Entertainment
The Buffy Reboot Disaster Proves Oscar Winners Should Stay In Their Lane
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans are still reeling from the bad news that Hulu canceled the reboot of this iconic ‘90s show. The streamer had ordered a pilot, and things seemed to be going well: not only was Sarah Michelle Gellar returning to star in the new series, but the showrunner was going to be Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao. The fandom had visions of Buffy returning as a prestige TV show, but Hulu’s cancellation put a stake through those dreams, leaving us only with dust.
As usual, battle lines were quickly drawn when it came to discourse about this show’s failure. Some (including Gellar herself) thought this was just a matter of out-of-touch executives not getting what Buffy was all about. Hulu, meanwhile, reportedly claimed the problem was that the show was too small, too focused on younger audiences, and (perhaps most importantly) didn’t have enough Gellar in it. Personally, I tend to believe Hulu, as they wouldn’t throw away a golden IP for no reason. With respect to Zhao (who has done some excellent work), the cancellation of the Buffy reboot clearly proves why Oscar-winning directors should stay in their own lane.
High “Stakes” Drama
What was the Buffy reboot about? While official details are relatively minimal, the show was reportedly going to focus primarily on a new Slayer played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong. She was going to have to deal with a new vampire menace that popped up in a very familiar location: Sunnydale. Like Buffy, this new Slayer named Nova was going to have a hard time learning the ins and outs of dusting vamps. Fortunately, Buffy herself was going to serve as this young warrior’s mentor, helping her keep the forces of darkness at bay.
Hulu didn’t like the initial pilot, believing that it was too small for an IP this big and that it had too much kiddie stuff and not enough Sarah Michelle Gellar. They demanded reshoots, but those weren’t enough to save this ambitious reboot. The streamer ended up canceling the new Buffy show, which Gellar ultimately blamed on an unnamed executive. As she told People, this exec “was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him.”
Getting The Bad News
Part of why Gellar is so upset with the cancellation is that she had worked with director Chloe Zhao for years to develop this reboot. To the Buffy actor, bringing the show back was a real no-brainer. One of the most beloved IPs of all time getting rebooted by an Oscar-winning director; what could go wrong? However, Hulu’s cancellation of the series (and, make no mistake, they wouldn’t cancel the show if they thought it would make money) reveals a simple truth: like most Oscar winners, Zhao is good at making a particular type of film, and her skills don’t necessarily transfer to the small screen.
Chloe Zhao is an excellent director of such films as The Rider, Nomadland (which won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director), and Hamnet (which was nominated for a whopping eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director). But Zhao is best when making indie films that focus on relatively unknown actors (Hamnet turned rising star Jessie Buckley into a Best Actress Oscar winner). But she seems to struggle when it comes to creating bigger films with more mainstream actors. This is most evident in The Eternals, her Marvel movie that ended up being a wall-to-wall snooze fest.
Eternals Was Our Warning
Obviously, hindsight is 20/20, but it seems like the failure of The Eternals effectively foretold the failure of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot. Audiences hated this film because it lacked the mainstream appeal of the MCU. The pace was slow instead of brisk, the writing was serious instead of funny, and the villains were abstract rather than clearly defined. It just didn’t feel like a superhero movie for most of its runtime. Instead, it felt like a typical Chloe Zhao joint: an introspective indie film that just didn’t fly with fans of tights-and-flights films.
The exact same thing happened with the Buffy reboot on Hulu. Executives reportedly thought the show wasn’t “mainstream enough” for the audience. Those same execs worried the new show was trying to chase too much of a youth demographic compared to the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which appealed to both children and adults. Finally, they worried about the relative lack of Sarah Michelle Gellar, who reportedly had only one line of dialogue in the original pilot.
Letting The Past Die
To sum it up, the show was going to be a Buffy reboot that had hardly any Buffy in it. No other legacy cast members were in the pilot, so fans weren’t going to get to see any reunions between the Slayer and fan-favorite characters like Willow or Spike. That means most of the show would focus on the new Slayer and her new Scoobies, which is (let’s be honest) a bit like making an entire show out of Dawn’s Season 7 adventures with her forgettable Sunnydale High clique.
Left to her own devices, Chloe Zhao creates breathtaking works of cinematic art, the kind of awesome indies that remind you why you fell in love with movies in the first place. But she is clearly a poor choice when it comes to genre entertainment. The Eternals was dead on arrival, and the Buffy reboot died before it streamed a single episode. Ironically, Zhao found out the reboot was canceled on the same weekend that she attended the Oscars to see how many awards Hamnet would take home. It’s a juxtaposition that drives home a simple, stake-like point: this Oscar winner should stay in her own indie darling lane and stop dabbling in genre entertainment she clearly doesn’t understand.
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 29
It may appear full, but the Moon isn’t actually at 100% illumination yet. In fact, we’re still a couple of days away. But it’s still big and bright enough to do some moon gazing, so keep reading to find out what features you might be able to see tonight.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Wednesday, April 29, the Moon phase is Waxing Gibbous. Tonight, 94% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Without any visual aids, tonight you should be able to see the Mares Vaproum, Tranquillitatis, and Imbrium. With binoculars, you’ll see the Mare Frigoris, Clavius Crater, and the Alphonsus Crater. And, finally, with a telescope you’ll see all this plus the Apollo 17 landing spot, Rima Ariadaeus, and the Fra Mauro Highlands.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
According to NASA, the Moon takes roughly 29.5 days to circle Earth once, going through eight distinct phases in the process. Even though we always see the same side of the Moon, the amount of sunlight hitting it changes as it moves in its orbit. The shifting light creates the changing shapes we know as full, half, and crescent Moons. Altogether, there are eight main lunar phases.
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Entertainment
The ASUS TUF Gaming F16 gaming laptop is down to a record-low price at Amazon — now $400 off
TL;DR: Amazon has the ASUS TUF Gaming F16 gaming laptop on sale for $899.99, down from its $1,299.99 list price. That saves you $400 on a 2025 gaming laptop with an Intel Core i5-13450HX processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 graphics, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and a 165Hz FHD+ display.
$899.99
at Amazon
$1,299.99
Save $400
Finding a current-gen gaming laptop in today’s economy for under $1,000 is already amazing, but Amazon’s latest ASUS deal is offering you an all-time low bargain.
As of April 28, the ASUS TUF Gaming F16 gaming laptop is on sale for $899.99 at Amazon, marked down from $1,299.99. Price tracker camelcamelcamel has confirmed that this is the lowest-ever price for this gaming laptop.
For that price, you’re getting the RTX 5050 and Intel Core i5 version of the TUF Gaming F16, which is built around an Intel Core i5-13450HX processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU. It also comes with 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD, so it should be nicely suited for jumping between games, school work, everyday browsing, and plenty of tabs without causing your sessions to come to a sudden crash.
With those sorts of specs, this version of the ASUS TUF Gaming F16 lets you comfortably run games from the latest graphically demanding titles — including Crimson Desert, Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Pragmata.
Mashable Deals
The 16-inch FHD+ display is a big part of the appeal, with ASUS’s fitted 165Hz 16:10 panel with 100% sRGB color giving you extra vertical space compared to a standard 16:9 screen while keeping motion smoother in fast-paced games like Fortnite and Counter-Strike 2. The handy Adaptive-Sync also helps cut down on stuttering and screen tearing when your frame rate starts shifting during intense firefights or brawls with lots of assets moving around at the same time.
Mashable Deals
The TUF Gaming F16 keeps the series’ usual more rugged angle, as well. ASUS has had the laptop tested to MIL-STD-810H standards, while its 2nd Gen Arc Flow Fans, full-width heatsink, and full-width vent are designed to help keep performance steady without making the machine unnecessarily loud.
If you’re after a laptop that’s more for work than gaming, Samsung’s ultra-sleek Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 just got a $450 price cut.
Entertainment
Beloved Star Trek Character Busted Franchise’s Biggest Myth With Single Line
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Star Trek has some of the most passionate fans on the entire planet. For the most part, those fans are unified in their love for this decades-old sci-fi franchise. However, there are a few things the fandom has bitterly debated over the years. One of the most intense arguments involves a seemingly innocuous question: can Vulcans lie? Some fans are convinced that these logic-loving aliens are far too moral and upstanding to deceive anybody. Other fans believe Vulcans are fully capable of lying and have successfully convinced the galaxy that they always tell the truth.
This persistent Star Trek myth goes back to The Original Series and claims made by characters like Spock and Dr. McCoy. Eventually, this myth was busted by Tuvok, who reluctantly told Seven of Nine that Vulcans were capable of lying but generally preferred not to do so. After decades of fan debate, this finally settled the matter. However, what most fans don’t know is that Tuvok accidentally busted this myth far earlier in the show. In “Twisted,” he blatantly lies to Captain Janeway in a scripted exchange that seriously upset Tuvok actor Tim Russ.
The Man, The Myth
First, we need to talk about how the “Vulcans don’t lie” myth came about. Back in The Original Series episode, “The Enterprise Incident,” a Romulan commander asks Spock if it’s true that Vulcans can’t lie, and Spock responds, “It is no myth.” This idea is also backed up by Dr. McCoy, who offered his medical opinion on the matter in “The Menagerie, Part 1” when he says of Spock, “the simple fact that he’s a Vulcan means he’s incapable of telling a lie.” Even the android Data agrees. In the Next Generation episode, “Data’s Day,” he wrote a message to Bruce Maddox about how Vulcans couldn’t lie.
If you pay close attention, though, Spock himself sometimes justified telling blatant lies. In The Wrath of Khan, when Saavik realizes Spock told Kirk that Enterprise repairs would take longer than they did, she confronts him: “You lied!” Spock (who was speaking in code to Kirk) simply replies, “I exaggerated.” In The Undiscovered Country, his apprentice, Valeris, does something similar. When asked to name her fellow Starfleet traitors, she says she does not remember. When Spock asks, “A lie?”, she responds, “A choice.”
A Secret Onscreen Lie
When he began working on Star Trek: Voyager, Tuvok actor Tim Russ seemingly bought into the idea that Vulcans don’t lie. In an interview with Cinefantastique, the actor discussed some dialogue from the episode “Twisted” that he disagreed with. “There’s a line in an episode we just finished, ‘I’ve always respected the Captain’s decisions.’ And that line was difficult to say.” Elaborating, he said, “[The] line was difficult to say when, in fact, we know he […] violated protocols [in ‘Prime Factors’] by taking matters into his own hands.” He’s referring to an earlier incident where Tuvok traded Starfleet technology to aliens for technology that could transport the Voyager crew 40,000 light-years.
To those closely watching Star Trek: Voyager, this settled the old debate: Vulcans can lie, as we saw Tuvok do to Captain Janeway. On other occasions, Tuvok has found ways to (like Spock before him) justify his deception. After he tells Chakotay, “As a Vulcan, I am at all times honest,” the commander says that Tuvok clearly lied when he passed himself off as a loyal member of the Maquis. Tuvok replies, “I was honest to my own convictions within the defined parameters of my mission.” To this Vulcan, it seems, lies are in the eye of the beholder.
A Borg Assimilates The Truth
Later, Star Trek: Voyager would bust this old franchise myth in a much more blatant way. In the episode “Hunters,” Seven of Nine asks, point-blank, if Vulcans can lie. Tuvok reluctantly admits to her that Vulcans have the capability of lying, but that he has never found it useful or necessary. Given Tuvok’s previous moral flexibility, this information might square the circle with the line about always respecting Janeway’s decision. In Tuvok’s mind, he may respect her decision without following it.
With any luck, this helps settle the debate, once and for all. Vulcans can lie. They just mostly choose not to do so. This explains what they are capable of while also explaining their reputation for honesty. If nobody ever sees you lying, why would they doubt you are honest? If you doubt what I’ve written, though, you can always wait until First Contact Day and ask the first Vulcan you see about all this. Don’t worry: I’m sure he’ll tell the truth!
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