Greg Cox is one of the most prolific, and successful, authors of media tie-in novels, and he's won a loyal following for his many Star Trek books, including a trilogy filling in the backstory of much-loved villain Khan Noonien Singh. He's also written tie-in novels based on Alias, The 4400, Roswell, Underworld, Fantastic Four and Iron Man. He's also novelized the movies Ghost Rider, Daredevil and several others, plus DC Comics' big crossovers.

We talked to him about his new Terminator Salvation tie-in novel Cold War, out now from Titan Books, plus some of his other recent projects.

Cold War uses the same timeline as McG's recent movie, but only includes a couple of characters from the film: The main character is Losenko, the Russian general who appears briefly in the film, mentioning that Skynet is looking for Kyle Reese, and we learn all about Lysenko's backstory. Says Cox, "When I watched the movie, I was probably the only person who was mentally hanging on every scene with general Losenko," watching for every detail about the character to include in the book. Also in the book is General Ashdown (Michael Ironsides), the resistance leader who lives on a submarine. John Connor only pops in the book as a sort of mythological figure, giving inspirational speeches over the radio.

The new book takes place in Alaska and Russia, in two different time frames: 2003, right after Judgment Day, and then 2018. In 2003, the survivors are coping with the aftermath of the nuclear war, and Skynet is attacking them with really primitive Terminators, and the technology is close to what really existed in 2003. And then in 2018, Skynet has all the same tech it has in the movie — plus snowmobile Terminators, to navigate those frozen northern areas. It sounds like Cox had a lot of fun with the frosty settings:

My big gimmick was snowmobile Terminators. There's also a giant Terminator train. The trick is to try to find stuff in the [same] universe, that's slightly different. What haven't we seen yet? We haven't seen a Terminator train. The main reason for setting it in Alaska [was to include things like] dogsled chases, grizzly bears, avalanches, volcanos... We've seen so many chases on California highways, with fire trucks and emergency vehicles. I was looking for a whole different environment, not just recapitulating what people had done before.

Cox is somewhat surprised that the Terminator/grizzly bear fight has been the main thing people have talked about in his novel. "You can't have a Terminator in Alaska and not have him fight a grizzly bear. Okay, it's gratuitous, but how can I resist having a grizzly bear fight a Terminator?" And now that people have been so excited by it, "from now on, I put a grizzly bear in all my books." Spoiler alert: The bear doesn't stand a chance against a Terminator, says Cox.

There's also a Western-style train heist and loads of detail on a Russian submarine, plus lots of gritty war-movie-style action. Cox watched tons of World War II movies on TCM, read every Tom Clancy novel for the submarine details, and did loads of research on the world right after a nuclear war.

Cox says he watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles "religiously," but Titan Books and Halcyon were adamant that his book couldn't contain any references to T:SCC continuity. So don't expect Cameron to show up, but if anyone ever green-lights SCC novels, Cox will be first in line. The Terminator people were very keen to make sure Cox's book fit in with their vision of the universe, including making sure Skynet wasn't developing high technology too early after Judgment Day — and that meant loads of conference calls, notes and intensive feedback at every stage of the process.

Wrapping up The 4400

The amount of feedback you get from the licensors on a licensed property depends heavily on whether it's an ongoing concern, says Cox. With The 4400, for example, Cox wrote one tie-in novel while the series was on the air, and went through four different drafts in response to feedback. But when Cox wrote the first of two novels wrapping up the series after it ended, Welcome To Promise City, he got a more-or-less free hand. (The other novel, available now, is written by David Mack.) Cox, Mack and their editor cooked up an ending to the series together.

Except for tons of feedback from the fans. Cox says as soon as it was announced that he was writing a 4400 novel explaining what happened after the show's cancellation, he was bombarded with emails from fans all over the world demanding to know what he was going to do with their favorite subplots and characters. "I can't claim we wrapped up every loose end, but we tried to wrap up the important one," says Cox. He and Mack debated with their editor whether to tie up the end of the series with a neat bow, or leave a few things slightly open-ended in case they ended up doing more novels. They settled on the second approach, so if the books sell amazingly well, you might see further continuations of the story.

Novelizing Final Crisis

Cox novelized Infinite Crisis, 52 and Countdown for DC Comics, and now he's novelized Final Crisis, Grant Morrison's narrative-shredding uber-crossover starring the evil Darkseid. How on earth do you take Morrison's loopy storytelling and convert it into a single novel?

There was a lot of condensing involved, Cox admits:

There's not a lot of connective tissue in that series. [There are] a lot of scenes that jump from place to place. I've got to admit, the book is probably a bit more linear than the comic book, especially issue seven, which was jumping all over time. I actually just tried to tell it a bit more in chronological order, and maybe simplify it a bit.

The biggest problem with novelizing one of these sprawling DC crossovers is figuring out what subplots and tie-ins to leave out. The first week Cox was working on the Infinite Crisis novelization, he was trying to include all of the spin-off issues, including things like Rann-Thanagar War One-Shot, and every other miniseries and crossover issue, "and I realized this book is going to take me ten years, and it's going to be the size of The Wheel Of Time." So he began paring things down. Similarly, the Final Crisis book ignores a lot of tie-ins, sadly including the 3-D Superman tie-in series. "I apologize if your favorite scene is not in this book, but there's no way I can get in the 3-D tie in superman issue and the Batman issues and the special tie-in issue of Secret Six."

With novelizations of comics crossovers, "it's all about streamlining." It's the opposite of novelizing movie scripts, which is all about fleshing out the story and characters and adding new stuff to turn a 90-page script into a 300-to-400-page novel. "The script for Ghost Rider was not a terribly long script," notes Cox. He recalls coming across the novelization for Snakes On A Plane and marveling that Christa Faust had managed to get 400 pages out of that film. He felt like sending her fan mail.

Should Khan Come Back?

As the author of three Khan books, Cox is conflicted about whether Khan should appear in the next Star Trek movie. On the one hand, recasting Khan seems almost impossible, given how much Ricardo Montalban put his stamp on the character. On the other, Cox might have said the same thing about recasting Kirk, Spock and McCoy — and J.J. Abrams and crew pulled that off. The real question is, "do you do Botany Bay Khan, or crazy burned-out Wrath Of Khan Khan? There's the young virile but not quite crazy Khan, and then there's the obsessed spent-15-years-in-Hell Khan. And then there's the whole messy [subject of the] Eugenics Wars — when exactly did they take place? Did they take place during the Bill Clinton years?"

