After waiting hours in line and sitting through trailers for gorey slasher films, Twilight fans were rewarded with two clips from the sequel New Moon. Did they get their money's worth? Only if they like staring at half-naked vampires and werewolves.

So here are the clips we watched:

Team Jacob Fanservice

At La Push, a long-haired Jacob is teaching Bella how to ride a dirt bike. As he tells her to release the clutch slowly, she sees an apparition of Edward at the handlebar. She falters, nearly falling off the bike. Jacob is about to halt the lesson, but she says, "Let me try again."

This time, she takes off, but she sees another apparition of Edward, and she watches him as she rides by. Apparently, Jacob's lesson didn't include keeping your eyes on the road and not on phantom ex-boyfriends. She starts to lose control, crying to Jacob for help. "Bank it!" he shouts. "Hit the brake!"

The bike catches on the edge of the path and Bella goes flying face-first into a rock. Jacob hops on his bike and catches up with her. He pulls her up and tsk-tsks, "No more bikes."

Bella touches the blood streaming from her forehead. "Oh, I'm bleeding," she says, and then automatically adds, "I'm sorry."

He gives her a bemused look. "Are you apologizing for bleeding?"

"Oh yeah, I guess I am."

"It's just blood, Bella."

Of course, all this business of blood and rocks is a mere set-up for the most fanservicey moment of the clip, when Jacob pulls off his shirt and just stands there for a moment, showing off all the hours of gym work Taylor Lautner put in for the film. The pause is, I assume, to allow sufficient time for the screaming to die down. Finally, he bends down and uses his shirt to wipe the blood from Bella's brow.

She looks at him dazed with what could be lust or a concussion. "You're so beautiful," she tells him. The audience seems to agree.

And he replies, amused but wary, "How hard did you hit your head?"

Team Edward Fanservice

Alice — looking like an undead Audrey Hepburn in her sun-shielding scarf and glasses — is driving through the narrow streets of Venice, while Bella is having a panic attack in the passenger seat. Bella asks why everyone outside is wearing red robes and Alice explains that it's for the Saint Marcus Day Festival, the perfect opportunity for Edward to reveal himself and provoke the Volturi. When she can't drive any further, she kicks Bella out of the car to chase down Edward. Bella protests, but Alice insists, "You have to do this, Bella. You're the only one he won't see coming."

Bella races through the streets toward the Piazza Grande, shoving red-robed celebrants out her way as she goes. Finally, she reaches the piazza and spots Edward, in the entryway of a building. Slowly, he slips off his dress shirt. His abs are much paler than Jacob's, but the crowd doesn't seem to be complaining. As he steps forward to reveal himself in all his sparkly glory, Bella cries out, "Edward, don't!"

But Team Jacob scored a point during the Q&A session with director Weitz. When asked how filming in Vancouver compared with filming in Portland, Taylor Lautner complained that both places were cold and wet. "Don't get me wrong, they're both beautiful, but it's no fun to be filming there with your clothes off."

Later, in the press roundtables, we were able to talk to director Chris Weitz about stepping into Catherine Hardwicke's shoes. He says:

They're ladylike shoes... There's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing bad about [taking over a franchise from another director], if someone gives you a chance to make a movie that you know a lot of people are going to see. I've inherited a great cast, a book that people love, a screenwriter who adapted the first one successfully and did a great job of taming the huge amount of material from the first one. At first the notion of a male director was a tough sell to fans of the books. Little do they know how much like Bella I actually am. We all identify with being broken up, except for the part where you get them back in the end, it rarely works like that in real life.

We asked Weitz about how he approached the challenge of presenting the Volturi, the ancient vampire society, in the new movie. He said casting was the key piece of that puzzle. "I got a chance to add to this cast, and get Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning, Christopher Heyerdahl (who's an extraordinary Canadian actor) and Jamie Campbell Bowers. If you get actors of that caliber, it's easy for you." As for the look of the Volturi's lair, "I wanted to take every cliche possible, and throw it out. You're not going to see Dracula's castle, and dripping wax, that sort of thing... Or if you do, you'll see it briefly on your way to something totally unexpected."

And did you know that Weitz's grandmother was a silent movie star in Mexico, who starred in the first Spanish-language Dracula movie? So he's a third-generation vampire movie person. (Well, I guess it skipped a generation.)

