Tonight!
FOX!
Second hour of primetime!
Dollhouse!
Be there!
(This message is brought to you by the part of me that is an undiluted Joss Whedon fanboy. This will of course have as little bearing as I can possibly manage when it comes time for me to write a review of the show, but just so you know, there may be some leakage. I can't be totally dispassionate about everything.)
There are times when I think that it is easiest to write about things that you really, really like or really, really hate. It is only mediocrity that is difficult to quantify. Which may explain why I still haven't come up with a review of 90210 while dashing off a review of Hole In The Wall the night it aired. I am going to do it again for Fringe but this time it's because I really, really, really like it. To be sure there are flaws in logic and execution but despite flaws in some of the parts the thing holds together quite well. For me the proof is that despite the 95 minute running time – with limited commercial interruptions no less – the episode felt quickly paced and not like something that was padded with excess material. Indeed one of the faults was that, at times, it felt like it was rushed; as if they could have used a bit more time to develop an idea. That's unusual in most pilots that are longer than an hour and feel like they were stuffed with fluff to make them fit the time slot.We get a pretty quick impression of what we're dealing with in the first scene aboard a German airliner flying to Boston. Encountering extreme turbulence the passengers fasten their seat belts. One of the passengers is feeling unwell. He uses an auto-injector which we later discover is supposed to contain Insulin (the device looks like an EpiPen, so my first reaction was that he was using Epinephrine for an allergic reaction). Almost immediately he gets up and runs for the front of the plane, a flight attendant running after her. When she finally catches up with him and sees his face she recoils in horror. His face is melting. We see the other people on the plane; their faces are melting. When the plane's co-pilot opens the cabin door to see what the panic is about he quickly closes it. The last image we have from the inside of the plane before it lands is of the co-pilot's face melting away, allowing his jaw bone to drop off.
FBI agents Olivia Dunham and John Scott are called to the airport to participate in the investigation. They're called separately but they're in bed together, conducting a secret love affair in a cheap motel. The FBI isn't in control of the operation though. That job goes to curt and abrasive Homeland Security agent Philip Broyles. Broyles takes charge of things in the sort of pre-emptive manner that most local law enforcement agencies on TV accuse the FBI of adopting, and when Dunham protests using her position as "interagency liaison officer" she not only earns a new nickname, "Liaison" but also a position as one of the people going on board the plane. The plane is absolute carnage; bones, clothes, blood and sticky slime. We learn (after one of the episode's commercials) that the plane has been ordered burned by the Centers for Disease Control, a cover story of course. Acting on an anonymous tip John and Olivia go to a storage facility. There they share "a moment" where they talk about the fact that John said that he loved Olivia for the first time at the motel. Naturally this means that something very bad is going to happen to John. Sure enough, after what must have been hours spent looking in storage lockers – since it has gone from daylight to night (all the better to see the explosions of course) John opens a locker filled with experimental animals and chemicals. He has also flushed his quarry, the man running the experiments. The guy runs, with John in pursuit, then, using his cell phone triggers a booby trap. The subsequent explosion not only badly injures John but also catches Olivia. Then as they say, things get weird.
When Olivia regains consciousness we learn that John isn't dead ... yet. His skin has basically turned transparent to the point where we can see through his skin to his muscle structure. The doctors have managed to slow the process of degradation but not totally arrest it. Investigating the circumstances of the deaths on the plane, Olivia finds a link to an incident at Harvard many years before. This leads her to Dr. Walter Bishop. The only problem is that Bishop is a patient at a mental hospital, and the only way to get to his is with the permission of his sole surviving relative – his estranged son, Peter. Peter Bishop is a high school dropout who is on the run from a gambling debt. He's currently in Iraq trying to make money by conning some Iraqi oil men with a plan to build a pipeline. Olivia travels to Iraq and bluffs Peter into coming back to the States with her. She uses him to gain access to Walter. It's apparent that Walter is both brilliant and totally detached from reality – as if his mind is travelling on two tracks at the same time. Seventeen years in an asylum that is little better than a snake pit will do that to you. Bishop lets Olivia know that the only other person has any idea about the compound that caused the deaths on the plane and John's condition is his old lab assistant "Belly" – Dr. Bell. Bell is the founder of Maximum Dynamic, a company that states that what they make is everything. Olivia wants to talk to Bell, but without any proof of his connection to the deaths on the plane it isn't even something to be considered. The only person who can provide the information that can cure John is the man who caused the explosion and the only person who saw him is John.
