(1) THE MURDEROUS MONTH OF MAY. Apple TV+ announced today “Apple’s new sci-fi series “Murderbot” to make global debut May 16, 2025”. They also released two photos of Murderbot, one with the helmet, the other without.
Today, Apple TV+ unveiled a first look at “Murderbot,” its highly anticipated comedic thriller created by Academy Award nominees Chris and Paul Weitz (“About a Boy,” “Mozart in the Jungle”) and starring Emmy Award winner Alexander Skarsgård (“Succession,” “Big Little Lies”), who also serves as executive producer. The 10-episode sci-fi series will make its global debut on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Friday, May 16, 2025 followed by new episodes every Friday through July 11.
Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-winning book series of the same name, “Murderbot” is a sci-fi thriller/comedy about a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients. Played by Skarsgård, Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.
The ensemble cast also includes Noma Dumezweni (“Presumed Innocent”), David Dastmalchian (“Oppenheimer”), Sabrina Wu (“Joy Ride”), Akshay Khanna (“Critical Incident”), Tattiawna Jones (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) and Tamara Podemski (“Outer Range”).
(2) FROM CLIMATE EXTREMES TO HISTORIC BALKAN ORIGINS OF VAMPIRISM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Modern fantasy lore has it that Transylvania is the home to vampires, creatures from the past that feed of the presently living for their immortality… Way back in the 1990s, following the fall of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe we (members of the SF² Concatenation team and the former NW Kent SF Society had a series of E. Europe science and SF cultural exchanges with Romanian and Hungarian fan (and scientist fan) partners. As part of this I was lucky enough to have a guided tour of Transylvania. I also got to visit Jimbolia, an ethnically Hungarian town in Romania surrounded on three sides by a border with Serbia. Actually, I got to visit it with SF fans three times over the years…
This brings us up to today, and academics from Jimbolia Technology Highschool, as well as the University of Oradea (Romania), have found Transylvanian chronicles, diaries, and official records from the 16th century that illuminate extreme climate events of that time — the 16th century was part of what is known as the “Little Ice Age”. They found that prolonged heat waves, often associated with droughts and unusually cold winters, could affect agricultural production, leading to food shortages, forced migration, and social instability…
Primary research Gaceu, O. R. et al (2025) “Reconstruction of climatic events from the 16th century in Transylvania: interdisciplinary analysis based on historical sources”, Frontiers in Climate, vol. 6, pre-print.
All of which brings to mind whether such events could have been attributed by peasant locals to the mystical? (Other research has previously shown that witch burnings in Germany increased in rural areas around the time of crop failures associated with climate events.)
While vampires were popularised in the west with Stoker’s 19th century novel, we must remember that it was in the 17th century the Greek librarian of the Vatican, Leo Allatius, produced the first methodological description of the Balkan beliefs in vampires (Greek: vrykolakas) in his work De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (“On certain modern opinions among the Greeks”) a few decades after the 16th century climate extreme events in the area described by this latest research.
(3) BROCCOLI IS OFF THE MENU. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] In a shake-up worthy of a James Bond martini, the Broccoli family has relinquished control of that storied movie franchise. It will be Amazon MGM Studios forging the way forward. “James Bond Shake-Up: Amazon Takes Creative Control of Franchise” at The Hollywood Reporter.
The James Bond movie franchise has gotten a shake-up, with Amazon MGM Studios and Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli forming a new joint venture to house the movie property’s intellectual property rights.
Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise, while Wilson and Broccoli will remain co-owners of the 60-year-old property. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, including a vast catalog with more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows.
Since the MGM acquisition, Amazon has held rights to distribute all of the James Bond films, and following completion of the joint venture transaction will control the creative on future productions.
“We are grateful to the late Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for bringing James Bond to movie theatres around the world, and to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for their unyielding dedication and their role in continuing the legacy of the franchise that is cherished by legions of fans worldwide. We are honored to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement on Thursday….
Variety thinks they can explain “Why Amazon Took Control of James Bond; Next 007 Movie Remains in Limbo”.
…And even as every actor with a British accent has seen themselves tipped to slip into Bond’s designer tux, development on a follow-up has stalled. There’s still no director, no story, and no script for a new installment, sources say, and without those elements little progress has been made on finding a new leading man. Though there has been a character bible circulating around the studio and a few informal meetings with potential creative talent, shooting on a new movie is at least a year away. That’s been a source of frustration at Amazon, which spent $8.5 billion to buy MGM four years ago, in no small part because of the ties to Bond. Even with the initial acquisition, Amazon MGM only owned 50% of the franchise and was relegated to being a passive partner when it came to artistic choices.
