Here's a complete list of all the methods we found for jogging your memory from science fiction tales, from the least fantastical to the most. (The end of the list, sadly, includes some items that you're unlikely to be able to find at your local office supply store.)

Use an acronym.

Suppose you've got a beautiful blue time machine that goes by the ungainly name of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space — you can always shorten it down to TARDIS, which is much easier to remember. That's what the Doctor (and his granddaughter Susan) did in Doctor Who.

The same goes for Marvel Comics' super-secret spy organization, the Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) The only problem with acronyms is, people will change what they stand for when you're not looking — S.H.I.E.L.D. now stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate in the comics, or Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the movies.

There's also the General Unilateral Neuro-link Dispersive Autonomic Maneuver (GUNDAM), and lots of other examples, here.

Write yourself a post-it note.

This may be the most foolproof method out there. In Star Trek: Voyager, Chakotay falls in love with a member of a species that erases itself from your memory after a while — and also somehow deletes all computer records. To guard his memories of their torrid, torrid love affair, Chakotay writes himself a paper note explaining everything that went on.

Similarly, in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies, Tally Youngblood undergoes the surgery to become a Pretty — but first she writes herself a note explaining all the plans she made to reverse the surgery. Because she won't remember them after she's become a Pretty.

In the movie Push, Nick gets someone to erase his memories and the memories of all his friends, so the mind-readers can't follow their plans. But he writes letters for himself and everybody else, to help them remember at the crucial moment — and there are instructions on how long to wait before reopening the letters.

And this technique is also used by Gwen Cooper in Torchwood (with so-so results), Noah Bennet on Heroes and Kurt on Odyssey Five. There's a great list over at TVTropes.

Keep a diary:

This is one step further than just writing a little note to yourself. In Gene Wolfe's novels Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete, the protagonist loses his memory every single day. And he doesn't realize that his ability to converse with gods, ghosts and other mythic figures is unusual. He writes himself a detailed diary, and the first line of it is, "READ THIS EACH MORNING."

Lost's Daniel Faraday keeps a diary too, and seems to use it to remind himself of a lot of stuff he's forgotten as a result of some time-travel experiments that went wrong. Among other things, he doesn't remember writing the stuff about Desmond Hume being his constant.

Make up a song:

That's what Draycos does in Timothy Zahn's novel Dragon And Thief: A Dragonback Adventure. Draycos sees Jack being taken away on a spaceship, and needs to remember the words written on the ship's side — but they're in English, a language Draycos doesn't know. Says Draycos, "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da, and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song." For example, to describe the letter A, his lyric goes, "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands." Or to describe the letter O, he sings, "Squeezed ring of fire, and what is more/A fire burns within its core." If you have an easier time remembering goofy song lyrics than unfamiliar symbols, this could work for you.

Leave yourself some objects to trigger a memory:

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck sees his own future, but then has his memory erased. So he leaves himself an envelope full of tiny objects, including a nail and an old penny, and a lottery ticket. They mean nothing to him — until he realizes that they're each incredibly useful at just the right moment. And they do help jog his memory, sort of. The Doctor on Doctor Who is constantly tying a knot in his hanky to remind him of things — but then he has to leave another knot in his hanky to help him remember why he made the previous knot.

Make yourself a video:

That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in Total Recall — he's forgotten his true identity as an agent of Mars intelligence (or maybe there was never anything to forget?) And now he leaves himself a video to explain everything — except maybe his past sellf isn't quite telling the exact truth.

Rodney McKay also leaves himself a video message in Stargate Atlantis after everybody loses their memories in the episode "Tabula Rasa." He tells himself to find Teyla quickly, or hundreds of people are going to die.

Create a memory key or "memory palace":

This one is a bit more involved. In John Crowley's modern fantasy novels, the Aegypt tetralogy, we meet the real-life philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had created a complex occult memory system, based on assigning graphical images to different pieces of information, allowing you to access them easily later. One such scheme involved concentric circles, and could allow you to set aside tons and tons of information. The Aegypt novels include the adventures of Bruno, who becomes the librarian of the Secret Library of San Domenico, keeping track of the huge collection of heretical texts using his amazing memory powers:

He knew and remembered every book, where it lay in Fra' Benedetto's cases, who had asked for it, and what was in it. In his vast and growing memory palace, the whole heavens in small, all that took up next to no room at all.

Also, in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Tzu creates a "toy cupboard" in his mind, among other techniques for creating an order for random facts:

He learned to memorize longer and longer lists of things by putting them inside a toy cupboard the tutor told him to create in his mind, or by mentally stacking them on top of each other, or putting them inside each other. This was fun for a while, though pretty soon he got sick of having all kinds of meaningless lists memorized. It wasn't funny after a while to have the ball come out of the fish which came out of the tree which came out of the car which came out of the briefcase, but he couldn't get it out of his memory.

The Mentats, or human computers, in Frank Herbert's Dune seem to use a variety of techniques, including memory keys (and sapho juice) to remember tons of information with perfect clarity. There's a Yahoo group where would-be Mentats have posted advice on how to train your mind to be as clear as that of a Mentat — or a Vulcan.

Tattoo yourself:

It works for the guy in Memento.

Take smart drugs:

It's pretty amazing what you can do with smart drugs, but in Woody Allen's story "Think Hard, It'll Come Back To You," a smart drug called Cranial Pops can help you recall any weird bit of information that may have gotten away from anyone, allowing you to be the hit of a party — until they wear off and you crash.

Use hypnosis:

Lots of science-fiction heroes use hypnosis as a memory aid. In Robert Heinlein's Citizen Of The Galaxy, Baslim hypnotizes his foster son Thorby, so he can memorize a coded message to the Space Police, as well as a letter to a space captain to help Thorby get off the planet. When Claire forgets her assault by Ethan on Lost, the castaways use hypnosis to help her remember, and Fox Mulder on X-Files uses hypnosis to remember his sister's abduction by aliens.

More complex spins on the idea of jogging your memory using hypnosis include the hypnotic trigger that sets off River Tam and activates her killing-machine programming in Serenity:

And the images that make Chuck Bartowski suddenly recall bits of spy information stuck in his brain, in Chuck:

Wear video goggles or use image-recognition capability:

In David Brin's Earth, people wear True-Vu lenses that record everything they see, so they can recall stuff later. And in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome, an object recognition computer can wring out all the details about objects you've seen. Science-fiction author Charles Stross suggests soon it'll be cheap and easy to store visual data on everything you've seen all day for a year, raising all sorts of questions about the boundaries between private memory and public records. Already, researchers have developed smart video goggles that will track what you see.

More way out solutions:

You could get a storage system in your head containing all the information you need to safeguard, as in Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson (and the movie of the same name.) You could burn your own initials into your brain to remind you that you erased your own memory, like Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. You could use Wonder Woman's magic lasso to restore your memories, if you know where to track her down. You could transfer your memories into someone else, like Data in Star Trek: Nemesis or Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. You could record your memories, like the people in Strange Days, or the dolls in Dollhouse. You could use a de-neuralizer to restore your memory, like Agent J in Men In Black II.

Top image: Citizen Of The Galaxy by Phil Golyshko. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder and Cyriaque Lamar.

The reason why I say that so emphatically is, there's a tendency to avoid watching a television show if you think it's already pre-cancelled. Why give your heart to a piece of ephemeral pop culture that won't even last the five-to-seven years that a successful show lasts? Why become fixated on a story you know won't end? Part of the answer is that we are science-fiction fans, and having our hearts broken is part of the deal. But you also have to keep the faith alive that it won't happen this time.

So in case you've missed our grindingly depressing coverage (mirroring everyone else's) of V's misfortunes, it's had a troubled ramp-up. First it was put on a production hiatus for a few weeks, then it was announced that showrunner Jeff Bell (who was showrunner on Angel's final season) was being demoted — he's still around as a writer, but he's no longer in charge. Then before the first hiatus was even over, a second hiatus was announced, and the show was on hold for at least a couple of months. And then the network decided to air only four episodes, this month, and then put the show on hold until after the Olympics, in March.

And today, there's the news that Scott Peters, the show's creator who replaced Bell as showrunner, was himself ousted. His replacement, luckily, will be Scott Rosenbaum, who's been a producer on Chuck and The Shield. Judging from the USA Today article, it sounds like the root of all these problems, including the production turnovers and delays, is the network's discontent with the show's creative direction. Here's USA Today's succinct explanation:

[T]he series remake has run into roadblocks. V's pilot episode was well-received by advertisers and critics, but ABC's late-summer decision to start the show two months earlier than planned – in part to dodge American Idol and the broadcast of the Winter Olympics, also in Vancouver – led to script problems, which forced reshoots and a five-week production break.

The first of three planned story arcs was condensed from six to four fall episodes. And the show will test viewers' loyalty with a three-month hiatus; remaining episodes won't surface until March. A promotional campaign that called for planes to skywrite red V's over national landmarks was scuttled after publicity over potential environmental effects.

And Thursday, in a response to the show's production problems, Peters (USA Network's The 4400) was replaced at the helm of the show by Scott Rosenbaum (Chuck, The Shield), though he is expected to stay aboard as an executive producer.

