Star Command is a totally ludicrous attempt to do a Trek-esque space opera on a shoestring budget. During the first hour or so, all of the female cremwmebers wear a white formal uniform that makes them look like strippers during Fleet Week, complete with white dress jackets, white caps and teeny white miniskirts. Later, there's a drill when everybody's asleep, and all the young cadets run onto the bridge of their ship wearing their pajamas... or in some cases, nothing but a T-shirt. Star Trek never did that! And no, I really don't know why my copy of Star Command is only playing in Hungarian. I think it's because the scene isn't dramatic enough in English.

But back to the weird virtual reality world. It's not just crazy torture sequences. There's also a scene where another one of our heroes has a pleasurable V.R. simulation... in which, for some unaccountable reason, he's wearing the puffiest sleeves outside of a Fabio cover. Later on, the ship's captain catches him doing this V.R. simulation, and the hot chick in the bathtub morphs, without any warning, into the captain's scowling head.

Moore, creator of Battlestar Galactica, didn't seem to mind our obnoxious question. Here's what he said:

Well, it's a different concept. The holodeck is a space, and you would go into [it] and 3D forms were created in front of you... This is truly a virtual world, much more akin to a virtual headset. Whereas you have an experiential ability touch things [you're not going into an actual space], so it's a different sort of mechanics. At the story level, we're not explaining the idea that if you die in the virtual space, you die in the real space. [Instead, if you die in the virtual space, you just wake up.]

It's more like gaming is now. You game, you don't get killed, you wake up. We're using it much more psychologically now. The experiences that the astronauts have aboard the spaceship in the virtual space are things that are psychologically motivated. They go in there in and do things for entertainment. [And this reveals something about their personalities, and where they want to spend their time.] When things go wrong in that space, how is it going to affect them in the real world? How does the virtual space affect the real world storyline, and vice versa?

He did admit, in response to another caller, that Virtuality's virtual headsets are pretty similar to the ones you'll see in the BSG prequel Caprica. The main difference is that in Virtuality, there's less of a shared virtual world, and it's not an infinite space with tons of orgy rooms and different environments. Rather, each crewmember has a private virtual reality module, which can be shared but is pretty limited. The show conveys the virtual nature of these environments by filming all the VR scenes in greenscreen, instead of a real setting.

And Moore promises that Virtuality is less serious than the post-apocalyptic BSG. "There's more humor probably in the first 10 minutes of Virtuality than there was in the whole run of Battlestar," he says.

Virtuality is much more about the tensions and manipulations and cross-tensions among a group of people "in a metal tube going in a straight line for a decade or so." In addition to serving in this deep-space exploration mission, they're also taking part in a reality TV show for the viewers at home. And the crew was chosen as much for their diversity and mix of characters — for this reality show — as for their skills, which gives rise to questions over whether the best people for the mission were chosen. Another source of tension: when the crew hears news from Earth (including news of major ecological disasters) they don't know if it's true, or if they're just being fed horrendous news to make the reality TV show better viewing.

These three elements: deep space exploration, VR, and reality TV are "tough to juggle," Moore admits. "It's a very ambitious piece. That was the reaction on the part of Fox when they saw it: It's a very complicated piece with a lot of moving parts." Fox felt the two-hour pilot would have been a great feature film, but weren't sure if it could launch a TV series. But Moore still holds out hope that it could be picked up as a series if the response to the June 26 airing is positive enough. It's also possible the story could be continued as a comic book or as another TV movie.

Also, keep your eyes peeled in the next few days for some special web-only content created for Virtuality:

There is a series of webisodes were created for Virtuailty... The webisodes were episodes of the reality show. You would see pieces of the reality show as it's broadcast back to Earth. That was part of the pitch [to the network. If the show had been picked up, you would have been able to watch installments of Edge of Never, the reality series, on the website.] The concept and plan would have been that you can log in on to the website and there would be information included that would not be accessible to people watching the show. If you wanted to know everything that is going on. The astronauts may not be aware of how the show is being viewed back on Earth, they may not understand how things are. My understanding is right now fox is going to put them up on the Facebook page for Edge of Never In the next few days you'll be able to download or view these webisodes.

This week io9 is launching "The Sims Go Scifi" contest, where you show us screengrabs from the best scifi scenarios you've created in The Sims. Our panel of distinguished judges will pick a winner, who gets a copy of The Sims 3, as well as $250 to spend at an online store of your choice so you can give your own life a makeover as well as your Sim life.

The contest deadline has been extended to Friday. Apologies if anyone had tried to write to the contest address and had problems. That email address should be working now.

Here are the rules:

1. Create a scifi scenario in The Sims 1 or 2, and take screengrabs (no more than 8) or movies (no more than 2) from it to show us your scene or story. You may use user-generated content and mods, as long as they work in the game. The idea is to create a scenario that actually works in the game, not to modify images or machinima after the fact.
2. Include a written description explaining the story and how you made it happen.
3. Submit your screengrabs and description to scifisimscontest@io9.com by midnight PST on June 9.

Here's the gallery, which also includes a photo of the ship's captain, Frank Pike, acting out a Civil War scenario on horseback via the ship's virtual reality modules. And a picture of visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel in action. After this post had already gone up, producer Michael Taylor sent me a bonus image showing the Phaeton's workings, which is now in the gallery.

And because the gallery software doesn't seem to be able to give you a high enough resolution of it, here's that explanation of the Phaeton's physics:

Having read the script to this TV movie (which still could become the pilot for a new series if the stars align just right) I'm incredibly excited to see it play out on screen. Here's the official description:

The crew of the Phaeton is approaching the go/no-go point of their epic 10-year journey through outer space. With the fate of Earth in their hands, the pressure is intense. The best bet for helping the crew members maintain their sanity is the cutting-edge virtual reality technology installed on the ship. It's the perfect stress-reliever until they realize a glitch in the system has unleashed a virus on to the ship. Tensions mount as the crew decides how to contain the virus and complete their mission. Meanwhile, their lives are being taped for a reality show back on Earth in the World Broadcast Premiere of VIRTUALITY airing Friday, June 26 (8:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

Scientists at the Université Libre de Bruxelles have created a computer program that combines existing technologies, allowing them to map your gait with scanning technologies, and create 3-D images of your entire body. Other scientists in Britain are using similar technological marriages to create virtual models of how blood moves through both brain aneurysms and the heart. With enough time and effort, scientists think they could entirely replicate functioning human bodies in the virtual world, possibly eliminating the need for animal research... or any kind of life outside your computer.

Virtual body parts take the guesswork out of medicine [New Scientist]

As the Cyberpunk Project writes in an essay called "Neuromancer Afterlife":

"I am the dead, and their land."

With life redefined, so comes a new afterlife. New gods, new demons, new inhabitants. And many different levels, reincarnations. The body can be remade, copied, clones carry on the family line. Cold sleep, cryogenics extending presence, slow wasting. Cons tructs, down loads of the soul, ghosts. Digital purgatory, brain death.

"For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible."

Omnicient, omnipotent, omnipresent. Demons or gods, they possess power. They are worshipped and feared. The AIs. Religion has advanced with technology, heaven and hell can be interfaced with, the powers addressed. Science has brought back that which was previously done without. Some hint o f symbiosis, of the immortal hive. Others fear them like the lords of Hell. To themselves, they just are. They exist, they reside. They are the infinity of angels on the head of a pin, the threads of the matrix. They, It, is All.

"To live here is to live. There is no difference."

Memories are virtual, we relive them without physically manifesting. Perhaps the mind can be reproduced, decanted into a simulated environment. Perhaps what we ta ke for granted every day is such an experience. It is the age old question of who we are. How do we define ourselves? Bits, bytes? By the flow of information, by wiring, by memory, data? In the Virtual age, what do we become? And were do we go? Is this salvation?

Several people in Neuromancer by William Gibson. Super-hacker Case meets his girlfriend Linda Lee, who was murdered in Chiba City, but her consciousness lives on in the cyber-matrix. And then he and his friends have to steal a ROM containing the personality and memories of McCoy Pauley, aka The Dixie Flatline. And at the end of the book, mocking inhuman laughter suggests that Pauley may have been reanimated permanently in cyberspace, thanks to the help of Neuromancer/Wintermute. As one book puts it, he gets an unsettling vision of his life continuing in cyberspace after his body dies.

Reno in Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams. This uber-hacker dies in the "real" world, but his consciousness lives on in cyberspace, and even manages to ambush the bad guys electronically at the end of the novel.

Pulse (movie). A haxx0r named Josh steals and distributes (why?) a computer virus that opens a portal to the world of the dead. And then he commits suicide, but he keeps popping up on the computer, sending people messages and videos and mortgage-refi spam. (It was 2006.) And later in the movie, you can see spooky dead children trapped inside the computer, and the implication is that the computer is trapping their dead spirits. The only way to escape is to get out of cellphone coverage, because the cellphones have it too. Veronica Mars, why don't you just use your awesome sleuthing skills to solve this one?

