Ghost ships that drifted the oceans – My Sailing

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It may not rival the legendary Flying Dutchman, but the MV Alta is a ghost ship all the same.

The 77-metre "ghost" cargo ship made headlines around the world when it ran aground on rocks off Irelands south coast last weekend after drifting around the Atlantic for more than a year without crew or passengers on board.

The cargo vessels bizarre odyssey came to an end during high seas caused by Storm Dennis when it ran aground near Ballycotton, a fishing village in County Cork, overlooking the Celtic Sea.

Unlike the mythical ghost ships of ocean lore, there is no real mystery around why the Alta, built in 1976, was abandoned. The story began in September 2018 when it became disabled in the mid-Atlantic en route from Greece to Haiti.

The 10 crew members spent 20 days on board as it floated 2,220 kilometres southeast of Bermuda, before they were taken off by the crew of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. The coast guard said at the time it was working with the ships owner to arrange a tug back to shore but the ships subsequent movements are unknown.

It is believed the Alta was hijacked twice in the process of being salvaged and came on the radar again in August 2019 when a British Royal Navy ice-patrol ship found it drifting in the mid-Atlantic.

While definitely newsworthy, the abandoned ships voyage to Ireland is not entirely without precedent as we see from todays spooky list of Five Real Life Ghost Ships...

Read the full story at the Free Press, including accounts of the five greatest mysteries, from the Marie Celeste to the Jiang Seng, which was discovered drifting off the Queensland coast in 2006.

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Ghost ships that drifted the oceans - My Sailing

Despite talks, more fighting likely in Libya | Michel Cousins – The Arab Weekly

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TUNIS - The sight of some 3,000 camels being evacuated from Tripoli port and herded along the main road towards Zawia, 40km away, was unusual, even in an overcrowded city that has become used to the unusual while under siege for the past 10 months.

Traffic was halted February 20 as police blocked roads to ensure the safe and steady progress of the camels. Camels used to be a common enough sight in and around Tripoli but that was long ago and even then not 3,000 at one go.

The camels arrived in Tripoli port February 17, the ninth anniversary of the Libyan revolution and the day before the Libyan National Army (LNA) attacked the port.

The LNA said it hit a Turkish vessel carrying weapons to the Government of National Accord (GNA). After port officials said that no vessel had been hit but that a warehouse had, the LNA said that it had carried out a defensive operation, targeting a building used to store arms and equipment that had recently arrived on a Turkish ship.

Turkish officials were quoted as saying the LNA targeted a Turkish vessel but missed.

Turkish ships have continued to deliver arms and equipment to Tripoli the past five weeks despite promises January 19 at the Berlin Conference on Libya by Turkey and other countries not to do so.

That resulted in the scathing comment from UN Deputy Special Representative Stephanie Williams at a Berlin follow-up meeting February 16 in Munich that the arms embargo has become a joke.

Like Berlin, the Munich meeting was little more than a talking shop even though German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told his counterparts from 11 countries that words agreed in Berlin now must be followed by deeds and that violations of the arms embargo had to stop. There were no hard-hitting deeds, just more words.

There was an unwillingness on Maass part and that of most others to condemn Turkey and the other violators or take measures against them. The sanctions busters were not brought to heel. On the contrary, Maas said Turkey would be an important partner in turning the truce into a permanent and effective ceasefire.

The sanctions busters were given the unmistakable message that nothing meaningful would be done to stop them from flooding Libya with weapons.

It was left to EU foreign ministers meeting February 17 to come up with plans to monitor possible arms shipments to Libya. To satisfy Austria, which threatened to veto the idea because migrants would head straight towards European navy vessels so as to be rescued and taken to Europes shores, it was decided to mount the new operation at arms length. Monitoring is to be done at least 100km from the Libyan coast, which raises the likelihood it would be ineffective because sanctions busters may be able to sail around monitoring vessels.

Questions were also asked whether the European Union would challenge and board ships suspected of taking arms to Libya, especially if those vessels are Turkish.

Italian authorities halted a cargo ship in Genoa at the beginning of February following allegations by a crew member that the vessel had been used to smuggle tanks and military vehicles from Turkey to Libya but the ship was already in an Italian port and its current ownership is Lebanese. Detaining a ship on the high seas would be a very different matter.

Unlike the Munich talks, the Tripoli port attack has changed a great deal. Not only did it expose the truce as a sham, it threatened to unravel the international communitys diplomatic efforts to end the Libyan conflict.

The GNA responded by pulling out of the second round of 5+5 military talks, which had begun in Geneva the same day as the attack. There were also threats that members of the Tripoli-based High Council of State would pull out of UN-mentored political talks starting February 26 in Geneva.

After what was believed to have been outside significant pressure on Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, the GNA recommitted to dialogue. However, the disconnect between international efforts for peace and what the two sides and their respective backers do on the ground in Libya has become wider.

Responding to the announcement of the EU arms monitoring plans, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the European Union of interfering in the region. It did not have the right to make any decision concerning Libya, he insisted.

Erdogan also said Turkey would continue to back Sarraj and the GNA until it gained full control of all Libya. That is significant. Previously the Turkish promise was to ensure full GNA control of the greater Tripoli area.

The stage appears set for more bitter conflict. Sarraj was in Istanbul February 20 to coordinate with Erdogan, just hours after Libyan National Army Field-Marshal Khalifa Haftar was in Moscow to coordinate with Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoygu.

The Russians said Shoigu and Haftar stressed the importance of the talks in January, mentored by the Russians and Turks, which had established the now vanishing Tripoli truce, suggesting there needed to be more of the same.

In an interview in Russias Sputnik News, while he was in Moscow, Haftar said he was losing patience with the GNA and that it was using the truce as cover to transfer Syrian mercenaries, Turkish soldiers as well as terrorists and weapons to Tripoli. In doing so, the GNA was violating the ceasefire, he claimed, not the LNA in hitting out at the violations.

The Russians indicated that they may try for another attempt to bring the two sides together.

The same day as the Tripoli port attack, Russian and Italian foreign and defence officials were in Rome talking about Libya. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that the two countries would have further special consultations on a possible solution to the Libyan crisis.

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Despite talks, more fighting likely in Libya | Michel Cousins - The Arab Weekly

MV Alta: The unmanned voyage of the Ballycotton ghost ship – The Irish Times

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THE MV ALTA DISCOVERED BY A JOGGER NEAR BALLYCOTTON LAST WEEK WASHED UP IN CORK AFTER A 17-MONTH CREWLESS ATLANTIC VOYAGE

A winter afternoon run along a desolate cliff top pathway is as good a time as any to see a ghost. Last Sunday, Barry McDonald could feel the gale at his back. He regularly jogs this rugged strip of Co Cork coastline between Ballyandreen and Ballycotton but the previous day it had been under siege by storm and blustering winds.

About 200 yards out along the cliff path his eye caught something over his right shoulder. As he turned he saw a hulk of white rusted metal pitched along the crags of a half-mile-wide cove.

It just came into view as I ran along the cliff, he says of the MV Alta, the so-called ghost ship whose prolonged disappearance on the high seas came to an end at that moment. I could see it was up on the rocks but I couldnt understand how it was there.

McDonald was astonished by its sudden appearance, at a spot between the locally known Skur and Ceann Capaill rock. I was thinking, had it happened during the week and nobody told me about it? Was I not around?

It was all the more unusual for McDonald, an RNLI volunteer whose network of contacts would surely have heard about such a major nautical event on their doorstep. They hadnt. McDonald ran on from the cliff walk and quickly rang the Coast Guard.

In the week since, the story of the mysterious arrival of the abandoned 77-metre (250ft) cargo ship has been recounted around the world. Those claiming to own the vessel have made contact with the authorities and the long process of resolving its ultimate fate is now under way.

Its emergence on the rocky Cork shore concludes a lonely trans-Atlantic journey of about 17 months. The unmanned voyage of the Tanzanian flagged Alta began in October, 2018. Its 10-strong crew had been adrift in the wild Atlantic for three weeks, unable to make repairs and running out of food, and had to be rescued by the US Coast Guards Cutter Confidence about 1,380 nautical miles southeast of Bermuda.

Little has been reported about the ships activities at this time. One marine source, however, remarks that its ambitious voyage from Greece to Haiti a distance of almost 5,000 nautical miles was not in keeping with its size and design. This class of boat is more likely to be engaged in near continental trade, a term that refers to boats hugging coastlines in specific areas such as the Mediterranean or Persian Gulf.

The following July, long after its crew had been plucked to safety, an unverified report emerged in the Maritime Bulletin suggesting the ship may have been towed toward Guyana in South America before being hijacked and abandoned for a second time.

That is uncertain, but what is definite is that its next confirmed sighting was by the icebreaker HMS Protector, the Royal Navys scientific research ship, in August or September 2019. It never released an exact location. The Protector attempted to make contact with a crew that was no longer there and eventually sailed away.

Its rare that something of this size would be wandering around for a long time but it does happen, and this wont be the last, explains Cormac Gebruers, head of college at the National Maritime College of Ireland in Cork.

The idea of a large steel ship floating around unnoticed for months on end is a difficult one for many to take in. But, as Gebruers explains, the vastness of the oceans is not always easy to process.

Something even the size of a 77-metre steel vessel when you drop it into the centre of the Atlantic Ocean, its a very large area. Its not unusual, if it dropped out of regularly travelled shipping lanes, that it wouldnt be sighted for many months.

Even in shipping lanes, a typical distance between large vessels is often in the order of 50-100 miles. They dont see each other.

As a former navigator on super tankers sailing between the Persian Gulf and the US, Gebruers would often travel the leg between Capetown, South Africa and the Caribbean via the south Atlantic. Over the course of three weeks they might spot two other ships. The oceans are vast.

The most likely scenario for the Alta after its abandonment in the Atlantic was that it got snagged in the Gulf Stream, and was pushed up along the northeast coast of the US and Canada and then northeast across the Atlantic towards the Irish coast.

In August 2019, an article in the trade Merco Press reported the HMS Protector was in Middlesbrough for maintenance work. The following month she was due to sail for the Bahamas for disaster relief efforts.

The Protectors precise whereabouts when it sighted the Alta are unknown, but Gebruers says a reasonable hypothesis is that she was sailing southwest when she encountered the Alta in the mid-Atlantic.

She would probably have passed through the Azores, so theres a good chance she would have run into the Alta somewhere about 700 miles southwest of Ireland, he says. That position is about 500 miles northwest of the Azores which is kind of about where you would expect something floating from the Gulf Stream and into the North Atlantic Drift to be.

Based on those assumptions, Gebruers reckons the Alta would have drifted about four nautical miles a day at an approximate speed of 0.2 knots.

The romantic notion of a ghost ship lurching aimlessly, endlessly on the ocean swells quickly disappears when it runs aground. At sea, the Alta would have been a silent, foreboding monster. In the cold daylight of the southern Irish coast, however, she is quickly reduced to the reality of a rusting hull of peeling paint, with a lingering smell of diesel.

This week, in keeping with procedure on washed-up ships, an officer of the Revenue Commissioners was appointed Receiver of Wrecks by the Minister of Transport essentially custodian of the whole mess.

This function, under the Merchant Shipping (Salvage & Wreck) Act, 1993, is designed to apply legal process to managing the ships carcass, and the costs associated with doing so. It is with this office the Altas apparent owners would have made contact, and their bona fides are currently under review.

Several owners have been registered for the vessel; the last change of hands appears to have occurred in 2017. With the complexities of maritime law, actual ship owners can be difficult to ascertain amid a complex weave of registered, often international companies.

Those claiming to own the Alta have not been identified by Irish authorities. Why they have come forward to claim the ship now is unclear. Nobody can know for certain although, according to Darren Lehane, a barrister specialising in maritime law, there is no legal responsibility on anyone to deal with an empty vessel in the middle of nowhere.

[For] ships on the high seas, if they are stateless or abandoned it only becomes an issue for a [specific] country if it comes into our waters. The high seas are kind of stateless, he explains.

There are a lot more vessels out there than people think. A lot of small boats dont have to be registered.

All kinds are left on the ebb and flow of the worlds oceans, he says official counts put the number anywhere between 6,000 and 9,000 every year.

Sometimes they are set adrift because of shady activity (drug trafficking); sometimes because their owners simply no longer want them or cant afford them. Sometimes they simply break down and are not worth fixing. Few, however, are the size of the Alta.

