First off, the movie looked great. The 1960s inspiration was fantastic, and the all of the landscapes were extremely impressive for the seemingly small budget. I especially enjoyed the House of Cards Casino.

The modernized plot, in which the Red Queen was kidnapping humans and sucking them dry of their emotions for profit, was just gonzo enough, and had that dark twist that kept us present in a modern day wonderland.

I stand by my standing ovation for the hopelessly charming and impossible to forget Andrew Lee Potts' Hatter. He was the heart and soul of this film. Even when the plot dragged on and the pacing died down it was consistently Potts who helped the cast pick up the pace. Plus he's exceedingly easy on the eyes.

But here's the rub. The chemistry between Alice and Hatter is great, not amazing, but I believe it even when the plot fumbles around with the characters. At the same time, I'm not really sure why these two like each other, besides the fact that Potts is charming and saved Alice's life a few times. But it's hard to understand what's going on in the Hatter's head. First Hatter wants to sell her ring, then he wants to use it to get to the other side and start over, and finally he wants to use it to lead the resistance. Sure characters can change their minds, but this happens so quickly and jerkily, the feelings behind these exceedingly strong sentiments are lost in the shuffle.

The same goes for Hatter's growing emotions for Alice, in the first half he mutters under his breath that Jack is a lucky guy and that later acts jealous when he finds out that Jack is the Prince of Wonderland. But we still never really understand the motivations or reasons why he fancies her. And it started so well, with the half-pervy half-sweet line, "Can't I be nice to a girl in a very wet dress?" We never really knew what his intentions were, at any time. Still we knew he wanted to be with Alice, based on the puppy-dog eyes he kept giving her.

The rest of the star cameos came and went rather quickly. Tim Curry yelled a lot and was gone forever, Colm Meaney managed to eke out some strange remorse for loving his heartless Queen Kathy Bates for so long, so much so that he stayed behind and died in the collapse of the casino while the Queen didn't even bat an eye. Very odd. I would have hoped that this would make her care a bit, but no dice. Matt Frewer was a loveable old Knight, until he dug up a bunch of his old companions to act as scarecrows. This moment was totally lost on me and I didn't understand why these skeletons were intimidating at all, if they couldn't fight.

The Father and the Carpenter plot line also made only the tiniest bit of sense, and rang dangerously close to The Tenth Kingdom, especially when Alice was pleading with her mind-wiped Daddy to save her life, so I was fine when he was axed in the end.

The heart of the story is the love story between Hatter and Alice, and while I hated not really understanding why things were so dangerously slow in some places, I adored the little moments here and there, like when you piece it together in the end that Hatter must have jumped through the looking glass moments after Alice left. I'll watch it again, if only to try and wrap my head around a few of the editing and plot decisions, like making Mad March from Long Island. But all in all I had fun, developed a new crush and enjoyed the gorgeous scenery. Horrible truth room CG background, flying flamingos and all.

But what did you think?

Updated with squid-fighting action.

Admittedly, I was prepared to dislike this episode on principle. "Next Tuesday" (without the words "See You" in front of it) has always been teased as Magnus and Will getting stranded somewhere and having a potentially fatal encounter with an abnormal. Sound familiar? It should if you've seen the first season episodes "Kush" (in which Magnus and Will crash in the Himalayas and have to survive a killer abnormal) and "Requiem" (wherein Magnus and Will are stuck in a submarine while Magnus suffers a deadly parasitic infection). Does Sanctuary not pay their other actors enough?

Anyhow, while on a conservation mission to capture the rare vampire squid from the Gulf of Mexico, Magnus and and Will's helicopter crashes inside a decommissioned oil rig, causing the vampire squid to escape. However, we're quickly assured that the vampire squid isn't nearly as exciting as it sounds. Apparently, the descriptor "vampire" refers to it's intellect rather than a penchant for sucking blood (Why? Because Nikola Tesla is a vampire?), and the squid is quite docile. Immediately, I smelled another Big Bertha bait and switch.

"Next Tuesday" is also plagued by incredible crimes against logic, too many to fully enumerate here. Hatches on the helicopter that were open in one shot are mysteriously closed in the next. An acetylene torch similarly appears and disappears. At one point, the helicopter sinks rapidly, but fails to pull any people or objects down with it. And despite claims that the helicopter is soaked in fuel, it only explodes when it's convenient. For such a claustrophobic episode, there is remarkably little attention to detail.

But there was one redeeming factor. We actually got to see some abnormal-on-abnormal violence. It turns out that when the team lifted off, they were carrying an unexpected stowaway: a clever and vicious sea scorpion. And, as a bonus, the normally docile vampire squid becomes quite violent when faced with a turf war with the sea scorpion. After last week, it was refreshing to see a little monster action.

So who wins in the battle between scorpion and squid? As it turns out, no one. The squid bites it, the scorpion bites it, the helicopter bites it, and Magnus and Will are left treading water inside the oil rig (presumably, they'll eventually be rescued). So much for monster conservation.

The Wormy Horror: This week's bit of scientific crime centered around a bunch of vaguely Lovecraftian worms with creepy tendrils surrounding a vagina dentata of a mouth. The worms have remarkable healing powers, but they need to be incubated inside a human host. But when the worms mature, they tend to exit their host in the most painful and deadly way possible. There's a definite Alien vibe to the premise, but Fringe manages to acknowledge it (for a moment, it looks like one such worm might burst through its host's chest) while changing it up a little bit. Then next time I feel a tickle in the back of my throat, I'm going to think about those skinny tentacles snaking through my nasal passages.

Walter Grows Up: Walter is asserting his independence at last. He's gone from being unable to sleep alone to choosing his own wardrobe and insisting he can go out without adult supervision. Granted, he's acting like an eight-year-old crossing the street alone for the first time, but there's something more tragic here than Walter's childlike nature. Walter is preparing himself for the day when everyone learns his terrible secret, the day when he'll lose Peter for good, and maybe Olivia and Astrid to boot.

Never Take the Seasickness Pills: A crew of worm traffickers have found the perfect hosts for their facebursting monsters: Cantonese refugees coming to America by boat. The traffickers infect the refugees by inserting worm larvae into "seasickness" pills and turning their passengers into unwitting worm mules. It's sort of like the folks who take weight loss pills and end up with an intestine full of tapeworm, except I doubt the refugees' pills actually cured seasickness.

Walter Can Get High Off of Anything: Seriously. Walter, of course, assumes that the worms must be psychotropic because he can't imagine any other reason they'd be worth killing so many people for. But the worms' value isn't recreational; it's medical. The worms are the ultimate form of alternative medicine, boosting even the most worn-down immune system. But just because the worms aren't a drug doesn't mean Walter can't enjoy getting bitten, as we see in the clip at the top.

Agent Farnsworth, Is That You?: I get that Astrid's abilities seem to be largely linguistic and technical, but she is a trained FBI agent. She can't evade foggy Walter's notice for a few hours? On a separate note, it's telling that Walter has started calling her "Agent Farnsworth" instead of some odd variation on her first name.

Kick the Puppy: Also on the "Isn't Astrid a trained FBI agent?" note, she's followed back to the lab and fails to notice the tail, then is caught completely unawares by the worm traffickers. This wouldn't be so odd if it weren't the second time Astrid has been attacked in the lab. She was attacked and sedated last season — by Walter himself.

Doing Everything the Hard Way: Walter's experiment in independence hits a snag when he can't remember Peter's phone number. Well, to be accurate, he can remember all the digits, but can't recall the order. When Peter scolds him, reminding Walter he stuck the phone numbers in Walter's pocket, Walter barely seems to register it. Is Walter — either consciously or unconsciously — rejecting Peter's paternalistic help? Or does it not even occur to him that there might be a simpler solution to his problems?

Walter Moment of the Week: Walter realizes that it's his fault that Astrid was attacked; he gave her slip and tipped the traffickers off to the giant worm in his lab. He's genuinely remorseful, but he responds in a typically over-the-top Walter fashion: he embeds a transponder in his neck so that Peter and Astrid can always locate him electronically. I wonder how this will come into play when the interdimensional tensions heat up.

We were sent an extremely early edit of the film, so I'm not making a final judgment on the two-day mini movie until it airs, but what I did watch I got a excited about.

Here's the premise: Alice is a no-nonsense commitment-phobe and karate instructor. So yeah she kicks ass, and a lot, for better or worse. Strong armed Alice falls for one of her students who sneaks her some sort of magical ring and is promptly kidnapped. Alice follows her boytoy through the looking glass and is transported to Wonderland. But Wonderland has changed. It's now a dirty world that looks strangely like Vancouver. Alice soon learns that the Queen of Hearts is kidnapping humans and imprisoning them in her casino, siphoning off their happy emotions and selling them to the inhabitants of Wonderland. Thus making her beloved, for providing the quick fix, as well as rich.

