Khaji-da!

In case you missed it over at the Newsarama blog...

an incarnation of the Blue Beetle will finally be showing up on your TV screens, in the latest Batman cartoon, Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

While characters running the gamut from The Creeper and Booster Gold to Aztek and B'wana Beast managed to get themselves cameos in the DCU in media other than comics, we have been denied any appearances of any of the Blue Beetles - neither Garrett, nor Kord, nor Reyes - in any form, whether it be Justice League Unlimited, or even Teen Titans. Why? Well, apparently Fox Feature Syndicate, the company that created and owned the blue bug in the forties until they went kaput and sold the rights to Charlton, had short-sightedly signed away the broadcasting rights to the character in order to produce a radio program. While I can only speculate, it would seem that they concluded that comic books were a fad, and were due for a crash sooner rather than later. It was, therefore, better to get their money now, and if that meant losing out on holding the rights to a worthless asset in a few years, than so be it.

That license finally expired in 2006, but by then it was too late to feature him in JLU - the cartoon had been canceled. Luckily for us Blue Beetle fans, though, no matter how many such shows are shit-canned, there will always be room for more Batman on our Saturday mornings.

The case of Blue Beetle is pretty enlightening, actually. I used to believe that if you tried hard enough, and maybe wrote a few letters, you could get a cartoon or toy based on any character you wanted. After searching for information about the Blue Beetle rights, though, I came across this post on the boards at Action Figure Insider, and was thoroughly humbled. I wasn't really disappointed, though - I felt more informed, and less like DC had something explicitly some of my favorite characters. It was calming to find out that, sometimes, no matter how popular a character, or how much money you could make out of it, you just can't use something - even if you own the character! Who knew making action figures, or cartoons, could be so complicated?

It's Probably a Defense Mechanism: A Review of the Stargate Atlantis Episode, "Trio"

The most recent episode of Stargate Atlantis continues to avoid building on any kind of an arc with episode 16 of the fourth season, “Trio,” in which Dr. Keller, Samantha Carter, and Rodney McKay all find themselves stuck in a hole. This is just about the third such episode this season, each involving Dr. Keller, so I’m guessing that she’s on some kind of fast-track to character development with the writers. The only thing I’ve learned about her so far, though, is that she’s terrible when put into a life-or-death situation, unless, as revealed in “Trio,” said situation involves bar games. So, if you’re ever captured by a Wraith with an affinity for beer pong, you’re going to want her right there with you. If, however, you are not in such an alcohol-fueled predicament, but instead find yourself a member of the opposite sex, you’re pretty much screwed: in her two out of three “locked room” episodes, Keller has ended up forming a tenuous and quickly forgotten quasi-sexual relationship with a crewmate. The earlier episode, “Quarantine,” showed us that when faced with danger and having her only plan fail terribly, she’s willing to let it all hang out and sex-up Ronon. In “Trio,” her failed “bar knife bridge” leads her to ask McKay out for a drink – an event that occurred after she was all too willing to strip for his failed plan of making a rope for his “grappling hook” out of shirts and pants. Given the evidence, I’m surprised that her earliest outing of this type, “Missing,” didn’t find her macking up Teyla, with whom she shared the spotlight of that episode. This may have just been common courtesy; after all, Teyla was involved with an Athosian man, and Keller did have the good sense to convince Rodney that he had inadvertently broken up with Dr. Brown in “Quarantine” before she began to shove her sweet thing all up in his grill.

Speaking of Keller’s past romantic interludes, there’s a part of me that wonders if this might be what sets Ronon down the “dark path” that Jason Mamoa talks about wanting to do in an interview with Gateworld.net. I know I’d be pissed if my lady was fooling around with David Hewlett behind my back. If I had a lady. And if I knew David Hewlett. And if me doing something counted as any kind of evidence for what Ronon would do.

Sexual relations aside, I was just bored with “Trio.” It was a character-building episode for a character that I don’t particularly care for, it didn’t advance any of the dangling stories from this season (was it just my imagination, or were we not promised that Season 4 would be “darker” than previous seasons? I hope they weren’t just talking about giving them leather jackets.), and there was no real sense of peril. Rodney’s clever bit of “Arena” engineering was fun, though, and I liked their little discussion about Zelenka. Poor guy just can’t catch a break.

The good? McKay fails, but isn’t made to be the complete cause of the team’s problems, so we don’t have to hate him.

The bad? Keller turns into a frightened field mouse when in danger.

The ugly? We’ve seen it all before.

Correction: We also know that Keller would rather do Brian Green than that thief, Neil deGrasse Tyson.


Stargate Atlantis Airs Fridays at 10PM on Sci-Fi.

Bird

Boosterin' the TARDIS

Deedle-dee-dum deedle-dee-dum deedle-dee-dum dum dum dada dum...WOOWEEWOOOOOOOO...

If you'll forgive the brief musical interlude, I have something... fantastic to show you.