"We had a great pilot, then a couple of great episodes, but we had a disconnect on where we were going from there," says ABC Entertainment Group chief Stephen McPherson. Though no stranger to tinkering (he made extensive changes to the original Grey's Anatomy pilot), "I hadn't had the experience of that before." But McPherson accepts "a little blame for rushing them."

Mitchell, who plays hero FBI agent Erica Evans, says the resulting changes merely speed the pace of storytelling to pack a bigger wallop, including big cliffhangers in the Nov. 24 episode. Filming on that episode is set to wrap today, giving actors another unexpected 10-week break as the show is retooled. (Mitchell will trek to Hawaii to shoot new Lost episodes.)

So, yes. A troubled show, even before its first episode airs — and this does remind me a bit of similar behind-the-scenes stories about Bionic Woman, Dollhouse, Life On Mars, and countless other shows that had difficult gestations leading to troubled runs. But these things aren't fore-ordained, and a show can beat the odds.

Here are some reasons why I'm still cautiously optimistic about V in spite of all of the negative buzz:

1) The pilot really is great. From what I hear, the pilot that airs tonight is much the same one we all watched at Comic Con, and it's truly impressive. I went into the pilot expecting, at best, pleasant mediocrity or a watered-down tribute to the geek TV of our childhoods. And instead, I was surprised by what a cracking great piece of television it is. The story of the aliens who arrive promising great wonders, but quickly turn out to be a lot worse than we realize, is retold at a zippy pace and revamped for our wired, media-savvy culture. And it's provocative to have a show that says that despite all of our proud cynicism and air quotes, we're still suckers for the first super-advanced civilization that shows up offering us small-pox-infested blankets.

2) The cast is terrific. This matters a lot. You know who they never replaced during Bionic Woman's behind-the-scenes dickering? Michelle Ryan. You could have swapped in a dozen different producers, and it wouldn't have made Ryan watchable. In V, Elizabeth Mitchell is proving that her sparks of versatility on Lost weren't just illusions — she's really great as the show's heroine. (And how great is it that we actually have a female lead on a network show, who's not Michelle Ryan?) Given time, Mitchell could be as great as Lena Headey as Sarah Connor. Also, Whedonverse alums Alan Tudyk and Morena Baccarin are also just as great as you'd hope — and Baccarin is so natural as a smarmy alien leader, you'll almost forget Inara.

3) Maybe all the tinkering really will make it a better show in the end. Rosenbaum coming on as show-runner is actually great news — and if he can bring a bit of The Shield to V, then we'll be doing great. Also, I'm not entirely sad to hear they're tightening the pace. When I hear that six episodes were compressed to four, or that a show is going to cut to the chase faster, I often secretly rejoice — the biggest pitfall with a show like V is that the mysteries will be sustained for too long, that characters won't figure stuff out until long after the audience has, and that we won't get to see people fighting aliens until season three. As the SF Chronicle's Tim Goodman points out, this sort of molasses-slow storytelling has already overtaken fellow ABC show FlashForward (which might get renamed "inch forward" soon) — so it would be a shame if it happened to V as well.

4) We sort of owe it to ourselves to support any show about alien invaders. It's not as if we have a bevy of alien-invasion shows to choose from, or really a bevy of shows about aliens period. American television seems to have abdicated the territory it once owned, of first contact, alien attackers, galactic imperialists, and so on. I am prepared to apologize for mocking the boring alien makeup on shows like Star Trek: Voyager, if it means that we'll get aliens on TV once again. But for now, if there's even a hope of getting a show about meeting people unlike ourselves on television again, we need to grasp it with both hands.

5) I'm hoping that the creative stew of influences will still yield something really subversive and interesting. Peters, who created The 4400, is still on board as a producer according to USA Today, and Angel's Bell still seems to be in the mix as well. And the pilot definitely contains a huge dose of the paranoia and concerns about selling out that those earlier works were all about. (There's the journalist who's willing to ask only softball questions of the alien leader, as well as the religious figures who hitch their wagon to the aliens' star.) So maybe if those things remain part of V's DNA, and they aren't part of what gets sacrificed in the network's headlong dash to create soft and mushy enough for the general public to chew and swallow, then we'll still get a show that challenges us and reminds us that science fiction, even on television, can be a thing of amazement.

So yes, it's worth risking another disappointment. V is on ABC tonight at 8.

After compiling 43 clips of science-fiction dream sequences, we started to wonder exactly why we invade people's dreams so often in SF stories. What purpose does this unreality serve?

We all want to venture past our own limited little reality fields and pop our limiting bubbles of experience — and sometimes aliens, spaceships, time-machines and weird mutations just aren't enough to make that possible. Sometimes we have to get all the way liminal. Stand in the doorway for a bit.

But more specifically, here are some reasons why science fiction gets so dream-happy:

1) The cheap foreshadowing

So we haven't thought about the Borg in months, and they haven't flashed so much as a single implant around these parts. But they're never far from our thoughts — or our dreams, for that matter. And it's just a nifty coincidence — and by "nifty," we mean "ominous and horrifying" — that our hero has a terrible dream about the Borg right before they pop up again. Such a dream does double duty: it reminds us of exactly what the Borg are about and why they're so fearsome. And it sets the mood for another round of Borgian devilry.

2) The prophetic dream

This is similar to the use of dreams as foreshadowing, but usually the foreshadowing dream also includes some actual useful information that our heroes can decipher and use against the monster/villain later. The prophetic dream is a plot device as well as (or sometimes instead of) a grace note. It's not just thrown in for effect, it's actually providing useful info, or at least clues to future developments. The frequent dream sequences in Buffy The Vampire Slayer often set up developments years down the road, like the coming of Dawn. A cruder version is the Doctor's dream at the start of the Doctor Who story "The Time Monster," which gives him tons 'o' clues.

3) Escaping the straitjacket of realism

Science fiction often works really hard to establish a mood of complete realism, paradoxically because it features so many elements that don't, and maybe couldn't, exist in our world. And sometimes, the only excuse for letting go of that need for realism is to stick in a dream sequence, where everything goes loopy.

4) Heightened realism

On the other hand, if people really did meet aliens or their own grandparents, or whatever, people would probably have severe, bizarre mental reactions as a result. Reactions that, honestly, would seem over the top or crazy if you tried to depict them normally. So sometimes the only way to convey a realistic sense of humans coming face-to-face with the unreal is by representing their terror and confusion in the form of an alarming dream. It's actually a form of added realism.

5) Thematic gracenotes

This is something that seemed to leap out from many of the dream sequences we looked over. Like Fahrenheit 451, for example — the hero is facing a conflict, or a mind-blowing decision, and we see that mental anguish amplified in a dream sequence. Preferably full of whirling shapes, and faces going around in a circle. Whoosh.

6) The easy scare that doesn't break any toys

Oh no, Ripley has an alien in her stomach, and it just burst out! Oh, except she doesn't, and it didn't. False alarm, folks.

7) Padding the running length.

What do you mean, we still have another ten minutes left? Do we have any explosives we haven't set off? No? Can we afford another monster costume or some extra CG? No? Okay, how about a long, trippy dream sequence where people stand around and recite e.e. cummings. It's puddlewonderful — in space! The fans will be debating what it means for decades...

8) Up the surrealism ante.

Imagine you're David Lynch. Okay, that may be asking too much. But pretend for a moment that you're impersonating a guy (or Laura Dern) and who has weird hair. And the person you're impersonating has done a lot of drugs, and it's making him or her have loopy visions of worm babies. What can you possibly do to make this guy (or Laura) have more weirdness on top of that? How about a totally batfreak dreamsequence, preferably featuring David Bowie? Or maybe a tiny radiator lady with facial hair?

9) Meeting the alien

Sometimes alien creatures (and gods, and demons) are so alien that no real-life encounter will work. The only way we can talk to them, or have any kind of meaningful communication, is in a dream, or a dreamlike world, where everything is semi-nonsensical and there's a bit of vaseline on the lens... because we're meeting a consciousness that's totally unlike our own.

10) Extra sexiness without consequences

And most importantly, we want to see Mulder shirtless and handcuffed. We want to see Sookie and Eric doing the wild thing. We crave random titillation, and we don't care if it makes sense in the context of the story. In fact, the less sense it makes, or the more it hints at undercurrents of sexitude under the surface, the more exciting it is. So it's almost mandatory for dream sequences to include "I can't believe they went there" friskiness.

The truth is, we want to be smacked in the face with strangeness. Our desire for the bizarre and ridiculous is so much greater than our pitiful suspension of disbelief that you need to short-circuit the whole "is this really happening" question.

In an interview with MTV David Duchovny said he was completely open to a new X-Files movie, in fact he thinks the possible Mayan apocalypse in 2012 almost demands it.

"As far as the X-Files movie I'd like to do next, if we get a chance to do it, would be a return to the heart and soul of the mythology, which is the alien-oriented conspiracy," Duchovny said. "I think it's natural for 'The X-Files' to have another movie in 2012, so we'll see if we get to do it."

I'm all for this — we need to end the series on a preferable alien note. Because I still believe that the truth is out there.

It's not just the comic continuations of canceled shows (which also include The X-Files, Angel and, soon, Pushing Daisies), though; old ideas are never allowed to die anymore anywhere; that's why we're reading news about Battlestar Galactica being relaunched as a movie by Bryan Singer, X-Files possibly undergoing a movie reboot, eagerly anticipating the 28-years-later sequel to Tron and worrying whether or not there's going to be a fifth Terminator movie.

