Of Sharks and Octupi

I watched Sharktopus the other day. SyFy announced on Twitter it was "our most watch[sic] Sept movie ever". I have trouble putting up with their Saturday night B-movies like this. The best parts of this movie were the Bumpers (when the show came back from commercial) that had a quick message from the Destination Truth guy, who made fun of it. SyFy knew this movie was bad. They even made a special Sharktopus theme song. They mocked their own movie, ruining the only joy I normally get out of it.

A secret branch of the government makes a Sharktopus, already an unstable emotion creature, and puts an electro-shock control collar around its head to test it in open waters. It runs rampant killing as many bikini-clad girls as it can. People hunt it and many more people die. The best character was the VW Beetle the reporter drove around. I gave the first hour 100% of my attention. After that every minute I dropped 1%. I watched it die but I hovered around 55% interest. I’m so glad to get it off my DVR. Wasted ones-and-zeroes I tell you.

So, why did I watch it? Last week I got into a debate, by e-mail, with Tuning In To SciFi TV about the popularity of SyFy branded B-movies. I hate them. I think they hurt Sci-Fi fandom in general. How could new people to the genre watch Sharktopus and walk away saying they like Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror at all. The counter argument, that had never occurred to me, was that it is a gateway for non Sci-Fi fans to watch the channel, and these movies pay the bills. Really cheap junk B-movies help to fund their TV shows (currently Stargate Universe, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Haven, Sanctuary, and Caprica), all of which I really enjoy. There is a huge disconnect for me between their movies and TV shows. SyFy single-handedly made Battlestar Galactica relevant. I can accept this now and have moved on with my life. I will watch a SyFy movie that casts an actor I like, though, which is to say I’m a sucker for stunt-casting. Can’t wait for Red.

Stargate Universe is currently one of my favorite TV shows of the season, along with Fringe, Chuck, and (surprisingly) No Ordinary Family. Dr. Rush has been my favorite character since day one. He gets how bad “bad” is, and makes what others perceive to be questionable decisions, to save lives. This comes off a bit wrong only because he doesn’t waste time explaining himself, so he’s seen as a bit anti-social. (Not unlike the print version of Sherlock Holmes.) That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve to get beat up every once in a while by Colonel Young, but it’s food for thought.

In the season premier everything from the cliffhanger wrapped up quickly in that hour, almost before we could figure out if it made sense. Instead of heading to the airlock and certain death, Scott and Greer hid on the “dark side” of the ship to survive the pulsar radiation. This makes sense to me, but Cloe’s magic healing leg needs to be explained at some point, not to mention she got all her blood back. We never really saw all the Lucian Alliance troops so they introduced new actors that weren’t in last season, since they let LDP kill Rhona Mitra’s character, Kiva. She’s now free to do The Gates. TJ’s baby-dream-sequence-thing actually worked for me since they had to account for Alaina Huffman’s lack of pregnancy. Now the show is like Star Trek: Voyager again but with a third faction on board; Military, Civilian and Lucian Alliance. Things were already shaky between Young and Camile, how will the new group cope.

At the end of the month a new vision of the Zombie Apocalypse hits AMC for six episodes of Walking Dead. The series looks great, even though it reminds me a little of the opening of 28 Days Later. I’m too impatient to wait so I bought the first Graphic Novel. Anything I say would be spoilers but this series is worth it. I’m not a huge Day/Dawn/Return of the Dead movie fan, but I love playing Zombie videogames and the book World War Z grabbed my attention fully. I’m even in the middle of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The production values look high in this series and I hope it goes the distance. With six episodes it feels a bit like a mini-series, and I don’t want to wait until this time next year for season 2 and I haven’t even seen the first episode.

My only gaming has been Halo: Reach. Daily Challenges are very addictive, and I don’t even care that I’ve ignored the campaign. Maybe this weekend I’ll finish the game on Heroic, but I’m really enjoying all the multi-player offerings. Why is it that every 8-year-old on Xbox Live sounds exactly the same. Are there Microsoft clone children being grown somewhere whose only power is to whine about being shot virtually? The real world might know my pain if the try calling this public megaphone. All parents should secretly play their kids online just to see what its like. Plus every 8-year-old is better at it than me, so I’m bitter. Playing some more Halo now…

Blog 2.5 (aka Twitter killed my Blog)

I used to be good at writing. I could pick a topic and go on for paragraphs. In the past couple years I have learned how to use the internets to express my inner geek and share with the world how I perceive it. Whether that's good or bad is debatable, but it feels good to me. It takes some time to put several paragraphs of thought together and I'm kind of a lazy person. Then I discovered Twitter last February, not coincidentally around the time I stopped blogging. Like most I didn't "get" Twitter at first, but it suddenly opened up to me and I figured out how to use it as a micro-blog. So, in a way, I've been blogging, just in 140 characters or less, and a lot more frequently. But Twitter is much more temporary and a bit like a stream of consciousness, whereas this blog is a much more permanent record of my thoughts I, or others, can research and archive. So I'm trying to get back in a semi-permanent habit of actually writing a blog.

