Best science TV, film and books of 2025 | The New Scientist culture review

0:00And now a word from our sponsor South by Southwest London. Imagine a future where things just make sense. In the 1700s, we had canals. In the 1800s, the railways. Then telecom, fibre optic. And now? In a world that's more unsure than ever before, we need the answers. South by Southwest London presents over 900 speakers, 200 music artists, and 100 films in one location in June. To find out how they merge together and shape the future in person, visit southbysouthwestlondon.com. That's S-X-S-W-LON-DON dot com. Welcome to a special festive edition of The World, The Universe and Us from New Scientist.

0:38Merry Christmas. Happy holidays, everyone. I'm Rowan Hooper and I thought we'd take the opportunity to provide you with some holiday culture, a review of some of our favourite things of the year. So, to help me out, I've asked our culture editor, Alison Flood, and our TV and film reviewer, Bethan Ackley, to help me out. Welcome both to the pod. Hi there. Now, people might be listening to this after over-consuming over the holiday period. So should we start off with something nicely settling and relaxing, Beth? Do you want to kick us off? I don't think I have that. I think I have something that might turn your stomach instead.

1:14But yeah, what I'd like to talk about first is Ocean with David Attenborough. What an amazing film this is and what an amazing time in David Attenborough's career and in his life for him to be making a film like this. so ocean's all about what humanity is doing to our oceans and particularly through things like industrialized fishing um and there are some really bleak sequences in this there's one sequence in particular that was pretty widely publicized the dragging yeah the dragging so basically it's it's a bottom trawler's net um just scraping the the bottom of the ocean floor and it is it's horrifying it's as horrifying as anything i've seen all year in any horror film to be honest with you so it's it's quite a bleak film in terms of the situation as it stands but it is also quite a hopeful film it talks a lot about the resilience of our planet and how it can bounce back from the things that we've done to it if we just allow it to do that it also has this really beautiful soundtrack uh by Stephen Price so if you don't have time to see the film just pop on the soundtrack in particular there's one track called Out of the Emptiness it's so beautiful yeah I listened to that after you said it and it did make me it lulled me into a false sense of security about the state of the oceans but I think it's I think it's kind of in must be in Attenborough's contracts that he has to end on a message of hope yes I insist on that you know um Alison what have you got uh well I'm mostly going to talk about books I think that this one that I'm going to talk about now every version of you by Grace Chan which I brought with me is particularly good to relax with after maybe a big lunch or big dinner.

2:51It's science fiction. It's about uploading your brain to a virtual reality because our world has been so fried by climate change. So it's set in a near future version of Australia, which is totally dry and arid and awful. And we're following our protagonist, Tao Yi. She's not keen on uploading to this virtual utopia. And her boyfriend, Narvin, who is very keen on doing it. And so sort of negotiating what this will mean for their relationship. Not good I imagine. Not good but I guess uploading to a virtual reality isn't a new idea in science fiction but Grace Chan who is a first-time novelist realises it really beautifully here.

3:29She leaves you with so much to think about. I read this back in May and I've been wanting to talk about it ever since really so I'm still wondering if I'd ever upload to a virtual utopia myself. I'm thinking probably not and I chatted to Grace Chan actually and she thinks she probably wouldn't either but it would depend on what all of your family are doing yeah i also think that um she handles climate change really well here it's not the focus of the book it's kind of around the edges but it's really hard-hitting and terrifying take on it you kind of see it slant wise well okay so you kind of both mentioned climate change on nature crisis climate change um my non-fiction book of the year is the story of co2 is the story of everything by peter brannan um and it's a biography of carbon dioxide and what's kind of funny is that co2 is is the big villain of course at the moment um because it's it is the molecule responsible for uh driving the climate crisis but as he says it's also the molecule of life it's it's what is taken by photosynthesis and made into life um and that and so his story he's written the whole story of co2 across a sort of geological time period.

4:36And so it is the story of everything, history, science, geology, biology, and then of course, fossil fuels and climate change as well. But it sets our story in a geological context. And basically, it kind of says that what we're doing today in our society is not geologically durable. It's quite a haunting way of putting it, I thought. Rehabilitation of carbon dioxide. A bit, yeah. Should we have another TV or film pick, Beth? Sure, yeah. How about some TV? The best TV of the year, in my opinion, of any kind, was Andor, which is just implausibly good. So it's a Star Wars series, but it's as good for people who know nothing about Star Wars as it is for people who love Star Wars.

5:24It's essentially a very gritty spy drama about fascism and about the banality of that and the kind of everyday gear grinding that goes on to uphold that and the very brave individuals who undermine that. So it's about Cassie Nandor, who, if you've seen Rogue One, is one of the characters in that. It's a prequel explaining what motivated him to stop just being like a petty thief and why he joined the Rebel Alliance. And we've been waiting three years for a second season of this. And the first season was amazing and it was way better than it had any right to be, basically. And then the second season has finally arrived and it's even better.

