gagglefrak - comic books, science fiction, faux profanity

“The pain is how I learn from the guilt. There’s wisdom there. Clarity. You know yourself there…. When you’re in pain, that’s when you learn who you really are. That’s when you focus. Sharp as the point of a knife.” - Six to Tigh

So … it’s safe to say that pain was the common thread this week on Battlestar Galactica. In particular, the pain of guilt. Which Six schools Tigh about when he keeps visiting her cell, trying to learn how he can shut off the guilty pain he feels over killing his wife Ellen for being a Cylon collaborator (without revealing that he’s a Cylon himself). Six is oddly sympathetic to his plight, and in Tigh’s mind, she keeps morphing into the face of his dead wife. In fact, she’s so sympathetic that she gleefully bashes his face in for his own good, and he lets her. But really, it’s just foreplay, and the last we see of them, they’re making out on the floor. Not sure how that’s all going to end up, but as relationships go, it may just be THE most dysfunctional one on the show so far. Continue Reading »

I bought my first iPod a few months back — a little 2GB Shuffle — and among the reasons I was excited to have one was because it would give me the opportunity to start listening to “X Minus One” during my drive to and from work. I stumbled across an episode while flipping the channels on my Sirius Radio a while back, quickly ran home to Google it, and learned that “X Minus One” is an old NBC radio science fiction show, a precursor to Rod’s Serling’s “Twilight Zone” (yes, I’m a big TZ fan).

And when I say old, I mean OLD. I know there are some teenagers out there who will look at a movie from the 80s like “Back to the Future” and say, “Wow, that’s old!” But I’m talking 50+ years here. Half a century. The show ran from 1955-1958, and featured dramatic adaptations of works by such classic sci-fi authors as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. Continue Reading »

Missing in Action is the 16th book in the Star Trek: New Frontier series of novels by Peter David. I’ll freely admit that I’m a huge fan of Peter David’s work, whether it’s comics or fiction. So whenever a new installment in this ongoing saga hits paperback, I generally drop whatever else I’m reading to find out what he’s done with/to the characters this time around.

Peter David started this series back in 1997, and at the time, it was a bit of an experiment. There had been plenty of Star Trek novels written over the years, but all of them had been attached to one or more of the various TV shows — The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or Voyager (and later Enterprise) — and each dealt with the continuing adventures of such established characters as Kirk, Spock, and Picard, each in their own familiar milieu. What David decided to do (with the nudging of then-editor John Ordover) was start an entirely new and original ongoing story, one set in the same universe as but unattached to any of the established shows in the franchise, using everything that had happened in the TV shows and movies as its “history” and moving forward from there. Continue Reading »

It’s official …

The Sarah Connor Chronicles will return in the fall.

“Not only has Fox has picked up Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for a second round, the show is returning in the fall.”

“[The show] premiered in January as a midseason drama, but Fox is shifting the show to its fall lineup for next season. The network on Monday handed a 13-episode order to the sci-fi drama [which] will likely get a new time period next fall rather than stay at Mondays at 9 p.m. NBC puts the similarly sci-fi tinged Heroes in that slot, which was on hiatus due to the writers strike when [the show] aired this season.”

“The series could also get an early back-nine order… Next May, Warner Bros. will release the fourth ‘Terminator’ film, which could make for some ideal corporate synergy should the TV series survive the fall.”

“[The show], which launched in January, is the highest-rated new scripted series this season among adults 18-49 with an average of a 4.4 rating/10 share. The Warner Bros. TV-produced series drew an average of 10.5 million total viewers.”

Overall, the New York Comic Con was fun this year. Really, for me, when a giant room full of comic books is involved, you can’t go too far wrong. Yet even though this year’s con was a huge improvement over two years ago … and even though it was a heck of a lot nicer to schlep into Manhattan at the start of Spring rather than the tail end of Winter … I have to admit, I preferred last year’s con to this one, for a variety of reasons.

Allow me to elaborate … Continue Reading »