Merry Little Thoughts...

First things first. I owe all of you an apology. My entry last week was completely lacking. It did, however, teach me a very important lesson: Unless I’ve been struck with a sudden inspiration (which does happen from time to time) I cannot just write something on the fly. It won’t work, clearly. So going forward I won’t post unless I’ve given the entry at least a little bit of thought and planning before sitting down to write. I’m making a list of potential topics and I also think I may mix in reviews of the zillion shows I’ve got waiting for me on DVD as I watch those. So bear with me, gentle reader, I promise it will get better. Now, to get to it…

Science fiction in television…there are so many shows out now—new and returning—and obviously I’m not watching them all, but I thought I’d let you know which shows I am watching and give you my thoughts on the series in general and the season so far.

Chuck (NBC, Mondays)
This is a new one. The basic premise follows Chuck, who was kicked out of Stanford and now works at the Buy More (i.e., Best Buy), as he receives a life-changing email from his former college roommate (and the individual responsible for getting him kicked out of Stanford) Bryce. The aforementioned email contained the database that receives all intel gathered by both the CIA and NSA and coded into the form of images. So, suddenly our friend Chuck finds himself knowing all kinds of things he shouldn’t (and doesn’t really want to) know. This newfound knowledge is triggered by seeing one of the images that was cataloged in the database that now resides in his brain.

Okay, this one is a wacky fun-time show. Chuck clearly has enough problems working at the Buy More with his best friend (I’m not really familiar with the actor playing Morgan but I swear the guy is channeling Seth Green and that is okay by me) and living with his sister and her boyfriend “Captain Awesome.” Everyone has expectations of Chuck, and he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life at this point—so he really doesn’t want to hear what anyone else thinks he should be doing. None of this changes when he becomes the crux of the CIA/NSA information sharing initiative. What does change is that now he’s got agents of the CIA (hot chick who is posing as his girlfriend to the outside world) and NSA (Adam Baldwin posing as a new employee at the Buy More) babysitting him and utilizing his hidden knowledge to complete “missions” to keep the free world safe and all that jazz.

I know it’s getting some mixed ratings, but I am really enjoying this show so far. I cannot give Adam Baldwin enough praise for how he is playing his character. He is probably, hands down, my favorite thing about the show. He can be scary and funny all at the same time. If you’re not familiar with Firefly or a Stargate aficionado, you probably best know Adam Baldwin as the guy who shot the can off the spaceship in the movie Independence Day. And no, before you ask, he’s not one of “those” Baldwins. Trust me; he’s got more cool in his pinky toe than all of them put together. That being said, I would never want to run into his current character at my local Best Buy. I think I’d just go home and order my DVD online…oh wait, that’s what I do anyway. Well, there you go.

So if you like a little action, adventure, and comedy with your sci-fi, I definitely recommend this one. I am very curious to see how this series proceeds.

SciFiTVFanGirl rating: 4 SQUEE!s (out of five)

Heroes (NBC, Mondays)
(**Spoiler Alert if you haven’t seen this week’s episode yet.**)
This one is a returning favorite. Tim Kring’s comic book for the small screen is entering its sophomore year to a lot of flack from the critics, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t get it. Let’s admit up front that I am a) easily amused, b) for the most part perfectly capable of temporary suspension of disbelief for entertainment purposes, and c) not a professional television critic. I tend to be a little bit more forgiving of some things that might make critics want to play a round of headdesk. At the same time though, I feel this makes me your average television viewer (although I still can’t stand so-called reality television, so maybe not that average). That means I’m the audience these shows are directed at, and I say that so far, Heroes’ second season is coming along swimmingly.

I will concede that they are getting kind of crowded with the multiple story lines and express my disappointment we didn’t get to visit Hiro in ancient Japan with last night’s installment. But that being said, I am glad that they are introducing new characters and given the overall title of this season, which is “Generations” in case you weren’t aware, I don’t think anything we’ve seen so far was completely unnecessary. I haven’t been terribly impressed with Maya and Alejandro, the twins of doom, so far. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure what purpose Maya’s power serves to the overall arc and unless she learns to control it and soon it’s just going to be more of the same. However, now that they’ve teamed up with Sylar and he’s figured out they have powers, that whole story line has become more interesting. I can see one of two outcomes here. Either Sylar will kill them and steal their powers, giving him the ability to have the eyes of death as well as temper the power, which will just be scary, or Maya and Alejandro will somehow manage to escape from Sylar, powers intact, which suggests that they will have gained some further measure of control over them. If they can do that they will have earned my respect. You don’t mess with Sylar without being a badass or without some serious help. This actually brings to mind a third potential outcome—they could meet up with another hero that helps them escape Sylar. I’m cool with that too, because it means more threads being tied together.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in comic books, but I have read my share. If you’re looking at serial comic books, Heroes, to me, fits the pattern. Kring has a plan here, and if we’re patient we should see a really stellar payoff by the season’s end. The whole point is to give you just enough in each episode to move the story a little further along and bring you back next week. It’s working for me. I don’t have to like all of the characters or be completely into all of the separate story lines—I know that it’s only a matter of time before they switch to someone else and I also know that when it all comes together it’s going to be one hell of a bang.

