io9: clone

Clips From The Series Finale Of Stargate Atlantis

Meredith Woerner — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:00:00 PST

Television comes back after its long holiday nap, with the final Stargate Atlantis. We've got clips from the series finale to say goodbye Sheppard, Ronon, and sweet McKay... we'll miss you most of all.

To celebrate the final passing of SGA the Sci Fi Channel is running a week long marathon.

Monday:

The Stargate Atlantis marathon takes flight on Monday, beginning with Season 2 from 8 AM until 4 PM on the Sci Fi Channel.

Movies:
Fox FX has a great selection o' scifi tonight. Watch urinary tracts get healed with the mere wave of an inmate's hand in The Green Mile at 4:30 PM, followed with the rather unfortunate The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at 8 PM. To top it all off, there is an 11 PM showing of Spawn.

Tuesday:

Stargate Atlantis Season 2 and 3 Marathon on the Sci Fi Channel from 8 AM until 6 PM.

The Universe -

Find out your chances for getting crushed by a world-ending asteroid here on Earth, in this week's The Universe on The History Channel at 9 PM.

Movies:

A three-and-a-half-hour version of Superman Returns is on FX in HD, at 6:30 PM

Wednesday:

Stargate Atlantis Season 3 Marathon on the Sci Fi Channel from 8 AM until 6 PM

Thursday:

Stargate Atlantis Season 3 and 5 Marathon on the Sci Fi Channel from 8 AM until 8 PM.

Movies:

The sexiest video game vixen, Lara Croft, comes to life via Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life on TBS at 10 PM. How insanely hot would it be to have a Resident Evil Alice-versus-Lara Croft fight, and who would win? (It would have to be Alice from the first movie to keep it interesting.)

Friday:

Stargate Atlantis Season 5 is on the Sci Fi Channel from 8 AM until 6 PM.

Stargate Atlantis -
The final episode of Stargate Atlantis "Enemy At The Gate" brings a lot of old faces back to Atlantis to try and stop an invading Wraith Hive from getting into the Milky Way Galaxy and taking over Earth. Team up, SGA and make us proud, this is your last episode ever...until the made for TV movies sometime in the future.

Clips From The Final Episode Of Stargate Atlantis:

SGA Promo:

Batman The Brave And The Bold -
"Enter The Outsiders" pits Batman against a bunch of punk kids, and Wildcat comes along for the ride. The cartoon is on 8 PM on the Cartoon Network

Star Wars Clone Wars -
"The Gungan General" is a Jar Jar Binks-centric episode, mixed with a little chain gang runaway action. Hey, at least Obi-Wan is as unhappy about being around Jar Jar as I am. The next episode is on 9 PM on the Cartoon Network.

Clone Wars Promo

Sanctuary -

This week on the Amanda Tapping-and-monsters show, it's the second part of the "Revelations" two-parter, where Henry and Ashley are held captive by the evil Cabal. Find out if they make it out alive at 9 PM on the Sci Fi Channel.

Saturday:

Movies:

Adam Sandler in a gimmick movie — say what? Click the movie where Christopher Walken hands Sandler a remote control to his LIFE, which of course teaches us all a valuable lesson about something or another. Click is on Fox FX at 5:30 PM.

Here's A Trailer With Kate Beckinsale In Tiny Shorts:

But if that's not heartstringy enough for you. ABC family is showing Practical Magic at 8:30 PM. It's full of midnight all-girl margarita table dancing madness, and witch women Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. I think it's like a rule from the 90s that if you made a movie with a predominantly female cast, you had to have a scene where they all danced around a table.

Sunday:

Movies: Let Wesley Snipes show you how it's possible for vampires to walk in the daylight and get hideous hair cuts. Blade II and Blade Trinity is on TNT at 3:30 and 5:30 PM.

A Mega Violent Comedy, From The Office's Producer

Charlie Jane Anders — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:28:00 PDT

A new British sitcom has the weirdest storyline ever — and the most intriguing pedigree. Clone is the brainchild of Adam Chase, an executive producer of American sitcom Friends, and he's enlisted Ash Attila, a producer of the British Office, to make it. The show's main character will be a wimpish clone soldier created by a mad scientist, played by Jonathan Pryce. And the story will be "extremely violent," but super-low-budget: they'll only have about £250,000 per episode. I see the words "Jonathan Pryce," "The Office," and "extremely violent", and I start to get strange flutters of excitement. [TV Scoop]

Back, Back, Back To Life With The Best of the Worst Scifi Resurrections

Kevin Kelly — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:00:50 PST

Anyone who reads comic books knows that no one is ever really dead. Every character from Superman to Green Lantern has returned to life from the whereverafter they went to when sales figures dropped. Plus every zombie movie ever made brings your loved one back from the beyond, although they are never quite the same. Insta-reanimation doesn't happen as much in science fiction, where you have devices like nanobots and cellular regenerators that should make returning from the state of deadness quite easy. Of course when we do get a scifi resurrection, it's often so lame that you wish the character had stayed dead. Read on for our picks of the best bad returns from the grave.

