Entertainment
Starfleet Academy Just Made A Perfect Voyager Episode Even Better
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
How do you fix a controversial show that audience members keep complaining about? Simple: through blatant fan service!
Starfleet Academy has been under constant fire from Trekkies who think the brand is being worn by it like a skinsuit. In an effort to combat this, the new spinoff has been making more and more callbacks to classic shows, attempting to strengthen its ties to some of the franchise’s best episodes from Star Trek’s golden age.
The latest Starfleet Academy episode, “Life of the Stars,” takes fan service to the next level by serving as a direct sequel to a forgotten Voyager episode. In “Real Life,” the Doctor used Voyager’s holodeck to create a family for himself, but thanks to the realism of his simulation, his digital daughter died after a freak accident. While he never seemed all that bothered about it in subsequent episodes, Starfleet Academy just revealed that he has been carrying around the horrific trauma of her death for over 800 years.
The Real World
“Real Life” was an episode of Voyager’s third season in which the Doctor wanted to learn more about what it meant to be a human. Accordingly, he programmed a family in the holodeck, giving himself a wife and two children.
After Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres (who visit for dinner) tell him everything is a little too perfect, the Doctor tweaks the program to make it more realistic. This results in more rambunctious teenage children: the son falls in with a bad crowd of local Klingons, while the daughter starts playing the dangerous fictional sport of Parisses Squares.
While it looks like the Doctor’s son is in the most danger (it isn’t very long before he wants to get involved in Klingon bloodletting rituals), things take a turn for the worse when his daughter receives a fatal injury while playing sports. The Doctor’s attempts at treating her fail, and he shuts the simulation down out of sheer pain; however, after Tom Paris reminds him that families must support each other through even the worst tragedies. The holographic healer resumes the program and stays by his daughter’s bedside until she dies.
An Unexpected Callback
Star Trek: Voyager was a very serialized show, so it never really followed up on how the Doctor felt after watching his daughter die. However, the Starfleet Academy episode “Life of the Stars” dropped the bombshell revelation that he has been carrying around the extreme trauma of that event for more than 800 years. This also provides a retroactive explanation for why the Doctor has been so weird about SAM, his fellow hologram: she has reminded him of his daughter since day one, and he shut down her attempts to reach out to him because spending time with her reopened old wounds that had never fully healed.
SAM is glitching out in this episode, and the Doctor helps her mysterious alien race diagnose the problem: namely, that she never had the benefit of growing up, so she lacked the emotional resilience to process the recent trauma (namely, the Doctor’s own rejection of her) that she has experienced. In order to help her do so, the Doctor makes the radical decision to raise SAM on her homeworld, giving her 17 years of life experience before she returns to Starfleet Academy. But thanks to some timey-wimey stuff with her home planet, what feels like 17 years to SAM and the Doctor only amounts to about two weeks back at the academy.
Fan Service Done Right
Some critics of Starfleet Academy have complained that previous fan service episodes (mostly “Series Acclimation Mil,” which focused extensively on Deep Space Nine) are just naked attempts to please the audience. That doesn’t make them bad, necessarily; for example, some DS9 fans were happy to finally learn more about what happened to the Sisko. But “Life of the Stars” arguably takes fan service to the next level by making a perfect (albeit obscure) Voyager episode even better nearly 30 years later.
“Real Life’ is an underappreciated gem of an episode that allowed Robert Picardo to do some of his best work as an actor. He channeled some major pathos back then to portray the grief of a man experiencing grief over losing a daughter he never realized he loved until she was gone. Starfleet Academy brings that pathos back, letting Picardo give a master class in acting while adding some much-needed depth and complexity to his character.
Even if you’re not a huge fan of the show (maybe you even outright hate it), Starfleet Academy just added serious rewatch value to one of Voyager’s best episodes. The show also did this while giving explicit callbacks to the golden age of the franchise. Now that the show is finally getting decent (even downright good on occasion), let’s hope that this new Star Trek spinoff can defeat the ultimate no-win scenario of them all: premature cancellation by Paramount.
