Drones Set To Deliver Benefits for Labor-Intensive Industries: Forrester By John P. Mello Jr. June 3, 2025 5:00 AM PT ADVERTISEMENT Quality Leads That Turn Into Deals Full-service marketing programs from TechNewsWorld deliver sales-ready leads. Segment by geography, industry, company size, job title, and more. Get Started Now. Aerial drones are rapidly assuming a key role in the physical automation of business operations, according to a new report by Forrester Research. Aerial drones power airborne physical automation by addressing operational challenges in labor-intensive industries, delivering efficiency, intelligence, and experience, explained the report written by Principal Analyst Charlie Dai with Frederic Giron, Merritt Maxim, Arjun Kalra, and Bill Nagel. Some industries, like the public sector, are already reaping benefits, it continued. The report predicted that drones will deliver benefits within the next two years as technologies and regulations mature. It noted that drones can help organizations grapple with operational challenges that exacerbate risks and inefficiencies, such as overreliance on outdated, manual processes, fragmented data collection, geographic barriers, and insufficient infrastructure. Overreliance on outdated manual processes worsens inefficiencies in resource allocation and amplifies safety risks in dangerous work environments, increasing operational costs and liability, the report maintained. “Drones can do things more safely, at least from the standpoint of human risk, than humans,” said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm, in Bend, Ore. “They can enter dangerous, exposed, very high-risk and even toxic environments without putting their operators at risk,” he told TechNewsWorld. “They can be made very small to go into areas where people can’t physically go. And a single operator can operate several AI-driven drones operating autonomously, keeping staffing levels down.” Sensor Magic “The magic of the drone is really in the sensor, while the drone itself is just the vehicle that holds the sensor wherever it needs to be,” explained DaCoda Bartels, senior vice president of operations with FlyGuys, a drone services provider, in Lafayette, La. “In doing so, it removes all human risk exposure because the pilot is somewhere safe on the ground, sending this sensor, which is, in most cases, more high-resolution than even a human eye,” he told TechNewsWorld. “In essence, it’s a better data collection tool than if you used 100 people. Instead, you deploy one drone around in all these different areas, which is safer, faster, and higher resolution.” Akash Kadam, a mechanical engineer with Caterpillar, maker of construction and mining equipment, based in Decatur, Ill., explained that drones have evolved into highly functional tools that directly respond to key inefficiencies and threats to labor-intensive industries. “Within the manufacturing and supply chains, drones are central to optimizing resource allocation and reducing the exposure of humans to high-risk duties,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Drones can be used in factory environments to automatically inspect overhead cranes, rooftops, and tight spaces — spaces previously requiring scaffolding or shutdowns, which carry both safety and cost risks,” he said. “A reduction in downtime, along with no requirement for manual intervention in hazardous areas, is provided through this aerial inspection by drones.” “In terms of resource usage, drones mounted with thermal cameras and tools for acquiring real-time data can spot bottlenecks, equipment failure, or energy leakage on the production floor,” he continued. “This can facilitate predictive maintenance processes and [optimal] usage of energy, which are an integral part of lean manufacturing principles.” Kadam added that drones provide accurate field mapping and multispectral imaging in agriculture, enabling the monitoring of crop health, soil quality, and irrigation distribution. “Besides the reduction in manual scouting, it ensures more effective input management, which leads to more yield while saving resources,” he observed. Better Data Collection The Forrester report also noted that drones can address problems with fragmented data collection and outdated monitoring systems. “Drones use cameras and sensors to get clear, up-to-date info,” said Daniel Kagan, quality manager at Rogers-O’Brien Construction, a general contractor in Dallas. “Some drones even make 3D maps or heat maps,” he told TechNewsWorld. “This helps farmers see where crops need more water, stores check roof damage after a storm, and builders track progress and find delays.” “The drone collects all this data in one flight, and it’s ready to view in minutes and not days,” he added. Dean Bezlov, global head of business development at MYX Robotics, a visualization technology company headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria, added that drones are the most cost and time-efficient way to collect large amounts of visual data. “We are talking about two to three images per second with precision and speed unmatched by human-held cameras,” he told TechNewsWorld. “As such, drones are an excellent tool for ‘digital twins’ — timestamps of the real world with high accuracy which is useful in industries with physical assets such as roads, rail, oil and gas, telecom, renewables and agriculture, where the drone provides a far superior way of looking at the assets as a whole,” he said. Drone Adoption Faces Regulatory Hurdles While drones have great potential for many organizations, they will need to overcome some challenges and barriers. For example, Forrester pointed out that insurers deploy drones to evaluate asset risks but face evolving privacy regulations and gaps in data standardization. Media firms use drones to take