I caught “Last of the Time Lords” on BBC America last week – and they’d cut out the following scene!
Now admittedly that scene doesn’t really advance the plot; but still, I would bet it’s the one scene that fans best love and remember from that episode. (Plot isn’t everything.) And of course BBC America offers its viewers no announcement that they’re watching truncated versions of episodes.
There’s a new Galactica series in the works, to take place between Caprica and BSG, featuring Ensign Bill Adama in the early years of the Cylon War.
The next Star Trek movie will feature one of the following five original-series characters: Harry Mudd, Trelane, Gary Mitchell, the Talosians, or the Horta. I guess I’m hoping for and/or expecting Gary Mitchell, because: Mudd is too silly, Trelane is too much like Q, the Talosians are too entangled with a specific Christopher Pike plot thread that the last film seems to have averted, and the Horta strikes me as not having, um, legs beyond its original story. (But if Abrams does use Mitchell, it’ll be one more case of his channeling Of Gods and Men – the $150,000 libertarian fan film that featured the destruction of Vulcan and the creation of an alternate timeline stemming from the moment of Kirk’s birth, three years before Abrams’ film did all those same things.)
There might be some Star Wars sequels (CHT AICN) on the (fairly distant) horizon, but will probably “not have anything to do with the Skywalker Clan” and may take place “as far as 100 years or 1,000 years in the Star Wars universe future,” presumably to avoid conflicts with the Expanded Universe stories.
The good news is that The Hobbit will film in New Zealand after all. The bad news is that this result was achieved by government micromanaging industrial relations to keep a big corporation happy. (And no, if it’d been micromanaging industrial relations to keep a big union happy I wouldn’t have liked it either.)
Want to help send Charles Johnson under the banner of the Molinari Institute to preach Hayekian feminism to Marxian philosophers in the wilds of Oregon? Well, of course you do; it’s what you’ve been dreaming of all your life. Now you can.
Check out Stephan Kinsella’s upcoming course on intellectual property. See more info here and here.
I’m pleased to announce that the Auburn Philosophy Department has created (or discovered, one of my colleagues argues) an Institute for Value and the Arts.
We’ll be kicking off the Institute’s sure-to-be-illustrious career with a two-day conference on philosophy of law at the end of next week.
Very good news! After announcing only the other day that he was turning down the role of Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s upcoming Hobbit movie in order to return as Dr. Watson in Steven Moffat’s marvelous Sherlock series, Martin Freeman has apparently been cast as Bilbo after all – which strikes me as absolutely perfect casting. (Remember him also as Arthur Dent, like Bilbo a bewildered everyman thrown into cosmic adventure, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) This means he’ll be doing both Bilbo and Watson, I hope?
Addendum: Yup, he’s confirmed as doing both. And if you haven’t seen Sherlock, the first episode is playing on PBS’s Mystery! this weekend.