Author: Trafficblast

In Legion’s Season 3 premiere, we spent a bubble gum-colored opening act with the new character played by Lauren Tsai, the time-traveling mutant Switch. Switch followed a trail of psychedelic bread crumbs to reach David Haller, who at this point is leading a cult of worshippers who get stoned on his psychic blue mind juice. All the while, she listened to an unaccountably specific book on tape–Lessons In Time Travel–the source of which has yet to be revealed.

Centering Legion’s third and final season around time travel is a choice with clear artistic intent. When you have characters with regrets as profound and fundamental as David and Syd, the ability to return to an earlier, simpler time is tantalizing indeed. But this is Legion we’re talking about, and there’s no way anything is going to be that simple.

Switch herself is a big factor here. The teenage time traveler is no mere tool, although David seems intent to use her as one. When we meet her, she’s as vulnerable and eager to trust David as the rest of his followers–worried she might simply be another of her father’s pet robots. David, being the pretty bad guy that he’s turned out to be, easily takes advantage of her. But given the direction Legion Season 3 seems to be going across its first two episodes so far, it’s probably safe to assume she’ll catch on to his bulls*** eventually.

“Now that we’ve discovered that David maybe isn’t the hero, I wanted to try to reset the camera to show David not through his own eyes, but through the world’s eyes,” Legion creator and showrunner Noah Hawley told journalists during a recent visit to the show’s set in Los Angeles. Hence the opening scenes not from David’s usual perspective, but from Switch’s. And if the goal is to make David a full-on, objective villain by the end, Switch’s assessment of him will need to change.

“It sort of depends on which way the wind is blowing for David, as to whether he feels any humanity or empathy toward people, or whether he’s just sort of blitzing through and destroying everything,” Dan Stevens, who plays David Haller, said.

“But she’s a wonderful, curious creation, Switch, and Lauren [Tsai], who plays her, is an amazing discovery,” Stevens continued. “She comes with this incredible sort of curiosity and wonder and strange air about her, I guess–as you would, stepping into Season 3 of Legion, I think in any role. But it perfectly suits Switch.”

Switch’s method of traveling through time is as unique as the character herself. She traces doorways, sometimes on solid surfaces and sometimes in thin air, and steps through into a gloomy but utilitarian hallway filled with doors that stretch backward through time. The door she picks determines where in her past she’ll emerge, but the further back she goes, the more danger there is, as we’ve glimpsed so far in Season 3.

“At a certain point, we decided to give it rules.”

Legion producers John Cameron and Lauren Shuler Donner told journalists on the set visit that they try their best to impose logic on Hawley’s crazy, unpredictable world. “I’ll give you an example on time travel,” Donner said. “At a certain point, we decided to give it rules, and to define it so that each door was 20 minutes in the past, one hour in the past, one day in the past, one month. It does help to find that device for the audience.”

“Although,” Cameron interjected, “I will say by late in the season, those rules again fall apart. She causes those rules to fragment. So, like I said, it’s always like, ‘what now?’ It’s a lot of fun.”

Thoughts Of A Time Traveler

“I can imagine it’s been very fun for the writers to play with because you have this whole butterfly effect from every movement that you make,” Tsai, a model and illustrator who’s never acted before now, told GameSpot during the set visit. “I was honestly very nervous to work with such an incredible team and cast of people, but it’s been nothing but a good time thus far. And it’s not over yet.”

As we chatted with the actors, producers, set designers, and more on Legion’s set, the cast and crew were busy shooting scenes for Season 3’s seventh episode–scenes we caught a glimpse of, although we won’t spoil them here.

For her part, Tsai said she believes that, paradoxically, Switch is able to use her abilities to bring a sense of “normality” to Legion Season 3.

“By the end of Season 2, we’re all very familiar with this family of characters and their relationships to each other, and how they’re all breaking off at the end. And then my character brings in this whole other world, by being someone completely from the outside, and giving David a whole new ability to go back and revisit any moment he wants to,” Tsai said. “She is someone who doesn’t have history with any of these characters, so we get to see these characters from a whole different point of view.”

As for the effect that Switch’s abilities will have on what is already an extremely far out TV show, we’re already starting to see it across the first two episodes: She was able to go back multiple times until she could save David, who relocated his entire commune thanks to her warning, and by the end of Episode 2, David has coerced Cary into working on a gadget that will let David travel with Switch through time.

“From my perspective, time travel is a whole different deal than from Lauren’s [perspective],” Bill Irwin, who plays Cary, told GameSpot. “I work with Lauren [Tsai] and with Amber [Midthunder, who plays Cary’s counterpart Kerry] and there are 50 years difference between us in age. So, time travel is a very, very deeply intriguing notion.”

