One of the things that TV-based sci-fi often gets ragged on for is that the aliens tend to look suspiciously like ordinary humans. Sure, they might have cranial ridges (bumpy foreheads), or extra fingers/less fingers, or maybe even extra eyes or tails. But they’re still two arms, two legs, one head, approximately 5-7 feet tall. This is definitely a limitation of the medium, and there’s no arguing against it. Even as CGI gets cheaper and more realistic, it’s still far too expensive to use as extensively as most viewers and writers would like.

But those restrictions only stand on alien characters or species that have to show up often. When it’s an alien that only has to appear once or twice, however… the sky’s the limit, as these 4 bizarre alien species prove.

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Defiance seems to be back on track with another strong episode this week. Well, with one really weird exception. And we all know how that went with the “one weird exception” of last season’s sixth episode…

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Are you planning on building a time machine? Or maybe you’re just trying to figure out what to do with the one you’ve already got? Well, you’ve come to the right place, my friend. I have here four of the big mistakes that new time travelers make early in their careers. If you don’t want to return home to a future of Nazi Zombies from Space, or even just get back, excited to share your invention, only to find that no one remembers who you are, then you better read over these sci-fi missteps first.

And for the love of all that exists, DON’T EVEN GO NEAR HITLER!

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This week is a marked improvement over last. We get some backstory on Nolan, finally, but it comes across as more of an excuse than an explanation. On the other hand, things are looking up for Alak, and that’s who we actually care about, right? New opening credits are just made of sad, though…

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Comic book movies, like those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, are far more popular than the comics from which they originate. Indeed, some of that even goes back to early TV series like the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk or Adam West’s Batman, which served as the faces for those heroes to the public well outside the comic demographics. In spite of this, though, almost everyone going to see Iron Man or Wonder Woman in theaters knows that they’re characters from comic books.

Then there are other movies, where few people even know it was originally adapted from another medium at all. The success of the film so totally eclipsed the source material that it’s almost completely unknown in comparison. And that’s where we find these, four films that have left the sources to languish in the shadows of their popularity.

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One thing you can say for Defiance is that they’re never afraid to destroy that status quo. There’s hardly a status quo at all, really. We’ve got returning characters this week, so we can wrap up that already idiotic hanging plot thread from season 2, and pretty much nothing else. But there’s a new character, and a few significant shifts at the end of the episode, so you can’t just skip this one.

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After looking at 4 of the biggest changes to the status quo just a few weeks ago, I thought it might be an opportune time to take a moment to see just how that status quo emerged in the first place. In most sci-fi works, or hell, most works set in the future at all, there are a few easy ways to fill in that gap between the story’s setting and the present era, and the main one is with a war. Wars happen all the time in real life, so it’s a logical thing to carry forward into the future; and wars, as most obviously seen in World War 2, often have huge effects on the balance of power and shape the world for decades to come. It’s a good way to explain why things are so different, or even why they aren’t quite as different as they should be. So here are 4 (usually offscreen) wars that helped establish the sci-fi worlds we’ve come to know and love.

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After the intensity of the Defiance season 3 premiere, things step back a little bit to give everyone a little room to breathe. Well, not everyone. Life always sucks when you’re Alak. And that doesn’t really mean that things are looking up, either.

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A lot of the time in long-running shows, or even just shows that manage a few seasons, there will be some big things that are brought up, and then never heard from again. Often it’s because the answer would’ve been a huge shakeup for the status quo, but not always. Sometimes it’s just a plot thread that was left hanging in case the writers ever decided they wanted to revisit it. But then the story started to go in a different direction, and it didn’t really make sense any more to dust that idea off and drag it out of the closet. So looking back on the finished shows later, it can become a rather large mystery for the fandoms: what is the deal with this unresolved plot thread?

In that vein, here are 4 big questions raised by series, usually early in their runs, that were never answered.

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Warping in on an unusual day of the week, the Obscure Sci-Fi Primer returns with a fan-requested show: the extremely short-lived 1999 series Harsh Realm. Clocking in at a meager 9 episodes, this is by far the shortest show to appear in the Primer to date. Harsh Realm deals with virtual reality, much like another show we’ve covered already. But while VR.5‘s virtual worlds were highly personal ones, Harsh Realm is far less so, having started as a high-tech training simulation for dealing with potential nuclear apocalypse. It’s also an (incredibly loose) adaptation of a comic book, and had a number of X-Files writers working on it, like Chris Carter and Vince Gilligan (although the latter wasn’t a writer here).

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