Also, in the new movie, Lautner finally gets rid of the wig that he had to wear in the first outing. "I was very excited to ditch the wig. I did not have a fun experience with it in the first film." Now, with shorn locks, he can "give some competition to Robert's spectacular hair." As for Bella's hair, Stewart told us:

I think my hair is kind of like this character in the movie. It's flowing, it's good though, because it's untouched. She doesn't want to change, she's so terrified of anything being different. By Breaking Dawn, it's just going to be at my feet.

Here's what's really going on. Big science fiction franchises used to have incredibly complicated storylines. But nowadays, the storylines are simple but the differences between the stories are complex.

Take Superman: there used to be only one version of the Superman saga, stretching back decades and including a super-monkey and a super-horse. But now, you have pre-Crisis and post-Crisis Superman, plus All-Star Superman, Smallville Superman, Donner Superman and whatever new version will appear in the next movie. Each version has a fairly simple story, but you have to have a PhD in geekology to understand where they diverge.

This isn't just an accident caused by different creators wanting to put their stamp on a character. It's a deliberate attempt to appeal to mainstream audiences while giving hardcore fans something to geek out about. Ideally, the average Smallville viewer barely thinks about how the show's version of Clark Kent is different from Christopher Reeve's. But the die-hard minority can spend hours obsessing about the differences, like whether, and at what point, Pa Kent dies.

It's like dog-whistle fanservice, the fine art of sticking in references that will drive fans nuts but go over the head of regular viewers/readers.

When I mentioned pre-Crisis and post-Crisis above, you either nodded your head wisely and thought about Harbinger's ribbed crotch (it represents the striations of the timelines), or you just shrugged at the appearance of more super-babble. But the Crisis On Infinite Earths was arguably the beginning of our current era of faux complexity. In 1986, DC Comics decided its universe was both too silly and too complex, and decided to "reboot" it with a 12-issue miniseries that is now unreadable. (Seriously, it reads like the begats, with tons of random cameos and obscure references.) After the series was done, the universe nearly ended, but instead it restarted, with only one universe instead of a multiverse. But DCU 2.0 wasn't stable, and needed a patch (1995's Zero Hour). In the past few years, the creators have gotten a bit happy with the reboot button, hitting it over and over again in series like Infinite Crisis, 52 and Final Crisis. It's like the universe is constantly blue-screening.

But anyway, the idea behind CIOE was to make things simpler and more friendly to new readers. And at first, this worked reasonably well. Creators like Frank Miller and John Byrne put their stamp on the old-school DC superheroes, and everybody had a clear backstory. Until each new batch of creators wanted to put their own stamp on the characters, and you ended up with things like: "Hawkman is a Native American Egyptian archeologist from outer space."

More importantly, though, fans could spend hours discussing the differences between the pre-Crisis and post-Crisis versions of their favorite characters. The Platonic ideal of the Crisis-break is that it would be opaque to the occasional readers of Superman comics, who would have an easier time reading because they wouldn't have to worry about whether the Composite Superman was still a reverse antimatter proctologist. And the reboot would provide "jumping-on points" for new readers to start reading without worrying that they missed something. It would only be transparent to the detail-obsessed fans.

(A side note: I feel as though in the past, when there were multiple continuities, there was much more of an effort to have the "canon" continuity and the non-canon versions. So you knew the Superman in the comics was really canonical, and other versions didn't "count." Or the Star Trek movies counted but the books didn't. Or something. But now, when you have multiple movie continuities contradicting each other, it's become impossible to keep up with.

Probably the last franchise that seemed to be trying to have one unified continuity was Star Wars, which at least claimed that all of the comics, video games, books and now TV shows were in continuity. George Lucas even said a few times that he would never make any movies after Return Of The Jedi because the post-ROTJ story had already been told in the novels. But even the maniacal SW mono-culture has become a giant tangle, according to "continuity cop" Leland Chee, who laments that George Lucas has a habit of tossing out long-accepted facts when it suits him, and introducing new "facts" like "Anakin built C3PO" Says Chee, "George's view of the universe is his view... He's not beholden to what's gone before.")

So what's the problem? The casual viewers can ignore the differences between Ultimate Spider-Man, Amazing Spider-Man and Tobey Spider-Man, and the fans can obsess about them. And everybody's happy, right?