Entertainment
NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for July 19, 2026
The NYT Connections puzzle today is not too difficult if you’re good at reading people.
Connections is the one of the most popular New York Times word games that’s captured the public’s attention. The game is all about finding the “common threads between words.” And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we’ve served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today’s puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for today’s Connections solution. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
What is Connections?
The NYT‘s latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications’ Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there’s only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Mashable Top Stories
Here’s a hint for today’s Connections categories
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
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Yellow: Electrical
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Green: To match
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Blue: Using the john
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Purple: Body language
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Here are today’s Connections categories
Need a little extra help? Today’s connections fall into the following categories:
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Yellow: Circuit components
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Green: Digital coupling verbs
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Blue: Things toilets do
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Purple: ___ face expressions
Looking for Wordle today? Here’s the answer to today’s Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today’s puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today’s Connections #1134 is…
What is the answer to Connections today
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Circuit components: BREAKER, FUSE, RELAY, SWITCH
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Digital coupling verbs: CONNECT, JOIN, PAIR, SYNC
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Things toilets do: DRAIN, FLUSH, REFILL, SWIRL
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___ face expressions: GAME, LONG, POKER, STRAIGHT
Are you also playing NYT Strands? Get all the Strands hints you need for today’s puzzle.
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you’re after? Here’s the solution to yesterday’s Connections.
Entertainment
The X-Files May Be Secretly Coming Back To The Big Screen
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
It’s a very interesting time to be an X-Files fan right now. Next month, Chris Carter will be releasing a director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want To Believe, which is generally considered the second worst thing in the franchise (the worst thing was that crappy revival). But what really has the fandom excited is that the entire series is getting rebooted, with Ryan Coogler serving as showrunner. After all, this isn’t just anybody bringing a beloved series back to life; it’s the Oscar-winning writer and director behind the modern horror classic, Sinners. If there’s anybody who can restore The X-Files to its former glory, it’s this guy.
And make no mistake, restoration is desperately needed. The original X-Files series took a nosedive after Season 5, eventually ending with one of the worst finales in television history. The second film was a critical and commercial flop, and the revival was bad enough that it should be classified as a war crime. However, Coogler has the passion, drive, and (most importantly) the talent to restore this spooky series to its former luster. It helps that he’s gone all-out: the showrunner shot the pilot on 65mm film, and he’s now considering giving this first episode a theatrical release.
The Dream Of The ’90s Is Alive On Hulu
Ryan Coogler’s reboot of The X-Files replaces David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson entirely. Instead, our pair of erstwhile FBI agents will be played by Himesh Patel and Danielle Deadwyler. This show has its own unique canon, one in which the X-Files had previously been established and, later, shut down. These new agents are tasked with reopening the division and exploring various unexplained phenomena. The show will be exclusive to Hulu and doesn’t yet have a fixed release date, though it could drop on the streaming platform as early as late 2026.
When it does, it’s going to look absolutely fabulous. That’s because Coogler shot the pilot episode on 65mm film, which is a major rarity for television. Typically, things shot in this high a quality are reserved for the big screen, and the showrunner is reportedly considering giving the X-Files reboot pilot a theatrical release. Right now, Hulu is reportedly on the fence about doing this, especially because they have only commissioned a pilot and not yet ordered an entire series. If the pilot makes it to theaters, you’ll want to see it on the biggest screen possible because Coogler hired Oscar-winning cinematographer and Sinners collaborator Autumn Durald Arkapaw to shoot the first episode.
Will The X-Files Reboot Get Canceled?
Whether the X-Files reboot gets a series order depends on how well Coogler can impress the Hulu execs. As fans of the Slayer know all too well, the powers that be at the streaming platform didn’t like the initial cut of the highly anticipated Buffy reboot, requiring reshoots. Those reshoots did not impress them, and the show ended up getting canceled altogether. After the success of Sinners, Coogler has a lot of star power and momentum going for him, but that may not be enough. After all, the canceled Buffy series was also a reboot of a highly popular genre show from the ‘90s, spearheaded by another Oscar winner: Eternals director Chloé Zhao.