Alice meets the Hatter in one of these emotion dens and the two strike a deal to go and save her boyfriend, who has presumably been kidnapped by the Queen for emotion harvesting. If I tell you more we'll get into spoiler territory, but there are plenty more twists and turns. It also gets pretty heavy with the family issues and inner love turmoil for poor Alice. In fact it really reminded me of a shorter and less in-depth version of the TV movie The 10th Kingdom, which I adored. So even coming close to that is a good thing.

Plus the cast is just bafflingly great. Tim Curry plays the Dodo, Kathy Bates is the Queen of Hearts, Harry Dean Stanton is the Caterpillar, and Colm Meaney is the King of Hearts. Those names alone are worth tuning in for. You won't want to miss watch Tim Curry walk around with his stomach forward, Dodo-style. Sure, I could mention that Curry really pushes the level of running and screaming that I can take from him, and that Kathy Bates seemed like she was sporting dead face for most of the movie, but they're are small issues.

But the real standout was Andrew Lee Potts' Hatter. Call me a sucker for British heroes who wear funny suits and like to throw their weight around, but I couldn't rip my eyes off of the Hatter when he was on screen. Almost to the detriment of Alice. Potts is familiar with the scifi world, having starred in the BBC's Primeval, but he really hits his stride here. And while I was watching him on a version that needed copious edits and tweaks, I still really enjoyed watching him try to elevate the story and dialogue he was handed. Yes, making the Hatter a cute hipster is a little eye rolling, but he made it work. Potts really attempted to sell some of his totally implausible actions he was taken in by the script. You heard it here first: If Matt Smith the new Doctor crashes and burns, certainly wouldn't be any worse off with Potts. But that's just hopeful projecting on my part.

So the bottom line: I'm tuning in. I'm anxious to see what the home of Matt Frewer's dimwitted White Knight looks like, as it's merely described as a chessboard forest kingdom. Along with the flying jetski-like flamingo sky cars, and the Queen's casino once the FX are all finished. Plus I wouldn't miss the opportunity to watch Andrew Lee Potts make me reassess my staunch views on men who wear guyliner.

Even though some of the story did feel a bit pushed here and there, and the plot was in an eternal loop of running to the casino and escaping, then running back, and escaping, the characters, settings, costumes and actors make this worth your time. And for those of you worried it's a Tim Burton rip, fear not: This contemporary Wonderland has a strange feel all on it's own.

Here's the trailer:

The first part begins December 6th, 8 PM.

I say "anti-villainy", because you'd be hard-pressed to find a single hero in any of the six parts that make up Incognito. There's a protagonist, one Zack Overkill, who was once a super-strong villain but is now a heavily drugged civilian in the Witness Protection Program. He occasionally does the right thing, but never for the right reasons, and there are one or two truly unforgivable acts he commits along the way. Even the so-called good guys of this world, the SOS, are a morally gray, clandestine bunch who only recently stopped torturing their prisoners.

Brubaker chose to spin the universe of Incognito out of the pulp tradition of the 1930's, which is part of the reason this is now such a brutal world. As he argues in the collection's afterword, characters like Doc Savage and the Shadow were always more violent and ambiguous than the likes of Captain America and Superman, and the larger world of the pulps was one dominated by horror and noirish murder mystery.

Considering this background of pulpish adventurers and the current war between the omnipresent, villainous organization run by the Black Death and the heroic-by-default SOS, I couldn't help but be reminded of The Venture Bros. (There's another plot point that will really hammer home that connection, but I won't spoil it.) The comparison is a worthy one - both are superior explorations of how supposedly extraordinary people try but fail to lead ordinary lives, and the consequences of secret wars between good and evil for those caught in the middle. Oh, and they're both fantastic, if you prefer to keep things simple.

Between Sleeper and his truly epic run on Captain America, I'd rank Ed Brubaker as one of the top three writers working in comics today. After reading Incognito, you could definitely talk me into handing him the outright title. What's so impressive about his work here is that the story is grim, gritty, profane, ultraviolent, and more than a little offensive - and none of it feels gratuitous. He is telling a story from the perspective of a man without a moral compass, and there's no way such a story isn't headed for some pretty dark places. Still, because neither he nor Zack Overkill revel in it, all of the carnage feels artistically justified. Take note, comic book writers from the nineties. This is how mature comics writing is done.

At just six issues, the story barrels along quickly. Although the concept of a supervillian working an office job while in witness protection was the initial impetus for Incognito, Brubaker does not dwell on it for too long. He extracts a lot of great material from the premise - including Zack's one civilian friend and his rather inexplicable office crush - but puts a lot of other balls in motion while he does so. With at least five or six factions out for Zack, each with their own distinct interests, it's remarkable that the story is entirely coherent. Of course, based on Brubaker's track record, it's not exactly surprising.

Sean Phillips also deserves a great deal of praise for his work on the art of Incognito. A perfect visual fit for Brubaker's writing, he excels at bringing out the twisted, complex emotions of the book's characters. Although clearly capable of rendering an exploded head or charred corpse in all its exquisite glory, he too shows restraint, preferring to indicate the most horrific moments tastefully, rather than let them take over the panels. That isn't to say there isn't some brutal imagery in here - there definitely is - but much like Brubaker's script, none of it feels exploitative or gratuitous.

Incognito sets out to explore one possible fate of a supervillain and ends up tackling questions of morality, destiny, voyeurism, and whether there are limits to what humans can do to themselves in the name of power. It also takes the story of Zack Overkill and uses it as an opportunity to construct an entire world of pulp heroes and villains brought forward into the 21st century, one that Brubaker has promised he will return to. I can't wait.

The Road, which opens today, is based on a bleak novel by Cormac McCarthy where a man and his son travel through a world destroyed by a vaguely-explained apocalypse that has covered the planet in a cloud that blocks the sunlight and kills all plant life. Brutal and horrific, it is a story difficult to adapt to film - especially a holiday film. And indeed, the movie has a troubled history for this very reason. Plagued by endless edits, its release was delayed an entire year: Rumor had it that nobody could figure out how to market the damned thing because it was just too grim.

Whatever that editorial tinkering did, it didn't tone down the grimness. The man known only as Papa, played with ragged intensity by Viggo Mortenson, has lost everything - his beautiful country home, his wife (Charlize Theron), and civilization itself. All he has left is his young son. Most of the movie is preoccupied with the awful, starvation-laced journey the two of them take, through dying forests and cannibal ranches, to the southern coast. They're looking for something better than certain death, trying to keep hope alive.

At the heart of every brilliant road movie are finely-drawn characters. The plot arc may be harnessed to their journey, but only as a way to express how the characters' relationships with the world change as they travel. Great road movies like Thelma and Louise or even Wizard of Oz use landscapes and pitstops to foreground human relationships. And that's where The Road falls flat.

Part of the problem with the father/son relationship in this movie is, to be fair, the actor who plays the boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Whiny and cutsey by turns, he looks like he belongs in a remake of Home Alone - not in a barren post-apocalypse eating bugs. More than that, though, the father's love for his boy is simply too exalted, too idealized, to be realistic or even interesting. At one point Papa and the boy share dinner with an old man by the side of the road, and Papa confesses to the man that the boy "is God" to him. The bloated symbolism in this comment masks a basic meaninglessness - the boy is holy, their family relationship is holy, and that drains all the essential human complexity from both of them.

It's fascinating to see the world become an empty vessel, but all The Road pours back into it are hollow truisms. Family is good. Sons are good. Fathers are protectors. There is even a dreadful product-placement scene where man and boy, on the verge of total starvation, find a giant cache of flagrantly branded food items in a bomb shelter. Here we learn that Vitamin Water is good. Cheetos are good. Jack Daniels is good. What's truly grim about this movie isn't imagining the fall of civilization, but instead imagining what would happen if everything in our society evaporated except for families and advertising.

We need desperately to have characters we can relate to in this world where most people have degenerated into cannibalism or worse. And yet there are very few moments in the film where we actually see any kind of realistic ambiguity or subtle characterization. There is one intriguing moment when Papa and boy are robbed while Papa is hunting for food and the boy is sleeping. When they find the robber, Papa forces him to strip and steals all his possessions - just as he did to them. Though Papa wants to teach his boy to be a "good person," we see that circumstances are forcing him to slide into desperate, unforgivable evil. This is also the only time when the boy acts like the preteen he is, violently disagreeing with what his father has done.

To succeed, The Road needed more scenes like this, where its characters break out of the dull molds of Papa Saint and Boy Angel. We needed to know more about why the man knows so much about anatomy and medicine (was he a doctor?), and what motivates him and his son beyond a nearly religious fervor to survive. And why, if they are journeying to the coast to find a better place to live, does the man never attempt to connect with non-dangerous people? The movie gives us a few possible answers to these questions (maybe Papa has gone crazy over the loss of his wife; maybe there are no non-dangerous people) but they are sloppily vague and leave our characters ill-defined throughout the film.

I don't want to make it seem like the problem with the movie is that the characters are minimalistic. There is an elegance to the idea that the need to survive pares everyone down to their most basic selves. But that's not what's going on in The Road. We're not getting minimalism so much as simplistic sentimentality. We learn that children are beautiful, perfect creatures; families are good; and evil is as easily-recognized as cannibalism. Papa and his son remain one-note throughout The Road; instead of developing, they wander from a blandly dismal scenario into a blandly mawkish one.

