The final episode of SGA managed to score 2 million viewers, capping off an incredibly successful season that had seen the show grow its audience by 5% compared with the year before. More impressively, its household rating increased by 14% when compared with last season. Sanctuary, meanwhile, also managed to grab 2 million viewers, giving the show its best ratings since the season premiere.

The one-two finale punch managed to make the channel the fourth most-watched cable network for the night, something that has to make the people in charge very happy... especially knowing that this Friday sees the start of the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica, replacing the departed shows.

'Stargate,' 'Sanctuary' Give Sci Fi Stellar Ratings [TV Week]

This week’s episode, “Nubbins,” opens on our core team of cryptozoologists inside a cargo ship. The ship belongs to one of Dr. Helen Magnus’ monster hunters for hire who was supposed to deliver his latest find to the Sanctuary, but never checked in, so it comes as little shock when the team finds the entire crew has become monster chow. They quickly discover two culprits: some fuzzy little critters that look like a chinchilla swallowed a Furby, and a gigantic, snarling dog. Both animals have sharp teeth and the ability to become nearly invisible, but because the fuzzkins are so adorable and the dog leaps at them on sight, the blame falls on the pooch.

Naturally, there’s more to the furry creatures, nicknamed Tribbles Nubbins, than meets the eye. Once in the Sanctuary’s replicated habitat, they start breeding, quickly escape, and start clogging the Sanctuary’s tubes with semi-invisible fuzzballs. There’s also something in their biochemistry that makes people develop amorous feelings for one another. The main target of their super pheromones is Will Zimmerman. First, the young scientist shares a tense, fireside moment with eternally youthful Helen. Then, when visiting Helen’s daughter Ashley, Will gets squirted on by Ashley’s pet Nubbin, and the younger Miss Magnus starts wiping Will down as if Nubbin pee were Spanish Fly.

This episode exposes some of the key problems with Sanctuary. The Nubbin aphrodisiac provides a missed opportunity for some much-needed character development among the central cast. Leaving Will and the Magnus women uninhibited could have offered an insight into who they are, what they desire, and how they behave after realizing their normal boundaries have been crossed. Instead, they act generically lusty toward one another, breathing heavily and lingering too close. And, because the writers seem congenitally allergic to conflict among their major characters, highly rational Will and highly rational Helen realize that the Nubbins are to blame for their sudden bouts of “randiness” before any faux-pas can be made. The creature-induced lust doesn’t even distract the trio from hunting down the escaped Nubbins, suggesting that the only purpose the subplot served was to introduce an eventual love triangle between Helen, her daughter, and Will.

The show also keeps forgetting the other residents of the Sanctuary. In theory, dozens, if not hundreds of “abnormals” reside openly throughout the building, and I kept hoping the Nubbin love would create an all-out orgy of lizard men and fish people. Instead, the abnormal residents were largely ignored, trotted out only to impress a rare human visitor to the Sanctuary. Perhaps budgetary constraints prevented us from seeing the full effects of the Nubbins’ pheromones, but when your show operates almost entirely on green screens and CGI, you have to work that much harder to make your world seem real.

The episode also features a somewhat vestigial subplot about a young girl who has inherited her grandfather’s empathic ability. We’re meant to believe that her ability proves vitally useful to bringing down the obnoxious Nubbins, but she mostly just reinforces ideas the other characters already had. It’s meant to serve as a reminder that some abnormals are good and useful rather than dangerous and destructive. That may be a noble aim, but the fact is, dangerous and destructive make for better television.

Sanctuary's fascination with monsters can makes for good fun if you're watching in high definition, but this week, I wasn't, making me all the more thankful that this episode, titled "Folding Man," oriented around a mystery with an exciting, if predictable, finish instead of chasing a special effect in circles. For those that were watching in high definition, there was the occasional visual to get excited about. A flying druglord soared over the fictional Old City setting, and an inspired trip to Austin, Texas gave rise to CGI that felt more like the dystopia of Strange Days than the show's usual monster movie. And the new title sequence that debuted shined as well.

