Nowhere Man, "A Rough Whimper Of Insanity":

This short-lived 1990s show starred Bruce "Captain Pike" Greenwood as a guy who discovers the U.S. Army is being naughty, and suddenly he gets erased from existence. Even his wife no longer knows him. In one episode, "A Rough Whimper Of Insanity," he meets a hacker who can help him discover the truth. (And the episode's title is an anagram of "Information Superhighway." Clever, eh?) First the nice hacker takes Bruce into the virtual world, where he can meet a VR reconstruction of his long-lost wife. He feels the wind on his face and dances with his sweetheart, and it all feels so real... until she fades away. And then later, the duo goes inside the computer architecture and searches for the secret files on what happened to Captain Pike... except that the world starts shaking and falling apart, like an earthquake. It's the bad guys deleting the system! Oh noes!

VR Troopers, "Defending Dark Heart":

The VR Troopers was a sister show to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, about a group of power rangers who fight evil — in the virtual world! In this episode, they get caught in a deadly trap inside virtual reality, which seems to consist of some spikes coming out of the wall. I especially love the way the evil corporate guy clutches a crystal ball to transform himself into his long-haired, evil wrestler persona and return to VR:

Cleopatra 2525, "Reality Check":

Total awesomeness! Cleopatra wakes up and she's back in the year 2001, with her old boyfriend. He tries to convince her that her futuristic life in the year 2525 never really happened, but it turns out she's actually trapped in a virtual reality simulation, and none of it is real! OMG! You can watch the whole episode here, if you're in the correct country:

Transformers Armada, "The Chase":

A bunch of characters you've never heard of, including one named The Rad, get trapped in cyberspace and attacked by Sideways and a guy that looks like Unicron (but isn't, I think). I love that they're biking through cyberspace. Bikes are a common feature in the cyber-world, as you'll discover below. At first, it's just a wacky grid thingy, but then there are planets and moons and weird swirlies and crazy shapes. D00d!

Stargate SG-1, "The Gamekeeper":

Oh wow. This episode has everything. The entire population of a world being kept inside pods and living in virtual reality full time, like in The Matrix? Check. Our heroes get sucked into the VR world too? Check. They're forced to relive their traumatic memories? Check check check, including a trip back to the barbaric era of 1982. And then they escape from the virtual world — only to realize they're still in the VR simulation after all? Check! And finally, the planet's inhabitants don't realize their world is safe to inhabit again, believing it's still ruined by the aftermath of some cataclysm. It's STUFFED WITH GOODNESS!

Doctor Who: Trial Of A Time Lord, "The Ultimate Foe":

We already praised the seminal 1976 story "The Deadly Assassin," where the Doctor travels inside the virtual world of the Matrix for the first time. But Oh. My. Guardians. This 1986 followup is putrid. The Colin Baker version of the Doctor ventures into the Matrix once again, only to find himself in a crappy Dickens Fair adorned with a fugly neon sign, where the evil Valeyard is trying to humiliate him with waiting rooms. And stuff. It's all so the Valeyard can use a "megabyte modem" inside the virtual world to, uh... mess shit up. To be fair, this whole script was written in a weekend after the original writer died, and the replacement writer quit.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Back To The Sewer, "Something Wicked":

The Foot (I think those are the evil ninjas, or else it's some kind of fetish thing) has captured Master Splinter, the Ninja Turtles' teacher, and trapped him in cyberspace. Which is basically like a rotating shiny box in a blue space. Ooh, scary. The Turtles have to venture into the virtual world to rescue Master Splinter before he's, uh, defragmented or something. Did you ever want to see the Turtles act out Tron, complete with glowy blue outfits and lightcycles? Well then, here ya go:

The Adventures Of Lois And Clark, "Virtually Destroyed":

Lex Luthor's illegitimate son is a computer genius, who traps Clark in a virtual world, where his superpowers don't work, and then beats the shit out of him, in an episode written by star Dean Cain himself. And for some reason, being trapped in the virtual world means that Lois and Clark have to share their deepest secrets about their sex lives with each other. Just becuase. Check out this awesome clip from Entertainment Tonight promoting the episode:

Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, "The Tale Of The Renegade Virus":

This may actually be the greatest thing ever. A computer virus becomes sentient and starts stalking a kid with really really bad 1990s hair, to punish him for his evil NKOTB-worshipping ways. The virus not only embeds weird blue gems in the kid's palm, he also rides a little kiddie bicycle (more bikes!) and says things like: "Rule number one: I win, you lose!" And "Going up?" I feel like we don't see enough computer viruses riding teeny bicycles.

