The 1990s were really the heydey for wonderful but not-quite-convincing space skirmishes. We used to see tons of ships flying around our screen, often too many to count. Unlike Battlestar Galactica's quick cuts and weird handheld camera footage, these 1990s space wars were usually filmed with an unflinching eye or a slow pan, letting you see every computer-generated line and explosion.

And it's totally awesome.

You can compare these massive space shoot-outs to video games, but it's not entirely accurate — because the absolute best of these TV shoot-em-ups have more sensory overload, and you can't even imagine trying to interact with them. (I have seen a few video game cut scenes that approach this level of overload though.) You get ships flying in every possible direction, or a hundred individual starships on screen at once, and all you can do is sit there and drool. It doesn't look real, but your imagination fills in the gaps, which only makes it better.

That's really the key — these space battles are super elaborate and over the top, and that helps them draw on your imagination.

Remember when you used to imagine what a whole fleet of Federation and Klingon Starships flying into battle would look like? And then Star Trek: Deep Space Nine finally gave it to us, and it was completely unreal looking, yet amazing:

It wasn't really until the 1990s when you could have tons of ships flying in formation, like these SA-43 Hammerheads from Space: Above And Beyond:

Possibly my favorite 1990s CG space battles came from Babyon 5, however. They were even cheaper looking than Trek's battles, but even more ambitious. Look how much stuff they pack into every frame of these battles. And every penny they don't have for CG effects is more than made up for by the conviction of the actors:

For people who grew up on space battles as shown on the original Trek, Space: 1999, Blake's 7 or even the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, these dogfights are revelatory. If space battles in the late 1970s and 1980s were all about trying to match the dog-fighting feel of Star Wars, then 1990s space battles were all about massive fleets going at it, sustaining massive casualties and fighting on. And yes, the massive casualties are a big part of why these battles rock so hard — you don't ever quite believe that each of those Federation starships has hundreds of crewmembers aboard, dying every time there's another flare on your screen, but it's still kind of horrifying and exciting to think so.

It really is all about suspension of disbelief — these battles ask more suspension of disbelief from you, but they give more back as well.

Here's some amazing battle footage, showing crowds of ships swarming, in this snippet from Andromeda as well. (Skip the first minute or so of this video):

And some awe-inspiring Farscape action:

And then there's Doctor Who's fake but oh-so-lovely Dalek fleet:

I suspect that we'll see a wave of nostalgia for these 1990s-style fleet-on-fleet battles, one of these days. Just like today, geeks feel nostalgic for guns that went "pew-pew-pew" and models roaring around fake starfields, in another decade everyone will be discovering the beauty of computer-generated space mayhem.

For now, though, the only place you can get this kind of star-fighting (in the United States, anyway) is on Syfy:

Help me out please! Which episodes should I watch first? Which episodes are absolutely skippable? What do I need to know before plunging into the Andromeda-verse?

Oh, and there are some spoilers for upcoming TV shows here.

We can't help noticing the odd religious moments in a lot of the fall's biggest SF TV shows, and how shoehorned-in the references to God or the Bible often seem to be. Unlike Firefly, which featured a man of God as one of its major supporting characters and naturally sparked theological discussions, or BSG, which took place during an apocalypse, the newest crop of shows seems determined to mention God even when it doesn't make that much sense.

Take the scene above from the season opener of Fringe, where FBI agent Amy Jessup goes through all of the Fringe Division's cases and compares them with Bible verses — it's all in the Book Of Revelation! (Thanks to Meredith for suggesting this one.)

Or FlashForward, whose pilot includes one character who randomly questions whether God gave everyone on Earth a glimpse of the future as a punishment. Leaving aside the fact that clairvoyance seems like an odd shape for divine punishment to take. There's also the fact that the slutty/Christian babysitter just happens to be making out with her boyfriend (while the girl she's looking after is asleep) and thus feels guilty — so she decides that God gave the entire world a future vision just to punish her for making whoopie on the couch. Make sense? Absolutely not. Unless you think that some studio exec in a meeting said, "We need a religious angle here. There oughta be one character who decides that this was all God's doing. Because that'll play well in the God states."

And then there's V, which — spoiler alert — has aliens visiting us and claiming to be benefactors, who've come to help us. Plenty of people are suspicious of these allegedly enlightened visitors, but then we meet a Catholic priest who's decided to preach that these aliens are "God's creatures," with the implication being that they're sent by God. And the priest tells his underling, Father Jack, that he must preach the aliens are divinely sanctioned — or else. It's even sort of implied (if I remember correctly) that the Vatican has made support for the aliens official policy. WTF? Why would the Catholic church come out in support of random aliens that we know nothing about? It's one of the few moments in the V pilot that literally makes no sense whatsoever, and it inspired much head-scratching when we saw it at Comic Con.

And then there's Stargate Universe, which — spoiler alert again! — has a character experience weird religious visions for no discernable reason in its second episode. (Or third, if you count the two-hour pilot as two episodes.) It's never entirely clear why one character, stuck on a weird, inhospitable planet, is having visions of being in church and talking to a priest, and it seems partly designed to give us a chunk of this character's backstory. But it also feels like a quick-and-dirty way of conveying that this character is having a spiritual wandering-in-the-wilderness thing, without actually having to create any real religious/spiritual content to go with it. It feels a bit cheap: he's in the wilderness, and he sees some churchy stuff. Oh! So that means it's deeply symbolic or something.

And of course, Dollhouse gave us the ultra-stereotypical "Christian cult with guns" in one of its first-season episodes — the one where Echo gets turned into a blind religious zealot with cameras in her eyes, and everybody's sorta Amish and sorta Mormon.

Honestly at times, watching current SF TV it's hard not to feel like someone watched too many early John Woo movies and thought "church with birds in it — deep!" Or maybe too many early 1980s New Wave videos, where Duran Duran dance around pews and it randomly turns black and white. (And yes, I know that those videos are directed by Highlander auteur Russell Mulcahy.) But it also feels like a bit of pandering to a Christian nation that's perceived as being a bit suspicious of science-y stuff.

The Genesis of religion in SF TV

Once, it seemed like religious iconography and rhetoric was rare in science fiction — the original Star Trek confronted Captain Kirk and his crew with Greek gods, as well as godlike aliens who just wanted to toy with our heroes. You might have a hysterical crewman babble something about "If God had wanted us to go into space, etc," and the Roman episode did end with Uhura staring at the camera and saying the rebels were worshipping "the son of God." But these were just grace notes. (We won't get into Star Trek V, since that was a movie, and it came much later, and it makes the head hurt.)

After Trek, you certainly had the occasional SF program where the good guys were confronted with bog-standard space gods, who were notably free of any religious dogma that people on Earth could recognize. In fact, one reason why space gods are so often ridiculous and campy is the fact that they're trying so hard to be ecumenical. One common SF trope, over the decades, was the "meeting the real-life alien behind the ancient Earth myth — but this was usually the creature who inspired the Aztecs or the Egyptian religions, not the Judeo-Christian deal.

