Roger Stern: The Writer Who Reshaped Spider-Man, the Avengers, Superman, and Modern Superhero Cinema

Key contributions

Character and team creation cards

Comic to screen: connection tested scene by scene

LASO stands for Legendary All Skulls On. For twenty years it was an honour system, a challenge players agreed to impose on themselves because the games had no way of checking. Halo: Campaign Evolved is the first entry to make it a real, selectable mode with a real reward attached, and the reward is called MYTHIC.

This guide covers both routes to it. The first is the intended one, which is genuinely punishing and worth understanding on its own terms. The second is the exploit the achievement-hunting community found within days of launch, which involves cranking the custom difficulty modifiers to their ceiling and using a checkpoint trick to force the tracker to register progress it should be refusing. If you are working through the collectibles first, the companion piece is the full skull location guide for Campaign Evolved, because neither route opens until you have found the right seventeen.

The Pillar of Autumn is both the first mission of a legitimate LASO run and the mission the exploit sends you back to.

01 // What MYTHIC actually asks for

Halo Support is unusually direct about the requirements. LASO in Campaign Evolved is Legendary difficulty plus seventeen specific skulls, and the mode does not appear in the menu at all until you have discovered those seventeen in the campaign. Once unlocked, it becomes selectable from the standard Campaign and Campaign Remix menus.

Complete the campaign in that state and you receive MYTHIC: fifty Gamerscore on Xbox, a Steam achievement on PC, or a Gold trophy on PlayStation. The same article states plainly that using custom difficulty modifiers will prevent the reward from unlocking. Hold that sentence in mind, because the entire second half of this guide is about the fact that it is not currently true.

Skulls are found by ear. Each one emits a faint ambient sound that grows louder as you approach, and they are claimed with the Interact or Reload input, which is X on Xbox, Square on PlayStation, and E on keyboard. The sensible order of operations is to sweep them on Easy during a normal story run, then decide which of the two routes below you want.

02 // The seventeen skulls and what each one does to you

Some of these are cosmetic. Several of them rewrite how the game is played. It is worth reading the list as a system rather than a checklist, because the difficulty comes from how the effects interact.

The last two are atmosphere rather than obstacle. Everything above them is load-bearing.

03 // Running it legitimately

Three skulls define the experience, and understanding why is more useful than a mission-by-mission walkthrough.

Principles that actually carry a run

• Treat melee as a resource, not an attack. Before you commit to an encounter, identify the enemy you intend to punch for shields and the route to reach it. If there is no safe melee target, you are not ready to enter the fight.
• Weaponise Grunt Funeral and Boom together. Grunts detonate on death and the blast radius is doubled, so a single kill in a tight cluster can clear an entire group. The same mechanic works in reverse, so never melee a Grunt while an Elite has you pinned in close quarters.
• Never partially reload. Famine halves the ammunition in dropped weapons and Johnny Ammo Seed dumps whatever is left in the clip when you reload. Fire magazines dry, and treat every plasma weapon as disposable rather than something to conserve.
• Accept that you cannot retreat quickly. Speed Limit disables sprint, so a bad commitment cannot be walked back. Scout before entering open ground and know where the next piece of cover is before you leave the current one.
• Learn the audio. Fog removes the motion tracker and Malfunction can remove your shield bar or ammunition counter after a respawn. Positional sound and memorised patrol patterns replace the HUD.
• Drive past what you can. Vehicle sections are frequently safer at speed than cleared on foot. The Library and Keyes are where most legitimate attempts collapse, so bank your progress carefully before either.

If it has been a while since you played through the original campaign, the structural refresher is the in-game events of Halo: Combat Evolved, which lays out the shape of the ten remade missions in story order rather than as a mission list.

04 // The cheese method

The exploit works because two systems in the game disagree. Campaign Evolved allows custom difficulty modifiers, and the interface states clearly that active modifiers block achievement progress. In practice, mission completion still gets written to your LASO progress with a modifier preset running. The achievement check and the progress tracker are not reading the same value.

