Warp Section

Networks are announcing their new fall TV seasons, meaning we get to find out which shows are staying, which are cancelled, and what’s new in the pipeline.

Heroes: Renewed. Duh.
Medium: Renewed. Yay!
Jericho: Done, it’s outta here. Oh wait, no it’s not. It’s sort of half canceled. Enjoy your last seven episodes, guys. The word from CBS: you can stop sending them nuts, now. Please.

Lost: Still here.
Dresden Files: still waiting to hear.
Doctor Who: on Sci Fi starting in July.
Supernatural: Renewed!
Smallville: Renewed!
Battlestar Galactica: Gets one more season. And as a fan, I’m actually okay with that. I’d rather see a show like this go out on top than suffer an X-Files style death spiral.

Stargate SG-1: Ending a 10-year run. Stick a fork in this one.
Stargate Atlantis: Renewed!
The 4400: Renewed!
Torchwood: Looks like it’ll be back.

New:
A remake of the Bionic Woman.
Flash Gordon miniseries
The Sarah Conner Chronicles
Various shows with SF and fantastic elements trying to cash in on the success of all the above shows

Stay Tuned…

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Just when I was thinking we were about due for a remake (or “reimagining,” as the current trend has it) of this classic, along comes this. That’s right. Apparently there is a new Flash on the way from the Sci Fi Channel. (which means it could be good. . .or not.)

I already have three Flash Gordons in my collection. For some reason, this dashing space hero has always appealed to me. It’s space opera, but through the eyes of the folks next door. He may be a square-jawed icon, and Dale Arden may be beautiful and spunky, but they’re our surrogates in these space-faring adventures.

The 1930s serials starring Buster Crabbe are credited with being one the inspirations for Star Wars — and really, just about every space opera that came after it. It’s all about the rockets with fins. These are so much fun to watch, because each episode is only about ten minutes long — and each one ends on a hideous cliffhanger, so we’ll be sure to come back and pay our nickel at the theater next week to see what happens. So every ten minutes, Flash falls down a chasm, gets blasted by an exploding robot, crashes his space ship, nearly freezes to death on an ice planet. . . you get the idea. Many of these episodes are online at the Internet Archive.

I discovered the 1950s TV version starring Steve Holland in, of all places, the Target dollar bins. This version is fascinating because for one thing, it was filmed in postwar West Berlin. All the extras have German accents. Also, it’s a very 1950s version of the character, with less swashbuckle, and more science. They actually try to explain things from a scientific standpoint as they go along. It’s like the writers were devouring issues of Astounding magazine, which was busy publishing authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov at the time.

Then there’s the 1980 feature film starring Sam J. Jones as Flash. All camp, all the time. Timothy Dalton in green leather as Prince Barin. Songs by Queen. As embarrassing as it might be to say it, I love this one. It’s just so happy. Come on, you can sing it now… “Flash! Ah-aaaaahhhh! He’ll save everyone of us!”

Will Sci Fi be able to say the same? Stay tuned…

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A new season of Doctor Who is underway, with a new companion. You know what I like best? The Doctor’s ability to pick the smartest person in the room and latch on to her. It happened in the episode “Rose,” when we first meet Rose Tyler, and it happens again in “Smith and Jones,” when we first meet Martha Jones. Both of them were faced with weird, impossible situations, and instead of freaking, tried to figure out what was going on. Now that’s the kind of person you want with you in the TARDIS.

Looking forward to more new episodes. This show is so much more cheerful than Battlestar Galactica…

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That’s a quote from George Bernard Shaw, and it’s as true now as it ever was.

I’ve mentioned previously a BBC show, Life on Mars. It’s about Sam Tyler, a 2006 cop who wakes up in 1973 and feels like he’s on another planet. It’s tangentially science fiction in that there might be time travel involved. Or maybe Sam is just crazy. Or maybe he’s in a coma. Or maybe… You get the idea. At any rate, I think it’s surreal and warped enough to count. And it’s brilliant. Part weird mind game, part homage to 70s cop shows (as Sam says in a recent episode, “Starsky and Hutch have a lot to answer for.”), it’s very well acted, and I keep watching because I feel so much pity and empathy for Sam, a sensitive new age guy stuck in rough-and-tumble 1973 with a bunch of hooligan cops. I love watching him in his predicament, and I desperately want him to get back home.

