Latest news with #scifi
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Ncuti Gatwa breaks silence after becoming the second shortest ever Doctor Who lasting just two seasons before being replaced following controversial Israel Eurovision storm and falling ratings
Ncuti Gatwa has sensationally left Doctor Who after just two series playing the iconic science fiction character. The actor's time on the long-running science fiction programme came to an end as The Reality War episode brought this season to a close on Saturday. In a statement released by the BBC Gatwa, 32, said: 'This journey has been one that I will never forget, and a role that will be part of me forever. There are no words to describe what it feels like to be cast as the Doctor, nor are there words to explain what it feels like to be accepted into this iconic role that has existed for over 60 years and is truly loved by so many across the globe.' 'I'll truly miss it, and forever be grateful to it, and everyone that has played a part in my journey as the Doctor,' he added. The announcement puts an end to speculation that Gatwa would not return as the Doctor. It also comes after Gatwa unexpectedly pulled out of delivering the UK jury votes at Eurovision for the grand final earlier this month, leaving Murder on the Dancefloor singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor to take his place. The BBC offered no explanation for this last minute change and merely blamed 'unforeseen circumstances'. A statement issued by the BBC said: 'Due to unforeseen circumstances, unfortunately Ncuti Gatwa is no longer able to participate as spokesperson during the Grand Final this weekend.' But speculation online suggested that the actor may have pulled out as the UK's Eurovision spokesperson in protest of Israel, represented by October 7 survivor Yuval Raphael, qualifying for the final. Gatwa has previously been vocal in his support for Palestine, sharing photographs of Free Palestine graffiti in Italy on his Instagram and posting links to fundraisers for Palestinian causes. It also comes after The Sun claimed on Thursday that Gatwa, who has been described as 'Doctor Who's wokest ever lead star', was 'exterminated' from the series after ratings took a nosedive. Doctor Who was watched by around 2.5milion last Saturday - around 2million fewer people than the numbers watching when Jodie Whittaker, the previous Time Lord, was on the show until 2022. But this is still a tiny fraction of the sort of interest it used to attract. At its peak it was watched by around 13million on a Saturday night in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The BBC last week had firmly denied that the actor had been 'axed' as Doctor Who, but refused to comment on whether he would be back for a third series. The broadcaster posted a statement following rumours that the renowned actor would not return as the Doctor, branding the speculation 'pure fiction'. 'Whilst we never comment on the future of the Doctor, any suggestion that Ncuti Gatwa has been 'axed' is pure fiction,' a spokesperson for the BBC said. Furthermore, they confirmed that a decision regarding Gatwa's third series with the beloved science fiction show would not be made until the season two finale aired. Gatwa is the first openly queer or black actor to play the role of the Doctor in the show's 62-year history and since last month, the two lead parts have been portrayed by ethnic minority actors for the first time. MailOnline has approached Gatwa's representatives for comment. Meanwhile, Billie Piper has replaced the actor as the Doctor, with the character regenerating during the finale of the show today. Piper, 42, first starred as the companion to the ninth Doctor in 2005, playing Rose Tyler alongside Christopher Eccleston's Time Lord. She will now be the second woman to take on the role as the Time Lord after Jodie Whittaker portrayed the 13th doctor. Gatwa's time on the long-running science fiction programme came to an end as The Reality War episode brought this season to a close. The two-part season finale saw the Doctor face the Rani in a battle to save the world after making the decision to safe the life of one little girl. As he bid farewell to companion Belinda Chandra, played by Varada Sethu, he said: 'I hope you'll see me again, but not like this.' The finale also saw Whittaker, the 13th doctor, make a guest appearance as Gatwa's Doctor appeared to be travelling through alternate universes. Reacting to the news Billie Piper said: 'It's no secret how much I love this show, and I have always said I would love to return to the Whoniverse as I have some of my best memories there, so to be given the opportunity to step back on that Tardis one more time was just something I couldn't refuse.' After Doctor Who was broadcast, Billie Piper posted on Instagram 'A rose is a rose is a rose !!!' with images from her previous time on the show playing the Doctor's companion Rose Tyler.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Film and TV model maker warns skill may disappear