Rumors have swirled for years that the Broccolis have clashed with Amazon over the direction of Bond. The family felt the e-commerce giant was a poor home for the elegant secret agent and bristled at its efforts to expand the scope of the franchise, while Amazon executives were frustrated by the glacial pace of getting a new film off the ground, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The company managed to get the Broccolis to sign off on a reality competition spinoff show, “007: Road to a Million,” but other attempts to revitalize the property have yet to bear fruit.
Amazon MGM’s joint venture with the Broccolis is unique in that it is not an outright sale. The family will retain an ownership stake. However, the Broccolis, who controlled everything from casting to marketing decisions, will release their grip on the series. That will allow Amazon MGM to move more quickly to figure out how to keep Bond relevant….
(4) SCIENCE BOOKS RECOMMENDED. Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks in Nature: “Poetry on Mars and robots on Earth: Books in brief” (behind a paywall). One of his selections is —
Waiting for Robots
Antonio A. Casilli Univ. Chicago Press (2025)
US founding father Thomas Jefferson used dumbwaiters — small lifts that carry meals — during his extravagant dinners. There seemed to be no human intervention, but the lifts were operated by enslaved basement staff. As sociologist Antonio Casilli acutely observes, today too, artificial-intelligence systems are made to seem automated, often by overlooked and underpaid workers.
And here’s the cover of another choice:
(5) LGBTQ IDENTIFICATION GROWS. “Nearly One in 10 U.S. Adults Identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., Survey Finds” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall).
Nearly one in 10 adults in the United States identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., according to a large analysis from Gallup released Thursday — almost triple the share since Gallup began counting in 2012, and up by two-thirds since 2020…..
…The increases have been driven by young people, and by bisexual women.
Nearly one-quarter of adults in Generation Z, defined by Gallup as those 18 to 27, identify as L.G.B.T.Q., according to the analysis, which included 14,000 adults across all of Gallup’s telephone surveys last year. More than half of these L.G.B.T.Q. young adults identify as bisexual.
Among all respondents, 1.3 percent identified as transgender, up from 0.6 percent in 2020. That is higher than other large surveys have found in recent years…
(6) LGBTQ VIDEOS BACK ONLINE. The City reports “NYC Schools Restore LGBTQ Videos Yanked by PBS Following Trump Executive Order”.
In response to a blizzard of executive orders from President Donald Trump, the Public Broadcasting Service recently erased a series of videos made in partnership with New York City Public Schools focused on LGBTQ history.
This week, the city’s Education Department found a new home for them: its own website.
The short films draw on material from the city’s LGBTQ-focused curriculum, part of a series called “Hidden Voices” that seeks to elevate a broad range of underrepresented groups students learn about in their social studies classrooms.
The videos profile prominent LGBTQ people such as the feminist thinker Audre Lorde and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. They also survey key historical moments, including the mass dismissal of queer government employees during the Lavender Scare of the 1940s-’60s and the 1969 Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village, widely considered a catalyst of the modern LGBTQ rights movement….
(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. There’s a new episode of the monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA. Simultaneous Times Episode 84 has stories by Marisca Pichette & Eric Fomley.
Stories featured in this episode:
“Press Release from a Utopia on the Way Down” by Marisca Pichette; with music by TSG; read by Jenna Hanchey
“The Thing You Never Were” by Eric Fomley; with music by Phog Masheeen; read by the Jean-Paul Garnier
Theme music by Dain Luscombe
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
February 20, 1988 — Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha”
Thirty-seven years ago on this evening, Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha” first aired on HBO. It like a lot of genre series can now found streaming on Peacock.
In the episode, a lonely man dressed as Oliver Hardy at a masquerade party meets a lonely woman dressed as Stan Laurel, it seems nothing short of a match made in heaven. But a game of Gotcha! may just test their newfound romance a little too much. Or will it? Being Bradbury what’s your guess?
It was based off his short which was published in Terry Carr’s The Year’s Finest Fantasy, Volume 2 but the romance shown here wasn’t in that story as Bradbury added it in here.
The cast was Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch, and it was directed by Brad Turner who has done a lot of genre series work including seventeen episodes of The Outer Limits. The casting of Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch was absolutely perfect.
Reception for it is generally excellent. As Scared Stiff puts it: “GOTCHA is incredible. It’s another great tale in this series and it reminded me a great deal of the beginning of Twilight Zone: The Movie with Dan Aykroyd turning into a monster. This tale starts off so slow and cheerful that the turn to terror was very impactful. I really enjoyed this. As a horror fan you can’t ask for much more. I highly recommend it.”
