The sprawling saga that loses the thread is a more common problem in fantasy books than in science fiction — think the Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time, or Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books. But science fiction still has its own never-ending stories that really ought to end. Here are the biggest problems:

Changing the rules: When I first read To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer, I was incredibly excited by its story of an artificial planet where everybody who's ever lived comes back to life. Until I got to the end of the book and realized it was actually Book One in a long series, and none of my nagging questions about the resurrection planet, Riverworld, would be answered for another three or four books. I was even more annoyed when a friend of mine told me that Farmer changes the rules of Riverworld after the first book, to make it easier to keep spinning out tales. I think there my have been some book-throwing involved.

The heir apparent. As I mentioned, a reviewer coined the term "Herbert's Syndrome" in 1984, when Frank Herbert was still alive and had yet to publish his sixth Dune novel, Chapterhouse: Dune. The reviewer defined it as when "a large advance induces a good writer to extend a successful series beyond its natural span." You may have your own opinions about whether six Dune books were too many — but since Herbert's death, his son Frank and his collaborator Kevin J. Anderson have already written seven Dune books, with more on the way. Say it with me: "The cash must flow."

The neat trilogy that becomes a messy tetralogy, and more. The first two Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books by Douglas Adams seemed pretty well-rounded, encompassing more or less the same arc as the original radio series and TV series. So I was a little nervous about the third book, Life, The Universe And Everything, but it was still a fun ride and seemed to move things forward. I was less thrilled by the fourth volume in what Adams called "the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's trilogy." So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, felt sort of anemic, as if Adams really didn't have any more ideas for the series, but he needed the Ningis. And then I think I read the fifth volume, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.

The need to explain the meaning of everything. Feminist science fiction blogger Liz Henry says this is where many series break down:

People write a series, and then they feel the need to finish it off and Explain it and they go all mystical and metaphysical. [They] try to solve every giant Burning Issue of Existence and good and evil, and why does the universe exist at all, and [the meaning of] utopia. So often, you get the underlying Manifesto or attempt to come up with a coherent philsopy of the author, but all too often, you sure wish they hadn't. By the time Herbert hits God Emperor of Dune, he has gone compeltely mad, trying to explain Everything, and there is no plot any more.

The random left turn. Isaac Asimov gave into fans' pressure, after a thirty-year gap, and started writing more Foundation novels again. And few would argue that Foundation's Edge or Foundation And Earth are in the same league as the original trilogy. One major problem: a slew of new characters, including one who's introduced right at the end of Foundation And Earth, who might have played a bigger role in a final Foundation book, had Asimov written one. But in the end, it just feels as though Asimov is floundering a bit, in the unnecessary sequels.

The miraculous save. In Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue series, there's a clan of women and children who become language experts, and learn a ton of alien languages so they can serve as translators. But over time, they create their own secret language that the men don't understand. Which is great, but then in the third book, suddenly the women discover that they can eat sounds. They can survive by ingesting noises — sort of like a plant's photosynthesis, except noisier.

The shrinking protagonist. Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books become less and less fun, as his roguish protagonist, Slippery Jim DiGriz, becomes more and more of a pussycat. But worse yet is when we get a new protagonist whose story cheapens our original hero, like Bean in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow.

To be fair, why shouldn't novels go on and on and on? It's what movies do, with their endless sequels. And TV series — who really thinks Smallville deserves an eighth season? On the other hand, the thing that makes novels superior to other media is the fact that they have a single author, who puts his/her stamp on them. When that one person runs out of ideas, the novels themselves start to deflate.

With TV, movies, comics and other media, as long as the corporate copyright-holder can find another Akiva Goldsman or Roberto Orci to spin out a new idea, you can have endless installments. In theory, no TV series ever needs to go stale, as long as the writers have the grace to leave when they run out of ideas. (Which almost never happens.) It's a bit harder with books though — and I like picking up a novel and discovering a new universe for the first time.

Q: Why did you want to write a Galaxy Quest comic?

I think that Galaxy Quest got short shrift by being identified only as a Star Trek parody. When there really was a lot more going on in that movie. Galaxy Quest the comic will show you more of the mythology of the show, the actors and their relationships and the adventures they go on. You get to see more of the characters and see how their lives have been affected by the movie.

Q: Does the comic take place right after the movie ended?

The comic book opens with the final scene from the movie when they are showing the title sequence for the new Galaxy Quest series. The idea is that the actors are watching a screening for the new show, hoping it will get picked up and they can all have their old jobs back. But during this process a few terrible things start to happen in space and the government asks the crew to pilot their ship out to space and check it out. As we know from the movie the ship was made based on the actors movements and actions so no one else can work it. The government has no choice but to send the cast up in space.

Q: How are all the old characters doing?

Well you find out that the network that is working on the new Galaxy Quest series has agreed to kill Dr. Lazarus. So Alexander Dane is torn between staying in this character that he says he hates, or exploring new characters. Gwen DeMarco is in a relationship with the head of the studio. She still has affection for Jason Nesmith, who is now dating a young starlet since his fame is on the rise. Readers will get to see how the movie changed each character, especially Jason. Fred Kwan is trying to have a child with Laliari, which you see the results of in the fifth issue [featuring] the human/thermian love child.

Q: Are there going to be repercussions to crash-landing a space ship on Earth?

Yes the second issue reveals a lot on what happened after they crashed the ship into the convention center. A character [named] Colonel Stetson is trying to convince the world that it didn't happen, he's leading the government cover-up. After the crash, the crew spent a lot of time in Area 51 being tested and experimented by the government.

Q: What else are you working on these days? What about Hell Week? Wasn't this originally called Half To Death?

It was in the original script, but now it's Hell Week. It's teen slasher meets Groundhog Day. The main character is a catty sorority girl. She's the chick who nobody likes but gets murdered right away. But then she keeps living the day where she is killed over and over. The main character has no idea who the murderer is but each time she dies she rules out one suspect. She also becomes a better person through this process and begins to appreciate those in her life more. It takes place in a sorority during the 'hell week' period.

Obviously, not all scifi madness is space madness, but there are some great examples of this classic form of mental degeneration coming from being cooped up in a tiny place that is your only life support. Sometimes you're cooped up with a bunch of annoying people, like in the Michael Crichton book/movie Sphere, where the space madness is actually "undersea madness" but it's the basic idea. You're in a tiny, stinky space and you want badly to leave, but if you do you die. In Sphere, as in many "space madness" classics (including the best Ren & Stimpy episode ever). One of the basic signs of space madness is rampant hallucination, usually enhanced into something real by alien technologies. This also the case in the original Russian version of Solaris, where a mad spaceman starts seeing freaky visions of his mother and lots of macrame because the planet he's circling has some kind of power to manifest the unconscious.

You see a strange and gooey-disturbing variation on the theme of space madness in Donnie Darko, a cult film that may be slightly incoherent but wins the awesome award anyway for successfully depicting a genuinely scary cute bunny costume. In this film, which has about a billion interpretations, one thing is clear: our antihero Donnie has a potentially-fatal encounter with a jet engine that crashes into his bedroom. And then time goes out of joint, or maybe his imagination does, and he begins to have visions of an evil cute bunny and car crashes and a sky filling up with clouds like dark ink. Space doesn't drive teenager Donnie mad, his family does. And his suburban house is sort of like a spaceship in that he's still too young to leave home and survive. So he's stuck there, until his world is punctured by a giant piece of jet junk. Are his visions real? Can he change the future? You'll be creeped out by these questions and his mental anguish until the very last scene.

The novel and movie Mysterious Skin turn childhood trauma into space madness. It's the story of two boys who grew up together in Kansas, barely knowing one another, but connected by an incident that one of them is convinced was an alien abduction. The movie, an indie directed by Gregg Araki with Joseph Gordon Leavitt, is terrific — but the novel by Scott Heim is simply gorgeous and haunting and full of midwestern teen angst turned trippy. While one character pursues his theory that he was abducted by aliens, the other pursues gay hustling and moves to the alien city of New York. It's to Heim's credit that you don't know until the very end whether the aliens are real.

As I said in reference to Sphere and Solaris, one of the hallmarks of space madness is that your mad fantasies become real. That's certainly the case with one of the most tragic and beloved crazy creatures in science fiction: The Hulk. I'm not the first person to point out that Bruce Banner is basically a mutant with multiple personality disorder, whose dark alternate self has the unfortunate ability to embody what would in an ordinary person be merely a delusion of grandeur. Like Mr. Hyde before him, Hulk is the literal representation of repressed rage. Like madness itself, which can sometimes be contained but often never completely cured, Hulk is always returning from whatever prison the military, the shrinks, or the Avengers cook up for him.

