At one point in No Time to Die, Daniel Craig's final entry as James Bond, you can see a sleek supercar in the background. It's the Aston Martin Valhalla, a 937hp beast of a plug-in hybrid, and it's just sitting there, with nowhere to go. If you've seen a Bond film before, you can imagine it's holding a slew of killer gadgets (though hopefully not invisibility). Surely it would appear later in the film, perhaps just in time to save our hero before he sips a martini from a built-in fridge. But no—nobody drives the car throughout the film's 163-minute runtime. We never even see it in motion. (Though that's not stopping Rocket League from pitching it as a Bond vehicle.)

Nicola Dove/DANJAQ, MGM

That undriven Chekhov's car makes one thing clear: No Time to Die, directed by Cary Joji-Fukunaga (True Detective, Beasts of No Nation), isn't your usual Bond movie. And as I watched the film, a momentous occasion after years of delays, I was struck by how few gadgets there were. Sure, Bond gets a cool watch, a classic bulletproof (and gun-equipped) Aston Martin and he rides in something called a gravity plane, but they come few and far in between. Instead, the film focuses on Bond's human drama: His inability to trust; his persistent death-wish; the danger he brings to others.

Craig's Bond was different from the beginning. In 2006's Casino Royale, he was a fledgling agent he hadn't yet earned his 00 status. He was gruff and dirty, more used to getting into Bourne-esque fights instead of wearing a tux. But the Bond writer's and producers could never quite settle on how they wanted to transform the character. 2008's Quantum of Solace was a disaster mired by the Hollywood writer's strike (not to mentioned completely incomprehensible action). Skyfall was a return to form, elevating the franchise with Roger Deakin's Oscar-nominated cinematography. But the series hit a new low with 2015's Spectre, a boring and regressive film I haven't had the heart to revisit.

Strangely, even though No Time to Die is Craig's final entry, it never tries to one-up the set pieces of its predecessors. There's a thrilling motorcycle chase early on, which features an astounding practical jump up a flight of stairs, a balletic shoot-out in Cuba, and a few smaller sequences later on. But the film cares less about spectacle than it does setting a mood. That may make it a divisive entry for some, but as someone fascinated by emotional action movies, like Michael Mann's much-maligned Miami Vice reboot, I found it endlessly compelling. (It helps that No Time to Die, like Casino Royale before it, actually makes you care about Bond and everyone in his orbit.)

When I chatted with No Time to Die's VFX supervisor, Charlie Noble, he had a hard time pointing to a specific whiz-bang set-piece. Unlike Tom Cruise's latest Mission Impossible movies, this Bond outing isn't built around a specific stunt or gadget. And after the emptiness of Spectre, I'm all for that. Noble says he's more concerned with subtle VFX work, like adding additional cars to the background of a chase, or removing wires from a dangerous stunt. Sometimes the best visual effects are the ones you don't even notice.

There's something genuinely refreshing about No Time to Die's practically lo-fi approach to action, especially after living through more than a decade of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's often weightless CG. Even something that's genuinely high-tech in the film, like a series of magnets the villains use to jump down an elevator shaft, aren't dwelled upon. Instead, the focus is on what that action means (in this case, it's a group of baddies stealing a potentially world-ending nanovirus from a high-security research facility.)

Nicola Dove/DANJAQ, MGM

Now don't get me wrong, I love a good Bond gadget or two. But for an aging franchise that seriously needs to reckon with its sexist and colonialist origins, I'm glad that No Time to Die decided to focus more on its characters. That includes Lashana Lynch's Nomi, who wastes no time taking up the 007 mantle when Bond disappears, as well as Paloma, a fresh spy recruit who joins for an action romp in Cuba. 

Daniel Craig may no longer be Bond, but this is a fitting end for his tenure. And the toys aren't going anywhere—now anyone can use them.

