Oh, and as with last year, we decided not to stick any April Fools stuff in today's spoilers... and we did our best not to get taken in by any April Fools posts from other sites. Fingers crossed that we succeeded...

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:

The two main characters of this sequel are Sam and Optimus Prime, who both go through similar character arcs about being away from home and learning to live on your own. And the "giantic" first bot we see is Wheelbot. Other Transformers in the movie include Jetfire, Arcee, Mudflap, Volt (the electric car), plus the Decepticons (Starscream, Soundwave and the Fallen) and the Constructicons (Demolishor, Hightower, Long Haul, MixMaster, Rampage and Scrapper.) There may or may not be an explanation in the film for why Arcee is a girl. [Sci Fi Wire]

Terminator Salvation:

A new extended trailer shown at Showest included a shot of either John Connor or Kyle Reese holding the iconic photo of Sarah Connor, from the first movie. [Slashfilm]

And here are four new photos, which look pretty fantastic. [SpoilerTV-Movies]

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:

The first look at the penultimate episode of the season, airing Friday. Finally, the strands start to converge! [Fox and Sarah Connor Society]

Lost:

The scene where Sayid shoots Ben will have huge repercussions for the rest of the series, and will be one of the most talked about scenes, says actor Sterling Beaumon. He also claims that now the castaways can change history, because they're stuck in the past. So maybe the massacre will never happen. And "that big older mean Ben that we know very well may not even exist." But the other Ben, Michael Emerson, says it would be wrong to count Ben out, because Ben has a destiny. [TV Guide and TV Guide]

Also, Beaumon had two theories: that Ben and Locke are brothers, and that Miles is Marvin Candle's son. Producer Damon Lindelof told him one of those was true. (I'm pretty sure it's the one about Miles.) [Zap2It]

Ooh, and here are some clips from tonight's episode. Hurley's BTTF riff is amazing. But man, Jack is cold!

Whoever dies at the end of the season, we'll have a Charlie-level freak-out over it, and it'll cause tons of grief and remorse. [E! Online]

According to the spoiler-fiends at SpoilersLost, the "Watch With Kristin" Q&A also included a bit where they said the person who dies in the finale is the polar opposite of Charlie Pace in "at least one physical attribute." But for some reason, the E! Online folks deleted that question and answer after a while. (I never saw it, so I can't verify this.) [SpoilersLost]

Life On Mars:

We weren't the only ones to interview producers Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg. They dropped a few spoilers. In tonight's episode,

The jumping off point is that his mother and father come back into this episode in a big, big way. His mother comes to the station house and says that his father has reappeared and kidnapped a little boy. So, basically, Sam has to save himself, as it were. And it goes from there.

The episode involves a "major climax" to Sam and Annie's shared journey. Perhaps significantly, they say Lisa Bonet, who plays Sam's 2008 girlfriend, will not reappear. And they promise, once again, that tonight's episode will wrap everything up, with no ambiguity whatsoever. Everything's explained, even the "tiny robot." Oh, and once again, they say the ending will be nothing like the BBC version. [TV Guide and EW and Sci Fi Wire]

Fringe:

Speaking of answers, by the end of the first season, "various players' interests and allegiances, like William Bell-like his potential connections to our characters from before-all that will be more fleshed out and their place in the world more defined," says producer Roberto Orci. We'll get a "deeper context" on the Observer. We'll learn why Broyles requested Olivia be part of this unit. Weird science to watch out for in upcoming episodes includes subcutaneous tracking chips, chemtrails, invisibility cloaks, cloning, etc. [Sci Fi Wire]

Supernatural:

You'll be shocked — shocked! — to hear that those imdb spoilers were false. John Winchester does not appear this season, in the flesh or in the spirit. We will see a photo of him at some point though. Meanwhile, Castiel is definitely a season regular in season five, but we can't say the same for Ruby or Anna. And with a couple of deaths coming up in the season finale, neither of them is guaranteed to be safe. [E! Online]

Chuck:

The second season finale is "Chuck Vs. The Ring." [Chuck TV]

Heroes:

The producers answered more fan questions. Hiro's only power is freezing time. In episode 3x24, we'll learn more about how Janice really feels about Matt Parkman, and why she named her baby "Matt." Speaking of which, Baby Matt will get some great screen time, continuing into season four. He's the same Matthew as we saw in the episode "Five Years Gone." And in season four, we'll see Matt Sr. struggling to protect his "very powerful son."

