Television

Season 1, Episode 3: ‘The End Is the Beginning’The first three episodes of “Star Trek: Picard” feel like a long pilot unto themselves. We establish what Picard has been up to. We establish several new characters, the central conflict and the circumstances which led to the conflict; in this case, Picard’s efforts to rescue Romulus from the supernova. By the conclusion of “The End Is the Beginning” — an apt title — we have our central arc: Picard has formed a ragtag group of outsiders to solve this thing on their own.It’s telling, once again, how much Picard links his identity with Starfleet. The thought of mounting a rescue effort without the Federation’s backing is out of the question for Picard, as he notes to Raffi Musiker (played with charisma by Michelle Hurd) Which is what makes the arc a novel one for our dear captain. “Picard,” as a show, wants to make clear that we are not watching “The Next Generation”; this is something totally new.And yet, Picard still values Starfleet somewhere deep down. Note the way he recruits the swashbuckling pilot Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera). He exhorts him with “You are Starfleet!” because his ship is clean. Picard doesn’t even consider that Rios doesn’t care about the ideals of Picard’s old haunts. Maybe, Rios just likes to keep things efficient.Raffi, in particular, knows how to cut Picard deeply. “I saw you sitting back in your very fine chateau,” she says sarcastically, while Picard grimaces. “Big oak beams. Heirloom furniture.”The not-so-subtle implication: You changed after quitting Starfleet in a huff, while I suffered. Picard swallows her anger, knowing he deserves her resentment and that she’s right. He’s been faking it for years. But Raffi’s biggest point of contention is that fact that Picard never called.If you consider Picard’s actions throughout the decades that he’s been on our screens, this makes sense. Starfleet came first. His entire life was about serving the Federation. That’s it. Once he left Starfleet, he had no purpose, and no reason to interact with Raffi since they had no work to do together anymore — Picard was never one for nostalgia and sentimentality.He also wasn’t suited to be cooped up at a vineyard, as he tells Laris. He’s a space explorer. As Laris says, “I suppose you’ve always had one eye on the stars.”But Picard also a sweet talker, so you knew Raffi was eventually going to come on board.This episode was a series of introductions. We got our first glimpse of Hugh, the former Borg drone who won over “The Next Generation” fans in episodes like “I Borg.” Jonathan Del Arco plays him again here — this version is unrecognizable from the original series, which makes the character the perfect callback for a series looking to explore fresh ground. He’s familiar to Trek fans, but not too familiar. Hugh is far more human now, perhaps an aspiration of his, but unhappy with where he’s ended up — much like Picard.Then there is the curt Rios, apparently the “Star Trek” answer to Han Solo. He’s of course the best pilot around and he doesn’t care about rules, lawyers or his holograms. He’s a welcome addition to the “Trek” franchise. Picard has historically been a man who loves order and regulations, and I’m sure this will eventually rub Rios the wrong way.Meanwhile, Soji the android is in a strange position. Everyone seems to know what she is except her. She interviews a Romulan named Ramda, who was once a former Borg drone, who tells her, “I remember you from tomorrow” and asks her repeatedly which sister she is. Ramda is an expert in ancient Romulan mythology, which surely ties into the attack at Chateau Picard, happening simultaneously on Earth. (I’m not sure where this story line is going, but the implication is that there is a prophecy involving Soji and Dahj.) Soji is getting suspicious of her own abilities, though, realizing that she has knowledge she’s not supposed to have. The manipulative Narek is unaware of what Soji knows.Let’s say a quick word about the attack on Chateau Picard by the Zhat Vash, the old Tal Shiar sect, mentioned in last week’s “Maps and Legends.” It is one of the most delightfully choreographed fight scenes in “Trek” franchise history. (Note how many “Next Generation” fights simply involved an open palm punch.) Picard, Laris and Zhaban defend themselves gracefully, with an assist from Jurati. The scene is shot beautifully — and no character does anything beyond their abilities. Picard has won many fights he probably shouldn’t have over the years but in this one, his actions made sense.Both Ramda and the captured Romulan refer to Soji as “the destroyer.” I haven’t seen any episodes past this one, so I feel free to speculate. I’m predicting that Soji and Dahj were created long before Jurati thinks they were and discovering Maddox on Freecloud will illuminate this. I’m guessing one of them was created as a weapon that the Romulans somehow discovered.I’m also typically wrong about everything, so take this prediction with a grain of salt. More

The president used the National Prayer Breakfast “to lash out at those who oppose him, just as Jesus would have done,” Kimmel said. More