6:03It's incredible. No one in that show is giving anything less than a career best performance. Everyone's amazing. Yeah, yeah. So I totally agree. I love this as well. Absolutely. It's grown-up TV. It's nothing, you know, it's not... You're going to get some hate for saying Star Wars isn't grown-up. I mean, you know, there's a place for all that. Lightsabers and Baby Yoda. I can enjoy that as well. But this is proper. It doesn't really, it's not really sci-fi, is it? It's a story, as you say, about resisting fascism. Yeah. And so a bit timely, right? Yeah, just a bit. Yeah. So what a brilliant thing.

6:41When I'd watched it, so there was this gap between season one and two. I watched season two and I was going, oh, so I went back again and watched season one and then season two again. That's how good it is. Yeah, it's amazing. Rewatch it and rewatch it again. Alison, what's next on your list? My next book tip is going back to climate change with Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie. She's a data scientist and she is answering the 50 burning climate change questions you want at your fingertips. So if you've got friends around, if your annoying uncle is there, they're asking you something, you don't have that answer.

7:11You go to her book. So we've got like the big question. So is it too late? And she goes she goes and she gives you like a short answer and then she gives you a long answer. that's backed up with loads of data. So for is it too late? Her short answer is no, every tenth of a degree matters. There's no point at which it's too late to limit warming and reduce damage from climate change. Or she does, won't renewables and electric cars mean a lot more mining? And one of my favourites, isn't it bad to eat ultra-processed alternatives to meat? I like this one because my dad is always teasing me about eating fake meat since we went veggie.

7:44Anyway, Hannah says that if she got a pound for every time she heard that question, she could subsidise the entire industry. But her short answer is meat substitutes can be just as nutritious as meat. And while they hit some of the criteria for ultra processed foods, they're usually not high in calories, sugar or saturated fat, unlike, say, sausages and burgers. So, yeah, it's great. It's a good book to have at your fingertips. OK, since we're on climate change still, I'm going to mention Positive Tipping Points by Tim Lenton, who we had on the podcast a little while ago. In a nutshell, what it's about is that we hear all about these catastrophic tipping points that we are facing the the Atlantic Ocean circulation um Antarctic ice sheets collapsing you know the Amazon rainforest flipping into Savannah those sorts of things but Tim shows that society can flip to go across its own tipping points in a positive way and he gives historical examples and this is what we need to to push very much so And you mentioned going vegetarian.

8:47That's one really important one that we have to cut down on the amount of meat that people eat in our society because it's totally unsustainable, but a really brilliant way of cutting emissions very quickly. So we need to make these social tipping points, positive tipping points, and flip them because we can't do anything incrementally anymore. We need revolutionary change. so that's what we need and this book really shows positively how to go ahead and do it And he points out doesn't he that we don't really know when we're about to be at a positive tipping point or not, I think that one of his distant relatives was a suffragette and now it's just normal right that we women are allowed to vote on podcasts You're allowed in the podcast Don't know when you're at the edge of one No If we're going to continue to talk about climate change again, I can give more climate change stuff.

9:44There's an amazing film on Netflix called The White House Effect. It's a documentary. It's largely made up of kind of archival footage. And it's basically about, again, like this key period in the late 1980s when the US was kind of poised to do something about climate change. It was during George H.W. Bush's administration. And at that time, it wasn't as polarised an issue as it is today. and the kind of the heart of the film is this sort of it's set up around this battle between two of Bush's advisors one of whom was a climate skeptic and one of whom was an environmentalist and you it is again quite a bleak film just taking you through how and why we missed that chance to do anything about it really and what a good opportunity it would have been yeah it is it's another bleak one I'm afraid and enraging yeah it made me incredibly angry particularly as like I wasn't I wasn't even alive when all this was happening but um yeah it's a really interesting watch and there's this really interesting thread throughout it of um one particular climate scientist I think his name is Steven Schneider yeah and you see him like he one of the the earliest scientists just sort of put their head above the parapet and try and bring attention to this and it takes you up to uh just before he died in 2010 and he really there's a quote from him saying oh we're we've finally grasped it we're finally going to do something now you know we should have long ago we should have thought this but you know we're finally on the edge of this and then he died a few months after that and if he could see the world as it is now you just it's unspeakably sad yeah it's a really sad thread to this but it's a great film yeah happy christmas yes everyone i met um steven schneider in san francisco um just before he died and what an extraordinary communicator and scientist he was and what an absolute tragedy that he did die very suddenly and it was a really great loss.

