It’s time once again to turn on The Monitor, WIRED’s roundup of the latest in the world of culture, from box-office news to release-date announcements. In today’s installment: Adult Swim dreams of electric sheep; Netflix's anime push continues; Disney’s Artemis Fowl teaser soars; and Jordan Peele conjures up Candyman (Candyman, Cand … ice Bergen. Sorry, we still can't bring ourselves to do it).

Back to the Future

Last year’s WIRED-beloved sci-fi sequel Blade Runner 2049 is being replicated in anime form: A new 13-episode series, Blade Runner-Black Lotus, is set to arrive on Adult Swim (and stream on Crunchyroll) at some unspecified point. Though it’s not clear which characters from the film will be appearing, Black Lotus will be set in 2032, and will involve Shinichiro Watanabe, who worked on a series of Blade anime prequels released last year. In the meantime, Blade Runner 2049 is streaming on HBO Now, and it’s really majestic and rad, so go rewatch that while you wait, K?

Netflix’s Next Moves

The streaming service announced a slew of new adaptations this week, starting with a live-action Cowboy Bebop, the adored future-set series. It’s the latest anime entry for Netflix, which is also adapting Avatar: The Last Airbender, and has set a Pacific Rim spinoff and a new Ultraman for next year (the mechs-and-match Ultraman trailer is below). The company also announced plans to create animated versions of several classic books by Roald Dahl, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and Matilda. What? No Danny, the Champion of the World? That’s a Matil-don’t.

An Unfortunate Moni-turn

WIRED would like to apologize for that last Matilda-adjacent pun. We promise to do better—at least matilda next time.

Playing Hooky

Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions will add to its creep-heavy development slate —which already includes Twilight Zone for CBS All Access, horror film Us, an HBO Lovecraft Country adaptation, and more—with a reboot of 1992 horror hit Candyman, about a hook-wielding killer who can be summoned by looking in the mirror and saying his name five times (or, presumably, by playing this song non-stop). Peele, who cowrote the script with Win Rosenfeld, will produce the film. Nia DaCosta, whose debut feature Little Woods has been a festival hit this year, will direct.

Fowl Play

Finally, Disney released its first look at next year’s Artemis Fowl, the delightful story of a wayward chicken who … sorry, I’m being told Fowl is actually an adaptation of the beloved multi-volume fantasy series by Eoin Colfer. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, the long-awaited epic stars newcomer Ferdia Shaw as the titular young criminal mastermind taking on a race of fairies. Opening next August, the movie features Judi Dench, Josh Gad, and Hong Chau.

Hey, tiger. Long week, huh? Between the Jeff Bezos vs. National Enquirer dustup and the acting attorney general of the United States testifying before Congress, there's been a lot of back and forth. But last week also saw the premiere of Ariana Grande's new video and a cat that miraculously came back to life after being frozen in the snow, so it's not all bad. Happy Year of the Pig, everybody!

The State of the Union Is as Boring as Ever

What Happened: After all the shutdown drama, last week President Trump was finally able to give his 2019 State of the Union address. Was it worth waiting for? It depends on how much you were looking forward to bad writing and flat delivery, but at least the audience was interesting.

What Really Happened: Welp, after a lot of political rigamarole, President Trump gave his State of the Union speech last week—and what a speech it was. Clocking in at 82 minutes, it was the third longest State of the Union speech ever. (Unable to break the record for the longest speech ever? Sad!) But journalists aside, nobody really cares about the runtime except for the poor people who had to sit through the whole thing. We'll get back to them later. In the meantime, let's look at what Trump said.

As should be expected, fact-checkers were busy pointing out falsehoods and misstatements, but even they couldn't make people take the speech as anything other than a damp squib, judging by the reaction online.

OK, we meant those not already on the Trump train, as Twitter was all too eager to demonstrate.

Of course, we can't just blame the writing in this case. After all, it is a speech delivered by Donald Trump, and that brings certain … shall we call them perks? Sure, why not.

It's also worth noting what the president didn't mention during the speech.

But let's get back to that lengthy run time. Just how long was the speech this year? More importantly, how long did it feel? Well, let's consider the case of one of the special guests at the speech, brought there by the First Family.