So imagine my curiosity when I learned that ABC is developing an American version of Life on Mars. Part of me is very excited. It’s a great show, and an American version could be a lot of fun. After all, The Office made the transition to an American version quite well.

But then there’s Red Dwarf.

Red Dwarf was a brilliant UK sci-fi comedy about the last surviving human, who’s a complete slob. His only companions are a holographic recreation of a dead crewmate who’s a complete git, and the sentient lifeform that evolved from his pet cat. If you haven’t seen it, run don’t walk to the video store, put it in your Netflix queue, whatever. It’s Douglas Adams on crack.

In 1992, someone though it would be a good idea to make an American version. I can understand the impulse. Lots of little cultural references don’t quite make sense in the U.S. The pilot for the American Red Dwarf was filmed, and it was an unmitigated disaster. YouTube has the proof.

It’s like they stripped away everything that was truly great about Red Dwarf and dumbed down what was left. And don’t get me started on the appalling laugh track. Have you ever noticed that the actual humor of a show is inversely related to the volume of the laugh track? It’s like by laughing harder they can convince us it’s actually funny. Not. Linwood Boomer wrote this — as the creator of the witty Malcolm in the Middle, he really should have known better. Needless to say, the show never got past the pilot stage.

So this is my fear, that an American version of Life on Mars will suck all the life out of the show and reduce its subtle wit and emotional power to one-liners and pratfalls. There’s hope: the producers have delayed the pilot by a year, because they’re looking for just the right actor to play Sam. They at least recognize that whoever plays Sam is going to be carrying the weight of the entire show on his shoulders and he’d better be damn good.

Fingers crossed.

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I was recently talking with some friends about favorite canceled shows (the conclusion: if we like a show, it’s bound to be cancelled forthwith), and was reminded of this gem.

Ezekiel Stone is a cop. Rather, he was a cop, and in a rage he murdered the man who raped his wife. Shortly after, he himself is killed, and he goes to Hell for that murder. Because life’s a bitch and then…well, you know.

Then something odd happens. 113 of Hell’s worst offenders escape and are now roaming the planet as demons. The Devil needs someone to bring them back. Who better than a damned cop who has demonstrated he has the chops to hunt down bad guys and mercilessly dispatch them? So he sends Stone back to Earth to hunt down the escaped demons.

Stone is rather enjoying his second chance at life — even if it is as a supernatural bounty hunter for the Devil. He’s catching up with all the changes in the world in the decade or so since he died, and he occasionally checks up on his wife. Thankfully, Stone’s fish-out-of-water story of being sent years into his own future (our present) never overwhelms the core of the demon-hunting plot.

John Glover (who currently does an outstanding job as Lex Luthor’s father, Lionel, on Smallville) nearly steals the show as the Devil, effectively Stone’s boss. This Devil is snide, manipulative, sadistic (of course), and yet harbors a lot of pain. In one memorable scene, he angrily tells Stone, “I loved God! No one loved him more than me!” He isn’t just the Devil, he’s the Devil from Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose every action and motivation stems not from his own evil, but from his pain at being rejected by God. Heady stuff.

It occurs to me that this is the show The Dresden Files desperately wishes it could be: dark, magical, tricky, subtle, and smart. Add another one to the DVD wish list.

And because everything has a fan site: here’s Brimstone’s.

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We live in something of a golden age of information. The internet has made possible an explosion of sheer, raw data. Can’t remember the title of a book you read ten years ago? Type a description into a search engine, and you’ll probably find it. Is your favorite TV show of all time something that aired for ten episodes in 1976 and was never heard from again? Chances are, someone on the internet has copies available and you can relive those happy moments all over again, or at the very least find a forum or newsgroup dedicated to your own obscure corner of fandom.

In this day and age, you know something’s really obscure when it still manages to slip through the cracks in this glut of information. Which brings me to Probe. There’s not a whole lot out there on this very short-lived series, so my description is necessarily brief.