The preset

The modifier panel is reached by pressing X on the difficulty selection screen. The values documented by the community are:

Note what those numbers do to the three skulls that define LASO. Damage Resistance at twenty times normal makes Iron almost irrelevant, because you are extremely difficult to kill in the first place. The Shield Recharge boost combined with tripled melee damage means Black Eye stops being a constraint, since a single punch restores you and kills most things outright. Bottomless Clip neutralises Famine and Johnny Ammo Seed simultaneously, because ammunition economy no longer exists. Eye Patch and Speed Limit remain, but they are inconveniences rather than threats when nothing can meaningfully hurt you.

The procedure

1. Collect all seventeen LASO skulls. There is no shortcut here, because Play LASO does not appear in the menu until you have them, and the exploit begins from inside that mode. Gather them on Easy during a normal run.
2. Build the preset above in the difficulty modifiers panel and set it as the active preset.
3. Back out and choose Play LASO from the campaign menu. Confirm the active skull count reads seventeen alongside the Legendary icon, which means the run is being counted as LASO.
4. Clear the mission with the preset still active. Check the MYTHIC tracker afterwards. Clearing The Pillar of Autumn and grabbing the first skull moves it to roughly seven per cent, which confirms progress is recording.
5. If the tracker stalls, run the checkpoint trick. Set the modifier preset to None, load The Pillar of Autumn on the LASO playlist, collect the Speed Limit skull in the first room, wait for the checkpoint to register, then quit. That forces the tracker to update. Switch the preset back on and continue.
6. Repeat across all thirteen missions. The ten main missions carry the tracker to approximately seventy-six per cent. The three Operation: METEORITE bonus missions sit in their own menu and finish the run to one hundred.

05 // Which route is worth your time

There is a reasonable argument on both sides, and it is not really about difficulty. A legitimate LASO run is one of the most demanding things in modern Halo, and finishing it teaches you the combat sandbox in a way no other mode does. Black Eye in particular forces a genuine reconsideration of how Halo encounters are structured, because it removes the mechanic the entire series is built on.

The counter-argument is that MYTHIC is worth fifty Gamerscore, which is the same as several trivial collectible achievements, and that the reward has never been proportionate to the effort. That complaint dates back to the LASO achievements in The Master Chief Collection and it has not gone away.

What the exploit does not do is give you the experience. If you use it, you will have the trophy and no idea what a LASO Library run feels like. That may be exactly the trade you want, particularly if you are cleaning up a completion list rather than chasing a challenge.

Where this sits in the wider Halo picture

The skull system began in Halo 2 as a hidden Easter egg that changed the rules, and it grew into one of the franchise's defining replay features. Making LASO an official mode with an achievement attached is the logical endpoint of that twenty-year drift from secret to institution, and it is fitting that the first game to formalise it also shipped with a hole in the enforcement.

For the broader context of the remake and why the new Operation: METEORITE material sits before the original ring campaign rather than over it, see the piece on Campaign Evolved and the return to Alpha Halo. If you want the route through the rest of the series, Halo in chronological video-game order covers the playable spine from Reach to Infinite, and the full Astromech Halo archive gathers the lore, the music, and the Forerunner material in one place.

In the third act of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the Hulk has Spider-Man by the throat. Peter has already failed to stop him by force. The gamma inhibitor chip will not adhere to Hulk's skin and the webbing does not hold him. What ends the fight is Peter using his real name and telling the Hulk they are friends. The Hulk releases him, drops from the tower, and reverts to Bruce Banner.

The scene has caused a lot of confusion, most of it produced by three things being glossed over: which version of the Hulk is present, what Jean Grey did to produce him, and what that version could plausibly know about a man Doctor Strange's spell removed from every memory on Earth.

Which Hulk Peter Is Fighting

The MCU has run four configurations of Bruce Banner. The distinction matters here because the film uses it as a plot mechanism rather than as background. The full sequence is set out in our chronological guide to every Hulk appearance in the MCU.

