We already know that Syfy is working on reboots for both Alien Nation and Quantum Leap, but why stop there? There are some fine dearly departed shows out there that could easily serve as the network's chance to get back into the space opera genre. Here're some of our picks - and why we think they could work.

UFO


What's that, you say? You don't think UFO is space operatic enough? Well, if you just duplicated the original series - where the secret organization SHADO worked to prevent alien invaders from harvesting human organs without anyone knowing - we'd agree... but what if you took the battle back to the aliens in addition to keeping the intergalactic Cold War going on Earth? We're seeing something not unlike Torchwood: Children of Earth mixed with BSG's silent space battles in our heads, a gritty, political take on the alien invasion idea... and we like it.

Blake's 7


Escaped convicts fighting for freedom against a fascistic government in the distant outer space future? There's nothing about the concept behind Terry Nation's 1970s BBC series that doesn't scream win, and as a plus for Syfy, the British Sky network is already working on a revival so they don't have to do everything from scratch. The potential for political allegory illustrated with impressive special effects rivals Galactica at its best, if done right, and there'd be less outcry from fans of the original - This one was always downbeat and depressing.

Farscape


Yes, we know that people have gotten mad when we suggested remaking Farscape before, and to them - and to those keeping the dream alive with the current Farscape comics - we'll suggest this: How about we don't reboot the series entirely, but relaunch it and find a new focus without undoing everything that's come before? If nothing else, that's got to be better than waiting for the perennially-forthcoming webisode sequels, right?

Lost In Space


It's a classic for a reason, people. Don't let memories of William Hurt and Matt LeBlanc put you off, Lost In Space is ready for a revival. What other show offers the chance for family drama, fantastic aliens and cowardly scientists hamming it up on a weekly basis? Take the Buffy route of using genre staples as metaphors for familiar problems, add a generous helping of humor, and voila: A Space Opera for all the family. Hell, just get Josh Friedman onboard as showrunner and you'll be set.

Star Trek


When you think of Space Opera TV, you can't help but think of Trek... and with the success of the new movie relaunching the franchise, and Bryan Fuller (under contract to Syfy's parent company NBC/Universal to come up with new shows) constantly talking about his desire to create a new Trek TV show, it almost seems like fate. TrekMovie even made the case for Syfy launching a new Trek, leading the network's Craig Engler to respond "A good, new, affordable Trek would be great on Syfy." Take note of "affordable," though; as we've pointed out before, the rights issues involved alone may make this idea financially a bad idea.

What do you think? Would you watch any of the above, or are you aghast at the very idea of yet another remake? Use the poll below to let us know just how wrong we are.

Even as more women are becoming astronauts and getting to pilot the space shuttle, science fiction has shown tons of women taking the helm. Here are some of the most awesome, in no particular order:

Lady Sharrow in Against A Dark Background by Iain M. Banks

We don't get to see combat specialist Sharrow doing that much piloting in this book — but when she does take the controls, she makes it count. The one sequence where she does some fancy flying is one of the best moments in the book.

Carolyn Fry from Pitch Black.

I don't know how I managed to forget her — I actually had her on my list, and had grabbed this cool pic of her in advance. She manages to bring a dead ship down in spite of incredible odds — and sure, she tries to jettison her passengers. But she's just being sensible, after all.

Sue Parsons from Virtuality

As with Sharrow, Sue Parsons spends most of her screen time doing other things — mostly, like all the other characters on this show, bickering and freaking out about virtual reality nightmares. But when she does actually get to handle the Starship Phaeton's controls — watch out. She does an incredibly complex series of maneuvers while giant bombs are going off in her wake. Makes all the drama totally worth it.

Jenna, from Blake's 7.

This smuggler is the best pilot around — there's no competition, except maybe that arrogant twerp Del Tarrant. Jenna manages to take the controls of the Liberator, the most super-advanced ship in space, and master them almost immediately. And she's able to take it on manual and do some fancy flying, on occasion.

Saint-Emxin from Battle Beyond The Stars.

She's a mean Valkyrie fighter pilot, who more than holds her own in the movie's crucial Star Wars-inspired firefights. Han Solo not only couldn't pull off her headgear, he also couldn't outfly her. (I almost included Padme Amidala in this list, since she pilots a ship in Attack Of The Clones — but could Amidala really hold her own against Saint-Exmin? I think not.)

Tak from Invader Zim.

The "hideous new girl" shows up hoping to do a better job of invading Earth than Zim, and she has the ability to hypnotize humans into doing her bidding — but she also pilots her own ship.

Faye from Cowboy Bebop

Faye is an awesome fighter pilot, and even held her own in a dogfight with Spike. Runner-up status also goes to space trucker V.T., aka Victoria Terpsichore.

Carol "Foe Hammer" Rawley in Halo.

She does some pretty nifty flying as the pilot of Pelican transport Echo 419 on the UNSC Pillar of Autumn. She specializes in doing lots of missions involving hostile insertions and rescues, making her stand out from the rest.

Ana Khouri in Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

This assassin joins the crew of the Nostalgia For Infinity, intent on killing one of the crewmembers, but then two different digital entities fight over control of her, and thus of the ship. Also a killer pilot is the ship's de facto captain, Illia Volyova.

Mary Raven from Ignition City.

This grounded space pilot journeys to Earth's last spaceport, Ignition City, to find out what happened to her dad, in this new comic by Warren Ellis and Gianluca Pagliarani. Space-jockey Mary Raven is determined to find out what happened to her dad, and she won't leave Ignition City until she gets some answers.

Lt. Shane Vansen from Space: Above And Beyond.

According to this site, she's "one of Earth's most celebrated pilots," piloting the SA-43 Hammerhead space fighter into battle.

Corp. Ferro in Aliens.

Okay, sure, she gets killed after speaking only a couple lines of dialogue. But she has cool sunglasses, and she manages to put the ship down through a lot of turbulence.

Carmen Ibanez in Starship Troopers.

Many of the badass pilots in this movie are women, and Carmen (Denise Richards) is the most memorable of them. She's a pilot in the SICON fleet, who pilots the drop ship, and even helps on the ground when things get rough.

Col. Wilma Deering in Buck Rogers In The 25th Century.

She doesn't just look good in a slinky jumpsuit, or boogieing next to Buck — Wilma's an ace fighter pilot in her own right, and a lot of episodes see her flying off solo to deal with the bikini-clad menace of the week.

Aeryn Sun in Farscape.

She's a formidable fighter generally, but she's also a former Peacekeeper pilot, and some of her best moments involve her taking the helm of a ship — like the season two finale, when Crichton is flying away with Scorpius' mind controlling him, and Aeryn chases after him in her own ship.

Yoninne Leg-Wot from The Witling by Vernor Vinge.

We don't actually get to see much of her piloting skills, since she and her companion Ajao Bjault get stranded on the planet full of telekinetic aliens early on. But she does turn out to be resourceful, and despite being unattractive by Earth standards, she helps win over the "witling" of the story's title, Prince Pelio.

River in Serenity.

Okay, so Serenity's real pilot is, and always will be, Wash. But you can tell, at the end of the movie, that River is gearing up to be a pretty great pilot in her own right. And in the series of movie sequels that unspool in my daydreams from time to time, she's piloting the ship all the time.

Manda in Burning The Ice by Laura J. Mixon.

Manda CarliPablo's stigmatized because she's the only colonist on a barren gas giant who's not a twin or triplet — her other clones died before they were "born" — but her isolation turns out to be a good thing, as she becomes the best pilot in the colony and explores the unexplored regions of this new world — discovering an alien race along the way.

Turanga Leela from Futurama.

Despite being captain, she's also always ready to take the helm of the Planet Express ship, and her lack of three-dimensional vision doesn't seem to interfere with her amazing piloting skills.

Jaina Solo from the Star Wars expanded universe.

The daughter of Han Solo and Princess Leia didn't just inherit her mom's Force powers — she also became a kick-ass pilot, like her dad. She flew the Millenium Falcon on a few occasions. When she got caught flying the Merry Miner, an unarmed mining ship, during the Yuuzhan Vong war, she managed to dodge the aliens' attacks until help arrived. And then she became one of the New Republic's most valued starfighter pilots.

Captain Beka Valentine from Andromeda.

Thanks to everyone who suggested adding her — Beka Valentine is, among other things, the Andromeda's first officer and pilot, taking advantage of her better-than-human reaction times and strength.

Tanni from Mutineer's Moon by David Weber

Here's the key sequence:

"And," MacMahan added gently, "Tanni will be your pilot."

"What?!"

"Tanni will be your pilot," MacMahan repeated mildly. "I'm speaking now as the commander of a military operation, and I don't have time to be diplomatic, so both of you just shut up and listen... we can't afford anything but our very best pilot behind those controls. You're good, Colin, and your reaction time is phenomenal even by Imperial standards, but good as you are, you have very little experience in an Imperial fighter.

