The Green Hornet

Reader Kyle sent us more exclusive photos from the Green Hornet set, where some havoc had occurred:

All the windows of the recruiting center to the right side of the door were blown out. They were cleaning glass off the sidewalk and cleaning up the inside of the room. Notice that the Marines poster in the window only has a silhouette of a Marine, when the one inside the center has an actual photograph. Interesting! The shoe store next door was really dusty inside, but there was no damage to it at all. Probably only for the outside shot, because there is an actual T-Mobile store to the other side . . . so they can't show that!

Avatar

It's not surprising that 20th Century Fox execs are touting James Cameron's film, but co-chairman Jim Gianopoulos emphasized that there are six specific scenes that simply blow him away every time, and the LA Times thinks he sounds genuine. [LA Times]

The Wolfman

New posters give us one werewolf and one distressed damsel. [ShockTillYouDrop]

Stargate SG-1

If the third DVD movie is made, it will be titled Stargate: Revolution. [GateWorld]

Stargate Universe

In the mid-season finale, "Justice," a crew member is found dead from a gunshot wound, and the gun is found in Colonel Young's quarters. Young will turn over command to Camille Wray. Meanwhile, Rush gains access to the Ancient interface, and a planet harbors a secret that threatens the Destiny. [GateWorld]

True Blood

Despite rumors, Rudy Reyes hasn't been cast as the werewolf Alcide. [EW]

Supernatural

In the November 19th episode, Castiel loses his virginity. Misha Collins talks about his character Castiel and the previously mentioned drinking episode, but says he's still looking forward to the angel losing his virginity. [TV Guide]

Dollhouse

Joss Whedon spilled a lot about the final episodes of the now-canceled show. Summer Glau's character Bennett, who works for the Washington DC Dollhouse, is a character from Caroline's past. We've known for a while that Echo will learn some unsavory details about her pre-wipe persona, and it appears that Bennett will be the person who reveals them. Whedon describes her as having morals, and explains that her arm is in a sling because she has a dead arm. As for Ray Wise's character Howard, he may be Adelle's DC counterpart, but he's not so big on the morals. We'll also be seeing more of Keith Carradine's Harding.

Alpha will be back in the December 11th two-part episode, and we'll see one of his personalities we haven't seen before: a violent Franciscan monk. And he'll have some very interesting questions to ask of someone, and rather unsavory ways of asking them. This time, we'll also see him interact with people at the Dollhouse other than Echo.

Claire Saunders will return for two episodes, and where she's been may come as a surprise. It sounds like Echo will be sent to the Attic, which Whedon describes as "Disneyland on really bad acid." Ballard and Echo's relationship will change in the remaining episodes (there will be a kiss), and Ballard's whole life will change more than once. Felicia Day will return in a later episode (Whedon said he would like to return to the dystopian future of "Epitaph One"). The remainder of the season will focus on Echo realizing that her larger battle isn't with the Dollhouse, but with Rossum. [TV Guide]

Also, a casting call for eleventh episode is out for a female test subject who can sing opera and speak German. [Spoiler TV]

Lost

The title for the eighth episode is "Recon." [Spoiler TV]

Apparently, there's a rumor that Alexis Bledel is going to be in an episode. She's not. [EW]

Fringe

The producers talk about several aspects of the show centered around "Momentum Deferred." They explain that the First Wave hybrids are more interested in intelligence-gathering than battle, and while William Bell may be telling the truth, he's probably out to serve his own interest rather than the Fringe team's. They also mention that Walter and Bell may have some sense of religion, and imply we'll see more of Rebbecca. As for the formerly disembodied leader of First Wave, we will eventually learn who stored his head and why he wasn't killed. [Fringe Television]

And here's a peek at the smooth-headed Observers. [TV Guide]

V

The Visitors get visas in a sneak peek of next week's episode.

And here's a lovely picture of Morena Baccarin. [TV Guide]

Heroes

The Nov. 23 episode, "Thanksgiving," is the one where Adrian Pasdar will take his final bow, and Angela will have to admit she was behind the Nathan-Sylar switcheroo. [TV Guide]

Smallville

Clark spends some quality time with the Army of Zod in stills from "Pandora." [Spoiler TV]

And here's the aforementioned sneak peek of "Pandora" with shirtless Clark.

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder.

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.

These are the science-fiction universes where you can transfer your consciousness into a robot body permanently, and wave goodbye to those annoying bones and excretory organs forever. And tomorrow, we'll have a list of the ten best robot bodies you can plug your brain into, and control temporarily.

Note: To some extent, there's some overlap here with the list we did a while ago of people who died and went to cyber-heaven. So we left out a few examples from the earlier list, like Dr. Ira Graves and Juliana Soong in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Mindscan, by Robert J. Sawyer
Wealthy Jake Sullivan is dying of a rare medical condition, so he pays the Immortex corporation to scan his brain and load him into a new, immortal robot body. There, he meets a children's author, Karen, who's also gotten a robot body so she can keep her copyrights for centuries. They fall in love — but Jake's original meat body, who's still not dead yet, decides to sue to get his personhood back from the robot duplicate. And after Kate's meat body dies, her son sues to get control over her estate.

Robotrix

In this bizarre, messed-up Hong Kong movie, an evil super-rich business man loads his brain into a robot body. And a sexy crime-fighting babe gets killed trying to stop him — so two female scientists, in shiny fetishy labcoats, put her naked body on a table with an also-naked robot body, and then transfer her consciousness into the robot. So she can go out there and kick some robo-butt. (We have a couple more clips from Robotrix here.)

8th Man aka 8-Man:

In this early Japanese anime series, Special Agent Brady gets killed, but downloads his brain into a robot body and becomes the 8th Man, a robot superhero who has superior speed, strength and reflexes, and he can change his appearance at will. His alter ego is Tobor, a private detective. Watch him deal with a Godzilla-esque robot from outer space, in this awesome clip.

Stargate: SG-1, "Tin Man"
The SG-1 crew winds up on a planet where a man named Harlen copies their consciousnesses into robot bodies. In an interesting twist on the usual "minds transferred into robot bodies" concept, it turns out that the crew's original bodies are intact, and they're eventually free to go. The robot duplicates meet their original selves, and the robots are a bit jealous of the "real" crew, who get to go home. Witness this exchange between robot Jack O'Neil and the "real" Jack:

ROBOT JACK: Somebody stole my life. That's what happened.

O'NEILL: You talking about my life?

ROBOT JACK: Hey, I've got every right to it that you do. I was kind of hoping I could figure out away to undo all this, get myself back into my body, where I belong.

O'NEILL: Well it's occupied, thank you.