But in general, when television SF did grapple with religion prior to recent years, it was to reveal religious icons as aliens, using high technology to impress the superstitious. It wasn't until the final couple of seasons of Stargate SG-1 that this "superstitious humans worshipping aliens" storyline seemed to be an overt critique of organized religion. The show suddenly introduced a new antagonist for our heroes, a set of "ascended" (non-corporeal) aliens called the Ori, who encourage humans to worship them and preach from the Book of Origin. Writes blogger Chris Bateman in his 10-part essay on religion in science fiction:

It is almost impossible not to interpret the Ori as a paper-thin parody of Christianity... Much of the shallow critique of Christianity occurs between Claudia Black's ex-Goa'uld host Vala Mal Doran – who takes over Richard Dean Anderson's role as comic relief in the later seasons and fulfills this role magnificently – and her Ori-worshipping husband Tomin. Vala and Tomin square off in debate after Tomin reads incessantly to her from the Book of Origin, with Vala accusing him of taking a bunch of stories about how to live well and using it as a justification for war and murder. The scene serves a narrative purpose – Tomin later witnesses a Prior blatantly distorting the meaning of one of the verses in the Book of Origin, causing him to question his faith – but it also reads as a clumsy attack on contemporary Christianity.

Bateman theorizes that the producers of SG-1 were aghast at the Bush Administration's war in Iraq and wanted to satirize what they perceived as a right-wing Christian crusade against Islam. To some extent, The 4400 also seemed to be taking jabs at organized religion on occasion.

But before SG-1 introduced the Ori, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took a huge leap forward in introducing religious themes to SF, with the Prophets, aka the "wormhole aliens." For most of DS9's run, you could choose to believe the secular theory that the Prophets were merely interdimensonal aliens, who lived outside space/time and saw future and past as the same thing. But towards the end of the show's run, the messianic overtones around Benjamin Sisko made it harder and harder to sit on the fence. And meanwhile, Babylon 5 won praise for including characters of faith (including a Catholic commander, and a group of Catholic monks who come to live on the station) as well as including religion in many of its storylines.

Most recently, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles included Agent Ellison, who's frequently shown to be a Baptist, and religious references became more and more predominant in the show (which is about the actual apocalypse, so it does make sense to bring it up.) Most fans of BSG would agree that the show's monotheist/polytheist divide made it a much richer experience than a simple robots-vs-humans show would have been otherwise — regardless of how you may feel about the Baltar Cult, and the hand-wavy "Starbuck turns into ZZ Top" ending. And it's pure blasphemy to suggest that Firefly would be better without Shepherd Book.

The rise of Space Jesus?

Lately, though, it's seemed almost required to have some kind of religious discussion among a TV show's themes — and it's more likely to be Christian rather than some kind of vague Space Religion (TM) or misty spirituality.

Religion is part of society, and including religious points of view makes your world seem more realistic and three-dimensional — it would seem odd if science fiction on television never included a religious viewpoint, just as it would if people never mentioned politics at all. At the same time, there are ways to include religion that make sense (Firefly and T:SCC come to mind immediately) and ways to include it that feel gratuitous and weird (the Vatican is endorsing the aliens!)

And yes, when you throw in religion in a nonsensical way, it either feels like you're going for a cheap effect, or like you're pandering to religious people. Add to that the fact that scientists and people who use pure empiricism to deal with problems are far and few between — Walter Bishop and maybe the twisted Topher on Dollhouse are our only real avatars of tech nerdhood that I can think of off the top of my head. It's become a taboo in televised science fiction to show people doing science.

The show that's handling religion in the most fascinating manner right now is Supernatural, which is modern fantasy rather than science fiction. In the last year or so, angels have joined the show's long-standing demon characters — and now Lucifer himself is roaming around. And there are lots of hints that we'll actually be meeting God this season at some point. Theological discussions over why God allowed all of the horrors of the 20th century to happen are automatically more fascinating when they come out of the mouths of actual Angels, and the fact that the Archangels believe that God is dead makes for fascinating viewing.

So consider this a plea for more thoughtful portrayals of religion in science fiction — and fewer random, thoughtless, kitchen-sink inclusions. People who watch science fiction are smart. We can tell when we're being pandered to, and when we're being spoonfed religious ideas just because it makes your show seem more "mythic" or "relevant." Religion can make your science-fiction story feel like it takes place in a world we can relate to, and it can deepen your characters and add another layer to your story — or, in the wrong hands, it can feel like a random piece of baggage, tacked on to your story for spurious, external reasons. We can usually tell the difference between the two.

Thanks to Graeme McMillan, Meredith Woerner, Annalee Newitz, Lauren Davis, Briana Cavanaugh, Chris West, Jeff VanderMeer, Andrew Liptak, Pete Gofton, James McGirk, Dennis Woo, Rachael Parker, Brian Williams, Rina Weisman, Chris Hsiang, Jessy Randall, David Fraser, Tim Todd, Chris Newman and Kiriko Moth, plus anyone I missed.

Tron

This is the all-time classic of trapped-in-a-game stories, and it's the first type of story that you see a lot — hero gets sucked inside the digital/computer world, and turned glowy or avatar-y. In this case, the evil Master Control Program is trying to keep the users from monitoring its functions, because it wants to gain absolute power. So when Flynn challenges its rule, the MCP digitizes him and then forces him to take part in a series of deadly disc-throwing, bike-racing, tank-battling games against computer programs.

Running Man

There's the "guy gets sucked inside video game" story, which is like Tron. And then there's the "condemned prisoner gets forced to take part in brutal gladitorial games in an ugly unitard" story, and this is the most perfect example. Partly because it features Arnold Schwarzenegger bringing his A-game, acting wise. But also, it gets major points for use of chainsaws and barbed wire and stuff.

Star Trek: "Gamesters Of Triskelion"

And this is the third type of "trapped in a game" story. There are some vaguely superior aliens (except that they kind of suck) and they kidnap other species and force them to compete/fight for their amusement. There needs to be a gangsta rap about hustling for the quatloos.

Doctor Who: Vengeance On Varos

Doctor Who has done many, many "trapped in a game" stories. There's "Vengeance On Varos," which is pretty much the classic "prisoners forced to take part in deadly games" scenario. There's "The Five Doctors," which is the epitome of "superior aliens kidnap lesser species and play deadly games with them for amusement, with the added wrinkle that the superior aliens are the Doctor's own species. There's also "The War Games," which is what it sounds like. And "The Celestial Toymaker," which features a superior alien games master who's inexplicably Fake Chinese.

Gemini Game by Michael Scott

This is another classic standard — teenage twins Liz and BJ create a hot-selling virtual reality game called Night's Castle. But then it gets invaded by an evil virus, causing havoc. Liz and BJ are trapped inside the game trying to fix it.

Death Race 2000

In a dystopian future, the totalitarian Bipartisan Party keeps an iron grip partly by distracting the people with its televised deadly cross-country race — and top racer Frankenstein is the latest person in a long line to bear that identity, having no choice but to race and/or die. In the recent remake starring Jason Statham, it's more like Running Man — another "felons forced to take part in deadly games" type deal.

Lexx, "The Game"

Kai plays against Prince in a deadly game of chess — and if Kai loses, his crewmates will die. But if Kai wins, he gets reunited with his soul. So Kai accepts Prince's terms, and Stan and Xev get turned into literal pawns.

Deep Space Nine, "Move Along Home"

Quite possibly the most annoying episode of DS9 ever, this episode features the Wadi, aliens from the Gamma Quadrant who force Sisko, Bashir and their friends to play really dumb games, with the refrain of "Move along home," every time they complete one of the asinine challenges. And then there's also the DS9 episode where O'Brien befriends the Tosk, an alien who's been bred to be the prey in a lifelong hunt.

Dungeons & Dragons (cartoon)

A group of kids gets on a spooky roller-coaster fairground ride at a fair, and winds up pulled into the dark world of D&D, where they must play the game in order to escape. Here's a clip from "The Dragon's Graveyard," the most controversial episode, which was almost banned because of its violence and because they contemplate killing their nemesis.

"Arena" by Frederic Brown.

