SciFi Weekend: More News From Comic Con Including The Orville, Star Trek Discovery, Doctor Who, The Expanse and CW Shows; Game of Thrones; Altered Carbon Renewed

Last week I began coverage of this year’s San Diego Comic Con, concentrating on Star Trek: Discovery, The Orville, and Doctor Who. This week I will add some additional information which came out at Comic Con on these shows, some information on other shows, and some news which came out later in the week.

Marina Sirtis will be guest staring in an episode of The Orville, which will be directed by Jonathan Frakes. John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox) is yet another former Star Trek actor who will be appearing in an upcoming episode of The Orville. More on plans for season two of The Orville in last week’s post and at TrekMovie.com.

Rod Roddenberry premiered a short film at San Diego Comic Con, which can be viewed here. More information at SyFy Wire.

Alex Kurtzman says that a new Spock has already been cast.

Last week I wondered whether Anson Mount would be taking command of the Discovery for the entire season, or just as an arc part of the season. This does not entirely answer the question of whether he will be in command of Discovery the entire time, but Mount did say how long he will be appearing on Star Trek: Discovery in this interview with TrekMovie.com:

They’re still shooting, so was it an arc or are you a season 2 character?

Oh yeah. I’m contracted.

For the whole season, I meant. Main cast, whole season?

Yep.

13 episodes.

Yep.

There’s something a little jaded about Pike when we meet him early on in “The Cage.” Would you say that maybe some of what he experiences in this is part of his arc that takes him to that point?

Editor’s note: The question was intended to touch on how “The Cage” informed Mount’s performance, and how it affects where Pike is now. The fast pace of the red carpet means sometimes questions aren’t phrased perfectly. To clarify, the events of “The Cage” took place in 2254, three years prior to DSC season two (2257).

You’re going to see some easter eggs that you’ll recognize about Pike, I can tell you that.

Michael Dorn says that there hasn’t been any talk yet about a Worf spinoff among the new Star Trek projects, but he is working on it:

“I think this Worf thing would be perfect — I mean, really perfect,” he says. “It’s just a matter of getting the phone number of the right guy or getting the email of the right person that can actually get you in there. It’s a little early in the game right now, but I still think there’s hope for it.”

Even though there’s a powerful mystique to being a Starfleet captain, Dorn’s idea isn’t to put Worf in charge of the Enterprise. Dorn is fascinated with Klingons and feels the race of warrior aliens could be explored even further. His idea is to put Worf in charge of a Klingon ship during a period of cultural change for their fictional empire. There would be different aliens — including humans — on the ship, and the shift toward diversity and inclusion would be a painful one for the Klingons.

“I’ve always liked the Klingons. I’ve always thought that they were the most interesting aliens outside of the Vulcans and all that,” Dorn says. “There’s a certain Shakespearian bent with the Klingons. They’re very nationalistic — there’s coups, there’s assassinations, there’s takeovers, there’s all these kind of things. Interestingly enough, they talk kind of Shakespearian.”

Chris Chibnall told Digital Spy why the upcoming season of Doctor Who will have three companions and be more of an ensemble:

“I love Doctor Who as a big, popular, mainstream, accessible show,” Chibnall said. “So I wanted to make sure that every member of the audience felt they had a relatable character, an access point. Hopefully it means that the show can resonate with the broadest possible audience.

“And of course, three companions with the Doctor… we’re really going back to 1963 – that’s the format of the show! You’re not changing the format, that’s how it started, really – which I only realised afterwards.”

The Doctor’s new friends – Chibnall says not calling them “companions” just feels “a bit more natural” but “is in no way a rule or edict from now on” – include Yaz (Mandip Gill), who is “in absolute awe of the Doctor” and Ryan (Tosin Cole), who “challenges the Doctor from time to time, gets it right sometimes, but wrong a lot of the time”.

“Ryan’s 19, Yaz is 19, and then you’ve got Graham who’s the oldest of the bunch, so we’ve got different generations, different genders,” Cole told us.

“People have an ‘in’, in three different ways,” Gill added. “We all bring something different to the group, with gender, race, everything. And just the personalities of the three characters are very different.

“They each have a very individual voice, where I think certain people will be able to instantly relate to Bradley Walsh’s character, instantly relate to Tosin’s… and hopefully just love us all!”

Walsh completes the trio as Graham, with Chibnall confirming that he thought of casting the star having worked together on ITV’s Law & Order: UK in 2009.