The "Ware" series by Rudy Rucker
Cobb Anderson is an aging computer scientist who's best known for committing treason — he gave the robots free will and liberated them from the restrictive laws of robotics. Now the robots, who are living on the Moon, have come up with a scheme for Cobb to live forever — they've created a perfect robot duplicate of his body, and they want to digitize his consciousness and load it into the new shell. The only catch: to scan Cobb's brain and duplicate it, they have to slice it up, thus destroying it in the process.

Sliders, "State Of The Art"

The dimensional travelvers visit a world where robots have taken over — and the robots' creator, James Aldohn, has found a process to transfer a human consciousness into a robot body. The only downside: it's an untested procedure, and he needs to use the visitors as guinea pigs. Weirdly, the scene where Katherine McClellan's robot body gets switched on has inspired some really odd slow-mo Youtube fetish vids.

The Outer Limits, "The Brain Of Colonel Barham"

Colonel Barham, a dying astronaut, volunteers to have his brain loaded into a robot body so he can go to Mars before the Soviets — although, in this case, it looks like they keep part of the meat brain alive, so it's an edge case. In any case, the arrogant Col. Barham goes nuts once he's in a robot body, and he starts trying to kill anyone who messes with him. Somehow, his robot body has the ability to control people's minds and turn them into zombies.

Caprica

We couldn't leave this Battlestar Galactica prequel out — that plucky Zoe Graystone gets killed in a terrorist bombing, but luckily she's figured out a way to back up her brain electronically first, because the human mind only takes up about 300 MB of disk space.

Skinned by Robin Wasserman

Lia Kahn is rich, young and beautiful — unfortunately she's also fatally injured in a car accident. So her dad pays for her consciousness to be transferred into a new robot body. She no longer eats or has any sense of smell, and she doesn't feel touch the same way she used to. Is she still the same person she used to be? Even she isn't sure, and her old "popular kids" clique at high school isn't sure whether to accept her either. Think you had a hard time fitting in in high school? Imagine doing it with a robot body, in a culture that's uncomfortable with uploaded humans. (Read an interview with the author here.) Another novel with a similar theme is Nightmare In Silicon by Colette Phair.

Star Trek: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

Captain Kirk's mind gets copied perfectly into an android body, except that he's obsessed with being sick of Spock's half-breed interference, because that's what Kirk was muttering to himself when his mind got scanned. I love the spinning table with the two naked Shatners on it (at around 5:20 in this video.) Of course, they don't destroy Kirk's original fleshy body, probably just because they don't get around to it.

Runners up:

The Red Skull And Zola both transfer their brains into robot bodies in Captain America Reborn

The Creation Of The Humanoids

Osama Tezuka (creator of Astro Boy) writes a story of a dying person whose consciousness gets transferred into a robot body in the Phoenix series.

Fragile Machine

Starr Saxon, aka Machinesmith, becomes a gay robotic supervillain in issues of Daredevil and the Fantastic Four. (See top image.)

Ghost In The Shell: Innocence shows a world where cyborgs have abandoned their last bits of humanity and have become fully robotic.

Battle Angel Alita also includes some of the best cybernetic bodies — thanks to Cash907Censored for suggesting it.

In Dragonball Z movie 2, Dr. Willow dies, but he downloads his brain into a robot body.

The story "The Robot Who Came To Dinner" by Ron Goulart features a detective who's downloaded his brain into a robot body.

Jens in Galidor: Defenders Of The Outer Dimension

Doozy Bots

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...

1950s and 1960s:
Space vessel design in the actual Space Age tends to involve either sleek rockets or funny flying saucers — until Star Trek comes along, with the U.S.S. Enterprise's weird mix of saucer and rocket-like nacelles, bonded to a tuber shaped main section. Not to mention the fierceness of the Romulan warbird and the gun-like Klingon warships. Model design is already starting to change drastically:

1968 to 1977:

And then with 2001: A Space Odyssey, you start seeing more rugged, lived-in-looking ships, with weirder shapes, like the probe's long neck and rounded front. And ships start having more bumpy weird bits. This trend only continues with Space: 1999's squat Eagles, which look like they could survive anything (even blowing up multiple times) but aren't as elegant as an old-school rocket.

1977 to 1986:

And then Star Wars comes along, with its awesome space dogfights, and suddenly, hugeness and imposing scope are a must. It's no accident that later iterations of the U.S.S. Enterprise are way huger than the 1960s original. The crazy shapes of the T.I.E. fighters and other craft inspire some other weird models in things like The Black Hole. And the X-Wing fighters inspire everything from Buck Rogers' fighter ship to the Last Star Fighter's vessel.

1987 to 1997:

Star Trek: The Next Generation saw in a whole new era of space opera, but the main thing that changed in the late 1980s was the rise of CG effects, allowing spaceships to look much more diverse and weirder than models ever could. From the Borg cube to the many bizarre shapes of vessels in Babylon 5, starships no longer had to look like a few pieces stuck together.

1998 to present:

I can't think of one defining franchise of the past decade that has shaped how we view space opera the same way these earlier franchises did. Star Trek has kept innovating, but so have BSG, Farscape, Stargate and a number of others. CG has gotten a lot smoother and ships can move in much more natural, organic ways — just look at the Narada, to bring us back to our first example. At the same time, as nostalgia has reigned the genre, we've come full circle and resurrected a lot of classic designs, with a few tweaks.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Nowhere Man, "A Rough Whimper Of Insanity":

This short-lived 1990s show starred Bruce "Captain Pike" Greenwood as a guy who discovers the U.S. Army is being naughty, and suddenly he gets erased from existence. Even his wife no longer knows him. In one episode, "A Rough Whimper Of Insanity," he meets a hacker who can help him discover the truth. (And the episode's title is an anagram of "Information Superhighway." Clever, eh?) First the nice hacker takes Bruce into the virtual world, where he can meet a VR reconstruction of his long-lost wife. He feels the wind on his face and dances with his sweetheart, and it all feels so real... until she fades away. And then later, the duo goes inside the computer architecture and searches for the secret files on what happened to Captain Pike... except that the world starts shaking and falling apart, like an earthquake. It's the bad guys deleting the system! Oh noes!

VR Troopers, "Defending Dark Heart":

The VR Troopers was a sister show to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, about a group of power rangers who fight evil — in the virtual world! In this episode, they get caught in a deadly trap inside virtual reality, which seems to consist of some spikes coming out of the wall. I especially love the way the evil corporate guy clutches a crystal ball to transform himself into his long-haired, evil wrestler persona and return to VR:

Cleopatra 2525, "Reality Check":

Total awesomeness! Cleopatra wakes up and she's back in the year 2001, with her old boyfriend. He tries to convince her that her futuristic life in the year 2525 never really happened, but it turns out she's actually trapped in a virtual reality simulation, and none of it is real! OMG! You can watch the whole episode here, if you're in the correct country:

Transformers Armada, "The Chase":

A bunch of characters you've never heard of, including one named The Rad, get trapped in cyberspace and attacked by Sideways and a guy that looks like Unicron (but isn't, I think). I love that they're biking through cyberspace. Bikes are a common feature in the cyber-world, as you'll discover below. At first, it's just a wacky grid thingy, but then there are planets and moons and weird swirlies and crazy shapes. D00d!