When the inhibitor fails, Banner does not revert to the lucid Professor Hulk. He reverts past that stage to the 2008 configuration. The entity holding Peter is therefore a version of the character that, on its own record, has never met Peter Parker.

The 2008 configuration. This is the version Peter faces, not the Professor Hulk of Endgame.

What Jean Grey Did

Jean is not controlling the Hulk during the fight. Her telepathic interference breaks Banner's control of the inhibitor, and the rampage that follows is the Hulk acting on his own. She supplies the trigger, not the direction.

This is consistent with her role across the film. Jean is searching for answers about her sister's death inside Department of Damage Control experiments, and her method throughout is to enter minds and alter what she finds there. Structurally the film stacks one act of mind-alteration on another: Strange's spell, then Jean's possessions, then the attempt on Banner. The Hulk is where the pattern fails. Jean can break Banner's control and cannot reach what is beneath it.

We covered the reveal itself in our piece on which X-Men character Sadie Sink turns out to be playing. With mutants now formally in the MCU, the chronological ordering of the X-Men films becomes relevant to the Spider-Man material for the first time.

The Name Peter Uses at ESU

Earlier in the film Peter poses as a student, approaches Banner after a lecture, and asks for advice about the changes in his biology. Banner explains the inhibitor, which gives Peter the idea for his own chip. During that conversation Peter introduces himself as Ned.

The detail is more important than it first appears. Peter does not use a false name to protect his identity, because his real name no longer identifies him to anyone. He uses one because the real name is inert. He had already introduced himself under an alias at MJ and Ned's party earlier in the film, to no effect. The spell has not only erased the memory, it has made the word useless.

Whether Banner and Peter Had Ever Met

Barely. Peter and Bruce were both present at the final battle of Endgame and both attended Tony Stark's funeral. They have no scene together before the ESU lecture hall, and at the lecture hall Peter was calling himself Ned. When Peter tells the Hulk they are friends, the accurate reading is that they are allies rather than companions. Their positions relative to one another are laid out in our complete chronological guide to the MCU and in the case for the Avengers films as the franchise's structural spine.

There is no off-screen friendship, and the film does not claim one. What the record does contain is asymmetrical. Professor Hulk wore the Nano Gauntlet and burned his arm reversing the Snap, and Peter Parker was among those restored. The Hulk's investment in Peter is not conversational history. It is that he is one of the people the Hulk brought back. The film does not state this, and it is offered here as a reading rather than a confirmed intention.

Why the Spell Does Not Reach the Hulk

Strange's spell removes a fact from a mind. Banner is a scientist and holds his knowledge in exactly the form the spell targets, so the edit is clean. He meets Peter in a lecture hall and sees a stranger. The film establishes this deliberately, so that the exception later has weight.

Professor Hulk was a merge rather than a suppression. Throughout the Endgame period the Hulk was present for everything Banner experienced, observing from within the shared body. What he retained from the battle and the funeral was not stored as information, because he does not store information that way.

This has precedent in the comics, where the Hulk is repeatedly shown to resist reality alteration and magical effects. The specific source is Tom Taylor's Immortal Hulk: Great Power, in which Loki swaps Hulk and Peter Parker into each other's bodies, a reality-altering memory wipe closes the story, and the Hulk retains the memory while Banner does not. Brand New Day reproduces that structure with higher stakes.

Why the Scene Is Resolved This Way

The film's supporting cast is organised around a single problem, which we examined at length in our reading of the themes running through Brand New Day. Frank Castle shows what two decades of unchecked isolation produces. Jean's grief has become a means of entering other people. Banner has built a career around a self he cannot be trusted to occupy. Peter has surveillance coverage of the entire city and no personal contact with anyone.

Peter's own arachnid biology is also asserting itself under stress. His stated fear is not defeat but that the spider will complete what the spell began, leaving nothing human to check it.

