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Apr 23, 2026 By Mark Redfern Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern

The big news from Awesome Con 2026 in Washington, D.C. was dropped at the panel for Firefly. In the 2000s and 2010s it was commonplace for big announcements to be made at comic book and sci-fi conventions, especially at San Diego Comic-Con. I was there in Hall H when the full cast of The Avengers was revealed and when the very first footage from Captain America: The First Avenger was shown (shot only a week or so earlier). But these days such announcements are generally made online or at industry events such as CinemaCon and certainly not at a smaller convention. However, Awesome Con managed to get together almost the entire living cast of Firefly—the beloved 2002 space western TV show—Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Morena Baccarin, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, and Summer Glau were all there, with only Adam Baldwin missing. At their main stage panel first thing Sunday, Fillion was armed with a stack of notecards that he had each cast member read out as if they were him, all starting with “I’m Nathan Fillion.” The drawn-out process was amusing (the cast still have an amazing rapport with each other), but one couldn’t help but worry that it would be anti-climatic. While they didn’t announce that the show was returning in live action form, they did announce the next best thing, that an animated continuation was in the works.

The logistics of getting the busy cast together for a live action return were too complicated, they said, plus they wanted to set the show in-between its one and only season and the 2005 big screen follow-up movie Serenity, allowing them to still use beloved characters that died in that movie and to respectfully recast the character of Shepherd Book, who was originally played by Ron Glass, who died in 2016. Fillion confirmed that disgraced Firefly creator Joss Whedon would not be involved but had given his blessing and that they had Marc Guggenheim and Tara Butters lined up as showrunners, with animation by ShadowMachine. A pilot has already been shot and they showed off character designs. All that’s left is for them to find a streaming home for the series. They’ve been working on the animated show for five years. “We’re at the final stage. We’re that close,” said Fillion to the to-capacity crowd.

“Thank-you very much for your attention, I now return you to your regularly scheduled Firefly panel,” said Fillion after the announcement.

The cast continued to talk about the show and their dedicated fans. “I think we’re all just continuously surprised that all of you keep showing up to these things,” said Jewel Staite. “It’s been passed on to new generations and now kids, perhaps some too young, have been watching it.”

Alan Tudyk said Firefly was “cut off too soon” and was “a better TV show” than a movie, indicating that he was excited for its return to its episodic roots.

Fillion said that one notable super Firefly fan had gotten wind that they might be announcing something and had reached out to him. “I got a phone call from Justin Trudeau,” he said, referring to the former Canadian Prime Minister. “It was actually a text and video saying, ‘You better not mess with me Fillion. I know people.’” Fillion was born in Canada.

The Firefly panel was not the only highlight of Awesome Con 2026, which took place at Walter E. Washington Convention Center. On Friday there was a panel dedicated to the classic series of Doctor Who—meaning episodes that aired in the 20th century, versus the more modern continuation that launched in 2005. Of chief importance was the presence of Carole Ann Ford, who played The Doctor’s granddaughter Susan Foreman, the very first companion way back in the first episode in 1963. The 85-year-old is the the only surviving cast member of the original TARDIS team—William Hartnell as the First Doctor, William Russell as Ian Chesterton, and Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright. Fans have long wanted Ford to return as Susan and it finally happened in the most recent season of Doctor Who, but it was more of a cameo, with the rumour being that some of her scenes in the season finale were cut when it was reshot when Ncuti Gatwa (who played the Fifteenth Doctor) decided to leave the show after only two seasons. Ford didn’t have much to say about her return to the show, instead focusing on the early days.

“It was tremendous freedom, because no one had done it before,” said Ford of the first season. “We had no backstory at all,” she said, explaining that she and Hartnell came up with their own backstories for how The Doctor and Susan ended up on Earth in a stolen time and space machine. They decided that there had been a war on their home planet of Gallifrey and so they had to escape in a hurry.

Ford was joined on the panel by Frazer Hines (who played Second Doctor companion Jamie McCrimmon from 1966 to 1969), Nicola Bryant (who played Peri Brown, the Fifth and Sixth Doctor companion from 1984 to 1986), Sylvester McCoy (who played the Seventh Doctor from 1987 to 1989), and Sophie Aldred (who played the Seventh Doctor’s companion, Ace, also from 1987 to 1989). Hines was the longest-serving companion in terms of episode count (he was in a total of 113 episodes, back in an era when one story was spread across many episodes with cliffhangers). “Three of the happiest years of my life,” he said. “We worked together for three years and never had a cross word,” he said of Patrick Troughton, who played the Second Doctor.