Stargate SG-1, "The Gamekeeper":

Oh wow. This episode has everything. The entire population of a world being kept inside pods and living in virtual reality full time, like in The Matrix? Check. Our heroes get sucked into the VR world too? Check. They're forced to relive their traumatic memories? Check check check, including a trip back to the barbaric era of 1982. And then they escape from the virtual world — only to realize they're still in the VR simulation after all? Check! And finally, the planet's inhabitants don't realize their world is safe to inhabit again, believing it's still ruined by the aftermath of some cataclysm. It's STUFFED WITH GOODNESS!

Doctor Who: Trial Of A Time Lord, "The Ultimate Foe":

We already praised the seminal 1976 story "The Deadly Assassin," where the Doctor travels inside the virtual world of the Matrix for the first time. But Oh. My. Guardians. This 1986 followup is putrid. The Colin Baker version of the Doctor ventures into the Matrix once again, only to find himself in a crappy Dickens Fair adorned with a fugly neon sign, where the evil Valeyard is trying to humiliate him with waiting rooms. And stuff. It's all so the Valeyard can use a "megabyte modem" inside the virtual world to, uh... mess shit up. To be fair, this whole script was written in a weekend after the original writer died, and the replacement writer quit.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Back To The Sewer, "Something Wicked":

The Foot (I think those are the evil ninjas, or else it's some kind of fetish thing) has captured Master Splinter, the Ninja Turtles' teacher, and trapped him in cyberspace. Which is basically like a rotating shiny box in a blue space. Ooh, scary. The Turtles have to venture into the virtual world to rescue Master Splinter before he's, uh, defragmented or something. Did you ever want to see the Turtles act out Tron, complete with glowy blue outfits and lightcycles? Well then, here ya go:

The Adventures Of Lois And Clark, "Virtually Destroyed":

Lex Luthor's illegitimate son is a computer genius, who traps Clark in a virtual world, where his superpowers don't work, and then beats the shit out of him, in an episode written by star Dean Cain himself. And for some reason, being trapped in the virtual world means that Lois and Clark have to share their deepest secrets about their sex lives with each other. Just becuase. Check out this awesome clip from Entertainment Tonight promoting the episode:

Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, "The Tale Of The Renegade Virus":

This may actually be the greatest thing ever. A computer virus becomes sentient and starts stalking a kid with really really bad 1990s hair, to punish him for his evil NKOTB-worshipping ways. The virus not only embeds weird blue gems in the kid's palm, he also rides a little kiddie bicycle (more bikes!) and says things like: "Rule number one: I win, you lose!" And "Going up?" I feel like we don't see enough computer viruses riding teeny bicycles.

Star Trek, "A Fistful Of Datas"

There are so many terrible Trek holo-romps that we could be here all day listing them. (And maybe we'll do that later in the week.) But this is the absolute worst: If I ever go on a killing rampage and slaughter an entire shopping mall full of people with a giant flamethrower, I'm going to blame this episode, and I'll probably be acquitted. Worf and his annoying son Alexander are using the holodeck, playing out some kind of cheesy cowboy fantasy, when Data gets jealous of the holodeck's amazing safety record and decides to prove that he's the most buggy appliance on the Enterprise-D. The result? A whole bunch of cowboy Datas, just inciting me to stage a mall massacre. I love how this Youtube clip has user ratings disabled, for obvious reasons:

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

For each drinking game, we're just listing the absolute best rule of the bunch. For the whole set, click through on each link. (Unfortunately, there was no way I could test-drive all of these; I kind of wanted to keep my liver.)

General:

Drinking Game with the Sci-Fi Channels Original Movies (by Joanna Lopez, associatedcontent.com)
Best Rule: four sips if the movie looks like a poor person's version of the latest popular movie playing in theaters.
Likelihood of Intoxication: Relatively High

The Scifi/Action/Disaster Movie Drinking Game (posted by oblivion)
Best Rule: Evil clown/mime/street performer (Because, really, I had no idea that happened with any sort of regularity in sci-fi and action films.)
Second-Best Rule: Leading man named after verb or mineral (Because now I'm trying to think of an example and can't . . . You know, this game has some odd rules.)
Likelihood of Intoxication: Moderately High, especially if the plot involves a guy named Hunt Quartz preventing a syndicate of mimes from setting off their hurricane-causing doomsday machine

Spot the Scifi Cliché! A Drinking Game(by Charlie Jane Anders, here at io9)
Best Rule: The hero has a miraculous gadget (which may rhyme with ironic brew diver) allowing him to get out of literally any difficult situation with no hassle.
Score: Minus 10 points.
Drinking game: Make yourself a sonic screwdriver out of orange juice, vodka and ultrasonic vibrations. Drink the whole thing in one go.
Likelihood of Intoxication: Probably highest if you're watching a show that may rhyme with Proctor Glue (Speaking of which . . .)

Specific:

Doctor Who - The Drinking Game! (by Simon Oxwell)
Best Rule: If you see something of which 1970s anti-violence crusader Mary Whitehouse would disapprove (This is a drinking game designed for the classic series, by the way.)
Likelihood of Intoxication: Moderate, depending on which Doctor it is and how many Daleks are present.

The Batman Movie (1966) Drinking Game (Sky of Blue's Hoosier Journal of Inanity)
(Can I just say how pleased I am that someone's made a drinking game for this movie, considering how much it pretty much cries out for one?)
Best Rule: Now, here's the REAL kicker. At one point in the movie, Robin asks Batman, "You risked your life to save that riffraff in the bar?" Chug ONE ENTIRE BEVERAGE upon Batman's reply of, "They may be drinkers, Robin, but they're also human beings ..."
Second-Best Rule: "Under this garb we're perfectly ordinary Americans."
Likelihood of Intoxication: I'm going to say "Pretty High," because according to the creator of the game: "With what we were drinking, no one remained upright much past Rule 5." (Although now I just want to know what they were drinking . . .)

Drunkgate: Stargate Drinking Game (for Stargate: SG-1)
Best Rule: The team has to impersonate deities. (This includes if they are recognized as such but choose not to carry out the impersonation.)
Second-Best Rule: There are trees. (Basically, I think this rule should be added to any and all drinking games.)
Likelihood of Intoxication: Extremely High, from what I can tell (But only if you follow all the rules, of which there are about a million)

The (Original Series) Tomorrow People Drinking Game (by Beth Epstein, with submissions by Heidi Howard, Amy Houghton, and Maria Sloughter)
Best Rule: A trend in fashion or pop culture turns out to be an insidious alien plot.
Likelihood of Intoxication: Extremely Low if you follow the rule at the start of the game: "Tomorrow People don't ingest anything that will affect the functioning of their minds. Alcohol affects the mind. Therefore, Tomorrow People don't drink alcohol. This game is meant for root beer, juice, or other soft drinks, or you could use M&M's (1=sip, 2=gulp, use snack size/halloween size bags for whole drink— or two really big handfuls)." (I figure this is one of those instances in which rules were made to be broken, though.)

300 Drinking Game (SuperHeroHype Boards)
Best Rules (Aka, the only rules): Every time the word Sparta or Spartan is mentioned, you drink. Or if you want to get really plastered, you have to keep chugging during all the slow-mo.
Likelihood of Intoxication: For a game with only two rules, I feel the odds are pretty darned high.

The Battlestar Galactica Drinking Game (by Denise Martin, Los Angeles Times)
Best Rule: Sneak a swig... Every time you wonder why more people watch "Lost."
Likelihood of Intoxication: Moderate.

Supernatural Drinking Game (by Lsketch42, via YouTube)

Best Rule: I don't know that there's a best rule here, as I couldn't really get past the polka music and The Chicken Dance. That being said, I admire anyone who condenses an entire show down to the moments when you ought to be drinking.
Likelihood of Intoxication: If you watch the drinking game video, you're probably just going to have to chug for a couple minutes straight, so I figure your odds of being buzzed by the end are up there. (You will have also endured a few minutes of the aforementioned Chicken Dance music, so I think you've earned the buzz.) If actually watching the show, with all the extraneous plot and stuff, your chances of intoxication plummet pretty severely, I think.

KryptonSite's Smallville Drinking Game! (via KryptonSite)
Best Rule: You count more than a five second awkward silence between Clark and Lana.
Likelihood of Intoxication: Pretty Darned High
(Then again, here is another, which gives you new rules every time you refresh the page.)

The Star Trek Drinking Game
Best Rule: A newly discovered planet is "Much like Earth"
Second Best Rule: Kirk violates the prime directive (Mostly because I thought it said "detective" for a minute. Now that's an episode that should have happened.)
Likelihood of Intoxication: Pretty High (I'm interested to see how well it holds up in the movie coming out next week.)

Heroes: The Drinking Game (Miss Geeky)
(But you can find others here and here. As well as about a hundred other places.)
Best Rule: Mohinder saying "evolution", "mankind", or "cure". (I think you could pass out on this rule alone.)
Likelihood of Intoxication: Pick any one of the games and you can get really wasted. Combine all of them, and you're dead.

1. Daniel Jackson (Stargate SG-1)
While pretty much the entire team has died and come back, Daniel wins the prize for doing it the most. He gets shot, he gets radiation poisoning, he gets killed, he gets killed again. And then again. And then again. You know, it's hardly any wonder he's gotten compared to Kenny from South Park.

2. Ellen Ripley (the Alien movies)
As far as resurrections go, Ellen doesn't totally adhere to the strictest definition. But when she's brought back as a clone in Alien Resurrection, it's in order to bring Sigourney Weaver back. This time with enhanced strength and acidic blood. So she's not only back, but she's also even more badass than she was before. (Which actually seems to be a trend with scifi resurrections.)

3. Captain Jack Harkness (Doctor Who and Torchwood)
In "The Parting of the Ways," the finale of Series 1, Jack is killed by the Daleks, but is brought back by Rose Tyler, who's essentially ingested the power of the time vortex, making her pretty much all-powerful. When she brings him back to life, however, she kind of overdoes it, and now Captain Jack cannot die.

4. Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
In the hundredth episode, "The Gift," Buffy sacrifices herself for her sister Dawn. After she's been dead for five months, she's brought back by her friends in "Bargaining." Whoever said you can't get by with a little help from your friends?

5. Charlotte "Chuck" Charles (Pushing Daisies)
Really, every single dead person Ned touches comes back to life. (Remember the Resurrection Glove in Torchwood? That's basically Ned, only Ned bakes pie too. And has a few more rules about how long he's allowed to keep the dead alive.) Well, he breaks those rules to let his dead childhood sweetheart, Chuck, remain in the land of the living, making her the most permanently resurrected character on the show.

6. Pretty Much Every Dead Superhero Ever
It would take forever to even tip the iceberg here. I figure it's a pretty fair assumption that if a superhero's died, they've also come back, maybe more than once. And if they haven't, you just have to wait a few years and they will. (Or they'll somehow manage to keep showing up in death. Exhibit A: The Dibnys.) Superman, Jean Grey, Batman, Jason Todd (Robin II), Hal Jordan (Green Lantern I), and on and on and on . . . No wonder they say death is a revolving door in comics.

7. The Iron Giant (The Iron Giant)
Now, once you open the list to robots, it gets a little messy. You can, after all, repair and rebuild them. (You have the technology.) In this case, however, the Giant sacrifices himself in order to prevent the entire town getting destroyed by a nuclear missile from the USS Nautilus sent to destroy the Giant. Several months pass, and everyone thinks the Iron Giant is dead, but we see him in pieces at Langjökull glacier in Iceland, slowly calling all his parts together, ostensibly to reassemble. (On top of that, I still hold that voicing the Iron Giant is Vin Diesel's greatest role to date.)

8. Sam and Dean Winchester (Supernatural)
In the finale episodes of Season 2, Sam is killed by Jake, another "special" kid ("special" being "potentially demonic"), who really does think he's doing the right thing. Dean, however, feels that killing Sam is decidedly the wrong thing, so he makes a deal with a Crossroads Demon: Sam back to life in exchange for one year left of life for Dean. That's Winchester Resurrection #1. Unfortunately, Dean only has a year left to live, so at the end of Season 3, he, er, dies. Lucky for him, however, he gets dragged back by an angel named Castiel. (Unlucky for him, it's because it's his job to stop the Apocalypse.) And that's Winchester Resurrection #2. (Actually, it's probably also the second or third time Dean's died. But still.)

9. Captain James T. Kirk (The Return, a novel by William Shatner)
While the canonicity is most definitely in question, The Return also most definitely has Kirk coming back from the dead. He's resurrected by the Borg and implanted with false memories designed to make him hate the Federation. The goal is, of course, to destroy Picard, but at the end of the day, Kirk sacrifices himself in Picard's place, thereby making it seem that he is once again dead. Spock, however, does not believe that.

10. Pat Henry "Hobbit" Hobbins (The Armageddon Rag by George R. R. Martin)
Pat Hobbins was the frontman for a rock band called The Nazgul, but was assassinated at a 1970 concert. When the band reunites with a young lookalike singer named Larry (who's even had the cosmetic surgery to look like Hobbins), they begin noticing a change in Larry at concerts, but only when they perform songs off their aptly named last album, Music to Wake the Dead. Larry, for all intents and purposes, becomes the once-dead Hobbins. Maybe it could be argued more as possession, but the novel's title is taken from one of the band's songs, the second half of which is "The Resurrection Rag."

11. Aslan (The Narnia series, C. S. Lewis)
Hey, what better way to end a post in honor of Easter with a little allegory? He's tortured, humiliated, and murdered by the White Witch and her followers, but come dawn and he's back in all his glory, which he explains thus:

"But if she could have looked a little further back, [...] She [the White Witch] would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

Not that I had my doubts, but it's great to hear that the studio is going ahead with a third SG-1 DVD movie. The first two were pretty solid examples of where Stargate can go (given time and money). I especially enjoyed the character development that happened in Stargate Continuum.

Executive Producer Brad Wright confirmed to Gateworld.net that the movie would most likely begin this year and would continue to be a RDA-centric storyline. Which is exactly what the people want.

But don't worry, Atlantis fans: Producer Joseph Mallozzi promises that the Atlantis movie will also be made. In fact, he's hard at work on the script right now, with Paul Mulli, and hopes to have the draft done this April with a potential production in the fall. So thank goodness for that - I need a McKay fix.

All that's left is settling on a title, which I leave in your hands.

[via Gateworld]

Think about it; even the runaway successes don't make it past a seventh season. With the exception of the original and most recent series, all of the Star Trek series lasted seven seasons. Buffy lasted seven, as well, and BSG lasted four and a bit (The miniseries always feels a little like a season zero to me). The only three shows to break this rule that I can think of are Doctor Who (which ran for 26 years originally, then went on hiatus for 16 years before returning), Stargate SG1 (10 seasons) and Smallville (About to head into its ninth).

The practical answer, I'm sure, would involve actors wanted to stop playing starship captains and go off and do something else for the Hallmark Channel or guestspots on Leverage or whatever; seven years seems the limit on contracts for most actors aside from Tom Welling and Allison Mack. But what keeps SF shows from just swapping out actors and leads like Law & Order and continuing on regardless? Part of me wonders what the fan raction would've been had Star Trek: The Next Generation had introduced the cast of Deep Space Nine into the show around its sixth season and just continued with them as a new Enterprise crew for an eighth, and beyond, with the cast and crew of Voyager joining in at a later date. Could we have had fifteen years of Star Trek, or would fans have jumped ship because their favorite characters were gone?

You could make the argument that no show deserves to run 15 years no matter what the genre; certainly I'd admit to dropping out of er way before the ten year mark, never mind making it all the way to the end. It wasn't that I was bored of the cycling in and out of numerous characters who shared similar traits and ever-increasingly dramatic personal demons, but also that the stories themselves became repetitive and predictable. The same could be said of the final years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Voyager and Stargate SG1 (and of recent seasons of Smallville and Doctor Who, for that matter). Even the last couple of years of Buffy and Deep Space Nine began to feel stale, as if the writers had told all the stories that they'd wanted to. Is there something about sci-fi drama that exhausts itself in its need to constantly up the scale and scope of its stories each and every year? Perhaps actors seeking greener pastures isn't the only reason why even successful SF ends around the seven year mark; maybe the creators run out of new ideas that they're able to create on a weekly television budget, as well (After all, Star Trek: First Contact was one of the best Next Generation stories despite coming years after the seventh season of the series).

Part of me wonders why we haven't really seen a successful sci-fi procedural set up so as to allow for characters to come and go more freely than a Star Trek, but also to take advantage of a syndication-friendly done-in-one format without the constant demands of an ever-growing internal mythology and backstory... A CSI: Mars, or whatever. The closest things I can think of to that would probably be The X-Files, which tried to replace its stars in its eight season (Hey, another show to add to my list of 7+ seasons! X-Files ran nine, of course) without much success... probably because of the crushing weight of the show's mythos being tied directly to the original leads, and SciFi's Eureka, although that seems to be creeping towards a "bigger picture" backstory ever so slowly. It seems like an obvious idea, considering the success of police and medical procedurals, but science fiction shows always seem to gravitate towards intricate backstories and centering the shows around the characters, instead of the plots, as some kind of cliched way of giving "regular" audiences something to hold onto amongst the technobabble. But, as Lost and Battlestar Galactica push SF TV towards a model of shorter, more novel-like approaches, it'd be nice to see Eureka or even SciFi's new Warehouse 13 demonstrate that SF TV can do something else, and have the longevity of more "mainstream" shows.

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.

It's pretty much impossible to discuss fictional archaeologists without talking about Indiana Jones, but until a year ago he arguably wouldn't have belonged on this list. If nothing else - and I'm pretty sure that that film didn't accomplish anything else - Kingdom of the Crystal Skull firmly ensconced Indy in the realm of science fiction. Which is probably a good thing, considering Dr. Jones is generally considered the quintessential fictional archaeologist, the iconic representative of everything alluring about the discipline - solving history's mysteries, going on exotic adventures, stealing priceless cultural artifacts...it's all there! That said, Indy can't really be considered the preeminent archaeologist in science fiction.

That title would probably have to go to Stargate's Daniel Jackson, who in his various incarnations headlined both the original movie and a decade's worth of television, making him arguably the most prominent archaeologist in all of science fiction. As a nice bonus, he even occasionally bordered on being a vaguely realistic depiction of an actual archaeologist, particularly when he used his linguistic know-how in the original movie to decipher the language on the other side of the Stargate. And honestly, who can resist the oddball charm of James Spader?

There are plenty more scifi archaeologists; in fact, far more than any one list can hope to capture. But here's a rundown of some of the most notable.

Doctor Who

Despite his stated policy of pointing and laughing at archaeologists, the Doctor does seem to spend a lot of time with them. If I had to guess, it's probably because nothing beats an archaeologist when you need to accidentally release an ancient evil. There's Professor Parry and his assistant Viner from the Patrick Troughton classic The Tomb of the Cybermen – I think you can guess which bunch of monsters they awaken (hint: it's not the Daleks). But nobody beats Marcus Scarman in Pyramids of Mars when it comes to unleashing evil; he lasts for maybe thirty seconds of episode one before the all-powerful alien Sutekh murders and possesses him.

The new series has only introduced one archaeologist, but Professor River Song is fairly important, what with her being the Doctor's wife and all (or not…I'm still not completely clear on that point). Still, she's not the first such scientist to play a major role in the Doctor's life – that honor goes to Professor Bernice "Benny" Summerfield, a hard-drinking, wise-cracking archaeologist from the 26th century. Originally created by new series scribe Paul Cornell in his novel Love and War, she both accompanied the seventh Doctor and had her own adventures in a horde of novels and audios.

Star Trek

Jean-Luc Picard was a huge archaeology buff, studying under the preeminent archaeologist of the 24th century, Richard Galen. He was even entrusted with completing Galen's final project, which revealed…well, I think I've dealt with that before. Picard also romanced the ethically dubious Vash, who was really more of a looter with a diploma than anything else.

Captain Kirk, on the other hand, showed no particular interest in the field. It probably didn't help that every archaeologist he ever encountered was a crazed degenerate with woman issues, whether it was Robert Crater in "The Man Trap" or Roger Korby in "What are Little Girls Made of?" It's almost as though the Federation's apparent policy of stranding one or two people on an uninhabited planet for years at a time to dig through the remains of a dead civilization was somehow flawed.

DC Comics

Want to become a superhero without all the hassle of locking yourself inside a nuclear reactor? Archaeology might just be the career for you! It's actually unclear whether there are any ancient idols in the DC Universe that won't give you superpowers. There's Carter Hall, who upon touching a stone knife remembered his past life as Prince Khufu and so becomes Hawkman. Rex Mason became Metamorpho when he was exposed to the radioactive Orb of Ra. The Silver Age Blue Beetle*, Dan Garrett, discovered the mystical scarab that gave him his powers during an excavation in Egypt. Adventurer Adam Strange was engaged in some archaeological work when the Zeta Beam transported him to the planet Rann. Sven Nelson died shortly after uncovering the Tomb of Nabu, but his son Kent would be trained by Nabu's spirit to become Doctor Fate. Oh, and the Tim "Robin" Drake's dad Jack was an archaeologist as well, but he somehow managed to never get any superpowers out of the deal.

*OK, technically a Charlton, not DC, character. But you get the idea.

Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds

In his 2000 novel, Reynolds follows Daniel Sylveste as his excavations on the planet Resurgam reveal newfound details about the long-dead Amarantin civilization. From this starting point, Reynolds weaves a tale of cyborgs, assassins, cosmic mysteries, and antimatter implants, all of which sounds pretty awesome. It's almost enough for me to forgive him for not knowing how to spell "Alasdair." Almost.

Isaac Asimov

Archaeology forms a pretty big part of my second favorite Asimov book, the criminally underrated Pebble in the Sky. The Sirius-born Bel Arvadan comes to the primitive backwater known as Earth in the hopes of evaluating the local claims that humanity originated there. Naturally, he gets a bit distracted by a plot to wipe out all of humanity and never does get round to doing any excavating. Which is why Foundation, set millennia later, finds the foppish Lord Dorwin blathering on about some very promising leads regarding humanity's origins recently discovered in the Arcturus system. For obvious reasons, this line of inquiry doesn't pan out, and shortly thereafter galactic civilization pretty much collapses, which I'm guessing led to some serious budget crunches in a galaxy's worth of archaeology departments.

Babylon 5

Ian McShane took some valuable time out from being a total badass to play Dr. Robert Bryson in the B5 television movie The River of Souls. Dr. Bryson brings an orb on board Babylon 5 that apparently contains a billion tortured souls. For some reason, the orb holds the secret to immortality. Either way, this is a serious enough situation that Martin Sheen shows up as a Soul Hunter to demand the orb be returned to him. This eventually happens, but not before Dr. Bryson and the billion souls team up for some serious havoc-wreaking.

"Omnilingual", by H. Beam Piper

This 1957 short story centers on the efforts of an archaeological team to decipher the language of an ancient Martian civilization, a task that at first seems all but impossible. They eventually figure out a road to decipherment with the discovery of some linguistic common ground: the periodic table of elements.

Saga of Seven Suns, by Kevin Anderson

The husband-and-wife xenoarchaeological team of Louis and Margaret Colicos accidentally set off Anderson's seven-book battle royale of elemental forces when they discover ancient technology that can turn gas planets into stars. This is great news for lovers of solar energy, but bad news for the super-intelligent, all-powerful aliens that live on gas planets (it's also bad news for people who don't want to be wiped out by super-intelligent, all-powerful aliens). Not the greatest advertisement for archaeology I've ever heard, really.

Futurama

I'm fairly sure we've yet to see any actual archaeologists on Futurama. If I had to guess, they're probably hiding out of shame at the general terribleness of their work.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Speaking of shame, the wonderfully, horribly Canadian MST3K entry The Final Sacrifice probably involved archaeology. The film isn't really coherent enough for me to speak with certainty, but I believe the father of hero person with the most lines Troy McGreggor got killed by an evil cult because he was investigating the ancient Ziox civilization. Although, on second thought, I think Crow and Servo clearly established Troy's father was really Miami Dolphins great Larry Csonka, who is not generally considered an archaeologist. Not yet, anyway.

There are plenty more, of course. Who are some of the biggest ones I missed?

It's difficult to separate an actor from her character, especially when the acting is of high caliber. Of course, actors deserve to have private lives just like all other creative professionals, and if some of them don't read the Lord of the Rings trilogy every year (like Dominic Monaghan), well, that's just who they are. But it's a special gift from actor to fandom when the people who play beloved heroes turn out to be more than a little like the heroes themselves. They might not fight caped evil in their daily lives, but these eight actors possess that crucial bit of understanding that keeps them from phoning in their roles — and convinces their admirers that they're worth every jaw-drop and swoon.

Kristen Bell
After three years as teenaged noir super-sleuth Veronica Mars, Kristen Bell had to move on to something different — and she chose Heroes. Having watched the show since day one, Bell told the minds behind the show that she was a huge fan; the rest, as you know, is history. She's living proof that part of being a great actress is having a deep personal investment in the story you're being paid to tell. Audiences appreciate the hell out of that. And in a fantastic interview with the A.V. Club, Bell further showed her respect for her fans:

The bottom line is, everyone's a loser in their own right. Here's why I like geek culture: People like what they like because they like it. They're not trying to fit into any mainstream likes or dislikes. You want to dress up like a Star Wars character and go to Comic-Con? Do it, if that's what makes you happy. People might look at you as super-weird, but if that's your obsession, go for it.

Damn straight, Kristen! And I expect to see you in our next cosplay round-up.

Wil Wheaton
The man you know as Wesley Crusher just might be the poster boy for actors-in-fandom. Whether or not you like his Star Trek character, you have to admit that his subsequent work as a blogger has made the lives of many geeks, nerds, and fans very happy. He's written extensively and thoughtfully on his experiences in the world of Star Trek and in real life, producing three books: Dancing Barefoot, Just a Geek, and The Happiest Days of Our Lives. He currently blogs at Wil Wheaton dot Net in Exile.

David Tennant
Nobody had to explain Gallifreyan customs to David Tennant when he took the role of the Tenth Doctor on BBC's Doctor Who. He'd already been watching the program for years. In fact, he is a self-described "Doctor Who junkie" and once cherished a Tom Baker action figure. Now an action figure himself, Tennant took us through the production history of the show in a memorable episode of Doctor Who Confidential entitled "Do You Remember the First Time?" — and by the way, it turns out that pretty much everyone on the team these days was a childhood fan.