It was a heartwarming story with a twist ending.

So, yeah. It was a pretty bad speech. So bad that a lot of the post-speech discussion online didn't actually focus on Trump's oration, but on people the world was actually interested in. Of particular interest, as is becoming increasingly common these days, was the presence of representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even among other congresspeople, she was a star.

People were obsessed with what she was wearing (especially as she was one of many women of Congress dressed in white for symbolic reasons)—

—and people were obsessed with how she behaved during the speech itself, with her responses drawing different reactions depending on what side of the political divide they came from.

The speech also launched a meme that put KKK hoods on AOC and the other Democratic women wearing white, but, as ever, Ocasio-Cortez rose above the cheap shots with a blunt, honest response.

To be fair, she may have already won even before the State of the Union thanks to this preview tweet:

Who would have thought that the Twitter President would run too long, and be brought low by someone else keeping to 280 characters or less? Is that … irony?

The Takeaway: This feels like an appropriate summary of what happened during the State of the Union, sadly. More sadly, this could describe so many State of the Unions before this one.

Nancy Pelosi Is All of Us Watching the SOTU

What Happened: Not content with winning people over by standing up to the president during the shutdown, last week speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi became the internet's avatar for State of the Union responses.

What Really Happened: Officially, the Democratic response to Trump's State of the Union speech came from Stacey Abrams, who delivered a short speech that seemed to go over well, triggering talk of a possible presidential run and panic at Fox News. But neither Abrams, nor even AOC, provided the most popular and widely shared Democratic rebuttal to the president's speech. No, for that, the internet turned to Nancy Pelosi. Madame Speaker?

Sure, we all know what a "hell no" look is, but if only there was a perfect example of just how wonderfully passive aggressive Pelosi's clapping looked…

Everyone immediately understood what was going on in the image, and so, a meme was born.

The internet was in love.

It was the clapback seen around the world, and was soon the subject of a number of news stories the next day. When sarcastic applause gets as much coverage as a speech, that’s when you know that nobody was really listening to what was being said.

The Takeaway: There’s one person who recognized exactly what Pelosi was doing: her daughter.

Investigate This

What Happened: As if to reinforce that no one was paying attention to the State of the Union, lawmakers responded to Trump's demand not to be investigated by announcing a new wide-ranging investigation into his administration and campaign.

What Really Happened: One particular line of Trump's SOTU speech would appear to be particularly prescient, given what happened the very next day—and not just because it was an awkward, tortured rhyme.

Less than 24 hours after the president complained publicly that there "cannot" be an investigation into his administration, the House Intelligence Committee—now under Democrat control for the first time in the Trump era—made a couple of big announcements.

No, that wasn't one of the big announcements, although the reason given seemed somewhat curious… Well, until the following two announcements were made, at least.

OK, that was kind of big. (Only kind of, because the Republican-controlled Intelligence Committee voted to release some of those transcripts last year, so it's not as if they were entirely hidden.) Even that was, however, the lesser of the two pieces of news announced by Rep. Adam Schiff on Wednesday.

Yes, the House will really for serious investigate the president and potential wrongdoing, unlike what happened under Republicans, which was clearly not intended to be a serious investigation. Oh, and that's not all: Everyone in America will get to find out exactly what the investigation reveals.

So, you know, that's kind of a big deal. How did the president, who just finished declaring he shouldn't be investigated, respond to the news that he was actually going to be very investigated? The answer is pretty much, "as you'd expect."

That was just the start of his tailspin; the next day on Twitter, he shared how he really felt.

So, the tenor of his reaction seems to be "clearly terrified," then. The next few months clearly aren't going to be boring, at least.

The Takeaway: How best to sum up this week in terms of the volleys between the president and the House Intelligence Committee? This seems pretty accurate, considering.

Bad Yearbook Photos

What Happened: Apparently, every politician of a certain age in Virginia has a personal connection to blackface in their past.

