The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone


I was first introduced to the Dead Zone when I was twelve. It was on right before Farscape on Sci-Fi Fridays. I must have seen the last ten minutes of every episode for four of five seasons of that show. When I got to college and had an unusual amount of free time, this was one of the shows that I tried to watch through.

But I failed because I couldn’t find the last two seasons.

All six seasons of the show are now much more readily available for viewing, so I went ahead and started over to watch Johnny Smith’s story from his car accident, which opened up his ‘dead zone’ and gave him psychic visions, to the very last scene of the last episode.

I really like seasons one through five. I like the visions as fragments that create mysteries and twists and problem-of-the-week stories and the coming apocalypse storyline and Johnny’s functional relationship with Walt as the dad to his son and the husband to his ex-fiancé. I mean, there were snags in all of that, but it usually worked itself out and I found Johnny’s ability to function within the culture of his small town-like community really interesting in a psychological/sociological kind of way.

The last season, though, went a bit south for me. Half of the recurring characters were gone and the nature of Sara and Johnny’s relationship changed in a direction I didn’t particularly like. And JJ had a new actor which was really weird after so long with the other kid. And they didn’t look anything alike.

I mean, I think all the changes in the season were interesting from Johnny’s perspective because it took away almost all of his support ,but it turned into the same type of deal the last season of the X-files did. Interesting, yes, but not really the show I enjoyed watching.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

With my history of science fiction show marathoning and my penchant for cheesy storytelling from before my time, do you really think I could have possibly passed this one by?

No way. As soon as I saw that Netflix had this entire show, I threw it into my queue and let the amazingness commence.

If you are unfamiliar, the show follows Buck Rogers, an American astronaut who goes out on a mission for one of NASA’s last deep space projects in 1984. His capsule gets flung into this crazy orbit which freezes his life support and keeps him in stasis until he returns to Earth in the 25th Century. There he meets Wilma Dearing, pilot and leader of the Earth’s defense squadrons, Dr. Theopolis, a sentient portable computer responsible for much of the Earth’s scientific work, and Theo’s ambuquad Twiki, a smartass robot with unusual fortitude and loyalty. Together, they defend the Earth from the cunning conquerors, the Draconians, rescue damsels in distress, and save the day throughout the galaxy. Later, on a mission to discover the fates of the lost Earth colonies, these heroes are joined by Hawk, the last of the ancient race of hawk men, Dr. Goodfellow, an old scientist, and Chrichton, a very proud and slightly delusional robot.

I love this stuff. It goes right to the happy centers of my brain. Lessons in tolerance and equality disguised with bad make-up and spandex? Hilariously choreographed martial arts and bad reaction shots to laser weapons? Roller discos? Buck Rogers is a flood of those things and I swam through it grinning like a madman. It is feel–good-TV with stories from a time when storytellers believed in the good ol’ American hero and everything he stood for.

There were times, of course, when the lessons were heavy handed and there was a stretch of time when Twiki has a radically different voice that threw me off, but I still enjoyed every episode.

One thing that I really had fun with was Buck and Wilma’s relationship. The male lead and female lead almost always fall in love and get together, right? Well, with these two, I spent the whole series trying to figure out how they fit. At the start of the show, it certainly looked like they would hook up. The kind, chivalrous Buck Rogers had made the stony Colonel Dearing discover that she had a heart and Captain Buck Rogers, as dashing and charming as he is (which, of course, results in an endless stream of admirers), never fell for the other damsels’ charms because he knew he had Wilma waiting for him.

But they never really made any moves further than that. Buck flirted with pretty girls sometimes, but he always went back to Wilma with a laugh and one of those special between-two-close-people smiles. Wilma wasn’t ever really interested in other men, except for one or two blokes she was with in the past, but she didn’t ever really claim Buck as hers either. In fact, she was perfectly fine with, and sometimes encouraged, Buck’s interactions with his multitudes of beautiful women who inevitably fell in love with him. She only ever displayed jealousy or disapproved at all when Buck had to play along with the Draconian Princess Ardala’s flirt-and-conquer games. Buck and Wilma even acknowledge their budding romantic feelings to each other during one episode, but they never really kiss or acknowledge a courting relationship of any kind. And yet, when on board The Searcher, it looked to me like they shared quarters for a bit (I could be mistaken there) and make the kinds of jokes that long term couples make.