Walter suggests a method to allow Olivia to find out what John knows. It's called coordinated dreaming and required Olivia to enter a sensory deprivation tank, take LSD and have her brain connected to John's with electrodes. Peter is appalled by the idea, but Walter claims that he has used it in the past to interrogate a dead man. The technique works in allowing Olivia's mind to contact John's and she persuades him to remember the events leading to the explosion. She sees the man and is able to create a computerized drawing of him, which in turn allows him to be identified. The picture matches one of the passengers on the German airplane. They also discover that the man has a twin brother, and the twin brother works for Maximum Dynamic. It's enough to all them to try to contact Bell. However Bell is out of the country, and Olivia and her FBI partner Charlie Francis to one of Bell's leading executives, Nina Sharp. Sharp is all charm and cooperation, giving them information on the man they're looking for, Richard Steig. Nina also lets slip the information that the event they're investigating is part of a pattern. It's a pattern that Olivia and Charlie have no knowledge – according to Nina, their security clearance isn't as high as her company's. Once they have the information from Maximum Dynamic, Olivia and the FBI, with Walter and Peter in tow track him down to his home. Peter sees Steig escaping from house and lets Olivia and the FBI know the direction he's taken off in and give chase. They eventually catch him and get the information they need to cure John with, after Peter threatens him.
Steig has one other piece of information to make a deal with. The events on the airliner were in the way of a demonstration. However Steig had already set up a deal with someone else. When the plane landed Steig had received a call from one of their representatives, an FBI agent. Steig recorded the call and was willing to release the tape to Olivia in return for a plea deal. The voice on the tape was John's. Hurrying back to the hospital where John is recuperating and where Steig is recovering from Peter's interrogation techniques, Olivia finds Steig smothered with a pillow and John missing. Olivia chases him but his car crashes. He dies as Olivia tries to get the name of who John is working for. Broyles has explained the pattern of mysterious events to Olivia by now and offers her a job working with him on trying to discover the cause of the events. She is reluctant to take on the job but the events with John have forced her to change her mind. She wants to enlist Peter and Walter Bishop into her team. Peter is reluctant but eventually they agree to work with her.
The acting, at least from the people who have an opportunity to say more than a handful of lines, is first rate. Australian actress Anna Torv, who plays Olivia has a vaguely exotic quality that is difficult to describe, however she delivers a strong performance playing a woman who is determined to do anything necessary to save the man that she loves. She expresses her pain when she realizes that John was involved with Steig as much with her expression as with anything that she says. Joshua Jackson as Peter Bishop progresses from a sort of outraged disbelief that anyone could take his father's rantings and pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo seriously (as far as Peter's concerned his old man could rot away in that asylum forever and it wouldn't bother him one little bit) to someone who, if he still doesn't believe everything that he's seen, is at least committed to helping Olivia. The implication is not so much that he has romantic feelings for her but rather is impressed with her determination to save John if only as a way to escape from this scary world. Even as he seems to reconnect with his father he rejects his father's work. Blair Brown is perfect in the small role (in the pilot at least) of Nina Sharp. From the moment we see her – even before she actually says a word, just based on the way she carries herself – we sense that there is something sinister about this woman. And when she does speak, even though she says nothing that seems particularly threatening, our suspicions are aroused even further. She is too calm, too smooth, too prepared, as if she already knows what is going to happen and how she is going to react to every question posed to her in her interview with the FBI (because of course that's exactly how she treats it, as if she is being interviewed by a reporter who feels well briefed but actually has far less information than Nina does). And as we find out in the last scene, where Nina talks to an orderly about John's corpse, we are exactly right about her.