Arguments could - and will - be made about how this shows the void of new ideas in the entertainment world, but I'm not sure that those really hold water; this year alone, we've seen District 9 and Moon find success, gotten curious about Chris Nolan's Inception and watched as James Cameron's Avatar has become the most anticipated movie of the year. New stories are out there, and from big studios normally condemned for only sticking with familiar franchises, as well (In television, the same arguments can be made; for all the familiarity of Fringe or Warehouse 13, they're new shows, as are/were Dollhouse, Day One and even Flash Forward. As far as comics go, you only have to leaf through the 400+ page Previews to see all manner of new ideas sharing space with familiar faces). So, if it's not that no-one's coming up with new stories, why do we keep going back to the old?

It can't just be nostalgia; you can't really tell me that Jericho's return as a comic book and potential TV movie comes down to people longing for those halcyon days of 2008, for one thing, and it's not just the sense of unfinished stories or unfulfilled potential (Unless I missed the legions of people crying out for someone to come along and give us the story of bearded Lorne Greene Adama in Galactica 1980 that they knew we deserved for all these years). So, what is it?
I'm worried that, ultimately, it's laziness. Not only laziness on the side of creators, but also on the side of fans; for the creators, resurrecting an old franchise seems like a no-brainer because it:
* offers a way around that whole pesky "coming up with an idea" thing,
* brings a ready-made amount of fans, no matter how small, who are not only already interested in your product but can take up some slack on marketing and publicity (Yes, this involves "I can't believe they're letting Bryan Singer do BSG only months after Ron Moore's show ended" style outrage),
* creates an easy PR hook for whatever publicity you want to do ("[Character X] is back!")
* allows you to learn from the mistakes and successes of your predecessors instead of making yourself look like idiots in public (Until, of course, you learn new ways to do that, which is inevitable), and
* gives you a chance to work out some of your "I could do that idea a million times better!" feelings about original version.

On the fan side of things, though, it gets more complicated. We cling onto these resuscitations because, in a weird way, we feel entitled to them: We've invested all this time and energy in them, and - for want of a better way to put it - that gives us the right to demand more of it until we decide we're done (See: Star Trek and Star Wars and the fact that they'll never go away), and also because... well, we've invested all this time and energy and we want to know that it's not for nothing, and that we won't have to go through it all again with something else that might just break our heart.

In the end, it's as much a success for the market as it is anything else: Everything is available to us if we want it badly enough (Well, as long as what we want already exists; those new things, they still have to be dreamt up), even if it's not what we really need, or what is good for us. Don't get me wrong; for the people who couldn't consider life without knowing what happened to Angel and Illyria after the end of the TV show, I'm happy that they get their chance to find out (And I selfishly look forward to the further adventures of Ned and Chuck, when they appear). I just wish that, sometimes, we were not only allowed to move on from our old favorites and find something else to surprise and amaze us.

Bloody Disgusting are reporting that Anderson's comments to the effect that we can expect a third X-Files movie somewhere around 2012 (Perhaps that's the terrible disaster that will spark the end of the world as promised by Roland Emmerich, countless ancient prophecies and fixed Google searches) are part of a possible reboot of the franchise that's currently being discussed by the powers that be, although they add that "[n]othing is set in stone, all should be taken as rumor until confirmed."

We're not too surprised that an X-Files reboot would be considered, considering the critical drubbing of the last movie and a remake/reboot-happy Hollywood that sees no problem in rebooting Battlestar Galactica less than a year after the last version, but it has to be asked: Doesn't Fringe already do that job pretty nicely? Do we even need any new X-Files anymore?

News Bites: Alba on 'Machete' Set, New 'Pandorum' Poster, a Third 'X-Files', New Discoveries! [Bloody Disgusting]

Some people interpreted last week's top 10 list of silly alien prosthetics as hating on low-budget science fiction, or dissing the hard work of makeup artists — and that was definitely not the intention. But when you've seen the same few ideas crop up again and again, you tend to get a bit jaded.

For me, personally, Star Trek in the 1990s and early 2000s ruined me for boring humanoid aliens. After the endless parade of people in vinyl pajamas, with different smushy bits of latex on their faces every week, I got rubber-nose fatigue. There's a lot to love about 1990s Trek — Deep Space Nine was frequently brilliant and prescient, and Voyager had some standout episodes — but the infinite assembly of silly faces was not one of the things I loved.

Oh, and the picture above is from Davosmith's amazing Flickr set of Manchester's Fab Cafe. Here's another image from the same set, featuring another one of the creatures on this list:

So here are ten aliens that were obviously done on a shoestring budget, but which absolutely knock your space boots off:

10. The Daleks, on Doctor Who.

The evil genetically engineered cyborgs on Doctor Who are like mini-tanks with buzzing bee voices, and they scared the pants off generations of British (and some American) kids. They've had their ups and downs — if the first Dalek story you saw was "Day Of The Daleks," "Destiny Of The Daleks," "Remembrance Of The Daleks" or the recent one where they turn people into pigs and then dress in zoot suits, you won't understand what the fuss is about. Watch "Genesis Of The Daleks" or "Dalek." (Before you jump on me in comments, I do like "Remembrance," except the Daleks wobble horribly and look just decrepit.) In their prime, though, the Daleks glide along, rasping with anger and pointing their terrible egg-whisk guns. They're utterly cheap — and horrifying. And you only occasinally Runners up: debatable whether the Cybermen are aliens, but they do often look cool. Also, the Draconians and Zygons make the rubber-mask thing look brilliant, and the Forest of Cheem also doesn't look bad at all. I also like the Slitheen, but only design-wise.

9. The Aliens from The Arrival.

Directed by David "Pitch Black" Twohy, this 1996 alien invasion film was probably made for three Snickers wrappers and a handful of arcade tokens — but I really love the look of these aliens, and they way they move on their weird satyr-ish horse legs. Here's a slinky alien transforming itself into a hawt babe, probably because it just watched Species. Also, I love the flaps that cover up its brain, and how they undulate. Nice stuff!

8. The Visitors from V.

They look human most of the time, but when we get the occasional glimpse of their real lizard faces under their human masks, it's super-effective — as long as we don't linger. Here are a couple of choice moments. I love Diana picking at the shreds of her human disguise, like they're a scab (at about 4:00 in the first video). And the speech in the second video is the greatest thing ever:

7. Greedo and the other cantina aliens, in Star Wars.

Weirdly, later live-action Star Wars movies have never featured aliens that felt as interesting and lively as the first glimpse we got in that cantina scene. Of course, we've already exposited about our love for Greedo, but all of the quick glimpses of aliens in this scene have a liveliness that makes you feel like they're each the star of a cool story. Not bad for an underdog film with a tiny $8.5 million budget (not much even in 1977) whose crew was busy trashing the set and making fun of the Wookiee costume.

6. The Jem'Hadar in Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

They actually jumped out at me when I was compiling pics for the post about silly-looking facial prosthetics last week — there was a picture of a Vorta surrounded by Jem'Hadar troopers, and I had to crop the Jem'Hadar out of the image, because they actually looked kind of cool. Something about the way their prostheses work with their faces really feels realistic, and all of those scenes of them struggling with their addiction to ketracel white feel engaging rather than run-of-the-mill. Runner up: Species 8472 in Voyager had some moments of genuine creepitude as well.

5. Black Oil in The X-Files.

A sentient alien virus that can live in hibernation for thousands of years, it appears as a liquid, not unlike crude oil. But it can move on its own, and it's sentient, and it can take people over. There's nothing cheaper than just having some black goo oozing around, and yet it's completely convincing and compelling, and doesn't feel like any life form you've encountered on Earth.

4. The Aliens in District 9.

Obviously, this movie's still fresh in our minds, but the downtrodden aliens in the film look different than anything we'd already seen. Their twitching face-tentacles can't help grossing you out a bit, even as their big pleading eyes lay claim to your sympathy. With a budget of around $30 million, this film is the equivalent of Star Wars or Alien back in the day — a low-budget film that succeeds thanks to a lot of inventiveness born of desperation. And great storytelling, of course. I almost left this film off the list, because we've covered it so much lately, but it clearly belongs.

3. The Vorlon from Babylon 5.

These energy-based life forms are among the First Ones, and inspire a quasi-religious awe among people who see them. So its fitting that their headgear and robes look so alien and unfamiliar. As Sheridan tells Kosh at one point, he can't even tell if it's the same Vorlon under all that covering, or different Vorlons in the same guise.

2. The 456, on Torchwood.

To me, this is the absolute best way to do an alien species on a budget. Shroud it in toxic smoke — and mystery — and just show little glimpses of evil tentacles. The way these creatures shriek and spatter the walls of their enclosure with alien puke will stick in your mind long after you're done watching the miniseries "Children Of Earth." This official still is actually a better look at the 456 than we ever get in the actual television show — and even in this image, they're somewhat indistinct and obscene looking. They're the perfect mixture of mysterious and disgusting, just right for aliens who want to molest your children.