Ian Urbina, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of The Outlaw Ocean, a detailed examination of illegal practices at sea, says the Alta case first and foremost raises questions about its former crew.

What were the conditions that led them to stay on a ship that was broken down for three weeks? he wonders. And also, what fate has befallen them since they were rescued?

Urbina points out that apart from some troubled waters in certain parts of the world, comparable cases of large empty vessels floating aimlessly are not common.

In Ireland, Lehane says the number of such cases in which a Receiver of Wrecks is appointed is probably relatively few. Those that do occur are usually linked to storms.

The Department of Transport says instances in recent years arise infrequently and many of these are low-value, small abandoned boats or parts thereof washed ashore, with no pollution risks. No financial information regarding costs is available.

In such cases, where wrecks are spotted they must be reported to the Receiver (in reality, this means the authorities). If a treasure chest washes up ashore, you cant just take it, explains Lehane.

As an extension of centuries old maritime logic, the notion of those who rescue boats before they come to harm being rewarded for their efforts has continued in modern law.

As for the Alta, while it may consist of relatively worthless scrap metal and a bit of diesel, no third party has a claim because she washed up on the rocks. Her case falls under the law of derelict ships.

In these circumstances owners are encouraged to provide financial security for costs and their proof of ownership quickly in order to keep costs down. They are entitled to the return of their property only when they have settled any outstanding fees and expenses, in this case to the State.

Time is ticking. Earlier this week, a marine salvage expert warned that while an operation to remove the ship was a relatively easy task for now, it would become more difficult and more expensive. There are also environmental concerns and no matter how downplayed they may be, pressure will build for as long as the hull is allowed to fester.

On Tuesday morning the boots of Cork County Council contractors stomped through the empty decks to begin inspecting conditions onboard, probably the first human activity in many months. Plans are being drawn up, the owners are engaged; the 2,300 tonnes of steel will one day leave this small Cork inlet one way or another.

In the meantime, as Barry McDonald jogs near the ongoing salvage operation in the weeks ahead, he will be thinking about his small role at the centre of a story that this region has seen play out before. History is repeating itself.

Almost exactly 125 years ago, about two miles west of the site of the Alta, another ghost ship came to haunt the east Cork shoreline. In February, 1895 the remains of the Swedish brig Saga were discovered at Kellys Cove. Derelict and rudderless, not a single person was found aboard.

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MV Alta: The unmanned voyage of the Ballycotton ghost ship - The Irish Times

Parsifal III looks like its going to hit the dock in Below Deck: Sailing Yacht sneak peek – Monsters and Critics

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Disaster is looming for the Parsifal III crew if they dont start communicating better. Pic credit: Bravo

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The Below Deck: Sailing Yacht sneak peek shows the Parsifal III getting ready to hit the dock as the deck crew struggles to avoid an accident.

There is drama on the high seas in the latest episode of the Bravo show.

If the preview clip is any indication of what viewers are in store for, it going to be a really good episode of Below Deck: Sailing Yacht. Nothing rattles a crew or charter guests quicker than a possible collision with a dock.

The video shows Captain Glenn Shephard letting his first mate, Paget Berry, as well as deckhands Ciara Duggan and Parker McCown, know to get the yacht ready for docking.

There are choppy waters near the dock, which Paget observes, but he still begins to lower the sails per the captains request.

Paget lets Ciara and Parker both know the weather is not ideal, so they need to be on top of their game. They all three agree communication is going to be vital to getting the Parsifal III docked safely.

The first mate then tells the confessional that the winds are tricky. However, the crew must be careful because if the yacht is not docked correctly, it could do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the sailboat.

It is easy to see in the footage that the water is extremely choppy, and the wind is powerful.

Parker is inexperienced when it comes to being a deckhand. He even tells Paget in the first part of the clip to just let him know precisely what to do.

Well, as Captain Glenn is trying to dock the yacht, both Parker and Ciara throw lines incorrectly to the men waiting on the dock.

The footage cuts out after a dramatic glimpse of the charter guests overhearing the deck crew arguing and Captain Glenn asking for guidance.

Where the captain is on the yacht, he has no view of what is going on with his crew or how close the sailboat is to crashing into the dock.

Of course, fans will have to tune in to find out if the crew of the Parsifal III manages to get the boat docked safety or if it collides. One thing is for sure, whatever the outcome is, Captain Glenn and Paget are not going to be happy.

Even if there is no accident and lets be honest, there probably isnt, having guests witness the drama with the crew and an almost crash is not good.

Captain Glenn is going to have words with the deck crew for various reasons after the incident.

Below Deck: Sailing Yacht airs Mondays at 9/8c on Bravo.

Continued here:

Parsifal III looks like its going to hit the dock in Below Deck: Sailing Yacht sneak peek - Monsters and Critics

Hardy beetles survived all that Zealandia threw at them for 40 million years – Stuff.co.nz

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Birgit Rhode, Landcare Research

This 2mm beetle species evolved here 40 million years ago and survived the Oligocene mass extinction 23m years ago.

New Zealand science has exactly one specimen of a beetle that evolved here 40 million years ago.

Called Tatakiteana marskeae, it is known only from one mountainsidein Oparara, north of Karamea on the West Coast. It's of "very high conservation concern", says Dr Thomas Buckley of Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research.

It probably lived mostly in leaf litter or deadwood and the specimen is slightly longer than 2 millimetres.

It's not a fossil. It was collected in 2007 anddescribed and named in 2018.

READ MORE:* Subantarctic beetles: Did they originate in Gondwana?* Stuff to publish New Zealand's daily carbon count in print and online* Newly-discovered pigeon species related to the dodo lived in NZ millions of years ago

Buckley and colleagues recently studied this beetle and 764 other individual beetles using sophisticated DNA analysistechniques. They identified 15-20 lineages of zopherid beetles that were living on Zealandia about 23 million years ago.

Between three and 11 of these lineages probably date back to when the continent of Zealandia separated from Gondwana about 82myears ago.

Buckley was mostly interested in which beetle lineages were alive 23myears ago because that's the peak of the Oligocene Drowning.

The drowning was caused by the sinking of the New Zealand landmass and some geologists have proposed that all of Zealandia was underwater for probablysome millionsof years.

If that happened, then no Gondwanaspecies survived on land and every living thing on these islands are more recent arrivals.

But since the drowning proposal was made more than 25 years ago, DNA sequencing was developed and biologists have shown that many species on New Zealand today probably had ancestors that survived the Oligocene Drowning and a smaller group whose ancestors were alive on Gondwana.

These include various types of tuatara, frogs, wrens, crayfish, centipedes, weta, dragonflies, velvet worms, freshwater mussels and other shellfish, as well as 10 lineages of spider-like mite harvestmen.

Some trees mountain rimu and cypress as well as the native shrub griselinia and liverwort have also been traced back to Gondwana.

Today, it's thought that the land area of New Zealand was reduced to about 18 per cent of its current size by the Oligocene Drowning more than enough land for some species to survive but also causing the extinction of many others.

All of these ancient lineages must have beenrobust because they survived highglobal temperatures and high seas, as well as existingthrough many ice ages and numerous volcanic periods. They also survived the events 65myears ago that wiped out the dinosaurs.

"We find no evidence of an Oligocene mass extinction event" for these beetles, the authors concluded.

Zopherid beetles in New Zealand are notably diverse compared to overseas cousins and that adds to their interest for biologists, Buckley said.

About 190 NZ species have been described and there are probably many more undiscovered.

Some species don't have hindwings, meaning they can't fly. If their ancestors couldn't fly, then surviving the numerous environmental changes would have been more difficult and making their survival more remarkable.

Dating a species back millions of years depends on DNA sequencing, fossil and other calibrations, as well as statistical analysis.

The techniques left Buckley and colleagues with some uncertainty. Only one of the two calibration models showed lineages dating back to Gondwana for example. And the broad range of speciesidentified as that old (three to 11) illustrates the current limits of the science.

These uncertainties have been used by other scientiststo argue that a total drowning occurred during theOligocene.

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Hardy beetles survived all that Zealandia threw at them for 40 million years - Stuff.co.nz

The Call of the Wild is a picturesque cinematic journey that is ruined by the use of a CGI dog – The Canberra Times

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whats-on, music-theatre-arts,

The Call of the Wild (PG) 2 stars By the look of the bio of the American author, Jack London, there was a time when he answered the call of the wild himself. After many adventures on the road and the high seas, he decided to settle for earning his living as a writer. It was only after he had done a lot of living. A high school dropout at 14, he worked as a sailor in San Francisco Bay, then travelled to Japan. On his return to the US, he rode freight trains across the country with the down-and-out, educating himself at public libraries, and became a socialist along the way. At 19 years of age he entered university after a cram course but quit his studies again to make his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. It was his muscular adventure stories set in the Yukon, like The Call of the Wild (1903) and its reverse narrative companion piece, White Fang (1906), in which a wild dog is domesticated, that first made him popular with the reading public. One wonders what London would have made of the latest movie version of The Call of the Wild, in particular what they've done to the dog Buck. The film written for the screen by Michael Green (who co-wrote Blade Runner 2049) and directed by Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch) sticks to the original story. There are some changes to the ethnicity of several key characters that will make it acceptable to 21st century filmgoers. Nothing about the main character, Buck, a Saint Bernard-Scotch Collie cross, needed changing. He was the best of loved pets and had the perfect life with kind and caring owners on a farm in California until he was stolen by one of their staff who was short of cash. Buck changes owners a couple of times, is taken north and ends up on a team of sled dogs, delivering the US Mail in the Yukon. As luck would have it, his newest owner is a good and kind man. Omar Sy (such a likeable presence in The Intouchables), a French actor of African descent , plays Perrault, the dog sled master. His companion Mercedes is played Canadian first nations actor, Cara Gee. They make a far more attractive, winning couple than the pair who drove the sled in the novel. Buck has adjustments to make in his new life. He has to learn to be part of a pack dog and resist haring off after the first rabbit he sees, and he has to toughen up, and overcome his 'Californian' paws, and get used to running on snow and ice. Buck, a massive 140-pound pooch who is all heart and courage, should be totally endearing. The problem is he is totally CGI and looks real enough, but has been given a range of cute facial expressions from concerned to kind to quizzical to forlorn to crestfallen that are nothing more than CGI visual effects. It looks so fake. Since London's novel was first adapted for the screen in 1923 there have been a number of film and TV versions. A recent film was in the 1970s with the late Charlton Heston, the embodiment of rugged frontiersman, who became a high-profile proponent in the US for the right to bear arms. As you might expect, Buck, was then played by a dog with four-legs. Here Buck has been played by Trevor Notary, an actor with a gymnastics background who is known for his motion capture performances as creatures in Avatar, Planet of the Apes, and The Hobbit. Perhaps the kids won't notice or mind that this doggy protagonist has been anthropomorphised so much you can hardly recognise him. It's good, though, to see Harrison Ford again, looking hirsute and homespun here, as John Thornton, the man who forms a close bond with Buck and takes him on the last leg of his journey into the wild. Ford also provides the voiceover with lines that help reinforce the moral points that this family-friendly film wishes to make for children. Something like "we come and go, but nature's wilderness is always here". Fair enough. If this is a journey to find Buck's inner wolf, why make him so fake?

https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/913da233-776b-4809-bfe0-b435ad31698f.jpg/r264_0_1783_858_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

REVIEW

February 23 2020 - 12:00AM

The Call of the Wild (PG)

By the look of the bio of the American author, Jack London, there was a time when he answered the call of the wild himself.

After many adventures on the road and the high seas, he decided to settle for earning his living as a writer. It was only after he had done a lot of living.

A high school dropout at 14, he worked as a sailor in San Francisco Bay, then travelled to Japan. On his return to the US, he rode freight trains across the country with the down-and-out, educating himself at public libraries, and became a socialist along the way.

At 19 years of age he entered university after a cram course but quit his studies again to make his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush.

Harrison Ford and CGI dog Buck. Picture: Supplied

It was his muscular adventure stories set in the Yukon, like The Call of the Wild (1903) and its reverse narrative companion piece, White Fang (1906), in which a wild dog is domesticated, that first made him popular with the reading public.