Anyway, I found that fascinating and I like seeing that kind of relationship in the leads. It’s something that I wish more shows would adapt now. I guess I just wasn’t expecting it in a show from the 1970s.

Also, I wasn’t expecting so many shared smoldering glances between Hawk and Buck.

Apparently, all shows I watch have some kind of queertastic subtext. Seriously, I don’t think Buck gave that many roguish grins to the combination of all the ladies he met. And there was a drop in damsels in distress falling in love with Buck after Hawk came into the picture…

It makes one wonder….

Or I’m just projecting my queerness all over the place.

The point is that I had a blast with this series and I fully intend to watch it again sometime in the future.

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

There shall be spoilers ahead, so turn back now if ye'd like to be surprised.


I should start keeping a notebook of my thoughts while I watch things because I remember having lots of things that I thought were interesting or good or awkward or whatever during this year's Christmas special, but I'm not certain that I remember any of the good ones.

Ah, well. Such is life.

I suppose I must first say that the lack of Rory in this episode is disappointing. I was honestly hoping that the three of them would play the roles of the three ghosts. The Doctor would be the past, but only because I knew he had a line saying he was from the preview, Amy would be the present because she's so vibrant and in the now and all that character stuff, and Rory would be forced into the role of the future and he would be delightfully awkward about the whole thing until he got really serious and we would get to see some of the 2000 Centurian!Rory there with his experiences of having already died. This is what I thought would happen, but alas! Rory and Amy were trapped aboard a crashing honeymoon cruise thing. Sadness.

(Although, ideally, Rory would be the past in my brains because we've seen that he's really attached to places and people and ideas from before and doesn't always adjust to new ones (like in the Dream Lord episode) and also, dressed as a Roman soldier. And there would be Christmassy quips about the Romans crucifying Jesus and Rory would be all- "Yeah. Well. No one's perfect." And then we'd have serious face Doctor for the future. Yep.)

The premise of the episode - the Doctor changing Scrooge!Dumbledore's life around to try and change time - is an interesting one. Interesting in that it's a rookie move for the Doctor to make because he knows that some things cannot be changed, even if you go back and try to change them deliberately, and also because it's quite full of childish arrogance. He's doesn't flaunt his ability like I imagine Ten would have done, but he doesn't seem to realize that you shouldn't actually change people like that, even if it is to make him a better person.

But then, it also felt like something the First Doctor would do and he is commonly held by his own future selves to be the wisest of the lot. He was very cleverly manipulative, often sending his companions to make friends with useful people so that they could take advantage of skill or position in order to get what he wanted.

Child!Scrooge!Dumbledore and the Doctor were fantastic, though. Love them together. With the fish and the shark sleigh and Christmassy Christmasness. Brilliant. Matt Smith should always act with children.

I love the image of a beautiful blonde woman in a white dress singing to a shark in a creepy freezer filled chamber. Possibly my favourite moment of the episode.

Also, that shark lived a damn long time with that chunk o' screwdriver in its gut. Well done.

I enjoyed the episode. It was silly and cheerful and proper Christmassy feeling and childlike, which seems odd because it didn't feel like the characters were in any danger at all except for the bit with the shark in the bedroom. Usually the specials maintain a bit of urgency and danger throughout the story (or absolute misery, like last year), but this one didn't. I don't know if I like that aspect or not, but if I don't, it didn't detract from my viewing of it all that much.

All in all, lovely.






.

Monty Python's Flying Circus

This definitely falls into the Things I Should Have Watched By Now. Seriously. Monty Python? How did I even manage that?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not completely ignorant here. I had seen all of the famous sketches and Holy Grail and The Life of Brian. I did have background in Monty Python. I just hadn't managed to sit down and watch the episodes.



I first sat down and watch them during my internship this past spring. I didn't always have enough work to do and the work I did have was spectacularly dull and I had my own office. It was only sensible to start secretly watching Monty Python's Flying Circus.



But I stopped watching it in the madness of graduating and didn't pick it up again until after I finish the epic Stargate run. And that was stupid. I should have picked it up much sooner. Monty Python is still one of the funniest shows I've seen and I'm not sure anything will ever be able to compete. They pushed boundaries and crossed lines and changed TV as we know it today.