What Really Happened: It's not all about Washington this week, though! Let's take a moment to consider the horror show that is Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's response to the discovery of a photograph that may, perhaps, have featured him either dressed as a member of the KKK or in blackface. After initially apologizing hours after the photo went viral last Friday, he shockingly walked back that apology a day later.

Oh, but it got worse. Much worse.

Yes, that's right; Northam's argument that it wasn't him in a photograph showing someone in blackface was, essentially, "Don't get me wrong, I did get dressed up in blackface, but I didn't look like that." And that's saying nothing about the fact that he almost moonwalked at the press conference, only to be talked out of it by his wife. Let's just say that it was far from the most convincing pushback.

This really didn't go down well with other Democrats.

As of this writing, a full week after the photograph originally came to light, Northam has not resigned—indeed, he reportedly refuses to do so in case that meant he would be branded as "racist for life," as if that's not a done deal already—but the heat has been inexplicably taken off him by the fact that a second Democrat in Virginia came out as wearing blackface last week.

Unsurprisingly, the Republican Party swiftly moved to take advantage of this.

But, guess what? Spoiler alert: It's exactly what you're worried about.

Oh, and then there was this, too.

The Takeaway: What's genuinely shocking about the following tweet is that it doesn’t actually seem over-the-top or out-of-bounds considering what's actually been happening this week.

Liam, No

What Happened: Actor Liam Neeson said some fairly racist-sounding things. Lots of people noticed.

What Really Happened: In what might be an almost-impressive feat of career suicide, Liam Neeson decided to share something that he really shouldn't have last week.

It almost sounds like an Onion joke, but it really wasn't; Neeson did indeed give an interview wherein he admitted to wandering around wanting to attack a person of color after a friend had been raped.

The writer of the Independent story took to Twitter to talk about her experience.

Some people tried to see the funny side of the what was happening—

—but more people couldn't quite see what was worth laughing about.

The interview prompted much discussion across the media. A day later, Neeson attempted to tamp down the controversy, with a second interview on the topic.

People weren't convinced by it, and the backlash continued as public events got cancelled. Would no one stand up for Neeson, preferably with a ridiculous statement that you can't quite believe was shared publicly?

There we go. Celebrities! They're just like us, only they say really stupid things and everyone hears about it!

The Takeaway: Man, remember when Liam Neeson wasn't an embarrassment? You know, like a week ago?

Games get announced, games get cancelled, players get mad. As Lion King fans might say, it's the circle of hype—and it's well-represented in this edition of Replay. Controversies, kiboshes, and the oddly high risk associated with surprise game unveilings. In other words, just a normal week.

Blizzard Announces a Diablo Mobile Game, Making Everyone Furious

At fan gathering Blizzcon late last week, Blizzard capped off their presentation with a surprise announcement: Diablo: Immortal would be a multiplayer mobile game set in the Diablo universe. It doesn't not make sense for the publisher to try to tap the gargantuan smartphone market, but with it having been more than six years since the last core title in the dungeon-crawling franchise (the last Diablo III expansion came out in 2017), hardcore fans were … well, they weren't happy.

This wasn't the announcement a lot of fans wanted, and seeing a game that you don't think is going to be very good is a valid reason for disappointment. But gosh, the internet response was ugly. Here, I have an idea: What if we didn't announce videogames? Just release them when they're ready. Keep hype cycles to a minimum. So much less shouting.

Final Fantasy XV Is One Director (and Three Downloadable Episodes) Short

Square Enix's Final Fantasy XV has had a storied, decade-long history of development limbo, which didn't stop just because the game came out: since release, the creators have worked to put out a wide selection of DLC that serves to patch in missing parts of the story, add multiplayer, and broadly expand its engaging world. That, however, is going to come to an end sooner than expected. Wednesday night, in one of the strangest announcement streams you'll ever see, Square announced that it was cancelling three of the four currently planned DLC packs—everything except an episode about the character Ardyn—and that lead director Hajime Tabata would be leaving Square Enix altogether.

It's not clear why Tabata is leaving, but the announcement mentions that he has another project in the works, and he'll be founding another company to see it through. After everything, it seems, Final Fantasy XV will remain somewhat unfinished. So it goes.

