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Irish Examiner
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
How do some blockbuster disaster movies stack up against real science?
From fiery asteroids to rogue planets, humanity's fascination with its own demise has fuelled countless blockbuster films. End-of-the-world movies captivate us with their spectacle and suspense, but how do they stack up against real science? Let's explore some iconic apocalypse films and rate which ones get close to plausible science and which ones veer into pure fantasy. The scientifically plausible, kind of… Deep Impact (1998) Deep Impact starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, and Morgan Freeman Plot: A comet is on a collision course with Earth, threatening mass extinction. Science Check: This one gets a lot right. Comets (icy, rocky bodies from the outer solar system) could indeed strike Earth, as they have in the past (think of the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — although this is widely believed to have been caused by an asteroid not a comet). The film's depiction of a global effort to deflect the comet with nuclear weapons aligns with real-world concepts like NASA's planetary defence strategies, including the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully altered an asteroid's orbit in 2022. Where it stretches plausibility is in the timeline, detecting a comet just months before impact is unlikely with today's tech, which can spot near-Earth objects years in advance. Still, the tsunami-causing aftermath of a smaller fragment hitting the Atlantic? That's a chillingly realistic touch. Accuracy Rating: 7/10. Nails comet impacts and deflection but stretches the detection timeline. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) The Day After Tomorrow starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward, Emmy Rossum, and Ian Holm Plot: Climate change triggers a sudden ice age, with superstorms and flash-freezing chaos. Science Check: This film takes a kernel of truth and runs wild with it. The idea of a disrupted Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a key ocean current that regulates global climate, has basis in science. Studies suggest that melting polar ice from climate warming have weakened this system, and under high emissions scenarios it could collapse, which would cool Europe and the planet overall; however, scientists aren't sure about the timing this could happen — it's a hot (or cold) topic. But the movie's hyper-accelerated timeline (days instead of decades) and dramatic effects, like tornadoes shredding Los Angeles or New York freezing solid in hours, are pure Hollywood. Real climate shifts are gradual, not instant, and liquid nitrogen-style freezing of humans? Thermodynamically absurd. Accuracy Rating: 4/10. AMOC disruption is real, but the rest is cinematic craic. Interstellar (2014) Anne Hathaway as Amelia in Interstellar. Picture: Warner Bros/Paramount/Melinda Sue Gordon Plot: Earth becomes uninhabitable due to crop failures and dust storms, prompting a search for a new home via a wormhole. Science Check: Interstellar earns points for ambition. The film consulted physicist Kip Thorne, ensuring its wormhole and black hole visuals (like Gargantua's accretion disk) were grounded in relativity theory. Crop blight wiping out food supplies is a plausible threat, fungal pathogens and climate change do endanger global agriculture. However, the idea of Earth becoming a dust-choked wasteland in mere decades is exaggerated; such a collapse would likely take centuries. The wormhole? Theoretically possible, but we've no evidence they exist or could be navigated. Accuracy Rating: 7/10. Blight and dust are credible, but the speed and wormhole travel are speculative. The scientifically absurd Armageddon (1998) Armageddon with Bruce Willis Plot: A Texas-sized asteroid threatens Earth, and oil drillers are sent to nuke it from the inside. Science Check: Armageddon is a rollercoaster of nonsense. An asteroid that big (1,000 km wide) would obliterate Earth on impact, no drilling required. Splitting it with a nuke wouldn't work either; you'd need energy far exceeding all human-made explosives combined, and the fragments would still rain down catastrophically. Plus, training drillers to be astronauts in days? NASA would sooner train astronauts to drill. It's a thrilling ride, but it's about as scientific as a cartoon. Accuracy Rating: 1/10. Gets the asteroid threat vaguely right but flunks physics and logistics. 