I mean, I'm a 22 year old American. I don't always get the references and I wasn't even alive when this was airing to have any cultural context for this show. Sometimes I think I'm missing out because of that, but EVEN STILL. Amazingly hilarious. Obviously. And if you haven’t sat down and watched these, do it.

Stargate Atlantis

I’ll bet you never saw this one coming.

…

Yeah. We all knew I would pick this up after I finished SG-1, if only because I have full access to all five seasons of this show on DVD. And we all know what a sucker I am for spin-offs. I’m a completionist.

Atlantis was fantastic. To be honest, I fully expected this show to be exactly like SG-1. Just… you know… in the Pegasus Galaxy instead of the Milky Way. While there are clear similarities – the core team, half of the villains, the self-mockery and sci-fi action goodness – Atlantis is inarguably its own show.

A show I really, really liked, in fact. The international cast of characters was amusing from the start (and Zalenka’s cursing in Czech is one of my favourite things) and having their base of operations in an alien city/spacecraft opens up a whole new set of challenges to the usual sci-fi mix. There was a sense of discovery in this show that wasn’t in SG-1, which I really liked. Earth is rarely featured as the setting of an episode and the baddies aren’t based on our own mythology, so there’s no frame of reference there. Everything is new. I mean, I love the mythology in SG-1, but having something new after ten seasons of mythology is nice.



Radek Zelenka

And there are new team dynamics! Which are my favourite thing ever, as you know. SG-1’s team sort of became a stereotype. Not a bad one, mind you, but each position on that team was defined by a specific set of expertise and character traits and it didn’t change when the team members did. Jonas filled the exact same place as Daniel. Cameron filled the exact same place as Jack. The main Atlantis team, at first glance, seems to follow those same positions, but it becomes very clear very early on that they aren’t the same people. I mean, naturally, John Sheppard and Rodney McKay are supposed to be the Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson of the show with the same tensions and banter, but the circumstances and personalities of the Atlantis pair are very different from the SG-1 guys. In fact, they tend to agree about things more often than not- they’re just argumentative and more neurotic than they’re willing to admit.



John and Rodney

Thankfully, Teyla and Ronin are very different from Sam and Teal’c, as well. This team could have gone very wrong if the writers tried to force the same character archetypes into this show. Teyla needs to be the voice of compassion and hope and common sense in the ways that Sam couldn’t. Sam was an officer in the military and was often limited by that position and, while Teyla was similar in the fact that she was a leader, she was closer to the problems facing Atlantis and it made those problems real and personal for the Atlantis expedition. And Ronin needs to be bitter and angry and jaded with the universe because Teal’c wasn’t. Ronin had nothing left to lose- he couldn’t have that same hope for his people or family or own self because there was nothing to have hope for. The audience knows that Teal’c is loyal to the SGC- there needed to be more risk there with Ronin because there wouldn’t be the same consequences for him.



Bros

Spin-offs need to have this kind of range. Photocopies don’t really work so well.

And while I love all that stuff I just rambled on about, I’m going to have to say that my favourite part about Stargate Atlantis is the Wraith.

Yep. The Wraith.

SG-1 had Goa’uld and Replicators and Ourai, and all those were all well and good for the bad guy department, but the Wraith are the coolest baddies I’ve seen in a long time. They’re actually frightening when they first reveal themselves. They’re not threatened by these new humans. In fact, their appearance is beneficial to them because they feed on human life. Like life vampires.

And they look like vampires. Real vampires. I like to call them punk rock Nosferatu. White-ish and green-ish sickly looking skin, long greasy white hair, facial tattoos, scary teeth, and a hell of a lot of black leather. Fantastic. Seriously.

Plus they have semi-sentient, semi-biological hive ships because they’ve evolved from insects and telepathically communicate across space and freak out their human prey with hallucinations. It’s pretty spectacular.

And I can’t talk about the Wraith without talking about my favourite character of the series. Todd.