One wonders what London would have made of the latest movie version of The Call of the Wild, in particular what they've done to the dog Buck.

The film written for the screen by Michael Green (who co-wrote Blade Runner 2049) and directed by Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch) sticks to the original story. There are some changes to the ethnicity of several key characters that will make it acceptable to 21st century filmgoers.

Nothing about the main character, Buck, a Saint Bernard-Scotch Collie cross, needed changing. He was the best of loved pets and had the perfect life with kind and caring owners on a farm in California until he was stolen by one of their staff who was short of cash.

Buck changes owners a couple of times, is taken north and ends up on a team of sled dogs, delivering the US Mail in the Yukon.

As luck would have it, his newest owner is a good and kind man. Omar Sy (such a likeable presence in The Intouchables), a French actor of African descent , plays Perrault, the dog sled master.

His companion Mercedes is played Canadian first nations actor, Cara Gee. They make a far more attractive, winning couple than the pair who drove the sled in the novel.

Buck has adjustments to make in his new life. He has to learn to be part of a pack dog and resist haring off after the first rabbit he sees, and he has to toughen up, and overcome his 'Californian' paws, and get used to running on snow and ice.

Buck, a massive 140-pound pooch who is all heart and courage, should be totally endearing. The problem is he is totally CGI and looks real enough, but has been given a range of cute facial expressions from concerned to kind to quizzical to forlorn to crestfallen that are nothing more than CGI visual effects.

Since London's novel was first adapted for the screen in 1923 there have been a number of film and TV versions. A recent film was in the 1970s with the late Charlton Heston, the embodiment of rugged frontiersman, who became a high-profile proponent in the US for the right to bear arms.

As you might expect, Buck, was then played by a dog with four-legs.

Here Buck has been played by Trevor Notary, an actor with a gymnastics background who is known for his motion capture performances as creatures in Avatar, Planet of the Apes, and The Hobbit.

Perhaps the kids won't notice or mind that this doggy protagonist has been anthropomorphised so much you can hardly recognise him.

It's good, though, to see Harrison Ford again, looking hirsute and homespun here, as John Thornton, the man who forms a close bond with Buck and takes him on the last leg of his journey into the wild.

Ford also provides the voiceover with lines that help reinforce the moral points that this family-friendly film wishes to make for children.

Something like "we come and go, but nature's wilderness is always here". Fair enough.

If this is a journey to find Buck's inner wolf, why make him so fake?

Read more:

The Call of the Wild is a picturesque cinematic journey that is ruined by the use of a CGI dog - The Canberra Times

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Utopia Falls’ On Hulu, Where Teens From A New Earth Colony Who Discover The Power Of Hip-Hop – Decider

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Hulu is billing Utopia Falls as the first ever sci-fi hip-hop television series, and its easy to see why such a thing hasnt been created before. Sci-fi has been a generally white genre, and one thats more concerned with drama than dancing, singing and rapping. That may sound like were being wiseasses, but nothing could be further from the truth; the idea that a sci-fi show could be made from a younger, more diverse perspective is a welcome change. But is Utopia Falls that show?

Opening Shot: As we see an aerial shot of the clouds over Earth, then we start panning into Earths barren landscape, we hear a voice over go, They say, time is the greatest thief there is.

The Gist: As we pan over, we see that much of the land is uninhabitable. But then we see, under an environmental bubble, the colony known as New Babyl. Its the last operating colony on Earth, established hundreds of years after the ancestors of apocalyptic survivors went underground to live. Its the day when the 25 teens from the colonys various sectors are chosen to train for a musical-dance competition called The Exemplar.

Aliya (Robyn Alomar) is a guide in the Progress Sector and is the daughter of Gerald (Jeff Teravainen), a member of the Tribunal, who advise the Chancellor Diara (Alexandra Castillo), the leader of the colony. Her boyfriend Tempo (Robbie Graham-Kuntz) has also been selected. Over in Reform Sector, essentially a nicer version of a prison colony, best friends Mags (Robbie Graham-Kuntz) and Bohdi (Akiel Julien) are picked; the first time two from that sector are going. Sage (Devyn Nekoda), from the Nature sector, is so sure she wont go she doesnt even watch the announcement.

After the announcement, Diara and the Tribunal find out that there was a breach in the colonys protective bubble, meaning that either someone came in or someone left.

When they students get to the facility where they train for The Exemplar, theyre greeted by Mentor Watts (Huse Madhavji), who tells them that their first performance is in ten minutes. During that time, Bohdi and Aliya get in a tiff over what Bohdi thinks are her obvious advantages. After the performance, Watts takes down the mostly-confident students by saying the performances were average, and immediately kicks out the three worst performers to show the students how serious this is.

Most of the new students are invited to a mysterious party right outside the borders of the colony, which is considered to be off-limits; the invite says anyone who attends will get a leg up on the competition. When Bohdi and Aliya separate from the rest, they find a door in the woods. When they go in, they find something called The Archive (voice of Snoop Dogg) that introduces them to an ancient form of music: hip-hop.

Our Take: Theres a lot of good things about Utopia Falls, created by R.T. Thorne, known for directing series like Find Me In Paris and Blindspot. Both Alomar and Julien are appealing leads (its pretty apparent that theyre the leads of what will be an ensemble), and they both do good work in a first episode that more or less feels like Glee set hundreds of years in the future. The entire ensemble has to be multi-talented, either as dancers, singers, musicians, as well as actors, and it feels like Thorne has found actors that can create believable characters with some depth.

But the story, as with most Sci-fi that is trying to build a new world out of nothing, can get confusing. As much as Thorne tried to give some exposition in the beginning of the episode, it felt like we dont know nearly enough about New Babyls various sectors, what The Exemplar actually is, how some people are related to each other (Sage, for instance, has a Gran Chyra (Diane Johnstone) and Gran Reale, but were not sure if they raised her or are just two of her grandparents). Also, stilted language abounds, like when people are said to be in their 17th year instead of just saying theyre 16. The temptation to jargonize everyday speech to make it sound futuristic has always been a pitfall of sci-fi, but the best of the genre has its characters speaking in contemporary speaking patterns; when Thorne strays from that, it immediately loses us.

We get that this show is likely geared towards a younger audience, but we hope that the idea that the colony may seem like a collective but in reality comes off as a North Korea-esque totalitarian state will be addressed. Everyone vows loyalty to the leaders, and when those leaders call to their charges on massive screens, the show feels less like a teen dancing and singing show and more like 1984. Perhaps as the influence of hip-hop, and much of the genres message to challenge authority, permeates with the students, that topic will come to the foreground.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Sleeper Star: We might watch every episode solely to hear Snoop Dogg as the voice of The Archive. If we didnt see his name in the opening credits, hearing his voice would have been one of the most out-of-left field things weve encountered on TV so far in 2020.

Most Pilot-y Line: Moore Times (Dwain Murphy), an influential friend from the Reform Sector, tries to get Bodhi and Mags to give out black market shoes to the students. Bodhi refuses. Hes been like a father to us! Mags says to Bodhi. First of all, you can keep that father talk, Bodhi replies. Whoo boy, lots of history in that sentence.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Were not sure if Utopia Falls is going to get better than the first episode, which we found hokey at times. But well keep watching just to hear more Snoop Dogg, and if the show improves, all the better.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesnt kid himself: hes a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

StreamUtopia Falls On Hulu

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Stream It Or Skip It: 'Utopia Falls' On Hulu, Where Teens From A New Earth Colony Who Discover The Power Of Hip-Hop - Decider

amBroadway: American Utopia to return to Broadway, new season at the Metropolitan Opera and more – amNY

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American Utopia will return to Broadway

American Utopia, David Byrnes acclaimed mega-concert, will return to Broadway in September for an additional 17 weeks at the Hudson Theatre. The announcement was made following the shows final performance on Sunday. Its become obvious to us in the band, the crew and the producer team that audiences want, dare I say need? To see this show, Byrne said in a statement. A film version of American Utopia directed by Spike Lee will be released later this year.

The Metropolitan Opera will open its 2020-21 season with a new production of Verdis Aida directed by Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening) and starring Anna Netrebko. Ivo van Hove (West Side Story) will direct both Mozarts Don Giovanni and the contemporary opera Dead Man Walking. In a surprise move, the company will introduce a new staging of Die Zauberflte (i.e. The Magic Flute) directed by Simon McBurney, which leaves the future of Julie Taymors popular production in question. The new season will extend into June and include more Sunday matinees and a break in performances in February.

The title of David Mamets 1977 drama American Buffalo (which is being revived on Broadway with Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss) refers to a potentially valuable American Buffalo Nickel coin that its characters plan to steal. Nevertheless, a 9 x 5, 90-pound replica of a full-size buffalo by the name of Nickel will be on hand to greet audience members in the lobby of the Circle in the Square Theatre. In other news, on Thurs. Feb 20, a limited number of discounted tickets will be made available that reflect the ticket prices of earlier productions of the play.

Nothing is ever Frozen on Broadway apparently. This week, changes were incorporated to the two-year-old Broadway production of Disneys Frozen that reflect the national touring production, as reported by Broadway News. The changes include adding a new song for Elsa and Anna (I Cant Lose You), eliminating one of Annas songs (True Love) and rehauling the opening sequence of the second act (Hygge). On Tuesday night, Ciara Rene and McKenzie Kurtz took over as Elsa and Anna respectively.

An Off-Broadway revival of Arthur Millers The Crucible by the experimental-meets-classical company Bedlam, which played the East Village earlier this season, will receive an encore four-week run at the Connelly Theater beginning March 27. Prior Bedlam productions include a scaled-down Saint Joan, a gliding Sense and Sensibility and the mashup Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet.

Paul McCartney at American UtopiaTom Selleck at Harry Townsends Last Stand.

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amBroadway: American Utopia to return to Broadway, new season at the Metropolitan Opera and more - amNY

‘We were all a little bit punk’: Haring, Basquiat and the art that defined 80s New York – The Guardian

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New York curator and cultural critic Carlo McCormick is proud and serene as he describes the National Gallery of Victorias blockbuster 2020 exhibition, Crossing Lines, as a celebration. Hes also quick to note that this is not just a celebration of the men whose names are on the door.

Keith [Haring] and Jean-Michel [Basquiat] are really ciphers that signify a whole group of artists and community, says McCormick, who guest curated the show. Every bit of modernism was actually a gang of friends getting together. And theres no arguing that this gang a bunch of bratty kids defined an era.

At that time, museums were very insular, McCormick says. They were for blue-haired old ladies ... And there was a whole group of narcissistic white men who thought they knew better. They looked down on us.

Haring, and Basquiat defied this. Coming from marginalised communities Haring was gay, Basquiat was black they made vibrant and often political art that was vernacular and younger and more youth-oriented, and then they made that kind of art the norm.

McCormick discussed with the Guardian 10 works (and the people behind them) that cemented this radical legacy three of which are currently on show at the NGV.

Whether on subway walls, scraps of paper or large industrial tarps (like this piece), Keith Harings work was meant to be universal. The young artist developed an iconic visual language of simple motifs dogs, babies, hearts and used them to communicate his generations not-so-simple energy and anxieties.

We were all Cold War babies, McCormick says, reflecting on his reading of Untitled 1982, which is part of Crossing Lines. Every age is an age of anxiety theres plenty for kids to be worried about now but for us it was knowing that, at any moment, our world could blow up. He notes that Harings dogs arent barking, as usual: Theyre almost like Egyptian statues that you would see guarding the dead.

His work always seems really nice, but when you look at it the TV sets etc it was always a lot about control, McCormick says. Haring also frequently cited homosexuality and Aids (the artist died of Aids-related complications in 1990). This was a moment where the politics [in art] turned into a kind of social politics [Haring] could express his difference or his fears but it was kinda smiley.

Jean-Michel Basquiat rocketed to fame in his late teens and early twenties. Within a few years, the Brooklyn-born artist of Haitan and Puerto Rican descent went from doing local graffiti under a pseudonym, to exhibiting at the countrys best galleries.

This work is at a moment when [hes] getting bigger, McCormick says. In the work, which is currently hung at the NGV, Basquiat is depicted (on the right) with fellow black artists Toxic and Rammellzee. Theyre living large, but theres a lot of tragedy built into their success.

