In terms of references, if “No Small Parts” was the only episode of Star Trek you’d ever seen, you would have been given a crash course on the entire franchise. Seriously, if you wanted to explain to someone, very quickly, what Star Trek was about, it would probably be easier to just have them watch the 26-minutes of the Star Trek: Lower Decks finale, “No Small Parts.” The Easter eggs and references start with The Original Series and end up with a big shout-out to the TNG movies, the infamous Enterprise finale, and one officially licensed Star Trek toy that is somehow now canon....

Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Episode 9 Well, the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Picard Season 2 is a thing that we have all now watched. Plagued by many of the same problems that have repeatedly cropped up throughout the rest of the season—poor pacing, ill-timed flashbacks, and a bizarre disregard for the basic rules of time travel—”Hide and Seek” is an hour that has plenty of action, but a deeply messy and often pointless plot, as Picard and friends face off against the Borg Queen, a bunch of random paramilitary types she’s assimilated, and Adam Soong, who is also there for some reason....

In 2021, during the filming of Star Trek: Picard season two, Jonathan Frakes was working behind the camera as a director, making sure Alison Pill’s transformation into a new kind of Borg Queen made sense. In between shots, showrunner Terry Matalas confronted Frakes with a jarring question: “Are you ready to play Riker?” Frakes was caught off guard. He was always ready to play Riker. In 2020, he returned as Will Riker in the first season of Picard and cameoed as the voice of Riker in Lower Decks....

When Stranger Things Season 2 hit Netflix in 2017, I learned to hate the binge-model. Before I could catch my breath, I was already aware that it would take the entire season for Eleven to reunite with the boys, and I felt heartbroken. I didn’t mind the spoilers, I was just more frustrated that there wasn’t time to process all the twists and turns. From that point on (and maybe before) I rebelled, sometimes loudly, against the Netflix binge-model....

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode 3 Like the classic episodes “The Naked Time” or “The Deadly Years,” Strange New Worlds has entered into Star Trek-storytelling mode all about a weird alien virus sweeping the ship. From The Next Generation to Deep Space 9 and beyond, every Trek show needs an episode like this, and in “Ghosts of Illyria,” we get a great one. When a virus that’s transmitted by light starts to make everyone lose it, it’s up to Number One to sort everything out....

In the surprisingly epic, and emotionally affecting Season 2 finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks — “First First Contact” — writer and creator Mike McMahan pulls us back to another era of Trek history and reveals what happened to a character who, in some ways, qualifies as the first The Next Generation Lower Decker, well before the actual TNG episode “Lower Decks” ever aired. At the start of “First First Contact,” Captain Freeman reveals the USS Cerritos will be going on a joint mission with the USS Archimedes commanded by her “old friend” Captain Sonya Gomez....

In No Man’s Land, Raffi wants to be more emotionally vulnerable but it’s hard for Seven, her time with the Borg and the ensuing prejudice she’s faced back on Earth a huge stumbling block. Despite the problems the two are committed to each other, though they won’t be setting up a house with a white picket fence anytime soon. Both Ryan and Hurd felt this edge to their character’s relationship was important when coming into season 2 of Picard....

The Bad Batch Episode 1 During the opening scene of The Bad Batch, the new animated series set during the rise of the Empire, the The Clone Wars logo burns away. At once blatant marketing and a promise of something new, the logo neatly explains what The Bad Batch is. As Jennifer Corbett (producer and head writer) and Brad Rau (producer) said during a press junket ahead of the May 4 premiere, this show is a spiritual successor and also a direct sequel to The Clone Wars....

Steven Universe Season 5 Episode 17/18 Can’t go back is right, jeez. I’ve spoken before about Steven Universe slowly dolling out answers but there was always a sense that it wasn’t enough. That all we were getting were breadcrumbs. There’s nothing wrong with that but now we’ve just been gorged on a full meal in half an hour. There’s a lot to process and more answers are coming. Before we get into the meat of this let’s look at the appetizer of this two parter, the Lapis plot....

Superman and Lois Episode 5 This is the first episode of Superman & Lois that maybe felt like it was spinning its wheels a little. To be fair, this entire season has been unfolding at what can best be described as a deliberate pace. It’s an understandable decision since the entire concept of this show is meant to take fans of the Superman mythos pretty far out of their comfort zones, so there’s still a lot of heavy lifting that has to get done each week, especially as we get used to the Kent family, the Cushings, the history of Smallville, and more....

