Since 2020, The New York Times Presents has provided eye-opening documentaries investigating the biggest stories of the day to the public, earning a slew of accolades for their journalism. Fresh off of their Emmy-nominated film Framing Britney Spears, their latest documentary, Move Fast & Vape Things, is a deep dive into the rise of the e-cigarette company Juul, now available to stream on Hulu.
Directed by John Pappas, this latest film covers how Juul grew from a novel idea from two Stanford students to help prevent smoking to a, at one point, multi-billion dollar corporation with addiction controversies of its own. The film includes insider interviews, including with former F.D.A. commissioner Scott Gottlieb and the creative director behind the viral marketing campaign that helped put Juul on the map — and garner lawsuits. The New York Times also got a hold of a new source in the Juul story — a member of a public health journal who resigned upon hearing Juul sponsored an issue defending vaping.
It seems full of stunning revelations regarding how Juul conducted business and switched its image to capitalize on addicts, but also on how the F.D.A. and other sources failed to stop it. Gottlieb’s interview focuses on the regrets he had from his time as commissioner and his impression of Juul and vaping when they rose in popularity. The trailer also highlights the concern that Juul and vaping, in general, would attract kids. Expect a long, illuminating breakdown of how this modern addiction crisis began in the first place.
Move Fast & Vape Things is the eighth film from The New York Times Presents, a series that began as a manner of bringing modern news stories closer to viewers and in great depth. It’s a product of the crew behind The Weekly, a weekly docu-series from The New York Times that visualizes a contemporary news story in a typical half-hour TV show format. Aside from Framing Britney Spears, The New York Times Presents also released the NAACP Image Award-winning film The Killing of Breonna Taylor.
Check out the trailer below for The New York Times’ exploration into the world of vaping, now available to stream on Hulu:
Comedian and television host Conan O’Brien apparently decided to crash the stage last night while his fellow talk show host Stephen Colbert gave his acceptance speech for the 2021 Outstanding Variety Special Emmy award for his 2020 election night special Stephen Colbert’s Election Night 2020: Democracy’s Last Stand Building Back America Great Again Better 2020.
At the L.A. Live Event Deck and after having lost his Emmy for Best Variety Talk Series to John Oliver and his HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the Conan talk-show star merrily followed after Colbert and his group of Late Show employees onstage. O’Brien stayed celebrating onstage as Colbert accepted his Emmy. In response to this, Colbert only laughed as he noticed his fellow TV talk show host on the stage. “Thank you. Wow. I haven’t met some of these people before “ Colbert quipped during his speech and later added “… These people behind me are absolutely — most of the people behind me — really deserve this Emmy right now”.
Amusingly enough, this was not the first time O’Brien was to blame for causing chaos on the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards’ night. Earlier in the show, he interrupted Frank Scherma, the CEO of the Television Awards, beginning to loudly cheer and shout and effectively making the audience shift their attention to his entertaining outburst.
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O’Brien’s behavior was unsurprisingly topic for discussion in the backstage press room where the Emmy winners went with their trophies. Among these were Colbert and Oliver, the latter of which had some words for Conan regarding his award: “He can take it from my cold, dead hands! I realize I said I appreciated him, but not that much.”
This year sadly brought the Conan show on TBS to an end, with its last episode airing back in June.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, The Witcher star Henry Cavill has revealed some more details about his character Geralt of Rivia’s role in the upcoming season. Cavill has never shied away from sharing his thoughts on the book series and game franchise, both of which had captivated him prior to getting his role in the Netflix series — and it turns out he had plenty to share in regards to Geralt’s motivations, relationships with the other characters, and psychology.
“He’s got this deep down White Knight Syndrome,” Cavil said in regards to Geralt’s attitude in the series, “even though every time he acts upon it, it gets him into some serious trouble – and puts him and everyone else in a worse position than initially intended. But with Ciri, she’s definitely bringing out the paternal side of Geralt. While he hasn’t necessarily been someone who craved children, he does take quite naturally to being a protector.”