Cox is writing one of four new novels that take place in the movie's continuity, picking up where the movie left off. He's written a draft of his novel, but hasn't gotten feedback from Paramount yet, so everything is subject to change. But at least for now, his novel takes place six months after the end of the movie, and follows Captain Kirk and his crew on a stand-alone adventure. And he hints that, if Paramount approves, the fact that the Vulcans are refugees scattered across the universe will play a part in his novel's plot.

(And no, I don't believe Dollhouse is for-certain doomed — the ratings are picking up slowly, and the show still has a shot. The fact that it's being left out of November sweeps, and won't be back until December, is a very bad sign, but we've already seen miracles. Joss doesn't seem to think it's necessarily the end. So, you know, be mighty and all that.)

Dollhouse is one of my favorite TV shows right now, but it's not my absolute favorite — sadly, that honor belongs to Glee, which isn't even science fiction. It's not just the show's brilliant musical numbers, its visual flair, or its amazingly rich character-driven comedy. It's not even the relentless pushing of the "it's okay to be different" message. It's the storytelling — even in a year that has seen Torchwood: Children Of Earth and the final half-dozen episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Glee has been making me see whole new possibilities for television as a unique medium, with its own storytelling toolkit.

So here are a few things we'd love to see Joss Whedon bring back to Dollhouse after his visit with Glee.

1) The pacing. That's actually the main thing that jumps out at me every time I watch an episode of Glee. They pack so much into one episode, and none of it feels forced. Last night's episode would have been ten episodes, or maybe even a whole season, of any other show. The Puck-dates-Rachel subplot alone would have spanned several episodes and featured a whole host of scenes of them discussing it and other characters reacting. The bit where Mr. Schu and Sue Sylvester are suddenly doing a dance number together — was it a dream sequence? Was it an imaginary story? No! — it came out of nowhere, and then made total sense.

No other television show burns through plot lines as fast as Glee, and it's exhilarating to watch. It makes other TV shows feel like they're doling out story in little doses, with a teaspoon or something. And it makes each episode of Glee feel more like a movie.

Dollhouse, in particular, has a problem with pacing. It was worse in season one, when Fox pushed the "remote-free viewing" idea, in which every episode had limited commercial interruptions and Whedon's crew had to fill 50 minutes instead of 42 minutes per episode. But the pacing continues to lag quite a bit in season two. Whedon has done faster-paced television before — many Buffy season two episodes rush forward as if they're on fire — but maybe it's time to return to that kind of downhill-racer story-telling. Like, for example, maybe instead of the assignment of the week, we could get the assignment of the next ten minutes?

2) Fun villains. Okay, so Joss probably can't put a gun to Jane Lynch's head and march her over to the Dollhouse sets. If he tried, she would probably disable him for life using her retractable ginsu blades. But maybe Dollhouse could use some more characters who actually enjoy being evil? Adelle has her moments of smugness, and Alpha seemed to have some fun with being nasty, in the tail end of season one — but they both mostly seem tormented. Dollhouse is full of morally gray people who feel really bad about all the awful things they're doing, and what's better to put that into relief than giving us at least one character who just revels in his/her badness? I'm holding out hope for Reaper's Ray Wise, as the head of another Dollhouse, in some upcoming episodes. Also, it's possible we'll be meeting some more high-up Rossum Corp. people who can show us more of the full-blooded nastiness we've only glimpsed so far.

3) More fantasy sequences and montages. Quinn's "You Keep Me Hanging On" sequence last week was just insane — and Dollhouse has shown lots of potential to go to the weird montage/dance sequence/bling-covered fantasy place. Just watch its unaired pilot, which is on the DVD box set. There's so much crazy jumping around between Echo as a gangster and Echo as a ballroom-dancing wedding date, and everything is colorful and zingy — I feel like maybe some of that spirit got lost in the show's revamp, after Fox nixed the original pilot. But it wouldn't hurt to get a bit of that back. I'm picturing mindwiped synchronized swimming, and brainwashed hot-air ballooning, set to showtunes. Come on, why not?

What do you think? Could Dollhouse use just a touch more Glee?

(Sorry, I know this DVD box set came out a couple weeks ago — I didn't get a chance to sit down and look through it until this week, for reasons too complicated to go into.)

Watching the second season of Sarah Connor Chronicles in one go, you really get way more of a sense of how cohesive and powerful this story actually is. Watching it in weekly installments, the show often felt frustratingly uneven, until its final six-episode burst of genius. But when you sit down and watch four or five episodes in a row, a lot of the episode-to-episode flaws fade away, to be replaced by a much stronger sense of character development, and a really clear narrative arc. The awesome ass-kicking moments also just keep coming.

In particular, when you watch the whole thing in one go, you realize it really is about Cameron, the Terminator played by Summer Glau, and what happens when she goes bad. In the season opener, a car bomb damages Cameron's chip and she reverts to her original programming — to kill John Connor. Instead of shutting her down, John Connor decides to try and repair her, and take a chance that she'll work properly again. (Is this partly because she tells him she loves him? We'll never know.) And at the end of the episode, Cameron tells John that he made the wrong choice, and this decision has changed everything — people are going to be upset that John spared Cameron's life. John thinks that Cameron means his mom and uncle, but she says that's not whom she means.

And then in the very next episode, we meet Riley, the chirpy blonde chick who cozies up to John — and it turns out she's one of the people who were indirectly affected by John's decision to spare his Terminator friend. It's a lot clearer, watching the season in a few sittings, that when John makes that choice, he's changing the future — and bringing it a lot closer to the future we see in the nuclear submarine flashforwards, where John Connor is a ghostly presence that nobody ever sees — he only speaks through his Terminator companion, Cameron. That future drives Jesse Flores to go back in time and bring Riley, to seduce John and then become a victim of his jealous Terminator, to drive John away from Cameron — basically, to unmake John's decision to let Cameron go on functioning.

A lot of the episodes, one way or another, deal with whether Cameron can be trusted, including the one where she "reverts" to the original human she was based on, and the one where we start wondering just what she's been doing at night while everyone sleeps.