A resolution by force would have framed the Hulk as a technical problem with a technical solution, and Peter's question about himself would have gone unanswered. Instead the least human configuration of the character, with no memory of Peter Parker and under no external control, responds to a name. The film's position is that the human element survives beneath every other system failure, which is the answer Peter needs and does not realise he has been given.

The recognition is also limited in a way worth stating plainly. It comes from something that cannot speak, is not in control of itself, never properly met him, and will not reliably retain the encounter. It lasts a few seconds and ends with the Hulk falling from the building. Peter gains no ally and no restored relationship. What he gains is evidence that his name still exists somewhere outside his own head, which is the first such evidence in four years.

Common Questions

Why did the Hulk stop before killing Peter Parker?

Peter told him his real name and said they were friends, and the Hulk recognised it. Force had already failed, since the inhibitor chip would not adhere to his skin and the webbing did not hold. Recognition was the only remaining option and the only one that worked.

Which version of the Hulk appears in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?

The original Savage Hulk. Banner spends the film in human form using a gamma inhibitor, and when that control breaks he reverts past Professor Hulk to the older, non-verbal, uncontrolled version. The progression is mapped in our Hulk MCU chronology.

Does this mean Doctor Strange's spell is broken?

No. Nothing is undone and Peter remains anonymous at the end of the film. The Hulk is an exception rather than a failure of the spell, because the spell removes knowledge held in a mind and the Hulk does not hold it that way.

Had Bruce Banner and Peter Parker met before?

Only in passing. Both were at the final battle of Endgame and at Tony Stark's funeral, which is the entire record before Brand New Day. Their relative positions across the franchise are set out in our complete cinematic history of Spider-Man.

Is the scene based on a comic?

It draws on Tom Taylor's Immortal Hulk: Great Power, which ends with a reality-altering memory wipe that Banner forgets and the Hulk retains.

On choosing a screening, we also examined why the V-Max presentation is not what it claims to be.

The most important thing that happens in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is not the fight. It is the moment after it - a rooftop rifle crack, a body in the wrong place, and a girl who has spent the entire film taking people over deciding, for the first time, to hold someone together instead. 

Frank Castle pulls the trigger on Jean Grey.

Peter Parker steps into the round and should be dead instantly. 

Jean, whose power until that night had mostly been a way of borrowing other people's bodies, reaches into Peter's and breathes for him.

That single beat carries an enormous amount of freight. 

It resolves Peter's arc, it converts the film's antagonist into its next protagonist, and it functions as the MCU's formal ignition point for the Mutant Saga. 

It is also, quietly, the most faithful thing the film does to the comics - not in plot, but in mechanism. To see why, you have to walk the whole road that leads to the shot.

Castle and Parker are not rivals in this film so much as two answers to the same question: what do you do with a person who has become dangerous?

The lead-up: a sister, a lab, and a word that meant nothing

Jean Grey does not enter this story as a hero, or even as a villain in the usual sense. She enters it as someone looking for a missing person. Her sister Sara was taken by the Department of Damage Control to be studied — a psychic asset to be measured, mapped and, as it turns out, used up. Before she died, Sara pushed one last thing into Jean's head: V-Max.

The film lets that phrase behave like a MacGuffin for most of its runtime. A codename. A weapon. A place. Jean chases it, and we chase it with her. The reveal is that it was never a clue at all: it was a peeling maintenance label on an air vent — VENT MAX — the last object Sara's eyes registered before the tests killed her. A dying transmission stripped of context. Not a map, just a fact. (I've written separately on why V-Max is emphatically not the Maltese Falcon, and why that refusal is the smartest structural choice in the film.)

This matters enormously for what happens on that rooftop later, because it establishes the emotional physics of the character. Jean's arc is not powered by ambition. It is powered by a search that ends in confirmation of a death she was too late to prevent. Everything she does afterwards is grief looking for somewhere to put itself.

