If you can't remember what all these new shows are — which is a bad sign for some of them, to begin with — then check out our handy guide to the new TV season, for all the details.

Star Trek:

Yet another day of vague statements about the next Trek film. I missed posting the other day this interview, in which J.J. Abrams seems to downplay the idea that the next movie could be about the Enterprise battling a force of nature instead of a traditional villain, as writers Orci and Kurtzman have hinted. Says Abrams:

Well, I'm open to anything. We've had some really interesting discussions so far but, you know - you have to be open to everything to find the right thing so the answer is sure, I'm open to that. I think in a story it's important to personify, somehow, what you're up against so it's a tricky one to figure out how to, like, fight evil wind!

So I'd say that's looking less likely. Meanwhile, Orci and Kurtzman were interviewed by UGO, and the interviewer suggested that he'd like to see a well-rounded Ferengi character in the next movie. To which Kurtzman said, "Right on." So does that mean we can start spreading rumors that the next movie will be all about the Ferengi? [Collider and UGO]

Iron Man 2:

There's a somewhat garbled report that Robert Downey Jr. saved an extra who had gotten hit by a stuntman in some kind of robot costume. The spoilery part is that it was a scene where a group of stunt men dressed as robotic villains rampage through a crowded event. [Cinemablend]

Transformers 3:

No, it's really not too soon to start talking about the next one. Are you kidding? It's almost too late. Director Michael Bay says the next movie will have a much bigger role for Ramon Rodriguez, who's Shia's sidekick in the current release. (I'm wondering if this is because Shia doesn't want to come back? Or just because Bay really likes Rodriguez.) [L.A. Times]

Battlestar Galactica:

Edward James Olmos confirms our report last week that Dean Stockwell is basically the star of "The Plan," the TV movie about the show's first two seasons from the Cylon standpoint. Apparently, Stockwell's character Cavil masterminded everything. But Grace Park also delivers an exquisite performance, says Olmos. And he says there's a major surprise in store for us as we learn about the Cylons' titular Plan:

What their plan was, I think that's a big surprise. Finding out what the plan was and how it was structured and how close they were to completing it.

And he says we'll learn how different from us the Cylons really are. [Sci Fi Wire]

Fringe:

Here are some set photos from the filming of the new season, involving some kind of car accident. Could this be the accident that involves an FBI agent vanishing from a locked car? And is that Olivia laying battered on the street? [SpoilerTV]

Supernatural:

Remember Meg, the evil demon who has it in for the Winchester boys? We haven't seen her since season two, but actor Rachel Miner says she'll be back in the new season. (I thought she died, for some reason. Didn't she get stabbed with the demon-killing knife, or shot with the colt?) Says producer Eric Kripke:

I've been wondering, what Meg's doing out there. I've been continually asking the writers, ‘Where's Meg?" She's would make a really formidable adversary. I got impatient and ended up writing her into my own script.

She may only appear in one episode. [TV Guide Magazine]

Torchwood:

The Radio Times includes some details about this miniseries. Apparently, Captain Jack has a scene with his daughter Alice, where she laments that "I get older... and you stay the same." She appears to be the same age as Jack. Also, the 1965 flashback involves children in duffel coats and boots marching towards a mysterious light and vanishing. The show features the biggest set in its history, the mysterious Floor 13. And here are some nice photos. More at the link. [Blogtor Who]

FlashForward:

Some cool new stills from the pilot. At the very least, this show will be pretty interesting. Just watching Shakespeare and Sulu hang out together will be cool. [SpoilerTV]

Stargate Universe:

Colonel Telford (Lou Diamond Philips) is expected to be a "recurring guest star" rather than a regular character, although his status remains swathed in mystery. In any case, it may be significant that he's not coming to Comic-Con for this show, and neither is Justin Louis, who plays Colonel Everett Young. [Gateworld]

Vampire Diaries:

I know your excitement for this show has already reached fever pitch. But just in case, here's a new promo to put you over the top:

And some new posters. [VampireDiariesWeb]

