Entries Tagged 'scifi channel' ↓

Doctor Who’s latest episode just ended with a Time Lady (Georgia Moffett, daughter of former Doctor Who star Peter Davison) cloned from The Doctor’s DNA running around out in the universe somewhere. Judging from what I’ve seen of the BBC’s cloning techniques (Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures already have sprung from the show’s DNA), this smells like another spinoff just waiting to land.

Now that was more like it!!

After a fairy tale Christmas special, a loopy regular season opener with animated fat creatures, we finally get an episode that is more like regular Doctor Who.

The plot itself was a little thin perhaps, but it has a hell of a payoff. The instant in which the Doctor realized that HE made the choice that doomed Pompeii was effective, but nothing compared to the act of kindness shown by Donna when she helped the Doctor press the button, accepting part of the Doctor’s burden–she may never know how much that must mean to the Doctor–who has so much blood on his hands.

We were teased again about the return of Rose Tyler; how long until we get some kind of payoff?

Wow. Just…wow.

I’m not sure what was more disturbing: Tyrol’s utter, complete meltdown, Baltar’s messianic tendencies, Chip Six’s ability to physically pick Baltar up, or Tigh’s beatdown/makeout session with Six.

One of my old professors likened certain tragic plots as being akin to watching multiple trains on a collision course. We’re starting to see the trains picking up speed and we can tell that it’s gonna be a high body count collision. Continue reading →

Has Doctor Who finally morphed into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? You might think so with the Titanic-in-space plot (reminiscent of a Douglas Adams video game) last week, and all the comic bits between David Tennant and Catherine Tate in this week’s official season premiere.

Since I’m always a sucker for slapstick, I kinda liked “Partners in Crime,” which introduces Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, the woman with the mile-a-minute mouth (who may eerily remind you of Carol Burnett). Tennant and Tate play off each other well; the scene in which Donna comes up with a solution to the Doctor’s dilemma with an alien computer played a lot better than it should have. Of course, Donna seems to have fallen for the Doctor, despite her protestations; that’s now a Who cliche. Please, this is a sci-fi action show; let’s not get too mushy.

The plot — about a diet pill with which “the fat just walks away,” literally and possibly dangerously — wasn’t much, but the emphasis on the characters kept the episode in working order. Still, there weren’t any bits as perfect as that one in last week’s belated Christmas episode in which the Doctor lands with Titanic sightseers to find that London now evacuates annually on Christmas, just in case there should be an alien invasion with a certain Time Lord involved. Both episodes were fun, but I’d like an exciting cliffhanger one of these days.

I repeat:

Holy.

Frak.

A show that has generally been a tad on the dark side suddenly gets a lot darker. To emphasize that fact, the episode opens with one of the more adorable scenes in the series, with Adama reading a potboiler to Laura as she’s receiving her chemo.

A lot’s going on in this episode, so let’s get to it: Continue reading →

To whet your appetite, here’s a clip from this week’s episode of Battlestar Galactica, courtesy of our friends at SciFi Channel. Remember, you can view the episode online at SciFi.com on the hour from 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Eastern tomorrow.

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Another solid episode of Battlestar Galactica this week, with some great intensity between characters, a nice couple of goodbyes for Apollo, a truly “ick” moment between Balter and one of the new Cylons, and some sweet Cylon versus Cylon tension that builds to a excellent climax.

But what made this an especially memorable episode was one killer line of dialogue at the beginning. During an argument, Cavil (Dean Stockwell) said to the other Cylons, “Go take a cleansing walk.” Man, I can’t wait to use that line the next time someone gets in my face, so I can say, “Hey, why don’t you go take a cleansing walk, pal!”

When a girl moving into a new neighborhood with her divorced father sees the local crazy lady talking to what must be an alien, she decides the crazy lady mustn’t be so crazy after all. Soon, Maria learns that Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) has an attic full of alien gadgets and a knack for getting space invaders riled up. That’s the premise of The Sarah Jane Adventures, a Doctor Who spinoff that premiered tonight on Sci-Fi Channel. Doctor Who fans will probably be curious–and there is something amusing about having a black hole in the attic that needs sealing–but anyone who doesn’t already know that Sarah Jane traveled with the Doctor in the 1970s will probably feel lost. The family-friendly series is mostly harmless, not as scary as Doctor Who can be, but not as inventive or witty either. Moreover, Sarah Jane’s pining for a lost love from outer space (the Doctor, of course) could get really tiresome really fast.

It does leave me with a question, though: Do all of the Doctor’s former companions run into aliens once a week?

Sarah Jane Adventures will run on Fridays at 8 p.m. on Sci-Fi Channel.

It might seem a bit strange to hear a commentary track before you have a chance to see the show, but BBC7 radio online is featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate as they talk about the new season’s episodes of Doctor Who. The shows are live at 6:30 p.m. London time (1:30 p.m. EST, I believe), with reruns on the Listen Again feature for six days starting sometime Monday. They’re also running episodes of Paul McGann’s Doctor Who audio drama. The BBC radio sites block sports programs, but there’s no problem with the rest of the lineup.

The first episode has some good stuff, like Catherine Tate talking about how she felt about getting a regular gig and seeing her name on that “iconic credits sequence.” David Tennant drops hints about an end-of-season shocker that will be teased throughout the season (”Bad Wolf,” anyone). They tend to do specifics of the episode in a way that’ll leave you baffled and curious, instead of spoiling the surprise, so it’s more like a half-hour advert if you haven’t seen the episode yet. These two laugh a lot.

It’d be great if Sci-Fi Channel and CBC put these up on their sites after their runs, but that could be too much to hope for.

You can catch the Doctor Who commentaries at Listen Again under Sunday here.

The final season really started off with a roar, didn’t it? The opening battle sequence is yet another in a ridiculously long list of stunning battle sequences. I like that they never forget that battlestars and basestars are essentially combinations of aircraft carriers and battleships–the tactics are built around those identities. Every battle has its own money shot–this time out, it was the view of the basestars from the POV of Galactica’s heavy guns.

The rest of the episode had a variety of tones and rhythms, but everything grew from what has gone before.

Spoilers ahead–don’t go to the rest unless you’ve seen the episode.

Continue reading →