And in next week's episode, 3x22, we'll see a huge Big Matt/Danko showdown that's cathartic for Big Matt. Also, there are hints that Sylar and Nathan will have some quality time together. We won't see Micah and Claire meet up this season, but Micah will meet up with someone in 3x24. [Comic Book Resources]

Star Trek: The New Frontier:

So the real synopsis for Peter David's next New Frontier book, Treason, finally came out. Unlike the weird leaked version we ran back in December, this time there's no mention of Captain Calhoun being stuck in Andromeda. Here's the official version:

It is a time of political upheaval and uncertainty in the New Thallonian Protectorate. Following the brutal assassination of her husband, Si Cwan, former Starfleet officer-turned-newly-appointed-Prime Minister Robin Lefler must now face the growing danger and intrigue surrounding her newborn son and heir to the noble line of Cwan. Following a harrowing assassination attempt, Robin has no choice but to flee New Thallon with her child...seeking refuge with Captain Mackenzie Calhoun and the crew of the U.S.S. Excalibur and creating a major diplomatic crisis in Sector 221-G.

The political fallout between the Federation and the New Thallonian Protectorate pales, however, in comparison to the threat of an enigmatic alien race determined to seize the infant Cwan for its own mysterious purposes. But nothing could possibly prepare Calhoun for the shocking betrayal from within — an act of treachery to aid and abet this alien race — forever altering the lives of the Excalibur crew....

I've read every single one of these books up to now, but I'm not sure I'm up for any more Thallonian intrigue. [Simon and Schuster via TrekWeb]

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

SciFi's decision to release screeners of last night's Battlestar Galactica episode to critics without the final scenes - in order to protect the "sensitive reveal," according to the channel - may have raised outcry amongst critics and fans, but it worked exactly as intended; while there had been much speculation that said character was, indeed, the Final Cylon, there was no concrete spoiler before the show went out. The problem is, now that I've seen the show, I wish there had been.

I have a love/hate relationship with spoilers. Yes, I'm all about experiencing the story as the creators intended (And make a point of avoiding spoilers for certain things that I really love as a result... Including, ironically, Battlestar Galactica since the end of the first season. Which, yes, makes Morning Spoilers a very scrolly option some mornings), but I also think that spoilers can serve an unexpected and important function outside of what most people think they're there for.

I'm reminded, tangentally, of writer Peter David's non-interview with Newsarama.com, where he spoke about why he wouldn't speak about his comic series X-Factor:

[M]y greatest desire, frankly, is for the internet to somehow develop the self-control to keep its collective mouth shut over the specifics. Fans should be entitled to be stunned by what they see without Ruiners. That's my term for ‘Spoilers,' by the way. Blowing key aspects of stories don't simply spoil stories; they ruin them. Ruin them for the creative team, ruin them for the company, and they ruin them for the readers. I would love to see issues #39 through #41 be a Ruiner-free zone. I want to see fans exhibit the self-control not to ruin the stories for others, because fans who come into the books not knowing what to expect will, I believe, quite simply be blown away by what's coming up.

See, I think that, while spoilers can ruin stories (They're called spoilers for a reason, after all), they can also redeem them, in a strange way; when given advance notice of a particularly abrupt development, the reader/viewer/listener/audience of whatever sort can - for want of a better way of putting it - get used to an idea that would, otherwise, pull them too far out of the story. Take last night's BSG for example (And here, I will spoil it for people who've not seen the episode, so be warned): Like Annalee, I thought the episode was strong without being sensational, and all of the "small" reveals (Starbuck discovering Kara Thrace's corpse, the 13th colony being revealed to be Cylons, Dualla committing suicide) worked for me... until the identity of the Final Cylon was revealed. Yes, we'd had hints and speculation that it was going to be Ellen, but the reveal itself - especially ending on it - seemed off, somehow, forced, and was the thing that stayed with me about the episode afterwards. It ruined the episode for me, in its own way, and I can't help but wonder how much more satisfying the episode would've been without that discordant note at the end.