And MTV has a review. Apparently for every spooky fogbound moment, there's at least a minute of teen banter in the local cool hangout, accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack. And apparently, one character from the books, Elena's friend Meredith, isn't in the pilot but will show up eventually. And Stefan is from the show's small town, in the Civil War era — not Renaissance Italy as in the books. [MTV]

Past Life:

We reviewed the pilot for this new Fox show yesterday, but here are a bunch of stills to help keep all your previous incarnations excited. [Fox]

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Past Life, airing spring 2010 on Fox, seems to be trying to piggyback on the success of Medium, a show I haven't actually seen. You have a kind of procedural crime-solving aspect to each episode, but there's also a spooky supernatural aspect. And it's all sprinkled with a dash of personal growth. It's very loosely based on an M.J. Rose novel called The Reincarnationist, but I don't think much beyond the idea of reincarnation got carried over.

Fox kindly sent us a DVD of this pilot, and it's got the same rough edges as a lot of other pilots. It's also saddled with the task of selling you on one of the oddest premises I've seen in quite some time. In a nutshell, Dr. Kate McGinn is a psychologist who works at New York City's Talmadge Center For Behavior Health, which is dedicated to studying "the human soul." McGinn specializes in "regression therapy," helping people to confront the stuff that happened in their previous lives which may be affecting them today. McGinn is almost paranormally sunny and cheery, except when she's comforting someone who's grappling with having been murdered.

And because (I guess) these cases often involve ferreting out the details of exactly what happened the last time around, the Talmadge Center hires a detective, Price Whatley, to help McGinn out. Whatley is the Scully to her Mulder — he doesn't believe in all this past life nonsense, but he needs the money since he lost his job at the NYPD. But Whatley harbors a secret pain having to do with his dead wife — and you won't be too shocked to hear that he's secretly hoping all this reincarnation nonsense will lead to some sort of reunion. (I'm picturing Whatley eventually having a very serious relationship processing conversation with a one-year-old, which is how old his reincarnated wife would be now.)

The Talmadge Center, incidentally, is quite swanky, and seems to be able to afford to keep Kate McGinn in classy therapist outfits. The clients we meet in the pilot, whose 14-year-old son is having weird murder-esque flashbacks, seem extremely well heeled. So I'm guessing we're mostly going to be concerning ourselves with the previous lives of the wealthy and troubled here. Besides Kate and Whatley, the Talmadge Center is also home to Dr. Malachi Talmadge, who stands around looking worried and occasionally butts heads with Whatley. And then there's Rishi Karna, the hard-working research assistant who barely pops up in the pilot.

I'm just going to pause here and wonder whose idea it was to call our tough-guy detective character "Price Whatley."

So I'm guessing that not every episode of this show will involve murder, per se. You could have a character who got mugged during the 1920s, and never got over it, and now is still pissed about it thirty years into a new incarnation. Presumably, there has to be some kind of crime every week, though, or Price Whatley won't have much to do.

Judging from the pilot, there'll be two tracks to every episode: the therapeutic track, in which the reincarnated person works through all of their issues under the sympathetic, tight-lipped smile of Kate McGinn. And then the mystery track, where Price Whatley searches through old case files and says things like, "I know it sounds crazy, but I really think we're on to something here." (That's not a quote from the pilot. That's just the sort of thing I can imagine Price Whatley saying.) Price Whatley, of course, is on the outs with his former superiors, but there are still some cops who owe favors to him and will let him research old unsolved crimes on the sly.

And then, at the end of every episode, the two tracks will converge somehow, as the tormented reincarnatee finally discovers the truth of what happened and gets some closure. And Whatley gets his man, or woman, or whatever. A crime is solved, a soul is healed, and the cycle of suffering turns a bit slower. Or something.

