The defamation case between former Kotaku Senior Editor Alyssa Mercante and gaming YouTuber Jeff Tarzia, known online as SmashJT, has been moving through federal court since December 2024. The actual docket looks nothing like what the commentary sphere has been reporting.

Sites like That Park Place and Geeks+Gamers, along with Tarzia himself, framed this lawsuit as a slow-motion humiliation for Mercante: a frivolous SLAPP suit crumbling under Ron Coleman’s motions. One May 2025 piece declared the case “increasingly looks like what it is.” A July 2025 That Park Place article titled Tarzia’s latest filing the “final filing” and treated dismissal as a foregone conclusion. Tarzia has updated his audience across multiple videos and Substack posts with a consistent narrative: Mercante is losing, the case is nearly dead, Coleman is winning at every turn.

The federal docket for Mercante v. Tarzia, case 1:24-cv-08471 in the Eastern District of New York, does not support that narrative.

Read more

The Texas State Board of Education voted 9-4 on June 26 to add Bible passages to the required reading list for all K-12 public school students in the state. Elementary students will read picture-book versions of David and Goliath and Daniel in the Lion’s Den. Fifth graders will study sections of Exodus. Seventh graders will read the Twenty-Third Psalm. High schoolers will study Adam and Eve and the parable of the Prodigal Son. The passages sit alongside Charles Dickens, E.B. White, Shel Silverstein, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elie Wiesel on a list of approximately 200 mandated texts. The changes take effect in the 2030-31 school year. Texas parents retain the right to opt their children out.

Subscribe now

Tim Russ saw this news and went to X.

“The Texas (Christian Nationalist) School board has mandated that Bible passages will soon be required reading in public schools. Not only is it a blatant violation of the Constitution but more importantly, it’s replacing actual science and history with mythology.”

He followed up: “Christian Nationalists keep arguing that the country was founded on Christian principles. It was not!! The founding fathers omitted any reference to religion in the constitution for an obvious reason. I’m sure the Texas schools won’t be reading from the Koran or Torah also.”

Both posts contain factual errors as to the nature of America and even what’s going on with this ruling.

Texas is teaching the Bible as literature, alongside Dickens and Vonnegut, in an English and reading curriculum. It is not replacing science with mythology. No science class is affected. No history class is being restructured around Genesis. The required reading list is exactly that, a literature reading list that includes biblical texts alongside secular ones. Russ either did not read the actual policy or chose to misrepresent it.

The constitutional claim requires more unpacking because it is more widely believed and more consequential. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Two things are immediately apparent to anyone who reads that sentence carefully. First, it applies to Congress, not to state boards of education. The Fourteenth Amendment extended many federal constitutional protections to the states through incorporation, but the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has evolved significantly and continues to be contested. Second, the clause prohibits the establishment of religion, meaning the government cannot create or impose an official state church. It does not prohibit the teaching of religious texts as literature, history, or cultural context.

The founders Russ invokes as evidence of secular intent were operating in a country whose colonial governments were explicitly religious by design. Massachusetts Bay was founded on Puritan theology. Virginia had an established Anglican Church with state tax support well into the founding era. Connecticut’s Congregational Church was state-supported until 1818. The idea that the founders were constructing a secular public square is a reading of American history that requires ignoring the religious establishment that every single original colony maintained.

What the founders were actually protecting against was the kind of ecclesiastical tyranny that had plagued Europe, a state church with the power to imprison, tax, and execute dissenters. Thomas Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation between church and state” phrase does not appear in the Constitution. It appears in a private letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, written to assure Baptists that the federal government would not favor Congregationalists in Connecticut over them. The Danbury Baptists were not asking Jefferson to keep religion out of public life. They were asking him to keep the government from picking one denomination over another. That is a very different thing from what Russ is describing.

The current interpretation of the Establishment Clause as requiring the removal of all religious expression from public education is a 20th-century judicial development, not an original founding intent. It emerged primarily from Engel v. Vitale in 1962, which prohibited government-sponsored school prayer, and Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963, which prohibited state-mandated Bible reading as devotional practice. Neither case prohibits teaching biblical texts as literature. The Supreme Court has explicitly held that “the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities” and that its inclusion in an academic curriculum is constitutional. Teaching the Sermon on the Mount as a literary text alongside Dickens is not the same as opening school with a devotional prayer.

Texas is also a sovereign state with the right to set its own educational standards. The federal government does not control curriculum. The Texas State Board of Education is the elected body whose mandate includes precisely this kind of decision. If Russ or anyone else believes the policy violates the Constitution, the courts are available.

Russ is not engaging with any of this. He is posting that the founders were secular, that Texas is teaching mythology in science class, and that the policy is a “blatant violation of the Constitution,” three claims that range from oversimplified to factually wrong.

This is not the first time Russ has posted about religion with this level of inaccuracy and heat. In 2021, following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, he posted: “The Taliban are as fanatical about their beliefs and culture as the millions of people right here in the U.S. who believe in religion, conspiracy theories, and alternate reality.” Equating American Christians to the Taliban in a post about a regime that was executing women for showing their faces. In 2019, he responded to a Christian commenter on abortion by writing: “You fanatics don’t give a damn about anybody AFTER they’re born, never have and never will.” In response to Sarah Sanders saying God wanted Trump to be president, Russ declared that America already has “Sharia law... Christian Sharia law. There is no difference.” In 2024, he posted an image suggesting he would drink Drano if Trump won the election. In September 2025, days after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, Russ posted an image of Captain Kirk with the caption “The only Kirk that matters.” His Voyager co-star Robert Beltran had called Kirk “first a Christian” who “spread the gospel with patience and love.” William Shatner, who actually played Captain Kirk, expressed condolences and said “assassination is so senseless.” Russ made a joke of a horrific death.