11:41What's next Alison? So I'm going to move away from climate change to talk about another book The Last Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimac so I absolutely loved this I was always going to I was a fan of these terrible books by Jean Owl as a teenager The Clan of the Cave Bear which is all about homo sapiens interacting with Neanderthals they're not great but I loved them back in the day and this is kind of the non-fiction corrective to those so Sulimak is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse he led excavations at Grotte Mandra in France which have transformed our understanding of Neanderthals and of the first wave of our species Homo sapiens to have reached Europe so this is basically the story of those excavations and how he uncovered the remains of this Neanderthal that he called Thorin who was found to be between 42 ,000 and 50 ,000 years old which is kind of revolutionary in our understanding of the Neanderthals, one of the last Neanderthals.

12:32But he's amazing. He kind of really brings you into the heart of it all. So you see him there at the cave, like, as the teeth of Thorin are discovered, and he realises that if they're going to keep them safe, they're going to have to pick off every single grain of sand individually with tweezers, or the teeth are going to crumble away and they won't be able to analyse them. So he's a real storyteller. He brings to life not only what it's like to be on an excavation and make discoveries like this, but he also shines a spotlight into our past and this time when another species of humans occupied the planet with us.

13:00It's definitely better than Clan of the Cave Bear. If you do want more Neanderthals in your life, Human is an amazing documentary. It's a five-part BBC documentary presented by Ella Al-Shamahi, who's such a good entertaining guide to all of this. Lots of Neanderthals in that. For such a short, relatively speaking, series, it's a really comprehensive guide to so many of the key questions surrounding like human evolution. And it's one with a really philosophical take on our origins. It digs into all kinds of questions like how exactly do we define human? Is it only our species? Is it all of the Homo species?

13:37And it gets into some of the things that we once thought were the preserve of our species, like the kind of the capacity for symbolic thought. We now know that other species had and how does that change how we think about ourselves? I thought it was really fascinating I've watched a couple of episodes of it so far I've been watching it with my kids and I think that you're really right that she's a really engaging presenter because she's kept the attention of even the little one though he's always saying we need a bit more of the fighting bit he wants the reconstructions but no, I really enjoyed it Season 2 Yeah, yeah As you know, The World, The Universe and Us is a podcast that's all about science and technology which is why we're big fans of Nick Gray and G-Tech Nick is the founder of G-Tech the British design company that took on some giant global brands.

14:24And he first built a cordless sweeper in his garage back in 2001, which is still going strong today. G-Tech is all about making life easier with things people love to use, which is why they're the UK's most trusted home and garden brand. So whether it's an air ram vacuum, a nifty garden tool, or just something that gets rid of all those pet hairs on your sofa, G-Tech have got you covered. Plus, if you're like us and care about the planet, you'll love all their interchangeable components and batteries gtech stands for innovation simplicity and engineered perfection find out more at gtech.co.uk and pluribus let's talk about pluribus beth i know you like pluribus very much and so do i um so pluribus is the new show from vince gilligan who is the creator of breaking bad and better call saw a bit of a legend um and this is him going kind of back to his sci-fi roots when he was working on the x-files and things like that.

15:16Oh, was he? I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He wrote a bunch of X-Files episodes. But yeah, it stars someone from Better Call Saul, Ria Sehorne. She plays Carol Sterker, who is this, she's one of the few people on the entire planet who has not fallen, has not succumbed to this alien virus that has essentially turned everyone into a hive mind or killed them off in the process. And Carol, even among the survivors, is kind of an outlier because she's one of the only people who actually wants the world to go back to the way it was. It's such an interesting show. Loads of people have different lenses on it.

15:52Some people jump to thinking about like not wanting, like being surrounded by people who are happy to use AI for basically all of their thinking and being the only person being like, please, we need to not ruin our brains in this way. It's very much also about grief, not to spoil things, and depression was kind of the lens that I took to it. It's such an interesting show. So it's so confident with itself. It's so character-driven and it doesn't rush anything. It's not, you know, jingling keys in front of you because it thinks you're stupid. It's a really clever show and I'm really excited to see how it turns out.

16:27Yeah, it's a really interesting idea. And Pluribus, so the name comes from, it's Latin obviously, but the motto of the United States, E Pluribus Unum, which means out of many, one. So the whole idea that all humans on Earth are fused into this super organism. What a great idea. And it's weird because as I started watching this, I also saw a film. So I'm just going to mention this quickly, even though it's from 1982. But it's the first time I've seen it in the cinema. And the film is called Koyani Katsi. There's no dialogue at all. There's just a score by Philip Glass. And it's all about really America, the natural beauty of it, but also the cities.

17:11And it's filmed in time lapse or lots of it's filmed in time lapse. And it just shows not just the beauty of the country, but the exploitation of it, of its people and its resources through mining and shopping. And it just shows our way of life in this sort of condensed movie. and you just come away from it thinking, wow, you know, we are consuming the whole world. So what an incredible movie. And it's from, so Koyani Katsi is a Hopi word, meaning crazy life, a life in turmoil or out of balance. And that was in 1982. So imagine what they'd make of it now. But let's go back to 2025 or come back to the future.