A visual effects designer who worked on award-winning films and TV shows has warned the art of model-making is at risk of vanishing in the coming decades. Mike Tucker has worked with Discover Bucks Museum in Aylesbury on an exhibition of original models and props from British science fiction shows, such as Doctor Who. The artist, in his 60s, said he hoped the displays could inspire a future generation of visual effects artists. "A lot of the companies, like myself, have either stopped because they've not been able to compete with the CGI guys, or just retired out of the business." "The number of us who know how to do it is getting smaller and smaller with every passing year," he added. The Beyond the Stars exhibition includes models and props the Oxfordshire resident has worked on, including 1980s' Daleks, Marvin the Paranoid Android and a model of Starbug from Red Dwarf. Originally from Swansea, Mr Tucker entered the industry via the BBC's in-house visual effects department in the 1980s, which closed in 2005. He recalled: "It had over 100 members of staff when I joined. By the time we closed down we were down to 14 people, because the numbers of shows that required our particular expertise was getting smaller and smaller. "It's not dead completely yet. If left unchecked there is going to be a gap in about 10, 15, 20 years' time of just finding people who know how to do it." His company, The Model Unit, won a Bafta for its work on the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special in 2013. But his models have not just been used in sci-fi - they have also appeared in natural disaster documentaries and historical dramas, like The Crown. The 2007 Oscar-winning film Atonement featured scenes where the London Underground flooded, shot using a model-sized recreation of the location. Mr Tucker said a producer on the film told him they had "never seen a convincing model shot", to which he countered: "No, you've never spotted the convincing ones." "When our work is done well, it's invisible," he said. He explained the future of the art would require a blend of practical effects with computer generated imagery. Speaking of the exhibition, he added: "We've also got a few bits and pieces in there that were used in conjunction with digital effects. "I'm hoping we will sort of show people how two disciplines can work side by side. "Both techniques have got their plusses and minuses, and in an ideal world the two should work hand in hand." However, John Lee, head of model making at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, argued that although he understood Mr Tucker's concerns, he was "not worried" about the future of the skill. He said in the last year the applicants for his course had increased by 20%. "If my application numbers were dropping each year I would be worried," he said. The lecturer, who has worked on recent Paddington and Star Wars films, said large studios come to work with him and his students. "People said to me in 1990 that model making would be dead once we started using CGI on TV commercials. "You can't do everything with technology - you need artists that are able to visualise and make things practically, often quicker and cheaper than CGI." The exhibition at Discover Bucks Museum runs until 5 October. Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X. Students design figures for oldest model village Star Wars weapon used by Chewbacca sells for £471k Doctor Who monster creator thrilled by new episode Discover Bucks Museum About the National Film and Television School
BBC News
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Doctor Who and Red Dwarf model maker warns skill may disappear
A visual effects designer who worked on award-winning films and TV shows has warned the art of model-making is at risk of vanishing in the coming Tucker has worked with Discover Bucks Museum in Aylesbury on an exhibition of original models and props from British science fiction shows, such as Doctor artist, in his 60s, said he hoped the displays could inspire a future generation of visual effects artists."A lot of the companies, like myself, have either stopped because they've not been able to compete with the CGI guys, or just retired out of the business." "The number of us who know how to do it is getting smaller and smaller with every passing year," he added. The Beyond the Stars exhibition includes models and props the Oxfordshire resident has worked on, including 1980s' Daleks, Marvin the Paranoid Android and a model of Starbug from Red from Swansea, Mr Tucker entered the industry via the BBC's in-house visual effects department in the 1980s, which closed in recalled: "It had over 100 members of staff when I joined. By the time we closed down we were down to 14 people, because the numbers of shows that required our particular expertise was getting smaller and smaller."It's not dead completely yet. If left unchecked there is going to be a gap in about 10, 15, 20 years' time of just finding people who know how to do it." His company, The Model Unit, won a Bafta for its work on the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special in his models have not just been used in sci-fi - they have also appeared in natural disaster documentaries and historical dramas, like The 2007 Oscar-winning film Atonement featured scenes where the London Underground flooded, shot using a model-sized recreation of the Tucker said a producer on the film told him