Sort of. The problem is that the distinction between casual and intensive consumers of geeky culture is breaking down. Take comics: They're meant to be read by kids, especially tweens and teens, and then discarded. There's supposed to be immense turnover among comics readers, so that people reading Zero Hour would never even have read CIOE. The die-hard fans would be aware of the older stories, but not the fickle readers, who were only in it for a few years. The same goes for TV and movies to some extent: superhero and space opera shows and movies are supposed to attract a young, Ritalin-addled audience, who tune out after a few years, because they've started a garage band or gone to college.

But that kind of churn among consumers of escapist entertainment isn't happening the way it used to. Instead, things like Trek and superheroes are going "mainstream," which means it's cool for people to follow them longer term. As regular people stick with these narratives for longer periods, they're likely to become more aware of the endless reboots and revamps and divergences and reinventions. And to some extent, it may be exciting, like a revamped brand — the 2009 Mazda Miata or New And Improved Bounty — but over time, it may start to get annoying. (Which is why I think, in spite of the cruddiness of Spider-Man 3, Sony did the right thing bringing back Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi instead of trying to reboot Spidey.)

The other problem with this endless proliferation of alternate versions is one I alluded to earlier: it's fake complexity. Instead of having stories that are complicated and multi-layered, we can have lots of simplistic stories. You can distract yourself from the limitations of these one-track stories by thinking about how they differ. But that only works for a while. After a time, you get tired of facile storylines with tons of version numbers, and you start to crave one single storyline that gets more elaborate, satisfying and addictive as it goes along. Let's hope Hollywood can take its greasy fingers off the reboot button long enough to give it to us one of these days.

Empowered gets her powers from her costume and her body issues from a lifetime of hanging out with superheroines with perfect physiques. Her continual ability to find herself tied up and gagged by whatever villain happens to be around at the time? That would be down to her initial audience, according to Marvel and DC veteran Warren:

Two years ago, I was plowing my way through a bunch of commissioned sketches for various folks, and hit a streak of, shall we say, "distressed damsel" requests. (Welcome to the exciting world of not having a regular gig in comics or elsewhere, BTW! Gotta earn that cash somehow, baby) Nothing too graphic or very "extreme" about them, but these latter commissions become very tiresome very quickly... So, in place of boringly static sketches of "Wonder Woman runs afoul of her frickin' golden lasso yet again" and the like, I started drawing a series of very short, theoretically humorous "continuity pieces" about a plucky but oft-distressed superheroine, under the obviously ironic title of Empowered... I ended up playing down some of the original version's more "Good Girl" elements, though some of that stuff's still in there... (After all, I still owe those fellas their "distressed damsel" commissions) For the most part, the focus drifted into broader degrees of ribaldry and sex comedy, not to mention general-purpose hammering on the goofier tropes and implications of the superheroic experience.

Speaking to UK showbiz site Digital Spy, Roberts talked about the upside of the WGA strike:

If anything good can come out of the writers' strike in the US, I think it was an opportunity for the Heroes camp to regroup and get back to the type of storytelling that garnered all these fans across the world and to do right by them. I mean the fans put the show where it is and it's only right that the creative element behind it respects that audience and gives them something that is worthy of their respect. I hope that they've had some time to do that — I think they have — and when everybody gets back to work I have no doubt that it's going to be a stellar season.

Admittedly, those ideas centered around renaming the show Zombie DL and the rest of those Heroes, but still... [Digital Spy]

Davison starred in the show the first time it started to inscribe itself with its own past like the amnesiac moron in Memento. He had a whole season of stories featuring only villains from the show's previous 20 years, followed by a past-Doctor convention. After Davison left, the show hired a fan to serve as "consultant" on the sixties and seventies backstory it kept referencing. All that self-indulgence helped lead to the show's death in the late 1980s. To be fair, this short skit is the right place to do a fan-service cameo by Davison. And writer Stephen Moffatt finds a cute way to treat Davison's manic doctor as one "phase" in the development of a single person.

But still. The new Doctor Who has been at its best when it's pretended to be a reinvention instead of a continuation. The revamped Autons, Daleks, Cybermen, Master, Macra and soon Sontarans are becoming yawn-inducing. At a time when Star Wars and Star Trek are both doing the autofellatio of delving into their own pasts, Doctor Who should keep moving forward. So this latest clip, harmless nonsense though it is, is another bad sign.