How Jean's powers actually work — before the escalation

The film is careful, and unusually disciplined, about establishing rules before it breaks them. Jean's baseline ability is not the telekinesis-and-fire package that most audiences associate with the name. It is mind-jumping: she can push her consciousness into another person, drive their body, and leave them blacked out with no memory of the interval. She can chain those jumps in rapid succession within a radius of roughly ten metres, which reads on screen as a kind of teleportation — she vanishes from one body and arrives in the next.

Two constraints are established early and both pay off later. First, the range is short. Second, genetically altered bodies fight back: Spider-Man and the Hulk can both eject her, because whatever the spider and the gamma did to them, it made their neurology non-standard. Peter is, in the film's own logic, the one person she cannot simply take. That is precisely why he is the one person she can eventually save.

The escalation of Jean Gray's mutant power: what Damage Control unlocked

Bill Metzger's experiments are the film's engine of transformation, and the film is honest about the ugliness of that. Metzger notes, clinically, that Jean's telepathy exceeds Sara's. The testing that killed one sister is what breaks the ceiling on the other. Trauma plus intervention equals emergence -  a departure from the comics, where Jean grows up in a stable Westchester household, and a deliberate one. Jean is built from damage rather than from privilege.

What emerges is a different order of mutant. Her mind-control range goes from roughly ten metres to roughly a kilometre. She stops jumping between individuals and starts operating crowds -  a squad of Hand ninjas moving in impossible unison, then thousands of New Yorkers frozen mid-step across a vast chunk of Manhattan. Precise telekinesis arrives alongside it. She is no longer a person with a trick; she is a person with a field of effect.

This is what the comics mean by Omega-level. The term is not a power ranking in the arcade sense — it describes a mutant whose ability has no inherent upper limit, whose only ceiling is their own capacity to survive channelling it. Most mutants have a natural maximum baked into their biology. An Omega has a horizon instead. Jean holding a square kilometre of civilians in stasis is not "very strong telepathy"; it is telepathy with the lid taken off, and the film shoots it that way — not as a spectacle of destruction but as an eerie, city-wide stillness. If you want the fuller taxonomy of how the mutant metaphor has been handled across the franchise's various continuities, the X-Men film timeline is a useful map of where the idea has and hasn't been allowed to breathe.

The rooftop: two philosophies, one target

By the time the film reaches its climax, Jean is standing in Metzger's lab with the city in her grip and the man who killed her sister in front of her, and she is preparing to end him telekinetically. She is, by any reasonable threat assessment, a mass-casualty event in progress.

Two people respond to that assessment. Peter walks in and offers her the one thing she has not had since Sara died — contact. He goes into her mind, and what he brings with him is Aunt May: not an argument, not a restraint, a memory of being loved by someone who is gone. It lands. Jean's grip on the city loosens.

Frank Castle, several hundred metres away, has already reached a different conclusion. Castle's entire presentation in this film is a study in severed connection — a man whose home is booby-trapped so that nobody can get in, physically enacting what he has done emotionally. He has one method for a threat like Jean, and it is a scoped rifle. The genuinely interesting thing is that Castle is not written as wrong, exactly. On the evidence available to him, he is applying sound logic. He simply cannot see the variable Peter is working with, because he amputated his own access to it years ago. This is the same fault line the film draws through Banner, Yelena and Peter himself — grief, identity and isolation, and Castle is its furthest extreme.

Peter's spider-sense fires. He gets in the way. The bullet meant to end the film's antagonist goes into its protagonist instead.

How Jean saves the life of a dead Peter Parker

Here is the mechanism, because it is worth being precise about it. Peter is dying of a gunshot wound. Jean does not heal him — she has never had a healing power and the film does not invent one. What she does is keep a psychic connection open, put her mind inside his body, and run it. She breathes for him. She holds the autonomic functions that his own body is losing, and she keeps holding them while she flees the scene, maintaining that link at distance until he can be found and taken to hospital, where he is treated without his identity being exposed.