I also gained a slightly better impression of Thomas Dekker's acting as John Connor — he really does grow as a character throughout the season, becoming tougher and more like a leader, even as he's more and more compromised by his dependence on Cameron. Dekker is probably my least favorite actor in the series, but he does manage to sell Connor's transformation way better than I'd remembered, and his scenes in "Today Is The Day, Parts 1 & 2" are pretty heart-stopping.

And of course, the other great story strand in season two is the artificial intelligence that Sarah Connor thinks is destined to become Skynet, but which we discover is actually a separate A.I., called John Henry. While the Connor clan struggle with just how much they should depend on Cameron — and by extension, how much people can rely on machines in general — a machine super-intelligence has been gestating, learning to play with action figures and hashing out the tricky details of human ethics and morality. Every time Garret Dillahunt, as John Henry, and Richard T. Jones, as Ellison, are on screen together, it's just fantastic to watch.

It's too bad those two strands only come together in the very last episode, and we only really glimpse how John's Cameron issues and Ellison's John Henry issues intersect. It's just enough to make you wonder how great a third season could have been.

But all in all, the season feels much more satisfying when you view it as one novel with individual chapters (despite the occasionally clunky episodic bits), and when viewed as a novel, it does reach a conclusion that stays with you. John's been wondering about the future world all this time, and now he's stuck there. He has tangly emotional ties with Cameron, and now he's meeting her human version. And John Henry is finally going to see for himself a world built by another A.I.

Not every storyline flows perfectly, though — the business with the dying man from the future writing all over the wall in blood still feels a bit contrived and random, and the "three dots" that he leaves behind never quite gel as a plot device.

On the other hand, in case you ever forget how lucky you are to be watching this version of Terminator, each disc begins with a trailer for Terminator Salvation, to make you give thanks all over again.

The special features are pretty much a Summer Glau fan's dream — if you're one of the people who thinks Glau can beat Darth Vader and Galactus with one hand tied behind her back, then you owe it to yourself to get these DVDs. The first disc has a great feature on storyboards for the big "Cameron goes bad" sequence that include lots of great pulpy drawings of Glau looking evil and menacing — suitable for framing! I like the way they compare the original storyboards with the final filmed version:

And then, the second disc has a great featurette showing rehearsal footage from the big fight between Cameron and Rosie the contortionist Terminator (the big elevator fight sequence). You get to see Glau in a T-shirt and sweatpants, running through this incredibly complicated fight choreography in real time — I knew she'd been a ballet dancer, but this definitely gave me a new appreciation for how limber and dancerly she really is. Plus you get to hear the second-unit director telling the actors, "You can kick and Summer just grabs it — and choke her with her own leg!" And you watch Summer do just that.

The best featurette is probably the "Writing The Future" documentary, which lets you inside the writers' room, giving you glimpses of the whiteboards on which the writers sketch out the show's future direction:

And there's a great bit where we see Creator Josh Friedman saying that we already "know" the Turk (which becomes John Henry) is Skynet and we're just waiting for it to wake up and become evil — and the implication is that Friedman is about to suggest that the writers should subvert that premise, and make The Turk not turn out to be Skynet after all. You also see some great discussion happening about just how much Cameron is evolving — is she having an emotional awakening, or just pretending? How much is she programmed to pretend to evolve as a human, and to make John love her?

And then there are these fascinating glimpses of directions the show didn't actually end up going:

There are also some great design featurettes, including one about the making of iconic sequences like the urinal-becomes-Catherine-Weaver sequence. You also get some lovely behind the scenes glimpses of Rob Hall's distressed Terminator-face makeup and the endoskeleton action, and then all of the show's surprisingly ambitious sets, including the submarine and the horrible future world.

Not all of the special features are that great — the deleted scenes are mostly pretty disposable. There's one scene which seems to exist purely to allow Derek Reese to namecheck the family's black Dodge truck — just an extra bit of product placement for the show's main sponsor.The "gag reel" is also pretty meh.

But generally, this box set will really make you see Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in a whole new light — even if you've already watched every episode. And if you've been on the fence about joining Sarah Connor's army, and you're still not sure what the fuss is about, this is your best chance to discover it for yourself. Not to mention, with Christmas coming up, it makes for a tight present.

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

Fox scheduling chief Preston Beckman tells The Hollywood Reporter that even though Fox isn't happy with Dollhouse's ratings, the network plans to air all 13 episodes — although during November sweeps, Fox might have to air something else, to goose up its numbers. Fox won't make a decision about giving Dollhouse the other nine episodes of season two until after the first 13 episodes finishes airing — which means the show still has a chance. But it also means the show will have to shut down production after it finishes shooting episode 13, and then ramp back up if it gets another order.

Joss Whedon tells THR he's currently shooting episode eight, and he'll make sure the script for episode 13 gives fans a degree of closure, in case the show does not come back after that:

We'll definitely have closure, but will leave some doors open. When we got our first numbers, which were bad, the first thing [Fox president of entertainment] Kevin Reilly said was, 'You'll have all 13,' which was great. They're not going to pull the rug out from under us.

Beckman says he didn't want to face the wrath of Whedon's fans for yanking Dollhouse before the end of its current block of 13 episodes, given the fact that he's already pissed off the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles fans:

If you cancel it, you're an asshole; if you renew it and then don't put it back on, you're an asshole. I'm still paying for 'Terminator.' 'Dollhouse' has a small rabid fan base that in the world of social media seems bigger than it is. We gave them another season knowing full well we were going to burn in hell if we pulled it.

It really may not be too late to save Dollhouse — last week's episode, "Belle Chose," did see a nice uptick in ratings, and luckily all of those people saw a much better episode than the first two of the season. If the show keeps improving in both ratings and storytelling, we might just see a second miracle. On the other hand, it's nice to know the show's not planning on leaving us totally unsatisfied. (And I'm betting that closure includes another glimpse of the "Epitaph One" future.)

Oh, and there will be some spoilers for recent TV episodes here — most notably Fringe.

This is mostly a list of people whose characters died or departed forever, but then they went on to play a totally different character. This doesn't include people whose characters died and then came back to life, which is a totally different trope. (And I'm not including actors who played more than one minor character in a show, or a minor character followed later by a major character.)