But those were garnishes on a meal with a noir-ish, The Usual Suspects feel. It's a promising direction for the show: Sanctuary's tiny cast is suited for noir, a gritty feel would counter the glitzy special effects nicely, and on a series like this not much can shift radically from episode to episode — another noir convention. That's why the abrupt ending of "Folding Man" was on the disappointing side. Without spoiling anything, we'd welcome a return cameo for the main villain here, the elusive criminal genius Nomad.

For the most part they stuck to the main cast in this ep, with little in the way of extraneous outside characters. Perhaps the biggest key to the show going forward is to dispense with the annoying skepticism of Robin Dunne's psychologist Dr. Will Zimmerman, and the show may have put that thread behind it for good in the last scene this week. He and the other three regulars are developing a charming chemistry. No one lacks appeal or is particularly hard on the eyes. Perhaps more importantly, one one seems ready to laugh at Amanda Tapping's Victorian accent. Inoffensive is a step up from actively bad...isn't it?

Last night's episode concerned a centuries-old cult and echoes of the bubonic plague - and the only efforts at the science part of "science fiction" was Amanda Tapping looking vaguely concerned at the prospect of a CGI corpse. I don't suppose these Stargate vets have read Connie Willis' masterful Doomsday Book, the best presentation of the Middle Ages ever done in the genre? Had they done some research, there was a fine episode here buried under layers of dead skeletons. Once you've got a bunch of people with skulls for heads being gunned down willy-nilly, is time travel really that much of a stretch?

It's not that Sanctuary is entirely bad, it's that even when it's good, it's having trouble rooting itself in any firm ground between humans and CGI monsters. At the premiere, exec producer Damian Kindler mentioned an episode that takes place entirely in one warehouse-like setting. It's high time they brought that convention of the cobwebs and bonded these people together in some meaningful way.

I still believe there's a hint of something promising here in this concept. On the Fringe podcast this week show executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci answered a question about the future of Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson's characters: basically, will there be intercourse?

The Fringe creators responded by saying that you don't want to plan everything out on a series. It's fun to watch things happen to the characters along with the audience instead of plotting everything to the hilt. With that said, explicit CGI-enhanced sex between psychologist (Robin Dunne) and Amanda Tapping's Hayden Panettiere-inspired daughter (Emilie Ullerup) should probably be pushed to episode 3, and fast.

Did you watch, and did you weep softly during each brutal murder?

Executive producer Damian Kindler (left) wrote the concept for Sanctuary as a spec after his agent told him his West Wing pilot wasn't in his own voice. For those who haven't sampled the web version, Sanctuary is about Dr. Helen Magnus and the monsters she keeps in her stately mansion overlooking the fictional 'Old City.' Her team features the quirky tech guy (Battlestar Galactica's Ryan Robbins), her murderous daughter Ashley (Emilie Ullerup), and nemesis Jack the Ripper (Christopher Heyerdahl).

The show's 11 webisodes marked a first for a series with a budget and cast of that stature, but the experience didn't necessarily hearten the show's producers. What distinguished Sanctuary on the web was its high production values, and the upgrade for television is startling. This is one of the best looking and most ambitious series ever done, and at a price "equal to catering budget for Battlestar Galactica," Kindler joked.

Look at how much greenscreen the final product uses! Fellow executive producer and star Amanda Tapping describes the process as "a lot a like doing theatre." She's worked with considerable greenscreen before on Stargate, but really, no one has to this extent:

The castle-like facility that is home to the team of monster-hunters doesn't exist, except digitally:

This process requires a different skillset from every member of the production team. The number of special effects shots is a new one in the television format, and the amount of SFX is staggering: "When you watch, you'll think, they would have built that," Sanctuary director Martin Wood said of the elaborate digital sets.

Filling in the green is special effects supervisor Lee Wilson, who said that the opening shot in the premiere took three months for his Vancouver-based company to put together.

"On Stargate we'd do 12 [special effects shots]," Wood said. "Here, we did 486 shots." The show's broad array of monsters bears that out. What Wood calls "a computer with a lens" creates stunningly detailed mermaids, lizards, Neanderthals and all manner of misunderstood creatures. While the writing in the premiere is slow at times, Sanctuary is almost never not fun to look at.