As I said earlier, the one consistently breathtaking aspect of this film is the landscape where it is set. Father and son walk through grey, empty spaces full of ashy buildings, abandoned trucks, and greenery reduced to sticks. We've seen post-apocalyptic cities done well before, but The Road's true visual genius lies in its majestic substantiation of total environmental collapse. One way the movie is different from the book is that we're fairly sure that the apocalypse was caused by a meteor crashing to Earth (Papa says there was a rumble) - and it's tossed up enough dust to shut out the sunlight. We witness what would happen to Earth's ecosystem without sunlight. Vegetation has become tinder, animals have wasted away, and the only food left is in cans or on the bodies of surviving humans.

What this also means (weirdly) is this stately art movie is echoing the disaster scenario from blow-em-up apocalypse flick 2012. Given the cliched smarminess at the heart of The Road, however, the comparison is all too apt.

Makers is written by Cory Doctorow, that cape and goggles-wearing editor of Boing Boing, and author of such novels as Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Little Brother. This latest volume touches on many of the topics Doctorow has become famous for obsessing over: intellectual property rights and open source, the tension between individual and institution, his emotionally complicated relationship with Disney, how technology is gradually changing our culture, transhumanism, and ordinary people who make really cool shit.

The novel is set in that fifteen minutes into the future that is Doctorow's forte, at a time when Silicon Valley has begun to disintegrate more subtly than Detroit, but perhaps as thoroughly. At a press conference, Landon Kettlewell, the CEO of a newly merged Kodak/Duracell (termed "Kodacell" by a snarky tech journo), announces a bold new direction for the company: he plans to scout talented people from all over the country who make cool stuff, fund them, and find a way to quickly monetize their ideas time and time again. Many are skeptical, but business writer Suzanne Church — who once covered the Detroit scene and finds herself increasingly, if unconsciously, disillusioned with the Bay Area — is intrigued by Kodacell's new endeavor. After a few flirtatious interactions with Kettlewell (a maverick of an executive who insists that the people close to him call him by absurd nicknames like "Kettlebelly" and "Kettledrum"), Church finds herself embedded with Kodacell and flies to a depressed Florida suburb to meet Kodacell's first idea tank. There she finds Perry Gibbons and his obese sidekick Lester Banks, a pair of scavenger-artists who design elaborate mechanical art pieces for wealthy collectors: simple difference engines that spew M&Ms, crews of robotic Elmo dolls reprogrammed to drive cars. Perry and Lester are pros at repurposing technology, though they've never had an eye for the practical. They are soon joined by Tjan, a Kodacell moneyman who helps them develop products with mass appeal, rapidly get them to market, and then start the process all over again when imitators flood the market.

The first portion of Makers reads very much like a manifesto. The characters make enough pretty speeches about moral capitalism that I sometimes suspected it was being ghostwritten by an undead, philosophically reformed Ayn Rand. But the gleeful moneymaking of those early chapters isn't about the glory of the high-powered executive or developing a greed-is-good social code; it's about giving people power over their own destinies, giving people the ability to build things, to take pride in their communities (all communities — not just those located in major cities), and the notion that in order to sell things to people, you need to make sure they have the money to buy them. Thanks to Suzanne's vivid chronicles of Perry and Lester's innovations and Kodacell's early success, they all find themselves at the center of a New Work movement. Former cubicle jockeys flee their metropolises for smaller cities and suburbs and get their hands dirty — serving their neighbors and themselves instead of just serving their corporate masters — in an ephemeral golden age of American innovation.

But it quickly becomes clear that good ideas and wide-eyed idealism alone won't save America, and Makers shifts from manifesto to novel, albeit a novel still very concerned with the social problems plaguing America. The country's obesity problem takes an abrupt term with the development of the so-called "fatkins" treatments, where Russian biotechnology clinics reshape corpulent bodies as generically fit Adonises and tweak their metabolic systems to require metric tons of empty calories. As the treatments catch on, the fatkins become one of the nations' dominant cultures, with their own restaurants, dating styles, and demographic box. There is a great deal of frustration with government intrusion, especially concerning a shantytown of squatters who view their brand of community building as a new frontier. And there's similar frustration with the legal system, the need for intellectual property and formalized institutional structures, though it's coupled with the recognition that foregoing these legal protections carries dangerous consequences.

It's a dense, and always interesting reading experience, even if it has its warts. Subtlety has never been a virtue of Doctorow's novels, and Makers is no exception. The story has its villains, and even when they possess the capacity for redemption, a good deal of mustache-twirling goes on. Suzanne Church has a Dagny Taggert knack for making brilliant men fall in love with her, and though our other heroes are flawed, they seem in many ways the perfect models of idea men and executives.

The most frustrating aspect of Makers, however, may be the most honest. We see the rise and fall of various projects and innovations over the years, and Doctorow fills his world with wondrous technologies and forward-thinking people. But when things fall apart, as they periodically do, it's often because of interpersonal issues, because disagreements get in the way of big, brilliant ventures. It's not a crack at Doctorow as a writer; it's just that he's so adept at raising our spirits and making us believe in these superhuman people that when they fall prey to the ugly foibles of the real world, it's a bit of a letdown. Affection and optimism, even when a bit overblown, is a better look on him, and the most engaging portions of Makers are the ones that harness that.

Still, Makers is a book for the lovers of technology, for the gleeful optimists more than the cynics. It's for the people who love the kooky engineering projects you see on Boing Boing, for the people who believe that, as the poster says, "The future belongs to the few of us still willing to get our hands dirty." It's for the people who can't wait to own a 3D printer, and who believe that while technology has its missteps, it's going to change our lives in wonderful and unexpected ways. It's for the people who hate Disney's corporate tactics, but still get a thrill at the idea of visiting the Magic Kingdom; for the people who believe that, even if they can't change the world, they can at least improve their little corner of it. It's for the people who think that, while the future may not be all jetpacks and hover cars and all the world's people people singing Kumbaya, we as individuals have the power to make it awesome in its own right.

Makers is currently out in hardcover, but you can read the serialized novel for free on Tor.com.

Last night's episode began with what was supposed to be the ultimate Sanctuary shocker: Bigfoot turns up dead in the Sanctuary's morgue. I can't imagine that we're supposed to believe for a moment that the Big Guy is actually dead; he already almost died once this season, and it's unlikely he'd get such an ignominious demise without some sort of build-up. But then there's the kicker: Declan Macrae (a character I constantly forget is on this show) believes that Helen Magnus murdered the Big Guy. Macrae, who's more than ready to hop in as head of the Old City Sanctuary, claims that Bigfoot discovered that Magnus was suffering from a degenerative mental disorder and that Magnus decided to silence him, permanently. Of course, Will is having none of this and, after shedding a few requisite tears for the Big Guy, launches an investigation to prove Magnus' innocence. It doesn't help matters that Magnus is increasingly batshit insane and that there's a video of Magnus actually shooting Bigfoot. By the time the Triad, a group of psychic interrogators from the Sanctuary Network, show up, Will is completely at a loss.

As it turns out, though, Magnus really is crazy — crazy like a fox. She's out to expose the Triad members, who are after Big Bertha, an abnormal capable of leveling whole cities. And why might the Triad want to get their mitts on such a creature? I'll let the lovely Erica Cerra (who's really been making the rounds on Syfy shows this year) explain above.

I definitely perked up at the description of Big Bertha. Tectonic plate-shifting abnormal? Yes, please. We may have had our zombie apocalypse a few episodes back, but we've never seen a single abnormal on such a large scale. I was looking forward to seeing Big Bertha, even if it was just a little glimpse. But sadly, Big Bertha was just a cataclysmic tease, and when Cerra's Triad member opened the shipping container that allegedly held her, there was nothing inside, nada. Instead, we were treated to a breakdown of just how clever Magnus' plan to expose the Triad was. Shooting Bigfoot with a paralytic chemical? Ah yes, very clever. Placing an insanity-inducing beetle in her brain so she could hide her true thoughts from the Triad psychics? Uh-huh, brilliant. Coding a message to Kate so that the team could snare Erica Cerra in Magnus' trap? Yes, we get it, Magnus; you're a genius. But I'm still miffed we didn't get our big earthquake-maker.

Planet 51's tragedy is that it could have been a decent movie. It starts off with a neat premise: on a distant planet, there is an alien civilization that strongly resembles 1950s Americas — right down to everyone speaking English and grooving to The Chordettes. They even have a love for alien invasion movies, and, through a remarkable stroke of coincidence, the scifi franchise du jour is titled Humaniacs and features a monster that looks like an astronaut. Into this world plunges Captain Chuck Baxter, a middling US astronaut who has been sent to explore the planet (which NASA mistakenly believed was uninhabited) and suddenly finds that, on this world, he is the alien. Naturally chaos ensues. The movie also has some endearing and well-animated characters, especially in rock-craving robot Rover, and a Xenomorph-shaped dog that pees acid. The early clips promised a fun, if light, movie filled with cute science fiction references.

