Over a million viewers tuned into the American premiere of "The Waters of Mars," giving BBC America its highest ever primetime rating. Richard De Croce, Senior Vice President Programming for the network, said:

The final specials starring David Tennant have opened the door for new audiences to this iconic series while taking longtime fans on an incredible journey. Tennant's remaining two specials, The End of Time, Part One and Part Two, are the most anticipated episodes in the history of the series – which is why we're airing them just a day after their UK premiere.

They're also releasing new behind the scenes videos to tease even more viewers into tuning in:


"The End of Time, Part 1" airs Saturday at 9pm.

Gaters everywhere are expressing their dismay upon learning that Syfy will not be airing a SGU marathon this Christmas. This year Syfy has decided to ditch its pre-planned Stargate Universe marathon, in lieu of old movies.

Not that we don't love Serenity, but we were hoping that the SGU marathon would build up some new fans. Sure, we've been pretty harsh on this new series, but now our theory that this show just needs to be watched in a giant lump to attract new fans can't be tested out, with a giant day of eating, drinking and catching up on Stargate.

So why did this happen? We haven't found the official answer just yet, but we're hoping that it doesn't mean a lack of faith in the show's marathon potential. It's been a bumpy road, but we hope many of our concerns about the shows pace and female characters has been heard and are being acted upon in the second season. SGU really just needs a few nips, tucks, cuts and a pretty bow to be a series worth of it's gritty realism label. But does canceling the marathon mean the higher ups at Syfy don't think they can depend on it to bring in the viewers Christmas day, more than old films will?

But do not fret fans, Hulu is currently hosting ALL of the episodes from Stargate SG-1. So that's a little something to tide you over the holiday season.

[via Gateworld picture via Joseph Mallozzi's Blog]

It's not just that most of your regular shows are on holiday break this week; the rest of programming is also affected by marathons and special programming that you'd probably be better off avoiding.

Monday, for example? There's really not much to be looked for at all. Fasten your grump-belts: You're going to run into a lot of that this week.

Tuesday

It's not SF, but Dirty Jobs is at least weird enough to occasionally seem like urban fantasy, right? For those who don't believe me, Discovery is running a marathon of the show from 12pm through 12am to convince you otherwise. For fans of Robin Williams' later work, AMC has Jumanji at 1:45pm.

(Edit: There's also a new episode of Better Off Ted on ABC at 9pm, which I highly recommend and would've earlier if I hadn't accidentally thought it was a rerun. Sorry!)

Wednesday

We're still a couple of days before the holiday itself, but that doesn't mean anything to a time lord, which explains why BBC America has two Doctor Who Christmas Specials already: "The Christmas Invasion" (David Tennant's first episode) at 12pm, and "The Runaway Bride" (Catherine Tate's first episode!) an hour later.

Thursday

Dear Syfy, I know it gets a lot of viewers, but a Ghost Hunters marathon for Christmas Eve? Unless they're looking for the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, I'm not a big fan (8am through 5am the following morning). Just watch BBC America's rerun of Doctor Who's "The Next Doctor" (5pm) instead.

Friday

Dear Syfy, Twilight Zone from 8am, then some trashy movies (Monster Ark at 9:30am, Copperhead at 11:30, Ghost Town at 1:30pm and Stephen King's Desperation - sadly, not a film about the desperation of a horror writer with a face like a shaved lion - at 3:30) before Serenity at 6:30, Total Recall at 9pm and Star Trek: The Next Generation from 11:30 through until 4:30am on Saturday? You're forgiven for that Ghost Hunters thing.

And for those who'd rather watch something with a little more (admittedly dubious) educational value, Discovery has a Mythbusters marathon from 12pm until 6am the next day.

Maybe you shouldn't watch the whole thing.

Saturday

Awake post-festive revelry and wondering if there are old SF B-movies to stave off sleep? AMC has you covered, with a triple-bill of The War Of The Worlds (3:30am), The Day The World Ended (5:30am) and Earth Vs. The Spider (7:15am).

Alternately, Syfy has a horrorfest happening, starting with Stay Alive at 9am, Rest Stop at 10:30, The Descent at 12:30, Autopsy at 2:30, then the first three Saw movies (4:30, 6pm and 9pm, respectively) to scare you out of any post-Christmas Day bluster.