(Yes, now I wish I'd seen the screener, just because I wonder whether it would've been a more satisfying experience.)

Another reason I secretly love spoilers is that it robs writers of the ability to rely solely on shock tactics, in theory (In practice, of course, this isn't exactly the case. For example: Final Crisis #6); when a portion of your audience - and, despite Peter David's wishes, a growing portion, I think - already knows the broad strokes of what is about to happen in your story, it changes the way in which a story becomes satisfying; plot almost comes secondary to character, and it becomes less about what happens than the way in which it happens. In an age of DVDs and trade paperbacks and re-watching and re-reading everything, I think that this is a direction that most serialized storytelling is going to find itself going, anyway - Once the big shock is revealed, you can't un-reveal it, or change the reveal, to make that second experience as shocking as the first, after all; the emphasis in making the shift from short-term populism to long-term appeal (Heroes to Lost, perhaps?) needs to be in what follows the shock of the lightning, and whatever foreshadowing there is to go back and revisit later - but a spoiler society is accelerating the change, for better or worse. If we end up with a world full of well-planned, well-written stories that offer plot that stands up to consideration and more than just a moment's stunned silence, then surely that's a good thing, right...?

(Of course, this doesn't mean that writers should never seek to surprise their audience, and - as both the BSG screeners and David's refusal to talk about X-Factor show - there are still ways to keep things secret, if you really want to.)

Ultimately, I think what I want to see is an acceptance from creators that spoilers are here to stay, and a move to work with that knowledge that offers more than pouting and withholding scenes. We've seen some of this already; Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen has used spoiler sites as a way to build buzz about his movie with well-timed leaks and fake rumors, for example, and there have been continued rumors about movies like Watchmen purposefully leak spoilers to see how the fanbase reacts, as trial balloons before making final decisions. Spoilers are, or at the very least, can be, a dress rehearsal for the audience in terms of how they deal with a story... It'd be a welcome change if more people would recognize that and see it for the possibility that it offers.

David was already one of the best known Star Trek novelists when he launched the New Frontier series of spin-off books. His Imzadi was a #1 New York Times bestseller and a rare Trek novel that got taken seriously by readers. But in the New Frontier books, he's managed to create his own soap-operatic annex of the Trek universe, with its own races, politics and dynasties. Over the course of twenty-something books, comics and short stories, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun has married his long-lost love, Elizabeth Shelby (from the TNG two-parter, "Best Of Both Worlds") and various people have gotten together, broken up, had babies and overthrown empires. I have been meaning to do a giant post about the New Frontier books, which I've read in their entirety, but it's hard to explain their appeal to someone who's never read them. Suffice to say, it's Peter David taking enormous liberties with the Trek universe and having a blast in the process. You can get the first four books as one collected volume, which should be enough to let you decide whether you really want to commit to this crazy ride.

UPDATE: Apparently that's not the real synopsis, after all. We'll post the real synopsis as soon as we have it.

So here's the synopsis for Treason, the umpteenth book in the series coming next year:

Three years have passed since the events of the previous New Frontier novel, Missing in Action, and tensions within the New Thallonian Protectorate are at fever pitch following the murder of Prime Minister Si Cwan. Captain Mackenzie Calhoun and the crew of the USS Excalibur face an uncertain future in the turbulent Andromeda Galaxy. The sudden power vacuum will have far-reaching consequences for them all, as lives and the very fate of Sector 221-G are catapulted into utter chaos. In Treason, the New Frontier storyline jumps ahead three years from the events depicted in Stone and Anvil, picking up again at a point of crucial change, where new and old Star Trek readers are at the same level of discovery for the series.

I have to admit I'm a little lukewarm about the idea of jumping ahead three years. Didn't David already pull this trick in between Stone And Anvil and After The Fall? It feels a bit... well... gimmicky. As though he wasn't sure how to move forward with the story otherwise. Also, I'm officially bored with the whole subplot about Si Cwan, the former emperor who returned to power in a new regime (and married Robin Lefler, from the TNG episode about the orgasmic video game) only to be murdered. I wish Mackenzie Calhoun would travel to some other part of his sector, instead of constantly dabbling in Thallonian politics. At the same time, that's sort of what these books are about, and it's part of the whole "David taking liberties" aspect of the storyline. It feels, at times, like a generic space opera with Trek elements grafted onto it. Which isn't entirely a bad thing, since it lets David play with some peripheral Trek characters (Lefler, Shelby, the cat-woman from the animated episodes) while inventing most of his pocket universe out of whole cloth.

