We re-watched Pirates of the Caribbean a few nights ago, and noticed that Jack Sparrow also has a compass that doesn’t point north, just like Locke on Lost.
Clearly, Locke’s compass points to the Isla de Muerta! It’s in the wrong ocean, but they were off-course…
Since we’ve started showing Babylon 5 to a new group, I’ve been surfing the Lurker’s Guide and other sites. I came across an interesting tidbit about the spinoff series Crusade that I had forgotten.
At the point that TNT cancelled Crusade (13 episodes into filming, and months before it aired), Warner Bros. tried to sell it to the Sci Fi Channel. SciFi was interested in picking it up — and they actually did buy the rights to show reruns of B5 — but they had already committed their original-programming budget to several new shows. No mention of what shows they were, but…
Something jogged my memory. “What year was this?” I checked; it was 1999. “What year did Farscape start?” Sure enough, 1999.
When it comes to serial entertainment, everything will end at some point. I’m sure even Superman and Spider-Man comics will cease someday. A show can end before or after it’s run out of things to say, but it’s worst when it hasn’t finished speaking.
We’ve all seen shows that kept going long after, by any rights, they should have been cancelled. Is there any doubt that Voyager only lasted 7 years because it was Star Trek, on a studio-owned network, and the previous two Treks had also run that long? “The Far Side” and “Calvin and Hobbes” ended while the artists were at the top of their form. Compare that to “Peanuts,” whose last 20 years were hardly worth reading, or the new “Opus” from Berkeley Breathed (although it does have its moments). Continue reading
The mystery of where the Farscape miniseries will air has been answered! From Sci-Fi Wire [archive.org]:
SCI FI announced it will be bringing back Farscape with an all-new miniseries — called Farscape: Peacekeeper War — slated to air in the fourth quarter of this year.
WTF? OK, it’s not the last place I’d expect – that would be Fox, or maybe Lifetime – but the Sci Fi Channel has spent the last year and a half distancing itself from Farscape, and a good chunk of that trying to move away from actual science fiction. I guess Dune must have done better than Scare Tactics.
Hmm, it might be worth getting cable again.
Further reading: Save Farscape, in particular Sci Fi Picks up the Mini [archive.org].
Congratulations to the Farscape cast and crew! We’ll be watching!
Miss two weeks and they pull the rug out from under you:
…the cast, crew, writers and producers of Angel deserve to be able to wrap up the series in a way befitting a classic television series and that is why we went to Joss to let him know that this would be the last year of the series on The WB
At least the WB had the decency to let them know in time to do some sort of wrap-up, unlike the way certain other shows were treated by channels that shall not be named.
Unfortunately we live in a world where the offbeat has to make way for the mainstream. I don’t care if the WB puts up some new “reality” show, as long as I can find the kind of shows I like to watch. With so many hundreds of cable and satellite stations available, you’d think there’d be room for shows like VR.5 and Crusade.
Still, Angel managed five years, which is pretty damn respectable – especially in the modern era of cancelling shows without even airing half a season.
Joss Whedon sums up the perils of producing anything that strays too far from the beaten path:
“Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I took the road less traveled by
and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN’ SHOW.
I totally shoulda took the road
that had all those people on it.
Damn.”
When I heard they were turning Birds of Prey into a TV series, I wasn’t sure what to think, having never picked up the comic book (although I do follow various comics news sites). Having seen 3 episodes, I’m still not sure. The premiere episode was pretty good, for a pilot. In fact, most of the things I disliked about it were, as another review termed it, “pilot-itis” – excessive exposition, cast not quite settled in, etc.
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