cost-effective, cinematic aerial footage, but face strict regulations, it added, while in urban use cases like drone taxis and cargo transport remain experimental due to certification delays and airspace management complexities. “Regulatory frameworks, particularly in the U.S., remain complex, bureaucratic, and fragmented,” said Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst with SmartTech Research in Las Vegas. “The FAA’s rules around drone operations — especially for flying beyond visual line of sight [BVLOS] — are evolving but still limit many high-value use cases.” “Privacy concerns also persist, especially in urban areas and sectors handling sensitive data,” he told TechNewsWorld. “For almost 20 years, we’ve been able to fly drones from a shipping container in one country, in a whole other country, halfway across the world,” said FlyGuys’ Bartels. “What’s limiting the technology from being adopted on a large scale is regulatory hurdles over everything.” Enderle added that innovation could also be a hangup for organizations. “This technology is advancing very quickly, making buying something that isn’t instantly obsolete very difficult,” he said. “In addition, there are a lot of drone choices, raising the risk you’ll pick one that isn’t ideal for your use case.” “We are still at the beginning of this trend,” he noted. “Robotic autonomous drones are starting to come to market, which will reduce dramatically the need for drone pilots. I expect that within 10 years, we’ll have drones doing many, if not most, of the dangerous jobs currently being done by humans, as robotics, in general, will displace much of the labor force.” John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John. Leave a Comment Click here to cancel reply. Please sign in to post or reply to a comment. New users create a free account. Related Stories More by John P. Mello Jr. view all More in Emerging Tech

Paramount+ has a lighter lineup of original content in June, though the platform will stream the live broadcast of the 78th annual Tony Awards from Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The show, hosted by Wicked's Cynthia Erivo, will air live on June 8 for Paramount+ With Showtime subscribers—other viewers can watch on-demand the next day. Other content available for Paramount+ With Showtime users is Love Me (June 16), a post-apocalyptic romance starring Kristen Steward and Steven Yeun, and Noah's Arc: The Movie (June 20), 20 years after the titular show first debuted. Darryl Stephens, Rodney Chester, Doug Spearman, Christian Vincent, Jensen Atwood, and Wilson Cruz are set to reprise their roles. Here’s everything else coming to the service in June. Note that titles with an asterisk are exclusive to Paramount+ With Showtime; everything else is also available to subscribers on the ad-supported plan. Those with two asterisks are available to Paramount+ With Showtime users streaming live on CBS and to all subscribers the following day.Paramount+ Originals and premieres coming in June 2025Available June 8The 78th Annual Tony Awards**Available June 16Love Me*Available June 20Noah's Arc: The Movie,* premiereTV shows coming to Paramount+ in June 2025Available June 4SpongeBob SquarePants (season 14) Available June 11The Really Loud House (season 2) Available June 22Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards (on-demand) Available June 25The Patrick Star Show (season 3) Ice Airport Alaska (season 5) The Last Cowboy (season 5) Movies coming to Paramount+ in June 2025Available June 13:10 to Yuma*12 Years a Slave Bad News Bears BlacKkKlansmanBoogie NightsBut I'm a CheerleaderCall Me By Your NameCarolCarriersCenter StageChanging LanesChasing AmyCloverfieldCrawlspaceDaddy Day CampDance FlickDog Day AfternoonDouble Jeopardy Eagle Eye ElfEnemy at the Gates EuroTripEverybody's Fine ExtractFirst Blood HeatwaveHow She MoveHow to Lose a Guy in 10 Days Imagine That In & OutIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal SkullIndiana Jones and the Last CrusadeIndiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark Indiana Jones and the Temple of DoomJawbreakerKinky BootsLaw of DesireLayer Cake Light of My LifeLike a BossMarathon ManMastermindsMilitary Wives*Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final InsultNo Country for Old MenOrange CountyOverdrivePretty In PinkPulp Fiction Racing with the MoonRambo IIIRambo: First Blood Part II RED* Reservoir Dogs Risky Business Road Trip Run & Gun Saturday Night FeverSave the Last Dance School Ties Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse She's All That Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Stand By Me Teen Titans GO! To the Movies The Autopsy of Jane Doe* The Crossing Guard The Dictator The Fighting Temptations The GamblerThe General's DaughterThe Girl Next Door The Godfather The Godfather Part II The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone The Hunt for Red OctoberThe Ides of March The Kings of SummerThe Last Samurai The Lovely Bones The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of FearThe Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad! The Nice Guys The Other Woman* The People vs. Larry Flynt The Running ManThe ShootistThe Space Between Us* The Untouchables Tigerland Tommy BoyTootsie Total Recall (1990) True Grit Whiplash Without a Paddle xXxZola Available June 5Lions for Lambs*

With the recent Warframe 1999: Techrot Encore update, several new adversary weapons were added to the game. Similar to their Tenet and Kuva counterparts, the Coda weapons require a player to obtain an adversary, this time a Technocyte Coda. They then have to equip their Parazon with one of several Antivirus mods, which will slowly cleanse its virus. Once slain, the Technocyte Coda will give the player Live Heart Cells, which can then be traded with Eleanor for the Coda weapons.