More than a decade after Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher dramatized the rise of Facebook with The Social Network, a new TV series will attempt to tell the story of the company’s more recent history. Per Deadline, production companies Anonymous Content and Wiip, best known for their work on Mr. Robot and Dickinson, are working on a show titled Doomsday Machine that will star two-time Emmy winner Claire Foy as COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Based in part on AnUgly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Deadline reports the series will cover everything from Facebook’s actions during the 2016 presidential election up to more recent revelations about its business. That includes recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal that showed Facebook has for years ran a program called XCheck, which has allowed high-profile users, including former President Donald Trump, to skirt its content moderation rules.

The timing of the announcement comes as Facebook faces increasing scrutiny from federal lawmakers. On Wednesday, whistleblower Frances Haugen told the Senate Commerce Committee Congress should regulate the social media giant. It also comes after the company went through an hours-long outage on October 4th that left people unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In the aftermath of that event, there have been renewed calls from American lawmakers, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to break the company up into smaller entities.

The Internet Archive is marking its 25th anniversary by peering into the future to predict what the web might look like a quarter of a century from now. The non-profit took the opportunity to rail against internet regulation by offering a grim vision of what lies ahead.

Punch a URL into the Wayforward Machine and you'll see a version of that page covered in pop-ups. The messages include one reading "Classified content. The website you are trying to access features information that the owner(s) have opted to restrict to users that have not shared their personal information." Another reads "This site contains information that is currently classified as Thought Crime in your region."

The way things are going, the Internet Archive suggests, free and open access to knowledge on the web may become far more limited. A Wayforward subsite includes a timeline of things that might go awry in the coming years, starting with the repeal of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites and internet platforms from being liable for things that users post. A repeal could have enormous consequences for the web, though some, such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have proposed that the provision should be reformed.

The timeline includes some other wild-but-not-inconceivable suggestions, such as a law allowing corporations to copyright facts, forcing Wikipedia to move to the Dark Web, and more countries introducing their own versions of China's Great Firewall. The Internet Archive teamed up with several digital rights organizations for this project, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future and the Wikimedia Foundation. The subsite includes resources on how to help protect freely available information.

The Wayforward Machine is, of course, a satirical version of the Wayback Machine, which has archived hundreds of billions of web pages over the last two and a half decades. It's an important resource for helping preserve the history of the internet, including things like Flash games and animations, so it's probably worth paying attention to the Internet Archive's vision of the future.

Marvel Studios is reportedly developing a new Disney+ series that will see WandaVision’s Kathryn Hahn reprise her role as Agatha Harkness, according to Variety. If the project moves forward, Jac Schaeffer, the lead writer of WandaVision, is expected to return to write the new series. She’s also likely to produce the show. Other than the fact it’s supposed to be a dark comedy, plot details are limited at the moment.

Marvel Studios did not comment on the possibility of a WandaVision spinoff when Variety reached out to the subsidiary, but there’s a chance we could learn more about the project when Disney holds its first-ever Disney+ Day on November 12th. The company said the event would include a “look toward the future” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Either way, Marvel fans would likely welcome the chance to see Hahn in her own series. Agatha was one of the show’s more memorable characters, and Hahn even earned an Emmy nomination for the performance. The spinoff likely won't debut before sometime in 2022 at the earliest. Until then, there's Hawkeye, which will premiere on November 24th.   

YouTube scrapped its Rewind 2020 video due to COVID-19 and social unrest, but it's not coming back now that the turmoil is (partly) calming down. As Tubefilter first confirmed, YouTube is cancelling its year-end Rewind videos once and for all. The service insists it's not due to the blowback from Rewind 2018, however. Rather, YouTube is reportedly so large that it would be impractical to summarize the site with a yearly video.

The Google-owned brand will instead trust creators like MrBeast and Slayy Point to produce end-of-year videos, and promote them through social networks. You'll also see annual trend lists, awards shows and a currently mysterious "interactive experience."