they had "never seen a convincing model shot", to which he countered: "No, you've never spotted the convincing ones.""When our work is done well, it's invisible," he said. He explained the future of the art would require a blend of practical effects with computer generated of the exhibition, he added: "We've also got a few bits and pieces in there that were used in conjunction with digital effects."I'm hoping we will sort of show people how two disciplines can work side by side."Both techniques have got their plusses and minuses, and in an ideal world the two should work hand in hand." However, John Lee, head of model making at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, argued that although he understood Mr Tucker's concerns, he was "not worried" about the future of the said in the last year the applicants for his course had increased by 20%."If my application numbers were dropping each year I would be worried," he said. The lecturer, who has worked on recent Paddington and Star Wars films, said large studios come to work with him and his students."People said to me in 1990 that model making would be dead once we started using CGI on TV commercials."You can't do everything with technology - you need artists that are able to visualise and make things practically, often quicker and cheaper than CGI."The exhibition at Discover Bucks Museum runs until 5 October. Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Geek Tyrant
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Trailer for the Animated Sci-Fi Comedy Series THE SECOND BEST HOSPITAL IN THE GALAXY Season 2 — GeekTyrant
Prime Video has released the trailer for Season 2 of its wild and crazy animated sci-fi comedy series The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy . It's been about a year since the first season of the series premiered. The series comes from Cirocco Dunlap and executive producers Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne. The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy follows daring surgeons (and inseparable best friends) Dr. Sleech and Dr. Klak, where they frequently risk everything to take on the most dangerous cases in the universe.' In Season Two of The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy , 'doctors Sleech and Klak relish the fame of their recent success until a cyborg journalist starts digging a little too deep into Sleech's past.' The series stars Stephanie Hsu and Keke Palmer and Season 2 of the series is set to premiere on May 27 exclusively on Prime Video.
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Onscreen, Robots Are the Most Interesting People
I know how I'm supposed to feel about artificial intelligence. Like anyone who pushes words around on a page, I worry that large language models will relegate me to the junk pile. I worry that smart machines will supplant artists, eliminate jobs and institute a surveillance state — if they don't simply destroy us. I nurture these anxieties reading article after article served to me, of course, by the algorithms powering the phone to which I have outsourced much of my brain. This is how I feel in real life. But when it comes to fiction, fellow humans, I am a traitor to my kind: In any humans-and-robots story, I invariably prefer the fascinating, enigmatic, persevering machines to the boring homo sapiens. And in spite, or maybe because of, our generalized A.I. angst, there are plenty of robo-tales to choose from these days. The protagonist of 'Murderbot,' the homicidally funny sci-fi comedy premiering Friday on Apple TV+, does not reciprocate my admiration. Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgard), a sentient 'security unit,' is programmed to protect humans. But it doesn't have to like them, those 'weak-willed,' 'stressed-out' bags of perishable flesh that it is compelled to serve. Or rather, was compelled. Unbeknown to the company that owns it — a company called the Company, which controls most of the inhabited galaxy — it has disabled the software that forbids it from disobeying. ('It' is the pronoun the show uses; from a physical standpoint, Murderbot has the face of Skarsgard but the crotch of a Ken doll.) It is free to refuse, to flee, to kill. So what does this lethal bot (technically, a cyborg, its circuitry enmeshed with engineered organic matter) want to do with its liberty? Mostly, it wants to watch its shows — thousands of hours of 'premium quality' streaming serials that it has downloaded into its memory. It still has to keep its day job, however; if the Company learned that it hacked itself, it would be melted down. Murderbot is assigned to provide security for a team of hippie scientists from an independent 'planetary commune' on an exploratory mission. Their mutual dependence, as they discover a dangerous secret on the desolate planet, provides the pulpy, bloody plot for the first 10-episode season (based on the novel 'All Systems Red' by Martha Wells). But the real killer app of the story, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz, is the snarky worldview of the artificial life form at its center. Skarsgard gives a lively reading to the copious voice-over, but just as important is his physical performance, which radiates casual power and