News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: We Could All Use a Little Labyrinth Right Now Plus: Sister Simone, Carol Sturka, and (some) of the best books of 2025. By Molly Templeton | Published on January 9, 2026 Photo: Tri-Star Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Tri-Star Pictures In a different week, in a different timeline, this would be a “hey, welcome back, happy new year!” bit of intro text. But this week has crushed any shreds of festivity I might have had left. In Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. A day later, in Portland, Customs and Border Patrol agents shot two more people (who survived and were taken to local hospitals). I keep thinking about what Portland mayor Keith Wilson said (and I am generally no big fan of Mayor Wilson): “We know what the federal government says happened here. There was a time when we could take them at their word. That time has long passed.” Everyone is quoting 1984 on social media, and with good reason.  Call your reps. And take care of yourselves and your communities as best you can. I Wish Mrs. Davis’ Sister Simone and Pluribus’ Carol Sturka Could Meet I loved the end of the first season of Pluribus. And while I wait with absolutely zero patience for this show to come back, I think I will rewatch Mrs. Davis, which is not exactly a similar show—but I do think it shares some DNA, somehow. Instead of a collective mind, Mrs. Davis involves a supposedly benevolent AI that everyone on Earth loves. Almost. Not Sister Simone (a fantastic Betty Gilpin), who goes up against said AI with the help of her ex. She also has a really complex relationship with Jesus. Mrs. Davis is funnier than Pluribus, and more tangled, and less streamlined and polished, and I love all of those things about it, from the chaotic episode titles to the way one character smashes phones. It is really hard to recommend, though, because it doesn’t sound like much. (Leah Schnelbach’s review is titled “How Do I Talk About Mrs. Davis?”) In actuality, it’s kind of everything. Including a quest for the Holy Grail.  Mrs. Davis is streaming on Peacock. We Could All Use a Hoggle Hug Right About Now: Labyrinth Labyrinth is 40. I cannot linger on this thought; it feels weird. But as is the case with so many big film anniversaries these days, that means it is playing in theaters this weekend only! There’s a funny synchronicity to this, as this week contains both David Bowie’s birthday (January 8) and death day (January 10). Maybe you want to celebrate, maybe you want to mourn, maybe you want to do a little of both? I know I always, always cry at the end, when Sarah says she needs her friends. Go and appreciate tiny Jennifer Connelly; go and appreciate David Bowie and the offscreen man handling his crystal balls; go and appreciate the puppetry and the soundtrack and all the magic that happens when people get to make movies straight out of their own idiosyncratic imaginations.  The Inconsistent Passage of Time Speaking of the passage of time (Labyrinth is forty?!?!?), there’s a gorgeous essay in Emergence magazine about time, and how it’s not the same for every living thing. It’s not even the same for each of us, running on our own clocks and calendars. “Wild Clocks” covers a lot of ground, but swings back, like a clock hand, to the Future Library Project: a grove of trees outside Oslo, in Norway, that will be turned into books in one hundred years. The works that will be printed on these trees will not be read until 2114.  Thinking about this project makes me feel marvelously unstable and small; I can only imagine how it feels for the authors whose work is part of the project. No one will ever read that work until they’re dead. Phew.  David Farrier’s “Wild Clocks” talks about that project, about the way climate change affects the internal clocks of animals and plants, about time and how we move through it. It’s a perfect New Year’s read: rich, challenging, honest and optimistic in turns. It makes me think of Gandalf saying, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” The most important part of that line, I think, is not “the time that is given us.” It’s “we have to decide what to do.” (Side note: It was J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday a few days ago, too, on January 3rd.) What We All Read Last Year I love a reading year in review. To name just a few you might peruse: Reactor critics did our reviewers’ choice in December; at Intergalactic Mixtape, Renay has a list of bloggers and critics wrapping up their 2025 in reading; Strange Horizons is doing their multi-part year-end wrap-up now. On Bluesky, Roseanna Pendlebury tallied up which books appeared most often on the Strange Horizons list; it would be interesting if someone with a lot of time on their hands tallied up all the mentions on all the lists, as—as Pendlebury notes—it doesn’t really feel like critical consensus has landed on a frontrunner for book of the year. (For the record, I think this is a good thing. I prefer a broad spread to one or two books dominating all the discourse!)  I do feel like I’ve seen a few books mentioned a lot, including The Raven Scholar, The River Has Roots, Notes from a Regicide, Luminous, and The Incandescent. But then there’s also The Everlasting, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, and Katabasis. Whatever your 2025 favorites are, don’t forget that the deadline to register to vote in this year’s Hugo Awards is January 31st![end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: We Could All Use a Little <i>Labyrinth</i> Right Now appeared first on Reactor.