Still there are two really standout performances. The first comes from Lance Reddick as Philip Broyles. Reddick imbues Broyles with a sense of arrogance. This seems particularly directed at Olivia that turns to something like bemused tolerance as she goes off on what probably seems like a foolish tangent, to something that's not quite respect but may be acceptance. All the while, even as he reveals some of the details of "The Pattern" to Olivia, you get the sense that he's holding stuff back. It's not malevolent (although it could be) simply that there are things that she doesn't need to know and won't find out about them until she does. And it's all done with a calm even serene demeanour. The other bravura acting performance comes from Australian actor John Noble as Walter Bishop. They say that playing someone who is insane can be amongst the hardest challenges for an actor. Noble, who is probably best known in North America for playing Denethor in Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King does what seems to my untutored eye to take a magnificent stab at it. By turns his Walter Bishop is all business and childlike. At one point he takes a skin sample from John's arm while asking for some ginger ale because it's been so long since he's had any. At another point, while waiting for some result from Olivia's attempts to contact John in the dreaming state, we see Walter watching Spongebob Squarepants, with a joy and amazement that surpasses anything that you'd see from a child. It's ana amazing performance.
The writing may, in some respects be a weak point for the show. I don't mean the actual dialogue, which conveys the emotion of Olivia's desperation to save John quite well. Rather I guess it's a vague sense of being rushed. There's no real sense of the passage of time unless the characters specifically comment on it. We move from Olivia telling Broyles about needing to get to Peter Bishop to Olivia in Baghdad confronting him. To be sure there's an indication that we're in Baghdad (one of the "cute" visual tricks of the episode which I'll mention in the next paragraph) but there's no sense of how long it took her to get there. For all we know (and in this series it's just possible) that she was teleported where she needed to go. Everything about the pacing of the episode seemed to have been rushed. In a show like Mad Men or Battlestar Galactica (two dramas that never fails to impress me with their quality) one is never without a sense of the passage of time, even though it's normally not overtly stated. I suppose that that contributed to the sense that the pacing of the episode seem fast – as if they were trying to fit everything into the 95 minute running time – and why it sometimes didn't seem like the episode took as long as it did.
I wanted to mention a couple of the visual effects. The setting for John and Olivia's shared dream was suitably other worldly. It probably should have provided us with a clue as to the turmoil within John that the place where she met him was not a "happy place" but at the time I supposed we were meant to see it as an effect of his injuries. The other effect, which I like though others seemed to have been annoyed by, was the use of captions to indicate location. Other shows use these but none do it with the "flair" (or perhaps "chutzpah" is the better term) that J.J. Abrams displays here. The captions are big and done in a three-dimensional type face. Moreover at times they seem to exist in the physical universe. In the establishing shot at the FBI office in Boston, the camera pulls through one of the "Os" in Boston to get into the office. But perhaps one of the most brazen/brilliant uses of the effect comes soon after when Olivia travels to Baghdad. We start with an establishing aerial shot of the city with the words "Baghdad Iraq" superimposed over the city. We then switch to a ground level establishing shot looking up towards helicopters flying over the city...and the "B" from Baghdad. Like I said, "flair" (or perhaps "chutzpah").