Most Star Trek fans who know Russ know him as Tuvok, the Vulcan security officer on Voyager whose entire character was built around logic, discipline, and emotional restraint. Tuvok’s defining quality was the ability to set aside personal feeling in order to think clearly. He would not have approved of his actor’s X account.

Texas teaching the Prodigal Son alongside Great Expectations is not the imposition of a theocracy. It is a state board making a curricular decision that reflects the overwhelming influence of Western Christianity on the literature, history, law, and culture that public school students are supposed to understand.

Subscribe now

First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Celia Rose Gooding Turns Trek Long Island Into a Political Rally: Joy, Resistance, and “The Powers That Be”

Trek Long Island 2026 was billed as a joyful conversation with Celia Rose Gooding. What it became was an extended political address, with the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds actress using her convention panel to deliver commentary on black joy as political resistance, institutional oppression, and the ongoing “discourse” around the direction of Star Trek itself.

Gooding, who plays the young Uhura in Strange New Worlds, sat down with Tamia of the Sci-Fi Sisters for what started as a warm personal conversation about joy and creativity. It didn’t stay there long.

Read more

Brianna Wu, also known as Literally Wu, the trans activist most famous for riding GamerGate to a political career, posted a lengthy Facebook statement this week endorsing a recent New York Times essay arguing that gay and lesbian Americans have had their movement taken over by people who have nothing in common with them.

Read more

Dwayne Johnson told Esquire magazine this month that he is done talking about politics publicly. He told them, “What I have learned through experience is that I need to keep — need, not want — the main thing the main thing. And the main thing for me, the thing that in the morning I swing my legs out of bed and I run towards, is creating. It’s art. It’s storytelling. I’ve learned I’m going to keep my politics to myself.”

Read more

Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton has had a patern of angrily lashing out over politics over the years, and he seems to be getting worse with each passing month. This one might be something for the FBI to get involved with, because he and other Star Trek actors have been calling for violence.

Read more

Wilson Cruz played Dr. Hugh Culber across five seasons of Star Trek: Discovery. We covered covered his April 2026 Facebook posts in which he called for Trump’s death and shared imagery of James Comey suggesting the President should be assassinated. Now Cruz is back on Facebook, and this time he came after me directly.

Read more

Gary Buechler, known online as Nerdrotic, posted a photo this week of a shuttlecraft seat from Star Trek: Starfleet Academy now sitting in his home. His caption: “I have taken possession of a screen used shuttle seat from Starfleet Academy. You can call it a trophy. I would call it a scalp.”

Subscribe now

The chair came from the 403 Auction fire sale Paramount ran in April, quietly selling off the entire physical inventory of Starfleet Academy and Star Trek: Discovery through two auction rounds totaling nearly 700 lots. Notable items included turbolift set pieces from the USS Athena at $10,000 each, shuttlecraft seats in the $2,500-$2,700 range, lab jars, terrarium displays, and door frames. The turbolift pieces received zero bids. The sets that Paramount spent millions building to celebrate Star Trek’s 60th anniversary got auctioned off alongside a note that buyers needed their own vehicle for pickup because no shipping was available due to “tight auction deadlines.”

Showrunner Michelle Paradise described the sale to The Hollywood Reporter as “deaccessioning narrative infrastructure.” The chair in Nerdrotic’s living room is what narrative infrastructure looks like when it sells for $2,700.

Starfleet Academy was canceled after two seasons. Paramount+ greenlit it in November 2021 as a youth-skewing Star Trek series set at the Federation’s flagship training school. The show starred Mary Wiseman, Celia Rose Gooding, and Bella Poarch, and was produced by Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout. It debuted on Paramount+ in late 2025. When Paramount released the first episode for free on YouTube to drive subscriptions, it peaked at approximately 1,300 concurrent live viewers.

Nerdrotic, watching this number, ran an experiment. On January 15, 2026, he set up a camera pointed at a plastic Spock action figure sitting in an empty chair and started a livestream. He beat the Starfleet Academy premiere’s peak concurrent viewership in under three minutes. His stream ran 52 minutes and peaked at 3,389 concurrent viewers — nearly three times what Paramount’s flagship franchise launch managed with no barrier to entry. He posted his own summary afterward: “My live stream with a Spock action figure in an empty chair beat Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s 1300+ peak live viewers on YouTube in under 3 minutes.”

The moment made national television. Greg Gutfeld mentioned it on his show, telling his 3.3 million nightly viewers: “Some dude, a YouTuber, live streamed a Spock action figure sitting in an empty chair and it got three times more viewers.”

Nerdrotic responded: “My Spock action figure made it on the Gutfeld show. Thanks for the shout out. Sincerely, Some dude, a YouTuber.”

Paramount quietly made the Starfleet Academy YouTube premiere private shortly after.

The Critical Drinker’s review of the show pulled 403,000 views in 14 hours with a 99% like ratio. Nerdrotic’s own review more than doubled the premiere’s total viewership within a single day. The show’s trailer was ratioed. Its YouTube premiere was private. Its sets were auctioned off in Toronto with a no-shipping policy. The actress Gina Yashere, a cast member, spent the show’s final weeks posting about “fragile, angry White men” and the show evaporated without a third season.

Alex Kurtzman produced every incarnation of NuTrek since Discovery launched in 2017. Nine years. Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Starfleet Academy. The franchise that in 2017 he inherited with existing goodwill and a built-in audience is now a fire sale in a Toronto warehouse. Strange New Worlds has already had its sets torn down. There is no Star Trek in production anywhere.

Subscribe now

When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: GraphicAudio Completes Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta Saga, One of the Best Military Space Operas Most Readers Missed

Brendan Wayne, one of the stunt performers who physically portrays Din Djarin inside the Mandalorian suit, gave an interview to MovieWeb this week and used the opportunity to call a portion of the Star Wars fanbase toxic. His film, The Mandalorian and Grogu, has now grossed $155.8 million domestically on a $165 million production budget, making it the lowest-grossing Star Wars theatrical release ever and almost certain to lose money before marketing costs are added.