1. The Xenomorph, from Alien.

The studio originally only wanted to give director Ridley Scott a $4.2 million budget, until he showed them storyboards and Mobius illustrations. But, says Scott in a recent interview, "The [revised] budget started out at $.8.2-million and ended up at 8.6, which I think in those days was still relatively cheap. We didn't have the money to do pretty well anything... But in a funny kind of way, you get very clever when there is very little money, because it makes you think." Scott had a stroke of luck when writer Dan O'Bannon took him aside and showed him H.R. Giger's art "like he was showing me a dirty book," and they brought in Giger to design — and sculpt — the alien costume and other alien artifacts. But the other key, says Scott, was disguising the fact that this was still a man in a suit:

We started with a stunt man who was quite thin, but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man. So my casting director said, ‘I've seen a guy in a pub in Soho who is about seven feet tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body.' So he brought Bolaji Bodejo to the office, and he was actually from Somalia, funnily enough," Scott remarks, having much later directed BLACK HAWK DOWN, which was set in Somalia. "I said, ‘Do you want to be in movies,' and he said sure. And he became the alien. I had him for two months. In the cockpit, there's a pack of cigarettes that says ‘Bolaji.'

Thanks to Alan Bostick, Alasdair Stuart, Madeline Ashby, @Nightwyrm on Twitter, Marlin May, Andrea Zanin, Melinda Adams, Rina Weisman, Micky Shirley, Susie Kameny, Greta Christina, Serene Vannoy, Rus McLaughlin, Minal Hajratwala, Annelise Ophelian, Seth Kaufman, David Fraser, and James Limbach for suggestions!

The Thing

There are two movie versions of The Thing, which is itself based on a short story by John Campbell called "Who Goes There," but every iteration shares the same basic structure. An alien beneath the ice of Antarctica gets thawed out by a lonely group stationed on the continent during winter. It slowly picks off members of the group, perhaps most spectacularly in John Carpenter's movie version, which is packed with terrific, gory effects of alien/human slaughter.

"At the Mountains of Madness"

This classic short story by H.P. Lovecraft is about a group of explorers who discover an ancient city buried beneath the ice in an Antarctic mountain range. Within the city, they find evidence that Earth's earliest inhabitants were aliens who took up residence in the once-temperate South Pole. They lived in a state of advanced civilization, occasionally having problems with other alien groups (like Cthulhu's spawn, which live in the sea). But finally their city descended into decadence, and the polymorphous slave beings known as Shuggoths began to take over. Eventually it emerges that some of the Shuggoths still live, and the human expedition may have released them upon the world.

The X-Files movie

The 1998 movie that came out of the popular alien-paranoia TV series includes a final set of scenes that take place in a secret underground lab in Antarctica, where aliens are being studied. We know the aliens are dangerous, and are associated with the black oil that has been mind-controlling several humans in the show. As the movie ends, a spaceship beneath the lab rises up and takes off. More black oil to be unleashed on the world? Aliens finally freed from prison? We may never know.

Alien vs. Predator

A group of explorers travel to Antarctica (this plot is starting to sound familiar, isn't it?) to investigate a mysterious heat signal in an ice field. They discover a vast, underground structure that looks sort of like a temple. It turns out to be a holding tank for aliens, and a group of predators have awakened them in order to have a fun hunting expedition. Unfortunately the human explorers are caught between the predators and aliens, and some of them get used as alien-hatching vessels so the predators can have their fun. When things get out of control, the humans have to decide whether to ally themselves with the dangerous predators if they're going to escape alive – and prevent the aliens from being unleashed all over the Earth.

Alien

It's possible to claim that the original 1970s Alien movie is about ice-bound creatures awakening to kill, kill, kill. The aliens that Ripley's vessel stumbles across are on what seems to be a frozen planet.

"A Colder War"

In this short story by Charles Stross, a Cold War-era nuclear submarine finds a Cthulhu-esque creature beneath the ice. It's an even greater threat than nuclear war, and makes the cold war pale by comparison.

Mammoth

Perhaps one of the greatest kitchen-sink monsters ever created, this movie's eponymous creature is discovered frozen whole in the arctic ice. But when the ice melts and (of course) the mammoth escapes, we discover that not only is it a reanimated paleolithic beastie, but it's also controlled via wireless by a group of hostile aliens and it's got the power to suck people's lifeforce out using its trunk. So it's an alien-controlled vampire dinosaur. And it's pissed. Watch the alien vampire mammoth wreck havoc among drunken teens, including Summer Glau (!) at a rave in the forest!

Transformers

In the first Transformers movie, evil Deceptacon leader Megatron is found deep beneath the ice, and as he thaws, his evil world-destroying powers grow.

Demolition Man

In the movie version of Demolition Man, set in the near future, supercriminal Phoenix is thawed out of deep freeze to face trial. Unfortunately he kills everybody in sight and escapes, to engage in a zillion acts of crime in a city unprepared for such a dangerous criminal. Luckily the city is able to defrost our cop hero too, whose skills dealing with violence were honed during Phoenix's era.

Dinosaurus

In this flick from 1960, a team constructing a harbor on a Carribbean island accidentally unearth two dinosaurs, a T-Rex and a brontosaurus. Of course the kaiju are struck by lightning and brought back to life for a mega-rampage – though sadly they aren't controlled by aliens or capable of sucking people's souls out. A caveman is brought to life with them, and serves as is the friendly defrosted foil to the dinos.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

This classic 1952 Ray Harryhausen movie basically started the giant atomic monster genre. A "Rhedosaurus" is awakened in arctic circle by atomic bombs, and unleashes monstery, claymation madness upon the world.

Doctor Who, "The Ice Warriors"

A new ice age is sweeping over the world, and a team of scientists and maniacs is desperately trying to find a way to roll back the glaciers. And then they find a weird Viking warrior-esque figure trapped in the ice for millions of years... and when the ice defrosts, the figure awakens!

Heroes

At the end of last season's superhero soap Heroes, Tracy uses her freeze-ray powers to freeze . . . herself! She goes mega-icy and then shatters into a million pieces to save the son of her dead, ultrastrong mutant genetic clone "sister" Nikki. But she'll be back this fall in the new season, all thawed out and healed up and ready to engage in all kinds of evil.

Frankenstein's Monster

In this early-70s comic from Marvel, the Frankenstein monster emerges from an arctic glacier twice: Once to battle Dracula, who injures him; and a second time in the modern world, aided by Frankenstein's distant, gothy relative Victoria Frankenstein. Though revenge and killing were among his goals after his first thaw, by the time he thawed a second time he was ready to fall in love (with Victoria) and fight for great justice (with Iron Man). Frankenstein's Monster teaches us that taking a second ice nap can be redemptive.

Terminal Freeze

In this novel by Lincoln Child, a group of explorers living in "Fear Base" underneath "Fear Glacier" encounter – surprise – something they need to be afraid of. It's a frozen, catlike creature that they plan to defrost when they return to civilization. But unfortunately it defrosts before the group makes it home, and people start dying. This is yet another tale in the sub-sub-genre established by "Who Goes There," the short story on which The Thing is based.

Sang-hyun (Thirst): If the path to Hell is paved with good intentions, Sang-hyun sprinted down the road and locked the gate behind him. In attempt to reduce the whole of human suffering, he volunteers to be a guinea pig for the Emmanuel Virus vaccine, but the experiment goes awry, leaving the priest with an unnatural thirst for human blood. And, though he tries to keep himself from killing, the comatose patients in the hospital where he works are almost too delectable to bear.

Ivan Isaacs (Priest): There are bad-ass priests...then there are bad-ass priests who sell their souls to the devil to become even more bad-ass. Fallen priest Ivan Issacs sells his soul to Belial for a second chance at life — and vengeance. Now an undead revenant sustained by only by his rage, Isaacs stalks the midwest with a blade, a sawed-off shotgun, and his superhuman strength.

Jesse Custer (Preacher): Jesse Custer may be one of the good guys, but get him in the wrong mood, and even God Himself shakes in His cowboy boots. He starts fights at the drop of a hat, is best friends with a vampire, and when he's bound to Genesis — granting him the powers of the Word of God — he drives his foes to suicide and even commands a fellow to do unspeakable things with his own genitalia. And he's on an ultraviolent mission to find God and make Him answer for His crimes against the world.

Reverend William Stryker (X-Men): Nothing says "scary" like an imagined genocidal mission from God. As if it weren't bad enough that Stryker is on a personal mission to exterminate all mutantkind, he has to use his televangelism to recruit new hatemongers. In fact, Stryker's power and charisma as a preacher are far more frightening weapons than the Sentinel arm he picks up in his anti-mutant travels.

Bishop Antony Lilliman (V for Vendetta): Certainly the whole notion of a fascist party that constantly spies on the whole of Britain is frightening enough, but party member Bishop Lilliman is particularly creepifying with his participation in the Larkhill experiments and his penchant for ordering up little girls like they're entrees. He's so busy attempting to molest a jailbait-outfitted Evey that he can't even heed her warnings about V.

Reverend Henry Kane (Poltergeist II): Adults might be inclined to give the creepy old reverend who comes traipsing into their front yard the benefit of the doubt, but kids and dogs know when "creepy" crosses the line into "absurdly evil." Listen to your dogs, Mom and Dad, or else you'll never know when Pastor Overly Friendly is a Satanic cultist with a penchant for murdering his followers and stealing their souls.