Star Trek, "A Fistful Of Datas"

There are so many terrible Trek holo-romps that we could be here all day listing them. (And maybe we'll do that later in the week.) But this is the absolute worst: If I ever go on a killing rampage and slaughter an entire shopping mall full of people with a giant flamethrower, I'm going to blame this episode, and I'll probably be acquitted. Worf and his annoying son Alexander are using the holodeck, playing out some kind of cheesy cowboy fantasy, when Data gets jealous of the holodeck's amazing safety record and decides to prove that he's the most buggy appliance on the Enterprise-D. The result? A whole bunch of cowboy Datas, just inciting me to stage a mall massacre. I love how this Youtube clip has user ratings disabled, for obvious reasons:

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods but Hollywood nabbed lightning from Zeus himself - and here are the ten best ways they've put those thunderbolts to use.

Create Life
This is the one that started it all. Before Frankenstein, lightning was just a handy way to collect some insurance money. After Frankenstein, it could do anything. Although Mary Shelley's novel provided no description of Victor Frankenstein's methods, the classic 1931 film cemented lightning's place in the popular imagination as the giver of life. Part classical Zeus imagery and part flashy spectacle, the revivifying lightning bolt is now inseparable from Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

Save gas on your DeLorean
Great Scott! The entire plot of the first Back to the Future is centered around a lightning strike, necessary to power the DeLorean and send Marty McFly back to… well, you know. Doc Brown's plan to swap lightning for plutonium to get the necessary 1.21 gigawatts is also a clever nod to the history of technobabble – by the 80s, nuclear power had become the all-powerful pseudo-science of choice, but in the 50s lightning was still the dominant fix-it. Which leads to the most dramatic "should've gotten the longer extension cord" moment in all of movie history.

Scramble tv transmissions and DNA samples
Considering Doctor Who's long history with scientific hand-waving, you'd think they'd be old pros at the lightning fixit. But lightning saves the day in only the very lamest of the new series episodes, proving that we are better off with paradox machines and timey wimey detectors after all.

First, the mildly dreadful Idiot's Lantern climaxed with the Doctor clinging to a tv tower while some flashy pink lightning somehow trapped a face-eating television monster inside a Betamax tape. Then a year later, the exuberantly dreadful Daleks in Manhattan two-parter found the Doctor once again struck by lightning while clinging to a tower, this time the Empire State Building, causing his Time Lord DNA to mix with that of the already genetically awkward Human-Dalek hybrids. Somehow this saves the day. I don't know. I really try not to think about these episodes too much, and neither should you. If you want to try to suss it out, here's a clip:

Leap tall buildings in a single bound
It's a fairly established bit of Superman lore that a freak lightning accident can transfer the Man of Steel's powers to an ordinary human – a random Army private in a 1958 comic, a woman who would become electric villain Livewire in The Animated Series, even Lana Lang on Smallville. But my favorite example is Lois & Clark's "A Bolt From The Blue," in which lightning strikes while Superman is stopping a suicide, turning a 90 pound weakling into a 90 pound Hercules. Metropolis's newest superhero charges citizens for his services, asking Lois to print his price list, but in the end everything is put back to normal thanks to that other great scifi fixit – reversing the polarity.

Control lightning itself
The power to control lightning is not as common a side effect as you might think – so leave it to The X-Files to cover the obvious angle for us. Third season episode "D.P.O." features a young man whose lightning strike left him able to harness the power of electricity. Soon, four other men in town are conveniently struck dead by lightning, bringing in our favorite FBI agents so that poor Mulder's cell phone can get zapped as well. Check out the clip below to see Giovanni Ribisi use his powers to defibrillate Jack Black.

Teach robots to love
Yes, yes, we know: Short Circuit's Johnny 5 bears a remarkable resemblance to his adorable robot successor Wall-E. But while Wall-E gained his sentience through years of isolation on the desiccated Earth, Johnny 5's personality burst into life and into our hearts in a bolt of lightning. The lightning itself isn't the interesting part, so here's Johnny 5 busting out the moves with his friend Stephanie.