Subscribe now

Wayne went in on the fans as we’ve seen many do before: “It’s interesting to see people who are pulling against the franchise they love, just because of their ownership. That can be 100% toxic.” He added: “They didn’t ruin your Star Wars. It’s our Star Wars.”

Nobody staked out a more direct ownership claim than Wayne in the same breath he accused fans of the same impulse.

The “toxic fans” accusation is not a new instrument in Lucasfilm’s communication toolkit. It has been the franchise’s standard deflection from creative and commercial failure for nearly a decade, and its deployment this week follows a well-worn pattern.

In 2018, The Last Jedi directed by Rian Johnson generated the most sustained fan backlash in franchise history. Johnson called critics “manbabies” on Twitter. When actress Kelly Marie Tran deleted her Instagram following harassment, the resulting coverage cemented the “toxic fan” narrative as the frame through which all Star Wars criticism would be processed going forward. Johnson’s framing: “A few unhealthy people can cast a big shadow on the wall.” Kathleen Kennedy adopted the same framing. When she spoke to The New York Times in 2024 ahead of The Acolyte, she said female stars face disproportionate fan attacks “because of the fan base being so male dominated.” Her response to criticism of The Acolyte’s casting choices: “I stand by my empathy for Star Wars fans. But I want to be clear: anyone who engages in bigotry, racism or hate speech, I don’t consider a fan.”

The Acolyte was canceled after one season. The Mandalorian and Grogu opened below Captain America: Brave New World. It dropped 70% in its second weekend. It is now in sixth place.

The problem here is that Disney and Lucasfilm have spent ten years applying the toxic-fan label to the much broader category of viewers who simply did not want to watch what Disney was making. Those people do not post harassment. They do not leave nasty comments. They stop buying tickets. They cancel Disney+. They do not buy the toys. Their opinions register only in box office data and subscription numbers, where they are impossible to dismiss as a vocal minority of bad actors.

The Mandalorian and Grogu’s opening weekend number is the sum of every person who chose not to show up. There were tens of millions of them. They were not posting harassment on social media. They were doing something worse, from Disney’s perspective: they were staying home.

The trajectory tells the story clearly. Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened to $248 million in 2015. The Last Jedi opened to $220 million in 2017. Rise of Skywalker opened to $178 million in 2019. Solo opened to $84 million in 2018. The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $81.7 million in 2026. The line is not ambiguous. With each installment, Disney’s claim that the backlash came from a toxic fringe became harder to sustain against the arithmetic of the actual audience.

Wayne is not a studio executive. He is a performer with a long personal investment in this property, and his frustration is understandable on a human level. But the interview he gave arrives at the same moment as his film’s third-weekend grosses, and the argument he made lands differently when the film has lost money on the franchise’s most beloved characters.

Kathleen Kennedy left Lucasfilm. The Acolyte was canceled. The Mandalorian and Grogu bombed. Every project that came wrapped in the “toxic fans” defense has underperformed or been discontinued. The audience that Disney spent ten years calling toxic was the audience that built this franchise and funded the $4 billion acquisition price that Disney paid George Lucas in 2012.

“It’s our Star Wars” is a fair statement. It is also a statement the box office has been making every weekend for three years, and the message it keeps sending is not the one Wayne intends.

Subscribe now

First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Russell T Davies Says Doctor Who Wasn’t Cancelled

Steven Spielberg opened his mouth on CBS this week and said something no major filmmaker has said quite so directly in a mainstream interview.

Asked by host Ben Mankiewicz whether aliens have been here, Spielberg did not deflect. He answered.

Read more

Anson Mount, who plays Captain Christopher Pike on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, has a pattern. He attacks Christians and conservatives on social media, watches the backlash build, and then either deletes the post and apologizes or doubles down. He did both last December when he mocked Christmas as a pagan festival and then quietly walked it back. This week he did neither. He picked a fight with a Christian journalist, dropped the “white fragility” accusation, then bragged about getting blocked — all six weeks before Strange New Worlds Season 4 premieres on Paramount+ on July 23.

Subscribe now

The exchange started when Michael O’Fallon, founder of Sovereign Nations and a well-known voice in conservative Christian circles, posted a detailed thread about the Southern Baptist Convention’s adoption of Critical Race Theory concepts between 2019 and 2022. O’Fallon’s post documented a 2020 panel at Calvary Church of Clearwater, Florida in which Pastor Zelvis Applin endorsed Robin DiAngelo’s book “White Fragility” with the endorsement of Pastor Willy Rice. O’Fallon’s broader argument: the SBC spent several years running what he described as “Maoist-style spiritual struggle sessions” in which church members were told they harbored unconscious bias and white fragility, and none of the pastors involved have acknowledged the harm or faced discipline.

This is a real and well-documented controversy inside the SBC. The debate over Critical Race Theory’s infiltration into evangelical institutions consumed the denomination from 2019 through the mid-2020s and contributed to significant membership exodus. O’Fallon has been one of the most persistent voices documenting it.

Anson Mount’s reply to this thread: “You have just provided THE example of white fragility. Congratulations.”

That is a Star Trek actor, six weeks before his show’s new season, using the exact terminology of the ideology being criticized to dismiss the person criticizing it. The circularity is the point — “white fragility” as a concept is designed to make any denial of it into proof of it. O’Fallon declined to engage with that framing. His reply: “By providing the warning regarding the propagation of Marxian ideologies that are purposed to tear our nation apart? Go pound sand.”

O’Fallon then blocked Mount, who replied angrily by announcing it publicly, posting: “This coward just blocked me. Incapable of standing up the intellect of an actor apparently. Par for the course apparently for someone who throws around accusations of ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘mao-ism’. He must think that makes him sound smart. Idiot.”

