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Spoilers below for Episode 6 of Cape Fear . New episodes stream every Friday on Apple TV.

“Possum” is the funniest, most unhinged episode of Cape Fear yet and the best episode since the show’s premiere. The sixth entry of the Apple TV series has, to paraphrase beloved SNL-cum-cultural icon Stefon, a bit of everything: shared family acid trips, rodents in the walls, a secret passage, pig ears, a burning toe, and a stolen cat named Peanut Butter. It all adds up to a completely bonkers hour of television that deftly blends camp and dread.

At its core, “Possum” is a series of bottle episodes rolled into one. In the aftermath of the revelation that Max Cady has moved into the house across the street from the Bowdens , we’re treated to an extended flashback of Max’s time in prison. Immediately after he was beaten senseless by a white supremecist gang – who he then, in turn, brutally murdered – Max is more-or-less adopted by a heretofore unseen elderly inmate (we’ll call him Padrino, the Spanish word for godfather, since that’s how Max refers to him later in the episode).

In a scene straight out of Darren Aronofsky's 1998 psychological thriller Pi, Max undergoes invasive brain surgery (complete with a drill!) before being inducted by Padrino into the “Sons of Changó”– a mysterious religious order that may or may not be the reason we keep seeing candles and altars pop up throughout the series.

Back in the present, the Bowdens are taking Max’s threats seriously. They upgrade their perpetually broken home security system. Tom and Anna tell the kids they’ll be tracked at all times, much to Natalie’s chagrin. Tom seeks the advice of a fellow lawyer about what can possibly be done about Max’s supposed harassment. There’s nothing to be done of course. Chalk it up to lack of evidence and political pressure.

Next, we get a series of quick scenes (Max gets a threatening phone call; Max helps Natalie confront the nosey podcaster who harassed her before; Anna intimates that she knows about Tom’s infidelity; Natalie has a dream where Zack puts his thumb in her mouth) before arriving at the best set piece of the entire series to date.

Lounging at home during a sultry evening after their air conditioning breaks, the Bowdens begin acting strangely. After confronting Tom about his “almost” affair, Anna sees the wallpaper move. Tom quickly realizes that the whole family’s beverages have been spiked with the acid he’d been microdosing “for stress.” What follows is a beautifully shot, superbly acted sequence that’s at once tense and hilarious.

After the acid kicks in, Tom and Anna hesitate to call the police because they are paranoid the kids might get taken away. Zack moans that he can’t come downstairs because “the stairs are too big for him.” Tom ponders if he should grab his shotgun for no reason at all. To top it all off, Anna’s anger management counselor (with whom she’d been having a video call) may have overheard the whole thing. Soon, a drone flies into the house and Tom and Anna ponder whether it’s real or a hallucination before Natalie pulls out Tom’s shotgun and blasts it to smithereens.

It’s an amazing scene, a one-act play within an episode laced (pun intended) with slapstick and paranoia. Every element, from the music to cinematography, coalesceces into a technicolor feast that unearths suspicions, builds drama, and reveals buried character traits.

The next morning, a now sober Anna and Tom barge across the street to confront Max. As he prepares and then eats a dinner of pig’s ears, Max disarms them, reveals he stole their cat, and kicks them out of his house. Max jokes (maybe not) that he had his dead wife’s eggs frozen and wants Anna to carry his child. He then demands that Tom and Anna both stop practicing law and offer a public apology as a way to repay him for everything they put him through.

Tom demands he leave the Bowdens alone only for Max to tell him, “You’ll have to kill me.” “I know,” Tom replies, setting up the inevitable final showdown in the season finale. The sequence is straight out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a simmering, threatening bit of acting and scene construction.

Next, we’re plunged back into Max’s time in prison. It’s some time later and Max has fully immersed himself into his prison cult/religious order. Soon, he confronts Padrino and reveals he knows that Padrino let him be beaten by the gang so that he could collect Max as part of his order. As you can imagine, the realization doesn’t sit well with Max, who murders Padrino with a prison shank.

We then flash ahead to the present where Tom (finally) asks the question we’ve been screaming since the premiere: Did Anna sleep with Max back when she was his lawyer? She vehemently denies it, only to be interrupted by a blaring smoke alarm and fire in the family’s unfinished den. Tom puts it out quickly, only to discover Zack’s severed toe at the top of the burning pile.

