Cleopatra 2525 (2000)

Some of you called this a guilty pleasure, I still don't understand how. Maybe it straddles the "so bad it's good" ratio, but still, come on — this is awful. This came from Sam Raimi's production team. Cleopatra, the stripper not the historical figure mind you, gets frozen and wakes up in 2525. Cue machine CG and colorful outfit armor.

All Souls (2001)

Think of it as Grey's Anatomy meets Disney's Haunted Mansion Yep, that's about it.

Black Scorpion (2001)

Female police officer by day, hooker crime fighter by night. And a Power Ranger too apparently. This dismal SciFi Channel series was based on the Roger Corman movies, which is a questionable judgment right from the get go.

Alien Hunter (2001)

"The Crocodile Hunter" in space. The only thing this show had going for it was Doug Jones' "sick of this shit" alien crew member. He was actually funny, unlike everything else on this show.

Birds of Prey (2002)

Birds of Prey's failure stung the most because it was a great idea, but executed so poorly. They didn't care about the characters, story or mythology at all. I really wanted Batman and Catwoman's baby to be a bad ass crime fighter, but her personality never took off. Still, it did generate decent ratings for the WB for a while.

Special Unit 2 (2001-2002)

Yet another TV show that has a cult following for no understandable reason. This series followed Chicago's top secret paranormal police division that chased down odd happenings or "links," as they unfortunately called them. How many paranormal police shows are there now? Plus one of the characters always freaked me out.

Mutant X (2001)

It's like X-Men for idiots, and those people already have X-Men cartoons. This actual Marvel creation focused so much on making sure the team of new mutants was sexy, that there was very little time left to develop personality or interesting character traits.

Baby Bob (2002)

This CBS sitcom was such a disaster I can no longer find any clips of it anywhere! New parents find out their baby can talk, and instead of throwing this demon in a well decide to keep it around. This was one of those genius "inspired by a commercial" TV shows. Truly terrible.

Bionic Woman (2007)

We were all so excited for this dark Bionic Woman reboot from David Eick — then it started and just went totally off the rails plot-wise and accent wise. Eventually the main character's attitude, the side character's one-dimensional insanity and waste of Katee Sackhoff, all compounded into one giant "meh."

Caveman (2007)
Even though comedian Nick Kroll, who played one of the cave people is hilarious, we all make missteps along the way. The saddest thing about this show was that there were decent jokes in there, they were just totally thrown away on a series no one in their right mind would watch.

Knight Rider (2008)

The new Knight Rider gets the crown as the worst TV Show of the decade. Forget the fact that all the plots centered around finding a way for the main character to take off his shirt. Billy from BSG actually LEFT BSG to do this show. And couldn't do a repeat cameo later on when President Roz was having acid dreams. Yes, this show truly is a work of pure evil. And it didn't even have turbo boost.

Flash Gordon (2007 - 2008)

Terrible acting, ideas and concepts. Every week we died a terrible cheesy death with this SciFi series.

Heroes (2007-2009)

Every season of Heroes except the first belongs on this list. From the tattoo super powers to making the cheerleader a sometimes lesbian. Not even a carnival or killing a character twice can save this series.

Eastwick (2009)

Midlife-crisis witches and Paul Gross' penis were the entire cast of this series. Too PG to ever be anything than a "cute" series that told dick jokes. Sigh, the threeways that could have been.

A common theme in Crichton's work is that science is evil, and tampering with the forces of nature will get your face bitten off, writes Brotherton on his blog:

The theme of much of Crichton’s work is that of Frankenstein: playing god brings destruction. This is the message of Jurassic Park and Prey, for starters. There are related themes in books like Sphere, which indicates that there are things that humankind is better off not knowing... When a writer devotes so much time to pointing out the great arrogance and hubris of scientists and how it always brings doom, well, I think that sucks. We don’t have enough positive examples of scientists in books and movies.

And yet in the course of criticizing science, Crichton makes fundamental scientific errors, Brotherton points out. Most amusingly, he thinks "chaos theory" means every complex system will automatically break down — which means the space shuttle shouldn't be able to fly. And of course, Crichton has been lecturing whoever will listen about the "hoax" of global warming, disparaging the work of real climate scientists.

Brotherton links to a fascinating deconstruction of the bad science in Crichton's global warming hoax book, State Of Fear, at RealClimate.org: Crichton dredges up the myth that all scientists believed in the 1970s we were on the verge of an ice age. And in an appendix, Crichton compares the study of global warming to the 19th century academic study of eugenics: both were supported by foundations and had academic support, so ipso facto they must be equally valid. Right? Meanwhile, over at Nanotechnology Now, Chris Phoenix deconstructs the weird science in Crichton's fear-nanotechnology opus Prey, including the idea that atoms can pass through glass. (In which case, lightbulbs wouldn't work all that well.)

[Mike Brotherton]