Speaking Of Caprica

 

With Battlestar Galactica coming to an end tonight, many fans are looking forward to the spinoff show Caprica that premieres next year on the Sci-fi channel.  Sort of a prequel series, Caprica takes place 60 years or so before the events of BSG.  It's about the creation of the Cylons and how the AI of them began and adapted and grew.

 

In this clip from the Sci-Fi Wire, the cast and crew discuss the show and a bunch of clips from the first episode are shown.  It's going to be a very different show from BSG, but it does look like it's going to be really good.

 

The first episode will actually be coming out on DVD on April 21st of this year, so be sure to look for that next month.

The End Of An Era

 

Tonight, the greatest show on Television (as far as I'm concerned) comes to an end.  After four amazing seasons, Battlestar Galactica will be airing its series finale this evening.  The build up to the end has been wild.  All season long there has been wild speculation amongst fans as to how things will wind up.  And then there's been the never ending set of questions we've been forced to deal with.  What exactly is Kara Thrace?  What's up with that opera house thing?  Will Baltar ever stop being a douche?  Will the human race ever find a happy home?  What the hell is going on with Anders?  Why won't Rosalin die already?

 

Ok, so that last one is only something that's been bugging me.  But still, there's a lot of unanswered questions that the writers of BSG still need to resolve and there's only tonight's two hour series finale episode to answer it all in.  That's a lot of resolution that needs to get fit into one double sized episode.  Will we get all of our answers?  Will we get to see a happy ending, or will the series end as it has spent the last four years and make us all thoroughly depressed as we watch everyone die?

 

I wouldn't put it past the writers of BSG to have everyone go out in a wild blaze of glory.  It would be sad, but it would also be a fitting end to a show that has been about constant struggle and fighting to survive and running for humanity's collective lives.  I don't think that's where they're going though, but I'm just saying I wouldn't be suprised.

 

Personally, I'm both really excited and really sad by the prospects of tonights finale.  I'm excited because hopefully "All will be revealed" as we've been promised for the longest time.  We'll finally get to see how things end for the last surviving bits of humanity, and that closure will be good to see.  I'm really sad though because this marks the end of an era of amazing television.  BSG pushed every conventional boundary of what a televised sci-fi series could do.  They reinvented serialized sci-fi storytelling and created a show that was both pure science fiction and fantasy sci/fi.

 

The show was a reflection of the culture in which it was made.  Many analogies can be made to the post September 11th world in which we live. The occupation of Caprica as an analogy of the Iraq war is the easiest example to point to.  Occupation forces being attacked by a small rebel/terrorist force (depending on your point of view) which employed dirty tactics such as suicide bombers was something we were reading about every day in the newspapers, but we were also seeing played out on TV which made us look at the situation very differently.  The fact that the heroes of the show (the human resistence) were the rebel/terrorist force and that the evil robots were the the occupation forces turned the Iraq war on its head for western viewers.

 

This is what great science fiction does.  It takes a giant mirror and holds it up to society and makes us take a long, hard look at ourselves.  This is what BSG has done again and again so beautifully.  The series has covered many topics over its run including things like politics, religion, human nature, fate and destiny, women's rights and racism.

 

Hell, this week the writers of BSG as well as some of the cast were even invited to speak in front of the United Nations to discuss how they handled some of these topics on their show.  If that isn't a show having a profound effect on the world, I don't know what is.

 

I will admit though, I do miss the days when BSG was all about the viper pilots.  The fighter jockeys, much like a sort of Top Gun in space, were the heart of the series during its first two seasons and those shows are still my favorites.  I recognize the show needed to grow beyond that or it would have gotten stale, and I am glad that it did grow beyond showing dogfight after dogfight.  At the same time though, I really do miss seeing Apollo and Starbuck whooping some Cylon ass every other episode.

 

What makes me the most sad though is that there's nothing, and I mean nothing, currently on TV that I can watch which will fill the hole that the departure of BSG will leave.  There's nothing else like Battlestar out there.  Sure, there's tons of other sci-fi shows, and while many of them are good, none of them come close to the excitement or complexity that episodes of BSG delivered week after week.

 

So long Battlestar Galactica.  You will be missed.  But you will never be forgotten.  You gave us so many things over the last few years, including the word Frak, which I will probably use in my regular vernacular from now until the day I die.  We can only hope that the spinoff show Caprica will be anywhere near as good, although I doubt it ever will be.

 

Personally, I want to see a spinoff show about the first Cylon war.  But that's just me.