If you're thinking "This doesn't sound like my cup of tea," then it's probably not. I went into the pilot feeling somewhat apprehensive, and nothing about it was quite able to change my mind — although there was nothing wrong with any of it. The main thing that jumped out at me, honestly, was that Price Whatley should be a laughing stock. He's a former cop who now runs around chasing leads that come out of vague past-life visions from people who seem a bit mental. Nobody should be taking Whatley seriously at all, and yet somehow he manages to fulfill the same role as every detective on every procedural show ever. And the show invests a lot of energy in showing how professional and serious Kate McGinn and the rest of the Talmadge team are, with their jargon about regression therapy and their great resources.

So why do I feel as though this is some kind of watershed for genre television? Maybe because it feels like an uneasy fusion of a few different genres, into something that I'm not sure is ever going to be as thought-provoking as other Fox shows like Fringe or Dollhouse (or the late lamented Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) Rather than boldly venturing into speculative territory, this show reflects the gathering consensus that any speculative themes must be subtle, vague, and swaddled in formula.

So you have the "team of experts" model of detective show, not unlike Bones or CSI. (Except that instead of having a laboratory, these people have a therapist's office.) You have the therapeutic, personal-growth type show, where every week someone is going to get past his/her trauma. And then you have the one strand of actual speculative fiction, the past life regression, which doesn't look like it's ever going to evolve into a mythos or ask deeper questions. It's just going to be the McGuffin — and it's going to allow us to have spooky J-horror-esque blurry flashbacks to something vague and terrifying happening in the 1960s or 1970s, which get slightly more detailed every time we see them throughout the episode.

It's a perfectly solid show, and a nice enough cast, but the genre element feels like weak tea. And I'm really not sure how the reincarnation-of-the-week format will pan out week in, week out. It seems like it could suffer from the same problems as Tru Calling, only worse. Still, I have a feeling this show could be a humongous mega-hit, and further drive genre television in the direction of being somewhat apologetic, and vaguely detective-oriented.

Monday
Mondays stay their relatively lowkey selves with the new schedule and, if anything, become even more quiet for SFTV; Heroes and Chuck, both on reduced seasons, end up sharing the 8pm timeslot on NBC (Heroes' 19 episode fourth season goes first, with Chuck's 13 episode third season replacing it in the spring of 2010), with Heroes and Lost alum Jesse Alexander's new show Day One taking up the 9pm timeslot on NBC in 2010. Otherwise, it's a light night, although honorary io9 shows House on Fox and The Big Bang Theory on CBS keep on keeping on (Although BBT is being moved to 9:30pm).

Tuesday
Feel free to go outside or catch up on some cable shows on Tuesdays; Fringe has been moved away from its original timeslot, and until Fox premieres reincarnation crime procedural Past Life in its former 9pm slot midseason, there's almost nothing to see here (The exception being ABC's Better Off Ted, which will start its new 9:30pm slot as soon as Dancing With The Stars finishes). Move along.

Wednesday
Just like Tuesday, we're grasping at straws here until midseason, when new Fox drama Human Target will premiere at 9pm (It'll be replacing Glee, which I shamefully have to admit having loved the preview of last week. Don't judge me). Of possible interest: ABC's Eastwick, which adapts (and, more than likely, homogenizes) the John Updike novel/Jack Nicholson movie The Witches of Eastwick, may turn out to be more interesting than the "Desperate Housewives meets Bewitched" show I'm dreading. Not currently scheduled, but almost certainly on Wednesdays in spring 2010, the final season of Lost.

Thursday
Okay, this is the night to be thankful for TiVo, or else to make some hard choices as to what to watch and what to torrent Hulu later. ABC's new Flash Forward will air Thursdays at 8pm, which is the same timeslot as the CW's equally-new-but-probably-less-good Vampire Diaries and the not-SF-but-kinda fifth season of Bones on Fox (Also, not SF at all but still potentially worth watching at 8pm: NBC are doing more SNL Weekend Update Thursday). 9pm, you'll have to choose between Fringe in its new timeslot on Fox or Supernatural in its old timeslot on the CW; Annalee's head may explode, but this is one of those occasions where my love of multiverse stories makes a choice surprisingly easy (Sorry, Winchester Bros.).