What’s StreamingTIMMY FAILURE: MISTAKES WERE MADE (2020) Stream on Disney Plus. The filmmaker Tom McCarthy’s 2015 investigative journalism nail-biter, “Spotlight,” won an Academy Award for best picture. “Timmy Failure,” his first movie since, is also about professional investigators. One of them is an 11-year-old. The other is a polar bear. Based on a series of children’s books by Stephan Pastis (who wrote the screenplay with McCarthy), “Timmy Failure” centers on a boy (Winslow Fegley) who runs a detective business in Portland, Ore., with the help of a big, hairy Arctic escapee. While the movie is skipping theaters in favor of being released directly on Disney’s streaming service, “it owes more to independent cinema than anything,” McCarthy told The New York Times last year. It is both family-oriented and proudly weird.HONEY BOY (2019) Stream on Amazon. Shia LaBeouf plays a version of his own father in this intense drama, which was written by LaBeouf and directed by Alma Har’el. Telling a fictionalized account of LaBeouf’s early stardom, more recent erratic behavior and rehabilitation, “Honey Boy” splits its story between two time periods: The 1990s, where it focuses on a young child actor, Otis (Noah Jupe), being bullied by his father (LaBeouf), and the 2000s, where it turns to an older Otis (Lucas Hedges), a blockbuster star with an explosive offscreen life. LaBeouf’s “drawling evocation of his own father is a bravura incarnation of resentment,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. But the film at large, Kenny wrote, is “a flex: an assertion of the clout LaBeouf claims, in interviews, to no longer have.”MYTHIC QUEST: RAVEN’S BANQUET Stream on Apple TV Plus. Some of the minds behind “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” trade that show’s dingy bar lighting for the fluorescent shine of a video game studio in this new comedy series, the latest entry in Apple’s quest to shake up the world of streaming TV. Created by the “It’s Always Sunny” stars and producers Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day along with Megan Ganz, another producer of that show, “Mythic Quest” centers on a fictional video game company headed by a controlling, self-obsessed creative director (McElhenney, whose character does things like bring his own PowerPoint remote to somebody else’s presentation). The employees under his reign are played by a cast that includes Danny Pudi (“Community”), David Hornsby (another “It’s Always Sunny” face), Imani Hakim (“Everybody Hates Chris”) and F. Murray Abraham.What’s on TVTHE DEMOCRATIC DEBATE 8 p.m. on ABC. Qualifying candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination will take the stage in New Hampshire on Friday night for their latest debate, capping off a turbulent week that began with Iowa caucuses thrown into disarray by a delay in results. The debate will give candidates a chance to appeal to voters before next week’s New Hampshire primaries. It’s scheduled to last three hours, giving any TV audiences made anxious by the proceedings a chance to decompress with the season-four premiere of HBO’s marijuana-dealer series, HIGH MAINTENANCE, which will air on that network at 11 p.m. More

Twitter spoke, and Netflix listened.On Thursday, the streaming behemoth announced that it would give viewers a choice: autoplay or no autoplay. Viewers can now not only skip automatic previews, but also prevent the next episode in a series from playing immediately after the previous one. It’s a seemingly minor change, but some subscribers celebrated the announcement as if it was a great populist victory.It’s a common annoyance for some Netflix users. While you’re scrolling through the vast library of movies and television shows, if the cursor hovers for a nanosecond too long, the beast that is Netflix autoplay is unleashed.“Morning, bakers! Welcome to your very first day in the tent,” says a lively British voice coaxing you to click on “The Great British Baking Show.”“What I love about Charlie…,” Scarlett Johansson begins, luring you to spend an evening with “Marriage Story.”“When I started Goop in 2008 …,” Gwyneth Paltrow starts her story, hoping that this preview will convince you that “The Goop Lab” is for you.Netflix bypassed a news release or a statement this time and tweeted the announcement in response to a Netflix subscriber who had shared a personal gripe about autoplay on Twitter. (She said she had resorted to simply muting the television while she searched for something to watch.)Autoplay, which has existed as a built-in feature since 2016, seemed designed to keep subscribers’ eyes on Netflix and off their streaming competitors (and real life, for that matter). When one episode of “Arrested Development” ended, another would begin in seconds — no need to wear yourself out by clicking a button. And if no title was revealing itself as the pick of the night, an automatic preview might whet your binge-watching appetite.A spokeswoman for Netflix said that autoplay was intended to help make it “faster and easier for our members to find titles tailored to their tastes.” Some viewers clearly didn’t feel helped.Netflix’s announcement was met with triumph by many subscribers, but for others, the mission wasn’t complete. They simply took to Twitter to asked for more changes to their streaming pet peeves. More