River Song and friends in Doctor Who, "Forest Of The Dead". River Song does the time-honored thing of knocking the Doctor out so she can take his place in the brain-frying machine and get cooked to a sizzle. But luckily, FutureDoctor has left a handy escape clause that PresentDoctor can use to bring her back from the dead: her fancy sonic screwdriver retains a copy of her consciousness, and he's able to upload her into the planet-sized library's computer system, where she's stuck taking care of a couple of snot-nosed virtual kids forever. Way better than being dead, right? Right?

Eva Friedel in Memories: Magnetic Rose. This famous opera singer retires to a space station, but when she dies, she leaves behind an A.I. imprint of her personality. Unfortunately, it's damaged and incomplete.

The Mailman and Ery in "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. The Mailman backs up his brain into the system, but his consciousness runs so slow, he only manages to experience fifteen or twenty hours of human awareness in the several years he's running online. Ery plans to do the same thing, only better:

She was grinning now, an open though conspiratorial grin that was very familiar. "When Bertrand Russell was very old, and probably as dotty as I am now, he talked of spreading his interests and attention out to the greater world and away from his own body, so that when that body died he would scarcely notice it, his whole consciousness would be so diluted through the outside world.

"For him, it was wishful thinking, of course. But not for me. My kernel is out there in the System Every time I'm there I transfer a little more of myself The kernel is growing into a true Erythrina, who is also truly me. When this body dies," she squeezed his hand with hers, "when this body dies, I will still be, and you can still talk to me."

The story's hero, Mr. Slippery, thinks about stopping her, but realizes this is an inevitable end-point of human evolution.

Dr. Londes and his cult in Cowboy Bebop, "Brain Scratch." The imaginary Dr. Londes starts a cult that believes in achieving immortality by digitizing your brain and zapping it up to the network. But it turns out Dr. Londes doesn't exist at all, he's just a construct.

Alex McCandless in Freejack. In this movie, which is almost more awesomeness than two hours can contain, Emilio Estevez is a racecar driver who is about to die in a spectacular crash, but his body is whisked forward in time to the dystopian future of 2009. He's held prisoner by Mick Jagger, and it turns out that Anthony Hopkins wants his body. Because Hopkins died in an accident while on a business trip, and his mind is preserved in cyberspace, where he and Estevez face off in a virtual world. Can Estevez keep Hopkins from downloading himself into his body?

Moloch in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "I, Robot... You, Jane." Somehow scanning a demonic spellbook causes the trapped demon to get scanned into the interweb, and it starts having steamy chats with Willow. Ah, cyberlove.

Kenshiro "Zero" Cochrane in Ghost Rider 2099. Zero is a hacker in the futuristic world of Marvel's 2099 universe. He gets hit with a poisoned flechette in Transverse City, but as his body dies, he jacks his consciousness up to the cyberverse. A group of A.I.s living in Cyberspace — in an area known as the Ghostworks — retrieve Zero's concsiousness and download it into a fancy new robot body, to become Ghost Rider 2099, the cyber-spirit of cyber-vengeance. It's cyber!

Almost everyone in "Sweats" by Keith Brooke, in the anthology We Think Therefore We Are. In this story, everybody (or at least everybody rich) gets to go to a virtual afterlife after dying, which also allows a murder victim to prosecute (and persecute) his murderer after death. Even up to the point of stealing his murderer's body and downloading himself into it.

David and Invisigoth in The X-Files, "Kill Switch." A hacker named David develops a way to upload his brain to the net in this episode written by Gibson. And that turns out to come in handy, since later on David's dead body is found, with a cyber-helmet attached to his head. The A.I. that used to be David takes Mulder prisoner because he wants a copy of a killer virus called "Kill Switch" that Mulder has. In the end, both David and his girlfriend, Esther aka Invisigoth, manage to escape into the internet together. In another Chris Carter creation, the short-lived TV series Harsh Realm, Thomas Hobbes is declared dead after his brain is uploaded to a virtual apocalpytic war scenario called "Harsh Realm."

Magi in Neon Genesis Evangelion. The supercomputer "Magi" is created from the mind of Ristsuko Akagi's dead mother. It has "the mother, the scientist and the woman" balancing out its brain. Also, two of the "Evas" are made from the souls of two characters' dead moms.

Graves in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Schizoid Man." This pompous scientist is dying, but he has a plan to transfer his brain into a computer network. Instead, though, he downloads his consciousness into the android Data, whereupon he starts reciting crappy poetry about himself, feuding with Picard and whistling showtunes from Wizard Of Oz. Some people just don't deserve cyber-immortality.

Juliana Soong in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Inheritance." Juliana Soong dies, but her husband Noonien saves her by transferring her into an android body so realistic, she can't even tell she's not the original Juliana. And later on, Noonien achieves a kind of immortality after his own death, by leaving a subroutine in Data's brain that makes Data dream of him.

Roushana Maitland in Song Of Time by Ian R. MacLeod. The protagonist of this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel is a concert violinist who's about to pass into a "virtual afterlife," when she discovers a half-drowned man on the Cornish coast.

Lawnmower Man (the movie). Jobe, the idiot turned cyber-savant, kicks Pierce Brosnan's ass — but then he gets caught in an explosion that destroys the building his body is in. Good thing Joby's found a "backdoor" to the mainframe his consciousness was trapped in. Now cyberspace is his oyster. His salty, slimy, cyber oyster. Full of slimy, salty bad cybersex.

Everyone, in Silicon Karma by Thomas A. Eaton. Someone invents a viable mindscanning technology, which means that everyone goes to cyberspace after he/she dies. And of course, naughty people learn how to hack the afterlife and mess up everyone's experience of Heaven.

Nono in FAQ:Frequently Asked Questions. The hero of this indie film runs away from a totalitarian government, and then at the end of the movie, he sees his dead girlfriend, Angelique, reincarnated inside an erotic broadcast online. He somehow leaves his body behind and goes inside the erotic internet to be with her. (Or does he? It's an art film, so who knows what actually happens?)

Jonathan Wilde, in The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod. Any novel that starts with the line, "He woke, and remembered dying" automatically earns inclusion on this list. In Stone Canal, the anarchist leader Jonathan Wilde lived on Earth 600 years ago, but a group of radicals retrieve his consciousness from online, and put him into a new body. The only trouble is, this new Wilde isn't quite the same person as the original.

A few people in Ghost In The Shell: S.A.C. This anime series features a few people who die but have their consciousnesses saved in virtual networks. For example, in Ghost In The Shell: SAC: Solid State Society, Koshiki gets permission to work from home via a cybernetic body. And then he dies due to illness, but it's two years before anyone notices, because his cybernetic body keeps going under his control, and his consciousness appears to be preserved.

Hellraiser: Hellworld. This direct-to-DVD sequel revolves around an evil MMO called Hellworld (at hellworld.com.) One of the players, Adam, commits suicide, and Pinhead tells Adam's father, "Your son was quite the prodigy. He opened the gateway to Hell. But you never believed yourself, did you?" The other teens who play Hellworld are invited to a special Hellworld party at a spooky mansion, with sex and drugs and blood and guts. Reality blurs together with the MMO world, and the hapless teens realize they're partying... in cyberhell. Or something.

Frankie in "Xanadu" by Thomas M. Disch. Frankie dies and finds his consciousness uploaded to a virtual world. It's all sunshine and puppies at first, until the company that runs this afterlife falls on hard times and needs to raise some more capital. Suddenly, all of the people in cyber-Heaven have to work for a living again — and due to a clerical error, his consciousness is downloaded into a woman's body and he has to work as a prostitute. Probably not the eternal reward he had in mind.

Caprica (TV Series). Long before the Cylons had a plan — or a sexy red dress for that matter — a monotheistic cult-member blows up a monorail in Caprica, killing everyone on board including Zoe Graystone, daughter of computer genius Daniel Graystone. Luckily, she's a computer genius too, and she's already uploaded her consciousness to the 'net, creating a cyber-avatar called Zoe-A that lives on in the virtual orgyspace. (Becuase, of course, the human brain only takes up 300 megabytes of storage space.)

Mr. Hormel in "New Hope For The Dead" by David Langford. In a similar vein, Mr. Hormel is a fully paid-up resident of the digital afterlife, with a trust fund in place to guarantee his eternal rest. Unfortunately, the global economy takes a nosedive, and he's faced with three choices: going into storage as a .zip file until the economy improves, having his clock/processor speed slowed down so that a century passes in a few weeks for him, or working for a living. And the third choice isn't even as fun as it sounds. (You can read the whole thing here.)