Nintendo Removes Offensive Animation From Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Which, Good

Attentive viewers might have noticed something off about Mr. Game and Watch, a fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate based on the line of retro Nintendo handhelds of the same name. As shown in recent promos, he has an attack based on the game Fire Attack, a game about a Civil War general fighting indigenous peoples and … well, you can see where this is going. During the attack, Mr. Game and Watch briefly turns into a racist caricature. Pretty upsetting stuff.

And, somewhat surprisingly, Nintendo is ahead of the curve on this one, announcing that the animation would be patched out upon release. While it probably shouldn't have ended up in the game in the first place, it's nice to see some swiftness from a company that's generally been less than responsive to concerns about representation from its Western audience. Next time, maybe keep it out of the trailers, too, huh?

Recommendation of the Week: SUPERHOT for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 (and Oculus/Vive/PSVR)

It's one of those weeks where I just want some good old-fashioned fantastical action. SUPERHOT isn't exactly old-fashioned, but it distills that desire for adrenaline and excitement down to its most basic parts. The premise is simple: time moves only when you do. Shoot your enemies. Survive. That mechanic turns action into choreography, letting you slowly map out moves that would make the heroes from The Matrix jealous. With a basic, stylized art style, it really sings. (And check it out on VR, if you can handle it.)

I have not quite finished Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the latest in Crystal Dynamics' rebooted saga of videogame icon Lara Croft. I'm not sure I want to, either. Following the violent archaeologist on a quest to a hidden city with the lofty goal of stopping an ancient apocalypse, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a competent, occasionally enjoyable action-adventure romp. It'd be great, if only it weren't so nasty.

Lara Croft is defined by her ability to endure pain. One of the earliest moments of the games is pure claustrophobia. Lara is wedged in a crevice deep underground, nearly crushed between two sheer rock walls as another rock pins her legs down. The camera lingers intimately as she agonizingly uses a knife to work the rock off of her lower leg, scraping off skin, groaning and squirming. The scene immediately before this, the literal first moments of the game, showcase Lara getting into a plane crash.

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The new Tomb Raider series is built on the foundation of Lara's pain. In the first game, the pain was at least expressive, a crucible through which Lara Croft could go from a naive young woman into a hero, a fighter, the insatiable curious and bloodthirsty heroine of the 1990s. Back then, pain was a form of redemption for Lara, and while that isn't without its problems—why must a woman be physically injured to grow?—it was at least a meaningful idea, and Lara's mantra, a slow, breathy "I can do this" before confrontation, had a power to it.

That was two games ago, and yet Lara, supposedly fully developed into her heroic self a long time ago, still regularly gets stabbed, impaled, mauled, nearly drowned, and shot. Every time the player dies in this game, something awful happens to this woman. My own failures made me cringe, as I had to see some horrific punishment inflicted on her.

Lara Croft is born to suffer, and Lara Croft is also born to dole out suffering. Violence follows her everywhere. The game begins with Lara making a terrible mistake out of greed and desperation, a mistake that kills countless people. In another early scene, a supernatural tsunami—caused by Lara's plundering—consumes an entire Mexican town. Another vignette depicts a child dying. This, the game says, is Lara's fault. Shadow of the Tomb Raider then has Lara go on a warpath of her own, murdering droves of her enemies in pursuit of redemption and knowledge, even as the game halfheartedly attempts to encourage Lara to learn to be, well, less of a tomb raider and more of a tomb visitor. Hundreds of people die in this game to teach Lara Croft a lesson in humility.

The problem in Shadow of the Tomb Raider is that this suffering feels without expressive purpose. It doesn't carry sufficient weight to justify itself. In these games, people suffer as mild, milquetoast entertainment. Crystal Dynamics, whether purposefully or by accident, have created games that feel, first and foremost, cruel. This would be less insulting if the games weren't so competently made. The combat, the sneaking, the labyrinths of puzzles that feel both sprawling and tightly focused—it all pops. There is a legitimate and powerful sense of tension here, and in a game that was framed with less brutality, a more bright and cheerful and playful sort of adventure, there would be a lot to recommend.