In the eighth and final season of “Homeland,” the C.I.A. officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) returns to Afghanistan and comes across the child of a contact she dealt with years ago. He’s growing tall now. When she last saw him, he barely came up to her knee.“Homeland,” which returns Sunday night on Showtime, is about a lot of things, personal and geopolitical. But at its most powerful, the new season conjures that simple, sad feeling: My God, it’s been so long. All of this — the war, the fear, the vengeance — has been with us for so many years, it’s hard to remember a time without it.That feeling was built into “Homeland.” It began, in 2011, a full decade since the Sept. 11 attacks. “24” — the show’s precursor, with which “Homeland” shares creative talent — had by then aired eight seasons.Where “24” flourished in the fight-or-flight rush of 9/11’s aftermath, spinning out cathartic fantasies of ever-bigger terrorist attacks on the United States, “Homeland” looked at the psychic cost of all those years of fighting and catastrophizing.Jack Bauer, the tortured torturer of “24,” took on the physical burden of the war on terror. He was a hard-boiled St. Sebastian, pin-cushioned with all the arrows he took for us over the years. “Homeland,” created by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa of “24” and based on an Israeli series, focused on the war’s internal wounds through Carrie, an officer living with bipolar disorder as well as lingering horror at the intelligence failures before 9/11.As dicey as it can be to use actual mental illness as a symbol for national trauma, Carrie was a kind of synecdoche for a rattled America. She both fought the shadow war for us and felt it — more intensely so when she took the case of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), an American prisoner of war turned by his captors into a sleeper agent, who became her target and her lover.There could have been a version of “Homeland” that ran as a single, devastating limited series and went out a legend. This version did not. As it spun Brody’s story into a second season, then killed him off in a third, it began to suffer from implausibility and plot one-upmanship.And though it had a greater political sophistication than “24” and its like, “Homeland” still tended to see its non-American characters more as objects than subjects. This blind spot was manifest in Season 5 when artists hired to tag a refugee-camp set with Arabic graffiti painted “‘Homeland’ is racist” into their work without anyone on the production noticing.But even in its weaker seasons, “Homeland” was bolstered by a commitment to nuance, in its politics and its characters. Danes’s raw-nerve performance has been stunning throughout. And Carrie’s partnership with Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) has been one of TV’s most complicated pairings: They’ve been mentor and pupil, peers, surrogate family, adversaries and uneasy allies, their interactions charged simultaneously with warmth and with a necessary professional chill.Over the years, the thriller evolved to focus not just on America and the Islamic world but on crises within the West as well. In the most recent season, in 2018, Russian operatives launched a disinformation campaign that precipitated a constitutional crisis in the United States and ultimately led to the resignation of the president — as well as Carrie’s capture by the Russians, who withheld the medication that had kept her stable.It was a powerful treatment of a current-day America where the horror had moved from sleeper cells to troll farms, where enemies attacked us not with our own aircraft but with our own animus. All these years, anxious and angry, we had been whetting sharper and sharper blades, the better to cut ourselves with.In the new season, Saul, now the national security adviser to the new president, Ralph Warner (Beau Bridges), is conducting negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan at last. When the peace process is undermined, he recruits Carrie, still recovering from spending months in a psychotic state as a captive — though the C.I.A. is concerned that she revealed information during the long stretch of her imprisonment that she can’t recall.This setup brings “Homeland” full circle. Carrie, having sacrificed her sanity and even custody of her daughter by Brody in the service of her mission, has to readjust to fieldwork while wondering, herself, what she might have said while the Russians had broken her. She may, in a way, be Brody now, and one of her own adversaries is herself — at least, the mysterious, unmedicated version of herself lost to her own memory.The first four episodes of the season have their wild plot lurches but also the gimlet eye for human nature of “Homeland” at its best. Danes gives us a Carrie who’s older and wiser (“I’m not as fun as I used to be,” she deadpans, ordering a nonalcoholic drink) but also wrenchingly aware of her own precariousness. And the show is conscious of the collateral damage of the great game, as with the story of Samira Noori (Sitara Attaie), an Afghan woman whose husband was killed by a car bomb after she spoke out against government corruption.There’s an elegiac feeling to “Homeland” returning to the site of a war a generation old. The season returns a number of characters from past seasons, but the long war, in a way, is the ultimate enemy — formless, multiheaded and endlessly able to reconstitute itself and survive.There are glimmers of hope that this time might finally be different. But the show’s realpolitik worldview suggests that you not bet on it, as it demonstrates in a scene that captures the mind-set of endless war in miniature. Bunny Latif (Art Malik), a retired Pakistani general who figured into Season 4, is sitting with a revolver in his garden, where to the consternation of his neighbors he’s been shooting the squirrels who steal from his bird feeders.Asked why he doesn’t simply stop filling the feeders rather than spend his free hours turning his backyard into a war zone, he answers as if the question were insane: “That wouldn’t be fair on the birds, would it?” In big wars and small ones, “Homeland” tells us, people can always find reasons to stick to their guns. More