The latest in EA’s FIFA soccer franchise won’t just star your favorite current players, but will also feature the fictional squad from the hit AppleTV show Ted Lasso. And the character himself will be a playable coach in the upcoming game, with a fully mocapped Jason Sudeikis to bounce about alongside your team, waving his arms, and doing whatever it is a soccer coach even does.
Today, within minutes of each other, both the official Ted Lasso and FIFA Twitter accounts revealed a one-minute trailer that sets up Lasso’s playable appearance in the game. Characterized as an unlikely soccer genius whose knowledge of the game might be sparse, but who is quite a successful coach regardless, a CGI Jason Sudeikis walks out onto a virtual field before clapping, pointing, and cheering in victory. In the trailer, we also catch glimpses of (fictional) soccer reporter Trent Crimm, Coach Beard, and several AFC Richmond stars, including Roy Kent and Jaime Tartt.
You can find the full details of the Ted Lasso / FIFA 23 crossover in EA’s official announcement.
This reveal was teased a bit yesterday when the Ted Lasso Twitter account tweeted a picture of Sudeikis standing in front of an array of cameras and lights. “Look out, Mario!” the tweet reads, “You’re not the only pixelated man with a mustache who never knows where the tube is taking him.” Before that, as PC Gamer notes, leaked database rankings for the game hinted at the crossover.
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While it’s a suitably themed crossover, fleshed out by the inclusion of the full AFC Richmond squad—whom you’ll be able to play as in any mode—looking at the footage, it’s hard to avoid that creepy uncanny valley feeling. Especially as the camera moves around Lasso’s face at the end of the trailer, revealing him in full 3D polygonal form, something just isn’t right. That poor (and kind, and astonishingly emotionally intelligent) man.
She-Hulk herself isn’t a telepath, but Disney Plus’ She-Hulk: Attorney at Lawknows exactly what you were thinking when you first saw its statuesque heroine in all her uncanny VFX glory, and it appreciates all the feedback. While She-Hulk’s frequent forays into the uncanny valley feel like an undeniable sign of the less than ideal conditions its visual effects were produced under, the show as a whole is a surprisingly refreshing spin on Marvel’s small screen character studies — one that feels like the precursor to something new yet very familiar.
After multiple Phases full of hero origin series like Daredevil and Moon Knight that gradually teased out how their titular vigilantes became super, She-Hulk: Attorney at Lawswitches things up by immediately dropping you into the deep end of Jennifer Walters’ (Tatiana Maslany) life with little warning. Much like her counterpart in the comics, She-Hulk’s Jen is an exceedingly talented but pathologically sheepish lawyer whose entire world is upended by a freak accident that leaves her with a set of superpowers very similar to her hulking cousin Bruce Banner’s (Mark Ruffalo).
Smart Hulk and She-Hulk meditating together on an island.Image: Marvel Studios
The exact circumstances of how the MCU’s Jen — normally a mousy, easily frazzled woman Maslany plays very down the middle — wakes up super strong, more than a foot taller, and a striking shade of green are somewhat different than how it plays out in the comics. But enough of the source material’s beats are present to make it clear that She-Hulk’s well aware of its own absurdity, and the show wants you to get in on its jokes about itself. Almost from the moment Jennifer’s introduced, she’s already breaking the fourth wall to insist that She-Hulk isn’t exactly a superhero show and that nothing about her life has to change even with her newfound Hulk powers because she’s always in complete control.
This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth, and She-Hulk’s first few episodes are in large part a comedic study about what happens to an ordinary person who suddenly becomes an “enhanced individual” in the MCU. But instead of simply framing Jennifer as yet another brooding hero who has to self-actualize before taking a codename and putting on a costume, She-Hulk presents her reluctance about becoming a known super quantity as something crucial to understanding who she is. Hulk powers or not, Jennifer prefers fighting in the courtroom alongside her paralegal Nikki Ramos (Ginger Gonzaga), where she knows they can use their legal prowess to change lives in ways that none of the Avengers ever could. Even more importantly, though, Jen’s genuinely not all that interested in being a superhero even though it’s what the entire world and her own TV show expect from her.
More than any of the big-name heroes or villains Jen crosses paths with in a professional capacity, it’s managing people’s ideas about who and what she is that gives her the most trouble throughout She-Hulk’s first season. Regardless of whether she’s dealing with her sexist colleagues or her well-meaning cousin, scarcely anyone in Jennifer’s life really trusts her ability to make smart decisions. But that’s not quite the case when she’s in her She-Hulk form, and even though that double standard understandably pisses Jen off, it’s once she starts using it to her advantage that She-Hulk really starts to pick up.
Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky, the Abomination.Image: Marvel Studios
Though She-Hulk’s definitely Jen’s Ally McBeal-inspired “lawyer show,” it’s also one of Marvel’s more pointed attempts at tying together disparate parts of its multiverse to remind you that many of these characters from different movies and series kinda, sorta know each other. As the Earth’s sitting Sorcerer Supreme, it makes a certain sort of sense that Wong (Benedict Wong) might call on She-Hulk for delicate matters requiring an understanding of mortal laws, and his presence in Attorney at Law adds a pointed sense of timeliness to the series.
Like Wong, Tim Roth’s Abomination returns here both to remind viewers of the last big Marvel movie he was in and to help She-Hulk delve into the minutiae of the universe it’s set in as only an aggressively nerdy and rather horny legal comedy could. Though the star power of She-Hulk’s guest stars varies from week to week, with each of their subplots, the show finds different ways to make the MCU feel like a more lived-in place, where a countless number of people were only recently wished back into existence. Silly as many of her cases and clients are, Jen does what she does to act as a force of justice in the world, and She-Hulk leads with the idea that people like her are exactly what the public needs in times of crisis.
When She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s firmly in comedy mode and playing up the influence of John Byrne’s and Dan Slott’s comics or hammering home an important idea about the importance of rehabilitation over incarceration, the show feels like it’s in a pretty good spot. But in moments where She-Hulk tries to shift gears, the series occasionally seizes up a bit, almost as if it’s remembered just how much it’s trying to do and panicked.
Image: Marvel Studios
That same harried sense of panic similarly arises in a number of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s more technically complex scenes featuring Jen in her massive, curiously proportioned Hulk form that bears much more resemblance to Maslany than Smart Hulk does Ruffalo. There’s no denying the incredible amount of work that went into creating a She-Hulk model that’s more convincing than not. But it’s also impossible to ignore how off shots of the character in motion tend to be, particularly when the show’s drawing attention to her mane of luxurious but often distracting hair that calls to mind the way Inhumans handled Medusa.
Given how much more consistently She-Hulk’s able to pull off the visuals for characters like Smart Hulk and Abomination who aren’t as new to the MCU, it stands to reason that Marvel intends to refine its take on She-Hulk as she continues to pop up in more projects. Even if that’s the case, though, it’s still odd to see She-Hulk repeatedly falling face-first into the uncanny valley on her own television show when Marvel had to have known the risks involved with building an entire series around a CGI character whose voice would have to be dubbed in during post-production. Surprisingly, the audio mixing on both She-Hulk and Smart Hulk jumps out even more than the characters’ tendency to read (visually speaking) more cartoonishly than Marvel likely intends.
Individually, none of She-Hulk’s drawbacks keep it from being watchable, and when they’re all working in concert, the show’s able to get by relying on its irreverent sense of humor and ability to laugh at itself. While Jen might need a new game plan if and when she ever makes the leap over to Marvel’s films, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s approach to the bruiser works reasonably well for the small screen, and it’s almost certain to go down as one of Phase 4’s more inspired entries.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law also stars Jameela Jamil and premieres on August 18th.
Disney Plus’ Ms. Marvel series needed to shift gears drastically if it wanted to complete Kamala Khan’s transformation into a bona fide superhero and wrap up all of its different subplots within the span of its season 1 finale. Ms. Marvel had already provided plenty of clues about how Kamala might end up joining the big leagues and working alongside her idol in The Marvels. But Ms. Marvel’s season 1 finale, “No Normal,” single-handedly turned Kamala into one of the MCU’s most important characters by featuring a very particular word and instantly recognizable musical cue.
This review contains spoilers for the first season of Ms. Marvel. For our initial review, go here.
Though Ms. Marvel started out with its feet planted firmly on the ground, the show quickly started taking steps up above street level once it began teasing out that Kamala might actually be magical. After sending Kamala to Pakistan — and the distant past — to learn more about her family and their roots in another dimension, Ms. Marvel brought her back to the present just in time to come clean to her mother about her powers after using them to narrowly prevent a massive disaster.
“No Normal” checks off all of the boxes we’ve come to expect from Marvel’s overstuffed, VFX-heavy final acts. But the episode also plays like Ms. Marvel’s way of reminding everyone that live action comic book adaptations don’t have to stick to the source material to be interesting. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Marvel’s Kamala doesn’t suddenly discover that she can shape-shift the way her counterpart in the comics sometimes can. But recreating some of the most memorable moments from Kamala’s first solo outing in 2014’s Ms. Marvel #1 is part of how the show’s able to sell its wild new spin on who and what she is.