Brother Justin Crowe (Carnivale): The Methodist answer to radio priest Charles Coughlin, Brother Justin has the added title of Creature of Darkness. He uses his radio program as a mass-scale vehicle for his supernatural powers of manipulation, bringing people's greatest sins and darkest desires to life in horrifying visions. And where manipulation fails, Justin can always draw his strength from violence, mowing innocents down with a not-so-subtle scythe.

Caleb (Buffy the Vampire Slayer): In seven seasons of villains, Caleb may have been the most chill-inducing of the lot. Nathan Fillion gave him sufficient charm to understand how he managed to lure two girls to his death, and his link with the First Evil gives him the power to defeat even the Slayers. But Caleb takes on-screen violence in the Buffyverse to an uncomfortable level when he unflinchingly stabs his thumb into Xander's eye.

Brother Blood (Teen Titans): For centuries, the Church of Blood consisted of two members: a father who held what might be the prayer shawl of Christ (and its powers of invulnerability) and a son who would eventually slay him and take his place. But one of these Brother Bloods eventually realized that religion could be used not only to attain superpowers, but to take over the world. His brainwashing, baby-stealing, no-exit cult even managed to attract powerful government officials, despite the distinctly Satanic-sounding name.

Paladin Alexander Anderson (Helsing): Alucard is the most powerful vampire on Earth, but even he is thrown off guard by the Vatican's top vampire hunter, Father Anderson. Engineered with superhuman abilities and the capacity to regenerate, Anderson himself seems, at times, more monster than man. And he'd be less fearsome if his hatred for vampires didn't extend to all non-Catholics — and if he lost that rictus grin.

Anthony Tipet (The X-Files): After getting out of prison for bludgeoning his wife to death, Tipet begins to preach the "Via Negativa," the notion that the path of darkness is the best way to get close to God. And he gets to put his philosophy into action when a super-amphetamine turns him into Freddy Krueger, granting him the ability to kill folks in their sleep, and — for creepy bonus points — opening his third eye.

The Confessor (Astro City): The Confessor may have been modeled on Batman, but he has something in common with one of the other priests on the list: Thirst's Sang-hyun. This one-time priest wears a cross to immolate his cursed flesh and focus his mind on something other than his relentless hunger for blood. But at least he's not too distracted to use his vampiric powers to fight crime.

Mr. Eko (Lost): Priest was only Mr. Eko's second job title. Earlier in life, he was a warlord and a drug smuggler, the sort of man who would threaten to burn down his own brother's church to get what he wants. And even after taking on the role of village priest to atone for a life of violence, Eko is still a man to be feared. When guerillas threaten his village and attack Eko, he still has, much to his dismay, the strength and killer instincts to take them down.

Father Grigori (Half-Life 2): Father Grigori is quite friendly when it comes to fellow zombie-killer Gordon Freeman, but he comes off as a bit unhinged as he wields his pump-action rifle (nicknamed Annabelle). Of course, if you watched your entire congregation get turned into headcrab zombies, you'd probably develop a few spooky characteristics, too.

Steve Newlin Jr. (True Blood): While not as eager to bloody his hands as the other preachers on this list, here's something creepy and off about televangelist Steve Newlin. It's not just his extreme hatred of vampires or his propensity for wearing t-shirts over button-downs. It's his unquestioning conviction in his moral and spiritual correctness, his ability to attract unfailingly like-minded worshipers, his ends-justify-the-means — and the sense that he's playing Dr. Jekyll to a gleeful (and possibly misogynistic) Mr. Hyde.

Syfy is trying to impress us with its new look and new shows, like a small-town girl who moves to the big city to be an "actress", bleaches her hair platinum blonde and changes her name. And while we remain skeptical of clichéd reinvention, we have to admit – it worked for Norma Jeane.

Warehouse 13 premiered this week on Syfy, and many viewers were filled with a strong sense of Déjà vu. A pair of odd-couple government agents are sent to investigate paranormal activity, blatantly setting the characters up as replicas of Mulder and Scully. Couldn't Syfy at least have mixed things up a bit by making Pete being the by-the-book skeptic and Myka being the intuitive true-believer? But it's not just the agents themselves that are borrowed directly from the archives:

The name of show, and its very concept, evokes another direct influence: the quirky Canadian series Friday the 13th that aired in 1987, about a pair of cousins who inherit an antique shop that turns out to be filled with supernatural artifacts. They too are aided by an eccentric middle-aged man with a vast knowledge of the supernatural. In Friday, the female lead is named Micki, and Warehouse's tight-laced female agent is Myka – here again, Syfy strives to make things new and shiny by swapping "y"s for "i"s.

This isn't a new approach by any means. When Syfy's old staple show, Eureka, first premiered in 2006, its premise was equally familiar; government official gets sent to a small town in the Pacific Northwest to investigate a strange occurrence, teams up with local law enforcement and becomes deeply embroiled in the wacky little town and all its colorful characters. Sheriff Carter is no Agent Cooper, but the sense of odd familiarity about the show was undeniable. Eureka appeared to be a candy-coated kid's coloring-book version of Twin Peaks.

The question remains, why isn't Syfy trying harder to hide its repackaging of television we already know and love? Do they hope that by transparently recycling these well-worn television tropes they can take a direct route to high ratings and fan admiration? Certainly the ever-increasing number of movie sequels indicates "more of the same" is a safe bet. Syfy already seems to be engaged in rebooting even more 80's television, including Quantum Leap and Alien Nation. It is remarkable how much attention all these "new" shows have gotten on blogs, message boards and by word of mouth. Perhaps the network executives at Syfy know the game better than we imagine, and are inviting us to play along as we watch them pressing our buttons. But don't they also know that "familiarity breeds contempt"?

You have our attention, Syfy – now can you show us something new?

BEST:

Spot, Data's Orange Tabby Cat from Star Trek: The Next Generation
Who: Data's number 1 friend that didn't wear a Devo-esque visor on his face.
Why he's awesome: He's probably one of the only cats in the universe that has an infinitely advanced AI at his beck and call.
Bonus points: Anything that pisses Riker off is a big plus in my book.

Willis the Bouncer from Robert Heinlein's Red Planet
Who: A sound mimicking furry ball that every kid should have as a friend.
Why he's awesome: In a 1960's era future, when a dog just won't cut it, the only way to really impress the kids at school is with an alien that doubles as a soccer ball. And here's a clip from the Fox miniseries adaptation.

R2D2, Star Wars
Who: The yin to C3PO's (annoying) yang that brings logic and light to any situation through a series of flickering lights and bleeps.
Why he's awesome: He's a moving trashcan that manages to be more likeable than most of the Star Wars palz extended cast.

Porthos, Captain Archer's Beagle from Enterprise
Who: Easily one of the more tolerable characters on Enterprise. Mostly because he didn't talk.
Why he's awesome: He's a beagle! How can beagles not be cute? Also, I feel like after the unfortunate Scotty related transporter incident, he deserves a nice memorial.

Ampersand, Y the Last man
Who: The world's ending, every man is dead, you're an aspiring escape artist pining away for your lost girlfriend and you're all alone. What do you do? Have crazy monkey antics with your favorite jungle friend with a punctuation mark as a name.
Why he's awesome: Not to spoil too much, but he may or may not be humanity's key to getting the XY's back in action.

Lockjaw
Who: Marvel's own alien bulldog and member of the non-human branch of the Avengers.
Why he's awesome: He's super strong, can eat anything and once latched onto the Thing.

Dog the Robot from Half Life 2
Who: Alyx Vance's No.1 go to robotic buddy who helps when your path is blocked by other dimensional beings or just wants to play fetch with your grav gun.
Why he's awesome: He's a giant robot with the personality of a dog. Do you need more?

Pen Pen, from Neon Genesis Evangelion
Who: A genetically altered super smart penguin that lives with Misato Katsuragi during the Angel apocalypse.
Why he's awesome: While the series has moments of intense despair and darkness, you can always count on jerky, anime humor involving naked people and penguins to brighten your day.

K-9 from Doctor Who
Who: Dr Who's multi-generational robotic canine companion.
Why he's awesome: He's gotten a series of spinoff stories and was even parodied on South Park.

Nibbler from Futurama
Who: Nibbler is part of an ancient race of Nibblonians who protect the universe from giant glowing brains that make everyone stupid. Er, Stupid-er.
Why he's awesome: He can eat about 1,000 times his body mass to, uh, produce dark matter.

Gaspode, from Terry Prachett's Discworld series
Who: A talking dog with human intelligence that attempts to bring "Hollywood" to Discworld.
Why he's awesome: He's an endless source of snarky remarks and regularly uses his speech to manipulate humans when he needs food.

CJ-7
Who: A puff ball with a body that guaranteed to produce family friendly fun times.
Why he's awesome: CJ-7 can help you repair torn relationships with certain parental figures and bring people back from the dead.

Einstein, Doc Brown's dog from Back to the Future
Who: You might be under the impression that a certain Family Ties alum might be the Doc's best time traveling friend in this series, but you'd be wrong. This adorable little terrier follows Doc whenever her goes.
Why he's awesome: As long as you ignore the craptacular animated television series, Einstein is always cute, helpful and never obnoxious.

Ein, Cowboy Bebop
Who: A super brained corgie that gets stranded on the Bebop.
Why he's awesome: Although they never really get into it in the series, Ein is a "data dog" that possesses super intelligence that allows him to answer phones and steer cars.