Spock in Star Trek: There's no doubt that Spock was one of the best characters on Star Trek, which is what made his death so awesome. However, when he returned to life by having his body shot onto the Genesis planet, it just lost credibility for the science-hardened. How did Spock's dead body get injected into the Genesis life matrix anyhow? Good thing he'd downloaded his brainfiles into Bones, eh?
Ripley in Alien: Ripley was brought back to life in Alien: Resurrection as a clone, although with spotty memories of herself and a DNA strand laced with Alien bits and bobs, so she ends up as a freaky post-human mommy. It was creepy enough seeing all of the failed Ripley clones inside the vats, and the tied up Ripley who wants you to kill her, but the Ripley/Mommy clone was just devoid of everything we've loved about Ripley from the previous films. Yes, that's including Aliens 3.
The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica: The Cylons aren't just exactly clones in BSG, they're identical copies that take on the personality of their previous self upon death, and "rebirth" into wet, gooey, slimy, and slightly sexy birth tubs. They have to fly giant "Resurrection Ships" within reach of their "bring me back to life, I'm dead" signal, which sort of defeats the purpose. Couldn't their memoryfiles just be stored until they're close enough to get zapped into a new body? Why is it a finite process? Why are we asking so many questions about a show we love?
Just about any Jedi in Star Wars: When you die in Star Wars, and you have the power of the Force, you have the option of appearing as a glowing, transparent spectre. It's hinted that this is due to the research that Qui-Gon Jinn did sometime before he died, and it gets picked up by Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin so everyone can reunite and glow with pleasure around fires and dispense knowledge to your Jedi-kin. In fact, if you're lucky, you might get your own green glowy action figure.
The Doctor in Doctor Who: If you ever need to keep bringing in actors to play the lead in your extremely long-running BBC science fiction show, what better way to just have them die and come back as the exact same person, who just happens to look completely different? The Doctor can resurrect or "regenerate" himself up to 12 times, although we're sure the writers could figure out some way around that. They might start working on that too, since we're already on the 10th model. Maybe we can get a new Doctor altogether? What about bringing back Romana?
Captain Kirk in Star Trek: If you remember your Star Trek storyline, then you'll recall that Captain Kirk dies in Star Trek Generations, putting an end the The Shat in the series. Or so you thought. Shatner went on to write a book called The Return, which features the Borg and the Romulans teaming up to bring Kirk back to life. Sort of like your worst nightmare. It inspired several further novels, all co-written by Shatner, proving that the man will probably never die.

Super-Heroes Need Love More Than The Rest Of Us

Graeme McMillan — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:00:23 PST

You may be sick of the flowers and Hallmark cards of Valentine's Day already, but spare a thought for those whose careers make romance an all-but-impossible dream. I'm talking, of course, about superheroes, those brave souls who have to make the choice between getting their rocks off or defeating yet another alien invasion. Yes, they have secret identities, but as many of us already know, the choice to spend at least part of your day wearing outlandish tight-fighting costumes only complicates relationships even if you keep that part of your life secret. With that in mind, let's celebrate the three super-heroes who are the unluckiest in love.

Spider-Man: The original bad luck hero, Peter Parker knows what it's like to be single and unloved. Admittedly, that's only because the devil came and magic-ed away his marriage to hot supermodel-turned-actress Mary Jane Watson, but it still counts, right? Even before that happened, though, he wasn't having much success at the whole relationship thing. His first love of his life, Gwen Stacy? Thrown off the George Washington Bridge by the Green Goblin just to piss Spider-Man off. Even nowadays, the newly-single swinger still can't catch a break - his new potential girlfriend, Carlie Cooper, is an NYPD forensic expert who's working on a case that has Spider-Man as murder suspect number one.

Cyclops: Pity poor Scott "Slim" Summers. Being the stoic leader of the X-Men doesn't make you exceptionally easy to date, if his experience is anything to go by. If it's not your first girlfriend sacrificing herself for the good of the universe on the surface of the moon, it's your first wife being revealed to be a clone of said girlfriend created by a bad guy to mess with your head and, oh, by the way, your girlfriend isn't actually dead after all - that was another clone, albeit a cosmic one - and your wife is actually a Goblin Queen who wants to kill your baby son as well as a clone. Even after he sorted that mess out (the clone wife was quickly dispatched, and he married the not-dead girlfriend instead), things didn't get any easier. Failing to make his marriage work, he had a psychic affair with the X-Men's resident evil bitch telepath before his wife died again, only for real this time. Sure, now he seems happy enough with his new girlfriend (that would be the evil bitch telepath), but you know that it's only a matter of time before she betrays him and/or his first girlfriend/second wife is revealed not to have died this time, either.