The problem is, Planet 51 has no idea what it's precisely about. Sure, it has a plot: a teenager named Lem has to help get Chuck back to his ship and off the planet before the military captures him and removes his brain (and, hopefully, without ruining Lem's life in the process). But it has the feel of a movie written by committee: too many ideas stuffed in and not enough fat trimmed off. Planet 51 tries to be about so many different things that it ends up being about nothing at all. Is it about the dangers of automatically attacking that which we don't understand? How the media makes us suggestible and paranoid? What it's like to learn that the universe is much larger than you ever imagined? Or is it about having the cojones to take risks and do the things you dream of doing? Okay, so the pants-less aliens have no visible cojones, but you get the point. And this lack of a center is symptomatic in the film's cast of predictable stock characters. Only the dog-like characters get any bite.

Even the jokes are just so much spaghetti thrown at the wall. Crude jokes about alien probes are mixed in with references to classic science fiction films, and great swaths of the film rely on forgettable sequences of slapstick. The odd joke hits, but when it does, it's just a solitary joke, and doesn't contribute anything to the movie as a whole. And, though it's a ostensibly kids movie, the rare jokes that elicited laughs went over the younger viewers' heads. During the viewing I attended, the audience laughed in unison just once — at a penis joke.

There are certain sins that children's films can sometimes get away with because they're geared toward younger viewers: being too busy or too cloying, or having a wearying or simplistic sense of humor. But Planet 51's problems are far deeper: it's a film that simply never engages, and for a science fiction film, leaves us with depressingly little to think about after it's over. Do yourself a favor and, instead of seeing Planet 51, watch these clips and pretend you've seen the entire movie. You'll be better off for it.

The Twilight series, whose second installment hits theaters tonight in the weird form of New Moon, has gone through a lot of changes in its journey from book to screen. This paranormal romance about a postgrunge girl from the Pacific Northwest and the monsters she loves isn't just a fictional world. It's a lifestyle. But what exactly is this lifestyle about? Is it about celibacy and traditional gender roles, the way its conservative Mormon creator Stephenie Meyer would have us believe? Or is it about rampant girl hormones, boys who strip at the slightest provocation, and otherworldly sparkle woodies?

Or is it, perhaps, about something else entirely?

I'll go with door number three. From the moment that Bella arrives for her first day of school and sees vamp Edward ambling toward her in slo-mo, his skin powdered white and lips cherry red, we're plunged into some kind of gender-bending satire of beer commercials. But instead of a busty blonde boob-bouncing her way towards the camera, we have the ridiculously made-up Edward, looking like something that got dunked in a Sephora store and then hurled through the stock room at Abercrombie and Goth. Once the two have kissed in extreme lurid closeup, wolfboy Jacob emerges literally from nowhere to show off his mega-muscles (which everybody comments on endlessly). As he gives Bella a hug, he explains that he likes the Reservation school way better than the white people's school. The scene is sheer comic genius, with the actors panting exaggeratedly as they kiss, and the lines wildly out-of-sync with the action (Jacob is constantly reminding the main characters how white they are in the middle of a "let's kiss" moment).

And it only gets better. Bella's human friends, represented incongruously as hipsters, are in on the joke. Their banter, possibly the best part of the whole movie, tips you off immediately to the fact that writer Melissa Rosenberg - whose main claim to fame is as a producer on ultra-dark serial killer satire Dexter - knows there is a significant audience who has come to watch New Moon just to laugh their asses off. And indeed, when I saw the film at a special sneak preview, loud laughter was as frequent as shots of Jacob's perky nipples.

It's almost as if the ostensible set-up of the movie - EDWARD: We can't be together; BELLA: Ohhhhhh [sigh] - is there just as a kind of blocky set in the background of the real story. A story about smart, snarky teens who think the entire premise of the film is stupid. There's a terrific scene when Bella starts to hang out with her old friends again after months of moping over the missing Edward, and she and her gal pal go to see a zombie movie. As they walk out of the theater, her friend launches into a long rant about how zombie movies claim to have some "deep meanings about consumerism" but that they're just dumb. Hello, moment that is way too meta for this movie.

And that's not the only meta moment. After the zombie rant, Bella and her pal run into a gang of motorcyclists who are catcalling and hooting at them, asking them if they want rides. As Bella stares at the men, Edward appears before her in a really bad Obi Wan-style apparition, urging her to "keep walking - danger." So of course, Bella walks up to the motorcycle guys and hops on the motorcycle, only to see the Obi Edward ghost go all after-school special on her, warning her again about the naughty man. This is the kind of pop culture reference that teens raised on "very special episodes" and old Star Wars movies will get, especially with the cheese larded on in such dramatic proportions.

Don't get me wrong: There are long, boring parts in this movie, mostly featuring the giant lack of chemistry that is Edward/Bella. But there are moments of subversion in between the emo globs that tantalize us into asking what Bella could become - if she would just exit the Twilight plot arc that will eventually propel her into marriage and babymaking.

In New Moon, that exit feels like a real possibility in a way that it won't after next year's wedding-oriented sequel Eclipse. The Bella of New Moon becomes "an adrenaline addict," seeking out motorcycle rides with shirtless Jacob and jumping off cliffs into the water, just so she can see Obi Edward again, telling her to be safe. She also starts cozying up with shirtless wolf boy Jacob and his pals - who cheerfully remind her that she's "not brown enough" to be clever. Again, Bella's friends (and writer Rosenberg) supply the ironic commentary that's running through everybody's heads anyway.

When a human boy with a crush on Bella asks her out to the movies and suggests a romantic comedy, she insists that they go see a movie hilariously called Face Punch, because she's "all about the adrenaline." First of all, Face Punch is now my new favorite movie title - New Moon cannot stop making jokes about teen pop culture. And second, I love the idea that Bella has this totally badass side that in no way matches the character's reputation as chaste romantic girly-girl.

The Bella of New Moon is a chick who fools around with vampires and werewolves, and then goes cliff jumping, "you know, recreationally," as she puts it later. And when this girl finds herself in the middle of over-the-top romantic scenarios, she's not exactly a swooner. In fact, she just wants to get her annoying boyfriend to turn her superpowered and vampy like him. When the boringly tormented Edward hints that he can't make her a vampire because she'll "lose her soul" and she looks kind of irritated and replies, "Well I don't believe in that."

So is this a movie about the glories of celibate romance? Not metaphorically, and not literally either.

Let's just take a quick gander at the much-vaunted symbolism of the series, where monsters stand in for humans and monstrous desires stand in for sexual ones. Edward's brother tries to eat Bella when she gets a paper cut; Jacob's brother also tries to eat Bella when she makes him mad. So: Sexiness is in the metaphorical air. But then things go literal. Jacob takes off his shirt and Bella tells him he's beautiful. Then when Jacob goes Total Wolf, he just stops wearing shirts altogether, spending most of the movie in tight denim cutoffs and running shoes. Edward also takes off his shirt in a scene where his pants ride so low that we see a little wisp of sparkling vampire pubes.

Nobody ever says anything about celibacy ever. Indeed, they spend more time arguing about race than they do about sex. As Jacob snarks to Bella, "Maybe I'm not the right kind of monster for you." All these teens ever do is jump into each other's bedrooms and kiss and pant heavily. This is not a movie about avoiding sex: The sex is just taking place offscreen. I guarantee that people the world over will be jacking off to memories of Jacob and Edward and Bella in their ruffled pink beds tomorrow night because this flick is packed so full of beefcakery. Basically, New Moon is training wheels for future Playgirl readers.

What's amazing about New Moon, and the whole Twilight series generally, is how easily it becomes self-parody. I think that's part of its appeal to teenagers, a group of people who cut through adult pretension and lies so incisively - and yet fall so hard for impossible fantasies. It caters to a youthful desire to watch a fairy tale, and then to see that fairy tale mocked mercilessly as the after-school-special bullshit it is.

I suspect that audiences for New Moon will sometimes choose to see Edward as genuinely romantic, while others will laugh at his makeup. Still others will - like the movie itself - vacillate wildly between romantic yearning and scornful laughter.

They can catch bullets. The ability to catch bullets probably comes in handy when you hop around time observing significant (and often violent) moments in history. But August's Superman stunt is just another sign that the Observers aren't human (or if they are, they are extremely altered), and that they can be powerful, even if those powers are rarely used.

They know the future (to some extent). August says that he can see Christine's future, and he knows both what she is about to say before she says it and when the report of the crash will come on TV. And the Observers watching Olivia and her niece comment that it's a shame things are going to be so hard for her. On a side note — are we supposed to automatically assume they're talking about Olivia, or could they be talking about her niece?

They can still be surprised. At least, they're surprised when August interferes with the natural order of things. Are Observers the only ones with free will, or do they observe to see how individuals react to these big, important situations.

Their writing is culled from various civilizations. So it turns out that the Observer language isn't a language at all, but simply words written in various languages from throughout human history (and perhaps other people's histories as well). It's got to be a handy way of communicating exclusively with people who have an encyclopedic knowledge of all languages ever written.