Rewind debuted in 2010 and was popular for most of its history as a snapshot of the online zeitgeist. That all fell apart with Rewind 2018, however. Many felt the video both ignored major creators like Pewdiepie and had more than a few cringe-worthy moments (Will Smith's "oh, that's hot" haunts people to this day). When YouTube returned with Rewind 2019, it abdicated editorial control and let the statistics guide the content to the frustration of viewers. Even if YouTube is right about the site becoming too large for Rewind, the demand just isn't what it used to be — a revival might not have much of an impact.

You don't have to be a Kanye fan (or buy a gadget) to remix a new album. MusicTechnotes that Courtney Barnett has shared a free, web-based stem mixer that lets you chop up three singles from the Australian rocker's upcoming Things Take Time, Take Time. You can isolate or highlight elements like percussion and guitars, and there's even a simple loop generator with start and end points. You aren't about to produce a drum-and-bass mix of "Before You Gotta Go," but you might get closer than you think.

This is a promo for the album, of course, and it's notable that you can't (officially) save your compositions. This might teach you a thing or two about layering in music, though. And it's free — you won't need more than your computer and some headphones to experiment with Barnett's tracks. Don't be surprised if other artists follow suit, even if they're unlikely to pull a Nine Inch Nails and release the raw track files.

The following contains minor spoilers for season two, episode nine of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks.’

Throughout the history of Star Trek, it’s generally accepted that a member of Starfleet will spend about three years as an ensign, the lowest officer rank in the fleet. It’s the position given to new Starfleet Academy graduates, and the status of the four protagonists on Lower Decks. However, as the show wraps up its second season and prepares for a third, it does bring the character’s status as “lowly ensigns” into doubt. This week’s episode touches on, though doesn’t solve, the problem by exploring the universal concept of a “lower decker.”

In “wej Duj” (the first full Klingon language episode title in the entire franchise), the USS Cerritos is in transit between missions, giving the crew some much-needed downtime. Mariner, Rutherford and Tendi use their day off to spend some personal time with senior officers, which sends the bridge-crew-friendless Boimler into a panic since he notes that this will give them an edge when it comes to getting promoted. He spends most of the episode trying and failing to get buddy-buddy with various officers. If this all feels like C-plot level shenanigans, well, it is. But as a result the show takes its biggest leap yet to fill out its narrative in this episode.

CBS

“wej Duj” is Klingon for “three ships,” and we get to see the crew of the Klingon vessel Che’Ta, where a very ambitious Boimler-esque Klingon is trying to get in good with the current captain of his ship. Old school fans will remember that authority on Klingon ships is assigned by force, with an officer assuming command by killing the previous captain. This young Klingon isn’t quite that ambitious, but he’s perfectly happy to walk the captain’s pet targ if it helps him become first officer.

The episode also shows us the happenings on a nearby Vulcan craft called Sh’Vhal, where a lower decker named T’Lin there has been messing with the sensors and as a result, notices some strange readings in the area that she takes to the captain to investigate. The captain agrees to the search, but he also reprimands her for undertaking such unnecessary adjustments to the ship.

CBS

The entire episode could have been played as a “slice of life,” with the three plot lines never intersecting and it still would have been a fairly successful installment of the series. This isn’t our first look at the internal life of a Klingon ship, but it is our first look at a Vulcan crew, and playing those distinct societies against Starfleet culture is a great bit of world building. Star Trek has never been good about showing life outside Starfleet, only lightly touching on the grander world in more recent shows like Picard and Prodigy. And even those still have tenuous Starfleet connections. Lower Decks has relished showing us the larger universe that the characters exist in, and here we now get that same sense of expansion without the Starfleet worldview intruding.

That doesn’t mean the storylines stand apart, far from it. All three ships and their plot lines come together in the end, not only pulling the episode into one cohesive narrative, but also continuing — and starting to resolve — a plot line that has lingered since the end of season one, namely the Pakleds. We finally find out why they suddenly became a huge threat in the Alpha Quadrant, thanks to a series of machinations reminiscent of storylines on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Not everything is revolved by the end, presumably leading into a big finale next week. It’s fair to say that seasons one and two basically comprise one full story arc, with season three possibly presenting a fresh slate.

