BSG back on track

This episode proves that a side story can be told without the sense of it coming out of left field or being unrelated to the larger arc. Throw in a higher calibre of writing than we've seen in the past couple eps, and we get a good show that offers character development and progresses the story without a major upheaval in the plot.

This was another Chief ep, but I don't mind since I like the Chief. It makes me wonder, though, if the writers are bringing us closer to this character in anticipation of a stronger reaction to some upcoming dramatic event.

Of course, I was happy with the flirty moment between Adama & Roslin. I'm not sure why I'm so taken with those two, but the romantic sucker part of me really likes their chemistry. Now I just wish they always did the Right ThingTM in their respective jobs.

Throughout Roslin's tenure, she's had to grapple with several issues that relate not only to the immediate situation, but also to the greater concept of what it means to be human and how this humanity will be fostered as the remainder of the race survives. I think by the end of this ep, her perception of the class structure of the colonies had changed to accomodate the opportunity they now have to fundamentally alter that structure to the greater benefit of the survivors. Not that they're on the verge of some happily ever after in a ship-bound utopia, but I think they're taking baby steps.

All in all, a very good episode. Baltar is at his best when he's being an opportunistic worm. Does anyone think he's sincere, or are so many just getting the message? And, it ended on a happy high; I cried when Seelix was promoted.

Now the commercials for the next ep are making me want Sunday to get here quick!

BSG and the mid-season slump

I'm a week behind & haven't even seen yesterday's ep yet, but I'm getting there! Anyway, about last week....

BSG seems to be developing a pattern - start off the season really wonderfully, have several eps in a row that totally kick ass, then midway through the second half of the season, dick around with zero story development and crappy interpersonal sub-plots. Usually I get into the personal drama and the backstory, but these days it's just not grabbing me.

The latest episode ran hot & cold for me. Most of it didn't thrill me much, and I want to know too many things that haven't been talked about. How are Adama & Roslin reacting to having Hera back on Galactica? Are they running tests on that kid? What are the cylons up to? But, some of the scenes with Adama & his ex-wife were interesting to watch. After such a deal was made of Baltar "projecting" as the cylons do, should we have noticed how very similar Adama's experience was? In thinking about the ep, I've had to remind myself that we weren't seeing flashbacks. Adama was projecting.

Frankly, I was kind of hoping Callie would die, but it doesn't look promising. She's expendable, in my pantheon of characters. The hype, however, has been that someone's going to die this season, so I'm antsy to find out who it'll be.

The highlights? Adama & Roslin, of course. I so want those two to hook up. They'd be great together [by which I do mean, I want to watch them have sex].

A different sort of geekery

I've been lax on posting, in part due to marathon stints of Alias, a show highly recommended by friends. I'm only a little over halfway through season 1, so it's hard to say much about it. The story has sucked me in, though already I'm not sure I'm following it all.

But that's not what I want to geek about. One of the coolest parts about watching Alias is that I'm doing it on the extra fancy brand new 24" iMac. This thing is sweet. It's bigger & brighter than my television, and way fast. Now I can download stuff, play a game, run a couple chat programs, and nothing lags.

Even better than the super pretty picture and awesome speed, is the videochat capability. In the past couple weeks I've been able to talk to several friends, including one in Puerto Rico with a lovely view of the ocean behind him. Awesome!

No wonder people use this for porn.

More scifi geekery soon!

DragonCon pictures up

Now Claudia Christian [Ivanova on B5] is scheduled to be at DragonCon. This means I must go, and I must finally make the B5 uniform I've wanted for years.

Anyway, my pictures from DC last year are now online. Some of them are crappy, because I still don't quite know how to use my camera, but some are pretty cool.

...I've seen everything!

This is a very hilarious clip of Patrick Stewart on Extras.

A BSG monster-of-the-week episode

[This installment of my blog brought to you by a couple of white russians. I make no apologies or excuses.]

Not a bad episode, all things considered. The many stories I'm eager to see advance were not really touched on, but we did get a little bit of a tease with Roslin & Tom Zarak's conversation, and the brief exchange between Athena & Caprica Six. Of course, I agree with Zarak - a trial is a terrible idea. Hasn't Roslin learned by now that her honest streak doesn't serve her well? First she gives up a perfectly good stolen election, now she's granting a trial to a man who should have been shoved out an airlock while he was still in a body bag a couple episodes ago. Unfortunately, I fear the trial is going to feel like little more than an excuse to drag out Baltar's story [and his life]. Maybe I'm missing some crucial aspect of the situation that makes Roslin believe she needs to stick to the rules of their beloved government, but even Tom Zarak's not supporting her this time. That oughta tell her something.