McCoy lamented never getting to meet Troughton, who died in 1987, the same year he took over as The Doctor. Troughton was The Doctor McCoy most remembered watching in his younger years. By the time he got the part he hadn’t watched the show for many years. McCoy and Aldred share the same birthday, the same sense of humor, and the same politics. “We just became instant friends,” McCoy said.

“I was a bit surprised when they followed me up the stairs,” McCoy joked of Remembrance of the Daleks, the 1988 serial where the villainous Daleks levitated for the first time.

Aldred remembered with fondness hitting a Dalek with a baseball bat, one of her character’s most iconic scenes and which she joked would be written on her tombstone. “I was never allowed to do anything physical like that,” lamented Ford. “A combination of admiration and envy. Why didn’t they let me do that?’

Ford excitedly reminisced on her Planet of the Giants serial, which she said was accomplished without the aid of green screen and instead they had giant props and furniture built to make the characters appear small in a world of giants.

“They were always trying to blow us up,” said McCoy of his era, speaking of various mishaps on set, including when Aldred almost died in a water tank until he saved her.

McCoy’s final appearance in the classic series was in 1996’s Doctor Who TV movie, which was a BBC/FOX co-production that saw the introduction of Paul McGann as the short lived Eighth Doctor when the Seventh Doctor regenerated into him. “I came to America. I opened the TARDIS door and they shot me,” McCoy said, indicating that the scene was a bit of a satire on American gun culture, even though the movie was actually shot in Canada.

The initial seasons of The X-Files were also filmed north of the border and Gillian Anderson (who played Special FBI Agent Dana Scully on that show) was also in attendance at Awesome Con. It’s the first time she’s been on the lineup to a convention I’ve been to. “I’ve met more scientists and FBI agents than I have my whole life,” Anderson said of her experience at Awesome Con during her Q&A on Sunday. Which makes sense, considering her character was both of those things.

Anderson was initially reluctant to sign on to a TV show, but her career needed a break. “When I found out I got the job I got my final unemployment check that week,” she said of landing the role on X-Files.

Scully has inspired many women to get into science careers. “I am as grateful for her presence in my life as you are,” Anderson said.

Anderson said that Jodie Foster’s character in The Silence of the Lambs, FBI trainee Clarice Starling, inspired Scully when X-Files creator Chris Carter was developing the character, but that she purposefully didn’t rewatch The Silence of the Lambs, so as to not to have it influence her performance.

Ryan Coogler (director of the Black Panther movies and Sinners) is rebooting X-Files with a new cast. “The pilot script is really good. I would say have an open mind, because it’s really fuckin’cool,” promised Anderson. Later she added: “Who says Agent Scully is even in the reboot?”

Anderson also discussed some of her other notable roles (in Sex Education, The Fall, and The Crown), her ability to switch between an American and British accent (“I think I’m a nicer person when I’m American, I’m much cheerier…more warm”), and her drinks company G Spot (“It’s really tasty and easier to find than ever,” she joked). She admitted that she was a workaholic, which was just as well, as G Spot takes a great deal of her time right now.

When asked what advice she’d give to her younger self, Anderson replied: “Think less about myself and more about other people…. God help me if there had been social media back then.”

George Takei is currently very active on social media. The 89-year-old actor and activist is best known for playing Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise in the original ’60s Star Trek series and various movies in the late ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s. But these days he is just as well known for his witty social media posts that tout progressive causes and take President Trump to task. He was brought out on the Awesome Con main stage in a wheelchair, but don’t worry, it wasn’t down to a serious illness—he had recently had a foot operation because of all the marathons he’s run. “I don’t do marathons anymore obviously,” he said. “But you will see me walking before too long. I’m determined.”