Its kind of a tribute to his fellow black people in the art world [and a] barbed joke. African Americans were not well represented in our cinema, and if they were they were caricatured and marginalised. It was sort of a way of saying, Hey, were the Hollywood Africans. Its the same deal: were playing like blackface for white people.

This was an era in which art became enmeshed with celebrity and while that meant young artists like Basqiaut could prosper, it also ensured their work was seen as spectacle, rather than art. It was given the same degree of analysis that we might give a K-pop star today, McCormick says. That degree of analysis has certainly changed since the artists death from overdose, at age 27 in 1988.

Keith really loved Jean-Michel, McCormick says. Its a memorial. Think of the momento mori in Renaissance paintings; the reminder of death. The crown was Basquiats most iconic symbol, used frequently in his work.

[They] had this incredible mutual respect, he adds. They had much in common, generationally and in terms of [being outsiders] All these people came [downtown] because they were different. They were ostracised and alienated from this normal America.

This era of artists met and bonded on the street and in the nightclubs. People liked to dance, McCormick reminisces. Now, maybe Jackson Pollock liked to dance, but Im sure he danced like the ugliest white guy on the planet. This was a generation that had the beat, it had the rhythm.

This work came at a time of great change, in the midst of the Aids crisis. We went from partying every night to going to memorial services every week, McCormick says. He notes a tremendous gravitas in this; they are aware of a moment passing. [Its] the way that spring is fun, but fall is something else because you feel winter coming on.

Yes, Vivienne Westwood is British. But her iconic punk aesthetic had a lasting impact in the US and McCormick argues it actually had its origins in New York. I hate to be such a provincial New Yorker, but before [Westwoods collaborator Malcolm McLaren] created the Sex Pistols as his little boy band, he managed the New York Dolls ... Malcolm was very influenced by what was going on in New York.

By the 80s, he recalls, we were all a little bit punk even if some people were into dance music, others were into hip hop There was this hybridity, and fashion was very much interspersed in our culture.

Keith [whose work was featured in the Witches collection] cared very much about the ability for his art to interact with the real world the day-to-day. This continues today, with his work most accessible on T-shirts and fridge magnets.

People forget, McCormick says, that Andy Warhol was at the total nadir of his career in the 80s.

He was very uncool. [But] what really brought him back was the fact that there was this whole generation me included who adored him. Many of us had moved to New York because of the Factory and Warhols books.

Two decades on from his seminal work in the pop art movement, Warhol became something of a mentor to artists like Haring and Basquiat. Everyone talks about how he was a little vampiric in his relationship to people, but he was very generous and very supportive. There was a beautiful connectivity an intergenerational conversation.

In this portrait, one year before his death, Warhol renders himself with the same pop art methods that inspired others. He had a particular way about reaching people, McCormick says. About how you can do signifiers without being didactic, and how personality and life can become part of the art. Also, he adds, Andy queered things up.

Francesco Clemente migrated from Italy to join the scene in New York. He wasnt the nightclub type less Mudd Club, more like Mr Chows, McCormick says and his work had a different energy to it. It was all pastels and soft edges.

Clemente had been going to India since the 70s and he brought in much more poetic, much more Italian, a little more mythical, allegorical [influences]. But he was also just an incredible painter. Great painters recognise great painters as something entirely distinct from all the people who dont push paint in such a magical way.

Clemente and Basquiat are also often lumped together as neo-expressionists; whether you agree with that label or not, its true that they defined an era of raw and emotive art. This then went out of favour towards the end of the 80s with the rise of neo-geo (think Jeff Koons) which was much more about intellectualising your emotions.

This is an ecstatic thing, McCormick says. If its not a photo of an orgasm, its one to bring you towards that ecstatic state. It might sound provocative, but when seen in the context of Robert Mapplethorpes broader work its just a statement of fact.

Maybe Jackson Pollock liked to dance, but Im sure he danced like the ugliest white guy on the planetThis was a generation that had the beat.

The New York-based photographer had a wonderful sense of beauty, which was based off the other, McCormick says.

Obviously sexuality and fetish are part of it, but its more interesting than that Beauty had been so codified by then from Boticelli to the pinup girls in the Hollywood magazines.

Mapplethorpe portrayed the beauty of people who were inherently different by lifestyle or by body. Alistair Butler, the model used for this work, was a New York dancer originally from the Bahamas. Haring, Basiquat, all of them, this is a generation of really questioning people theyre all sponges. They take from everything around them.

Kenny Scharf grew up on the west coast, but met Keith Haring at art school in New York. Like Haring, McCormick says, his stuff looks so cartoony, happy really fun. But its all candy-coated. Its a bitter pill. When The Worlds Collide is another work about nuclear catastrophe: a grotesque and lurid collision of utopia and its demise.

[This] generation was promised a beautiful future. There was going to be better living through technology ... we were all going to be flying around in space! Instead were the punk generation of no future.

Feminist art was fantastic in 1980s New York, McCormick says, but unfortunately it was just being ignored. Barbara Kruger was the exception: the graphic designer-turned-artist became known for her acid-tongued text works that took aim at consumerism, the patriarchy and the intersection of the two.

She took the seductive language of advertising and consumerism, to throw it back in a way that rips it apart, McCormick says. Pop art took popular culture in a kinda acquiescent way, without really questioning so much its just a Brillo box [but she used it] to subvert and to question.

In this work, the images are taken from 1950s advertising: the boys posture is reminiscent of Rosie the Riveter, and the title is a Tina Turner song from two years prior. Kruger led the way for dense, appropriation-fuelled art while profoundly speaking to the womens condition from [the New York] scene.

Like Warhol, Nam June Paik was a forefather figure in the 80s scene. Paik grew up in Korea and moved to New York in the 1960s where, McCormick says, he became one of the seminal figures of Fluxus with Yoko Ono and all sorts of interesting people. It was another gang of friends getting together that, in fact, had much in common with Haring, Basquait and co.

Fluxus wanted to playfully destroy the boundaries between art and life, and experiment with the nature of what art could be. The movement was also fiercely anti-consumerist and, for Paik, this was most evident in his work relating to television. I remember his first video was like the earliest TV you could imagine, just a video of the moon, called Moon Is The Oldest TV, McCormick recalls.

In the MTV generation of the 80s, Paik went on to become the father of video art. In Video Flag Z, he reconstituted American identity as a Korean living in America. He may not have been a bratty kid but, like Basquait, Paik had a perspective so few others in the white art world could offer.

NGVs Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines is showing in Melbourne until 11 April 2020

The Stories of a Scene series is supported by the National Gallery of Victoria

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'We were all a little bit punk': Haring, Basquiat and the art that defined 80s New York - The Guardian

Boris Johnson has promised London-style bus services for other cities. So where’s the money coming from? – CityMetric

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Boris Johnson will have to do some work to improve buses. Quite a bit, if we are going to see the London-style services outside of the capital that he promises.

The money is there: 5 billion, less a bit for cycling and fair bit more that will go straight into the procurement of new low-emission vehicles. But before England becomes a bus utopia, some things need to happen. Boring things. Detail things.

What are London-style buses? We dont know. But we have some clues, because in 2017 the Bus Services Act made it possible to operate buses in England in much the same way as they are in London. Features available in this legislation include allowing elected councils or mayors to decide how services are run, plan the routes, choose the specification of the vehicles, their livery and branding and fares, and integrate bus ticketing with other transport modes.

Unfortunately, no local council or mayor has used these powers, and only one is exploring it seriously, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority led by Labour mayor Andy Burnham. Liverpool City Region, also Labour run, recently indicated that it is getting more serious about going down the required route of statutory consultations and secondary legislation, but all this is time consuming. Is Johnson going to speed this process up?

And there is a political problem, potentially, for Boris Johnson. Many of the places in England that have lots of people who could be using the bus are run by Labour mayors. Johnson might be helping the mayors back into office by giving them a success story. Conversely, he might be able to steal the credit for what could have been Andy Burnhams greatest achievement, sorting out the Manchester buses.

Johnson might be wise to start in the West Midlands, a region with lots of people, buses that need sorting out and a Conservative mayor although one, admittedly, who has not been as enthusiastic about buses as the northern mayors. The issue this highlights for Johnson is that his bus offer must be attractive to local politicians for them to be compliant. It will need to be locally-led, and possibly difficult for him to control.

The likes of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands are not in fact the worst affected areas for the huge cuts in bus services that have happened under austerity budgets since 2010. Those have been the more rural areas where running a bus service is hard anyway, because of low density and dispersed settlement patterns. Boris Johnson might find that these areas are hard to help. The answer is either sustained annual funding, which seems unlikely; or a technological solution like demand responsive travel services. Either way, it is very unlikely all of the 3,000+ routes cut will be restored.

One aspect of London buses that cannot be replicated elsewhere is funding. With no operational grants from central government, the capitals bus fares are subsidised by the profits from London Underground. No such cash cow exists in other cities. So, what does Boris Johnson have up his sleeve?

Serving new housing developments could also prove difficult. Weve been building more homes, but they are often at low density and remote from amenities, jobs and established centres of population. Merely extending existing routes creates lengthy services that are unattractive to passengers along the whole route and are vulnerable to delays caused by congestion.

And congestion will need to be fixed to make buses an attractive option to passengers. Available ways to deal with congestion and generate sustainable revenue for buses include congestion charging, charging clean air zones and the workplace parking levy. Two of these are London-style and one of them works in Nottingham. Is this all a bit much for Boris Johnson, or will he leave it up to local leaders to do the politically hard part of charging motorists? On the plus side, that procurement of low emission buses would ensure operators were exempt from clean air zone charging.

If you want to know where all this money is going and what exactly London-style buses turn out to be then keep an eye out for the upcoming National Bus Strategy. It should give us all the required details unless of course it is delayed.

Steve Chambers is an urban planning and transport consultant, lecturer and campaigner.

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Boris Johnson has promised London-style bus services for other cities. So where's the money coming from? - CityMetric

Go further west – Bangkok Post

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Throughout their decades-spanning career in the music biz, Pet Shop Boys have always operated within the realm of sophisticated synth-pop that advocates varying degrees of dancefloor abandon. For lyricist Neil Tennant and composer Chris Lowe, however, it's not just about the allure of club culture or pure hedonism. From day one, social consciousness gets woven into the sonic fabric of their music. "In a West End town, a dead-end world/ The East End boys and West End girls," Tennant sings about the class and wealth gap on their 1984 debut single West End Girls.

What would follow over the next three decades are stories of economic struggle, Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money), Rent, and a never-ending quest for utopia, Se A Vida (That's The Way Life Is), Go West, mixed with your regular romantic woes, I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Any More. Last year also saw the release of Agenda, the four-track EP which marks the first time that Tennant and Lowe straight-up expressed their political angst, lashing out against Brexit and right-wing populism.

Some of these topics remain constant on the duo's 14th album proper, Hotspot. The Stuart Price-produced outing, recorded at the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin, sees the London pair professing their love for clubbing and for the German capital itself. Tennant starts this off by recounting his encounter with a beautiful hedonist on a train. "You were always such a free spirit Will you recognise me today? Give me a smile for old time's sake/ Before you run away," he sings on the synth-laden Will-O-The-Wisp.

Against a backdrop to the PSB-certified disco jaunt, the story continues to arc on You Are The One and Wedding In Berlin with the local neighbourhoods providing a cohesive scene ("Drivingdownto Zehlendorf/ Lie bythe lake on a summer afternoon Back into Mitte to see a film/ About love and liberation"). Elsewhere, euphoric 90s Euro-dance takes the shape of Happy People and Dreamland, the latter touching on anti-Brexit sentiments and featuring an exchange between Tennant and Years & Years' vocalist Olly Alexander.

Sevdaliza / Oh My God

"Oh my God, who should I be?/ What is it you want when you come for me?" Sevdaliza's latest offering,Oh My God, begins with her distorted vocals coupled with nimble synths. "Everytime, you're another evil/ Waitingfor an angel that you bringto hell." Although this is not the first time the Iranian-Dutch singer-songwriter has explored the duality between two extremes, she uses it in such a way that it highlights the general political hopelessness (and, perhaps on a more personal level, the ever-increasing tension between her motherland and the US). The minor-key production and skittering beats work in tandem to echo this bleakness, with an underlying sense of cautious optimism ("Roamin' in the fields of hope/ Will it make or break me?/ As my dreams are heavy, they outweigh me").

