Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 5/2/25

Optional Wheaties Box edition

Hopefully you’ve had a productive and instructive week! The Agency of Health and Wellness has asked me to reach out to the extended N.T.A.B. family and check in with you: how are you doing? Are you hanging in there? For those of you who might need a little extra help in the next few weeks, we have a prescription for you: binge-watch (or selectively watch, as you like) Ted Lasso on Apple TV.

That show is a master class in writing, acting, and also in slipping useful information into a story in such a way that you don’t mind being told how to manage stress, how to improve your confidence, how to open up to others, etc. In fact, I’m a little disappointed that there’s not an episode guide for each season, with discussion questions and self-starting homework for dealing with your extant bullshit and avoiding picking up more.

Ted Lasso. Trust me on this.

One’s Own Horn, and How to Toot It

It’s a little weird to know that at least half or more of you reading this don’t know who I am, outside of maybe the stuff I’ve written or the things I’ve done. If you’d like to rectify that, head over to The 42cast for an interview with me, wherein I spill all the details about growing up in Abilene, Texas, and the things I did, and the stuff I like, and all of that. I tried to make it fun, but we went a little deeper than the usual stuff. You be the judge.

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: no sooner did we decree that we were going to hold off on lightning-fast turnaround reviews in order to let other people catch up than we received this missive from the Administration about the most recent Marvel movie. We would like to caution you that there may be some spoilers below, but maybe not.

Thunderbolts* (In Theaters)

A rag-tag group of shadowy operatives come together to foil a plot hatched by their handler. Can they put aside their differences for the greater good?

I think everyone was worried that this would be “Marvel’s Suicide Squad,” which is fair and not unreasonable, given that Thunderbolts* consists of all the disgraced heroes and bad guys with complicated pasts and hearts of gold that have graced both TV and film in the last ten years.

Marvel’s back, baby! Whoo hoo! Okay, well, it’s not exactly back like before; it’s a new iteration of the original “Marvel Formula” that kicked everything off. You know what I mean: different heroes crash into one another and start fighting until they realize they are working towards the same goal and agree to put aside their differences to thwart evil.

That’s Marvel 101. There is a lot of familiar MCU storytelling DNA in Thunderbolts* but the playbook has been sufficiently tweaked to feel fresh and new. The emotional heart is still there, though, along with some tried and true tactics designed to keep you engaged throughout, and into the credits, of course.

Probably the best thing about Thunderbolts* is that it is about something besides searching for meaning in the next chapter of one’s own life—which is a great thing to explore, no doubt. For being a ‘comic book movie’ we get into some deep emotional grist for the mill, and seeing some of our beloved favorites going through personal growth is refreshing.

Okay, two things; as much as I liked the original concept for the comic book series Thunderbolts (hey Kurt!), we all knew that wasn’t gonna work for this movie. I really liked how we got everyone together to make something bigger than the sum of its parts. And I am on the record as not liking the comic book version of Sentry, but I really liked how they got him into the MCU. I still think he’s a dumb character, but for the movie, they made him significantly less dumb.

Thunderbolts* appears to be the start of the new era of Marvel at the movies. I think Disney has made some internal adjustments after the mediocre performances of their movies the last few years. It’s time to get back to the days of high adventure. Go see this one in the theaters.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”