Mistral AI accélère la cadence. Après avoir introduit Le Chat Enterprise en début de mois - désormais disponible via Google Cloud Marketplace,...

When Apple TV+ launched back in 2019, one of the most common complaints was its lack of a back catalog. And to some extent, the criticism made sense, especially given that some expected Apple to (at least partially) bundle in its vast iTunes movie library. Now, more than five years later, Apple has quietly built up a surprisingly solid library of original films and series. If you’re a relatively new subscriber, there’s a good chance you missed out on a few of these great early releases: Defending Jacob Based on William Landay’s 2012 best-selling novel of the same name, this limited crime drama series stars Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey, The Gentlemen) and Chris Evans (The Avengers, Knives Out), as well as Jaeden Martell (Knives Out, It) in the titular role of Jacob. Evans’ character is tasked with the defense of his own son in a murder trial, and the story explores the tectonic shifts caused by such an event in the life of a family. If you’ve watched Netflix’s recent Adolescence limited series, you know to expect this won’t be a light, dinner time, binge-worthy show, but it is definitely worth a watch. Watch Defending Jacob on Apple TV+ The Velvet Underground Being a Velvet Underground fan, I am partial to this one. But this excellently produced documentary explores how one of the most influential bands in history came together, and turned the rock scene upside down. As one IMDB reviewer put it, the documentary is “pieced together almost as strangely as the band itself”, which is possibly the highest praise director and writer Todd Haines (I’m Not There, Carol) could possibly expect. Even if you are not a Velvet Underground fan, this documentary might surprise you. Watch The Velvet Underground on Apple TV+ CODA For the standards of a three-time Academy Award winner, this remake of 2014’s La Famille Bélier flies surprisingly under the radar. CODA stars Marlee Matlin (The West Wing), Troy Kotsur (The Number 23), and Emilia Jones (Brimstone) as members of a deaf family whose hearing daughter, played by Jones, serves as their connection to the hearing world. Until her musical ambitions begin to pull her in a different direction. CODA became the first movie produced by a streaming service to win Best Picture, and it also scored Apple the Academy Awards for Best Adapted, and Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role thanks to Kotsur’s portrayal of character Frank Rossi. Watch CODA on Apple TV+ WeCrashed Alongside the Theranos case, the WeWork saga is possibly one of the craziest, most interesting and unbelievable stories that only reality could provide. The show features Jared Leto (Requiem For a Dream, Suicide Squad) as Adam Neumann, and Anne Hathaway (Interstellar, Les Misérables) as Rebekah Neumann. It explores the couple’s trajectory as they, well, manifested WeWork’s $47 billion valuation. Based on a homonymous podcast, this eight-part series is a must-watch for any tech enthusiast. Just by writing about it, I feel like watching it again. Watch WeCrashed on Apple TV+ Black Bird This is yet another inspired-by-true-events limited series that made a bit of a splash when it came out, but was soon unfairly forgotten. Taron Egerton (Tetris, Rocketman) plays a playboy turned convict who accepts a plea deal involving a fellow convict, played by the fantastic Paul Walter Hauser (BlacKkKlansman, Richard Jewel). Black Bird also marks Ray Lotta’s final performance, and earned Apple quite a few awards due to Hauser’s terrifyingly good portrayal of… well, you’ll see. Watch Black Bird on Apple TV+ Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry I had never been a big Billie Eilish fan. I did know one or two of her songs, but that was it. Still, I gave Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry a try, and I’m glad I did. The documentary takes you along (in sometimes uncomfortable ways) on the ride all the way up to the top, and the loneliness that might come with it. The documentary highlights Eilish’s creative partnership with her brother Finneas O’Connell and her fiercely protective mother, who is set on not letting her daughter become another cautionary tale for early stardom. Watch Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry on Apple TV+ Do you have a favorite forgotten Apple TV+ gem? Any recent favorites you can’t recommend enough? Let us know in the comments. Apple TV+ is available for $9.99 per month and features hit TV shows and movies like Ted Lasso, Severance, The Studio, The Morning Show, Shrinking and Silo. Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

By Isaac Schultz Published May 17, 2025 | Comments (0) | Scientists are using AI to decipher animal communication, creating some ethical conundrums. © Gizmodo [Illustration: St. Lumbroso, Photos: TatianaKim,Gulf MG/Shutterstock) Chirps, trills, growls, howls, squawks. Animals converse in all kinds of ways, yet humankind has only scratched the surface of how they communicate with each other and the rest of the living world. Our species has trained some animals—and if you ask cats, animals have trained us, too—but we’ve yet to truly crack the code on interspecies communication. Increasingly, animal researchers are deploying artificial intelligence to accelerate our investigations of animal communication—both within species and between branches on the tree of life. As scientists chip away at the complex communication systems of animals, they move closer to understanding what creatures are saying—and maybe even how to talk back. But as we try to bridge the linguistic gap between humans and animals, some experts are raising valid concerns about whether such capabilities are appropriate—or whether we should even attempt to communicate with animals at all. Using AI to untangle animal language Towards the front of the pack—or should I say pod?