It was an extra special treat to see Caprica's Imaginary-Baltar finally show up again. Though we only got one episode of him, I've missed him; he's a much more likable version of Baltar. Roslin & her assistant watching while Caprica made out with Imaginary-Baltar was pretty funny as well. Hopefully, we'll be seeing a lot more of him as Caprica plays witness for the prosecution during her boyfriend's trial. However, I'm not sure she's going to be the star witness they've been hoping for...

Though the main story didn't thrill me much, it was nice to see Bruce Davison. I'm left wondering, though...are they trying to make a saint out of Helo? Well, let's just hope not.

I liked the little bit of comaraderie we saw between Starbuck & Athena early in the ep. It seems as though she's been accepted into the fold with no more questions about her loyalty...but I wonder when we'll get the attack-on-Athena episode, where someone decides s/he can't serve with a toaster.

Geeks, en masse

Last year Timothy & I went to DragonCon in Atlanta and had an amazing time. If you're not familiar with DC, it's one of the largest scifi conventions in the world, drawing 25,000+ geeks of all varieties. 2006 was our second year ever, and our plan was to make a habit of it every couple-few years. My intention for this year was to attend BurningMan [they happen over Labor Day weekend, so I can't do both], but then I foolishly went to the DragonCon website. I just wanted to have a look at the latest news, see if any guests had been announced yet. Well, now I'm thinking BurningMan can wait for another year. Confirmed guests already include Jamie Bamber [Apollo] & Katee Sackhoff [Starbuck] from BSG, and Brent Spiner. Damn, Spiner alone makes it worth it. Plus, Michael Shanks [Daniel Jackson] & Christopher Judge [Teal'c] from SG-1 are also confirmed, as well as a few other people I wouldn't mind seeing. Over the next several months, the confirmed guests will grow to nearly 200 and I know there will be a lot more people on that list I want to see.

I think we decided this morning to go ahead & register for DC, before the fee goes up, and if we change our minds about going we can always sell the tickets. But, I suspect that once I have that confirmation in my hand, I won't be changing my mind.

So...anyone interested in sharing a room at DragonCon this year?

Current reading: Heinlein & Bester

I'm about halfway through Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, a relatively short book about some folks in a crazy sort of genetically created distopian future. It's entertaining me well enough, though it's in line with about half his work, in that it's neither especially great nor especially weak.

I've been a very hardcore fan of Robert Heinlein since I first picked up Time Enough for Love when I was 14. Over the next several years and more sporadically through two decades, I devoured his work, reading pretty much everything he's ever had published. For a long time meeting Heinlein was on my shortlist of Life GoalsTM. He died before I got around to it. While many of his novels made a strong impression on me, my favourite work is the story "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." Written in 1942, this is from the very early years of his writing career, long before his books turned into scifi fanboy wet dream material [see anything he wrote in the '80s].

In addition to Beyond This Horizon, I just read Alfred Bester's "Star Light, Star Bright," a short story that can be found here*. I've read very little Bester, only a few of his short stories and The Stars My Destination, and enjoyed all of it. "Star Light, Star Bright" follows a queer chap on an ultimately frenzied search for a young boy who seems to have disappeared. I like his writing style and though elements of "Star Light, Star Bright" are distinctive of the period [1953], it was written with a sophistication more common in later scifi eras.

Incidentally, my favourite recurring character on Babylon 5 is psicop Al Bester, which led me to seek out the author's work in the first place.

*This is the SciFi channel's short story archive, with a great selection of both "classic" stories and more recent works.
[Update: Since SciFi became SyFy, I have been unable to locate any fiction archive on their site, so the link I had there broke. Sorry.]

The plot thickens

Wow, this was a pretty great episode of Heroes. Claire's story is certainly getting more & more interesting. So her old man is Nathan, who's just found out his long-dead daughter isn't dead after all. Will mom tell him about Claire's ability? And how is it that these two people with these amazing abilities just happened to have a child 16 years ago? That, and our other mutant couple, Nikki & DL, are starting to make me wonder if their offspring weren't planned. These couples meeting & having kids is a pretty great coincidence, unless a much higher percentage of the population has abilities and we just don't know about it. If they were planned, I think we can assume Linderman was behind it. Isn't he behind everything?