Tanni, on the other hand, is a natural pilot and the youngest of our Imperials, with reaction time almost as good as yours but far, far more experience. The overall mission will be under your command, but she's your pilot and you're her electronics officer, or neither of you goes."

Kathryn Fairly in Space Camp.

A group of teenagers get to go aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis during a test-firing of its engines. But the mean android named Jinx decides to — what else — jinx them by making the space shuttle blast off for real. They're stuck in orbit, without enough oxygen to get home. And Kathryn (Lea Thompson), who was struggling with the "multi-axis trainer" that's required for shuttle pilots, manages to ace the real-life situation that simulator creates: a flat spin after the shuttle's reorbit burn. She brings that bird down safe and proves she's an awesome pilot.

Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica.

As I said before, these are in no particular order — but if they were, Starbuck would be #1 in any list. She's clearly the best pilot among Battlestar's flyboys and -girls. Adama always refers to her as his best pilot, and she pushes herself harder than anyone else. Kat may have tried to challenge Starbuck's impressive kill rate, but she never really had a hope.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Special thanks to Pete Gofton, Brian Williams, Erin Souza, Ira Wile, Jordan Hoffman, Austin Grossman, Ekaterina Sedia, and @soapboxx on Twitter.

For those of you coming to this late, The Middleman was a graphic novel that spawned a television show on ABC Family last year. It followed the adventures of art student Wendy Watson, who takes a temp job that turns out to be an apprenticeship with the Middleman, a mysterious superhero who fights monsters and mad scientists. And the Middleman strikes up an awkward but really sweet flirtation with Wendy's roommate Lacey.

The Forbidden Romance Contingency: Show creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach says he balked at having any kind of romance between MM and Lacey. "I was only willing to make it a joke in the pilot," but insisted that would be the end of it. The pilot, incidentally, was 90 percent the same as the first issue of his graphic novel, laying out the characters as broad archetypes: the stoic, quirky hero, the snarky art student and her idealistic roommate.

But this is what happens when you develop a TV show, Grillo-Marxuach says. You bring that story that you created sitting in a room by yourself into a room full of other writers, and they start putting in their own ideas and influences. And you bring in actors like Natalie Morales (Wendy Watson), Matt Keeslar (The Middleman) and Brit Morgan (Lacey Thornfield) and they have bring their own stuff to the characters. One of the things that really jumps out at you, if you read the graphic novel (which you should) and then watch the TV series (which you most definitely should) is how much more complex and nuanced the characters become. Grillo-Marxuach says that's a result of working on the characters in a collaborative setting.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.And Grillo-Marxuach says he has "boundaries" in his own writing ability, stuff he can't or doesn't do. So when the other writers on the show started pushing for Lacey and MM to go on a date, Grillo-Marxuach pushed back. "But the writers in the writer's room kept insisiting... It's weird to be a showrunner at loggerheads with the writing room." He objected for several reasons: "He's older than she is, he's Wendy's boss and an authority figure." But in the end, he gave in, and that led to some of the more poignant moments in the show, and deepened the characters immensely. "If it was just me writing this in my room by miself doing every episode you'd never have seen that," says Grillo-Marxuach. "I'm not a megalmanical show runner, and I like it when people make my work better."

The Superhero Comedy Initiative: We just sat down and watched most of the show's run once again on DVD — the DVD box set comes out July 28, incidentally — and it's striking how much the show feels like a straight-up comedy when you watch a bunch of episodes in a row. Grillo-Marxuach is happy for people to view The Middleman as a comedy. "It was always a comedy, in that it always riffs on popular culture, and it always had this very specific pattery way of talking."

"If you want to send a message to the world — and I don't know that the show was a big message show — it's better to do it by making people laugh than by being preachy," Grillo-Marxuach says. The Middleman "was always a very sweet-souled show, and it had a lot of heart. It has a lot of pity towards villains. It says that evil is little people doing a lot of work not to be good, even though being good is probably easier."

And as we talked about last summer at Comic Con, a big part of the show's lightness is in response to the fetishization of darkness in genre entertainment of the past 20 years, shows and movies which insist that life is hard and full of struggle, and heroism will destroy your life. In response, "an affirmation of the possibility of joy and accomplishment is very much what the show is all about. Of course, my show got canceled after 12 episodes, and The Dark Knight made $600 billion," notes Grillo-Marxuach.

The Unlikely Terry Nation In-Joke Alert:The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The fact that The Middleman is such an upbeat show makes it even funnier that — SPOILER ALERT — the unfilmed final episode is full of tiny references to Blake's 7, the famously depressing British science fiction series. I would list them, but we'd be here all day. "I was trying to find the show that has the most depressing series finale ever" to reference in The Middleman's finale, says Grillo-Marxuach. That unfilmed final episode, of course, is coming out as a graphic novel in time for Comic Con, and there'll be a reading of the episode's script, featuring the original cast, on Thursday at Comic Con. And for those who missed it, here's the official description:

Who is The Middleman's long-lost love? Can Lacey Thornfield ever forget her requited but never-acted-upon attraction to The Middleman? Is Manservant Neville a beneficent plutocrat or an evil madman with a nefarious plan for world domination? Will Wendy Watson and Tyler Ford ever find time for one another? Will Wendy Watson ever wear a slave girl costume? All your burning questions will be answered - and all your burning answers will be questioned - in this season-ending, series-concluding installment of The Middleman.

And at the right is a sneak peek at the graphic novel's final image of MM, from original artist Les McClain.

Anyway, all of those Blake's 7 references are there to set up a downer ending, but the graphic novel's actual ending is not that bleak, says Grillo-Marxuach. In fact, the graphic novel version of the series finale has a more upbeat ending than the actual episode would have had if it had been filmed as planned. By the time the show's creators were working on the 13th episode, they were exhausted from doing the first 12 and struggling with "big budget obstacles," and their beloved colleague Neil Levin had just died. (The show's 12th and final episode is dedicated to Levin.) But since Grillo-Marxuach had some time to rework the script slightly between the show's cancellation and the graphic novel coming out, "I found a way to end it on a more optimistic note... Had we shot it, it would have had more weariness."

So as Grillo-Marxuach puts it, "In our world, Blake is not evil, and the Federation is destroyed." (This led to us having a huge debate over whether Blake is evil in the Blake's 7 series finale.)

The "Never Say Never Again" Potential: So if the DVD box set sells a billion copies, could The Middleman still return in some form? Absolutely, says Grillo-Marxuach. "The nice thing is, this happened with Firefly, it happened with Futurama, it happened with Family Guy. There's a history of cult shows being found and further exploited by the corporations, in a good way."

So this seems like a great moment to plug the DVDs, which are coming out July 28 on Shout Factory. We'll post a review of the box set later, but they're already available for preorder at Amazon.com. And it's never too early to do your Christmas shopping. You never know when your local shopping mall will be overrun with gun-toting gorillas, after all.

1950s and 1960s:
Space vessel design in the actual Space Age tends to involve either sleek rockets or funny flying saucers — until Star Trek comes along, with the U.S.S. Enterprise's weird mix of saucer and rocket-like nacelles, bonded to a tuber shaped main section. Not to mention the fierceness of the Romulan warbird and the gun-like Klingon warships. Model design is already starting to change drastically:

1968 to 1977:

And then with 2001: A Space Odyssey, you start seeing more rugged, lived-in-looking ships, with weirder shapes, like the probe's long neck and rounded front. And ships start having more bumpy weird bits. This trend only continues with Space: 1999's squat Eagles, which look like they could survive anything (even blowing up multiple times) but aren't as elegant as an old-school rocket.

1977 to 1986:

And then Star Wars comes along, with its awesome space dogfights, and suddenly, hugeness and imposing scope are a must. It's no accident that later iterations of the U.S.S. Enterprise are way huger than the 1960s original. The crazy shapes of the T.I.E. fighters and other craft inspire some other weird models in things like The Black Hole. And the X-Wing fighters inspire everything from Buck Rogers' fighter ship to the Last Star Fighter's vessel.

1987 to 1997:

Star Trek: The Next Generation saw in a whole new era of space opera, but the main thing that changed in the late 1980s was the rise of CG effects, allowing spaceships to look much more diverse and weirder than models ever could. From the Borg cube to the many bizarre shapes of vessels in Babylon 5, starships no longer had to look like a few pieces stuck together.

1998 to present:

I can't think of one defining franchise of the past decade that has shaped how we view space opera the same way these earlier franchises did. Star Trek has kept innovating, but so have BSG, Farscape, Stargate and a number of others. CG has gotten a lot smoother and ships can move in much more natural, organic ways — just look at the Narada, to bring us back to our first example. At the same time, as nostalgia has reigned the genre, we've come full circle and resurrected a lot of classic designs, with a few tweaks.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

The best television show endings don't just provide a satisfying conclusion to a serialized drama - they give you the sense that you've traveled, and arrived somewhere. They tie up at least some of the loose ends, and give some thematic resolution. But more importantly - they kick you in the ass and shock you. They make you go, "Wha? That's where this was heading?" By startling you, they make you view the whole series that's gone before in a new light.