But over the course of three games, the tone of Tomb Raider has curdled. Lara Croft often gets compared to Indiana Jones, but disregarding their mutual tendency toward appropriation and violence instead of archaeology, the two have little in common. Lara's world is mean in its heart in a way that Indy's never was. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a nasty game, and if this series continues, I hope it veers in a wholly different direction. I'm tired of watching Lara Croft get impaled on spikes.

Skrulls have been many things in the Marvel Comics over the past 60 years: superhero impersonators, religious extremists disguised as humans, canon fodder in any number of Avengers brawls. In their first appearance, they were even cattle, made bovine by Reed Richards in Fantastic Four #2. (This ended poorly for them in the absurdist 1995 miniseries Skrull Kill Krew when the Cow!Skrulls were slaughtered and turned into hamburgers, resulting in a mad-cow-like disease.) Skrulls are impersonators. Skrulls are terrorists. Skrulls can't be trusted.

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(Warning: Spoilers ahead!)

In Captain Marvel, the Skrulls are something else: people. They are beings whose plight, and fight, has been misunderstood.

This is true not just of a few exceptional Skrull characters, but of the Skrull as a species. The first two acts of the movie may set them up as the enemies, and Captain Marvel's Kree as the saviors, but the third act flips that dangerous assumption entirely. Instead, it presents the Skrulls as a refugee group being hounded across the galaxy by the military of a fascist hegemony, a Kree Empire that denies them their basic dignity. Captain Marvel turns General Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) into a character to be fought for, not against, showing the universe through Skrull eyes.

This isn't entirely new. Marvel comics have given readers sympathetic Skrulls before, but their shape-changing abilities and dramatic ears and chins have historically coded them as untrustworthy and alien. They're a version of the old sci-fi trope of the alien race that infiltrates society to replace humans. They can even, dangerously, be seen as stand-ins for immigrants or minorities; they are Other. Captain Marvel upends that, calling into question assumptions about who is the Good Guy and who is the Bad Guy in any war narrative. Do we side with people who look like us? (Kree, even with their blue skin, still look more human than Skrulls do.) Or do we side with the people who are forced into hiding?

Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), by the end of Captain Marvel, knows which side she's on. She has been hiding too. On the Kree planet Hala, she was expected to suppress her feelings, her unique powers, even her past. After crash-landing on Earth, she slowly learns she had to hold back there too. She couldn't fly combat missions in the US Air Force, and if you read a queer subtext into her relationship with Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch)—many already do—then she may have also been hiding her identity during the era of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Once she realizes her power, and the realities of the Kree-Skrull War, she isn't protecting the Skrulls as a member of the Air Force or as a part of the Kree Empire, she's doing it as herself.

There is some precedent here. Queer-coded Skrulls like She-Hulk's (girl)friend Jazinda or Effigy in Marvel: The Lost Generation have been popping up in the comics for years. (See also: Xavin in Runaways and Teddy Altman, the half-Skrull, half-Kree boyfriend of Scarlet Witch's son.) But those Skrull are portrayed as outliers of their species. Similarly, Hawkeye and friends stumbled on a whole town of Skrull living in harmony with humans in Dungston, Iowa, in Occupy Avengers, but that was one story, not the thrust of the Skrull story.

Captain Marvel, then, is a new chapter in that tale. The movie doesn't just show the galaxy from the Skrull point of view, it asks viewers to identify with them. Like the Skrull, people conceal themselves in order to survive in an oppressive world. When they defend themselves, the oppressors call it war. Like Telos racking through Carol's memories, marginalized groups—and anyone, really—look to other people's stories for a path to survival and to find a safe place they can inhabit as their true selves.

This narrative, this through line of Captain Marvel is central to any discussion of the movie's importance. As the first standalone Marvel superhero film to feature a female lead, it's already a part of the discussion about representation, and the Skrull, as proxies for any number of ostracized groups, are a part of that. But it's not enough to just have Skrulls to identify with. Movies, superhero movies especially, still need more representation of marginalized groups onscreen, still need to move beyond the allegories. Then, perhaps, messages like Captain Marvel's—that someone's difference isn't a threat, that refugees just want asylum—will have truly been heard.

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