News they know They Know: Horror Movie Written and Directed by Bill Hader Is Heading Into Production The movie will be his first project since Barry By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on February 19, 2026 Credit: Merrick Morton/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Merrick Morton/HBO Bill Hader is diving into his first project since the series finale of Barry (pictured above), a dark dramedy that he co-created and starred in as a hitman trying to make it as an actor. According to Deadline, Hader has partnered with MRC (the company behind Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights) to make They Know, a horror movie penned by Hader and his Barry collaborator Duffy Boudreau that will also see Hader direct. Plot details are sparse for the film, though we do know it “centers on a divorced dad (Hader) who grows suspicious that his ex-wife is secretly dating a mysterious man who is having a strange influence on their children.” This may be a film that Hader has talked about before. Back in July 2025, Hader was on the A24 podcast with director Ari Aster, where he shared that he’d written a horror movie right after Barry wrapped. The initial reaction to his script, however, wasn’t what he was hoping for. “I had a meeting with a big producer—actually, a very smart, lovely guy,” Hader said (via The Playlist). “But his response to it was so bad.” The producer called it “mean-spirited,” “horrible,” “disturbing,” and “cynical.” “I was like, yeah, it’s a horror movie,” Hader recalled. “Did you not see my TV show?” In this podcast, however, Hader also said that seeing Aster’s Eddington gave him the motivation to take the script out again. Whether that script was They Know isn’t confirmed, but it seems likely. Production on They Know will start in Los Angeles this spring. [end-mark] The post <i>They Know</i>: Horror Movie Written and Directed by Bill Hader Is Heading Into Production appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews A Medieval Situationship in George Falls Through Time by Ryan Collett Jenny Hamilton discusses sceney London gays and time travel romance in Ryan Collett’s new novel By Jenny Hamilton | Published on February 19, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share What if millennial life became so acutely stressful that it caused a portal to open up in the middle of London and you tumbled through it into the 1300s? Happened to my friend George. As he’s navigating a breakup, utility bill logistics, and six dogs from his dog-walking gig, George falls through a portal in time and can’t get back. Unable to explain where he came from or why he’s dressed like that, George is imprisoned, beaten, and finally—after months—made into a sort of indentured servant. He manages to escape alongside another indentured servant, Simon, and they develop a cohabitating situationship that works pretty well for them until the king shows up ordering George to slay a dragon. Interspersed with George’s adventures being beaten up and indentured in 1300s England are his memories of his life before. He had a job he neither loved nor hated, a boyfriend with whom he was neither happy nor unhappy. Formerly a tech guy at an investment firm, he fell into the company of hot, ambitious, plausibly-deniably-straight hedge fund bros who traded their flirtatious approval for minor acts of financial dishonesty on George’s part. The job and the relationship were both ultimately empty, but the loss of both of them at once still engenders enough stress to rip a hole in the fabric of the universe. Though George Falls Through Time is not a traditional romance, the relationship between George and Simon is still central to the story, and to me easily the most interesting aspect of the book. These two men fall in love, and George never feels it’s a love he can fully trust. The gulf between each of their ideas about what it means to be two men who have sex and say I love you and make a life together is so, so vast. Simon understands his devotion to George in terms of fealty, a concept that has strong overtones of subservience. George worries that he’s taking advantage of Simon, and there’s a clear echo—although Collett wisely doesn’t make it explicit—of the exploitative flirting George remembers from his time with the hedge fund bros. The danger of intimacy still exists in medieval times, though it takes a different shape from George’s life before. Compared to George’s life before, medieval life is simple—which made me start to feel antsy. George is careful to note that medieval people are just people: But it was their faces—their bodies—that shocked and made me stop. Their faces were normal. I don’t know what I mean by normal, but that’s the best I can describe it. Their expressions, their eyes, how they darted, the way they breathed as any other human would breathe, how they blinked—they were like me, like anyone else. Buy the Book George Falls Through Time Ryan Collett Buy Book George Falls Through Time Ryan Collett Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget We easily fall into the idea that people in history were different in some