Numlock News: October 29, 2025 • Bonsly, Toxin, Doctor Who

Oct 29, 2025

Disney

Disney is bowing out of a deal to produce the British icon Doctor Who with the BBC after partnering on the project for two seasons. On paper, this collab made a ton of sense given the Mouse’s return on investment with Star Wars: decades of history, an army of nerds delighted to spend their pounds on the product, something about a Christmas Special, the estate of Peter Cushing being keen to hear your ideas and you being able to staff the whole project with a couple of cleverly-laid snares outside of RADA and pubs in Cardiff. But alas, this new series was just too weird for Disney, and didn’t seem to resonate as they’d hoped on Disney+. With Disney’s backing, the show had a budget of £10 million (US$13.3 million) per episode, but it seems like that wasn’t translating into the U.S. viewership as hoped.

Max Goldbart, Deadline

Bonsly Stuff

While many people who are trying to collect valuable Pokémon cards would go through the typical steps of finding popular or rare cards and amassing a collection consistent with the evolving tastes of the market, a new strategy has emerged from one collector named Emily Hopkins. She has set her sights on collecting the Bonsly #71 card included in the Pokémon TCG: Diamond & Pearl expansion release in 2007. Bonsly, which is a bonsai-inspired Pokémon that evolves into Sudowoodo, appears to be in a somewhat compromising position in the card’s art to those with a sufficiently en-guttered mind. The card is goofy, if not particularly interesting, to collectors. That is, until Hopkins made her play: she has amassed 305 Bonsly cards, plus another 20 reverse holographic versions, plus a PSA 6-graded reverse holographic of Bonsly. By essentially buying up a common card until it becomes rare, and then going viral about the quest on TikTok, the price of a Bonsly has indeed spiked. An ungraded Bonsly 71 went for $2.59 as of the beginning of the year, and has spiked to an average $10.21 as of October, and is going up to $14.99.

Patricia Hernandez, Polygon and Price Charting

C919

COMAC is the state-owned aircraft manufacturer in China, and it’s angling to compete with the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320 with the C919 jet. One issue for the C919 is the volatile trade policies that are currently complicating the relationship between the United States and its allies and China. It’s really making it hard to build that airplane. The C919 has 48 major suppliers in the United States, 26 suppliers in Europe and just 14 in China. Deliveries have been bad; despite making its maiden commercial flight in 2023, COMAC delivered just 13 C919s to Chinese carriers last year. Despite hopes of ramping up delivery to 30 jets in 2025, only seven jets have been delivered as of October. China is projected to need 9,570 new passenger aircraft from 2025 to 2044, 80 percent of them single-aisle jets.

Chan Ho-Him, The Associated Press

Phil

A bankruptcy court has ruled against television personality Dr. Phil McGraw in his quest to keep his company’s bankruptcy in Chapter 11 and has moved instead to a Chapter 7 liquidation. This will mean that a trustee will sell Merit Street for parts rather than McGraw’s preferred course of action. The judge cited in his decision incriminating text messages that had been deleted by McGraw, one that indicated a plan to game the bankruptcy and pay favored creditors before others. Merit Street is suing Trinity Broadcasting for breach of contract regarding a $500 million 10-year agreement in exchange for 160 new episodes of Phil’s show. Undeterred, Dr. Phil is launching an entirely new entity called Envoy Media.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

Bones And All

At fast food restaurants, menu listings for boneless wings, tenders and other portions have increased by 29 percent over the past four years. Over that same period of time, bone-in fried chicken meals have dropped precipitously by 72 percent. One reason for this is that ever since the pandemic, more people seem to be eating in their cars, as the latest data from Circana indicates that 26 percent of fast food orders are consumed in a customer’s vehicle. All this adds up to bad news for KFC, as upstart rivals literally eat the company’s lunch. It seems the bowl of bone-in fried chicken that defined KFC is going out of style.

Heather Haddon and Christopher Kuo, The Wall Street Journal

Snow

We are just a few months away from the Winter Olympics, which are once again taking place in Italy, with the Milan-Cortina games using the mountains of the Alps for skiing events. This comes after three consecutive Winter Games that were located in traditionally non-ski areas (Sochi, PyeongChang and Beijing) that required extensive use of artificial snow. However, despite the natural snow on the alpine slopes, these games will still require the artificially-produced powder. All told, the expectation is that they will need to make 2.4 million cubic meters of artificial snow, requiring 948,000 cubic meters of water.

Ella Ide and Jérôme Rasetti, Agence France-Presse

Poison

Poison is an arms race in the animal and plant kingdom, as species evolve to produce compounds that are poisonous to species that might eat them. All the while, the eaters will evolve to develop resistance to the poisons. The development of a toxic defense for a single species can have fascinating impacts on an entire food chain. For instance, milkweed plants evolved to produce glycosides that interfere with proteins, deterring insects from eating them. In turn, some insects have developed sodium-potassium pumps that glycoside cannot in turn bind to, and some monarch caterpillars now nick the veins of milkweed plants to drain the toxin before eating them. The coolest part, though, is that one study has subsequently found four animals, including the black-headed grosbeak bird, that have evolved to tolerate cardiac glycosides because they eat monarch butterflies, which apparently retained the evolutionary tolerancy of their younger caterpillar forms. These birds evolved this resistance despite living thousands of miles away from the prairie where the toxic milkweeds grow.

Katarina Zimmer, Knowable Magazine

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