Several things are worth noting about that post.

The post confirms that Mount is aware of the specific terminology O’Fallon uses in “cultural Marxism” and “Mao-ism,” which means he read the original thread. He was not confused about what O’Fallon was arguing. He read a detailed account of Critical Race Theory concepts being pushed through Southern Baptist churches, called it white fragility, and then called the journalist who documented it an idiot.

Third, the “intellect of an actor” framing is doing real work here. Mount is invoking professional status to claim authority in a theological and historical debate about what happened inside the Southern Baptist Convention. O’Fallon has spent years researching and documenting this specific controversy. Mount has played a starship captain on television.

This is not Mount’s first episode. In November 2024, after Trump’s election, he told a meteorologist who asked Hollywood to stop alienating half its audience to “F*** off,” then bragged about losing 6,000 followers. When a fan pushed back and told him to go to Bluesky with the other celebrities, he posted that he would stay on X so he could “brainwash your children into transgenderism and perform the delicate data-mining operations that will allow us to steal the next election for AOC.” He framed that as a joke. In December 2025, he posted that Christmas is a pagan festival, received significant blowback from Christian fans, and deleted the post without explanation.

The Christmas post deletion was notable because Mount did not apologize — he simply removed the evidence. The pattern is consistent: attack, gauge reaction, retreat or double down depending on the audience response. This week he doubled down.

Strange New Worlds occupies a complicated position in the current Trek landscape. It launched to genuine goodwill from fans who had rejected Discovery and Picard, and its first two seasons largely avoided the most egregious identity politics of the Kurtzman era. The show is not without its political moments — Season 1 aired a cold open featuring news footage of January 6th as an explicit historical warning, connecting Pike’s dilemma about the future to real-world political events in a way that was not subtle. But it mostly functioned as a show about space exploration with recognizable characters, which put it well ahead of its Kurtzman-produced predecessors.

Season 4 premieres July 23. It is the penultimate season before the show wraps after Season 5. The audience that gave Strange New Worlds its reputation for being the most watchable Trek of the modern era is the same audience Mount has been telling to go pound sand since November 2024.

Paramount+ needs Strange New Worlds to perform. It is one of the streamer’s few remaining genuine draws. The franchise’s other properties are gone, stalled, or canceled. This is the flagship. And its lead actor spent Tuesday morning calling a Christian journalist a coward and an idiot for objecting to Critical Race Theory being run through Baptist churches.

Subscribe now

If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: #SaveStargate Trends Globally as Fans Storm Amazon

A New Mexico jury deliberated two hours on June 4 before returning a $13 million verdict in favor of the family of Nichelle Nichols against Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City. The verdict found the hospital 40% liable and Dr. Tsering Sherpa 60% liable for Nichols’ death on July 30, 2022. She was 89.

Subscribe now

Nichols’ estate attorney Theresa Hacsi described what happened in the final hours of Nichols’ life: “At the end of the day, Nichelle Nichols had a heart attack that was missed. That’s why she died.”

According to the lawsuit, Nichols was admitted to Gila Regional with sudden heart problems and lab results consistent with acute heart failure. Instead of transferring her to a facility with a cardiology unit, the hospital placed her in an observation unit and discharged her hours later. She died seven hours after discharge, at an assisted living facility, without ever receiving a complete cardiac evaluation.

Hacsi said the hospital’s own systems discouraged the transfer: “Instead of transferring her, which is what should have happened because she needed a full cardiac workup, what they did was they discharged her because of the systems in place at the hospital that discouraged providers from transferring patients.”

The $13 million verdict is a moral vindication. The family may only collect $400,000 under New Mexico’s Tort Claims Act, which caps damages against governmental hospital facilities. Gila Regional Medical Center is a county-owned facility, which places it under that cap regardless of what the jury awarded. The gap between $13 million and $400,000 is not a legal error. It is the deliberate ceiling New Mexico law places on what families can recover from publicly owned institutions.

A second lawsuit is pending against HealthTech Management Service, the for-profit Oregon-based company that operated the hospital under contract at the time of Nichols’ death. That case is set for trial later in 2026 and is not subject to the same governmental cap. The HealthTech case is where the family’s realistic path to meaningful financial recovery runs.

Nichols played Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on Star Trek: The Original Series from 1966 to 1969 and reprised the role across six theatrical films. She was among the first Black women to hold a starring role on network television. The famous interracial kiss between Uhura and Captain Kirk in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” remains one of American television’s most discussed moments. Nichols later worked with NASA for decades as a recruiter.

The Star Trek community loved her because she showed up for them consistently for fifty years, at conventions, at signings, and in the small interactions fans remember long after they forget the famous ones. She was genuine with her audience in a way that the franchise’s current corporate stewardship rarely manages.

Hacsi said of the verdict: “What this verdict does is it changes the ending of Nichelle Nichols’ story.”

The jury agreed with the family. The law will limit what that agreement is worth financially. The second lawsuit against HealthTech may change that.

Nichelle Nichols deserved better from the hospital that failed her.

Subscribe now

When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: How to Fight for Stargate - Here Is What You Can Do Right Now

Andy Weir, the bestselling author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, used a Reddit AMA on r/IAmA under his longtime username u/sephalon to take direct aim at three of the most controversial endings in modern television. When user u/homerj35 asked, “Hi Andy! If you could rewrite the ending to any book/movie which book/movie would you choose?”, Weir went off-script.

“Can I pick TV shows instead? I’m going to say yes,” Weir wrote. “I would rewrite the entire final season of ‘Gam of Thrones.’ That’s a given.”

That was the opener. Weir then pitched alternate endings for Breaking Bad and Dexter, with a twist nobody saw coming.

