Variety reports that Lionsgate is moving forward with The Panopticon, a spec script by Lost story editor Craig Rosenberg, who also penned the American version of the South Korean psychological horror film The Uninvited. Lionsgate has tapped The Haunting in Connecticut's Peter Cornwell to direct.

The elevator pitch is that a salesman receives a pre-recorded message from himself saying he is the only one who can prevent the impending apocalypse. But the script has been floating around fro a while, and FirstShowing's Ethan Anderton promises there's more to the movie than meets the eye:

Without ruining too much of the story (having read the script) the conflict comes from not knowing exactly who to trust as the "good guys," including the main character himself. Plenty of twists and turns make for an edge-of-your seat kind of experience that should make for some very fresh entertainment after it goes into production next year. A saving-the-world plotline might seem a bit heavy handed nowadays, but believe me, this is one of those stories that you'll want to keep untainted until it hits theaters.

Peter Cornwell Directing New Sci-Fi Thriller 'The Panopticon' [FirstShowing]

Witnesses throughout Northern Norway reported seeing a bright object spinning through the sky this morning, forming a brilliant spiral. According to air traffic reports, the phenomenon lasted for two minutes, too long to be an astronomical event, and it doesn't resemble any previously reported aurora.

So what caused the mysterious spiral? No one is sure, but the prevailing theory is fairly mundane. Several astronomers are speculating that an errant, spiraling rocket is responsible. Since no rockets were fired from the local Andøya Rocket Range this morning, the hypothetical rocket may have come from Russia.

Or, as one poster on Reddit suggests, it could just be the Sliders breaking into our universe:

[VG Nett (Translated) via Reddit]

BBC Northern Ireland is currently developing the five-hour series, which stars Tamzin Outhwaite as Detective Inspector Rebecca Flint and Emun Elliott as Dr. Christian King. After a series of images are sent to King's laboratory from space, he realizes that they hint at a devastating incident — one that has not happened yet. He teams up with Detective Flint to solve the mystery behind the images and try to prevent the catastrophe from occurring.

"We knew there was an appetite for a big, bold, fresh take on the cop show," explains Murray Ferguson, chief executive of Clerkenwell Films. "Something that might be different from the traditional formula of investigating a crime that has already taken place.

"So, we began to consider what if we could find a means of telling that story in reverse? Is there an original and credible way of a police team finding themselves with the knowledge of crimes or disasters happening in the future? We wanted the show to feel like it really could happen in the world we all know."

But the writers claim that we'll get some actual science mixed with our cop drama, and they've hired astrophysicist Margaret Aderin to consult on the theories behind the show's titular paradox. There's no date yet for Paradox, but the series will air as five individual episodes.

Behind the scenes of BBC's upcoming sci-fi series Paradox [The Geek Files]

Oh, and there are spoilers in this review, mostly for the first third of the book.

Rosemary And Rue is the first book in the October Daye series, about a half-fairy, half-human detective who solves crimes at the intersection between the magic and mundane. At least, that's what happens in this first book, which involves shape shifters, sea witches, the king of cats, and a gun that shoots iron bullets (which are deadly to fairies.) McGuire's version of San Francisco, with fairie kingdoms hidden all over the Bay area and pixies hiding in Golden Gate Park, is genuinely enchanting, especially when she's bringing out the downsides of magic being everywhere. At one point, our hero, October, visits the court of the Faerie Queen, who transforms her T-shirt and jeans into a ballgown — and then doesn't change them back, forcing October to slog through mud and crime scenes wearing an impractical gown that gets increasingly muddy.

We were talking about noir fantasy a while back, and Rosemary And Rue isn't really that noir — it's more like classic urban fantasy with a murder mystery. It's not quite paranoid, dark or morally gray enough to be noir, and McGuire's characters are mostly fundamentally nice, with a few nasty quirks here and there.

Rosemary And Rue starts out with a bang, one of the best openings to a novel I've read in ages: October "Toby" Daye is working as a private detective on a case for her lead, Sylvester Torquill, whose wife and daughter have been kidnapped. Toby is tailing a suspect, Sylvester's brother Simon, and she calls her human husband and mostly human daughter to let them know she'll be late coming home. And then she follows Simon into a trap — with help from a sinister ally, he turns October into a fish, and traps her in the koi pond in Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden. She stays there for the next fourteen years, until the spell finally wears off and she changes back.

