Tag Archives | Science Fiction

Okay, we’ve all seen the scene so many times we don’t think about it. But think about it.

Luke is hanging upside down from the ceiling of the wampa’s cave like a human stalactite, his feet encased in ice. So first of all, how’d he get there? Sure, the wampa put him there (for reasons that are less than entirely clear), but how?

To encase someone’s feet in ice, you first have to melt the ice, then stick the guy’s feet in, then wait for the ice to refreeze. How did the technologically-challenged wampa melt the ice?

But wait, there’s more. This ice is on the ceiling. If you melt it, it, y’know, falls down. So how did the wampa keep the water from draining off as he held Luke’s feet in it?

Answer: that must not be how the wampa did it. Well then, how did he do it?

And finally, after Luke cuts himself free with his lightsabre (with a single stroke – what “shape” would that stroke have to be, I wonder?) and jumps down, why aren’t his feet still encased in chunks of ice?

Possible answer: the lightsabre is so hot it instantly melted the rest of the ice. But that doesn’t seem right. Whatever directly touches a lightsabre’s blade gets pretty hot, yes. But we’ve seen that the blade can be an inch or two away from someone’s skin without causing burns. So how could one quick slash with the blade be enough to melt, instantaneously, such a large amount of ice?

After Sara Tancredi’s head showed up in a box, I thought for a while that Prison Break had jumped the ichthyosaur. But the plot twists and character dynamics of the last few episodes have lured me in again.

Alas, yesterday’s episode may be the last. Certainly it was the last for a while – a premature “season finale,” because season 3 was truncated as a result of the Hollywood labour dispute (not, incidentally, as a “result of the strike” – it takes two to tango). But it remains to be seen whether the show will be picked up to complete its arc.

I need closure!

As a fan of Jack Kirby’s original OMAC character (as opposed to the recent reboot that turns Brother Eye evil, connects it with Batman, multiplies the OMACs [doesn’t it defeat the point of a “one man army” to have a whole army of them?], and makes them mindless pawns of Brother Eye), I’m glad to see that a couple of pre-reboot OMAC collections are on the way.

The original OMAC (“One Man Army Corps”) was Buddy Blank, a hapless corporate cipher in a quasi-Orwellian future who is given superpowered enhancements and personality alteration in order to become the Global Peace Agency’s chief enforcer; he draws his power from Brother Eye, an intelligent and apparently benign satellite. After the series ended (along with Kirby’s involvement), OMAC’s universe was moved into continuity with that of another Kirby creation, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, as it was retroactively decided to make a de-powered Blank turn out to be Kamandi’s grandfather.

This collection looks like it’ll be collecting Kirby’s original 8-issue run, while this one will be collecting a grab bag of various Kirby and post-Kirby OMAC stories. (But why not collect all the post-Kirby/pre-reboot OMAC stories in a single volume as a companion to the Kirby volume?) Also, some of the events in the old Hercules Unbound series intended to bridge the gap between OMAC and Kamandi will presumably show up in the upcoming Great Disaster anthology whose release date keeps getting pushed farther and farther back.

So, we know there are reasons that the current labour impasse in Hollywood might be bad for Galactica (though I’m not too worried, since the first half of the final season is written, and rumor has it that SFC was already planning to postpone the second half to 2009 anyway).

But apparently there’s a way in which it might be good for Galactica too. It had looked as though plans for Caprica, a prequel pilot dealing with Adama’s father and the origin (in some sense of “origin”) of the Cylons, had been pretty much shelved. But now the network is taking a second look at it because of those magic words, “script already written.” (Conical hat tip to AICN.)