Felicia Day
You may know her as Dr. Horrible's lost love Penny or a Potential Slayer from Sunnydale, but it turns out that Felicia Day's geekiest — and awesomest — work yet is the creation of the online web series The Guild. Her tribute to gamers is adorable, hilarious, and subtitled in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, French, and German. Yeah, she's one of us.

Nathan Fillion
One of the hallmarks of devoted sci-fi fandom is allowing a fantastic story to become your reality. So Nathan Fillion, who played Captain Malcolm Reynolds on Firefly, endeared himself to me forever when he started making posts to internet fan forums and signing them "The Cap'n." The Serenity star is my kind of man: He devoured comics as a child, holds frequent Halo tournaments as an adult, and has this to say about his experience as the leading man of a sci-fi western (from Firefly: The Official Companion):

I put on my costume in my trailer and took one last look in the mirror. They called me to the set and I remember coming right from my trailer to inside the door of the set. When you walked into the studio, the ship was just to your left with the big open cargo bay door looking at ya. I remember walking up the cargo bay door for the first time in costume. I believe it was David Boyd, our director of photography, who turned and saw me walking up and turned back around to the crew and said, "Captain on deck." Some people clapped and it was kind of neat. It was a reception I will remember always.

David Duchovny
Nothing says commitment like writing two episodes of the show you star in, directing three others, and contributing to the story of five more. He may have left The X-Files a bit too early for some of our tastes, but Duchovny and creator Chris Carter were very much in cahoots as far as this celebration of unexplained phenomena is concerned — and that demands some respect. As Duchovny told the Los Angeles Times, it's an honor to be part of sci-fi culture:

The X-Files was said to be the first Internet show. We had chat rooms and fan sites and all that. Look, I'm usually five or six years behind whatever is hip. So it was around 2000 that I started doing e-mail and finally started understanding what all that was about. ... My initial response — and I still hold this to be true — is that it takes the place of some of the functions of a church in a small town: A place where people come together, ostensibly to worship something. But really what's happening is you’re forming a community. It's less about what you're worshiping and more about, "We have these interests in common." Someone has a sick aunt and suddenly it's about that, raising money to help her or sharing resources to make her life easier. That's what it was about with The X-Files on the Internet.

Ben Browder
Ben Browder's starred in the much-loved Australian-American series Farscape and American-Canadian series Stargate SG-1. Other actors in his position might bitch about being pegged as a sci-fi actor, but not Browder; he was heavily invested in both series, and seemed to have as much fun making them as people did watching them. He snagged a story credit for SG-1 and wrote two episodes of Farscape. As you can tell from the panel recording below, Browder learned his stuff while doing it: he says, "when people tell you that some long arc show which is five years in making is planned in every detail from the beginning, they are full of it!"

Simon Pegg
Simon Pegg will be Scotty in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, and is one of the creators and stars of the tongue-in-cheek sitcom Spaced — he plays a sci-fi enthusiast and aspiring comic book writer. He certainly brings a lot of talent to both sides of the screen, and when he guest-starred in Doctor Who, Pegg told the BBC:

Doctor Who was a big part of my childhood ... I'd got into Doctor Who just before Jon Pertwee regenerated into Tom Baker, and as a kid I never remember the special effects being as primitive as they were. It scared the hell out of me but I loved it. I particularly recall monsters like the Sontarans, who had very strange heads; the giant insects in "The Ark in Space" and in one episode, Julian Glover tearing his face off to become this one-eyed creature.

He's speaking, of course, of alien menace Scaroth, who manipulated human history for his own ends in the serial "City of Death." If that brilliantly campy special effect impressed Pegg, he had to have been totally immersed in the story, and that is true sci-fi cred any day.

Salutes all around for these glorious nerdy thespians! Now — who'd I miss?

Thanks to tipsters Heather, Sarah, Ellen, and Lily!

Image from Adventures in Time and Space.

You could be seeing the recut Stargate pilot in the next few months. "I was at the final mix the night before last," Wright revealed. "It's an MGM thing now, [as to] when they want to release it."

So why did Wright feel that the SG-1 pilot needed a re-cut? "The reason I did it was because I was watching the pilot...and I thought, 'Man we can do better than this.'" The visual effects some of them were kind of shaky. And I wanted to get rid of some of the bad dialog I wrote 12 years ago. So I did. And mainly it was to incorporate Joel Goldsmith's score, brought back the way it should be. Hopefully the fans won't kill me for it, I think it's going to be great."

Besides talk of possibly destroying classic scifi there was a Stargate party going on, atop of the San Diego Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum. Many of our favorite 'gaters were there, and we got to pester them with the things you all wanted to know, like if Richard Dean Anderson thinks Colonel Samantha Carter looks hotter with short hair or long hair.

Cliff Simon (Ba'al):

Have you given any thought to the new character you're going to have to become, the person that Ba'al has been living in for 2,000 years is now free?

I've given it a lot of thought. I hope Brad Wright does. He could be a very interesting character. He could be worse than Baal, as far as being a bad, bad human being. He could be a really great guy. We don't know. I've thought about it for down the road and the future.

What's the attraction to Qetesh? She's so vicious. I would have hoped Ba'al was smarter than that.

She's beautiful. What else can I say? He's vicious too. Can you imagine them together? I've been saying, Guys, let's write an alien love scene, come on, come on. No, she's evil and she's actually a real adversary for Ba'al.

Ben Browder (Lt. Colonel Cameron Mitchell):

Continuum gives you a lot of screen time, what did you think when you read the script?

I called Brad Wright and I thanked him. I said thank you, you've given me some great things to do.

I have a lot of fun stuff to do. I get to put on prosthetics, I get to go to the arctic, I get a few quiet character moments. I just thought Brad did a great job with the script.

What did you think of yourself in all that make up?

Wasn't me. That was my grandfather. I actually thought they did a really nice job with the prosthetics.

Chris Judge (Teal'c):

Do you think you could be reappearing on Stargate Atlantis any time soon?

I really don't know. The time depends on what goes on with my other projects. It's just the timing issue. If I'm available I'd love to go there. I think there will be — I don't like to rehearse anything. I don't like to rehearse dialog or fight scenes or anything. But we rehearsed this fight scene, and it just showed me that Jason's in his mid twenties and I'm not.

Do you ever catch yourself saying indeed?

Ummmm, no because... You just want me to say, "indeed." Well, um, no....indeed.

Richard Dean Anderson (Major General Jack O'Neill):

What was your favorite part of being in Continuum, being with the cast or the plot?

Filming in Antarctica. Getting a chance to go to the Arctic. I've never been North of Alaska.

Samantha Carter: short or long hair?