Image: Marvel
Were it not for Kamala coming across her grandmother’s mysterious bangle in Ms. Marvel’s first episode, she never would have discovered her power to make hard light constructs or how her family’s history intertwined with that of a group of djinn-like beings called Clan Destines from another plane of existence. Both of those plot points have worked as interesting ways of making Kamala’s MCU story one about a young person figuring out how she fits into her family’s legacy. But they’ve also helped Ms. Marvel sidestep some of the budgetary and narrative complications that would come with directly adapting the powers and Inhuman origins Kamala typically has in Marvel’s comic books.
In the books, Kamala develops her polymorphic ability to alter her body’s mass after being exposed to a gas that causes people with dormant Inhuman (think X-Men but weirder and usually lurking on the Moon) genes to undergo sudden evolutionary transformations. Connecting Kamala — Carol Danvers’ biggest fan — to the Inhumans established a number of complex power dynamics between some of Marvel’s most important legacy heroes. But the MCU hasn’t exactly been in a position to touch upon those aspects of Kamala’s lore, mainly due to the fact that the Inhumans seemingly vanished from the franchise following the cancellation of ABC’s short-lived Inhumans series after its first season.
Even after Black Bolt’s recent cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it felt reasonable to assume that the Inhumans’ time in the MCU was over and to go along with Ms. Marvel’s framing of Kamala as a special kind of magic user. That’s the idea everyone’s already accepted in “No Normal” as Kamala sits down the rest of her family in a botched attempt to be the first to tell them that she’s the vigilante known as Nightlight. While Kamala’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law are all understandably curious about how her powers work, no one bats an eye at her news — not just because they already know but also because none of it makes them see Kamala as all that different of a person.
“No Normal” does underscore how Kamala has been changing, though — evolving and growing more and more capable of taking on the increasingly dangerous challenges that come with wearing her family’s bangle. Just by gifting Kamala a bespoke superhero costume tailored in Pakistan, Muneeba’s (Zenobia Shroff) able to share with her daughter how, on a certain level, she understands some of what Kamala’s feeling and wants nothing more than for her to be safe as she fulfills her destiny. Like Kamala’s costume, the way “No Normal” brings Bruno (Matt Lintz) and Kamran (Rish Shah) back into the picture only bears the slightest resemblance to what takes place in Marvel’s comics, but the show’s handling of the characters gets at the heart of one of the Ms. Marvel books’ most important ideas.
The moment Kamran developed powers similar to Kamala’s earlier this season, his life became even more endangered than it already was when his mother and the other exiles from the Noor Dimension abandoned him. What little Ms. Marvel’s revealed about the Department of Damage Control made clear that agent Sadie Deever (Alysia Reiner) could and would use the agency’s power to harass Jersey City’s Muslim population in her hunt for the city’s new enhanced vigilante.
Ms. Marvel#1 tackled one manifestation of Islamophobia by having Kamala’s polymorphic powers cause her to spontaneously transform into Carol Danvers because some part of her mind thought less of brown, Muslim girls like herself. “No Normal” takes a somewhat different approach as it puts Kamran and Bruno on the run from Damage Control after the agency destroys the corner store where the boys have been staying. By pitting Kamran against external Islamophobia rather than focusing on internalized bigotry, Ms. Marvel’s able to frame the community taking collective action as an effective way to combat hatred.
It isn’t until basically everyone in town has said, in no uncertain terms, that they won’t help Damage Control find anybody that the agency begins closing in on both Kamala and Kamran and their friends in a school building where they mean to capture the children. It also isn’t until it seems like Damage Control might actually kill Kamran and Kamala in front of a massive crowd of civilians that she taps into a whole new level of strength to will her powers into something akin to her comics self’s embiggened form.
Though it’s immensely satisfying to see Kamala stomping around on the screen and catching cars with her hands, you can immediately see why Marvel was hesitant about trying to create shots of her doing these sorts of things with her actual flesh. VFX heavy as Kamala’s final showdowns with Kamran and Damage Control are, they’re a fun change of pace that sell the idea of her taking on more formidable foes down the line. But what really makes the final few scenes that end “No Normal” so beautiful is the very Spider-Man-like way that everyone rallies around Kamala when presented with the opportunity to claim her as their hero.
“No Normal” closes Ms. Marvel’s first chapter on an upbeat note with an emphasis on valuing the communities we come from that nurture us. But what’s most likely to jump out about the episode to most people — even more so than the cameo who pops up during the mid-credits scene — is the short conversation Kamala and Bruno have before he leaves Jersey for Caltech’s gifted and talented immersion program.
