Tag Archives | Science Fiction

Here’s another trailer for the second half of Doctor Who series 6. It overlaps heavily with the previous trailer, but there are a few new scenes in there.

A lot of people are calling Captain America: The First Avenger the best of the Avengers film franchise so far. I can’t agree; I enjoyed it, but for me Iron Man still surpasses it. (Does that mean I find wisecracking supergenius assholes more fun to watch than earnest self-sacrificing patriots? Yeah, I guess it does.)

Two nice touches in the movie that I haven’t seen anyone else mention (I suppose these are spoilers, especially the second one):

1. When we first see Dr. Arnim Zola (the Dream Lord, for Doctor Who fans), it’s as a distorted face filling a viewscreen. I’m pretty sure that’s a nod to Zola’s eventual fate in the comics, where he eventually becomes reduced to nothing but … a distorted face filling a viewscreen.

2. When Rogers wakes up in the 21st century, he’s greeted by a woman with the same hair colour as his lost love Peggy Carter. And when he goes on the run, this woman calls in a “Code 13.” Comics fans will recognise why a woman who resembles Peggy Carter might be associated with the number 13. (Others have made the same guess as mine as to this woman’s identity, but I haven’t seen anyone mention the association with “13,” which for me is what clinches the hypothesis.)

J. Michael Straczynski just sent out the following rather disappointing email. (Well, I guess I can’t strictly say I’m disappointed, since I hadn’t known there was anything to get appointed about.)

Last year, the studio offered a full season of a new and rebooted B5 as part of a new distribution venue they were creating (us and several other shows from the same studio were part of the same deal). We’d have a full season, a big budget, and total creative control. The negotiations (not between us but between the participants of the venue) dragged on for over a year, we were told repeatedly this is going to happen, but finally, the participants couldn’t make the math work. So we and the other three shows that they were hoping to put out there got set aside.

At this point, I’ve told the studio that if this isn’t going to move ahead, there’s something else they need to consider and there’s a very informal negotiation going on now in that regard. We’ll see where it goes from there.

But again, B5 was never created to be a Deep Space Franchise, we wanted to do our 5 years and get out clean. That was my intent going into this, and if that’s where this ends up, I’m happy to stick with that.

Any guesses what he means in paragraph 2?

I’m ordinarily not a fan of colourisation (to put it mildly), but I find Stuart Humphryes’ work on scenes from Doctor Who’s black and white era quite charming. (And notice how much more interesting the TARDIS’s central column looks.)

I’ve previously mentioned the Adventures With the Wife in Space blog series, in which a couple – one a fan, one not – work their way through every Doctor Who episode from 1963 on.

Another blog series that’s doing the same thing in a very different way is Philip Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum. (CHT Jesse Walker.) Sandifer’s series takes a cultural-studies approach, and situates each episode in its historical context (though usually with a title drawn from a later era); he’s one season into the Pertwee era now. As with “Adventures,” I’ve gone back and read the whole series from the beginning; I don’t always agree with him, but what he has to say is generally fascinating in any case.

Incidentally, I don’t know why my comments on his blog keep coming out as being by someone named “7a1abfde-af0e-11e0-b72c-000bcdcb5194.” “Blon Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen” would be simple by comparison.