Zack and Anna rush to Zack’s room to find him sitting in his closet next to the opening of a — wait for it — secret passage! They realize that Zack, not Max, was the one who spiked their tea and Tom rushes into the passage only to FALL THROUGH THE FLOOR and crash land into a hideout where someone has been living. Anna frantically smashes the drywall only to reveal a possum. But, this being Cape Fear, you know that can’t be the only thing hidden in the walls.

As the possum scurries away, Tom pushes out of the wall and is snatched back by a straight-out-of-a-horror-movie hand, which belongs to Neveah. She quickly attacks, only to be smashed upside the head with a paint can by Anna. The episode ends with the camera following a trail of Zack’s bloody footprints leading across the street to Max’s house.

It’s a truly wild end to an excellent episode after a somewhat sagging middle run. “Possum” pulls off the feat of answering many burning questions in an entertaining, surprising way and propelling the story forward. The story breathes in and out throughout the entire hour, with top-tier comedy leading into quiet drama followed by gonzo action.

Throughout the episode, I was never quite sure what would happen next and was constantly surprised that whatever DID happen was completely unexpected. While it’s not perfect (we’re still bogged down with weird side stories, like Max’s desire to open a restaurant, and often blocked from knowing too much about characters’ true intentions) “Possum” is a brilliantly acted, sometimes uproarious thrill ride that hopefully serves as an episodic template as the Cape Fear barrels toward its finale.

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NBC is on top of its game when it comes to dropping all the hottest shows on network TV. Three of the most popular shows all fall under the same banner known as One Chicago, and NBC has confirmed that all three series are returning this October . Chicago Fire , Chicago Med , and Chicago P.D. were written and created by Derek Haas , who also penned the Jensen Ackles -led crime drama Countdown on Prime Video. The series was cancelled after one season , but Haas is keeping busy with his work on the One Chicago shows. NBC is also behind the Law & Order franchise, which continues to spawn spin-offs while maintaining the flagship series and Special Victims Unit .

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The United States has taken some significant steps into the final frontier during its first 250 years.

The nation has put people on the moon , helped build and operate a long-running space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) and sent fleets of robotic explorers to many corners of the solar system — and even beyond it, into interstellar space .

All of this work has been done relatively recently, as the space age didn't dawn until 1957 ; when the U.S. was born on July 4, 1776, humanity was still seven years away from even balloon-borne flight. Where might we be another 250 years from now, on the nation's 500th birthday, should it be fortunate enough to live that long? Trying to see that far into the future is so difficult as to be a fool's errand, but it's fun. So let's have a brief and far from exhaustive crack.

A vibrant in-space economy

The United States and other space powers have already established an off-Earth economy — one based on the activities of communications satellites. Companies like Vantor and Planet sell imagery to a variety of customers, for example, while others like SpaceX (via its subsidiary Starlink ) and Viasat provide internet service from above.

That nascent industry will doubtless expand greatly over the next 250 years, and we're already seeing some of the directions it may go. For instance, space tourism has gotten off the ground; wealthy people can book trips to suborbital space, and the super-rich can fly all the way to Earth orbit, as the experience of NASA chief Jared Isaacman shows. (Isaacman, a tech billionaire, has funded and commanded two missions around our planet using SpaceX hardware.)

We've also seen the dawn of in-space manufacturing, with companies such as Made In Space making stuff off Earth and bringing it down for analysis (and eventually, if all goes to plan, sale). This is a field that could really explode over the coming years and decades, according to Dava Newman, director of the Human Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served as deputy administrator of NASA from 2015 to 2017.

"If you give me a nice big time horizon to look at, I've actually always thought it would be a pharmaceutical breakthrough — manufacturing, more medical-related," Newman told Space.com.

That's because the microgravity environment is great for growing flawless crystals, potentially enabling a newly efficient and effective production line for a wide range of pharmaceuticals and other high-value goods. The California company Varda Space recently demonstrated this potential, successfully crystallizing a stable form of the HIV drug ritonavir in one of its orbital "minifactories" and bringing the drug safely down to Earth .

Varda Space's third reentry capsule landed in South Australia's Koonibba Test Range on May 13, 2025 (May 14 local time). (Image credit: Varda Space/Rocket Lab) Asteroid mining, too

There are other potential drivers of a booming off-Earth economy as well. Futurist, astrophysicist and sci-fi author David Brin pointed to asteroid mining , which several American companies, including AstroForge and TransAstra, are investigating seriously already.

"That's where the riches are," Brin told Space.com.