Already opinion of this series seems to be all over the place. People either love it (like me) or they loathe it. Many people comment on the similarity between this series and The X-Files and usually find it lacking. I do acknowledge a similarity to The X-Files but I also see similarities to a show from a couple of seasons back called Threshold, starring Carla Gugino, that I actually think is closer to this series than The X-Files is. I liked that show a lot – felt in fact that it was the best of the three "alien invasion series" from that season (the others were Invasion and Surface). Despite a handful of things about Fringe that I found annoying – the pacing problem that I mentioned being the biggest, and that may be have a lot to do with getting the show up and running – I really like this show as well. What I'm really interested in is how they'll follow up on this. After all, as is often the case the pilot is not reflective of the show that we'll see in subsequent weeks. In the pilot for Fringe the focus was on Olivia's relationship with John, her desperate attempts to save him, and her sense of betrayal when she finds out that he had been dealing with Steig. All of this is what draws her into the area of fringe science and introduces her to Broyles and to the Bishops. What the rest of the series has to do is to hold on to us as she and her team investigate the various threats that they'll be investigating. That could be a difficult thing to pull off. Threshold wasn't able to – it was one of the first shows cancelled that season. FOX, which is notorious for cancelling series quickly needs to take its time with this one, but given that it comes from producer J.J. Abrams, that seems likely to happen, even if the ratings for the pilot may not have been stellar (it finished second to America's Got Talent, though to be fair it held its audience solidly in each half hour). This could still turn out like Threshold, but I'm hoping that things go more like The X-Files, which started slowly and built an audience. I think this show is intriguing enough for that to happen.
I think that over time I've mentioned the fact that as someone who blogs about Television as an amateur critic I am at a disadvantage because the networks don't send me "screeners" – episodes of shows sent out in advance by production companies so that critics can have copy to review before the show airs. It is part of my lot in life as an amateur critic, and while I accept it, I have to say that it would be very convenient around season premiere time to have copies of the new shows to review without having to either watch the show as it goes to air or find the time to watch a taped copy. And now I have the opportunity to do just that.The Sci-Fi Channel in the US has been making a major push to promote the season premiere which will air on both the Sci-Fi Channel in the US and on Space here in Canada on Friday April 4th. As part of the promotion for the start of the final season of the series, the network (through a company specializing in online promotion) has been sending out material to bloggers and others with an interest in television in general or Battlestar Galactica in particular, or both (that would be me). This included a review screener. Getting the screener included some restrictions, the biggest of which was this one: "After the 3/31/08 hold, I will provide only spoiler-free coverage, which means that ANYTHING that happens in the last 15 minutes of the episode is completely off-limits." I confess that this may put a crimp in my style, but it was a condition I was aware of so let's see how it goes.
The first thing that viewers will note when they see the episode on Friday night is a new introductory sequence instead of the sequence that tells us that human beings created the Cylons, the focus now is on the twelve humanoid Cylon models – seven have been revealed (Sharon, D'Anna, Cavil, Leoben, Doral, Simon and Six), four are living in hiding (Tigh, Anders, Tyrol, and Tory Foster), and one will be revealed. Once this opening sequence is completed and the requisite recap of the important events of the past couple of episodes – notably the apparent death of Starbuck – is finished the action immediately picks up from where we left off at the end of the last season, with the Colonial Fleet unable to jump following a massive power outage, and a huge Cylon fleet closing in on them. Oh yes, and Lee finding a live Starbuck. The battle starts off badly, and the fleet suffers a huge loss in its population when one of the big passenger ships is destroyed and another is badly damaged. And with the Cylons seemingly on the verge of finally eliminating humanity, something happens that causes the Cylons to break off their attack. And that's all before the first commercial.
There are three main plotlines in this episode. The first deals with the four hidden Cylons. There are some tantalizing hints that they aren't entirely the same as the humanoid Cylons that we've come to know. They are wracked with doubt as to what their role in things is. This seems particularly true of Anders while Tigh is the one most determined to retain his humanity. It also fits the notion, stated by series creator and Executive Producer Ronald D. Moore in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that these Cylons are fundamentally different from the others that we know. For them, as well as for us, the questions of where they came from, why they've been activated and where their loyalties actually lie, is something to be discovered.
