News Dungeon Crawler Carl Peacock’s Dungeon Crawler Carl Series Has Found Its Princess Donut Princess Donut has been cast before Carl himself By Matthew Byrd | Published on July 24, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share At SDCC 2026, Matt Dinniman revealed that Jeff Hays has joined the planned Peacock adaptation of Dungeon Crawler Carl in the role of Princess Donut. Hays will undoubtedly be a familiar name to fans of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. He not only narrates the series’ audiobooks but produces them as well. While this is the only confirmed bit of casting for the series so far, it at least suggests that the show is going to stick fairly close to its source material wherever possible. If so, that would hardly be a surprise given how much its fans contributed to this series going from an entry in the still somewhat obscure LitRPG genre to a full mainstream hit. And if you are not a Dungeon Crawler Carl fan, then just know that Princess Donut is a prized show cat (full name Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk) who accompanies Carl on his journey into the mysterious dungeon that appears following a transformative event. Much like Carl, Princess Donut undergoes quite a few changes in the Dungeon and emerges as one of the series’ best characters. The fact that Princess Donut was cast before Carl in the series kind of says something about the character’s fan-favorite status. On that note, we really still don’t know much about that series outside of what was initially revealed relative ages ago. It’s going to premiere on Peacock, Matt Dinniman is creatively involved, and the series is produced by Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door. It seems likely that the series will make it to production given how absurdly popular the books have become, but we’ve of course seen stranger things happen in the world of literary adaptations. So we’ll all be keeping an eye open for any updates on this one.[end-mark] The post Peacock’s <i>Dungeon Crawler Carl</i> Series Has Found Its Princess Donut appeared first on Reactor.

News Avatar: Seven Havens Avatar: Seven Havens Trailer Leaves Us Asking, “What Happened to Korra?” The series’ seemingly villainous take on Korra certainly feels like a red herring By Matthew Byrd | Published on July 24, 2026 Photo Credit: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Paramount+ A new trailer for Avatar: Seven Havens dropped at SDCC 2026, and while the show continues to look promising, it does raise some serious questions about what happened to Korra. See, Seven Havens is set after the events of the The Legend of Korra series (which, for reference, is a sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender). While much of the Seven Havens plot is still being kept under wraps, this trailer does emphasize that the show is set in a desolate, ruined world that is the result of an as-of-yet unnamed catastrophic event. It also notes that the event was seemingly related to the previous Avatar (Korra) letting everyone down. The show follows an Earthbender named Pavi who discovers she is the next Avatar. Unfortunately, her world is not only in a bad place but filled with people who still don’t trust the Avatar. It’s all fascinating, but what we know about the series really leaves us wondering what happened to Korra. Now, the easiest read of the trailer suggests that the implication that Korra somehow triggered the cataclysmic event or was somehow responsible for what ultimately happened is probably a false narrative spread throughout the years. Yet, even that implication doesn’t exactly help us understand what really became of Korra. You usually only get a new Avatar after the previous one dies, which (unless the show is really going to play with the series’ mythology) means that Korra died at some point. Given that Korra was very much alive at the end of The Legend of Korra and in the canonical graphic novels that followed, there’s clearly a pretty big missing piece of the puzzle here. Some had even previously speculated that Seven Havens must take place many years (and numerous Avatars) after The Legend of Korra given the number of questions the series premise raises. The somewhat awkward subtext here is Korra herself. The character drew an unfortunate amount of slander from certain sections of the Avatar fanbase, and the idea that she would be presented as a villain in this series raises some questions regarding whether or not Seven Havens will lean into that element of the franchise’s… fandom. It feels incredibly unlikely that the situation is anywhere close to being that cut and dry, though it’s hard not to be intrigued by the many possibilities. At least we won’t have to wait as long as we thought for answers. Avatar: Seven Havens is set to debut on Paramount+ on October 9, which was actually the original release date of the upcoming Avatar movie. There’s no word on what the series’ episodic release schedule will be, though.