CBS

And it’s just in time, too. Each season has represented a year on the Cerritos. Next season will mark three years on the Cerritos for Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford, placing them in line for a promotion. And unlike Mariner’s purposeful self-sabotage, her friends have all shown themselves to be competent, trustworthy officers. There’s no reason they shouldn’t be promoted — and technically Brad Boimler already was at the end of last season, having only been demoted and sent back to the Cerritos because of a transporter accident on the USS Titan.

While it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that the characters will get promoted in the season finale, it will have to happen some time next year for the show to maintain its verisimilitude in Star Trek canon. The Cerritos doesn’t have the luxury of being trapped in the Delta Quadrant as an excuse to keep its ensign an ensign (poor Harry Kim). But there’s hope, given what happens to our Klingon and Vulcan lower deckers by the end of “wej Duj.” Those outcomes, alongside the episode wrapping on Brad giving sage advice to a young crewman, seem to hint that the show is comfortable with letting our protagonists move on when it’s time.

This post contains spoilers for the season finale of Marvel's 'What If…?'

All season there were hints that What If…? was going to be more than just an anthology show. The fact that it debuted week to week, instead of dropping all at once like Star Wars Visions. The Watcher’s repeated insistence that he must not interfere, an assertion begging to be tested. Stephen Strange noticed the Watcher’s presence. And then Ultron becomes aware of not just the Watcher, but of the entire multiverse, setting the stage for this week’s finale. It’s like a “greatest hits” of the series so far, with room for future adventures.

After last episode’s altercation, the Watcher knows he cannot handle Infinity Ultron by himself, instead enlisting the help of the heroes we’ve met over the entire season, including Captain Carter, T’Challa Starlord and Party Thor. The one exception is a Gamora who appears to have been working with Tony Stark, pulled into the group with little explanation, making me wonder if I had missed an episode. (Though the Watcher’s dismissal of Tony was pretty funny.)

Where other episodes have had to rush through their premises, showing us how those particular realities differed from the main Marvel Cinematic Universe, the finale has eight prior episodes to lean on for background so it got straight to the action. What we got was a tight, zippy episode that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser, with lots of fun banter between the characters. And it certainly helped that a few were played by their original live-action actors, most notably Benedict Cumberbatch and Hayley Atwell.

However, even this episode left some loose ends and a lot of doors open, with Arnim Zola and Killmonger locked in eternal battle, Black Widow finding a new team and Captain Carter discovering her lost-long love still alive. These all feel ripe for sequels that this show appears more than willing to deliver.

Marvel Studios

It raises the question of what What If…? actually is. The show was originally presented as an anthology — which is still one of the tags it’s given on Disney+. Traditionally an anthology is a collection of stories or essays by different authors, but as early as The Twilight Zone television has defined an anthology as a program with new characters and scenarios every episode, regardless of whether the writers are the same. Even now, while every episode of Black Mirror is written by Charlie Brooker, you’ll still see it described as a science fiction anthology.

The episodes of What If…? are written by a variety of people including showrunner A.C. Bradley, but that’s par for the course with any television program, even the serialized ones. But its anthology nature was due to the fact that even if they were similar to characters we already knew and loved from the live-action productions, the characters were still different people. This is actually alluded to in the finale, when Gamora’s machine fails to destroy the Infinity Stones because it was only built to crush the gems in her universe, not in all realities.

Marvel Studios

But ultimately, even if it’s different universes, it’s one multiverse and thus, one continuity. To watch this finale you would have needed to see every episode of the series this season, instead of cherry-picking only the episodes you were interested in. I know a few people who were only watching the concepts that intrigued them, but in the end they’ll have to watch every episode in order to make sense of certain plot points. While the show has been careful not to intrude into the main MCU and becoming “required” viewing in that expanding behemoth, it’s still building an essential canon of its own.

It’s still rather up in the air over what part What If…? is meant to play. Having many of the actors reprise their roles from the films was a way to tie it into the larger universe, while the change in medium from live-action to animation set it apart from not just the films, but series like WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Being billed as an anthology gave it license to do a lot less long-term character building than those two programs as well. 

