Asking the Wrong Questions

Now that Comic-Con is over, the folks at io9 can get back to their regularly scheduled mix of quirky science stories, film and TV news, off the wall lists (best TV robots! is actually a rather unremarkable example), and opinion pieces. I'm fond enough of io9. I wouldn't like it to be the only source for genre news and commentary around, and it's certainly not my first stop when looking for same, but I do tend to read it most days. Which is how I ended up, at an ungodly hour this morning, being confronted by a television piece by the blog's editor Annalee Newitz, in which she muses that "There are a lot of cool ways this underrated show could return to TV as something darker, less campy, and more socially relevant, just like Battlestar Galactica did." The show in question? Farscape . Which, Newitz goes on to opine, could be made into "a potential hit" by deepening the moral abmiguity of its characters (Rygel as a former genocidal despot, Zhaan...

Sci Fi Wire reports : SCI FI Channel will revive its popular original show Farscape as a Web-based series of short films on SCIFI.COM's SCI FI Pulse broadband network, part of a slate of new original online programming. SCI FI has ordered 10 webisodes of Farscape, to be produced by Brian Henson and Robert Halmi Jr. and produced by The Jim Henson Co. Exciting as this news is, it's best to keep in mind that the webisode concept didn't work out so well for Battlestar Galactica , what with the killer celery and all (if you haven't watched Resistance , I just made it sound a hell of a lot more exciting than it actually was). That said, I trust the people involved a hell of a lot more than I trust the Galactica folks these days, and unlike Resistance and the upcoming Razor web-series (more info here ) this series is probably not primarily intended to build up anticipation for traditional programming, which gives it a better chance of working as its own piece of storytelli...

Over at Strange Horizons , Dan Hartland has an interesting write-up of the second half of Battlestar Galactica 's summer season (am I wrong, or are most of the critical opinions about this show coming from genre insiders? Certainly it seems that mainstream venues can't stop falling over themselves to indiscriminately praise the show). Hartland makes a good argument about the importance of individuality and its acceptance within the show, and suggests that it is this ability to accept individuality--the huge range of human experience and personality--that separates good from evil on the show. The Number Six stored in Balthar's mind exhorts us to consider the abused woman as an individual, a reality, rather than a scientific problem or icon. Balthar later observes that her catatonic state emphasizes more than anything else so far that the psychology of those Cylons who appear human is identical to that of the beings they imitate and destroy. When Cain, assuming command of th...

Sure, TWoP 's two Farscape recaps (of the premiere and of the second season episode "Crackers Don't Matter" ) were hilarious, but we all know that it's the show's fourth season that deserves a touch of snark. Enter Danny at ToughPigs , whose recaps are solely responsible for the fact that I've been getting a lot of funny looks today as I remember really funny bits and start snorting and laughing. The theme of today's episode, really, is that Technology Of The Future Is Not Any Better Than The Technology We Have Today. After the whole hands-in-vomit thing, then Chiana and Sikozu spend minutes and minutes trying to figure out what complex sequence of buttons operates the cannon. They're smart people, and clearly very experienced shooting weapons at things, but it takes them forever to figure out how to do it. Isn't there a Big Red Button somewhere marked LASER CANNON? I mean, my laser cannon has one of those, and I got it on sale at Best Buy. ...