The Good, The Bad, And The Duros

 

Meet Cad Bane.  He's a new bounty hunter character that will be making his first appearance in the Star Wars universe in this Friday's episode of the Clone Wars.  This is the same trailer that was shown to fans at the Star Wars panel at Wonder Con a few weeks ago.  It's a teaser for the season finale of Clone Wars, in which Count Dooku hires Bane to free a Separatist prisoner being held on Coruscant.

 

Obviously, the character is modeled heavily after a western gunslinger from such films as Clint Eastwood's  Man With No Name trilogy, and personally I'm totally ok with that.  Do you know which other Star Wars Character was modeled heavily on western gunslingers?  I'm sure you've heard of him before.  His name is Han Solo. 

 

So having a bit of a spaghetti western character in the Star Wars Universe makes sense as far as I'm concerned.  Plus he's a bounty hunter, so it fits his character.  Add on top of that the fact that he's a Duros, one of the alien races from Star Wars that I love but which we never get to see enough of, and I'm a happy camper. 

 

My only concern are the sort of lame looking metal tubes going into his face.  What the hell are those for?

Green Lantern Movie To Begin Filming This Fall

 

Warner Brothers has announced this week that they are scheduled to begin filming of the live-action Green Lantern movie this fall.  Filming will start in mid-september and will be shot on location in Australia.  The film's expected release date is December 17th, 2010.

 

Directing the picture will be Martin Campbell who has directed such other notable geek films as the James Bond movies Goldeneye and Casino Royale (my two favorite Bond movies ever) and the Mask of Zorro.  Unfortunately, he also directed the crappy Zorro sequel The Legend of Zorro.  I guess no one is perfect, right?

 

No casting choices have been announced yet, so we don't know who will be playing the titled hero.  Also, no story notes have been released either, so we're not even sure which Lantern we'll be seeing, or who they'll be fighting.  It would be stupid though for the WB to make a film about any other Lantern than the classic version of Hal Jordan.  Then again, this is Hollywood and dumber things have definitely happened before.  They could totally annoy fans everywhere and make a film about the original Green Lantern Alan Scott.

Eddie Izzard + LEGOS + Star Wars = Geeky Greatness

 

Eddie Izzard is an incredibly funny British comedian.  He once did a bit about the cafeteria on the Death Star that I loved.  Now, someone has taken the audio of that bit and made a stop-motion LEGO movie to go along with it.  The result is something beautiful.

Pat's First Online Rant: I Am Officially Done With Heroes (aka F This Show)

 



 

That's it, I'm done.  I can't take it anymore.  I've given up.  I am never watching NBC's show Heroes again.  Ever. 

 

They had finally done it.  They've gotten me to swear off the show.  It's an amazing accomplishment for a show about superheroes to get a lifelong comic book and superhero fan to stop watching their program, but after seasons of bad stories, horrible plot twists and bad acting the show has finally done something truly unforgivable. 

 

They have insulted and mocked their core audience.

 

For those of you who don't watch the show, or who haven't been keeping up with this season, let me explain.  In one of the show's many boring sub-plots, the character of Claire (a young attractive blonde cheerleader) decides to try to get a job at, of all places, a comic book store.  She doesn't actually read comics mind you, she just plans on using the job to help her smuggle fugitive superheroes to safety.  It's sort of a cover.

 

Anyways, in one of the scenes from the show, she goes in to interview with a manager at the store.  He talks to her a little bit about comics, asks her if she can work Wednesdays because that's when the new comics come out and then he asks her "Invisibility or flight"?  Claire is obviously confused and doesn't know the answer.  Basically, she has a really crappy interview.  She knows she's failed and turns to walk away when the store manager tells her she has the job.  Perplexed, she asks why and he whispers to her, "Every guy in here has been staring at you since you walked in.  You will definitely sell comic books."  We are then shown shots of  a number of the stores patrons, all of whom are either staring at or are blatantly leering at Claire through the comic racks or over the comics they're pretending to read.

 

The comic book fans are portrayed as pimply faced geeks who gawk at the sight of a pretty girl and they become lusty creeps in the process.  This angers me for a number of reasons.  First and foremost, I am so annoyed that this image of the comic geek still exists in today's culture.  The socially outcast nerd who have never even talked to a pretty girl, let alone ever had sex.  It's a negative stereotype that the media seems to love to push.  Everytime some big geek event happens, there's always some jackass media reporter who will find people standing in line waiting for the event who will ask them something along the lines of, "Have you ever seen a woman naked?"

 

Case in point.

 

In an era where comic book movies are topping the box office and the Dark Knight can take in a half a billion dollars, the fans who actually read the comic books these successful films are based on (which millions of people have seen) are summarily mocked time and time again for being social freaks and outcasts.  Meanwhile, comic books, science fiction and other typically "nerdy" things continue to become the mainstream forms of entertainment.  Look at things like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or even TV shows like Lost or Chuck or Big Bang Theory.  Geek stuff is in.  Geeks are everywhere, and we're taking over the world.