The second storyline concerns the return of Starbuck. From the moment that we first see her and her ship there is something noticeably different about her and the ship. In fact the difference is so noticeable was that my first thought was that the appearance of her ship was a bit of bad CGI work. But of course the look of things is entirely deliberate, and adds one more aspect to the mystery of what happened to Starbuck. Her claims that she's been to earth and knows how to take them there are greeted with suspicion to say the least. There's a time discrepancy – for Kara only hours have passed but for the fleet several weeks have gone by. And then, while she has pictures of the planet she calls Earth, her ship's flight recorders are blank. When combined with the condition of her Viper and the general human paranoia about the remaining five Cylons Indeed, there's one scene with Lt. Gaeta where this come bubbling to the surface. People are not in a mood to listen to what Kara says.
Finally there is Baltar's story. In Herman Wouk's The Winds Of War there is a line where Captain Henry, speaking about his son Byron who is trapped in Warsaw, tells his wife that their son will come out of the wreckage of the city, probably holding someone else's pocket watch. This pretty much describe's Baltar's situation. Set adrift after his acquittal on a ship where most people would sooner kill him as look at him. He manages to find people who will not only accept him but embrace him. And virtually all of them seem to be women – attractive women. For the moment our Gaius is doesn't understand his situation – even with the guidance of his personal Number Six – but still as happy as a pig in warm...mud.
Inevitably most of the episode takes place within the claustrophobic world of the ship. That's hardly surprising; unlike the 1979 version of the series this version of Battlestar Galactica has never been about the big space battles. Rather it has been about the ship and the people who serve as its crew, and the fleet and the survivors of the attack on the Colonies. I suspect that this episode's opening sequence may be the biggest battle sequence that we've ever really seen in this version since at least the first episode. The fact is that the quality that makes Battlestar Galactica one of the best shows on television is that the aspect of the story they focus on isn't combat but characterization and relationships between people. The original Battlestar Galactica was very much the opposite. Characterization was virtually nil, being replaced with "action" and frequent use of stock footage. The current Galactica is about people forced to deal on a daily basis with life and death situations where they can't afford to make mistakes. This episode, like so many others on this show, is anchored by conversations. To be sure there's action but even when there is violence it is used to reveal something of the people we are watching.
There's a lot more to each of the stories that I've mentioned, but I'm trying to avoid the whole matter of spoilers and I don't think I can go much further than I have without revealing too much, or without revealing elements from the final fifteen minutes. I don't think it's revealing anything shocking to acknowledge that the episode as a whole offers a lot in the way of questions without providing much in the way of answers. That's the way of the show. There's a whole season left to provide us with answers (not to mention additional questions). The episode is definitely satisfying, and I think I have to disagree with Alan Sepinwall, who wrote that "it doesn't majorly advance the plot" if only because I at least don't know where the plot is going right yet. And really, should we expect major advances in the plot in the first episode of a new (and sadly final) season? Or should we expect what this episode in fact manages to deliver, the foundation on which this season will play out; what sets Tigh and the other three "hidden" Cylons apart, what Baltar's part in things is going to be, and of course, the quest for Earth. While I doubt that this episode with excite viewers with a massive WOW factor I have a definite sense that people will come away with plenty of questions but still eminently satisfied. In short, I think you're really going to like this one.
I'm not sure about most people who blog about TV, but from time to time I get press releases sent to me by various networks or publicists. Most of the time these are condemned to the trash section of my email client for what I regard as a couple of good reasons. One is immediacy. It really doesn't make much sense for me to mention that Larry King will be interviewing Senator Obama on Thursday on CNN, or to run excerpts from an interview of General Petraeus by Kyra Philips of CNN, just to give a couple of examples of material that dropped into my email box on Wednesday. Another consideration is my ability to give an informed review of what is actually on the screen. Because I'm a Canadian I don't always get to see shows at the same time that they debut in the United States either because a Canadian station or cable network doesn't have the show or because it has appeared on a Canadian service that I don't have access to (because I can't afford it or Shaw Cable doesn't offer it or – in the case of something on HDNet or other Hi Def only channels I don't have an HD TV). I would have loved to have written about John Adams but it was on Movie Central which I'm not prepared to pay an extra $11 for, and it probably won't make it onto the Canadian version of History Channel for a year or two. Then there are shows that just don't make it onto a Canadian station. Since I'm going to be talking about the Sci-Fi Channel's upfronts, I'll just mention that the Tin Man mini-series, which was just one of the highest rated shows that that network had last year, still hasn't aired in Canada. I don't get network preview DVDs or press packages (not that I'd say no by the way if anyone wants to contact me about it) so when it comes to writing about new shows I am dependent on what I see on TV. Worst of all is the occasional sense that I might not be doing the "right" or ethical thing.Still, I increasingly feel like I'm missing a bet when it comes to at least some of these press releases, at least ones like this where there's a long lead time and an effort to promote, or at the very least to inform readers of something to look forward to, rather than to get me to review something that I haven't seen and maybe won't see. At the very least I can express an opinion on what the press releases say without making myself look like too big an ass right? And come to think of it since when has that ever stopped anyone in the media or the TV business.