Toby's husband and daughter want nothing to do with her because they think she abandoned them. And she's ashamed of her failure, so she can't go back to her friends in Faerie. Instead, she takes a job on the graveyard shift at the Safeway (when her magic can conceal her fairy features most easily) and keeps to herself. Until one of her closest friends in Faerie gets murdered and puts a binding on October — either she finds out who the killer was and brings them to justice, or she'll die too. Solving the murder, of course, means returning to the world of the fae, which is full of dark corners and deadly surprises.

The great strength of Rosemary And Rue is in its worldbuilding: Faerie San Francisco feels like a real city, and it's not hard to imagine that mythical creatures and magical glamours lurk in every alley in SOMA and behind every tree in Golden Gate Park, and super-powerful mystical forces are living in rent-controlled apartments in the Tenderloin. Every relationship in Faerie turns out to be fraught with obligations — everybody owes debts to each other, which are viewed as the worst kinds of encumbrances, and there's a taboo on saying "thank you," lest you inadvertently take on another constricting debt.

The other great thing about Rosemary And Rue is that October is a great fantasy heroine, from her contentious relationship with her cats to her many tormented Loves That Can Never Be. She's caught between her fairie and human heritage, and can never really be at home in either culture. Plus — and this is the closest the novel comes to being noir-tinged — half-blooded fairy hybrids, like October, face discrimination and mistreatment at the hands of a magical world that views them as inferior, or even worse, as a abominations. The novel is full of these cast-off, mistreated and misbegotten "changelings," and October is the biggest underdog of them all — despite having been knighted for past gallantry, that we only dimly hear about.

After exploring McGuire's fairy city for one dark murder mystery, I'm on board for more, and looking forward to seeing how October's tangled web of allegiances and obligations plays out over the course of the next few books.

Now for the bad news: Rosemary And Rue has a couple of serious flaws, on top of occasionally cheesy writing. First of all, it works much better as an urban fantasy tale than as a murder mystery: October is a terrible detective, who mostly stumbles around making a target of herself until the bad guys finally take a shot at her. She doesn't do all that great a job of collecting leads, frequently ignores the most obvious line of investigation, and needs others to point out the obvious to her. And there's really only ever one suspect in the murder who makes sense, so it's not much of a shock when it turns out to be that person.

And the other major problem is that McGuire tries so hard to make Rosemary the first book in a series, it falls a bit flat at times as a stand-alone novel. The book has an enormous, sprawling supporting cast, and October has a lengthy, involved backstory with every single one of them. There were a few moments where I thought I must have missed a page, because the narrator starts talking about a character whom she's got a history with — and then I realized the book hadn't mentioned this character before. Long after you think you've met all of October's old frenemies, the book keeps bringing in new characters who aren't new to October. And this usually means the story has to grind to a halt for a few pages, while October spoonfeeds us more stuff that happened before the book began. At times, this feels like the tenth book in a series, rather than the first. There are almost no characters in the book whom October doesn't already know.

Despite both of those issues — which feel a bit like "first novel" pains — I'm still a huge fan of the universe McGuire has created, and eager to become more acquainted with her city of fairies, rose goblins and kelpies.

Along with Karl Kerschl, of the previously mentioned The Abominable Charles Christopher, Cameron Stewart is part of Transmission X, a small collective of enormously talented professional comics artists who are trying their hand (with great success, I might add) at webcomics. Stewart has, among other things, provided artwork for Catwoman, Grant Morrison's Seaguy, the Eisner-nominated Vietnam series The Other Side, and the high-energy, post-apocalyptic punk rock book The Apocalipstix.

In Sin Titulo (or simply, Untitled), Stewart puts on his writer hat as well, telling the story of Alex Mackay, an emotional dysfunctional young fellow about to spiral down the rabbit hole. Alex has been having a strange recurring dream, one in which he sees a dead, gnarled tree on a beach. Sometimes he sees someone on the beach, but the image is never clear, and he always wakes before he can see who it is.

