In the days of episodic television, there were always villains of the week, showing up just in time for the next episode and being dispatched within the hour. Usually, they had little explanation and even less characterization, and that was okay because no one really cared about the background of this one episode bad guy. Once in a while, though, a villain would appear on the scene who warranted more. He was skilled, not just another in an endless line of mooks. He had a code of honor. He had things he believed in and fought for, and just as often, died for. And for once, we in the audience were forced to stop and rethink the position of our heroes. These 4 bad guys below were doing their jobs, exactly as the heroes do, and from another perspective, they might even be a hero.

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Not a lot going on this week, but I’ll share what I saw. Like this picture of Jason Momoa as Aquaman. But he’ll always be Ronon Dex to me.

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Merchandising, as we’ve touched on before, is one of those things that makes a huge amount of money for these massive franchises. Most of the time, that’s fine, because it gives fans and kids alike figures of their favorite characters. Once in a while, they’ll take famous or popular scenes and base whole playsets and other such things off of them. And sometimes, the people making the merchandise get a little desperate for ideas. Then they turn to scenes that never, ever should’ve been made into toys. That’s how we end up with headscratching toys like these, based on 4 scenes completely inappropriate for toys.

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It’s February, and that means it’s the season of love. Apparently. And while romantic relationships between characters are ubiquitous in Hollywood movies and TV series, some of them are better at establishing these relationships than others. Because after all, it’s not enough to just have your characters jump each others’ bones. There’s gotta be some development, hints and feelings and dashed hopes, all leading up to the big hook-up. Sometimes they just say screw it, and that’s how we end up with these, 4 of the least developed relationships in sci-fi’s small screen history.

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“What’s coming?”
“The news roundup. Duh.”

Lots of news this week, which we can mostly thank the Super Bowl for. Tons of summer movies will release their first trailers and begin their marketing pushes during one of the few remaining events to draw massive audiences on mainstream TV. Is that a good reason to finally care about this sporting event? We’re also starting to hear about upcoming sci-fi projects and networks are beginning to send out feelers for fall shows. What more can you really ask for in your sci-fi news?

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News all across the spectrum this week, with developments in Star Trek, Marvel, Star Wars and many others. Too bad there’s not a lot that’s pic worthy. Read more

It’s not uncommon, especially in sci-fi shows, to see the same actors cropping up from program to program. Many of the shows are shot in the same area, often at the same time in different parts of the city (usually Vancouver), so it’s not terribly uncommon to see actors from one show with small roles on another. This goes double for actors from shows that have ended, and that tends to lead to some odd trends emerging. Here are four strange casting situations that arose from all these shows and movies drawing from the same actor pool.

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So, after the abysmal premiere of a certain recent miniseries, people’s reactions to the various twists seemed to suggest a question was forming in the minds of sci-fi fans everywhere: why, exactly, are psychic or telekinetic powers considered to be an acceptable plot device in sci-fi? It’s certainly a divergence from most of the other tropes of sci-fi. After all, one of the ground rules that separates sci-fi from fantasy is “technical possibility.” We believe aliens could exist; we believe Artificial Intelligences are possible; traveling through the stars in massive spaceships? Well, we’re already halfway there. Sure, the execution isn’t always terribly realistic, but those are generally concessions to storytelling than deliberate breaks from reality. Star Trek‘s aliens mostly look like humans because Star Trek is a TV show and the characters have to be played by human actors (at least, until very recently with CGI). Psychic powers are the one exception that’s still often considered to be part of the sci-fi writers’ workbag–so why?

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We’ve just finished up that time of year when selling the most toys is paramount. There are a lot of shows and films, especially ones aimed at kids, that seem to exist solely to push toys on their impressionable young viewers (looking at you, Transformers. There’s definitely more to some of those price tags than meets the eye). Other shows will indulge in this on occasion as well, often at the behest of some executive, although we the audience can’t always know for sure. So, here are 4 moments in otherwise fine TV shows and films that seem to have given in to that desire to sell the merch.
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So last week I discussed what makes a show capable of producing spinoffs that succeed independently, and a big part of that was the parent show having an open premise. Star Trek was simply about the exploration of space, while Battlestar Galactica was narrowly focused on the story of human survival after the end. The fact that it’s set in space is almost incidental most of the time. But there has to be another aspect to it. After all, Lost in Space and Space 1999 were contemporaries of Star Trek TOS with similarly open premises and yet they’re all but forgotten by comparison. So what else is there?

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