This famous short story is basically the same deal as the Star Trek episode of the same name: Humans are fighting a bunch of lizard aliens, so super-powerful godlike beings pick one representative of each side and force them to fight in a barren landscape. The solution to the puzzle is different, and the human actually does take the opportunity to kill his enemy. You'll have to get your entertainment right here! There's also an Outer Limits episode with a similar premise, "Fun And Games," according to Wikipedia.

Legend Of Neil

We've raved about this webseries, about a guy who gets sucked into a World Of Warcraft-style online game world, before. Neil gets drunk and plays Legend Of Zelda, and decides to masturbate while asphyxiating himself with his Nintendo game controller, which somehow leads to him getting trapped inside the game, where he hangs out with psychotic fairy Felicia Day.

Arcade

From Albert Pyun (the director who brought you Cyborg and the original Captain America), and writer David S. Goyer comes this great movie, about a video game that takes over your brain. You must win the game — or get sucked inside it forever. Or something. It's all because they used human brain cells in making their new game console. Video game developers — do not do that. Human brain cells do not belong in your wii controller. They will turn Wii Boxing into a deadly death sport. Seriously!

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Two men enter — how many leave? (How many do you think?) This is another subset of the "hero forced to compete in a deadly arena" genre — here, it's humans forcing each other to take part in ritual combat in an arena. Mad Max is pitted against Stevie Wonder's second worst song, Master Blaster, and there can be only one victor. The "trial by combat" thing is a common feature in science fiction, including many many television episodes.

Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone

You know what's cooler than Arnold Schwarzenegger having to navigate a deadly maze of games and traps? Molly Ringwald having to do the same thing! Okay, maybe not. It's the handiwork of the evil Robodog, whose deadly maze is almost unescapable, even for classic brat-pack actors at the start of their careers.

Stargate SG-1, "Avatar."

There are at least a couple classic Stargate episodes featuring a deadly game of death — but "Avatar" is our favorite, because Teal'c kicks major ass in it. He gets stuck inside a V.R. game training module, where every time he dies, he's brought back to life. The only way out is to win or get inside the Elevator of Surrender. And every time Teal'c dies in the game, his chances of dying in real life due to a heart attack increase. Here's an awesome music video of the episode's events, to the sounds of Michael Jackson.

Philip K. Dick, Game Players Of Titan

It's a dystopian future, and the last inhabitants of a depopulated Earth amuse themselves by playing a board game known as the Game, for huge amounts of property as well as each other's wives. (Um, yeah.) The game is administered by the Vugs, amorphous gambling-loving aliens from Titan, who turn out to have different factions with their own agendas. The rules of the game start to change, and it turns out the endgame is a lot more sinister than you'd realized. Other notable Dick works: Maze Of Death, and The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch.

Farscape, "John Quixote"

Chiana brings back a fancy virtual-reality game, and Crichton gets sucked into it, finding himself reliving his exploits in the Uncharted Territories, and then moving on to a scary fantasy world. The game plays out Crichton's fears, and he encounters dark reflections of people knows in the real world.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Game."

We've already made fun of the silliness of this game once before. Trust Riker to get everyone on the ship addicted to a time-waster.

Vivian Vande Velde, Heir Apparent

Fourteen-year-old Gianne is connected to a virtual reality game of kings and intrigue, only to find it has a malfunction and she must win quickly, or it will kill her.

Ben 10, "Game Over"

Here's another one we featured in our list of suckiest fictional video games. Ben gets stuck inside a really weak game involving flying discs and aerial combat — and if the game controller is turned off, he'll be trapped there forever.

X-Files, "First Person Shooter"

In this Wiliam Gibson-scripted episode, Mulder and Scully find themselves inside a VR game with sexy-but-deadly cowboys. Good thing Scully's got riot gear and funky goggles. And a virtual machine gun.

Scooby Doo And The Cyber Bunch

A group of computer nerds makes a special video game about Scooby Doo, and our heroes get digitized and beamed inside the game in a very Tron-inspired sequence. There they must face killer video game icons, deadly tests... and computerized versions of themselves.

Lost In Space, "The Deadly Games Of Gamma 6"

Faux Klingons challenge Dr. Smith and the Robinson family to a series of games of death — and if they lose, the Earth is forfeit. Here's a great scene of Daddy Robinson playing Russian Laser Roulette (which turns into a bong if it doesn't shoot) with one of the Kling-nots, who blinks first.

Existenz

This is the total classic "sucked into a video game" movie — you never quite know if our heroes have escaped from the game or not, and the scene of down-and-dirty spinal installation of a weirdly organic-looking video game port in the guy's spine is pretty memorable.

series 7: the contenders, are you afraid of the dark "tale of the pinball wizard"

Charles Stross, Glasshouse

This one is sort of a social experiment as well as a game — a group of people volunteer to be ported into random bodies inside a simulation of 1990s Earth. The better they do of embodying their pre-ordorained roles, the more points they get. But there's no way out of the game, and over time it becomes clearer that the people running it are actually trying to create a new society.

The Game

It's vaguely five minutes into the future, and Michael Douglas applies to take part in an alternate-reality game where the game intersects with your real life. He can't ever quite escape from the tentacles of intrigue and stuff. Notable for being one of the first pieces of fiction about ARGs, as well as for its sinister game/life overlap.

Saw

People are trapped in a game by a psycho who makes them do puzzles. It's like every psycho GM you've ever gamed with, rolled into one.

Cube

In this classic by Vincenzo Natali, director of the upcoming genetic thriller Splice, a group of people wake up in cube-shaped rooms in a building that turns out to be cube-shaped in turn. They have to navigate a series of deadly traps to escape from the mega-cube, but their sanity starts to come apart.

Hellraiser: Hellworld.

In the umpteenth Hellraiser movie, there's an evil game, and someone commits suicide while playing it. And then all the other players get invited to a mansion where everything is the game, and (wait for it) you can never quit playing.

Nightmares

This early 1980s horror movie features four different stories wrapped together, and one (which we featured previously) shows Emilio Estevez taking on the "Bishop Of Battle" video game — only to find that if you win, the console blows apart, and the video game monsters come into the real world and attack you.

Jumanji/Zathura

In this Robin Williams vehicle (and its quasi-sequel, directed by Jon Favreau), there's a board game and stuff from the game becomes real and invades the real world, menacing our heroes' lives. In the second movie, the board game is actually an outer space game, and the entire house gets whisked out into space, where the kids are menaced by aliens and helped by a friendly astronaut.

Evolver

Wow. How did I not know about this movie already? Every time the video game system Evolver is activated, it learns and "evolves" becoming more powerful... and more deadly. And Evolver is played by William H. Macy. And in this trailer, John "Q" DeLancie explains to us how Evolver hates to lose and will just get smarter and harder to beat, until...

Some people interpreted last week's top 10 list of silly alien prosthetics as hating on low-budget science fiction, or dissing the hard work of makeup artists — and that was definitely not the intention. But when you've seen the same few ideas crop up again and again, you tend to get a bit jaded.

For me, personally, Star Trek in the 1990s and early 2000s ruined me for boring humanoid aliens. After the endless parade of people in vinyl pajamas, with different smushy bits of latex on their faces every week, I got rubber-nose fatigue. There's a lot to love about 1990s Trek — Deep Space Nine was frequently brilliant and prescient, and Voyager had some standout episodes — but the infinite assembly of silly faces was not one of the things I loved.