Yena / Islam Hai Kord Ook

After touching on topics like social hierarchy and capitalism in their previous singles, Thai three-piece Yena turn their focus to everyday discrimination in social and religious spheres on their latest,Islam Hai Kord Ook. What happens if the very institution that's meant to foster social harmony is the one that does the exact opposite? This question is explored through the track's nuanced yet vivid lyrics that are not too far removed from reality. "At the school assembly on the morning of a Buddhist Holy Day, men clad in yellow robes slowly entered," vocalist Kul sings, setting the scene. "Then the teacher shouted, 'If you're a Muslim, cross your arms over your chest!'."

TOPS / I Feel Alive

Montreal's four-piece TOPS may have described their sound as "a raw punk take on AM studio pop", but their music, as evinced by the previous two albums, stretches far beyond those two genres. The latest evidence arrives in the form of the new singleI Feel Alive, a breezy pop jam that could have been made back in the late 80s/early 90s. "I feelalive looking in your eyes," vocalist Jane Penny enthuses alongside lush vocal harmonies in one of the catchiest hooks we've had the pleasure of hearing so far this year. The track is a harbinger of their new album of the same name, which is poised to drop in April.

Caribou / Never Come Back

If Caribou's previously shared singlesHomeandYou And Ihinted at anything at all, it would be the fact that Canadian producer Dan Snaith's first album in five years will see him in what could be described as throwback mode. So far we've heard him dabbling in an eclectic mix of retro funk, neo-soul and synth-pop. And now with new cutNever Come Back, we're taken on a time machine back to the early 90s dancefloor when house music was at its peak. Think massive Eurodance-esque synth chords, plus Snaith's warm, repeated refrain.

Little Dragon / Hold On

Next month will see the release of Little Dragon's albumNew Me, Same Us, which will serve as their sixth studio album after 2017'sSeason High. Before that, however, we're getting a glimpse of what's to come in the form of first singleHold On. Loaded with their readily recognisable blend of funk, R&B and electronica, the track finds the Gothenburg-based outfit pairing an infectious groove with a message of conscious uncoupling. "No regrets, though the pain will heal/ Please accept why we're standing still/ I wish you happiness, joy/ Good fortune, boy," frontwoman Yukimi Nagano sings before slipping into lush vocalisation shadowed by a playful synth line.

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Go further west - Bangkok Post

The rise of Britains woke members clubs – The Economist

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Out with cocaine-fuelled hedonism, in with gender politics

Feb 22nd 2020

NAMED AFTER Marx, who famously did not want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member, the Groucho sold itself as the antidote to the gentlemens clubs of Londons St Jamess district when it opened in 1985. With a heavy drinking culture, artistic spirit and cocaine-driven largesse, the club captured the zeitgeist. Of late it has been swept up in Sohos commercialisation, and is now owned by a private-equity firm. Despite offering reduced fees for under-30s and a vegan menu, it is not the magnet for youth it once was.

Todays antidote is a breed of clubs promoting values rather than loucheness. They offer a similar aesthetic to those of the 1980s and 1990s: all have adopted the velvet chesterfields and modern British art customary at the Groucho Club and Soho House, another club popular among media types. The new ingredient is wokeness.

In October The Wing, a glossy feminist utopia that does not admit men, opened its first branch outside America, where there are ten. Candidates to join the new outpost in Fitzrovia are asked, for instance, to describe how they have promoted or supported the advancement of women and what they think is the biggest challenge facing women today. At the clubhouse, oil paintings of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Mary Beard (feminist heroes in acting and academia respectively) line the walls, the library is free from books written by men, and badges dispensed at reception allow everyone to indicate their preferred personal pronoun. Members are described either as the cohort or the witches (liked for its connotations of subverting male power).

The Wings native British equivalent is AllBright. There are two in London, and there will be three in America by the end of the year. Like The Wing, it offers an additional service beyond somewhere stylish to socialise and work: self-help. At The Wing, recent events have covered self-sabotage, boundary-setting and how to be sober and social. At AllBright, group sessions have discussed impostor syndrome and how to overcome fear. Cognitive behavioural therapy and psychoanalysis are available by the hour. Mindless hedonism is off the menu.

For mixed company, people passionate about driving positive impact can join The Conduit in Mayfair, opened by a former chairman of Soho House, which claims to be a platform for catalysing and supporting new ideas and collective action. For eco-enthusiasts there is Arboretum in Covent Garden, a leafy idyll where people who care about the planet convene, create and collaborate. Its deli promises dishes free from dairy, refined sugars, additives and chemicals.

Other than the offer of cheap drinks by some traditional clubs to attract younger members, little has stirred in St Jamess. As a result, clubland is increasingly diverse. There are ever more clubs for a modern Marx to be rejected by, and even more reason to reject them.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "More woke than coke"

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The rise of Britains woke members clubs - The Economist

New Star Wars Movie in the Works with Sleight Director J.D. Dillard – Collider.com

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Theres a mysterious new disturbance in the force.SleightfilmmakerJ.D. Dillard andLuke Cage writerMatt Owens are reportedly teaming up to work on a newStar Warsmovie but its not yet clear whether the new Lucasfilm project is intended to head to theaters or find a home on Disney+.

Per THR, Dillard and Owens have been tapped to develop the project, which has no known plot or character details at the moment. Its also unclear if Dillard will direct should the project move forward, but the report does note that the project is said to be unrelated to the potential projects from MCU chiefKevin Feige andRian Johnsons ongoing work with the franchise.

Image via Blumhouse

Its an interesting and evolutionary time for the Star Wars franchise, withRise of Skywalker having just closed out the decades-long Skywalker saga and Lucasfilm putting the film franchise on a temporary hiatus. For now, the next theatrical Star Wars movies arent scheduled until December of 2022, 2024, and 2026. At the same time, the first live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, found tremendous success on the new streaming service Disney+ last year and is already teed up for Season 2 to launch in October of this year.

During the most recent Disney earnings call, Disney Chairman and CEOBob Iger briefed investors on the current state of the Star Wars saga. 2020 is not going to be the same as 2019 for the studio, he said during the call, explaining, the priority for Star Wars in the short-term is going to be Ill call it television for Disney+ and then we will have more to say about development of theatrical soon after that.

Dillards first feature Sleightdebuted at Sundance in 2016, where it picked up a lot of buzz and got scooped up by Blumhouse and WWE studios. Blumhouse also backed his second feature, the woefully underseen monster movie meets island survival thrillerSweetheart(which you can watch on Netflix right now) that dropped last year. He also recently directed an episode of Utopia and is attached to a new remake of The Fly. And this isntDillards first journey to a galaxy far, far away. The filmmaker got his start working withJ.J. Abramsat Bad Robot and subsequently joined Abrams team onThe Force Awakens shoot. He also had a cameo as a Storm Trooper inRise of Skywalker (pictured in the slice image above).

As for Owens, the writer has primarily worked with the Marvel branch of Disneys empire to date (though as Jon Favreau and Taika Waititi demonstrate, the studio is keen to carry over talent between brands.) Owens got his start as a story editor on the Netflix Marvel-verse team-up miniseries The Defenders before going on to write forAgents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and becoming a staff writer onLuke Cage.

As for what else is up next in the world of Star Wars, aside from the aforementioned Feige and Johnson projects and the upcoming second season of The Mandalorian, Disney+ just debuted the first episode of the seventh and final season of The Clone Wars. The streamer also has a Rogue Oneprequel series and a series based on Obi-Wan Kenobi in the works, withEwan McGregor set to reprise the title role for the later. Last month, we reported that production on the series was placed on hold and the crews sent home, and McGregor later confirmed the shoot has been pushed back while reinforcing that the show is still very much a go.

For more Star Wars-y goodness, check out the long-awaited Baby Yoda toys that are finally heading to the market and check out the recently-revealed Blu-ray details forRise of Skywalker.

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New Star Wars Movie in the Works with Sleight Director J.D. Dillard - Collider.com

Andrew Krivaks The Bear Imagines a Lush, Post-Apocalyptic Earth – Observer

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The Bear, by Andrew Krivak. Bellevue Literary Press

What if the dystopian future were dreading actually looks like a transcendental utopia? Andrew Krivaks third novel, The Bear, begins with the end of humanity. Its opening line reads as straight reporting: The last two were a girl and her father who lived on the old eastern range on the side of a mountain they called the mountain that stands alone. From the books start, the gig is up; we know its all over for humankind. So why does it feel as though these two are living in paradise?

In this arresting, exquisite novel, time acquires a new quality. When human civilization is over and theres no hope left for society, what Krivak imagines is a stillness. An incandescent calm settles upon the earth now that humans are no longer capable of doing any further damage. His unnamed father and daughter live a simple life. Together they hunt, forage, farm, care for one another and tell stories. Gone is rush hour, traffic, neighbors, colleagues. With no one but each other and the earth, the urgency that marks our days is missing.

SEE ALSO: Jenny Offill on How Weather Mirrors Her Own Struggle and the Book She Abandoned

Life is dictated by the seasons, not deadlines. Talking about spring as it returns after winter, Krivak writes, Those were the days when the girl left the house in the morning with her father and studied a new world that pushed up from the dirt of the forest and emerged from the water at the edge of the lake, days in which she lay on the ground beneath a warm sun and wondered if world and time itself were like the hawk and eagle soaring above her in long arcs she knew were only part of their flight, for they must have begun and returned to someplace as of yet unseen by her, someplace as of yet unknown. Yet, for all this pastoral splendor, certain facts are missing. Namely, how did this dire fate come to pass? What series of events led humanity to these final two individuals?

There is no shortage of plausible worst case scenarios available to novelists today. Other authors (Cormac McCarthys The Road, Jeff VanderMeers Southern Reach trilogy, Ling Mas Severance to name a few) focus on the catastrophe followed by its fallout. This is what makes The Bear so striking. Krivak isnt interested in how or why human society is ending. Instead, he found the origins of The Bear through the bedtime stories he told his children. When my sons were much younger, I needed to find a story to get them to sleep, he tells Observer over the phone. As you do, because youre sleep deprived and because they always want to know about where youre from and what you were like as a kid, I used to tell them how a bear helped my father and me find our family dog Troy in the woods. Its not true, of course, but the whole idea of the woods and of bear in northeastern Pennsylvania was. They would ask me to tell it over and over. And at a certain point they stopped asking about it. Children grow up, but, as both a parent and writer, this story lingered.

Maybe about two or three years ago, I decided I would try to write down the story for them as a gift for Christmas, Krivak remembers. Sometime after, I was out fishing [near Jaffrey, New Hampshire where Krivak splits his time] one day in my boat. It was one of those days where theres a kind of an early summer mist coming off the water and there was no one around at all. I just thought, What was this place like when people had just come here, the first people to be in this place? And then I thought, you know, probably indicative of the times, Whats it going to be like for the last ones? Krivak recalls that shortly afterward, I pulled in my line and I rode up to the dock and I just went inside the house and I just started writing that first line.

It might be a leap for other parents to use well-worn family storytelling as the basis for a literary novel, but Krivaks first novel, The Sojourn, was a National Book Award finalist as well as the 2012 winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In addition to his second novel The Signal Flame, hes also the author of the memoir A Long Retreat, which examines Krivaks desire to become a Jesuit priest, an eight-year experience. When I was teaching, I started to wonder about whether this religious life was with the proper creative outlet for me. Realizing he would never be happy without prioritizing his creative life, Krivak left the order a year before he would have become an ordained priest.

Andrew Krivak. Sharona Jacobs

I was curious how his religious experience may have influenced this book. The notion of the composition of place in prayer, which comes out of St. Ignatiuss spiritual exercises, brings one into, as one prepares oneself for prayer or contemplating scripture, the very setting and emotional tone of the story. He elaborates with an example, Say the passage in the storm of the Sea of Galilee. Put yourself in that boat. Imagine the fear of the apostles. That, having been trained as a Jesuit, is really important for me as a writer, especially writing about nature. And just seeing the world as a thing created and a thing precious as a result of that creation, is was obviously there. Everything moves and lives and has its being in that in that creation.