A quick disclaimer: I’ve omitted (but not forgotten) both of the Man of Steel’s movie serials, Superman (1948) and Atom Man vs. Superman (1951), simply because, despite playing in movie houses, they aren’t feature films, and the serial format played by a different, rather archaic, set of rules. I’ve also left out George Reeves’ debut as the Last Son of Krypton, Superman and the Mole Men (1951). While this one also played in theaters, its 60 minute runtime doesn’t qualify as a feature film, and it’s really a glorified pilot for the (excellent) Adventures of Superman TV series....

Over the course of 15 years, Supernatural aired an extraordinary 327 episodes, every single one of them starring the same two people, a quite incredible achievement (there were two attempts at backdoor pilots, but both featured Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles at least briefly). In 327 episodes, of course, there have been some stinkers, and there have been moments of brilliance. Supernatural did scary episodes, gross-out episodes, funny episodes, tragic episodes, tragically funny episodes and episodes set on its own soundstage....

The beginning recap intro started with a Dean voiceover, which basically sounded like “If you haven’t been watching this show religiously up to this point, you’re about to be real confused.” And it’s true. With a long run like this show has, the avid viewer is rewarded with references to the past and old characters and once-forgotten storylines being brought back front and center. For the montage of intro sequences, they added a lot of Scooby-Doo, which had no bearing on the season story arc, and shots of the Wayward Sisters....

Then they improbably brought Earth’s Strangest Heroes, Doom Patrol, to life in a convincingly weird 15-episode series of the same name. Now, DC Universe has reached into the drawer to pull another beloved character in the DC library: Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing was created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson for DC Comcis in 1971. In the ‘80s, Alan Moore’s hallowed run on Swamp Thing became a classic that brought many wayward fans back to comics....

While sci-fi cinephiles saw Terminator 2 coming from the time the film’s tightly-scheduled principal photography commenced in October of 1990, the sequel was a surprise to the general public when its first teaser trailers ambushed big screen audiences. After all, this was a time before the prevalence of the internet (specifically YouTube) made the frequent release of trailers into a commonplace, slow-burn promotional strategy. Instead, the $102 million-budgeted film had to rely on theatrical trailers and television spots, which effectively spoiled the film’s narrative notion of Schwarzenegger’s new T-800 being the hero this time around, poised to battle Robert Patrick’s groundbreaking, visually-perplexing T-1000....

Truth be told, there have only been a handful of Spider-Men, and each has left a strikingly distinct and unique spin on the old Web-Head. For that reason, we’ve decided to look back at the most renowned wallcrawlers and reexamine what each one brought to the table. Danny Seagren The first live action Spider-Man came from a place you might not expect: an educational series from the same people behind Sesame Street....

We spoke to Robert Pattinson for our The Batman cover story in the new issue of Den of Geek magazine and he told us what it was like putting on a prototype of the suit for the very first time. “I think I immediately started doing somersaults in it just because you could,” Pattinson says with his signature mischievous smile. The actor calls the suit a vast improvement over from what’s come before....

Movies of this kind are inherently meta, exploring the conventions of the genre or reimagining previous works from a different perspective. They may be works of fiction, but films of this kind provide fans with what is seen as a raw and unfiltered look at how the sausage is made. The films within the films, meanwhile, often serve as a comment on the wider movie as a whole, occasionally poking fun at the tropes associated with the genre....

The Boys season 3 opens in a place where the show hasn’t dared tread before: the cinema. After filming a whole superhero movie in season 2, The Boys now entreats viewers to the fruits of Vought International and director Adam Bourke’s (P.J. Byrne’s) labor in the first five minutes of season 3. And what a five minutes they are! Dawn of the 7 is an Avengers or Justice League-style superhero teamup film starring the superpowered members of Vought’s premier team....

Ever since satire was invented people have loved to claim that it’s dead. The impulse is understandable as sometimes the world is so intensely bizarre that there doesn’t appear to be much point in comedically exaggerating it further. Articles claiming that the noble comedic art is obsolete dominate the internet right now just as much as the topic surely saturated discussion in Roman baths and coliseums. What all of those discussions miss, however, is one very important point: The Boys....