2012 (2009) 2012 starring John Cusack, Thandiwe Newton, Danny Glover, and Woody Harrelson Plot: Neutrinos from a solar flare heat Earth's core, causing continents to shift and mega-tsunamis to ensue. Science Check: This one's a doomsday fever dream. Neutrinos, near-massless particles that pass through matter, are incapable of heating Earth's core. Science says no, but the film says 'yes, and here's tsunamis'. The idea of 'solar flares' triggering pole shifts or crust displacement is geological gibberish, plate tectonics don't work that way, and shifts take millions of years, not hours. The arks saving humanity are a nice touch, but the science here is a Mayan prophecy-level stretch. Accuracy Rating: 0/10 —Pure fantasy with zero scientific grounding. The Core (2003) The Core: In a last-ditch effort to restart the planet's failing magnetic field, scientists and astronauts must set off a nuclear device at the center of the Earth. 2003 film starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, and Stanley Tucci Plot: Earth's core mysteriously stops spinning, so a team drills down to detonate nukes and restart it. Science Check: Where to begin? The core stopping would take an incomprehensible force (far beyond anything natural) and would disrupt Earth's magnetic field gradually, not instantly. Drilling to the core is impossible with current tech; the deepest hole ever (Kola Superdeep Borehole) reached just 12 kilometres, versus the 2,900 kilometres to the outer core. And nukes restarting it? Angular momentum doesn't work like a car engine. This film's a wild sci-fi romp, not a science lesson. Although there is a factually correct documentary by the same name... and I know a lecturer who accidentally played the wrong core movie to their university class. They shall remain anonymous. Accuracy Rating: 0/10. A wild sci-fi ride with no scientific legs. Why we love the apocalypse anyway Whether they nail the science or fling it out the window, end-of-the-world films tap into our primal fears and hopes. Films such as Deep Impact and Interstellar remind us of real threats, asteroids, climate change, resource depletion, while offering heroic solutions. Meanwhile, Armageddon and 2012 lean into absurdity, prioritising explosions over equations. Scientifically accurate or not, they all ask: How would we face the end? And that's a question worth pondering, even if the neutrinos stay harmless and the core keeps spinning. So, next time you're watching an apocalyptic blockbuster, enjoy the ride and just don't bet on it being a documentary.
Washington Post
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In ‘Murderbot' and ‘Overcompensating,' hunks with something to hide
It's surely a coincidence that two summer comedies featuring conflicted avatars of conventional masculinity are airing the same week — and that both protagonists spend their respective seasons trying to hide who they really are. But it's a fun coincidence, akin to when competing studios put out two versions of the same blockbuster around the same time ('A Bug's Life' and 'Antz,' 'Armageddon' and 'Deep Impact').
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Why do the odds of asteroids hitting Earth keep fluctuating?
Recently the asteroid 2024 YR4, which is expected to pass Earth in 2032, was calculated to have a 1 in 83 chance of striking our planet. Then a week passed and suddenly there was a new headline: Asteroid 2024 YR4 was now believed to have only a 1 in 43 chance of striking our planet — the highest odds ever recorded for a space rock to hit our planet. Later the space rock fluctuated again, this time to a figuratively and literally astronomical 1 in 59,000 chance for impact. In short, asteroid 2024 YR4 went from breaking records for known threatening asteroids to being a near-zero threat. At some point in the near future, this risk may be out of date. The rock is 130 – 300 feet across (40 – 90 meters), meaning if such a collision were to occur, it would at the very least cause an airburst, shattering windows and infrastructure if it took place near a large city. The impact would be much less damaging if it occurred over the ocean, as asteroid 2024 YR4 is not large enough even at the outer range of projections to trigger a tsunami. Even so, most humans want absolute zero certainty rather than near-zero likelihood in their disaster forecasts. Reality does not instill the same confidence one sees in sci-fi depictions of scenarios in which near-Earth objects like asteroids and comets approach our planet. In 'Deep Impact' and 'Armageddon,' astronauts know for sure that our planet is in danger, how much time they have to solve the problem and how to use nuclear weapons to blow up those dangerous near-Earth objects before they wipe out all life as we know it. Yet according to Richard P. Binzel, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who invented the Torino Impact Hazard Scale for measuring these space rocks, we should not think in terms of conclusive eventualities and solutions on this issue. Binzel literally created the system scientists and ordinary people alike utilize to assess the threats posed by near-Earth objects on a scale of 0 (no threat) to 10 (will definitely hit Earth and destroy all life.) Because the sky is so vast and our knowledge of it is so limited that the scale is not capable of doing anything more than operating within probabilities. This way the Torino scale allows our species to honestly know what we are dealing with, on a mathematical level, as we become aware of the increasing number of variables pertaining to a given asteroid or comet. We will need any information we can get. Should our species in our lifetimes ever be so unlucky as to actually face a potentially apocalyptic near-Earth object, Binzel noted that the elegant solutions depicted in cinema are far, far from what we would really have at our disposal. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. How did you develop the Torino Scale? Once upon a time, if you go back to the beginning, it would be Eugene Shoemaker, who was studying craters. He was going to be an Apollo astronaut but got washed out [Shoemarker developed Addison's disease, an endocrine disorder], so he studied craters. He's the geologist that determined that the meteor crater in Arizona was a crater by finding minerals underneath the bottom of the crater which could only have been formed by a high-heat, high-intensity shockwave, which is an impact crater. And so Shoemaker began wanting to know what was making craters on the Earth, on the Moon. He transformed himself from a geologist to an astronomer and began searching for these objects in the 1970s. I actually worked as a summer intern for Shoemaker in 1980. I began focusing on, or at least being aware of, working in the field of near-Earth objects as far back as 1980. As we were discovering these objects and surveys that Shoemaker was doing, and then others came along, we would get to the point where we would discover an object that had a non-zero probability of striking the earth. Could be one in 20,000, one in 60,000, just a number that was really small, but not zero. And so astronomers were perplexed: What do we do with these? Do we keep these objects secret until we get enough data and can make it go away, and then we don't have to upset anyone?The problem with that is twofold. One is, the data, the observations are always public, and so anyone who couldn't read the listing of asteroid observations could do these kinds of orbit solutions themselves and declare it to the public. Secondly, the sky is free and open to everyone, so it doesn't seem right to ever not tell you to be public about what you find in the sky. As we were getting to the point of finding objects that could pose a threat to Earth, or at least for which we could not rule out some small chance of striking Earth on a distant date, we had no set way of communicating. It would be a little bit of a tower of Babel, with different astronomers saying different things. Not that the numbers were different, but they would express themselves in different ways, and that could be very confusing to the public. This was the motivation for finding a common communication system, a common scale that we could put into context any newly discovered object. And so this now goes back to 1995 when a guy named John L. Remo brought together a conference at the United Nations for people to discuss the discovery and calculation of orbits of asteroids coming near the Earth. And that's where I presented the first concept of a common language or common scale. I called it a hazard index. That first presentation in 1995, it was a zero-to-five scale, and it generated a lot of discussion, but not a lot of enthusiasm. So I carried the proposal forward, took a lot of input from my colleagues, from science journalists, in terms of what could we do that would make a communication system better. From that I revised the proposal to a 10 point scale, added some broad characterizations for the different categories of what merits attention by astronomers, what would be an actual threat, and then what would classify as a certain collision. That's the lower limit of categorizing objects on the Torino Scale. So a small object that's discovered that's going to disintegrate in the atmosphere, or maybe land a few pieces on the ground, is zero on the Torino Scale, even if we're certain it's going to hit. So where's the bottom limit? And then at what probability does something become interesting? For example, on average in any given year, an object the size of 2024 YR4 has perhaps a one-in-a-thousand chance of striking the Earth or taking us by surprise. That's the level at which it would become a one on the Torino Scale: If we discover an object and it has a probability higher than just sort of the average background of being taken by surprise in any given year. Anything under four [on the scale], I wouldn't worry about. What do you think of the various scientific theories about how we could deflect or otherwise protect ourselves from near-Earth objects? Which ones do you think are viable and which do you think are more fanciful? The most important thing about near-Earth objects is to find them early. The earlier you have, or the more years or more decades you have to find an object, the more options you have such as a deflection, which is easiest to do. The more years you have, the tinier the nudge you need to make sure the objects will miss the Earth. At the moment, that's the capability we have, or the capability we've tested is a deflection technique, to nudge an asteroid slightly off course. That's why these new surveys are actually important because the sooner we start completing the inventory of what's out there, the more time we'll have, in case there's some object out there with our name on it. Do you believe that, aside from the near-Earth objects that have made the news, there are other bodies out there we should be concerned about? There are thousands and thousands of objects like 2024 YR4 and smaller that are out there. We simply need to do a thorough job of cataloging them as the first step towards making sure that we are never taken by surprise, by any sizable object.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Steph Curry's 56-point masterpiece adds to long list of classic scoring flurries
The Bounce Newsletter | This is The Athletic's daily NBA newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Bounce directly in your inbox. I watched the first seven episodes of 'Running Point' on Netflix. It's a new basketball comedy whose main character is similar to Lakers owner Jeanie Buss and played by Kate Hudson. So far, it's extremely funny and not all that basketball-y. Plus, you've always wanted to see Chet Hanks as a professional basketball player, right? Sometimes, his shooting just isn't fair There are two different things that can happen when Steph Curry has an in-game scoring flurry. You can weather the storm, reset your defense and regroup to create a new outcome. Or you can be like Tea Leoni at the end of the movie 'Deep Impact,' standing on the beach and just accepting that the tidal wave will get you. Last night, the Magic were hosting the Warriors, and Curry had one of those famous flurries in the second quarter. Advertisement Out of nowhere, he hit four 3-pointers along the way to scoring 16 points in the blink of an eye. That run gave him 21 points at halftime, and the Magic needed to find a way to regroup and find some way to break his rhythm. Instead, the tidal wave of Curry points came crashing ashore. He followed up his 21-point first half with a 22-point third quarter. The 36-year-old sharpshooter outscored the Magic (21) by himself in the third period. By the end of the night, Curry and the Warriors had prevailed. He finished with 56 points after scoring 13 in the fourth quarter to close out the Magic (29-32) in the Warriors' 121-115 victory. He went 16 of 25 from the field and made 12 of 19 from 3-point range. It was the 11th game in NBA history in which a player made at least 12 3-pointers. This was Curry's third game of at least 12 threes, tying Klay Thompson for the most such games ever. No other player, except the Splash Brothers, has multiple. It's both expected and unsurprising with Curry, while at the same time being jaw-dropping. It was the first time Jimmy Butler got to experience it as a teammate, and the Warriors (32-27) endured an abysmal first half before Curry turned it to gold after halftime. It's the fourth-highest scoring total in his career. It's a reminder that, when he gets going, there is not much you can do. You can hope he tires himself out and that he loses the rhythm. You can pray the deluge will cease. But ultimately, you are at the mercy of the greatest shooter of all time. KD didn't like idea of a Warriors reunion 🏀 No do-overs. Kevin Durant spoke about why he didn't want to return to Golden State. He costs too much. 🏀 Draft board. We all know about Cooper Flagg, but other 2025 NBA Draft prospects are rising. Meet 19-year-old V.J. Edgecombe. 🏀 It's official. Legendary Spurs coach Gregg Popovich made an announcement yesterday. He won't be back this season. Advertisement 📺 Don't miss this game tonight. Cavaliers (48-10) at Celtics (42-17), 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN or Fubo (try it free here). This regular-season series has been epic. 📺 League Pass gem. Nuggets (38-21) at Pistons (33-26), 7 p.m. ET on League Pass (get LP here). Denver gets a chance to end Detroit's eight-game win streak. About Anthony Edwards' disappointing ejection I was in attendance for the Lakers' 111-102 win over the Timberwolves. I wasn't there as a member of the media. I simply went as a fan of the NBA and attended the game with some friends. During the early parts of the first half, we had Anthony Edwards and Jarred Vanderbilt get into a little skirmish during the start of a timeout break. They were both assessed double technical fouls for their little pushing episodes. That was a good risk-reward scenario for the Lakers. If both players got into it again, the Lakers would understandably be willing to sacrifice Vanderbilt's night if it meant an ejection for Edwards. The next-best thing happened, though. Edwards hit the deck in the third quarter, having been tangled up with a Lakers defender. After not getting the call, he held the ball on the ground and put his arms out to complain to the referee who refused to make the call. Eventually, Edwards' complaints became enough for referee Brent Barnaky. Edwards didn't care about the previous technical foul. Or maybe he didn't remember it. Regardless, Edwards was T'd up and ejected from the game. Crew chief James Williams said it was for directing profanity toward an official. Thoughts and prayers to that ref? Edwards also tossed the ball into the stands before exiting. As someone attending the game, I found the crowd reaction fascinating. There was a mixture of Wolves fans there, but it was an obviously pro-Lakers audience. Some immediately signaled for Edwards to go to the locker room. The majority of people in my section were dumbfounded and groaned with discontent. One Lakers fan in front of me joked that Dennis Rodman did far worse in his career without being ejected. I joked back that Rodman is still doing much worse. Advertisement I had asked some people around me during the moment and after the game what they thought of the ejection. One Lakers fan said he paid $1,000 for his ticket to watch LeBron James and Luka Dončić go against Edwards. Another fan said he did not pay to watch a Wolves team not have its best player. A few Wolves fans told me their night was ruined, as they complained about the refs. Sometimes, when watching this stuff on television, you can forget the in-arena entertainment aspect of it all. The technical foul seemed unnecessary, and it's Edwards' 16th of the season, which triggers a one-game suspension. More from last night's action Bucks 121 (33-25), Nuggets 112 (38-21): Did you ever watch 'Pacific Rim'? It's about two massive kaijus fighting on modern-day planet Earth, and how regular people try to figure out how to take them down. It's similar to what watching Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokić going at it felt like. Big Honey finished with 32 points, 14 rebounds and 10 assists for Denver. Antetokounmpo had 28 points, 19 rebounds and seven assists. Mavericks 103 (32-28), Hornets 96 (14-44): Charlotte recently had the worst three-game stretch in NBA history, losing by a grand total of 131 points. That means losing to the Mavericks by seven is essentially the Hornets' championship. Pelicans 124 (16-43), Suns 116 (27-32): Phoenix is in a bad place right now. Devin Booker had 36 as Kevin Durant added 28, but it didn't matter because Zion Williamson had his first career triple-double (27 points, 11 assists and 10 rebounds) to lead New Orleans. Why is Rookie of the Year search so difficult? I'll never forget the Dončić-Trae Young race for Rookie of the Year. While both players put up incredible rookie campaigns, it never actually came down to a close vote. Dončić wasn't unanimous in the voting, but he might as well have been. He ended up garnering all but four of the first-place votes for ROY that season. He was the overwhelming selection by a panel of media voters. That's not the part I focused on, though. Before their sophomore seasons, Young was asked about the four first-place votes he received. His answer was essentially that he wanted to prove for the rest of his career that those few voters who picked him would end up being correct. That is just flat-out not how that award works. You aren't voting for who will have the best career. You're voting for who had the best rookie season. Sometimes, we can get too cute in trying to figure it out. In the Awards Watch yesterday, I touched on the ROY race with this class that hasn't exactly lit the world on fire. Check the betting favorites every few days and you're liable to see an entirely different top three each time. I don't think it's because the landscape changes all that much. It feels like it's people trying to decide who will be the best player from the class, rather than who is having the best rookie campaign. This is what I wrote about the ROY top-three candidates with a very obvious top choice to me. Advertisement 3. Kel'el Ware, Miami Heat (Last week: 2) He's proven to be another gem the Heat have found in the middle of the first round, joining guys like Bam Adebayo, Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Tyler Herro. Ware hasn't had a complete season, but his play as of late shows you this is a key figure for the Heat moving forward. 2. Stephon Castle, San Antonio Spurs (Last week: 1) You can make the argument that Castle has shown flashes of being the best player in the future, but that's not what this award is about. Castle has been a solid defender for a rookie, and a good playmaker for a non-point guard. But he still struggles to consistently make shots. 1. Jaylen Wells, Memphis Grizzlies (Last week: Honorable mention) Wells has simply been the best rookie this season, outside of Jared McCain and the start he was off to before he hurt his knee. That's not to denigrate the other candidates, because they've had moments and stretches to make you take notice. Wells has been as consistent as anybody else, and he's giving this rookie class the most complete season so far. He would be just the second rookie since the NBA/ABA merger to win the award as a second-round pick. Can you name the other without looking it up? Wells has been the guy for most of this season. He wasn't when the 76ers rookie was cruising. But once McCain was lost for the season with his knee injury, Wells was so clearly the most consistent from there. I don't know if he will garner the most votes. The second-round pick isn't the sexiest name on the board, but the Grizzlies' rookie should take home the hardware. He's maybe not the best player moving forward, but that's also not the point of this award. 📫 Love The Bounce? Check out The Athletic
The Guardian
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Zero Day is a political thriller without a political position or even point
For decades, movies and TV shows that feature the president of the United States as a character have tried, often playfully, to keep pace with the headlines. Sometimes they even managed to move a little faster than real-life progress; Morgan Freeman was chosen to lead the nation in Deep Impact a decade before the election of Barack Obama, and plenty of women have occupied the on-screen Oval Office, anticipating a glass-ceiling break that has yet to actually happen. So at first, the new Netflix series Zero Day comes across like a slightly and understandably mistimed attempt at topicality by focusing on George Mullen (Robert De Niro), a former US president known for bipartisan cooperation, who only served one term before stepping down to deal with the death of his son, and who later works closely with the current president, Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett), a woman of color. The show may have been anticipating a Kamala Harris/Joe Biden dynamic that never quite came to fruition, but on the other hand, Zero Day started filming in 2023, well before Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket in summer 2024, so maybe it should get points for prescience anyway. What the show can't get any points for, however, is constructing a coherent political reality out of our world's spare parts. Because while Roland Emmerich movies like Independence Day, with its vaguely Clintonesque Bill Pullman, or White House Down, with Jamie Foxx standing in for Obama, use the presidency to inject some winking currency into silly action movies, Zero Day purports to have more on its mind, as it compulsively collects and remixes moments from 21st-century US politics, nominally to construct a grownup political thriller. The show's major incident is, essentially, a digital 9/11: a cross-platform cyber-attack that hacks enough systems to leave thousands dead (the initial estimate of 3,000 even manages to match 9/11 to a queasy T). In response, President Mitchell forms a commission involving Patriot Act-like surrender of civil liberties, and appoints Mullen to run it. He has misgivings about the level of power the government is flexing, but takes the job assuming that he will personally be well-equipped to serve as a check on that power. To this early-2000s scenario, the show adds Mullen's wife Sheila (Joan Allen), a judge with her eye on the second circuit court of Appeals (shades of Hillary Clinton's post-first lady political career), and the couple's daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), a New York City congresswoman with leftist bona fides – yes, Netflix has summoned its vast money and other resources to bring us a white AOC. The show also casts Dan Stevens as a strident, self-styled pundit who tonally sounds like Tucker Carlson but engages in some horseshoe-theory quasi-leftist conspiracy theorizing, too; and Gaby Hoffmann as a gender-swapped tech-bro CEO who – does this count as a spoiler? – turns out to have some nefarious connections to the bad guys. There's nothing necessarily wrong with pastiche, of course. Yet in the post-2016 years, there's an increasing sense that Hollywood's attempts at political thrillers like Zero Day are frantically collecting signifiers without having the faintest idea of how to convincingly imitate a reality they might have once inhabited effortlessly. Zero Day's creators Eric Newman (of the various Narcos series), Noah Oppenheim (who has extensive experience at NBC News), and Michael Schmidt (a New York Times journalist) have an embarrassing idea of what will endear their lead character to viewers immediately: Mullen, whose political party is improbably never identified, shows his natural leadership by taking