Those riches come in several forms. For starters, many asteroids are thought to harbor considerable amounts of water, which humanity could leverage for life support and split into oxygen and hydrogen, key components of rocket fuel. Space-rock mining could therefore enable the operation of off-Earth propellant depots, which would allow voyaging spacecraft to top off their tanks on the go and explore the solar system more deeply and ambitiously.

Then there are the metals — industrial-grade stuff like iron and nickel, which could feed the off-Earth manufacturing industry, and precious species such as platinum. So there are huge economic opportunities for us in the asteroid belt , according to Brin.

“The question is, will we be able to leverage asteroidal resources to get a takeoff industry out there?" he said. "And will we remain friends with the robots out there that are doing all of the work?”

That latter question is a serious one, for robotics and artificial intelligence will advance a great deal over the next 250 years. Indeed, humanity will likely merge with robots in meaningful and ethically confounding ways, according to Brin.

"There will be fuzzy boundaries between us and the robots," he said. Our species, Brin added, may eventually "range from residual totally organic types through cyborgs and multilinked clusters all the way to robots who either think of themselves as human citizens, or at least know that it's in their best interest to fool us into thinking they think that."

Living off Earth

There's no guarantee that the U.S. will be able to exploit the plentiful resources of the asteroid belt by 2276. For instance, Brin stressed that the nation, and the world at large, are in danger of falling into a sort of "lobotomized feudalism," which could derail most of our spaceflight hopes and dreams.

If we can avoid that trap, however, Brin thinks that asteroid mining could fuel our expansion into the solar system over the coming decades.

"I have no doubt that, if we restore a rational, scientific civilization, there will be city lights on the moon," Brin said. "I am hoping there will be city lights on the asteroids."

Newman has a different outlook. For starters, she's opposed to the idea of transplanting human civilization on a large scale to pristine worlds.

"I'm not a fan, of course, of colonization," she said. "We should never do that. History should teach us something."

She also doesn't see a business case that would drive companies to spend large amounts of money on moon and Mars activities, which could be prerequisites for the establishment of large human settlements there. And she's skeptical that many people would want to pack up their lives and move to Mars or the moon permanently.

"There's a reason Antarctica is not populated," Newman said. "I love it, I can't get enough of it, but that's pretty crazy. Most people don't want to be in a very isolated, confined environment."

Mars settlement, she added, "doesn't make any sense. It's not Option B. We have to take care of this planet."

Newman still thinks that we should (and will) explore the moon and Mars in the not-too-distant future. But she envisions a much smaller-scale effort that's driven by ambitious science goals — a committed search for signs of life on Mars , for example. This effort will likely start with small outposts on the moon, which will serve as stepping stones for similar activities on the Red Planet.

This vision is not exactly far-fetched; it's the approach that NASA is currently taking with its Artemis program. The agency plans to build an astronaut outpost near the lunar south pole over the next decade or so, then use the information gained to send astronauts to Mars in the late 2030s or 2040s.

A moon or Mars base would be a huge breakthrough, of course, but it wouldn't be our species' first toehold in the final frontier. We've had one since November 2000, when the International Space Station — a partnership involving the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan — began hosting astronauts on a continuous basis. The orbiting lab has been occupied by rotating crews ever since.

Are we alone?

The U.S., and the world at large, will doubtless make great strides in space science over the coming years as well. Indeed, Newman thinks we will answer perhaps the biggest question of all — and doing so won't take anywhere close to 250 years.

"I think definitely we will have found [alien] life," she said. "I think we might find the evidence of life — and it's probably going to be past life — in the coming decade."

Her optimism is based on a number of data points. One is the example of our own planet: Life sprang up here about four billion years ago, not long after Earth had cooled enough to support oceans on its surface. That suggests it doesn't take a miracle for a world to go from habitable to inhabited.

And our solar system hosts multiple worlds that could be habitable. Multiple moons in the outer solar system — Saturn's Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa , for example — host big liquid-water oceans beneath their icy shells. Titan, Saturn's biggest satellite, hosts hydrocarbon lakes and streams on its surface and likely has a buried water ocean as well, raising the possibility that it could support two entirely different types of life.

Then there's Mars. Scientists know that the Red Planet had lots of surface water in the distant past, around four billion years ago. They see evidence of lakes and streams in many Martian locales, some of which have been explored by rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance . And both of those NASA robots have discovered complex organics , the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. Such molecules are not convincing evidence of life, but they're suggestive and intriguing. And humanity aims to follow up on such finds — possibly by astronauts working out of a research base. Mars is therefore the place where we'll likely make the big discovery, Newman said.

