The Sci-Fi Cast

The first television serial that grabbed my attention was V. If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll explain the plot’s basics. Aliens arrive on Earth in enormous ships and convince humankind of their altruistic intentions. Of course, they’re really reptilian bad guys who want to replenish their planet’s exhausted natural resources by robbing Earth of her own.

Also, they eat gerbils.

V was replete with 80′s cheese and typical sci-fi conventions and plot twists (who can forget the V baby?). When we first heard of the pending remake, we were cautious. Could it possibly be good?

I know you can’t judge a project by a 90 second trailer (The Phantom Menace is proof of that), but these clips have gotten us excited. Above we see the ships arrive and human kind’s terrified response. Here’s what V has going for it:

1. The Aliens are sexy. Morena Baccarin plays Anna, the alien leader. I’ll be quite happy to stare at her for 40 minutes a week. Not to mention Lisa on the New York mother ship, played by Laura Vandervoort.
2. It’s not on Fox or SciFi. Fox has a hair trigger when it comes to under-performing TV shows (not to mention a very broad definition of “under-performing”), and SciFi’s scheduling is managed by a monkey. I feel that ABC will give it a shot it wouldn’t enjoy elsewhere.
3. The special effects look good. That brief scene of the shuttle taking off from a landing pad looks great. BSG set a standard for FX on TV. It seems ABC is answering the call.
4. Religion is front-and-center. BSG demonstrated that heavy-handed religious themes in a prime-time television show, when done right, are compelling. The clip above suggests that we’ll find a similar tactic in V.

We’re still not 100% convinced that this is going to be good, but we’re certainly encouraged. Let the invasion begin! Watch another clip after the break.

For more of our thoughts on the popularity of sci-fi “reboots,” check out Episode #31.

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If you love the Oscars, but hate having to stay up until 2am, and wish they’d give awards in your favorite BSG categories, then have we got the episode for you! The long-awaited Toastie Awards are being handed out and you have a front row seat right next to Jack Nicholson (as a seat warmer).

Join Dave, Jen & Ged as we announce the best and worst of the Sci-Fi Channels’s Battlestar Galactica as voted by you, our nine listeners. This is a fun one filled with suspense, drama, comedy and a few twists & turns so you won’t want to miss it.

Warning: The Toasties contain spoilers for all four seasons of BSG, so if you don’t want to know who frakked whom or who bought that big space farm in the sky, then don’t listen.

Original post date: 4/11/09
Duration: 33’33″

Links for this episode:
Rolling the Hard Six
Lucy Flawless Fan Site
Billy Crystal Opens the 69th Academy Awards
Old Glory Insurance

Episode 028 [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Announcing the first (and last) annual Toastie Awards for our favorite science fiction show, Battlestar Galactica. What just are the Toasties you ask? The Toasties are a fun and completely arbitrary award bestowed on our very favorite parts of BSG. We’ll be handing out Toasties like algae during episode 28 of The Sci-Fi Cast and we need your help!

We have some pre-determined Toastie categories that we’ll be mentioning during the podcast, but we’d also love to hear your nominations for any and all funny BSG categories you might have. We encourage you to post them, along with who you think should win, either in the comments thread of this post or by tweeting them to us @scificast. Be sure to include the search term #bsgtoastie in your tweet so we don’t miss it when categories and nominees are tallied.

Here are some of the Toastie Award categories we’ll be mentioning during episode 28. If you’d like to add nominations for fun categories, go for it! We’ll pick the best fan categories and announce the winners for each in our podcast the week of April 13th.

Toastie Award Categories:

• Best episode of BSG
• Best Tag Line or Saying
• Fan Favorite Character
• Best Frak
• Best Death Scene
• Sexiest Cylon
• Best BSG Shock
• Most Annoying Character
• (other fun ones you nominate!)

No matter how far man travels, or how distant into the future we look, science fiction writers can’t escape the need to surround the heroes we love with dangerous parasites. They typically infest starships, cling to the people around them like space-going viruses and wreak havoc on characters, equipment and story lines. Unfortunately we’re not talking alien body snatchers, sinister robots or beings from another dimension. We’re talking about the annoying children of science fiction.

You know who they are. They’re the ones typically written into stories to give the plot that “human” touch, but who usually end up grating on your nerves like nails on a chalk board. Sci-Fi writers love them, and with very few exceptions, fans almost always hate them. They come in all shapes, sizes and ages and we’ve dug though our repressed memories to bring you a list of the best (or worst) of them. Here are our picks for some of the most annoying children in sci-fi.

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It’s difficult to believe that in just a few short weeks, the Sci-Fi Cast will celebrate its one year anniversary. When we look back, it seems like we’ve been watching and discussing Battlestar Galactica in our podcasts forever. In reality we only started with the launch of season 4, not bad when you consider just how frakking long seasons of BSG really are.