—is Project CETI, which has used machine learning to analyze more than 8,000 sperm whale “codas”—structured click patterns recorded by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Researchers uncovered contextual and combinatorial structures in the whales’ clicks, naming features like “rubato” and “ornamentation” to describe how whales subtly adjust their vocalizations during conversation. These patterns helped the team create a kind of phonetic alphabet for the animals—an expressive, structured system that may not be language as we know it but reveals a level of complexity that researchers weren’t previously aware of. Project CETI is also working on ethical guidelines for the technology, a critical goal given the risks of using AI to “talk” to the animals. Meanwhile, Google and the Wild Dolphin Project recently introduced DolphinGemma, a large language model (LLM) trained on 40 years of dolphin vocalizations. Just as ChatGPT is an LLM for human inputs—taking visual information like research papers and images and producing responses to relevant queries—DolphinGemma intakes dolphin sound data and predicts what vocalization comes next. DolphinGemma can even generate dolphin-like audio, and the researchers’ prototype two-way system, Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry (fittingly, CHAT), uses a smartphone-based interface that dolphins employ to request items like scarves or seagrass—potentially laying the groundwork for future interspecies dialogue. “DolphinGemma is being used in the field this season to improve our real-time sound recognition in the CHAT system,” said Denise Herzing, founder and director of the Wild Dolphin Project, which spearheaded the development of DolphinGemma in collaboration with researchers at Google DeepMind, in an email to Gizmodo. “This fall we will spend time ingesting known dolphin vocalizations and let Gemma show us any repeatable patterns they find,” such as vocalizations used in courtship and mother-calf discipline. In this way, Herzing added, the AI applications are two-fold: Researchers can use it both to explore dolphins’ natural sounds and to better understand the animals’ responses to human mimicking of dolphin sounds, which are synthetically produced by the AI CHAT system. Expanding the animal AI toolkit Outside the ocean, researchers are finding that human speech models can be repurposed to decode terrestrial animal signals, too. A University of Michigan-led team used Wav2Vec2—a speech recognition model trained on human voices—to identify dogs’ emotions, genders, breeds, and even individual identities based on their barks. The pre-trained human model outperformed a version trained solely on dog data, suggesting that human language model architectures could be surprisingly effective in decoding animal communication. Of course, we need to consider the different levels of sophistication these AI models are targeting. Determining whether a dog’s bark is aggressive or playful, or whether it’s male or female—these are perhaps understandably easier for a model to determine than, say, the nuanced meaning encoded in sperm whale phonetics. Nevertheless, each study inches scientists closer to understanding how AI tools, as they currently exist, can be best applied to such an expansive field—and gives the AI a chance to train itself to become a more useful part of the researcher’s toolkit. And even cats—often seen as aloof—appear to be more communicative than they let on. In a 2022 study out of Paris Nanterre University, cats showed clear signs of recognizing their owner’s voice, but beyond that, the felines responded more intensely when spoken to directly in “cat talk.” That suggests cats not only pay attention to what we say, but also how we say it—especially when it comes from someone they know. Earlier this month, a pair of cuttlefish researchers found evidence that the animals have a set of four “waves,” or physical gestures, that they make to one another, as well as to human playback of cuttlefish waves. The group plans to apply an algorithm to categorize the types of waves, automatically track the creatures’ movements, and understand the contexts in which the animals express themselves more rapidly. Private companies (such as Google) are also getting in on the act. Last week, China’s largest search engine, Baidu, filed a patent with the country’s IP administration proposing to translate animal (specifically cat) vocalizations into human language. The quick and dirty on the tech is that it would intake a trove of data from your kitty, and then use an AI model to analyze the data, determine the animal’s emotional state, and output the apparent human language message your pet was trying to convey. A universal translator for animals? Together, these studies represent a major shift in how scientists are approaching animal communication. Rather than starting from scratch, research teams are building tools and models designed for humans—and making advances that would have taken much longer otherwise. The end goal could (read: could) be a kind of Rosetta Stone for the animal kingdom, powered by AI. “We’ve gotten really good at analyzing human language just in the last five years, and we’re beginning to perfect this practice of transferring models trained on one dataset and applying them to new data,” said Sara Keen, a behavioral ecologist and electrical engineer at the Earth Species Project, in a video call with Gizmodo. The Earth Species Project plans to launch its flagship audio-language