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      ‘Billions’ Season 6, Episode 7 Recap: Let the Games Begin

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      Chuck visits an old friend. Wags tries to cover his boss’s tracks as the decision about New York’s Olympics bid nears.Season 6, Episode 7: ‘Napoleon’s Hat’You know, it’s funny: Before I watched this episode of “Billions,” I’d been thinking to myself, “It’s been too long since Chuck Rhoades went to a dungeon.”Seriously! The series launched with an image of Chuck in flagrante, and his so-called “arousal template” played a major role in the show on and off for quite some time. A calculated admission of his predilections helped him win the attorney general’s office. And a failure to service his kink spelled the end of his relationship with last season’s romantic interest, played by Julianna Margulies.In this very episode, in fact, Rhoades says regarding sex workers, “I’m out of that game.” An almost entirely sexless sixth season, at least as far as Chuck is concerned, just didn’t sit right.So it was with some pleasure that I greeted Chuck’s descent into his old dungeon, on a quest to uncover the current location of the high-end brothel where Wags illegally entertained the bigwigs who select the host city of the 2028 Olympics. It was great to see Clara Wong as Troy, Chuck’s one-time dominatrix, and even better to see Paul Giamatti squirm as Troy painfully tweaked Chuck’s ear.It even meshed well with the subplot in which Chuck and his ex-wife-slash-amateur domme, Wendy, briefly rekindled their old friendship, only to bail when professional concerns got in the way. At their son’s high school carnival, Chuck had won a private dinner for two with the Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud, to which he invited Wendy for old time’s sake. But poor Boulud, playing himself, wound up serving the multicourse meal to their nanny and himself instead. C’est la vie!In the end, however, Chuck’s reunion with Troy bore no fruit, legally speaking. Wags was one step ahead of him, tipping off the elite brothel that the cops were on the way; the pros in question converted the place into the world’s least-geriatric bridge club, stymying Chuck’s attempt to tie Prince to illegal activities and thus scupper his Olympic bid.Even Chuck’s Plan B winds up D.O.A. With the help of his lieutenants, Dave and Karl (who’s been increasingly entertaining), Rhoades pinpoints the Olympic “fixer” Colin Drache as the recipient of a $5 million bribe, presumably from Prince. (Even Wags, of all people, is aghast at the brazen nature of the graft, at least as it pertains to a self-conceptualized straight arrow like Prince.) But just when he’s ready to make an arrest amid New York City’s celebration for securing the games, Drache simply vanishes, like Keyser Soze.In a way, watching this season of “Billions” is like watching some kind of ethical disease spread. Taylor Mason, head of the Prince Capital subsidiary Mase Carb, could well be patient zero. The one-time wunderkind spends this episode setting up a crowdsourced algorithm for investment ratings, then lording it over an established ratings agency in order to force them to downgrade the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The idea is to allow Prince to weasel his way back into the system after his previous $2 billion donation to the authority backfired, abrogating the city’s need for his big ideas to improve the subway.It’s such an effective play that the governor, the mayor and the head of the M.T.A. can basically only nod and go along with it. Prince is upset that Taylor and his own right-hand man, Scooter, went behind his back with the plan, but he knows how to take a W. Still, he insists he’s not like some drunk dad from whom the booze needs to be hidden at Christmas; he wants to be