Oh, and the picture above is from Davosmith's amazing Flickr set of Manchester's Fab Cafe. Here's another image from the same set, featuring another one of the creatures on this list:

So here are ten aliens that were obviously done on a shoestring budget, but which absolutely knock your space boots off:

10. The Daleks, on Doctor Who.

The evil genetically engineered cyborgs on Doctor Who are like mini-tanks with buzzing bee voices, and they scared the pants off generations of British (and some American) kids. They've had their ups and downs — if the first Dalek story you saw was "Day Of The Daleks," "Destiny Of The Daleks," "Remembrance Of The Daleks" or the recent one where they turn people into pigs and then dress in zoot suits, you won't understand what the fuss is about. Watch "Genesis Of The Daleks" or "Dalek." (Before you jump on me in comments, I do like "Remembrance," except the Daleks wobble horribly and look just decrepit.) In their prime, though, the Daleks glide along, rasping with anger and pointing their terrible egg-whisk guns. They're utterly cheap — and horrifying. And you only occasinally Runners up: debatable whether the Cybermen are aliens, but they do often look cool. Also, the Draconians and Zygons make the rubber-mask thing look brilliant, and the Forest of Cheem also doesn't look bad at all. I also like the Slitheen, but only design-wise.

9. The Aliens from The Arrival.

Directed by David "Pitch Black" Twohy, this 1996 alien invasion film was probably made for three Snickers wrappers and a handful of arcade tokens — but I really love the look of these aliens, and they way they move on their weird satyr-ish horse legs. Here's a slinky alien transforming itself into a hawt babe, probably because it just watched Species. Also, I love the flaps that cover up its brain, and how they undulate. Nice stuff!

8. The Visitors from V.

They look human most of the time, but when we get the occasional glimpse of their real lizard faces under their human masks, it's super-effective — as long as we don't linger. Here are a couple of choice moments. I love Diana picking at the shreds of her human disguise, like they're a scab (at about 4:00 in the first video). And the speech in the second video is the greatest thing ever:

7. Greedo and the other cantina aliens, in Star Wars.

Weirdly, later live-action Star Wars movies have never featured aliens that felt as interesting and lively as the first glimpse we got in that cantina scene. Of course, we've already exposited about our love for Greedo, but all of the quick glimpses of aliens in this scene have a liveliness that makes you feel like they're each the star of a cool story. Not bad for an underdog film with a tiny $8.5 million budget (not much even in 1977) whose crew was busy trashing the set and making fun of the Wookiee costume.

6. The Jem'Hadar in Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

They actually jumped out at me when I was compiling pics for the post about silly-looking facial prosthetics last week — there was a picture of a Vorta surrounded by Jem'Hadar troopers, and I had to crop the Jem'Hadar out of the image, because they actually looked kind of cool. Something about the way their prostheses work with their faces really feels realistic, and all of those scenes of them struggling with their addiction to ketracel white feel engaging rather than run-of-the-mill. Runner up: Species 8472 in Voyager had some moments of genuine creepitude as well.

5. Black Oil in The X-Files.

A sentient alien virus that can live in hibernation for thousands of years, it appears as a liquid, not unlike crude oil. But it can move on its own, and it's sentient, and it can take people over. There's nothing cheaper than just having some black goo oozing around, and yet it's completely convincing and compelling, and doesn't feel like any life form you've encountered on Earth.

4. The Aliens in District 9.

Obviously, this movie's still fresh in our minds, but the downtrodden aliens in the film look different than anything we'd already seen. Their twitching face-tentacles can't help grossing you out a bit, even as their big pleading eyes lay claim to your sympathy. With a budget of around $30 million, this film is the equivalent of Star Wars or Alien back in the day — a low-budget film that succeeds thanks to a lot of inventiveness born of desperation. And great storytelling, of course. I almost left this film off the list, because we've covered it so much lately, but it clearly belongs.

3. The Vorlon from Babylon 5.

These energy-based life forms are among the First Ones, and inspire a quasi-religious awe among people who see them. So its fitting that their headgear and robes look so alien and unfamiliar. As Sheridan tells Kosh at one point, he can't even tell if it's the same Vorlon under all that covering, or different Vorlons in the same guise.

2. The 456, on Torchwood.

To me, this is the absolute best way to do an alien species on a budget. Shroud it in toxic smoke — and mystery — and just show little glimpses of evil tentacles. The way these creatures shriek and spatter the walls of their enclosure with alien puke will stick in your mind long after you're done watching the miniseries "Children Of Earth." This official still is actually a better look at the 456 than we ever get in the actual television show — and even in this image, they're somewhat indistinct and obscene looking. They're the perfect mixture of mysterious and disgusting, just right for aliens who want to molest your children.

1. The Xenomorph, from Alien.

The studio originally only wanted to give director Ridley Scott a $4.2 million budget, until he showed them storyboards and Mobius illustrations. But, says Scott in a recent interview, "The [revised] budget started out at $.8.2-million and ended up at 8.6, which I think in those days was still relatively cheap. We didn't have the money to do pretty well anything... But in a funny kind of way, you get very clever when there is very little money, because it makes you think." Scott had a stroke of luck when writer Dan O'Bannon took him aside and showed him H.R. Giger's art "like he was showing me a dirty book," and they brought in Giger to design — and sculpt — the alien costume and other alien artifacts. But the other key, says Scott, was disguising the fact that this was still a man in a suit:

We started with a stunt man who was quite thin, but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man. So my casting director said, ‘I've seen a guy in a pub in Soho who is about seven feet tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body.' So he brought Bolaji Bodejo to the office, and he was actually from Somalia, funnily enough," Scott remarks, having much later directed BLACK HAWK DOWN, which was set in Somalia. "I said, ‘Do you want to be in movies,' and he said sure. And he became the alien. I had him for two months. In the cockpit, there's a pack of cigarettes that says ‘Bolaji.'

Thanks to Alan Bostick, Alasdair Stuart, Madeline Ashby, @Nightwyrm on Twitter, Marlin May, Andrea Zanin, Melinda Adams, Rina Weisman, Micky Shirley, Susie Kameny, Greta Christina, Serene Vannoy, Rus McLaughlin, Minal Hajratwala, Annelise Ophelian, Seth Kaufman, David Fraser, and James Limbach for suggestions!

Heraclitus said you can't step into the same river twice, but that's what Syfy, having adapted Riverworld into a standalone feature in 2003, is trying with next year's more ambitious, four-hour miniseries based on Philip José Farmer's beloved novels. Judging by this Q&A at SciFiWire, however, scribe Robert Hewitt Wolfe (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The 4400) seems undaunted by the prospect of alienating Farmer's loyal readers with an adaptation that ditches the original's storylines and relegates its protagonists to supporting character (or antagonist) status.

The basic premise is the same: deceased humans from across time find themselves living in a watery limbo, a planet-traversing river, where famous historical personages and obscure folk unite to unravel the mystery of their situation. Like the 2003 movie, however, the Wolfe miniseries will push aside the first book's protagonist (real-life Victorian explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton) in favor of a contemporary American protagonist (to be played by Dollhouse's Tahmoh Penikett) with a simple motive: to find his missing love (Smallville's Laura Vandervoort), who died with him in a suicide bombing.

Wolfe (whose strong résumé includes multiple episodes of Andromeda, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and The 4400) suggests that he wants to leave the saga's spiritual and philosophical underpinnings intact, but downgrading the swashbuckling, complex, real-life protagonist to a supporting role because American TV viewers might find him too obscure and unlikable doesn't speak well for the project's literacy and thoughtfulness. In fact, Wolfe hints that Burton may be more of an antagonist than a protagonist. Mark Twain, the hero of the second book, will turn up early on, having managed to build himself a riverboat.