“He’s an amazing actor and that’s what I learned working with him on Law & Order,” he added. “He has an incredible emotional range. He’s able to be really funny, and break your heart. And these guys [Gill and Cole] are exactly the same, as is Jodie. It means you have a range of emotional flavours in the show.”

Io9 interviewed Naren Shankar, showrunner of The Expanse at Comic Con, and asked about the move to Amazon:

io9: Will fans be able to tell the difference with the shift to Amazon?

Shankar: I think we’re in real strong continuity at this point. Anybody who’s read the books know that the books change pretty radically, sort of season by season. We’re in book four now, and if you’ve read book four, that is set entirely on one of the alien worlds beyond the rings. We’re not going quite that far, to, just completely do that as the entire season. But I think one of the strengths of the show is that it keeps changing. But—hopefully we’re doing our jobs right.

It’s not like Ty [Franck] and Daniel [Abraham, who co-author the Expanse books as James S. A. Corey] stopped being involved in the show. [laughs]. So, it’s not that. [Show writers] Georgia Lee and Robin Veith have both moved on to other projects, but they’re still friends of the show and they’ll be part of it again, I have no doubt.

io9: Will working with Amazon give you more creative freedom, or at least release you from having to do things like bleep out swear words?

Shankar: Absolutely. None of those restrictions have to come into play, because those are all basic cable issues. What’s weird about it is that on Syfy all of that stuff was bleeped out, but if you happened to be watching it on Space in Canada, none of that’s bleeped out. It’s going to be, I think, terrific for the show, because we don’t have language restrictions, we don’t have nudity restrictions, we don’t have all of these things that conspire a lot of times to make, especially genre shows, not feel as adult as they should be. Not to feel real. In my mind, it sort of infantilizes genre [TV series] even more so. But that goes away on Amazon.

We also don’t have to jam the individual episodes into 43-minute chunks. There were a lot of times over the last few seasons that I’ve gotten a show through post, and it’s been like, “Man, it would much better if I could just open this thing up by two minutes.” But you can’t. That isn’t a problem on Amazon either. So I think there’s huge creative advantages. And honestly, this show was made for streaming. It was made for bingeing. That’s just what it is. And everybody [who works on The Expanse], I think to a person, would say the same thing. We kind of have found our home. This is the right place for the show…

io9: The third season had events from both book two and book three guiding its plot. Will there be any of book five in season four?

Shankar: Without giving too many spoilers [laughs]—there’s so much that is juicy from this point on. One of the great frustrations when we thought we’d been canceled at the end of season three was that the end of the third book is really the end of the first big movement of the series. Which is, after spending a lot of time inside the solar system, this gigantically important thing happens that opens up an entirely new frontier for humanity. And that starts happening in book four.

Yeah, the book itself is completely restricted to the storyline on this new planet, Ilus, and a huge portion of the new season [is based on] book four. But we’re also creating material [that takes place] back in the solar system, that reflects on the events on Ilus. It’s stuff that isn’t in the book, but it actually bridges books four and five going forward. There’s a whole bunch of things happening that are sort of referred to, obliquely, in the text, but we’re bringing them to life and actually playing storylines back in the solar system simultaneously.

io9: Can you name a couple of examples from past seasons when the show has added or changed material from the books?

Shankar: There’s a few examples, even going back as far as the pilot. Chrisjen Avasarela, she’s not in book one of the series. She actually comes into book two. Very early on, that decision was made to pull her into the original narrative to give Earth’s perspective of the events, so it’s not just Holden and Miller, which is the entire book one. Similarly, the character played by Elizabeth Mitchell, Anna Volovodov, she’s in book three but she’s not in book two at all. So because we knew that we would be bridging the end of book two and book three in the third season, we launched Anna at the beginning of season three—the backstory of Errinwright and her on Earth, that’s not in the books or the novellas. So we’re teeing up the narrative for future seasons of the show, but we’re creating new stuff that’s not in any of the published stuff. Ty and Daniel are right there with us, so we’ve talked a lot about how to bridge it. But I think people are going to be pretty psyched by what we do.

io9: Is the ultimate goal to finish the books?

Shankar: I would love to take the show to the end of book nine. Ty and Daniel have written a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That is the perfect version of this for me—if we can keep the show going, and people like it, I think it would be remarkable to tell, because they are telling a story about the evolution of a species and sort of the fate of humanity in very, very big terms with a very particular point of view. I’d love to be able to take it to the end. That would be amazing.

Nora Allen said she made a “big mistake” at the end of last season, but it turns out that she made multiple mistakes per this report from ComicBook.com:

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, Helbing said that Nora (Jessica Parker Kennedy) has more than one mistake to deal with and that those additional mistakes are well on their way.

“There’s a bunch of big mistakes and they’re coming,” Helbing said. “It’s not just one.”

While Helbing didn’t elaborate on exactly what those mistakes were, during the show’s SDCC panel Helbing also revealed that the show, whose overall theme for season five is the concept of legacy, would be doing a younger version of The Rogues. If Nora, whose heroic codename is XS, is operating as a super heroic speedster in the future it would make sense that she would also have her own version of the Rogues, the iconic group of Flash villains in comics.

On top of the possibility of a Young Rogues, the season’s big bad, Cicada, has also been teased as art of Nora’s big mistake. A tease about the villain was supposed to factor into The Flash’s season four finale, but was ultimately cut for time, though it was confirmed that Cicada won’t be a speedster, something Helbing told ComicBook.com gave the show a way to change up the obstacles for Barry and the team.

TV Line looked at Legends of Tomorrow, including why they are not being included in next season’s Arrowverse crossover.

Supergirl will have feature television’s first transgender superhero next season.

Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger has been renewed for a second season.

It was revealed at Comic Con that the third season of The Man In The High Castle will premiere on October 5, with the entire season being released that date. Amazon has also renewed the show for a fifth season.

The final six episodes of Game of Thrones will air in the first half of 2019. A pilot for one of the prequel series will also start filming early in 2019. At present there are only plans to proceed with one series, with previous stories discussing several possible spinoffs.

TV Line has information on The 100.

Altered Carbon has been renewed by Netflix for a second season. Like Doctor Who, the show lends itself to the “regeneration” of the main character, or at least having a different appearance and star every season. Anthony Mackie, who has played The Falcon in Captain America and Avengers movies will play Takeshi Kovacs next season. It is not known if other characters from the first season will return.

Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits is being made into a television series by Apple.

SciFi Weekend: Stephen Hawking, Scientist & Genre Star; The 100; Martin Freeman on Sherlock; Alexis Bledel on A Handmaid’s Tale; Double Renewal For Eric McCormack–Will & Grace & Travelers; The Americans; Nathan Fillian To Reprise Firefly Role; Saturn Award Nominees

Stephen Hawking died last week leading to recognition not only from the scientific community, tributes from many in actors due to his many appearances on genre television. He was the only historical figure to play himself on Star Trek. In the video above from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Hawking played cards with  Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Data in the holodeck. Syfy Wire has several tributes to Hawking from the cast of multiple versions of Star Trek. More at TrekMovie.com.

Sheldon Cooper met Stephen Hawking on The Big Bang Theory in the clip above. TV Line has tributes from the cast of The Big Bang Theory. IO9 has additional television cameos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=238&v=giiIq7t4oMQ

The 100 ended last season with major changes, and a quick glance of the future. An extended trailer for the the fifth season has been released, showing a new enemy to contend with. The 100 returns on April 24.

It has been a huge question as to whether Sherlock would return considering how the careers of both stars have taken off. It does not sound encouraging that Martin Freeman will want to return after he said that it wasn’t fun anymore in a recent interview:

In a new interview in The Telegraph, the Black Panther actor was asked if there were any talks about a fifth season of the BBC fan favorite.

“Not massively,” the Dr. Watson actor said. “Um… I think after series four [it] felt like a pause. I think we felt we’d done it for a bit now. And part of it, speaking for myself is [due to] the reception of it.”

Martin, the article explained, was referring to 2017’s fourth season which seemed to struggle to continue building on fans’ expectations of previous outings.

“To be absolutely honest, it [was] kind of impossible,” he explained. “Sherlock became the animal that it became immediately. Whereas even with [the U.K. version of] The Office, it was a slow burn. But Sherlock was frankly notably high quality from the outset. And when you start [that high] it’s pretty hard to maintain that.

“Being in that show, it is a mini-Beatles thing,” he concluded. “People’s expectations, some of it’s not fun anymore. It’s not a thing to be enjoyed, it’s a thing of: ‘You better f—ing do this, otherwise, you’re a c—.’ That’s not fun anymore.”

The Handmaid’s Tale returns to Hulu on April 25. Entertainment Weekly interviewed Alexis Bledel:

This season, we get to learn a lot about Emily’s life from Before. Was her backstory something you’d thought about before this episode?
Yes, I loved filming Emily’s flashbacks. [Executive producer] Bruce Miller and I had talked about what her pre-Gilead life might have been like even before I started working on the first season. I think much of her worldview is informed by her previous life as a professor of cellular biology. Life in the Colonies is a last stop. Emily does not have a great deal of hope for a future there; she knows her days are numbered.

Marisa Tomei costars with you in the second episode. What was that like?
It was amazing to work with her; she’s someone whose work I admire. We had these incredibly dark, dramatic moments to play out that she brought so much depth to.

I keep thinking/wondering what’s worse: life as a Handmaid or living in the Colonies?
Being forced to exist in either Gilead or the Colonies threatens to destroy a person’s soul in different ways. Handmaids are forced to follow an extremely limiting set of rules to comply with the mandates of the Gileadean regime, including the horrific monthly ceremony. Anyone in Gilead would be terrified to be sent to the Colonies. Everything from the soil the unwomen turn over to the water they use to wash is toxic in the Colonies, so a person’s health begins to rapidly deteriorate as soon as they get there. They know they will die there, all the while forced to do hard labor without decent food to eat or clean living conditions.

We are going to be seeing more of Eric McCormack on television next year. NBC has renewed the Will & Grace revival for a second season, and is extending it to eighteen episodes. Fewer people might be aware that Eric McCormack also stars in an excellent Canadian science fiction series called Travelers. The first two seasons were broadcast on Showcase and later shown on Netflix–although once I discovered this show I wound up downloading episodes rather than waiting for it to be available on Netflix.

Travelers has been renewed for a third season, and McCormack will be directing the first episode. However, instead of airing first on Showcase, the show will be shown exclusively on Netflix. I wonder if this was a case of Netflix saving the show if Showcase was not going to continue it, or (I suspect more likely) Netflix has business reasons and the power to take it over.

Travelers is technically a time travel show but the series takes place entirely in the present, with people from the future taking over the consciousness of people at the moments they were to have died. The characters must deal with not only their mission to save the earth , but also must deal with the personal lives of the bodies they take over. I won’t give specifics for those who have not seen it, but the second season ended with major changes for everyone, making fans eager to see a third season.

The Americans returns for its sixth and final season on March 28. FX has released the above official trailer.

Earlier in the week I had this post regarding a social credit system in China which sounds like something out of Black Mirror. It is also reminiscent of Majority Rule, an episode of The Orville.

Storing the contents of one’s brain provided for a fascinating story on Altered Carbon. A company is claiming that they can store the contents of your brain, but there is a huge catch.

Nathan Fillian is going play himself on an upcoming episode of American Housewife, and will be suiting up as Captain Malcolm Reynolds of Firefly.

(more…)

SciFi Weekend: The Magicians Musical Episode; Black Mirror Renewed; Timeless Returns; Michelle Gomez on Returning To Doctor Who; The Expanse; Agents of SHIELD; Gotham; Lost In Space; Jessica Jones; Altered Carbon; Episode of Black-ish Too Controversial For ABC

Last season The Magicians went into battle with a musical number from Les Miserables (video here). This season they topped that in an episode with four muscical numbers, which also revealed where Josh has been.  The most talked about musical scene was Under Pressure where the entire cast was involved but my favorite was Kady (Jade Tailor) singing All I Need Is the Boy (adapted from All I Need Is the Girl from Gypsy). While most of the cast members have no experience singing, Jade Tailor does have experience with burlesque.

I have not been able to find a stand alone video of Jade Tailor’s song. Video of the entire cast singing Under Pressure follows:

The producers discussed All That Josh with Entertainment Weekly:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: In approaching the episode with so many musical numbers, where do you start — with the songs or the story? 
JOHN MCNAMARA: God, I wish it was that linear. [Laughs]
SERA GAMBLE: John, I remember you talking about the David Bowie song, like, the previous season. Am I remembering this right, that you kind of had this image in your head of everybody singing that song long before we got to this episode?
MCNAMARA: Yeah, I think the music was first. Initially, I think it was a much looser, even lighter, less menacing plot. At first, the design was almost going to be like a singing contest where there are high stakes to be lost. That didn’t really hold water, it just didn’t seem to work. [We realized] it had to sit in the serialized narrative of the show, it had to be about the quest, it had to be about something and someone you really cared about, and it had to also serve several ongoing threads that had nothing to do with this musical pocket universe. That just took a lot of trial and error. This was one of those episodes — you have one every season — where the normal episode will take anywhere from three days to two weeks to break the story, get all the beats on the board, and my recollection is this took six weeks. It stopped the [writers’] room. It literally stopped all forward momentum. Fortunately, we’d been on schedule with our other scripts and we kind of planned out. This was the knot to untangle at the end of the second third of the season. All hands were on deck. I give a lot of credit (or blame, depending) to my two co-writers Jay Gard and Alex Raiman. This was their debut professional script.

For me, one of the breakthroughs — which fortunately happened while I was out of the room, so it wasn’t my idea, but I immediately approved it — was the idea that it was a universe where there were dangerous consequences if you didn’t behave exactly the way the leader, Todd/the demon, wanted you to behave. That was a really important breakthrough, I think, for all the writers because it gave it a lot of bottom. It wasn’t just going to be like jazz hands.

When I got to this episode, I was surprised that it became about the group uniting. How did you land on taking it in that specific direction, where it’s about Josh feeling left out? 
MCNAMARA: Part of it was just an accident. We realized we hadn’t had Josh in a bunch of episodes. He sort of got bumped out of a block of episodes through no fault of his own, just that we have a lot of characters and a lot of plot, and that in a way felt fortuitous, that you could then make the show about what happened to Josh.
GAMBLE: Whether or not the episode we’re working on happens to have half a dozen musical numbers in it, we are always playing within the structure of a classic fairy-tale quest this season. Quentin especially is very, very cognizant of how these epic quests work and how each step of the quest challenges the quester in a different way. From the beginning in this case, the quest has been a group effort, and when Eliot is given the quest in the first episode, he’s both encouraged and warned by the fact that everybody is part of one whole, and that means that these different keys, as you try to get them, will challenge you in different ways. If they’re a team and they forgot Josh, that’s a problem for the quest. So that was really one of the first things that we could sink our teeth into. Unlike John, I really don’t have a brain for musical theater. There are a lot of hilariously ardent musical theater fans in The Magicians writers’ room, as you can tell, starting with John, and I am not one of them. I am sort of the grumpy person in the corner who’s drinking coffee and saying, “Explain to me how this would work if no one was singing.”

You had “Under Pressure” in the back of you head for a while, but how did you pick the other three songs for the episode?
MCNAMARA: We knew the opening number would have to reintroduce Josh in a big way. It would have to be a big, inexplicably well-choreographed number that tells you why he’s so happy to be here, how integrated he is into this universe. The dance tells you something nonverbally about the world and the character: He is the center of this whole little universe. He’s the lead singer, he’s the lead dancer, and Todd is kind of his enabler, and we later learn why. That to me felt like we needed something big and upbeat and party-ish. We listened to a lot of songs, I can’t remember the titles of all of them. Some of them were insanely expensive and popular, and the song “Wham Bam” I thought was really catchy and a lot of fun. I thought it was like a really good introduction. It then gave Alice, Quentin, and Kady something to stare incomprehensibly at.

Another [type of musical number] that I’m very fond of is cabaret, where most of the musical numbers take place on a stage, so that you’re seeing a character perform for an audience that isn’t the audience in the theater, it’s the audience of the Kit Kat Klub, and character and milieu are revealed through a little more of a sideways way in. On the surface, it’s not as revealing of character, but if you do it right, it’s very revealing of character. So that informed the decision to have Kady sing her song. All I knew about that song early on was I wanted it to be a Sondheim song, because I love his work and I think it’s really intelligent and it always has layers to it, and I knew that it had to be a torch song because I had an instinct early on that we do a kind of classic Mata Hari move wherein she would do something outrageous to distract all of these creatures, and mollify and entertain them while our heroes were off doing something nefarious upstairs with Josh. I thought the [“All I Need Is the Boy”] lyrics were just as good if not better than “All I Need Is the Girl,” which has pretty good lyrics. I thought that’s the perfect torch song and definitely for our really hardcore musical theater aficionados, who may number in single digits, it’s kind of a treat to hear what is kind of, for 99% of the world, a brand new Stephen Sondheim lyric and, in my opinion, does not disappoint when you want cleverness, emotion, and a not-sentimental emotion and depth from Sondheim.

Then I came to discover with Sera, Jay, and Alex was now we have to explain why it is Kady would choose to sing this song and do a striptease. Then we thought, well, her mom, who we met in season 1 and was a bit of free spirit, might have had a year where she decided to be a stripper and maybe she did this burlesque number and Kady remembers it and recreates the dress. Without necessarily intending to, suddenly the song and the number and the moment and even the suspense it creates all illuminates Kady’s character to a greater degree.

“Car Wash” was just that we wanted something fun for Josh to use to distract, but also to slowly reveal to him how empty and repetitive this life has become and how false it is. I thought disco was a pretty good route to get to the death of the soul. If you’re just doing disco for months and months and months, you’re going to see the emptiness of it. As I said, “Under Pressure” was always in the back of my head before there was anything like a story as something that all eight characters could sing as we intercut between their various worlds and their various problems. None of us started out knowing how or why. That was just always on the board as the big number. In a weird way, the only one that we planned ahead of time was “Under Pressure.” Everything else was kind of trial and error, and selected to either illuminate character or move the story forward.O

Inside the Magicians (video above) has more on the episode, including a very brief look at Jade Tailor singing All I Need Is the Boy.

Black Mirror was officially renewed for a fifth season. There is no word yet as to how many episodes

Timeless returns tonight. Spoiler TV has a preview of the episode here.

In an interview with Doctor Who Magazine, Michelle Gomez says she might return to face Jodie Whittaker’s version of the Doctor. She had this to say about the character:

I think it’s going to be really hard to shake this one off. Missy has made quite a big impression on me, and hopefully on the fans as well. She was such a great fit. Even though, for now, she has been laid to rest. I don’t think she’s ever going to be that far away. I loved playing this character so much, and it was really hard to see her go. But I think that in many different shapes and forms, she will be back. I can’t really say much more than that. I have never had this response to anything else that I’ve done, and I’m really grateful for that.

While her character appeared to be killed and left unable to regenerate, the Master has a long tradition of returning from apparent death. Plus time travel would allow for seeing her at a different point in her time line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3dW-tU6oQg

Syfy has released the above trailer for The Expanse season three, which returns April 11.

There were big moments last week for the 100th episode of Agents of SHIELD (discussed and spoiled here), and on Gotham. Although it was during a drug induced hallucination caused by Poison Ivy, Bruce Wayne had a vision of his future, with might be the only view of Batman we are likely to see on the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=142&v=RzJtDqAtzfg

The Librarians has been cancelled by TNT, with there some talk of trying to have it picked up elsewhere.

Netflix will be releasing another remake of Lost in Space on April 13, and released the following trailer:

Jessica Jones is out on Netflix now. I have a four more episodes to go, but so far it has been excellent, showing more about Jessica’s backstory. While the series is slow moving, I haven’t minded. I would much rather spend time with Jessica, Patsy, and the rest of this cast than in the far less interesting world created in Iron Fist.

Altered Carbon is another show highly worth binging which came out recently on Netflix. It also starts out a little slow, but once I got to the second half it was hard to stop until the end.  While it has not been renewed for a second season, I would not be surprised if it returns after the success of the first season. They have the options of adapting the sequels to the novel, or writing new stories set in the universe created.  Joel Kinnaman, star of the current season, will be staring in Hanna on Amazon, and may or may not be available to return for a future season. However, somewhat analogous to Doctor Who, this series has a built-in way to cast a new lead. In this case, as occurred in the novels, Takeshi Kovacs could receive a new sleeve and have his consciousness placed in a new body, played by a different actor. If desired, they could continue this series with a different lead actor every year.

Black-ish has often dealt with political matters, but the episode originally scheduled for February 27 was not shown due to “creative differences.” Variety has some information on the episode:

Shot in November and directed by Barris, “Please, Baby, Please” features Anthony Anderson’s patriarch Dre caring for his infant son on the night of an intense thunderstorm that keeps the whole household awake. Dre attempts to read the baby a bedtime story, but abandons that plan when the baby continues to cry. He instead improvises a bedtime story that, over the course of the episode, conveys many of Dre’s concerns about the current state of the country.

The episode covers multiple political and social issues. In one scene, Dre and oldest son Junior (Marcus Scribner) argue over the rights of athletes to kneel during the performance of the national anthem at football games.