 

Yet again and again we stuff like this.  There's also the stereotype being portrayed here that women, especially attractive women, never ever read comic books.  The stereotype that a woman in a comic book shop is a more rare occurance than a bigfoot sighting is as old as time itself.  Yet the truth is so far away from that.  It makes the writers of scenes like this look like out of touch leftovers from the 1960's.  Today's comic audiences have a huge female population.  There are just as many geek girls out there as there are geek guys, yet the perception remains that geeks as a whole are a bunch of loser guys who never have dates.

 

Matt and I ran into this during the impromptu Geek-tastic panel at Wonder Con too.  One of the guys in the audience had made a comment about the exhibit hall floor being filled with nothing but geeky fat guys, with nary a woman to be seen.  Matt was quick to retort though and asked the guy to look around him.  The room was about a 50/50 split of men and women.  Matt challenged the guy to walke the exhibit hall floor for a while.  There were just as many women down there as there were men.  When I go to comic conventions, you see tons of women. 

 

Geek isn't an entirely male thing, and I'm sick and tired of it being portrayed as such.  Whenever I see something like this it just reminds me of the old shows I used to watch growing up that mocked and ridiculed me for watching cartoons and reading comic books and sci-fi novels.  I would have thought that by now in the 21st centure we had moved past such outdated views, but apparently I was wrong.

 

What makes this a truly horrible slight though was that this came from a show about superheroes.  It's a show about comic books.  It's watched by millions of comic book fans, and in one fell swoop the writers of the show have gone and openly insulted their fans right to their faces.

 

I don't know about you, but I refuse to take that from a show.  I've been on the fence about Heroes for a while now anyways, and this just seems to be the last straw with me.  The show had a great first season.  Sure, it was all a blatant ripoff of the X-Men, but that was ok because the show was good and entertaining.  But since the end of the first season we've had to suffer through absolutely horrible seasons of television filled with atrocious writing, plots that went nowhere, one plot that was given up entirely without any resolution whatsoever (Peter's Irish Girlfriend who got trapped in the future), annoying characters who die only to be replaced by their even more annoying twin sister, weak villains, lots of time travel insanity and a general lack of direction or purpose. 

 

I've put up with all of that because I had hope the show would get better.  But it hasn't.  It just gets worse and worse and worse.  And now they've even sunk so low as to insult their fans, the ones who have made it so that the show hasn't gotten cancelled long ago like it should have.

 

I refuse to watch agood TV show which insults me or my intelligence, so you can rest assured I'll be god damned if I'm going to let a crappy show insult me like Heroes has.  I have watched my last episode of Heroes.  They have lost a viewer due to their old fashioned and stereotyped sensibilities.  May the show rot in ratings hell and get the early cancellation it so richly deserves.

 

My only hope at this point is that there is a panel for Heroes this year at the San Diego Comic Con.  If there is, I'm going to try my best to get in line to ask a question of the writers during the usual Q&A portion of the show.  If I can manage this, I will ask them something along the lines of the following:

 

"How dare you show yourselves here?  How do you have the audacity to show your faces here at a convention about comic books, that is attended by comic book fans, when you have so blatantly insulted us in your show?  The scene in which Claire interviewed for the job in the comic book shop was disgraceful.  You portrayed every man in this room as a pimply faced social reject who becomes a leering sexual deviant simply at the sight of a pretty girl, and you insulted every woman in this room by perpetuation the false belief that women do not read comic books or enjoy other geeky pursuits.  Look around you, please.  And tell me if the fine folks you see around you are the same type of people you have shown us to be on your pathetic excuse for an X-Men ripoff TV show?"

Geek Item Of The Week - 03/18/09

 

Pac-Man Energy Drink

 

If ever there was a videogame character who personified chemical dependence, it's Pac-Man.  The pill chomping, fruit eating, ghost killing menace is a glutton who gorges himself on everything in sight.  And you know those power pellets have got to have some crazy strong uppers in them.

 

So it's no suprise then that Pac-Man would get his own energy drink.  The amount of drugs going through Pac-Man's system at any given moment is probably enough to kill a herd of elephants, so it makes sense his likeness would be used to sell massive amounts of caffiene to consumers.

 

You can pick up a can of Pac-Man's drug fueled insanity over at Amazon for only $2.99 a can too, so how can you go wrong.  Just don't start blaming me if you find yourself awake at 3am wandering your house looking for pills to eat.