In any case, I'm still pretty excited for another New Frontier book to add to the 20 others already on my shelf. It's fun candy for Trek fans who want to read adventures set after the end of the TNG movies.

[TrekWeb]

First, some background: The teenage Roland grew up in Gilead, a dusty hamlet in which the Old West and the even older medieval times meet, itself set in a timeless world underlain with curious technology, alternate universes, and of course magic. It’s the later that exacts havoc on Roland’s life: After becoming a full-fledged gunslinger, he’s eyed by the powerful and manipulative wizard-type Farson who’s itching to destroy both the fledgling Roland and his placid homeland.

So his dad convinces him to high-tail it out of Gilead. With a couple friends in tow, he lands in the town of Hambry where Roland takes possession of Maerlyn’s Grapefruit (a.k.a. a mystical crystal ball coveted by Farson) and romances a lass. Things are looking up, until said lady friend is whacked amid a plot to destroy him and his motherland. You see, the fine folks of Hambry—they’re friends of Farson.

Long Road Home follows the trifecta making their way back to Gilead, mulling over their traumatic sojourn to Hambry. With the Hambrians on their tails, the threesome’s walkabout gets that much more complicated once Roland’s soul is sucked into the Grapefruit. Forging ahead on parallel trips (think The Lord of the Rings or Empire Strikes Back)—Roland in an alternate reality, his comrades in the creepy frontier—Roland’s buddies struggle to bring him back to safety while eluding the baddies. Also figuring into this equation: the Hambry village idiot getting probed by a robot. We kid you not!

Despite being populated with killer canines, underworld demon-like lords, nefarious crows, and the like, a bunch of stuff happens but not a lot of stuff actually transpires on this Road. It’s an excellently ominous interlude—Jae Lee’s landscapes ache with menace and shadows—that can, at turns, feel like a stalling plot that reaches an inevitable conclusion: Roland has changed. (The narrator’s good-ol'-boy quips, which are too frequent and at odds with the characters’ feudal speak, don’t exactly speed things along.) But perhaps it’s unavoidable, this being an excursion from King’s original book. Our suggestion? Best to read Road’s gripping predecessor, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, to fully soak up its follow-up's rich, brooding color.

Wondering just what you're missing in the now-mythical 70 minutes of cut footage from The Incredible Hulk? Turns out that you don't have to wait for the DVD release to find out, just crack open a copy of the movie's tie-in novel by longtime Hulk comic writer Peter David. Or, alternatively, let someone else do so and then read the summary of missing scenes that they post online. We're helping you with that latter option under the jump.

Comic site 4thLetter took the time to compare the finished version of Marvel's smashfest with David's novelization and came away surprisingly relieved that someone had taken the scissors to Ed Norton's vision:

With Incredible Hulk, the good outweighed the bad in terms of cuts. God, did it ever. Yes, there was definitely some stuff that should have stayed in there. No doubt. It’s just that a lot of scenes that got ousted had the potential to be really bad. Really bad. I’m talking Superman’s cellophane S projectile bad. I’m talking Matt Murdock fighting Elektra at the playground bad. I’m talking the entirety of Rise of the Silver Surfer bad. It’s cool that I count that movie as one long, horrible scene, right?

I really am the only person who kind of enjoyed FF2, aren't I...? Turns out that we're not missing a lot in the extra scenes, although there's a couple of awesome Easter Eggs in there for fans of the comic (An Amadeus Cho cameo? Who would've seen that coming?), but that one scene that everyone already knows about in the Arctic...? Here it is:

The opening scene, which appears to be the kind of thing to take place before the credits, has a truck driving through the arctic. Bruce Banner asks the driver to stop when they’re in the middle of nowhere. Then he gets out and walks away. The driver is confused, but drives off anyway. Banner walks through the blizzard, pulls out a pistol and tries to off himself. His arm won’t let him and he unwillingly pulls the gun away from his head and fires it empty. Then he falls to the ground, hoping to die from the cold, but transforms into the Hulk instead. As the Hulk, he smashes the ground and breaks it into icebergs.