For me the biggest announcement was undoubtedly the long anticipated Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica. Caprica will be presented as a "backdoor pilot" which may be turned into a series. Set fifty years before the Cylon attack on the Colonies, the series will followthe rivalry between two families, the Adamas and the Greystones during the time when developments were occurring in artificial intelligence were being made. These developments would eventually lead to the creation of the Cylons. According to Mark Stern, the Sci Fi Channel's Executive Vice President for Original Programming, "We couldn't be more excited to see this long-anticipated project get off the ground. It's an amazing script, and, though clearly inspired by the Battlestar mythology, it is not just a pale spin-off. This is a smart, thought-provoking, emotional, and compelling character drama in its own right." Battlestar Galactica's co-Executive Producer David Eick added, "While Caprica will have its own personality, it will carry on Battlestar's commitment to
pushing the boundaries of the genre, and we're thrilled that SCI FI has seen fit to giving us another opportunity to tell character-driven stories in challenging ways."
From a fan's perspective – or maybe I should say from this fan's perspective – Caprica offers an opportunity to see the society that spawned the characters who make up this series, and perhaps answer some of the questions that have been bothering me a bit – like the fact that they have advanced space travel but never seemed to have developed weapons more advanced than what we have. It is a society that is advanced in some ways and backward in others and it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
In other "scripted" series news from Sci Fi, three pilots and a mini-series were announced by the network. True Believer is described by the network as "a quirky, contemporary dramedy about a 20-something comic book nerd who hires a washed-up real-life Superhero to be his crime-fighting sidekick and teach him the ropes. Together, this unlikely duo set out to save the World." Actress and comic book writer Rosario Dawson will be the Executive Producer while David Atchison (who is Dawson's co-creator on the Image Comics book Occult Crimes Task Force) will write the pilot along with Matthew Spradlin. The Stranded is a project which comes out of Sci Fi's partnership with Virgin Comics to create comic book titles that "integrate the unique spirit and vitality of both brands and create intellectual properties that can be developed across all mediums from publishing, film and television to digital and gaming." The Stranded is one of Virgin Comics' top sellers. The series deals with five seemingly ordinary people who discover that everything they remember about their past is a lie and that in fact they are actually from another world, called Standfire. Worse, the past that they are just discovering is coming back to try to kill them. The third pilot, called Deputized is about "an average Joe" who finds himself with special abilities after he is accidentally fitted with an alien exoskeleton that can't be removed. As a result he is enlisted as a member of "the inter-galactic police force that patrols the universe." The scripted miniseries that Sci Fi will be running is called Alice and is a modern retelling of the Alice in Wonderland story in much the same way that Tin Man, which was the network's most watched program ever, was a modern retelling of the story of The Wizard of Oz. It should probably come as a surprise to no one that Alice is being created by Writer/Director Nick Willing and Executive Producers Robert Halmi, Sr. and Robert Halmi, Jr. who were the people behind Tin Man.