Of course, anyone who isn't watching Doctor Who: The End Of Time part one on BBC America at 9pm should consider themselves (a) not in America, (b) someone who may have watced it online the night before, but we won't talk about that or (c) not our friends. Sorry, it's just the way it is (For those concerned: It's an unedited version, at 1hr and 15mins, including commercials).

Sunday

Catch up with the first four episodes of weird, quasi-animation Outer Space Astronauts on Syfy at 9:30am and then just throw away the remote; the same channel has In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale at 11:30am, followed by Beyond Sherwood Forest (Monsters! Robin Hood! Together!) at 2pm and Dragon Wars at 4, before Men In Black II (at 6pm) and Nic Cage's "What if Indiana Jones was happening today and shit?" National Treasure at 8. What better way to end the week than with Cage, after all?

Here's the official synopsis from the BBC, which will be airing the two-day special December 28th and 29th:

The world is struck blind by a solar storm, and millions of man-eating mobile plants are released to roam Britain.

As an expert on the Triffids, Bill Masen knows that salvation rests in the hands of the father he hates, who mutated the Triffids in the first place to produce a green source of oil that the world craves.

The Observer's Johnny Davis offered up a profile of the actor this weekend, ahead of Friday/Saturday's "The End of Time, Part 1," and gave a glimpse into Tennant's mindset as he approaches the end of his tenure as Time Lord:

For four years I've always been going back to Cardiff at some point in the near future, so when I leave it will be like leaving campus. I don't mean to get things out of proportion, but I was keenly watching George Bush leaving the White House, and the thought of how his life is going to change… I'm not saying his life is like mine. I'm not the leader of the Free World, I'm really not… Oh, that's not really worked out very well for me, has it? It's just the thought that you hand over… and it stops. Maybe I'll be whisked up into something equally all-consuming.

As far as how the fans will take it, he's a lot more self-depreciating:

You know what will happen? Everyone will go: 'Oh, it'll never be the same.' And then two weeks in [to the new series] they'll go: 'Matt Smith: he's brilliant.' That's what happened when I was a kid, when Tom Baker left... That's just how it works.

"The End of Time" begins on BBC One in the UK on December 25th, and on BBC America on December 26th.
It just feels scary… all the time [Guardian.co.uk]

Syfy should really spin-off the Nikola Tesla character, or else hire him on as part of Sanctuary's core team. Someone obviously has a great deal of fun writing his dialogue, and Jonathon Young delivers it with such douchebag relish. Tesla wants to revive the long-extinct vampire race, and to that end, has posed as the head of a private addiction clinic so he can infuse his patients with a latent vampire gene. Apparently rich meth heads are perfect candidates for the undead master race.

The plan was to start killing off these latent vamps in a couple of decades when they were older and wiser, so they could become true vampires. But ex-drug users aren't exactly the most cautious characters, and they start dying all on their lonesome being reborn as vampires. The kids catch wise to what's going on, and are soon killing and reviving their fellow former addicts. As a bonus, they kidnap Tesla in hopes of making him their vampire mentor.

Tesla finds them insufferable, and the Sanctuary team has to find the failsafe they know Tesla must have hidden somewhere (in a rather clever callback to Tesla's vino habit, it's stowed in Magnus' wine cellar) so he can de-vampify the undead trust funders. Sadly, it de-vamps Tesla, too, making him mortal and, in his estimation, decidedly less cool. But hey, he's still brilliant, still obnoxious, and now he can actually get drunk off of all that wine.

Seriously, forget Sanctuary Season Three. Give me thirteen episodes of Nikola Tesla on a quest to turn himself back into a vampire and try to take over the world.

ABC is promoting the sixth season of their island drama with six special weekly episodes airing on DirecTV's 101 channel. The episodes will be a mix of recap episodes already broadcast on ABC and unseen extra material such as deleted scenes, behind the scenes footage and extras from the already-released DVD boxsets of each season, all with the aim of driving more of DirecTV's 18.3 million subscribers towards Lost's new season premiere on February 2nd.

The first special premieres next Saturday, December 26th on Channel 101.

'Lost' specials to DirecTV [Variety]

Starstuff, produced in 1980 by WCAU-TV in Philadelphia, was thought to be gone forever. But thanks to some found footage and an active fanbase online, we can remember Starstuff fondly with another io9 video:

Find out more about the show here, including a complete episode to download for your viewing pleasure.