This respect for nature informs his choice to open The Bear at the point of human extinction. In doing so, he makes space for a meditation on stewardship. Without interrogating the specific way humankind has ruined the world, human conflict exits the conversation. Whats left is a tranquility tinged with regret: the beauty of silence and the wisdom of nature beyond human intervention. Struck by the books peaceful pacing and meditation on nature, I read with a humble sense of awe rather than an ever-growing sense of dread. Too often dystopias leave readers off the hookThe worlds ending anyway! Its too late! Theres nothing you can do! with panic superseding any sense of agency.

Concentrating on nature as the guidepost for the book, Krivak reveals how much were losing when we fail to serve as good stewards of the planet. However, his tone is never didactic or melodramatic. Whats done is done. This father and daughter are merely another species on the brink of extinction, but they must carry on. At the end of the world as humans know it, they still need to prepare meals, tools, clothing, and collect resources. The careful attention to survival techniques and living off the land will remind readers of the beloved 1986 Newbury honor-winning young adult novel, Gary Paulsens Hatchet, a book with which Krivak was surprisingly unfamiliar.

An accident during a long journey to the coast to collect provisions leaves the daughter alone, carrying her fathers remains back to the mountain where her mother is buried. On her own, what is left to live for? What starts as a trek back to honor her parents opens the young woman up to a new way of living in harmony with the world. While she is the last of her kind, Krivak doesnt give into the impulse to make her a hero or a warrior. Interestingly, it became harder and harder for me to not confuse the young woman with another young woman consumed with survival: the seventeen-year-old activist Greta Thunberg. How frustratingly fitting that while we as a society fail to do our part, its a young woman who becomes a leading figure to shoulder the burden of the movement to save humanity from itself. In The Bear, its a woman who bears witness to its end.

In a twist, Krivak also refuses to make the woman a savior or imbue her with superhuman abilities. When she needs help the most, the natural world intervenes. A series of animals steps in to aid the young woman as she travels home. Without anthropomorphizing animals or concocting a folksy message, Krivak manages to establish communication through actions and spirit between the young woman and the natural world. With no one left to speak with, she is free to listen to the earth. In doing so, she finds that perhaps humankinds hubris was their dogged individualism. Turning away from the lessons that nature has to offer us, we disrupted the harmony necessary to survive. The transcendentalists may have been right about returning to nature, but the myth of self-reliance was a fallacy. Just as readers now know that Henry David Thoreau didnt truly live as an individualist at Walden, no man can survive alone. Survival is a communal act.

Krivak elaborates on this note elaborating that his novel offers a glimpse into a moment where a veil lifted between nature and humans. This notion that we all live separately somehow just disappeared [for me] because there was no reason for there to be a separation. And thats when I began to think, you know, perhaps [the end of the world] would be like that.

A dystopian utopia is not a bedtime story told to children. The evolution of this story is a curious one, but consider one of the earliest stories passed down through Judeo-Christian faith: the creation myth of Adam and Eve. Krivak links the exodus from Eden to his story as well. He reflects, I wasnt pondering the possibility of human extinction when I set out to write this, but once that became the story, it was liberating. When you consider the hubris of the way society disregards nature, were not good stewards. And so in the in the same way that the first two [Adam and Eve] in Hebrew scripture are told to be good stewards, I took that message back to the last two. I didnt want this story to be a post-apocalyptic catechism where everything is torn down and burning. I wanted it to be as beautiful for the last two as the myth tells us it was for the first two.

The end of the world could be upon us, but any possible future depends upon community with nature as much as with each other. The Bear is more than a parable for our times, its a call to listen to the world around us before its too late. With loving respect and acute awareness, The Bear imagines the ecstatic balance of a world without us.

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Andrew Krivaks The Bear Imagines a Lush, Post-Apocalyptic Earth - Observer

5 Reasons The ’00s Were The Best Decade For The X-Men (& 5 It’s The ’10s) – CBR – Comic Book Resources

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Those who belong to popular comic book fandoms, such asX-Men, can be rather picky when it comes to their favourite media. Ask any one of them what their favorite era of Marvel's Merry Mutants is and the disparate answers one will get is quite surprising. That's because the X-Men have had so many great times. It helps that they are the best selling Marvel franchise of all time.

RELATED: The 10 Most Powerful Ultimate X-Men, Ranked

The '00s were a time of restructuring for Marvel. They'd bring in new talent and start concentrating on fixing their biggest brands and this included the X-Men. The '10s would see the X-Men go through a lot of changes, not all of them for best, but would include some stellar work by big creators. This list is going to lay out reasons the '00s were the best decade for the X-Men... and reasons why the '10s were.

This might seem like a weird thing to see as a pro that would make one decade better than another, but anyone who has read a Chuck Austen X-Men comic will vouch for it. Many fans believe that the work created under/by Chuck Austen was some of the worst work produced for the X-Men series. None of his stories are remembered fondly and even the ones that aren't completely terribleare still not looked upon fondly.

For some reason, DC and Marvel put Austen on multiple books in the early '00s off the strength of his War Machine mini series. Beyond that series, everything he did was not a big hit with fans. He wrote X-Men books, both Uncanny X-Men and X-Men, for years. No one knows how he was on the books for so long.

In the early '10s, after the Avengers Vs X-Men event, Brian Michael Bendis was given two X-Men books, All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men. Both started off pretty well, if a little verbose and tedious, but eventually they became drawn out and disappointing. It felt like he had lost interest eventually.

RELATED: X-Men: 10 Times Storm Earned Her Status As An Omega-Level Mutant

No one looks back on the Bendis era of X-Men fondly. It wasn't terrible, but it went on way too long and fans got tired of it all rather quickly. It's strange since Bendis's style, a lot of soap opera drama and dialogue, should have went well with the X-Men. However, it didn't. Fortunately, there were much better X-Men books at the time anchoring the line.

Schism was an X-Men event that focused on an ideological divide between Wolverine and Cyclops and would change the status quo of the X-Men for years. The two men came to blows over Cyclops ordering a teenager to kill. Wolverine was against this, arguing that children shouldn't be soldiers while Cyclops said that the X-Men had always done this sort of thing and that he had no choice.

This divide would split mutants into two camps- the ones who followed Wolverine and the ones who followed Cyclops. It led to two of the best X-Men comics of the decade, which will be showcased later in this list.

House Of M was a 2005 Marvel event. In it, Scarlet Witch changed reality, creating a world where mutants were the dominant species and all of her heroic friends got their heart's desire. Eventually, the heroes would realize this and try to get the bottom of why she did it, demanding that she change the world back. At the end of whole thing, she would utter some fateful words: "No More Mutants."

RELATED: X-Men: The 5 Deadliest Members Of The Hellfire Club (& The 5 Weakest)

All but 198 mutants would lose their powers and no new mutants would be born for years. This changed the storytelling paradigm that every X-writer after had to follow until it was undone years later and would present mutants an endangered species, opening them up for all kinds of new stories.

As things got worse for the shrunken mutant race, they all went to San Francisco, setting up a new home there. Norman Osborn, at the time head of H.A.M.M.E.R. and the leader of the Dark Avengers, would try and bring the X-Men under his thumb. He'd fail and the X-Men would take over Alcatraz Island, renaming it Utopia and making it into a new homeland for mutants.

Utopia would become basically an autonomous entity, a place for the beleaguered mutant race to gather and lick their wounds. Talents like Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen would work on the books during the Utopia era and tell some great stories.

In 2005, writer Peter David would relaunch a book he hadn't wrote since the 90s- X-Factor. Focusing on Jamie Madrox and his detective agency, X-Factor Investigations, the book would also star Siryn, M, Strong Guy, Wolfsbane, Rictor, Shatterstar, and Layla Miller, a character introduced during House Of M.

RELATED: The 10 Most Powerful Female X-Men

David would use this team to tell different X-Men stories than were being done in the mainline X-Men books. It had a humorous and irreverent tone, but still had hard hitting stories and even got David nominated for a GLAAD award for his treatment of the same sex relationship between Rictor and Shatterstar.

Jason Aaron, fresh off Schism, would launch Wolverine And The X-Men. The book followed Wolverine and his faction of mutants starting a new school in the ruins of the old one in Westchester, calling it the Jean Grey School. Fan favorites like Beast, Iceman, Kitty Pryde, and Rachel Grey would teach new mutants, and it introduced a whole new Hellfire Club.

Aaron took elements of Morrison's New X-Men run and brought them back to the fore. He played up the school aspect that Morrison had set up so expertly while also throwing in his own touches. In a time when mutants and the X-Men were at lowest, he brought humor and fun back into the franchise.

After Grant Morrison left the X-Men franchise and Marvel for DC in 2004, Marvel had to do some serious retooling of the X-Men line. They did this by starting a whole new flagship book called Astonishing X-Men and got Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly, to write it and superstar artist John Cassaday to draw it.

RELATED: X-Men: The 10 Most Powerful Female Villains, Ranked

What followed was twenty-five issues of X-Men greatness. Focusing on Kitty Pryde, Whedon and Cassaday knocked it out of the park. The book had a very Claremont feel and introduced all kinds of new threats for the X-Men to deal with.

X-Force was restarted in the Utopia era as Cyclops's personal hit team. The book would be relaunched in 2010 with writer Rick Remender and artist Jerome Opena. It would star Wolverine, Psylocke, Archangel, Deadpool, and Fantomex as they went after the biggest threats to mutantkind with extreme prejudice.

Remender would tell the best X-Men stories of the decade in this book, pitting the team against Apocalypse and his Final Horsemen, the World, throwing them into the Age Of Apocalypse, battling a betrayal of one of their own, and so much more.

In 200o, superstar writer Grant Morrison left DC and came to Marvel. He worked on two mini series, Marvel Boy and Fantastic Four: 1234, before being given the reins to the X-Men. He would relaunch X-Men as New X-Men, with his frequent collaborator Frank Quitely. He would revolutionize the X-Men.

He would focus on the Xavier Institute, making it actually feel like a school. He would finally make mutants feel like they were the future. He introduced new threat Cassandra Nova to the X-Men and tied his entire run together expertly. Marvel would pretty much throw away everything he did when he left, seemingly out of spite, but it was a golden age for the X-Men, one that hasn't been rivaled until Hickman came along.

NEXT: X-Men: 10 Times Iceman Earned His Status As An Omega-Level Mutant

NextDragon Ball: 10 Amazing Caulifla Cosplay That Look Just Like The Anime

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5 Reasons The '00s Were The Best Decade For The X-Men (& 5 It's The '10s) - CBR - Comic Book Resources

Why The New Gods Movie is Something We Can Look Forward To – TVOvermind

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The movies of the DC Cinematic Universe have been on a roll recently and they show no signs of stopping. A movie based on the New Gods is one of their projects on the development list and its got us fans wondering. Warner Bros. has recovered from their missteps from the past and now theyre focusing on lesser-known DC characters. The New Gods have a big influence in the DC universe, but they wont win any popularity contests when it comes to characters. Bring up DC, and the Justice League comes up, and even the Teen Titans have their own show. What do the New Gods have outside of the comics? In fact, who are the New Gods exactly? They have a history with the Justice League in the comics and it involves one of their greatest enemies. If thats the case, then why arent they seen more?

The most interesting thing about the New Gods is that its about a conflict that stretches far beyond Earth. What they are exactly is an alien race that represents two sides of the same coin. They once inhabited the same world, but it was eventually split apart into two separate worlds. One world is New Genesis, an idyllic utopia that is ruled by the compassionate Highfather. The other world is a Apokolips, a hellish dystopia that is ruled with an iron fist by the totalitarian Darkseid. Yes, that Darkseid, the Thanos of the DC universe and prominent enemy to the Justice League. One world represents peace and stability, while the other represents chaos and oppression. Two sides of a very large coin.

That sums up who they are and what their series is mostly about. It sounds like an interesting premise for a movie, which is why DC has given director Ava DuVernay the chance to bring them to the big-screen. DuVernay has directed the films Selma and A Wrinkle in Time, and yes, the latter wasnt exactly a big win for her, but Selma proved her competence as a director. A year ago, it was announced that DuVernay will be co-writing the script with comic book writer, Tom King. Thats great news for the film, because King is known for writing comics for the hero known as Mister Miracle. This superhero is an escape artist and the son of The Highfather, but in an attempt to bring peace, he was traded for Darkseids son, Orion.

