Posts Tagged ‘science fiction’
There’s been a bit of a theme as of late, with most of my recent posts dealing with cancellation and renewal and cliffhanger endings. So today we’re going to keep that rolling by taking a look at how the Netflix binge-watching trend has affected the development of TV versus the way things used to be in the past.
Watching TV can be a very enjoyable experience, but have you ever considered what it would be like to live a life like your favorite character’s? While we tend to look up to our heroes and hope to emulate them, if most people really thought about it very few would want to be them. The kind of world that TV protagonists live in is often an awful one full of crime, corruption, enormous alien threats and facing death on a daily basis. Take Agent Coulson, for example–he got stabbed by a Norse god and forcibly brought back to life, forever changing who he is. The organization he dedicated his life to is in shambles, and now all the responsibility for trying to rebuild it is on him, including the lives of both the people under his command and of the innocents caught up in the crossfire. But it wouldn’t just suck to be Coulson, or part of SHIELD; imagine being an ordinary Joe in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, left powerless while gods and supersoldiers do battle for the fate of the planet. It’s downright horrifying, when you think about it.
And while there are some exceptions (I think we all want to live in the Star Trek Federation. Replicators and holodecks, anyone?) TV is littered with these kinds of unpleasant worlds. So here are 4 of the worst universes to live in that have ever been shot on camera.
Picking up exactly where last week’s episode ended, we get an interesting setup for Lance Hunter’s character, a returning character from last season, and a step forward in the season’s story arc with the (real) first-time appearance of someone that we’ve heard quite a bit about. It also has a really, really appropriate title. Read more
Seeing how popular the Stargate Atlantis article was last month, I thought we’d continue on this trend by taking a look at the lost future of its younger brother, Stargate Universe. Much like Atlantis, it was canceled prematurely, but unfortunately it wasn’t really given a satisfying ending. The producers tried to pull out the wrap up movie technique for this also, so we once again have two different possibilities that the show could have taken to continue on. There’s a lot less solid info for this one, given that it’s more recent, and part of it is still being withheld from the public on the vague hopes that the story may still be finished in some form, be it television or otherwise. Let’s push forward into inevitably depressing territory with vanished potential of Stargate Universe Season 3.
Crossovers are a funny thing; as I alluded to earlier in the week, most early crossovers were between popular shows on the same network that weren’t necessarily meant to be in continuity with each other when they were created. That’s how we end up with things like Adam West’s Batman and the original Green Hornet in the same universe. This tends to have some strange consequences, where previous in-jokes (like Batman watching Green Hornet on TV) no longer make sense or cause outright contradictions when trying to combine the two continuities. And while a main character crossing over is by far the easiest, most obvious, and hardest to deny of all the crossover types, there are many, many other ways for two shows to imply that they coexist in the same universe–some of which don’t even necessarily require permission from one of the shows! And that’s how we end up with these, some of the weirdest crossovers seen on TV.
Season 2 concept art, shared on twitter.
I know I don’t usually do news, but with as much focus as this site’s start had on Defiance, it felt important to get the news out there. As reported here and confirmed on Twitter, Defiance was successfully renewed for Season 3. I gotta say I’m rather relieved; as irritating as the show can be at times, I’m still pretty invested in it, even if I don’t (yet) love the characters as much as the crew of the Enterprise-D or the gang aboard Moya. I’m only so harsh because I care, really! The show has so much potential and I want to see it through, however it develops. And now, no more will we have to worry about the last hanging plotlines being resolved in game, for those of us who don’t play the MMO.
But just reporting the news that it’s returned isn’t very exciting. What can we expect from Season 3 of Defiance, then? Here are some plot teasers that Kevin Murphy, Defiance‘s showrunner (who will indeed be returning, according to the article), said he’d like to see next season:
That’s all I’ve been able to dig up as far as season 3 related tweets go. Obviously the show would pick up with some of the running plot lines, like Pilar and Quentin, and presumably they’ll have to dig Nolan and Irisa (and Sukar!) up somehow. And keep in mind these are just tweets, speculating about possibilities; that doesn’t necessarily mean all these things will happen. But it gives us an idea of what might lie ahead, and had the show gotten canceled I’d probably have used these to make a “What Could Have Been” post for Defiance. I’m glad I don’t have to, though.
Season 1 of Agents of SHIELD didn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger. There were plenty of plot threads left hanging, but all in all it wrapped up the main plot dealing with the Clairvoyant and gave the show a new direction moving forward–rebuild the agency and strike back against the newly emerged HYDRA. The show picks up with almost all of these, showing us what became of Fitz, Coulson, Ward, and wasting no time introducing a plethora of new characters.
When you have a shared universe, one of the biggest benefits is the crossover–bringing characters from one show within the property over to another show. Agents of SHIELD is starting off its second season tomorrow with a crossover of sorts, featuring flashbacks with Agent Peggy Carter before her own spinoff starts early next year. While this situation is a little different, as both Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter are spinning off from the same parent property, they still have enough in common to enjoy the benefits of a crossover. And with that in mind, I thought it would be a good time to examine the crossover and how it helps with the cohesiveness and plausibility of a shared universe. Read more
As a television viewer, odds are you’ve had a show you enjoyed canceled prematurely. Sometimes this is okay; the last episode of Almost Human is probably the best ending it could have realistically asked for. But other times, especially for shows that had orders for a full season upfront, the producers were fairly confident they’d get renewed, and chose to end their season finale with a cliffhanger (like the rebooted V). And then, for whatever reason, the show wasn’t renewed, and… oops. Fans are left with a finale that placed their favorite characters in a trap of unavoidable death, the bad guy in command of the starship, or with hundreds of killer robots surrounding their base, giving a nasty implication about the fate of the heroes and their world. So this week, we’re going to countdown some of the most aggravating unresolved cliffhangers in sci-fi TV history. (Obvious spoilers ahead.) Read more
So, we’ve discussed the history of the webisode, and looked at some of the earlier examples. But as I said at the end of that piece, those early webisodes are quite different from how this medium is utilized today. If webisodes aren’t usually spinoffs, then what are they? And why should anyone care to look them up?
As we’ve already established, webisodes have been linked with sci-fi for a long time. You occasionally see them for sitcoms (Scrubs: Interns comes to mind), but more often than not, the invented world of a sci-fi show provides the kind of room for exploration needed to create interesting web content. One of the biggest shows to utilize the webisode format has been Doctor Who. As an early adopter to the idea, Doctor Who has experimented a lot trying to figure out what makes for a successful webisode. Naturally, then, I’m going to be using it as an example frequently throughout for the different varieties out there. Without further ado, let’s explore the concept and what value it has in a storytelling capacity. Read more