In the first season of The Witcher, told through anachronistic timelines and perspectives, Geralt is stuck with a reward he has unintentionally won when saving a knight named Duny in the kingdom of Cintra. He claimed the Law of Surprise, which states that the person saved must offer to their savior that which is unknown to both. The reward ended up being an unborn princess Ciri, who had been in her mother’s womb at the time of the pact. An unidentifiable span of time later, the Nilfgaard Empire launches a siege of the city of Cintra, which results in the death of the Queen. Ciri is forced against her will to go on the run. Geralt and Ciri’s paths become definitively intertwined as he searches and ends up successfully managing to locate her, and Season 1 ends with them meeting face-to-face in the forest.
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Cavill says that Season 2 will not have the same timeline intricacies that made Season 1 so puzzling. Instead, he warned fans there may be “multiple cliffhangers throughout a [single] episode.”
Cavill also made mention of new cast member Kim Bodnia, who will debut in the next season of The Witcher as Geralt’s fellow Witcher and father figure Vesemir:
“Kim and I were discussing the emotionality of these characters, and Kim brings some powerful emotion to [the role] and a real sense of soul and heart and connection to the wild and connection to nature. It’s beautiful to watch and beautiful to be a part of. Some of my favorite scenes I got to perform with Kim. He does bring something really special to the character, and I think people are really going to enjoy it.”
In addition to Cavill, returning cast members Anya Chalotra (Yennefer of Vengerberg), Freya Allan (Ciri), and Joey Batey (Jaskier) are joined by Bodnia as well as Paul Bullion as Lambert, a witcher who has a personal involvement in Ciri’s training at Kaer Morhen. The Season 2 cast includes Bridgerton‘s Adjoa Andoh as Nenneke, Outlander‘s Graham McTavish as Dijkstra, Simon Callow and Liz Carr as Codringher and Fenn, Chris Fulton as Rience, Cassie Clare as Philippa Eilhart, and Kevin Doyle as Ba’lian.
The second season of The Witcher is scheduled to premiere on Netflix on December 17, where Season 1 is currently available to stream. Watch the first trailer for Season 2 below:
Universal has released the final trailer for Halloween Kills, which leads us right back to the town of Haddonfield and the aftermath of the events of 2018’s Halloween, which saw Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) narrowly escaping the clutches of Michael Myers — but when the fire department shows up to put out the blaze at Laurie’s safehouse, they unsuspectingly set Myers free to continue his rampage. Halloween Kills will be released simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock on October 15.
If the first Halloween movie of this new trilogy was about the Strode women waging a battle against the Shape, this sequel looks to be about what happens when the entire town of Haddonfield pitches in to help in the war, with the survivors who are prepared to fight back against Michael Myers by any means necessary.
There’s also a big indication that this sequel is going to go back to the heart of the franchise — Myers’ childhood home, where he murdered his sister Judith on that fateful Halloween night — and at least one flashback scene, which includes a blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of someone who looks like Dr. Sam Loomis in his trademark trenchcoat (the late Donald Pleasence).
RELATED: Jamie Lee Curtis Teases Sequel ‘Halloween Kills’: “It’s a Masterpiece”
In addition to Curtis, Greer, and Matichak, Halloween Kills will bring back several more characters from the iconic franchise — Anthony Michael Hall will play a grown-up Tommy Doyle, and Kyle Richards will reprise her role as Lindsey Wallace from the 1978 film. Nancy Stephens also returns to the franchise as Marion Chambers, former assistant to Dr. Loomis.
After the success of 2018’s Halloween, two sequels were announced: Halloween Kills as well as the third film Halloween Ends, which is slated for release on October 14, 2022. The entire trilogy is directed by David Gordon Green, who previously directed such movies as All the Real Girls, Pineapple Express, and Prince Avalanche. Both Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends are written by Green, Danny McBride, and Scott Teems.
