X-Men movie plot

At D23, Marvel put six X-Men names on a stage, and Adam Driver came on by video with a joke about playing Magneto. Then he said his character's real name, Nathaniel Milbury, and the room kept laughing. For a month the internet argued about whether Samara Weaving is the right Emma Frost. Nobody looked up Milbury. I did, and it changes what this X-Men movie is about.

Then read the X-Men cast in the order Marvel hired it: Sadie Sink's Jean Grey, Kit Connor's Scott Summers, Samara Weaving's Emma Frost, Christopher Abbott's Professor X, Maya Boyd's Storm, Inde Navarrette's Rogue and Asa Germann's Angel, with Jake Schreier directing. None of these picks is random, and the ones people are angriest about make the most sense once you see what they're for.

This is the first episode of DEVELOPING, a new format for movies that are years out and arrive one announcement at a time. Every read on the X-Men movie goes on a board with a date on it, and every new name either sharpens the picture or breaks it. Watch to the end for the announcements that would prove me wrong, and put yours in the comments. The board is at knowitallnation.com/developing.

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00:00 Adam Driver's Magneto Joke at D23
01:47 Who Is Nathaniel Milbury?
03:08 Sadie Sink and Kit Connor: Jean and Scott
04:33 Samara Weaving's Emma Frost
05:48 Christopher Abbott's Professor X
07:10 Maya Boyd's Storm and Inde Navarrette's Rogue
08:38 Asa Germann's Angel and Jake Schreier
10:32 Who's Missing From the Cast
12:04 The Board So Far
13:09 Why There's No Know-It-All Index
14:11 Tell Me What Breaks It

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Lanterns Episode 7 The Jordan Boys Legacy Explained

Lanterns episode 7 has two people say "Great arm, kid." The first is Hal Jordan's father, Martin, a couple of months before he kills himself. The second is Sinestro. I missed it on the first watch and caught it going back through the hour trying to figure out why I wasn't crying when everybody else was, and the answer is that Lanterns just showed you why Hal never let go, and it did it with a baseball.

The boat scene is three men and two notes: the grandfather who went to the war, Martin who passed his death off as a test flight, and the note in the safe under the workbench. That's family history before it's a confession, which is why the tears didn't come. Then the copy of Hal Jordan says the line of the season, "I'm not fearless because I'm brave, I'm fearless because I'm broken," and the only version of Hal who could say it is the one with nothing left to protect. Damon Lindelof called canon plutonium this week. I go through the retcon, the airfield speech, the kid in funeral clothes going back for the ball, and why John Stewart is the son Hal never got to have.

Then the fear planet: John Stewart in the rain with a gun to his head, the same image as Xanshi in Cosmic Odyssey, and why his moment counts as overcoming fear when the copy's confession doesn't. The ring comes off and Hal stays. Kyle Chandler plays two men in one body, Ulrich Thomsen's Sinestro greets John with Martin's line, and the planet lost its horizon in post. Then the Know-It-All Index for Lanterns episode 7, and your turn: did that note deepen Hal Jordan, or just explain him?

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Timecode Chapters
00:00 The two men who said great arm, kid
01:15 Not the origin story I wanted
02:36 The wrong sentence
04:31 Why he never let go
06:59 The one who overcame something
09:50 The ring comes off, Hal stays
11:17 What it cost
13:29 The Know-It-All Index

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Lanterns Episode 6 Who Killed Hal Jordan

Everyone else spent this week asking whether Hal Jordan is really dead. The episode 7 promo, the mark on his arm, a James Gunn post. My comment section spent the week on a different question: who put a bullet in him, why he let them, and what a funeral suit that fit without a tape measure has to do with Noah Macon.

This is the Know-It-All Files, where the Nation asks and the Files answer. Kerry Kane, John Stewart, Noah, Guy Gardner and Sinestro all get a chapter, built from what you wrote under Monday's video and checked against everything the rest of Lanterns fandom is saying. Where you were ahead of them, I say so. Where you corrected me, I say that too.

And 1,300 of you say I heard one line in the café wrong. I have a writer's answer for that, and I am not backing down. Then one frame I need you to check before Sunday.