Brin was similarly optimistic, predicting that we'll find evidence of alien life in the next 20 years "if we reclaim our potential as an exploratory culture." Mars could be the place it's found, but he thinks the chances are perhaps even greater on Titan and "ice roof" worlds like Europa and Enceladus.

"I would bet 3 to 1 odds we'll find life under ice roofs," Brin said.

If multiple icy moons have life, and we can confirm that each one represents an independent origin, that would tell us something very profound: That life is exceedingly common across the universe .

"It would mean that every star you can see, except perhaps the blue supergiants, has life," Brin said.

The search for intelligent life

The first alien lifeforms we find will probably be microbes, because most life across the universe is likely microbial. That's an inference we can take from Earth, the only inhabited world we know of: Life here remained single-celled for about three billion years, suggesting it's tough to make the leap to more complex organisms.

Becoming a technological civilization is another big leap, one that humanity made just a few centuries ago. But given the vastness of the universe, in both time and space, life has probably made this leap in other places as well, and Brin is bullish on our chances of crossing paths with such aliens — provided we make the right choices in the near future.

“If we restore a dynamic and scientific civilization, we might get some answers to that within 20 to 30 years," he said.

Those answers might come close to home, in the form of long-hidden "lurker" probes sent to our solar system to monitor us on the sly. Or we might pull a world-changing SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) signal from the sky, one that could not have come from a natural, astrophysical source.

Given how young humans are technologically, however — we started launching things to space less than 70 years ago, after all — we probably won't get the drop on advanced aliens, if they're out there .

"Is it likely that intelligent life will actually find us before we find them? I think that's a pretty good probability," said Newman, who sits on the SETI Institute's board of directors.

And we have a chance to mature greatly as a spacefaring civilization over the next 250 years, Brin said. If everything goes well — we don't fall back into feudalism, for example, and we fully exploit the resources of the asteroid belt — the U.S., and humanity overall, we will likely be able to explore other star systems in a meaningful way. He cited laser sailing as a promising propulsion method, one that could send robots — and perhaps cybernetic versions of ourselves — very far afield on reasonable timescales.

"If we make a dynamic, enlightenment civilization, then it's 100% that we'll send somebody out there," Brin said.

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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 director Guillaume Broche is a huge fan of turn-based RPGs (heck, his own multi-award-winning Game of the Year is a stellar example of the genre) – and he won't have any of the chatter that they're "old school."

The lead discusses as much in a new episode of Video Game Club via Konbini on YouTube (below) after sharing why he loves the Persona – a series of some of the best JRPGs (turn-based, of course) out there.

"I don't get this whole 'turn-based is old school' thing," he says. "I've never bought into that; I've always thought it was total nonsense. A lot of people say that, but it's just a game system. I like board games, too."

Those count as turn-based, right? It's not just the fact that all of these games are turn-based that makes Broche enjoy them, however.

"It's not just the turn-based aspect that I like. It's also the part where you prepare your team beforehand," he explains.

As a fan of JRPGs (and consequently, turn-based games) myself, I get where he's coming from – a lot of effort goes into planning before combat sometimes, and it feels great when it pays off.

"It's just that when you come up with a plan, you get into battle, and everything goes pretty much the way you want it to, and you see that all the pieces you've been preparing for 50 hours of gameplay before all fit together perfectly and everything works out great, and you take down the boss right in front of you – it's incredibly satisfying because you feel smart," as Broche puts it.

Other genres just don't offer that same sort of satisfaction.

The director uses Devil May Cry as an example: "Whereas, in an action game like Devil May Cry, I don't feel particularly smart – I just feel like I have quick fingers and good dexterity. But in a turn-based game, it's more your brain that gets rewarded."

I mean… I get it. Both are good for different moods. Devil May Cry is undeniably a stellar series, but you can turn your brain off and enjoy some action-packed (and far less strategic) combat.

Broche concludes that in a turn-based game, "It's kind of like math. You put things together, you work out the equation, you get to the end – x = 2 – that's the right answer, you beat the boss, and you're happy. And I love that." Same, Mr. Broche. Same.

Elden Ring and Dark Souls inspired Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 director's approach to the RPG's story – "I didn't want to spoon-feed the player"

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Hyundai posted its best-ever June with 77K US sales, up 11 percent.