Bubastis, Ozymandias' lynx from Watchmen
Who: When you're a super genius David Bowie impersonator with the world at your fingertips what do you do next? You create a genetically engineered psychedelic colored lynx as a companion.
Why he's awesome: He takes one for the team for the sake of furthering an evil plan for his master.

Gizmo, Gremlins
Who: The main furry faced protagonist of the Gremlins series.
Why he's awesome: While I'm pretty much a fan of all the gremlins, I can't deny the greatness that is Gizmo channeling his inner Rambo.

Seymour from Futurama
Who: Seymour is a part of one of the most tear jerking episodes of Futurama involving Fry recounting the story of the most loyal dog that ever lived.
Why he's awesome: Did you see the last scene? He's the most loyal dog that ever lived! Also, we can rest easy knowing that alternate timeline Fry gave Seymour a great life.

Bronx from Gargoyles
Who: Bronx is the dog version of the Manhattan gargoyle clan. During the whole series you only see one other gargoyle beast, but unlike Budeka, Bronx gets a whole episode devoted to him befriending an Amish kid.
Why he's awesome: Gargoyles are already pretty high on the cool supercreatures scale, but add a dog personality to the mix, and you've got gold.

Roach from WALL-E
Who: They weren't lying when they said that after the world ended there would be nothing left but cockroaches. Fortunately, the end of the world also gave them charming personalities!
Why he's awesome: Making me want a roach as a pet is an epic win in my book.

Kevin and Dug from Up
Who: Kevin is a rare, brilliantly colored giant bird that Carl and Russell accidentally find in Paradise Falls. Dug is sweet golden retriever with a collar that allows him to talk.
Why they're awesome: It takes a lot to make slapstick giant birds funny, but Pixar does a magnificent job. And Dug? He's exactly what I imagine an actual talking dog to sound like. SQUIRREL!

WORST:

Tribbles from Star Trek
Who: Fuzzy, purring little meat pets that take over the original Enterprise.
Why they suck: Pets rocks were bad enough, why would they think that a massively multiplying furry pet rock would be better?

ALF
Who: Alien puppet that takes over a really lame sitcom in the 80's. If ever you want to torture someone without the use of waterboarding, show them and episode of ALF… or Small Wonder.
Why he sucks: Look me straight in the eye and tell me you didn't scream in horror when you saw that clip.

Snarf, Thundercats
Who: A fat alien cat that ends every sentence with an annoying "snarf!" sound.
Why he sucks: Is he a lizard or a cat? I'm going to go with meth induced demonic lovechild.

Teddy from A.I.
Who: An animatronic intelligent Teddy Rucksbin from the future that accompanies David in a search for the Blue Fairy.
Why he sucks: Ok, now I understand that some people might take issue with Teddy's position on the worst list but he's a toy that's alive. That's pretty much the worst nightmare of most 8-year-old kids. And me.

Slimer from Ghostbusters
Who: A green ghost that terrorizes the Ghostbusters team by covering everything in slime.
Why he sucks: For those of us born in the mid 80's and watched the Ghostbusters cartoon first, we expected to see cool ghost antics when we finally saw the movie. Instead, we were greeted with a grotesque blob that was pretty evil.

Div-x from Penny Arcade
Who: You might remember the Sony Dix-X player, an ahead of its time technical marvel.
Why he sucks: According to Penny Arcade Comics, he's a foul-mouthed drunk that's teetering on the edge of killing us all.

Pets from Children of Men
Who: When the world's gone infertile, people turn to animals to provide comfort in the end of humanity.
Why they suck: I have nothing against the animals in Children of Men, personally, but seeing all the dogs, cats and birds cluttering people's homes can be an ominous image.

Selacious Crumb from Star Wars
Who: He's a little fox-lizard thing that hangs out with Jabba the Hut and laughs at all his lame jokes.
Why he sucks: Everybody hates the skinny jerk in the corner with the stupid laugh.

Gleek from Superfriends
Who: The alien monkey pet of the Wondertwins.
Why he sucks: Usually if he was featured in Superfriends, you could count on him popping out to end the episode on a lame joke.

Independence Day Dog from Independence Day
Who: If you're like me then you probably laughed at the idea of a ball of flame chasing a golden retriever down a tunnel.
Why he sucks: Was it really necessary to have a slow motion explosion behind a dog? And wouldn't all that heat ultimately cook them all in that storage locker?
Then Again:...he's immune to explosions. And that's pretty cool. Dodging fire like that, he's like a canine Neo. Maybe he should have been best?

Space Buddies
Why they suck: I'll just point you in the direction of this.

Queequeg, X-files
Who: A Pomeranian adopted by Dana Scully and eaten shortly after by the legendary Big Blue.
Why he sucks: He was found snacking on his previous owner.

Krypto
Who: Superman's dog. Enough said.
Why he sucks: I hate pet versions of superheroes. Also, why does he need a cape?

Muffit from the original Battlestar Gallactica
Who: Caprica used to have a variety of tracker dogs but sadly, none of them survived the Cylon attack. Instead a group robotic dogs are created to replace them.
Why he sucks: Is he an ewok? A fuzzy, metallic gremlin on meth? You decide.

MAD Cat from Inspector Gadget
Who: Dr. Claw's chortling fat feline.
Why he sucks: He's the quintessential evil cat meant to taunt the hero. Plus Dr. Claw regularly beat the crap out of him and he seemed to be ok with that.

Frank the Dog from Men in Black
Who: An alien stool pigeon using the guise of a small pug.
Why he sucks: He made me remember "Who Let the Dogs Out" existed.

Gir, Invader Zim
Who: Invader Zim's mentally disturbed robot helper that was given to him as either a joke or sabotage. Probably both.
Why he sucks: Yeah, yeah Gir is really cute, but he's amoral, evil and would gladly watch you die a fiery death while bursting into a fit of giggles.

Astro, The Jetsons
Who: The Scooby Doo knockoff of the 21st century.
Why he sucks: It might have worked with the Scooby Gang, but there's only room for one charismatic dog with a speech impediment ‘round these parts.

Lamar, Half Life 2
Who: The neutered headcrab that resides in Dr. Isaac Kleiner's laboratory.
Why he sucks: Crabs are rarely a good thing. Head crabs are a double whammy of bad.

Joshua from Dark Angel
Who: A transgenic dog-man with an affinity for painting and crappy comedic timing.
Why he sucks: There was only one good thing that came out of season two of Dark Angel and that rhymes with Smensen Shackles.

Honorable Mention: Blarp from the Lost in Space remake.

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.

Bell, is known for his work on X-Files, Alias and the best part of Angel (right around the time the lonely vampire took charge of Wolfram and Hart). In fact, Bell was showrunner for the final season of Angel.

"Like many people, I have fond memories of whatching the original miniseries," Bell said. "And to see how they did it now, it's epic. (Exec producer/scribe) Scott Peters did a fantastic job relaunching it. It seems like there are so many ways that you could go with this story."

While Bell's deal is for two years, the alien invasion series is on a year-by-year contract. The first year will consist of 13 episodes, and the next could have more (or none). The drama will begin in January. Scott Peters, of The 4400 fame, and the brains behind the updated V, will remain an executive producer.

[Variety]

The Daily Express is reporting that Anderson will appear in new Doctor Matt Smith's first season, and she'll be playing The Rani, the Time Lady who crossed swords with the Doctor a couple of times in the 1980s. Originally played by Dynasty actor Kate O'Mara, the Rani was an amoral scientist who didn't care who got hurt by her crazy experiments. She wasn't actually evil, just morally challenged. And she needed a constant supply of human brain fluid to pay for her shiny Hot Topic outfits. Despite appearing in two of the worst 1980s stories, the Rani isn't intrinsically horrible, and could turn out to be a fun character if given a decent makeover - and a better actor, like Anderson.

The same source who told the Express the Rani is coming back also insisted the new production team, led by Steven Moffat, is eager to bring in tons of new villains. So which is it? [via DenOfGeek]

We got to see a preview screening of Trespass a few days ago, and it was pretty fun, although possibly trying too hard to emulate a real 1950s movie.

During the Q&A after Thursday night's screening, and the movie's panel at Wondercon, director Goodwin insisted there was no irony in his 1950s pastiche. Or rather, that any irony would come from us viewing the film, not from the film itself. Movies from the 1950s are unintentionally funny when we watch them now, so Goodwin and collaborator James Swift decided that if they made a 1950s-style SF film now, and played it absolutely straight, it would be unintentionally funny as well.

So you have the cheap rubber-suit monster, the slightly wobbly flying saucer (but done via CG), the theremin, and the painfully earnest acting and dialogue. There's even a thing where someone walks alongside a moving car and the background scrolls behind the person and the car, but when the car stops the background is out of sync.

The rubber monster, the Gota, looks like a "seven-foot-tall penis, with eye in the middle," Goodwin said in the Q&A after the screening. "We put those little fringey things over its eye to try and take that off it." He said he made everybody watch tons of old 1950s movies, to try and keep this one as true to their spirit as possible, and every prop or piece of decoration is as authentic as possible.