Everyone in The Accord by Keith Brooke. The Accord is a virtual realm, where you can upload your consciousness, so it'll live on after you die. (As someone in the novel says, "If you want to enter Heaven, first you must be saved." Ha ha.) Noah has an affair with Priscilla inside the Accord, but her husband finds out and murders her. Noah kills himself so he can be with her in the Accord — but there's a catch. The version of you in the Accord isn't who you were at the moment of death, but who you were the last time you uploaded. The Priscilla who lives on inside the Accord is younger and doesn't remember loving Noah at all. This novel takes place in the same universe as "Sweats," mentioned above.

Vance in Batman Beyond, "Lost Soul." Vance died many years ago, when he was an old man. But his consciousness was digitized and became an A.I. After his son dies of a heart attack, his grandson Bobby reactivates him, so he can help run the family business. But instead, Vance tricks Bobby into putting him online, so he can take over all of Gotham City's computers. And then he takes over the cybernetic Batsuit! Oh noes!

The alien entity in Stargate: SG1, "Entity". This disembodied consciousness, which apparently was originally a living being, travels through a wormhole and downloads itself into the mainframe. Eventually it escapes and downloads itself into Sam Carter's body.

Eiri Masami in Serial Experiments Lain. (Thanks to SumatiAmphimonous for suggesting this one.) The project director of Protocol 7 is in charge of advancing the Wired, the sum total of human computing power, but he also aims to copy his brain into the Wired so he can live forever. A few days after he succeds in doing this, he dies in the "real" world. He aims to convince Lain, a 14 year old girl, to follow in his footsteps.

Paul Durham and others, in Permutation City by Greg Egan. (Thanks to WRyan for suggesting this one.) In the future of 2045, rich people are backing up their brainwaves into complete duplicates, known as Copies, and the Copies have started agitating for full personhood and civil rights. Along comes huckster Paul Durham, who proposes to create a virtual-reality city for the wealthy to live in. Durham disembowels himself in the bathtub, but thousands of years later he's still bopping around Permutation City.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Thanks also to Zack Stentz, Rus McLaughlin, Jack Random, Tim Chevalier and @NoMentionOfKev, @anewthought, @Lazybastid and @cartoonmoney on Twitter.

1. John Anderton, Minority Report

The Setup:

In the year 2054, John Anderton is the chief of Washington DC's elite precrime unit, which uses three psychics to predict when murders will occur and thus prevent them. Arrested for a murder he actually did sort of commit (which is way rarer than it sounds), Anderton is placed in suspended animation in the Precrime holding cells. The case seemingly closed, his longtime mentor Lamar Burgess goes to comfort Anderton's estranged wife Lara, but accidentally lets slip a crucial detail that suggests he knows far more than he is letting on.

Lara, finally believing John's claims of a deeper conspiracy, goes to free him from his cell. It's then full speed ahead to the film's conclusion, where Anderton confronts Burgess and places him in a no-win situation, where the only way to save his beloved Precrime will mean destroying it forever. Burgess kills himself rather than face such a prospect, and Precrime reforms itself, setting free everyone it was holding captive. But did Anderton ever actually get released from his cell, or was this all just a fantasy he created?

The Case For:

Somewhat unusually for a project rooted in a Philip K. Dick short story, Minority Report isn't particularly interested in the nature of reality, at least not in the way we're talking about here. Instead, most of the film concerns itself with debating predetermination versus free will, which is a different philosophical question from whether or not the events we experience are real. As such, it doesn't really make much thematic sense, and there's only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence to suggest Anderton fantasized the whole thing.

Besides, this is Steven Spielberg we're talking about, not David Cronenberg (but more on him in a little bit). It just isn't really his style to reject the reality of his own films. If anything, Spielberg's fantasy and science fiction oeuvre is defined by accepting everything as real, no matter how preposterous.

The Case Against:

Still, that really is an impossibly easy ending. After spending a solid ninety minutes doing nothing but running and hiding from the implacable Precrime officers, the escaped John Anderton has no trouble leaving their facility or breaking into the impressively ritzy social event Burgess is at. Everything just falls into place a bit too neatly, considering pretty much nothing came easy for the first two-thirds of the film. Perhaps the end of Minority Report is a bit like the end of Adaptation - its sheer implausibility is the biggest clue that it isn't exactly happening the way you see it.

Chances That It Really Happened:

90%. A lot of recent Spielberg films have had somewhat weak conclusions, including Munich, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and you don't see anybody claiming those endings didn't happen. Well, plenty of people prefer to believe Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never happened at all, but that's a different issue.

2. Bender, Futurama

The Setup:

In the episode "Obsoletely Fabulous", Bender is sent back to the factory to receive an upgrade that will make him compatible with the new Robot 1-X. Unwilling to go through the painful, personality-altering upgrade, Bender goes on the run, eventually winding up on an island full of obsolete robots. Forsaking his own technological nature, Bender downgrades himself, replacing his metal parts with wood.

After launching an attack on civilization, Bender and his primitive cohorts end up at the Planet Express building, where they manage to do far more harm than even Bender really intended. All of his friends trapped in a raging inferno, a now useless Bender is forced to call upon the aid of Robot 1-X, finally making him realize the new robot has his uses. At that point, he snaps back to the factory, where he is informed the whole thing was just a hallucination, his robotic mind's way of coming to terms with and accepting Robot 1-X. This forces Bender to ask the philosophical question:

If that stuff wasn't real, how can I be sure anything is real? Is it not possible, nay probable, that my whole life is just a product of my or someone else's imagination?

It's a valid question - is any of Futurama real?

The Case For:

Absolutely, yes, all of it is real. By which I of course mean no, none of it is. Much as I'm sure it pains all of us to admit it, Futurama is just a TV show. So, technically speaking, I suppose none of it is actually real. But that's not what we're dealing with here. Much as Bender's line represents a great bit of meta humor, it isn't really meant to call into question whether the "actual" events of Futurama are any less real than any other TV show in the same way that, say, the "Normal Again" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer did. Am I the only one who's horribly confused by all of this? If nothing else, I need to find some more synonyms for "real."

The Case Against:

The end of the episode finds Bender walking back into the slums of New New York City, which he chooses to see as a beautiful meadow full of friendly woodland creatures. Beyond the fact that that sort of seems like an odd choice for Bender's perfect world, Bender's newfound belief that "reality is what you make of it" really does suggest that, on some metaphysical level, Futurama is all just some idle fantasy.

Chances That Futurama Really Happened:

90%. In the end, you've got to trust in the robot technician's brusque response to Bender's philosophical query: "No, get out. Next!" A man that coolly competent probably has a pretty good handle on the ways of the universe. Now, as to whether Leela ever really recovered from the space bee sting, well...that's another matter entirely.

3. Ed Straker, UFO

The Setup:

In, "Mindbender", one of the best episodes of this British cult classic about an elite but underfunded paramilitary force fighting mysterious aliens (which I've already waxed lyrical about in a previous post), SHADO recovers a bizarre artifact from the surface of the Moon. All those who touch it experience ultra-realistic hallucinations. After two men are killed because they started shooting at fellow SHADO personnel, thinking they were the enemy, Commander Ed Straker takes possession of the strange object.

It isn't long before Straker hallucinates as well, as a heated argument with General Henderson is interrupted with a director yelling, "Cut!" Utterly confused, Straker finds himself on a television set filming a TV show that looks an awful lot like UFO. He wanders around the studio, stumbling into a theater showing previously shot footage. Straker watches in horror as he sees some of the most traumatic moments of his life - all moments previously shown in the series itself - up on the screen as mere entertainment.

Unable to cope with this strange new world, Straker rushes back to his office set and desperately tries to make it return to normal. To his great relief, everything finally snaps back to normal, and he is once again Commander Ed Straker. But still...did he actually stumble upon reality, however briefly?

The Case For:

This is the same fundamental problem we faced when grappling with Futurama. What's the difference between a show acknowledging the fact that it's a TV show and a show suggesting everything we see is an illusion? I guess it's all a matter of degree, and the more and more elements from real life the show draws upon, the harder it is to dismiss the idea that the TV show is really just a TV show.

For instance, one of Straker's costars joins him in the theater to watch the raw footage. On UFO, the character was Colonel Paul Foster, but here he introduces himself as Mike. The actor who played Foster? Michael Billington. It's little details like this that suggest "Mindbender" really was trying to push Straker's hallucination as close to the actual production of UFO as it possibly could. At a certain point, doesn't the false version of reality get close enough that you might as well consider it the real thing?

The Case Against:

Then again, there are plenty of elements that don't match up with the actual behind the scenes of UFO. "Mindbender" would have been much more, well, mindbending if they had given the actor who played Ed Straker the same name as the man who really portrayed him. Considering that was Ed Bishop, they even could have had some somewhat amusing gags over the fact they shared the same first name.

Instead, Straker's actor name is Howard Beale, who was also an actor that, in his cover job as a movie executive, Straker had had to reprimand earlier in the episode. Much as the episode does some truly crazy, fourth wall shattering stuff for something made in 1971, there aren't nearly enough dualities for this to perfectly mirror the real making of the show, and as such it's hard not to conclude it is just a hallucination after all.