Over the past few weeks, Dollhouse season two has started reminding me of Jericho season two — both shows came back from cancellation, with a limited number of episodes. Both shows' fans cherished hopes that they'd continue past those truncated second seasons, but the people making both Jericho and Dollhouse seemed aware that they shouldn't save any trail mix for the hike back. Both shows abandoned their slow, incremental approaches and started racing forwards... almost too fast. But I'd way rather have too fast than too slow... or a setup that never pays off.

The other comparison, while we're at it, is that both Dollhouse and Jericho have pretty unique spins on the apocalypse — both involving an evil corporation and entitled assclowns who just have to control everything.

So last night, Dollhouse served up one decent episode, and one great one. In the first hour, we learned, yet again, that you never really leave the Dollhouse. Victor's contract expires, and he gets set free, wealthy but adrift, and unsure why he's in love with a woman he can't remember. He's so used to doll life, he sleeps in his bathtub because it reminds him of his coffin. And then he gets kidnapped/recruited to become a soldier in a new Rossum unit, that's basically a linked group mind. And then in the second hour, Echo, Victor and Sierra get sent to the Attic, where they encounter Mr. Dominic, and a serial killer... who turns out to be one of the founders of Rossum Corp.

The first hour was a slight disappointment, but only a slight one. After seeing so many hints about Victor's war-related PTSD, I figured we were in for an exploration of the ways in which trauma comes back even after you think you've defeated it. Even though Topher seemed so confident that they'd "cured" Victor's PTSD, I assumed we were going to learn otherwise. But after waving a bit in that direction, the episode lurched towards the "hive mind" soldiers thing — which was a really neat concept, and yet another fresh spin on the Dollhouse's tech. (The execution was pretty good, but the "chanting soldier voices" thing veered towards being cheesy once or twice.)

Mostly, instead of being an homage to Kimberly Peirce's underrated movie about PTSD and getting re-drafted against your will, the episode "Stop Loss" served to show us just one more way in which Rossum is evil. And at this point, we're pretty much primed to think Rossum is more evil than a dozen standard evil corporations put together. So it's just as well that the show is moving forward beyond showing us how evil Rossum is — towards explaining how Rossum got that way, and how our heroes are going to fight it.

You have admire how quickly the second episode, "The Attic," ran through all the standard science-fiction cliches for this sort of situation. Echo is in a virtual shared world, along the lines of the Matrix, and then she and Laurence Dominic are being chased by a shadowy serial killer through people's worst nightmares. The first half of the episode was fun, and some of the nightmare imagery was pretty jarring — especially the vision of Echo and the other dolls on tables, with wires going into their brains and tubes going down their throats, as liquid slowly flows into their trays.

There's nothing wrong with a "chasing a serial killer through people's nightmares" episode — we all like a good mindscape serial killer. But it's probably just as well that the episode took a sharp lurch halfway through, when the good guys finally catch up to the evil mass-murderer Arcane — and he's revealed to be a British nerd.

The Attic turns out to be more than just the random hell all of the broken dolls and disloyal employees are sent to — it's a giant computer, made out of hundreds of human brains, all supercharged by experiencing trauma over and over again. It's another neat spin on the show's central "brain hacking" conceit, and then it leads to us discovering the origins of Rossum. Arcane, the serial killer, is actually Clyde, the co-founder of Rossum, who developed "encephalic coding and communication," only to be betrayed by his partner after he imprints someone with a more docile version of his own mind.

And ever since Clyde got sent to the Attic — in 1993 — he's been running statistical analysis and scenarios for the future of the ECC technology. And in all but 3 percent of these scenarios, the ability to read and write brains leads to the collapse of civilization. Presumably, Rossum has access to Clyde's data-crunching, and knows about this — but doesn't care.

Conveniently, Clyde's memory of the name of his partner in founding Rossum, as well as the person who was imprinted with the obedient "Clyde 2.0" persona, has been removed. But it turns out Echo's original personality, Caroline Farrell, discovered who they were before she was wiped and turned into a doll. (We know a lot of time passed between Caroline breaking into the Rossum lab on that college campus and her becoming a doll — so presumably she discovered more about Rossum during that time.) So after Echo and the others break out of the Attic, they know enough to start taking the fight to Rossum.