17:58Alison, what's your next one? Another book I've really enjoyed this year is Hello, Cruel World by Melinda Wenner-Moyer. I think it's a good one to recommend over the festive period when any kids might be running wild on sugar and presents. It's basically a parenting guide. She's a science journalist and a parenting columnist. It's full of helpful and relaxed and non-judgmental chapters. And it's also full of research and interviews with experts. It offers great advice on everything from how to handle tech issues with your kids to backing off when you need to, to how to deal with friendship issues.

18:28I really appreciated the chapter on screens as it's an area that really seems to raise hackles and moral panic with people. And Moir points out that experts define problematic media use not based on how much time kids spend on screens, but on whether their use interferes with their daily functioning. And I'll be bearing that in mind as my children squabble over how long they're allowed to spend on the switch. Yeah, I think I definitely need that one. Now, let's sort of come to the end of this list of recommendations because we've gone to a lot. but like Beth I know you've got loads more Severance Kingdom, My Husband the Cyborg 28 years later House of Dynamite, do you want to pick one or two of those?

19:08Oh you kill me to choose as hard seeing as you were talking about relationships in a sense, another kind of relationship in My Husband the Cyborg which is a film about marriage and the impact of technology on marriage it's a little tricky to find I'm afraid but if you can get hold of it or watch it somewhere please do essentially it's a film made by a woman called Susanna Capillero who's one half of that marriage um it's a documentary it's a documentary yeah sorry I should have said that um so it's a documentary made by Susanna about her marriage when her husband Scott decided that he wanted to become a cyborg what he ends up doing is he has these two titanium piercings put into his chest and then they sort of cradle a small circuit board called a north sense which is something that he worked on which vibrates when he turns north and in his mind this is a hugely profound change to his perception and that qualifies him to become a cyborg of you know other opinions may vary and come up in the film but it is essentially just this lens into the cracks in their marriage and it is fascinating it all of the kind of the most toxic behaviors come out in both of them and it's incredibly intimate because it does feel like you're like trapped in a restaurant with like the worst couple that you know, basically.

20:27I mean, I don't mean to come across badly about this couple because it's a really brave thing that they've done by doing this. But yeah, it's like being trapped in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, basically. It's horrifying. And it does ask some really interesting questions about transhumanism and also like Susanna tries very hard to immerse herself in this world and Scott doesn't always want that. so yeah it is fascinating if you're cooped up with your spouse and their family it's the last thing you want it's really the only thing that he does to have this thing that vibrates when he faces North I sense some underlying issues perhaps yeah perhaps it's not all about that he then she eventually this is a bit of a spoiler but she gets a magnet put in her finger and he's like no no no that's not being a cyborg it's very strange but yeah it's an excellent film it sounds really interesting okay and one more one more I would be remiss if I didn't mention Severance because I think it is probably my favourite show ever apart from Andor well this is the thing so Severance again is another show that was the first season aired in 2022 another three season wait for the second season because of all kinds of backstage shenanigans and world events but it came back, it hasn't had as perfect a second season as I think Andor has but it is such a fantastic show with such a brilliant premise that I think you can forgive it a few flaws.

21:56So yeah, recap the premise. Oh yes, sorry, I just assume everyone knows about Severance, sorry. So Severance is set in a biotechnology company where some of the employees have chosen to become severed which is when they get their memories of their work lives separated from the rest of their life which in essence creates like a whole new consciousness in the same body with sort of similar traits to that person, but is essentially a fresh new person. And they can never leave the office. They can be treated incredibly poorly by their employers. And the outside version of themselves won't even know.

22:35So the second season of the show really gets into some amazing directions with this central metaphor. I mean, there's a discussion at one point where they talk about if a religious person who knew that they had done immoral things in their life, could they choose to become severed and then some version of themselves, some more innocent version of themselves, could go to heaven? And there are so many different ways to read that central metaphor that I think is just fascinating and it's full of this haunting imagery. It's some of the best sci-fi out there. I think if you love Lost for all its flaws, you should watch Severance.

23:11Look, we'll have to leave it there, but we're going to put everything we've discussed, We'll put it in the show notes so you can go and hunt it out. Also, in the meantime, do sign up for our book club. There's loads of recommendations and discussions, author interviews. That's at newscientist.com slash book club. At the moment, we're reading The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks, the late, great Ian M. Banks. And also newscientist.com, loads of Beth's TV and film reviews. That's it. Thanks for listening. Thanks to our guests, Bethan Ackley, Alison Flood, and we'll see you in the new year. Bye for now.

23:43Bye. Bye-bye. Thanks.

24:13We'll be right back. lotion. You're welcome. Columbia. Engineered for whatever.