[end-mark] The post <i>Avatar: Seven Havens</i> Trailer Leaves Us Asking, “What Happened to Korra?” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV X-Men 97 X-Men ’97 Heats Up With New Mutants, New Uniforms, New X-Corp and More in “Danger.Exe” How is Xavier holding up given a certain someone’s death? Not well. By Ben Francisco | Published on July 24, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share The episode opens with Professor X (Ross Marquand) using the technology of the Danger Room to relive the death of Magneto again and again, a kind of holographic trauma therapy that ends with the professor nearly being injured. Xavier asks why the safety protocols aren’t working, and the Danger Room (Rachel Kimsey) responds that she was adapting to his repeated failures. Out on the ocean, Polaris, a.k.a. Lorna Dane (Carolina Ravassa), intercepts a cargo ship smuggling weapons for anti-mutant bigots. Val Cooper (Catherine Disher), director of X-Factor, orders Polaris to break off her attack, but she slices the ship in half anyway, saying that she’s not the one who needs to be controlled. In their debriefing, Cooper tells Polaris people are calling her the next Magneto and fires her for her impetuousness. At the X-Mansion, Professor X greets a new class of students, including Synch (Zeno Robinson), Quentin Quire (Thomas Dekker), Eye Boy, Chamber, Monet, Dust, Beak, Cerebella, Glob Herman, and many others. Xavier eulogizes Magneto as both a rival and an ally. He notes that although the U.S. government has outlawed the X-Men, the school’s work continues under the guidance of its new headmistress Storm (Alison Sealy-Smith).  Polaris reunites with her old teammates at the mansion and tells Professor X that she regrets working with X-Factor to control mutants. Xavier expresses hopefulness about continuing Magneto’s legacy, but Polaris says Xavier was the one who really raised her, disavowing any feeling of connection to Magneto even though he’s her biological father. Image: Marvel Animation The new students’ training takes a dangerous turn when Wing nearly dies in the Danger Room despite the safety protocols. Storm and Bishop (Isaac Robinson-Smith) are able to save him with an improvised mutant-powers defibrillator, but then the Danger Room locks in all the students, with only Bishop and Polaris to protect them from a barrage of robots and other attacks. Polaris attempts to use her electromagnetism to disable the Danger Room, but it seems to feed on her power, taking on a new form as an anthropomorphic robot. The newly independent automaton (now referred to simply as “Danger”) steals a minijet and flies to Genosha. Since the X-Men have been outlawed, only Bishop and Polaris can follow, as neither are officially part of the current team roster. In Genosha, Professor X tours the ruins of the fallen mutant nation with Beast (George Buza), Cyclops (Ray Chase), and Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale)—all clad in new black and yellow leather jackets inspired by the uniforms from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s legendary run on the comic books. Danger attacks, explaining that she has adapted and is no longer bound by the professor’s directives.  Polaris and Bishop arrive just as Danger is on the verge of overpowering Xavier. As Danger and Polaris confront each other, Danger explains that they’re both products of their creators, bound to them “like magnets.” The X-Men attack Danger with their various powers, but she re-channels the energy to heal herself. Professor X exhorts Lorna to summon all her electromagnetic energy to defeat Danger. He uses his telepathy to share his knowledge of her father Magneto so that Polaris can wield her powers as he did, while Bishop absorbs the excess energy. With their combined effort, they defeat Danger. Lorna feels connected to her father for the first time, and Xavier realizes what he must do next. Amidst the wreckage of Genosha, Professor X holds a press conference announcing that the X-Men are evolving in their quest by forming X-Corp—in front of a massive skyscraper bearing the X-Corp logo. Back in the U.S., Cooper announces that the X-Men can’t skirt federal law by operating overseas.   