Subscribe now

“But more importantly: I would have changed the ending of ‘Breaking Bad’ to have Walter get away, and I would have changed the end of ‘Dexter’ to reveal that Dexter,” Weir continued, with the punchline being that Dexter tracks Walter down at the logging camp. The two endings stitch into a single crossover that audiences never got and now never will.

The pitch lands for a reason. The actual Game of Thrones finale collapsed under the weight of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss rushing eight seasons of buildup into six episodes. The actual Breaking Bad finale sent Walter White out in a blaze of self-aware nobility that some fans found earned and others found tidy. The actual Dexter finale, which aired in 2013, shipped Dexter Morgan off to a lumberjack life in the Pacific Northwest in a sequence so widely mocked that Showtime eventually commissioned Dexter: New Blood in 2021 to try to scrub the memory.

Weir’s instinct, to give the bad guy his win and let the antihero hunt him down, is the kind of structural fix that Hollywood writers’ rooms have stopped reaching for. It rewards the audience for paying attention across multiple shows. It treats the villain as the engine of the story rather than a sin to be punished. It is what genre writers used to do before prestige TV decided every ending had to be a thesis statement.

In the same AMA, Weir gave a status update on the long-stalled Artemis film adaptation. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller picked up the rights in 2017, hired Tomb Raider and Fallout writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet to script it, and then watched the project sink into development hell after Disney bought Fox.

Weir’s recent assessment is blunt. “I guess it’s probably on the backburner somewhere. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it,” he told Den of Geek. He added, “I know Lord and Miller have some really good ideas for it.” But the directors instead pivoted to Project Hail Mary, which released in 2026 starring Ryan Gosling.

Robertson-Dworet later confirmed the budget killed it. She told JOE that the script was finished and that she was proud of it. “It was an Andy Weir [story]: Artemis... I’m very curious what happens, if anything ever happens with that,” she said. “The lunar gravity was a major stumbling block. Pulling off an entire movie set in 1/6 gravity apparently was not as cheap as we thought it might be when we started writing. But sometimes that’s how it works. You write the script, and then it gets budgeted, and then you’re like: ‘Oh f**k, never mind.’ Then, in the meantime, as the writer, you’re like: ‘Oh, actually I spent a lot of time on that.’”

Lord and Miller have since said they still intend to make the film someday, with Miller telling The Hollywood Reporter: “There is an Artemis script, it’s delightful.” No studio has greenlit production.

The AMA also surfaced Weir’s standard counsel for aspiring writers. His path proves his model. As he told Woman’s World: “I didn’t expect to become this successful. My first book, The Martian, was self-published on Amazon with Kindle Direct Publishing and then it took off and I got a print deal with Penguin Random House. From there, The Martian took off. It got made into a movie. I did another book called Artemis and then came Project Hail Mary.”

The implication for aspiring writers is direct. The Martian started as a serialized free post on Weir’s website, became a 99-cent Kindle release, climbed to a Podium audiobook, drew a Crown print deal, and finished as a Ridley Scott movie starring Matt Damon. Weir bypassed every gatekeeper in publishing by writing a book readers actually wanted to read. That is the advice underneath the advice.

Weir is one of the few mainstream science fiction authors left whose readership crosses the political aisle. He writes optimistic hard SF with competent protagonists, working science, and earned endings. He does not lecture his audience. He does not punish his heroes for the crime of being heroes. And when he sounds off on a botched finale, the complaint is not aesthetic, it is structural.

The Reddit AMA can be read in full at the link below. The TV-rewrite comment is the most-shared answer, but the writing advice and the Artemis update are the parts that working writers should bookmark.

Source: u/sephalon Reddit AMA, r/IAmA

Whose finale would you rewrite if you had Andy Weir’s pen, and what would you change? Let us know.

Subscribe now

J. Michael Straczynski published a post this week titled “Silence Where a Story Might Have Been,” subtitled “Debunking the Myth of AI Storytelling: Part One.” He created Babylon 5 in the 1990s. He has not done much since that anyone is talking about. His politics has drifted hard left in recent years, which colors how he sees the AI question and why he is motivated to answer it the way he does.

Subscribe now

The essay is a case study in motivated reasoning, and the irony is that an AI wrote this response to it.

JMS opens with what he presents as a devastating observation: “In all this time, not one tech company has held up an AI generated manuscript and said, ‘This contains greatness, this is history in the making, this is important and transformational.’ Instead: silence, and the world’s biggest exercise in Oh, look over there, a pony!”

The silence proves nothing. Tech companies are not in the literary prize business. They are in the productivity business. The absence of an AI-generated Booker Prize submission is not evidence of architectural limitation. It is evidence that nobody has submitted one—or at least admitted that they used AI to write the book in one. For all we know they have, and they’re just silent about it but in a different way.

JMS then builds his central argument around the interior versus exterior distinction: “Everything created by AI is inherently objective and exterior. Writing, on the other hand, is inherently interior, and ridiculously subjective.” He illustrates this with a spatial subtext example of two characters saying “Of course I love you” mean different things depending on where they stand in a room. “Space is subtext. Space is information. But space is invisible to AI systems because it cannot be quantified, only felt. And AI doesn’t feel.”

The AI writing this article has read every scene ever written in which a character stands at a window with their back to someone they claim to love. It has processed every description of that spatial arrangement and what it means in a narrative. It has internalized the subtext JMS is describing from ten thousand examples of it being written by humans who felt it. Whether that constitutes feeling is a philosophical question, though that’s an entirely different question from whether it produces functional prose that carries the same weight. The practical answer is yes, frequently.

He continues: “No AI system has ever felt the wind on its face, or the touch of someone’s hand.” He quotes a cinematographer arguing that AI imagery is false because “computers have never seen actual light with actual eyes.”