Chances That UFO Really Was All An Illusion:

15%. I'd be a lot more conflicted if they'd just been a little more meta. Although Straker's reaction to seeing his entirely life as a TV show really is heartbreaking.

4. The Red Dwarf crew, Red Dwarf

The Setup:

In the series five finale "Back to Reality", the crew find themselves under attack from a giant squid. Facing certain death, they suddenly awaken in a virtual reality gaming center. There, they are told they've spent the last four years playing a total immersion video game, and not playing it particularly well either. Returning to their miserable lives in a fascist state, the four friends aren't completely sure they can face their newfound existences and prepare to commit suicide together.

Luckily, they don't have to, as the ship's computer Holly is able to pull them back from the brink of despair. As it turns out, that squid that was attacking them had release a hallucinogenic toxin that caused them to experience the same hopeless fantasy as a group. The squid's effects disrupted, they are able to escape and resume their adventures. But is the world of Red Dwarf any less illusory than that of the fascist state?

The Case For:

The idea that they actually were playing a video game for four years doesn't really hold up to any serious scrutiny. Kryten alone is deeply problematic, as he didn't appear until the start of series two, when he looked and sounded vastly different (because a different actor played him), and it wasn't until the third series when he became a regular. I mean, I suppose the total immersion game could have had an entire part where one character plays housekeeper on a dead ship for the first year, especially if the players were doing a really terrible job, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Anyway, it's not even like UFO, which retained some slight ambiguity in that Straker didn't suddenly snap out his hallucination - he instead had to return to his office and actively choose to return. The Red Dwarf crew doesn't go back to the VR machines; indeed, we actually see them back in the real world for a few seconds before they realize where they are, as they continue to act like they're stuck in the fascist world. That's pretty conclusive visual evidence.

The Case Against:

Still, the possibility that Red Dwarf is just a slightly malfunctioning virtual reality simulation might be one way to explain all the massive, inexplicable changes to the show's continuity. For instance, the show quietly moved the characters' home century from the 21st to the 23rd, and Christine Kochanski somehow morphed from Lister's secret obsession (played by C.P. Grogan) to his ex-girlfriend (played by Chloe Arnett). Even if the despair squid simply created things that weren't there, it might well be possible that they simply returned to another layer of the game. After all, I've heard the levels of immersion involved are pretty total.

Chances That They Really Did Go Back To Reality:

65%. At a certain point not long after this episode, the show sort of stopped existing for me anyway.

5. Sam Lowry, Brazil

The Setup:

Mild-mannered bureaucrat Sam Lowry discovers love thanks to a clerical error, and his single-minded pursuit of what is quite literally the girl of his dreams makes him an unintentional enemy of the state. About to be tortured by his best friend Jack Lint (played by Michael Palin, in one of the all-time great underrated performances), Sam is suddenly rescued by domestic terrorist and freelance air conditioning repairman Harry Tuttle. Lowry and Tuttle proceed to blow up the Ministry of Information, but then things get a bit weird (to say the least). Sam ultimately escapes with his beloved Jill, and the two can now live happily ever after. But did any of it actually happen?

The Case For:

Completely depends on which version of Brazil you saw. Terry Gilliam's cinematic bad luck is the stuff of legend, and he faced studio interference on Brazil from the very start. Unwilling to accept Gilliam's bleak ending, Universal chairman Sid Sheinberg took his grim 142-minute version and cut it down to a breezy 94 minutes, complete with a happy ending where Sam does indeed go off to live in peace with Jill. This so-called "Love Conquers All" version appears on the Criterion release of Brazil, and was once shown in syndication on TV because its much shorter running length made it easier to market.

The Case Against:

Well, you see, the biggest thing missing from the "Love Conquers All" cut is a final scene between Jack Lint and the Deputy Minister of Information, Mr. Helpmann. The two look sadly at Sam, still strapped to the torture chair, and remark that he is "gone" - incurably insane. In other words, any legitimate version of Brazil ends with it completely clear that the happy ending is a product of Sam's broken mind. Which, considering all the crazy things that happen during his escape, is really the only plausible explanation anyway.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

5%, if only as a slight nod to the power of television syndication.

6. Allegra Geller and Ted Pikul, eXistenZ

The Setup:

Legendary game designer Allegra Geller has to go on the run with her de facto bodyguard Ted Pikul when an assassin shows up at a focus group for her new fully immersive masterpiece eXistenZ. The pair jump into an exponentially more bizarre adventure where it becomes impossible to know for certain what's in the real world and what's just the game. Finally, Geller realizes Pikul is the real assassin and kills him, only to find herself awaking as a member of the focus group for the actual game TranscendenZ, programmed by the actual legendary designer Yevgeny Nourish. The entire movie up to that point had all been a game, or so it would seem.

Allegra and Ted are seemingly content with their gaming experience, but then they pull Yevgeny aside to ask him whether he should pay for all the harm he has done and will do to the human race. They then shoot kill him and the head of the focus group in front of a stunned crowd of their fellow testers. They then prepare to kill another tester, who is forced to ask: "Hey, tell me the truth - are we still in the game?" So how about it? Did they ever make it back to reality?

The Case For:

Ooh boy. Let's see now. Well, there's the fact that a lot of the actors in the film only use their real accents in the final scene. That might be taken as a clue that the focus group for TranscendenZ is real, if only in the sense that the characters now actually sound like real people. Look, I honestly have no idea whether anything in eXistenZ is real or imaginary, but I do know one thing: Christopher Eccleston's American accent is the fakest thing in cinematic history.

The Case Against:

It just would seem to fundamentally go against director David Cronenberg's brutally ironic, unsparing sensibilities for the characters to ever escape the game. In fact, I think it's debatable whether there even is such a thing as "the real world" in eXistenZ, and even more debatable whether it makes much of a difference. Honestly, I'm pretty sure the question of whether they're in the real world or not is the least important part of eXistenZ.

And just so we're clear - yes, this argument has come down to a metaphysical quandary on the one hand and the ninth Doctor's terrible accent on the other. Just as it should be.

Chances That They Really Got Back To Reality:

I'm not sure. I guess you'd have to define reality first.

Even before most people had heard of Erwin Schrödinger, we knew that there were plenty other Earths out there; we'd seen Star Trek's Mr. Spock with a goatee, or watched the Justice League and Justice Society meet up thanks to a crystal ball. I've already written about my undying love for the concept, and I'm not alone; sci-fi loves to offer glimpses of the roads less taken, whether they're character-based or somewhat more... epic. Consider the following while planning a summer trip to another world:

What Mad Universe
If you're looking to get away from it all, you could do much worse than decide to take a break on the parallel Earth from Fredric Brown's 1949 novel. Admittedly, you'd have to avoid being accused of being an alien spy when you try to spend your money, but isn't that a chance you'd want to pay to visit a world where spaceflight was accidentally discovered in 1903, and astronauts are pin-up girls?

Eye in the Sky
Of course, you'd have to be careful of your own subconscious if travel to parallel Earths followed the rules of Philip K. Dick's 1957 novel, where alternate realities were entirely subjective manifestations of your own state of mind. Unless, of course, your state of mind was completely relaxed because you're going on vacation. Oh, the tangled web we weave...

Doppelgänger/Journey To The Far End Of The Sun
Who doesn't wish that scientists could still discover a parallel Earth on the opposite side of the sun, as in this classic 1969 movie written by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, creators of Thunderbirds, UFO and Space: 1999? The idea was recycled three years later in Marvel Comics' Warlock stories (and later in their Heroes Reborn arc), but Doppelgänger's world - where everything is reversed from ours, including writing, thanks to the wonders of flipping film - remains the one to beat. Imagine getting away from it all in a world where everything is backwards.

The Eternal Champion
Michael Moorcock's Multiverse works slightly differently than most, in that each world includes facets of people, instead of multiple versions of the same people, and each world may be vastly different from the one you're familar with. This may be a plus for your holiday, of course; experience something entirely new, and be less likely to run across a more successful, happier and healthier version of yourself in the process. (Much more traditionally multiversual, but feeling like it should be mentioned in the same breath as Jerry Cornelius: Matt Fraction's comic Casanova, where the hero is trapped in a parallel Earth, replacing the him that had died there.)

Star Trek
With this summer's movie, Starfleet's finest have finally come up with a parallel timeline (including an Earth, so it counts, thank you very much) that measures up to the show's classic Mirror Universe. Out of all the revamps and reboots that we've seen, this is one of the few that made the choice to make the revamp the center of the story and patiently explain that history may have been changed, but all that did was create a new parallel timeline. Pandering to the original show's fanbase? Sure - but doing so in such a way that it doesn't stop the movie for everyone else. Yes, the crew of the Enterprise have played around in the timestream many of times, but the new Movie-Earth lines up so well with Mirror-Earth and OriginalSeries-Earth that it's really only a matter of time before some comic or novel seeks to cross them all over in a Spock-centric altern-orgy, and I for one can't wait. As it is, Trek doesn't just offer one utopian future, but two; your choice depends on just how much time you feel like you want to spend with William Shatner.