model for animal sounds, NatureLM, this year, and a demo for NatureLM-audio is already live. With input data from across the tree of life—as well as human speech, environmental sounds, and even music detection—the model aims to become a converter of human speech into animal analogues. The model “shows promising domain transfer from human speech to animal communication,” the project states, “supporting our hypothesis that shared representations in AI can help decode animal languages.” “A big part of our work really is trying to change the way people think about our place in the world,” Keen added. “We’re making cool discoveries about animal communication, but ultimately we’re finding that other species are just as complicated and nuanced as we are. And that revelation is pretty exciting.” The ethical dilemma Indeed, researchers generally agree on the promise of AI-based tools for improving the collection and interpretation of animal communication data. But some feel that there’s a breakdown in communication between that scholarly familiarity and the public’s perception of how these tools can be applied. “I think there’s currently a lot of misunderstanding in the coverage of this topic—that somehow machine learning can create this contextual knowledge out of nothing. That so long as you have thousands of hours of audio recordings, somehow some magic machine learning black box can squeeze meaning out of that,” said Christian Rutz, an expert in animal behavior and cognition and founding president of International Bio-Logging Society, in a video call with Gizmodo. “That’s not going to happen.” “Meaning comes through the contextual annotation and this is where I think it’s really important for this field as a whole, in this period of excitement and enthusiasm, to not forget that this annotation comes from basic behavioral ecology and natural history expertise,” Rutz added. In other words, let’s not put the horse before the cart, especially since the cart—in this case—is what’s powering the horse. But with great power…you know the cliché. Essentially, how can humans develop and apply these technologies in a way that is both scientifically illuminating and minimizes harm or disruption to its animal subjects? Experts have put forward ethical standards and guardrails for using the technologies that prioritize the welfare of creatures as we get closer to—well, wherever the technology is going. As AI advances, conversations about animal rights will have to evolve. In the future, animals could become more active participants in those conversations—a notion that legal experts are exploring as a thought exercise, but one that could someday become reality. “What we desperately need—apart from advancing the machine learning side—is to forge these meaningful collaborations between the machine learning experts and the animal behavior researchers,” Rutz said, “because it’s only when you put the two of us together that you stand a chance.” There’s no shortage of communication data to feed into data-hungry AI models, from pitch-perfect prairie dog squeaks to snails’ slimy trails (yes, really). But exactly how we make use of the information we glean from these new approaches requires thorough consideration of the ethics involved in “speaking” with animals. A recent paper on the ethical concerns of using AI to communicate with whales outlined six major problem areas. These include privacy rights, cultural and emotional harm to whales, anthropomorphism, technological solutionism (an overreliance on technology to fix problems), gender bias, and limited effectiveness for actual whale conservation. That last issue is especially urgent, given how many whale populations are already under serious threat. It increasingly appears that we’re on the brink of learning much more about the ways animals interact with one another—indeed, pulling back the curtain on their communication could also yield insights into how they learn, socialize, and act within their environments. But there are still significant challenges to overcome, such as asking ourselves how we use the powerful technologies currently in development. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Lucas Ropek Published May 16, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 16, 2025 By Isaiah Colbert Published May 16, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 15, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 14, 2025 By Kyle Barr Published May 13, 2025

Andor‘s final batch of episodes had to walk a steady balancing act, tying together myriad swirling character arcs into the overarching looming shadow of not just the events of Rogue One, but the events of Star Wars itself. In navigating those final climactic days where Andor could be itself as well as the passer of the torch, the show managed to give us and its characters alike the endings that perhaps mattered most. Luthen © Lucasfilm It’s impossible to talk about the final arc of Andor without talking about the ending it gets out of the way first. Luthen’s long-awaited confrontation with Dedra is tragic in many ways, not just because of his choice to sacrifice himself to deny her the information she craves, but because, in contrast to the other rebellious stories we see climax here, it’s so incredibly lonely. There is no grand exit, no long goodbye—he gets a brief moment with Kleya when he sends her away, and of course, Dedra’s attempts to keep him alive make the actual moment of his end occur after the course of episode 10, “Make It Stop.” He dies quietly, he dies unable to really know just what an impact he’s about to have on the people he knew, the people he loved, the Rebellion, and the fate of the galaxy itself. But Luthen’s final moment standing, before