He gives little thought to the dream until one day when he goes to visit his grandfather in the retirement home, only to discover that he's been dead a month. And, when he goes through his grandfather's effects, he discovers a recent photograph of his grandfather with an attractive young woman, a woman Alex has never seen before. When he asks the retirement staff about the picture, however, their strange and terse reactions make him suspect that something sinister is at work. As he begins to investigate the woman in the picture and Wesley, the retirement home's menacing orderly, Alex is quickly drawn into a series of ever-deepening mysteries involving coma patients, murder, teleportation, and the mysterious tree, and finds his life, liberty, and girlfriend all placed in jeopardy.

Stewart is well-versed in the language of comics, and Sin Titulo is at its very least a prime example of expert visual scripting. Each episode is set in a rigid eight-panel structure that neatly conveys the suspense and noir tone of the series, and that Stewart can so easily convey small emotional shifts through his thick black lines makes it fantastically jarring when a character displays genuinely intense emotion.

Sin Titulo is far grittier than most webcomics currently running, and when violence occurs, it's not the stylized violence of many comics, but very real, very present violence. Characters get beat up, get in car accidents, and when they do, their bones break and blood gets everywhere. When a punch becomes a frightening thing, characters who throw them become all the more terrifying, as with the squat, muscular orderly — even before we get the sense there may be something supernatural to him. This sense of realism pervades the comic; cubicles, diners, hospital rooms are all stark and unfriendly, but utterly familiar.

But what makes reading Sin Titulo an intriguing and unnerving experience is the way Stewart, borrow a page from the likes of David Lynch, juxtaposes this realism with the fantastical. On panel, we see plenty of punches thrown, but off-panel, we learn that characters have been ripped to shreds. Alex's vivid childhood memories are haunted by a monstrous apparition, and he begins to encounter surreal visuals: a network of cinderblock rooms where the blond woman speaks over a monitor and an old telephone, and a beach front dinner setting , where a blindfolded waiter serves up an unappetizing crustacean. And then there's the fact that Alex isn't the only one visiting the beach and seeing the mysterious dead tree.

Sin Titulo is not a comic for those who like quick and satisfying answers to their mysteries. Just as Alex's head has stopped spinning from the latest series of unexplained developments, a new wrinkle emerges. But for those willing to sit back and watch the story unfold and the protagonist unravel, it's a well-paced and often unsettling read.

[Sin Titulo]

I'm pretty much a noir addict, especially the works of Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Stark and MacDonald. (I also loved Frank Miller's Sin City comics, back in the day.) There's tons of science fiction noir out there, but it's rare for an SF book to hit my noir sweet spot quite as well as Hammond's first two novels, KOP and Ex-KOP. Hammond avoids any hint of pastiche or satire in his tale of over-the-hill bruiser Juno Mozambe. And he never makes Mozambe remotely loveable or even cool. Mozambe's just as revolting and broken as the world he inhabits.

That's the world of Lagarto, an Earth colony that's gotten royally screwed over by the rest of the human race. It's sort of a New Orleans-esque place, mixed with some third-world country. Lagarto's brandy-making industry collapsed years ago, taking the planet's economy with it, and now all that's left is tourism and vice, which usually turn out to be the same thing. Offworlders come to Lagarto and treat it like their own private playground, and all the locals are corrupt, from the slumdogs of Tenttown to the local money-skimming elites. In a neat metaphor for Lagarto's fuckedness, the steamy planet includes particularly aggressive flies that lay their eggs inside of an open wound within seconds. Any time people get injured, or even nicked, they'll have maggots breeding inside their wounds in no time. There's also something called "the rot" that can eat you alive if you're not careful.

When we first Mozambe, he's a bag-man for the police department, going around collecting protection money from brothels, smack dealers and gambling parlors. He kids himself that he, and the corrupt squad he works with, are helping to keep the city safe by working with organized crime and preventing the city's criminals from running amuck. But Mozambe's just kidding himself, plus the nice stable crime organization he's used to working with is on its way out, and nothing but chaos and worsening corruption are coming in its place. Good honest poppy farming and ass peddling are giving way to snuff films and human trafficking. Mozambe's a dinosaur, increasingly unable to throw his weight around the way he used to. By the second book, Mozambe is pretty much a punching bag for all the lowlifes he used to terrorize. (But it's not much of a spoiler to say Mozambe always comes out on top, mostly because he's still more vicious and cunning than everyone else.)