Takei didn’t let this setback deter him from having an animated, informative, and amusing dialogue with the moderator and the audience. “I have a way of rambling,” he warned. The first order of business was to acknowledge the 60th anniversary of Star Trek. He remembered attending the second ever Star Trek convention in 1973, at the Commodore Hotel in New York City. “Donald Trump tore it down,” Takei said of the venue, to boos from the audience. The recent documentary Beam Me Up, Sulu was discussed. It chronicles a mid-’80s Star Trek fan film that was made by teenagers and that Takei generously agreed to act in.

Even though Star Trek was known for pioneering diversity and inclusion on television, when Takei was playing Sulu, few knew that in real life he was gay. “Most of my adult life I was closeted because…I wanted to build an acting career,” he admitted. “No writer would write a gay character unless they died in the end.” It was an open secret that he was gay and Takei has been with his partner (now husband), Brad Altman, for four decades. He officially came out in 2005 when then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed same-sex marriage legislation. Takei got the audience to boo Schwarzenegger too. Takei and Altman eventually married in 2008.

Beyond his work on Star Trek and his gay rights activism, Takei is also known for bringing wider attention to the Japanese American internment camps of World War II. After the attack at Pearl Harbour, Japanese Americans were rounded up and put in camps, supposedly for the protection of themselves and other Americans. Takei, then a young boy, and his family were put in such camps. At first they were forced to live in converted horse stables at Santa Anita Park until the proper camps were ready. Those in the camps lost their jobs, businesses, bank accounts, and property. When I was at university at USC in the 1990s, Takei came to speak to the school about the internment camps and it was one of the first times I really heard about them in any detail.

“We were Americans,” Takei said. “We were not aliens, we were not the enemy…. We didn’t have due process.”

He added: “They sent soldiers out with bayonets on their rifles into our own homes…. They destroyed my dad’s business.”

In 2019 he released the graphic novel They Called Us Enemy about his experience in the camps, which was followed by the 2024 children’s picture book My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story. “Too many Americans don’t know [what happened] to this day. That’s why I wrote those books.”

Takei warned that democracy is fragile. “We the people are the government, but the people are fallible human beings,” he said, adding that in the 1940s Americans were “caught up in war hysteria…. We looked exactly like the people who bombed Pearl Harbour.”

After World War II Takei finally learned Japanese so that he could communicate with his grandparents. In 1982 they held hearings about the internment camps, which Takei testified at, but he said all these years later “that kinda thing can happen in the United States…as is happening now,” no doubt referring to the ICE detention centers where illegal immigrants are rounded up and placed in for sometimes months on end. Takei bemoaned that we don’t learn the lessons of history, which is why we have Trump for president for a second time.

On a more positive note, Takei was happy for his multigenerational fanbase, stretching from those who watched the original Star Trek when it first aired in 1966 to much younger fans. “I feel like a proud grandfather when I come to these conventions,” he gushed.

Throughout the Awesome Con weekend we also saw Q&As featuring Beauty and the Beast / Hellboy / Sons of Anarchy actor Ron Pearlman (who also praised his fans—“Without you I’m the tree that fell in the forest that no one heard”), comic book writer Tom King (who discussed the acclaimed Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which has been adapted into this summer’s Supergirl movie, which he later told me at his signing table he hadn’t seen a cut of yet), and two stars of Stranger Things—British actor Jamie Campbell Bower (who plays the villainous Vecna, but is much nicer in person and said he learned after having to sit in the makeup chair for seven hours a day that he had “way more patience than I thought I did”) and Cara Buono (who played Karen Wheeler, the mother of Mike, Nancy, and Holly Wheeler, and admitted, “I sometimes joke I don’t want to work with adults anymore, because they are so jaded”).

Unfortunately two of the biggest guests cancelled: Parker Posey cancelled a week before due to an injury and Paul Giamatti cancelled that weekend due to flight complications. Despite those disappointments, there was plenty to see and do at Awesome Con 2026, including the Cosplay Competition (complete with a superhero-themed drag show while the judges decided on the winners), many other cosplayers out and about the convention to admire, all the stores selling all manner of geeky goods, chances to get autographs from your favorite actors and photographs with them, laser tag, and an impressive video game arcade. Compared to some other conventions I’ve been to, the whole weekend was very chill and well organized.

Pearlman summed up the Awesome Con experience from the perspective of the talent that attends: “What I get from these conventions is indescribable. The amount of love.”

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