Help you cheat on tests
Saved By The Bell's Screech was one of the greatest of the tv nerds – you never knew when he was going to fall out of a locker, masquerade as a woman/teacher/alien to further one of Zack's schemes, or get struck by lightning. The wonderfully cheesy Saturday morning sitcom never shied away from patently ridiculous plot devices – see the famous Jessie Spano caffeine pill freakout and, my personal favorite, Zack's 1502 on the SATs – and it only took till the series' third episode for lightning to strike. The bolt hits Screech, of course, who becomes instantly but temporarily clairvoyant, and he uses his newfound lightning-powers to help Zack and the gang cheat on a history exam. Good thing it wasn't earth science!

Magnetize all available metals
You may be seeing Danny Kaye on your tv this time of year in White Christmas, but it was in the 1956 classic The Court Jester that he taught us how lightning can save the day even in vaguely-medieval England. The lead-up to the jousting scene is well-remembered for its impossible tongue twister about the pellet with the poison in the flagon with the dragon, but it wasn't fancy word-play that saved Danny Kaye's neck in the end – just good old-fashioned lightning. The bolt, in all its cheesy 50s special effects glory, magnetizes his suit of armor, giving him that vital edge against his enemy's mace. This is one of the greatest sketches of all time, so if you watch only one of the clips in this article, make it this one.

Magnetize all available non-metals
In another fine instance of random lightning-induced magnetism, Gilligan's Island had good old Gilligan go bowling in a storm and get struck just as he's throwing a strike. Naturally, this causes the bowling ball to become magnetized to Gilligan's hand. If the idea of a rock getting magnetized to a hand sounds implausible to you, just wait for the Professor's explanation at 3:30 on the video, one of the finest feats of technobabble ever recorded. Oh, and when they try to remove the bowling ball? Gilligan turns invisible. Of course.

Score free plastic surgery
And sometimes, lightning just makes you pretty. In a subversion of the classic Frankenstein trope, 1960's monster-family sitcom The Munsters had patriarch Herman Munster – normally green-skinned and bolt-necked like a traditional Frankenstein monster – turn magically, hideously normal after a freak lightning accident in Grandpa's lab. True to family form, the rest of the Munster clan is disgusted by Herman's newly handsome appearance. But fear not! Another lightning strike at the end of the episode turned Herman back into his usual ugly self. Check out the clip to see actor Fred Gwynne in his only appearance as Herman Munster sans make-up.

So next time you walk through a storm, hold your head up high - because if you get struck by lightning, who knows! You just might discover another fantastic power of the sci fi world's greatest fix-it.

Get a Cylon to steal some ballots. When President Roslin was about to lose the election to Gaius Baltar, she decided desperate times called for under-handed measures. She gave her aide, the secret Cylon Tory Foster, permission to steal a box of ballots and replace them. It would have worked, but for the eagle-eyed Felix Gaeta and the uncharacteristically squeamish Bill Adama.

Kill the other candidate in a virtual world. It worked for the Doctor, in the Doctor Who story "The Deadly Assassin." To make a long story short, the Doctor put himself forward as a candidate for the presidency of his home planet, Gallifrey, to escape from trumped up charges of murdering the last president. The Doctor won the election by default — because during the campaign, he took some time out to meet up with his opponent in the Matrix, a virtual dreamscape, and slaughter him ruthlessly. (Serves the guy right for being named Chancellor Goth. What's next? Mayor Emo?) The Doctor didn't actually claim the presidency until a year later, when he decided the best way to prevent an invasion of Gallifrey was by helping the invaders take over, and THEN defeating them. Despite being the only president to turn his inauguration into a party for marauding tinfoil monsters, the Doctor was popular enough that the Gallifreyans begged him to take office again.

Brainwash everybody in the country via telepathic satellite. It worked for the Master, the Doctor's nemesis, on Doctor Who. Maybe because the Master was so impressed by the Doctor's election-stealing prowess, the Master stepped up his game and got himself elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, thanks to the Archangel satellite network broadcasting pro-Master messages into people's brains.

Brainwash everybody in the country via telephone. Satellite too high-tech for you? There's always Ma Bell. That's what worked for Tempus, an escaped alien psychopath, who came to Earth under the fake name John Doe and ran for president in Lois And Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman. Tempus used his amazing alien technology to control everyone's minds via telephone, making everyone think he was a "darn nice guy." Everybody voted for him — except those telephone-hating Amish people.