As an added bonus for all the nerds out there, this show gives constant love to the world of Star Trek. I’m not even a fan and I’m amused. First there was good old George Takei as Hiro’s father. He’s gone now, alas, but this season they’ve brought in Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) as Micah’s grandmother. Given the theme of generations, I can’t wait to see what her power is. I find Micah so much more interesting now that his mom is out of the picture. I’m sorry; I just don’t think schizophrenia is a super power. Plus, we’ve got Zachary Quinto (Sylar) lined up to play Spock in the new Star Trek movie next year. This is just good stuff.

SciFiTVFanGirl rating: 5 SQUEE!s

Journeyman (NBC, Mondays)
Here’s another new one for you. I was a little indifferent about this show at first, but it’s starting to pull me in. Here’s what NBC’s website has to say about this show:

“’Journeyman’ is a romantic mystery-drama about Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd, "Rome"), a San Francisco newspaper reporter and family man who inexplicably begins to travel through time and change people's lives.”

In the pre-season build up I often heard this compared to an old favorite of mine, Quantum Leap. I will admit there is no other reason why I even gave this show a chance. Really the only big similarity between the two shows is that Dan is sent back to “fix” something about history. He’s not lost in time the way Sam Beckett was, Dan only leaps back for small periods at a time before returning to his present life. I like this, because it gives us all kinds of issues he has to deal with when he does get back, because while he’s not always gone for the same amount of time that he spends in the past with each visit, he’s still gone for big chunks of time and he has absolutely no control over when he travels. Unfortunately, so far this season, the show runners haven’t really taken this set-up to its full potential. Mostly his wife has just been pissed that he’s missed something important, or his boss has been pissed that he missed a deadline, etc. Apparently, however, Dan has had a history of gambling problems. His disappearances initially cause his loved ones to think he might be gambling again, or perhaps experimenting with drugs. Eventually Dan manages to convince his boss he’s clean and to get his wife to believe him when he explains what he’s actually been doing. So now he has an ally in the present.

Of course, the whole “romantic” part of that show description then comes into play. Dan’s not the only traveler we meet on the show. It turns out his old fiancé, Livia, is also a traveler. In fact, she once ended up traveling while on a plane that crashed and has been presumed dead by Dan for the last nine years. Surprise! I haven’t seen last night’s episode yet, but last week left Katie (Dan’s wife) having just discovered that Livia is still alive and also traveling like her husband. I sense renewed trouble in paradise. I hope they get this triangle resolved quickly, or at least relegated to a minor, and much less irritating, plot point. It has the potential to be a nice running piece of the show but it equally has the potential to reach the Clark-Lana proportions of irritation being forced on us by Smallville’s show runners. Ergh.

Another nice touch is that when Dan travels, he goes back as himself, at his current age. Which means if he’s traveling in his home city of San Francisco (which is usually the case), he needs to be careful to a) not run into his younger self (which would be much easier if he would stop going to his old apartment, seriously), and b) not run into anyone he knows who might wonder why good ol’ Dan has suddenly aged twenty or thirty years. It keeps things interesting. As I mentioned already, he only goes back for short periods of time, a day, a few hours, etc. Whatever is sending him back will keep sending him back to either the same day or different periods in the life of the individual he has been sent to “help.” For example, in one episode he helped deliver a baby girl on an airplane, only to end up helping her confront her absentee father once she was in her twenties. There’s a lot of potential here. If the show runners can find the right balance between Dan’s personal life and his “missions” I think that this could be an outstanding show.

I must also give kudos for the soundtrack. So far, every time Dan has gone back, I have been highly impressed with how well the chosen background music has set the scene for the new time in which our hero finds himself.

SciFiTVFanGirl rating: 3 SQUEE!s

Bionic Woman (NBC, Wednesdays)
Now we get to yet another new series this season. Of course, it’s not completely new. Bionic Woman is, of course, an update of the classic series. It comes to us from the minds that took Battlestar Galactica from cheesy but entertaining fluff to a dark, intense, and gripping look at humanity as a whole. I had high hopes. Between the BSG creative might working on this show, and the on-screen talent they’ve “borrowed” for cameos and recurring roles I had my fingers crossed that I would once more be blown away. So far, not so much.