Here are the top 10, in my book, from worst to best:

10) Doctor Who. By the late 1980s, the original Doctor Who had run out of steam, with silly storylines and weak production values. But the show's final season saw a bit of a renaissance, with a couple different storylines that addressed the theme of evolution in different ways. The final story, "Survival," brought back the Doctor's old enemy, the Master, and placed him inside a story about "survival of the fittest." Meanwhile, the Doctor's traveling companion, Ace, started evolving herself, reaching a kind of conclusion in this episode where she becomes more than human. The whole thing ends with a nice speech as the triumphant Doctor tells Ace they've got work to do.

9) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The TV series, encompassing the first two books, and several large chunks of the radio series, ends on a lovely note. Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are back on Earth in prehistoric days, and they get the question that goes with the final answer of life, the universe and everything... only it's slightly wrong. Still, it's a beautiful day, and they walk off through the prehistoric meadow as Louis Armstrong sings "What A Wonderful World."

8) Sapphire And Steel. A lot of this British show about two time travelers, played by David McCallum and Joanna Lumley, feels dated and slow now. But the final four part episode, in which the agents get caught in a time trap, is still as eerie and scary as it was originally. They're stuck in a roadside cafe where time appears to have stopped, along with a handful of people who claim to be from 1948. Normally, Sapphire and Steel can solve time-displacements just by using their wits, but this time they're out of their depth. "I saw the future... and it was our future."

7) Space Island One. This show about the crew of a commercially run space station had its ups and downs, but its last couple of episodes were among the best television I've ever seen. The company that owns the space station is trying to decide between shutting it down and just pulling the plug. And the station's best crewmember, Dusan, has already found a new job. But before Dusan goes, the company orders an unwise series of tests, which overload the station's equipment and cause it to go down in a blaze of glory, which not everybody survives.

6) Quantum Leap. Okay, all the commenters talked me into watching this finale, which I barely remembered. It's pretty great stuff, including Sam traveling back to where it all started and meeting a bunch of the people from his past jumps... And the bartender has some revelations for Sam that he struggles to take on board. So Sam makes one last jump, to the wife of an old friend... and you fade out to that message, "Beth never remarried. She and Al have four daughters... Dr. Sam Becket never returned home." Classic stuff.

5) The Prisoner. This is the most polarizing ending of them all - anyone who expected an actual explanation for the craziness which had come before would have been horribly disappointed. But anyone who wanted to see the craziness elevated to the level of Dada, and Number Six's latent egomania turned into the whole point of the series, found "Fall Out" an episode that just gets more rewarding the more you watch it.

4) Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is actually the textbook case of how to do a decent ending to a serialized show, and one that people reference all the time. After a couple of increasingly bland seasons, the show comes back with an episode that ties in with its original pilot as well as giving us a glimpse of the characters' possible futures. It feels grand and epic in a way the series mostly didn't feel after season five.

3) Babylon 5. Famously, this show filmed its Hugo-nominated final episode before the rest of its final season, allowing for some grand thematic resolution instead of a simple pay-off. "Sleeping In Light" takes place 20 years after the end of the Shadow War, and Sheridan is dying at last. He visits Babylon 5 on the eve of its decommissioning and destruction in a last blaze of glory, then prepares for death... except that a new adventure is waiting for him instead.

2) Blake's 7. Yet another show whose final season was drek, but then the actual final episode represented a huge return to form. Not only does the show's ostensible star, Roj Blake, come back from the dead, but we finally see a showdown between Blake and Avon, which seems to come directly out of all the mistrust and warped love the two shared during the first two seasons. You suddenly realize that, despite Blake being absent for nearly half the show's run, it really is all about Avon and Blake, the idealist and the uber-cynic. And it's never going to end well. (And for the record, Avon dies in the end. So there.)

1) Life On Mars. (British version.) I'm putting this at the absolute top because it redeemed the time-traveling cop show for me. Honestly, I was starting to lose interest in this show, even after only a dozen or so episodes. How many times can there be a crime, and Gene jumps to the wrong conclusion and tries to force it using barbaric methods, while Sam stands back and critiques Gene's racism and sexism? (And then, of course, the case turns out to have some connection to Sam's childhood.) I was dying for an episode where Gene was right and Sam was wrong. But the last couple of episodes totally redeemed the show for me, by asking: "How far will Sam go to get back to the present?" And then that turns out not even to be the right question, since the real question is, "Will Sam be happy when he finally gets back to his nice, sanitized boring future"? I have no idea how the American version will end, but somehow I doubt we'll see the American Sam Tyler killing himself, and it especially won't be portrayed as an understandable choice. Apparently this was voted #1 in a list of the 50 greatest TV endings. And apparently the show's makers just wanted to end it with him jumping off the roof.

12) Searle in Sunshine.

Okay, I may be the only person who really loved Danny Boyle's blazing space opera about a doomed crew trying to reignite the sun. That's okay, I can be right all on my own. I especially love the way the character of Searle, the ship's psychiatrist, surprises you in his final moments. He's kind of a prurient asshole for most of the movie, obsessed with looking into the sun with as little filter as possible. He's a pretty terrible therapist. But when the chips are down, he knows he's the most expendable crewmember. When four crewmembers from the Icarus II get trapped on the wrecked ship Icarus I, with the airlock damaged, Searle agrees to stay behind so the rest of the away team can get back to the Icarus II. He helps blast the others out the airlock, then exposes himself to the sun, dying the same way as the Icarus I's crew.
If you're going to be a creepy therapist, the least you can do is self-immolate to save the rest of us.

11) Woody in Mission To Mars.

This is a pretty terrible movie overall, but a fantastic death scene. Our heroes have to abandon their vessel. And then Woody, played by Tim Robbins, leaves the others and launches himself at the Resupply Module (REMO), but after he attaches the line from the other astronauts at the REMO, he keeps moving towards the planet. His wife, Terri, wants to go after him, but Woody knows she'll die in the rescue attempt. So he takes off his own helmet and dies of depressurization rather than let her die for him. (Thanks to Meredith for the suggestion!)

Runner up: Speaking of depressurization deaths, Graeme really wanted me to include Cally's death from Battlestar Galactica. But I didn't really think her death was awesome. Sorry, G.

10) Graham in "The Sleeper Wakes" by H.G. Wells.

One of Wells' weirdest stories involves a man known only as Graham, who sleeps for over 200 years and wakes to find that he's not just the richest man in the world, but actually the owner of the entire world. He eventually discovers that the White Council, which governs in his name, is oppressing everyone, and he helps a revolutionary named Ostrog to mount a revolution. But afterwards, Ostrog starts oppressing people just as badly as the White Council had. So finally Graham gets mad. This time, it's personal — he gets into an airplane and rams a whole bunch of Ostrog's air fleet. (Remember, this was written in 1910.) Finally, he rams his plane into Ostrog's, then spirals to Earth, knowing that the revolution will prevail at last.

Runner up: Someone suggested Hari Seldon from Forward The Foundation, but I haven't read that book and couldn't find much about it or track down a copy. Was his death truly awesome? Let me know.

9) The Controller in Doctor Who, "Day Of The Daleks"

"Day Of The Daleks" is probably not on my list of the 100 greatest Doctor Who stories of all time, but it has a few really amazing moments. The greatest of these is where the Controller finally stands up to his Dalek masters. All along, the 22nd century bureaucrat has been fooling himself that he can help the Daleks govern the human race and actually do some good along the way, helping people when the Daleks aren't looking. But after a few chats with the Doctor, he finally realizes you can't work within the Dalek system. He helps the Doctor escape, and when his coverup fails, the Daleks decide to exterminate him. "Who knows?" he says. "I may have helped to exterminate you." Awesome.

Runners up: Various people suggested the deaths of various Doctors, but none of them really jumped out at me as especially cool. One person suggested Adric, and I'll protect his/her identity, to save him/her from the inevitable scorn of the masses.

8) Lt. Paul Wang from Space: Above And Beyond.

"Everybody's favorite tortured bipolar guy," Lt. Wang, callsign "Joker," gives his life to hold off the aliens while everyone else gets away. "This is for you!" he shouts as he pours ammo into the enemy. Commenter oconnellmd suggested this scene, and I can see why.

7) Certain people in Blake's 7, "Blake"

I'm going to show an unusual degree of restraint and not say who dies in this episode. Let's just say it's an incredibly fitting end for the saga, one which makes all of the stuff that comes before seem cooler because it leads up to this. In my write-up on how to discover Blake's 7, I actually advocate watching the last episode first. At the very least, I think this is one spoiler that makes you appreciate the rest of the show more. But don't take my word for it: watch for yourself.