Replace both candidates with green slimy aliens. As various commenters pointed out, I somehow forgot to include Kang and Kodos in my roundup — how could I have forgotten them? Finally, two candidates who behave with a modicum of decency and respect towards each other. So what if they're evil monster guys? What are you going to do — vote for a third-party candidate? Oh, and they're from the Simpsons.

Hit everybody in the country with an Acid trip. It sort of worked for the Brotherhood of Dada, enemies of the Doom Patrol. Their leader, Mr. Nobody, decided to run for president, and harnessed the power of Number None, who's a hallucinogenic bicycle linked to the discovery of LSD. (This was when writer Grant Morrison was doing a LOT of drugs, I think.) The Brotherhood traveled around the country in a psychedelic bus, causing acid trips, and finally went on television to spread the Dada message.

Something similar worked for Max Frost in the campy 1968 movie Wild In The Streets — he got elected president partly by spiking the D.C. water supply with LSD. When he won in a landslide, he passed a new law saying everyone over 30 had to live in retirement homes and do LSD every day. Far out, baby!

Discover a parallel world which solves all our problems. In the Philip K. Dick novel The Crack In Space, Jim Briskin is running to be the first black president of the United States — in 2080. (That's optimism for you.) Briskin's campaign gets a tremendous boost when a gateway opens to a parallel Earth, where humans never evolved. It's the perfect solution to the overpopulation problem, and Briskin capitalizes on it. (This one's a bit iffy, but I still like it.)

Manipulate probability itself to make the improbable happen. In the Justice League of America comic, Dr. Julian September split seven photons, and discovered that he'd managed to destroy their synchronicity, allowing him to manipulate probability to his liking. Among other things, this allowed him to become president of the United States and win a Nobel Prize. Eventually the Justice League found those photons and rejoined them.

Use telepathy. In Marvel's New Universe comics, a supervillain known as Philip Nolan Voigt, aka Overshadow, used his telepathic abilities to be come the president of the United States in the 1988 election. His running mate? A mind-controlled puppet Mike Dukakis. (Probably the only way Dukakis could look presidential, actually.)

Disguise a whole bunch of candidates as one candidate. That way, you get one composite candidate who's better prepared, and more well-rounded, than any one person. That's how they cheat in the story "The Election," by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Shaara. In the year 2066, a computer called Uncle Sam administers a series of tests to find the person who's most qualified to become U.S. President. But the presidency has become so complex, the computer can no longer find anyone who's qualified. So the authorities secretly have a bunch of experts in different fields take the test in their subjects, and pretend to be one super-qualified person.

A similar stunt worked great in a novel I read years ago, but now can't find any information on, including the title. A group of identical clones run for president and pretend to be one person, dazzling crowds with their multi-faceted brilliance.

Get someone who knows how to control machines with his mind. That's what Linderman did on Heroes, to ensure that Nathan Petrelli became a U.S. Congressman at the end of the first season. Micah, the kid who can make any machine do his bidding, interfaced with the electronic voting system and added a quadrillion extra votes for Nathan. Because who would ever vote for "flying man" otherwise?

Implant a brain chip in your candidate that lets you tweak his message in real time. Can't believe I forgot this one, since it's one of my fave novels — thanks to Fanfilmbook (among others) for bringing it up. In the novel Interface, which Neal Stephenson co-wrote with his uncle George Jewsbury, Illinois governor William Cozzano suffers a stroke and a shadowy business coalition called the Network has a chip implanted in him. Ostensibly, it's to heal him from his stroke, but it actually allows the Network to control what he's saying in real time. If his speech isn't going over well with audiences, they can jolt him in a different direction. Puppet candidate FTW!

Hack the vote. The scenario in Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is a bit hard to swallow — who would ever believe that people would trust electronic voting machines with no paper audit trail? Nevertheless, that's what happens in the lunar election, allowing the supercomputer Mike to steal the vote in favor of his libertarian buddies. Something similar worked for Robert A. Booth, the final president of the United States, who won reelection in the Judge Dredd comics by sabotaging the voting computers. Luckily, it could never happen in real life.

Additional reporting by Katharine Duckett.