This was probably going to be where the hyped Captain America appearance was going to take place. I suppose that without Namor in the cards, they would just have Hulk be the one to smash up the arctic and release his frozen body into the water. From what I understand, a version of this scene is in the videogame.

Whoever decided to cut this scene is a total pussy.

Wait, was that going to be the fabled Captain America cameo...? Guess we'll just have to wait for the DVD to find out after all.

Incredible Hulk: The Deleted Scenes [4th Letter]

Image Comics' Transhuman is a new series by Pax Romana and The Nightly News creator Jonathan Hickman and artist JM Ringuet that oozes potential joy for the faithful. A "mockumentary" about genetic engineering, superheroes and the effort to mass-market a combination of the two, the series looks set to confirm Hickman's reputation for both visually-arresting work and an ability to play well within the SF genre. If you want to know more, you can find a 5-page preview of the first issue here (PDF).

Another premiere that's worth paying attention to this week is the first volume of Flight Explorer, the kid-centric spin-off from popular anthology Flight - It may not all be science fiction, but with a new story about the top-heavy monster Jellaby, and another strip called Zita the Spacegirl, this should be considered for the childlike near you. Even if that happens to be you yourself.

(You can read some more about the book, including seeing preview pages, here).

The third book appearing for the first time on Wednesday is Star Trek: New Frontier #1, a new mini-series tying into the New Frontier novel series. Both the novels and the comics are being written by Peter David, allowing for both coherent continuity and full-on nerditry, both of which are heartily approved around these here parts.

Elsewhere, it's all about the collections. Marvel is putting out hardcover collections of their popular time-travelling 1980s Iron Man versus Doctor Doom stories in Iron Man: Doomquest and their not-so-popular "The Devil annuls Spider-Man's marriage" story in Spider-Man: One More Day.

Meanwhile, DC pulls in some of the best of their 1980s output with the complete run of Dan Jurgens' greedy jerk anti-hero in Showcase Presents: Booster Gold, and then reprints some comic history with the fourth and final volume of Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, which not only reprints Kirby's final stories starring Orion, Mr. Miracle and Darkseid, but also does its best to return Kirby's final work with the characters, graphic novel The Hunger Dogs, to the way it was before editorial forces demanded rewrites and changed the ending to make the production of more Super Powers figures that little bit easier. Previously unseen, reworked and re-inked art, and restored script and structure on the strip provides something like a Director's Cut version of one of the lost masterpieces of superhero comics by one of the greatest comic artists who ever lived... which has to be worth a look, right?

As ever, a full list of the week's releases can be found here, and the place to find your personal comics emporium can be found here. Now go and buy the Fourth World book and make a dead comic mastermind a happy ghost already.

Space Cases was the brainchild of comics/Star Trek novels/Babylon 5 writer Peter David and Lost In Space star Bill Mumy. You can see the trademark Peter David goofiness in a lot of the humor, but it also has a lot of David's cleverness and willingness to delve into intense shit.

Suzee started out as the imaginary friend of Catalina (Firefly's Jewel Staite), but after Staite left the show Suzee suddenly became real and everyone could see her. Here's a clip of Jewel escaping a space prison using her wits and her Black Canary-esque super-scream:

Suzee's a genius who understands every computer ever, and she has gills on her neck that allow her to breathe in any atmosphere. Plus she can project her mind into other sentients, including the computer in this clip. Plus, her hair rules, way more than Catalina's did. In this episode, the series finale, the lonely and damaged computer wants to keep Suzee prisoner forever. But Suzee teaches the computer that friendship means being willing to let your friends go. And then after Suzee finally leaves, Warlord Shank shows up seeking revenge for that computer virus. The computer tells Shank all about how it's learned the true meaning of friendship. And then Shank says, "Warlord Shank has learned that he doesn't care what you have learned!" And blasts the computer to atoms. Awesome.

Pasty gray. Originally, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby intended the Hulk to be gray. But the printing press kept having trouble with the Hulk's color and he kept coming out green. So he only spent the first few issues of his comic being gray. The original, gray Hulk is sort of surly and crafty, and is very much a riff on Mr. Hyde.