I was perusing the old episodes of Justice League Unlimited this morning, killing time and fulfilling my Booster Gold craving until #6 comes out by re-watching the Booster Gold episode (The Greatest Story Never Told), when I noticed a familiar shape making an appearance - a cameo that would rival the epic partnership of chocolate and peanut butter.

Gentlemen, BEHOLD:



Hey, haven't we seen that blue box somewhere before? And I think I may remember seeing it heading into that kind of swirly, vortex-like effect before, too... but where?

(photo unrepentantly swiped from http://www.answers.com/topic/time-vortex-doctor-who-1 )

A Very Special Guest Star

Hey, Chris! Guess who was in last night's South Park (Imagination Land: Episode III)?

Only the Greatest of the Space Knights.

Spooky Star Trek

Ha! Back... and fully charged.

Star Trek is a TV series that isn't exactly known for its tales of horror.

Ever since that one episode of TOS that was trying explicitly to be a Halloween-themed entry made Kirk and Co. go up against black cats and highly questionable witches, the series had tried to stay away from the realm of Doctor-Who-like monsters. And it's been all the better for it, I say: the less you depend on the foam-rubber monsters, the harder you have to try to tell a good story. This inevitably led to the Star Trek Renaissance, in which episodes of TNG were not limited to sequels to TOS episodes and other shows about aliens posing as gods, humans posing as gods, your imagination posing as a god, and computers posing as gods.

This isn't to say that there aren't any moments of fantastic flight or interstellar horror starring Data and crew. It just means that, like all media, Star Trek has had to be a bit more cerebral in its portrayals. Rather than outright scary, or even spooky, Star Trek has had to try for creepy.

Here are three moments from the Star Trek universe that actually succeeded in freaking me out. These scenes rely on atmosphere rather than gross-outs or jump-scares, and that makes the images stick with you long after you've seen the episodes.

Torres Has an Encounter With Bleeding Metal

Trekkies have always had a hard-on for Klingons. I never got this, quite frankly. Oh, I tried - back when I was playing the Star Trek CCG in its early days, there were only three groups you could play as, and I latched onto the only group I had enough cards to actually play: the Klingons. And so I started to claim that the Klingons were my favorite alien race. But, I mean, really: once you got beyond that contrived "honor" bullshit, there wasn't a whole lot to like about the klngons. They were violent, often smelly, and I must have missed the class where honor was defined as conquering those weaker than you in order to build a vast interstellar empire, as well as settling any and all grievances, no matter how trivial, with a big curvy knife. Seems kind of primitive, is all.

But like I said, the majority of fans friggin' love Klingons. So, Rick Berman tried to squeeze as many forehead-ridges into the show as he could back in the day when he was running things. And that was how we got the episode, early into the sixth season of Star Trek Voyager, called "The Barge of the Dead."

B'Elanna Torres is the chief engineer aboard the U.S.S. Voyager, and she's also half-klingon. Her mother was the proud warrior type, and her human father seemed like he was probably the one sewing up tears in B'Elana's Klingon cheerleading uniform. Occasionally, when the writers were out of ideas and Berman shouted from his office that ratings were slipping and they needed a Klingon episode, B'Elanna would run into conflicts with her "Klingon heritage." You should read that line as "Sometimes she would worry about whether she was being quite as violent as she could be."

Anyway, "Barge of the Dead" involves B'Elanna suffering a hallucination while in a coma after a shuttlecraft accident, which makes her believe that she is on the aforementioned barge of Klingon Mythology. Here, she is charged with saving her mother's soul from Grethor, i.e. Klingon Hell. It's supposed to be a character-building episode, I guess, but it strays too far into woo-woo territory for me to care all that much.

On the scale of "the human condition" stories, this one ranks pretty low. We've already seen Worf go through all of this, and, hell, even Spock can be counted as among the many aliens that had to try to deal with the little bit of human that was infecting their blood. But I'm not here to review how well the B'Elanna character was handled - I'm here to show you images that will shock and disturb. Behold!


Bleeding metal! In the first moments of B'Elanna's hallucinations, she imagines that her shuttlecraft was damaged by a piece of debris from a hunk of metal from a Klingon space-vessel that, by the logic of the series, shouldn't be there. When she takes it back to her quarters (because, really, a girl's gotta have her knick-knacks) and goes to fiddle with the food replicator, a rising crescendo of the moans of the damned swells in the background, and the metal begins to ooze blood. It's all very Nightmare on Elm Street.

It's the sounds that really get me. You've got to see it for yourself to understand how bloody freaky it is.

Voyager Wants to Kill and Eat You

Another Voyager episode creeps me the hell out in "The Haunting of Deck 12." In this one, Neelix (the obligatory annoying alien character) is charged with keeping the children on board (there's only five of them, but trust me, that's five more than were really necessary) occupied when the ship has to run on minimal power as it heads through some weird-ass nebula (which, in it's own scary-ass way, turns out to be mostly alive). This means that the ship has to be kept almost entirely in the dark for around three hours.