Plus, Wolfe envisions future installments of this possible ongoing series, where he uses Farmer's platform as an opportunity to dig up various historical figures and watch them fight. "I'd love to do a story where the real Macbeth finds out about this play that has been written about him and is freaking pissed off because it makes him look like a dick!" Heh heh. Watch your back, Shakespeare!

Farmer, who died in February at 91, was reportedly upbeat about the prospect of this miniseries. These days, however, he's probably on a steamboat somewhere with Twain and Shakespeare, plotting vengeance.

It was surprisingly hard to pick the worst Trek holodeck stories, with so many stinkers (and so few good ones) to choose from. It was especially hard not to make the entire list consist of Voyager. As commenter Evlsushi says, "Mentioning a bad Voyager holodeck episode is like shooting really fat, slow fish in a barrel." But here's what we came up with, in rough chronological order:

TNG: 11001001. You could argue this isn't really a holodeck adventure, because Riker doesn't really get "trapped" on the holodeck. But my. God. We, the viewers, are trapped inside Riker's holodeck romance with Minuet, his ideal woman, who's a simpering idiot. She's been created by the Bynars, a race of autistic savants who speak in binary code to each other, and they're about ten million times sexier than she is.
Worst moment: Riker offers to show Minuet his "bone." In a similar vein, I almost included "Outrageous Okona," the "holographic Joe Piscopo" episode, but decided it didn't have enough holodeck awfulness mixed in with the Okona outrageousness.

TNG: Hollow Pursuits. Oh man. Some people really love this episode, in which Lt. Barclay gets addicted to the holodeck, and our heroes have to wean him off it. But I never liked Reg Barclay as a character, and whatever goodness there might have been in the concept of holodeck addiction gets lost in his whining and posturing. Plus TNG can never resist a chance to have its stars dress up in silly outfits and act campy and out of character, so Troi, Worf, Data and the others all wear old-timey garb and act ridiculous.
Worst moment: Troi: "I am the goddess of love and compassion."

TNG: Ship In A Bottle. I'm willing to give the "Dixon Hill" episode a pass, since it won an award in spite of extreme silliness. I'm even willing to let the first Moriarty episode slide, despite its Wishbone-esque quality. But the sequel, where Moriarty takes over the ship, is just a bit too over the top. Especially once he decides he'll be too lonesome as a holographic character wandering the universe alone, and gets his Countess. Also, Moriarty is too easily fooled by the same trick he pulls on Picard and company: making them think they've left the Holodeck when they're still really in there.
Worst moment: Moriarty explains to Picard how much he loves his Countess.

TNG: A Fistful Of Datas. I've already hated on this episode, but it can always stand more hate. Data's mustaches, alone deserve an epic poem in their honor, with heroic couplets and at least 100 stanzas. Plus any father-son bonding between Worf and Alexander is reason enough to hate an episode, and Trek should have learned its lesson about cowboy episodes with "Spectre Of The Gun."
Worst moment: Data in a dress, macking on Worf.

DS9: Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang. Some people really loved Vic Fontaine, the holographic singer who guest starred in several episodes of DS9's final couple of seasons. I don't understand those people, and try to avoid them as much as possible. Vic was like a less cool Guinan, except that he sang. A lot. But to be fair, he was mostly used for some good purposes: like finally getting Odo and Kira, those crazy kids, to hook up. And helping Nog deal with his trauma of losing a leg in battle. (I actually really liked the Nog's leg episode.) But inevitably, some bright spark thought: "Why not have Vic star in his own episode? About mobsters and stuff?" And... no. Bad, bad idea. The awesome Cynic's Corner site explains all the ways this episode fails, including lack of actual humor, Sisco singing, and an implausible plot.
Worst moment: We find out that if Vic dies in the program, his program is deleted permanently from the Matrix. Wha?

Voyager: The Thaw. Yes, I'm skipping over the episodes about the Doctor's holographic family and Ensign Kim's Beowulf simulation. They're pretty hideous, but not in the same league as the worst Voyager holodeck eps. "The Thaw," on the other hand... ugh. There's a clown, okay? And his name is "Fear." And Fear has a bunch of random people, plus the always-feckless Harry Kim, trapped in his virtual world because their bodies are plugged in. Fear the Clown amuses himself by playing silly games and turning Kim into a baby and an old guy. Finally, Janeway instills fear into Fear.
Worst moment: God, where do we start? I guess the Harry Kim baby thing. I dunno.

Voyager: The Killing Game. Aliens trap the Voyager crew in a holographic simulation where they think they're really their holo-characters, and then somehow the aliens are Nazis. It's Springtime for Hitler on the Holodeck. Ugh Ugh Ugh. Although Klingons versus Nazis is kind of great.
Worst moment: One of the Hirogen decides to embrace Nazism as a life philosophy, for real.

Voyager: Fair Haven. Janeway falls in love with a holo-stud in the cheesy "Irish village" holodeck program, and heartstring-tugging romance ensues. Along with ethical dilemmas, as Janeway starts "editing" her beau to make him more suitable (and to delete his inconvenient spouse.) And then she has sex with him — while other Voyager crew members are visiting the holodeck, which, after all, is only one tiny room.
Worst moment: So many. No, wait. how about when Harry Kim questions an order that could save Voyager from imminent destruction, because it might damage the Irish village simulation??

Voyager: Spirit Folk. As bad as "Fair Haven" is, I actually think the sequel episode is worse. The simple Irish folk develop a new and exciting malfunction, so they become aware of the Voyager crew editing reality around them. They decide to burn Harry, Tom and the Doctor as witches, or something.
Worst moment: The villagers hypnotize the Doctor.

Enterprise: These Are The Voyages... You could write a whole essay about how terrible this episode was — and I'm sure tons of people already have. It's as if Berman and Braga wanted to end their version of the Trek franchise with an episode that's not only horrendous, it also makes a strong argument that Trek deserves to die, by giving us some of the series' worst tropes, in one tiny capsule. An unaccountably worse-for-wear Riker and Troi decide, during TNG season 6, to visit a holodeck simulation of one of Captain Archer's missions.
Worst moment: Probably Trip's ridiculous death, although that's not technically a holodeck issue.

The Orgasmatron Booth
Maybe I should be more surprised that Woody Allen would come up with one of the most well known pieces of SF sextech in Sleeper, his one and only SF movie to date, but all I can think is that anything that demonstrates how easily people can be replaced by machinery is right up his 1970s comedy neuroses alley. Sure, science may have tried to create the real thing, but the fact remains: Is there a closet that I can walk into and experience multiple climaxes without the presence of another human being and risking repetitive strain injury? No. And that's the true tragedy here.

The Excessive Machine
Unlike the Orgasmatron, Barbarella's Excessive Machine is made for evil purposes, apparently (Unless you think that "Executioner" is some kind of porny euphemism), but you can't deny that with a little reworking, this organ-based organ-replacement could bring happiness to a great many people everywhere, while being more aesthetically-pleasing to look at than any of the inventions seen so far on popular internet destination Fucking Machines (Dear everyone: That link is very NSFW. Do not blame me when you click on it in your place of employment and get in trouble. The clue as to why may be in the name of the site).

Sex Rays Of Various Types
Whether it's Flesh Gordon's Sex Ray or Orgazmo's Orgazmorator, there's no denying that there's something primal about the idea of making that penis/gun substitution a little more literal than usual. The best variation of this idea belongs to 2000AD's satirical Big Dave strip from the 1990s, wherein Saddam Hussein unveiled his plan to defeat the West once and for all by using his Love Gun - built by aliens, of course - to turn opposing armies gay, and therefore - proving the reasoning behind the US military's ban on homosexuals - useless as soldiers.

