carter’s gonna start dealing weapon prototypes and government secrets because super soldiers are no longer in demand. Damn! As unlikely as this outcome seemed back when Sharon Carter was simply kicking ass in the show’s trailer, it appears that Power Broker could be a Season 2 villain. Looking back at the conversation that she had with Karli Morgenthau in the finale, it’s clear that she’s got a mega-beef with the powers that be, and Karli was at odds with her ending objective, which now seems to be world domination. As Karli put it, “You wanted to control a world that hurt you.. I wanted to change it… I’m not interested in power or an empire.”

What’s kinda crazy is this: If Sharon had the super serum and wanted to rule the world, why did she not take the serum as well? Instead, she apparently meant to use the Flag Smashers as her goons, and when Karli refused to play along, that meant the end of Karli. Likewise, Batroc made the mistake of threatening to expose Sharon’s Power Broker identity, and Sharon had no problem killing him, either. At this point, we can only assume that she’s off-the-hook but very good at maintaining the illusion of composure, given that she was very cool with the Senator declaring that Sharon’s surname “has always been synonymous with service and trust” and running with it after the hearing.

An important point: This series’ version of the Power Broker is nothing like the Marvel Comics character of the same name, so comics will be of no use to predict where Sharon might go from here. What’s very obvious is that Sharon’s now ascending to greater heights, and her intentions are not good. She’s entirely disillusioned with the idea of heroics, and she has an accomplice waiting in the wings to help her sell off every other dangerous thing she can access. “Should be something for everyone,” she added, which could mean… other countries, other planets? Yikes.

The situation could go a few ways. It could take Power Broker into another MCU show or movie, or this could line up a Season 2, should the Marvel Studios gods choose to go there. Kevin Feige has left the door ajar for more, and if that happens, the new Captain America, Sam Wilson, and his sidekick, Bucky Barnes will have a Power Brokered mess to fix. Also, the betrayal factor! Let’s hope we see that drama unfold onscreen.

‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ season finale is streamable on Disney+.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: being an actor must be weird.

Look at Andrew Scott. The Fleabag and Sherlock star has won a BAFTA and a Critics’ Choice Award, and been nominated for a Golden Globe and an Emmy. He’s also an acclaimed theater actor. But for the rest of his life, whenever strangers see Scott on the street, they will yell “HOT PRIEST” at him. It’s what I would do.

There are worse things than to be associated with one of the best TV shows of the 2010s, and also be called “hot,” but it still must take getting used to. At least he’s not wasting his “hot” talents.

Scott and Lily James star in BBC’s The Pursuit of Love, “a romantic comedy-drama about love and friendship. An adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s celebrated novel and set in Europe between the two World Wars, the story follows the adventures and misadventures of the charismatic and fearless Linda Radlett and her best friend and cousin Fanny Logan.” That stuffy-sounding plot summary leaves out Lily James spitting bath water on her friend; Andrew Scott making out with a scantily-clad woman on the dance floor; and McNulty from The Wire screaming about how “an adulterous women is the single most disgusting thing there is.” It looks like a steamy good time.

Look out for The Pursuit of Love on BBC and Amazon Prime Video soon.

Back in September, Hayley Williams was one of a bevy of artists to contribute to Good Music To Avert The Collapse Of American Democracy, a 40-track compilation of songs released for just 24 hours to benefit the voting rights organization Fair Fight. So, her cover of Broadcast’s “Colour Me In” has been officially unavailable since the album was removed from digital shelves, but now Williams has re-shared the cover on its own.

Williams says of the cover, “I really love Broadcast. It was hard to choose which song of theirs I wanted to cover, but I feel like this one hits me in a sweet spot that’s strangely comforted by longing and melancholy. I recorded this days before lockdown last year and it’s just been floating around in the ether. So happy it’s got a place to land now. Enjoy.”

Back when the Good Music To Avert The Collapse Of American Democracy compilation was initially released, Williams wrote, “TODAY ONLY get an unreleased cover of ‘Colour Me In’ (one of my favorite Broadcast songs) along with tons of other unreleased songs by so many great artists on @bandcamp!”

Listen to Williams’ cover of “Colour Me In” above.

Hayley Williams is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Following his death in 1992, Francis Bacon’s studio revealed dozens of destroyed paintings. The idea of those completed works hung in galleries or private homes existed in some form or fashion for Bacon, but that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what it was meant to be. And yet, those works remained, in their mangled form. The destruction was its own act of creation, part of Bacon’s process, one that created sacred beauty out of the profane.

Recently, very much alive guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López was featured in German newspaper The Süddeutsche Zeitung along with Clouds Hill producer Johann Scheerer in advance of The Mars Volta’s massive, career-spanning box set La Realidad De Los Sueños, out today. In the interview, the two discuss the role of pain in work, among other topics. And Rodríguez-López expresses his thoughts on the physical act of creating art, or in this case, a song:

“You’re destroying all the possible ways in which it may have developed. You’re erasing all the different chords, intervals, melodies and arrangements in order to see a manifestation of your own view – which is the same as taking control of destruction and turning it into creativity. You’re cooperating with destruction. When I’m starting off with a song, I can hear hundreds of different versions and I love each and every one of them. They all make me happy. But I have to choose one that’s going to be mixed, mastered and printed.”

There’s no doubt when listening to The Mars Volta that pain and destruction form a common thread. Rodríguez-López famously spoke of trying to “wrestle the guitar” due to his combative and complex relationship with the instrument. Singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala utilizes the profane amidst the sacred in his lyrics, often tying death and decay directly to religious iconography. The pair’s musical journey has been filled with tragedy and loss since their early At The Drive-In days.

And yet, there was always creation in destruction.

That’s on full display in La Realidad De Los Sueños, an eye-opening 18-LP set featuring no shortage of surprises (including pins, 3D glasses, illustrations, and yes, that truly haunting “Mr. Muggs” song — but strangely, missing the “Frances The Mute” single). Nowhere is that motif clearer than the disc that’s (rightfully) drawing the most attention: the unfinished Deloused In The Comatorium sessions (titled Landscape Tantrums). This destroyed canvas showcases the raw, the exposed, the unsanded of the band at its earliest, still reeling from the dismantlement of At The Drive-In. Holed up in Long Beach, Calif. (at a place they dubbed Akinulapo — which translates to “he who carries death in his pouch”), the band would find its voice, one as unique as any in modern rock.

The result was the Long Beach-recorded Tremulant EP (also remastered in the box set), which gave way to the finished product of Deloused, given the appropriate amount of Rick Rubin magic that has made it as powerfully disruptive as ever since its release almost 20 years ago.

But between Tremulant and Deloused was a destruction of all the possible permutations The Mars Volta could’ve developed from. Spiritually and in some ways physically, as band members joined and left, the “train” — Bixler-Zavala’s cheeky term for the band — rolled on regardless of who was on it. That’s what makes Landscape Tantrums so intriguing, not just as a time capsule, but as a work of art. One can parse both the past and the future of Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López’s work in these tracks. It’s a chance to experience those Bacon works before he would slash them to ribbons or make them unrecognizable to anyone but himself.

And in a lot of ways, this ouroboros of beginning and end in the physical act of creating a box set represents the entire ethos of The Mars Volta. By going back to the beginning, a band that ended in 2013, but always twisted and morphed — songs appearing in one form or fashion on other projects or other groups, collaborators teleporting in and out, At The Drive-In bookending both, with Antemasque (a 2014 project featuring Flea made possible by the end of The Mars Volta in the first place) and Bosnian Rainbows wedged in — could start again as an Escher painting.

Where one chooses to engage with the group is up to them, and box sets like this have power in ways streaming can’t. You’re free to dive in, but once you’re in, you’re on a staircase to nowhere. You’re in the Dark City. You’re K from The Castle.

It’s a fitting monument to a band that never purported itself to be boring or accessible. Just looking at a The Mars Volta album cover, or even just peering at a tracklisting or their song lengths, gives that away. One album is based on a cursed Ouija board that is now allegedly broken and buried. Bixler-Zavala often switches between languages, and creates his own words mid-song. Rodríguez-López presents a challenging production style to both listeners and his own musicians (who sometimes don’t know which project they’re recording their isolated tracks for). One song (in five parts) off Frances The Mute clocks in at over 32 minutes.

(All of it – from profane to sacred and from absurd to inspired – it should be noted, sounds absolutely incredible on this vinyl, and reflects the painstaking process that must have been remastering each of these recordings.)

And yet, for as silly (or “self-indulgent,” as critics loved to write as often as possible) as all of it can be, it’s also incredibly ambitious. For every musical interlude that features four minutes of coqui frogs, there’s some of the most inspired guitar work or percussion of the 2000s. For every challenging riddle or narrative in Bixler-Zavala’s lexicon, there’s inspired repeated refrains that stick with you. They’re all or nothing. They’re pain and laughter. They’re destruction and creation. And La Realidad De Los Sueños (which fittingly translates to the reality of dreams) is the beginning and the end and a new beginning (in the form of Landscape Tantrums) of The Mars Volta.

Because what is a punctuation mark if not the end of one sentence and the start of another?

While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been lauded for drawing inspiration from decades of Marvel Comics, yet still blazing its own trail that keeps the films (and now shows) fresh and unpredictable, the The Falcon and the Winter Soldier season finale delivered a surprisingly comics-accurate moment for its most controversial and morally ambiguous characters: Wyatt Russell’s John Walker. If you walked away from the finale confused about whether he’s a hero or a villain now, don’t feel bad. That’s how you’re supposed to feel about John Walker, especially now that he’s assumed his more well-known persona from the comics who’s been a divisive character from the minute he first appeared on the page.