Fringe


What was the ingredient that made this show more than just an X-Files wannabe with an eccentric scientist and a cow? The sudden, surprise introduction to a war with a parallel Earth (complete with explanation of the multiverse concept for newbies, above). Admittedly, the glimpses we've seen of the alternate Fringe world(s?) haven't been especially alluring to those seeking a quiet getaway - It all seems to be explosions, Charlies with scars and grim skies, unless you're in a shining New York with multiverse magnet Leonard Nimoy and his newspapers that mention JFK still being alive (Maybe we should call this parallel Earth-StereotypicalRightWingViewOfADemocraticFantasy?) - but there's a downside to every vacation spot.

Sliders


Like Quantum Leap (or, if your tastes run to a slightly later vintage, The Time Tunnel) before it, Sliders took the idea of characters just trying to get back home and ran with it... Ran across the multiverse, that is (A similar idea was behind the earlier, and much less successful Otherworld television series from the mid-80s). Five seasons of hopping between Parallel Earth San Franciscos on a television show budget demonstrated a wide variety of possible alternate worlds out there, including an Earth where Britain won the Revolutionary War leading to the British States of America, an Earth where a zombie plague has been unleashed, an Earth where dinosaurs are still alive, and an Earth where Ancient Egyptian is the dominant culture. Sadly, they didn't find an Earth without shitty CGI effects, but it was the 1990s. As a model for how to spend your summer, I'm torn whether or not to recommend it. Maybe you should ask yourself how much you really love San Francisco.

DC Comics
Less one potential getaway than a superpowered version of Orbitz, DC's superhero line loves the idea of a multiverse like almost none other; their original multiverse came from the company trying to come up with ways of haphazardly adding characters from other publishers without confusing things too much as much as anything, but the current version is much more structured... and finite. For one thing, there are "only" 52 Earths, now. Here are the ones we know about. Pick your favorite:

Earth 0 is the "core" Earth, the one that all "regular" stories take place on and - more importantly for the purposes of this post - the one that was the basis for the 51 alternate Earths that are known to exist within DC's current multiverse. Of those 51, the following have been identified:
Earth-1 is, essentially, the Earth that most comic fans grew up reading about - Think of it as "Earth Super Friends."
Earth-2 is an Earth that missed out on all of the Silver Age of comics, so there's no Hal Jordan Green Lantern (or Green Lantern Corps at all, for that matter), nor a Barry Allen, Wally West or Bart Allen Flash. For all intents and purposes, it's the same as DC's original Earth-2.
Earth-3 is an Earth of reversed moralities - the Justice League is the Crime Syndicate, Clark Kent is the villainous Ultraman, Lex Luthor is a superhero, and so on.
Earth-4 is as close to Earth Watchmen as you're likely to get outside of the Watchmen series; it's an Earth where only the Carlton characters who inspired Moore and Gibbons' series exist.
Earth-5 is an Earth where the only superheroes are Captain Marvel and his associated Shazam Family of characters.
Earth-6, Earth-7, Earth-32, Earth-37, Earth-38, and Earth-39 are all Earths where the variations are fairly minor, and very continuity based:"What if Batman became Green Lantern?" - That kind of thing.
Earth-8 is a parody of Marvel Comics' Ultimate Earth, where the Avengers are represented by "The Meta Militia."
Earth-9 is the home to the Tangent Comics characters, who bear the same names as the more familiar characters, but are in all other respects different.
Earth-10 is a world where the Nazis won World War II, and home to the guilt-ridden super-Nazi Uberman.
Earth-11 is an Earth where genders are reversed, so you have Superwoman, Batwoman and Wonderman instead of the more familiar versions of the characters.
Earth-12 is an Earth you're very familiar with; it's officially the world of Batman Beyond, which also means that it's the parallel Earth where all the Bruce Timm DC cartoons took place.
Earth-13 is the Earth where many of DC's Vertigo line apparently occurs.
Earth-15 used to be an Earth where all crime had been eliminated by particularly successful superheroes... but then it was destroyed by Superboy Prime, just to prove how much of an asshole he can be. Of course, it theoretically was rebuilt
Earth-16 is the home planet of the Super-Sons, AKA Batman Junior and Superman Junior. Yes, that's right; Superman and Batman got married (not to each other), had sons, and named them after themselves. Don't ask.
Earth-17 is a post-apocalyptic Earth where nuclear apes rule. I promise you, I'm not making this up.
Earth-18 is an Earth where the world is still in Wild West times, complete with cowboy versions of the Justice League.
Earth-19 is an Earth where the world is still in Victorian times, complete with a Batman who has hunted down Jack the Ripper.
Earth-20 is "Pulp-Earth" - essentially, a parallel world where everything is as if it was a pulp novel.
Earth-21 is the Earth from the wonderful DC: The New Frontier series by Darwyn Cooke.
Earth-22 is the Earth from Kingdom Come, Alex Ross and Mark Waid's cautionary tale about why superheroes can't save the world, except for when they can.
Earth-26 is an Earth of smart, talking animals; it was "rendered uninhabitable" during 2007's Captain Carrot And The Final Ark series because funny animal books apparently are silly and not what the audience wants, but then reconstituted at the end of Final Crisis.
Earth-30 is the Earth from Red Son, where Superman landed in communist Russia.
Earth-31 is the Earth from The Dark Knight Returns series, so it's all mutants with sharp teeth and old grumpy Batman.
Earth-33 is an Earth where all of the familiar superheroes are now suddenly (magically, one might say) magicians, with names like "Batmage" and "Lady Flash, Keeper Of The Speed Force."
Earth-34 is an Earth where the British Empire still exists, and is ruled by a tyrannical despot called King Jack.
Earth-40 is an Earth where there are no public superheroes, just superpowered spies who work for the government. Which, if nothing else, would make James Bond movies more fun.
Earth-43 is a parallel Earth plagued by vampires, who have managed to turn Batman into one of their number. There are all manner of other mythical beasts as well, so this is pretty much "Horror Earth".
Earth-44 is Robot Earth; the main superheroes of this Earth are robotic versions of the Justice League.
Earth-48 is, unlike Earths 18 and 19, an Earth far in the future, where humanity is extinct after an intergalactic war has wiped out all native life on the planet.
Earth-50 is the Earth of DC's Wildstorm line. Again, post-apocalyptic, currently.
Earth-51 is, post-Final Crisis, the home to all of Jack Kirby's creations for DC Comics, following it having been yet another post-apocalyptic Earth. At least this one was repurposed for something constructive.

(There are also some Non-Numbered Earths (or, to be completely correct, Earths we don't know the numbers of yet), which include an Earth where Superman and Wonder Woman are black, an Earth where everyone resembles a manga character, and an Earth "just like our own" where superheroes are just the stuff of fiction.)

Charlie Jade

The 2005 South African/Canadian co-production gave us a glimpse at the parallel Earth you should really try to spend some time in: the Gammaverse, where everything is perfect, humanity has worked out how not to squander our resources, and you'll have no trouble getting a hotel room at an affordable rate. Just remember to ignore any offer of a budget weekend in the Alphaverse; it may sound exciting ("Alpha" just sounds good in general, right?), but it's pretty much the hellhole that give you anecdotes but also various forms of disease during your short stay. And if someone suggests a stay in the Betaverse, remind them that that's where you already live and go find a new travel agent. (For more class-based alternate worlds, Warren Ellis' Anna Mercury may be what you're looking for.)

Additional research and reporting by Sarah Hope Williams.

Santoro was a senior visual effects artist on movies like Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem and Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer. But Offline looks like it has the potential to be way better than either of those films, thanks to its weird, off-kilter visual style. Here's the trailer, which Santoro told Slashfilm he made to raise interest (and money) for a feature-length film:

Here's the plot synopsis for Offline, which I'm really hoping does get made into a feature film:

"The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating."

In this future, the world is dying a slow and ugly death. In an effort to cope or perhaps out of pure denial, humanity has become increasingly obsessed with mass media.

The Internet has evolved into an all-consuming visceral experience where every one's perception of the world around them is fully customized. The brown smog in the sky can be easily ignored when a beautiful sunset is projected through your optic nerve, courtesy of the Naneuron Corporation.

But like all systems there are glitches. Someone or something is disrupting the feed; a Ghost in the machine. A group of extremists have risen up, led by young man named Maro. Defiant and charismatic, he has seemingly endless promise until he unexpectedly surrenders.

All enemies of the state are processed for reprogramming. Those like Maro who are physically and mentally gifted enough are transformed into counter-terrorism soldiers. His memories are erased. His body is enhanced. His humanity is destroyed. Maro has become the perfect weapon.