6) Pham Nuwen from A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge.

Pham Nuwen is animated by the Old One, a super-powerful artificial intelligence, and he dies fighting the Blight, another super-A.I. First Pham downloads as much of the Old One into his brain as possible, overclocking his human brain by containing this massive superhuman intelligence, which will inevitably destroy him. And then he launches the Countermeasure, an advanced weapon which moves the boundaries of the Slow Zone far enough to enclose and destory the Blight. But the Countermeasure also has the effect of terminating Pham at the same time:

The Countermeasure's writhing had slowed. Its light flickered bright and then out. Bright and then out. She heard Pham's breath gasp with every darkness. Countermeasure, a savior that was going to kill a million civilizations. And was going to kill the man who triggered it.

Almost unthinking, she dodged past the thing, reaching for Pham. But razors upon razors blocked her, raking her arms.

Pham was looking up at her. He was trying to say something more.

Then the light went out for a final time. From the darkness all around came a hissing sound and a growling, bitter smell that Ravna would never forget.

(Thanks Annalee!)

5) The T-800 in Terminator II.

After Arnold Schwartzenegger's T-800 helps Sarah and John Connor defeat Robert Patrick's mean T-1000 by blowing it up and knocking it into molten metal, Arnie knows he has to go too. If there's anything left of the T-800, the technology could be used to reconstitute Skynet and bring the badness down on our heads. So Arnie gets Sarah Connor to lower him — slowly — into the molten metal. He gives a thumbs up as he descends to his robo-fondue doom. (Thanks, Annalee!)

4) Biggs from Star Wars.

I was seriously considering making Obi-Wan the coolest death from Star Wars, but really, screw that guy. First of all, as he points out himself, he comes back a thousand times more powerful afterwards. And secondly and more importantly, he's kind of a big martyr, as everyone points out in the awesome parody Hardware Wars. And Biggs doesn't have any super Force powers, or the ability to come back a thousand times more anything. All Biggs has is a X-ing, a can-do attitude, and an awesome porn-stache. And he's the greatest wingman ever, taking enemy fire and blowing up so that Luke can nuke the death star and get all the glory afterwards. And look how stoic Biggs is in this deleted scene from Episode IV, telling Luke he may never come home again because he's off to join the rebels:

When does baby Biggs get his own episode of the Clone Wars cartoon? Preferably with a little baby mustache?

3) Spike from Cowboy Bebop.

Martian bounty hunter Spike Spiegel gets into a duel with his former best friend, Vicious after Vicious' Red Dragon gang has killed Spike's girlfriend Julia. Spike finally decides to face the past with Vicious that he ran away from three years earlier, and he storms the Red Dragon headquarters, killing a bunch of its members as he climbs. Vicious manages to slash Spike with his katana, but then Spike shoots Vicious dead. Spike comes down the stairs, wounded and weakened, to face all the remaining members of the Red Dragon. Spike makes a gun with his fingers and says "Bang"... then collapses. Most people seem to assume Spike dies of his wounds, and it's not hard to find tons of people online listing this as one of the coolest death scenes in all anime, or all Asian films, let alone science fiction.

2) Someone from Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Since this book just came out and it's a bit of a major spoiler, I won't say who dies and how — click here if you've already read the book and/or don't care about spoilers.

1) Spock from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.

I'm not putting the pointy-eared green blooded Vulcan first just because I know I'd get lynched otherwise. I'm not even including the death of Spock because I pretty much memorized all the dialog from that scene as a little kid. I'm including it because it's the template of how to do a memorable, important death in a science fiction epic. The movie isn't ABOUT Spock at all, but it still feels as though the whole film has been leading up to his death. A lesser film would have been more clumsy and obvious about giving Spock a bunch of cool moments leading up to his death, and trying to manipulate us into feeling the Spock love before he snuffs it. Instead, we do get plenty of cool Spock moments, including giving Kirk his present and mentoring Lt. Saavik. But it's woven into the rest of the movie, and the film's running theme of the "no-win situation" and the impossibility of cheating death every single time help to set up the death of Kirk's best friend way better than a scene where Spock talks about what he's going to do when he retires and goes back to Vulcan. The result is one of the most amazing moments in Trek history, one of those moments where you can really beleive Trek is a sweeping saga instead of just a zany adventure with green women and Saurian brandy.

Runner up: I can't believe I left out Roy Batty in Blade Runner, as various commenters have pointed out. Especially since I went on a whole tangent about Roy's amazing death scene in my rant about why there shouldn't be a BR sequel earlier in the day. Suffice to say the Roy Batty death scene is definitely one of the all-time classic, and easily up there with Spock's.

Automan.

I don't even know if I need to explain this one. It's another Glen Larson show, along the lines of the original Battlestar Galactica, except it's about a guy who's a holographic computer game image come to life. And he goes out and fights crime! — but only when the city's electricity usage is at low levels. If too many people plug in their electric blankets, he vanishes. He's like Tron, only in the real world. And he has a sidekick named Cursor.

Blake's 7

This one is an even bigger WTF, given what a cult following this show has in the U.S. Yes, there are U.K. DVDs, so if you're willing to pay import prices and have a region-free player, you're all set. There were rumors of American DVDs of this show, about a freedom fighter who teams up with criminals to fight an evil galactic federation, several years ago when a TV revival was first floated. But they never materialized, maybe due to rights issues. Also not on U.S. DVD: Blake's 7 creator Terry Nation's series The Survivors.

M.A.N.T.I.S.

Still no DVD, but ooh! Looks like it's available as a video on demand! Still, I am disgruntled. This was announced as coming out on DVD back in 2003. WTF? For those who missed it, this was an early Fox show about a paralyzed scientist (the awesome Carl Lumbly from Alias) who puts on a super exoskeleton/armor suit, and goes out to fight evil. It also boasted an early appearance by our ruler, Gina Torres (I shouldn't need to put anything in parentheses after her name.)

Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future

We posted a couple clips from this one a while back — it's an early show from Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. It's like a post-apocalyptic saga, with evil cyborgs and laser gun fights. It's pretty much the perfect TV show.

Journeyman

I'm actually kind of shocked about this one. I would have thought this show would do really well on DVD, since it's like a novel in episodes, about a guy who finds himself zIpping between the past and the present, while trying to save his marriage and job and stuff. It's like a metaphor for our modern dislocation. Also available as a video on demand though.

Alienated

Okay, I know almost nothing about this show, but I need to see it on DVD after reading the description: "The plot centers on the Blundells, a typical suburban family living in Victoria who undergo strange (often sexual) changes after being abducted by space aliens (who remain unseen throughout the series)." Plus it's Canadian,which means it's automatically really sophisticated.

Cosmic Slop

This was an African American Twilight Zone-esque anthology show that aired on HBO back in the 1990s. I have been seeking it on DVD for many years. It was co-produced by Reginald Hudlin, and took its name from the famous Funkadelic song. In the first segment, aliens turn up and promise to make America fantastically wealthy forever — if we'll let them take all of our black people away. Another segment is based on a Chester Himes story about a poor squabbling couple who have a rifle mysteriously delivered to their door.

Space Island One

I loved this show when my local PBS station showed it, and we included it on our list of great unsung TV shows. Here's what I said then: The crew of a corporate-funded space station mostly deals with scientifically plausible problems (with a couple of exceptions) and the stories focus on the ethical problems that come with profit-focused science. I should add that the characters get deeper and richer the more you watch this show, until you suddenly discover that the nicest guy on the show is deeply fucked up in a way you never expected. I would maim for DVDs of this show.

The Clangers

Okay, I have no clue if this show would hold up today; I've only seen a few tiny clips since I was a little kid and I watched it religiously. It's a stop-motion claymation show about little aliens living in peace and eating blue-string pudding. You know it's a great show because it's the favorite entertainment of The Master, the evil time traveler from Doctor Who. It's like acid induced proto-Teletubbies in space. I freely admit I may have rose-tinted glasses on when it comes to this show. Here's a clip.

Max Headroom

This one is really a no-brainer. This show influenced so much of today's television and was such a seminal cyberpunk masterpiece. Its brain-exploding superfast adverts, "blipverts," are like a warning of how ADD-focused advertising is becoming. We need a box set that includes his early appearances as a music video show host, his short-lived TV series as an investigative reporter, and his various TV commercial and music video appearances.

RoboCop

Okay, I mostly want to see this because it sounds incredibly cheesy and hilarious. I included it on my list of the worst TV shows based on movies, but it also sounds pretty amazing. RoboCop doesn't actually kill anyone because it's kid-friendly viewing, and villains include Dr. Cray Z. Mallardo and Boppo The Clown. Also not on DVD: the TV series of Logan's Run, Starman and Timecop.