Once again, the star of last night's episode was really Olivia Williams as Adelle — her arc moved awfully quickly, but it was still pretty amazing to watch. In the first hour, she has one last fling with "Roger," her perfect lover who's installed into Victor's body — only to have Roger confess that he's in love with someone else... Sierra. Even a pre-programmed lover won't love Adelle. "Roger" only rubs salt in the wounds by scoffing at the idea that Adelle would be pathetic enough to hire a programmed doll to love her. This rejection, and evidence that Adelle has lost her grip on the Dollhouse by not preventing Victor and Sierra from "grouping," sends her into a tailspin, and she spends pretty much the rest of the episode drunk, while everyone around her schemes. Echo bursts in to tell Adelle that they're not equals, and Boyd tells Adelle that she needs to find the old Adelle quickly, or he'll help take her down.

And then Adelle takes a shower with the Actives, and when she comes out, she's apparently sobered up a bit — and chosen her side in the fight between Rossum and the human race. We think at first that Adelle has finally discarded the last little piece of her soul and become "Darth DeWitt" in full — but then it turns out she sent Echo to the Attic on purpose, to discover Rossum's secrets.

If these episodes had aired on a weekly basis, this progression would have felt a lot slower, probably — Adelle losing control of the Dollhouse to Harding, selling out to get it back, turning into a bitter shell of her former self, and then finally making her choice. But even getting all six of these episodes over a three-week span, it still feels like a pretty intense journey, with Olivia Williams fully investing you in Adelle's downward spiral.

Once again, I also really liked Echo — especially the bit where she went shopping in the Dollhouse's imprints and turned them into an all-you-can-eat skillset buffet. After so long of Echo being helpless and glitchy and confused and headachy, it was just beautiful to see her turning her previous source of weakness into an amazing strength. And yay for Echo taking on an army single-handed and winning, by hacking their brains with her super-brain. If we didn't already know the good guys were going to lose, I'd say maybe Rossum had created the engine of their own destruction.

And I wonder if Victor and Sierra are gone for good — are they just Tony and Priya now? Their love has overcoming brainwashing and programming, and now it's overcome a military hive mind as well. I wonder if we'll get to see what it is that drives them apart in the future?

Speaking of which, it seems like we're leaping over the flashforwards in "Epitaph One" at amazing speed now. I'm having a hard time figuring out where those segments fit into all this. I'm guessing we've already passed by the sequence where Echo is programmed to be a Russian girl and complains to Ballard about her headaches — when did that happen? Right before Alpha's visit? It doesn't seem like the sequence of events allows for that. (Or did that scene purely happen in Echo's nightmares inside The Attic?) And then the scene where the Rossum scumbag Mr. Ambrose takes over Victor's body and announces that the Dollhouse is now renting out its Actives to become spare bodies for rich people — did that happen during the three months Echo was away, but before Mr. Harding took over the Dollhouse? I'm a bit confused at this point.

In general, though, Dollhouse is delivering unforgettable characters and a mind-blowing spin on its basic premise, and it's really fully become the show it's hinted at from the beginning. It's going to be a long three weeks' wait to see our heroes posse up to take on Rossum, and I'm hopeful based on the past few weeks' incredibly strong track record that the revelations about Caroline's past aren't going to be disappointing. (It helps to know that the next episode is written by Tim Minear, the man who can do no wrong.) Even if you were hoping the show would plunge us into the post-apocalyptic Felicia-Day-on-the-run future right at the start of the season, you can't deny that getting to see the building blocks of that future sliding into place has been amazing. This show may be on its way to cancellation, but we're going to be seeing people building on it for years to come.

Also, I hate to be a broken record, but the more we see of season two, the sadder I am that the show didn't put its best foot forward. The season's first two episodes were just so lackluster, compared to everything that's come after, that it's depressing to look back on them. I get very sad when I think of the fact that Fox sent out DVD screeners of "Vows," the I-married-a-boring-arms-dealer episode, to every TV journalist in the country, thus generating bad or no buzz. What if Fox had mailed out the Sierra/Nolan episode instead? Or any of the episodes since then?

Anyway, there are just three episodes of Dollhouse left, including two present-day ones and then a return to the post-apocalyptic future. Now that the show has already proved it's not holding any plot (or character) developments back for a later that'll never come, those last three episodes are going to be the most anticipated television of January, as far as I'm concerned.