At times, you could almost kid yourself you're reading a regular noir detective story, because Lagarto is a low-tech backwater, where criminals and cops both use knives and fists a lot of the time. But Hammond uses science-fictional elements to add to the bleakness and paranoia, rather than just at random. The offworld visitors to Lagarto are perfect physical specimens, with lily white skin and chiseled physiques in contrast to the locals, who are all mixed-race and show their ages. The offworlders frequently have enhanced muscles, super-genitals and built-in defenses (like electrocution and poison claws) making them almost impossible to beat in a fair fight. Pretty much every offworlder we meet is a sadistic fuck, who toys with the locals for temporary amusement.

And there are other science fiction touches, as well. Like the holograms people use to communicate, which always wear an eerily happy face no matter how freaked out or pissed off the person's voice may be. And the occasional bits of surveillance technology that the hardscrabble cops manage to scare up.

The main glimmer of optimism in both novels comes from Maggie Orzo, a spoiled rich girl who becomes a police officer and tries to convince Mozambe to help clean up the sewer of the police department. She's young and idealistic, but you also never forget that she's almost as privileged and sheltered as those psychotic perfect offworlders.

Both KOP and Ex-KOP are super fast reads, with enough brutality and corruption to keep you riveted, while they still offer up the occasional glimmer of hope that Mozambe (and Lagarto) can be redeemed. You can probably read either book in one or two sittings. A warning, though: They're not especially well-written, and KOP in particular has some super clunky exposition. At his absolute worst, Hammond doesn't just tell instead of showing. He tells, and then he tells using slightly different words, and then he comes back a page or two later and tells again a couple more times. At his best, his writing is pulpy and cheesetastic, as in this scene, where a kinky pornstar is trying to seduce Mozambe (unsuccessfully):

"Ooh, is it interrogation time?" Liz turned on her "Liz Lagarto: Porn Star" persona. "I don't know anything about any of that, offither." She little-girl lisped the word officer...

I felt weak as I took in her parted lips, her jasmine-smelling hair, her erect nipples... "I said stop it." The words came out limp, as another part of me was becoming anything but.

Really, the writing is no worse than a hundred other detective novels. I used to consume crime fiction like popcorn, and I've encountered far worse prose. The saving grace of KOP and Ex-KOP are the unrepentant nastiness of Mozambe - even when he's trying to be a better person, he expresses it by being a foul bastard - and the slow spectacle of this lifelong asskicker becoming the world's hacky sack. Plus the unrelentingly cruel worldbuilding that goes into Lagarto, which is dystopian and unrelentingly horrible, and almost beyond saving. Supposedly, Hammond is working on a third Mozambe book, and I'm totally on board. [Amazon]

He’s an Alien

Star Trek “Wolf in the Fold”: Psycho author Robert Bloch reinterprets one of his favorite subjects as an alien force. Redjac is a parasite that bonds to humanoid organisms, compelling them to commit crimes so it could feed on fear and pain. Redjac was responsible for the Ripper murders as well as serial killings in Shanghai, Kiev, and the Martian colonies.

Doctor Who “Matrix”: The Time Lord known as the Valeyard travels to 1888 London and takes on the identity of Jack the Ripper. He uses the Ripper murders to power the Dark Matrix, the computer that harbors all the Time Lords’ evil impulses. He plans to unleash the Dark Matrix on the universe and transform it into an unimaginable nightmare. (Jack the Ripper also showed up in an unfilmed script for the 1996 Who TV movie.)

The Outer Limits “Ripper”: When prostitutes start turning up dead, the police suspect John York, a drug-addicted daughter whose misdiagnosis lead to the death of the duke’s daughter. But Dr. York realizes the truth is more horrifying than the police could possibly imagine: an alien force is taking possession of prostitute’s bodies, killing them each time it jumps to a new host.

He Escaped into the Future

Time After Time by Karl Alexander: Around the time he unveils his time machine, HG Wells begins to suspect (correctly) that his friend, John Leslie Stevenson, is Jack the Ripper. Stevenson steals the time machine and Wells follows him to the year 1979. The murderous Stevenson fits into modern life far better than Wells does, and continues his bloody crimes.

“A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch: Rather than escape, Jack is pulled into a hedonistic future against his will by Juliette, a woman named for the character invented by the Marquis de Sade. Juliette kidnaps historical figures and then gleefully murders them, but Jack isn’t having any of it. In Harlan Ellison’s follow-up, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” the serial killer is driven mad by a populace no longer shocked by his sexuality and violence.