It is the same power we have watched her abuse for two hours, pointed the other way. The film has spent its runtime teaching us to read mind-jumping as a violation — a theft of agency, a person reduced to a vehicle. In the last ten minutes it shows the identical technique used as an act of care, and asks whether the power was ever the problem. That is a properly good piece of screenwriting: the redemption is not tacked on, it is the same verb in a different sentence.

And it is a near-direct lift of Jean's comics origin, structurally if not literally. In the source material, Jean's telepathy first detonates when her childhood friend Annie Richardson is struck by a car; Jean psychically links to her and experiences her death from the inside. The power arrives, in other words, as an involuntary act of communion with someone dying. Brand New Day takes that seed and gives it agency: this time she does not just feel someone die, she refuses to let it happen. The origin has been converted from a wound into a choice.

Mutant, not miracle: what the film is actually establishing

It is worth stating plainly what this sequence does at a franchise level. It establishes, on screen and without hedging, that Jean Grey is a mutant — born with the X-gene, not irradiated or engineered into her abilities. Metzger's experiments amplified something already present; they did not create it. Sara had it too. That distinction is the entire architecture of the X-Men premise: mutation is inheritance, not accident, which is why it reads as identity rather than injury and why it has always carried the metaphorical weight it does.

It also establishes what a state actor does with that knowledge. Metzger escapes the film alive, carrying two things: a working understanding of the inhibitor technology used against Spider-Man, and a fully formed idea about experimenting on mutants to manufacture super-soldiers. That is not a loose thread. That is the ideological seed of every anti-mutant program the comics have ever run, from Weapon X to the Sentinel program, planted in the MCU by a bureaucrat with a clipboard rather than a supervillain with a plan. Readers who have followed how earlier films handled the persecution-and-response cycle will recognise the shape of it immediately.

Becoming an X-Man — and the shadow behind it

Jean leaves the film a fugitive, powerful beyond measurement, grieving, and now — crucially — carrying proof that she is capable of using what she has to preserve rather than dominate. That is the exact psychological position from which someone becomes an X-Man. The team has never been a reward for good behaviour; it is a structure built for people who are dangerous and want help not being. Charles Xavier's pitch has always been less "join us and fight" than "you are not the worst thing you have done, and you do not have to be alone with this." Jean, at the end of Brand New Day, is precisely the person that offer is designed for. Sadie Sink's casting and the shape of the role were flagged early — I covered exactly which X-Man Sink was playing before the film landed, and the ending confirms the scale of the intent: this is the on-ramp to Schreier's 2028 X-Men.

The shadow, of course, is Phoenix. Every element required for the Dark Phoenix Saga is now on the board: a mutant with no natural ceiling, a formative trauma involving experimentation and a dead sister, a demonstrated willingness to hold a city hostage for personal reasons, and a first taste of using that power for good. The comics version escalates from cosmic elevation to the destruction of a star system and ends in self-sacrifice. Two previous film franchises have attempted it and both fumbled, largely because they hadn't done this groundwork — they wanted the fall without building the height. This time the height is being built first, carefully, and in someone else's movie. If you want to trace how differently the earlier attempts were staged, the chronological run of the X-Men films makes the pattern fairly obvious.

What the bullet actually means

Strip the sequence back and it is a clean thesis statement. Castle's answer to a dangerous person is subtraction. Peter's answer is his own body. Jean, offered both simultaneously, chooses to become the third thing — not the person who takes, and not the person who is taken from, but the person who gives something back. The film has been asking since its first act what a hero does when the world stops recognising him, and the answer it lands on is that heroism is the willingness to remain connected when disconnection would be easier and safer. Castle's fortified, booby-trapped house is what the alternative looks like after twenty years.

Peter lives. Jean runs. Metzger gets away with a plan. And the title stops being ironic: it really is a brand new day, because for the first time in fifty years of Spider-Man on film — a run you can trace from 1977 through to now in the complete cinematic chronology — Peter Parker's sacrifice doesn't just cost him something. It creates someone.