Probe lasted for seven episodes. It’s of interest to science fiction fans because the co-creator of the show was Isaac Asimov. Parker Stevenson played Austin James, a child prodigy grown into an isolated, antagonistic genius who works for a think tank. He starts to open up a bit when he hires bubbly, cheerful secretary, Mickey Castle (played by Ashley Crow). Together, they solve crimes. Baffling, high-tech crimes requiring intelligence and application of scientific principles to solve (in the spirit of Asimov’s own science fiction mysteries such as The Caves of Steel).

I haven’t seen it since it went off the air, so my memories are fuzzy. I liked the show. I liked hanging out with Austin and Mickey. It was clever, with lots of inside jokes (I remember Austin, just before smashing to bits a murderously malfunctioning supercomputer, shouting, “Sing ‘Daisy,’ computer!”). And that probably gives us a big clue as to why it was cancelled. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long enough to develop the kind of following that generates an internet footprint, so it will probably continue in its entrenched obscurity.

Probe on Wikipedia

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I’m a fan of science fiction and fantasy. Obviously. But there are very few things that I go completely, you know, fannish over. Like memorizing all the episodes, joining mailing lists, collecting every scrap of news and memorabilia I can. Writing fan fiction, for God’s sake. Star Wars is one of the things I have a deep, abiding, and obsessive love for.

Captain Power is the other.

I say that so if everything else I say about it sounds adoring and gushing beyond all proportion, you’ll understand why. And if you’re thinking to yourself, “Captain Power. Wasn’t that a totally dorky live-action kids’ show with these stupid toy things that were supposed to let you shoot at the screen and wrack up points?” you’d be right. Except it was actually, you know, really good. You doubt me. I can tell. I can see your eyebrows rising in doubt. Let me explain.

The story editor on the show was a guy named J. Michael Straczynski. Yes. That J. Michael Straczynski. Lawrence diTillio was another writer. Douglas Netter was one of the producers. Is this starting to ring some bells? Like, a good chunk of the creative team that went on to produce Babylon 5? So when I tell you Captain Power had complex characters with dark and troubled pasts, complicated storylines with intelligent writing, and an ongoing plot that required you to pay attention from one episode to another, you must believe me. When I say that there are strong signs in the show that Straczynski was already playing with ideas that would later come to fruition in Babylon 5 (in fact, one of the characters, Tank, was produced by a genetic engineering program known as Babylon 5), you must believe me. In short, this was the most intelligent “kids” show ever to air. (I’d rather not talk about the toys, because frankly, the show would have been better off without them. Without the toys, the show wouldn’t have relied on the support of Mattel, and Mattel wouldn’t have been able to thoroughly pull the plug on it.)

This was my favorite show when I was 14, and a big reason for that was “token” female character Pilot (played by Jessica Steen, who many people remember as Doctor Julia Heller on Earth 2). Except that she wasn’t token. This was one of the first times I saw a woman character on a science fiction TV show who acted like and was treated like an equal. She dressed in a khaki military uniform, just like the others. A pilot and mechanic, she was a fully integrated member of the team. She rescued the guys as much as they rescued her. In a TV landscape where so many women characters, especially on half hour kids shows, were running around in pink spandex or brass bikinis, squealing in fear and not doing much else, Pilot was truly a role model to aspire to.

Which brings me to the second reason Captain Power had a huge impact on me. To put it bluntly, Captain Power was the only kids show that didn’t lie to kids about the brutality of war. While the A-Team couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with their machine guns, and exploding airplanes on GI Joe morphed into parachutes to reassure us that no one really died, people on Captain Power died. All the time. In every episode. And when my punchy rebellious teenage self was starting to notice how completely unrealistic it was for these shows to put their characters in life-threatening situations week after week without actually killing anyone, Captain Power did the unthinkable. In the final episode, Pilot died when she manually destroyed the Power Base’s reactor, blowing the base up to keep it out of the hands of the evil Lord Dread. I couldn’t believe it. I sobbed for days.

And yet. Pilot’s death made this show and this world more real than anything else I was watching at the time. I’ll say it again: Captain Power was the only kids show that didn’t lie to kids about the brutality of war. For that alone, it deserves a medal.

Twenty years later, fans are still hatching theories about how Pilot could have survived the explosion. The scripts for the second season were written, though not produced, and pirated copies and scraps of information are passed around like resistance propaganda. Say whatever you will about it, Captain Power lives on. As well it should.

Power on!

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I’m just old enough to remember the original series.  It does, believe it or not, come on in the wee hours of the morning on YTV I believe.  Ah the 60s cartoon, the theme song, ah the memories.  Regardless great news here:

Spider-Man swings back into television action in early 2008 as an animated series from Culver Entertainment to air on Kids’ WB! on The CW, it was announced by Kids’ WB! Senior Vice President and General Manager Betsy McGowen and Sony Pictures Television Co-President Zack Van Amburg.
Source: Marvel Announces New Spider-Man Cartoon! - Forever Geek

I hope this one is better than the Fantatic Four that’s out now.  Man I wanted to like it, but it just doesn’t thrill me.  I also hope that it comes to YTV since I don’t have any WB channels on my cable system.

Any of you remember all the Spidey appearances on Electric Company?  Yes, when Morgan Freeman was on the show.

Yes, I’m old.

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My recent viewing of Carnivale got me thinking about one of my favorite episodes of The X Files: “Humbug.” (Maybe because it guest stars Michael J. Anderson, who plays Samson on Carnivale and who also had a role in Twin Peaks.)

This episode was the first of a quartet written by Darin Morgan: “Humbug,” “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” “War of the Coprophages,” and “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’” These aren’t just four of the best X Files episodes from the entire run; they’re four of the best episodes of television ever. They managed to maintain the feel that made The X Files great — dark mysteries explored by the vivid personalities of Mulder and Scully — they also added humor and commentary, accomplishing this very difficult thing wherein the show approached self-parody without crossing the line. They gently mocked the world of The X Files while maintaining respect for it. These episodes took that line between humor and horror and made a very nice home there. (The episode that Darin Morgan guest starred in, “Small Potatoes,” also treads that line effectively.) I’m very fond of that line between humor and horror, so these episodes always stick out in my mind.

“Humbug” aired during the second season. I was in college, and I organized a weekly get-together in one of the dorm TV lounges. We also watched videos of Twin Peaks and made sort of a “Wacky FBI Agents” night of it. We had thirty people crammed into that room, which was fantastic for a show like this, because every little bump, every little noise and ounce of suspense gets amplified when you have thirty people feeding on each other’s reactions. So imagine our shock and delight when it became apparent, about two minutes after the opening credits, that this was going to be funny. Hilarious even. The X Files, funny? Why yes, as it turned out, and it worked very well indeed.

Mulder and Scully are investigating a murder at a winter colony of circus performers and freaks. In one scene, they’re interviewing the human pincushion, Dr. Blockhead (ably played by real-life performer Jim Rose). Throughout the episode he’s constantly mocking their clean suits, their government jobs, their sheer normality that makes it impossible for them to understand people like him. He’s got a jar of crickets. He offers one to Scully, expecting her recoil in horror. Regarding him with her flat, clinical gaze, Scully takes a cricket and pops it in her mouth. Mulder’s jaw drops. We all cheered.

It turned out to be sleight of hand — Scully palmed the cricket rather than eating it, but that only served to extend the metaphor. They can’t trust their eyes here. They can’t take appearances for granted, and to get to the heart of the mystery they’ll have dig very deep indeed. The solution (the murders were committed by Vincent Schiavelli’s evil detachable Siamese twin, who was tired of him and wanted a different brother to burrow into) shocks even the jaded freaks like Dr. Blockhead. So the bottom line is, despite its wacky humor, this is a classic X Files episode.

The great shows, and the great series, play with expectation. Can they give us what we want, while still surprising us? Can they use a formula to make something identifiable (as an X Files episode, as science fiction) while transcending it?

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Forever Geek is reporting the Saturn Award nominations today.  Much to my surprise Superman Returns received 10 nominations.  I have yet to see it, and from what my friends are saying about it, I think I can still wait.  X-Men III, yeah that was good.  Of course Pirates of the Caribbean was good.

The nominees for the 2007 Saturn Awards have been announced, with Superman Returns leading the pack with 10 nominations. Other nominated films include: X-Men: The Last Stand, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible III, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Stranger Than Fiction
Source: Superman Returns leads 07 Saturn Award Nominations at Forever Geek

Forever Geek picks their favs for the winners.  For the animated category I have to agree with Scanner Darkly.  That was one freaky film.

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