The revolutionary special effects will attract fans of science fiction, Kindler believes, but the show won't stop there.

"I was trying to find an interesting common ground - this will satisfy really hardcore passionate sci fi fans, but not be such an amazing suspension of disbelief that you there would be tuning out it's about people flying around in giant spaceships that make noise," he said. That's fair enough, but with a 157-year cryptozoologist and her hot mercenary daughter as the protagonists, there's some question of where "the suspension of disbelief" barometer sits at the moment.

Sanctuary's two hour premiere happens tonight in the Battlestar Galactica timeslot, and from what we've seen in the premiere, the show is sufficiently different from its competition that it warrants a look. Sanctuary plans to add to the graphic novel feel by debuting Sherlock Holmes in subsequent episodes, and Kindler promised a serial staple in the form of a cliffhanger in the season finale.

We won't render judgment until the series starts going, but there's reason to be excited. You can watch Samantha Tapping on The Today Show here:

We asked Browder if he'd ever appear on Stargate Atlantis, and he hauled producer Brad Wright over to help answer the question. Wright wouldn't make any promises, but did say he hoped to feature Browder in another direct-to-DVD Stargate movie soon.

When we asked Browder how he feels embodying heroic archetypes like Farscape's Crichton and Stargate's Mitchell. He was super modest: "I let someone like Brad write it, and I just say the words. My job, in a lot of ways is the easy job... my job is just the fun part. I get to go out and do the boy stuff and do the fun stuff, I don't think I think about the heroic archetype. That's something the writers take care of, and the directors and the editors."

Browder had some practice being villainous when he was being mind-controlled by Scorpius in Farscape. Would he like to play an out-and-out villain sometime? Yes, he said. "I think it'd be a lot of fun. Now, wearing prosthetics on a full-time basis — that's not fun."

We asked Tapping about the difference between the gadget heavy Stargate and the more low-tech setting on Sanctuary, and she said Sanctuary is much more "steampunk." Actually, the making of Sanctuary is much more high-tech, because it's entirely shot in greenscreen. But there's less technobabble and fewer gadgets, because her character is 157 years old, and she borrows from all different eras. She said it's a bit weird to be shooting in greenscreen all the time, and she gets a "green chromakey headache." But the good news is that the show's art department shows the actors a really good representation of what the scenes will look like when they're done, so they know what they're reacting to.

In Sanctuary, Tapping plays Dr. Helen Magnus, who protects the "abnormals" (the mutants that society has deemed deviations, but who may actually be the next step in human evolution.) So she's sort of like Professor X from the X-Men, except not bald, "and hopefully prettier," she said.

And she confirmed that she'll be in at least a couple more episodes of Stargate Atlantis this season, plus a third direct-to-DVD Stargate movie.

In Venus Rises, humanity has completely abandoned the Earth. All of the big corporations and wealthy people have set up shop on Mars, while the working stiffs are stuck in much worse conditions on Venus. The series begins as conflicts between the planets begin to heat up. Our hero, Sam, is an officer with the Mars Defense Directorate, and his friend Kylara is a scientist from Mars. Before this clip starts, Sam and Kylara are stranded in space, and they happen upon the Ikarus, a mining ship. The clip is still somewhat "raw," without music.

Venus Rises will be free online at VenusRises.com, and also available on science fiction-on-demand cable channel IllusionTV. We talked to Birdsall about his series, and here's what he had to say.

We love the look of the Ikarus in this clip. How many sets did you build for the show in total?

There are seven sets total. I originally planned eight, but I had to drop one cause of budget. I looked through a lot of NASA books to try and match the feel of a real operational spacecraft.

In the clip, it looks really cramped

Space is a commodity.

So what are the chances of a second season of VR right now?

I only plan to do a season two if I can get funding. But I do plan on continuing 'interspace' episodes after the series is over.

Those are shorter, fill-in episodes, right? Are they all flashbacks?

Flashbacks and flash forwards. I'm lookin to keep them about 10 minutes long. Short story like.

Would your funding for season 2 come from illusionTV? or somewhere else?

It hasn't been finalized yet. It really depends on our fan base. There have been other inquires... but nothing formal yet.