included in future maneuvers of this sort.Meanwhile, Rian, who has been spending the season as a sort of Jiminy Cricket-style externalization of Taylor’s conscience, rues handing over the spiffy new ratings algorithm to the corrupt old guard just to have it squashed. The Rian-Taylor dynamic is one of the show’s most intriguing at this point; I have no idea where the endgame is with these two.But the most compelling duo in this episode is Chuck and Dave, thanks to their verbal sparring over the nature of extreme wealth. Chuck has the zeal of the convert when it comes to the rich: He calls billionaires a threat to democracy itself and says that the lower classes have been sold a myth because they hope against hope to be rich themselves one day. Dave argues that “only those with wealth have the privilege of resenting it, but for the rest of us, it’s that dream that makes us go.”Honestly? For as shrewd a legal operator as Dave is made out to be, her position sounds hopelessly jejune. I mean, Horatio Alger? In this economy? Please. By contrast, Chuck’s rage against the billionaire class reads like a logical and narratively fruitful outgrowth of his old enmity for one specific billionaire, Bobby Axelrod, and his current grudge against Axe’s successor, Mike Prince. Chuck has met the enemy, and he is cash.Loose change:No “Godfather” allusions that I caught this week, but there was a shout out to another gangster movie, “A Bronx Tale.” For my money, though, the best pop-culture reference of the episode was a subtle but unmistakable quote from “The Big Lebowski” when Chuck talks about the scholarship students sponsored by Prince: “Proud we are of all of them,” he says, quoting Julianne Moore’s Maude Lebowski on the “Little Lebowski Urban Achievers.”As a charter member of the Karl Allard fan club, I was delighted to no end by this episode as it revealed the wild side of the old legal hand. Dave recoils in borderline disgust as Karl recalls nights in an Okinawa sex club with viper-seasoned sake; Chuck gazes at him incredulously as he describes his prowess as a “spirit guide” in the psychedelic era. (“Loose, breathable clothing is key.”)Still no clues as to whatever Mike’s secret agenda may be, beyond his vaguely proclaiming, “I plan on having a lifetime of grand projects.”Crucial to all of Mike Prince’s plans is the approval of his semi-estranged wife Andy, an Olympic-level rock-climbing coach. She ends the episode with an anecdote about racing up a summer-camp rock wall to kiss pinups of era-appropriate heartthrobs at age 8 and by extracting a promise from Prince to fly back and forth to Denver. Can he really be trusted to put his marriage ahead of his city?“The year Sperrys or a Vineyard Vines blazer shows up on Kevin’s Christmas list is the year we’re transferring him to public school”: Wendy is decidedly sour on her son’s private-school upbringing after she and Chuck are confronted by an obnoxious parent at the carnival, who calls Chuck a communist and Wendy a Karen. As an aside, the way they ferociously stick up for each other makes me think there’s still dramatic juice to be squeezed from their relationship.For all of Chuck’s self-conception as a man of the people, he still reacts like a scalded dog at the prospect of his son going to — gasp — Cornell instead of Yale.“That guy … a Cypress Hill song comes to mind,” says Prince of Chuck. Which one, I wonder? “Insane in the Brain”? “How I Could Just Kill a Man”? Uh, “Hits from the Bong”?Chuck on that fancy brothel: “These places shuffle locations like handsy priests change dioceses.” As a veteran of a Catholic upbringing, this one hit home hard.“Next time I pay every employee their full night’s wages,” Wags says to one of the brothel’s workers, “something unspeakable is going to transpire, and I will be right in the middle of it.” Now that’s our Wags! More

