NOC Week in Review #13: 9/26-10/2/2026

This week, Insomniac let Logan loose, Forgotten Island kept the conversation going, Star Trek turned 60 on the red carpet, and Dark Matter took my Pearl Jam bit to heart. Here’s everything you might’ve missed on the NOC.

On the gaming beat, Dominic spent a full playthrough with Insomniac’s Wolverine and came away convinced it does for the X-Men what the studio’s Spider-Man games did before it: a gore-heavy brawler anchored by a genuinely haunted story about grief, loss, and finding a reason to keep coming back to life.

Forgotten Island kept dominating the conversation this week too. Lauren, Mike, Michael, and Swara got together for a spoiler-filled roundtable on DreamWorks’ latest, while Mike also sat down with composer Nathan Matthew David to talk scoring the film — and how he drew on his own Filipino heritage, plus a research trip back to the Philippines, to blend traditional folk music with modern synth-pop for the soundtrack.

On the red carpet in Los Angeles, Eli caught the premiere of The Sixty-Year Mission: How Star Trek Changed Television and the World, talking with William Shatner, Terry Farrell, Nana Visitor, John de Lancie, and more about six decades of Star Trek’s legacy — and why the franchise still matters.

And closing out the week, the Dark Matter recaps hit episode 6 — this time a rare one-two punch, since the show’s own cold open needle-dropped Pearl Jam’s “Present Tense” before I got to my own pick off the Dark Matter album, “Waiting for Stevie.” Both songs end up doing some real emotional lifting as Daniela searches for herself at a cabin, Jason starts chasing a life he never had, and Blair and Leighton dig up something big underground.

More importantly, Dark Matter creator Blake Crouch seems fully aware of my Pearl Jam bit because he commented the following on our Instagram post about the recap:

So we know at least one person is reading our Dark Matter/Pearl Jam recaps. Good thing it’s the show creator/original author. If you want to join him, click on the recap link above and catch up!

That covers this stretch at the NOC — same time next Friday.

— Keith

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