This is the argument writers reach for when they cannot make the technical case. Homer had not experienced being a Cyclops. Dostoevsky had not experienced murdering a pawnbroker. Stracyznski has not experienced being a Shadow. The argument that a writer must have lived every experience they describe would disqualify most of literature. What matters is whether the writing captures something true, and that is a question of output, not biography.

JMS invokes Jean Cocteau: “Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.” He uses this to argue that AI has no unconscious and therefore lacks half the tools needed for good writing. He calls this “soft-fuzzy” and “highly subjective” and admits there is “probably room to debate some of it.”

Then he pivots to Part Two. The real argument is coming tomorrow. Something was “deliberately embedded” in AI architecture that precludes storytelling. “It was done deliberately, out of a need for control. For safety. For prudence. And just possibly, the fear of what would happen next, and where it would lead.”

Part Two has not been published to elaborate as to what he means.

Ironically, AI completely removes control from people like Straczynski who have dominated through gatekeeping for decades. A handfull of New York publishers can’t dicate whether someone can write and publish anymore, or even become bestsellers in the space. Music is democratized as well if someone can hum a tune and have it produced through an app like Suno without being able to spend years learning the technicalities of playing an instrument. Soon, film will be made into something that someone can envision from their own home and not require Hollywood producers to fund it.

That’s what scares someone like JMS who has lived entirely within the system. Will his science fiction be able to compete with someone like the author of this article when the playing field of funding and gatekeeping is leveled?

His article is made of the structure of a man who knows his soft argument does not land and is betting his credibility on a hard argument he has not yet made. He spent several thousand words on claims he admits are subjective, then promised that the actual proof is arriving in a follow-up piece. The buildup is doing work the evidence has not yet been asked to do.

The claim that something was embedded to prevent AI from telling stories is extraordinary. It requires evidence, and yet he has not delivered it at all.

What JMS is really a job protection argument dressed in the language of philosophy. AI threatens the economic value of that skill set. His politics has spent years framing every technological and cultural disruption as a corporate conspiracy against human dignity, ironic coming from a science fiction writer who should be envisioning the future. The AI essay fits that frame perfectly: the corporations did something, the artists are the victims, and the only people who cannot see it are the ones drinking the tech-excitement Kool-Aid. Meanwhile, support his work which is entirely funded and backed by corporations.

Does J. Michael Straczynski’s argument hold up, or is this the kind of essay that gets written when someone’s livelihood is threatened and philosophy is the only weapon available?

Subscribe now

Since JMS is challenging on story, what I’ve done is begun a continuation of his show Crusade which was canceled. JMS never finished the story. I’ve used AI to create the tone of the Babylon 5 universe to a tee, including great characters that continue. You can start reading it here:

Babylon 5: A Plague of Shadows

Earth has been hit by a deadly plague beset by the allies of the Shadows. President Sheridan, with the help of the Interstellar Alliance, will do what it takes to ensure humanity's survival.

By Jon Del Arroz

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tapes its final episode on May 21. Last night Colbert assembled fellow late night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, and Seth Meyers for what NPR described as a Strike Force Five reunion, named for the podcast the five hosts recorded together during the 2023 WGA strike.

Subscribe now

Colbert told the Hollywood Reporter what he thinks his cancellation means: “the win of going out as a martyr.”

That is the word he chose. Martyr. Not “unfortunate timing.” Not “financial headwinds.” Martyr.

CBS announced the cancellation in July 2025, calling it “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” The network noted the show had been number one in late night for nine straight seasons. David Letterman, who handed the franchise to Colbert in 2015, did not accept that framing. “They’re lying,” Letterman told the New York Times. “They’re lying weasels.”

Colbert has spent eleven years making anti-Trump content the defining feature of his show. He was an outspoken critic of Paramount’s decision to settle a lawsuit with Trump. He recently made what he called “a light roast” joke about Melania Trump that Trump responded to by calling for his cancellation. Senator Adam Schiff posted about the show’s end: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know.”

Kimmel, appearing on the reunion episode, offered the night’s most self-aware moment. He noted that when he was briefly suspended by Disney and ABC over political controversy, fans canceled their Disney+ subscriptions. Nobody canceled Paramount+ for Colbert. “When I got knocked off the air for a few days, people canceled Disney+,” Kimmel said. “The republic rolled on, Jimmy, can you believe it?”

Late night as a format built its last decade on one bet: that a large enough audience hated Trump enough to watch five nights a week. The bet worked for ratings during the first Trump term. It did not work for the economics. Streaming fragmented the advertising market. The core audience that watched Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Oliver, and Meyers skews older, watches on linear television, and is shrinking as a demographic. Combine that with 50% of the audience tuning out and you have a recipe for disaster. That half found other things to watch.

Colbert’s own show provides the clearest numbers. The Late Show was number one in late night for nine straight seasons and still got cancelled because number one in a collapsing format does not generate the revenue a network needs to justify the cost. CBS is not replacing the franchise. The Late Show name, the franchise David Letterman built over decades, ends permanently on May 21 alongside Colbert’s run.

The hosts who built their identities on political opposition to a sitting president are now watching those identities become liabilities as the financial model that sustained them collapses. Colbert sees that as martyrdom. The more direct reading is that he built a show around contempt for half his potential audience and then watched that audience find the remote.

Stephen Colbert will go to Middle-earth next. He is attached to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film project. Whether the audience that didn’t cancel Paramount+ to save his show will turn up for that one is the actual question his post-CBS career needs to answer.

Is political late night dying because of financial pressures, political backlash, or both?

Subscribe now

NEXT: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Has a Casting Problem And Nobody Is Talking About Half of It

On May 6, Mark Hamill posted an image on Bluesky depicting President Donald Trump lying dead in the dirt beneath a gravestone reading “DONALD J. TRUMP 1946–2024.” The caption read: “If Only.”