Of course, there is one perfect way to defeat madness — perhaps as perfect as the cold virus was at defeating the tripods in War of the Worlds. Simply destroy the brain that spawns the madness. Hence the amazing brain-drilling scene in Pi, which allows our hero to escape his own mind — and escape the evil corporation that wants to exploit his mind. This idea also feeds into the utterly depressing scene at the end of Brazil where our romantic hero Sam Lowry has been tortured to the point of complete catatonia. I suppose in Brazil his madness may in fact be his salvation. Depends on how you read it.

There are dozens of other books and movies that deal with space madness writ small or large: Jacob's Ladder, Perdido Street Station, Dark City, and Octavia Butler's superlative Patternmaster series. While some of these stories imagine that you can get over "the crazy," as it's called in the TV-signal-makes-you-smash-heads movie The Signal, most of them don't. Either the characters die, or remain alive in a state of horrifying out-of-controlness like Hulk or some of the creatures whose minds have been eaten in China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station. So, like I said, things could be a lot worse than having your brain eaten by zombies. You could have zombies in your brain. Forever.

Superman.
He's the last survivor (or one of the half-dozen last survivors) of the exploding planet Krypton. And he's invulnerable to just about everything in the universe, including nuclear bombs and the vacuum of interstellar space — but he can't come anywhere near a radioactive fragment of his own planet without dying. Or, if it's a red fragment, it'll turn him into a dwarf or a dragon. Of course. Also, Superman's pal, the Martian Manhunter, has a terrible vulnerability to fire — but it turns out to be mostly psychological.
Why it's poetic: Come on, he's lost his home planet... and now whenever he encounters part of it, it nearly kills him. The loneliness, the desolation.

Sontarans.
On Doctor Who, the Sontarans are cloned super-soldiers from the distant planet Sontar. They're almost unstoppable (although in their latest appearance they turned out to be pretty darn stoppable once you used non-copper bullets.) And their only weak spot is a small vent in the backs of their necks, which they use to recharge.
Why it's poetic: They're super-warriors, so they must always face their enemies. I mean, they could put a cap or a shield onto their neck-holes, but they choose not to. Because they need their fatal flaw to remind them who they are.

The Klowns.
In Killer Klowns From Outer Space. It turns out you can kill a killer klown by popping their red nose — it makes perfect sense!
Why it's poetic: They wear their most vulnerable part right in front of them, so they can see any attacks coming. Plus, it's like slapstick and murder rolled into one. Dude!

The Martians.
In War Of The Worlds, the invaders can clobber everything that humans can throw at them, and they scoff at our huge weapons systems. But then they're felled by the smallest enemy of all, the common cold.
Why it's poetic: Mostly because H.G. Wells gets so fancy and flowery talking about the "smallest and humblest of all God's creatures" and how it stomped the monsters' asses. (How does he know germs are humble?)

The Fithp
The Fithp are sort of weird super-intelligent elephants who use superior, if borrowed, technology to invade Earth in the 1986 novel Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The humans are hopelessly outclassed, but they have one advantage. In the Fithp culture, when two herds fight, one eventually surrenders and gets absorbed into the other herd — so they're not prepared for humans to surrender and then mount a resistance or plan sabotage.
Why it's poetic: Because these super-elephant guys fail to understand the most human of behaviors... sneakiness.

The Colonists
In The X-Files, the aliens seeking to invade the Earth create super-soldiers who have only one weakness: their bodies are torn apart by the magnetic fields of large deposites of magnetite.
Why it's poetic: The alien soldiers are super-human because of their metallic bodies — but those same bodies make them vulnerable to magnetite. Woah.

The Crawling Eye.
Aliens who are basically just huge eyeballs with tentacles invade the Earth and nothing can stop them — until one human figures out the aliens have no defense against the awesome power of fire!
Why it's poetic: Because the eyes are burning! It's a tremendous metaphor for the blindness of power. Or maybe it's just a metaphor for how much you'll be rubbing your eyes with sleepiness as you try to pay attention to this movie.

The Signs invaders.
We've already talked about this a fair bit, but the aliens who decide to attack/invade/kidnap kids in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs have a terrible vulnerability to plain old water.
Why it's poetic: The humblest of beverages! Or maybe, the fact that the aliens can't protect themselves against water without giving up their shape-shifting abilities. So they rely on the chameleon thing, to the exclusion of protecting themselves.

The Alien Teachers
Aliens replace the teachers at Henderson High School in Robert Rodriguez's The Faculty. And it turns out the aliens' only weakness is Zeke the drug dealer's "homebake."
Why it's poetic: It's the humblest of drugs! Oh, wait. I mean, come on. They're impersonating teachers, and they're vulnerable to the students' drugs. That's awesome. Plus, it's proof that drugs really are good for you. And the school drug dealer is your friend. Etc.

Leto Atreides II
In Frank Herbert's God Emperor Of Dune, Leto lives for 3,000 years and becomes nearly unkillable because he's part sandworm. But then it turns out that he's gained the sandworms' vulnerability to water.
Why it's poetic: He inherits the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the worms. Dude, come on!

Stitch:
Stitch, from Lilo and Stitch, is a super-awesome alien koala creature. Except that he can't swim.
Why it's poetic: Stitch's super-dense body makes him indestructible, but also means he sinks like a rock. Oh noes!

The Tenctonese.
The aliens from Alien Nation could be burned, and even killed, if they came into contact with salt water. What is it with aliens and water of various types? (Thanks Roraz!) Science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer has an incredibly complicated explanation of how the Tenctonese's weakness actually makes sense.
Why it's poetic: You can't cry on their shoulders... or if you do, they'll definitely feel your pain.
Note: In the course of putting this blog post together, I found this post at Everything2, which was pretty helpful in coming up with some examples.

The Stone Gods tells the story of two characters, three different times. The first time, Billie is a cynical human who gets roped into helping colonize a new planet, and Spike is the beautiful slutty android who falls in love with her. The second time, Billy is a cabin boy who gets marooned on Easter Island, and Spikker is the Dutch sailor, also marooned, who competes with natives to harvest a precious seagull egg. And then the third time around, Spike is a female android again, but she's under construction and is just a head so far. Billie is a software engineer helping to create Billie. And then there's a twist at the end of the book that brings the three narratives together. It's cute, even if you see it coming a long way off.

Winterson has dabbled in science fictional themes, so it's not surprising that her new novel The Stone Gods is full of androids, space colonization and post-apocalypses. Her second novel, Sexing The Cherry, had a sort of time-travel motif. But Stone Gods is probably Winterson's most scifi book so far.

Too bad she's so clueless about how to deal with speculative world-building. Chances are, most science fiction readers won't make it past the first 20 pages of Stone Gods before the urge to start tearing the pages gets too overwhelming. Winterson goes for the "massive info-dump" theory in establishing her future setting. And just in case you don't understand how brave and new her world is, she starts way too many paragraphs with a weird alphabet game. "F is for future." "R is for robot." Etc. etc. (No, I'm not kidding. She actually starts a paragraph "R is for robot.")

It's sad, because the dystopian futures she creates are actually extremely compelling — at the start of the book, we see a more dissolute version of our world, where everyone is genetically "fixed" to look young and beautiful, and pedophilia is becoming accepted. (Early on, we meet a woman who is trying to have herself genetically modified to become a 12-year-old "Lolita" for her husband, who visits a sex club featuring bestiality and pedophilia.) And then towards the end of the book, we encounter another future dystopia, where a nuclear war has left the world under the domination of the MORE corporation, which owns everything. (Humans can't own property, but they can rent things from MORE, in a weird sort of corporate communism.)

In all three of the linked stories, Winterson explores the idea that humans are destroying the planet through not just greed, but the pursuit of stupid status symbols. (Like the "stone gods" of the book's title, which are the Easter Island statues that the tribespeople ruin the island's ecosystem to create.) And just in case we miss the significance of her message, she includes some long rambling lectures towards the end.