Babylon 5 “Comes the Inquisitor”: Harlan Ellison contributed to this episode, in which it is revealed that the Vorlons employ an inquisitor, a human male named Sebastian who is especially capable of inflicting violence without remorse. Sheridan learns that Sebastian, known to history only as “Jack,” was abducted from London in 1888 on the very day after the Ripper committed his final murder.

He Escaped to America

Batman “Gotham by Gaslight”: When murders mirroring the Ripper killings start happening in 1888 Gotham City, everyone suspects Bruce Wayne, who has just returned from Europe and cannot account for his nocturnal whereabouts. (The graphic novel is an "Elseworlds," putting Batman in an unfamiliar context.) Strangely, no one suspects Jacob Packer, Wayne’s misogynistic lawyer who also took a recent European vacation. In a different "Elseworlds" book, the Joker takes the place of Jack the Ripper, cutting smiles into the faces of his victims.

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” by Robert Bloch: In Bloch’s earliest Jack the Ripper story, the Ripper doesn’t commit violence for its own sake; his murders function as a sacrifice to dark, Lovecraftian gods, who grant him eternal youth for his blood offerings. After using the five London prostitutes to work his ritual, he travels to America to enjoy his immortality.

Cloak and Dagger “Predator and Prey”: Jack the Ripper slips off to America to quietly continue his crimes. He dies when a church collapses on his head, but his soul continues on in the Darkforce Dimension, ready to be unleashed on the world at the Predator’s will.

He was Driven Insane by Supernatural Forces

Sanctuary: John Druitt is part of a circle of scientists in Victorian London who inject themselves with vampire blood. The injection gives him the ability to travel through space and time, but each jump comes with sanity-crippling brain damage. Soon the maddened Druitt is beyond help, murdering prostitutes in Whitechapel.

Anno Dracula by Kim Newman: In an alternate England in which Count Dracula has married Queen Victoria and turned London into a vampire society, Jack the Ripper is murdering vampire prostitutes. And this Jack is none other than Dr. John Steward of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, driven mad by the turning of Lucy Westenra and driven to kill the vampire women who remind him of her.

He Wanted to Keep Women Down

From Hell by Alan Moore: Queen Victoria’s royal physician William Gull saw the Masonic God Jahbulon during a stroke. As a result, when the queen asks him to deal with a group of blackmailing prostitutes, Gull believes that he is making sacrifices on the alter of Victorian London that will shape a male-dominated 20th Century. And his forays into mental time travel only strengthen that belief.

Wonder Woman “Amazonia”: In another "Elseworlds," Jack Planters is an American cousin to the members of England’s royal family. He follows up his murder of five prostitutes with the decimation of the royal family, making himself the king of England and making female subservience the height of proper etiquette.

He’s a Monster of a Different Kind

Amazon Women on the Moon: In one segment of the channel-surfing sketch comedy film, an Unsolved Mysteries-style show explores the possibility that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, a certain elusive sea monster:

Justice League of America “The Island of Dr. Moreau”: In anohter "Elseworlds," Dr. Moreau’s experiments create a team of superpowered human/animal hybrids: a cheetah Flash, wolf Wonder Woman, and porcupine “Black” Arrow. When the group succeeds in tracking down Jack the Ripper, they are horrified to discover that he is the first of Moreau’s experiments, an uplifted orangutan who seeks to use Moreau’s technique to transform men into beasts.

X-Men: The Animated Series “Descent”: Mad scientist Nathaniel Essex created for himself a minion, Jack, to procure mutant organs for him. Essex would use the mutant DNA of Jack’s victims to transform himself into Mr. Sinister.

Special Unit 2 “The Beast”: The serial killer known as Jack the Ripper was actually a “Link,” one of the evolutionary gaps between humans and apes. This Link in particular is an ogre, who uses injections to become human and control his murderous instincts. But when the serum wears off, the Ripper resurfaces in modern day Chicago.

He’s the Good Guy

A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny: Accompanied by his faithful familiar, Snuff, the sorcerer Jack must commit grisly acts in the service of his magic. But his ultimate goal is to protect the world from the Elder Gods, who threaten to burst through the gateway into our world on Halloween.

USA Today, New Scientist, the awesome astronomy blog Bad Astronomy and the BBC and Nature and just about every sciency news outlet all have items devoted to the centennial. But they disagree on what the Tunguska Event was. USA Today calls it an "impact,' but Bad Astronomy says "air blast" and says there's no evidence anything hit the ground. New Scientist has posted a video in which their reporter circles Lake Cheko nearby the blast site in a helicopter and speculates whether it's the smoking gun of an impact.

What's going on here? Tunguska is probably the most heavily studied impact/air blast/space rock encounter on Earth and we know almost nothing about how it happened. It's also hard to say how likely it is that it will happen again, though one scientist's guess isn't comforting:

In terms of risk to Earth, astronomer David Morrison of NASA's Ames Research Center says a Tunguska-magnitude strike could happen once every two centuries and a bigger impact, a "civilization-threatening" million-megaton strike, could happen once every 2 million years. Even though astronomers have spotted more of these nearby asteroids in the last two decades, the estimated odds of an impact have actually declined, as Morrison notes in a May issue of NEO News, his asteroid newsletter.

If Morrison's right, we've got at best another century to learn as much as we can from Tunguska before another similar event hits home — maybe less. And in the mean time, we'll have plenty of close calls reminding us that we are basically sitting ducks unless we start doing something about one of the greatest threats to our survival as a civilization.