Rachel Keller, who plays Syd, teased some of the ways Legion Season 3 will explore the concept in upcoming episodes. “On one hand, when you introduce time travel in a story, nothing matters anymore,” she told GameSpot. “And yet, I think we have some nuances in dealing with time, and what that actually means, and losing time. There’s some cool sequences of like, time being eaten around you.”

Aubrey Plaza, who plays the Breakfast Queen Lenny, said the addition of time travel serves Season 3’s themes perfectly. “I think it’s fitting that we end where we began, and I think that in a way, that’s kind of where the story has always been leading,” she teased. “I think that this season is all about exploring that, and exploring kind of–what are the stakes if you have the ability to go back and change things? And what are the consequences of doing something like that?”

“What are the stakes if you have the ability to go back and change things? And what are the consequences of doing something like that?”

We’re only a couple of episodes into Legion Season 3 at the moment, but it seems those consequences will be dire.

“[Switch] suffers terribly, just to help him,” Dan Stevens teased. “It’s that mutant bond, and this feeling that she can finally use her gift for something greater, which ultimately is just David really on his selfish journey.”

Legion Season 3 airs Mondays on FX.

Read Next: Legion Season 3: Is David Haller Forgivable After What He Did In Season 2?

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A new Evil Dead game is on the way, actor Bruce Campbell has confirmed. Writing on Twitter, Campbell–who plays Ash Williams in the series–clarified that the game is being developed for console and PC, not virtual reality as some reports might have suggested.

That’s all the information there is to go on at this stage, so we don’t know what kind of game it will be, when it will release, who is developing it, and other key particulars.

Whatever the case, it’ll be the first new Evil Dead game in a long time. Three Evil Dead games were released in the 2000s, including Evil Dead: Hail to the King (2000), Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick (2003), and Evil Dead: Regeneration (2005). Each title was developed by a different studio, though they were all published by the now-defunct THQ.

While THQ went under, the THQ name was acquired by Nordic Games which later re-branded itself as THQ Nordic. The company is now bringing back a number of THQ properties, including SpongeBob: Battle for Bikini Bottom, but it’s not clear if THQ Nordic owns the rights for Evil Dead.

In August 2018, Campbell confirmed to Bloody-Disgusting that the new Evil Dead game is a “whole immersive kind of dealio.” He also confirmed that he’ll be voicing Ash in the game because he “wouldn’t want someone else’s voice hamming it up.”

Would you be interested in a new Evil Dead game? Let us know in the comments below!

Part tower defense, part city builder, They Are Billions is a real-time strategy game whose flow swings between cautious turtling as you hunker down to fend off the zombie hordes and well-considered dashes to expand your territory and exploit vital new resources. Introduced into Steam Early Access last year with a survival mode that challenged you to endure a certain number of days on a randomly-generated map, the game now features a hand-crafted campaign mode as part of its Version 1.0 release. The result is a hybrid RTS that shines when it plays to its strengths even if several of its new additions feel like unnecessary distractions.

When you first start a new map and see your isolated base surrounded by zombies, the game’s title will feel accurate, if an understandable exaggeration. Stray zombies take refuge in the fog of war, milling around in small groups until you alert them and occasionally shambling towards your settlement. There aren’t really billions, but it looks like there could be. Fifteen days later, the klaxon blares to signal the arrival of the horde and soon, as a seemingly relentless river of undead lay siege to your defenses, you start to suspect billions may well be an understatement.

The survival mode and the majority of maps in the campaign offer a similar experience. First, you establish a perimeter with patrol routes to pick off encroaching zombies, scout the immediate area to identify chokepoints and nearby resource deposits, build structures around your base to grow the economy, and secure it all with enough troops and fortifications to fend off the first wave of attack. Survive that, and the second step is an expeditious land-grab to claim whole swathes of fertile new ground, clearing away the errant undead and managing your production to generate all the resources required to populate and work your expanded colony.

The ebb and flow at play here is lovely. The arrival of each new wave of zombies is clearly signposted, so you always know precisely how many days you have to prepare for the attack. How you use that time is where the interesting strategic choices arise. Weighing up whether it’s wise to expand northward towards the iron that will let you build soldiers or eastward, where there’s a large forest that provides natural cover and wood required to repair fencing and guard towers; such choices arrive with every wave and your prospects for surviving the next one hinge on the decisions you make.

It’s incredibly tense, too. Outside of the horde attacks, a single zombie that manages to elude your patrols and wander into your settlement can mean game over. If just one manages to attack a dwelling, everyone inside will become infected and proceed to join the assault, multiplying the danger to unmanageable levels in an instant. Death is swift. I lost entire colonies thanks to my failure to spot a gap in my defensive setup. Next thing I know, death is spreading across the camp and weeks of desperate survival count for nothing.

Survival mode is based around permadeath, as you’d expect. But the campaign, too, incorporates various degrees of permadeath and iron-man elements in an effort to force you to accept the consequences of your choices. If you get overrun and fail a campaign mission, for example, you have to restart that mission from the beginning rather than reload a save from mid-mission before it all started to go wrong. There’s even a penalty applied to the mission reward for each time you fail. Somewhat ironically, an option to back up your campaign save has been added since its 1.0 launch, and the developer has indicated it may continue to adjust its approach in this area in future updates, which makes these decisions feel unconfident.

The campaign falters with the inclusion of survival elements, which don’t mesh well with the flow of exploration. The campaign maps are hand-crafted–they’re the same every time you play them. They are, essentially, puzzles in which the solution is discovered through increasingly efficient resource management. Most of the maps here deliver satisfying challenges, and the permadeath aspect punishes you for experimentation within these maps. When you know you messed up between 60 and 65 days, having to restart from day zero can be tough to swallow.

The campaign fares better as a more gentle introduction to They Are Billions. The tech tree locks away many of the game’s structures, units, and bonuses behind research points accumulated by completing missions. This means the early missions let new players learn the ropes by only having to worry about a handful of buildings and a couple of units, rather than potentially overwhelming them with too many concepts to understand at once. As a new player myself, I also appreciated the adjustable difficulty settings which let you advance more slowly through the research tree while at the same time serving up missions that let you progress with the lesser tech at your disposal. Then, once I was comfortable, I was able to bump up the difficulty to match my improved skills.

Adding variety to the campaign are a couple of non-traditional mission types. There are Hero missions in which you control just one unit infiltrating a small base and Swarm Attack missions that are pretty barebones tower defense skirmishes. The elimination of much of the base-building and economic management–or indeed all of it in the case of the Hero missions–exposes the remaining combat as shallow. Worse, stripping out the core mechanics simply misses the whole point. As a result, neither of these mission types are particularly enjoyable, and quickly become irritations you have to wade through to get to the proper missions. Adding variety for variety’s sake, in this case, only serves to diminish rather than enhance.

At its best, though, in both the original survival mode, across the bulk of the campaign and in the one-off challenge of the week maps, They Are Billions remains a tight and compelling strategy game. The knowledge that you’re always just one misstep away from disaster creates a gripping, tense atmosphere that’s unusual for the genre. And the cycle from defense to offense and back again as you progress from one wave to the next offers both well-paced urgency and the ability to set clear short-term goals. It’s a smartly designed game at its core, despite the distractions. Just like a lone zombie can bring about your demise, sometimes one strong idea is enough.

JJ Abrams was not the first choice to direct Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Lucasfilm originally hired Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow to co-write and direct, but he left the project due to creative differences. According to actress Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, Trevorrow’s version was “very different” than what people will see on screen later this year.

Ridley said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, and reported by Collider, that she met with Trevorrow at an event where she asked him about what happened.

“He was Josh [Gad’s] guest at [the] Murder on the Orient Express [premiere] and we went for dinner afterwards, and Colin sat next to me and I was like, ‘What’s this gonna be like?’ Because all I had heard–I didn’t know what had happened, I just knew that he wasn’t doing it anymore. And he did sort of tell me and sort of not… Actually no we had gone for dinner and stuff, we went for dinner with Michelle, who is a producer. So I sort of knew. I think everything happens for a reason I guess.”

Ridley only confirmed that Trevorrow’s version was “very different,” though it’s unclear what differences there are between Trevorrow’s version and the movie that JJ Abrams made.

Trevorrow worked on the Episode IX script alongside Derek Connolly and Jack Thorne, but Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio later came in to write a new script.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the scripts that Trevorrow submitted didn’t cut it. While Trevorrow was keen to try again, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy opted to fire him instead.

Also in the interview, Ridley talked about an epic lightsaber battle between Rey and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) that’s coming up in Rise of Skywalker.

“I just think they’ve done a great job with all the relationships,” she said. “With the fun friendships, and with the sort of strange thing with Rey and Kylo… also we have a great fight. A great fight. And I was really happy that the Vanity Fair pictures did show a bit of it. It’s a great fight. Like I’ve become such a better fighter and they made the lightsabers lighter, so it actually looks like we’re swinging light and not like heavy [swords].”

The Rise of Skywalker is the third and final movie in the new trilogy that began with 2015’s The Force Awakens. It also wraps up their entire Skywalker Saga that began with 1977’s first Star Wars. There are multiple new Star Wars trilogies coming, including those from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, but Rey will not be in them.

The Rise of Skywalker opens on December 19.

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