Garret Dillahunt on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

This amazingly versatile actor plays Cromartie, a Terminator sent from the future to kill John Connor. And after a season and a half of cat and mouse games, Cromartie finally gets blowed up good. But then his body gets repurposed and used as a UI for the childlike AI known as John Henry. (You could also say the same for Brian Austin Green, but that's slightly different — he came back as the exact same character, Derek Reese. It was just a different timeline where Derek hadn't died (yet.))

Sheryl Lee on Twin Peaks.

Laura Palmer dies (as you may have heard), but then actor Sheryl Lee shows up as Laura's nearly identical cousin Maddy. Good thing they wouldn't kill off the same actor twice... right?

Ali Larter on Heroes.

Larter plays the troubled webcam girl Niki, who's also the psychotic killer Jessica sometimes. But then Niki/Jessica dies... but it turns out Larter has an identical sister named Tracy. (And another one named Barbara, but apparently we'll never actually meet her.) And there's a mad scientist guy involved, who decided to give one sister weird water powers, and the other sister weird "psycho mirror" powers, because hello, mad scientist!

Doctor Carson Beckett on Stargate Atlantis

This jolly Scottish doctor is great at cooking up retroviruses and coming up with last-minute saves... but after he died at the end of the third season, fans were outraged. Good thing he was able to come back as his own clone. Also notable: Elizabeth Weir dies, but comes back as a machine intelligence (although I'm not sure if Torri Higginson ever played the mecha-Weir.)

Kirk Acevedo on Fringe .

This is the somewhat spoilery one: Acevedo's character, Charlie, dies at the end of the first episode of season two. But he's been replaced by an evil (or at least morally suspect) shapeshifter from an alternate world — where, presumably, there may also be another Charlie Francis running around. So we could eventually see Acevedo playing a third character. (And then a fourth, when the shapeshifter impersonates alt-Charlie?)

Amy Acker on Angel.

We were heartbroken when Fred died, but then chilled and shocked when she was reborn as the psychotic demon god Illyria. And then we learned to love her new persona almost (well maybe half) as much as her original one.

Terry O'Quinn on Lost.

Locke appears — emphasis on appears — to be stone dead, although maybe he's alive in another timeline? In any case, after Locke died, someone (or some thing) impersonated him, allowing O'Quinn to stretch his acting muscles and play Locke as, well, kind of a dick.

Denise Crosby on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Oh. The pain. Tasha Yar dies, but then Crosby later reappears as Tasha Yar's daughter (from an alternate timeline) with a Romulan. You see, Picard sent alt-Tasha back in time to the Enterprise-C so it could be destroyed by Romulans and the timeline could be repaired, but alt-Tasha didn't die, and so she shacked up with the Romulans, and... oh, whatever. It's Crosby with pointy ears. Look!

Steve Bacic on Andromeda.

He plays Gaheris Rhade, who betrays Dylan Hunt and is killed in the show's pilot episode — although Gaheris reappears several times in flashbacks and one alternate history episode later. And then in later seasons, Bacic takes on a new character Telemachus Rhade, who's the descendant of Gaheris. (Thanks to Xicer for the heads up!)

Lalla Ward on Doctor Who.

Okay, so Ward's character, Princess Astra, didn't actually die — but she did get written out of the show forever. And then the Doctor's Time Lady companion, Romana suddenly decided to regenerate, and randomly chose to refashion herself into the guise of Princess Astra. You could also mention Anthony Ainley, who played Tremas in "Keeper Of Traken." Tremas died — but then his body got taken over, and he became the new incarnation of the Master — but Tremas was always just intended to be a new host body for the Master.

Katee Sackhoff on Battlestar Galactica.

This is another edge case — Starbuck definitely died, because there was a body. But did she come back to life? Is Sackhoff playing a different character in the final season of BSG? Your theory is at least as valid as mine, because I haven't a clue. Like the video says, "You Will Know The Truth."

Thanks to Alexis Brown, Meredith Woerner, Sam J. Miller, Paul McEnery, Sean Passmore, Katrina James, Rus McLaughlin, Kathleen Warnock, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, S.J. Edewards, David Daw, Debcha, Barclay Sylvester, Karen Meisner, Brooklyn Erica, and "Dillahunt News" on Twitter (is that actually Garret Dillahunt, or a fan?), plus anyone else who helped out.

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.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles went off the air last May, and seems unlikely to come back to television. But fans have become increasingly focused on the idea that the show could have a direct-to-DVD movie sequel. The show's creator and showrunner, Josh Friedman, told us back in May that the show was over, and unlikely to be revived.

But fans have kept clamoring for a direct-to-DVD continuation. So we decided to ask producer James Middleton (who also produced Terminator Salvation) if there was any hope whatsoever that fans might get their wish. Have there been any meetings about a direct-to-DVD sequel, or other continuation? Middleton responded via email:

The quick answer is, yes, there have been many discussions. I can't go into more detail about the subject until I have something truly substantial to report. What the fans should know is that I hear them and I too would love to see T:SCC come back in some form.

So it sounds like there's reason to hope after all. At least, the reference to "many discussions" sounds encouraging, as does the notion that Middleton may actually have something "substantial" to report at some point. So fingers crossed!

And here's a better look at that mobile billboard, which drove around near the Warner Bros. studio offices for three days this past week:

Cameron tells John that she'll find a workaround to avoid trying to kill him again:

Okay, so it's not exactly an essential scene — we got to find out about Cameron's little self-destruct mechanism workaround in a later scene that did air. But it's a nice moment of tension between John Connor and the robot he depends on way too much. And it's always nice to see Summer Glau doing that creepy stalker thing she does so well.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The Complete Second Season is out on DVD/BluRay Sept. 22, and here's a list of the special features:

- Write the Future - An inside look at creator Josh Friedman and the writing process and how it guides the creative decisions for each episode.
- Conceptualization - Visual Effects supervisor James Lima and others discuss the production challenges of bringing the sci-fi world of Terminator to television.
- Blood and Metal - Go behind the scenes with special makeup effects artist Rob Hall and the cast as they reveal the process of creating realistic cybernetic organisms.
- Designing Destruction - Production Designer Marek Dobrowolski and others discuss the challenges of combining real locations with futuristic sets to create a world in which the present fights to avoid a horrific future.
- Choreographing Chaos - See how Stunt Coordinator and 2nd Unit Director Joel Kramer and Special Effects Supervisor Steve Galich work closely to create the stunts and on set effects that add an undeniably kinetic quality to each episode.
- War Stories - From an unexpected earthquake on the jam-packed Santa Monica pier to the intricacies of filming underwater sequences, the producers and cast reflect on some of the most memorable production challenges from Season Two.
- Setting the Tempo - Composer Bear McCreary and the producers explain the process of taking cues from the Terminator mythology and incorporating them into the score. Bear, Josh Friedman and Shirley Manson also talk about the process of recording the season opening song "Samson and Delilah."
- Motivations - The producers and cast discuss the themes of Season Two and how these informed both the writing and acting.
- Terminated Scenes
- Cameron vs. Rosie: Fight Rehearsal - The raw fight rehearsal and choreography session between Summer Glau and a contortionist is interwoven with storyboards and interviews explaining this intricate battle sequence.
- The Storyboard Process: Cameron Goes Bad - The production team outlines the process for mapping key sequences from the show in Storyboard format.
- Audio Commentary with Lena Headey, Thomas Dekker, Summer Glau and Shirley Manson and Executive Producers Josh Friedman, James Middleton and John Wirth
- Gag Reel
- Collision with the Future: Deconstructing the HUNTER KILLER Attack - Interactive exploration of the climactic Hunter Killer attack featured in the Season Two finale. Four simultaneous points of view show all elements of the filmmaking of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles from Production, Direction, Visual Effects, and Special Effects. Additional focus points allow the viewer to explore even more elements of what it took to create this dramatic stunt sequence. (Blu-ray only)

Can. Not. Wait. [MovieWeb]

So if you're as obsessed with the Sarah Connor Chronicles as I am, you'll remember the season ended with John Connor having jumped forward in time to a future where nobody knows him. He left his mom, Sarah Connor, behind in the past. But Dekker hints that John might have met a future version of Sarah, who miraculously survived past Judgment Day. At least, Dekker says there are two possibilities: that Sarah's dead in the future, or that there's an older Sarah running around. And Dekker says Friedman told him it was "the more interesting of the two to me." (It's just barely possible that Dekker finds the idea that Sarah's dead in the future more interesting. But it seems a bit unlikely.)

Also, Dekker says John would have been torn between Alison, the flesh-and-blood person whose body the Terminator called Cameron was based on, and the actual robot Cameron, whose chip was taken to the future by the A.I. called John Henry. (Here's where it gets a bit complicated. John Henry has Cameron's chip, not her body, right? But is the Cameron "software" still running on that chip?) It would have been fascinating to see that play out.

But neither of those things is the most intriguing bombshell: Dekker also says a major character in season three would have been Danny Dyson, the son of the man who helped create Skynet in the first place. That would have been interesting because "it harkened back directly to the second film," says Dekker.

Oh, and Dekker says that if T:SCC were to continue, it would be as a direct-to-DVD movie, similar to the Stargate SG-1 films. But don't hold your breath:

Obviously it's difficult because the show is based on a movie and they just had one come out, so it's kind of hard to make a movie with our show because everyone has kind of forgotten about us. But they're hoping, at least when I spoke to [Producer] James Middleton that's where they are with it.

[The TV Addict]

It's the classic trade-off: on the one hand, self-contained weekly episodes are newbie-friendly and easy to show in reruns, because it doesn't matter what order you show them in. On the other hand, how deep can your characters and universe really get when nothing ever changes and the situations get fully resolved within 43 minutes?

You probably already know the story of how television shows got arced: It used to be that every show was like the original Star Trek, with a neat resolution (and, usually, forced laughter by the main cast) at the end of each episode. And then shows like Blake's 7, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (among others) experimented with having more long-running storylines even as individual episodes usually told a standalone story. At last, we ended up with shows like Lost, where an individual episode may just add one tiny pebble to the overall zen rock garden, with no resolution whatsoever. And yet, some shows are still stubbornly episodic, and others try to find a balance between long-term storytelling and singleton episodes.

Really, every show finds a balance — even shows that land really far one end or the other. Nobody is doing pure arcs, nobody is really doing 1960s-style interchangeable episodes any more.

And yet that balance shifts constantly, for individual shows as well as for the television landscape as a whole. Almost any time you hear television showrunners being candid about their arguments with the networks over the direction of their shows, the standalone-vs-arc thing comes up. Watch the unaired pilot of Dollhouse, and you'll see a show that's setting out a ton of long-term storylines in its first hour — but Fox wanted Joss Whedon to deliver a half-dozen episodes that anyone could watch cold, without knowing anything about the show. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles got renewed for a second season, but only on the condition that most of the episodes would stand on their own — hence the wall of messages written in blood, each leading to a different adventure. And according to Wikipedia, one reason Robert Hewitt Wolfe left Andromeda was because the network wanted more self-contained episodes and less mythology. There are hundreds more stories like that.

Some viewers complain about story arcs because they're hard to follow and you have to trust the show's producers not to drop the ball. It's like that trust exercise where you fall and someone catches you — except that you fall, and hope that two years later, someone will still be there to catch you. You trust that the clues and questions dropped in season two will get paid off or explained in season four — and that there will be a season four.

Really, though, both arc-based storytelling and episodic storytelling can lend themselves to tremendous laziness. Bad arc storytelling can consist of nothing but random wheel spinning, pointless melodrama and random "clues" being tossed out, to keep the juggernaut chugging along. Bad episodic storytelling can consist of cookie-cutter plots, the "rinse, repeat" syndrome, and "monster/artifact/whatever of the week." But really, anything can be done badly — even if it could also be done incredibly well.

On the other hand, whenever you hear about producers saying the network forced them to do more standalone episodes, the result is almost always a drop in the show's quality. That's not because standalone episodes aren't as good as complex arcs — it's just that standalone episodes done by creators who wish they were doing complex arcs instead are usually not as good. And often, the showrunners who are most eager to feature longer-running storylines are the ones whose shows are most prone to the "X of the week" problem. (See Dollhouse, Terminator, etc.)

The main point is that today's audiences are no longer willing to believe that someone can meet God, or battle a sentient nebula, or get tortured, or have space amnesia — and then never refer to those events again. An adventure isn't really even epic unless it leaves some mark on you.

On the other hand, there's only one thing worse than a standalone episode that leaves its heroes and universe completely unchanged: a whole, season-long storyline that ends... and then leaves its heroes and universe comopletely unchanged, and is never spoken of again.

Oh, and then there's the faux arc, where standalone episodes are gussied up with little clues here and there. One of my biggest pet peeves about the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who was his habit of pretending he was doing more arc-based storytelling than he was actually doing. If the Doctor mentions the "Medusa Cascade" in random conversation half a dozen times, that doesn't make it an arc — just makes it clumsy foreshadowing.

One other generalization occurs to me: shows that offer complete resolution every week tend to be lighter, maybe even fluffier, than shows that draw out stories over months or years. A show that's totally content bringing up a problem and then sorting it out, with no loose ends, tends to be one that's bright and sunny simply by virtue of showing that problems have tidy solutions. A show that tries to show the consequences of decisions over time, and the psychological effects of events, will inevitably go much darker.

One last thought about arcs: they're usually (but not always) the hallmark of more complex, three-dimensional characters. But when those more complex characters get lost in layers of mystification and randomness (the sort of thing Josh Friedman was talking about in his guest post earlier today) then I'm not so sure that's a worthy tradeoff. But the most important thing is to tell a good story — whether it's just this week, or over five years.

We were talking about a book he'd written, and I asked him if he'd tell me the answer to a Big Unanswered Question in the book. (I won't say who this novelist is because I don't have time to call him and ask him if I can quote him.)

NOVELIST: I can't tell you, Josh. I don't know the answer.
ME: Really? It's like, a big unanswered question for the characters and for the reader.
NOVELIST: For me, as well. I don't know.

Which lead us to this: there will always be a point in your world-building when the world you've built outgrows the scope of the story you're telling. The edges are fuzzy; the next town over is mysterious. Perhaps you've hinted at something which suggests something else, which would really turn things on its fucking head IF you were to go down that path BUT YOU ARE NOT.

Not now. Not yet. And possibly, never. If you're world-building well, your world should feel full and alive and bustling in the corners, even if you've never actually made it over to the corner to see what the fuck is going on there. The world is true to your vision, but there is ambiguity and mystery and things undiscovered. I can know a thousand things about my the world I've created, but if there aren't a thousand others just outside of my creative periphery, then I start getting a little sketchy and bored.

This is the type of thing that drives studio and network executives crazy.

In the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 finale "Born to Run," Cameron invites John Connor to get up on top of her and cut her open in order to check and see if her nuclear power source is leaking. This is what she says (although she never actually says it) but we can wonder whether this is what her plan actually is. Certainly she knows whether it's sound or not, so perhaps she's doing it for John's benefit. On the other hand, she's not exactly clinical about the way she makes him straddle her. Here's the conversation I had with one of my executives:

EXECUTIVE: I don't get that scene.
ME: How so?
EXECUTIVE: I just don't get it. Why does she do that? Why does he do it? Was he going to kiss her? Does she want him to? What does she really want from him here?
ME: Well, we've got a lot of different possibilities. I'm sure she has her reasons. We don't really know Cameron's mind, do we?
EXECUTIVE: Shouldn't we know it?
ME: We, who? The royal we, you and me? Or the audience?
EXECUTIVE: Well. Any of the above.
ME: Like I said. You could read that scene many different ways.
EXECUTIVE: Do you have a favorite?
ME: They're all God's children.

Which is why they usually hated me.

Now whether you want to believe it or not, this was not me just being lazy. This is the way that I like my drama, both written and watched-organic, ambiguous, a little messy and inclusive of multiple interpretations.

Which, I grant you, on a bad day is barely distinguishable from lazy.

I can think of at least four reasons Sarah let John go by himself with Weaver into the future at the end of season 2. I can think of any number of reasons why he chose to do so. I also welcome the idea that both of these decisions were horrible decisions, and you might think that the Sarah Connor and John Connor that exist in your head would never do what they did. Because while I may lead you down a particular path, it is your god-given right as a participant in this television show to veer off the path at any time and start hacking your own way through the jungle.

Which is not to say I abdicate responsibility. Bad writing is a demon that takes all forms and often finds a warm and inviting host with writers who confuse the arbitrary with the mysterious.

So in that spirit, let me now contradict everything I've said previously by also saying that in Sci Fi TV there is NOTHING more important than the proper, specific detail. To wit:

In Episode 102 of the Sarah Connor Chronicles ("The Turk," written by John Wirth), the Terminator Cromartie kidnaps a scientist to assist it in growing cyborg skin. Cromartie has brought the skin recipe back from the future, and writes it on the scientist's wall so the scientist can follow it.

When writing the script, John had actually spent time on the phone with a cell biologist trying to get a formula which would best approximate something you might use to grow skin for a cyborg. John had given that formula to our production designer and he, in turn, had given it to the on-set painter so it could be written on the wall. These are the types of things we do all day.

The night before we were scheduled to shoot that scene, John Wirth and I went down to the set to see how it looked. It's late and I know the crew wants to get on their work. But here's the conversation we have:

ME: There's something…not right.
JOHN: I agree. It's just…what is it?
ME: It's not…I dunno…right.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Could you be a little more specific? We'll fix it. But, you know, maybe a direction to go in? Font size? Pen color? Anything?
ME: It's just…I can't think of any other way to say it…but it doesn't look like a Terminator wrote it.
JOHN: Exactly.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Huh.

What followed was a lengthy conversation where we ran through a number of issues:

Had we ever seen Terminator handwriting? Do they write in a particular style? Would they be as precise as a computer or would they be in some way affected by their biped-ness, their height relative to surface…Would they disguise their writing as more human-like? And seriously - where was the fucking manual for this?

Eventually we took the entire wall down and did it all over again. This time…more…Terminator-y.

Now this type of conversation occurs on every set on every television show in the world every day. I'd be willing to bet that as I write this at ten o'clock at night, somewhere in Hollywood a showrunner is staring at a set of drapes, a pair of shoes, a bloody handprint, or a gunshot wound and trying to find the perfect balance between story, character and filmic verisimilitude. That's the job. (Frankly, that's everyone's job.)

But in Sci Fi you also get this:

ME: We need to re-do that urinal morph, Jim.
JIM: What's the problem?
ME: She looks like she's coming out of the urinal.
JIM: Isn't she?
ME: No. She's supposed to be morphing from a urinal into a woman. Right now it looks like the urinal is birthing her. That's gross.
JIM: I getcha.
ME: Think "the prow of a ship."
JIM: Awesome. Great note. I'll make it so.
(Because they do love to make it so.)

TV fiction is a depictive media, while written fiction is a suggestive one. A novel's language casts different shadow plays off the back part of each reader's skull while a tv show casts one vision for everyone. We all have our own idea of what China Mieville means when Detective Borlu "unsees" someone in the neighboring city, but God help the poor schmuck who has to decide what that idea means for everyone.

So we (or I, since it's my blog post) try to balance the concrete specificity of what can be seen (Terminator handwriting, urinals) with the novelistic "suggestiveness" of what we don't see but feel (why does she do what she does?). This is not exclusive to science fiction, but especially true of it; speculative fiction is just that - speculative. Creating a beautiful unanswered question can be a complete work of art - just ask Schrödinger and his cat.

Just know that some day somebody will open that box and, dead or alive, there better be a fucking awesome kitty in there.

Josh Friedman was the showrunner on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

She'll be playing Bennett, an employee at the Dollhouse who shares a mysterious past with Echo. And there are more details about the reason the character played by Michael Hogan (Saul Tigh from BSG) comes to the Dollhouse to stop — his psychotic family member is on a killing spree, and Hogan needs the Dollhouse's help to stop it. Also, Alexis Denisof (Angel) will be playing a U.S. Senator who's on a witch hunt against the Dollhouse. And Keith Carradine's business executive character is Adelle DeWitt's nemesis. It all sounds like a rich stew of nastiness. [THR]

Yes, we couldn't resist the Summer Glau-on-Summer Glau ultimate smackdown. (Don't worry, the winner won't face that psychic girl from The 4400 or anything.)

Who will win? River has the moves, and the mental powers. Plus River has marginally better social skills, which might come in handy if the fight takes place in a crowded location. But Cameron has Terminator strength, and a metal endoskeleton that's pretty darn hard to destroy. Who you got?

Seriously, does Miles O'Keeffe look remarkably like Garret Dillahunt in that scene or what? Maybe it's just that they share the same wig. Possibly, the exact same wig. [IMDB]

Past Life, airing spring 2010 on Fox, seems to be trying to piggyback on the success of Medium, a show I haven't actually seen. You have a kind of procedural crime-solving aspect to each episode, but there's also a spooky supernatural aspect. And it's all sprinkled with a dash of personal growth. It's very loosely based on an M.J. Rose novel called The Reincarnationist, but I don't think much beyond the idea of reincarnation got carried over.

Fox kindly sent us a DVD of this pilot, and it's got the same rough edges as a lot of other pilots. It's also saddled with the task of selling you on one of the oddest premises I've seen in quite some time. In a nutshell, Dr. Kate McGinn is a psychologist who works at New York City's Talmadge Center For Behavior Health, which is dedicated to studying "the human soul." McGinn specializes in "regression therapy," helping people to confront the stuff that happened in their previous lives which may be affecting them today. McGinn is almost paranormally sunny and cheery, except when she's comforting someone who's grappling with having been murdered.

And because (I guess) these cases often involve ferreting out the details of exactly what happened the last time around, the Talmadge Center hires a detective, Price Whatley, to help McGinn out. Whatley is the Scully to her Mulder — he doesn't believe in all this past life nonsense, but he needs the money since he lost his job at the NYPD. But Whatley harbors a secret pain having to do with his dead wife — and you won't be too shocked to hear that he's secretly hoping all this reincarnation nonsense will lead to some sort of reunion. (I'm picturing Whatley eventually having a very serious relationship processing conversation with a one-year-old, which is how old his reincarnated wife would be now.)

The Talmadge Center, incidentally, is quite swanky, and seems to be able to afford to keep Kate McGinn in classy therapist outfits. The clients we meet in the pilot, whose 14-year-old son is having weird murder-esque flashbacks, seem extremely well heeled. So I'm guessing we're mostly going to be concerning ourselves with the previous lives of the wealthy and troubled here. Besides Kate and Whatley, the Talmadge Center is also home to Dr. Malachi Talmadge, who stands around looking worried and occasionally butts heads with Whatley. And then there's Rishi Karna, the hard-working research assistant who barely pops up in the pilot.

I'm just going to pause here and wonder whose idea it was to call our tough-guy detective character "Price Whatley."

So I'm guessing that not every episode of this show will involve murder, per se. You could have a character who got mugged during the 1920s, and never got over it, and now is still pissed about it thirty years into a new incarnation. Presumably, there has to be some kind of crime every week, though, or Price Whatley won't have much to do.

Judging from the pilot, there'll be two tracks to every episode: the therapeutic track, in which the reincarnated person works through all of their issues under the sympathetic, tight-lipped smile of Kate McGinn. And then the mystery track, where Price Whatley searches through old case files and says things like, "I know it sounds crazy, but I really think we're on to something here." (That's not a quote from the pilot. That's just the sort of thing I can imagine Price Whatley saying.) Price Whatley, of course, is on the outs with his former superiors, but there are still some cops who owe favors to him and will let him research old unsolved crimes on the sly.

And then, at the end of every episode, the two tracks will converge somehow, as the tormented reincarnatee finally discovers the truth of what happened and gets some closure. And Whatley gets his man, or woman, or whatever. A crime is solved, a soul is healed, and the cycle of suffering turns a bit slower. Or something.

If you're thinking "This doesn't sound like my cup of tea," then it's probably not. I went into the pilot feeling somewhat apprehensive, and nothing about it was quite able to change my mind — although there was nothing wrong with any of it. The main thing that jumped out at me, honestly, was that Price Whatley should be a laughing stock. He's a former cop who now runs around chasing leads that come out of vague past-life visions from people who seem a bit mental. Nobody should be taking Whatley seriously at all, and yet somehow he manages to fulfill the same role as every detective on every procedural show ever. And the show invests a lot of energy in showing how professional and serious Kate McGinn and the rest of the Talmadge team are, with their jargon about regression therapy and their great resources.

