First off, one my favorite sci-fi series over the last few years has been Heroes. Everyone knows the plight of Heroes by now I am sure. The show had a spectacular first season and ever since then it has been downhill. Book two was horrendous, book three wasn’t much better, but then book four finally started to get decent. It was curious to me, and likely others, how they would do starting into their forth season, and fifth book.

So far, I must say that I am liking it. I really do feel like they have returned to the common everyday issues of real people, just mixed in with super powers. I really felt this is what made the first season so great and that this is also where they lost their way. Now, Hiro is coping with a brain tumor that is interfering with his powers, Claire is dealing with college and being Claire Bennett again, Noah is coping with life after divorce, Peter is trying to live life a little more normally while trying to save people one person at a time, and Nathan is coping with being Sylar (and now visa versa). The only story line I don’t really care for is Parkman dealing with Sylar in his brain and honestly I really wish they’d be done with Sylar already. I also really love the addition of the circus family, they are all very interesting with cool powers and I like the idea of a family to offset the Petrelli family, a circus seems appropriate and needed in a comic book world. I think that so far season four is the best one since the first, though not as good as the first obviously.

Then we move onto Dollhouse. I was really jazzed going into season two of Dollhouse. The first season started slow but the last four or five episodes were stellar and then when I heard they were picking it up for a second season I got excited. However, they first started airing it with no fanfare or commercials so who even knew that it was on. And then when I finally started watching it, it was back to the awfulness of the beginning of the first season. The last episode with the serial killer was clever but it wasn’t to the caliber of the end of last season still. It thus far has been more than a little disappointing.

There were also a couple of Lost clones, both weirdly coming from ABC. Defying Gravity was a summer series that was actually pretty good, I think the show could have stood up without the Lost aspects, but even with them it still was decent. The acting is great, the writing is great, the story is great, too bad about the lost parts, but oh well it is still good. It has already been canceled, but it is definitely worth a look on Hulu.

The other Lost-like show is Flash Forward which they debuted the first 17 minutes on Hulu about a week before it aired. That first 17 minutes made the show look great and I eagerly watched it. The idea behind the show is the “what if” of everyone being able to see a little chunk of their future. Because of this, what kind of happens is instead of looking behind like Lost did, it has the characters constantly looking forward instead. Get it Flash Forward instead of Flash Back? Clever eh? Nah, it turns out to be a fairly poor excuse for television and not really worth watching. It’s too bad really.

Finally, there is Stargate Universe, which as I stated previously in a blog entry is just a splendid science fiction show all the way around. As of now, it has had four full episodes and I would rate it as the best sci-fi currently on television. It really does have a feel of the original Battlestar Gallactica, it is somber, a struggle, and yet full of hope and humor that the new BSG severely lacked. I am glad to see it on TV and look forward to where the show goes from here.

Looking forward, the remaining bit of sci fi that I think we have coming up still is Chuck and Day One, both on NBC. Chuck I am sure will continue to impress and I have high hopes on the post-apocalyptic Day One (at least hopes that it will be better than Jericho).

There was hope for Stargate: Atlantis when that came out. I thought the show had a huge amount of promise when it first came out years ago. However, the promise fell quickly, falling prey to the problem of copying SG1 too much with worse casting choices. Heck, they even copied SG-1′s strategy of bringing in popular sci-fi actors when the ratings were plummeting in its later years. For example Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager), Amanda Tipping (SG-1), and Jewel Staite (FIrefly). But in the end, the bad acting and bad writing and the lack of doing anything particularly interesting really made Atlantis not worth watching.

Stargate: Universe starts out of the gate (pun sort of intended) shooting. Just the base premise of SGU taking place on a ship light years away from Earth takes it out of the typical Stargate storylines. And it is a great story at that, i thoroughly enjoyed the discovery that we had watching the ragtag group of stargate refugees discovering the ins and outs of the Ancient Spaceship. The fact that the ship is on auto-pilot and taking them to planets that they will find things that they “need” is also pretty cool. The ship stays at the planet for a given amount of time before moving on. This part I could do without but I understand why they are doing it. It is designed to give them something to have a constant struggle with, but I felt it wasn’t necessary.

Another thing I think SGU fixes from SGA is that there is honest tension between characters. Dr. Rush is generally hated by everyone, but because of his knowledge of the Ancients and science he is always in a position of power, and seems to be making power plays behind everyone’s backs to ensure that he stays in that position of power as well. There are also other characters who hate each other, some who are sleeping with each other, and I’m sure many other secrets will pop up. They’ve really laid some groundwork for some complex workings in the ship, something I don’t think even SG-1 had.

Lastly, is the acting. I must say that SGU has some pretty good acting and it all starts with the main character Eli played by David Blue (previously seen on Ugly Betty for a short time). Blue does an amazing job at the naive yet intuitive young gamer being shoved into outerspace. I think it is a breath of fresh air to the series that offers the viewer a tie into the series. Eli basically is the viewer in the show and it has many opportunities to infuse laughter into a show which is otherwise dark.

Then there is Dr. Rush played by Robert Carlyle of “Trainspotting” and “The Full Monty” fame. He’s never been an A-list actor or anything, but he is still a step above everyone on the Stargate: Atlantis, or even SG-1 (at least the original cast). He was handed what looks to be a very complex role with likely backstabbing to continue his personal goals. I think what makes him even more complex is that he probably isn’t as terrible as they are making him out to be, he just seems to not have an ability to communicate well as evidenced when talking to the grieved daughter of the senator after his death.

The rest of the cast did a fairly good job as well, though at this point I don’t think many have been given the chance to shine quite yet. I was a little disappointed to see Lou Diamon Phillips getting killed off with very little time in the pilot episode, though IMDB lists him as being in 7 total episodes which leads me to think they will have some time travel or flash backs early on or something. There is little chance that he would be in the show in any other way. I think he also would have been a welcome addition to the show.

Lastly I’d like to talk about special effects. They were pretty darn good I must say. Technology has obviously come pretty far way since even the end of SG-1 which really wasn’t that long ago. Some of the scenes, such as when the G’ould attacked the planet in the beginning, were stellar. I hope that this sort of top notch graphics continues as the series does, but I have a feeling they are front loading it for the series premiere. This tends to happen, I personally felt that for the most part the best part of the special effects for Battlestar Gallactica was early in its airing, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they did it here again.

Overall, I think Stargate: Universe could be a really great program. It is sort of a mash-up of every Science Fiction show that has done well. The good fight of Star Trek, the struggle to sruvive of BSG (the original), the search home of Voyager, the dark grittyness of BSG (the new one), heck I fully expect to see cowboys running around from Firefly, but I think Eli’s humor is supposed to give us that piece.

Right now, I think that SGU is most definitely one of the best sci-fi shows on TV. This either speaks to how good it is, or how bad Sci-Fi is right now despite the dearth of it. It is definitely worth watching, and if you don’t have cable like me, then fear not it is in hulu (pilot episode is embedded above).

One of the first things you notice about the movie, or at least I did, was that it had humor. I think this was one thing that was really making Star Trek fall apart from the inside out was the lack of humor. But this movie has it in spades, there were plenty of times that I was laughing pretty hard and that is completely unexpected for the series as a whole and much needed. I have largely felt that a big reason that Serenity/Firefly was so good is because in addition to being good sci fi, it had heart and humor. Well this Star Trek went in and added both into the frey. The heart came from more story than Star Trek tends to have as well. Kirk’s father killed in his youth, Spock struggling with his humanity in a Vulcan world and then the loss of his mother, Uhura’s love for Spock (that I didn’t see coming at all!)… there was depth here that never existed before. And it was great.

Visually, the movie lived up to sci-fi movies. It was striking to say it simply. The animations were great and the action was well packed just as you’d expect from the original series. Again, action has been something lacking from the more recent Treks, even the movies, but it was here and it was here in a big way. They did some amazing action sequences in the movie and the sky diving from space that they showed in the commercials was just the beginning. The fight scenes between the Romulan ship and the various Federation ships were pretty enspiring as well.

Casting was amazing. We all knew that Zachary Quinto was a perfect Spock, and that held true, I was pleased that he pulled off the very un-Skylar like role very well. The rest of the casting was great too. Everyone seemed very much like the original cast and they were all as good of actors if not better. In particular, major props need to be given to Simon Pegg for his role as Scotty and Chris Pine as Kirk. I never thought that Chris Pine looked very much the part, but wow was he an amazing rendition of the role. I can definitely see why he got the part despite him being the only one that didn’t entirely look the part.

My one complaint about the movie was really the main plot line. I am not spoiling much by saying that it involved time travel and launching the warp core. Blech. To me, these were some of the many things that bogged down Star Trek in recent years. It seems like all the Trek writers can seem to think about anymore is either a borg storyline, a Q story line, or a time travel story line, there is no other story in Star Trek it seems and when in doubt launch the warp core to save the day. This story was no different.

The one bright side of the story was that unlike other similar time travel Trek stories, they did not rescind the changes at the end. The time travel disrupted the time line in a big way and set up the series to be allowed to take whatever direction they want without having to worry about the cannon of the original Trek. This was a completely brilliant move on the side of Abrams. There has already been a lot of talk about this movie being extended into a series. I’m not entirely sure how that will work. For one I’m not sure if a series could duplicate the action and for two I don’t know if they could get the entire cast to make the move into television, outside of Quinto obviously. In particular, Simon Pegg who has a decent movie career already.

Having a movie on the origins of the various X-Men characters is not a bad idea. The movies themselves really didn’t go into origin stories that much (outside of a couple) and really that was never the point of the comic when the characters first came on board either. And starting with Wolverine was also a really good idea as well, he had a really deep and complicated back story that would work really well on the big screen.

I was really excited for the concept of the movie until I heard that Gambit was going to be in it. At that point, I sat and said “wait, how exactly does Gambit fit in with Wolverine’s back story?” And the answer to that question is exactly what I thought, any way they can get a popular character crammed in is how. He didn’t, and what is worse in the case of Gambit is they gave him more special abilities that he never really had and then gave him a part in the movie that was extremely confusing (I don’t understand the fight scene involving him Sabretooth and Wolverine whatsoever). I think the point of this is ironic though, and really goes through the rest of the movie. They crammed Gambit into this movie to get comic book followers excited and in so doing, they completely revolted them. It didn’t help that the actor playing Gambit was all wrong and wasn’t even close to the accent, but those were minor quibbles, he shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

It is also a sad point when there were so many points in the movie where you just couldn’t help but laugh because it was just so over the top. Now granted, Wolverine always was a bit over the top and cheeky, but the extremes here was ridiculous. Especially the last fight scenes in the movie, it was just dumb. One of their big advertisements of Wolverine flying up from his motorcycle onto a helicopter and taking it down. I laughed and I’m not sure that this is the reaction the directors were going for. I knew that was a bad idea from the commercials, it looked dumb, it was. Why didn’t any of the creators or Marvel themselves step in and go like “uhh guys? That’s lame.”

Another complain I had was that even though I have always enjoyed the random appearances of X-men alumni in the X-Men universe being put into the background of the movies, they weren’t choosing the right characters here and often were using them incorrectly. In addition to misusing Gambit, they misused Emma Frost (who apparently was implanted with the ability to grow diamond skin), and certainly Deadpool which was completely awful. They also made cheeky roles for some like the return of Cyclops which just had no place at all and was dumb that they made him such a big role in this film. I understand the want for cameos guys, but find someone who actually fits the role that you are aiming for instead of just completely changing existing stories, abilities and time lines to fit a really bad movie.

The effects in the movie were not great either which was actually kind of surprising considering that is what these movies are usually best at. Wolverine’s claws actually looked worse in this movie than they did in the original X-Men movie nearly ten years ago. There goes the thought that we had better technology these days.

The main things that I think were positive about this movie was that I do think Hugh Jackman makes for a perfect Wolverine and it is nice to see him return in the role, similarly I was actually surprised at how well Liev Schreiber did in the role of Sabretooth. Sure he was a good two feet too short for the role, but he fit well and it was pretty well acted at that. Another extremely positive note was Ryan Reynolds portrayal of Deadpool which was spot on, now they completely ruined the character but that wasn’t his fault. It gives me hope that perhaps there could be a movie for this lesser known character who could hold one very easily and that they already found his leading role.

My biggest hope coming out of this movie is that it doesn’t spell the end for future X-Men and even Wolverine movies and that this one can be completely forgotten about as other really bad comic book movies have been in the past. It was too bad they made it the way that they did because it was really unfair to the story, the characters, the actors, and the fans that this had to happen.

Overall, I give the movie a D. Worth seeing in the cheap theaters if you need a theater viewing, otherwise don’t by it… put it on your netflix queue low in the list. You aren’t missing a lot but it has some moments at least. Worth watching only for Ryan Reynolds.

The storyline of Dollhouse is that there is a science in the not so distant future that allows people to wipe other’s personalities so that they can imprint new personalities on that person, therefor making that person able to fulfill any task you want them to have. This, of course, is illegal and so even the FBI doesn’t even really believe that there are still organizations who still practice the act. That is except for one particular agent whose goal is to find and crack down the biggest plant called the Dollhouse.

The story itself is kind of strange but I can go with it. It’s like some weird show about what pod people would be like if the were capitalists. It also has resemblances of The Pretender from the early 90s because the girls who are in the dollhouse can remember stuff from before their memory wipes which I am sure will lead to some sort of rise against the establishment. It is at the very least a very interesting idea that could really be cool if used right. It gives Joss a lot of ways to go with it and could be the basis for a very long show if it proves popular enough.

The acting was so-so. I think that Firefly had a much better base than what Dollhouse actually has, but it still has some promise. In particular is the casting of Tahmoh Penikett as the FBI agent. Penikett if you don’t know was previously cast as Helo in Battlestar Gallactica and in my opinion was one of their better actors despite not being in one of the main roles. Here again I think he gives a good performance and am happy to see him move on (haven’t kept up on BSG recently, did they kill him off???). I also am a little up in the air about Eliza Dushku who is previously known for Buffy and Tru Calling. She seems somewhat awkward as the main role, and even the main character, yet when she stepped into the role of the new personality she was pretty darn good. Though she didn’t really look the part of the new personality which is unfortunate.

Overall, I don’t think the show is as good as Firefly in the least, and that isn’t just because of high hopes. It lacks in story and in acting compared to Firefly. Still though, taking it on its own it still isn’t the greatest shows out there even for sci-fi. If they ever put it up against Heroes or BSG I would choose those two over Dollhouse. It isn’t horrible though either and could definitely get better with time as things start to come together a little more. I think the show has a great base, just a shakey start.

I give the show a rating of about a 7 out of 10. It’s definitely worth the watch but doesn’t knock me out of the park. I think this show could very easily do well if people sit down and watch it considering the horrible state of television on Friday nights. This could also ring a deathtoll for the show too as Fridays has only worked for a select few television shows over the last decade. Maybe Dollhouse can buck the trend, Joss Whedan seems to think so. But I tend to think he is just trying to do damage control.

The third season wasn’t perfect, it had many issues. For one, characters seemed to change personalities on a whim. Peter’s future self being so vastly different was about the only one that really made sense. Mohindir and Nathan changed almost completely in half a season (or less) with little logical explanation. Mohindir in this last episode finally came up with an explanation as to why he went from a good intellectual scientist to a nutball in just a single episode was that he always envied the superpowers. Really? That’s all they could do with him? If he envied it, why didn’t he really show it? I personally thought the trail with him would eventually lead to him having super powers of some sort. I don’t know, like the fact that his blood cured the Shanti virus, and that I don’t know Shanti was a super hero as well? But no we go through this junk. Nathan was a little more believable but he went so harshly to the “evil” side in the last episode that you didn’t realy understand how he got there. I mean he always teatered but he always had good intentions, now he doesn’t even seem to have that. What the heck happened to him?

I realize these could be questions answered in the future, but the real question should they. Should they actually spend time filling in the huge gaping holes that they left in the third season? I doubt they will… they still have plenty of huge gaping holes in the second season that we have no idea what happened. (Anyone remember Caitlin or the family in Louisiana that Micah is staying with? Talk about your cliff hangers!!!)

Another issue that is somehwo related to the quick change of personalities in characters is the new sister of Nikki, Tracey. A sure sign of a show desperately trying to hang onto characters that may not have been originally planned to be around for so long… I can already see the gears churning. “Woops we killed off Nikki, I know lets have long lost triplets who all have super powers that are all identical! That way we can keep killing off main characters without losing the actors!” A sigh pretty much sums up this story line.

I’ve also lost interest in Sylar about a little more than a year ago. He was great in the first season, however I really think they should have killed him off and found themselves a new villain of some sorts. I had high hopes that they would do so this year finally with a new “Villains” moniker, but no such luck. In fact, none of the villains from this season that were introduced seem to be continuing on past this year which is more than a little disappointing. Sylar was best used when he was barely in the show at all, now they force him into the show even if he need not be there. They leave off the season kililng him off, again, but surprise they’ve already announced that he isn’t dead.

There was bright points however. The scenes with Matt Parkman with the African future painter were some of Matt’s best IMHO and they really gave the character a little more. Hiro and Daphne were great as well and I hope they keep Daphne around for some time to come. The only disappointing thing for me was that nothing more came of Hiro’s duty for the formula. I think they wrapped it up really nicely at the end, however, I felt when they introduced that quest that Hiro’s father was playing him and it was never really followed up on after that. Lastly, Peter had some pretty stellar stories in it as well, I especially liked the future Peter coming in and completely screwing everything up. This in and of itself gave the writers to essentially ditch their previous storyline and move in a completely different direction, which they did.

Overall,  I give the half-season a B-. I think Tim Kring needs to settle back and stop worrying too much what fans think. Of course you care, but I have a feeling he does everything he reads that fans want on the internet, and as any dev of an MMO knows, fans don’t often know what they want. It is good to listen to fans for general direction, but you often end up with a general mess if you listen too much, which is about where Heroes is. With news of one of the major writers coming back to the series, I hope they can finally rein it in a bit and get some honest direction back. Even so, this is still one of the more interesting and entertaining shows to watch on TV, especially on Monday night.

What struck me most about the series is really just how bad it was. The acting was terriblbe and they just completely ignored some real issues that would occur after a nuclear bomb goes off, circumstances that they themselves mention in the show. I think they somehow tried to explain this by saying that no hydrogen bomb had really gone off in city areas so we really don’t know what would happen. But this explanation is fairly weak. We have a pretty good idea what would happen, and none of it would be good. And it wouldn’t just be that the power goes out for awhile.

Yet in this show people are running through toxic rain with no effect. Corn husks are somehow able to protect the corn from radioactivity, and power somehow gets back on, even though it is likely that the power lines are no longer there. The show just defies any realism and really is mostly just about what happens to a town when they are cut off from the rest of the world. This isn’t necessarily a bad storyline really, but the post nuclear holocost could have been so much more interesting.

I know the show has quite a following behind it. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it really is just the hope of the premise that drives the show. There is a mystery involved which I know for awhile drove a lot of viewers to watching Lost, though that has largely died in that show. Heroes has picked up much of this slack, largely because they decided to answer the big mysteries right away while starting new ones in their place. Yet, I didn’t find the mystery involved in Jericho to be a huge deal. Yeah, I too was curious as to who did what and how, but honestly the other mysteries in town seemed fairly predictable. Yeah they could be a little off to what I think, but overall I do think that it was plain on what was going to happen in the town itself.

It is too bad that another sci-fi ish show got lost, but there were so many better shows than this that actually deserved to be saved. I’m not sure why this one is worth the fuss.

Understand that until recent years, Babylon 5 had been my favorite sci-fi series of all time. Now with an explosion of television shows like Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Heroes, it has fallen to #4 on my list but it is still easily one of my favorites. (I do think Heroes is eventually going to drop but right now I am really liking the show).

I am very excited to see the show making a return in some format, even if it is straight to DVD. It gives me hope for other shows which have had similar fates like Firefly (whom only the main star has been able to maintain acting and only in really bad movies so I think even he could come back).

So my review of it… First I was happy to see that they were able to round up some of the former actors, including two of the captains and one of my personal favorites… Galen. Unfortunately, one of the captains was the third one who really wasn’t worth even having in the show in the first place. I think they mostly needed her for the fact that Sheridan was becoming president of the alliance, but she was awful and really should have stayed buried.

The DVD featured what essentially was two episodes. The first featured the third captain, with a priest dealing with a demon. Literally, a demon. I really didn’t like this episode. It reminded me of a crap filler episode of the show, especially one of the early ones. And when you got two episodes, I really would wish that they provided something a little more substantial. The second thing about it was that while there were religious undertones throughout the show previously, they weren’t as blatant as this. In fact, the show had previously always interpreted angels as being Vorlans and demons as being Shadows so I don’t understand why they came out in this fashion. I always appreciated the undertones. That being said, the actor who played the demon was brilliant, the other two actors that were in the episode were forgettable.

The second episode was longer, and really made the purchase worth the while. Sheridan is worth bringing back, and Galen was amazing as usual. I also appreciated the Centauri Prince that they brought into the show, I thought he did a fine job on the part, and hope to see him in future releases. The story was good and felt like a potential starting point for a new series of plot lines, which if this one makes money I imagine Warner Bros. will continue to make them. I am hopeful they do cause this one was good.

Other thoughts… the special features were fairly weak. They consisted of short interviews with the three main actors (mostly Lockley and Sheridan) and JMS. There were tributes to the two actors who have passed away since the show ended, these tributes while a nice thought turned out a little disappointing. The Sheridan interview for this was actually pretty good, and the JMS part was decent but I was hoping for behind the scenes clips with those actors, and even if they just got phone interviews with the other B5 actors it would have been nice to go beyond just the actors who appeared in the show. The new spruced up graphics were great, you can really tell how far technology has moved since the show originally aired, however I felt they relied on blue screens a little too much, often when they didn’t even need to (many hallways were completely blue screened). I realize this is a cost saver, but it also makes it feel less organic. But I suppose I can’t complain when the show is on, even if there are these minor complaints.

Overall, a decent disc. I think it was worth the money solely for seeing some new episodes. Although, I hope in future DVDs that they give out a few more features, and don’t have the junk episodes like they did here.