fundamental way, that human nature was otherwise; and Collett rebuts this idea early and often. But I also felt anxious about the possibility that the book would stray into nostalgia for a “simpler” time. George does seem to find his medieval life an easier one to inhabit than his life before. Sure, he gets brutalized when he first appears and can’t speak a version of English anyone around him can understand. Yes, he and Simon have to hightail it away from the lord’s manor for him to have any hope of freedom from indenture. With those obstacles out of their way, though, Simon and George fall easily into a kind of pastoral idyll, living in a small shabby house outside of Scarborough. They have livestock. They have sex. They hold hands and say I love you, and everyone they meet in Scarborough seems fine with this. In his one and only demonstration of useful future knowledge, George even sets them up with some basic irrigation. (I did not understand the system, meaning that I would have literally zero useful skills to bring to bear on medieval life. Please, God, do not let a portal open up and dump me through time, for I will not survive.) Their pleasant, mostly easy, mostly affectionate life together is a pointed contrast against the interspersing flashback chapters, where George’s straight friends use him to get ahead professionally, and his gay friends lure him into Too Much Decadence. I was worried about it, is what I’m saying. This turns out, I think, to be an unfair read. George’s unhappiness in the present day proves itself to be a character note rather than a judgment on sceney queer guys. George is prone to simply letting his life happen to him, handing over the reins of his life to whoever’s willing to hold them. As a Londoner of the twenty-first century, he can do this and never feel that his choices have brought him crashing into the reality of consequence. Even the stress that dumps him into a time portal is redolent with unreality. He gets fired from his job, but the job never felt like his actual life. He fucks a stripper in front of his boyfriend, and they don’t talk about it, and they break up, and he can’t get the internet bill put in his name only, and he’s walking six dogs at once, and none of it feels real. When he’s ordered to slay a dragon, the task is impossible and imaginary, but no more imaginary and impossible than anything else about his life has felt. If I’ve given a lot of grace to a rather frustrating protagonist, I will now take a moment to be snippy. There are no women in this book. There just aren’t any. Not in George’s life before. Not in his life in the medieval times. None at all. The only named female character is an Afghan wolfhound called Matilda. Do women exist? Maybe one day science can find out the answer. I don’t have much to say about this writing choice by Collett, except that I am getting much much too old for this shit. What I am not getting too old for, and what I dearly hope to find again in Collett’s future work, is this book’s commitment to utter strangeness. Beyond the timey-wimey shenanigans, which are far stranger and involve far more garbage disposal logistics than I anticipated, Collett has a knack for writing equivocality, never sanding down his characters’ incompatible edges, nor allowing them to settle into certainty. When I rail against the cookie-cutter sameness of our present crop of SFF romance, books like this provide a respite.[end-mark] George Falls Through Time is published by William Morrow. The post A Medieval Situationship in <i>George Falls Through Time</i> by Ryan Collett appeared first on Reactor.

News Percy Jackson and the Olympians Percy Jackson Season 3 Adds Ming-Na Wen, Jennifer Beals, and Hubert Smielecki in Key God Roles Ming-Na Wen will play Hera, Jennifer Beals will portray Demeter, and Hubert Smielecki joins as Apollo in the upcoming season By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on February 19, 2026 Credit: Lucasfilm Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Lucasfilm Percy Jackson and the Olympians is moving full steam ahead, and we’ve got some additional casting news for the third season of the series. Variety is reporting that Ming-Na Wen, Jennifer Beals, and Hubert Smielecki are now part of the show’s growing cast and will portray various gods in the upcoming season. Wen, whose previous credits include The Mandalorian (pictured above), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and voicing Mulan in 1998’s Mulan, will play Hera. The show describes her as “queen of Olympus, and wife to Zeus. She is the goddess of marriage and family so the infidelity of Zeus (Courtney B. Vance) rankles her. Regal, maternal and no-nonsense, Hera is the only god besides Zeus who has children who are also members of the Olympian council, which gives her leverage in the family politics.” Beals (The Book of Boba Fett, The L Word) will guest star as Demeter, “the goddess of agriculture, the harvest and the cycle of life and death. A respected sister of Zeus, Demeter remembers the war against the Titans very well, and will do what she must to prevent the return of her father Kronos (Nick Boraine).” Relative newcomer Smielecki (Ransom Canyon) will be Apollo, “the dazzling and charismatic god of the sun as well as music, poetry, archery and prophecy. He is the literal golden boy of Olympus and twin brother to the goddess Artemis, the moon to his sun.” Wen, Beals, and Smielecki are far from the only new cast members we’ll see in season three. We already knew that Dafne Keene and Saara Chaudry were playing Artemis and Nightshade, and that Kate McKinnon will be Aphrodite. There’s not an official release date for the third season, but we found out after the season two cliffhanger this January that it will come out on Disney+ sometime in 2026. [end-mark] The post <i>Percy Jackson</i> Season 3 Adds Ming-Na Wen, Jennifer Beals, and Hubert Smielecki in Key God Roles appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Science Fantasy Read an Excerpt From The Demon Star by Jesse Aragon Gods rule this planet. Demons stalk its canyons while Kings beg for mercy. Can three mere humans rewrite its destiny? By Jesse Aragon | Published on February 19, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Demon Star by Jesse Aragon, a horror-tinged science fantasy novel out from DAW on July 28. Ysira Naktis was a human sacrifice, marked for death. Unlike the thousands ‘harvested’ each year, though, she did the unthinkable. She survived—and what she brought back with her could change the fate of worlds.When Ysira’s estranged son is chosen to become the vessel of a god-killing demon, she is faced with a choice: allow him to harness cosmic power at an unspeakable cost, or doom millions to save him. She finds an unlikely ally in Brother Jacen Kheris, once a gifted exorcist, now a guilt-ridden addict, desperate for purpose. From a demon-haunted canyon to a starbound satellite, they must battle their way through cultists, aliens, and the gods themselves. The truths they unearth are deeper and more sinister than anything they could have imagined.  Ysira  The people of Zivora gave their dead to the desert. They carried corpses through the dust and the cacti, walking as far as they could before nightfall—though never too far, lest the wastes take them as well. Alone among the city-state’s denizens, Ysira Naktis made this journey not to give, but to retrieve. She stalked along the hard-packed red dirt over meandering, gently hilly terrain. The sun lay low on the horizon. As totality drew near, stubborn, final beads of light winked along the edge of the black disc. Ysira paused in her tracks to watch, an almost ritual farewell, until only Oe’s soft blue glow remained. The vast ringed planet kept a soothing vigil with the twin moons, tonight both waxing crescents. Night, during the Harvest season, was the only time Ysira did not feel as though she were being watched. Long ago, in days lost to living memory when Ysira’s people had freely roamed the desert, this ritual had demanded the dead be cast into the canyon—the sprawling, fathomless divide in the world that gave the Scar its name. Nowadays, no one made it that far. Ysira followed a well-worn path through scrubby vegetation and a labyrinth of bones, taking care not to step on the desiccated remains of men, women, and children. Most were sun-bleached skeletons, stripped of meat and moisture by the Scar and its creatures, but a few had just been carried out today. The funeral processions had long since departed. When the shadow came to Zivora and no one was promised survival, the city tended to become a mess of drunken revelry, desperate crime, and idiotic spur-of-the-moment commitments. Purchases. Business. Ventures. Weddings. Ysira was more than happy to get away from it all, but one could never be too careful out here. She ran her left thumb over the stump of her little finger. A perpetual reminder of the last time she’d run afoul of a higher power. Her objective lay beneath a tall yucca plant, hunched like a twisted human figure at prayer. The corpse belonged to a man in his forties. He’d been gone a full day now, limbs stiff, skin bruise-dark where it met the ground. Ysira knelt beside him and pulled supplies from her satchel: a bundle of rags, a jar half-full of Ogden’s special solution, and an assortment of slender knives. Buy the Book The Demon Star Jesse Aragon Buy Book The Demon Star Jesse Aragon Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget She cut the man’s shirt off, spreading it to reveal his chest and abdomen. Patches of red, peeling rash covered his skin. Pointlessly, she waved away the flies. She began with a long incision beneath the ribcage. She spread apart skin, fat, and muscle, scooping out clotted fluids, working through the tissue layer by layer. From its perch on a nearby skull, a tiny owl watched her with enormous amber eyes. It hooted softly, almost reproachful. After a decade of running errands for Ogden, Ysira knew better than to ask him why. This was not the first time the old healer had paid her to retrieve human remains. Once, he’d had her locate a cave deep in the canyon, to which she still returned every now and then to scrape mold off the rocks. Another time she’d stolen vials of pus, drained from lesions on sick goats in the High Lord’s personal stables. People liked to whisper about Ogden, saying he was a purveyor of blasphemous knowledge, in league with demons. He never outright denied it. He kept the Church off his scent by sending Ysira to do his dirty work, and she didn’t mind. She’d become rather more comfortable among the dead than the living. Besides, she owed Ogden her life. She located the head of the pancreas above the man’s third kidney and cut the organ free. She noted a fungating mass across its surface and a sulfurous odor that made her stomach roil. Cancer, just as Ogden had predicted. Ysira’s ears prickled, picking up the crunch of dry yucca sheddings nearby. The owl took flight and flapped noiselessly away. “Shit,” Ysira muttered. She covered her incision with the man’s shirt flaps, leaving him with as much dignity as she could muster. She dusted off her robes, crammed the jar inside her satchel, and slung her kirikil bone glaive across her back as she crept around the bend. A man was racing toward Ysira, down the dirt path. She reached for her weapon and he skidded to a stop. The man was young, probably younger than Ysira’s twenty-nine years, dressed in rags and clutching a roughspun sack. Red, blistering burns marred his brown skin. Not a Guardsman after all. She was almost disappointed. A fight would have done wonders for her mood. She tilted her head at him. “What happened to you?” No answer. His chest heaved as he regarded her with panic. Curiosity piqued, she prodded, “What’s in the bag?” His eyes darted toward it, then back at her. “What’s in yours?” Fair enough. Likely, he was a scavenger from the Knots. They came out here sometimes, braving the wastes in search of forbidden salvage from the canyon ruins. But something about him—the way he held that sack like a clutch of rattlesnake eggs—unsettled Ysira. Was he afraid of losing it, or afraid of it? “They’re after me,” he said. “I have to get home.” “Who?” Ysira demanded. He had to pause for breath. “Guard. Not far.” An understanding passed between them. Ysira seized him by the arm, practically dragging him along her path. Keeping low to the ground, they stole behind a towering one-armed cactus. They slid down a pebbled slope into a burrow half-concealed by shrubs and agave plants— —to find someone already there. Excerpted from The Demon Star, copyright © 2026 by Jesse Aragon. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Demon Star</i> by Jesse Aragon appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Starfleet Academy The Weight of Expectations — Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “Ko’Zeine” The Academy closes for mid-year break, and the students scatter… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on February 19, 2026 Credit: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Paramount+ One of the complaints I’ve seen in online comments about Starfleet Academy is that it supposedly doesn’t feel like Star Trek. Some of those are from people who have that same knee-jerk response to all the Secret Hideout shows, mind you, though some are legitimate criticisms from folks who don’t like the show. Which is fine, but I was mindful of those comments while watching this particular episode, because it feels exactly like a Star Trek show—indeed, it sounds like a lot of specific Star Trek shows, where a main character returns to their home planet for the first time in a while and go through some stuff that could result in their leaving the main cast, but instead has them returning to the status quo. We’ve seen it with Spock in “Amok Time” and Worf in “Sins of the Father” and T’Pol in “Breaking the Ice” and Billups in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie” and after a fashion with Kim in “Favorite Son.” And now in Academy with Darem. The episode opens about a month after the horrific events of “Come, Let’s Away.” Tarima is recovering back on Betazed, and we start with Caleb making an attempt to send a letter to her. He winds up deleting the letter before sending it, but at least it brings the viewers up to speed: there was a memorial service and everything is starting to get back to something like normal. It’s also spring break, apparently, so everyone gets to go off and relax for a week. SAM is going to a holographic “spa” in Denver, as she is still glitching after being shot by the Furies last week, and the folks there will be trying to fix her up. Indeed, the Academy itself is being locked down, with only Reno and Lura doing occasional spot checks. (We only hear Lura over comms bantering with Reno, so Gina Yashere is able to be in the episode without having to wear a crapton of latex.) Caleb, however, does talk Ake into letting him stay on campus rather than stay with a host family. Caleb is also pissed that Ake didn’t ask Braka about his mother when they were negotiating last week. (“He was right here!”)Ake points out that (a) they had more immediate concerns, (b) Braka doesn’t even necessarily know where his mother is, and (c) even if he did know, he wasn’t likely to tell the truth about it to her under that circumstance. (Hell, he didn’t even tell her the truth about what they were negotiating about.) This nicely addresses why Ake didn’t discuss Caleb’s mother with Braka last time and also goes some way toward explaining why Ake lets Caleb stay on campus. Genesis gets a nice kudo from Ake also: after her excellent performance during the crisis with the Miyazaki, the chancellor is recommending her for the pre-command track, which she tells her right before she buggers off to spend her break with her father the admiral (or her “Dadmiral,” as Caleb keeps calling him). But she sneaks back into the Academy also, ostensibly because her father is speaking at a symposium, which she finds boring. The truth comes out after she and Caleb engage in various bits of tomfoolery on campus, culminating in their breaking into the bridge. But Genesis has an ulterior motive: she needs to alter her references, because they all talk about how much she fears following in her Dadmiral’s footsteps, and she’s concerned that that will have a negative impact on her ability to get onto the pre-command track. Meantime, Jay-Den is on his way to spend the break with Kyle in Ibiza when he sees two people grab Darem and seemingly kidnap him through a spatial rift. Jay-Den jumps through the rift right before it closes, only to find himself on the Sunset Moon in Khionian space. Darem has been kidnapped because he’s getting married. Khionian royalty/nobility have arranged marriages, and the original plan was for Darem to marry Kaira (Jaelynn Thora Brooks), the daughter of the monarchs, after he finished at the Academy. But her mother had a health scare and her parents decided to abdicate sooner than planned, so Kaira and Darem have to have their sealing now rather than later. (Side note: there’s a tendency in far too much science fiction to come up with unnecessary synonyms for things to make seem more sci-fi—calling it a “seating unit” instead of a chair, that kind of silliness. However, you have to watch out for homonyms when you do that. Every time the Khionians talked about the sealing, I kept thinking they were talking about the thing on the top of a room…) When Jay-Den shows up to “rescue” Darem, the latter quickly says that he’s his ko’zeine, which is basically the best man. Jay-Den is not thrilled at the fact that Darem is leaving Starfleet, nor at the fact that he’s been drafted to be ko’zeine, especially since it involves making a toast. However, when the moment arrives, Jay-Den proceeds to talk about all the selfless and brave things Darem has done since joining the Academy, from walking on the hull to save the Athena to helping Jay-Den get over his stage fright. What’s impressive about this scene is how well Brooks plays it, as her facial expressions darkens as the toast goes on. Darem has been her best friend since childhood, and hearing about all these heroic acts stuns her. She realizes that Darem is thriving as a cadet, and it’s the first thing in his life he’s done for himself rather than other people. Indeed, he has spent his entire life doing his duty to Khionia, but Kaira doesn’t want a husband who is only doing it because he’s expected to. She wants a proper partner—or no partner, which is what winds up happening. In the case of both plots, we see the weight of parental expectations warping the actions of two of our main characters. Just last week, we saw Darem and Genesis kicking ass on the bridge of Athena, figuring out and implementing a method of tracking the cloaked ship. This week, we see the other side of that uber-competence for both of them. Genesis is scared to death of the expectations of the captain’s chair, because there will always be the shadow of her father being cast over everything she does. And she fears that fear being known. Darem has always done what’s expected of him—except, apparently, go to Starfleet Academy. It takes outside perspective to get them to understand. For Darem it’s both Jay-Den’s toast and particularly Kaira’s lovingly angry request that he abdicate and divorce her. She’s pissed, but it’s from a place of caring: she wants him to be happy and to thrive, not to be obligated. For Genesis, it’s Ake whupping her upside the head and pointing out that fear can be healthy, and the committee that approves pre-command track candidates would not have held that against her. However, her and Caleb breaking into the bridge is being held against her. Genesis fears expulsion, but Ake doesn’t go quite that far. But she isn’t going to recommend her for pre-command anymore, either—and both she and Caleb have to do menial service as punishment. After the high-stakes drama of last week, we return this week to the more low-stakes drama of the difficulties of growing up and finding your place in the world, which is fine. This is a show about young people trying to find their place in the galaxy, and one of the show’s strengths is that they’re keeping it mostly low-stakes on a macrocosmic level, even if it’s all quite important to the individual characters on a microcosmic level.[end-mark] The post The Weight of Expectations — <i>Star Trek: Starfleet Academy</i>’s “Ko’Zeine” appeared first on Reactor.