he takes the knife to himself, as sad as it is, is also a beautiful one—one that thematically then ties the endings of the rest of the rebels across Andor‘s final act together brilliantly. “The Rebellion isn’t here anymore, it’s flown away,” he tells Dedra. “It’s everywhere now… there’s a whole galaxy out there, waiting to disgust you.” The work Luthen did may have been isolatory by design, playing cells and operatives off each other, the paranoia of all the secrets he helped keep. But as he burns brightly, for that sunrise he knew he’d never see, he is defiantly steadfast that what he has helped create has connected voices all over the galaxy. That there are, as his agents’ code phrase said, friends everywhere. Partagaz and the ISB © Lucasfilm It is this particular thematic throughline sparked by Luthen’s words that also defines the endings of our Imperial antagonists across the arc in stark contrast. We’ll get to Dedra separately, but it’s interesting that the endings we get for Andor‘s ISB apparatus—represented by her, Partagaz, and Heert in these episodes, and to a lesser extent double-agent Lonni—are lonely for very different reasons than Luthen’s was. Syril’s death on Ghorman laid the blueprint here: Andor‘s vision of the Empire is defined in equal parts the abuse of its systems for personal glorification, and the deadly threat of that system subsuming even its most ardent supports and benefactors, because that’s exactly what the Empire is designed to do. Lonni might die at Luthen’s hands, it’s implied, but he dies because his use as a tool of the system he’d turned on is over. Heert’s grand chase of Kleya—a mirror to Dedra’s obsession with Axis that he’d sneered at her for—is rewarded with K2 tossing his lifeless body around as a meatshield, crumpled and forgotten. Partagaz’s is perhaps the most deliciously bitter, not just for the system he helped create crashing down around him, but because, again, his final moments are spent realizing that the rebellion is so much bigger than the “disease” he thought he could contain and sterilize. He’s alone in a room, committing suicide, after hearing Nemik’s manifesto: he has no idea who it is. He just knows, again, that it’s getting out everywhere. Kleya © Lucasfilm Kleya’s end is not so much an end, but a continuation of a legacy that she’s followed her whole life. Luthen’s sacrifice gives her a chance to flee and tell the Rebellion about the Death Star, but it also pushes her out from under his lonely world of cloak and daggers, in a way. In the flashbacks that are woven throughout her solo mission to lay Luthen to rest before the Empire can pull him from the brink, we see her story start alone and afraid and angry—and in choosing to save this orphaned child and help her point that anger somewhere as she grows up, Luthen’s final gift to Kleya is to give her something bigger to be part of. Perhaps it’s a story we’ll revisit someday, of Kleya’s life in the Rebellion, but in this moment that set of facts doesn’t really matter, it’s that she gets to carry on his spirit as the Rebellion flourishes. Dedra © Lucasfilm It’s fitting and so telling then, that Kleya and Dedra’s final moments on-screen in Andor are side-by-side. If Kleya wakes up to on the new dawn of being part of the thing her mentor helped build, then Dedra—clad in those white-and-orange scrubs of the Imperial prison system—is to witness the structure that she helped build and champion chew her up and spit her out into some forgotten hole. We know from season one’s arc on Narkina-5 that the Empire has now designed these facilities to never really grant freedom. There’s a fascinating parallel to Syril’s own death in her ultimate punishment, the idea that her obsession with Axis, as his was with Cassian, pushed her and pushed her to a point where the Empire itself could turn on her and discard her, and she’d be too blinkered to notice it until it was too late. It’s not just that Dedra’s hoarding of information she shouldn’t have lands her in Krennic’s crosshairs, it’s her drive to get Luthen, to keep him alive once he mortally wounds himself, in the hopes that she will be rewarded regardless of any transgression she’s made to get there. That the Imperial system she believed in will work for her, rather than her for it. But the Empire exists to consume even its most loyal adherents, and so her punishment for championing it so ardently is as satisfying to watch as it was inevitable. Bix © Lucasfilm If any of Andor‘s endings might prove controversial, it’s perhaps its very last one. In some ways, Bix’s isolation from the final act of Andor (a decision she makes, but one that still takes her out of the broader fight she had previously yearned to be part of), only for her to part the series with the revelation that she’s given birth to Cassian’s child—a child he’ll never know—treats her story as less her own, and more in the service of Cassian’s. But it’s likewise also compelling that Bix is the rare character who ends the series given the chance of peace, of not having to fight and struggle. Many of the journeys that close out Andor are ones that we know will continue, and more specifically that continue in the sense that their fight isn’t over yet. That she is the final vision we have the show feels, in part, that this is what it was all for: to be free to live life with loved ones, a generation that can grow up in the hope that they in turn don’t have to fight and struggle to maintain that peace. Bail Organa © Lucasfilm But wait! Bail Organa’s journey doesn’t end in Andor. He’s in Rogue One! He’s technically in A New Hope, or at least very, very tiny atomized parts of him are! But while those stories are, chronologically speaking, Bail’s last moments in the