I've been rather occupied this television season with all the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Paranormal shows on, to the point I got a DVR this summer, which I promptly filled, and just can't keep up with the network broadcasts. iTunes, Xbox Live and Hulu help. I've also been trying to see all the Sci-Fi movies and enjoy the spate of great games, so maybe I'll concentrate on what I'm watching and playing for now.

One of this year's shows hit me out of left field, which is Stargate Universe (SGU). The reason I didn't expect it is I never watched any of the Stargate franchise, not really. I know of it. I did watch most of SG-1 season 3 once. I'm aware of the universe of Stargate, but I never saw the movie either. The badly named SyFy (rhymes with "sippy") has been doing good with their new shows so I gave it a shot, and liked it immediately. I would call it Lost... in space (not Lost in Space, which is obvious). The SciFi elements are compelling, but I'm not as interested in the drama. The basic idea is a group of barely functional soldiers and engineers are working on a type of Stargate with 9 symbols no one has ever heard of before. The chief scientist initiates a plan, I call Operation: Last Starfighter, that puts the mathematical puzzle placed by the Ancients (get it? an ancient race of aliens from our past?) into an MMO to see what enterprising 20-something-year-old can decipher it. The plan works, and a new guy gets brought on board, just in time to evacuate into the now-working, 9-digit Stargate. Woosh, they are all effed-up and stuck on an "Ancient" ship a billion LYs from Earth. The ship is busted and every episode is a struggle to survive a new issue. This is what Star Trek: Voyager should have been like. The feeling of being isolated is palpable. They even have a way to transfer their consciousness into people back on Earth, and it still feels claustrophobically lonely.

The ship, translated from Ancient as Destiny, is a character as well. A massive broken-down ship that needs a lot of TLC and there's not enough crew to do it. Speaking of the crew, they are group of almost dysfunctional types. Around 80 in all, but none have the special skills needed to survive on a damaged ship a 1,000,000,000 light years from Earth. (Look at those zeroes, that's a lot.) The mains are Colonel Young, XO Scott, First Lt. TJ (Medic), Master Sergeant Greer (who looks too young to be an E-8), Eli (the above MMO puzzle solving master), Chloe (fairly useless eye-candy who likes to sleep around, just not with Eli), and Dr. Rush (the genius scientist in charge who got them in this mess).

The episode I'm going to talk about is "Time", the seventh episode. Cleverly, each episode is named after the issue of day. We so far have had Air, Light, Dark, Water, and Earth (yes, Earth became a problem). [SPOILER Condition Red] The first part of the episode is told on a jungle planet through the lens of a Kino, a floaty ball-camera that Eli uses to record everything. We are generally shown a failed mission where the "away team" becomes ill, are attacked and killed by slug things, and the Stargate seems to malfunction. Reveal: all the people are still on Destiny watching the Kino recording of an event that never happened. Then the crew gets sick and realize they have a timeline for infection but no vector. Studying more Kino video gives away more clues that explain a Solar Flare from a local star effects the wormhole inside the Stargate, somehow folded on itself, and is showing the past. But a past that doesn't really happen. A temporal paradox. Eventually they figure out what's making everyone sick and send a new, well prepared away team to the planet, in the hopes of getting a cure for the illness. This "away team" fairs just as bad, and ends with a message from Scott warning the Destiny crew.

I'm usually really good with time travel stories, as this seemed like an episode of first season ST: Voyager. But I got lost in this one. The episode ends in what looks like a cliff-hanger, with the news if the crew doesn't go to Jungle Planet 01, everyone dies on Destiny from microbe infection, but on the planet they'll get killed by the indigenous insect life. Sad to say I'm lost, but there are competing timelines going on. The crew find a recorded Kino from a point in the future where an away team is sent to Jungle Planet 01. Because of wormhole distortion they are sent into the past, but don't realize it until they try to contact their ship, which isn't around yet. When they try to activate the Stargate on the planet, the wormhole connects to a future point on Jungle Planet 01, not Destiny. The "present" for the episode seems to be the crew on Destiny watching the Kino videos, and now that I think of it I don't know how they got them in the first place. I'm actually really confused and hope they clear this up in the next episode. If not, I read somewhere this is a self contained episode and I must have missed something. I did watch this in the morning before coffee, so I'll live with that excuse for now. I have failed my Time Lord training. And since I deleted it from my DVR I gotta find it on SyFy or something.

If anyone has any comments to help me out, I'd truly appreciate it. This is an amazing show. Logging Out.