Halloween Kills will premiere in theaters and on Peacock on October 15. Check out the final trailer for Halloween Kills below:
Here’s the official synopsis:
Minutes after Laurie Strode (Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) left masked monster Michael Myers caged and burning in Laurie’s basement, Laurie is rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries, believing she finally killed her lifelong tormentor. But when Michael manages to free himself from Laurie’s trap, his ritual bloodbath resumes. As Laurie fights her pain and prepares to defend herself against him, she inspires all of Haddonfield to rise up against their unstoppable monster. The Strode women join a group of other survivors of Michael’s first rampage who decide to take matters into their own hands, forming a vigilante mob that sets out to hunt Michael down, once and for all. Evil dies tonight.
This season, the third episode of Lower Decks’ focused a lot on Mariner and Tendi finally having a girls trip (and it going just as poorly as one might expect). However, one of the episode’s subplots is about their commanding security officer, Shaxs, suddenly showing back up like nothing ever happened. The main bridge crew often shows up in episodes, but what’s complicated about Shaxs is that he died heroically in last year’s season finale. This disturbs Rutherford because the security officer sacrificed his life to save him. And now that Shaxs is back, it’s driving him crazy, not knowing how that ever happened, despite the fact that his friends are brushing the whole thing off.
The semi-joke plot is in reference to the thousands of bridge crew experiences across the Star Trek franchise where characters valiantly risk their lives, sacrifice themselves or randomly die, only to come back later in the episode. This started with Spock sacrificing himself for the ship in The Wrath of Khan, only to come back because of an insane mind-meld and a planet growing him a new body in The Search for Spock. And let’s be honest, considering how often this happens, Starfleet really needs to offer better mental health care for all the weird stuff their officers go through.
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Explaining Shaxs
Let’s explain Shaxs particular circumstances a little more in-depth. When Shaxs died in the season 1 finale, he stayed behind on a Pakled ship to make sure it self-destructed. Initially, Rutherford would have been the one trapped there, but Shax took his place. Several months after his death, he suddenly appears on the ship again. In other Trek series, since the main bridge crew are the main characters, the episode would normally focus on the wild way he came back or him adjusting to the circumstances of the several months he missed. They did replace his position, after all.
However, since this is Lower Decks, the Rutherford and Boimlers of the world have no clue how Shaxs came back. They throw around a few referential theories (transporter pattern buffer accident, restored katra, mirror universe switcheroo, Borg rebuilding, etc.) but Rutherford spends a lot of the episode painfully curious and haunted by how this might’ve happened. And it’s clear Shaxs is dealing with it on a so-so level. He’s spending time with his friends like Billups, but he does jump down the throat of any cadet who asks because they are (justifiably) confused. In the end, Rutherford does ask Shaxs. The Bajoran gives in and offers him the details because his death was intertwined with Rutherford’s survival, but the audience still doesn’t know the exact details. All that’s shared aloud is that it involves some Black Mountain resurrection project and dark, haunting flashbacks.
History of Star Trek Bridge Adventures
As referenced in the episode, Trek characters have been tortured, died, and resurrected in a variety of horrible ways, from violent hallucinations to Borg assimilation to body-hijacking. In a particularly horrifying episode that’s played off casually, Scotty from TOS was trapped in a pattern buffer for hundreds of years. The Enterprise D found him like that, old and confused and out of his own time. He expected his own Enterprise crew to find and save him, but now the majority of his friends (save Spock) are long dead. Even the engineering that he loved is completely out of date, and he’s forced to live out the rest of his life in an unknown galaxy. Yet, the episode is played off to be nostalgic and not the waking terror that it is.
Also, there’s a running joke among fans that the series has a lot of terrible things particularly happen to their everyman transporter chief, Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney). He spends 20 VR years in jail, loses his daughter, gets kidnapped and put on trial by Cardassians. Hewatches his clone die, runs around a dying man’s mind and gets possessed by an evil alien. He also has to fight his wife when something similar happens to her, he goes through time travel and seeing his own death twice, and also has a lot of trauma from the Cardassian war that the writers only mention when it’s convenient. Throughout that, O’Brien gets little to no mental health support or therapy for his many, many traumatic experiences. In the episode right after, he’s not only back to normal duty but almost shipped off on a fun little jaunt to the Mirror Universe of all places.