Todd

We first meet Todd in a prison where Shepherd has been captured and held for ransom. He’d been imprisoned for some unknown but crazily long period of time and was starved so that his need to feed could be used as a method of torture and coercion. Despite being fed upon, Shepherd suggests they work together to escape before either of them gets too weak to get out.




“There is a lot about Wraith you don’t know, Shepherd.”

This is the first time we ever see Wraith portrayed as anything other than vindictive eating machines and, while I love Wraith who are completely evil all the time, I love ambiguous characters even more. Todd has a sense of honor and drive to prove that he isn’t some mindless animal that immediately drew me to him and I remember thinking that if we didn’t see him again in the show, I would be very disappointed.

Luckily I wasn’t and Todd became Todd (Sheppard has this habit of naming Wraith they encounter multiple times) and made hilariously inappropriate jokes for diplomatic situations and stole a dining table from some humans he fed on to decorate his ship and did some good things for the folks on Atlantis, but was mostly just a bad ass who did whatever he wanted. Seriously. I rewatch his episodes all the time. Sometimes just to hear his voice, which is one of the best character specific voices I’ve ever heard. He’s my desktop background. I’m obsessed.



Now that I’m done rambling on forever, the point is that this show is awesome and you should watch it. You know it’s awesome because I’ve dissolved into fanboyish rambling and pic spam.

Yeah.

And now I don’t know how to end this.

…

Stargate SG-1

I’ve been meaning to post this for weeks because I finished this series ages ago, but I somehow managed to not do it. I don’t know how this happens all the time. It’s just one of those things, I suppose.

I should point out here that if you’re interesting in what I’m currently watching in real time, you should follow me on Twitter.

I’m not sure if this should be counted towards my regular series write-ups or whether it should be classified as a Things I Really Should Have Watched By Now post. God knows I’ve watched enough reruns of this show; I really should have watched the whole thing by now. Unfortunately, due to some personal prejudice from way back in the Sci-Fi Friday days when Stargate took the prime spot over Farscape, I was unwilling to devote the time needed to watch the show.

I mean, it is ten seasons and three movies, after all.

But given my unemployment this summer and the unrestricted access to my mother’s Stargate DVD collection, I thought it was about time I buckle down and actually watch the show.

It was worth it for episode 200 alone.

This is a great series and, with the exception of the occasional spectacularly awkward situation that I had to mute¹, I enjoyed every minute of it. Seriously. The rate at which I plowed through this show was faster than my epic marathoning of Xena. That’s impressive.

The team dynamics drive the show and team dynamics are a particular weakness of mine. I love analyzing the power hierarchies and personality interaction and this show gives me plenty to work with. Mostly because it seems that no one is ever really in charge from one moment to the next. I mean, the dynamics between Jack and Daniel alone could make for an extremely long and detailed analysis. Add in Sam and Teal’c and you’ve got a hell of a power fluctuation as different situations call for different expertise.

The series also uses another weakness of mine – the integration of mythology. This show takes themes and entities from our own history and reworks them into new stories. Egyptian myths are manifested in the form of the Gao’uld and Norse myths manifest in an alien race calling themselves the Asgard. Hell, even Arthurian legend played a prominent role in the final season. The perfect combination of my favourite things. Aliens and ancient myths. Awesome.

It was especially awesome to finally see these episodes in context. The show’s writers did an exceptional job in writing episodes that were understandable as independent stories, which is how I’ve seen most of them in the past, but I really like having context. It’s why I have to start a show from the beginning. And why I like spin offs so much. And sometimes why I watch spin offs before the mother show.

This one is definitely worth watching. I know I’m late to the game, but it was well worth it. It’s full of adventure and excitement and self-mockery, which is something lacking in most sci-fi shows still on the air. Definitely awesome times.

Next on Things I Really Should Have Watched By Now is Stargate: Atlantis. Surprise, surprise. Which should be sometime this week because I finished it weeks ago. I’m just behind on posting these write-ups.





¹ Oh, my inability to watch certain awkwardness. You make television so difficult sometimes.

The X-Files

Huzzah! Another installment of Things I Really Should Have Watched by Now!

This time around it is the X-Files. I had somehow managed to never seen an episode of the X-Files. This is less of a TIRSHWBN show because I was very young when it was actually on, but it was on all of the time for nine years and for a great many years of reruns after that, so I don’t know how I missed it completely.