I wouldn’t go so far to say this show is bad, but I still can’t say I really like it at this point. I’m not even remotely invested in any of the characters they’ve given us so far. Considering how much I love some of the actors we’ve got, this is not a great sign.

The effects are okay, and the action scenes are satisfying on the popcorn scale. Overall though, I’m just not feeling the plot. I have yet to even consider watching this show live, and it’s usually one of the last ones I clear out of my DVR buffer at the end of the week. Still, NBC is putting a lot of effort into this one, so I am holding out hope. I wouldn’t recommend it at this point, but I am hanging in there, at least till the mid-season break.

SciFiTVFanGirl rating: 2.5 SQUEE!s

Smallville (CW, Thursdays)
Oy vey. Talk about shows making someone want to headdesk. Smallville definitely is not a new entry into sci-fi on television. It’s now airing its seventh season. I keep hoping each season will be the last and they keep bring it back. I would say I don’t even know why I watch this show, except that wouldn’t be entirely true. For one thing, on average, about half of the story for each episode is pretty good. For another, I’m committed now. It’s in its seventh frakkin’ season for Pete’s sake! I want to see him don the cape and the tights and fly!!

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last seven years, Smallville is a take on a possible origin story for Superman. It follows a young Clark Kent as he learns of his Kryptonian heritage and subsequent super powers. Throughout the series he has developed most of Superman’s trademark powers. As each ability surfaces he has to learn how to use it and still keep his true identity secret from all but the small and ever-rotating cabal of people who know about his real origin. In addition to watching the boy Clark Kent grow into the man who will become Superman, the show runners have added their own element to this iconic universe: meteor freaks.

Along with his spaceship, baby Kal-El’s arrival on earth brought a meteor shower. Those meteors were composed of green rocks that are pieces of Kal-El’s native world, Krypton. While we all know that Kryptonite is poison to Clark, it is also radioactive, and the inhabitants are constantly stumbling across it. Exposure to the “meteor rocks” tends to give us humans powers of our own. It also tends to make us crazy…and apparently to make us lust for Lana Lang. A large portion of the high school seasons dealt with Clark trying to protect the town (and Lana) from meteor-infected individuals while his best friend Chloe runs around town trying to expose them. Fun times.

Now that the show is getting on in years, I really can’t say it is aging terribly well. Clark can only stay in Smallville for so long. They’ve got Chloe working at the Daily Planet—alongside Jimmy Olsen (who is her boyfriend) and Lois Lane (who is her cousin). Lex Luthor has for the most part given up on his attempts to be anything other than the mega-villain he’s destined to become. Pappa Kent has passed on. Hell, this season we’ve even got Super Girl joining the party, and last season the JLA got its kick start. There’s only so much stalling the show runners can do before Clark has to put on the cape and finally become Superman. But man, are they trying to stretch it out.

My biggest quibble is that Clark is still chasing after Lana Lang. We all know they don’t end up together. They’ve completely broken each other’s hearts multiple times by this point. Lana married Lex Luthor for crying out loud—then staged her own death to frame him for her murder. This is not the woman Clark Kent needs to be trying to keep around. An interview with one of the show runners touched on this stating that Clark Kent will always love Lana, she’s his first love, so they can’t just abandon that story. To that I say, yes they can! I had a first love in high school. It happened, it was nice for a while, and it ended. We both moved on with our lives. This is the way the world works. This is even the way the comic book world works. Hell, even Angel and Buffy realized that while they would always love each other they weren’t meant to be and moved to different cities so they could get on with their respective lives. Keep her around as a friend, sure, that follows canon, but for all that is good in the universe, stop trying to pretend these two are PB&J. I can’t be the only person who is tired of that. It can completely ruin an otherwise excellent episode for me.

So, yeah, I’ll watch this one to the bitter end. But I really wish that the show runners would wise up. Go the BSG route and plan out your story arc, and then when you get to the end, end the series! People would far rather have a show that ended early that they can remember fondly than watch a beloved show grow stagnant and painfully drag on. I think even the band on the Titanic would understand…