Marvel Studios

However, in practice it feels a lot like Loki, which completely changed how we saw the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe — it even downplayed the Infinity Stones at several points! Taking major threats of the MCU and greeting them with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ says that even What If….? isn’t all that interested in retreading old stories and is ready to move on with the rest of the Marvel properties. It may be inessential canon, but it still wants to keep up with the main event. And that’s not how an anthology is supposed to work.

Amazon has opened a 4-star store in Bluewater, a mall located just southeast of central London. And it's not just the first 4-star store outside the US, it's also the company's first shop in the UK that sells non-food and non-perishable items. Similar to Amazon's 4-star stores in New York and other parts of the US, the shop in Bluewater will sell products rated 4 stars and above, are top sellers or are trending on the e-commerce giant's UK website. 

Since the shop can't carry all the highly rated products Amazon sells online, the selection in-store will be curated, though they will include goods across top categories like consumer electronics, toys, games, books, kitchen and home. It will sell products from small businesses across the UK, as well as the company's own devices, including Kindle e-Readers, Fire tablets and Echo speakers. 

The shop will have sections that correspond to specific sections of the website, as well, such as Most Wished For, which will feature products from Wish Lists. "Trending in Bluewater" will showcase items local customers have been buying, while "Most Gifted" will feature the top items ordered as gifts. Amazon says it will switch out products regularly based on customer feedback and to keep up with the latest trends. 

Products in the store will be marked with digital tags containing the item's price, average star rating and the number of customer reviews. In addition, customers don't have to be Prime members to be able to shop there. That said, the store won't feature Amazon's Just Walk Out technology like the company's Fresh grocery store in London. Just Walk Out allows shoppers to grab what they need from the shelves and, well, walk out without having to pay at a manned or a self-checkout counter. They can make their purchase from Amazon's UK website, however, and simply pick up their order from the store the next day.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't testify at today's whistleblower hearing, but he has posted a lengthy reply to the accusations being lobbed at the company. He said the Frances Haugen's claims don't make sense and that they paint a "false picture" of the social network. "At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true," he wrote in his post. The Facebook chief cited the Meaningful Social Interactions (MSI) update to News Feed, which was designed to show fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family. 

He said the company went through with the change knowing that it would make people spend less time on the website, because research suggested it was the right thing thing to do for people's well-being. In Haugen's testimony, she painted MSI in a less flattering light. She said Zuckerberg chose to apply "metrics defined by Facebook" like MSI "over changes that would have significantly decreased misinformation and other inciting content." The whistleblower said the CEO was presented with solutions to make Facebook "less viral, less twitchy," but he decided not to use them because they had a negative impact on the MSI metric. 

In the SEC complaint she filed, Haugen claimed that Facebook allowed "hateful" and "divisive" content, because it is "easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions." Zuckerberg addressed that in his post, as well, calling it "deeply illogical." Facebook makes money from ads, he said, and advertisers apparently tell the company that they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. 

In addition, Zuckerberg said the research into how Instagram affects young people was mischaracterized. He didn't explicitly mention it, but The Wall Street Journal published an article in mid-September about how it knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls based on internal documents detailing Facebook's own research. The social network eventually published a couple of documents from that research, but Haugen provided Congress with four more. Zuckerberg defended the platform, writing that many teens the company heard from actually "feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced."

Haugen, who joined Facebook in 2019, worked on democracy and misinformation issues when she was with the company. She brought "tens of thousands" of pages of internal Facebook documents to Whistleblower Aid founder John Tye in addition to filing a whistleblower complaint with the SEC. There were several reports that came out based on those documents, including the existence of a VIP program that enabled high-profile users to skirt Facebook's rules. Haugen also accused Facebook of contributing to election misinformation and the January 6th US Capitol riots.

As for Zuckerberg, part of his post reads:

"If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space — even ones larger than us? If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?"