I have a feeling Stone Gods could have been a great novel — and a great piece of speculative fiction — if Winterson had only been edited more heavily, or forced to do a total rewrite. It's full of great ideas, and every time I was about to give up on it completely, I hit on another fascinating scene, or another piece of beautiful lyrical writing. Winterson's major comfort zone is obviously writing "queer romance," so when the various permutations of Spike and Billie have a tender moment, the quality of the prose suddenly goes way up.

And Stone Gods has moments of genuine cleverness — like the sequence where the expedition to colonize a new human homeworld fucks up spectacularly. It reminded me of the wonderful turning point in The Sparrow where the humans mistakenly send their shuttle to pick up some of their crew — and then realize they don't have enough fuel to get off the planet any more. I like reading science fiction where people make disastrous mistakes, because this happens a lot in real life and not nearly as often in regular science fiction. It's interesting to me that both The Sparrow and The Stone Gods were sold as literature — I'm racking my brains to think of novels published as science fiction where human error by the good guys plays a major role.

But as it is, the Stone Gods doesn't just fail as science fiction. It fails as metafiction as well, and for much the same reason. Winterson uses a whole passel of postmodern tricks (most notably the three permutations of the same story, but also a host of stylistic tricks). But she's not engaged enough to use them all that well, and you can't escape the feeling that all of the cleverness (like the main character of the third segment finding a manuscript of the rest of the book) is a way of covering up a certain disengagement from the story and characters.

It's hard to care about these people, because you get the feeling Winterson doesn't quite care about them either. They're just a platform for Winterson's ideas. All three versions of Billie are sort of disaffected and unlikeable. And all three versions of Spike are sweet and naive, but a little superficial.

For another point of view on Winterson's novel, here's a thoughtful review by brilliant Ribofunk author Paul DiFilippo.

It really is an embarrassment of riches in this week's new releases. Take, for example, the vampire lover. Usually, they're stuck with some randomly generic goth-lite indie book to feed their fetishes, but this week, they can choose from the Brian K. Vaughan-written Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 8: No Future For You (It's the Faith-centric arc, and very good it is, too, first issue of a brand new sequel to The Lost Boys (no, really), The Lost Boys: Reign of Frogs, or Jessica Abel (and friends)'s slice-of-life take on the genre in the graphic novel Life Sucks. How often does that happen?

It's also time to catch up on a lot of books we've featured here in the past:

• Matt Fraction's Casanova finishes its current run with #14,
• Chris Claremont's "Children of the X-Men" series GeNext launches,
• you can fulfill your Tony Stark-isms with The All-New Iron Manual,
• Bruce Wayne meets his end (possibly) in Batman #676 (the first chapter of Grant Morrison's Batman R.I.P., and you can also pick up a hardcover slab of Bat-foreshadowing with Batman: The Resurrection of Ras Al Ghul, collecting an earlier Morrison storyline),
• Geoff Johns' Booster Gold has its first issues collected in the new 52 Pick-Up hardcover,
• and you can see whether Marvel Comics are afraid of nipples or not in the first issue of Euro-import Sky Doll.

For example, you could get your Ed Norton on in advance of next month's movie with the special edition Giant Size Incredible Hulk, which brings you up to speed on the recent history of the jade giant before everyone starts talking, once again, about how they just can't make a good movie out of his comic. If that doesn't satisfy your appetite for greens, then there are also collections of two recent mini-series, World War Hulk: Gamma Corps and World War Hulk: X-Men to show you big green men being scary. Or maybe the first issue of space-bound superheroes Guardians of The Galaxy would be your thing? Remember, they have a talking raccoon. With guns.

Best value for money this week, though, is probably Vertigo: First Cut, a $4.99 collection of the first issues of a number of series published by DC Comics' "mature" imprint, including Western Loveless, New York-dystopic love letter DMZ and M*A*S*H for the 21st Century, Army@Love. If that's not enough for you, then there's also a sneak preview of Air, an upcoming new series from the imprint, included. What more could you want for (slightly, just) less than $5, as long as you don't think about tax?

Just like every other week, you can find the full shipping list to stores here, and then find out where to find the damn stores to shop in here. Just remember that $5 can't barely buy you a Happy Meal these days, is all I'm saying.

But before I get into the eponymous "daughter" at the heart of "The Doctor's Daughter," I should address the overarching message of the episode. Here to explain it to you is Puppet Boy George (from TV's Spitting Image satire show.) Take it away, PBG:

Now that we've got that out of the way, I felt like this episode was a bit of a tease. Not because we were promised the Doctor's daughter, and instead we got the Doctor's cobbled-together supersoldier semi-clone. Who's all cute and chirpy despite being bred only for war. I expected something like that. (Even though it made no sense to me that Donna and Martha didn't get "daughters" of their own. The explanation of why only the Doctor was copied seemed very hand-wavy. And it would have made the episode much more interesting if all three travelers had had to deal with sudden immaculate conception.)

No, instead, the episode was a tease because for the billionth time, we see the Doctor working through the exact same issues, and not getting anywhere.

This episode wasn't really that much about fatherhood — the daughter in question was a convenient receptacle for the Doctor's angst, and didn't really have that much personality of her own. Instead, the episode was all about the Doctor's grief for the dead Time Lords, and his PTSD about the Time War. Back in season one — in the scene where Christopher Eccleston brandishes an enormous gun at the disabled Dalek, and then breaks down — I had high hopes for delving into the Doctor's grief and PTSD. And when the Doctor finally found another Time Lord and it turned out to be the crappest Time Lord possible — the Master — I felt for him again. But this time around, it just felt sort of cheap.

Although, to be fair, I'm holding out a glimmer of hope here that this recent surge in "violence is bad, guns are stupid" moralizing from the Doctor means that his PTSD is finally reaching some kind of peak and we're going to see a crisis of some sort. I'm not sure what form that crisis would take — whether it would be the Doctor getting even more reckless and prepared to sacrifice his own life more and more needlessly, or the Doctor getting more heavy-handed in his meddling. I am prepared for there to be an arc here.

But I'm not holding my breath: the show seems to prefer doing episodes like this one, which engineer a situation designed to elicit an emotional crisis, which is "resolved" by the end of the episode. Despite vociferously admiring Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the makers of the new Who don't have the same flair for building character points week on week.

But even though I've just excoriated the episode for being a bit of a cheat, I mostly liked it. Georgia Moffett was fun to watch as the pseudo-clone of the Doctor. If you take it as just, "the Doctor's got a magic daughter! And she's cute! And she does backflips through lasers!" It worked pretty well. She was cute, and we didn't really need her to have hidden depths. On that level, the show worked quite well. I wouldn't even mind if we get the inevitable Jenny comeback, although I'm really not sure there's any more to her character than we've already seen.

The main reason I sort of liked this episode despite its manipulative and contrived main plot was that the whole business with the endless war, which turned out to have lasted only a week, was pretty great. It was also sort of contrived and clever-clever, but it was just plausible enough not to bother me. I found myself wishing, while the Doctor kept struggling with the non-dilemma of whether to accept his cute gymnast kid, that we could spend more time on the war, and the process of indoctrination that had managed to convince these people they'd been fighting for aeons, and the society that produced this conflict in the first place. Plus, the Hath were cute!

Other random observations: the thing about the TARDIS bringing them there so they could meet Jenny, but first the Doctor had to create Jenny, made no sense, even by Doctor Who's dodgy time-paradox standards. So I just ignored it. Once again, Martha was criminally underused. I really do think Donna is showing a surprising range, and she's definitely growing on me.

I don't really have much more to say about this episode. It was another fun piece of fluff, and as long as you ignore all of the sledgehammery hints that we're actually supposed to care about Jenny, it's a fun romp. Judging from the previous two seasons, we're almost at the end of the "fluff" portion of the year. At this point last year, we were on the verge of the underrated "42," followed by "Human Nature"/"Family of Blood," "Blink" and then the final three-parter. The year before, the second half had the awful "Fear Her" but was otherwise pretty great.

So I am keeping my fingers crossed that soon I will be able to write Doctor Who recaps that aren't just a variation on "Well, it's not that bad, if you ignore the plot and most of the characters." Coming up next: the Agatha Christie episode written by Gareth Roberts (whose The Highest Science may be my favorite Who novel), and then Steven Moffat's two-parter about a sinister library. I live in hope.

Futurama: Slurm

When Fry gets to tour the factory for his favorite drink (and meet Slurms McKenzie) he discovers a nasty secret. The secret ingredient is actually green worm excrement. The queen worm is a shit-making factory and her goo is shot directly into the cans of Slurm. But in the end it doesn't really change his mind anyway. Futurama's other great food moment is "Parasites Lost" where Fry eats the parasite filled egg sandwich that in turn makes him brilliant and he is able to play the holophonor.