I have to say that there seems to be a rather disturbing familiarity about a couple of these projects. The plot description for The Stranded sounds vaguely similar to Roswell and probably has a couple of references to other series as well. However the one that sounds really familiar is Deputized. Substitute "power ring" for "alien exoskeleton" and you have a plot description that is eerily like the concept that John Broome used for the revival of the Green Lantern in 1959, while the idea of an exo-skeleton or a costume that grants special powers or abilities but can't be removed is reminiscent of another DC Comics character, Blue Devil. Of course, much will depend on how this concept is executed.
In terms of reality programming, Sci Fi is promoting the return of Ghost Hunters International, a spin-off of their popular series Ghost Hunters in which a new team of "ordinary people" debunks stories of paranormal activity. In the first season Ghost Hunters International examined some of the "most haunted" locations in Europe. In the second season the show will extend its reach to include "notorious haunted hotspots" In South Africa and New Zealand as well as returning to Europe. Also returning will be a revival of the series Scare Tactics, to be hosted by comedian Tracy Morgan (30 Rock), in which unsuspecting victims are "are placed into elaborately staged scary situations involving movie-style special effects and makeup. The horror hoaxes are skillfully designed to tap into the wildest fears of the prank's prey." A more interesting show for me is Mind Control with Derren Brown, a British series in which the magician and "psychological illusionist" manipulates human behaviour while at the same time debunking the paranormal. I've seen some of what Brown does – it's been posted on YouTube – and I find him fascinating.
Estate of Panic is a new reality competition series in which seven people in each episode are challenged to find money in a massive estate. However there are challenges along the way. Two people are eliminated in each of three challenges, with the money that they've found being added to the pot that the eventual winner will take home. In all honesty it sounds like a redressed version of the NBC series Fear Factor. The other new reality series is called Brain Trust. In it a group of geniuses (a Mensa member with a perfect SAT score, an award-winning computer scientist/ neuroroboticist, the man with the highest recorded IQ in the United States, a behaviourist and gamer; a math whiz and author, and a successful software developer) are brought together to find new solutions to everyday problems. Once they've developed a new approach it is tried in a "real world" application.
Finally, in a tie-in with the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, Sci Fi will be presenting Mystery of the Crystal Skulls hosted by Weekend Today host and NBC News reporter Lester Holt on May 18th. This is how the Sci Fi press release describes the special (because I can't summarize it and do it "justice" without wanting to burst in with my own sceptical nature): SCI FI feeds the Indy frenzy with the real story of and search for the legendary crystal Skulls. Glimmers of ancient civilizations and lost worlds have forever intrigued and tantalized but few ancient mysteries generate quite the fervor of the Crystal Skulls: 13 quartz crystal human skulls, now scattered to the four winds, discovered amid ruins of Mayan and Aztec societies. Legend tells us that should they ever be united, they may unleash untold energy, revealing secrets vital to the survival of humankind. In the new special Mystery of the Crystal Skulls, SCI FI and host Lester Holt (NBC News/Weekend Today) explore the history of the Crystal Skulls: the myths, the legends, the controversies and the scientific tests performed behind closed doors. It digs even deeper for the truth with new lab tests, as well an expedition into the jungles of Belize to track down the missing skulls, a quest worthy of Indiana Jones himself.
Finally, Sci Fi is pushing the fourth and final (*sniff*) season of Battle Star Galactica with website content including a one-time streaming presentation of the fourth season premiere episode on the Sci Fi website on April 4th at Noon Eastern Time (the press release says Noon EST which would be Noon CDT so you might just want to show up at the site early). This is nine hours before the episode is broadcast on the Sci Fi network. And no doubt this won't be available to anyone whose Internet Address doesn't say that it's American. There are also going to be "webisodes" and a "social gaming experience" called "Join The Fight! Cylon or Human," in which players pick a side and engage in battles for points through various games and challenges. Also available online is an original Web series called Starcrossed, written by David Hewlett of Stargate: Atlantis, about the behind the scenes "antics" at a long running science fiction soap opera.
Sci Fi has also posted a number of videos related to Battle Star Galactica at their YouTube Channel. They include the four part Battle Star Galactica Revealed program, and these two short videos previews:
