If the multiverse is having a moment, it is only because “the Science” continues to have a bigger one. One might expect, observing the hard sciences’ replication crisis, a little representational modesty. How about a series in which a heroic researcher eschews p-hacking and gets the same results twice in a row? Instead, we have quantum superpositions. Scratch a popular screen production these days, and one is likely to find the well-credentialed bending time and space to their will. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2023 Oscar winner, Michelle Yeoh’s Alpha-Evelyn discovered “verse-jumping” seemingly by accident, so exceptional was her apparent brilliance. It wasn’t Mister but Doctor Strange who strode through Marvel’s “Multiverse of Madness” the previous year. It’s all nonsense, of course, but of a peculiarly triumphalist kind. 

Given this context, it is no surprise to find Apple’s latest taking for granted its own narrative plausibility. Kidnapped into an alternate reality, the show’s protagonist barely asks questions, so complete is his faith in physics to achieve the impossible. Fifteen years ago, the same program might have saved its quantum gobbledygook for a late-episode “reveal,” stunning viewers with a high-theory exposition dump. The Dark Matter of today, by contrast, throws us into the deep end halfway through its pilot. With the multiverse on every tongue, there is simply no need to disguise the engine driving the show’s brazenly ridiculous plot.

Dark Matter stars Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a physics professor at a Chicago-area community college. Married to artist Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), Jason enjoys a comfortable life and has no regrets about a long-ago decision to prioritize family over the lab. Things change when, one rainy evening, a masked man abducts our hero and injects him with a mysterious syringe. Upon waking, Jason finds himself known to all as a famous scientist and entrepreneur. Even Daniela has changed, recalling him as a one-time boyfriend but decidedly not as a husband. 

If the plot I’ve summarized thus far owes much to The Twilight Zone, the similarity is often to the good. Like “The Parallel,” a fourth-season episode anticipating today’s alternate-universes obsession, Dark Matter captures well the existential terror of being the only sane man in the world. Helping matters greatly is the performance of Edgerton, who brings to his protagonist role a bruised vulnerability reminiscent of Steve Forrest’s in 1963. Who cares if the Australian roughneck is as believable a physicist as Leonardo DiCaprio would be a priest? The actor nails Jason’s panicked frustration. 

To whom does one turn when one’s sense of reality matches no one else’s? The answer, for a while, is Connelly’s Daniela, who possesses, in both universes, all of the actress’s customary warmth. Later, a psychiatrist named Amanda (Alice Braga) plays an important role as our hero explores the technology responsible for his crisis. Through it all, Jason’s goal is simple: to get back to “real” life and vanquish the kidnapper who has stolen his very existence. To do so, he will have to enter “the Box,” a room-sized, steampunkish cube that holds a gateway to every possible world. 

It is no spoiler to reveal that the villain being chased is Jason himself. The series shows us as much half an hour into the pilot. Brash and swaggering, this doppelganger is the very man our protagonist has been mistaken for. What he wants is a taste of married life with Daniela, an outcome he foreclosed in his own reality by choosing careerism and pecuniary success. 

Is it a sign of bad morals that I found myself cheering for the false Jason? He is certainly the more interesting figure, dressing down “his” bored students one moment and seducing Daniela the next. In a plot twist that delivers much-needed emotional complexity, Connelly’s character finds herself at least temporarily impressed by her husband’s alteration. Like Beauty preferring the Beast, she wants the dangerous man, not her familiar milquetoast. Never mind that fake Jason knows nothing about their life together and can’t get through a dinner party without a who’s-who cheat sheet. 

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For the most part, Dark Matter balances its dueling plotlines well, shifting between Jasons like a magician flipping a coin. Less compelling are the graspers and hangers-on who dog the real Jason in his adopted realm: Dayo Okeniyi as a fanatical corporate stooge and Jimmi Simpson as our protagonist’s apprehensive frenemy. I suppose these supporting players are necessary if the show is to fill nine hours. Then again, the program feels bloated even at its best. If ever there were a series that could have lopped off four episodes, this is it. 

Still, one is tempted, coming to the end of each installment, to let the next one start up. Dark Matter is handsomely produced, reasonably intriguing, and the beneficiary of two solid leads. At least in this iteration of our universe, there are far worse shows. 

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.

So terrifying is this moment — and so identified has it become with the film that surrounds it — that when Turner Classic Movies asked filmmaker Chuck Workman to assemble a montage of great movies from the art form’s first 100 years, he chose Backlinie’s startling expression of shock as the moment that would stand in for the entirety of Jaws. We didn’t need to see any scenes with the stars Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, or Robert Shaw; all that was required to identify the movie was Backlinie’s iconic reaction to her sudden, shocking encounter with a shark. 

Backlinie died on May 11 at age 77. Even allowing for the relative slimness of her resume, it seems obvious that Backlinie may not have had the acting pedigree of the best thespians of the age. Yet it is to her credit that she achieved cinematic immortality thanks to a relatively fleeting scene defined by shock and awe.

Not that Backlinie had spent her early days dreaming of a future career in show business. Born in 1946 in Washington, D.C., Backlinie was as athletic as she appears in Jaws, when, just before the attack, she is seen gracefully sprinting toward the beach while depositing articles of clothing for a male admirer who is straining to catch up to her. After relocating with her family at age 10 to West Palm Beach, Florida, Backlinie immersed herself in aquatics: As a high-schooler, she won the state freestyle swimming championship, and, in her 20s, she gained employment in live shows presented by the studio run by Ivan Tors, responsible for such wildlife-oriented programming as Sea Hunt and movies like Flipper. 

When she was up for the part in Jaws, Backlinie argued to Spielberg that there were advantages to having a single performer execute the scene in Jaws, rather than an actress for some shots and a stuntwoman for others. “I said, ‘If you use me, you could get close-ups during the stunt itself,’” Backlinie recalled to the Palm Beach Post in 2015. “‘If you use an actress, she’ll have to hide her face.’”

The scene in Jaws goes on, excruciatingly, beyond the moment when Backlinie first realizes she is under attack: The actress was seemingly being wrenched in every direction by the attacking shark — in reality, the work of stuntmen holding cables that were affixed to plates on Backlinie’s jeans.

“As I would feel my hips go to one side, I would just throw my arms in the opposite direction as hard as I could,” Backlinie told the Palm Beach Post. “I also had a pair of fins on because when they would pull me to one side, I would go under, so I had to kick with all my strength to stay above the water. It took a lot of energy, but I was in pretty good shape back then.”

And so she remained: Four years after Jaws, Spielberg coaxed Backlinie to return to the water in the director’s hugely unsuccessful (but greatly entertaining) World War II spoof, 1941. In a delirious Mad magazine-style self-parody, Backlinie gallops out to sea, but, this time, her swim is interrupted not by a shark but by a Japanese submarine suspiciously surfacing in American waters. 

Her appearance in the still-underestimated 1941 arguably represented the final minute of her 15 minutes of fame, but she had already made a modest career for herself both in front of, and behind, the camera. She turned up in such relatively undistinguished movies as The Grizzly and the Treasure (1975) and Day of the Animals (1977) and on TV series including The Quest, Quark, and The Fall Guy. She also accumulated credits as a stuntwoman and animal trainer. Perhaps her most apropos post-Jaws film appearance was as part of a water ballet in 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper.

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Backlinie retained a healthy perspective (and sense of humor) about the role that came to define her life. “I worked on dive boats many years, and some of the guys I worked with were a lot younger than me,” she recalled in the documentary The Shark Is Still Working. “They would say to me, ‘You know, you were the first woman I ever saw with no clothes on.’ I just laugh. What do you say? … You hope it was a good view.”

Because of its overwhelming box-office success, Jaws instantly became fodder for Hollywood’s sequel machine, but the three spinoffs never came close to equaling the first film’s imagination, intensity, and astonishing ability to petrify. Maybe that’s partly because those movies were missing Susan Backlinie.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.

Like Twilight Zone auteur Rod Serling, the cultural prophet who wrote the initial screenplay to the 1968 original, series overseers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa understood that an apocalyptic fantasy loses its power if it ever seems too serious — or if it’s not serious enough. In the 1968 Planet of the Apes, the main apocalyptic error under examination is racism. The astronaut Charlton Heston, a symbol of American civilizational hubris, crash-lands on a planet where the slaves have replaced their masters and a courageous, muscular white man is treated as a freakish outsider. Apes was Serling’s final attempt to literalize the insanities of a zero-sum notion of human existence. In the reboot trilogy, humanity is doomed by a not-unrelated flaw. As a plot review in the opening screen of the newly released Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes puts it, a “man-made virus” meant to turn apes into our quasi-intelligent helpmates instead kills nearly every human being while “robbing [the survivors] of their intellect and their ability to speak.” In the ’60s, an unreconstructed belief in our superiority will destroy us. In the new millennium, it’s humanity’s ambition to bust through moral guardrails and master the physical world that will reduce the species to mute idiocy. 

The franchise’s last entry, 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, concluded in this queasy suicide of human reason, with man and ape trading roles in the natural order. In Kingdom, which takes place hundreds of years later, we find out the monkeys haven’t done much with their human-free paradise. Our hero, Noa, lives in a nonliterate society of gentle apes who train eagles to hunt for them and dwell among the overgrown ruins of a civilization everyone’s forgotten and indeed has no curiosity about. Even Raka, the wisest of all apes and the only ape in the movie who can read, informs Noa that a terminal at what used to be Los Angeles International Airport was probably a facility where apes could care for humans, to make sure the stupid beasts’ material needs were met. Its construction was undoubtedly an act of the compassionate Caesar, liberator of the apes, protagonist of the prior three films, and the now-mythological Lawgiver who, Raka says, “taught us what it means to be ape.” The now-vanished and bastardized Caesarian thought system taught that coexistence with the human scavengers was important to ape self-knowledge, though even Raka can’t remember why. Noa, meanwhile, doesn’t even know who Caeser is. 

The intellectually and technologically backward wuss apes of Eagle Clan are not the only apes on this planet, thank the Lawgiver. A couple of valleys over is Proximus Caesar, a great ape of history and an enlightened despot who claims to be the rightful heir to the Caesarian project, whatever that is. Per Proximus, Caesar believed apes should dominate the Earth, however many ape or human dead it takes. In a world where no one can read and history doesn’t exist, there aren’t many apes around who feel inclined to argue with him. With the help of a rare talking and thinking human being who’s immune from the virus, Proximus has determined, with some justification, that the Planet of the Apes lacks the conditions for a rational labor market, meaning that civilization can only progress through mass coercion and rapid technological advancement. Exhibiting a keenly unsentimental understanding of how states and societies form, Proximus declares himself king, enslaves the wuss apes, and puts them to work busting through a vault of ancient human weaponry. 

Did the long-ago Caesar want a stagnant yet decent world of interspecies harmony or one where apes were self-assured, brutally enlightened, and hostile toward those wily humans, however few of them are left with their brains intact? Sapient minds may differ. Nonetheless, the movie, whose screenplay was largely written before 2020, commits a number of satisfying heresies against the adjustments that correctness-minded Hollywood types have made to their view of reality between 2020 and now: The action begins with a lab leak, the evil of Proximus’s Nietzschean apes is denoted through their wearing masks, and we are in a dystopia where nobody reads or knows anything, making historical memory both seamless and necessary to manipulate. Imagine living in such an awful world!

There is a welcome diagnosis of our present manias buried in Kingdom, though a 145-minute CGI film is an oddly unself-aware vehicle for a movie that takes an overall negative view of the eclipse of the human. This being 2024, it doesn’t give much away to note that nature still beats civilization in this particular film, as it did back on Endor and in FernGully, as well as on whatever the Avatar planet is called. Surely the bird-loving forest folk are Good and the people bearing technology and organized political and military institutions are Bad.

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Once we make it to the climactic battle between Noa and Proximus over the apes’ Caesarian inheritance — over what it means to be ape or human or whatever; the metaphors get a little mixed after 10 whole films of this stuff — we’re reminded for the umpteenth time that civilization itself might not be worth it and we should probably just return to our treehouses and grottoes before it’s too late. Serling didn’t believe this: His Planet of the Apes was an enlightened republic where science and argument were valued. Dr. Zaius wasn’t a chest-thumping simpleton but a simian Socrates, leading his student Heston on a quest of tragic self-discovery that ends with the final human kneeling before unmistakable proof that he’s the real brute and the torch of civilization has passed to what he arrogantly believed to be his inferiors. 

Nine films later, Kingdom suggests that the franchise is finally too derivative, and too cynical, to reach anything like this former level of terrible insight.

Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.

Giuliani’s recent firing occurred when John Catsimatidis, the owner of WABC, fired the former mayor due to his repeated claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Giuliani, who worked as an attorney for Trump during his presidency, has since brought his show onto X, where he thanked his listeners for their support in the wake of his firing.

“I’ve never compromised my integrity for money, and I never will, no matter the consequences,” Giuliani posted. “There’s too much at stake. We have a country to save.”

As of Thursday, Giuliani has released four episodes of his show on X, with his latest one discussing the recently announced debates between Trump and President Joe Biden. Giuliani described the scheduled date, June 27, for the first presidential debate as an “interesting tactic,” and predicted that it will be “a tryout” to see how Biden performs against Trump before the Democratic National Convention in August.

On X, Giuliani claimed that he never promised not to talk about the 2020 election, claiming that it was “the number one topic I discussed on air.” He also accused Catsimatidis of “caving to pressure from the Democrat Party machine.”

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On Tuesday, Giuliani shared the phone number and email address to WABC on X, and asked social media users to call the station to see if it supports free speech after he was fired. 

Catsimatidis had filled in for Giuliani’s show on Sunday, during which he described the fallout between him and the former mayor as “very tragic.” He also explained that Giuliani was given “three strikes” not to talk about whether or not the 2020 election results were legitimate, and that Giuliani’s behavior made it “hard not to terminate him.”

Families attending the story hour will get a sneak peek at Sorbo’s book, The Bear Essentials of Fatherhood, which releases in June. The book teaches children and parents alike that fathers are essential in our culture and should be honored in their homes.

The children’s book centers on Culture the Vulture, who pressures Mobi the Bear to “live for himself” rather than focus on fatherhood and family. The book teaches lessons about the important role that fathers have in the lives of children.

Sorbo said he would like the book to be his latest effort in defending against the “attack on fathers and masculinity.”

The Hercules actor’s book event will be held at the Northeast Dade-Aventura Library Auditorium in Aventura, Florida, on May 18 at 2 p.m.

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The story hour will be free and open to the public. Sorbo noted that he hopes families with children of all ages can come to “enjoy a time of prayer, patriotic tradition, and to listen” to his latest book.

His book is the latest publication from the up-and-coming conservative Christian book publisher BRAVE Books. Sorbo’s book comes just weeks away from Father’s Day in June.

“This class, this generation, in this time in our society must stop pretending that the things we see around us are normal,” Butker said to the Catholic liberal arts college over the weekend in Atchison, Kansas.

In speaking of the deadly sin of pride, he took a shot at Pride Month, which is celebrated each year in the month of June as it commemorates lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride.

“Not the deadly sins sort of ‘pride’ that has an entire month dedicated to it but the true, God-centered pride that is cooperating with the Holy Ghost to glorify him,” he said.

LGBT activist Justice Horn took offense at the football star’s comment.

“Harrison Butker doesn’t represent Kansas City nor has he ever. Kansas City has always been a place that welcomes, affirms, and embraces our LGBTQ+ community members,” Horn wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The Chiefs kicker called on students to stand up for Catholic teachings.

“The world around us says that we should keep our beliefs to ourselves whenever they go against the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Butker said. “We fear speaking truth because now, unfortunately, truth is in the minority.”

Butker had some tough words for priests needing to be held to a higher standard.

“Sadly, many priests we are looking to for leadership are the same ones who prioritize their hobbies or even photos with their dogs and matching outfits for the parish directory. It’s easy for us laymen and women to think that in order for us to be holy that we must be active in our parish and try to fix it,” he said.

The 28-year-old athlete added more criticism of the church’s handling of the pandemic.

“We saw during the pandemic that too many bishops were not leaders at all and they were motivated by fear of being sued,” he said. “Their actions, intentional or unintentional, showed that the sacraments don’t actually matter because countless people died alone without access to the sacraments, and it’s a tragedy we must never forget.”

The football star took aim at hypocritical Catholics pushing dangerous ideas.

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“From the man behind the COVID lockdowns to the people pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America, they all have a glaring thing in common: They are Catholic. This is an important reminder that being Catholic alone doesn’t cut it,” Butker explained.

“These are the sorts of things we are told in polite society to not bring up. You know the difficult and unpleasant things, but if we are going to be men and women for this time in history, we need to stop pretending that the ‘Church of nice’ is a winning proposition,” he said.

Rodgers sat down for an interview with Tucker Carlson on Tuesday to share his views on various controversies, including previous speculation about being a vice presidential finalist for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and how he’s “stood up” for himself.

“The last four years of my life I went from a pretty beloved athlete to a very polarizing figure,” Rodgers said on Carlson’s X show.

Rodgers said he’s experienced “a lot of character assassinations.”

Carlson laughed, “I noticed.”

The football player acknowledged that there are many “great athletes” who’ve kept their opinions private but said he loves this country.

“I got to a point where I’ve made my money. I have a platform. I’ve had success in my business. What’s the worst that you could do to me?” Rodgers said to Carlson. “I feel good about the way I’ve stood up for myself.”

Rodgers said that when it was revealed that he was a possible contender on the vice presidential short list for Kennedy, he felt the pressure of a “total character assassination” on him.

“When it came out from the campaign that I was to be a finalist to be Bobby’s vice president, there was a total character assassination with some bizarre story from 12 years ago that somebody thought they heard something that I was questioning,” he said.

In March, Rodgers was reported to have told people, including a CNN reporter, that he believed the Sandy Hook shooting to be a “government inside job.” Rodgers responded, denying the accusation.

Kennedy eventually chose attorney Nicole Shanahan as his vice presidential pick, but Rodgers expressed to Carlson that he was “interested” and had “thought about it.”

“I love this country and I want to see it thrive,” he said. “There’s just a lot of issues right now that seem really un-American. And I think there’s a lot of red-blooded Americans. People are like, how can Trump have such support? Because people are fed up with it.”

“When Bobby came to me and said, ‘Would you think about being my running mate?’ And I said, ‘Are you serious? I’m a f***ing football player.’ But I love this country, and I’d love to be a part of bringing it back to what she used to be,” he recounted to Carlson about his conversation with Kennedy.

Carlson followed up with a question, “Did you think about it?”

“Oh, yeah, I thought about it, and I wanted to hear what he had to say about it,” Rodgers said.

Kennedy responded on social media to Carlson’s interview with Rodgers.

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“Grateful to this man for his courage, integrity and the relentless brand of critical thinking that makes democracy work,” Kennedy said.

Rodgers slammed the media and his critics, “I’m not beholden. I have a contract, but I’m not beholden to anybody. I’m dangerous to them because I speak my mind. I’m not a cliche-ridden star athlete. I’m a loose cannon to them.”

The nearly 70-year-old television personality said she never in her “wildest dreams” thought it would be possible to be a model on the cover.

King will featured in the 60th anniversary Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, set to come out Friday.

King’s morning show co-hosts surprised her Tuesday with the announcement that she would be on the cover of the magazine.

King was thrilled and shocked with delight as she looked at the cover.

“I’m on the cover? They just told me I was going to be on the inside,” she cheered.

King’s morning television show shared a report on the evolution of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover.

“This ain’t your dad’s Sports Illustrated,” King is seen saying in the news report as she posed for the magazine’s photographer.

“It certainly isn’t,” a CBS reporter narrated over a montage of King taking photographs for the magazine.

The latest issue of the magazine has been spearheaded by its editor-in-chief, MJ Day.

“I want the world to realize that Sports Illustrated has evolved into such a far more wide-reaching powerful vehicle of change,” Day said.

The CBS reporter detailed the evolution of the magazine over time.

“Over the years, the issue has transformed to include women from sports, news, and entertainment, representing different races, ages, and body types,” the reporter said. “From the magazine’s first transgender cover model, Leyna Bloom, to Halima Aden, the first woman wearing a hijab, and this year, our very own Gayle King.”

In a later segment on CBS Mornings, King spoke to her co-hosts, alongside television host Drew Barrymore, about being featured on the cover.

“It’s really extraordinary that they only reserve that for deserved people that they think are exemplary role models of women,” Barrymore said to King and the panel of co-hosts. “And sure, some of it is sexy and scantily clad. But it is a moment of true empowerment.”

Barrymore added, “I think the magazine and the world also shifted into talking about: What is beauty? Who is beautiful? Who deserves to be on this cover, other than bathing suit aspects? This is a whole new era of Sports Illustrated.

“And you are the exemplary person that they chose to be the hot, beautiful woman to celebrate,” she said joyfully to King.

King chimed in, “I don’t know about beautiful!”

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The morning show host humbly told her fellow hosts on Tuesday that she knows what she looks like when she goes into hair and makeup but feels “honored to be included” in the issue.

Martha Stewart, 82, had previously been photographed for the 2023 issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit and will be seen in more photos in the special 60th anniversary issue this week.

“I don’t understand why people are not taking [Trump] seriously,” the actor said during an appearance on The View to promote his new film, Ezra.

“You read about it historically and other countries that didn’t take the people seriously,” he added.

De Niro gave the example of “Hitler and Mussolini” and how people who warned about them were treated as “fools and clowns.”

“Who does not think that this guy is going to do exactly what he says he’s going to do?” he asked as the audience and television hosts applauded.

“And then what? We’re gonna sit around and say what? ‘We told you so?'” the Hollywood star said on Tuesday.

De Niro said a Trump reelection would “change this country for everybody.”

“[Trump supporters] might think it’s going to make their life better,” he warned, adding that they are supporting “anger and hate” when they vote for the former president.

“Those people who support him with anger and hate — because that’s what he’s about — they’re going to see,” he said.

“I see what a hateful, mean-spirited, awful thing he is,” the actor said.

“When I say I want to punch him in the face, I want to because of what he said to a bystander at one of his rallies, that he wanted to punch them in the face. You don’t talk that way to people. What kind of person does that?” the Goodfellas star said.

De Niro then gave an expletive-filled rant that he worried the former president wants to “do the worst thing he can possibly do.”

The View censored his profane audio, but he seemed to say to the hosts about Trump, “His slogan should be ‘F*** America. I want to f*** America.'”

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg interrupted him to add, “If he becomes president again, listen, he’s not going to not stop being president. You understand this? His idea is to stay in until he drops dead.”

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“That’s it,” De Niro agreed with Goldberg.

“Imagine if he actually did win the presidency. It’s over. We’re going to have such civil strife,” he explained. “It’s what he envisions the world to be, which is chaos and craziness.”

Backlinie died of a heart attack in her California home, her agent Sean Clark told reporters.

Jaws’s iconic opening scene, where she is attacked and killed by the great white shark, is credited to Backlinie’s acting chops. The stunt was not choreographed, so Backlinie’s screams sound genuine when she is pulled under the water. Additionally, she was harnessed and pulled in all directions. Co-star Richard Dreyfuss said in the documentary Jaws: The Inside Story that director Steven Spielberg later recorded her screams by pouring water in her mouth.

After the 1975 release of Backlinie’s debut film, she had roles in films such as The Great Muppet Caper and Day of the Animals. Backlinie reprised her role in Spielberg’s spoof film 1941. Her most recent role was in the series The Fall Guy in 1982.

Backlinie was a freestyle swimming state champion at Forest Hill High School. She took her swimming capabilities to Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, where she worked as an underwater mermaid performer.

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The actress’s death comes just a year before the 50th anniversary of Jaws, an event that is typically celebrated at the filming location of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. She attended the 30th anniversary in 2005.

Backlinie is survived by her husband, Harvey Swindall.