Demolition Man: Rat Burgers and Taco Bell

It's the year 2032 and alcohol, sex, nicotine, meat and other unhealthy foods are all outlawed, but that's not the worst of it. The only restaurant is Taco Bell. Now, how can you make a crunchy-cheesy gordita without cheese, salt, fat and cat food? It's impossible! Talk about a dystopia. But on the flip side, I'll pass on the other option, which is: live with the underground resistance led by Denis Leary, that dines on rat burgers. I find it hard to believe that John Spartan had no problem ripping into rat flesh, but more power to him.

Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory: Violet's Bad Berry

"By gum, it's gum." A three course dinner wrapped into one piece of gum. A little girl learns the hard way not to be such a freaking brat and listen to her elders, courtesy of some transforming gum. Watch the expansion of Violet Beauregarde below.

Waterworld...you know the scene

So Kevin Costner chose to create a machine that filters urine into water. Hmmmm... How did he test this? Seriously, were there trial runs? More importantly, why urine? Why not salt water? If you're going to put enough time and effort into something into creating a machine, why not go ahead and have it filter the most plentiful substance around?

Lost's Fish Biscuits

True love is sharing your fish biscuit. Sawyer and Kate are locked up in bear cages. First of all, who knew you could make such and thing as a fish biscuit? And second why were bears on the island in the first place? Little crazy details like DHARMA biscuits sets Lost apart from other scifi shows. With one pink biscuit you're knocked on your ass with questions.

Matrix: Steak of Deception and Breakfast of Snot

Neo and friends had a downright obsession with food. Steaks, noodles and utensils ('there is no spoon') were used to explain even the most complicated theories about the the matrix. But it actually helped break down complicated ideas. Who could forget the Mouse's conundrum over breakfast, which made you question how would artificial intelligence know what things tasted like? What about the orgasm inducing dessert from the Merovingian that demonstrated how he could manipulate the Matrix to suit his needs? Or the biggest betrayal of all, when Cypher trades in his fellow crew over a steak. It wasn't a bad meal per se, but it was the worst meal because Cypher's a bastard. It may be juicy but I think it tastes like your demise, my friend.

It's People!

So I know Soylent Green is people, and you know Soylent Green is people. But the first time you watched the movie weren't you completely horrified at what the future held for man? Was it the idea that the masses didn't know they were ingesting corpse wafers or just the actual act? Either way it put me off government cheese for good.

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Tonight

Tonight sees the two-hour season premier of American Gladiators on NBC. This show is set in a bleak future dystopia where a drugged populace watches people compete in brutal events like "Rocketball" and "Vertigo," where survival is the greatest prize. Oh, wait.... never mind. If you like your contests of life and death a little more fictional, AMC is showing Terminator 2 at 8 PM.

Shia LaBoeuf is on Letterman tonight at 11:30ish, talking about Indiana Jones and explaining why he thought it was a great idea to play a "swashbuckling biker" named Mutt.

Tuesday

Shia LaBoeuf continues his TV rampage by appearing on Good Morning America, along with William Shatner.

The History Channel has two episodes of Mega Disasters at 8 and 9 PM, including a new episode, "Mega Tsunamis." Did waves taller than the Statue of Liberty smash the coasts of the Mediterranean sea 8,000 years ago — and could a tsunami like that happen again? Also, at 11 PM, the History Channel has a rerun of Earth's Black Hole, a special about black holes and whether they affect our life here on Earth. The answer, apparently, involves going to the Bermuda Triangle. (Of course it does.)

Also, FX is showing League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen at 5, and Hellboy at 8 and 10:30.

And Wednesday morning at 1:10, TMC has The Man Who Fell To Earth starring David Bowie at his absolute freakiest.

Wednesday

The History Channel comes to our rescue once again, with an episode of Modern Marvels called "Mad Electricity" — it's all about Nikola Tesla, and how we're all using his discoveries constantly today. That's at 8 PM, followed by reruns of MonsterQuest and UFO Hunters.

And at 10 PM, TMC is showing Hollow Man 2, in which Christian Slater plays a cop pursuing an invisible killer. Yeah. I didn't know they made a sequel either.

Thursday

It's the Smallville season finale, "Arctic." This could be the last time you ever see Lex and Clark face off, with the smouldering and the Lex wanting to probe Clark's secrets. After tonight's episode, Lex actor Michael Rosenbaum is leaving the show — possibly never to return — and Lana will only be back for a few episodes. Also possibly gone? Chloe. Oh, and the show's co-creators Miles Millar and Al Gough are also taking off. So even though Smallville is coming back next season, this may as well be the show's final episode because it'll be almost unrecognizable next year. So maybe we'll actually get some resolution of the show's main plot arc? It might be worth tuning in just to find out. In any case, Lex finds Clark's Fortress of Solitude and learns Clark's secrets. Anyway, it's on The CW at 8. Here's a clip:

And then Lost has the first hour of its three-hour season finale, "There's No Place Like Home Pt. 1." The survivors and the freighter people begin their final confrontation. And here's a trailer:

Also, TVLand has the 1999 movie of My Favorite Martian, starring Christopher Lloyd, at 8 PM. And TBS has the original Austin Powers at 9.

Friday

The Sarah Jane Adventures is already zooming towards the end of its first season on Sci Fi, with the second half of "Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane?" airing at 8 and the first half of "The Lost Boy" airing at 8:30. Sarah Jane gets restored to our timeline, but then her cozy little family gets broken up a different way: a family turns up claiming that her adoptive son Luke is their child. Oh, and Maria's dad finds out all about Sarah Jane's world-saving activities, and decides Maria should have no part of it. Here's a clip:

And at 9 PM, Sci Fi has the first half of a Doctor Who two parter, "The Sontaran Strategem." Some people liked this episode a lot better than I did, with the campy dancing and weird Sergey Brin knock-off. In any case, it brings the Doctor and Donna back to present-day Earth for a reunion with Martha Jones and the military organization U.N.I.T. You can read our recap of the episode here.

Battlestar Galactica has a new episode at 10 PM on Sci Fi: "Guess What's Coming To Dinner." The human survivors of the Cylon genocide reluctantly join forces with a group of rebel Cylons to destroy the crucial Resurrection Hub. And it looks like Hera has a favorite auntie. Oh, and if you're in Seattle, you can watch it with a group of fans. Here's the trailer:

Saturday

As usual, the CW has two Spectacular Spider-Man episodes starting at 9:30, including a new episode at 10. But this week's new episode is pretty special, because it features the debut of the sexiest female character from Spider-Man's comics (sorry, Mary Jane): the Black Cat. And just to up the sexiness quotient considerably, she's voiced by none other than Tricia Helfer, aka the Cylon Six on Battlestar Galactica. How much sexiness do you think you can stand at 10 AM on a Saturday morning?

And meanwhile, the Cartoon Network has another new Ben 10: Alien Force at 10: "Max Out." "The team searches for Gwen's missing brother Ken and uncovers a secret of the DNAliens invasion." And then at 10:30, there's a new Transformers: Animated, which sounds like the sort of wheel-spinning episode (sorry!) that TV shows do while they're waiting for the end of the season to shake things up: "Investigating a mysterious race car, Bumblebee gets involved with an illegal underground street racing circuit, which also captures the attention of the Decepticons." Street racing? Why would the Autobots care about street racing? Whatevs.

The Sci Fi Channel is showing all three 1980s Indiana Jones movies, starting at 4 PM. (They're also showing during the day on Sunday.) Also, at midnight, Sci Fi has Timeline, followed by Tremors 4: The Legend Begins and Prophecy: The Foresaken. (Why did it take until Tremors 4 for the legend to begin??)

Sunday

At 9 PM, Sci Fi is showing its big promo special about the new Indiana Jones movie: Mystery Of The Crystal Skulls. Apparently there really are 13 crystal skulls, of which a few have actually been found in Mexico and Central and South America. And they're a huge mystery to archeologists because they're so perfect and awesome. Not only that, but it turns out that if you assemble all 13 skulls, you can stop the world from coming to an end in 2012. (Why is Sci Fi the only channel reporting on this? You'd think CNN and C-Span would be interested in whether the world was ending in four years as well.) Anyway, it's investigative journalism at it's finest, and in no way is it just a cheesy promo stunt.

