Entertainment
The Thrilling Die Hard Homage That Made Scream VII's Star
By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
Actress Isabel May is starring in Scream VII as Sidney’s daughter Tatum, a role that puts her character in the vicinity of her famous mother and therefore in danger from Ghostface. May isn’t a stranger to playing characters whose lives are in danger, as she was also the star of the Daily Wire thriller Run Hide Fight. Between the Scream movie and recent news events, this 2020 film about a high school shooter has resurfaced on social media.
Run Hide Fight is about an angry teen named Zoe Hull, who is still grieving the death of her mother, making things not so good at home with her ex-military and outdoorsman father, Todd. Typical teenage concerns abound: prom is coming up, and Zoe’s friend Lewis wants to ask her to it, while Vernon Central High School is having its “senior prank day,” resulting in rooms filled with balloons and a sloped hallway doused in vegetable oil.
But the joke is over when four of Zoe’s classmates, led by psychopath Tristan, ram into the school in a giant white van and start shooting. He and his friends aren’t just out to kill their classmates, but also to livestream it on social media and become famous. Zoe manages to escape detection, but can a single 17-year-old girl save an entire school?
Die Hard In High School Doesn’t Cover It
The movie has been described as “Die Hard in a high school,” and that’s a fair assessment of its basic plot, but it sells short the intricacy and psychological warfare that is woven into the script by director Kyle Rankin. Various powers collide as the hostage situation unfolds, as the school’s administrators and teachers, the police, the media, and the students themselves scramble to deal with the crisis in various ways. There is so much going on in this movie that I took three pages of notes to write this review.
While there’s plenty of action, it’s not really an action movie but a thriller. Zoe is on a hero’s journey that includes her own grief as she talks to her mother, played by Radha Mitchell, throughout the hostage situation. Tension is high even when characters are just talking to each other, because you never know when someone with a gun might burst into the room. The movie’s plot moves through the phases suggested by its title and mirrored in the phases of Tristan’s plan.
Zoe is also not invincible. She’s a scrappy teen, not a Navy SEAL, and she takes some injuries as she tries to help her classmates escape. Unlike John McClane, she’s not looking for a fight; she’s looking to survive, and all she has is her wits. She is also suffering: her mother appears as a hallucination whose appearance documents Zoe’s grief. Isabel May puts on a wrenching performance, not just in her dialogue but in her expressions of deeply conflicting emotions in the face of terror.
With so many characters and so much going on, the action is emphasized in short, staccato scenes that allow the plot to unfold organically. It has the frenetic pacing of up-to-the-minute news, creating a livestream effect that underscores Tristan’s plan, but it also knows when to slow down, giving us time to care about the characters and their survival. Treat Williams, who plays the sheriff managing this crisis, dominates almost all his scenes with charismatic energy.
Great Writing Makes Run Fight Hide a Must-See
Daily Wire+ has a mature warning on Run Hide Fight because of violence, but we are only given enough violence to emphasize the severity of the situation. These scenes are very impactful, especially as the students are forced to livestream the carnage and Tristan’s posturing. The technique of using phones to record for social media is always present, as it connects all the characters inside the school to the police and parents outside the school.
The true strength of this movie lies in its script, which doesn’t shy away from its numerous themes. There is humor in the dialogue, and the characters are fleshed out well. The film draws viewers enough into the school that it’s easy to triumph when they do and to be afraid for their survival. The threads of plot and theme are so well executed that they wrap the story into a neat package, from its cold open to its chilling resolution.
It is difficult these days to write a story about school shootings, and you’re not supposed to enjoy that, though that’s what’s happening during this one. The script never asks for it any more than Zoe asks to be a heroine. That makes it all the more worth watching.
Run Hide Fight is Isabel May’s first dramatic role and paved the way for her to star first in the Yellowstone spin-offs and now in Scream VII. Even though she plays a teenager, this movie marked her transition from teen roles to more mature ones. Many people ignore or dismiss it because it is a Daily Wire production, but Run Hide Fight represents a successful early effort by the streamer to create quality fictional content.
Run Hide Fight is streaming on Daily Wire+. Scream VII is currently in theaters.
Entertainment
Hurdle hints and answers for April 19, 2026
If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.
There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it’ll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.
An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
If you find yourself stuck at any step of today’s Hurdle, don’t worry! We have you covered.
Hurdle Word 1 hint
The edge.
Hurdle Word 1 answer
BRINK
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Hurdle Word 2 hint
Moody.
Hurdle Word 2 Answer
POUTY
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
Hurdle Word 3 hint
America’s bird.
Hurdle Word 3 answer
EAGLE
Hurdle Word 4 hint
A platform.
Hurdle Word 4 answer
FORUM
Final Hurdle hint
Cheapskate.
Hurdle Word 5 answer
MISER
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Most Ambitious Villain Helped Create The Franchise’s Most Complex Hero
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Star Trek: Voyager first came out, the most fascinating character was the Doctor. While Robert Picardo’s performance was superb, it’s fair to say this character was mostly fascinating on a conceptual level. We had seen things like hypercompetent Starfleet captains and exotic aliens before, but what we hadn’t seen was a fully holographic chief medical officer. Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram seemed like the perfect embodiment of the Star Trek ethos. He’s a technological strange new world and new life, all rolled into one.
However, what casual audiences didn’t realize is that the Doctor wasn’t completely unique. Long before Picardo’s character ever sawed bones in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Picard dealt with another extraordinary hologram: Moriarty, the brilliant foe of the famous investigator Sherlock Holmes. Over on The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge accidentally created this villain as a sentient hologram when he asked the holodeck to create a challenge worthy of the android Data. Later, Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor revealed that, in-universe, the holographic Doctor was created because Starfleet took advantage of the same accidental breakthrough that created Moriarty!
It all started in “Elementary, My Dear Data,” the Next Generation episode in which the titular android and Geordi LaForge recreated Sherlock Holmes’ adventures on the holodeck. Thanks to his positronic brain and his encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, Data is able to easily solve every mystery that is thrown at him. That’s when Geordi makes a seemingly simple request. He asks the Enterprise computer to develop a holodeck foe that could actually defeat Data, one of the smartest beings in the entire galaxy.
The computer obliges and creates a sentient version of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ greatest foe. Following Geordi’s instructions, the Enterprise computer included much of Data’s vast programming, which resulted in the holographic character becoming self-aware. Moriarty ended up threatening the Enterprise on two different occasions, and Picard eventually got rid of him by trapping the unknowing villain in a simulation where he thought he had left the holodeck and could explore the stars. This was meant to be a happy ending for Moriarty, but in the show’s typically bleak fashion, Star Trek: Picard later showed us a different, more hostile version of this character created by a malevolent Section 31 AI.
How A Villain Created A Hero
What does all of this have to do with Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager? Elementary, my dear reader! Very early in Voyager’s development (the show didn’t even have a name yet), executive producer Jeri Taylor was inspired by Moriarty to create a new character. As reported in A Vision of the Future-Star Trek: Voyager, Taylor wrote down notes for a holographic doctor “who, like Moriarty, has ‘awareness’ of himself as a holodeck fiction. He longs for the time when he can walk free of the Holodeck.”
A few days later, she wrote down additional notes that contain a startling bit of Star Trek lore. “The Holo-Doctor represents a new, state-of-the-art technology which has capitalized on the serendipitous incident which created Moriarty, and has programmed a holographic character which has self-awareness of his situation and limitations.” While Moriarty is name-dropped on Voyager a couple of times, the show never mentioned what Taylor’s notes seem to confirm: that Lewis Zimmerman could never have created the Emergency Medical Hologram program if not for Geordi LaForge accidentally creating Moriarty on the holodeck.
From Villain To Leading Man?
If that’s not strange enough, there was a period of time when Voyager’s producers were considering making Moriarty a mainstay character on the show. As reported in Star Trek–Where No One Has Gone Before, Taylor’s notes mentioned that “everyone agreed that was a little too broad, and we couldn’t figure out why anyone would take him along.” After dismissing the idea, they decided “that having a holographic doctor with the full consciousness of being a hologram might be fun, and we’d never done anything like that before, except for Moriarty.”
There you have it, gentle reader. Without the character of Moriarty on Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’d never have the Doctor on Voyager. In this way, Trek’s most ambitious villain helped create the franchise’s most complex hero. Thanks to Jeri Taylor’s notes, we also know that, in-universe, Lewis Zimmerman would never have been able to create the Doctor if not for Geordi accidentally creating a sentient Moriarty so Data could have fun. In retrospect, this does make Zimmerman’s arrogance that much weirder. After all, he has a lot of attitude for someone who owes his entire career to the two biggest book nerds in the galaxy!
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 19
After days of almost (and complete) darkness, the Moon is finally starting to reappear. We’re currently in the Waxing Crescent phase of the lunar cycle, which means each night until the Full Moon we’ll see it get more illuminated from the right side.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, April 19, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 5% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Despite more of it now being illuminated, the percentage of surface is still too little to be able to spot any surface details. Check again tomorrow.
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?
NASA states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. We call these the lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
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).
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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.
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