They appear at important moments in history. We actually know this from the promo campaign, but the episode makes it official. Also, the increasing frequency of Observer appearances suggest that the most important event in human history is about to occur.

They eat fancy peppers. We already knew the Observers were fans of the hot stuff, but hot peppers are a handy way to track them. Will the apocalypse be marked by record sales of hot peppers?

They sometimes make mistakes — ones that require "correcting." So, sometimes observing affects the outcome, but we still don't know what mistake prompted September to save Walter and Peter. Did September cause Walter and Peter to fall into the lake all those years ago, or does the Observers' correction require Walter to survive for an entirely different reason? Or did September get attached to Walter and Peter the same way August got attached to Christine and simply convince the other Observers that he was fixing a mistake?

September made some kind of deal with Walter. Walter says he had an "arrangement" with September, presumably so he could keep the alternate universe Peter. Apparently, the other Observers know about this, but we're still left to wonder what the exact nature of this deal is, and whether it relates to Walter's particular relationship with September.

They can feel love. The Observers are apparently also changed by the act of observation. And, now that they're observing the same people for extended periods of time, I'd imagine it's more likely that they'll get attached.

They can be killed. But what does it take to kill an Observer who doesn't want to die?

Being responsible for the death of an Observer makes you "important." August may be more significant than Christine in this respect, but it implies that the violent death of an Observer is extremely rare — a monumental event in history.

Any other Observer observations?

The November 1954 issue begins with a big swing-and-a-miss by editor John Campbell, who writes in his editorial,

I am willing to bet that the next major advance in human understanding – the really big advance – will be initiated by working with something that is detected by organic entities . . . probably human detection systems.

He goes on to talk about how the first device used to detect electric current was a pair of frogs legs and how science has become more about meter reading than human inventiveness.

Campbell's sentiment echoes, though never directly references, Ernest Rutherford's famous statement "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." An unsubtle jab, this statement ridiculed the orthodoxy and classification that Rutherford believed characterized biology and chemistry, representing physics as the only branch of science which allowed for true scientific exploration.

Campbell's idea that human perception cannot be usurped by mechanical tools is perhaps inspired by one of the stories in the issue. "Pilot's License," by William T Powers tells the story of Lysle Cruthers, the son of a disgraced spaceship pilot, who spends fifteen years working to get his own pilot's license. He makes a difficult landing, detached from the danger of the situation, and tells the doctor who checks him out afterward that he was "flying the instrument panel," and not the ship. After a final confrontation with Lysle, the doctor walks off thinking about what a fantastic pilot Lysle will be since "no man with that degree of presbyopia could have read his instruments accurately enough to fly on them."

The human spirit, not cold, precise instrumentation, will be the next breakthrough in science, the issue seems to declare. Read in its own time, it would have made a very good case. Read fifty-five years later, though, the most memorable part of "Pilot's License" is the blurb which gives us the emotional thrust of the story; "The only man who you can be sure won't get polio is the one who's had it – and won the battle."

This was a true statement at the time. Five months later, Doctor Jonas Salk announced to the world that there was going to be a very reliable way to be sure that a man wouldn't get polio. While the polio vaccine didn't usher in the golden age of biochemistry, in which our focus has literally turned from our stars to ourselves, it could be seen as one of its early heralds. As for modern research, we turn to scanning electron microscopes, the Hubble Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider, which all detect things that we can never hope to witness with our own eyes.

What struck me, the first time I read this issue, was how antiquated much of the science seemed and how contemporary the capitalism felt. Sure, the ad that said "Prepare Now for Leadership in the New Industrial Revolution," was a scam, but it was a prescient one. And sure, the ad on the back cover that promises "Free Round Trip Reservations to the Moon," looks quaint. Until you read it a little closer and see that it's basically an early forbearer of the current Star Registry programs. You know the ones. You pay a company to tell you that, as far as they are concerned, such-and-such star is named after you, International Astronomical Union be damned. In 1954, they were selling the same thing, only this time it was labeled as an application to be on the ‘list' of the first company selling commercial flights to the moon.

Capitalism isn't the only thing that stands the test of time more than science does. Reading an article entitled "Our Hairy Ancestors," by Poul Anderson, the most contemporary sentence is, "These days, the subject of race is so touchy that intelligent discussion is almost impossible." The sociological awkwardness, and the carefully-worded-to-seem-off-hand disclaimer have held up far more than the scientific content of the article. Poul claims that despite evidence of "Australopithicus, the mysterious South African fire ape," the modern human race originated in Southeast Asia. Africans are, therefore, the "youngest race," having broken off last from the main Homo sapiens group. Europeans, meanwhile, have almost doubtlessly interbred with Neanderthals. It makes sense, since Neanderthals weren't too different from modern humans. They had developed stone tools, speech, and religion. They had much to offer, and their genes may be the reason some modern Europeans have fair hair.

To my mind, this essay was as much science fiction as "Pilot's License" was. While most of what Anderson wrote was at the time backed by solid scientific evidence, almost none of it is regarded as fact anymore. In Before the Dawn, Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, Nicholas Wade summarizes various genetic studies to paint a very different portrait of both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. Wade uses various studies to dismiss the idea that Neanderthals had anything worth contributing to the gene pool, let alone the thought that they might actually have a relative or two alive today. There is no genetic evidence that shows Neanderthals and humans interbred, Wade writes. More damningly, analysis shows that Neanderthals lack the FOXP2 gene, the so-called language gene. A population that lacked the capacity for language, and therefore long-term planning, religion, and creative development, would be unlikely to have contributed much to the human race.

"The title's not even right," I said to one of my friends, as I looked over the issue. "They aren't our ancestors."

"Actually," he replied. "They might be."

While reading Before the Dawn, I was again doing a little time-traveling, though this time only to 2006 instead of 1954. Since 2006, there have been a few developments that put Anderson's essay back in the running for scientific fact again. In 2006 and 2007, scientists discovered bone fragments which suggested that human-Neanderthal interbreeding was a possibility after all. In early 2009, though, studies in Germany, Spain, and Italy, ruled out the idea that Homo sapiens inherited any traits from Neanderthals. This looked to support Wade's theory, until it was discovered that Neanderthals did, in fact, have the FOXP2 language gene. Now, despite Wade's probably-correct assertion that Neanderthals did not interbreed with humans to any significant degree, Anderson's view of Neanderthal society, complete with language and religion, looks to be the correct one. At least, this year it does.

(Left: Nicholas Wade, seen here being wrong about Neanderthals.)

It was sometime between sorting through articles on Neanderthals and looking up studies on the FOXP2 gene that I understood why the science seemed so hokey and antiquated while the social issues and shameless marketing did not. Social strife and human acquisitiveness might not change much in fifty-five years, but scientific knowledge does. Constant inquiry and the rigorous testing of ideas, theories, methods and facts, has produced an stream of knowledge that might meander or loop back, but never stops progressing.

What we see in this issue of Astounding Science Fiction is the reason why science fiction will never surrender its grip on the human imagination. While most other genres focus on the static human condition, science fiction utilizes social themes while turning our gaze outward, on the ever-changing, ever-expanding field of scientific discovery. Perhaps, in time, John Campbell will be proven right about his faith in "organic detection systems." Perhaps, in fifty-five years, we'll be detecting dark matter with a pair of frog's legs.

It seems that once Roland Emmerich was done assembling all the CG components for destroying the world and gathering a full complement of "Hey, it's that guy!" actors, he realized 2012 had no script, and decided to cull characters and situations from every other disaster movie ever made. Despite its massive scale of destruction, 2012 will be familiar to anyone whose seen any movie about an earthquake, volcano, aquatic disaster, or celestial body striking the Earth.

2012 follows the parallel stories of several characters at the end of the world. John Cusack plays the sort of fellow John Cusack always plays, though this time he's also a struggling writer whose only novel sold roughly 400 copies. And Amanda Peet plays his Amanda Peet-esque ex-wife, who is dating a plastic surgeon named Gordon. Gordon is all kinds of perfect, adores Amanda, and is great with her kids, but of course she's only with him because she can't be with John Cusack. Oh, and John and Amanda (or Jackson and Kate Curtis as they've been named for the sake of the film) have perfectly generic children. There's the requisite daughter with a quirk (she's overly fond of hats) and the son who's mad at his father (and insists on calling him by his first name).

As it turns out, years earlier, an Indian scientist discovered that solar flares are causing mutant neutrinos to microwave the Earth's core, which will cause the tectonic plates to shift and the Earth's waters to boil (but somehow doesn't cause us humans to explode). He warns his friend and fellow scientist Adrian Helmsley (a blandly earnest Chiwetel Ejiofor), who in turn warns a Washington bureaucrat that the world is ending. World leaders are informed, contingency plans are made, precious art is stowed away, and important people mysteriously die. But the hoi polloi are left in the dark, and people in California gradually get used to the regular miniquakes and surface cracks that plague their streets.