And Spike is showing Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back at 8 PM.

Face-slamming excitement initiates the episode: Starbuck has a slitty-eyed glaring contest with Helo as he leads a mutiny on the Demetrius and tries to throw her in the brig. She's totally pissed off and Athena grabs her in a headlock while Helo yells "stand down!" a lot. More stand-downs ensue as Starbuck's cylon honey Anders goes nuts, aiming his gun at random people and demanding that Starbuck be reinstated as captain. Helo is yelling at Gaeta to jump the ship to its rendezvous with the Galactica, and Anders is yelling at him to stop, and Starbuck is freaking out, and in the craziness Anders shoots Gaeta right in the leg.

At that moment, Starbuck seems to snap out of crazy art girl mode, quickly patching Gaeta's wound and telling Helo that he was right. The Demetrius shouldn't go chasing after Leoben's promised Base Ship and cylon allies. Instead, Starbuck should take a Raptor, pack it with Leoben's cylon ass, and check out the Base Ship story for herself. A lot of "no ways" and "stand downs" later, Starbuck has an away team: Athena to be cylon interpreter, Leoben, Anders because he's Starbuck's arm candy, and a hot throwaway cast member who you know is going to be dispensable as soon as she says Starbuck as been "kicking ass all along." The Demetrius is going to wait for them for 15 hours, while Gaeta's leg goes to shit, before jumping to the Galactica rendezvous.

Oh poor throwaway cast member with the cute haircut, we will sorely miss you because as soon as the Raptor lands on board the least-crippled Base Ship, you die. But before we get to the death orgy, though, let's assess the coolness factor of seeing the horrible remains of the cylon civil war. As soon as Starbuck and Co. jump to Leoben's coordinates and tune out Leoben's inane commentary ("Can you feel the excitement? God is making my cylon nutsacs tingle!"), they are in the middle of carnage.

This really is a great scene, as the Raptor moves slowly through the charred remains of the Base Ships, their broken limbs glowing red like ripped muscles or burst blood veins. We know the Raiders are organic, but this is the first time we've seen the biological side of Base Ships. Does that mean the Base Ships are potentially autonomous beings like the Raiders are? Turns out the whole battle scene is what Starbuck has been painting in her cabin all this time, and the giant flaming comet she drew was actually the Base Ship they're about to rendezvous with. Whoa, religious epiphany, destiny, all that crap. Much oohhing from Leoben. Luckily nobody sees a giant electric Buddha like in Matrix Revolutions.

When the Raptor lands in the Base Ship from Starbuck's paintings, we get more of the organic creepy-coolness: the ship bay closes up with a slimy thud, red sinews and muscles blocking vacuum rather than a metal bay door. And more yuck awaits. As the away team steps out of the Raptor, Athena is immediately met with a bunch of Sharons in matching baby-blue sweater sets (scary!) who all want her to help them rebel against the Sixes. They start pushing Athena to teach them free will because Six is making bad decisions and "she must be stopped." Weirdly, Athena rejects their requests, telling them they should pick a side and stay with it, not leave at the first sign of trouble. Huh? Didn't Athena herself chuck her cylon sisters when the going got rough and she got busy with Helo? Whatever. Now she's all about the "stick with your sisters" thing.

After a tense meeting with the Sixes and Leobens, where one Six says something pretty funny about how all the Leoben models are obsessed with Starbuck, the alliance is secured. The cylons will help the humans, and in return the humans will help the Base Ship get its FTL drives back in order. They'll all go to Earth together. But first, Starbuck needs to fulfill that destiny that Leoben keeps whining about by visiting the cylon Hybrid who controls the Base Ship. That's the crazy, babbling lady who lives in goo and basically is a kind of avatar of the Base Ship's consciousness — or maybe the pilot of the Base Ship, or its symbiote.

But before the Hybrid tells us the future and reveals the plot arc of the rest of the season, Six kills the hot expendable crew member. Turns out hottie is a former member of the resistance on Caprica, and she killed that particular Six model in an incredibly horrible way in a septic tank. When the Six mentions her murder to expendable hottie, unfortunately hottie says something kind of insensitive, like "I'd do it again." So Six beats the shit out of her and kills her. Then Anders goes crazy and wants to kill the Six, and Starbuck is like "stand down!" and it looks like the alliance will be off until another Six comes in and talks to the murdering Six, telling her stuff like, "I thought we'd worked through this." Then she kisses the other Six and pulls the trigger on the gun Anders has aimed at her head. Whoa! So two things: One, holy crap. And two, apparently cylons can be extremely traumatized by being killed. Which makes sense.

The Starbuck-Hybrid meeting scene is nearly as cool as the tour of the cylon combat zone, and for some of the same reasons. Not only does the meeting advance the plot and give us more hints about the human-cylon alliance to come, but it also gives us a sharper understanding of how the cylon technology works. Starbuck is visiting the Hybrid because Leoben has told her it can reveal her true mission or path or whatever. But the complement of cylons are there because they have to take the Hybrid offline so the Raptor can reboot their FTL.

When everybody comes to the Hybrid's chamber, the Hybrid's babble makes more sense than last time we visited her: a lot of what she's saying are clearly commands to the ship, or maybe just logs of processes happening on the ship. She mentions the FTL failure several times, and then says repeatedly that "the children of the one reborn shall find their own country." I'm guessing Starbuck is the "one reborn." Then things get seriously awesome because they unplug the Hybrid and she totally freaks out, screaming in this eerie voice and seemingly inducing a Centurion to shoot one of the Sharons. (Remember, they're out of range of a Resurrection Ship, so death is for keeps.) As the Sharon dies, her blood staining the Hybrid's goo, Starbuck grabs the Hybrid and yells "What the frack?" or something like that.

And suddenly the Hybrid focuses totally on Starbuck, saying, "You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace." Then she goes kind of J.J. Abrams on our asses, and adds, "The missing three will give you the five who come from the home of thirteenth." Six and Starbuck quickly figure out that this means they need to reanimate D'Anna, the de-activated cylon model 3, who has seen the faces of the final 5 cylons, who apparently know about the "home of the thirteenth tribe," AKA Earth. So they zoom off to rendezvous with the Demetrius, and then head onward to resurrect D'Anna (damn I missed Xena, so thanks for that).

Meanwhile, as all this coolness has been going on, Roslin is confronting her mortality and starting to see why Baltar's message is so seductive. As she bonds with another cancer patient in the hospital who likes Baltar's message, she begins to realize that Baltar has captured a true desire in the fleet for answers to their spiritual agony in the wake of the cylon attacks. Roslin even has a vision of heaven as Baltar describes it: an otherworldly place full of her dead family, which she can reach on a ship that travels across the water.

Oh, and by the way, Roslin has one scene where she's handing off power to Foster while she undergoes her final treatments which is awesome for two reasons. First, Roslin doesn't have her wig on — she's totally bald. And she looks frakkin gorgeous. Brief moment of wow. And of course she's handing over all her power to Foster, which is a brief moment of the other kind of wow. Not so good.

By the end of the episode, Roslin is so taken with her dream of heaven and her reevaluation of Baltar that she visits Adama in his quarters and tells him she's starting to believe in what Adama calls "Baltar's horse manure." Adama is weirded out, but listens to Roslin then leans into kissing-range of her face and says that she's made him have faith in their trip to Earth. But they don't kiss. Damn.

Previews for next week look seriously exciting, though: Athena and Helo's hybrid baby Hera has started drawing scary kid drawings full of "66666" and pictures of blonde ladies. Has she become Damien? Or is she just yearning for Six the cylon? Tune in next week to find out!

So it turns out the new Trek movie has more ties to the other movies' continuity than we thought. The movie starts out after 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis, the last movie featuring Picard and crew. (I guess it's somehow made clear this is taking place later than that.) And the first character we meet in the film is Leonard Nimoy's Ambassador Spock, who's somehow back from Romulan space. And then we follow the older Spock back in time to the beginnings of the Kirk era, where we meet Zachary Quinto's young Spock. (As well as Baby Spock and Baby Kirk, by the sound of things.)