BUT because I am such a huge lover of science fiction and like to try and appreciate things that paved the way for the stuff I love today, I went into my Netflix, lined those nine seasons and two movies up in my queue, and got to watching.

Firstly, I’ll say that I really enjoyed it. Even at its worst, I was entertained. I thought Mulder was an interesting character in and of himself and that adding Scully’s skepticism to his hungry inquiry was a great match. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson worked very well together in the roles and I was glad to see that their renown was well deserved.

Unfortunately, my second point is a little less positive. While I enjoyed the entire series, I do think it should have ended earlier than it did. The overall conspiracy didn’t hold up over nine seasons and began to seriously deteriorate after the first movie. Also, the core of the show, which wasn’t the aliens or the conspiracy but Mulder and Scully’s relationship, began to deteriorate at the same time. Mulder was absent due to abduction and, later, his own exile and we lost that element of the show. They tried to patch it up by making Mulder and Scully lovers and then tried to replace it with Doggit and Reyes, but it never really returned to the relationship that drew us into the show.

Still, it was entertaining and full of science fiction goodness. Like many long running 90s shows, there were troped up episodes that amused me greatly and I could see how this show influenced the science fiction that had come afterwards.

Good times. On to the next thing!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I’m not entirely sure if this is an “official” review post or if this is a Things I Really Should Have Watched By Now post. I mean, it’s going to be about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The 1980’s television serial Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So, you know… it’s a bit of a toss up, really.

First thing you should know about this program is that it’s short. Six episodes. It took me less than a day to watch them all straight through. So, if you are interested in this series at all, it won’t take you very long.

The second thing you should know is that it doesn’t just cover the first Hitchhiker’s Guide book. It actually takes pieces from a few of the books and arranges them into a somewhat linear fashion. There are always pieces left out – this is inevitable when adapting a book to a movie – but when I was watching this I didn’t feel that leaving those pieces out made the story any less entertaining.



I know this isn’t a series for everyone. To be honest, it’s a bit of a cult series. It’s very dated to the 80s, and frankly, the whole thing looks ridiculous. It has cheesey British acting of all sorts and terrible blue screen and Atari looking computer animations. I loved it, but there are some folks out there who wouldn’t be able to get through it.

But seriously, if you like the Hitchhiker’s Guide books and like a little 80s cheese every once in a while, watch this. I watched it on Netflix streaming, but I know there are places you can buy this on DVD. Some places may even have this for renting. I don’t know. But it’s brilliant.

Farscape

Farscape




“What’s your favourite TV show?”

“Farscape. Hands down.”


Farscape is an Australian-American science fiction series full of mad aliens and deep character drama that was created Rockne S. O'Bannon and produced by Jim Henson Productions and Hallmark Entertainment. It began running on the SciFi channel in March of 1999 and I began watching it during the first reruns of the show.

Yes, I was 11 years old when I started watching this show. I probably should not have been watching this show at 11, but I watched it with my dad every Friday night. It was our thing.

I recently had the opportunity to watch the entire series through again and I loved it more the second time around. It was absolutely amazing.

The story starts with an astronaut named John Crichton who accidentally manages to pass through a wormhole into a completely alien part of space. He’s pulled aboard a living ship crewed by escaping alien prisoners and is forced to adapt to this new life as he searches for a way back to his native Earth.

This show has the whole shebang of a cast of characters. There’s Moya, the ship, and Pilot, her biologically symbiotic pilot, D’Argo the hot tempered warrior, Rygel the thrifty thief, Zhann the redeemed priestess, and Aeryn bad-gal-turned-good and the primary love interest of John Crichton. Throughout the series we lose and gain crew members, including Chiana the sassy slut, Jool the spoiled student, Noranti the crazy old lady, and Sikozu the intellectual who is ignorant of how the real world works.

And this series has a colorful array of villains as well. When the show isn’t featuring a bad alien of the week, the renegade Captain Crais, the shifty Lieutenant Braka, the creepy Scorpius, and the manipulative Commandant Graiza make Crichton and crew’s lives hell.

And while I absolutely love the gun fights and monsters and action of this series, it’s really the depth of the main characters and the broad spectrum of emotional responses that they have to their misadventures that makes this show worth watching. It’s a sarcastic, cynical, and oddly hopeful look at being lost in the universe and having no control over your life, and it was a series that touched the hearts of many science fiction fans.¹

I definitely recommend this series to anyone who loves science fiction. It’s a brilliant series.





¹ The show was abruptly cancelled after its fourth season and fan campaigns enabled the creators to go back and make a miniseries to properly end the show.

The Waters of Mars

Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars


Instead of a full season this year, the revival of Doctor Who has been showing a spread out series of specials before the Doctor’s tenth regeneration. This series started with the 2008 Christmas Special The Next Doctor and proceeded to the 2009 Easter Special The Planet of the Dead. This past Sunday was the first airing of the third in this series of specials, The Waters of Mars.

As I’ve never reviewed anything Doctor Who on this blog before, let me give you some information on my Who background. Like my knowledge of Star Trek, most of what I knew before the revival of Who came from being around the show. It was one of those shows that would occasionally run on PBS during weird hours of the day, and my dad has been a fan of Tom Baker’s Doctor for as long as I can remember. So I knew what the TARDIS was and I knew who at least one of the Doctors was, and a couple of years ago I heard that there had been new episodes, which really boomed in popularity with the casting choice of David Tennant for the Tenth Doctor. I decided to give it a go.

I watched through all four seasons of New Who in one week, just in time for the airing of the series four finale, and I was hooked. I re-watched the episodes I was particularly attached to and sought out The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood to feed my Who addiction. When I ran out of New Who shows, I went back and started watching The Classics. It’s taken me almost a year and a half to watch through the first four Doctors (nearly finished with Tom Baker’s run), and I’ve loved every single one of them.

So when I say that The Waters of Mars was an awful piece of nihilistic drivel, you won’t write me off as simply one of the Torchwood Hysterical Nine on an anti-RTD rampage. The story line was hopeless from the very start of the episode. Within the first fifteen minutes, you knew that everyone aboard the Mars station was going to die; they showed the newspaper headlines to prove it.

That wasn’t even the part that really bothered me. I just felt that it had already been done with the Pompeii episode in series four and the other ‘trapped on a space station’ episodes. The part that bothered me was the senseless hubris that the Doctor adopted during this episode. He’s always been a bit arrogant (being the only alien among humans would do that to anyone, I think), but it’s never been at the expense of his own morality. In this episode, the Doctor decides that he is God and his actions cause a woman to kill herself.

I do not know what this episode was trying to achieve, but it left me with a very bitter taste in my mouth. There was no hope. There was no redemption. There was nothing in this episode that even resembled the things that I love about Doctor Who.

For You In Full Blossom

My philosophy on TV shows, books, and movies is that, if you are willing to lend me a copy, I’m willing to give anything a try. Chances are you know how I watch shows and what I look for in a story and characters. So, when my friend Shannon told me that I needed to watch this Japanese TV show and handed me the DVD, I watched For You in Full Blossom (Hanazakari no Kimitachi e Ikemen Paradise).

Now, the show’s premise is really nothing original and would really not interest me on its own. This girl Ashiya Mizuki disguises herself as a boy in order to attend Ohsaka High School, an all boys’ school. She does this so that she can convince former high jump superstar Sano Izumi to return to his sport. Awkward moments and hilarity ensues. If you’re a fan of manga or anime, you know that this basic premise is the stock of more shoujo series than I can count.

I loved it.

There are a few things that contribute to this, but the biggest factor for my own enjoyment is the fantastic acting. This 12 episode series is live-action which, I think, makes all the difference. No matter how much you like anime or manga, you have to admit that there are great limits in terms of facial expressions. All of the actors and actresses in this series are incredibly expressive and fun. Nakatsu, in particular, is vibrant and hilarious. I was constantly laughing at the expressions on their faces.

Another major contributor was the soundtrack. For You in Full Blossom is full of seemingly random encounters and weird situations. The background music can make or break those scenes, and the choices for this show definitely make those scenes.

This show is great. The plots barely make sense, but it’s a big mess of fun, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Warning: If you are watching the official DVDs and not fansubs, the English subtitles are very “Engrish.” Grammar and spelling are sometimes a bit arbitrary.