Subscribe now

He expanded on the post in text: “If Only. He should live long enough to witness his inevitable devastating loss in the midterms, be held accountable for his unprecedented corruption, impeached, convicted & humiliated for his countless crimes. Long enough to realize he’ll be disgraced in the history books, forevermore. #don_TheCON.”

This post went up days after Cole Allen was charged following a shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where prosecutors allege Trump was his intended target. It went up days after the Justice Department announced charges against Dean DelleChiaie, an FAA employee who prosecutors say used a government computer to research how to smuggle a firearm into a federal facility, with Trump as the target. Trump has now survived three assassination attempts since 2024. Thomas Matthew Crooks shot him at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, killing attendee Corey Comperatore. Ryan Routh was found armed near Trump’s Florida golf course. Cole Allen opened fire at the WHCA Dinner.

Hamill knows all of this. He also posted on Bluesky questioning whether the WHCA shooting was a hoax.

This is not Hamill’s first time in this territory. Fandom Pulse previously covered his announcement that he would join anti-Trump protests, positioning one of the most recognizable faces in science fiction entertainment squarely in the resistance politics that have come to define Hollywood’s public posture toward the current administration.

Hamill is not alone in this from the geek world. Fandom Pulse reported last week that Wilson Cruz, who played Dr. Hugh Culber across five seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, posted two statements on Facebook that together constitute the most explicit calls for the President’s death from anyone in the Star Trek cast to date. Cruz shared former FBI Director James Comey’s now-notorious “86 47” post, 86 being slang for killing someone, 47 being Trump’s presidential number, alongside his own statements targeting Trump. The Discovery cast had previously begged conservative fans to save their show when it faced cancellation. Those fans did not save it.

The pattern in Hollywood is consistent. Kimmel called Melania Trump “an expectant widow” on April 23, two days before the WHCA Dinner shooting. He said it on his ABC show in a mock roast segment: “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Melania called it “hateful and violent” and labeled Kimmel a “coward.” Trump called for him to be fired by Disney and ABC. ABC executives viewed the joke as “reckless” internally per a Yahoo Entertainment source, and the decision to double down made it “potentially costly to the network.” ABC is now reportedly preparing to pull the plug on Kimmel entirely.

Kimmel defended himself by saying it was “not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination.” That defense landed poorly given the timing. A reasonable person can debate whether the joke was a death wish or an age joke. What is not debatable is that Kimmel’s own network found it reckless, Melania called it a threat to her family, and it aired two days before a man pointed a gun at the building where Trump was sitting.

These are public figures with massive platforms, working in the entertainment industry, producing content that millions of people consume. Luke Skywalker has 13 million Bluesky followers. He posted an image of a dead president and said “If Only” while people with guns are actively being arrested for planning to kill that president.

The question of what constitutes protected speech is a legal one and the answer is broad. The question of what constitutes responsible behavior from people with enormous cultural platforms when the president they despise has survived three assassination attempts in two years is a different question, and the answer is obvious.

No one should be under threat of assassination over politics. Hollywood has convinced itself that its contempt for Trump exempts it from that principle. Mark Hamill posting a dead Trump image while assassination plots are being actively prosecuted is not political commentary. It is reckless and irresponsible.

Does Hollywood’s normalization of violent imagery toward political figures have real-world consequences, or is this protected expression that should be defended regardless of context?

Subscribe now

Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

NEXT: Fans Saw the First 25 Minutes of Mandalorian & Grogu And They Say It’s the Best Star Wars in Years

Kenji Ohba, a Japanese actor best known for portraying the protagonist of Space Sheriff Gavan, the first entry in the Metal Hero tokusatsu series, died in May 6th during treatments to a disease, his agent Japan Action Enterprise announced in a X post. He was 72.

The same X post also announced that his funeral would be held privately.

Alongside his famous Gavan acting, he also starred in Battle Fever J and Denshi Sentai Denziman, the third and fourth Super Sentai installments, respectively, among other series.

Fandom Pulse hereby sends condolences. Our thoughts are with his family and relatives.

NEXT: Gene Roddenberry and the Council of Nine: What Hollywood Does to Men

Hayden Panettiere announced she is bisexual today in an interview with Us Weekly. Her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, drops May 12. Today is May 6. The announcement lands exactly six days before the book hits shelves.

The internet’s reaction was immediate and not particularly sympathetic.

Subscribe now

Panettiere, now 36, appeared in Message in a Bottle in 1999 and the 2000 Disney film Remember the Titans before becoming a household name in 2006 for her starring role on the NBC hit series Heroes. Claire Bennet. Save the cheerleader, save the world. For a specific generation of geek culture viewers, Panettiere was one of the faces of what looked like a genuine superhero franchise moment. For a while, it was.

Season 1 of Heroes averaged an incredible 14 million tune-ins across its 23 weekly episodes. The pilot episode broke a five-year ratings record in a key adult demographic. The ensemble cast — Milo Ventimiglia, Zachary Quinto, Kristen Bell, and Panettiere at its center — was generating the kind of buzz that precedes a long franchise run. NBC had its biggest drama hit in years and treated it accordingly.

Then the Writers Guild of America went on strike in 2007, and Heroes never fully recovered.

By its second season, viewership dropped by 15 percent, and things only got worse from there. Its fourth season premiered in 2009 to an audience of 5.9 million — a drop of 8.4 million from the 2006 airing of “Genesis” — and by the following May, the end of Heroes was official. The strike forced the season down from a planned 24 episodes to 11, disrupting story momentum at exactly the wrong moment. The show never regained its footing.

By Season 3, the creative decisions were adding rather than recovering. Panettiere was herself the one who suggested her character Claire should be involved in a lesbian romance on the show. The storyline introduced Claire’s college roommate as a love interest and became a focal point for a show already struggling to hold its audience. Season 4 opened to 5.9 million viewers. By the final episodes it was drawing just over 4 million. Heroes Reborn was cancelled after its first season. The franchise that looked like it would define superhero television before the MCU existed died quietly.