After a chance encounter with a crackpot conspiracy nut (Woody Harrelson), and hearing rumblings of the aforementioned contingency plan, Jackson realizes just in the nick of time that the world is, in fact, ending. And through a mixture of superhuman feats and incredibly unlikely bouts of luck, puts his family on the path to safety.

Although 2012's main concern is Jackson and his family, the film shifts perspectives and introduces us to a range of characters, all straight from central casting: a stocky Russian billionaire, a trophy wife who loves her purse dog above all, a pair of horrid children who look like they should be touring Willy Wonka's factory, a world-weary and noble President, the beautiful and intelligent First Daughter, a young Tibetan monk, an interracial jazz duo. It's too few characters and too Western-centric to convey an epic scale, but too many for us to particularly care who lives and who dies. Caring is irrelevant anyway; following classic disaster movie tropes will give you a pretty accurate picture of who makes it to the end of the movie.

All in all, it's a very Hollywood view of how the world ends. With the exception of a few token minorities, it's American and European characters we're tracking, American and European high culture people are trying to save, and American and European monuments we're seeing destroyed. Yes, Emmerich didn't get a shot at the Kaaba, but surely there were other non-natural monuments he could have thought to break apart. There's a lot of menfolk making decisions while the women hang out with the children, and a lot of nice speeches about respecting all humanity while Western leaders are calling all the shots. Perhaps Emmerich is being cynical about the end of the world — suggesting that even then, Westerners and Western culture will get all the breaks — but if the non-Western characters fight as hard for their lives, we don't see it on screen.

But, if you can shut down the centers of your brain that demand logic, storytelling, or characters who aren't secretly Superman, 2012 can be an enjoyable experience. We were promised beautiful footage of the world falling apart, and on that point, 2012 delivers. Whole cities break apart, monuments crumple, volcanos shoot up from the Earth, and waves pull supercarriers from their watery homes and crash them into buildings. Save for a few odd seams, the computer-generated effects look incredible and there's something strangely satisfying about watching things break down so completely. And Emmerich recognizes that the apocalypse doesn't just demand disaster porn; it needs moments of absurdity as well. He manages to make room for some offbeat sight gags, some of which are genuinely funny and surprising. 2012 might actually be enjoyed most thoroughly on mute.

Emmerich has announced his plans to follow 2012 with a television series, 2013, which would pick up after the end of the movie. Perhaps now that Emmerich has finished blowing the world to smithereens, we can get back to characters and drama, and the year 2013 can prove more interesting than the year 2012.

If you are a process junkie, then the boxset is made for you; along with a lovely booklet full of production sketches, each episode has an additional mini-documentary with interviews from the crew involved, as well as seven episodes with new material added for "Director's Cut" editions (Spoiler: Han doesn't shoot first in any of them). More to the point, just rewatching the series shows how the show has evolved as everyone learns what they can, and can't, get away with; I watched the first few episodes in the set after watching "Landing At Point Rain," the most recent episode of the second season, and the difference is amazing - and, for a second, somewhat damning to the first season in comparison ("Point Rain" featured not just some wonderfully choreographed battle sequences that offered a fluidity and grace that the earlier animation lacked, it was also surprisingly brutal in tone - The clones and Jedi used flamethrowers on their alien opponents and you saw them burning to death, which really leaves the earliest episodes of the show, uncertain about the tone just yet, looking anemic). But to concentrate on how far the show's come is to miss the point, and the fun, of the first season.

Clone Wars season one was full of trial and error, yes, but even when things didn't work, they're still worth watching - even moreso on DVD, when the bad taste of the Jar-Jar-centric "Bombad Jedi" is quickly washed away by the double bill of "Cloak of Darkness" and "Lair of Grievous," both of which move more towards the self-assured tone of the movies. The show's mini-arcs make more sense when viewed together, as well (And episodes like "Storm Over Ryloth," "Innocents of Ryloth" and "Liberty on Ryloth" work better than the feature that introduced the series in the first place). But as much as the writing shifts and grows in quality and confidence throughout the series - Just compare the Ryloth episodes to "Ambush" to see what I mean - so, in a much more subtle way, do the visuals.

Never less than impressive, even from the get-go (Just look at some of the textures used! Or the lighting! Man, it's good stuff), the animators nonetheless manage to tighten things all the way throughout the season by, ironically, loosening up: The "acting" by the characters - especially the facial movements - gets more natural as the show goes on, making it easier to empathize with the characters despite (because of) their impressive and intentional cartoony quality (Again, this is something that's all the more obvious looking at newer episodes like "Point Rain," where Anakin has some great subtle smirking going on, adding to his "Yeah, you're a hero now but you're going to end up Darth Vader because of that assholishness, buddy" thing).

But even outside of the "Watch the show improve" aspect that made the boxset for me - I couldn't help it, I'd seen the shows before - there's a lot to like about The Complete Season One; yes, some of the episodes (Ahem, "Bombad Jedi") are clunkers, but the good outweigh the bad, and there's something to like in all of them. The bonus features, as I've said before, are worth watching (Especially the "Jedi Temple" extras, which I think are BluRay only?), and the format makes the multi-episode arcs much stronger than they were when first broadcast, even without the addition of the extra footage.

In the end, then, there's something in The Complete Season One for almost everyone: Complete nerds like me get to geek out over the evolution of the show and peeks behind the scenes, casual fans who liked the series on television can enjoy the Director's Cut episodes and watching the arcs in one sitting, and newcomers... Well, they just get a pretty good cartoon that's, for the most part, more enjoyable than the prequel trilogy. Me, I'm already waiting for the Complete Season Two boxset to hear how they managed to get away with torching their enemies on Cartoon Network prime time.

I suppose if Fringe has to do a relatively mythology-free episode, at least it harnesses a little B-movie magic. Last night's episode has shades of The Incredible Melting Man, in which an astronaut returns from space and becomes a monster who needs to consume human flesh to survive. But Fringe took a gory concept and made it creepier with its radiation-sucking cosmonaut turning people to ash. That opening scene was a great little nugget of horror; even though we expect it, it's chilling when the woman comes home and her excitement melts into trepidation, then frightened disbelief as her husband crumbles to ash. When Fringe does monster of the week, it does a solid job.

Scream Queens: I get that this was supposed to evoke classic horror movies, but does it only have to be the women screaming? Men are perfectly capable of emitting a nice, high-pitched wail.

Russian Fringe Science: It makes sense that the Russians would have fringe science (and that it might be even more developed than American fringe science). I hope this isn't just a throwaway mention, and that this somehow comes into play in the coming interdimensional war. And it's interesting that Walter still uses the term "pinko." Is it just because of his 17-year timeout, or does this indicate something about Walter's politics.

Whither Nina Sharp? It's also interesting that, in a Broyles-centric episode, we see neither hide nor cybernetic arm hair of Nina Sharp. Little has been made of Broyles' relationship with Sharp since it was revealed in the season premiere, and now that Broyles is returning to the case that ruined his marriage, he doesn't ask Sharp to use Massive Dynamics' resources. Perhaps he's trying to maintain some illusion that Olivia is the only one in contact with Massive Dynamics', or maybe he only turns to Nina Sharp when he knows she can help with the problem at hand.

Man in Black: As the episode went on, it began to feel less like a standalone episode, and more like we're lining up potential players for the battle ahead. The CIA is less than thrilled that the Fringe Division is poking its nose into the case of the missing cosmonaut. Does the CIA have its own Fringe Science Division? Although, at the end of the episode, a man from the CIA informs Broyles that the cosmonaut was still alive and gave a pointed look at the night sky. I wonder how often the CIA deals with problems by shooting them into space.

Astrid Action: This was a Broyles-heavy episode, so most of our regular cast took a back seat to Lance Reddick. Still, when are we going to see Astrid in the field already?

Walter Moment of the Week: Walter still got to be Walter despite the focus on Broyles. He maligned Russians, played with Tinker Toys, and shared yet another embarrassing memory from Peter's childhood (involving doodles of genitalia no less). But the most truly Walter moment was when we fully realized that Walter thinks of licorice the way some people think of tea cookies and canapes.

When I first heard about Matt Youngmark's Chooseomatic book, I fully expected I'd get a fairly straightforward (perhaps even perfunctory) take on the zombie apocalypse where the only twist was the multithreaded, Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired storytelling layered over it. It's something we've seen before; last year, a pair of designers released a choose-your-own-ending film, The Outbreak, with a similar premise. But I was pleasantly surprised when the book arrived and I found a pink, chainsaw-wielding bunny on the cover and a note inside warning me to avoid the zombie kitten.

Zombocalypse Now doesn't just feature a pink stuffed rabbit; you are the pink stuffed rabbit, living in a world where stuffed animals walk, talk, and intermarry with the human population. As the book opens, you are waiting on what is sure to be another atrocious online date. And sure enough, when he or she shows up, they're disheveled, glassy-eyed, lacking in hygiene, and mumbling something about brains. You've been on so many bad dates that it takes you a while to figure out that they're undead, but soon enough, you're up to your fuzzy elbows in the walking dead.