Meanwhile, Abrams told Rolling Stone the monster definitely died soon after the end of Cloverfield. "Yes, he's dead. Ultimately the bombs kill him." The monster's name? "We just called him Clover." Also, that object you saw drop into the water in the very last Coney Island flashback? Abrams says the Cloverfield crew have two theories about it. One of those theories may get followed up if they choose to take the story further. They've been kicking around ideas for a sequel, but nothing is definite yet. [Trek Movie, via TrekWeb]

Resurrection

Q: Do you have any dreams for directors or cast in Resurrection yet? Have you spit balled a few ideas?

Not just yet. I hardly ever develop 'pie-in-the-sky' sort of ideas for directors. There are so many great directors out there. I wish I could say that I had a particular wish list, but that's not how my brain operates.

Q: Why did you decide to write Resurrection ?

I love science fiction, and like anyone who loves science fiction I've been watching TV shows and movies and reading comics about alien invasions for my whole life, practically. At the conclusion of every one of them I was always left with the question: "Well, what now?" You have a world that is fundamentally changed. Changed infrastructure-wise but also sociologically, politically, and economically. I'm really sort of fascinated by how we would rebuild things. What survives and what doesn't in terms of our ideals and our beliefs?

For example, if aliens were to invade, it would throw our whole religious system for a loop. Because we're supposed to believe that man was created by god and that we are the only life in the universe what happens when that belief is not just challenged, but completely proven false. There are a million questions just like that about a world post-alien invasion and post-contact with an alien race. What happens to America if there's no president? What happens to America if there's no line of succession any more? We take democracy for granted in this country, but democracy doesn't just exist because we want it to. It was fought for and constructed very deliberately hundreds of years ago. If you got rid of all of the things that were keeping that system in place, how would the vacuum be filled afterwards?

Q: How will this be different from other post-apocalyptic movies coming out like The Road?

I loved The Road. I read it and I thought it was incredibly gripping and moving. The world that Resurrection is in is very different from The Road. As bad a shape as the world is in at the beginning of Resurrection, it's in much, much worse shape in The Road... There are all sorts different projects that are out there that deal with life post-apocalypse. What makes Resurrection different is they are dealing with life post-alien initiated apocalypse. And as a result I'm getting into a couple of things that you can't do, post-nuclear, post-zombie or post-natural disaster. Pick your brand of apocalypse. We are going to be showing some pieces of alien technology, some alien cells. We've got the whole mythology of, "Why were the aliens invading us in the first place?"

Q: What are you most excited to see be brought to live on screen from Resurrection?

One of the things that's in the comic that we're excited about seeing on the film are the carriers. They are these massive, massive ships. I'm excited to see these on a huge scale.

Young X-Men

Q: Where did you get the idea to start the comic with a flash-forward?

I love the flash-back and flash-forwarding. In comics, I feel like have the most license to play along with that stuff. It's something I like to do a lot. In case of Young X-Men it was actually a very practical thing. I knew that I wanted that first issue to be an homage to the first half of Giant-Size X-Men Number 1, where Professor X went around the world and gathered up the team of new X-Men. And I knew I wanted to do the same thing with Cyclops. The problem is that as a whole first issue goes, if I were to just come in and just do Cyclops assembling the team, you would never get a chance to see the team in action. As a fully formed team in costume, doing their thing. The solution was the flash-forward. Then I get to do my homage to Giant-Size X-Men while at the same time not making readers wait until issue 2 to in order to see this team fully formed and kicking butt. And then of course since one of the characters is a precognitive it just seemed natural to make the flash forward something that she was predicting that would happen in the future.

Q: Are any other X-Men making an appearance?

In the second arc for sure we'll have a lot of the tried and true characters. Basically, this first arc is all about putting the team together and setting them up. Once I've accomplished that I'm going to start integrating them pretty tightly into the X-Universe.

Q: Any characters that will be coming back that you want to tell us about?

I would definitely expect to see Anole, who is a very popular character, a character I certainly like. I don't want to spoil too much, but you can definitely expect to see Anole and a few other characters from the past. Including one X-Man that I don't think anyone knows about just yet.

Q: Tell us more about Ink, the character that can take on powers from his tattoos. Are there any other tattoos he will be getting in the future?

If you go back to the first issue and you look on the cover in that flash forward. You can see that he's shaved his head and he has two lightening bolt tattoos on the side of his head so those are new powers that he'll be getting. My goal with Ink is to constantly be changing him by giving him new tattoos, thus giving him new powers. So he's going to be pretty dynamic.

Q: Why did you choose to bring Dust into the group? I know that it is a timely subject matter but were there any other reasons?

When you are trying to fit characters for a team you want a mix of a lot of different things. You want a mix of genders and powers. It wouldn't make sense to have three bruisers on the team. You want a mix of ethnicities and beliefs and what not. I also didn't want there to be just one token woman, I wanted a couple female characters. And having a character who is Muslim and from Afghanistan, in today's political climate, I think is interesting. It's not dissimilar to having Colossus having on team X-Men during the height of the Cold War. But mostly I thought her power worked really well in connection with everyone else's powers. She's has this really cool power in terms of being able able to turn herself into a sandstorm, I think she has a lot of different potential, in terms of spinning it. I thought it fit with the whole team.

Q: A lot of writers have started incorporating timely matters with the Middle East into their writing such as prejudices and terrorism, are you?

I have an idea for a Dust-centric story, that doesn't actually deal with terrorism but deals with prejudice against Muslims. That's a story I'm kind of dying to tell. I'm envisioning a self contained story with her. The idea is a little incompatible with another character I've got so I have to make some choices in terms of which story I want to tell and how I want to tell it. They also have a lot of plans for Dust that have nothing to do with her heritage. I don't mean to be coy but I like to keep my options open. Particularly if I make my way through another book I want to be able to allow inspiration to strike. It drives my editors crazy.

Q: What are your plans for Cyclops? A lot of people have problems with this character and I know you are planning to do new things with him.

Everyone sort of has issues with Cyclops. Ironically I think a lot of people are changing the way they feel about Cyclops because of Messiah Complex and these other big events that rocked him to his core. He's changed. He's become a different person. He's become ruthless. All of that is in service of a personal evolution. He's been becoming his own man for years and years. His whole adult life he's lived in the shadow of Professor X. I think what people are reacting to, both positively and negatively, is [the fact that] he isn't reacting the way he used to because it's sort of like a child that leaves a parent. That is very much the type of relationship that he had with Professor X, it was a father and son type of relationship. And in here you have him moving out and charting his own course. And like anyone else who has done that, sometimes the parent doesn't like it, or the people around you don't like it. You have to take risks and try different things. He is trying to discover who he is. He spent all of these years living in someone's shadow, only servicing their agenda.

Q: Well he does seem to have a lot more personality than before.

I think he's a fun character. I think Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon over the years have done some really amazing things with him. I think it has gone a long way towards making him a more interesting and dynamic character.

Q: What do you think about Jason Schwartz the writer for Gossip Girl going to write the new Young X-Men?

Yeah I heard that the news and I thought, 'Really, the Young X-Men movie, you don't say.' I'll be really curious to see how that movie turns out. I'm really glad that they are making all these comic book movies now. It's a great time to be a comic book fan.

Spider-Man

Q: Now that Peter Parker is single, what are Black Cat's chances with him?

Oh yeah that's funny. A lot of people ask about Black Cat. I can tell you right now we just don't have any plans to bring her into the book. It's not like we don't like her or anything, we've just got a lot of balls in the air right now and she just doesn't happen to be one of them. One of the big things that is different after One More Day, [is that] Black Cat no longer knows his identity. So the whole nature of a Spider-Man, Black Cat relationship will be very, very different, just because she doesn't know who Spider-Man is.

Q: How did you decide what to change in One More Day?
A lot of it was decided before the other writers and I were brought on. There was some discussion of do we resurrect Gwen Stacy while we were at it? And we collectively decided that obviously we wouldn't. A lot of it was decided before we got involved so I can't really speak as why they decided to change this or that. Most of it is just the natural outcome, of okay, Spider-Man is no longer married and the world no longer knows his identity.

Q: How have you dealt with the fan reaction with One More Day? Does it ever change your writing?

In Young X-Men there was a lot of negative reaction to the first issue. I think what you have to do is set your course and stick to it....I'm at the point where I'm almost immune to criticism. When you're working on something that is just starting out like Brand New Day is or Young X-Men, we're plotted out for the next year and a half at least. So we know what's coming down the road, the fans don't. There's no reason to change because people's reactions are based on a couple of months worth of reading. Those are not necessarily the same reactions they will have a year from now or two years from now. It's like trying to govern by the polls from a poll that was taken a year and a half ago. The problems that we are dealing with on Spider-Man in terms of story and things that we are trying to work out are about a year and a half removed now from where the books currently are. So you really can't react to people's reactions. You have to go forward to what you have planned in the first place.