Freaky Virtual Reality Sex
http://io9.com/5054503/the-dos-and-donts-of-cybersex
Lawnmower Man's face-melty sex scene may look somewhat cheesy now - and make you go "Hey, it's Frank off Lost! But young!" - but let's face it; Second Life really doesn't compare to the virtual reality insect fetish sex that this movie promised us. Science fiction loves to suggest that VR will open up all new worlds of sexual exploration (Even Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had Quark's holodeck suites, which you knew were dens of perversity and characters fantasizing about Dax and Kira getting it on with them), but the reality has proven to be somewhat lacking.

Sexbots In General
I know, I know. Sexbots; they're the android dream for all of us, whether they're Cherry 2000, Battlestar Galactica's Six or any of a large number of other possibilities, there's something amazingly alluring to many people about the idea of a lifelike play partner that only does what you tell it to do (or maybe not). But when I don't care how realistic they think robots are getting, that whole dead-eyed look just doesn't do it for me just yet. Give me a call when they've reached Tricia Helfer level - or maybe Sky-Doll.

Dr. Leonard McCoy ("Bones") (Star Trek)
Kind of the obvious place to start, right? It's kind of hard to think of something to say about McCoy that hasn't already been said. He's probably the original Awesome Space Doctor, providing not only medical expertise to the Enterprise, but also being one-third of the trifecta that is Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. If Spock is the logic and Kirk is emotion, then McCoy is morality glue that holds it all together. (Morality glue?) Originally portrayed by DeForest Kelley, he will be played by Karl Urban in this summer's film.

Dr. Pieter Cross (Doctor Mid-Nite) (DC Comics)
Dr. Cross is actually the third DC hero to don the mantle of Doctor Mid-Nite, and like his predecessors, he a) can only see in pitch darkness, and b) is a doctor. Despite the fact that the chosen spelling of midnight looks like the name of a bad motel, it's a little refreshing, really, to have a superhero who uses the title of "doctor" and has the medical degree to back it up. Cross, in addition to his vigilante activities, still puts in a full day at the office and is always willing to take time to deal with a medical emergency. On top of that, he's the superhero community's physician of choice, having done everything from emergency surgery on Hourman to removing the Brainiac virus from Oracle to removing a bullet from Lois Lane to giving Power Girl her annual checkups. (I kid you not; Pieter Cross is a lucky man.)

Dr. Janet Frasier (Stargate SG-1)
Dr. Frasier is basically amazing. She is a compassionate physician and finds herself not only dealing with Earth diseases, but alien ones as well, as she treats extraterrestrial refugees. Over the course of the show, she adopts a daughter, Cassandra, an alien orphan.

Dr. Owen Harper (Torchwood)
Owen is the medical officer for Torchwood Three. He's kind of sarcastic, kind of abrasive, and eventually also kind of wonderful. He spends his spare time getting romantically entangled with both of his female coworkers, a female aviator from 1953, and, well, pretty much whoever else he happens to run across. In the show's second season, he dies, but gets better. Sort of. In that he essentially becomes the team's resident snarky zombie boy for the rest of his run.

Dr. Simon Tam (Firefly TV series, Serenity, 2005 film)
A brilliant young doctor (graduating in the top three percent of his class at the Medical Academy), Simon became a resident trauma surgeon in a major hospital and his future looked bright. That is, until he has to bust his sister out of the Academy, where she's being experimented on, escape, and join up with a less-than-savory crew that conducts less-than-legal business. Lucky for him, their business tends to keep his medical training pretty well in demand. (Plus, he's pretty much a shoe-in to win Best Dressed among the ship's crew. He owns some nice waistcoats.)

Dr. Carson Beckett (Stargate: Atlantis)
If there were a competition for Most Awesome Doctor On This List, chances are Beckett probably wouldn't win, although he might earn a few points for sharing a last name with an existentialist playwright. At the same time, he's a pretty competent physician and has the honor of being the only Scottish doctor on this list. He also probably holds the honor of having the most awkward character death on here, but at least he's back now. As a clone. Which is also kind of awkward.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
Maybe he's not exactly a certified physician, but you have admit that creating a living being out of a bunch of dead people is about as impressive as you can get when it comes to medical skill. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, however, Victor both fears and rejects his creation because of its ugliness. Way to be a pansy, man.

Dr. Thomas Elliot (Hush) (DC Comics)
He started out as Bruce Wayne's childhood friend, despite being kind of a nutjob of a kid, and went on to become a successful, Harvard-educated surgeon. Unfortunately, he eventually becomes the doctor of one Edward Nigma (The Riddler), which spells bad news, considering Elliot is the guy who tried to kill his parents as a kid (and half-succeeded) and now hates Bruce Wayne. Well, he and the Riddler realize they have that in common, and Dr. Elliot invents himself an alter-ego to work on the whole bringing-down-Batman plan. And thus, Hush is born.

Dr. Stephen Franklin (Babylon 5)
Dr. Franklin is the chief medical officer aboard the space station, and as Wikipedia describes him:

Dr. Franklin is a strong-willed, kind person and idealistic leader on Babylon 5; he is also a workaholic. He is not afraid to take risks to save a patient's life; this habit can occasionally get him into trouble. He has strong moral and ethical values, but he can also be self-righteous and a perfectionist at times.

And while those qualities make him kind of awesome, they also kind of make him addicted to stimulants in the show's third season. He, of course, beats the addiction and goes back to the awesome.

Dr. Miles Bennell (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956 film)
The good doctor is called into town to look at the uncle of the cousin of his ex-sweetheart, who somehow seems not to be himself as of late. (This ex-sweetheart also seems to be able to call in some pretty convoluted favors.) Dr. Bennell is at first unable to find anything wrong, but a little more investigation leads him to discover the pod people, come to Earth to replace us. And, of course, snatch our bodies in the process-A fate which Bennell warns us of the last dramatic fourth-wall-breaking moments of the film. (The 2007 adaptation, The Invasion, features Daniel Craig as a doctor named Ben Driscoll. It unfortunately also features a bad movie.)

Dr. Sherman Cottle (Battlestar Galactica)
The Chief Medical Officer of Galactica, Dr. Cottle is also the only real physician-surgeon aboard. As the Battlestar Wiki describes him:

Cottle is somewhat eccentric and is considered a "bastard" among some of Galactica's crew, in addition to his penchant for being a heavy smoker, despite knowing the risks, and one not overly impressed by positions of power. He is, above all things, a healer. To him, nothing else really matters, be it rank, riches, or species.

Despite his somewhat abrasive manner, he's still well-trusted among the crew.

Dr. Samuel J. Loomis (Halloween franchise)
While its debatable whether or not the Halloween films are remotely science-fiction (although Michael Myers pretty inarguably displays some rather superhuman abilities), it's pretty safe to say that Dr. Loomis is just about the most awesome licensed psychiatrist in the business. After all, one of his main charges is more or less Unmitigated Evil. Then again, Loomis also doesn't have a great track record with keeping Michael from killing people. But he does get to say things like, "Death has come to your little town, Sheriff." And in Donald Pleasance's voice to boot.

Dr. Donald Blake (Thor, Marvel Comics)
Dr. Blake was Thor's original alter ego, having somewhat accidentally discovered the ability to transform into the god while on vacation in Scandanavia. Blake was a surgeon and while not being Thor, was actually seen practicing medicine in the comics. He is also said to have worked with Thor on multiple occasions, but what exactly that entails is a little beyond me.