Who is U.S. Agent?

In the final moments of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier finale, Julia Louis-Dreyfus‘ Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (call her “Val”) gifts Walker a new outfit that looks exactly like his old Captain America suit except its black. She then dubs him “U.S. Agent,” and literally everything about this character change is pulled straight from the comics. In the ’80s, John Walker was introduced as the new Steve Rogers after Captain America retired over the questionable patriotic zeal of the Reagan years. Walker, on the other hand, was an ultra-conservative, hardline Christian who was very eager to do the government’s bidding as the new Cap. However, things went south as it became evident that the Red Skull was manipulating Walker and the U.S. government, which prompted Steve Rogers to return and set things right. Despite being a seemingly gun-crazy killer, Walker helped Steve take down the Red Skull and returned the Captain America mantle to its rightful owner. Walker then took on the name U.S. Agent and donned a black suit similar to Steve’s.

As U.S. Agent, Walker is mostly a hero and has worked with several teams including leading The Avengers at one point. But he continued to operate in a morally grey area, and built a reputation as a cocky, obnoxious asshole, which seems to be the direction the MCU is taking Russell’s interpretation of the character. In the finale, there is definitely some question marks around whether he’s really good or bad, and he seems to be concernedly pumped about working for Dreyfus’ Val. Let’s not forget that Russell’s version of Walker killed an unarmed man in cold blood after recklessly injecting himself with super-soldier serum. The guy is still very unstable, and that can present problems down the line.

What happens to U.S. Agent next in the MCU?

Now, we’re in fan theory country. Here’s what we know: After the events of Endgame, The Avengers appear to be disbanded. In the five years between The Snap and The Blip, Black Widow and Steve Rogers were running the team. They’re both off the table along with Iron Man, who sacrificed himself to defeat Thanos. As for Thor, he jetted off with the Guardians of the Galaxy. So that leaves the Earth without an Avengers team, and it’d be a solid bet that someone is going to step in and fill that vacuum. Judging by Val being positioned as a more pragmatic (and possibly evil) version of Nick Fury, it seems like Dreyfus’ character is putting something together.

There’s also the matter of Zemo, who’s now being held at The Raft, the super prison under the purview of William Hurt’s General Ross. In the comics, Ross forms his own team of seemingly reformed villains called the Thunderbolts that was led by, you guessed it, Zemo. Could Val be helping to put together an MCU version of the Thunderbolts that includes U.S. Agent? Maybe. Could she be forming an entirely different team with Walker that doesn’t have the same moral compunction as The Avengers? Also, maybe.

What is known for certain is that wherever he shows up next, U.S. Agent’s methods will be problematic, morally ambiguous, and frankly, a true representation of modern-day America as John Walker unflinchingly uses deadly force on whoever’s in his way.

A lot of very famous people worked at County General Hospital over ER‘s 15-season run: Julianna Margulies, Ming-Na Wen, Linda Cardellini, Angela Bassett, and of course John Stamos. But the most famous was George Clooney, who played Dr. Doug Ross on the NBC medical drama until he left in season five to become an Oscar-winning actor.

Would he ever consider returning for a reboot?

“I don’t know. The hardest part is that when you look at the show and consistently over so many years — it would be hard to say that you could do it at the level that we did it,” Clooney said during a virtual cast reunion on Thursday. “I’m not sure that that’s available.” He added, “I’m not sure [about a reboot]… It’s hard to catch lightning again.”

But Clooney has been re-watching ER with his wife, Amal, a decision he now regrets. “This has been a very, very disastrous thing for me because I forgot all of the terrible things I’d done as Dr. Ross,” he joked. “My wife keeps going, ‘Is that it? Are you done? Season three, do you finally settle down with Nurse Hathaway?’ It’s been a disaster for my marriage.” Nurse Hathaway was played by Margulies, who admitted during the reunion that she had a “crush” on Clooney. Join the club.

The chemistry that erupted between Margulies and actor George Clooney turned them into one of TV’s hottest on-screen couples. “That can’t happen if you don’t have a crush on each other,” Margulies allows. “And with George and me, it was so organic. I was just supposed to be a guest star, number 39 on the call sheet. But he treated everyone the same.”

Also in attendance for the reunion, which benefitted Waterkeeper Alliance: Anthony Edwards (Mark Greene), Noah Wyle (John Carter), Gloria Reuben (Jeanie Boulet), Laura Innes (Kerry Weaver), Goran Visnjic (Luka Kovac), Ming-Na Wen (Jing-Mei Chen), and CCH Pounder (Angela Hicks), among others. You can watch it below.

Also, watch ER! It’s a good show that people don’t talk about enough.

(Via People)