Mister Miracle grew up in the devastating world of Apokolips, but despite the horrors he endured, he grew up to be a hero. Hes an interesting character, and one of the chief heroes of the New Gods series, so having King on board is a serious advantage. But Mister Miracle isnt the only hero the series has to offer. Mister Miracle found love in a native of Apokolips known as Big Barda. She is known for being the leader of the Female Furries, a group of elite, but savage women warriors fiercely loyal to Darkseid. She eventually found Mister Miracle and two became husband and wife. Barda even escaped the clutches of Darkseid and made way to Earth, where she became acquainted with several of Earths heroes. Miracle and Barda lived a normal life on Earth for a brief amount of time, but they couldnt completely escape their past.

A husband and wife from another world that escaped to Earth are rare kind of characters. They come from separate worlds that are totally different, but they managed to fall in love. Above all else, they are warriors who fight against oppression. These two must be the main protagonists of the New Gods film for these exact reasons. They are outlandish types of characters and not your typical heroes, and DuVernay even stated that Big Barda is her favorite hero. Who can blame her? Barda is a strong female character, much like Wonder Woman, but shes not afraid to get her hands dirty. DC has done well on giving us some great female characters and Big Barda can be added to the list. If the New Gods can accomplish anything, its introducing her.

What other characters do the New Gods have to offer? The answer is a lot. Lets go back to Darkseid, the villain of all villains in DC. He was briefly referenced in Justice League by Steppenwolf, the uncle of Darkseid. His presence in the DCEU has been confirmed and his world and minions need to introduced next. He was some sinister lackeys serving under him, including Desaad, his master torturer, and Kalibak, his bloodthirsty son. One of his most nefarious servants is Granny Goodness. A goofy name, right? Well, this femme fatale is anything but goofy, as she serves Darkseid in a horrific fashion. Goodness runs her own orphanages, but her version of caring for children involves brainwashing and torturing them into becoming heartless warriors. Shes responsible for forming the Female Furries and caused a lot of pain for Big Barda and Mister Miracle.

If the New Gods movie needs a good villain, Granny Goodness should fill that role. Darkseid is too powerful of a villain for Big Barda and Mister Miracle to face alone, making Goodness more suitable for them to handle. Shes powerful, but her true strength lies in her ability to command the Furries and psychologically torture her victims. Barda has a personal enmity with her and a confrontation with her will lead to a fight with the Female Furries. We got a taste of that in the animated film, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, and it was fun to watch. A live-action version of that would be fun, except shell have Mister Miracle by her side. On top of that, Granny Goodness is a female villain, which would provide a good balance of diversity among the DCEU villains.

The most significant thing about the New Gods movie is that itll expand the DCEU. Its a universe that stretches to literal galaxies and this can really push boundaries. The worlds of Apokolips and New Genesis are far from Earth, and itll feel separate, but it wont divert from the DCEU. These worlds have many new characters that are colorful and significant to DC and they need to be explored. The one character that really needs it is Darkseid, the villain that the main heroes will face in the future. He doesnt have to be the main villain, but its the best opportunity to give us a glimpse of him. Hes an intimidating and menacing villain that needs time to build up and this movie can set the stage.

Details on the New Gods movie have been scarce, but it can change a lot for the DCEU. If DuVernay is moving forward with the film, well have a superhero film like no other.

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Why The New Gods Movie is Something We Can Look Forward To - TVOvermind

Marvels new Wolverine #1 punctures the bright future of the X-Men – Polygon

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The X-Men have never been the same, and you might wonder if theres even a place for the snarling animal inside Logan in the current Krakoan utopia. Thats the question that Benjamin Percy and Andy Kubert plan to answer with their new Wolverine series, which kicks off today with Wolverine #1.

Writer Benjamin Percy and artist Adam Kubert are a great team for a Wolverine book. Percy is a novelist and comics writer whose first project for Marvel was writing the Wolverine: The Long Night podcast, and he joined the X-books formally with the first wave of Dawn of X titles, writing X-Force. And this doesnt really have bearing on his writing, but the mans natural speaking voice sounds like someone auditioning for the role of Sabretooth.

Kubert, meanwhile, is among the best known draftsmen in superhero comics today, and his first work at Marvel was in 1993s Wolverine series. Hes seen the character through a lot of big changes, including the time Magneto ripped out Logans adamantium, so long-time Wolverine fans should feel in good hands with him.

Wolverine #1 also has a lengthy backup story from Percy and artist Viktor Bogdanovic, whos worked on quite a few DC Comics titles of the past few years, including Action Comics, New Super-Man, and The Silencer.

This first arc seems to be about figuring out how to fit stories about Wolverine one of the most tragic, traumatized, and violent X-Men into the new paradise of Krakoa. As the official solicit text for the issue says With his family all together and safe, Wolverine has everything he ever wanted and everything to lose.

Wolverine is the first solo series of the post-Krakoa X-Men titles, which feels like a conservative choice in a time when the mutant stats quo is in such flux. There are many X-Men fans who remember the days when Marvel comics wielded Wolverines popularity to bolster the sales of any X-book editors could shoe-horn him into, and even more who watched the X-Men movie franchise become increasingly Wolverine-centric as time went on.

It probably doesnt help that the second solo series of the new Dawn of X is for another Character-Who-Saw-X-Treme-Popularity-in-the-90s, Cable. Fortunately, X-readers are also getting a handful off Giant-Size one shot issues thatll focus on single characters or duos, like Jean Grey and Emma Frost, and Magneto and the creative team on Wolverine is probably going to do a great job overall.

If youre interested in reading any X-Men book right now, you really owe it to yourself to read House of X/Powers of X, which set up the new mutant status quo. Also, its one of the best comics of 2019.

Wolverine #1 takes 67 pages to tell two stories in one issue (which is good, because itll set you back $7.99). The main story places Wolverine among the mutants of Krakoa and the islands concerns, and one classic noir Wolverine yarn on the streets of Paris.

The first story, drawn by Kubert, has a lot of visual pop, and sets up Logan to address a problem unique to the new mutant status in an emotional state thats new for him: feeling content and safe. But without spoiling the traditional cliffhanger ending, Logan winds up in just about the most classic Wolverine situation possible. It feels like a step back, but one easily corrected in issue 2.

The second story, drawn by Bogdanovic, is a little more contained. Its also playing on classic Wolverine tropes: He tracks down trouble in a spy-movie locale, meets a pretty lady who turns out to be at the center of the trouble, and a lot of blood is spilled. This story is also clearly a tease for future events, but extremely specific, exciting, gloriously ridiculous future events. I look forward to them with relish.

Mmm, thats a good splash.

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Marvels new Wolverine #1 punctures the bright future of the X-Men - Polygon

The human cost of recycled cotton – The Week Magazine

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Because it's cheap and easy to manufacture, polyester has become today's dominant textile. But polyester, which is essentially made of oil, causes a host of problems. While the material does provide a use for all those recycled plastic water bottles, washing any synthetic fabric whether it's made of raw petroleum or recycled plastics sloughs off microscopic fibers. Those microfibers end up in water supplies and never biodegrade.

Viscose and other wood-pulp fabrics do biodegrade, but making them has traditionally required a host of toxic chemicals. (This is why, in 2013, the FTC came down on brands claiming their bamboo rayon was eco-friendly. It's not.) Meanwhile, despite its higher costs, cotton has always remained everyone's favorite. For thousands of years, some form of the cotton bush has been cultivated in every tropical region, from Africa to the Far East and Central America. In his treatise, Empire of Cotton, Harvard historian Sven Beckert asserts that more than even sugar, cotton almost single handedly supported and financed Britain's colonialism and America's slavery, and ushered in the world's most brutal era of industrialization.

Today, the agro-industrial complex that has grown up around cotton has been dogged with everything from human rights abuses to its own environmental harms. Just the farming of cotton depletes increasingly scarce water supplies and spreads pesticide residue. The half-dried-up Aral Sea has been a public relations nightmare for the industry. So have child labor and farmer suicides in India. Forced Uighur labor in China is just the latest cotton indignity.

Not surprisingly, fashion brands would rather not deal with cotton's PR problems, or its fluctuating costs; thus, the rise of polyester and rayon. Now comes a company like re:newcell with a more efficient way to recycle cotton clothing. But its process is still dependent on cotton. So everyone's still searching for the innovation that all the fashion brands desperately need: a soft, high-performing, non-polluting material that can truly replace cotton.

Disrupting cotton

Summer vacation in Finland has just started, and the leafy campus of AALTO University, outside of Helsinki, is deserted and quiet. Dr. Marja Rissanen, a textile engineer who looks like the Saturday Night Live comedian Rachel Dratch (but more serious), meets me in the lobby of a research building and walks me into a large white lab, past a glass case with spools of thread and the H&M Global Change Award, then into a smaller lab where a small machine sits humming in the corner.

At first, I can't see anything. When I lean closer, I see a hair-thin filament being pushed out of what looks like a fairy-sized pasta maker. The filament drops down into a small vat of water, runs through a clear plastic tube, emerges out of a burbling fountain, then wraps onto a metal cylinder. Whenever you hear about some unexpected plant being made into a silky fabric bamboo, eucalyptus, wheat chaff, orange peels that's the kind of process I'm watching. Rissanen says this technology, called Ioncell, uses a safe solvent called ionic liquid to chemically melt down paper and textile waste, and extrude it into new, silk-like fiber.

I'm looking at the beginning of a shift toward what industry insiders call "circular fashion," an economy where we collect all kinds of old cotton, paper, and other plant waste; add in some (hopefully) benign chemicals; and transform the mix into a new fiber that is made into new clothes.

With northern European governments plowing research money into this utopia, Ioncell is just one of three fiber-recycling technologies Finland has produced. There's also Spinnova's fiber, which is made out of straw; and Infinited Fiber, a project run out of the same campus as Ioncell by Professor Ali Harlin.

An imposing Viking of a man with a large white beard, Harlin meets me, with Rissanen, in a conference room in the same building, seating himself at the table with a ponderous sigh. He pulls a crafter's plastic organizational box out of his bag; each cube of the box holds a different kind of fiber.

With a flourish, Harlin sets a large roll of thread in front of me. "That is cellulose carbamate," he says. Then he hands me a small, white square of woven cloth with an expectant look. I hold the cloth up to my eye, examining it like a cut diamond. I'm flabbergasted. To me, it looks and feels exactly like cotton. Apparently, that was the reaction he was hoping for. "A genuine fake," Harlin says with a laugh. "It's closer to viscose in terms of performance. It wicks away sweat, but isn't as stiff as cotton."

I ask him how he came up with this fabric. "It's a long story," he says, with another sigh. But it soon becomes clear that he relishes telling it, making full use of his expressive eyebrows and leaning back in his chair to wait for my reaction after each pronouncement.

Harlin begins by explaining that viscose, his material's primary competitor, is created by mixing dissolved pulp with carbon disulfide, a chemical that has been linked to insanity, nerve damage, heart disease, and stroke. "If you work in a factory where you are regularly exposed to [carbon disulfide], your brain will swell," Harlin says. (This is why most viscose is now made in Asian countries with more lax safety and environmental standards.)

Created through a technology called Ioncell, this fiber was used in a dress worn by Finlands First Lady. | (Alden Wicker/Courtesy Craftsmanship Quarterly)

Cellulose carbamate, he says, was invented to provide a safer alternative. It requires only urea, a harmless chemical used in wet wipes. Apparently, one factory in the north of Finland produced cellulose carbamate from 1986 to 1993, and with some upgrades, it could have kept going, but a competitor bought it and shut it down. "Textile companies didn't want to take the risk on a new textile," Harlin says. "Polyester was growing, cotton was available."

Around 2000, Harlin joined an academic research team and decided to take one last look at cellulose carbamate before it was shoved into the back of the scientific closet and forgotten. He brought in a pair of his old jeans, chemically broke down the cotton, and produced a light blue fiber. When he brought a sample to the ITMA textile technology conference in Italy, he came home with a list of 60 interested fashion companies.

So his team took some of the machinery from the old carbamate factory up north, installed it in a small pilot plant in Espoo, and started making samples. When compared with cotton, the resulting fiber has a 20 percent lower production cost; a 30-40 percent more efficient dye uptake than any other fiber; uses only 50 liters of water to manufacture a kilogram versus 20,000 liters (on average) per kilogram of cotton; and is close to carbon neutral. Not surprisingly, H&M is an investor here, too.