O’Brien should’ve spent a few weeks on paid leave and months, if not years, in therapy for that, not on transporter pads trying to go to meet his weird Mirror Universe counterpart “Smiley”. Everyone gets that episodic shows are difficult to treat any differently, but if he wasn’t going to be in the episode much anyway, there could’ve been a throwaway line that basically said “O’Brien’s on leave for a little while”, right? That’s better than pretending nothing happened. But, in the end, let’s just hope O’Brien got lots of off-screen treatment for all the messed-up sci-fi shenanigans that broke his brain in two.
The Misuse of Troi (AKA Deanna Deserves a Raise)
Speaking of, one of the largest counterarguments to this idea is the fact that bothTNG and DS9 very deliberately have counselor characters: Ezri Dax and Deanna Troi. However, if you really look at the plots they got and the numbers around their work, the situation doesn’t add up correctly. Let’s take Deanna Troi first. The average therapist sees 25-45 patients a week. If the entire bridge crew just had a rotating schedule of seeing her once a week, that wouldn’t be so bad. However, it’s implied she’s the only counselor on the Enterprise D. And how many people are on that ship? 1,012. 907 of those are crewmembers, while the rest are their families. To put that in perspective, if Counselor Troi was seeing 45 patients a week and doing monthly check-ins with the entire 907-person crew, it would take roughly 3 weeks to accomplish that. If anyone needed to be seen more often or was working through a tough time, that would easily overload her schedule.
And considering how many horrible, traumatic things people watched on screen, it’s impossible that Counselor Troi could properly care for everyone on the ship. Not unless people weren’t going to therapy as much as they should, at least. If Captain Picard is any example, it seems even deeply traumatized people might be avoiding the counseling they need. Throughout the series, the only people we see Troi regularly counseling or advising are Lieutenant Barclay, Beverly Crusher, one-off characters of the week, and Worf and Alexander to build their father-son relationship. While all those sessions that fans do see are proactive, they pale in comparison to the number of people who should be coming to her office. If fans take into account how much Picard still suffers from his Borg past in his new series, perhaps he could’ve used a few more sessions.
Ultimately, either Counselor Troi isn’t able to convince people to come to her office, or she is too overwhelmed by the large crew to get to everyone who needs it. Similarly, Ezri counsels the crew in her last season of DS9, but one of her only real “cases” that the show focuses on is Garak’s claustrophobia. While that was a positive interaction, she rarely deals with the war trauma that DS9 Starfleet members must face. The 300 permanent residents of the station are as bad as Troi’s numbers, but it is still a lot for one counselor. And many other series don’t even have a counselor, despite all the therapy their people need, too.
Trek With Therapy
Therapy and mental health care have shown to be very important parts of maintaining a healthy human being, especially as people become more and more cerebral. So, if it helps modern folks, it definitely should be an absolute necessity for the dynamic officers of the future. Perhaps a bit more therapy would mean O’Brien would stop throwing out his shoulder in the holodeck as a distraction. Maybe Worf and Alexander would have a functioning family relationship. Captain Archer might have processed his issues with Vulcans better and treated T’Pol with more respect. Theoretically, Shaxs might have been able to come back without his entire existence turning into an uncomfortable taboo. Kurtzmann-era shows do seem to be trying to address personal trauma more, whether it’s Picard’s long service history or Burnham’s many childhood traumas. However, exploring those with a character is different than getting them therapy.
From TOS to Discovery, Trek characters are all a mess. So, really, it’s about time that Starfleet invests in more therapists so that their officers stop getting their minds casually snapped in half. And if it does happen? Well, maybe acknowledging that would make a bit more sense than pretending they are perfectly healthy, because characters like Shaxs and O’Brien and Picard certainly aren’t.