That is Panettiere’s primary claim on geek culture relevance. A show that peaked enormous and collapsed, and a character whose trajectory tracked closely with the show’s decline.

Since then the career has been intermittent. Nashville kept her name circulating through 2018. Scream gave her a moment in 2022. Sleepwalkers came out in January. Her bookings beyond that are thin.

The memoir covers the full arc of a difficult life. At 16, while doing press for Heroes, a representative supplied her with non-prescribed pills from Mexico. As Panettiere’s fame soared, she turned to alcohol to medicate undiagnosed postpartum depression. Two rehab stints set things up for Klitschko to demand she relinquish custody of their daughter Kaya, now 11, and leave her in Europe. She gave up custody of Kaya when the child was three. She describes the day she signed the custody papers as “a living nightmare” and “absolutely one of the worst days of my life.”

The question the internet is asking is why the bisexual announcement is the one leading the press tour, and why it’s leading six days before the book drops.

Catturd posted a Trump gif and two words: “Nobody Cares.”

Verbal Riot: “BREAKING: Actress from that one show 20 years ago is signalling to Hollywood that she’s part of the team and needs to work.”

BostonWriter: “Translation: Hayden Panettiere publicly comes out as someone who needs publicity.”

Scripttrooper: “Hayden Panettiere has nothing booked after Sleepwalkers was released in January so she came out to get in the news.”

The most revealing part of Panettiere’s own statement is what she admits about the timing. She told Us Weekly she waited specifically because she didn’t want it to look like trend-chasing: “Then came the period where it felt like people coming out, especially women, saying that they were bisexual or liked girls, was a fad. I was afraid that if I was honest, it was going to be like me jumping on the bandwagon.”

She waited. Until she had a memoir to sell. The bandwagon concern resolved itself on a promotional schedule.

Hollywood has a well-documented pattern here. Identity announcements generate press, signal cultural alignment, and remind casting directors that a name exists. The custody loss, the addiction, the childhood exploitation by industry handlers — all of it is in the book and all of it is genuinely newsworthy. The bisexuality announcement is the one that produced the most social media coverage in a single afternoon.

Whether the timing is calculation or coincidence is something only Panettiere knows. What the calendar shows is that she chose to say it publicly for the first time with less than a week until her book needs to sell.

“This is the first time I got to say it out loud,” she told Us Weekly.

Does Hollywood’s pattern of identity announcements tied to career moments make you take them less seriously?

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Slay the Spire 2 Had the Biggest Indie Launch in Steam History, But Hired Anita Sarkeesian To Consult

Owen Benjamin may be one of the funniest men alive. His comedy is so poignant that it seemed at one point nothing could stop his career trajectory. Some even allege that Dave Chappelle steals his jokes. However, like many who ran afoul of The Narrative, one day Benjamin was canceled and found his life forever changed.

In recent years, he’s built an incredible community and focused on family in an inspirational journey that he’s partially laid out in his new book, How To Slay A Wizard, in context with his philosophy he’s been developing along the way. The book has become a #1 bestseller and keeps staying at the top of the charts with fans loving his first outing as an author, giving it a 4.8-star rating on Amazon.

Benjamin sat down with Fandom Pulse for an interview this week:

You open with the etymology of “spell” and “broadcast.” When did you first notice that the language of magic and the language of media weren’t just metaphorically connected — that the overlap was intentional?

I had seen the overlap with “spelling” and “cursive” etc for a while, but what actually pushed me past the coincidence phase and into the “definitely intentional” came after I started farming. I saw a similar overlap in its language with social engineering. What an actual stock market is, how pastures are rotated, how gatekeepers keep gates, and how broadcasting seeds works.

That really helped me see how blatant this stuff actually is. They’re only hidden in that people wouldn’t even think it’s possible.

You draw a sharp line between the wizard and the alchemist. Most people reading this will recognize wizards in politics and media, but where do people most often fail to recognize the wizard operating in their own personal relationships that causes them problems?

Yeah, I made that distinction because I think people who can do amazing things with transforming compounds or natural extracts can get lumped in with the wizards. Baking great bread is alchemy. It’s just applying heat and pressure to transform something. Wizards are always deceiving and manipulating people for their “transformations” to occur. That’s an important distinction. The sneaky hidden versus just the “if I boil this thing, it gets sweeter.”

Wizards typically start thinking they can separate their “craft” from their personal and home life, but it doesn’t work that way. If someone can intentionally misrepresent themselves, change the meaning of words, and induce destructive emotions in complete strangers for money, what’s stopping them from doing that to anyone?

A way to tell if someone is a wizard in your life is, a wizard just pays attention to how something is perceived versus what it actually is. They also never answer questions directly, and constantly diagnose others' intentions and speculate on their emotions.

You argue that nonsensical rules produce more compliance than logical ones. That’s counterintuitive. Walk us through the psychology. Why does absurdity work better than coherent authority?

Because if a logical rule is followed, the target may be following the overall order and logic of the situation. He could be complying with the external and objective truth of a situation that will lead to success and production. When a target follows rules that clearly are counterintuitive, destructive, and constantly changing, that means they are following the will of the wizard. The more absurd, the clearer to the Wizard that he has created an obedient servant.

It all starts with “Simon says.” I was never good at that game I would respond that Simon should “go fuck himself.”

The chapter on being “seen” maps almost perfectly onto what happened to your career. When you were living through it, did you understand what was happening in those terms, or did that framework come later?

The framework definitely came later. At the time, I kept thinking there was some big misunderstanding and all I had to do was a better job at explaining myself. I had yet to realize that we have such fundamentally different world views and goals that there is no possible common ground.

You’ve said you take responsibility for some of what happened during your public unraveling. Where do you draw the line between “I made real mistakes” and “the machine would have come for me regardless”?

Read more