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Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/GettyThe Thai royal family could be thrown into a succession crisis because the hot favorite to become the next king married an American woman, according to records reviewed by The Daily Beast. Marriage to a foreign citizen is a bar to taking the throne under Thai law.The couple also have two children, who are U.S. citizens, which would further complicate the succession plan as they would not be able to inherit the throne and thus hurl the scandal-hit Thai royal family into yet more uncertainty.The Daily Beast has learned that Vacharaesorn Vivacharawongse, nicknamed Vach (pronounced ‘Vatch’), is being pursued for $94,000 in unpaid credit card charges by American Express and is being sued for 2.55 million Canadian dollars (U.S. $1.88 million) in a dispute with a law firm.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyWelcome to Trail Mix, your 2024 election sanity guide. See something interesting on the trail? Email me at [email protected]. To get Trail Mix in your inbox, subscribe here for free.This week, we revisit 2024’s biggest grudge that won’t go away. Plus, in vitro fertilization politics, and a look at why Trump keeps underperforming his polling numbers.RON HIS WAY OUTRead more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyListen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.The New Abnormal hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy certainly won’t miss Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) when he’s gone from the chamber—and the headlines—though that doesn’t mean that they’re excited about who will eventually step up to fill his shoes.“If the best thing you can say about him is, ‘Well, there are worse people,’ that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement—and that’s the best I can do for the guy,” Levy said on this week’s episode. “My fear is that he’s gonna go away and then we’re gonna get that extreme MAGA awfulness. But even all that said, I cannot imagine for a minute looking back on the good old days of Mitch McConnell.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Larry Horricks / NetflixFrom Gravity and Interstellar to The Martian, Ad Astra, and High Life, the sad-astronaut sci-fi movie has lately become a subgenre unto itself, and Johan Renck’s Spaceman now joins its weepy ranks. A tediously maudlin saga about a Czech cosmonaut on a mission to the far reaches of the galaxy who really misses his wife and can’t get over his dad’s mistakes—and finds a way to cope with both courtesy of an unexpected new alien pal—it’s a star vehicle for Adam Sandler that strives for stratospheric emotional heights and yet proves so self-seriously somber and saccharine that it plays like a leaden parody.Jakub (Sandler) moves about his spaceship with sunken cheeks, exhausted body language and a haggard look in his eyes. This is nominally due to the fact that his toilet won’t stop making horrible noises that are keeping him up at night and slowly driving him insane. Mostly, though, it’s because he’s sad. In case this wasn’t immediately obvious, Chernobyl director Renck’s film (on Netflix March 1), adapted from Jaroslav Kalfař’s book, has Jakub make a PR phone call down to Earth, during which a young sixth-grader tells him that she read that he’s “the loneliest man in the world.” Jakub denies this but he’s unconvincing, and his spirits aren’t lifted by the notion that he’s on the cusp of saving the universe from a big purple mass of particles on the outskirts of Jupiter dubbed the Chopra Cloud that he’s been sent to investigate, all by himself, on a year-long solo mission.Five-hundred million kilometers from home, Jakub’s only real contact is with Peter (The Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar), his mission control buddy, whose job it is to keep Jakub in good mental and physical shape. Alas, that’s difficult because Jakub is so sad, and the present cause of his sadness is his inability to use his video phone to reach his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan). Peter makes excuses about why Jakub can’t connect with his spouse but Spaceman makes clear that it’s because Lenka, who is pregnant, is also sad, and her sadness has to do with her husband. Having once again been abandoned by Jakub, Lenka is akin to the loneliest woman in the world, and as her cosmonaut baby daddy approaches Chopra Cloud, she sends him a recorded message notifying him that she’s ending their marriage. Yet unfortunately for her, Jakub’s boss (Isabella Rossellini) blocks that transmission from getting to the cosmonaut because she recognizes that he’s already sad enough and making him sadder still will simply further jeopardize their venture.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/SquareEnixTo say Final Fantasy VII has immense staying power would be the understatement of the century. Despite coming out in 1997 on the original PlayStation, the game has stayed culturally relevant on an international scale for nearly three decades—so much so, developer Square Enix rebooted the game into an epic-scale series slated to have three installments. While the second, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, released Feb. 29 on PlayStation 5, the pre-release excitement was already so overwhelming that the game even made the front page of the New York Times’ website (albeit for controversial reasons).You could point to so many different reasons as to why Final Fantasy VII has such staying power. The horror of greedy corporations and politicians’ destruction of the planet at the story’s heart is even more resonant now than it was then. You could also