The Doctor (Star Trek: Voyager)
The Doctor might be an Emergency Medical Hologram, but he's more than just a bit of hardware. In an attempt to build his own personality, he develops artistic talents and a holographic family, as well as friendships with his crewmates. He even writes a novel titled Photons Be Free.

Doctor Gogol (Mad Love, 1935 film)
Doctor Gogol is a brilliant-but, of course, completely mad-surgeon. After all, he's played by Peter Lorre, who pretty much invented brilliant-but-mad. Gogol is (madly) in love with an actress named Yvonne, and when her husband, a concert pianist named Stephen, has his hands crushed in a tragic accident, she comes to him, begging for help. He obliges by replacing Stephen's hands with those of a recently executed knife murderer. The results? Well, let's just say that Stephen and that kid from Idle Hands should get together and form some kind of support group. And Doctor Gogol? Completely mad. But also brilliant.

Dr. Cecilia Reyes (X-Men, Marvel Comics)
A Puerto Rican doctor, Cecilia has the ability to project a forcefield around her. As Wikipedia says:

Cecilia Reyes decided to become a doctor when her father was gunned down in front of her as a child, and she was unable to do anything to help him. The X-Men tried recruiting her when it was discovered that she was a mutant, but Reyes had no interest in being a superhero. However, when Operation: Zero Tolerance, a government-backed anti-mutant task force, targeted her, she was forced to join forces with the X-Man Iceman and other mutants to escape New York City and track down Bastion, Operation Zero Tolerance's leader.

Doc Benton (Supernatural, 3.15 "Time is on My Side")
When people started turning up with surgically removed organs and a dead man's fingerprints all over them, the Winchester brothers begin looking into it, as they are wont to do. Their investigation leads them to Doc Benton, a nineteenth century surgeon who discovered the secret to eternal life and now has a habit of replacing his parts whenever they wear out. Maybe it's not the best plan to win a guy friends, but it sure makes great use of his surgical skills.

Doctor Strauss, along with Professor Nemur (Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes)
Although nobody really remembers the name of the doctor who tripled Charlie Gordon's IQ, you have to admit that pulling that off is no small feat. Unfortunately, the effects are-not to ruin the ending-not exactly all they're cracked up to be. Additionally, Strauss and Nemur can claim the credit for one of the most famous mice in sci-fi.

Dr. Julian Bashir (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
As Wikipedia tells it:

As a child, Julian Bashir fell behind in school, and was evaluated as having learning difficulties. Because of this, his parents, Richard and Amsha Bashir, had him subjected to genetic engineering. The procedure made him mentally superior to most humans, and greatly enhanced his physical abilities. However, because human genetic engineering is illegal in the United Federation of Planets, Bashir and his parents kept his procedure a secret throughout most of his adult life.

Throughout the course of the show, he gets to do such exciting things as end up in a prison camp, see the woman he loves (Jadzia Dax) marry someone else, and attempt to integrate some other genetically engineered people into Federation culture.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Unlike his more temperamental counterpart, Dr. Jekyll is a well-liked, friendly doctor. The secret life he leads as Mr. Edward Hyde, however, puts that likeable reputation at stake, thanks to a potion Jekyll invented. Perhaps the lesson here is that you shouldn't mix your own drinks, even when you're a trained professional.

Every other one of the Doctor's cunning plans, in Doctor Who. The Doctor is always hatching plans that fall completely flat. This is especially true in the original series, where stories had to last 90 minutes or longer. In "The Ark In Space," the Doctor plans to attack the Wirrn while they sleep — but they left a guard behind. And then he plots to stop them by electrifying the bulkheads — but they attack the electricity supply. In "Pyramids Of Mars," he builds a fancy anti-mummy machine, which the mummies wreck. Then he plants explosives on the mummies' spaceship, which fail to explode. In "Parting Of The Ways," he builds fancy Dalek-brain-busting machine... which he doesn't have the gumption to use. The Doctor has a clever scheme to get hold of the Master's laser screwdriver in "Last Of The Time Lords"... and it won't work for him. And so on.

The last battle against the Tripods, in The Pool Of Fire by John Christopher. The humans have a clever plan for attacking the domed cities of the alien Masters: sneak in and pour alcohol into the water supply, incapacitating the Masters so the humans can crack their protective domes. This works most places, but totally fails in the Panama Canal dome. There's a backup plan, which involves primitive airplanes and bombs. This fails too. And then there's a third backup plan, involving hot-air balloons and bombs. This almost fails as well, because the balloons just bounce off the dome — except that Henry lands his balloon on the dome and cradles his bomb against the dome's surface, sacrificing his life to make it blow up.

Pretty much every plan ever on Firefly. Let's rob a train — even though it turns out to be full of Alliance troops. Let's take on some passengers, what could go wrong? Let's crash a fancy society ball. Or better yet, let's team up with Saffron, the woman who double-crossed us last time. It'll be fine this time!

Whenever Sisko tries to get sneaky on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Captain Benjamin Sisko has many fine qualities, but subterfuge is not one of them. When he tries to trick the Romulans into joining the war against the evil Dominion by giving them a fake holo-recording of a meeting where the Dominion discusses invading the Romulans, it totally blows up in his face because Romulan senator Vreenak sees the fake for what it is. (But luckily for Sisko, Garak the "simple tailor" from Cardassia has a back-up plan, that blows up in Vreenak's face: literally. The resulting debris looks like the result of a Dominion attack, and the fake holo-recording looks much more genuine after it's been damaged in the explosion. Similarly, Janeway is always coming up with plans that fail on Star Trek: Voyager, including trying to shut down the evil clown in "The Thaw" and tricking the sentient missile into thinking they're in a minefield so they can shut it down in "Warhead."

In Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe Of Heaven, pretty much every well-intentioned attempt to use George Orr's reality-altering dreams for good purposes fails. Like when Heather tries to fix the problems George's dreams have already caused by inducing more world-warping dreams:

Heather begins to believe his story and seeks him out at his hideaway. Finding him in a state of exhaustion and desperation she says she will hypnotize him ( she learned it in college) and suggests that he dreams that the aliens are not on the moon and that Haber is really a good man who will cure George, not use him. This spontaneous plan backfires when George dreams that the aliens are no longer on the moon. You guessed it. George dreams that they came to the earth itself. Portland is nearly destroyed and civilians are killed by friendly fire as the military overreacts but it turns out that the aliens are peaceful beings without weapons, who are psychic and whose native element is the dream state itself.

Pretty much every escape attempt in The Prisoner. In the 1960s spy-village drama, the man known only as Number Six tries a whole variety of gambits to get away, from stealing a helicopter to getting elected Number Two to smuggling himself in crates to building a boat. He's the Wile E. Coyote of superspy escapees, and he meets with similar luck to Wile E.

That whole plan of sending soldiers into a nuclear reactor and not letting them fire their weapons when they're surrounded by alien monsters, in Aliens. Not to mention blocking off the bulkheads but not paying attention to the ceilings.

The whole trap-the-Predator idea in Predator 2. The feds have been tracking encounters with the Predator2 ever since the first movie, and they have a plan to capture a live specimen using a slaughterhouse that the Predator has been raiding for food. They think they can blind the Predator by blocking out the infrared spectrum of light — but the Predator just switches its helmet over to ultraviolet and wastes them all.

All of Horza's best-laid plans in Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. Infiltrating the pirates? Abandoning one of them to die (but leaving him the detonator of a nuclear weapon)? Impersonating the pirates' leader? Assuming the injured Idiran soldier who got away won't cause any more trouble? It all works out spectacularly badly.