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00:00 The Café Line and the Bubble
01:56 The Question Everybody Else Is Asking
03:55 Noah and the Suit
05:58 Kerry Kane and the Autopsy
07:36 The Punch in the Café
08:46 Hal's Last Five Percent
09:47 Door to Door in Rushville
11:53 The Halogram in the Pilot
13:11 Twelve Forty, Episode Five
14:15 The Mark on the Arm
16:11 The Nation Ballot and Episode 7

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Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 10 Review

Strange New Worlds closes season four with "Tomorrow's Enterprise": two Uhuras, a time ripple, and Kirk in command of a ship he does not have yet. Everyone is about to call it the show finally becoming real Star Trek. I think they have the ending backwards.

The Original Series never got a finale. The Next Generation did. This hour is built like one of them, and the receipts are on the record from Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers. I walk through what they said, when this episode was made, and what that means for season five.

Then Uhura. Celia Rose Gooding carries the hour, the press has her future self wrong, and Kirk's cadence is still an itch. Two Easter eggs at the end, M'Ress and the Department of Temporal Investigations, plus one bird-looking officer I would rather you identify than me.

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00:00 The Last Episode of Strange New Worlds
01:07 Tomorrow's Enterprise and the Word Finally
02:27 The Fifteen Serious Hours of the Original Series
04:46 The Original Series Never Had a Finale
05:53 Two Uhuras and Kirk's Bridge
07:04 Goldsman, Myers and the Interstitial Future
08:47 The Sets Are Gone, and La'an
10:37 Uhura, From Cadet to Lieutenant
11:50 Celia Rose Gooding, The Final Frontier and M'Ress
14:14 The Know-It-All Index

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Lanterns Episode 6 Bad Optics Explained

Lanterns episode 6 jumps to 2026 and hands you a funeral. Hal Jordan wrote his own eulogy for a crowd of dignitaries and visitors from other planets, and three people came: John Stewart, Kerry Kane and Carol Ferris. It ends on one line, "I hope I mattered," and that's the line everybody is carrying out of Bad Optics. I think everyone misread it.

Justin Britt-Gibson, one of the writers on Lanterns, says the funeral shows what the ring did to Hal Jordan: it made him possessive, it made him selfish. Kelly Macdonald says he's stunting at the gravesite. Get past the bravado and hold that letter against what the first five episodes already told us, a man who knocked on doors all over Rushville trying to make amends and wrote Kerry Kane letters for years, and it reads like a hero's letter.

Then the lens goes to work on the rest of the hour: the booth John Stewart once shared with Zoe, the pilot's first image coming back around, the ring the Guardians gave him, Guy Gardner calling the whole mess bad optics, Sinestro busted out of space Azkaban, the phone calls, and an autopsy that says Hal never fought back. I still think Noah did it. Then the Know-It-All Index for Lanterns episode 6, and your turn: which Hal did you hear?

Catch me live with Mikey at Steel City Collectibles, Thursday, September 24 at 7:15 PM Eastern on their Twitch and YouTube: a 2026 Upper Deck DC Platinum guest case break. Code KNOWITALL10 gets you a discount at checkout: https://www.steelcitycollectibles.com/i/guest-break-w-mr.-know-it-all-2026-upper-deck-dc-platinum-hobby-8-box-case-alphabet-case-break-1-mikey

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00:00 Hal Jordan's eulogy
02:23 John Stewart and Stewart Brothers
03:40 Guy Gardner's new ring
04:55 Justin Britt-Gibson's read on Hal
05:56 A hero who went home alone
06:57 Rushville and the letters to Kerry
07:59 Green Lantern #87
09:06 The booth and the pilot's first frame
11:00 Hal's vault and the phone calls
12:28 The autopsy and Noah
14:30 The Know-It-All Index
15:43 Which Hal did you hear?

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Lanterns Clon de Hal subtitle explained

On Monday somebody found a caption. On the Latin American Spanish track of Lanterns episode 5, at the moment Hal Jordan opens his mouth, the speaker label does not say Hal. It says Clon de Hal. By Tuesday the whole internet had it. The thing nobody covering this story mentioned is that a subtitle track is not a translation of what you heard, it is built from a document, and a speaker label that says clone is production paperwork, not a translator's guess. This video puts the frame on screen, reads the label, and shows you exactly which scene it lands on, because half the write-ups this week put it on the wrong one.