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      Mitchell Ryan, Who Played the Villain in ‘Lethal Weapon,’ Dies at 88

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      Mr. Ryan, who appeared in the TV series “Dark Shadows,” played a brutal businessman in “Santa Barbara” and a wealthy father in the sitcom “Dharma & Greg.”Mitchell Ryan, an actor known for his role in the gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows” and who played a heroin-dealing retired general in the action movie “Lethal Weapon,” died at his home in Los Angeles on Friday. He was 88.The cause was heart failure, Ro Diamond, who represented Mr. Ryan for more than 40 years, said on Saturday.With his square jawline and slicked-back hair, Mr. Ryan entertained moviegoers and television fans in a career that spanned more than 50 years, beginning with an uncredited part in the movie “Thunder Road” (1958).His breakout performance came in 1966 when he landed a role in “Dark Shadows,” a popular soap opera about the adventurous lives of the affluent Collins family. Set in the fictional town of Collinsport, Maine, the family experiences supernatural events and are tormented by strange beings, such as ghosts, witches and zombies.Mr. Ryan played Burke Devlin, an ex-convict who returns to Collinsport and seeks revenge on the family.“It was a wonderfully written Gothic kind of melodrama and Burke was this marvelous, mysterious character,” Mr. Ryan recalled decades later in an interview. “And actually, there wasn’t a whole lot to do with it except bring a lot of my passion to it and just allow it to come out.”He was fired from the show because of his alcoholism.Mr. Ryan, second from left, with Joan Bennett, left, and Louis Edmonds, second from right, in “Dark Shadows” in 1966.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHe recalled in his memoir, “Fall of a Sparrow,” how grateful he was to have overcome his struggles with sobriety. “I’m blessed that, 30 years a drunk, I’ve managed to live a working actor’s life to be envied,” he wrote.He added that “sober for the next 30 years, I’m told I’ve come out of it all a good and a useful human being.”Another major role came in 1987, when he played an antagonist in “Lethal Weapon,” which starred Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Mr. Ryan recalled in an interview that people involved with the film initially believed it was destined to flop.“It was a total scary mess for everybody,” he said, noting that the script was constantly being rewritten. “Nobody knew what was going on.”Mr. Ryan played a retired general-turned-heroin smuggler who delivers commands in a calm and collected cadence but is inclined to raging outbursts.The film would gross more than $100 million worldwide at the box office.“We were all absolutely totally shocked and dumbfounded when it turned out to be an enormous hit,” Mr. Ryan said.He joked that the series of films that followed made everybody richer, except him because his character, Gen. Peter McAllister, was in a vehicle that was struck by a bus. “Poor Mitch, I got killed,” he said.Mr. Ryan continued to play parts in more than two dozen television series but found that his ego was getting inflated. He wrote on his website that “the more successful I became, the easier it was to take credit for what ‘I’ accomplished.”Mr. Ryan, left, star of Arthur Miller’s play “The Price,” with Lee Marvin, right, and Mr. Marvin’s wife, Pamela, backstage at the Playhouse Theater in New York in 1979.Dan Grossi/Associated PressIt was a behavior that he believed would be “deadly in the long run and not in accordance with reality,” he wrote.Still, in interviews, he would frequently say that he was grateful for his long acting career, which, as a child, seemed unlikely.Mitchell Ryan was born on Jan. 11, 1934, in Cincinnati and raised in Louisville, Ky., by his mother, who was a writer, and his father, who was a salesman. Information about survivors was not immediately available on Saturday.He said that, as a boy, he would often invent people he could be one day and had no idea that he was “acting a role, as it was all real to me.”He served in the U.S. Navy and then pursued work in theater. “I can’t count the number of plays I have done, but it could easily be over one hundred,” he wrote.For 15 years, he acted in a play almost every night in road shows, on Broadway and Off Broadway. Even while working on “Dark Shadows,” he was still performing plays at night after leaving the television set, which, he said, was “not a very good idea.”In 1989, he played Anthony Tonell, a brutal businessman, in “Santa Barbara,” a television series about several wealthy families in California. From 1997 to 2002, he portrayed Edward Montgomery, a wealthy and eccentric father, in the sitcom “Dharma & Greg.”In the preface of his memoir, Mr. Ryan wrote: “A young man became an actor because someone thought he had the right look for a part. A pleasing voice. And he wasn’t doing something else just then.”“And he stayed an actor,” he added, “because, remarkably, he was good at it.” More

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      Actress Morena Baccarin Cooks a Brazilian Stew