• Show creator Chris Carter hadn't had much success in television writing, having written mostly comedies and worked for The Disney Channel, before he was offered a chance to create shows for Fox.
• Carter was inspired to delve into the mysterious world of The X-Files by both the Watergate scandal, the old television show Kolchack: The Night Stalker, and a report that was circulating around 1992 that said 3.7 Americans "may have been abducted by aliens."
• Originally, Fox executives wanted someone blonder with big boobs instead of Gillian Anderson. Thankfully they didn't win that fight.
• The company Carter formed to run the production was called Ten Thirteen Productions, after his October 13th birthday. Sound Designer Thierry Couturier's son says the "I made this" over the company logo.
• Fox left Carter and his production team alone for the most part during the first season because they were putting a lot of time and effort into The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Now, as a Bruce Campbell fan, I have to say I loved that show, and I'm glad it was able to take some heat off of The X-Files.
• The writing staff didn't want to follow Carter's all-alien abduction storylines, especially since the UFO show Sightings was airing on Fox. As a result, the show "Squeeze" with the creepy guy who ate livers, hibernated for 30 years and had Plastic Man like stretching abilities became a template for the "freak of the week" style the show eventually adopted.
• Besides the pilot episode, Carter also wrote "Space" during the first season, which was about a ghost in the Space Shuttle program. It was extremely expensive to make, and Carter calls it "one of the worst hours ever produced for the show."
• The show often fought for its life during the first season, having low ratings and a Friday night timeslot. Despite finishing 102nd out of the 118 programs in the Nielsens that year, it was picked up for a second season. This is why the season one finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask" has the X-Files being shut down, and Mulder and Scully being reassigned.
• The X-Files' opening sequence was nominated for an Emmy, and the theme song was remixed and became a hit in dance clubs in the UK, Australia, and France.
• The legendary writing team of Morgan and Wong, who were also co-executive producers, wrote many of the best episodes in the first season, although they left in season two to produce their own show Space: Above and Beyond. Sadly it tanked after one season, although Morgan and Wong didn't return to The X-Files until season four.
• The show didn't actually show an alien until the "Little Green Men" episode in season two.
• Gillian Anderson was pregnant throughout season two, and the producers decided to hide the fact by having her behind a desk or a medical exam table most of the time. It helped that she'd been transferred to Quantico to teach.
• By the end of season two, the show had climbed to 64th out of 141, although it was gaining cult status and spreading fast by word of mouth. The show had also spread beyond the U.S. borders, and was one of the most popular TV shows in the world, outside of the country.
• The show was also named the best show on TV by Entertainment Weekly that year, and also won a Golden Globe for best drama.
• However, the show was still so budget strapped that they couldn't afford location filming, and in the episode "Ascension," a rock quarry had to be painted to look like the desert of the American Southwest.
• Season three brought on a cavalcade of comedy, and a slew of guest stars including Alex Trebek, Jesse Ventura, Giovanni Ribisi, J.T. Charles Nelson Reilly, Walsh, R. Lee Ermey and Jack Black.
• Guest star Peter Boyle won an Emmy for his portrayal of a man who could predict death in the episode Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, and the show also won for best writing.
• The show went on to win five Emmys that year, and Gillian Anderson won a Screen Actors Guild Award. By now The X-Files was here to stay.
• Season four premiered to their highest ratings ever, and Carter's new show Millenium (set in the X-Files universe) was put on Friday nights, so they moved The X-Files to Sunday night.
• By the fall of 1996, it was the most popular show on Fox, and Fox got the rights to broadcast the Superbowl. So, they decided to feature an episode right after the game, and "Leonard Betts" (about the guy who could regrow his body) received the highest ratings ever for an X-Files episode. More awards and kudos followed.
• Season Five opened to even bigger ratings, and the show was supposed to end there and become a series of feature films. However, Fox desperately wanted to keep the show, and worked out a new contract with Carter.
• Carter had been planning a feature film versin of the show ever since season two, and security was so tight that they were sending the script around on red paper, which would make it unable to be photocopied.
• They filmed the X-Files movie, X-Files: Fight the Future, inbetween seasons four and five, although it ended up pushing the start date for season five back, and as a result that season was two episode shorter, with only 20 instead of 22. It was code named "Blackwood" after Algernon Blackwood, a British writer of ghost stories.
• By season five, the two main stars were also becoming popular, and as a result many episodes featured either Scully or Mulder, and not usually both of them together. This was to allow them time to concentrate on other projects.
• Season five also featured episodes written by guest writers, including Stephen King and William Gibson.
• By the end of season five, both Anderson and Duchovny wanted the show to move from Vancouver to Los Angeles (where it was originally supposed to be shot), and so the sets were struck and production moved at the end of the season.
• X-Files: Fight the Future opened in 1998, although it wasn't a smash success. The movie grossed around $189 million worldwide, which recouped their reported $126 million dollar budget (with advertising figured in), but not by much.
• The movie takes place right inbetween seasons five and six, and season six picks up right where the movie left off.
• At the end of season five, the X-Files were once again closed, but then reopened in season six. However, new agents Spender and Fowley were assigned to them, and Mulder and Scully were given a new boss.
• Season six was seen as the "beginning of the end" for several reasons. There were several episodes which hardcore fans considered too comedic, like the gated community episode "Arcadia" or the two-part body hopping episode starring Michael McKean as Morris Fletcher. Also the move from Vancouver to L.A. seemed to alienate fans as well.
• However, the show was Fox's most popular again that year, and pulled in more awards. But, the wheels had been set in motion.
• David Duchovny left the show after season in part due to contract problems and feeling the need to "move on." Scully's role was dialed back as a result, and new agents John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) were introduced.
• Doggett and Reyes had some good episodes, but the show had lost a lot of it's hardcore fans and was turning into a sinking stone.
• For the season nine episode "The Truth," most of the cast returned and ended the season, and the show, on a cliffhanger. Sadly, they finished third in their timeslot, pulling in less viewers than their original pilot episode.
• In 2001 Fox introduced The Lone Gunmen spinoff show (which I must admit I am a huge fan of), although it only ran one season. The first episode had the unfortunate plot of hijackers trying to fly planes into the World Trade Centers, although it was filmed before 9/11. They were eventually (supposedly, I hope) killed off in season nine of The X-Files.
• The X-Files has a long-lasting legacy, having inspired shows like Smallville, Torchwood, and even Alias. You can buy the entire mammoth nine season set with the Fight the Future movie (but sadly, no Lone Gunmen disc) for just about $150 bucks right now. As a fan, I'll tell you up front that the packaging sucks on this set, but the contents are more than worth it.

Right now, it only means wild speculation by everyone who hasn't jumped ship with the show already. The season finale for Lost promised good things to come, with everything taking place in the future, but how will this freighter fit into the mix? Is this the ship that Naomi was using as a staging ground in her search for Desmond? Remember, she flew out there in a chopper that had to come from somewhere, and she had a whole crew back onboard waiting on her call on the satellite phone. Of course, Locke backstabbed her, literally, so we're not really sure if that was the truth or not.

Depending on when ABC decides to start airing this show, we should have some answers. Maybe Jack stops wishing for plane crashes and charters this rustbucket in an effort to get back to where he once belonged.

Spoilers: first look at the freighter [Spoilers Lost]