To accomplish his duties, Neelix decides that it'd be a good idea to (keeping in mind that the entire ship is dark, claustrophobic, and there may or may not be any number of alien stowaways aboard) tell the kids some camp-fire ghost stories. He settles on the eponymous "Haunting of Deck 12," in which the ship is invaded by a nebula alien that can control electronic systems and will flood the decks with poison gas unless you turn that ship around right now and take it home this instant.

And that's the scary part of it all. It's the haunted house story, but a whole lot worse - it's more like the haunted submarine, mixed with a little techno-phobic terror. Once the alien gets tired with using subtle methods to try to return home (making Paris look like a jackass by flying the ship in circles is its main strategy here), it gets angry and begins to turn off the lights, make the atmosphere poisonous, and just generally turn the U.S.S. Voyager into a giant death trap. A sentient death trap, in which there is no escape.


Oh, but it gets worse. See, you may already know that in the Star Trek universe, all of the computers talk. And as 2001 and Portal have taught us, there is nothing more frightening than a piece of technology suddenly acquiring free will and deciding, in its flat, monotonous voice, that it wants to murder you.

And then you realize that it totally has the capability to do so. I dare you to watch this and not be spooked when Captain Janeway tells the nebula creature that she's not going to take anymore of its crap by saying "You'll have to kill me!" and then hearing the ship respond with a simple, direct, "Acknowledged."

Dead Tired

The downright creepiest scene that I have ever seen in an episode of Star Trek isn't from Voyager. It's from my childhood favorite, The Next Generation.

By the fourth season, TNG had finally gotten its legs, and was on the way to becoming one of the most popular shows on television, paving the way for Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. And it was because of writing that gave us scenes like this one, in the episode "Night Terrors."

In "Night Terrors," the Enterprise encounters the U.S.S. Brattain, a starship that was reported missing. When they investigate, they find that they entire crew have murdered each other, and they have no idea why. As the Enterprise stays within the area to study the ship and the surrounding space, they discover that something unusual is happening: they are unable to enter REM sleep, that is, they've lost the ability to dream. And then the shit hits the fan.

The crew begin to go insane, seemingly from the lack of REM sleep. Riker hallucinates that is bed is full of snakes (ahh, "Indiana Jones Syndrome"), Worf tries to off himself, and Doctor Crusher? Well, Doctor Beverly Crusher, CMO of the starship Enterprise, gets to experience this:


And really, if you don't know what scary about the recently deceased, still covered in body bags, sitting straight up and silent in a morgue (of which you are in the middle of, surrounded by said body bags), then I can't talk to you anymore: You lack the capability to be frightened.

Literate Yourself: Ray Bradbury Narrates The Halloween Tree

NO-air Extravaganza? CBS, Zombies, and Babylon Fields

Halloween season continues unabated here at Blackmarket Pies, and tonight I give you a look at the show that CBS decided we didn't want to see: Babylon Fields.

Babylon Fields was a drama (and it is a drama drama, with nary a chuckle in earshot) that features two of the hottest subjects at the moment - death and zombies. I'm guessing Pirates and/or Ninjas were out of the range of the budget. I say "was" because while a pilot was ordered by CBS for the fall 2007 season, the exec's decided to pass it up for the vampire series "Moonlight" instead. So this may be your only chance to get to know what a TV show about zombies would have looked like on a major television network. Go you!

Sounding like a spin-off from the idea behind the French movie They Came Back, Babylon Fields explores what happens when the dead return from the grave, and really aren't that keen on brain-eating: they just want to return to their old lives, even if the people from those lives had decided to move on long ago.

Cast:

Jamey Sheridan

...

Ernie Wunch (undead husband)

Kathy Baker

...

Shirley Wunch

Amber Tamblyn

...

Janine Wunch

Ray Stevenson

...

Carl Tiptree (police chief)

Our story begins with a shot of a recently re-animated corpse clawing his way back to the world of the living - except he's not coming out of a cemetery, he's emerging from within a fenced-off lot marked "Private Property." Keep this in mind, it'll be important later.

Then we're introduced to two of the protagonists: the surviving Wunches, Janine and her mother, Shirley. They're doing what those about to be attacked by zombies typically do: the banalities of every day life. There's not a whole lot here other than typical mother/teenage daughter banter, so it's probably best if we move on.

Cut to: a small-town police station. Carl Tiptree (played by Ray Stevenson, he was in HBO's Rome, don'tcha know) the only police chief in the world who lacks any kind of personality whatsoever, is introduced here, as well as his girlfriend/sex-buddy, Louisa Ramirez (played by Leila Arcieri). They, uh, "flirt," I guess, and then go about their business.

Meanwhile, the dead-man-walking seen earlier has been shambling his way through the town, and the Wunches arrive home just in time to discover that he's cracked open a cold one and made himself at home.


It turns out that the dead man is Ernie Wunch, ertswhile husband of Shirley, and something of an ambiguous "monster." I'm guessing he was just a wife beater, although we are dealing with zombies here, so he may have actually been a vampire and/or werewolf. It is disappointing that we may never truly know.