In episode 25 we discussed how disappointed some of us had been with the quality of BSG in the run-up to the finale. Now that the series is finished, I decided to go back and check our ratings for the last half of season 4. You can see in the chart above how each of us rated the last 10 episodes. Dave and I gave the last half of the season an average of 7 out of 10. Jen scored slightly higher with an average of 8 out of 10. All three of us had trends for season 4.5 that were heading downward. In other words, we all thought the episodes, in general, were getting worse instead of better.

What does this all mean? Not a heck of a lot, really. I think it’s safe to say we all enjoyed the finale and overall the entire season. We just wish Brother Cavil had returned to stir things up right after “The Oath” instead of waiting until the final minutes of season 4. Oh well, you can’t win them all. There’s always “The Plan” coming this fall. Guess we’re back to waiting again…

One the things that I most admire about Battlestar Galactica is how it handles humankind’s relationship with God. Heck, the fact that a show could even mention God in this politically correct day and age is incredible, let alone in such a direct and pivotal way. In fact, the show was originally pitched as a series of Bible stores set in space called “Adam’s Ark” in the late ’60s.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, ‘Daybreak’. If you don’t want to know what happens, then you should stop reading now.

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Warning: This post contains spoilers for the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, ‘Daybreak’. If you don’t want to know what happens, then you should stop reading now.

With the airing of last night’s series finale, Battlestar Galactica has passed from the realm of “what is” into “what was”. Even though the show ran for only 4 short seasons, its run lasted almost 6 full years. Watching the end of BSG last night among my friends, I was reminded that as with the end of many great TV series, it’s not always about the destination, but rather the journey.

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Last night’s series finale of Battlestar Galactica has come and gone, leaving many BSG-loving science fiction nerds to wonder, “Now what?” No more colonial fleet, cylons or good old fashioned fraking. Oh, no! Don’t jump out the airlock just yet. There’s plenty to keep you entertained. At least, there will be.

Caprica

We’ve been expecting Caprica, the BSG spin off series. While watching the trailer, we’ve gathered that Joe Adama (Bill’s dad, Apollo’s granddad) loses his daughter in a train crash on Caprica. The wreck also takes Daniel’s daughter. Daniel is a scientist of sorts whose focus is on high tech and artificial intelligence. Grief-stricken, he creates artificial replacements for the dead girls. But that’s not all …

What hath Eric Stoltz wrought? Why, it’s the first cylon!

Of course, this is all conjecture based upon an extremely limited amount of information, but it looks like Caprica will focus on the moral, religious and social ramifications of a world at the height of its technological achievements.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

Also waiting in the wings is Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. Written and directed by Edward James Olmos, The Plan tells the story of the destruction of Caprica from the cylons’ perspective. It will air on SciFi* and be released on DVD sometime in 2010.

Some familiar toasters will return, including Michael Trucco, Aaron Douglas, Dean Stockwell, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, Rick Worthy, Matthew Bennett, Callum Keith Rennie, Michael Hogan and Rekha Sharma. I can’t help but think that this could have been the bulk of BSG’s fifth season, and I’m glad it’s not. While I would have considered it a re-hash if used as a season of BSG, I’m more than happy to watch it as a stand alone movie. Bring it on!

*We refuse to use the new name until the change becomes official

Monsters come in many shapes and sizes and not surprisingly, the world of science fiction is ripe with them. In the 1950′s monsters took the form of invading hordes from strange places like Mars, or giant beasts mutated by the radioactive horrors of the atomic age. Growing up in the 1970′s, a boy like myself could hardly escape the weekly parade of creepy TV creatures. Although I put up a brave front to my parents, I don’t mind saying that some of them scared the bejeezus out of me. Here are three of the more nasty sci-fi ghoulies that kept me up at night.

The Doomsday Machine from Star Trek: TOS

Who wouldn’t be afraid of a giant space robot that looked like the tornado that swallowed Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz? Now imagine that tornado swallowing more than just houses. The Planet Killer from Star Trek The Original Series was so massive it gobbled up whole star systems, spaceships and anything else that got in its way including my favorite childhood hero, Captain Kirk.

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If it was closer to April I’d swear this was a April Fool’s joke. SciFi Channel is changing it’s name. To SyFy. (I’ll pause for you to go from disbelief to a curse laden diatribe.)

Don’t believe me? Here’s a article in the NYtimes about the pending rebranding.

Morons. Moronic fraking morons. So moronic I should have guessed Bonnie Hammer is behind it. And they are going to change the nature of some of the programming.

“We couldn’t own Sci Fi; it’s a genre,” said Bonnie Hammer, the former president of Sci Fi who became the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions. “But we can own Syfy.”

The entire thing reads like a stupid marketing joke. I better stop here before Dave figures out how to bleep blog posts.