SciFiTVFanGirl rating: 3 SQUEE!s

Moonlight (CBS, Fridays)
I so wasn’t going to watch this show. It’s been a hot topic of discussion all spring and summer. The show centers on a vampire who works as a private investigator in L.A. But he’s not just any vampire—he’s got a conscience, and he doesn’t feed off of people, but gets his blood from the neighborhood blood bank. Does this sound familiar to you? Does it sound a bloody awful lot like the plot synopsis for Angel? Exactly. I loved Angel (liked it better than Buffy, as a matter of fact), and I felt that my personal quota of vampire detectives had been filled. Plus, this show seems to have a curse hanging over it. Only one actor that appeared in the original pilot is still in the cast (the main one, of course). David Greenwalt (who actually worked as a show runner on Angel) came on to replace a show runner and had to leave because of health problems before the season started. All of the Whedon fans are in an uproar over the similarities to Angel. So the show has had a lot of negative press. But as I started to hear more of the actual details of the show, and found out that Shannyn Sossamon had been cast as the main vampire’s sire (I have no idea why, but I for some reason will try anything once if I find out she’s in it), I decided to at least give it a cursory chance. My hopes weren’t terribly high as there wasn’t a whole lot of good in what I’d heard about the show.

Wow. I was so wrong. I am totally digging on this show. The Angel parallels are there alright—reporter Beth Turner is decidedly like Detective Kate—but Moonlight has taken how I always thought things should have gone with Kate on Angel and applied that, instead of the girl meets guy, girl works with guy to solve crimes, girl finds out guy is a vampire and swears to kill him. The two actresses look creepily like one another though, and that is hard to shake.

The show was a tad slow in getting off the ground but I think they’ve done a good job of developing the characters and introducing their unique spin on the vampire mythos. Two nice touches in particular are that instead of a stake through the heart being lethal—the sweet spot for a stake on this show is the spine, and it’s not lethal—it will leave the vamp paralyzed until the stake is removed. I also dig “the Cleaner” who we met last week. She’s a vampire that specialized in cleaning up after other vampires. That means disappearing the bodies so that the humans don’t find out and go all Van Helsing on the vampire population. I do get the impression (I can’t recall 100 %) that the vampires of this world have reflections, and that irks me, but you can’t have everything, I guess. Other than that my only real complaint is that there’s a bit of a Thorn Birds vibe going on here. Mick (our vampire) rescued Beth from Coraline (his sire) when she was a little girl and has been keeping an eye out on her since, playing her protector and eventually becoming her friend. What worries me is that they seem to be setting up a romance between the two. Ick. Then again, I guess there’s a serious shortage of morally upstanding lady vampires floating around out there for Mick to choose from. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.

All in all, I am very pleased with what Moonlight has put out so far. There’s a lot of potential here. So to CBS I say, don’t screw it up!

SciFiTVFanGirl rating: 4 SQUEE!s

Stargate Atlantis (Sci Fi, Fridays)
Clearly I love this show. It is my favorite show on television right now. Atlantis is now in its fourth (and hopefully not final) season. This is the first year it has been on its own without parent show Stargate SG-1 leading into it. So far, I think that Atlantis has reaped all of the benefits of being the primary focus of the franchise. This show follows the exploits of an expedition of modern day humans comprised of scientists from multiple nations, many members of the U.S. Air Force and Marines, and a few aliens thrown in. The expedition occupies the lost city of Atlantis which is currently located in the far away Pegasus galaxy. They travel to other planets and Earth primarily using the stargates, but there are also some pretty ships. To date their biggest enemy is an alien race known as the Wraith, closely followed by the Replicators. We’re supposed to get a new big bad this season though. This show is just fun. While the science isn’t always 100% sound, the show runners do try to be at least remotely grounded in reality and the technobabble itself (sometimes in Czech, even) is always entertaining. But for me the best thing about this show is the dynamic between the characters.

As far as this season, I’ve already recapped in a previous post what I am looking forward to seeing in future episodes, so I won’t go into too much detail here. I’ll just say that so far I’m nothing but pleased with what they’ve given us and am eagerly awaiting more.

SciFiTVFanGirl rating: 5 SQUEE!s

Torchwood (BBC America, Saturdays)
Last, but certainly not least, we come to my new British favorite. This is another show dealing with aliens but it addresses them from the point of view of a group of humans on Earth. They know we’re not alone, but they also know we’re not really ready to know that. So the institution has taken it upon itself to make sure that aliens stay secret and alien technology doesn’t fall into any human hands but its own. It’s a fun premise and the show has good writing and great characters.

I think my personal favorite bit about the show is Captain Jack’s pet pterodactyl. That’s right, there’s a pterodactyl. It’s pretty awesome.

I also enjoy that (as far as I can tell) they avoid falling back on the Dr. Who aliens or even mention of the Doctor. This is a spin-off, yes, but it is very much its own show. I really look forward to watching Jack’s character grow now that he’s out of the shadow of the Doctor.

SciFiTVFanGirl rating: 5 SQUEE!s

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Alrighty folks, that’s it for this week. I hope you found it at least mildly interesting. Until next week, try to behave.

-C

Recent acquisitions: Transformers the movie