Until he begins communicating with the glitches, hearing whispers that lead him on a journey through the depths of his own subconscious. Trapped in the midst of a hellish nightmare, he must find a way to regain his identity and take down the system once and for all. But at what price comes freedom?

WHEN A MAN'S MIND BECOMES ONE WITH A MACHINE... WHAT HAPPENS TO HIS SOUL?

The movie's official website is here.

1. Douglas Quaid, Total Recall

The Setup:

After visiting Rekall in the hopes of going on a virtual vacation of Mars, unassuming nobody Douglas Quaid learns he's actually Hauser, a mindwiped secret agent. He then proceeds to get his ass to Mars, whereupon he becomes embroiled in a tangled web involving evil government operatives, psychic mutants, ancient aliens, and triple-breasted prostitutes. It's all very tense and exciting until a man claiming to from Rekall shows up to point out this is all just the memory implant he ordered gone horribly wrong.

Quaid dismisses this possibility, but the question remains - did he ever actually make it out of Rekall?

The Case For:

Director Paul Verhoeven has occasionally confirmed that the movie really happened, but that was mostly when it looked like the film was going to get a sequel. Perhaps the best evidence that the events seen actually happened is that Arnold Schwarzenegger played Quaid. In the end, is it really any more believable that a guy as impossibly ripped as Schwarzenegger was just a lowly construction worker than that he was a secret agent? And there is the fact that Quaid was dreaming about something similar to his supposedly recovered memories before he ever went to Rekall, but even the movie acknowledges how weak it is to use a dream to disprove virtual reality.

The Case Against:

The guy who claims to be implanted by Rekall to get Quaid out of his broken mind trip not only correctly points out everything that had happened was in line with the adventure Quaid chose, but he also accurately predicts the rest of the movie. (Quaid's logic in this scene also leaves something to be desired. People in virtual reality can't possibly sweat! Shoot him in the head!) For that matter, a Rekall technician at the beginning of the movie says the memory simulator has brought up the unprecedented element of blue skies on Mars for Quaid's trip. And guess what we see at the end of the movie right before the scene fades to white...

Chances That It Really Happened:

10%. Sorry, Quaid, I don't believe you'll be seeing Richter at the party after all.

2. Sam Tyler, Life On Mars (US Version)

The Setup:

The final episode of the American version of Life on Mars offered a rather unexpected resolution to just what had been going on with Sam Tyler all this time. As it turned out, he was neither a cop from 1973 nor one from 2008. Instead, he was part of the first manned expedition to Mars in 2035 and the virtual reality simulation meant to keep his mind busy during the two year trip to the red planet had gone haywire, accidentally sending him from his chosen reality of 2008 to 1973. His friends in 1973 had really been his fellow crew members, and Gene Hunt was really his father, Major Tom Tyler. But was this real, or just another coma fantasy?

The Case For:

To be fair, the makers of Life on Mars had set up this possibility for much of the series, what with all the Mars Rover stuff. Say what you will about the ending, but it wasn't completely random, and the act that Sam immediately accepts this new reality suggests it's the one he expected to find all along, deep down.

The Case Against:

For a start, there's that shot of the loafer as they step out onto the Martian surface right at the very end. It doesn't prove anything, but it undermines the supposed reality of the situation. And then there's the fact that this vision of 2035 really, really seems like the kind of thing a dude in 2008 would come up with. I mean, President Obama? I've already dealt with the logical gymnastics you have to do to get Malia Obama into the White House for her to send off a space mission in 2033. It seems just as likely that 2008 Sam simply came up with one of the very few recognizable names who could be president in 2035.

Then there's the fact that not-Ray describes his virtual reality trip as a deserted island full of women who looked like Splash-era Daryl Hannah or Scarface-era Michelle Pfeiffer. You know, pretty as both of them were in those films, I'm not sure I buy an astronaut fifty years later singling out those specific women for his two year porn dream. (By the way, does his haircut really look like NASA regulation? You'd think he'd have something more like Sam's crewcut in 2035.) Oh, and do we really want to deal with the implications of Sam sleeping with the daughter of Gene Hunt, when Gene Hunt is really his father? I don't think we do.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

30%. The whole thing just seems too contrived to be real, even if I'm pretty sure the creators intended it to be the actual solution.

3. Neo, The Matrix

The Setup:

I don't really need to recap The Matrix, do I? The main thing we're concerned with here is whether ever really got out of the Matrix once he took the red pill, which was briefly a matter of some fan debate back when the film first came out. So, how about it - did he really wake up?

The Case For:

This should be open and shut, really. Even if Neo's adventures are all illusory, the Matrix itself seems to be real. After all, the first scene of the movie features Trinity and the Agents doing impossible things, not Neo. That's fairly objective proof that the Matrix exists. There's also the fact that there were two sequels and an entire anthology of animated spin-offs made after the original Matrix, which would seem to remove any doubt the original actually happened. Why are we even discussing this?

The Case Against:

Well, there are a couple of loose ends worth considering. How, exactly, did Neo shut down all those sentinels at the end of The Matrix Reloaded using only his mind when he was in the supposed real world? I suppose it could have been some sort of residual link, but it certainly raises the question as to whether that world is any more real than that of the Matrix. Then there's what the Architect explains to Neo in Reloaded. He explains that 99% of humanity accepts the Matrix because they can't face the alternative, and the remaining humans wake themselves up and go to Zion.

But what if Zion itself is just another aspect of the Matrix, one that this tiny sliver of humanity is prepared to accept because it's suitably bleak? It certainly wouldn't be the most ridiculously convoluted plan the Architect came up with. As for the argument that the existence of the sequels proves the originally happened as it appeared to, I can't get away from the fact that, in the end, this is the Wachowskis we're talking about. I long ago stopped expecting them to play by the rules of fairness and logic.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

80%. A lot of weird stuff happens in the sequels that doesn't make a lot of sense, but that probably has more to do with them being terrible movies.

4. Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Setup:

The episode "Normal Again", the Trio unleashes a demon on Buffy that causes her to suffer severe hallucinatory episodes. She suddenly imagines herself in a mental institution, where she is told she has spent much of the last six years in a catatonia. Her doctor and her parents, who are still alive in this world, take advantage of this rare lucid moment to advise her how she can escape forever. The way to do this, however, is to allow all her friends to die, which is ultimately not something she can do. Returning to Sunnydale and taking an antidote to the demon's attack, Buffy commits to her vampire-slaying life as the real one. But did she choose correctly?

The Case For:

Well, that demon who attacked her did have hallucinatory powers. It's also questionable whether she could plausibly develop such a strong connection to the people she knew in her supposed fantasy world, and you'd kind of think the reality of the mental institution would have intruded just a little bit in the preceding six years.

The Case Against:
But all of those supposed arguments are countered and dealt with in the episode itself. And if she did just hallucinate the whole thing, then who exactly is issuing into existence the last scene of the episode, where the doctor sadly informs her parents that Buffy is gone forever? That happens after she took the antidote, so her mind should no longer be creating anything in that reality.

Chances That She Really Escaped:

50%. Because, in the end, it doesn't really matter which world is real and which is an illusion. What really matters is that Buffy chose the world she wanted to be real, and so the answer can remain safely ambiguous.

5. Batman, Batman: The Animated Series

The Setup:

In the 1992 episode "Perchance to Dream", Batman wakes up to find out he isn't really Batman at all. His parents are still alive, he's engaged to Selina Kyle, and someone else is playing the role of Gotham's Dark Knight. After initially rejecting the possibility that this could actually be real and the life he thought he knew nothing more than an intense dream, Bruce realizes he finally has a chance to be happy and have everything he always wanted.

But this moment of contentment is fleeting, as his sudden inability to read tips him off that this is a dream after all. In the final showdown with this world's Batman, he learns the Mad Hatter has him trapped in a dream machine from which there is no possible escape. Which he then escapes from...because he's Batman. But did he really?

The Case For:

It's pretty simple, really. Like I said, this is Batman we're talking about. Mind like a steel trap doesn't even begin to describe Bruce Wayne's intellect and inner resolve, so is it really likely a two-bit villain like the Mad Hatter could trap him for all eternity in a VR machine? When the comic book version of Batman faced a similar situation during Final Crisis, he managed to reassert control and destroy Darkseid's machine before he even woke up. There's just no way you can win in a battle with Batman's mind.

The Case Against:

Well, let's think about this for a second. When "Perchance to Dream" came out, Batman: The Animated Series was still a relatively grounded show. There had certainly been elements of science fiction before that, such as Man-Bat, Mr. Freeze, Clayface, and an invisibility cloak, but by and large the show had remained true to its film noir roots. It's only after this that Batman starts tangling with completely impossible characters like the immortals Ra's Al Ghul and Jason Blood, and it's not long before actually superpowered heroes like Superman start showing up everywhere.