point to how Nobuo’s Uematsu’s score is among the best in gaming history; the enthralling twists and turns of its epic story; to the sprawling map populated with fascinating towns; or the incredible cast of well-fleshed-out, complex characters, which include a refreshing number of badass ladies. Or you could say it’s because most of those characters are super hot. To play Final Fantasy VII is to watch all those hot people (plus a stuffed cat and a more hardcore version of Simba) have very fraught emotional experiences around each other. It’s the perfect equation for fireworks among the fandom. Everyone has their ships, but in particular, the sexual tension between our protagonist, Cloud Strife—the most fraught of all—and his mortal enemy, Sephiroth, is truly a popcorn-worthy spectator sport.At the outset of Final Fantasy VII, Cloud is an ex-member of an elite group called SOLDIER, who are scientifically doped-up to become super-soldiers. Sephiroth was the greatest of all members of SOLDIER, someone Cloud both looked up to and called a friend, until Sephiroth discovered the truth of his identity and went rogue. And by “went rogue,” I mean, “decided that everyone on the planet except him and the remains of his mom should die.” Cloud therefore feels personally betrayed by Sephiroth, and therefore hates him very much.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty ImagesDonald Trump is once again asking a federal judge to delay the trial over his alleged mishandling of classified documents until after the 2024 presidential election—but, if he must, he can stomach an Aug. 12 start date.The surprise admission by the former president’s lawyers comes as a response to a request by special counsel Jack Smith’s office to start the trial on July 8. The dueling proposals were filed Thursday evening ahead of a Friday hearing by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Fort Pierce, Florida, where she is widely expected to wipe the previously slated May 20 start date off the schedule.That said, Trump’s attorneys spent the vast majority of their 8-page filing arguing that the former president could not possibly be expected to get a fair trial this calendar year, given his status “as the presumptive Republican nominee and President Biden’s chief political rival.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersRep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Hunter Biden had a tense exchange Wednesday during the latter’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee, with the president’s son taking issue with Gaetz’s line of questioning.In the closed-door session, Biden called the impeachment probe into his father a “partisan political pursuit” being pushed by “MAGA-motivated conspiracies,” according to a transcript released by the committee Thursday.Gaetz, a frequent defender of former President Donald Trump, questioned Biden about serving on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Gaetz wanted to know if Biden, a recovering addict, was “on drugs” while on the board.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Nathan Howard/ReutersThe House and Senate both voted to pass yet another stopgap funding measure Thursday, staving off the threat of a looming government shutdown until at least next month while buying themselves more time to hash out a deal that would cover the full year.Washington is now looking at a partial shutdown that would take effect March 8 if lawmakers cannot come to another agreement to fund the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Interior, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development—with a much larger chunk of the federal government set to shutter on March 22 if a long-term deal does not materialize.Hardline Republicans in the House spent much of Thursday grousing after Speaker Mike Johnson cut a deal with his counterparts in the Senate and White House to advance the measure, which resembles a similar deal that led to Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s ouster from the speakership late last year.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Peacock(Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Traitors Season 2, Episode 10.)Alas, poor Peter Weber. We knew him, we watched him steadfastly hunt down the Traitors in Alan Cumming’s castle, and now, he is gone.We all knew that Pilot Pete was probably going home after last week’s The Traitors cliffhanger, but nonetheless, this week’s confirmation hit the castle pretty hard. Ever the martyr, Peter told his fellow players “I tried to save you guys” as he got up from the roundtable to say his goodbye during Thursday’s episode while a glum look spread across his face. Meanwhile, former Real Housewives star Phaedra Parks—who had also been on the line alongside him—looked as bitterly nonchalant as ever. Sadly for her many, many fans, she was not long for this world either.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / GettyDonald Trump is working hard to get an appeal of the $464 million judgment levied against him for committing bank fraud. But if he does fork over the cash and get that appeal, he may find that it doesn’t take the higher courts long to swat it down.That’s because the 92-page opinion issued by New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur F. Engoron was tailor-made to withstand appeal—and give the state’s First Judicial Department a roadmap to uphold the decision.“The reason why this opinion is so long and so specific is to emphasize to the appellate court how much care the judge took in issuing this decision,” said Jennifer B. Arlin, an expert on appeals who teaches legal writing at Brooklyn Law School.Read more at The Daily Beast.