It was almost a given that Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) was going to show up in Ms. Marvel’s finale, presumably by way of the other missing bangle that Kamala’s great-grandmother could never find. Carol appears to be confused and alarmed after seemingly switching places in Ms. Marvel’s mid-credits sequence that teases their next adventure together in The Marvels.
But Kamala seems much more at ease during her conversation with Bruno just before the mid-credits sequence in which he casually shares a new working theory of his about why she developed superpowers when no one else in her family did. Though Kamala’s non-human heritage is partially responsible for her light-controlling powers, as best as Bruno can tell, she’s unique in her family because of a specific mutation that makes her genes a little different than theirs.
Under any other circumstances, offhanded mentions about mutations might not raise many eyebrows. But the way a few notes from the X-Men animated series from the ‘90s swells as Kamala listens to Bruno strongly suggest that she might be one of the MCU’s first mutants is certainly notable. For understandable reasons, many people thought that Wanda Maximoff’s mental breakdown in WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness might pave the way for the X-Men to finally join the MCU. But there would be a similar kind of poetry to Kamala becoming a mutant in her journey from Marvel’s comics to its live-action cinematic universe — if that’s really what’s going on here.
After years of trying to breathe new life into the Inhumans properties by treating those characters like they’re deathly allergic to the X-Men, Ms. Marvel makes it seem like the company’s ready to try something a bit different with its newest hero. “No Normal” doesn’t say whether the presence of an X-Gene’s going to factor at all into Kamala’s future in the MCU, but Ms. Marvel leaves little doubt that its heroine’s going to be a much bigger deal the next time we see her.
In 1993, telecom giant AT&T launched an advertising campaign that somehow predicted quite a lot of aspects of how we work and live today. The “You Will” ad series, directed by now-famed thrill-master David Fincher, was an eerily accurate look at what life in the mid to late 2000s would look like. The ads, narrated by former Magnum P.I. star and professional mustache-haver Tom Selleck, imagined a series of scenarios involving gadgets and technology that didn’t yet exist.
“Have you ever done *insert thing we all do now*? Well, you will!” Selleck would say at the beginning of each ad. “And the company that will bring it to you? AT&T,” he added, at the end of each commercial. The campaign foretold a number of technological advances that would define the decades to come like tablets, smart TVs, remote work, smart watches, and smart home devices.
The central prediction of the ad was wrong, though. As Vox noted a couple years ago, while these ads were “remarkably accurate in predicting the cutting-edge technologies” that would soon arrive, they ultimately missed the fact that the company to “bring it to you” was not AT&T. Instead, it would be a whole bunch of startups that didn’t exist at the time, the publication noted.
That said, it’s uncanny to run down all of the things that “You Will” got right about the future.
Just a few degrees south of the equator of Mars, there’s a pockmark called the Airy Crater. It’s about 27 miles in diameter and whatever asteroid created it struck quite a blow. But within Airy lies Airy-0 — a sub-crater precisely at 0 degrees Longitude.
In an Instagram post, NASA shared the view of Airy-0 — which was chosen to be the exact spot that astronomers would call the prime meridian, where measurements of East and West begin. Unlike an equator, the line is arbitrary. But it helps scientists determine coordinates. Airy-0, as a subfeature of Airy, seemed like the perfect spot to plop it.
The crater also shows a series of ridges, which are Martian sand dunes. As on Earth, these dunes are created by the winds of Mars depositing fine particles, according to Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University. This gives the interior of the crater the appearance of cantaloupe skin. You definitely should eat it though, given the number of toxic perchlorates in some areas of Mars.
As for the erosion at the bottom rim of the crater, Byrne suspects that it’s mass wasting, something akin to a rock or landslide. Other craters on Mars have features associated with water or dry ice, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. “If there was water or CO2 ices there, they’ve long since sublimated, although I don’t know if they’d survive the impact formation event itself,” Bryne tells Inverse.
The photo was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on October 27, 2021. MRO has been in orbit around Mars since 2006, and is both the primary set of eyes on Mars from space as well as one of two communications relayers for Mars missions on the ground alongside the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter.
Both spacecraft have been in orbit around Mars for quite some time, and while they continue to function, NASA has plans to eventually send a new orbiter as a failsafe. But an initial plan to launch one in the fall of 2022 was scrapped in favor of a mission that would be paired with a Mars sample return, to launch in the late 2020s. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter may eventually have its orbit dropped as well in order to serve as an interim communications relay.