Carl also has an encounter with the dearly departed. He's been called to his sister's home, where he discovers that her dead husband, Dick, has returned from the great beyond. And let me tell you, for a guy laid to rest way back in 1998, he doesn't look half bad. Dude even brags later about how he can still get it up.

You read that correctly, gentle reader: there is implied pseudo-necro-philia goin' on in Babylon Fields. At this point, you may be wondering why the show was not green-lit within seconds of viewing this scene.

Dick tells Carl to go down to Greenfield Cemetary, and "he'll see." And boy, does he ever.



Not only have dozens of the dead gotten up and started wandering around, but he even discovers that his dead wife's grave is now empty. That might get a little awkward.

After a few more scenes in which the two Wunches encounter the standard paranoid survivalist types who have taken to barricades and home-made weaponry, the police station is reported to be (but never seen) under siege from frightened citizens (and not, sadly, flesh-hungry zombies), and everybody's favorite dull Police Chief gets to play hero by saving a dead man from a mob of angry church-goers, we discover what was undoubtedly going to be the big mystery of the series (you know, besides why, or even how, the dead have come back to, uh, "life"): Ernie Wunch discovers that he was actually struck down by a blow to his head - with an axe. He implores Carl to discover who's behind his murder, and that's where our introduction to the idyllic town of Babylon Fields comes to a close.

Refreshingly, the show doesn't take the tone of a Tim Burton movie, or something like Dead Like Me or Pushing Daisies - in the town of Babylon, death is no laughing matter. When the dead return in the first fifteen minutes, there aren't any cutesy zombie moments, or scenes played for jokes: it's what we'd expect it to be if this actually happened. Everybody freaks out, most people lock themselves in their houses, and some grab rifles and commence "removing the head or destroying the brain" when they encounter people who should still be six feet under.

Another theme that was planted in the pilot was the idea that it would not necessarily be the zombies that are the problem, but that we would be our own worst enemy. The zombies don't exactly cause any trouble, but the living citizenry shoot at them, swarm them, and entirely lose their cool. In fact, it's the zombies who appear rational, despite the fact that they were just dead. This is a little perplexing, since the archetypal zombies, those of "Night of the Living Dead," were already supposed to act as a metaphor for people throwing each other to the wolves.

It also raises an interesting question: if you kill a zombie - but it's, like, a nice zombie - does it count as murder? Even worse - what if they don't die after that? Does it still count as attempted murder? Inquiring minds demand satisfactory answers.

It does drag on a bit. They spend far too long showing how people react to the dead returning then actually, you know, doing something. And it's all the visceral reaction: shock, anger, fear. Only one person ever starts to get to know their dead loved one again (remember that zombie intimacy I mentioned earlier?), everyone else is too busy freaking out for 45 minutes.

It would have been nice if we had gotten a little "day in the life" image of the town of Babylon before the shit started hitting the fan. Maybe they could have established who was dead before they came back, just so that we'd have a connection with the characters and be able to see things through their eyes. For example, we know from a few snippets of dialog that Shirley and Janine Wunch know Carl the detective, and that they were actually the ones who killed Ernie (well, guess it wasn't that big of a mystery after all then, huh?), and it would have been nice to see the relationship between the chief and those two, and if he had assisted in covering-up Ernie's murder. I would have also cared to see how much Carl missed his wife, and maybe finding out that it was especially difficult for him to finally let go, and how freaking horrible it's going to be for him to have to face her again.

So I can see why the show wasn't picked up. It's too meandering, too talky, and I didn't give one iota of rat's ass about any of the characters. I am perplexed, though, as to why they didn't decide to release the pilot to iTunes or a similar online service. When they made Aquaman available for download, it was snatched up eagerly by waiting comics fans. The inexplicable allure of the zombie in popular culture at the moment would have guaranteed some return on investment - and hell, it might have even given the series a second chance.

Favorite lines:

"Like the bible says: 'When there's no room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.' "
"That's from a movie."
"Not even; it's from the poster."

This "Television" Is Have Being the Greatest Invention of All Time

The new season of good TV finally begins this week, which means that I'm going to have a really tough time keeping up with all of my procrastination. Here's what I'll be watching this season.

Mondays:

Chuck,The Big Bang Theory:



Chuck begins at 8PM, while The Big Bang Theory starts at 8:30, which means I'm either going to have to be content with missing the ending of every episode of Chuck, or one show is gonna get cancelled this year. Sorry, Chuck, but I do like The Big Bang Theory more than I like the representatives of the "Nerd Herd." I blogged about the Chuck pilot here, but I've nary uttered a peep about its conflicting program, The Big Bang Theory, which I enjoyed immensely, if only because I am those guys. Well, not all fo tehm. Out of four "geeks" introduced, I loved the Sheldon character (played superbly by Jim Parsons) and all of his eccentricities. He reminded the most of what geeks actually are, as I and the friends I had in high school were: judgmental social outcasts who think you're an idiot if you don't know what we know.