From here there are, of course, multiple paths your bunny self could take from here. You could tag along with a renegade cop named Mittens (who, despite the name, is not a stuffed animal). You could visit your conspiracy theorist friend Ernie, who is convinced that the walking dead are powered by fluoride in the water. You could try to strike out on your own and bash in as many zombie brains as you possibly can. You just hope that the choices you make lead to your ultimate survival.

Spoiler alert: you usually end up zombie chow.

To get the full effect of Zombocalypse Now, you have to read through several of the plotlines. Some are, admittedly, stronger than others (there's an oddly rushed one where you go all I Am Legend and start experimenting on the zombies), but taken together, the stories do form a cohesive narrative, and the logic from one plotline still holds true in the others. For example, in several storylines, the zombies are unusually attracted to your car (as in licking the windshields), and in one of threads, we learn exactly why. The chilling and rather amusing cause behind the zombie outbreak is also key; you learn about it in certain storylines, but it plays a significant role in others — including one ending where you mistakenly believe you've survived.

Youngmark packs a lot of strange odds and ends into his zombie adventure, and cherrypicks references from a wide variety of genres: mob movies, cop dramas, the works of Stephen King, and The Postman, to name a few. There's even a moment where you let out the battle cry "Leeeeeeroy Jenkins!" The effect is over-the-top silliness, like someone set a particularly manic children's book in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Sure, it's a bit on the fluffy side, but I found myself eagerly flipping back to try out different plotlines — at first to see if I could survive, then to root out some of the book's more bizarre twists and turns. It's a satisfying way to spend a couple hours here and there, even if you do die most of the time.

And do watch out for that zombie kitten. It's a killer.

The set-up to the tale is telegraphed on the back of the record sleeve, with a short set of sentences explaining the Moon colony and its secret guardians. Apparently, scores of half-alive bodies are kept in incubators on the moon to be used for organs in hospitals world-wide.

Guardians are employed for six month shifts to watch the silent caskets, and these guards spend the other six months of the year equally secluded among silent trees in opulent Colorado cabins.

The story is told through seven songs, each a brief glimpse into the world of our protagonist on his journey from bored night watchman to twisted, horrific cannibal. These glimpses are often poetic and obtuse, only obliquely fitting the narrative structure, so my recap / review is only one perspective on how to interpret these songs. No matter how you interpret them, though, they add up to a pretty chilling scifi horror narrative.

The first track, "Surrounded," led by Mountain Goat John Darnielle, is upbeat enough, but it introduces us to the crushing loneliness of being the secret guardian of an organ harvesting complex on the moon. Our leading man is in Colorado, on a six-month isolated shore-leave from his Moon-duties. The weather has turned sour, and the power's gone out in his cabin, but he's got a generator, so he passes the night surrounded by the white noise and static from his television.

His loneliness is clearly starting to drive him a little batty. As he contemplates the silent, watchful trees surrounding his cabin, he says "let me die, surrounded by machines." Remember, during the other half of the year, he keeps a watchful eye over a collection of half-alive bodies, equally surrounded by machines but not allowed to die.

The next track, the Vanderslice-delivered "Lucifer Rising," shows the seclusion continuing to take its toll. "Call me John the Ripper tearing at your skin," the lonely man says, "some day I'll pay for this." There's a rising intensity to this song, and our protagonist's memories of his home among the "generation fields" and "ventilation domes," surrounded by "body after body, alone..." it's pretty chilling.

"Satori In Denver," headed by Darnielle, is about our hero musing while driving "technically out of bounds" from his enforced seclusion and into the city for supplies. His "anklet buzzing on his leg," he contemplates his "solitude, friend of the friendless," and his thoughts on loneliness actually seem a little less manic, a little more depressing.

Next, on Vanderslice's "Scorpio Rising," our hero seems to be contemplating the strange life of "Bobby" Beausoleil, who starred in and composed the music for the film "Lucifer Rising." He later joined up with Charles Manson. Something about this character seems to resonate with our protagonist who says, "I'm not alright, I'm really not up for the fight."

"Sudden Oak Death," led by Darnielle, is the first time the guilt-ridden watchman gives in to panic and hallucination. Sudden oak death is a tree disease, but this man thinks he's succumbing to something similar. "When the crack sounds in the wood," he tells us, "you will know that I'm down for good." He feels he deserves whatever bizarre, debilitating thing that's taking him over; he's "so ready just to fall down, just to fall down and stay down."

"Columns Pillars Steps," led by Vanderslice, finds our guilt ridden protagonist in an apparently nostalgic mood. He's recalling night-long sojourns, possibly in his life before his involvement with lunar organ harvesters, alone with his guilt; "don't try to comfort me," he says, "I'm inconsolable still."

And finally, our protagonist's enforced solitude, surrounded by silent, watchful trees and accompanied by nothing but his paranoid guilt has finally ended, and a darker, stranger method of release for this guilt has set into his brain.

He's returned to his post at the moon colony on the Darnielle-led "Emerging," and "[he's] starving but the suit keeps [him] warm." He hungers, though, not just for food, but the comfort of a warm sleeping body. He recounts, "I kick an incubator open... sustenance, blessed sustenance oozing from the tomb."

In a last ditch effort for some human contact, he takes up a bizarre ritual: not only does he start sleeping with the half-dead bodies he is in charge of, he's resorted to cannibalizing these bodies. He seems unrepentant, though. "No one's ever gonna come," he justifies, "and nobody's gonna know." His dark ritual will not separate him from the good people of Earth when he finally rejoins them. "I will sail home again, concealed among the upright walking men."

So his journey from lonely but coping to cripplingly alienated and coping in an altogether more drastic, sick way is complete.

The whole of the record hangs together, then, as a very dark, very strange tale, combining elements of Duncan Jones's Moon with the stranger, older Gothic tales of satanic rituals, including touches of the story of Charles Manson's twisted family and the hidden guilt of a Poe story.

All accompanied by the earnest storytelling of the Mountain Goats and the lilting poetic pop of John Vanderslice. The two each seem to be curating their own version of the narrative, but the combination feels like a fully fleshed out (pardon the grisly pun) descent into madness. What's most jarring is how serene and easy this descent seems to be.

The album is no longer available, as it was a limited vinyl pressing sold mostly on the tour these two artists embarked on together. But it's a fascinating record, and some internet searching might reveal some of these tracks. And while none of it is as demented and science-fictiony as this record, the rest of each of these artists' respective catalogs deserve exploring. Bonus: their other records won't keep you up at night dreading the loneliness of a secret, profane duty like harvesting organs on the Moon.

There's a scene early on in Gentlemen Broncos where science fiction novelist Ronald Chevalier (the always wonderful Jemaine Clement) is holding a workshop on fantasy naming. A young girl tells him that she has a troll character named Teacup. He scoffs and explains that there are rules for naming trolls, and that a troll mother would never name a child "Teacup;" only a little girl would.

It's as if writers Jared and Jerusha Hess anticipated what the critics would say about Gentlemen Broncos, namely that the film disobeys the conventions of movie storytelling in favor of their own strange and gleeful energy. Gentlmen Broncos is a movie well aware of what it doesn't do, of what rules it doesn't follow, but it doesn't care. It's naming its troll Teacup whether you like it or not.

That said, Gentlemen Broncos isn't Napoleon Dynamite. Where the latter is a character study of an unusual protagonist, the former is, by contrast, a highly metafictional narrative about creativity and adaptation, with a hero, a villain, and a solid resolution.

Benjamin Purvis, a teenager nominally homeschooled by his loving but distracted mother (an appropriately out-of-it Jennifer Coolidge), spends most of his days writing pulpy science fiction stories. When he attends a writing conference keynoted by Chevalier, his favorite writer, Ben's latest endeavor, a wild tale called Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years falls into the hands of two conference attendees. One is Tabatha Jenkins, a fellow homeschooler who quickly elbows her way into Ben's life. Where Ben is quiet and shy to the point that he doesn't like people reading his stories, Tabatha is brazen, projecting a strange, confident energy. She is utterly without shame, but also unafraid of doing or embracing things that could be perceived as weird, and her remarkable joie de vivre makes her oddness charismatic where it should be off-putting.

The other person who happens upon Yeast Lords is Chevalier himself. Chevalier, with an endless collection of leather jackets and surgically attached to his Bluetooth ear piece, long ago won legions of fans with his series about harpies who shoot lasers from their breasts. It's easy to see Chevalier as a parody of the self-celebrating author (something Clement does with pitch perfection), especially when he presents a slideshow of the forty-some odd pieces of cover art he drew for his first novel. But even as we're laughing at the absurd harpy folk art, there's something deeper underneath. Chevalier was once an excited dreamer who compulsively doodled his bizarre fantasies; now he believes there are rules for naming trolls and his creativity has suffered. He simply can't recapture that crazy imaginative energy he once had, although he can certainly recognize it when he reads Yeast Lords.

Tabatha and Chevalier both want to adapt Yeast Lords, though each does it in a sort of underhanded way, and Ben's original vision gets poked and prodded into new shapes. Interspersed with the main narrative are scenes from Yeast Lords itself, with Sam Rockwell playing the story's shaggy-haired hero, Bronco. These scenes are crammed with all the strange ideas that swarm through Ben's brain: stolen testicles, cyclops turret men, rocket-powered battle stags, and yeast that gives you superpowers. These scenes are pure, straightforward fun, but they also show us first-hand Ben's own vision for Yeast Lords. As Chevalier takes over the story, we see how he changes and bastardizes Ben's original ideas, with Rockwell playing a very different version of Bronco. And as Tabatha and her friends adapt Yeast Lords as an amateur movie, we can experience the same disappointment Ben feels, that the characters and special effects never quite live up to the version in his head.

Gentlemen Broncos has been accused of asking audiences to laugh at the very characters it claims to celebrate: the weirdoes and misfits. And yes, it's easy to laugh at Ben's mother, who makes popcorn balls for every occasion and designs nightgowns that could double as space opera costumes, and Lonnie, Tabatha's lip-smacking filmmaker friend who invites less than flattering comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite. But the Hesses are, in fact, asking you to be a little repulsed by these characters and then look deeper, to see if they know something we don't. Yes, they may not fit into normal society, they may have values that differ from ours, they may make ugly nightgowns and crappy movies, but they're having fun. They're trying to live their lives on their own terms and be creative and pursue their wildest, wackiest ideas. Gentlemen Broncos may invite you to laugh at their foibles and their quirks, but it also invites you to go home, pick up your sketchbook, your camera, or that novel you're working on, and create something as great, as strange, and as utterly your own as Yeast Lords.

This little teen flick is based on a popular YA series by Darren Shan, Cirque Du Freak. The long-running book series folows Darren (Chris Massoglia) through his half-vampire life, with his undead master Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly). The film is based on the first book of the series with a collection of strange supernatural creatures, freaks and multiple vampire fingernail-scratching face offs.

In Darren Shan's world vampires don't have fangs — instead, they have super sharp nails which they use like sorority girls to scratch each other to death, when they're not flinging tombstones at their opponents' heads. The vamps also have "super spit," which will heal skin slashes. As someone who's more grossed out by germs than blood, I cannot even begin to describe the seat-squirming I endured in the final vampire battle, when each blow was followed by a hand lick and spit rub. UGH GERMS.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: the heart of this story is about two boys. Too terribly acted, horribly constructed, dialogue-mumbling boys, who fall head-first into this world of supernatural mystery. Besides our hero Darren, there's Steve (Josh Hutcherson). Darren is good and Steve is evil, and that's pretty much all you need to know about their characterizations. Through a mix of happenstance and destiny, both boys become vampires, and end up on opposite sides of the Vampire-versus-Vampaneze war. And let me tell you, reading the word "Vampaneze" isn't nearly as funny as hearing John C. Reilly say it over and over, deadly serious. Quick, hide — the Vampaneze are coming!

The — ahem — Vampaneze are evil, and murder humans for their blood, while the Vampires are goodly creatures who sedate humans with their super breath and only take a little bit of blood, then heal the wound. Oh yeah, they have magic breath too, and they can fly/flit around.

John C. Reilly is a Vampire, and he and the foppish Willem Dafoe used to be generals in the war against the Vampaneze. But now they are neutral, and Reilly lives in the circus. One of the things Vampire's Assistant has going for it is a sick list of actual actors cast as carneys in the Cirque Du Freak, 30 Rock's Jane Krakowski can rip her arms off and regenerate them back — which she sometimes eats, skeeving me out like the kid that ate his scabs in grade school. Patrick Fugit is the Snake Boy, Ken Watanabe is Mr. Tall, who is tall, Salma Hayek plays the psychic bearded lady Madame Truskaand, there's a freak with two super stomachs, a man with no midsection, an adorable freak with a set of powerful chompers, a wolf-man, and more. The freaks were by far my favorite part of the film, but sadly they were on screen all of 20 minutes. Still the circus freaks were wonderfully enjoyable and even magical, and they should have their own series on VH1.

But it does get a bit old, when the members of this talented troupe keep calling their place of work "the Cirque." Why did you join The Cirque? I've been in The Cirque for years. That's life in The Cirque. You need to prove yourself to stay in The Cirque, Forget it Jake. It's Cirque-town. Enough already — I get it. You're just using a fancy way of saying Circus over and over.

Yet, the vampire war is the main axis on which this story revolves, and sadly those damn Vampaneze had to go and make Steve, Darren's besty, their evil leader — so too much time is spent fighting Vampaneze and not in THE CIRQUE.

But this allows for plenty of scenes of John C. Reilly being a wise and sexy old vampire. Even when he's delivering the most bat-shit ridiculous lines like, "You have bad blood — I can't make you a vampire. Oh, you have good blood," he totally makes them work. I did not think he would win me over as Crepsley, but damn it if he didn't have the audience laughing at even the lamest of jokes. He's that good of an actor. He sold the vampire bit, and even mastered some strange sort of sing-song talk that apparently vampires have. Crepsley takes Darren under his wing and teaches him the vampire ways, meanwhile his mean bestie is being groomed to be the Vampaneze King, which I assume comes with some sort of t-shirt that says "That's Vampaneze, Bitch!"

So the battle between good and Japanese vampires, no wait, sorry — vampires and Vampaneze — is on, and Darren and Steve, who's now become completely evil — but it's okay, because he tells you his Mom is a drunk twice, so you know, issues — have to fight. See they really hate each other now....

And that's pretty much what happens. Ridiculous, no? It's not True Blood insane, but it walks the fine line between "that's weird," and "I don't get it." But if you're going to the movie for Salma, don't — she's not in it nearly enough. You should go if you like tween vampire movies, if you like tween movies generally, to hear people use the word Vampaneze in a sentence, and if you want to see something fun. When this film is good — and that means when John C. Reilly is on screen — it's a lot of fun. But when the two main kids or anyone else who's not a freak takes the wheel, it's a mess. Like "Macbeth death scene quoting" mess. Still I left laughing and wanting more hot John C. Reilly vampire action, which is a new experience for probably everyone in cinema.

Dream Machine: If I've learned anything from watching Fringe, it's that you should never, ever join a clinical trial. Earlier this season, it was those soldiers and their neurotoxin treatment that made them explode, and this week it was the guy who wants to hijack your dreams.

Our mystery of the week kicks off when a former sleepwalker suddenly thinks one of his co-workers is a demon straight out of Angel, and starts bashing his brain in. To add insult to crazy, the demon-seeing fellow soon dies of exhaustion. And later on, a restaurant chef walks through her kitchen at work, but instead of seeing tasty cow meat on the grill, she sees human hands and flips out, convinced her co-workers are cannibals. Much stabbing ensued.

Turns out both of these lucid dreamers received treatment for sleep disorders from a Dr. Nayak. Nayak implanted a chip in the brains of these once-disturbed sleepers (second note: if you do participate in a trial, never let them put a chip in your head). The chip was supposed to act as a sort of glandular pacemaker to regulate the thalamus, but Nayak actually used it to transmit their dreams to his brain. No dreams means no rest, hence the exhaustion deaths. But he can also trigger the dream state while they're awake, causing all those freaky hallucinations. But why steal dreams? According to Walter, it's a lot like being on LSD, but also highly addictive.

As much as a dream-stealing machine sounds like something out of a child's fairy tale, we actually get some cool visuals out of it and some classically villainous mad science. I'll take this over scorpion children any day.

Promise Me, No Students: Can we just dump Agent Jessup and adopt Agent Kashner instead? It's nice to see someone enter the lab who isn't as stoic as Astrid or Olivia (I mean, eventually someone had to vomit at the autopsy table). And he's so utterly unprepared for Walter that it's kind of adorable. Dude, he's not just some crazy old man. He's a mad scientist.

No More Nightmares: Every time Peter utters a single word about his childhood, I'm sure it's chock full of significance. Here, he tells Olivia about the nightmares he had as a child, and that Walter — in one of his rare moments of parental involvement — kept him from remembering the nightmares. I was almost disappointed that we learned the reason for this so quickly. Peter has nightmares about being snatched from his room by a man who both is and is not his father — that being the Walter of our universe.

Word Jumble: Olivia's bowling guru is still in the picture, and I guess we'll have to stick with him until we learn whether he holds the secrets of the universe. Bowling Guru has Olivia do an exercise where she obtains a seemingly random set of letters and then rearrange them into a coherent phrase — the phrase she needs to hear. I'm seriously looking for a copy of The Secret in that bowling alley. Anyway, Olivia cries when she realizes her letters form the phrase "You're gonna be fine." Sure, until that other universe comes crashing down on your head.

Astrid Watch: Did Walter just call her Asterisk again? Ouch.

Walter Moment of the Week: Definitely drugging Agent Kashner. No contest.

But it does seem odd after his heartfelt apology to hallucinogen-loving guinea pig Rebecca last week. In fact, between this and the Asterisk comment, it feels like Walter is regressing a tad.