TV Guide reports that Mack still hasn't signed on for season eight. She was using Rosenbaum's departure as leverage, because the studio knows if they lose her, there aren't very many characters left. Michael Ausiello quotes one insider:

If Allison leaves, they've essentially got Lois and Clark left... And that show's been done before.

In fact, the writers will be really screwed if Chloe leaves the show. Who's going to further the plot with her witty reporting and computer hackery? Who will Clark save every now and again when they introduce a pointless, one-episode villain? But most important, who's going to give Jimmy Olsen some lovin'? Sorry it doesn't matter how many Doomsdays you bring in, if Chloe leaves it's only a matter of time before the real money makers walk out the door... oh wait, he already did. [TV Guide]

The comparison between this weekend's season premieres of Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who does the latter no favors, unfortunately. BSG was all fresh, dark and conspiracy-minded, with lots of throat-cutting and screaming action. Who was at its absolute campiest, schlocky and backward-looking. It honestly felt kind of old-school compared with BSG.

As with the old Lois and Clark Superman series, the new Doctor Who tries to invert the traditional Doctor-companion relationship, putting the companion in the starring role. And as with Lois and Clark, the device feels a bit hollow, because the Doctor is still the one we're invested in, the person who saves the day.

The shocking twist this time around is that the companion, Donna, isn't in love with the Doctor. She pursues him and desperately needs him to fill an emptiness in her life — but it's a need for adventure, not love. It's not as much of a difference as I'd hoped, because her life is still totally worthless without the Doctor, as we're shown at great length. The only reason she's even investigating the evildoings of Adipose is because she hopes the Doctor will show up there too.

Whether you think this new spin on the Doctor-companion dynamic is enough to sustain a whole season may depend largely on how much you like the clip above, where the Doctor and Donna have a mimed reunion while they're both spying on the same barely-a-supervillain. My sympathies are entirely with Miss Foster, who wants to know if her evil scheme is interrupting their long ASL processing conversation. But to be fair, the plot of "Partners In Crime" is so thin, there's not that much for the Doctor and Donna to interrupt.

Speaking of being fair, I made a resolution last year, after I watched the end of season three — the bit where the Doctor suddenly returns to youth after being aged 900 years — and levitates — because everyone on Earth believes in him. That moment was simultaneously so amazing, and yet so awful, that it totally destroyed my critical faculties. I decided that you can't really judge Russell T.'s work based on any normal standards of good or bad. You just have to take it on its own terms.

But even if you judge "Partners In Crime" on its own terms, as a "jolly romp," it's just barely okay. It doesn't quite ever muster enough verve to be a real romp. And the jollity is a bit forced. A lot of the clever bits feel a bit rehashed, as if Russell T. is running through his greatest hits. Especially the relationship between Donna and her mom, who feels entirely like a stock character made up of pieces of Jackie and Martha's mother. And the main plot, with the fat people who make farting noises and then have babies burst out of them, is literally a rehash of the Slitheen. Except that this time it's not evil aliens pretending to be fat people, it's innocent fat people who give birth to evil aliens. And the alien babies are actually babies this time, instead of just looking baby-like.

I take comfort in the fact that the previous two season openers were also paper-thin: the one in the hospital with the cat-nuns, where the hospital gets sealed off and there's an evil secret. And the one in the hospital with the Judoon, where the hospital gets sealed off and there's an evil secret. Russell T. has a record of tossing out his fluffiest episode first, and then getting into the heavier stuff later. And indeed, everyone who's seen next week's Pompeii episode says it's miles better than the army-of-babies one, with Donna actually showing more emotional range.

Meanwhile, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the episode sets up some mysteries for the season's overall arc. The main one, of course, is the Rose-ghost whom Donna tells about the car keys in the rubbish bin. (Which, if I was Donna's mom, would be grounds for disowning her, by the way.) Then there's also the question of where Miss Foster got her own version of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, but there's a good chance we'll never find out. And then it's possible there's some significance to the fact that Donna and her grandfather Wilf both met the Doctor separately, a year apart. But it's probably just a coincidence. (And why wasn't Wilf at the wedding anyway?)

But, yes, it was a jolly romp, and it was nice to see David Tennant jutting his chin and shouting, "Oh, yes!" again. And a still-impressive 8.4 million Brits tuned in. So even if you hope (like me) that we're reaching the tail end of the RTD era of Who, the phenomenon still seems to be going strong. And I'm pretty sure there are better episodes ahead. What did you think?