The "teaser" opener for the first episode of Big Bang features Sheldon and Leonard (our protagonists) at a sperm bank, when Sheldon undergoes an "ethical dilemma" over the fact that he can't guarantee that his sperm would produce a child that was a genius. When Leonard responds that his mother would probably still love him despite not knowing whether to use an integral or a differential to solve for the area under a curve, Sheldon counters: "I wouldn't." That, my friends, is my variety of geek.

The only downside is that, in order to make the show funny in a "mainstream" way, they've had to "dumb down" some of the jokes, relying on cliches instead of the humor that arises naturally out of geeky awkwardness.

Heroes:

(9 PM)

When we last left our group of emerging heroes, Matt Parkman was "shot" a whole bunch of times; Peter and Nathan Petrelli were, supposedly, blown to smithereens; and Hiro found himself in feudal Japan. Oh, and there's talk about another "hero" (what do we call the super-powered in heroes? Metahumans? Mutants? Maybe we just call them "people..." hmmm...) who's even more dangerous than Sylar, who, if you'll remember, could use the powers of his mind to cut open peoples' skulls and eat their brains. If you're not watching this, I'm not talking to you anymore.

Journeyman:



(10 PM)

Another new show for this season makes Monday night even more crowded, and, unfortunately, I call this show at getting the axe quickest. Don't get me wrong: it wouldn't be on my "watch" list if I didn't like it. There's the time-travel thing, there's interesting character developments (exactly how did Vasser end up with his current-wife, who looked like she used to be his brother's girlfriend? Why is he travelling in time in short-spurts instead of controlled periods? What connection does "Livia," his supposedly-dead fiance, have with his situation?), and there was the clever bit at the end (SPOILER: Vasser takes his wife's ring from the present and buries it in the house's yard in the past, digging it up when he returns so that his wife will believe he's actually a time traveller, and not just on drugs) that made it good TV. I just can't see this show providing many reasons to keep watching: you can only do clever time-tricks so many times before they get mind-numbingly obvious, and the "saving lives to make the future a better place" rings of "Quantum Leap," as well as bringing up many uncomfortable questions: for instance, if there's someone else who's controlling his "leaps" through time, why don't they allow him to prevent WWII? What about paradoxes? What does the existence of time travel do to the concept of morality (if a person is a criminal in the present, do you treat him as a criminal in the past, before he commits his crime? The pilot sneakily avoided this by having its "bad guy" be hit by a bus, but Vasser is going to have to encounter this crisis eventually)? There are just too many places for this show to falter.

Oh, and did I mention that Vasser's dead fiance is totally hot?



Tuesdays:

Reaper, House




(9PM)

Another day, another conflict. You know I've gotta go with House on this one, CW, so why do you schedule Reaper in the same timeslot? House ended with almost all of the regular cast resigned or fired, and that leaves some very interesting possibilities on the horizon for this show. I mean, there's no question that Cameron, Chase, and Foreman will return, but the interesting question to ask is going to be: How? How can they just come back to the hospital after all that was said and done? How have their characters changed since they've been gone? House isn't one to apologize, forget, or even let go of the past, so it'll be fascinating to watch how they're going to get through this.

Sorry, Reaper: all you can offer me is a fat guy with no social etiquette and a man who's gotta capture demons in a vacuum cleaner.

Wednesdays:

Bionic Woman (haha! No, no, I'm just fuckin' with you - Bionic Woman really is a terrible, terrible program. Don't watch it.)

Mythbusters:

Alright, this really shouldn't be here, since Discovery airs new episodes of Mythbusters approximately "whenever they feel like it," but it does come on in the fall (sometimes), and I like it, damn it!

Thursdays:

Smallville:




Smallville is one of those shows that should serve as an example to networks: the first few seasons of this show were real stinkers, but, starting with the addition of Lois Lane, subsequent seasons proved to be stellar examples of great television. Instead of the early "freak of the week" episodes (similar to early episodes of The X-Files), the show's writers started delving into that rich mythology of the Superman universe, introducing characters like The Flash, Green Arrow, and even Aquaman. Season 7 looks like it can only get better, with the season premiere featuring Bizarro, Lex Luthor contemplating going straight again, and the arrival of "Supergirl." Actually, to be completely honest with you, the addition of Supergirl has me on edge a bit, but the show-runners have proven that they can write engaging stories with even the most unrealistic characters (The Martian Manhunter, for one), so I'm optimistic.

Plus, JIMMY!

Fridays:

Stargate Atlantis:



(10PM)

The Season 3 finale saw the City of Atlantis powering up its hyperdrive in order to leave the planet and escape from an Asuran beam weapon. Unfortunately, the city was grazed in the process, resulting in the injury of Weir, as well as forcing Atlantis to drop out of hyperspace earlier than it should have, stranding them in the middle of nowhere.

I've seen the first two episodes of Season 4 (albeit in a format which lacked music and sound effects, unless you call being able to hear the director yell "bang!" an effect), and I've gotta tell ya: this season looks like it may be the best yet for Atlantis. Shepperd was given something meaningful to do, there was more conflict, and Weir had more to do in the second episode than she ever had in all of the first three seasons. Sure, Teyla got short-changed, and Ronon was left playing the muscle (including an hilarious scene where he plays "tough guy" and tries to intimidate one of the doctors into removing a large shard of glass from his shoulder), but you can only focus on so many characters at once, one of the weakness of having as large a regular cast as Atlantis does.