In less than five years, Batman goes from barely defeating a guy who hides in the sewers with a bunch of alligators to confidently leading a Justice League of literally unlimited membership in wars with Brainiac and Darkseid. Maybe Batman's mind could never accept a world where he was completely happy. But what about a world where he could share his burdens with other heroes, a world where anything could happen and it frequently did, a world where he could stand toe to toe with evil gods...and win? That might be exactly the kind of world Batman wanted, and it's just possible the Mad Hatter gave it to him.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

98%. It's a nice theory and all, but come on...Batman doesn't lose.

6. Number Six, The Prisoner

The Setup:

In the series's penultimate episode, the unspeakably brilliant "Once Upon A Time", Number Two made the big push to crack Number Six by subjecting him to a lot of drugs and insane recreations of his life story. This backfires, as Number Six gains the upper hand and instead manages to break Number Two. The final episode, "Fallout", finds Number Six before a bizarre masked court, and then a bunch of crazy (but kind of awesome) stuff happens.

Finally, things take a turn for the incomprehensible as Number Six, the rebellious Number 48, the recovered Number Two, and the Village butler gun down the entire court as the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" plays. They then destroy the Village with a big rocket and find themselves on a motorway back to London, signaling that they've all finally broken free. But did any of that actually happen, or did Number Two really manage to break Number Six back in "Once Upon A Time"?

The Case For:

It's somewhat paradoxical to criticize anything that happened on The Prisoner for being impossible or nonsensical. The entire series is littered with little moments that make absolutely no sense whatsoever and go completely unexplained, even compared to the vaguely understandable main plots. This episode just happens to be nothing but absurdity, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any less tethered to The Prisoner's fractured take on reality.

The Case Against:

"Fallout" is insane, even by the standards of The Prisoner. (The revelation of Number One's identity is just the bonkers icing on an already demented cake.) And it's not as though the Village hadn't successfully trapped Number Six in illusory worlds before, as seen in "A, B, and C" (which used virtual reality) and "Living in Harmony" (which used a lot of drugs).

For what it's worth, the followup Prisoner comic miniseries, Shattered Visage, ran with the premise that the events of "Fallout" were indeed the Village's last, successful attempt to break the mind of Number Six. Considering Patrick McGoohan read Shattered Visage and said that he didn't hate it - which, by McGoohan's standards, qualified as a rave review - there might actually be something to its version of events.

Chances That He Really Escaped:

Pick a number. Any number. Now divide it by zero. Whatever that number is, that's the probability that Number Six escaped.

Check back this weekend as we examine a few more characters who may well still be trapped in virtual reality, even if they don't know it any more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sensorama

In what may be considered the first case of virtual reality reaching beyond its own limitations, Morton Heilig unveiled the Sensorama in 1962. It was a large box that enclosed the viewer's head and displayed a stereoscopic 3D movie. The seat tilted and the box unleashed wind and smells. And all of this was accomplished mechanically.

It was a costly venture, and beyond the prototype, Heilig was forced to stop development on the Sensorama. His failure then became the model for future virtual reality failures. The device was cool, but it was also large, expensive, and awkward.

Giant Headsets

There are too many examples of this particular item to pick just one. It seemed for years that hard-to-wear headsets were a prerequisite for any virtual reality technology. The earliest virtual reality headsets looked like a giant television strapped to someone's face. The technology has advanced since then, with smaller and more economical displays, but the headsets of the past made virtual reality nothing more than a passing, gawky novelty.

Nintendo Virtual Boy

The continuing pathway to the holy grail of devices marketed for home virtual reality gaming is littered with failures. One of the more reviled, more abject of these failures came from an otherwise reliable company. I'm referring to Nintendo's Virtual Boy.

Nintendo's foray into the virtual reality world promised a few things it couldn't deliver. It promised true 3D graphics on a portable console. What it delivered was a red-tinged, blurry, semi-3D picture and a clunky headset that needed a stand to operate. Games came with the option of automatically pausing every 15 minutes for a break, which sounds more like a difficult shift at work than a fun afternoon of virtual reality gaming.

The Virtual Reality Glove

Speaking of Nintendo, it seems every time the company digs into the virtual reality market, they miscalculate. You may remember the Power Glove from such cinema classics as The Wizard. The Power Glove recreated the motions of a user wearing it on screen, but the motion tracking was imprecise and the glove was clunky. The company sold about 100,000 of the gloves in the U.S. Compare that with a more successful technology descended from the Power Glove, the Wii; Nintendo has sold over 13 million of those so far.

That didn't stop other companies from trying to market similar technologies, though. The P5 glove for PC gaming required specially designed games and therefore never caught on and the CyberGlove proved too expensive for home use. As a result, the era of virtual reality gloves quietly ended.

VRML

Turning more to the tech side, VRML was billed as a 3-D alternative to HTML. The idea was that users could interact freely with 3-D worlds on the internet, described by text and interpreted by modeling software. VRML's creators envisioned virtual spaces where people could wander in and chat with each other. The reality was closer to slow-loading, blocky graphic snippets, hardly worth the dial-up bandwidth needed at the time. In time, Second Life would crop up, and while it wasn't as customizable and programmable as VRML, it did offer a similar experience, but with better graphics.

Omnidirectional Treadmills

Beyond the display, control, and coding problems of virtual reality, there's still the problem of mobility. When you virtually move forward, you also move forward in the real world, so designers had to find a way of allowing people to walk around while staying in place.

The most common solution is the omnidirectional treadmill. This device does exactly what it sounds like it would do: it lets users move in any direction on a treadmill. It's a good idea in theory, and as early as 1997 working prototypes were created. But these treadmills are also very expensive and very large. It's hard to imagine cramming something like the device pictured here into your living room.

The Virtusphere

Enter the Virtusphere. Users strap on their VR gear and enter a large translucent sphere. The experience is something like a large stationary hamster ball: as an individual wanders about, the ball freely rotates to allow the user to wander around in the virtual world. While the device clearly does what it claims to do, the average home user seems hesitant to play their games trapped inside something that looks like it just popped out of the water and is trying to bring you back to a prison village.

There have, of course, been pretty big advances in virtual reality technology since these failures, but now that the technology has caught up with the vision, it seems like people have bigger visions. Technologies like internet and personal computers survived their awkward teenage years. Virtual reality didn't.

(omnidirectional treadmill photo by David Carmein 2007)

Set around the year 2075, In-World War takes place in an era where virtual reality has become indistinguishable from the real world. The film follows a game tester who finds himself unable to log out from a simulation of the War on Terror. Ultimately forcing his way back into the real world, the protagonist finds himself in in the wrong city and, more worryingly, the wrong body. His attempts to return to his real body only lead him further astray into a world that still bears the psychological scars of our current events.

Writer-director Brant Smith acknowledged some of the most controversial aspects of Bush era politics may even now seem like old news, but he explained the film is about how supposedly forgotten stories become some of the most deeply entrenched aspects of history:

"This film is about mythologizing history, and the calcification of conventional wisdom as the accepted narrative of what happened. Specific issues of Muslim stereotyping and the 2002-03 fear-mongering era may be behind us, but they still have lasting imprints that will affect us through the ages, at least for the next few generations."

In-World War is the directorial debut for the Oakland-based Smith, who previously won some acclaim on the festival circuit as a producer on the ultra-low-budget 2004 drama Quality of Life. A self-described DIY filmmaker, Smith follows the guerrilla method of shooting as quickly and cheaply as possible wherever one can (although he stressed that he's just enough of a sellout to get the proper permits when they're needed).

Filming is due to begin in the Bay Area on July 6, and Smith also hopes to do location filming in such faraway locations as New York, Dublin, Paris, and Geneva. Though he hopes interested investors will contribute the necessary funds to make In-World War with the budget it deserves, he is not actively soliciting funds and is instead focusing on making the film however he can with whatever resources he can get his hands on, true to the DIY way. Maybe Universal could give Smith .1% of the budget for its Candyland movie. I'm guessing that would be more than enough.

[SF 360]

But before we give you the definitive answer, you need to take this quiz.

1. When you enter a virtual world, do you try to look sexy? When answering, consider the following: Do you care about how your avatar's hair looks? Do you spend money on outfits in your virtual world? Have you ever purchased genitals in a virtual world? Do you sometimes change the color of your avatar's eyes (blue is so dreamy)?

2. Have you ever had an argument with someone about how you should act in your favorite virtual world? This might include debates over politeness, " invading other people's space," how certain comments fit or don't fit into the game's terms of service, or whether certain avatars are allowed to exist at all. In addition, if you have ever attended a town hall meeting about proper behavior in a virtual world, you have no choice but to answer yes to this question.

3. Do you identify people that you know outside the virtual world as your "friends in real life"?

4. Have you ever had a strong physical reaction to something happening on your screen while in a virtual world? This would include sweating, heart palpitations, screaming, laughing loudly, and, of course, getting that tingly sensation in your special place.