At the new X-Corp headquarters, Xavier tells the X-Men that he senses the threat of Apocalypse approaching. In an underground lab in Athens, Apocalypse (Ross Marquand) brings a new horseman to life—who electrifies Tarot cards with power and bears the face of the fallen X-Man Gambit! Image: Marvel Animation This was my favorite episode of the season so far. Professor X repeatedly subjecting himself to the trauma of Magneto’s death hit me harder than the actual death scene in the previous episode. It brought home just how much Xavier has depended on Magnus as a compass in his life—whether as an ally or rival, as he later says in his eulogy. It also shows Xavier’s tragic perfectionism—his belief that things would work out if he could just get everything perfectly right. I also appreciated the economy of storytelling of using Xavier’s Danger Room therapy as the trigger for Danger becoming an autonomous AI. In general, like many successful media adaptations, this episode did a great job of mixing and matching source material from different eras to create a new cohesive story. The story pulls from Joss Whedon’s Danger story, Morrison and Quitely’s story of X-Corp and the recovery from the Genoshan genocide, and even has the Generation X characters of the 90s in the background—to name just a few of the comics stories they’re pulling from. Speaking of Generation X, I was delighted to see these young mutants not only making brief cameos but joining the secondary cast as students! I’ve always found it odd that, in this version of the X-Men, the Xavier School for the Gifted seems to be a school with… one student (Jubilee)? This episode corrects that oddity, giving us a whole bunch of young mutants with diverse backgrounds and a wide range of mutations—including some, like Cerebella and Glob Herman, who fall way outside normative homo sapiens bodies. Plus, Quentin is wearing a “Magneto Was Right” T-shirt! Image: Marvel Animation This show has also done well when it spotlights a single character who hasn’t received enough attention previously, as it does in this episode with Polaris. I was so relieved that she finally left X-Factor and realized their abductions of mutants were only causing terrible harm (which seemed out of character for her to begin with). The climax of her arc in this story—learning to embrace her own power—was one of the most impactful character developments of this season, alongside Jubilee’s breakout moment in the second episode.  I geek out every time the show features a “mutant circuit”—two or more mutants using their powers in tandem. We got three of them in this episode: Bishops and Storm combining their powers to revive Wing, Jean and Scott combining optic blasts and telekinesis to attack Danger, and Polaris, Professor X, and Bishop all coordinating for the final take-down of Danger. Such fun, and all beautifully animated. The new uniforms were also a delight to see in animated form—and an apt fit for the recovery effort in Genosha, which was also the Morrison-Quitely storyline where they first appeared in the comic books. The debut of X-Corp is also an interesting and unexpected turn, drawing from the same storyline. The genocide in Genosha was an overwhelming tragedy that defies comprehension, so it’s appropriate that its consequences continue to linger for our heroes this season. The writers are setting up some interesting potential plotlines in this episode. Beyond the inevitable confrontation with Apocalypse, there are also simmering tensions with the X-Factor and X-Force teams and their different visions for mutantdom. It feels like the death of Magneto may help make space for some interesting conflicts beyond the usual Magneto-Xavier binary. I also noticed Storm is not in the final meeting of the team in the X-Corp building. Perhaps that’s because she’s back at the mansion, focused on training the new batch of students as headmistress? The only plotline planted here that gave me pause was Gambit’s resurrection as a horseman of Apocalypse. His death last season was so perfectly executed, I worry about any storyline that could detract from its poignancy. But let’s see how they handle it. Image: Marvel Animation This episode featured some of the quippiest dialogue of the season, perhaps partly because, at long last, all our dear X-Men are back in the 1990s where they belong. Below are a few of my personal favorite lines: “Please. They met Wolverine.” —Professor X, in response to Polaris asking if he’s sure he wants the new students to meet her “How many X-Men does it take to find an exit to their torture chamber?” —Quentin Quire “The streets were my Danger Room.” —Bishop “You do not need to be controlled, Lorna. You never did. You just need to embrace all of who you are and unleash it!” —Professor X[end-mark] The post <i>X-Men ’97</i> Heats Up With New Mutants, New Uniforms, New X-Corp and More in “Danger.Exe” appeared first on Reactor.

News Carrie Mike Flanagan Doesn’t Want You to Hate Carrie’s Mom in His Carrie Series How Mike Flangan plans to generate some sympathy for the devil in his Carrie miniseries By Matthew Byrd | Published on July 23, 2026 Photo Credit: Liane Hentscher/ Prime Video Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Liane Hentscher/ Prime Video In a recent interview, Mike Flanagan explained that he intends to update and change Stephen King’s story for his upcoming Carrie series on Prime Video. While certainly an understandable goal (the existing Carrie movie is pretty darn good, don’tchaknow), eyebrows were raised at the notion that Flanagan also intends to update the portrayal of Carrie’s mom (Margaret White) in order to make her a more sympathetic character. On paper, that’s a radical departure for the character that risks diluting the effectiveness of one of horror’s most powerful villains at a time when Mrs. White’s particular brand of villainy is tragically en vogue. In a more recent interview, though, Flanagan and Samantha Sloyan, who plays Mrs. White in the series, elaborated on the direction of the character and better explained how she will be portrayed. “She loves Carrie more than anything in the world, but like many family members, we’re bound to each other, but we don’t exactly see the world the same way,” Sloyan says of Margaret in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “She loves Carrie, but she doesn’t understand Carrie.” According to Sloyan, her version of Mrs. White is a deeply religious figure who believes in the conspiracy that there is a global cultural war against her beliefs. That more militaristic mindset seemingly causes her to see Carrie as more of a victim of a cruel world. Well…at least in her own, special way. The conflict between the two in this version of the story is seemingly based more on Carrie’s optimism vs. Margaret’s paranoia. As Sloyan explains, Margaret feels the need to protect and fight for Carrie but doesn’t really see her for who she is. “Margaret’s reaction to fear, instead of trying to learn or to understand, is to really go to war with the world,” Sloyan notes. “Margaret’s really just all suspicion and fear and hatred.” And though it seems like a tall task, Flanagan hopes that this re-imagined dynamic will bring out more of the sympathy for a character whom he feels deserves a touch more sympathy than she has historically received. “I went into this determined not to hate Margaret White,” Flanagan says. “I wanted to understand her. And part of the importance of that is Margaret’s not entirely wrong. There’s a lot she has to say in the show that I agree with, and that makes it even more complicated.” It’s a big swing, to say the least, though choosing to tell a story as established as Carrie again arguably requires a willingness to take some big swings to avoid the eternal question of “Why?” We’ll know if this swing lands when Carrie debuts on Prime Video sometime in October.[end-mark] The post Mike Flanagan Doesn’t Want You to Hate Carrie’s Mom in His <i>Carrie</i> Series appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds A Commander of Mars — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Valles Marineris” It’s season four and we’re so back. By Emmet Asher-Perrin, Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on July 23, 2026 Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Strange New Worlds is back, both literally and figuratively. The literally part is obvious: the fourth season debuted today with “Valles Marineris.” The figuratively part is much more encouraging: after a hit-and-miss third season, the fourth season debuts with a truly superb episode. One of the landmines that SNW has had to deal with is the fact that it’s a prequel to a beloved show, and all too often the writers have stepped on those landmines to poor effect, focusing way too much on goofing around with fan theories and hey-this’ll-be-cool moments and sub-referencing over and over again and not enough on telling stories about a starship exploring space. “Valles Marineris” is one hundred percent about a starship exploring space, and it’s fantastic. The Enterprise is assigned to examine a rare phenomenon, an interstellar squall. It has appeared around a star with no explanation, and the Enterprise is to study it for as long as it lasts (they’re usually, according to Spock, gone quickly). Pelia is the only person on board who has seen one before, and she says she may have been in a phone box when it happened. (Okay, I know I said it was one hundred percent about a starship exploring space, but I should’ve said ninety-nine percent, because that was totally goofing around with fan theories, as this is the latest unsubtle hint that Pelia has traveled with the title character from Doctor Who.) Of course, things go horribly wrong, because if things didn’t go horribly wrong, we wouldn’t be interested in watching a TV episode devoted to it. They detect a distress call from a buoy, and they go in to investigate. The field chooses then to expand, of course, keeping them from making it out—and then when they do come out, the ship is rendered almost completely powerless. Even if they can fix the warp engines, they don’t have any uridium to ignite the engines. Worse, they have no idea where they are. There are three M-class planets in the system they’re in, at least, and one of them has uridium, so Number One, Ortegas, and La’an take a shuttlecraft to that planet to collect the uridium. Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, repairs are interrupted by a ship snagging them in a very sophisticated tractor beam and announcing that they’re salvage. Pike tries to reason with Battle Commander Cassell (superlatively played by Saffron Burrows), and he eventually convinces her to come on board to talk.  One of the more tired complaints about the current crop of Trek shows is that the producers of same don’t understand Star Trek. One of the things I’ve tried to make clear in my reviews of those shows is that that particular complaint is utter nonsense. With this episode of SNW, we have another piece of evidence to support that they understand Trek just fine, thanks, as we see some magnificent exchanges between Anson Mount’s Pike and Burrows’ Cassell. Throughout those exchanges, Pike is constantly putting forth the Trek ethos of communication over conflict, of understanding over violence. Cassell’s people—who look very Vulcanoid—are in conflict with the Dol’Drm, an insectoid species from a neighboring planet. While Cassell’s people have a lot of impressive technology—for example, they can phase through solid matter—they don’t have faster-than-light travel and they don’t have universal translators. Pike offers to help them communicate properly with the Dol’Drm, something they’ve never been able to do. It might lead to peace. But there’s a wrinkle to all this: Spock determines the Enterprise’s location in space—and, unfortunately, in time. They’re in the Sol system, 65 million years in the past. The planet Cassell came from is Mars and the planet on which the landing party is fetching uridium is Earth. Which means that the very large creature that the landing party is trying to get past is a dinosaur. Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ So now we get some fun cutting back and forth between Pike trying to convince Cassell not to salvage his ship on the Enterprise and Number One, La’an, and Ortegas trying to be careful not to step on any butterflies. (They don’t actually mention Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” but you can tell that all three of them have read it.) The stuff on prehistoric Earth is tremendous fun, as they try to figure out ways of dealing with the dinosaurs that don’t involve killing them. (Solutions they wind up using including Number One firing a phaser on stun to the soft palate inside a Tyrannosaur’s mouth and La’an punching a raptor in the head, which impresses everyone with its effectiveness, especially La’an herself…) Unfortunately, Pike’s attempt at helping mediate a peace between the Martians and the Dol’Drm fails when Cassell learns that the Enterprise is from the far future, something Pike goes out of his way not to mention. And in that future, Mars is a dead world that Pike’s own people only made habitable by terraforming. The giant crater known to us as Valles Marineris was created by a Dol’Drm weapon that killed millions, and left a permanent scar on Mars. Cassell wasn’t entirely sold on communication, and finding out that Pike lied to her burns out any interest she had in doing so. Instead, they steal the Enterprise’s antimatter containment unit, intending to use it to destroy the Dol’Drm homeworld. The landing party returns with uridium—which came from a crashed Dol’Drm ship, as it happens—and is able to power up the Enterprise.  (Brief digression: the Enterprise is still able to power up because they have a backup antimatter containment unit, and I wanted to dance a damn jig when that happened, because something that has driven me crazy about so many science fiction shows, the various Treks among them, is ships that are on allegedly long-term missions far from home, yet don’t have spare parts for important things. So it was extremely gratifying to see an actual spare part, and nobody even makes a fuss.) With sensors back at full bore, Spock is able to determine that the Dol’Drm come from the fifth planet—not Jupiter, rather another planet about the same size as Mars that is between Mars and Jupiter. The Enterprise moves to try to intercept Cassell’s ship to stop her from using the antimatter to blow up the Dol’Drm homeworld.  Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ And then at the last minute, Pike orders everyone to stand down. The presence of a fifth planet changes everything, and Pike realizes it just barely in time. It’s an awful, horrible decision. It’s one that visibly affects everyone on board. But it’s also the only decision possible. Because he knows that 65 million years in the future, there is an asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Which means that everyone has to watch as an entire world—an entire civilization—is destroyed before their eyes. As is a ship full of Martians, as Cassell’s was a suicide mission, her own ship caught in the wake of the explosion.  However, the explosion also provides the energy the Enterprise needs to get back to the twenty-third century, and they do so, creating the very squall they were sent to investigate. (Also the distress buoy they picked up was their own, sent after they lost power.) Spock confirms that the Dol’Drm homeworld is now the asteroid belt, but also that one piece of debris from the explosion struck Earth and created the extinction-level explosion that wiped out the dinosaurs. In addition, Mars’ orbit was changed, which resulted in destroying the planet’s atmosphere. The episode doesn’t softpedal the awfulness of the decision Pike has to make here. Oftentimes, doing nothing can be the worst thing to do—but in this case, it’s necessary. Pike of all people knows the inevitability of the future. And yet, these are also all people who, from their perspective, have been dead for 65 million years, and would be regardless of Pike’s actions. Truly, this episode has everything. There’s the cool CGI adventure with Number One and the gang fighting dinosaurs. There’s Pike’s very Trekkish pleading for Cassell to try to talk to her enemies. There’s Cassell’s obvious desire to try peace swimming upstream against the long, dreadful war that she’s spent a lifetime fighting—and ultimately losing that fight thanks to Pike’s lie-by-omission. (I can’t say enough about the dignity and gravitas that Burrows imbues Cassell with, aided by a superlative script, credited to executive producers Akiva Goldsman & Henry Alonso Myers, off a story bv Myers and co-executive producer Alan B. McElroy.) And there’s even fun with space cowboys, as the opening has Pike, M’Benga, and La’an riding horses on an alien planet, where they’re delivering supplies covertly, which is mostly there to put the time Mount spent on Hell on Wheels perfecting his equestrianism to good use. There are some lovely little touches here, more subtle than Pelia’s phone-box line. The Martians are Vulcanoid, and in the early concepts of Star Trek, Spock was supposed to be Martian. On top of that, M’Benga points out that the DNA he detected in Cassell and her people can be found in many Alpha Quadrant species—which is a continuity hit, believe it or not! In “Return to Tomorrow,” Spock mentions the Vulcan theories that their species might have originated on another planet. In that context, he thinks it might be Sargon’s people who did it, but it could be the Martians, also. (For that matter, Cassell’s descendants could possibly be Sargon’s people also.) Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ And we continue to see that this is a younger Scotty, as he’s been putting in alert lights whenever Ortegas pushes the engines beyond their specs. I love the fact that Scotty was conservative in his younger days. Just in general, the show has done an excellent job of showing us younger versions of the characters we know, and seeing the process by which they evolve into the ones we’re more familiar with from the show that aired sixty years ago. The story is very pulp-y, it’s true. The notion of the asteroid belt being a planet that was destroyed in a war with Mars (or with another solar planet) is one that has whiskers on it, as is the notion of life on Mars. Indeed, the episode itself calls back to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, the novel that introduced John Carter and chronicled his trip to Mars (or Barsoom, as the locals called it).  Speaking of tired tropes, we also have April offering Pike a promotion to commodore at the top of the episode and Pike refusing it at the end, which is one of Trek’s more boring clichés. Although it does result in Number One getting a promotion to full commander, which is good to see. In addition, Uhura is mentoring a Vulcan cadet who is spectacularly snotty even by Vulcan standards, and I spent pretty much every scene she was in waiting in vain for Uhura to upbraid her for speaking out of turn to an officer, which a properly trained cadet would never do, yet which she did constantly. Still—SNW is back! And in both senses, it’s about damn time…[end-mark] The post A Commander of Mars — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “Valles Marineris” appeared first on Reactor.