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      The actress stars in the NBC thriller, “The Endgame.”“If I take these home to my kids and they don’t like them, I’m going to kill them,” the actress Morena Baccarin said.This was on a sopping morning at Rio Supermarket, a Brazilian grocery in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. Ms. Baccarin, an Emmy-nominated actress, moved from Rio to New York City at 10. She still craves the foods of her childhood, like coxinhas, chicken and potato croquettes, formed into a golden-brown kiss. She placed two orders — one for her, one for her children — in rapid Portuguese and then bit into a croquette, somehow managing not to smear her lipstick.“It’s not part of my diet, but I can’t not eat these,” she said. “It’s deep fried and it’s heaven.”Ms. Baccarin, 42, had come to Rio Market on a recent Friday at the suggestion of two of her cousins, the same cousins who had given her the flamingo pink earrings she wore. She had an afternoon shoot for “The Endgame,” the thriller series that recently premiered on NBC. But she hoped to have just enough time to shop for ingredients and then rush home to make moqueca, a Brazilian fish stew, for her three children: an 8-year-old son, whom she co-parents with her first husband, the producer Austin Chick, and a 5-year-old daughter and 11-month-old son with her current husband, her “Gotham” co-star Ben McKenzie.Ms. Baccarin in a scene from “The Endgame,” a TV thriller in which plays an international arms dealer.Virginia Sherwood/NBCShe grabbed a basket and began to fill it with frozen cheese bread, bay leaves, herbal tea and a carton of brigadeiros, Brazilian sweets made from condensed milk, cocoa powder and butter.“The kids will forgive me for working all day if I bring that home,” she said, striding through the aisles in a camel-hair coat. Her manner was energetic, efficient, self-effacing. Her hair hung like a skein of silk, immune to humidity.Ms. Baccarin started acting early — her mother had been an actress in Rio, her father a journalist at Globo. “I love hiding in character,” she said. “I mean, obviously, it’s me, but I like to pretend that it’s not. I tell myself that I’m creating this whole new person.”So even as she struggled to assimilate to Manhattan life, she kept at it, honing her craft first at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, and then at the Juilliard School. She never felt that she fit in there.“I was not a favorite,” she said. “I had a lot of attitude.” Juilliard taught her technique, stamina, survival, but not how to embrace her strengths or her ethnicity. After graduating, she thought she would do classical theater; Hollywood called instead. “I felt like I was letting everybody down,” she said.She had a breakout role as a courtesan in Joss Whedon’s short-lived space Western “Firefly.” (She did not experience abuse from Mr. Whedon, but she does not dispute that others may have.) On set she discovered that her training helped her to handle elevated, stylized text and make it sound natural, which probably explains why she has found her way to so many superhero projects including “Gotham,” “Deadpool,” and “Justice League Unlimited.” Her work on the Showtime thriller “Homeland” earned her an Emmy nomination.Her character in “The Endgame,” an arms dealer and criminal mastermind named Elena Federova, has no superpowers. She doesn’t need them. “What’s really fun about this character is I just get to mess with people constantly and poke at their weak spots,” Ms. Baccarin said. She also gets to do stunts. In heels.That day she wore sensible ankle boots, which clacked against the ground as she added palm oil to her basket, then hot sauce for her husband. She spotted a 12-pack of soda flavored with guaraná berries. “It’s the best. So sweet,” she said. She upgraded her basket to a cart.Ms. Baccarin wore googles as she chopped an onion at home for a traditional Brazilian stew.Shina Peng for The New York TimesAfter adding coconut milk, herbal tea, hearts of palm, biscuits, juice, cheese and a pair of Havaianas flip flops for her nanny, she paid, toting her haul to a waiting SUV. Half an hour later it delivered her to her South Brooklyn kitchen, in the basement of a brownstone.Growing up, Ms. Baccarin rarely cooked. “My mom always swore that I would never cook for any man,” she said. But as a working actress, she learned to cook for herself and her friends. “It feels like the most like caretaking and loving stuff you can do,” she said.She learned some Brazilian dishes from her cousins, some from cookbooks. Her husband, despite having grown up in Texas, taught her a few more.After removing her coat, she laid out the ingredients and then snapped on a pair of swimming goggles as she briskly chopped an onion, which she slid into bubbling palm oil. Minced garlic followed, then sliced bell peppers, then leeks, a last-minute substitute for lemongrass. “I’m doing it a little bit differently,” she said.From the refrigerator she took a packet of fish and another of shrimp, which her husband had bought that morning. The shells were still on the shrimp. “Guys never get it right, but he’s so sweet I can’t complain,” she said. The shrimp, still unshelled, went in too, along with a bottle of coconut milk, a squeezed lemon, cilantro and salt.“And bay leaves,” she said. “I’m a rebel.”She stirred the soup, blew on it, tasted it. She added more salt and more cilantro and tasted it again. Then she took a sip from a freshly chilled guaraná soda.“I’m such the quintessential Brazilian right now,” she said. More

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      The Best of Late Night 🌙

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      The Best of Late Night �� Trish Bendix�� Reporting on cultureSarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesPresident Biden’s State of the Union address provided plenty of talking points for the late-night hosts this week — as did Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an odd statement from Florida’s governor. Here’s what they had to say → More

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      Seth Meyers Roasts Ron DeSantis for Berating Teens

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      Meyers said Florida’s governor was like “an old man who sees a bunch of innocent teens walking by and screams, ‘Hey, you kids get on my lawn!’”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Front Row SeatFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis chastised a group of students wearing face masks on Wednesday, saying, “Honestly, it’s not doing anything and we’ve got to stop with this Covid theater.”“How much of a [expletive] do you have to be to yell at a bunch of high school students who are just trying to be safe?” Seth Meyers said. “They’re actually doing the right thing and you’re scolding them for it you’re like an old man who sees a bunch of innocent teens walking by and screams, ‘Hey, you kids get on my lawn!’”“Also, what the hell is Covid theater? Those plays where all the actors have to stand six feet apart? [imitating theatergoer] ‘I just saw the Covid theater production of “Les Mis” — the stage was the size of a football field!’” — SETH MEYERS“Although for people who moved from New York to Florida during the pandemic, that’s the only theater they have left.” — SETH MEYERS“Students like, ‘Somehow you make our principal seem chill.’” — JIMMY FALLON“When the parents asked how their day was, they’re like, ‘I got bullied — by the governor?’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Putin’s Punishment Edition)“Ikea has announced it will temporarily pause manufacturing and retail operations in Russia and Belarus due to the invasion of Ukraine, while Ikea in Ukraine is opening their doors to Russian soldiers and hoping they can’t find their way out.” — SETH MEYERS“Ikea said they’ll do whatever it can to throw a useless tiny wrench into Russia’s economy.” — JIMMY FALLON“This will go into effect as soon as they can find that little Allen wrench to take the stores apart.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“They’re saying that the shutdown of Ikea could dramatically affect Russia’s supply of flardfulls, dagstorps and gronkulas.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And it’s not just business distancing themselves: I read that the International Cat Federation has banned Russian cats from all competition. I’m just going to go ahead and say that’s the biggest news that’s ever come out of the International Cat Federation. Meanwhile, the silence from the International Dog Federation is deafening.” — JIMMY FALLON“I’d be worried about pissing off the cat people. You think Putin is scary? Imagine Carole Baskin!” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Daily Show” correspondent Desi Lydic dug into the “hist-HER-y” of bras on Thursday’s show.Also, Check This OutKia LaBeija’s 2015 work “Eleven” features the artist in her prom dress at her doctor’s office. Kia LaBeija and FotografiskaThe photographer and performer Kia LaBeija, who was born H.I.V. positive in 1990, documents her life in an autobiographical show at Fotografiska New York. More

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      ‘Lupin,’ Netflix’s French Heist Drama, Is the Victim of a Theft

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      Equipment valued at more than $300,000 was stolen from the set of the hit series during filming in a Paris suburb last week.“Lupin,” the hit French heist drama, was itself at the center of a heist last week when about 20 young men wearing balaclavas stole equipment valued at more than $300,000 from the set during filming in a Paris suburb, a Netflix spokeswoman said.The theft, which was reported by the international news service Agence France-Presse and the French newspaper Le Parisien, came just over a week after more than 200 antique props valued at more than $200,000 were stolen from vehicles during the filming of the fifth season of “The Crown” in England, according to the South Yorkshire Police and Netflix.Netflix said in a statement on Thursday that there was an “incident” during the filming of the third season of “Lupin” on Feb. 25.“Our cast and crew are safe and there were no injuries,” the statement said. “We have now resumed filming.”A Netflix spokeswoman said that equipment and other items worth about 300,000 euros, or $332,000, were stolen by men who showed up on the set and “attacked” with fireworks. Filming was paused for an afternoon, and the local police were investigating, she said.“Lupin” became a global phenomenon upon its release in January 2021 and is among Netflix’s most streamed non-English-language original shows. Omar Sy plays Assane Diop, a debonair Parisian and the son of a Senegalese immigrant who idolizes Arsène Lupin, the “gentleman thief” and main character in a collection of stories by the French writer Maurice Leblanc starting in 1905.A spokesman for the police in Nanterre, the suburb outside Paris where the filming was taking place, said he could not comment on the case.In an earlier statement about the theft from “The Crown,” Netflix said that it hoped the items stolen from the set in Doncaster, in northern England, would be found and returned. The stolen items included a replica of a Fabergé egg, several sets of silver and gold candelabra, the face of a William IV grandfather clock, a 10-piece silver dressing-table set and crystal glassware, according to a report in the Antiques Trade Gazette.“The items stolen are not necessarily in the best condition and therefore of limited value for resale,” Alison Harvey, the set decorator for the fifth season of “The Crown,” told the Antiques Trade Gazette. “However, they are valuable as pieces to the U.K. film industry.”The South Yorkshire police said they had received a report of a theft in the late afternoon on Feb. 16. Three vehicles containing props had been “broken into” and “a number of items” were taken, they said. “Officers investigated the incident but all existing lines of inquiry have now been exhausted,” the police said in a brief statement.Matt Stevens More

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      ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Recap: Leave Jean-Luc Alone

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      Picard has earned his retirement. Is there really no one else who can save the universe?Season 2, Episode 1: ‘The Star Gazer’Why can’t poor Jean-Luc Picard just be left alone in retirement?Really, there must be some other people to save the universe at this point. As Season 2 of “Picard” gets underway, the retired admiral looks so at peace at his vineyard. He’s picking grapes. Petting his dog. He’s smiling without a care in the world.Picard handles retirement much better than Captain Kirk ever did. Picard might even be falling in love with Laris, who is grieving after the death of Zhaban. (This feels like a violation of friend code for Picard to be flirting like this, but we’ll allow it.)The admiral has always been presented as a duty-first professional, viewing the Enterprise as the love of his life rather than pursuing something, you know, living. Even in retirement, he’s still chancellor of Starfleet Academy. His romantic interests have rarely been explored in the decades that he has appeared onscreen, except for some brief interactions with Beverly Crusher and Anij, the Ba’ku woman from “Star Trek: Insurrection.” It’s nice to see the “Picard” writers (Akiva Goldsman and Terry Matalas wrote this episode) explore that side of our favorite Earl Grey-loving Starfleet legend.If you’re a Trekkie, Picard ending up with Crusher has long felt inevitable: Two flirting friends who have a deep bond resulting from years serving together. But that’s not how life works. Often, you end up with the unexpected. Even so, Picard seems leery of making this official with Laris — he walks right up to the line and hesitates.The show generally has been excellent at fan service, and having Whoopi Goldberg reprise her role as Guinan to size up Picard like in the old days went down like a glass of kanar.“It’s not as if I haven’t loved before,” Picard tells Guinan. “I have. Sometimes quite deeply.”Maybe he, too, still thinks of his former chief medical officer. But Guinan can sense that there is a trauma that keeps Picard from becoming intimate with others, even though he wants to. Such observations are part of what makes “Picard” different from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”: It is as much a character study as it is about explosions and exploration.Picard’s friends seem to be doing well for the moment. Elnor is a cadet in Starfleet. Raffi, who was fired from Starfleet, is in good standing again and is sitting behind Picard as he gives a speech to Starfleet Academy.“May you all go boldly into a future free from the shackles of the past,” Picard says during his speech to Starfleet Academy, basically a ruh-roh moment of foreshadowing.Seven of Nine is in her element throwing punches at marauders on Rios’s old ship. Speaking of which, Rios is now a captain — apparently promotions aren’t hard to get in Starfleet nowadays, and one can just come and go as they please. Soji is giving toasts to synthetics, while Jurati got away with murder. Things are great!(A common theme of “Picard”: Many of the characters feel that they don’t deserve love, or have other hangups when it comes to relationships. Jurati says she’s not dating material. Picard won’t kiss Laris. Seven of Nine needs space from Raffa. In Season 1, Elnor felt abandoned by Picard.)But enough about love and happiness. There’s a spatial anomaly. There’s always a spatial anomaly.Whoopi Goldberg has returned to the “Star Trek” fold as Guinan.Nicole Wilder/Paramount+In previous iterations of “Trek,” Picard would have been forced to deal with this green blob in space because the Enterprise was the only ship in the vicinity. Now the writers simply have the life-forms emerge from the anomaly and demand to speak to Picard, and only Picard.In this case, a Borg ship emerges and the decimated but still terrifying sociopathic robots would like to be an ally to the Federation, something that troubles Picard’s confidantes. Even though the Borg have effectively been destroyed, they still possess technological superiority to the Federation, able to easily transport through the Stargazer’s shields and take over the entire fleet. (It’s a little difficult to reconcile the Borg being a non-factor in the universe but still able to assimilate an entire fleet of Federation ships within seconds, but we digress.)Some other nice bits of fan service: Rios is captaining the Stargazer, Picard’s ship before the Enterprise. And when cadets are given assignments, Hikaru Sulu, Kirk’s old crew mate, has a ship named after him. There’s also a reference to the Grissom, which was a Starfleet ship destroyed in “Star Trek III: The Search For Spock.”) Raffi is commanding the Excelsior, which was Sulu’s ship when he got promoted to captain in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”And of course, there is the reappearance of John de Lancie’s Q at the end of the episode. The last time we saw Q, he essentially caused a similar spatial anomaly in the series finale of “The Next Generation,” trying to give Picard clues about how to save the universe in his own tortured way. That might be the case again here. Or maybe he just wants to play with Picard because he’s bored.It could be both. Whatever the case, in that brief scene Q clearly feels at home with his old “capitaine.” And even though Picard looks fearful in the new reality he’s been transported into, one has to wonder if he feels more comfortable taking on Q than he does falling in love. More

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      Late Night Recaps Biden’s Annual ‘Status Update’

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      Trevor Noah joked Biden’s speech was “like a birthday card from a 4-year-old: A lot of words didn’t make sense, but you got what it was trying to say.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.America Has Updated Its StatusLate night hosts recapped President Biden’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night, which Trevor Noah called “the one night a year where the president gives the country a status update about how things are going.”“Let’s talk about the State of the Union address, the one night a year Joe Biden stays up past 6 p.m.” — TREVOR NOAH“Biden spoke for 62 minutes. Well, actually he spoke for 10 with 52 minutes of clapping.” — JIMMY FALLON“More than 33 million Americans watched Grampotus speak for more than an hour. He announced he will release 60 million barrels of oil from our national reserve, which is good news for Ted Cruz’s hair.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Last night, President Biden gave the shortest State of the Union address since 2016, clocking in at one hour and two minutes. The shortest — I like this trend. I like it. Let’s get it down — let’s get it down to one TikTok, just save us all a bunch of time.” — JAMES CORDEN“You know, at times this speech was like a birthday card from a 4-year-old: A lot of words didn’t make sense, but you got what it was trying to say.” — TREVOR NOAH“But aside from policing and Covid and Ukraine, Biden also brought up a lot of policies last night that he wanted Congress to pass this year, like letting Medicare negotiate the price of drugs and doubling clean energy production and raising taxes on corporations, and strengthening voting rights — which are all great ideas that I can’t wait for him to bring up again at next year’s State of the Union. Because, I mean, if we’re honest, none of that [expletive] is going to pass through this Congress.” — TREVOR NOAH“According to a new poll, 71 percent of Americans who watched President Biden’s State of the Union address had a positive reaction to the speech. But let’s be honest: Everyone who would have had a negative reaction was watching ‘Yellowstone.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Him Who? Edition)“I’m sorry: ‘God protect our troops — Go get him.’ Get who? Go get God?” — TREVOR NOAH, on Joe Biden’s yelling “Go get him!” at the end of his State of the Union speech“Right after, Putin called Trump and was like, [imitating Putin] ‘Is he talking about me?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Go get him who? Does Biden just randomly shout, ‘Go get him’ sometimes? I mean, it would explain why his dog kept attacking people.” — TREVOR NOAH“Who are we supposed to go get? Putin? Pokemon?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Mike Pence was watching from home and was like, ‘Not again. What did I do this time?’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth Watching“Tonight Show” guest Zoë Kravitz took Jimmy Fallon in a game of “Can You Feel It?” where they guess objects they can’t see by touch alone.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightSerena Williams will sit down with Trevor Noah for the first time on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This Out“The Dropout” tracks the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and the start-up Theranos. From left: Elizabeth Meriwether, the creator; Amanda Seyfried, the star; and Rebecca Jarvis, the journalist whose podcast inspired the series.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesThe women behind “The Dropout” seek to humanize Elizabeth Holmes in their new Hulu series about the disgraced tech entrepreneur. More