Q: Why doesn't the Green Goblin know Spider-Man's identity?

Simply put everyone who knew Spider-Man's identity after One More Day, doesn't. So there would be no way for him to keep that knowledge. It would be like everyone forgot his identity except for this person or that person. This was something we had to decide very early on was, who knows and who doesn't know it and the thing that we all agreed upon was best to keep it simple. Let's come up with one bright light rule: nobody knows. And anybody that we want to know, it turns into a story about how they found out. Because now everybody has to rediscover that information.

The Flash

Q: It's an old question, I know, but why did The Flash (Bart Allen) have to die?

That was another thing that was decided before me. I killed him but it wasn't my decision. Basically DC came to me and said look we're killing off Bart Allen, we're going to do it in five issues, do you want to write those five issues? And I said yes and even though I didn't necessarily think that Bart needed to be killed off. I was determined that if I was going to make it the most meaningful death possible.

Q: Was it hard for you to write that, the end to a character?

It was actually a lot of fun. I really, really enjoyed writing those. Those five issues were a really pleasant writing experience. Maybe because I've never really worked with anything quite like that before. Because I knew my character was going to ultimately die, I could do crazy things. Like reveal his secret identity in the second issue, and have him break up with his girlfriend. I could blow up a lot of things knowing I would never have to put them back together. I wouldn't have to put any genies back in the bottle. It was very educational for me to be able to write with abandon like that. I tried to do this a lot in Resurrection. That is, sort of write like each issue is the last issue. So it creates this sense of unpredictability so you never really know what's going to happen. Anyone can live or die. The book can go in any direction and it's going to be a wild ride. And I learned that by doing The Flash.

Nowhere Man

Q: When are we going to be able to see your Virgin Comics series Nowhere Man?

My editor was just asking me that very same question earlier today. I've got to finish the scripts, it will still be a couple of months. I'm not quite far enough to be able to solicit the book yet, but hopefully there will be a release date shortly.

Q: What can you tell us about it?

Basically what is exciting to me about it is that it's science fiction. Like all good science fiction it has a lot to say about out present society. Right now in the post 9/11 world we are asking more than ever, how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice for security. And Nowhere Man is set in a society where they have answered that question in an ultimate way. It's a world where there is very little black and white, there are a lot of shades of grey. Even our protagonist will discover that he might be on the wrong side. So the characters are constantly asking themselves questions, that hopefully people will start asking about our world today.

In Transformers, the Megatron toy can transform into a Walther P38 gun, a model popular with the Nazis in World War II. This transformation gives him a giant trigger in his crotch (you can see here in the toy). It allows him to deliver focused energy beam blasts. But if we look at the actual capabilities of the Walther P38, we can see it's a semi-automatic but not really any more powerful than the typical hand gun. Obviously a giant-sized one would deliver more oomph. However, I think we can safely say this isn't the biggest or hardest of the crotch weapons.

Astro Boy deploys a machine gun from his butt. This is his main weapon, aside from super-strength and jet-powered flight. He can gun down bad guys, but the fact that these guns sprout from his ass makes them unwieldy.

The infamous cock and ball gun featured in the psycho-vampire flick from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, From Dusk Til Dawn, is a gooder. It can slay a vampire from yards away, and it just looks plain cool. It's hard; it has those semi-automatic testicles attached; and it's really everything a good crotch weapon should be. But is it really big enough?

Kekko Kamen uses her pussy as her finishing weapon in the eponymously-titled manga by hentai auteur Go Nagai. She uses the notorious headscissors takedown to mash her crotch into the bad guy's face and get him good. Nobody survives this ninja lady's crotch. Great weapon for close-range combat.

The main character in recent film Teeth is a mutant who has razor-sharp teeth embedded in her vagina. She uses her super-crotch to defeat a rapist and mangle two guys who have treated her horribly but nevertheless want to stick their junk in the toothy place. This is a great surprise weapon, because our heroine looks like a sweet little teenager who goes to church and eats oatmeal. Points on this one for viciousness and power of surprise.

The Codpiece is a character from occasionally bizarre comic Doom Patrol who basically has a cock-shaped crotch weapon that does everything: it shoots fire, it drills, it slaps people around, and it even grows a weird plunger-looking apparatus. Plus, it looks as spiffy as it could possibly be (see image up top). In terms of versatility and firepower, plus sheer audacity, I'd say the Codpiece is a standout.

In the aptly-named Cannon Crotch flash game, you are Cannoncrotch, a hero who fights the Nazis with your crazy firepowering crotch. Not only is this game one of the most intensely-satisfying flash game experiences you'll ever have, it also wins points for not making any bones (heh) about what it's really about. You play this naked xkcd-looking guy who is basically jizzing bullets. Nice. Get your crotch on with this game here.

Robot Jox has a lovely giant robot transformation scene which is clearly a tip of the hat to our pal Megatron's trigger crotch. When one of the big robots is injured, it fights back by opening up its enormous crotchal region, and releasing a massive chainsaw that slowly and hilariously extends into many-toothed, killer erection. See the scene here if you don't believe me. All those spammers should put that clip into their emails if they really want to sell us their expando-pills.

I'm going to have to go with Codpiece as the winner here, since his weapon is so versatile. But the girl in Teeth makes a close second. I hereby declare Codpiece the WINNER OF THE CROTCHIES.

The Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster. The cocktail from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy which says:

[T]he effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. The Gu ide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterwards. The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than the Encyclopedia Galactica.

• Take the juice from one bottle of that Ol' Janx Spirit.
• 
  
• Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V - Oh, that Santraginean sea water, it says. Oh those Santraginean fish!!!
• 
  
• Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (it must be properly iced or the benzene is lost).
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• Allow four litres of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it (in memory of all those happy Hikers who have died of pleasure in the Marshes of Fallia).
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• Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark Qualactin Zones; subtle, sweet, and mystic.
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• Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian suns deep into the heart of the drink.
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• Sprinkle Zamphour.
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• Add an olive.
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• Drink... but... very carefully...

Finagle's Folly: A cocktail which McCoy makes for Kirk on the 10,000th occasion that Kirk is depressed over losing control over his ship. (In this case, to a supercomputer in "The Ultimate Computer.") McCoy brags that his cocktail is famous "from here to Orion." But Kirk tastes it and grimaces. (Scotty probably would have liked it.) Oh, and apparently, Quark on Deep Space Nine makes a decent Finagle's Folly as well.

The Mother Teresa. In one of Spider Robinson's many Callahan's Crosstime Saloon novels, which all take place in a bar as you might imagine, he invents a type of martini called the Mother Teresa, because it has a prune resting in the bottom of the glass.

The Bull Shot. Larry Niven's version of Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is called the Draco Tavern, and the bartender sells all sorts of weird drinks (including "Green Kryptonite") to various alien visitors. One of the most popular drinks seems to be the Bull Shot, which Niven describes as "consomme and vodka." This is especially popular with the Glig, "grey and compact beings." (It's short for "Gligstith(click)optok.")

The Flaming Rum Monkey. Author Pat Murphy mentions the Flaming Rum Monkey in her metafictional odyssey Adventures In Time And Space With Max Meriwell, which features Murphy's pseudonym Mary Maxwell as a fictional character. Mary makes a habit of ordering a Flaming Rum Monkey to see what the bartenders will come up with, since they have to invent one on the spot. But in fact Murphy has come up with a recipe for a Flaming Rum Monkey, and here it is:

Put a teaspoon of brown sugar, a sprinkling of cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and a teaspoon of coconut syrup (the kind used in pina coladas) in a warm mug. Add a little boiling water—just enough to dissolve the sugar. Let the mixture steep for a minute. Pour in two ounces of dark Jamaican rum and one ounce of dark creme de cacao. Fill the mug with boiling water and stir.

Now for the flames! Put a pinch of brown sugar in a big spoon. Fill the spoon with 151 rum. To warm the rum, hold the spoon over the mug filled with hot water.

Light the rum in the spoon. Tip the spoon into the mug. The mixture in the mug will burn with a lovely blue flame.

Don't singe your eyebrows. Don't burn your tongue. Blow out the flames and try a sip of your Rum Monkey. Hot, sweet, and touched with coconut. Enjoy your Rum Monkey and dream of possibilities.