Mann And Machine

I found out about this show when I was doing our round-up of human-A.I. buddy comedy chemistry. And now I can't believe there are no DVDs! It sounds so awesome. It's about a human cop who hates androids, but he has to team up with a hot gynoid partner. And then he sends her on dates with serial killers, and they end up living together. Come on? Why isn't this on your shelf right now?

The Middleman

It is definitely not too soon to start demanding our DVDs of this awesome show's first season. This could turn into one of those big-selling DVD items that converts tons of new fans and indoctrinates them in time for the inevitable second season. (Inevitable, I tell you!) Seriously, in case you're new to io9 and our obsession with this show, this Avengers-esque story of a young artist who goes for a temp gig and becomes the sidekick to a nameless man who fights alien monsters is one of our fave recent TV series, and the real reason DVDs exist is so we can proselytize about shows like this.

Life On Mars (British version)

This head-injury time-travel cop show was a hit on BBC America, and now there's an American remake with name actors in it like Harvey Keitel and Gretchen Moll. So why are there no DVDs on the horizon? After the American remake totally fails to recapture the British magic, we'll need to see the real thing. (I'm still watching the Brit episodes, thanks to the magic of TiVo.)

Space Cases

This Nickelodeon series featured a young Jewel Staite as Catalina, the super-cool space kid with the yelling powers. It was written by Peter David and Lost In Space's Bill Mumy, and featured weird plots and joyously silly acting from guest stars like George Takei (playing the stentorian Warlord Shank.) It was one of the few kids' shows that you'd want to watch with your kid the requisite 20 times. Your kids demand these DVDs!

Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends

For some reason I've been hearing about this show a lot lately. It's the seminal Spider-Man cartoon where he teams up with Ice-Man from the X-Men and Firestar, plus a super-dog. Graeme recently suggested Spider-Man 5 should be based on this awesome cartoon. So why can't we watch it and judge for ourselves?

Time Trax

Okay, you're going to start questioning my sanity now. But I loved this show when it was on the short-lived PTEN syndicated network back in the early 1990s, because it was so goofy. Dale Midkiff is a cop from a dystopian future (where white people are a persecuted minority) and he has to go back to our time to chase down time-traveling criminals. In every episode, a boxer from the future uses his future-boxing powers to win boxing matches. Or a future car mechanic uses future car mechanic powers or whatever. And the future cop has a holographic sexy librarian helping him! It's so awesome. Why is there no DVD?

Tripods

And finally, the BBC TV adaptation of this classic book series about teenagers fighting War Of The Worlds-esque alien invaders was brilliant and arresting. It featured then-cutting edge special effects and a cool alien-fighting coming-of-age storyline. I haven't seen it in 20 years, and I'm dying to see it again.

Runners up: Jake 2.0 never really won our hearts, because we were waiting for Jake Panther. Also: Animorphs; Charlie Jade; Century City; Century Falls; Dark Skies; Doctor Who: the TV movie; the Star Wars Holiday special (does someone really want that on DVD?), Exosquad; First Wave; The Man From Atlantis; Future Cop; Hard Time On Planet Earth; Manimal; Men Into Space; The Night Man; Now And Again; Out Of The Unknown; Probe — when you search for this on Amazon, you get lube!; and Project UFO.

Even when teleportation works properly, there are tremendous risks. You can get a smirking Hayden Christensen popping up on top of every world landmark, chased by a bleach-blond Samuel L. Jackson. And that's an example of successful teleportation. Here's what happens when it goes wrong:

Star Trek: Gosh, are there transporter accidents in Star Trek? I can't actually think of any. Oh wait. Yeah, there are a few. Just a handful, maybe. If you've got big hands. Most notably, the transporter splits Kirk into two Kirks: one passive, one aggressive. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Stonn Q. Vulcan beams up along with someone else, and they get scrambled into a mess that doesn't live long OR prosper. (And according to the book, Kirk also has a wife who dies in a transporter accident.) In TNG, Reg Barclay has a transporter mishap that makes him even more annoying than usual. And Ro Laren and Geordi get turned ghosty. In DS9, the transporter zaps Sisko and Bashir back in time, forcing Sisko to pretend to be a civil rights leader. On Voyager, the transporter makes Seven Of Nine's Borg implants have sex with the Doctor's holo-emitter. Also, Tuvok and Neelix have the oposite of Kirk's original malfunction, and get merged into one super-passive-aggressive entity. There are like 10,000 more of them, but you get the picture.

Tron. As we pointed out a while back, Tron is about a teleportation experiment, and it's designed to teleport from point A to point B. But instead, it disassembles Jeff Bridges and zap him into the passive-aggressive video-game world. Oops.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One of the Turtles' main frenemies is the one-eyed giant alligator, Leatherhead, who got adopted by the alien Utroms. Stranded on Earth, Leatherhead is constantly building Transmat devices to take him back to the Utrom homeworld. And they're constantly going horribly wrong, in the comics and in the TV show. One transmat device blows up in Leatherhead's face. Another one simply materializes three Utroms, who shoot him. A third transmat device generates energy that lures a whole gang of Triceratons to Leatherhead's secret hideout. Poor Leatherhead!

Savage Planet. This is possibly the absolute sickest teleportation disaster ever, from the indie movie Savage Planet. A whole bunch of intrepid explorers are zapping themselves to an alien world, and they put just a wee bit too much stress on the system. So one of them comes through missing a big chunk of his inner torso. (Warning: video is totally gross.)

Adam Strange loved the Zeta Beam teleportation mechanism, which zapped him to and from the planet Rann — until it scooped out his eyes like cantaloupe balls. The original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, had the same thing happen to him, but he only lost one eye. I'm noticing a theme of teleportation mishaps and missing eyes, what with Leatherhead and all.

Ultimate Fantastic Four. In the original Stan Lee version, the Fantastic Four get transformed into lovable freaks when they go up in a rocket to beat the Soviets into space or something. But in the Ultimate reboot, they build a teleportation machine to send matter into a parallel universe. By accident, the four of them plus (Dr. Doom) get teleported into the N-zone and they get transformed into alternate universe versions of themselves, with the rocky heads and the invisible blondeness and stuff. And they become really passive-aggressive. Like the Thing is always saying, "Is it clobberin' time? Do you think it is? I don't know."

The Fly. In both the 1950s movies and the 1986 version, it's a teleportation accident that turns an inquiring scientist (Jeff Goldblum in the 1986 version) into a half-human, half-fly mutant. In the 1958 original, the scientist starts off his somewhat safeguard-free experiments by teleporting his cat, Dandolo, into a monstrous dimension where we can hear the cat screaming for help. And the cat never gets rescued! That's fucken hardcore. In the new version, Jeff Goldblum wants to stick Geena Davis into the teleportation machine so he can merge with both her and his fly parts, thus creating an even more awesome mutant. Not surprisingly, David Cronenberg is turning his version into an opera.

Blake's 7. I lost count of how many times people get teleported into space on this show, but it happens a lot. It's the show's get-out-of-jeopardy-free card. It definitely happens to Brian Blessed in the third episode. But given Brian's planet-sized ego, he shouldn't actually have been harmed by being zapped into space. He could just generate his own atmosphere and gravity field, with the force of his shouting.

Thunderbolts: Baron Zemo's mind gets zapped into Techno's mechanical "Tech-Pack" in a teleportation accident, according to the source of all lies wisdom.

Dinobots. In one of the origins of these awesome Dinosaurs-in-Disguise robots, they suffered an accident with the teleportation systems of the supercomputer Teletran-3, which zaps them back into Earth's prehistory where they turn into the robot dinos we love.

There's also a BBC show for kids called A Purrfect Villain, which sounds totally meowniacal:

Victor's DNA gets mixed up with that of a cat in a teleportation accident. Victor gets the cat's nine lives while the cat gets the computer code to destroy the world and turn all human life to jelly! The chase is on to save the planet, as Victor loses life after life while the cat types in the code numbers one by one over the internet.

I love that synopsis so much!

And then there's this:

The bringers of pain and delight from Star Trek, "Spock's Brain". Has there ever been a band called "The Bringers Of Pain And Delight"? If not, why not? In any case, that's like the perfect summing up of the dominatrix aesthetic — and check out those kinky boots (in the pic up top.) They not only plunder Spock's precious noggin, they also take vicious pleasure in attaching the pain devices to Kirk and friends, and then firing up the zappy with their wrist controllers.

Servalan from Blake's 7. She starts out as the vaguely butch Supreme Commander of the Federation, but almost immediately Servalan uses a mixture of intense sexuality and evil bitchiness to get her way. She swerves between flirting and threatening with almost no pause — and she never hesitates to use her subordinates (and prisoners) for her sexual pleasure at the drop of a giant feathery hat.