Of course, the Buffy series died in large part because it was difficult to create a reboot that matched the consistently high quality of the original show. That’s not going to be a problem with The X-Files, though: the original show diminished in quality, and after that, all we got was a terrible movie and an even worse, briefly lived revival. Fans have spent years hoping to get a truly great new incarnation of this once-great show. Is Ryan Coogler the man to give it to us? As Spooky Mulder himself might say, I want to believe.
Entertainment
Marvel Just Took The Most Drastic Step To Finally Beat DC
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One thing that Marvel Comics fans have long joked about is the sheer number of superheroes who are based out of New York City. Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four…believe it or not, these are just a few of the characters and groups based around the iconic city. How and why did this happen? Simple: Marvel Comics has always been located in New York City, and in the formative days of the publisher, most of the writers, artists, and editors lived in that same city. Accordingly, the stories they created reflected the lived experience of walking those streets, day in and day out.
These days, however, very few comic writers live in New York City due to its notoriously high cost of living. And now, even the company itself is forsaking the city. Earlier this week, Marvel informed its employees that it would be moving its publishing division out of Midtown and to Burbank, California, which is home to both Marvel Studios and The Walt Disney Company. Along with this big change, the publisher also named Stephen Wacker as its new editor-in-chief. These major shifts at the House of Ideas have one major purpose: to help Marvel Comics beat DC and become, once more, the market share leader in comic book publishing.
DC Keeps Kicking Marvel’s Butt
If you only pay attention to superhero movies, you might wonder why Marvel would fret about beating DC. After all, the DCEU ran itself into the ground trying to compete with the MCU, which is still going strong. Now, James Gunn’s DCU is floundering: Superman was a success story last year, but Supergirl, the second film in this cinematic universe, turned out to be a critical and commercial bomb. Throw in the fact that this year’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday are going to collectively make billions of dollars, and Marvel’s cinematic success is undeniable. Unfortunately, Marvel’s publishing side has been consistently losing ground to their biggest rival.
How is Marvel losing out to DC? As The Hollywood Reporter reports, Marvel “lost its position as comics market share leader for the first time this century.” In terms of numbers, ICv2 reports that DC successfully captured somewhere between 34 and 40 percent of the market share compared to Marvel’s 29 to 33 percent. This is due to multiple factors, including DC making its older works more affordable and accessible through its Compact Comics line and offering exciting new books like Absolute Batman. Compared to DC’s success, Marvel has recently looked like they were just publishing filler to keep readers interested between movies.
An Uncanny Team-Up
Now, however, Marvel is taking big swings to try to take back the market share from their greatest opponent. As Kevin Feige noted at a recent town hall event, moving remaining operations to the West Coast is intended to create better synergy between Marvel’s publication, animation, and live-action storytellers. This sentiment was echoed in a letter Brad Winderbaum (head of television, animation, comics, and franchise) and David Abdo (general manager, comics and franchise) sent to The Hollywood Reporter. “Bringing our comics, film, television, and other creative teams together will help us learn from one another, collaborate, and build on the strengths that make Marvel the true House of Ideas,” they wrote.
In a perfect world, this collaboration will give us more high-quality projects like X-Men ‘97 (when are we getting that animated cinematic universe, Brad?!) while improving the MCU, which has been very inconsistent since Avengers: Endgame. If nothing else, giving the publishing division a new editor-in-chief will give a shot in the arm to Marvel Comics and help them provide proper competition to DC once more. This, too, is good for the long-term health of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has become successful by adapting the best comics of yesteryear. The only way to make sure the films of the future rock is to make sure the comics of today don’t suck.
If that can happen, readers and viewers alike will proudly say “Make mine Marvel” yet again. Otherwise, the audience for this storied publisher might do their best impression of Spider-Man from Avengers: Infinity War by disappearing altogether.
NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for July 19, 2026
Scoring runs an issue for both Phillies, Mets