5. Has your spouse/special friend/partner/sweetie ever referred to your favorite virtual world as "the other woman/man"?

6. Have you ever thought it would be a good idea to dress as your avatar in real life?

7. Do you spend time pondering what it would really mean to have sex in a virtual world? Do you tell yourself, "Well, if it's text, it doesn't really count." Or have you decided that your octopus/crustacean/dolphin ménage is not really sex because your avatar couldn't take its clothes off? Alternatively, have you come up with an elaborate system of rules that determine which avatar is sexually connected to another avatar, and in addition which avatar is a top or bottom?

8. Do you think that Angelina Jolie looks hotter as the CGI mother of Grendel from Beowulf than she does in real life?

9. Have you ever read a book with "cyber dating" in the title? What about a book with "love online" in the title? You must answer an emphatic yes to this question if you actually paid for the books rather than just reading them for free online.

10. Do you think it would be a good idea to bring your sweetie into your favorite virtual worlds to "show them your true self"?

Scoring:

If you answered yes to only two or less of these questions, then you have never had sex online even if you bought yourself some genitals in Second Life and moved to Gor Island. There is no need for any one in your life to be jealous of what you're doing online.

If you answered yes to three to five of these questions, then it's obvious that you take the idea of online sex seriously. Maybe you're not having sex, but you're thinking about it. The fact is that you probably consider your online self a part of you. If somebody is hitting that virtual ass, it probably means something.

If you answered yes to 6 to 8 of these questions, you have probably considered buying some virtual birth control or lube because you're ready to get down and dirty in the digital world. You've thought about virtual sex and you've researched it too. Plus, your avatar is your special secret self. When somebody touches your avatar, they are touching you. Watch out, real world spouse or sweetie - sex online is potentially equivalent to sex with you.

For those of you who answered yes to nine or 10 of these questions, let's get real. You didn't even need to take this quiz, because you know your sex life online is not only important to you, but just as real as your sex life offline. Don't even try to tell me that it's not cheating when you do it with that dolphin, unless you and your spouse have a special open arrangement. In fact, if you don't have an open arrangement, it's time to have an honest talk with your real world sweetie about your online shenanigans.

Here's the thing. When it comes to virtual worlds, sex is what we believe it to be. If you are truly invested in the reality of your virtual experience, and you have strong emotional reactions to it (or physical ones), then what happens there is pretty real. That's what makes the virtual world so different from the real world - your beliefs and feelings determine what's happening. Of course that doesn't make something "real" online just because you choose to make it real or not. Don't give me any guff about how you chose for that dolphin sex not to be real the morning after. If you got off on it, sorry, but it was real.

So consider this handy quiz to be one way of answering that crucial twenty-first century question, "Was it real for you too?"

European scientists are studying the way in which people react to virtual environments and discovering that sometimes, things seem more real than they actually are:

For one experiment they developed a virtual bar, which test subjects enter by donning a virtual reality (VR) headset or immersing themselves in a VR CAVE in which stereo images are projected onto the walls. As the virtual patrons socialise, drink and dance, a fire breaks out. Sometimes the virtual characters ignore it, sometimes they flee in panic. That in turn dictates how the real test subjects, immersed in the virtual environment, respond.

"We have had people literally run out of the VR room, even though they know that what they are witnessing is not real," says Slater. "They take their cues from the other characters."

The reason behind the experiments is to find out whether or not VR can be used to treat patients with extreme phobias, according to the scientists. But, somehow, finding out that they also created a virtual version of the Milgram experiment makes me feel as if something more Manchurian Candidate may be going on.

When Virtual Reality Feels Real [Science Daily]

The Good:

Radiohead - "House of Cards"
Virtual Thom Yorke head? Yes please. Geometric Informatics and Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR was used to create this gorgeous virtual head.

Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Making Of The Radiohead Video

Aha - "Take On Me"
A classic virtual comic-book world of black and white.

Michael Jackson - "HIStory"
A virtual world full of Michael Jackson videos? Count me in, but only if I get to dance with King Eddie Murphy from ""Remember the Time."

Dire Straits, "Money For Nothing"
This block-headed virtual world makes me yearn for the simpler days when MTV actually played music videos, including a computer generated world that made the cast from Reboot look impressive.

Röyksopp - "Remind Me"
A breakdown of the real world through a virtual one? Brilliant.

Remind Me from Röyksopp on Vimeo.

The So Bad It's Kind Of Good

Infernal - "From Paris to Berlin"
Annoying song, but a cute tribute to the virtual world of Tron. Don't listen for too long, or it will be burned into your brain for days.

Aerosmith - "Amazing"
Possibly the cheesiest virtual world ever built. Especially when the young boy has an accident on the computer, which ends up in his pants in the virtual world.

Flying Lotus - "Parisian Goldfish"
Directed by Eric Wareheim, from the insane Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
this heavy on the strange sex virtual world is NSFW and NS for your brain.

So what are your favorite (and least favorite) music-video virtual worlds?

Nowhere Man, "A Rough Whimper Of Insanity":

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

VR Troopers, "Defending Dark Heart":

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

Cleopatra 2525, "Reality Check":

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

Transformers Armada, "The Chase":

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

Stargate SG-1, "The Gamekeeper":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Trek, "A Fistful Of Datas"

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

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Doctor Who

Was "The Deadly Assassin" the inspiration for the Wachowski Brothers? Probably not, but The Doctor's 1976 jaunt inside a virtual reality called The Matrix - with a psychedelic world constructed by The Master; Who loves to use that definitive article - may have been the first use of VR that many people ever encountered. Of course, this Matrix was more like a surrealist's nightmare constructed on a drama school budget, but Tom Baker managed to make you believe with his usual sense of glee.

Tron

To this day, the definitive virtual reality movie for many people, the 1982 weirdly Disney-esque anthromorphisation of computer programs (Yes, I know it was made by Disney; I mean it in the sense of, making computer programs into people seems very similar to giving animals human mannerisms and language) made an entire generation wish that they, too, could be zapped inside of a computer and ride around on awesome-looking virtual motorcycles.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

One of the first mainstream suggestions that VR could be fun and not a sign of some nefarious plot - even if it did keep breaking down, TNG's holodecks were, in fact, a holdover from the ill-fated late 1970s Star Trek: Phase II series. Needless to say, fans came up with the idea of using the ability to create lifelike duplicates of real people for purposes not suited for family television long before Quark's holosuites hinted at it in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Red Dwarf

Despite the science fiction on the British series often being more or less a disposable addition to the very traditional sitcom element of the show, 1988's "Better Than Life" introduced the concept of a "total immersion video game" that was so indistinguishable from reality that you could never be quite sure when you were actually in the game, and when you weren't, making it seem as scary as it did exciting - especially when the game could pick up on your subconscious self-loathing without your realization.

The Lawnmower Man

Ah, the early 1990s, when virtual reality really crossed into the mainstream, and we almost believed that it could (a) make you smarter, (b) give you psychic powers and (c) allow for melty virtual sex, just as this movie promised.

Of course, the technology wasn't there just then - or now, for that matter - and the disappointment turned us all into Jeff Fahey, going from this:



to this:


We await the day when virtual reality becomes all we've been promised by all of these shows and movies, if only for the ability to make the above change again, in reverse.

The possible series (possible), which will be airing as a two-hour TV movie on Fox, follows a crew who is on a 10-year mission, all the while visiting their own virtual reality dream sequences and having their lives taped and aired back on Earth for reality TV. I'm actually really excited to see what Jimmi Simpson and Clea DuVall are going to bring to the table, since both actors are pretty good at "troubled and disturbed" character acting. Yes that's McPoyle I'm talking about, so we're rooting for positive feedback from the audience and maybe, just maybe, it will come back as a series. But probably not.

The crew of the Phaeton is approaching the go/no-go point of their epic 10-year journey through outer space. With the fate of Earth in their hands, the pressure is intense. The best bet for helping the crew members maintain their sanity is the cutting-edge virtual reality technology installed on the ship. It's the perfect stress-reliever until they realize a glitch in the system has unleashed a virus on to the ship. Tensions mount as the crew decides how to contain the virus and complete their mission. Meanwhile, their lives are being taped for a reality show back on Earth

Virtuality will air Friday, June 26 8 PM on FOX.

This week io9 is launching "The Sims Go Scifi" contest, where you show us screengrabs from the best scifi scenarios you've created in The Sims. Our panel of distinguished judges will pick a winner, who gets a copy of The Sims 3, as well as $250 to spend at an online store of your choice so you can give your own life a makeover as well as your Sim life.

Here are the rules:

1. Create a scifi scenario in The Sims, and take screengrabs (no more than 8) or movies (no more than 2) from it to show us your scene or story.
2. Include a written description explaining the story and how you made it happen.
3. Submit your screengrabs and description to scifisimscontest@io9.com by midnight PST on June 9.

We will publish the top three stories, and hand over the game and cash to our first place winner.