Electrified models made up a third of every Hyundai sold this year.

The Ioniq 5 climbed 9 percent even after its tax credit vanished.

It seems as though Hyundai just can’t stop winning. The Korean automaker has posted its best-ever June sales in the United States, a record first half of the year, and a jump in sales for its electrified models, all in the same breath.

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Through the first six months of 2026, Hyundai moved 450,568 vehicles in the US, a 3 percent bump over the 439,280 it managed across the same stretch last year. The second quarter did most of the heavy lifting, with sales reaching 245,180 and climbing 4 percent over Q2 of 2025. June kept the momentum going, rising 11 percent year-over-year to 77,555 units.

Read: The Ioniq 5 Is Selling Better Now Than When EV Credits Existed

Of every new Hyundai sold locally this year, 33 percent were electrified in some form. Behind that number sat record monthly sales for the Santa Fe HEV, up 12 percent, the Sonata HEV, up a staggering 246 percent, and the Tucson HEV, which saw a 14 percent gain. Those three, along with the Elantra HEV, held strong through the entire second quarter.

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BEV Sales

Hyundai

Currently, Hyundai sells three all-electric models in the United States. The Ioniq 5 remains the most important of the trio, with 20,730 sold through the first half of 2026, a surprising 9 percent jump from last year despite the federal EV tax credit getting axed back in September.

Second-quarter numbers were up too, rising 4 percent to 10,940 units. June was the exception, with the Ioniq 5 slipping 26 percent against the same month a year ago, but that comparison flatters last year more than it punishes this one. Much, if not all, of that 2025 spike traces back to the $7,500 tax credit’s looming expiration, which pushed buyers to lock in their purchases before the incentive vanished for good.

Hyundai

The Ioniq 9 is also performing strongly, though its year-over-year gains come with an asterisk since the model only went on sale in spring 2025. So far this year, 4,858 have been sold, with 857 finding homes in June alone, a 21 percent spike over the 711 that moved in June 2025.

Working against the gains from the Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 9 was a collapse in Ioniq 6 numbers, since every version has been discontinued in the US apart from the high-performance Ioniq 6 N. Year-to-date sales have dropped 80 percent to 1,241 units, and June saw just 38 leave dealer lots.

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Hyundai’s single strongest performer in June was the Tucson with 19,581 sold, 20 percent up from last June. Sales of the Sonata and Venue rose by 36 percent and 20 percent respectively, while the Palisade increased 23 percent and Elantra sales rose 22 percent. Things weren’t so pretty in June for the Kona, with sales falling 15 percent, and the Santa Cruz, which saw its sales drop 14 percent.

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Hyundai US Sales 2026

Model Jun-26 Jun-25 Diff. Q2-26 Q2-25 Diff. YTD-26 YTD-25 Diff.

Elantra 15,179 12,412 +22% 46,776 41,278 +13% 79,839 74,768 +7%

Ioniq 5 2,335 3,172 -26% 10,940 10,481 +4% 20,730 19,092 +9%

Ioniq 6 38 701 -95% 412 3,004 -86% 1,241 6,322 -80%

Ioniq 9 857 711 +21% 2,868 1,013 +183% 4,858 1,013 +380%

Kona 6,036 7,117 -15% 18,778 22,810 -18% 36,169 39,828 -9%

Palisade 11,336 9,253 +23% 35,749 30,962 +15% 63,453 57,197 +11%

Santa Cruz 1,767 2,048 -14% 5,437 7,573 -28% 9,981 14,221 -30%

Santa Fe 10,382 10,230 +1% 30,660 33,677 -9% 64,003 65,078 -2%

Sonata 6,949 5,095 +36% 22,510 17,189 +31% 37,057 32,986 +12%

Tucson 19,581 16,378 +20% 62,186 58,337 +7% 117,612 113,310 +4%

Venue 3,095 2,584 +20% 8,864 9,400 -6% 15,625 15,463 +1%

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This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the Supreme Court, the private jet, and AI on the TV.

JOSEPH: I used to cover court cases and judge’s opinions a lot more back at Motherboard. Sometimes it was in cases I broke news in, like that time the FBI secretly ran a dark web child abuse website . Other times it is big decisions that have wider impacts on privacy, surveillance, and government power.

Here’s big news regarding the latter sort of decision. I first saw news of it on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog . As it says at the start: “You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.”