Star Wars saga, it feels like Andor actually gives the man himself a proper sendoff—more proper than the hasty one he gets in Rogue One to go meet his explosive destiny—in his brief chat with Cassian. It’s short and sweet but laden with meaning, to give Bail a little teeth, and a moment of bonding with Cassian after their initial disagreements. We don’t ever get to see Bail’s final moments from his own perspective on screen (they’re retold, if you’re interested, in the From a Certain Point of View anthology), but giving him a goal to go out swinging feels like a fitting coda. The Stories Left Untold © Lucasfilm But for all the above stories that Andor wraps up in its last act, there’s just as many—and it’s just as important—that it leaves so many paths open. There’s characters we just simply don’t see again, like Leida after her wedding, or even further flung characters like Kino Loy from season one. There’s characters for who the story just continues elsewhere, like Cassian and K2 themselves, or Mon Mothma, last seen chatting to Vel amid the hubbub of Yavin IV, or Saw, staring down the Imperial occupation of Jedha. Some of these are famous Star Wars figures, and we know where they end up, but just as important is getting flashes like Wilmon and Dreena sharing food, or, in a grimly hilarious fashion, a drunken Perrin hanging off the arm of Davro Sculden’s wife. Perhaps most fitting then is an end we glimpse, but never get: when Cassian wakes from his slumber to go on his mission to Kafrene, he dreams of his long-missing sister. Andor‘s first major story thread, the focus of its opening scenes to put this whole story into motion, never gets resolved. Some people may be frustrated by that, in an age when Star Wars fans and Star Wars itself, at times, is obsessed with checking off the facts and details of its world. But we get everything we need to know: Cassian still thinks about her. He dies never getting the answer. We will, perhaps rightfully, never learn ourselves. Not all ends definitively. Life goes on. Even as we know the broad strokes of what’s about to go down in this moment in Star Wars, some answers are just never found. But there’s a whole texture of existence beneath that sweeping saga and those big questions, and that’s what Andor was always reminding us of. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

I never thought I’d see the day when Tom Cruise didn’t stick the landing, but here we are. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the second half of the story launched in 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, is a high-wire act gone horribly wrong. The stunts are stunning, as you’d be right to assume due to the mere fact that Cruise showed up to make another M:I movie at all. In what’s been coyly (and in no way definitively) teased as the final curtain call for Ethan Hunt, the character Cruise has played since 1996’s Mission: Impossible, Cruise jumps from barrel-rolling biplane to barrel-rolling biplane, squeezes through a claustrophobic maze of undetonated underwater missiles in a sunken submarine, and knife-fights in booty shorts, in a most John Wickian turn. The Final Reckoning has it all — including two and a half hours of dead-in-the-water character drama and endless platitudes about Ethan’s destiny. The sheer number of flashbacks to previous franchise installments puts The Final Reckoning in a category with Seinfeld’s notorious clip show finale. Seeing two action-movie geniuses like Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie making a movie that is so often deadly boring, I wondered whether wrapping up the M:I series with a sense of finality was the true impossible mission all along. The Final Reckoning (a phrase uttered twice in the movie, with deathly reverence) picks up two months after the events of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, in a world that has been nearly consumed by the Entity, an all-powerful AI. Ethan has a plan to take down the robotic overlord, and it once again requires him to pull off a handful of nearly implausible tasks with his team, which includes longtime pals like Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), alongside newer friends from Dead Reckoning, including pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and French assassin Paris (Pom Klemintieff). Assuming their skills and a lot of ridiculous coincidences all come together with pinpoint precision, then maaaaybe he can time the execution of their digital overlord juuuuust right. There are obstacles: Mustache-twirling Gabriel (Esai Morales) constantly pops out of nowhere to screw with Ethan in hopes of seizing the Entity for his own control, while returning legacy M:I character Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), now director of the CIA, hopes to arrest the rogue Ethan and save the day his own way. In theory, this should all be another wild M:I ride. But even as a diehard M:I Guy, I was constantly lost among The Final Reckoning’s expositional word salad and aggressive attempts to tie every single story beat back to some event in the franchise’s past. The bar has been raised for Marvel movies that supposedly require too much homework ahead of viewing. Final Reckoning’s most direct references are groan-worthy: It “solves” a long-running series mystery with the grace of Solo’s “We’ll call you Solo” scene. And it turns the Langley NOC-list heist from the 1996 movie into the single most important historical event since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Tom Cruise, typically a mesmerizing charmer, looks beaten and exhausted throughout the talky opening hour of Final Reckoning — perhaps because filming the more thrilling parts of the movie left him literally