Yes, I liked it very much. I think the story here is sharper, more sure of who the characters are than a lot of his stories in this series was which were more interested in the gimmick that drove the story.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Animal Crackers sums it up.
- Brewster Rockit no longer has a problem – right?
- Crabgrass fears parallel universes have a shortcoming.
- Strange Brew asks a logical question.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has invented a new kind of mystery.
(10) AT LAST THE LAST. “The Last Of Us: HBO Sets Season 2 Premiere Date” reports Deadline. (Behind a paywall.)
HBO has finally revealed when audiences can expect the new season of The Last of Us.
Season 2 will debut on April 13 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, which means it’ll be picking up the Sunday marquee time slot from The White Lotus after the third season of Mike White’s series concludes. As always, the episodes will be available to stream on Max at the same time that they air on HBO.
Along with the date announcement, HBO also released a few new character posters featuring Ellie (Bella Ramsey), Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Abby (Kaitlyn Dever)….
(11) DON’T FORGET TO BITE ON THIS CLICKBAIT. “Could Michael Sheen be the first Welsh Doctor Who?” asks Nation Cymru. And for what it’s worth, Sheen once said on an episode of Staged (his show with David Tennant) he had been considered, then “they wanted to go in another direction” as the show biz cant goes.
Michael Sheen is among the favourites to become the next Doctor Who.
The actor has been named among the frontrunners for the prized role by the bookies, who have installed him at 6/1 to become the next occupant of the Tardis after news broke that the current Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, looks set to stand down after two series.
There’s never been a Welsh Doctor Who – and with the modern incarnation of the series being filmed in Cardiff, it would be the perfect moment for a native of Wales to enter the Tardis.
Sheen, of course, lives in Wales and has shown his unswerving commitment and dedication to Welsh culture with the launch of the Welsh National Theatre.
There are others who think so too.
Writing for the Standard while pondering potential candidates for the role, media commentator Vicky Jessop wrote: “We’ve never had a Welsh Doctor before – might it be time to change that, once and for all? A longtime friend of David Tennant, Sheen also recently announced that he was becoming a “not for profit” actor, meaning he’s pledged to give away large chunks of his salary to charity and focus on doing jobs he loves. Long story short: his paycheque might actually be affordable for the beleaguered BBC.”
Other names in the running include Crown lead Josh O’Connor, Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden and Hobbit star Richard Armitage.
After 10th Doctor, David Tennant, surprised everyone by returning as the 14th Doctor, 11th Doctor Matt Smith has also been mentioned as a possibility for another stint in the Tardis.
(12) WOLF TICKETS. Metro News says “Amazon Prime Video viewers are stumbling upon ‘best’ comedy series in years”.
TV fans have been binge-watching both seasons of ‘engaging’ show Wolf Like Me which was recently added to the streamer free for subscribers.
The series follows single father Gary (Josh Gad) who lives in Adelaide with his daughter Emma (Ariel Donoghue) as he strikes up a relationship with Mary (Isla Fisher).
Both Gary and Emma are still emotionally traumatised after the death of her mother Lisa seven years ago, so when Mary enters the pictures and is able to connect with Emma she is a welcome addition to the family.
However, Mary is hiding baggage of her own that she fears may hurt Gary and Emma: she is a werewolf.
On Google, Wolf Like Me fans have been urging everyone to watch the hidden gem series which has flown under the radar since it first aired on Stan and Peacock in 2022….
(13) LIKE YOU NEED TEENY TINY BRANDING IRONS FOR ANTS. BBC finds “Dorset micro artist sets world record for smallest Lego sculpture”.
A micro artist has set a new Guinness World Record for creating the smallest handmade sculpture.
David A Lindon, from Bournemouth, said the creation took months of planning and months of creating to bring to life.
He set the world record for his sculpture of a red Lego piece which measures 0.02517mm by 0.02184mm.
Mr Lindon, an engineer by trade who started work as a micro artist in 2019, says the sculpture is about the same size as a human white blood cell.
He’s become known for his work creating miniature pieces of art, including three microscopic re-creations of Van Gogh masterpieces on a watch mechanism which sold for £90,000.
Mr Lindon’s latest creation, which was crafted from a piece of red Lego brick, was measured by the team at Evident Scientific using a light microscope….
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Love Hurts Pitch Meeting” – beware spoilers.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Jeffrey Smith, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