So why do I feel as though this is some kind of watershed for genre television? Maybe because it feels like an uneasy fusion of a few different genres, into something that I'm not sure is ever going to be as thought-provoking as other Fox shows like Fringe or Dollhouse (or the late lamented Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) Rather than boldly venturing into speculative territory, this show reflects the gathering consensus that any speculative themes must be subtle, vague, and swaddled in formula.

So you have the "team of experts" model of detective show, not unlike Bones or CSI. (Except that instead of having a laboratory, these people have a therapist's office.) You have the therapeutic, personal-growth type show, where every week someone is going to get past his/her trauma. And then you have the one strand of actual speculative fiction, the past life regression, which doesn't look like it's ever going to evolve into a mythos or ask deeper questions. It's just going to be the McGuffin — and it's going to allow us to have spooky J-horror-esque blurry flashbacks to something vague and terrifying happening in the 1960s or 1970s, which get slightly more detailed every time we see them throughout the episode.

It's a perfectly solid show, and a nice enough cast, but the genre element feels like weak tea. And I'm really not sure how the reincarnation-of-the-week format will pan out week in, week out. It seems like it could suffer from the same problems as Tru Calling, only worse. Still, I have a feeling this show could be a humongous mega-hit, and further drive genre television in the direction of being somewhat apologetic, and vaguely detective-oriented.

BAG will be playing the role of Metallo, the cyborg villain with the heart of Kryptonite — and yes, people have already noted the irony that he's gone from fighting cyborgs to becoming one himself. He'll appear in at least the first two episodes of the season. The show still hasn't cast the long-awaited General Zod, which may mean Metallo has a bigger role than Zod, or just that Metallo shows up first, as a sort of evil appetizer.

(Insert all-purpose rant about the unfairness of this show being on the air, in its 500th season, when T:SCC was cut off in its prime.)

In any case, with Derek Reese on board, Smallville is starting to sound a little intriguing for the first time in ages. Here's hoping BAG gets to bring half the tortured intensity to Metallo that he put into Derek.

In other news, EW is reporting that this next season really may be Smallville's last, and the CW is talking about creating a spin-off for the show, as a way of extending it. (The same reasoning, I guess, which gave us that abortive "Dick Grayson before he was Robin" show.) Who do you think could support a spin-off? The show's version of the Justice League? Green Arrow/Oliver Queen? Or maybe Kara? Or some new character?

[TV Guide and EW]

There's already precedent for science fiction shows living on past cancellation on Saturday mornings - Lost in Space, and more famously, Star Trek both had stints as cartoons, after all, and Happy Days even became a science fiction show when it became a cartoon:


It wasn't just television shows, of course; why could forget The Real Ghostbusters or Robocop keeping the flame alive for the failed movie franchises?



With all that in mind, can you blame us for thinking of these five dearly beloved - well, and Knight Rider - shows that could perfectly translate into the animated format so that they could stick around for a few more years (and hopefully get the Futurama treatment, coming back to life with a complete season order)?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Why it'd work: Man versus machine, including time-traveling and ridiculous stunts? The biggest surprise is that the Terminator franchise hasn't made it to Saturday mornings already.
Why it may not be the best idea: Could the show's larger questions about the nature of identity and predestination thrive in an animated series? And, even if they could, would the audience be even smaller without Summer Glau, Brian Austen Green and Lena Hedley to make it look pretty (admittedly, in bruised and bloody way) each week?
Verdict: There could definitely be a Terminator cartoon... But a Sarah Connor Chronicles cartoon...? We're not convinced.

Pushing Daisies
Why it'd work: Quirky, filled with color and with four detectives solving weird mysteries on a weekly basis, it's a less-annoying Scooby Doo with Ned's magic finger replacing the comedic titular dog.
Why it may not be the best idea: Would network standards and practices have a problem with a cartoon with such a high body count every episode? Would the show's tendency towards the saccharine seem even more pronounced with animated actors?
Verdict: If it could keep the level of writing as the original - and Chi McBride and Kirsten Chenowith as voice actors - we'd happily tune into an animated Daisies every week.

Knight Rider
Why it'd work: It's a man fighting crime with the help of his talking car. Let's face it; this should've been a cartoon to begin with. Maybe the scripts would've been better than this recent go-around, if it had.
Why it may not be the best idea: Without the real-life car porn, is there any point to Knight Rider at all? Also, could the show's creators resist the lure of turning KITT into a Transformer now that CGI budget constraints would be gone?
Verdict: Thanks to the thoroughly generic nature of the original, there's nothing worth tuning up for a Knight Rider cartoon model.

Firefly
Why it'd work: High adventure on the space waves with a band of colorful characters risking life and limb as they try to survive? It's like Dungeons and Dragons grown up and transplanted into orbit.
Why it may not be the best idea: Would it hurt too much? Perhaps - or maybe we just wouldn't be interested if we couldn't see Jewel Staite on a regular basis. But Whedon's series work in large part because of the actors as much as the writing, and it just wouldn't be the same without them.
Verdict: Sadly, we're saying that the Serenity should stay grounded.

The Middleman
Why it'd work: From its origins as a comic book to its broad cartoony comedy as a television show, this is another series that has always felt like a cartoon despite its flesh and blood stars. Plus, as a cartoon, imagine everything it could get away with but couldn't afford on an ABC Family budget!
Why it may not be the best idea: We have no reasons why. Seriously, this is a no-brainer.
Verdict: Did you miss the part where we called it a no-brainer above?

So, did we forget a show that would be perfect for the animated treatment? Do you think that we're insane for arguing that a cartoon Firefly wouldn't work? And, most importantly, who do we have to beg for a Middleman animated series?

Talking to SciFi Wire about how the writers had planned to follow up on John Connor's surprise leap into the future at the end of the final episode of the season, he said,

[I]n the actual footage of the show, we see that Derek doesn't recognize [John.] So, by jumping into this future, he has erased his existence in a certain way, and we see that. We see that nobody recognizes him... If we had gotten a third season, I should say, we definitely would have explored what it all meant, but I think there's a great moment where we see Allison [Summer Glau], and John's look to her is very meaningful. I think that also would have been a great thing in terms of dramatic potential. Like I said, the show has ended, and it would all be speculation, and I really don't want to raise anybody's expectations.

Sure, tell us that something would've been a "great thing in terms of dramatic potential," and then tell us that you don't want to raise expectations? You big tease...

Sarah Connor producer on how the show would have continued [SciFi Wire]