Note: That first girlfriend/second wife, Jean Grey? Apparently so hot that even Professor X was in love with her, as this panel from the original '60s X-Men run shows:

The Flash: Police Scientist and Fastest Man Alive Barry Allen lived a life of speedy misery. Not only was his first wife, Iris, killed by his arch-nemesis Professor Zoom — probably in some kind of rage over the lameness of his name — but when he was preparing to marry a second wife, Zoom attempted the same trick again. This time around, things didn't go to plan; in preventing his fiancee's murder, Allen accidentally killed Zoom. And his appearance as the Flash and lack of appearance as Barry Allen led his fiancee to think that she'd been stood up at the altar, which drove her insane (Hey, some people take rejection really badly). There was light at the end of the tunnel, however, when Allen discovered that Iris hadn't been completely killed after all 00 Sensing a theme here? — but instead just spirited away to the 30th century, where technology had given her a new body. Only problem was, when Allen travelled to the future to be with her, he ended up being captured and tortured by a villain out to destroy all of existence. Trying to save the day one more time somewhat backfired, and Allen died in the attempt, leaving Iris to travel back to the 20th century and write a tell-all book about Allen before failing to prevent the death of another Flash, Bart Allen, years later. She was kind of a jinx, really.

The moral of these stories? You really don't want to be the partner of a superhero, because you'll probably be killed or have the devil rewrite your history at some point or another. But, on the plus side, if you do die? Chances are you'll come back to life before too long. So it's not all bad news, I suppose.

You Can't Gestapo The Hitler Clones

Kevin Kelly — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:00:51 PST

With new Indiana Jones and Hellboy movies on the horizon, we're reminded of heroes who fought supernatural Nazis from time to time. Heck, both Hellboy and Indiana Jones came face-to-moustache with Hitler, and Indy even got his autograph. But not all superheroes are so lucky. Some don't get to battle the Big Bad himself — they only get to square off with Hitler's clones. You'd be surprised how many Hitler clones have popped up in movies, TV and comics.

If you're a mad scientist with cloning technology at your disposal and you're hell-bent on cloning someone to represent your organization, Hitler would probably be at the top of your list. Just rest assured that you wouldn't be the first to try it. Check out the list of some of the better-known Hitler clones.

They Saved Hitler's Brain: This 1966 film features Nazi scientists removing Hitler's brain and sending it to South America so he can later be cloned. Too bad the movie didn't deliver on the promise of the title. it features numerous scenes of men talking. And talking. And talking. In fact, you don't even see Hitler's still-living head until the film is almost over. Talk about your wasted opportunities.
The Boys From Brazil: This 1978 film features a real gem of a plot. Dr. Joseph Mengele, the Angel of Death of Nazi concentration camps, has survived and has been feverishly working to clone Hitler himself. In fact, he's created 94 of them. These clones have been placed around the world and raised by families. However, in order to mirror Hitler's childhood, each of the clones fathers have to be killed when they reach age 14, since Hitler lost his own father at that age. The film features terrific performances from Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier, but the Hitler clone is only a background device, and we never get to see an adult Hitler tromping around.
Wonder Woman: In the Wonder Woman episode Anschluss '77, Wonder Woman stumbled onto a ring of Nazis in the 1970s trying to clone Hitler. They manage to pull it off, although the scene where Hitler's body rises up to fill his old uniform is laughable at best. While we love sci fi gadgets that can pump out clones at the flick of a switch, the ghostly resurrection of Hitler looks more like magic than quasi-science. Check out the episode below: the cloning happens about 28 minutes in.
The Hate-Monger: Marvel comics offered up this Hitler clone who used a "Hate-ray" to make love and other emotions turn into hate. Hoo-boy. He even wore a huge "H" belt-buckle, just to make sure you knew he wasn't a loving kind of guy. He also wore a Ku Klux Klan style hood and often exchanged fisticuffs with Captain America.
Sadly, we haven't seen a good book or movie that nails the Hitler clone storyline. In fact, the most evil clone movie that Hollywood has given us was 1996's Multiplicity, featuring Michael Keaton as multiple clones of himself. It's been eleven years, and we're still not able to wash the taste of it from our mouths.