Saturdays:

Robin Hood (Oct. 6 premiere in the UK, apparently)

As tiring as this show was last year (Robin Hood has a plan, someone gets captured when the plan goes to shit, Robin Hood saves them with a big fight scene with the same music that they've used in every single other episode), I still enjoyed it immensely. They delineated between who Robin was was indeed robbin': instead of taking from the ambiguous "rich" and giving to the equally ambiguous "poor," Robin keeps his actions limited to robbing from the sheriff, taking back the tax money that was stolen from the citizens. Other Robin Hoods would merely target anyone who had more money than others, which would have created a problem once Robin had succeeded in defeating the sheriff - when the poor become the rich, and the rich are now poor, do you change tactics? This Robin Hood doesn't have to think about that, because he's clear on his principles: he's going to stop the sheriff from taking away the rights of the citizenry.

The "modernisation" may have gotten a bit ridiculous at times ("I shot the sheriff," "No, you shot the deputy"), and Guy of Gisborne needed to lighten the fuck up a little, but if you just want to watch a true hero go and kick some unjust ass, Robin Hood's your show.

(I know, I don't live in the UK, but I don't have to be in order to watch it, now do I? Thanks, INTERWEB!)

And that's my life for the next few months. Being unemployed rocks.

That Is The Question

This is one of the most well-done pieces of fan-film I've ever seen, especially considering that it only contains re-used footage from "Justice League: Unlimited." Who wouldn't kill (only in self-defense, mind you) for a "Question" series?

Everybody Wants to Be a Klingon

When doing business in the galaxy, it's always a good idea to be prepared:

Take Michael Dorn's patented "Power Klingon" course, and complete your Master's Degree in fake languages!

"The Prisoner" Still At Large

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33786

Looks like that re-make of The Prisoner just ain't happenin'. Says it was the Americans' fault (isn't it always?), trying to turn it into something that isn't "British," whatever the fuck that means anymore. I think that's British for "it was too hard, and we were too scared that we were going to fuck it up." It could also mean "the Prisoner was borne of creativity, and we bean-counters have no idea what would be involved in resurrecting it. Couldn't we just make another cop show?"

Pre-Air Extravaganza: Reaper

Pre-Air Extravaganza comes to a close with the long-delayed review of the supernatural-comedy-drama thing, Reaper. I know that it's been a while coming, but I've been hard at work, writing a book (only the bestest most awesomest book e-var!), and there are some things that take priority. Like eating.

Without forever ado, awaaaay we go!

Reaper stars:

• Bret Harrison - Sam Oliver
• Missy Peregrym - Andi
• Ray Wise - Satan
• Rick Gonzalez - Ben
• Tyler Labine - Bert "Sock" Wysocki
• Valarie Rae Miller - Josie
• Kyle Switzer - Kyle Oliver
• Allison Hossack - Mrs. Oliver
• Andrew Airlie - Mr. Oliver

Reaper tells the story of Sam, a slacker who's amounted to nothing because his parents never pushed him to succeed or see anything through to the end throughout his life. The reason for this, apparently, is because before Sam was born, his parents made a deal with The Devil (yes, that universal plot device and scape-goat, Satan, Beezlebub, Lucifer, etc), whereby they would trade their first-born son's soul so that his father could be spared from death. Why they took this as a sign that they didn't really have to try to raise Sam is beyond me: were they so cynical that they considered his ass doomed from the start? Just because he's going to hell in the end doesn't mean he can't be responsible, or achieve something before then. Typical baby-boomer parents, if you ask me.

Sam finds this out on his 21st birthday, when Satan plays by the rules - mostly - and will not be taking Sam's soul until he dies. In the meantime, however, Sam must serve the Dark Lord by "collecting" people who have escaped from hell. I wonder if this means that people can escape from heaven? I'm disappointed that the topic never really came up.

It's an oft-used premise, but don't let the unoriginality of the concepts keep you away from the show: the difference is in the execution.

After we get introduced to Sam and his best friend, a slacker who goes by the name "Sock" and has no concept of appropriate conversation (or grooming habits), the show follows Sam as he heads to his dead-end sales job at a big-box retailer (played proudly by one of Vancouver's finest Canadian Tire store locations). Here, a series of bizarre occurrences (including apparent exhibitions of psychokinetic powers on Sam's part, as well as his unique ability to attract snarling dogs - and Sock's ability to hit a small one with a car door, with no apparent moral qualms) builds up the "suspense" until Sam is visited by the devil himself on his ride home.

When next they meet, Satan gives Sam his tool for bustin' up hellspawn: a Dirt Devil vacuum. Of course, his friends think this is hilarious until they test the device out and it manages to pull a tractor-trailer toward them.



Apparently confident that he is, in fact, dealing with the devil, Sam accepts his role as vacuumer of the damned, and tracks down the first one: an arsonist who has returned from the grave as a firefighter with the ability to create flame on demand, and a mission to burn down all of the places that were rebuilt since he last had a chance to turn them into smoldering ruins.



Following a lot of filler about a girl that Sam is attracted to (whom I am convinced will turn out to be some sort of heavenly-creature sent to Earth to steal his soul back from the devil) and several attempts by Sam to vacuum-up his quarry, we're treated to the stand-out scene in the pilot episode (what this says about the quality of the episode is up to you to decide): Sam and Sock suiting up like the Ghostbusters to battle their flamey-nemesis at his next target, only to discover that Satan's evil dust-buster is out of juice and needs to be recharged. Hey, Satan may have command of hell's legions and be an entirely physical-law-bending, supernatural entity, but he's still bound by the law of the Conservation of Energy. The two morons must sit around for hours (inside the store, without getting arrested or fired - so I'm really not sure when this is happening) while the Dirt Devil recharges, providing a nice comedic break for the heaviness that a show about hell might have.



To avoid too much spoilage, I'll just say that Sam wins and everybody's happy. The end.
Well, at least until Satan finds that another damned spirit is roaming free. You'd think that hell, of all places, would have perfected the tracking-chip by now. Or an "Amber Alert" system.

Reaper turned out to be not half bad, but it doesn't stand out in any way, either. It reminds me of too many supernatural comedies that tried and died on UPN so many years ago, and so I don't hold out much hope for it. It wasn't terrible by any means, though, so go ahead and check this one out. You could do far worse.

Premieres September 25 on The CW.

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Favorite Lines:
[Oooh! Two favorite lines in this one!]

Mr. Oliver: Did you wish your brother a happy birthday?
Kyle (Sam's brother): The guy's 21, lives with his parents, and wears an apron for a living. There's no "happy" in that birthday, Dad.

Kyle: Sam didn't even go to college!
Mrs. Oliver: Yes he did, Kyle.
Kyle: For a month!
Mrs. Oliver: And we're very proud of him for trying, it's just that college made him sleepy...

Pre-Air Extravaganza: The Bionic Woman

Usually I try to feign some enthusiasm for these pilot episodes, if only so that you'll read the entire post in earnest, with some hope in your heart for the awesomness to kick-in.

This, however, is one very bad TV show. It's just not very good.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the worst of the pre-air episodes to make it to the net:

The Bionic Woman

This thing is just full of crap from top to bottom. It's like they hired an avant garde writer who didn't believe that stories should progress logically, and that TV shows should be about cramming as many emotional cues and cliches as possible into a hour timeslot.

It almost seemed as if the first ten minutes were comprised of cut-and-pasted scenes from other movies that were temporarily glued into place just so they could get the annoying "development" out of the way and get quickly into the "part-robot lady" stuff, but it's not like it gets better after that. It just gets worse. A lot worse.

I apologize for not posting a proper synopsis and review, but really - I feel like I got ripped off just by watching it. This show is not worth your time.

And if you're holding an office pool to guess the first show to shit-canned this season, look no further than The Bionic Woman. I'm betting it doesn't even get to air more than six episodes. Who green-lit this turd? If you're an investor with NBC, or it's parents General Electric and Vivendi, I suggest that you withdraw all of your money, and promptly set it on fire - because it is, quite frankly, a smarter investment right now. Jim Cramer would probably agree with me.

Tomorrow I'll be looking at the Satan-inspired Reaper, which, judging by it's high concentration of Dead-like-me and fire, shouldn't be that bad. Right?

Pre-Air Extravaganza: Chuck

In the last pre-air extravaganza installment, I reviewed the leaked pilot episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As it turns out, the scene where [SPOILERS] Cromartie shoots up Cameron at John's school and then walks around with a gun shoved into his open leg wound [END SPOILERS] is set to be re-written and re-shot in the long, long wake of the Virginia Tech. shootings. I think that's ridiculous, but maybe that's why FOX doesn't pay me the big bucks to write a passionless Terminator spin-off.

But that's the past, and I'd like to avoid any apropos time travelling tonight if I may, because we're here tonight to hear about Chuck, a sort of sci-fi-comedy-drama mish-mash with the cast as follows:

• Zachary Levi - Chuck Bartowski
• Yvonne Strzechowski - Sarah Walker
• Joshua Gomez - Morgan Pace
• Sarah Lancaster - Ellie Bartowski
• Adam Baldwin - John Casey

Did you say Alec Baldwin!?

• Adam Baldwin - John Casey

Oh. You didn't. Well, I'm sure he's just as good.

Eager critics were willing to dismiss Chuck early on, as it had many apparent similarities to UPN's failure of a show, Jake 2.0, which really wasn't all that fair of a comparison: I mean, UPN could have had sole broadcast rights to the Moon landings, and they still would've had to cancel it halfway through. I know it's not exactly a challenge to insult UPN, but I mean, really. Have they ever had one show, other than Star Trek, that lasted more then two seasons on its schedule? Sure, I could go easy on them - maybe it's just that they didn't have the contacts that the other networks had, being new in the business: but they passed on Malcolm in the Middle, which, although being a terribly unfunny show, was a success for FOX. Then they killed Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Star Trek went down the tubes quicker than Data's reflexes once it became UPN-exclusive.

And that's why UPN sucked. Oh crap - I was supposed to be talking about Chuck.


Like before, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS, so watch out!

Chuck tells the story of Chuck Bartowski, anathema to women everywhere, and member of the prestigious Nerd Herd tech support team at the electronic retail chain Buy More. He hangs out and plays video games with fellow Buy More employee Morgan, a bearded hobbit-like dude who, like all of us desperate nerds, never knows when to shut up or go home. Chuck is sent an email from his former college room-mate, Bryce Larkin, and since Bryce just so happens to be a rogue CIA agent who's just downloaded a crap-load of state secrets into his Ipod and encoded it in a way that transmits it into another person's brain, Chuck is now SUPERCHUCK! Well, not so much, actually - he just has all that information stored in his little Nerd Herd brain.

It's explained away thusly: the NSA and the CIA were forced to share every bit of intelligence they had with each other after 9/11, and naturally this meant keeping it all on one computer in a big room in which every surface is covered in video displays, sort of like a Pee Wee's Secret Secret Mission:Impossible Playhouse. Therefore, we have a reason for why one agent could get all of the CIA's secret files, leaving no backup except in the head of a former friend. Whoopie and hooray for convenient contrivance!

The show begins at Chuck's birthday party, where his sister has tried to arranged for him to hook up with one, any one, of her fellow female doctors. I'm just going to skip over this introductory segment, since it only serves to introduce Chuck's status (single, ladies) and that he's still pining over a girlfriend he hasn't seen since the freshman year of college. We're also introduced to "Captain Awesome," Ellie's (Chuck's sister) boyfriend, but he doesn't do much either. So off we go! Chuck gets Bryce's email, has a head full o' new secret stuff, and goes off to work.

Sarah Walker, CIA Agent, is assigned to get close to Chuck and, if possible, retrieve the information. This helps us to get acquainted with "Nice Guy Chuck, leader of the Nerd Herd with a Heart of Gold," but more importantly, it gets Chuck out of the house so that he can come home to this:


A Ninja attempting to steal his computer. Needless to say, this means war.

When all is said and done, the Ninja is victorious, but the computer is mucilage.

Sarah and Chuck go out on a date so that Sarah can look for a backup to the super secret vital information that was only stored on one computer in the entire world. During a visit to a nightclub, the NSA attempts to get the information for themselves - you know, because National Security always plays second fiddle to making your career and getting to murder a blonde chick, consequences be damned.

Hey, how long do you think it'll take before this is animated and set to Haddaway's "What is Love?"
So, that doesn't turn out too well, either.


Throughout all of this, Chuck keeps getting "flashes" of the information he's been given, in particular, a bomb plot involving an Army General. NSA-asshole survives the hideous car-wreck pictured above, and just before he can kill blondie, Chuck remembers that the aforementioned Army General is about to blown to smithereens and, you know, just kind of throws it out there. NSA-asshole responds that Chuck "knows all our secrets," followed by "we're the good guys, we keep bombs from exploding." Which makes me wonder: if Chuck only has the information that the CIA and NSA have, then that means the CIA and NSA knew that there was going to be a bomb in the building where the General is. And just when were they planning on acting on this information? Was it in encrypted in such a way that it needed the magnificent mental prowess of the Nerd Herd to interpret it?

Well, putting aside plot holes that you could drive a fertilizer-filled truck through, the gang of CIA, NSA, and NERD get to the building, find the bomb, and, through the magic of Chekov's Gun, the day is saved by porno! How, you may be asking? Well, I'll spoil a lot of things, but this is really the highlight of the episode, so I'll leave it for you find out - all I'll say is that Morgan may have indirectly contributed. So go Morgan.

The episode ends the only way it can: through convenient suspension of disbelief. Chuck is not only allowed to live with all that information without being debriefed, but he's even allowed to go back to his thankless job as the alpha-male in the nerd herd. Of course, NSA-asshole shows up as a new employee for Chuck to train, and Sarah returns to keep an eye on him, presumably roaming the aisles of Buy More for 12 hours a day without somehow drawing suspicion, but this can only lead to more wacky hijinks!

What's the verdict on Chuck? I liked Morgan's character, and seeing as how I'm still watching Psych based solely on the humor of Shawn and Gus, that's really enough for me. There's the potential for NSA-asshole (whose name may in fact be John Casey, as played by Adam Baldwin) to be the straight-man Lassiter type to Chuck and Morgan, and that gives me great hope for the show. It also reminds me of The Lone Gunmen to some degree, so I'm definitely going to be giving this one a chance.

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Favorite lines:

Jeff (one of Chuck's co-workers): What if you were the unwitting target of a Ninja vendetta and he returns tonight to strangle you with his nunchucks?
Chuck: That's super, Jeff. Thanks for thinking outside the box on that one.

That's super, Jeff.