beaten and exhausted. The leaden dialogue doesn’t help, and McQuarrie’s decision to rarely hold the camera on his leading man for more than a few seconds means Cruise never gets to lock his charisma on the audience. The choppiness of the editing, even during the talky parts, recalls the hyperactive editing tactics that made Taken 3 go viral. A lackluster play-the-hits score makes even Ethan’s required running scenes limp along. The vibes are off. Bless the Final Reckoning actors who have pep in their step anyway! Atwell remains a cunning counterpart to Cruise, all reflexes and wit, and McQuarrie overindulges in her role. Final Reckoning did not need an extended scene where an Inuit woman teaches Grace how to steer a dog sled, but it’s tender. A chunk of the movie plays less like the usual globetrotting spy story than a tense Tom Clancy political thriller. But hey, if circumstances are going to trap Ethan in a submarine, at least it’s with a captain played by Tramell Tillman, who ports over his hilariously mannered presence from Severance to the equally heightened world of Mission: Impossible. And with the U.S. on the brink of atomic war, McQuarrie fills war rooms with cheeky TV actors, gifting Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso), Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation), and Holt McCallany (Mindhunter) some much deserved dramatic spotlights. It’s the series’ best that-guy casting since Mission: Impossible III. Still, between bursts of personality, the plot of Final Reckoning spins in circles. There’s little tension in the pursuit of the Entity, an invisible threat and the greatest enemy to the “show, don’t tell” screenwriting adage. McQuarrie stages Ethan’s big confrontation with the evil Siri in a VR chamber that zips through the AI’s master plan like it’s the wormhole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that sequence felt like anything more than an info dump, it could have been a rush based on the visual design alone. But the Entity blathering the same lines over and over about Ethan’s destiny in no way compares to human villains offering inhumane horrors. A talking blue circle isn’t exactly a standoff with Philip Seymour Hoffman holding a gun to Ethan’s wife’s head. To make up for the lack of chase, McQuarrie cranks up every familiar form of Impossible Mission Force-patented heist operation to maximum impossibility, to the point where it’s kind of exhausting. The difference between “thrillingly inconceivable” and “preposterously cartoonish” is the difference between “we need split-second precision” and “we need split-nanosecond precision.” Everything in The Final Reckoning, from pinpointing the needle-in-a-haystack location of a missing submarine to the mind-boggling requirements of incarcerating an AI in the realm of scientific possibility, veers over the edge: Unbelievable coincidence, not skill or precision, drives these plans. Also, there has never been a three-hour movie that needed more than one ticking-time-bomb-defusal sequence. Never! But, my god, the actual stunts. McQuarrie’s set pieces whisk the audience from the streets of London to the Arctic circle to the mountains of South Africa, and it’s progressively more awe-inspiring with each new sequence. A crosscut fight between Ethan and an Entity cultist — yes, we have those now — while his team members are duking it out with goons in a burning building is a spectacle of exactitude. Though Ethan winds up back on an aircraft carrier, in what seems like a shameless callback to Top Gun, Cruise really revives his Maverick do-or-die energy when he descends into the icy depths and contends with elaborate water stunts. The movie’s much-teased climactic plane stunt is the greatest sequence Cruise has ever committed to film. While many of the Mission: Impossible franchise’s set pieces have been anchored by one death-defying moment (Ethan clinging to the side of a jet or motorcycling off a cliff), Ethan’s pursuit of Gabriel through the skies goes on and on and on — and I couldn’t get enough. Cruise clings to the side of two different planes, flopping against their sides with every barrel roll, letting his cheeks flap in the wind, and delivering a few Indiana Jones-style punches as he commandeers each vehicle. There are times when he appears to be in full zero G as the second plane careens through valleys. Anything that goes right for him immediately goes wrong, and with constant escalation. It’s breathtaking.  And it’s the grand finale of a bad watch. Ethan Hunt deserves a proper send-off, and not just in a blaze of action-fueled glory. In 2006, J.J. Abrams gave the character a down-to-Earth quality and a group of close friends in M:I III. McQuarrie ran with that intimacy when he rewrote Ghost Protocol in 2011 then made the franchise his own with 2015’s Rogue Nation. His follow-up, 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, saw Ethan close the book on his marriage, hug it out with his best buds, and sustain a symphony of stunts from start to finish. It was the perfect finale. But it was so successful that Cruise and McQuarrie couldn’t resist going back for more, with this two-part story stretched across years. Dead Reckoning was satisfying, in a classic M:I way, but it needed a coda to wrap up all its open-ended plots. What was initially planned as Dead Reckoning Part Two became The Final Reckoning, which, after watching the movie, feels like an apt title for what is likely the duo’s last swing at the property. Either way, when the credits roll, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series feels like it’s over for good, whether more sequels are on the way or not. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in theaters on May 23.