Whatever she feels is appropriate?

Seriously...come on?

You want to know what I think? I guess whatever she feels most comfortable in. I'm stepping into a trap [laughs]. As a guy if I pick a side suddenly..oooh chauvinist. What about a buzz cut?

The categories in the chart should be pretty self-explanatory. But here's some explanation anyway:

We love our heroes to be super rich, and to have an excuse for self-pity. If your fabulously wealthy parents got killed in front of you when you're a kid, so much the better. (Seriously, a tragic past seems to be a crucial ingredient for many escapist heroes, because it lets you project all your own real-life pain onto your hero, even as you're imagining rising about that pain and becoming a mega-adventurer. )

And it makes us happy when our heroes have two or more devoted acolytes/sidekicks, who follow almost without question, and awesome gadgets. Superhuman powers means what it says. "Gets laid" doesn't just mean your hero hooked up one time.

"Marked for greatness" requires slightly more explanation. If your hero is the subject of a prophecy (like Starbuck), or is "the One" like Neo, then he/she is marked for greatness. Captain Kirk wasn't marked for greatness on the original Star Trek TV show, but we have a strong suspicion that the new Trek movie, by revisiting his origins, will show that he was marked for great things from the beginning.

"Not tied down" doesn't just mean being single: it means that you get to roam around having adventures. And at the end of an adventure, you jump in your spaceship and zoom off to the next adventure somewhere else. Captain Kirk wasn't tied down, but Captain Sisko was.

"Becomes a god or king" means your character ends up with a lot of people looking up to him/her. The Hulk, for example, is destined either to become a ruler, the Maestro, or the last survivor of Earth. Captain Kirk becomes an admiral, but more importantly he becomes a legend in his own time. The Doctor becomes the last of the Time Lords, and gets called a god a lot. Neo turns into the blind buddha Jesus monster, or something.

SG-1's producer, Joe Mallozzi shared that his favorite memory of Davis' was watching him work the conventions with fans. Many fans approached the General with trepidation (because of his character) but Davis was always incredibly charming with the fans and won them over immediately. Mallozzi also added that Davis was a true friend and, "had a bigger heart than his character that he played... and will be missed not just by the fans but by everyone who worked with him."

Davis' last Stargate appearance will be in the DVD movie Stargate: Continuum. We'll miss you always setting the crew straight, Don.

Davis' representatives have asked those wishing to make a charitable donation in Davis' name to donate to the American Heart Association.

I'm so excited for the return of Qetesh, and to watch Teal'c do Ba'al's bidding. But even more than that, I'm stoked for the Goa'uld System Lords. Look, more pics of Ra! What is Ba'al going to do to him? I hope he makes him cry like the little man-girl he is. And oooh — Cronus looks pissed. Probably because Teal'c is jumping at the chance for a beat down. I'm getting really excited for this movie, especially because I think it will finally show Ba'al's cunning intellect winning out over every other Goa'uld. [Stargate MGM]

The Execution Of Ba'al and Other Cast Members:
Continuum starts off with the execution of Ba'al, the time-traveling would-be world dominator. From the movie stills, it looks like an Ancient appears to do the deed. But, not surprisingly, Ba'al escapes and Vala and Teal'c just vanish, only to reappear. But now Vala has been possessed by Katesh and has become Ba'al's queen, and Teal'c is now Ba'al first prime (with the mark of Ba'al on his forehead). Looks like smartypants Ba'al went back and got a hottie and the best Jaffa warrior in the universe, well played. But more shockingly, it looks like when Ba'al escapes, he stabs Major General Jack O'Neill in the heart, and now he's dead. But no worries, it's a time traveling movie. I'm sure he'll be back.

Two Legs Bad:
Producer and writer, Brad Wright, explained that sometimes messing with a character is fun, like when he decided to take off Dr. Daniel Jackson's leg.

“Daniel’s leg is a funny story because Michael Shanks was not available to do the Arctic shoot,” says Wright. “I knew I had to separate Carter and Mitchell from Daniel, but he was on the boat with them! I didn’t know what to do. I thought how do I keep him there? I called Ben to discuss the script and he asked what I was going to do with Shanks. I told him I fixed it by having him step in the water and getting frostbite. He asked ‘What happens next?’ I said, ‘We cut off his leg.’ He said ‘Man, you are harsh!’ What I did to Jack O’Neill was pretty harsh too.”

Who's Coming Back:
Nirriti the hottie female Goa'uld is back. Hopefully there will be some more seduction/brainwashing. William DeVane will be back as Henry Hayes, but if it's an alternate universe he may not be the President anymore. But most exciting is the return of Apophis and his terrible hats. He's going to be such a baby with out Teal'c. I can't wait to see Ba'al just beat the crap out of that pretty face.

Vala Won't Have That Big Of A Part:
According to producers she won't be on for too long and actress Claudia Black, in an interview with Slice of SciFi, Vala won't be in that long. Which is fine by me. More room for Katech and her new love affair with Ba'al.

Sam brings back the sexy hair. Which style is better? Discuss.

[Newsaramaand Gate World]

• In season five of Stargate: Atlantis, the officious bureaucrat Woolsey (Robert Picardo from Voyager) takes over command of the expedition from Amanda Tapping's Samantha Carter. Tapping will still be a recurring character, but won't be in every episode because she's off starring in Sanctuary. Also appearing in some episodes: Tapping's SG-1 co-star Michael Shanks, and the back-from-the-dead Paul McGillion. (Thanks, RRich!) [TVGuide]
• OMG crazy Doctor Who rumor: the Doctor finds out he has a daughter, played by Georgia Moffett, the real-life daughter of fifth Doctor Peter Davison. But it turns out aliens stole his DNA and knocked some woman up with the Doctor's baby without his knowing. [GallifreyanGazette]
• And on Torchwood, supposedly Owen becomes a weevil-human hybrid, the Weevil King. Gwen gets pregnant with an alien baby. People step out of a 1920s black-and-white movie and wreak havoc. A mysterious medical facility named the Phram is saving people, but may have a sinister agenda, so Martha Jones (now part of the old United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) investigates. Oh, and there's a creepy church and a dying recluse who has something Torchwood wants. [Bad Wolf One]
• In the Valentine's Day Smallville, Clark decides he's done saving Lex's behind, after Lex gets into trouble with the amnesiac Kara's gun-toting busboy-stalker boyfriend. [Kryptonsite]
• But in that same episode, Lex gets super close to uncovering Krypton's secrets. [TVGuide]
• A visitor from the future (Brian Austin Green) tries to remember the world of 2027, while Sarah tries to explain to Charlie why she left him, on the Feb. 19 Sarah Connor Chronicles. [SpoilerGeeks]
• And here are a couple of new Indiana Jones pics, including one with Cate Blanchett. Indy looks really tired... [StarWars.com]