Next comes a mini-series where everyone has a symbiote, then everyone will have an Iron Man suit, then...
@Lassus: I staunchly concur. I remember groaning when Lucy Saxon told and didn't show the malarkey about the death potion, and when Naismith talked about making his daughter never die, and when The Master used his magic powers; but apart from that I was rapt. Wilf's moments with The Woman were worth price of admission, as was The Master reminiscing about Gallifrey.
@BigGreenMonster: That's what I thought at first, but Lucy is younger and thinner.
@Michael Jennings: Exactly! And that is what is so brilliant about it. It will catch that watching fans totally off guard! Doing precisely what we've done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they'll expect us to do this time!
If you get the reference, I like you.
@Lassus: I don't buy the 'they're living normal lives' deal. Harry and Ron are the Wizarding equivalent of secret agents, Hermione is like the Wizarding attorney general, Neville is a Professor, and Ginny (wee found out in interviews) is a Professional Quidditch player.
However, I still think it was unnecessary. I could have imagined most of that (Although I would have had Neville as the DADA professor); and we never found out what happened with a lot of the civil-rights issues.
Three questions. Firstly, who is that lady who says 'he returns.'? Secondly, how much do you want to bet The Master's revival is incomplete and he needs some timelord lifeforce (or somesuch) to stick around? Thirdly, am I the only one who got all excited when John Simm gave that little smirk at the end?
@bluehinter: Aww, I was still holding out that the Master's return would be some sort of time-travel duplicate trickery involving the paradox machine. Oh, well. I should have known at the first shot of his skeleton head.
@blackoak: Whether or not sally Sparrow returns, I'm psyched about more Weeping Angels. They are one of the more original creatures to come out of the New Series.
@Discodave: R.O.A.C.H. M.O.T.E.L.:
Dear God, it sucks. There are five Twilight themed stores there, and Twilight menu items at every restaurant. Traffic is twice as bad as it ever has been, and they're defacing the High School.
Every time I visit my parents, I just stay in my freaking house because I'm scared to go outside. The thing that really stings is that there is a much better reason for tourism, namely the freaking rain forest.
Does it need to be said that Rogue is an exception to rule #2? Because it shouldn't.
@bluehinter: Daleks in Manhattan was indeed painful to watch. The Cult of Skaro went from taking down an army of Cybermen to hiding from 1920s Manhattan to make pig-folks. Then again, when they put a Dalek in a vulnerable position in Dalek, it was magnificent. Here's hoping it's more of that!
At least, since the Daleks were going to come back no matter what, they are doing an episode that deviates from the pattern of: "Oh no! The Daleks are invading Earth, with a bigger army than last time! Oh wait, the Doctor used magic technology to kill every last one of them. Again." that defined the first, second, and fourth series finales.
@Jim Topoleski: Yeah, but that's 'cos it was supposed to be sort of subtle. She started as a damsel-inidstress, then was downgraded to a background character who got a little bit more detail every book until she could be a main-ish character by the last two.
I just re-read the sixth, and I think they should have had more time actually interacting, because it still seemed pretty sudden.
Red Dwarf Season VII opener. F**king glorious.
"Imagine, for example, that the Wachowskis had been hired to do the visual effects on, say, World War Z."
A thousand times "no!"
World War Z's greatest benefit was how down-to-earth it was, and how much it grounded itself in reality an plausibility. If anything, there should be next to no CGI, and all the cities and what should be understated. The whole book is set up as an oral history! this is going to be a very talky movie, and all the better for it.
If they had any brains, they'd film it as a documentary with about as much gloss as the History channel. Less when you think about where the author would get the fiming equipment.
As the pantheist son of a long line of progressive Lutheran ministers, I have to note that I have been saying this for years. Cobbling together a workable life-style from a collection of translated and re-translated bits of literature written over thousands of years and partially passed down by oral tradition takes as much, if not more, thinking than it does feeling.
Also, it's nice to be able to lean on hundreds of years of literature trying to make sense of the damned thing.
Also, also, in my house growing up, The Bible was considered the only way a Christian could come to know God, which is different than the divinely inspired word of God. I always took it as: "Some people had experiences that we believe connected them to the being behind all of the universe. This is what they wrote to describe them." That doesn't preclude lies, metaphor, or misconceptions. As anyone who's had any spiritual experiences knows, it's hella hard to describe exactly how they happened.
I think I'm going to campaign to restore the sun and the moon's planetary status while revoking Uranus' and Neptune's.
@Grey_Area:
Also, evolution has resulted in much crazier designs than most people could imagine. Pistol Shrimp? You're also falling into an anthropocentric fallacy. The only kind of intelligence or civilization that counts is one that's similar to ours.
There is a parable about a man who had never met a woman. When he finally did, he was amazed at how similar they were and how capable the woman was. He was upset because he had thought he was the greatest kind of thing in the world. And then he realized something.
He went back to his friends and said to them: "Women are almost equal to us, but they can never something we can do: see their faces. Since we have an ability they lack, we are clearly superior." It never occured to him that he couldn't see his own face, and the woman could.
This is a very good explanation of why cats evolved into cat people on Red Dwarf, but not necessarily a good explanation of Star Trek and Kryptonians.
A. The evolutionary pressures probably wouldn't be the same.
B. There isn't really an intelligence niche, i.e. it's probably a freak occurrence that large-craniumed problem solving apes survived. Big brains have proven to be a less advantageous adaptation than thick skins, horns, or wings.
But it's as good an explanation as any. Now, if you could only explain to me why, if all the humanoid species in Star Trek were nudged to that shape from all sorts of evolutionary backgrounds, why do so many of them lactate?
Also, in the de-evolution episode with Barclay's Syndrome, they claimed that human beings had spider DNA in them. wtf?
@John Hazard:
And the fact that they have a twin race known as Remans, and the Romulan sigil is that of an Eagle clutching two planets: Romulus and Remus.
AND that they were preceded by a similar, yet arguably less aggressive society that focused on philosophy, i.e. the Vulcans.