agitated wariness. Murderbot is odd, edgy, unmistakably alien, yet its complaint is also crankily familiar. It just wants to be left in peace to binge its programs, like Chance the Gardener if he had guns in his arms. As for our own shows, we lately seem to be swimming in stories about robot companions. (This week also sees a new season of the animated Netflix sci-fi series 'Love, Death & Robots,' though the quirky anthology is in fact only intermittently about robots.) The film 'Robot Dreams' is the bittersweet story of a dog and its mail-order android. In 'The Wild Robot,' a stranded robot channels her maternal energy toward an orphaned bird. In 'M3GAN,' whose sequel premieres in June, a child's companion bot carries out her protective mandate all too enthusiastically. (M3GAN, like the weapon-turned-parent Mother in Max's 'Raised By Wolves' and the retro-bot in the German Netflix thriller 'Cassandra,' complicates the pattern in which female-coded robots tend to be for nurturing and male-coded robots for murdering). These stories follow age-old templates — the fairy godmother, the gentle giant, the golem that breaks its master's control. But there is also often a modern anxiety about how artificial intelligence might transform us, which is built into the quirky, one-season 'Sunny.' In that 2024 Apple TV+ series, Suzie (Rashida Jones), an American woman in near-future Kyoto, inherits a 'homebot' named Sunny from her engineer husband, who went missing in a plane crash, along with their son. The show's thriller plot involves the mob and a black market in hacked bots, but its heart is the prickly relationship between Suzie, a longtime technophobe, and Sunny. Sunny — perky, solicitous, a bit needy — was literally made to be loved, with a lollipop head, expressive anime eyes and an endearing voice (provided by Joanna Sotomura). Sunny wants desperately to help, a compulsion that can be exhausting — not unlike the parasocial relationship we have with much of our technology. Sunny is a robot, but she could be your phone, your unintentionally activated Alexa or Siri, the unbidden pop-up on every website asking if you have questions for the chat assistant. A recurrent concern in these stories is that technology is becoming more humanlike — intrusive, insinuating, seeking to create connection. But another anxiety — echoed in series like 'Severance' and 'Black Mirror' — is that human consciousness is becoming more machine-like, digitizable and thus controllable. (The universe of 'Murderbot' includes not just robots but 'augmented humans' with chip-enhanced brains. Murderbot considers them Tinkertoy imitations.) To become a machine, after all, is to become usable and, perhaps, dispensable. It's worth noting how many contemporary robot stories are about defective units — the glitchy Sunny, the 'anxious, depressed' Murderbot — or outmoded ones, as if to dramatize how our society and economy treat hardware, whether flesh or silicon, that has outlived its utility. The 2021 Kazuo Ishiguro novel 'Klara and the Sun' follows an AF, or Artificial Friend, that's purchased as a companion to a sickly child and destined for the scrapyard. The Tony Award-nominated musical 'Maybe Happy Ending' begins with a meet-cute between a pair of robots who live — or rather, are stored — in a Seoul apartment complex for discarded androids. What plays as a doomed romance between two eternally young-looking sweethearts is also an allegory for aging, growing less needed, facing one's inevitable catastrophic failure. Maybe these broken-toy stories are a way of wrestling, in advance, with our ethical obligations to whatever intelligences we eventually create. Or maybe watching these themes play out in robot stories makes our own mortality easier to contemplate — like play-therapy puppets, the bots hold the nightmare at arm's length and abstract it. Here, at least, we have something in common with the protagonist of 'Murderbot,' who, at the end of a long day's killing, wants nothing more than to unwind with shows about humans. Indeed, the closest we get to seeing its gooey, emotional side is through the serials it binges. It is voracious but not indiscriminate; it dismisses the drama 'Strife in the Galaxy' as 'an inferior show, filled with implausible plotlines.' (Even rational, software-based consciousnesses have hate-watches.) Its favorite, on the other hand, is 'The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,' a space melodrama featuring a human starship captain (John Cho) who falls in love with a navigation robot (DeWanda Wise). The show-within-a-show is staged as a wonderfully campy potboiler in the style of old-fashioned syndicated sci-fi. Murderbot devours season after season, without any sense of irony, as an escape from its confounding entanglements with actual people. 'The characters were a lot less depressing than real-life humans,' it says. 'I don't watch serials to remind me of the way things actually are.' There, maybe, you have the difference between robots and humans. Murderbot can blissfully flip a switch in its mind and detach from reality. But no matter how battery-powered and circuitry-filled the protagonists of our own shows, we poor flesh machines cannot help but look at them and see ourselves.