It's a dicey proposition, calling something overrated, not least of all because it can seem like more of an insult than it's intended to be. For example, Battlestar Galactica was, at best, an amazing piece of television that managed to be thought-provoking, entertaining and addictive on a regular basis... but, by the time it closed out its run earlier this year with appearances at the UN and declarations of it being the greatest show on television ever, things were getting pretty close to overrating it. Personal taste comes into play a lot, as well; we're guilty of that as much as anyone (The strength of my Pushing Daisies love may have been somewhat out of proportion with the show itself, for example).

What we're looking for, then, isn't just the name of something (Movie, TV show, comic, book, creator, whatever) you consider overrated, but why. And, feel free to defend slighted favorites if you feel the need. We're just curious what you all think isn't as good as everyone thinks it is... Just make sure that The Venture Bros. isn't on the list, or there'll be trouble.

The British Court of Appeals upheld the original British verdict that the familiar white-and-black costume couldn't be considered copyrighted because it wasn't art. Instead, the costume has been considered "industrial design," and therefore only allowed to keep copyright for 15 years after creation. British Lord Justices Rix, Jacob and Patten considered the look of the Empire's cloned warriors to have a "utilitarian," rather than artistic, purpose, and denied Lucasfilm the right to enforce their US copyright in the United Kingdom.

It'll be interesting to see how this ruling could affect future British copyright cases. Can British companies now produce merchandise based on any movie or television designs, as long as they're older than 15 years, and use this as a defense? The Cybermen have been around for almost three times that long, let's see if someone's brave enough to test the BBC's legal wrath.

George Lucas loses court appeal over Star Wars costume copyright [Times Online]

Cleopatra 2525 (2000)

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

All Souls (2001)

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

Black Scorpion (2001)

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

Alien Hunter (2001)

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

Birds of Prey (2002)

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

Special Unit 2 (2001-2002)

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

Mutant X (2001)

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

Baby Bob (2002)

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

Bionic Woman (2007)

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

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

Knight Rider (2008)

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

Flash Gordon (2007 - 2008)

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

Heroes (2007-2009)

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

Eastwick (2009)

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

It's the Master! It looks like he's pretty helpless, but wait...

Appearances can be deceiving. Meanwhile, DigitalSpy saw the first episode of "End Of Time," and has a handful of fairly major spoilers. The first line of the episode is the one you've heard in the trailers: "It is said that in the final days of planet Earth, everyone had bad dreams." There's that scene you've already watched, where the Doctor lands with his Hawaiian lei and meets Ood Sigma. And it continues with him having visions of the Master, Joshua Naismith, and Wilf. The Master's resurrection is "preposterous," and his (ex?) wife Lucy Saxon plays a major role.

That other scene you've seen, where the Doctor and the Master have their "force lightning" battle, happens fairly early on. Besides Star Wars, the episode also references Jaws (with the iconic music) and The Matrix. So why does Joshua Naismith bring the Master back to life? He wants the Master to do something for him — and it turns out just as well as you'd expect using the Master to.

We see a lot of Wilf, but not much of Donna, at first. But we do find out what she's been doing with her life, and she's still very "special." And we meet (or see) the President of the United States. Also, Wilf says the word "cactus," the Master says "so hungry," and the Doctor says the word "shimmer," as well as "...new man goes sauntering away." A reference to regeneration? We can't wait to find out.

[FilmShaft and DigitalSpy]

Here's the latest clip from "The End Of Time Part 1". As some of the trailers have shown recently, the Master has new lightning hand powers, which seem to gain strength from rubbing his palms together. And the Doctor is forced to his knees!

[Buzzcocks clip via Oh No They Didn't , thanks to CJ for "End Of Time" clip]

This trailer was released at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, revealing that there will be a Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, canon be damned...

How the hell is he still alive? There were two options at the end of the game: death, or life as a half-robot half-creature thing, Sith Stalker, pictured here....

Not that we are complaining, Sam Witwer's Secret Apprentice rage and scowl are the things dreams are made of 00 but no thanks to the robot head and claw hands. This just doesn't work, or make sense. We liked the dark endings that tied up this character's fate with existing canon. Please do explain, LucasArts. More Force Unleashed concept art here.

But other spacey gaming news, we've got a new trailer from Star Trek Online, which also announced today that Zachary Quinto would be lending the game his voice! Here's the new Klingon-heavy trailer: