Various unimportant rantings.

I watched the 2 hour Terra Nova pilot episode today and for the most part I am impressed. It is visually stunning, and the story is very engaging, and it definitely has me interested enough to keep coming back to see how it answers some of the questions raised in the pilot. They definitely did a good job of making me care about a few of the characters enough to come back, and keeping me interested enough in the plot to come back. I would definitely recommend it, and I hope that this show is able to continue beyond just one season, and that it is able to keep furthering the plot and story without getting bogged down, or without slowing down. Momentum is the key to serialized shows like this, and lack of momentum is the reason so many other Sci Fi shows have failed recently such as V, and Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles (most of the second season did nothing for the overall story).

The story line with the faction that broke off from the main group, known as the sixers was great and I’m interested to learn more about them, who they are, why they were sent there, who sent them. The story line with Taylor’s son who disappeared seems like it’s going to be an interesting one, especially if they reveal what the cave drawings that are supposedly done by him mean, and why they look so old. Also, why is Taylor trying to cover these drawings up? I am also enjoying the relationship between Taylor, the autocratic military leader, and Jim Shannon, the former cop/escaped convict. The story has a lot of great material, and if it is able to expand on these plot lines and keep the momentum going, I think it will make for a great show. 

What I didn’t like about the episode is mostly Jim Shannon’s teenage son, Josh. It’s like they took the whininess and brattiness of Tyler from V and amplified him by 1,000. He is quite possibly the most annoying character I’ve ever seen on television. Not to mention the fact that his brattiness seems to come out of absolutely nowhere. The first half hour which takes place in the dystopian future and shows Jim and family being searched for an illegal third child and getting caught after hiding little Zoe in the air vent. Jim punches a cop and goes to jail. He then breaks out with the help of his wife, rescues Zoe, and manages to sneak his way through the time portal to escape the dystopian future. This whole time Josh is seen complaining that they can’t leave without his dear old dad, and he genuinely seems to care about him. As soon as they get to Terra Nova, and are shown to their new home, there’s a disgustingly heart-warming scene with Jim and little Zoe, with the whole family watching in the background lovingly. Overwhelming amounts of Spielbergian cheese in this scene, but it is touching, as much as it is annoying. Immediately after this however is when my first real problem comes up, Josh suddenly out of nowhere blows up and says “if dad didn’t freak out and punch a cop he wouldn’t have been gone, now I just have to act like nothing happened, and love him and blah blah blah?!?” …. BAD CHARACTERIZATION! Seriously… none of the writers got to this part and thought “wait, he’s been nothing but a loving son up til this point, why would he blow up out of nowhere like this?” This was terrible. Hopefully after this episode, which also featured Josh running off with some new friends and almost getting killed by dinosaurs only to be rescued at the absolute last minute by Jim and Taylor, Josh will drop this obnoxious, whiny brattiness. This character was terrible, and absolutely one of the worst in television history in my mind, but I was still able to look past it and really enjoy this pilot episode. I am excited to see where the series goes from here. 

My girlfriend and I have been watching The X Files on netflix instant stream for about the past month or so. I forgot how good this show was! I watched it on tv for a few seasons, but I wasn’t a religious fan of it or anything. But now that we’ve been watching it from the beginning, it is awesome! My favorite episodes are the ones that further the over-arching  mythology of the show, with the syndicate, the black oil, abductions, etc. But I have enjoyed all of the creature of the week episodes too! Some of them are just plain hilarious! And even some of the “bad” creature of the week episodes are still enjoyable at the very least, kind of like a b movie. Mulder’s wittiness makes pretty much every episode worth watching. 

We have about 5 episodes left until we’re finished with season 5, and that’s where the movie comes in. And of course, just a week before we get to the point where we can watch the first movie, Netflix takes it down from instant stream. I ordered the blu rays from Amazon, but I opted for the free shipping, and even though I placed the order on monday, they still haven’t shipped yet. I suppose the free super saver shipping means you save money by letting them ship it whenever they feel like it. 

I definitely recommend watching for any sci fi fans who may have not seen it, and definitely recommend watching it from the beginning to anyone who was a casual fan of the show like I was when it was still airing. 

V Season 2 Finale Review:

I  realize that I’m really late on posting this but here goes anyway. 

The final episode of V’s 2nd season, titled Mother’s Day, finally brought the show to the point where it probably should have been in last season’s finale, or at the very least half way through this second season. That is both what has frustrated me as a fan of the show, and also what gives me hope for the future of the series. As I mentioned in my last post about V, the show has suffered lag in it’s development and furthering of the story. About half of season 1 was composed of throwaway episodes that barely did anything to further the story or develop characters, and honestly even though I enjoyed season 2 a lot more, half of it was still crap. 

In my opinion this boils down to how long the story took to develop, and how much time they wasted on the fifth column. Up until the last episode, and even the first half of the last episode the show had fallen into a boring and frustrating formula which was basically:

1st half of episode - the fifth column as we know them (Erica, the priest, Chad Decker, Hobbes, Ryan nichols, and the new scientist kid) sit around in their hideout and plan out some sort of wile e coyote-esque scheme to hit anna. They chat about it, it’s boring, the priest and chad have a dumb scared/confused look on their faces, and their acting is terrible. To make it worse, after they’re done explaining it to each other, we have to watch them go over to a computer and webcam chat with the other fifth column members in the world about their plan. This whole idea of setting up the plot is awkward to watch and is just lazy on the writer’s parts. 

2nd half of episode - Fifth column attempts to execute their scheme, and of course just like all of Wile e Coyote’s schemes, it doesn’t work and blows up in their faces. It always ends up making Anna look like the good guy. The first couple times this was ok, but when it started hapening every episode it got really annoying and boring and predictable. 

After this formula the final 5 minutes or so, would be composed of fifth column trying to pick themselves back up by their boot straps, fighting about what went wrong and moral implications and such. Then it cuts to Anna talking about how stupid the fifth column is, and setting up her next evil plan for the next episode. 

I really do feel as though all the fifth column crap could have been wrapped up by the middle of season 2 at the latest. This lack of any real development in the story, has been extremely frustrating for me as a fan, knowing that this series has the potential to be great but keeps continuously falling short and not furthering itself. After reading an article today, the producer mentions that all these problems were things that were forced upon them by the network. So it’s actually ABC that is holding this potentially great sci fi series back. They wanted the story slowed down a lot, which the producer fought against, and apparently as the 2nd season went on they finally began to take notice and agree with him. Hopefully this is a good sign that they see what can be done better, and if it comes back for a 3rd season, things will move faster. 

Now on to this episode… I really enjoyed it. I was initially frustrated by the fact that it seemed to follow it’s own played out, and annoying formula, but it didn’t spend much time in the boring planning stage of their scheme. They got right to things, staged a kidnapping of Lisa to lure Anna out of the ship, so the fifth column could have her in a position where they could get Lisa to kill her. Also Diana could have a chance to show herself to her former followers and win them back. Anna notices Lisa in a reflection, holding a gun to her. She tells Lisa all the words she wants to hear and lisa changes her mind about killing her, the fifth column’s zany scheme fails again. They leave, with lisa thinking they have a happy mommy-daughter relationship. Meanwhile Diana is speaking to everyone on the mothership. Then, we the viewers are asked to completely set aside any sense of logic for what happens next. Anna sneaks in to the room and stabs her mother, diana in the back with her tail. Somehow she is not noticed at all by the hundreds, possibly thousands of V’s that just learned that she had been lying to them all along, and is able to sneak up and murder Diana completely by surprise. Dumb, but not that big of a deal because it was a pretty cool scene. She turns Lisa and says “that is how you murder your mother”. Awesome.

Lisa gets locked up in Diana’s former prison. Anna’s egg hatches, they make her look exactly like Lisa, so she can seduce and kill Tyler, whilst they make Lisa watch on a tv screen from her prison in what is an incredibly creepy scene. Also at this time Ryan nichols tries to sneak off and take his daughter away from the ship. His daughter of course has also been brainwashed by Anna, and she kills him. Very sad, I actually liked his character a lot. Then Anna finds out Chad decker was the voice in the ransom video for lisa’s kidnapping, orders him to come aboard the ship. She then gets Amy to bliss all of the humans on earth, which freezes all of humanity in place in a state of bliss, leaving them vulnerable to a brutal attack and slaughter. While this is going on, Erica had been kidnapped because she had been spied on while she told Tyler everything that she knew about the V’s, she is taken by her partner and boss at the FBI, to an underground lair for a V resistance group that actually seems to have their shit together, Project Aries. Pretty awesome cliffhanger for her storyline. They get an alarm about the mass blissing of humans, and Erica runs above ground and finds the priest frozen in place by the bliss, looking at the sky… oh yea, I forgot to mention this is particularly cheesy because earlier he mentions that he misses looking to the sky for hope. 

So that’s it. Tyler’s dead, Ryan’s dead, Diana’s dead, Lisa’s imprisoned, fifth column appears to have collapsed (thank god), Erica’s met up with a more organized resistance group, and Anna’s ships are still approaching earth. Considering they were approaching earth in season 1’s finale, I was hoping they’d be here by now, but I’ve already bitched enough about the slow story development.

I really do hope that it gets picked up for a season 3. I really enjoyed the finale, all the bitching of this post was about the rest of the season and how long it took to build up to this awesome episode. The cliffhangers and new storylines opened up in this finale would just leave me wanting more if it gets cancelled. I really hope they get their chance to come back and do things the way the writers and producers want to do things. Write stories that go places faster, and hopefully wrap it up to a logical point with another season. If they can fix all the problems that I have with this show it really could be a great series that I will love! 

I briefly touched on my thoughts about Firefly in my post about Dollhouse, but as promised, here is my full review of Firefly.

I’ll start with what I liked. The idea behind the show is that the main characters are outlaws, whose home planets were taken over by an intergalactic alliance that they didn’t fought and lost a war to. They are outlaws, smuggling, and taking whatever jobs they can to get by. It is a great concept, and the western mixed with space travel sounded like a really weird idea to me, but it made sense because most of the planets where they are traveling with less fear of running into the alliance are on the outer rim of the system and were terraformed planets that had gone wrong. So they were more primitive, and almost old west like. It makes sense and it definitely works, although it does still feel a little weird at times, and my favorite episodes didn’t focus much on the western aspect of the show. I also loved the mysterious backstory of River being experimented on by the alliance. I wish they had spent more time on it, as she was my favorite character on the show, partly because of her awesome story, and partly because I love Summer Glau! All of the characters were likable, even the bad boy Jayne Cobb. Everybody did a good job of playing their parts and acting was solid throughout, basically the only person I didn’t care for too much as an actor was Simon, River’s brother. I also liked that it was easy to watch in shorter bursts, and if it were still on the air it would be a good weekly sci fi fix. It gives story resolution at the end of each episode, and each one is easy to watch, even if you kind of drift in and out of paying attention.

So now what I didn’t like, and since I know this show is so beloved by many, this might be controversial. Many of the things that I sited as what I liked, are actually what lead to why I didn’t LOVE the series. I was actually quite frustrated by it as a tv series, because I felt it had everything it needed to be great, but didn’t quite get there until it was cancelled and made into the movie Serenity. It had me interested enough that I liked it, but not so thrilled about it that I loved it. I liked the characters, and Firefly is often praised for being a show that proved that the secondary characters can be just as important as the main characters. I definitely disagree there, I liked the characters, but to me, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, and River Tam, were the only characters interesting enough to have entire episodes devoted to their stories. The episode focusing on part of Jayne Cobb’s backstory and him being praised by sewage farmers, was boring. The episode focusing on Kaylee and Inarra and them going to an old timey ball, was boring. They are secondary characters and should have been kept that way, they really were not interesting enough to be pushed as if they were just as important and interesting as the main characters. If you want to praise a Joss Whedon show that has interesting supporting characters that are just as important, it is Dollhouse, not Firefly. Dollhouse actually pulls that off successfully. The episodes of Firefly that focused mostly on the Captain and his backstory and River and her backstory were really the only ones that had me interested enough to keep going through the series, and are really the only reason I liked the series. My biggest problem was how under-utilized River was in the series. They hardly touch on her backstory, just drop small hints at it here or there, and there are only a few instances where they let her badassness out… until the show was cancelled and brought back as the movie Serenity! Serenity focused on all the parts of Firefly that I liked and cut back on the supporting characters in the spotlight. It also cut back on things that I found cheesy and weird about Firefly, like how they would start talking in chinese all of a sudden when they were swearing. This was overdone on the show and always felt odd to me. Also, in firefly, clearly the most interesting villains were the reevers, which were BARELY touched on in the series! They brought back the reevers for Serenity, focused on the alliance’s control of the galaxy and their history with River, and focused on the Captain as the main character and leader. These were the strengths that the show desperately needed to take more advantage of! I think because they knew they only had 1 and a half to two hours to pull off that movie and wrap everything up, it caused them to focus on the strengths and highlight them, which is what it did, and that is why I LOVE Serenity and only kind of like Firefly. 

Now, most Firefly fans blame fox for it’s cancellation and failure to establish success. Fox aired the episodes out of order, and also disproved of Joss’s first Pilot, and forced him to write another one in the span of a weekend or the show would be cancelled. The pilot fiasco, is the only bad move I think Fox made. The first episode and original pilot was awesome! I really liked it. It established the characters and the story and let it unfold for the viewer to experience it for themselves. Fox didn’t like that and forced a rewrite which lead to “The Train Job” which is one of the worst episodes of the series. Instead of letting the viewers actually meet and figure out who the characters are for themselves, it basically just has them walking around talking to each other and saying things like “Hey you, this is who your character is and this is what you do. It would normally be weird for me to be talking like this, but for the sake of being lazy and establishing characters quickly instead of developing depth, this is how we’re introducing you.” So there’s that, but that’s the only mistake I think Fox made. As far as the episodes being aired out of order arguement, I really don’t think there’s a problem with that. Since most episodes are not part of a larger story arch, and they all give story resolution at the end of each episode, the series really can be viewed out of order, with the exception of only a few episodes. Watching Firefly out of order is like watching The Simpsons out of order, there’s nothing wrong with it. 

So there’s my review. I liked Firefly, but overall I think it is largely overrated among Sci Fi fans. It failed in so many aspects that were not corrected until they made the movie Serenity. I think it is an awesome thing that Firefly was cancelled, because it gave us Serenity. 

I am excited for this! Awesome packaging with both Tron Legacy in 3D blu ray and regular blu ray, and the original 80’s Tron on blu ray! It comes out 2 days after my birthday, hopefully I get some best buy gift cards! 

I’ve been a fan of the current remake of V since it first started airing. Although it’s been frustrating being a fan of this series as the quality seems to fluctuate all to often. The first 4 episodes were great, and got me hooked, but then it was pulled off the air for about 6 months before they aired the rest of the first season. And when it came back the quality fell very far, very quickly, and stayed there for the majority of the middle of the season. At one point I almost gave up on it and 5 episodes had piled up on my DVR because it almost felt like a chore to watch them, I powered through them and in most of those episodes the first 50 minutes of the show were painfully boring and slowly developing, but then they would end strong in the last 10 minutes. So strong that I would go on to the next episode hoping for better, and would be let down again until the last 10 minutes. Then the first season finale, and what I was sure at the time was the series finale aired. In the first 10 minutes we meet one of Anna’s supposedly fearful hunters. He was so hilarious I was cracking up at how bad it was, clearly it missed it’s mark. That being said immediately after that the episode got intense and was a thrill ride up until the end where the fifth column succeeds in destroying the eggs for Anna’s army, which causes her to become poisoned by human emotion and release “red sky” in a fit of rage. It was a great cliff hanger and actually had me thrilled when they announced a second season. It seemed like they took notes on what didn’t work and they fixed it, and the show was quite entertaining at that point. 

The second season began after way too long of a delay, which probably lost them some viewers. But it was awesome, every episode seemed to pretty much waste no time getting to the action and excitement, and the storyline was rich and full of questions about human emotions, the soul, and the battle of good vs evil, humans vs v’s was raging on and was pretty exciting. I really was enjoying the season! That is until these last 3 episodes. Basically once Erica takes over as the global leader of the fifth column the show tanked for me. It was like all the excitement stopped. Instead of letting the action and the story unfold in front of you, it’s starting to reflect the parts of the first season that I hated so much. The first half of all of these last few episodes has been taking place inside the Fifth Column’s lab with the 5 of them standing around and spelling everything out to each other in a very lazy attempt at storytelling. Everytime one of them is talking, the rest are standing there trying way too hard to look intrigued, and with dumb looks on their faces. I am so tired of seeing shots of the priest’s face with that stupid/scared/confused look on his face, every episode he has that same look and I’m sick of it! Him and Chad Decker both have that perma-confused face. Then after they explain it to each other they all go over to a computer together and you watch them webcam chat with the other fifth column leaders around the world and say exactly what they just said to each other. Have you ever watched a friend skype with a bunch of people that you don’t really know? It’s about as interesting to watch as that would be. During the time that the fifth column is doing this, the scenes are interchanging back and forth between them and Anna on the V ship spelling out her plans and saying things like “little do the humans know they’re digging their own grave”. Morena Baccarin is actually one of the only good actors on the show but the dialogue that they give her is even making her scenes hard to watch. And that’s the problem with V more than anything, the show is driven by it’s action, story and themes. The visuals are poorly CGI’d, the acting from everybody is pretty unbearable, and the dialogue is usually terrible, but when the action is strong and the story is rich those things don’t stand out as much and it’s pretty fun to watch! But during these slow parts where they’re just standing around talking, the show suffers. 

Also one thing that bothered me about this week’s episode is how the fifth column just now realized that Concordia is a landing site that the V’s are building so they can land their motherships and begin their invasion. Anna says this in episode 5 of the season in one of her V meetings, and the fifth column just now, 4 episodes later, figures that out?! THEY HAVE ANNA’S DAUGHTER WORKING WITH THEM AND THEY JUST FIGURED THIS OUT NOW?!?! Not only that, but they set this up as if it was a major revelation during their weekly-boring-stand-around-the-lab-with-dumb-faces-meeting when it’s something that we the viewers were told 4 episodes ago, and it’s something that they should already know as well!

On a positive note, after that it picks up and gets more interesting. Lisa borrows some Blue energy from the ship and gives it to the fifth column for research so they can try and set up a “Three mile island” like meltdown at the new york concordia site. She doesn’t know this is their plan and she learns that they are likely to accidentally weaponize it and kill thousands of people, and enlists Ryan nichols to swoop in and save the day. Then, she convinces Erica to re-enlist Ryan in the fifth column to help them in the battle next week. I’m glad to see he’s back on the good side with them. I always liked his character, and he is actually a decent actor. While he’s been gone, the fifth column meetings seem overrun by the dumb faces and bad actors. Even Elizabeth Mitchell’s acting skills seem to have tanked lately, but I don’t blame her entirely, with the dialogue on the show it would be hard to deliver any of it convincingly. 

Next week is the season finale and just like last season, I’m frustrated going into it. It’s built up to what seems to be an epic battle, but they’re really going to have to deliver on it and not waste time sitting around spelling things out in the fifth column lab and in anna’s office instead of actually letting the story unfold for us. If they get right into it and deliver on the epicness then I will actually be hopeful for a third season, but only if they deliver on the quality that they seem to only have at the beginning and ending of seasons. I will leave on this note, Everyone involved in the show have said lots of characters will be killed off here’s my top hopes for which ones get the axe:

1) The Priest

2) Chad Decker - since he’s anna’s main media contact, if he is shown to be killed by the V’s it could set the human race against the V’s in what would be an epic battle. Plus, I’m sick of his face and how he talks in his news anchor voice for every line of the show.

3) Tyler - don’t get me wrong, he seems like an ok kid, but he’s too oblivious and it’s getting annoying, and who would inspire more sympathy for the good guys in a sad death moment? 

4) Anna’s right hand man/assistant

5) The scientist kid who guest starred in a couple That 70’s show episodes - he’s too annoyingly obvious comedic relief and he has to go.

6) The guy who I really don’t know what his role is but he’s in charge of training Tyler as a pilot for Anna

I just watched the first and unfortunately only season of Flash Forward this week which is also on Netflix instant stream right now. I always saw commercials for it when I was watching LOST during the last season but they never really caught my attention. I didn’t know what to watch after Dollhouse, I have tons of stuff in my queue but I saw this on the netflix suggestions so I gave it a shot. 

It took me until about the 3rd or 4th episode until I was hooked, but once I got hooked, it was great. The acting from everybody was really good! There’s a few familiar faces to sci fi fans. My favorite of which is definitely James Callis, who is famous for his role as Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Galactica. His acting was great and his character was hilarious, I don’t know if it was supposed to be funny, or if I was just laughing so much because it was Gaius Baltar, but he was great! Also it was awesome to see Dominic Monahan, and Sonya Walger (Charlie and Penny from LOST) and John Cho (Sulu from the new Star Trek, and Harold from Harold and Kumar). Everybody’s acting was great, the story was awesome, and the action was also awesome. Once the story got rolling and the events that lead up to what each character saw in their flash forwards start unfolding it is very exciting and I was on the edge of my seat at more than a few parts! 

I feel like this show was scheduled poorly. It was a sci fi show and should have been scheduled on the same night as LOST and V. Or if there wasn’t room for both V and Flash Forward on the same night as LOST, then FF should have been aired that night. I’m sure the reasoning behind airing V after the 6th season of LOST was to attract fans who were upset about them killing off Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) at the end of season 5. I am a fan of V, although the quality fluctuates far too much and I’ve almost dropped that show more than a few times, but FF is far superior, and if it was aired after LOST, I’m sure it would have survived for a second season. Instead, at the same time they cancelled FF, they renewed V for a second season. From what I’ve read, it consistently received about 10 million viewers but was cancelled due to only 3 million of those viewers being in the 18-49 demographic. That is nearly twice what can be said for V’s second season though. Flash Forward is just great on pretty much every level, if it had continued, It would have replaced LOST for me! I loved the characters, I connected with them, the scripting was great, the acting was great, and the visuals were great even though it’s not necessarily an effects driven series. The realism and things like Cinematography really stood out to me which has always been a problem for me with shows like V where most of the special effects are even more poorly CGI’d than the Star Wars Prequels. 

Apparently after it was cancelled Starz expressed interest in picking it up and continuing the series which would be awesome because it did end on a pretty big cliffhanger! I don’t know if anything has come of that and the most recent articles I could find on the topic were from July/August and none of them had definitive answers yet. I really hope that this does happen, but I’m trying not to get my hopes up. There just isn’t enough good sci fi on tv anymore.