Altering history turns out to be a flawed plan in the 2002 movie of The Time Machine. Our hero, Alex Hartdegen, wants to save his girlfriend from getting killed by a mugger by going back in time and changing history. But after he finally builds his time machine, he goes back and can't change the past. No matter how many times he changes things, Emma still gets killed.

The dinosaur trap in Planet Of The Dinosaurs. In this fine, wonderful movie, a group of space travelers are at the mercy of a vicious Tyrranosaurus Rex. First, they try to poison the creature by leaving some Allosaur meat outside its lair, laced with poison berries. The plan goes south because the creature attacks from the rear. Their second plan, to coat wooden stakes with the poison and impale the creature on them, fails... until it finally works.

The Iluminati and friends come up with a whole host of plans to stop the Hulk when he comes back from outer space to trash everything, in the comic series World War Hulk. Iron Man comes up with some incredibly fancy battle armor that lasts about five minutes. Mr. Fantastic creates a huge machine that simulates the feeling the Hulk gets from being pacified by the all-powerful Sentry... and the Hulk smashes it right away. Dr. Strange tries to reach the Hulk's friendly alter-ego Bruce... and the Hulk smushes his hands. Oh well.

Lili's gambit on Earth: The Final Conflict: Lili Marquette is among the Taelons, who are attacking Earth, and tries to sabotage the engines on their ship. She sort of succeeds, but Zo'or deals with it by expunging the extra energy out into space.

Stargate is full of failed gambits: Sheppard tries to distract the Super-Wraith with a flare and run to a puddle-jumper in the Atlantis episode "The Defiant One," but the Super-Wraith left the puddle-jumper's shields on. When that fails, he challenges the Super-Wraith to a pointless knife fight and early gets slaughtered. In the SG-1 episode "The Serpent's Lair," the SG-1 crew plants C-4 explosives around a Goa'uld ship, but then Apophis himself shows up and captures them. Meanwhile, Colonel Samuels has a plan to attack Apophis using special warheads... which totally bounce off. Oops.

There are like three attempts to stop the comet in Deep Impact. First, the spaceship Messiah is launched to drill into the comet's surface and plant bombs, which only split it into two still-destructive comet pieces. Then Earth tries to launch a ton of missiles, which only make the comet more pissed off and splodey. The smaller piece of comet hits and creates a mega-tsunami. Just as the much larger piece of comet is about to hit, the Messiah flies into a fissure in the comet piece and blow it up.

Every Terry Gilliam hero ever pretty much makes screwy plans that don't work out that great. Like Sam Lowry in Brazil, who has a plan to erase Jill from the records so they can escape — which doesn't work out that great, because Jill gets erased for real. And James Cole in Twelve Monkeys thinks he can avert the future plague by tracking down Jeffrey Goines and the Army Of The Twelve Monkeys, but they turn out to be a total red herring.

Thanks to Lauren Davis, John Kim and Liz Henry for research help.

What he's working on: He's production designer on the Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight, including some new Bat-toys.

The American television series follows a modern day detective, Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara), who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. Now trapped in that century, he has to find work and battle the cultural clash. There's no telling if the premise will work with the yanks, but Life On Mars was awarded a Bafta and gave birth to a sequel Ashes to Ashes (which is set in the 80s). [Video from Entertainment Tonight via News4Jax] [BBC]

Aiguille Delaz from Gundam 0083. This strategic genius chose to pull out of the battle of A Baou Qu, the last stand of the One Year War. Instead, he massed his forces in a makeshift headquarters in the middle of a debris field, and prepared his masterplan. Operation Stardust involved having a pilot steal an experimental nuclear-armed Gundam warsuit. Delaz shows off the nuclear-armed warsuit, which proves the corruption of the Earth Federation, and then goads the Federation into showing off its strength in a set of space maneuvers that leave it vulnerable to the nuke — which destroys two-thirds of the fleet.

Ender Wiggin, from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series. Starting out as a laser-tag champion, he gets more and more badass until he becomes the greatest space strategist in history. He thinks he's just fighting a series of simulated battles, but he's actually giving orders to real Earth ships dispatched decades earlier — and he comes up with the crazy risk-taking strategy that destroys the "Bugger" homeworld and pretty much wipes out their species.

Kara Thrace aka Starbuck — You can talk about what a great leader Adama is, or how good Admiral Cain was at coming up with the craziest, most bat-shit strategies to confuse her enemies. But the craziest person on Battlestar Galactica is also the craftiest — just look at the plan Starbuck comes up with to distract the cylon basestars away from the resurrection ship using decoys. The basestars get distracted, and then Galactica and Pegasus take them on. And then Lee's stealth ship takes out that all-important get-out-of-death-free card for those cylons. Rawk!

John Christian Falkenberg, a CoDominium naval officer turned mercenary created by Jerry Pournelle for the CoDominium future history series. He's sort of a space tactician, even though most of the battles he fights are on the ground on various planets where the colonists are rising up. He's frequently facing superior numbers of better-armed insurgents, and has to use a mixture of blitzkrieg tactics and fighting dirty to pull out a victory.

Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Star Wars novels. The blue-skinned red-eyed Imperial Thrawn was already a chessmaster of space battle when the Empire fell in Return Of The Jedi. But after the Empire had collapsed in a rain of Ewok claws, Thrawn rebuilt a small fleet around his Imperial Star Destroyer and set about trying to retake the galaxy. He found a supply of clone troopers, recruited a rogue Jedi, and managed to control half the galaxy. He tricked the Jedi scum into thinking Coruscant was blockaded by totally imaginary space mines, and managed to assemble a formidable fleet out of almost nothing. His only downfall came from understimating the bun-clad head of Princess Leia. Also from Star Wars, there's Admiral Ackbar, who can recognize a trap when he sees one.

Captain Benjamin Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Trek is full of great tacticians, including a never-ending parade of admirals who only exist on video screens. But Sisko gets his hands dirty — sometimes literally — in planning all the big battles against the Dominion. His finest moment was probably planning Operation Return, the huge assault by 624 starships to retake Deep Space Nine. He had to convince one of those stuffed-shirt admirals that DS9 was a higher strategic priority than defending Earth, because DS9 controlled the wormhole, the key to the quandrant. Faced with a solid wall of Dominion and Cardassian ships, Sisko had to play a game of wits with Cardassian leader Gul Dukat, trying to trick the Cardassians into opening a hole in their lines. Dukat saw through Sisko's strategy and tried to set a counter-trap, but Sisko managed to use Dukat's trap to push through. Here's the fleet Sisko was commanding:

Donal Graeme from the Childe Cycle of novels by Gordon R. Dickson. He's an "intuitive superman" with a superb grasp of battle tactics. He's also a master of deception (notice a theme here?). In one campaign, he tricks the enemy into landing on a planet to engage a massive ground force — only to find that the ground force is an illusion. They're trapped on the planet, with Donal's forces threatening to bomb them from orbit unless they surrender.

Captain John Sheridan from Babylon 5. One of the most cunning fighters in the Earth-Minbari war, Sheridan took out the Minbari's biggest ship by mining asteroids with nuclear weapons. In "Endgame," he has to outwit General Lefcourt, his former mentor, who can anticipate all of his moves, including a diversionary ground assault on Mars. But Lefcourt fails to anticipate Sheridan's tactic of having telepaths disable all of Lefcourt's ships.

Just remember, you may think all these discussions about space battle tactics are purely academic, but some people out there are already thinking about how to kick ass in space for realz.

Note: this thread on the Bad Universe and Astronomy Today forums was really helpful in thinking about this post. Some really good stuff there, check it out.