What saves Alien Trespass from being just a pure campfest is the quality of the performances. Goodwin managed to score a surprisingly great cast, including Eric McCormack (Will And Grace, Free Enterprise), Jenni Baird (The 4400), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2) and Dan Lauria. They bring absolute conviction to their performances and never wink at the audience or start playing it for laughs.

"When you look at the original movies, [like] It Came From Outer Space, the actors were good and everything, but when you look like it now, it's really funny," said Goodwin. "We had to act like we were living in the 50s, and try really hard." In some ways, with all the world's troubles today, it was nice to go back to a time when "life was simpler, gentler and nicer," with "nothing to worry about except instant nuclear holocaust."

The movie's plot is pretty formulaic and never quite rises above the level of slavishly imitating 1950s storylines. A UFO which crashes near a small town, and two occupants lurch out: the Gota, a one-eyed monster that kills humans, leaving only puddles of water behind, and the spaceman who was keeping it prisoner. The spaceman, Urp, takes over the body of a local astronomer, Ted Lewis (McCormack) and tries to hunt down the Gota before it reproduces and overruns the world. But the town's residents think Lewis has gone crazy, and blame him for the rash of disappearances in town. Meanwhile, a group of joy-riding teens are the only ones who've seen the monster, but nobody will believe them.

The movie starts with a fake 1957 newsreel explaining how all copies of the film Alien Trespass were destroyed after a dispute between the studio and the movie's star. So we're meant to be seeing a lost classic here, that's been miraculously dug out of a basement.

Just to make it absolutely clear this is a 1950s homage, there's a scene where the kids go to a theater to watch The Blob. And we see a clip of the scene where the kids are in the movie theater, and the Blob oozes in and attacks them. And while the Trespass kids are watching this scene - you guessed it - the Gota comes into the movie theater and chases everybody out. It's totally meta.

If you've seen every single 1950s classic several times, and you wish there was one more film along the lines of It Came From Outer Space or The Blob for you to watch, Alien Trespass is literally made for you. I like those 1950s movies, but they're not my favorites, and I don't really enjoy this kind of nostalgia fest. So Alien Trespass wasn't really my cup of tea, but you might find its poker-faced retro-camp totally awesome and fun.

The movie opens April 3 in select markets, and then goes a bit wider the following week. Goodwin and Swift are depending on word of mouth to make this film succeed, so if it sounds cool to you, definitely tell your friends.

Jackson sat down and tried to make us really hate Peter Bishop, pontificating about how Peter's a bad guy and has his fingers in the dirty deeds pot. Sorry buddy, we like em' rough. But then, as if our Dawson's Creek-meets-Fringe love couldn't run deeper, Jackson started talking X-Files.

Jackson also revealed why he doesn't believe Olivia and Peter have any sort of romantic connection.

Would Peter really sleep with Olivia's sister and leave Olivia in the dust?

It's quite possible. Peter is a shallow, venal, hedonistic, nihilistic man. So... if Olivia's sister would sleep with him, I think he would absolutely jump at the chance.

But doesn't he have an emotional investment in Olivia?

The emotional involvement for Olivia on her side is with John Scott. Peter is a functionary in her life. It's not an emotional relationship that they have. She needs him to solve the riddle that is Walter. And then she needs Walter to be the crazy genius that he is. So when you say, is there a romantic relationship between the two of them, I don't think there is a romantic relationship between the two of them.

So who's going to love poor Olivia? What about that nice Agent Charlie Francis fellow? The press asked Kirk Acevedo about the chances of these two crazy kids hooking up, and he seemed a bit dubious about the subject.

When is Charlie going to step up his game and go for Olivia?

Kirk Acevedo: It's difficult because we're pretty much doing the episode now [episode 16] that pretty much answers that question the reason why. It's funny because that's one of the little secrets. Obviously in the first episode she's a junior agent who gets the liaison gig, which is a very big step up. I have to play it like she's a colleague and I care for her, but how much I care for her... I can't, it has to be so subtle, because I'm an FBI guy. It takes away from - it's so funny because I can't talk about it, because we're doing it right now. But it's hard because a lot of this stuff is an exposition. When you're a character actor, which is what I am, to play someone that's the polar opposite of you, it's trying to finds a way that you're happy and the character is happy, especially for yourself. Because you can't color it up and that's what you want to do. You want to add all the bells and whistles but you can't. So you keep it simmering.

God, will someone please give Olivia some lovin' so she'll stop shooting everyone?

Manners got his start working on Charlie's Angels before going on to direct episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and other shows. But it was as a regular director of X-Files and Supernatural that he became indispensible. He directed the series finale of X-Files, and directed every Supernatural season finale.

Here's Manners taking a hands-on approach on the set of Supernatural, photographed by PrincessFaerie:

Writes TV Guy:

I first met Manners during The X-Files' fifth season, the series' final year in Vancouver as it would turn out. He was directing a short, inconsequential night scene in a parking garage involving Mitch Pileggi, "Skinner" from the show, and Vancouver acting teacher William B. (Bill) Davis, aka "CSM" or Cigarette-Smoking Man. It was a nothing scene, really, just filler — the kind of scene TV scripts use to "bridge" one key scene with another.

Manners, always one to take a weird angle on the obvious, had decided to shoot the scene at shoelace level — literally. He lied down in a puddle of cold, dank water on the cold, hard cement floor of the parking garage floor and arranged the camera dolly track so that the camera would tilt up from Davis' shoes as the Cigarette-Smoking Man dropped a lit cigarette down toward the camera and then angrily stubbed it out of his toe. Manners laughed easily, and he could curse a blue streak that would put Gordon Ramsay to shame.

In an interview with DGA Magazine, Manners talked about his influences and his approach to filming X-Files:

The movies Manners saw as a boy were those of Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Vincent Price — "This is my niche," he said. The director recalled one of his X-Files shows, "Home," written by Glen Morgan and Jim Wong, which featured three mutant brothers and their armless and legless mother, who lived in a cart under a bed, and with whom they had an incestuous relationship. "The picture opened with this woman giving birth on a kitchen table during a thunderstorm. You never saw the baby, but these three brothers carried it outside and buried it alive, because they didn't want this terrible genealogy to continue. I read it, and I went, 'Now this is a classic horror script.' There are episodes that, when you read them — bang! — the images just leap into your head."

Believability is the key goal for The X-Files, and that, said Manners, is the result of a combination of good scripts, good acting and good directing.

"This is a very difficult show. If you don't do this show right, it would be the most ridiculous show on television. I mean, I directed an episode, 'Leonard Betts,' where a guy had his head cut off in the teaser, and he grew a new one."

Assassinated in the Act

The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross: Some people have a monkey on their back; Ramona Random has a succubus. If Ramona doesn’t have sex, the demon gnaws at her mind. If she does have sex, it devours her partner. It makes her questionable girlfriend material, but a highly effective assassin.

Goldeneye: Bond henchwomen often use their seductive powers to get what they want, and what Xenia Onatopp wants is a good orgasm. Unfortunately for her partners, she nothing brings Xenia to ecstasy quite like squeezing a man to death between her powerful gams.

Worshipping the Queen of Sheba (American Gods by Neil Gaiman): Bilquis, an incarnation of the Queen of Sheba, doesn’t get loving any more from the worshippers who once prayed to her and held sexy fertility rites in her temples. So she maintains her power the best way she knows how: by posing as a prostitute, having sex with her johns, and promptly devouring them with her vagina. Judging by the screams of ecstasy, it’s not an entirely unpleasant way to go.

Getting it on with Alien-Possessed Women

Torchwood “Day One”: Cardiff is ground zero for alien mischief, so when a beautiful woman leads you into the bathroom for some anonymous love, stay on your toes. She might have a fetish for sexy time in the stalls, but she might also be possessed by an alien gas that wants to suck the sperm – and all the energy – from your body.

The Outer Limits “Caught in the Act”: Chaste Hannah wants to wait until marriage before going all the way with her boyfriend Jay. When an alien lifeform takes control of Hannah’s body, premarital abstinence flies quickly out the window as she starts seducing every man on campus. But this isn’t sexual liberation; it’s a hunger for man-meat that goes way beyond genitalia. When Jay starts tailing his suddenly unfaithful love, he discovers that she’s absorbing men into her body during the act.

Death by Snoo Snoo (Futurama “Amazon Women in the Mood”): After all the men died out on Amazonia, the Amazon women devised a method of punishing male trespassers that fulfills the needs of the hetero sex-starved population: Snoo Snoo. Evidently, dying of a crushed pelvis only sounds like fun.

Alien Sex Vampires

Liquid Sky: The aliens who land on the roof of artist Margaret’s loft find human endorphins especially tasty. Initially, they’re content to nibble on the endorphins released during heroin use, but they quickly learn that the orgasmic variety is far more satisfying. So they start murdering Margaret’s partners at the height of their sexual pleasure, leaving Margaret behind to deliver avant-garde monologues in her neon makeup.

Lifeforce: When a beautiful naked woman found imprisoned in the tale of Hailey’s Comet crawls on top of you and starts kissing you wildly, it’s probably not because she thinks you’re neat. It’s much more likely that she’s searching for a convenient orifice through which to suck out your soul, leaving you a desiccated, undead ghoul.

Angel “Lonely Hearts”: Angel & Co. hunt down a demon that kills its host when close to another naked body. But it’s not looking to snag its host’s energy; it’s just leaping from body to body during sex, looking for the perfect body to inhabit forever.