For someone who's so weasely, I'm actually liking Mr. Bennett more & more. He didn't do much this ep, but I think Jack Coleman has a great handle on the role. I wonder how Mr. Bennett hopes to protect Claire now that Sylar's back on the loose.

While I mostly enjoyed the bits with Nikki/Jessica, I was a little disappointed that her removal from jail was so quick & easy. I was kind of hoping for some exciting escape using DL's power and maybe even Micah's ability. Nonetheless, I think their story is about to get a lot more interesting, now that Jessica is taking a different approach to the situation. Since Micah could tell the difference between Nikki & Jessica before, I wonder how long she'll be able to fool him.

It's nice to see Peter's ability manifesting more clearly. He seems to be another Sylar, but with angst instead of anger, and a much more benign method of acquiring others' abilities. I'm curious to understand how he acquires Ted the radioactive guy's ability, since they haven't encountered each other yet. However, he seems to already have an inkling of that ability, perhaps divined from his crazy visions. I continue to enjoy Christopher Eccleston and rather like his teaching methods.

Well, Hiro's father doesn't seem to be "anyone" in the story and it doesn't look like we'll be seeing him again, but it was nice that George Takei made even a brief appearance. And, I really liked that the license plate on his car was NCC-1701, the registration of the starship Enterprise. Nice touch.

Gushing about X-Men

Before I talk about my re-viewing experience [it's one of those flicks I've seen a bunch of times], I'd like to get into a little background. When I was a kid in the '70s, the only hero comic I was into was The Avengers and my idol was the Scarlet Witch. Then in 1979 my 6th grade boyfriend introduced me to The X-Men, and while the boyfriend lasted about as long as most grade school boyfriends do, my appreciation for this comic endured well into college. Scarlet Witch was joined by Phoenix, Wolverine and Nightcrawler on my list of coolest comics characters ever. When plans for a movie were announced, I anticipated it with uncertainty; I was hopeful, yet painfully conscious of the unending list of really cool things that Hollywood has tried to ruin. I mean, who could bring these characters to life with any believability? Who could translate this amazing world to live action without losing its magic? Who could possibly create a Wolverine that wasn't a weak and mockable caricature?

It turned out that Bryan Singer could. Of course, he had help, most notably the prolific & talented Richard Donner and real life comic hero himself, Stan Lee. I watched X-Men again last night and found it just as engaging as any of my previous viewings. The story kicked ass, comic booky without being campy, and the characters were portrayed wonderfully. So many of the effects were extraordinary, especially Mystique's many transformations.

With one exception, the casting was terrific. Then-unknown [in the US, at least] Hugh Jackman is as close to a perfect Wolverine as I could hope for, and the hair department even got his 'do right without making it look excessively silly. It seems like a small thing, but as with many good works, it's the details that matter. Famke Janssen was an excellent Jean Grey, James Marsden's Cyclops irritated me just as much as Cyclops irritated me in the comics [by which I mean he did good], Ray Park was a delightful & disgusting Toad, and even Anna Paquin, who was lacking the heft of some of her co-stars, impressed as Rogue. While there might be a better actor somewhere out there to play Professor Xavier, Patrick Stewart shone brilliantly. As for Ian McKellen's Magneto, he totally owned that part.

Halle Berry, unfortunately, disappointed. I've seen her in things in which I enjoyed her performance [most notably Monster's Ball], but as Storm, she was flat and uninspired, trying to portray a strong character but lacking the presence to make me believe she actually had the strength to be Storm. As a young girl growing up in a feminist household, I really appreciated the strong female characters in my comics. Marvel did not short-shrift the ladies when it came to heroes. And the character of Storm, while not on my list of personal heroes, was surely a favourite. Unlike Berry, she was most definitely not the weakest part of any story.

Truly, though, I think that's my only complaint with this movie. It stayed true to the characters I loved as a kid while providing excellent entertainment for my adult sensibilities [stop laughing]. Even the things that had high potential for cheese [Wolverine's hair, Magneto's goofy helmet, any number of silly one-liners] were pulled off with style. On a scale of Crapfest to Blow-me-away-awesome, I give it a Double Plus Good.