Friday
With more networks pushing more "hit" shows to Friday, I can't quite tell if that means that the old "Friday is where shows go to die" school of thinking is over, or that networks are trying to kill off some shows quietly (Hi, Ugly Betty!). There're only a couple of shows in our target demographic here, though; Smallville takes up residence for its please-God-final season at 8pm on the CW, while Dollhouse starts all over again in its old timeslot, and we keep fingers crossed that (a) it has a stronger start to the season than last time, and (b) more people tune in live this time (Seriously, DVD sales and Hulu views aren't going to keep this thing alive for a third season, people).

Saturday/Sunday
Both nights are incredibly quiet, especially following this summer's burning of remaining episodes of shows we love (Don't forget, Pushing Daisies' final three episodes begin May 30th at 10pm on ABC, and Kings is back on Saturdays next month), but we're hopeful that that'll change as various shows begin to become so unpopular that they get dumped there. Call us cynical, but we'd rather just say realistic...

Still Unscheduled
We know that ABC's V remake is a go, but it's not been given a home yet; looking at the schedules that've been announced, there's theoretically space for it on Mondays following the end of Dancing With The Stars, but somehow I'm not sure that the network would really want to pair it with The Bachelor... Perhaps they're waiting to find out when Lost is returning, to make an Elizabeth Mitchell one-two punch, or perhaps details are still being worked out about exactly how the rebooted V will work (We've heard rumors of a six episode season, a thirteen episode season and a full season so far, after all). Wherever it ends up, I wouldn't expect to see it until midseason at this point.

New drama Human Target stars Mark Valley (Oliva's brain boyfriend from Fringe) as a know-it-all, can do sort of fella for hire. According to the DC comic, the Human Target is supposedly a "master of disguise" and swaps his life with the client he's been paid to protect, thus becoming the "human target." Sadly, this TV persona puts forth zero effort on his disguise and tries to pawn off two minutes of wretchedly-accented Japanese on the audience to seal the deal of his crap cover. So yeah, it's absolutely nothing like the clever comic from which it was adapted. It feels more like a poor person's Burn Notice, but only if the main character was a smarmy dick who fails miserably at being incognito. They even got Tricia Helfer to star in the pilot. The show is being produced by McG — yes, THAT McG — which isn't really a marker of bad TV as the man produced Supernatural (which we all adore). Jackie Earle Haley guests stars, so maybe he can save this action drama. Here is the trailer:

Next up is the paranormal-ish detectives show Past Life. But instead of it being a direct rip off of Medium, this lady can sense your past lives. So either she's going to be talking to a lot of kids, or solving crimes from thirty years ago. Either way, I'm not too sure how this will work for a weekly TV show. Here's the trailer, let me know what you think.

Human Target premieres with a special preview Sunday, Jan. 17 9 PM. Past Life does not have a launch date yet.

With rumors of a Dollhouse return still circling ahead of next week's announcements of the network's fall line-up - Sadly, much less chatter about Terminator getting a third season - Fox have already announced that they've picked up Past Life and Human Target as series.

Target, based on a DC comic, centers around Christopher Chance, a bodyguard who protects his clients by taking their place. For anyone who's ever wanted to see the super-science of shows like Bones and CSI applied to the world of make-up, this will be your chance (No pun, etc.); this plus side will be if the show follows the lead of the most recent comic take on the character, adding a messed-up layer of identity politics and confusion to the drama. If Terminator doesn't end up getting renewed, this could be the ideal partner for a second year of Dollhouse.

Past Life, on the other hand, sounds like an ideal pairing with Fringe, being a show about detectives using somewhat unusual methods - like talking to the dead, or investigating victims' former incarnations - in order to get their perp. While it may lack Fringe's wonderful use of parallel Earths, I'd be surprised if it doesn't allow for jerky camera shots and fast edits just as much.

Fox announce their complete fall line-up next Monday.

Fox picks up 'Past Life' [Hollywood Reporter]