Bright green. For most of his first twenty years or so, the Hulk was green and very stupid. He settled into being a volatile child, alternating between curiosity, petulance and rage. Some writers, especially Len Wein, would give the Hulk incredibly long speeches in baby talk. Here's a free verse poem the Hulk recites when some trees and rocks come to life and attack him, from an issue of Wein's Defenders:

Even here — even in peaceful forest — they will not leave Hulk alone!
Wherever Hulk goes, enemies follow him — try to hurt him!
Why? Hulk does not know! All Hulk does know is —
When enemies attack, Hulk fights back — and smashes — HUH?
Is not enemy — is tree! Hulk is attacked by — tree??
Wha —? Now other trees attack Hulk — and rocks — flying rocks!
Hulk is confused — doesn't understand!
Hulk LIKED trees. Hulk LIKED rocks.
Hulk thought they were his friends — Hulk's ONLY friends —
But if peaceful forest attacks Hulk, too — then Hulk has no friends —
and Hulk will crush anything that gets in Hulk's way!
Do you hear Hulk, rocks?
Do you hear Hulk, trees?
Leave Hulk ALONE — or Hulk will make you REGRET it!

Eventually, writer Bill Mantlo started changing the Hulk's status quo around. At one point, Bruce Banner's mind was able to control the Hulk's body, so the Hulk was super-intelligent. But Bruce kept fearing losing control over the Hulk. In one famous scene during Secret Wars, the Hulk holds up an entire mountain that threatens to crush all the heroes, while Bruce angsts about whether he'll be able to stay smart and civilized much longer. At another point, the Hulk lost all vestiges of Bruce and became just a mindless, destructive beast.

Darker gray. For a short while, Bruce stopped being the Hulk, and Rick James became the Hulk for a few minutes. And then writer Al Milgrom turned Bruce back into the Hulk... except that he was gray and smart. And instead of becoming the Hulk when he was angry, Bruce turned into the Hulk when the sun went down. This gray Hulk was craftier than the original gray Hulk, and more corrupt. After he managed to suppress Banner completely for a while, he moved to Vegas and became an enforcer for a casino, under the name Joe Fixit. He totally crushed a takeover bid by the Mafia (referred to as the Maggia for some reason).

Pale green. And then the earlier green babyish persona bounced back. The Hulk went back into therapy (really!) and managed to integrate his three personas: Banner, the gray Hulk and the green Hulk. The resulting Hulk-fusion was a paler green and less brutish than the earlier Hulks. Instead of purple pants, he often wore flip-flops, unfortunately. But the Hulk's rage kept threatening to consume him, so he finally developed a psychological fail-safe where he would turn into Puny Banner if he got too angry. That way, he couldn't hurt anybody. Plus, comedy.

Bright green, again. And then the Hulk went back to being just his regular smart Banner/dumb green Hulk split for a while. But not so much baby talk. And the Hulk seemed to get smarter over time. By the time of Planet Hulk, he's practically a military genius. And a political mastermind.

Red. There's a brand new Hulk, wreaking havoc in Russia and killing old-school foe The Abomination. And it's not Bruce Banner, who's chilling out in General Ross' Gamma Base? Who is the new, redder Hulk? All signs point to longtime sidekick Rick Jones (who actually became a green Hulk for about five minutes in the 1980s). But we'll have to wait and see...

So which Hulk symbolizes romance? Dude, it's all of them. The Hulk is love. 'Nuff said.

Famous names: Peter David, George Perez

Crunchy goodness: 5

Continuity porn: The future Rick James lives in a giant "trophy room" that includes Captain America's shield, Wolverine's metal skeleton, the Beast's pelt, Magneto's helmet, and Thor's hammer.

Sights you'll never unsee: After the Maestro breaks the Hulk's neck and he's paralyzed, a voluptuous concubine comes to pleasure the Hulk... whether he wants it or not.

Life lesson: Meeting your evil future self may be cheaper than therapy, but the couch is way less comfy.

Sequels: The Maestro makes a brief appearance in the underwhelming Hulk storyline "Ghosts of the Future." Much better is David's Hulk prose novel, What Savage Beast, which features the Maestro recruiting a army of Hulks from alternate timelines.

A Write-Up of the "Trophy Room" Two Page Spread.