Star Wars Cocktail. Want to make one of those weird drinks they're drinking in the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars? This site claims to have an actual recipe — and it sounds like the most revolting drink imaginable. Equal parts Southern Comfort, Amaretto, Sweet'n'Sour mix, and Sprite... you might as well just smoke some crack and drink the entire contents of the Slurpee machine at the movie theater. Which might be just the ticket for enjoying Clone Wars, you never know.

The "foaming cocktail". Actually, we don't know the name of the drink Za orders in Iain M. Banks' The Player Of Games, but it's referred to as a "foaming cocktail." And here's what he actually orders:

I'd like a double standard measure of staol and chilled Shungusteriaung warp-wing liver wine bottoming a mouth of white Eflyre-Spin cruchen-spirit in a slush of medium cascalo, topped with roasted weirdberries and served in a number three strength Tipprawlic osmosis-bowl, or your best approximation thereof.

The baby jellyfish - small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner - slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.

"Wow," he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. "Don't try this at home, fleshboy."

Adrenalin and Soma. The favorite cocktail of cowardly thief Vila on British space opera Blake's 7. It sounds like a weird mixture of uppers and downers — like an Irish coffee — but it always seems to make Vila quite mellow.

The protagonist was a starry-eyed, two-dimensional protagonist named Go who wore white ankle-length pants and struck cool, determined poses while moving in simple staccato animation. His car was called Ma-ha Gogo, or Mach No. Five, and it did seemingly impossible things like jump through the air, grow super-grip tires on command, and slash obstacles with rotary swords. (The series title has a triple meaning—the name of the car, the name of the boy who drives it, and an exclamatory expression.)

Mach GoGoGo was an instant hit. The plots were easy to follow, the characters immediately likable. Neither writer/producer Tatsuo Yoshida or director Tsuyoshi Sasakawa were car enthusiasts—in fact, neither even had a drivers license. But it didn't really matter. The two knew how to craft a good story. The near-impossible challenges imposed on the protagonist by evildoers were the perfect setup for themes like revenge, competition, and honor to play out over and over again. In one series of early episodes (each story often spanned two or three), Go races against a mysterious, remote-controlled, robot-driven car that has been causing accidents. Go quickly gains a reputation as the mercenary hero who can fight superhuman nemeses that even the cops are helpless against, and inadvertently launches into a busy career of globe-hopping and car-racing.

Go is cool and collected, but the rest of the anime is chock full of humor and an ironic mix of strengths and weaknesses. The girlfriend, Trixie, might complain about her foot hurting, but then she'll parachute out of a burning airplane; the father, who created the Mach 5, is an engineering genius but a social goof; and his little brother who runs around in a candy-striped bodysuit with his monkey, often solves crimes way before the adults do.

The characters in the original Speed Racer are not atypical of Japanese anime. In fact, you see the repetition of these same types of characters to this day—the adventurous, disobedient young male hero, the feminine-yet-sassy girlfriend, the wise but slightly goofy father, and the unbearably cute extras.

The original series ran over 52 episodes. It kicked off in a prime spot, 7PM on Sunday nights—one of the few times when children and families in Japan gathered to watch TV. You can still rent the dubbed originals at certain video rentals stores, and on Netflix if you're lucky. An anime remake came out in the 90s and was aired in the US, but it's not quite the same thing.

On one level, the Wachowski brothers' new Speed Racer preserves a lot of the elements of the classic anime. The Mach 5's special features are derived from the original, and Go, or Speed, is pretty much the same dude—as are some of the other main characters. But the similarities end there. Of course, the obvious difference is that the Hollywood version is live action and features super CGI and cost a gazillion dollars more to produce.

But more importantly, the essence of storytelling is completely different. The Hollywood version is chock full of drama and emotions—the child who dreams about racing all day in school, the mother who encourages him to follow his dreams, the family's tragedy of the dead Rex Racer (Speed's older brother). There's all this buildup and tension. None of this in the original anime. The very first episode begins very abruptly: Go "borrows" his dad's super car and enters it in a race, and wins. There's a certain charm about that blunt simplicity that is increasingly hard to preserve as the prerequisites for a box office action movie become more elaborate.

So whether you come home from Speed Racer opening night feeling amazingly hyped up or strangely dissatisfied, try to watch at least one episode of the original anime sometime soon. It's worth the 30 minutes, if only to see how its creators applied antiquated animation to portray superfast, superhuman car racing.

From the moment the movie begins with young Speed Racer in elementary school spacing out during a test by drawing pictures of cars, you know the movie isn't just going to be a lot of empty visuals and "oh look we can make live action look cartoony." For when Speed draws, the next thing you see is him zooming through a landscape that looks just like his drawing — it's a lovely, quick way of showing us the inside of a kid's imagination, as he draws himself crossing the finish line and lets out a "crowd goes wild" noise in the middle of class.

There's a lot of stuff like this scene in the movie, where kids are going nuts over pop culture — and it works. The kid excitement in Speed Racer is genuinely infectious. You'll find yourself whooping along with Speed's little brother Spridle and chimp Chim Chim when they watch anime on TV and suddenly jump inside it, fighting each other and the spikey mechas with bright CGI lines careening around their bodies, and their faces transfigured by crazed, abandoned childish delight. Maybe it's just because a lot of us who grew up with nutty, zoomy pop culture like original Japanese cartoon Speed Racer still have the walls of our minds painted with crayon-bright explosions. Whatever the reason, the Wachowskis have hit a sweet, goofy nerve here and they play it well.

The plot of the flick couldn't be simpler. Nice kid Speed Racer wants nothing more than to compete in the big leagues of racing. His family runs Racer Motors, a tiny independent car design company that turns out beauties like the Mach 5 (and later, the ultra-awesome Mach 6). After he wins his first big race, giant mega-corp businessman Royalton tries to become Speed's sponsor, promising him all the riches in the world. But Speed turns him down because he wants to stay independent with Racer Motors. That's when Royalton gets ugly and says racing is all about money and power and Speed can never hope to compete without corporate sponsorship.

Will the love of family and indie production values be able to topple big business and evil corporate overlords? And who is the mysterious Racer X who keeps helping him fight the evil Royalton thugs? That's what Speed Racer is all about. There's a heaping dose of Matrix-style politics here, and even a long speech from Royalton about the nature of power that totally felt like a satiric take on the Architect's speech in Matrix Reloaded. Luckily, we don't linger too long in the chambers of philosophy and instead head out to the glowing, crazy, hallucinogenic race track.

As I said earlier, you won't be shocked to know that the visuals in Speed Racer are seriously awesome. You've probably seen some previews by now, so you know the cars swirl and shimmy and the citiscapes are full of dazzling rays of light. Nothing on screen remains unaltered by CGI: it's augmented reality top to bottom, and the attention to detail is sometimes a little overwhelming. What may startle you, though, is the feeling you got watching The Matrix for the first time and said, "Holy fuck what the hell I have never seen that before and it looks crazy fucking great." There are a lot of things in Speed Racer your eyeballs will be experiencing for the first time — cool ways of composing scenes to make them look like cartoons, awesome concept design, and ninja fight scenes that are both exciting and silly enough for kids.

Those silly fight scenes are the other really cool thing about this flick, especially for the usually grim-and-dirty Wachowskis. A whole lot of Speed Racer is pure CGI slapstick and it's funny as hell. Blink and you'll miss some zany shit like a crazed Segway race in Royalton's tower, evil racing Vikings doing their evil Viking thang, and ongoing hijinks with Spridle and Chim Chim. Normally, I hate cute kids and monkeys in flicks, but (dare I say it) the Wachowskis did the right thing with them here. We get just enough monkey poop, and then we're back on the mesmerizing race track.

As somebody who watched the Matrix trilogy more times than I care to admit, one of the interesting things about Speed Racer was realizing that maybe those previous movies were actually a lot more tongue-in-cheek than they seemed. Or maybe the Wachowskis have finally grown a sense of humor about their previous deadly-serious, ninja-laden efforts. While Speed Racer may not go down in history like Matrix did, I think it marks a hopeful turning point in the Wachowskis' careers. If they can keep successfully switching gears like this, I think they have a lot more awesome in store for us in years to come.

In the meantime, they've given you a giant dose of fun and flash to start your summer right.

Speed Racer opens tonight.