Zeta from Zeta One. Zeta is the queen of an alien lesbian Amazon ant colony called Angvia (which is an anagram for a part of the female anatomy.) The Angvians are kidnapping Earth women to come join their society, but an evil Earth man wants to turn their latest "recruit" into a double agent. There's a lot of chasing and capturing and escaping — and the Angvians are armed with exploding Judo chops, as you can see from this Benny Hill-meets-Barbarella moment, posted online by Danforth Buzzkill. (Clip may not be work-safe.)

Nyah, from Devil Girl From Mars. She's dressed in a shiny black costume with a sort of Darth Vader helmet, and she's here to collect male specimens to repopulate Mars — because the Martians had a war between the sexes, and the women became the rulers, wiping out all the men in the process. (Remember, Joe Jackson says, "If there's war between the sexes, then there'll be no people left.") The only men she can find are a group of bedraggled alcoholics, including an astronomer and an escaped murderer, in a Scottish pub. Here's a video of highlights with some added music, and you can watch the entire goldang thing here.

Witch, from 1990: Bronx Warriors. It's the distant future, the year 1990, and everything has fallen into a dreadful post-apocalyptic mess. A gang of punky bikers rolls around terrorizing the countryside, including Witch, who stabs people with her long brass fingernails or strangles them with her bullwhip.

The T-X in Terminator 3: The Rise Of The Machines. Long before Summer Glau went around kicking other robots in the head, the Terminator films introduced the first female Terminator, who dresses in red leather (including boots). Says Metaphilm:

The dominatrix reference is furthered during one particular fight scene when the T-X is seen to swivel head and limbs until she is wrapped around Schwarzenegger's T-800 in a highly sexualized grip. She also has the ability to control other machines via use of a slender, needle-like probe.

Xenia Onatopp from GoldenEye. If you consider this James Bond movie about a killer satellite system to be science fiction, then Xenia definitely belongs on this list. She's a former Soviet agent who's now joined the Russian Mafia, and she gets a seuxal charge out of killing. Says Wikipedia:

Literally leaping atop the admiral, she straddles him and violently kisses, bites and scratches him before finally wrapping her muscular thighs around his chest and crushing it into powder, loudly achieving orgasm, while rubbing her naked body against him as he asphyxiates.

Elizia from Space 1999, "The Devil's Planet." Commander Koenig crash-lands on a prison planet, whose sadistic warden Elizia decides she wants him to be her love-puppy. When he refuses, she makes him the quarry in a hunt to the death. Check out the guards' uniforms, including whips:

Captain Mother from Space Thing: this softcore porn scifi movie features a male hero, Captain Granilla, who crashes into an all-woman ship run by the cruel lesbian Captain Mother in the year 2069. (Link is NSFW, but awesome.) She swings her whip and shouts, "Maybe that'll teach you that men are off-limits!" But the Captain quickly introduces all of the lesbians, including Capt. Mother, to the joys of heterosexuality. Of course. The silver-boot-wearing Captain Mother tells him, "I order you to make love to me!" But Just check out the DVD cover:

Princess Ardala from Buck Rogers. She doesn't wear kinky outfits, but she does take tremendous pleasure in her stable of sex slaves, including Tigerman and Pantherman, and probably Emuman as well, if she'd made it into the second season. My favorite Ardala moment is when she's planning to marry Buck, and she has a special remote-controlled shrinky collar, which shrinks to half its diameter, so she can behead him if he disobeys her or displeases her for even a moment. Plus those headpieces!

Six from Battlestar Galactica. Just watch the way she tortures Baltar and various other men with total abandon. (Not to mention that actor Tricia Helfer is starring as a dominatrix in a new movie, Walk All Over Me. And hey, here's the trailer.)

Granny Goodness, from Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics. I didn't really think of Granny Goodness as a dominatrix until I saw her described that way here, but it totally fits. She's not exactly sexy, but she is totally evil and psycho behind a sweet facade. And she controls the Female Furies, a squad of killer women who are sort of dominatrix-y.

The Dominatrix from Gene Simmons' Dominatrix. I'm so glad I don't actually need to read this comic, because our own Graeme McMillan has reviewed it. Here's his summary:

A spy is so excited by his session with his dominatrix that he accidentally blurts out a secret so bad that he immediately gets kidnapped. But that's okay, because he has a magic pill that gives him superpowers - but he doesn't take it, he gives it to his dominatrix, because... um... well, just because! And then she beats this guy up! Because that's what dominatrixes do (There's even a caption where she feels guilty about it, because she's not getting paid to hurt him)! And then, after she beats up the bad guy, instead of trying to do anything about the guy she saw kidnapped, or the secret she's apparently learned that is so dangerous that said guy gets kidnapped, she goes home to have some tea. Only to get ambushed by a super sexy spy who's also dressed in fetish wear!

The clone, from Dominatrix Waitrix. This is a queer scifi porn video released by Fatale Media, about "a sexually voracious, leather-clad human clone who takes over the bodies of overworked waiters and preys on their customers." Yes, really. I guess the clone takes over bedraggled service workers, and then channels their frustration with customers into some kind of non-consensual domination scene? I like the quote, "You cannot deny that waitresses and customers are natural enemies." It goes on to say the customer belongs "under the waitress' foot." Has anybody actually seen this movie?

The alien visitor from a doomed world:

The most famous refugee in science fiction is probably Superman, who gets sent to safety when his home planet Krypton is destroyed. It's no coincidence that Superman is also the posterboy for assimilation — his "real" family is the Kents of Kansas, and he thinks of himself as an American. He gets to live the refugee's dream, being totally accepted into a prosperous new world — plus he's physically and mentally superior to everyone else around him, which is a plus. He's the embodiment of the melting pot, even as he has the power to melt you. (And of course, his creators Siegel & Schuster were the sons of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, mainly Lithuania and Ukraine.)

Doctor Who, meanwhile, has the same alien-world story as Superman, but without the assimilation. The Doctor, in the early episodes from 1963, drops hints about being on the run and in hiding, but doesn't explain further. The show's creators had a vague sense, originally, that he was fleeing a space war. But by the time it's explained in 1969, the explanation is much more benign: the Doctor's species are dicks. (No, not Terrance Dicks. Just dicks.) It's not until the show's 42nd birthday that we get back to the idea that he's fleeing a space war (upgraded to a time war.) And his planet has been destroyed, just like Superman's. But like I mentioned, he doesn't assimilate with Earth/British culture — even though he constantly takes on weird British affectations like jelly babies or cricket, they only make him seem like more of an outsider. He's like those Indian immigrants in the TV show Goodness Gracious Me, who anglicize their names and try to be more British than everyone else, only to look more out of place than ever. In many ways, the Doctor is the anti-Superman.

The protagonist who's fleeing war or genocide:

There are also tons of characters who flee a doomed or destroyed Earth, including Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series. And John Varley's novels frequently take place in a universe where humans have been forced to flee an Earth invaded by aliens, and have colonized the rest of the solar system as a result.

And then there's Hope Hubris, the hero of Piers Anthony's Bio Of A Space Tyrant series. As the first book's title, Refugee, suggests, Hubris starts out as a humble refugee from the moon Callisto, fleeing to Jupiter, where his family gets killed horribly. This starts him on his path towards becoming the "Tyrant of Jupiter."

The rag-tag fleet of humans:

And then there are plenty of stories in which a straggling mob of people flees from a disaster or massacre in space. Maybe the most critically acclaimed SF show right now — if not the most popular — is Battlestar Galactica, where the Cylons drive the humans out of their homeworld not once, but twice: on Caprica, and then on New Caprica. At the end of season three, Lee Adama makes a huge speech in which he says this has changed humanity from a civilization to a "gang," on the run and doing whatever it takes to survive.

Less organized rabbles also turn up, fleeing wars or political unrest, in books like C.J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station, where swarms of refugees pack into Pell Station in the wake of conflict between the Earth Company and outer stations. And a mob of refugees from a disaster that befalls the H9 colony swarms aboard a cruise ship, only to be exploited by the media, in Eric Idle's The Road To Mars. The TV show Babylon 5 is also full of refugee crises, like the people fleeing the Vorlon attack on Ventari III in "Falling Towards Apotheosis." (We also see a ship full of refugees under attack in the first regular episode, "Midnght On The Firing Line.")

Eco-refugees or disaster survivors on Earth:

Every eco-disaster narrative or post-apocalyptic story includes some kind of refugee motif, with people fleeing the destroyed cities or trying to find a safe haven. Like The Day After Tomorrow, The Postman, Waterworld, or Mad Max. Or Steven Gould's novel Blind Waves. The Martian attacks in War Of The Worlds spawn a huge fleet of refugee ships running away from the carnage. Islanders flee rising sea levels, only to drown or wind up in horrible refugee boat camps, in the 2002 young adult novel Exodus. And of course, there are tons of refugees from the collapsing nations of the world, seeking sanctuary in the U.K., in Children Of Men. Not to mention the Raft of refugees organized by telecommunications magnate L. Bob Rife in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

One of the most arresting moments in the TV show Jericho is when our heroes find the remains of a refugee train a mile wide, made by people fleeing the frozen north. The refugees have left their icy dead where they lay. (Not to mention the whole gaggle of refugees who settle in Jericho, only to face expulsion again.)