Harlin believes that many of the old viscose-rayon factories dotting Finland could easily and cheaply be retrofitted to produce Infinited Fiber. And here's the best part: as its name implies, Infinited's process can use any kind of cellulose an infinite number of times. That means all kinds of castoffs old clothes, bedsheets, used cardboard and paper products, even agricultural waste could now be used, reused, and continually reused to make more clothing. This seems like an enormous win-win-win for fashion companies, for Finland, and for the planet.

There is a not-so-small problem, however. After sustaining cultures in myriad corners of the world for thousands of years, the cotton trade is now woven into the very fiber of our global economy. Today, an estimated 300 million people work in the cotton industry on one level or another, which raises a question that nobody has asked: What will happen to the world's cotton farmers?

For the complete version of this story, please go to Craftsmanship Quarterly.

Craftsmanship Quarterly is published by The Craftsmanship Initiative, which highlights artisans and innovators who are working to create a world built to last. Subscriptions and updates via email are free to anyone who signs up for the magazine's newsletters.

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The human cost of recycled cotton - The Week Magazine

Doctor Who Theory: Brendan Is The Timeless Child | Screen Rant – Screen Rant

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The latest episode ofDoctor Who introduced a mysterious new character named Brendan, and he could be one of the Timeless Children. The greatest mystery ofDoctor Who season 12 is the Timeless Child, a mysterious figure who apparently had a profoundeffecton Gallifreyan history."They lied to us," the Master told the Doctor in the second part of season 12's premiere, "Spyfall, Pt. 2." "Everything we were told was a lie. We are not who we think. You or I. The whole existence of our species - built on the lie of the Timeless Child."

The latest episode ofDoctor Who, "Ascension of the Cybermen," introduced a new character named Brendan. He was introduced in a story that seemed to be set in Ireland, a baby found by two adoring parents. At first Brendan seemed to be just an ordinary human being, until the moment he was shot off the edge of a cliff - and got up inexplicably unharmed. The final Brendan scene in the episode revealed Brendan's friends and family are conducting mysterious experiments upon him.

Related:Doctor Who Hints That Captain Jack Is Transforming Into The Face Of Boe

It's possible Brendan is linked to the Lone Cyberman. And yet, his story has deliberately been left unfinished for the season finale, which bears the title "The Timeless Children." The title alone reframes the narrative, suggesting there's more than just one Timeless Child glimpsed by the Doctor in her mysterious visions. And it raises the possibility Brendan is really a Timeless Child.

At first glance, Brendan's story appears to be set entirely in Ireland. But it's worth noting no actual Earth locations are mentioned; there's no reference to Dublin or Cork, to Waterford or Limerick. The assumption that this is Ireland may be a misdirect and a pretty amusing one at that. Countless humans have incorrectly believed Gallifrey was a place in Ireland. Themistake is an established part ofDoctor Who lore, running all the way back to the Tom Baker eraand repeated several times in the relaunched series as well. So it would be quite appropriate for this to actually be ancient Gallifrey, perhaps before the sun expanded and the world's temperature increased, leading Gallifrey to become more arid.

The mysterious Brendan scenes reveal he appears to be immortal. In one key scene, Brendan pursues a thief to the coast and confronts him on the edge of a cliff. To Brendan's horror, the thief pulls a gun, and soon Brendan is stood on the cliffside pleading for his life. His pleas are in vain, and he's shot; the force of the impact blows Brendan off the side of the cliff. Astonishingly, though, he is completely unharmed, even though there's a bullet-hole in his clothes confirming he should be dead. Functionally, it seems Brendan cannot be killed; he is immortal, or - to use a different word - "timeless." What's more, he was found as a child.

It's true Brendan looks nothing like the Timeless Child seen in the Doctor's visions, but that isn't a problem. As noted, the title of the season 12 finale is "The Timeless Children," confirming there could be any number of these mysterious beings. This theory would sit uncomfortably with the first prophecy of the Timeless Child, of course, uttered by the Remnants inDoctor Who season 11, episode 2."We see... further back," the Remnants whispered. "The Timeless Child ... we see whats hidden, even from yourself. The outcast, abandoned and unknown." But the Remnants were digging deep into the Doctor's race memory, so there's no reason to assume they read everything correctly. Besides, the very title of the season 12 finale suggests the Remnant's words are being discounted to a degree.

Related:Doctor Who: Ruth Origin, Timeline & Future Explained

The final scenes with Brendan are even stranger, showing him on the day he's retiring from the police force. To his surprise, he's confronted by his former boss and the chief of police, who don't appear to have aged at all. They then subject Brendan to an unknown technological process they claim will erase his memories. There's no reason to assume that's the limit of their capabilities, however; it's possible they're also leeching his life energy.

Assuming "Ireland" is actually Gallifrey, this would fit with the Master's words. Time Lords practically live forever, barring accidents, but it's possible their functional immortality comes at a hidden cost: that they are draining the life energy from others. This would be the dark secret at the heart of Time Lord civilization, with the founding fathers of Gallifrey hiding these Timeless Children away and concealing the truth from the rest of their race. The Time Lords would then be able to advance technologically at a tremendous rate because each Gallifreyan would essentially have forever to learn and grow.

The idea hasa rich history in literature and is inspired by the Biblical concept of the scapegoat, where onebeing suffers on behalf of others. Fyodor Dostoevsky developed this idea inThe Brothers Karamazov, and in 1891 philosopher William James took it to its logical next step inThe Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. There, he imagined a utopia where "millions [were] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture." Famously, Ursula K. Le Guin further developed this into an actual sci-fi concept inThe Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. She presented Omelas as a paradise with one hidden atrocity; thecity's constant state of serenity and splendor requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery. Residents are made aware of this when they come of age, and most choose to consign themselves to this horrific reality.

Doctor Who's showrunner, Chris Chibnall, is well-known for his love of science fiction, and it would be perfectly fitting for him to adapt an idea that has such an established history in sci-fi. By that reading, the Doctor and the Master are about to learn the horrific truthlying at the heart of Gallifrey: that Gallifrey is Omelas, and the Timeless Children have been the secret source of their countless regenerations. This truth would shake the Doctor to the core and raise fascinating questions aboutDoctor Who's future, given she would refuse to continue preying on the life energy of others.

More:Doctor Who Theory: Season 12's Master Is From The Eleventh Doctor's Era

Star Trek: Picard's Riker Appearance Breaks a Star Trek Actor Record

Tom Bacon is one of Screen Rant's staff writers, and he's frankly amused that his childhood is back - and this time it's cool. Tom's focus tends to be on the various superhero franchises, as well as Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Star Trek; he's also an avid comic book reader. Over the years, Tom has built a strong relationship with aspects of the various fan communities, and is a Moderator on some of Facebook's largest MCU and X-Men groups. Previously, he's written entertainment news and articles for Movie Pilot.A graduate of Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom, Tom is still strongly connected with his alma mater; in fact, in his spare time he's a voluntary chaplain there. He's heavily involved with his local church, and anyone who checks him out on Twitter will quickly learn that he's interested in British politics as well.

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Doctor Who Theory: Brendan Is The Timeless Child | Screen Rant - Screen Rant

Doctor Who recap: series 38, episode nine Ascension of the Cybermen – The Guardian

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Every empire has its time, and every empire falls. But that which is dead can live again in the hands of a believer

Spaceships! I had a pang of excitement at the first of this two-part finale. It had only just struck me that every adventure so far this year has been Earthbound (Orphan 55 turned out to be Earth too, remember). And while that has been mainly fine, its a fizzing, refreshing rush to witness an epic space opera on the grandest scale. With loads of spaceships. And, of course, Cybermen, but more on that below.

It now feels almost comical that we spent Chris Chibnalls first year in charge grumbling about his Who being too simplistic. With one episode to go, it seems almost impossible that all the strands can be tied up. Which, more than likely, is the point. We are in a long game.

Following the chilling events of Villa Diodati, the Doctor attempts to limit the damage of her own haste by following Shelleys instructions to track down the Lone Cyberman to an indeterminate planet in an indeterminate period of the far future, and the grim aftermath of the much-storied Great Cyberwars. They encounter the last seven scraps of humanity desperate refugees who never trained for war but have adapted just the same. Chibnalls woke gene is still in action these people were teachers and nurses. And the desperation of the survivors is horribly palpable.

Team Tardis arrive tooled up with a rescue plan and a multitude of Cyberbusting technology all of which gets destroyed within minutes, causing the Doctor to lose it for putting her friends in more danger than she ever has before. All the while there is a series of flashbacks to period Ireland, portraying the life of an abandoned baby named Brendan who meets a grisly fate on his retirement from a heroic police career at the hands of some spooks the hint being that this was the Lone Cyberman.

From there on, it is, for the most part, a fun, classic Doctor Who, with doomed spaceships and advancing Cybermen abounding. Until things get somewhat psychedelic once again with the discovery of a kindly old wizard man named Ko Shamur, who guards an escape portal to what transpires to be Gallifrey, the Doctors destroyed home planet! Before we can catch our breath, out pops Hot Camp Master, cackling: Be afraid, Doctor, because everything is about to change. A change is coming, but I for one need a lie down.

After nearly two series of moaning about being hungry, Graham is getting good at this stuff. Even Yaz notices, commenting on how far he has come, occupying her typical space between genuinely nice girl and overachieving Doctors pet. Were not lucky, sunshine, were persistent, insists Graham to the survivors. We never give up. The pluck is tangible next to the fatalism that surrounds them.

In fact, all of Team Tardis are at the top of their game right now even Ryan seems momentarily over his wobble about the space-time lifestyle. Which is perhaps why the Doctor so recklessly endangers them in the first place. It is in the nature of a constantly regenerating show that a wo/man largely known for putting friends at risk and turning people into weapons that this is presented as a new idea, but I suppose the nature of mistakes is that you tend to keep making the same ones. And Jodie Whittaker runs with material worthy of her performance. In any case, we all know what they say about pride coming before a fall. Walsh, Gill or Cole have yet to be confirmed for series 13, and Im not feeling optimistic about all of them making it out alive. Or as humans.

The newly pimped-up Cybermen are a rowdier bunch than we have seen before. Gone are the slow, raspy advances, in favour of a fast-moving, laser-happy battle force. I am not entirely sure which version I prefer, but they are more badass than we have seen them since the series returned. They feel like a genuine threat, and the presence of some classic models affords us some minor finale fan service. Their reason for appearing, of course, is to amplify the horror of the Lone ranger the Cyberman that makes other Cybermen scream, as Rovia puts it.

This is where Chibnalls take on the number two monster comes alive. This guy was never finished, from his face to his emotional suppression. He suffers from the human weakness of pride, which makes him all the more dangerous. And when the Doctor chides him about hating his own existence, his anger and hatred being human emotions, it barely touches a (modified) nerve. Also, the flying Cyberdrone heads are cool.

Where to begin? What went on in the Cyberwars to leave everything so devastated? Is Hot Camp Master truly in league with the Cybermen again? And, if so, how did he survive Missys final predicament? In what sense is everything about to change? Because we had almost forgotten about her with everything else going on, will we be meeting Doctor Ruth again? (Theres no sign of her in the trailer for next weeks episode.) Why is Gallifrey at the end of the portal on Ko Shamurs beach? Is that where the humans have all been escaping to? Who is Brendan? Presumably the Lone Cyberman following his unfortunate fate. But is he also the Timeless Child? Will Ryan and Yaz ever get it on? We should discover at least some of that in the finale, The Timeless Children. Good luck with all that, Captain Chibnall.

Along with Whittaker, Chibnall has confirmed he, too, will return for a third series. But, annoyingly, it looks as if we may be in for another significant gap. The showrunner has said the team are just starting to discuss storylines, and that series 13 would air next year sometime, hopefully.

Cockneywatch: Graham actually calls someone cockle.

As wonderful as Julie Graham is, theres so much going on here that the supporting cast dont get much of a chance to shine.

The Doctor used to carry Jelly Babies. Now she carries ginger humbugs.

Were these the Mondasian Cybermen or the Cybus Industries ones?

Its big finale time, in the feature-length special The Timeless Children. The title at least suggests we may get some answers, while the synopsis warns: This is going to hurt.

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Doctor Who recap: series 38, episode nine Ascension of the Cybermen - The Guardian