Having Sex with Your Proxy Self (Kaiba): In a future where memories can be stored, traded, and implanted in someone else, having sex with someone who shares your memories can be a form of near-masturbation. But the experience is so intense that it can make your head (and the rest of your body) explode.

Death by Rapid Pregnancy

Fringe “The Same Old Story”: When you’re a human specially designed for rapid aging, and your sperm is similarly designed, it’s best to use protection when sleeping with a fertile female partner. But even condoms fail from time to time, and those rapidly gestating pregnancies tend to kill the mother.

Species II: The same rules apply to men infected with alien DNA. Female alien hybrids can handle nine months’ worth of pregnancy occurring in the span of a few minutes. Female humans just don’t have the wombs for it.

Magically Boinked to Death

Dresden Files: Storm Front by Jim Butcher: When Harry Dresden is sent to investigate a pair of lovers whose hearts exploded in the act, he comes across a wizard who draws his energy from sex and lust. The wizard sent his target a coital heart attack, and her unfortunate partner got his own dose of cardiac overload.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Where the Wild Things Are”: Buffy and Riley’s repeated and enthusiastic lovemaking literally wakes the dead, freeing a crew of sexually repressed poltergeists. Once freed, the poltergeists try to ensure that they’ll have a steady supply of sexual energy by getting Buffy and Riley to continue their round-the-clock shtupping until they die of exhaustion. Fortunately, the rest of the Scoobies come to the rescue with a spell to pry the lovers apart, at least temporarily.

Kryptonite Condom (Wanted by Mark Millar): Perhaps taking a cue from Mallrats’ speculation on how Clark Kent and Lois Lane might copulate, supervillain Professor Seltzer once devised a kryptonite condom to take down his own Superman-like nemesis. Apparently, the hero’s girlfriend never quite got the radioactive rubber on him, leaving us to wonder whether a kryptonite diaphragm would have been more effective.

The Classic Coital Coronary

Star Trek: New Frontier: Vulcans are known for their remarkable stoicism, which breaks down spectacularly every seven years during an individual’s pon farr, during which a maddened Vulcan must mate or perish. But not every Vulcan has the constitution for the intense consummation. The Vulcan Voltak had a heart attack while between the sheets with his new wife, Enterprise Dr. Selar, leaving Selar widowed and throwing off her pon farr cycle.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Let He Who Is Without Sin…”: Curzon was a great diplomat and a notorious womanizer. So it’s apt that he irreparably strained himself with attempting the sexual ritual of jamaharon on the pleasure planet of Risa, although he didn’t give up the ghost (or, in this case, the symbiont) until several days later.

The X-Files “Gender Bender”: The alien Kindred lead a life of quiet isolation in a rural Massachusetts community. But when one of the Kindred ventures into the outside world, their intense alien pheromones both attract a constant stream of willing partners and give them coronaries in the throes of passion.

The Tick “The Funeral”: Many superheroes hope to go out in a blaze of glory, felled by some worthy opponent. Famed superhero the Immortal meets his fate on a mattress in Captain Liberty’s apartment, felled by her vagina. Although judging from the pending paternity suits, he died pretty much how he lived.

Powers “Little Deaths”: Philandering superhero Olympia has a similar exit, albeit accompanied by a literal blaze of glory. His alter ego's wife commits suicide over the ensuing tabloid coverage, but the woman who was on top of him at the time gets half a million dollars for the TV movie rights.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods but Hollywood nabbed lightning from Zeus himself - and here are the ten best ways they've put those thunderbolts to use.

Create Life
This is the one that started it all. Before Frankenstein, lightning was just a handy way to collect some insurance money. After Frankenstein, it could do anything. Although Mary Shelley's novel provided no description of Victor Frankenstein's methods, the classic 1931 film cemented lightning's place in the popular imagination as the giver of life. Part classical Zeus imagery and part flashy spectacle, the revivifying lightning bolt is now inseparable from Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

Save gas on your DeLorean
Great Scott! The entire plot of the first Back to the Future is centered around a lightning strike, necessary to power the DeLorean and send Marty McFly back to… well, you know. Doc Brown's plan to swap lightning for plutonium to get the necessary 1.21 gigawatts is also a clever nod to the history of technobabble – by the 80s, nuclear power had become the all-powerful pseudo-science of choice, but in the 50s lightning was still the dominant fix-it. Which leads to the most dramatic "should've gotten the longer extension cord" moment in all of movie history.

Scramble tv transmissions and DNA samples
Considering Doctor Who's long history with scientific hand-waving, you'd think they'd be old pros at the lightning fixit. But lightning saves the day in only the very lamest of the new series episodes, proving that we are better off with paradox machines and timey wimey detectors after all.

First, the mildly dreadful Idiot's Lantern climaxed with the Doctor clinging to a tv tower while some flashy pink lightning somehow trapped a face-eating television monster inside a Betamax tape. Then a year later, the exuberantly dreadful Daleks in Manhattan two-parter found the Doctor once again struck by lightning while clinging to a tower, this time the Empire State Building, causing his Time Lord DNA to mix with that of the already genetically awkward Human-Dalek hybrids. Somehow this saves the day. I don't know. I really try not to think about these episodes too much, and neither should you. If you want to try to suss it out, here's a clip:

Leap tall buildings in a single bound
It's a fairly established bit of Superman lore that a freak lightning accident can transfer the Man of Steel's powers to an ordinary human – a random Army private in a 1958 comic, a woman who would become electric villain Livewire in The Animated Series, even Lana Lang on Smallville. But my favorite example is Lois & Clark's "A Bolt From The Blue," in which lightning strikes while Superman is stopping a suicide, turning a 90 pound weakling into a 90 pound Hercules. Metropolis's newest superhero charges citizens for his services, asking Lois to print his price list, but in the end everything is put back to normal thanks to that other great scifi fixit – reversing the polarity.

Control lightning itself
The power to control lightning is not as common a side effect as you might think – so leave it to The X-Files to cover the obvious angle for us. Third season episode "D.P.O." features a young man whose lightning strike left him able to harness the power of electricity. Soon, four other men in town are conveniently struck dead by lightning, bringing in our favorite FBI agents so that poor Mulder's cell phone can get zapped as well. Check out the clip below to see Giovanni Ribisi use his powers to defibrillate Jack Black.

Teach robots to love
Yes, yes, we know: Short Circuit's Johnny 5 bears a remarkable resemblance to his adorable robot successor Wall-E. But while Wall-E gained his sentience through years of isolation on the desiccated Earth, Johnny 5's personality burst into life and into our hearts in a bolt of lightning. The lightning itself isn't the interesting part, so here's Johnny 5 busting out the moves with his friend Stephanie.

Help you cheat on tests
Saved By The Bell's Screech was one of the greatest of the tv nerds – you never knew when he was going to fall out of a locker, masquerade as a woman/teacher/alien to further one of Zack's schemes, or get struck by lightning. The wonderfully cheesy Saturday morning sitcom never shied away from patently ridiculous plot devices – see the famous Jessie Spano caffeine pill freakout and, my personal favorite, Zack's 1502 on the SATs – and it only took till the series' third episode for lightning to strike. The bolt hits Screech, of course, who becomes instantly but temporarily clairvoyant, and he uses his newfound lightning-powers to help Zack and the gang cheat on a history exam. Good thing it wasn't earth science!

Magnetize all available metals
You may be seeing Danny Kaye on your tv this time of year in White Christmas, but it was in the 1956 classic The Court Jester that he taught us how lightning can save the day even in vaguely-medieval England. The lead-up to the jousting scene is well-remembered for its impossible tongue twister about the pellet with the poison in the flagon with the dragon, but it wasn't fancy word-play that saved Danny Kaye's neck in the end – just good old-fashioned lightning. The bolt, in all its cheesy 50s special effects glory, magnetizes his suit of armor, giving him that vital edge against his enemy's mace. This is one of the greatest sketches of all time, so if you watch only one of the clips in this article, make it this one.

Magnetize all available non-metals
In another fine instance of random lightning-induced magnetism, Gilligan's Island had good old Gilligan go bowling in a storm and get struck just as he's throwing a strike. Naturally, this causes the bowling ball to become magnetized to Gilligan's hand. If the idea of a rock getting magnetized to a hand sounds implausible to you, just wait for the Professor's explanation at 3:30 on the video, one of the finest feats of technobabble ever recorded. Oh, and when they try to remove the bowling ball? Gilligan turns invisible. Of course.

Score free plastic surgery
And sometimes, lightning just makes you pretty. In a subversion of the classic Frankenstein trope, 1960's monster-family sitcom The Munsters had patriarch Herman Munster – normally green-skinned and bolt-necked like a traditional Frankenstein monster – turn magically, hideously normal after a freak lightning accident in Grandpa's lab. True to family form, the rest of the Munster clan is disgusted by Herman's newly handsome appearance. But fear not! Another lightning strike at the end of the episode turned Herman back into his usual ugly self. Check out the clip to see actor Fred Gwynne in his only appearance as Herman Munster sans make-up.

So next time you walk through a storm, hold your head up high - because if you get struck by lightning, who knows! You just might discover another fantastic power of the sci fi world's greatest fix-it.