command of an unruly crowd yelling random talking points. He unites them all by using – get this – generic commonsense we're-all-Americans rhetoric that somehow gets everyone cheering together inside of two minutes. He might as well be talking to the protesters in that Pepsi ad with Kylie Jenner from some years back. The show's shamelessness and borderline insane attempt to locate an ideological dead center doesn't stop there. The funniest and most presumptuous moment may be when Hoffman's tech CEO, faced with federal agents knocking on the door to her compound after her connections to the attack are discovered, takes to a live stream in an attempt to make it seem as if the feds are overreaching to silence her. Panicked and cornered, she implores her many followers to … call their local representatives! This is a show where even the most manipulative bad guys believe heartily in the democratic process. The moment also functions as foreshadowing for when – spoilers ahead for anyone who still wants to behold the flabby pacing and ridiculous cliches for themselves – the conspiracy behind the attack is revealed to involve high-level election officials from both sides of the aisle. Yes, both parties (again, implied but not actually named!) have teamed up to commit deadly cyberterrorism in an attempt to unite the country and 'cut off the fringe on both sides'. Natural-born centrist Mullen triumphs, then, by out-centering the centrists. It's that classic tale of radical centrism at odds with regular centrism. In this alternate universe, radical ideology doesn't really exist; it's just an abstract nuisance that can be vaguely blamed on a few media figures and the idea of divisiveness. Worse, a storyline that initially looks like the core of Zero Day has a more powerful and still headline-derived simplicity: Mullen, called back into public service, has been privately experiencing what may be symptoms of dementia. But are his disorientation, forgetfulness and hallucinations part of a stressed mind failing him, shadowy forces gaslighting him, or some other form of surveillance-state nightmare? This storyline could use a Biden-inspired character as a clever way into a genuinely paranoid and contemporary political thriller, perfect for an environment in which healthcare advances have allowed many politicians to linger in their jobs some two decades past retirement age – and opposition to extremism, knotted together with a lust for power, keeps some at their jobs for way too long. It's topical about six different ways, with plenty of opportunity for entertaining heightening. But that doesn't seem to be enough for this show, which bafflingly sidelines that part of Mullen's story at its convenience, in favor of a story about how the suspension of civil liberties threatens to draw Mullen's honorable centrism into a quagmire. (They ultimately don't, because … he's allowed?) The show seems to almost revel in its own flailing – and it's not the only quasi-political product of the season to twist in the winds of 2025. This quarter's big Marvel movie Captain America: Brave New World attempts to return to the style of the beloved Captain America: The Winter Soldier (itself already a fun, lightweight, comic-book-y version of those films) while also taking even greater pains to avoid even a hint of a political position. (Apparently the film-makers consider having a Black Captain America political – which is to say, controversy-generating among the dumbest 5% of the internet – enough.) When the movie's president of the United States morphs from cranky senior citizen imprisoning a Black man for a recent attack into a gigantic, ruddy rage-monster, it's apparently important that the material resist any kind of metaphor or real-life parallel. After the requisite action sequence, Bad President is stopped, he graciously accepts a prison sentence, and even begins to mend his personal relationships. There will always be movies and TV shows that end more happily and more easily than real life, of course. Entertainment is allowed to deliver stories that don't end in a radical call to arms. But these projects lack insight into real-life people, and the imagination to think up new ones. What exactly is the point of a political thriller built on some delusional fantasy-baseball version of real-life figures, or one where no characters have any real discernible beliefs beyond being pro-justice? The particular fantasy ginned up by Zero Day and the new Captain America, minus any kind of provocation or point, is more about normalcy briefly disrupted, rather than permanently altered. Or, more disturbing, it's about a normalcy that cannot, shall not, never will be altered. It will come entertainingly close, but the center, quite literally, will hold. The most authentic paranoia these projects can produce is the suspicion that they exist to provide utterly faulty reassurance of an annihilated status quo.