Here is the part that makes this a Know-It-All Files episode. This comment section was arguing that the Hal we are watching is not Hal from September 1st, sixteen days before the internet needed a translator to get there, and every one of those calls came off what was in the frame. Jorge caught a break in the Halogram's protocol. Jack Is Back treated the shooting as the hinge. Le Jawn Jamez took the rule that an experienced Lantern's ring shields him automatically, held it against a body with a hole in its head, and found the one window where that rule does not apply. Unbreakable asked why John Stewart checks Hal's hand in 2026 if everyone knows where the ring went. Zero likes on most of them. Nobody clapped.

Then Dungeonstone handed everybody a mechanism, the secret reserve charge and a flat floor, and the argument stopped being a receipts video. The read that took over out there is that the thing John Stewart fought was the Halogram gone solid, which requires a rule this show has never given you. Meanwhile Lanterns has already put a machine on screen that takes a man burned down to almost nothing and hands him back without the army scar he walked in with. That machine did not repair John Stewart, it referenced something and printed the result, and it is standing in the background of the very frame everybody cropped down to a subtitle. There is also a trailer shot, not episode 5, with a marking on Hal's arm and a figure in the doorway, and if that mark is the machine's mark then the swap does not happen in a motel at all.

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Timecode Chapters:
00:00 The Spanish Caption That Says Clon de Hal
02:40 How Speaker Labels Get Into a Localization Track
03:46 The Comments That Called Fake Hal First
07:07 The Secret Reserve Charge and the Flat Floor
08:45 Everybody Is Blaming the Wrong Machine
10:53 Kerry, Noah and the Crystal Heart Flaw
12:43 The Trailer Frame and the Mark on Hal's Arm
14:40 The Bird That Outlived the Will That Made It
19:16 The Know-It-All Nation Index Score

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Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 9 Review

Strange New Worlds went back to the Elysian Kingdom for "Once La'an a Time," and the word waiting for it was the same word that has followed this whole season around. Gimmicky. Puppets, gimmicky. The soap opera, gimmicky. Now a fairy tale planet with a dragon, a wizard and a set of doppelgangers. I think the people using that word have the shape of Star Trek backwards in their heads, and I think this episode is the cleanest proof of it we have gotten. Pull up the original series and start counting: the gangster planet, Trelane in his ruffled shirt, Shore Leave, the planet where only the children survived, and Picard in tights in Sherwood Forest. The earnest military science fiction hour is the outlier. That is the show.

The part nobody is saying out loud is why they spent one of the last of these hours on La'an. Scotty's episode and Spock's episode work because we are watching people turn into somebody we already met, and the ending was written sixty years ago. La'an has no such file. Akiva Goldsman has said plainly that Spock and Uhura have futures the original series already locked, and that La'an and Ortegas do not, so somebody in that room has to build theirs from scratch. Before any of the magic starts, Pike finds her in the gym working out her aggression and takes a pattern of violent incidents to M'Benga as a medical problem. The fairy tale is not an escape she stumbles into. It is the treatment. And it pays off a hug this show planted in the season one finale four years ago.

Then I put my other hat on, because season one's Elysian Kingdom was a bottle show and this one has real money in the frame, from a floating planet to a practical forest married to a rendered world past the tree line. The effect everybody is calling magic when Queen Neve sends them into the tapestries is a transporter effect with a shrinking mask and a camera move, built by people who had the budget to go over the top and chose not to. Anson Mount and Ethan Peck are playing characters playing characters, which is the hardest note anybody ever handed me in twenty years behind a microphone. Christina Chong's sword fight with herself is what a season of fight rehearsals bought, and Runa the dog is Chong's actual dog. I have one complaint and it is about a seam, not the episode.

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Timecode Chapters:
00:00 Last Week I Got Kirk Wrong
01:26 Once La'an a Time and the G Word
02:39 Pull Up the Original Series and Start Counting
04:02 Goldsman and Myers on the Method
05:41 Scotty, Spock and the Circle Closing
07:19 Pike Finds Her in the Gym
08:29 A Quality of Mercy and the Hug
10:00 The 1960s Crew and the Resume
11:20 The Tapestry Is a Transporter Effect
12:29 A Hat on a Hat
13:41 Runa the Dog, and the One Complaint
14:43 The Know-It-All Index

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Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 4 review

I missed two weeks of Strange New Worlds and it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, because watching Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass and Orders of Magnitude back to back shows you something neither episode shows you alone. Both hours are about a bill. Something in them costs something, and the show has to decide who pays it. Two weeks running, at the exact moment the check hit the table, Strange New Worlds slid it to somebody else.