Survivalists:

And the survivalist narrative is a huge part of science fiction. Robert Heinlein not only wrote the novel Farnham's Freehold, about people surviving a nuclear war, but according to the source of all lies, he also wrote "How To Be A Survivor" and other essays on surviving nuclear war. Frederik Pohl deals with similar themes in his story "Fermi And Frost." Also, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle write about a group of survivors barricading themselves into a mountain retreat after a deadly comet strike, in Lucifer's Hammer. Plus there's The Survivors, the TV show Terry Nation made between his work on Doctor Who and Blake's 7 (which is also a refugee show, sort of.)

And then there are the narratives about people going on the run from repressive regimes. Like Logan's Run, where Logan flees the non-stop beautiful-people orgy where they kill you when you reach 30, in search of the mythical Sanctuary. (And in the Logan's Run TV series, he's just on the run, every week, with a rogue android. In Roger McBride Allen's The Ring Of Charon, Marcia MacDougal can only escape from the repressive Naked Purple movement, which has taken over a lunar penal colony, by being declared a refugee when her house burns down.

Fleeing from the future:

And finally there are refugees in time — sort of like the Doctor, except they're fleeing a particular oppressive future through time travel. Just type "refugee from the future" into Google (with the quotation marks) and you get a bunch of weird stories — including various X-Men who have journeyed back to our time to escape one of those Mutants-in-concentration-camps dystopian futures.

I feel as though I've just scratched the surface of science fiction's nearly endless store of refugees here — this post could be twice as long. But these seem to be the main types of refugees in science fiction, and I was somewhat surprised by how many of them I turned up when I started looking.

History is full of mass evacuations and displacements, and we've gotten pretty used to the sight of streams of humans struggling across an unforgiving landscape with whatever they can carry, trying to escape from something or other. But it seems pretty likely the 21st century will see more refugee crises than ever before, as the number of humans on the planet continues to skyrocket and there are more ecological disasters and wars over scarce resources. There will be more and more refugees — possibly including you.

And science fiction is uniquely suited to tell the stories of these fleeing people, because the stark reality of the refugee condition is so awful, we need metaphors to cover it. It's easier to think about people running away from an exploding planet than it is to think about grabbing what you can and running from your home before you get ethnically cleansed. A dollop of escapism — or, in the case of Superman, a truckload — helps us swallow the unthinkable.

Note: The illustration up top comes from Wagner James Au's New World Notes blog, from a report about a virtual "Camp Darfur" in Second Life, which was being vandalized by asswipes spouting racist slogans. So a team of Green Lanterns, most of them extraterrestrial, took it upon themselves to guard the site.

Nation's contribution to television reads like some kind of weird cautionary tale for would-be creators. Following on from early success as a comedy writer, Nation accidentally hit the big time by creating the Daleks for the second ever Doctor Who storyline - something that led to years of spin-off material for the writer, including an aborted attempt to launch a Dalek-only TV show in the US. Not content to be seen as a one-trick-pony, however, he also wrote for other shows like The Avengers, The Champions and The Saint, before creating a whole new series for the BBC in 1975 called Survivors.

Survivors was a show way ahead of its time - Influenced by more sober, serious SF than Who, the series dealt with what little was left of society following a viral outbreak that had spread across the planet and decimated humanity. Although the show ran three years, Nation left after the first season, moving on to create the much more upbeat space opera, Blake's 7.

From the creation of two successful British TV shows in a row, there was only one place to go next - but America proved too great a challenge for Nation and his success was limited to acting as producer of MacGuyver... which, as we all know, is no success at all.

Now, more than a decade after his death, Nation's creations all seem to be back in full force; the Daleks show up with depressing regularity in the new Doctor Who series, and both the BBC and Sky One have decided that audiences are ready for his particularly gritty take on SF post-Battlestar Galactica and Y: The Last Man. Maybe it's that audiences and program-makers have caught up with his artistic vision, or maybe it's just that program-makers want to capitalize on twin hungers for nostalgia and SF, but one thing's for sure - Next year, expect to experience Nation-building like you've never seen before.

Terry Nation.net

Back in the early 2000s, Blake's 7 Productions, which got the rights to Blake from Terry Nation's estate, was constantly promising that a new version would be on television any day now. If you signed up for their newsletter, you would get a series of emails written by Paul Darrow, who played Avon the snarky computer nerd and who was signed up to star in the new series. Darrow's messages always included a healthy mix of hype and Avon-style snark:

Everything in on track - (I've been told to say this) - for the realization of our dreams. The nightmare of procedures regarding the 'setting up' of the project are at an end. We are on red alert. Well ... amber. All that remains is to 'make the deal' with one of a number of interested investors and all of a sudden we'll gallop apace.

Question is ... with whom shall we climb into bed? I'll rephrase that. With which TV distribution company will the interests of the new... newish ... 'Blake's Seven' be best served? That's the stage we're at. It's now up to the sharp traders. What do 'they' want from 'us'? What will we get from them? We'll find out sooner rather than later and we'll keep you informed. Meanwhile, Andrew Mark Sewell - all three of him - slaves away on your behalf. (And mine - I need the money.) Simon Moorhead has joined our production team in place of Brian Lighthill. (Brian is now 'a consultant'. Nice one, Brian.) And for me ... I struggle on in the hope that Avon will not be on his death bed when the cameras start rolling.

This new version seems more likely to be a reboot, with new actors playing rebel leader Blake and the rest of the gang, plus the flouncy-but-evil Supreme Commander Servalan. Supposedly some of the same creative people who worked on last year's well-received Blake dramas for BBC Radio 7 (which also featured an all-new cast) will be involved once again. [BBC News]

This list actually came about because I had a friend who was interested in the wonders of B7, and I was starting to write her a long email with advice on discovering the show. Then it occurred to me that other people might actually find this useful. Anybody who has enjoyed shows like Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Firefly will find a lot to love about the anti-heroic Blake's 7, whose DNA is woven into the most daring SF on television.

• Find a friend who has the VHS tapes. Because of legal stupidities the DVDs aren't available in the U.S., but you could import them from the UK if you have a region-free player. There are also other ways to get the episodes, which we absolutely won't mention here.
• Go ahead and read spoilers. Blake's 7 is that rare show that's actually 1,000 times better if you know how it ends. I won't spoil the ending here, just in case you may disagree. But knowing the ending gives a new significance and poignancy to many scenes in the first two seasons.
• Feel free to skip the first episode. It's pretty good, but it's like a pilot for a different show. Pretty much none of the characters and threads from the pilot make their way into the following episodes, except for our hero, Blake. All you really need to know going into episode two is the show's main premise.
• And here's that main premise: it's the distant future, after humanity has colonized much of the galaxy. The evil Federation rules over most human worlds with an iron grip. Only a few rebels still hold out against the Federation, and their greatest, most legendary leader is Roj Blake, who gets stuck on a prison transport on a one-way trip to a prison planet. There, he has no choice but to team up with some unrepetentant criminals to fight for freedom. And maybe, over time, he can mould them into a force for more than just escape.
• Be willing to suspend your disbelief a bit in the first season. Blake and his crew have a run of good luck that's pretty hard to swallow, including stumbling on the greatest spaceship in known space and later inheriting the most awesome computer ever built. Just run with it, because it sets up some great stories later. And it's no different than lots of other science fiction shows, where the hero just happens to have the greatest time machine/spaceship/whatever in the universe.

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• The first season may require some patience, and you should feel free to skip some episodes liberally. The first season is a bit of a slog, because the show's creator Terry Nation wrote the whole thing himself. And this meant he was dashing off drafts as fast as he could, and then zipping to the next episode without looking back. Script editor Chris Boucher managed to add some sparkling dialog here and there, but there are also long stretches of padding and repetitive plot devices. The scripts improve a lot in season two, when Nation is no longer single-handedly writing them. Here's a compilation of some of the best quips and insults.
• The only first-season episodes you absolutely should watch are "Space Fall," where Blake meets his future band of criminals, "Cygnus Alpha," where Blake rescues some of his crew from a cult led by a scenery-devouring Brian Blessed, "Time Squad," where Blake meets a telepathic resistance leader named Cally, and "Seek-Locate-Destroy," which introduces the Federation's biggest villain, Supreme Commander Servalan. (It also introduces her lackey Travis, about whom more later.) You may also want to watch "Orac," the season finale, which sets up some stuff in the next season. And three other episodes, "Mission To Destiny," "Breakdown," and "Bounty," are amazingly great, but non-essential.
• Things to watch for: Servalan's outfits become more and more vampy as time goes by. Almost every episode has a cameo by someone who appeared on Doctor Who from time to time. The show's special effects get cheaper and cheaper, until some episodes actually just feature a cardboard cut-out of Blake's ship, the Liberator, instead of model effects. But the show scores points for having a teleportation effect that actually makes people have trouble finding their footing when it plunks them down.
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• Blake's 7 reaches its creative peak, and becomes more of an arc show, in season two. Watch for the relationship between Blake and the morally dubious computer nerd Avon to become more complex and twisted throughout season two. Also, Blake himself becomes more and more of a morally gray character as the season goes on. He's more and more willing to go to any lengths — make dubious alliances, take ridiculous risks, even condemn whole populations to death — to defeat the Federation. Blake's 7 gets a lot of credit for being a show with an overarching story arc, setting the stage for show's like Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine and the new Battlestar Galactica, and much of that reputation rests on season two.
• Almost every episode in season two is amazing and worth watching at least once. There are a couple of exceptions: awful filler episodes that you should skip at all costs. They're called "Hostage" and "Voice From The Past," and you'll be much happier if you just give them a pass.
• You'll notice that Travis, the number two bad guy, gets a new actor in season two. He also suddenly becomes a much, much more interesting and complex character. In season one, he's all about, "OMG Blake hurt me, so I must hunt him down." But in season two, he's been through a "reeducation" process (which is how they explain the new actor) and is a little less sure of himself. And his allegiances become a lot less clear, especially after the Federation hangs him out to dry. "Trial," the episode where Travis is put on a showtrial for war crimes — which he actually commited, but which are just a pretext — may be the best episode ever. Travis stands up in front of a jury of his superiors and explains, in a ringing speech, that war crimes are a logical outcome of his Federation training, not the aberration the judges would like to pretend. It makes the trial of Baltar in Battlestar seem like Matlock by comparison.
• Without getting too spoilery here, season three takes a very sharp turn away from the solid arc-focused nature of season two. To be honest, if you haven't become totally hooked on Blake's 7 by the time you get to the third season, there's probably no hope. However, it does contain a few of the absolute best episodes of the entire show's run: "Aftermath," where Avon gets to know the evil Servalan a lot better, "City at the Edge of the World," where the cowardly thief Vila finally gets to be a hero, and "Rumors Of Death," in which Avon tracks down the Federation agent who killed the only person he ever cared about.
• A lot of the rest of season three is sort of filler, and ranges from pretty good to awful. Skip "Volcano," "Dawn Of The Gods" and "Children of Auron" at all costs. "Harvest of Kairos," "Sarcophagus" and "Moloch" are okay for camp value, but that's it. You can watch the best of season three in a day.
• And season four is much, much worse. Apart from a few episodes ("Traitor" and "Headhunters" come to mind) it's just pure camp and silliness. The producers didn't expect the show to be renewed for a fourth season, so this run was just sort of an added bonus, with some scripts that seem to have been rushed out.
• But of course the final ever episode of the series, "Blake," is a must-watch, and a return to the greatness of the second season. I won't spoil what happens in it here, but you should definitely check it out. You may even want to be daring and watch the final episode first, and then go back and watch the rest of the show from the beginning. The last episode is pretty self-explanatory, and will definitely leave you curious about these characters and how they got to this point. And here it is!

The whole idea that our actions are determined ahead of time is more metaphysical than scientific, although some have claimed that quantum mechanics proves our decisions have already been made. But the idea of "fate," or "unshakeable prophecies," really belongs more in the realm of mythology and gods than in a story about a rational, observable universe. As soon as you start talking about someone being unable to escape his/her destiny, suddenly there's a guy with a white beard talking for like ten hours. Like this guy:(What I really want to know is, why hasn't anybody made an animated gif of the Architect doing a funny dance, with all his hand gestures?) So here's a list of the main types of SF stories about predestination, which I was always fated to write:

We're just following a program. That's what I think the Architect is saying at the end of Matrix: Reloaded. Neo is just the latest "One," acting out a program that leads to the Matrix and Zion being rebooted so that another version of the same cycle can happen again. Every choice Neo makes is just part of his program, except that this time around Neo actually saves Zion instead of rebooting it. I think.
Everything is ultimately predictable. If you have enough data about the present, you can make iron-clad predictions about the future. The only reason we don't know the future is because we don't have the raw data on every single factor that will lead to future events. In the first season finale of Blake's 7, the nearly omniscient computer Orac is able to make a dead-accurate prediction that a ship that looks like the Liberator (but isn't) will blow up. Orac never predicts the future again, for some reason. In another episode, "Weapon," a mascara-wearing psycho-strategist, Carnell, can predict everyone's future actions completely — but his predictions fail because he's lacking a crucial piece of info.

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck builds a machine that can absolutely predict the future. He uses it to witness his own fate (before his memory gets wiped), and gives himself a bunch of tiny items that allow him to kill all suspense get out of every jam he gets into. But then, in our totally nonsensical clip from earlier today, he suddenly decides that the machine's predictions really only come true because people find out about them and inadvertently make them come true. (It makes no sense to us either.)

The vision of the future. Our hero gets a glimpse of a future event, and has to accept it or change it. It's usually something worse than just "You'll have a colostomy bag in a few years." Sometimes, it's only a possible future and we can totally change it, but sometimes it's presented as an unshakeable reality. In the Robert J. Sawyer novel Flashforward, physicists accidentally send everybody's consciousness twenty years into the future, and one of the physicists learns he'll be murdered. Sawyer has written that Flashforward is about the unsettling notion that "the future is just as fixed as the past."

But in Minority Report (the Dick book, and to some extent the movie), it's made clear that the precogs are only seeing one of a few possible timelines. Otherwise, even imprisoning the pre-criminals wouldn't be able to prevent them from committing the crimes they're destined to commit.

Time travel. Heroes actually takes a belt-and-braces approach to future predictions: Isaac paints his precog vision of New York getting toasted, but Hiro also travels forward and sees it first-hand. But Heroes also tries to have it both ways about whether Isaac's paintings are "fated" to come true: New York doesn't get toasted, but everyone still acts as though HRG can't possibly escape getting shot in the eye. Maybe predictions that include actual time travel are more mutable, because you're only visiting a possible future?

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time, visiting his own past and future. He finds he can't change either one. He knows when he'll die, and can't change it. But he can announce the fact at a speech right beforehand, which seems like changing the future somewhat to me.

In most time-travel stories, the maxim "any future is only one of many possible futures" tends to come up, because an immutable future is a recipe for boring stories. At some point, the writers on Doctor Who realized that any story taking place in Earth's history must have zero suspense, because we "know" that Earth is fine in the twentieth century. So Robert Holmes inserted a scene into "Pyramids of Mars" where the Doctor proves that Earth in 1980 will be a barren wasteland if he doesn't stop the monstrous Sutekh in 1911. Similarly, in "The Unquiet Dead," the Doctor tells Rose that there's nothing stopping him from filling Victorian England with walking corpses, even though her "present" doesn't include that piece of history.

So here's the part where we settle the question of fate vs. free will once and for all. Ready? Okay. The bottom line is, in order to predict everyone's future actions absolutely, you would need an infinite amount of data. You would need a model of the universe the size of the universe. And you can't have time travel without the ability to change the timeline, or else you couldn't interact with the past at all. You'd be unable to touch anything or move anything, even minor things, because it's all part of established history. You couldn't even disturb the air molecules or step on anything. And if you can change the past, you can change the future. Any questions?

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Actually, this latex monstrosity is genuinely scary, thanks to the total darkness and the use of little touches like the drop of oily/watery fluid dripping from its stinger. Triffids was produced by David Maloney, who directed most of the best Doctor Who episodes in the 1970s, and then went on to produce the first three seasons of Blake's 7. Many fans wish Maloney had taken over as Who producer instead of the self-indulgent John Nathan-Turner. If he had, it probably would have looked a lot like his Triffids.

Famous names: Gareth Thomas, Paul Darrow, Michael Keating, Jan Chappell, Terry Nation, Michael Keating, Steven Pacey, Jacqueline Pearce

Crunchy goodness: 5

The shit: Pearce's Servalan, originally a throwaway villain, quickly becomes one of the show's main stars, cavorting around in slinky dresses and giant sun-hats while dispensing death with a smile. (In one recent television interview, Pearce announces, "I was a masturbatory icon to an entire generation," throwing her head back and laughing at the thought.)

Deadliest spoiler: The cynical nerd Avon goes nuts and finally kills the idealistic Blake, who also goes a bit nuts. And then Avon (probably) dies a moment later.

Elevator pitch: It's the evil twin of Star Trek — from the point of view of the bad guys.

The Largest Blake's 7 Site on the Web