So how explicitly is VR about class struggle? Is it sort of a haves vs. have nots situation?

It's not really about have or have nots... The Venus colonies are not looking to take over Mars. They want the means to make a comfortable living. Sort like war on the middle class. But they're being denied the basic stuff.

Yeah, I didn't think it was a war of conquest. But isn't that the definition of class war?

Yeah, there is definitely a class war context... but people have their own motives when taken out of their element.

So does the first season end with a cliffhanger? Are people going to be frustrated if there's never a second season?

It does end on a cliffhanger... but there are enough clues for the audience to piece it together.

So Earth is forbidden territory after humans abandon it. Why is that?

Thats an important story element... a little spoiler-ish. Earth plays more of a role later, in season two.

So all the big corporations are set up on Mars, and they use venus for cheap labor? Sort of like ousourcing to the third world.

Exactly. But the Venusians arent dumb, they know they are being exploited. Mars has key people in leadership positions on Venus.

Who designed your spaceships? What was the aesthetic behind the spaceship design? Gritty and spaceworn, or sleek and awesome?

We have a few 3d artists working on the project. Arnand kularajah is responsible for most of the spaceships in the series. He's an engineering physicist from Stevens Institute of Technology. He designed the ships science factually, which was a very important factor to me. Stephen Gilbert (cresshead is his handle) is a CG instructor in the UK. He's done work for NASA's moon landing anniversary so he was also a perfect match for this project. Craig Encer, and Mike Valentine work with Stephen. They're a strong team.

The show was always about grittiness. I designed the sets first, and it became a challenge for the artists to match that look. I never saw space being clean. It's a workplace. To quote Kirk from Star Trek IV, "I just work in outer space". I have to say i watched a lot of Babylon 5 and Firefly. I really like the character development in both series.

So when does the first season go up?

That's the 10 million dollar question. It's a pilot series, worked on by all volunteers.

• In season five of Stargate: Atlantis, the officious bureaucrat Woolsey (Robert Picardo from Voyager) takes over command of the expedition from Amanda Tapping's Samantha Carter. Tapping will still be a recurring character, but won't be in every episode because she's off starring in Sanctuary. Also appearing in some episodes: Tapping's SG-1 co-star Michael Shanks, and the back-from-the-dead Paul McGillion. (Thanks, RRich!) [TVGuide]
• OMG crazy Doctor Who rumor: the Doctor finds out he has a daughter, played by Georgia Moffett, the real-life daughter of fifth Doctor Peter Davison. But it turns out aliens stole his DNA and knocked some woman up with the Doctor's baby without his knowing. [GallifreyanGazette]
• And on Torchwood, supposedly Owen becomes a weevil-human hybrid, the Weevil King. Gwen gets pregnant with an alien baby. People step out of a 1920s black-and-white movie and wreak havoc. A mysterious medical facility named the Phram is saving people, but may have a sinister agenda, so Martha Jones (now part of the old United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) investigates. Oh, and there's a creepy church and a dying recluse who has something Torchwood wants. [Bad Wolf One]
• In the Valentine's Day Smallville, Clark decides he's done saving Lex's behind, after Lex gets into trouble with the amnesiac Kara's gun-toting busboy-stalker boyfriend. [Kryptonsite]
• But in that same episode, Lex gets super close to uncovering Krypton's secrets. [TVGuide]
• A visitor from the future (Brian Austin Green) tries to remember the world of 2027, while Sarah tries to explain to Charlie why she left him, on the Feb. 19 Sarah Connor Chronicles. [SpoilerGeeks]
• And here are a couple of new Indiana Jones pics, including one with Cate Blanchett. Indy looks really tired... [StarWars.com]

The first four "Webisodes" are free on Youtube, but you have to pay for the high-quality versions of all eight. The premise is interesting: it's 2007 and New York City is overrun with monsters who feed off the poor. But a heroic woman scientist (played by Stargate's Amanda Tapping) wants to help the monsters control their powers. Unfortunately, the actual show is a tad cheesy (it starts with Jack the Ripper), and Kindler has the look of a tired pitchman reciting the same talking points for the millionth time.

Video: Sanctuary For All Interview [Web Strategy By Jeremiah]