Episode 7 wants to be a soap opera and will not pay what a soap opera actually costs, which is a shooting model and not a lens filter, and then it brings Trelane in as a permission slip for a swing it never needed to explain. Then the haze comes off, and Captain Pike sits down across from a counselor played by Deidre Hall and grieves a daughter who never existed in this universe, and it is the best half hour of television this season has produced. Anson Mount has never been better.

Episode 8 lets Kirk put cordrazine in an admiral's coffee to stop General Order 24 from burning five thousand people, which is the boldest thing this show has ever let him do, and then it will not let Kirk carry it. M'Benga says it was me. Kirk says nothing. Twenty minutes later A'Sha walks away from Starfleet on her own account and Uhura owns breaking orders and gets pinned for it, and the show puts the honest version and the dishonest one in the same hour without seeming to notice. Two episodes, two scores, one argument.

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Timecode Chapters
00:00 The remote in my hand
01:31 Housekeeping, and the quiet
02:31 Both hours are about a bill
04:36 How they built the soap opera
06:49 Trelane and the note from home
09:45 The cookbook and Juliet
11:27 The Inner Light and the chair
13:42 Episode 8 and the admiral's coffee
17:28 Producer hat, the cheapest hour of the season
19:11 M'Benga takes the fall
22:30 A'Sha and Uhura pay their own
24:00 The Know-It-All Index

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Lanterns Episode 5 Lights Out Explained

Lanterns just had its biggest night and the reviews are unanimous. John Stewart finally gets the ring, and he puts it down on a table and walks out, and every outlet on the internet called that brave before midnight. I watched it twice and my hand is only halfway up, because the episode buried the two biggest things it did underneath the man on the roof with the rifle.

Zoe Macon is the Manhunter, and in the middle of a scene about a skin graft she says she killed Abin Sur in 1986, which is the reason there is a Hal Jordan at all. Antaan dies, Will Macon dies, Rushville burns, and Hal Jordan spends the hour holding a shield over a town that has already told him to leave. The show wants you to read Hal as a man who forgot what the ring is for. Watch him go recharge it and tell me that is what you saw.

And twice, with the sky coming down, this show stops for a kid. Kerry Kane will not let Billy leave the ranch because of Noah. Zoe finds Noah in the middle of a war to ask whether he remembers everything she told him. Ten years later a Green Lantern's body turns up on a football field, and the quarterback's name is Noah Macon. That is the episode nobody is talking about, and it is why this one lands where it lands on the Know-It-All Index.

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Timecode Chapters:
00:00 The man on the roof
01:04 The standing ovation
02:05 2007, and the finger
04:09 "I killed Abin Sur"
05:45 Lanterns don't kill
06:56 Hal Jordan under the shield
09:44 Antaan's test at the ranch
11:01 Lianna and the crystal heart
12:43 The face-up mystery
14:20 Noah Macon
15:30 The hole in the middle
16:31 The Know-It-All Index

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Lanterns episode 4 Zoe Manhunter theory

Lanterns told us who the Manhunter is on Sunday night, and by Monday afternoon the Know-It-All Nation had already stopped arguing about Zoe and started building a case against Lianna the Guardian. Nobody asked them to. This is the Know-It-All Files episode about what that room saw four hours after the credits rolled, and why a show that hands you its answer at the halfway mark is a show with plans for the second half.

Two weeks ago I asked when John Stewart would refuse an order for the first time in his life. Hundreds of you answered, the episode aired, and a lot of people decided it had not happened yet. It happened. The Guardian told John to take the ring off Hal Jordan, Hal held it out to him that same night, and John did not take it. Withholding is the one form of disobedience an obedient man already knows. What almost nobody has said out loud is that the order itself was built on a lie, because Hal Jordan has not been reporting to the Guardians at all.

There is also one thing in episode 1 that changes what that final shot means, and I have not seen it anywhere. Plus the best case anybody has made for Hal Jordan all season, which came out of my own comment section on a Friday night with five likes on it, and the first Nation Score of the run going up on the board next to my Know-It-All Index.

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00:00 The Manhunter Reveal
01:49 John Stewart's First Refusal
04:04 What Lianna Told John About Hal
05:38 The Case Against the Guardian
06:39 Hal's Hand in Episode 1
08:11 Hal Jordan's Side of It
09:40 The Verdict
10:41 Know-It-All Index and Nation Score
12:04 Know-It-All Nation Member Credits
13:04 End Card

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