A preview of my thoughts on X2: holy shit, what a great movie!

Ready for a marathon or three

While I'll happily sit and watch a movie or catch an episode of a show I like, I really favour my scifi in marathon doses. Some of the best geeking I've done has involved some friends and a whole bunch of hours of one show or another.

Well, this has been a great week for new media. To go along with the new DVD player [the old one worked...sometimes], we acquired all three X-Men movies, BSG season 2.5, and the complete Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. That last isn't exactly scifi, but it does have strange otherwordly devices, exciting "new" inventions [the show takes place in the 1890s] and even some time travel. In a funny little coincidence, the actor John Pyper-Ferguson appears in all three, as the Pegasus CAG on BSG, recurring baddie Pete Hutter in Brisco County, and as the dad driving a minivan toward the end of X III [on screen for all of a few seconds].

Now I'm ready for some serious marathon viewing!

More of the B5 legacy

So, the impending continuation of the B5 universe sent me back to Crusade, which I haven't watched in quite some time. This spinoff series lasted all of 13 episodes before it was cancelled, with a handful of unproduced eps on the drawing board.

The premise of the show revolves around Capt. Matthew Gideon [played by Gary Cole], as he & his appropriately caricatured crew travel the galaxy in search of a cure for a plague that was unleashed on Earth by former allies of the evil Shadows [see Babylon 5, seasons 1-4]. It wasn't a great show, but I wouldn't call it a crapfest either. The writing is on par with what can be expected from JMS, which means it ran the gamut from painful to pretty great. We probably would have seen extraordinary even, if the show had lasted longer. Though the premise didn't leave much room for advancing an actual story [either they find a cure or they don't], had it gone beyond 13 episodes it could have done a lot in the way of character development. Pretty much all the main characters are damaged in one way or another, and their adventures could have provided the opportunity for depth and growth. But even with all monster-of-the-week eps, it had some decent ones that hinted at the potential the show had. There is a pretty funny Crusade-meets-X-Files ep featuring two aliens who believe humans have been visiting their homeworld and taking part in a conspiracy to cover up human involvement in their culture's development.

Some highlights include a main character who is a technomage, played by Peter Woodward. His acting is a bit heavyhanded, but Galen is also the character who most often provides some much needed comic relief. There's also Daniel Dae Kim [fans of Lost will recognize him as Jin], who actually does a pretty impressive job amid mostly B-grade actors. Also, Crusade features the Excalibur, the most phallic ship a scifi show has ever seen, vast and long and requiring downtime before it's fully functional again after firing its main guns. Heh.

The order in which JMS intended them to be aired was different from the order in which TNT actually aired them, resulting in chronological inconsistencies that end up confusing the story. Oddly, even if they're aired in JMS's preferred order, things still don't make sense [for instance, Gideon & Lochley meet "for the first time" in two different eps, and the ep in which Gideon is assigned to his flying phallus is several eps after the start of the series]. However, such inconsistencies really do little more than give it the feeling of being experimental, like JMS had an idea for a story, but wasn't really sure what to do with it once it got started. Not a fatal flaw, by any means. I wouldn't suggest it's worth purchasing to anyone but serious B5 fans, but if the SciFi channel ever airs it again, it's worth catching.

Babylon 5, alive & kicking

J. Michael Straczynski is back at work reviving the B5 Universe, with an anthology series called Babylon 5: The Lost Tales. The first DVD, Voices in the Dark, will contain two ~40 minute stories and is due for release this coming July. At the moment, this is a straight-to-DVD venture, but there's discussion of broadcasting the series at some point in the future. The stories star several actors from the original series & Crusade, including Bruce Boxleitner [Sheridan], Tracy Scoggins [Lochley] & Peter Woodward [Galen]. Slated to work on subsequent stories are Peter Jurasik [Londo Mollari] & Jerry Doyle [Garibaldi].

Given the last attempt at a B5 production, Legend of the Rangers, I'm keeping my expectations low. JMS has a knack for really amazing storytelling, as well as the ability to write some of the worst dialogue ever recorded. Perhaps a few years away from B5 has served him well, and if we're lucky he's even gotten an editor.

Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to this. I'm especially eager for upcoming installments, one in particular that will tell the story fans have been pining for since B5 ended - the telepath wars. If we're very lucky, Pat Tallman [Lyta] will be available to work on it. Well, we'll see how things look in July.