Brain Assassin

This fall a remake of the 1970s clas­sic Bionic Woman pre­mieres on NBC. Michelle Ryan, who plays the Bionic Woman, obvi­ously likes that role very much accord­ing to some reports on the web. Actu­ally, she’s not my type but I did like the orig­i­nal and I hope I will like the remake, so the actor’s hot­ness isn’t a decid­ing fac­tor here. Any­way, let’s take a look at the plot:

Jaime Wells Som­mers (Ryan) is a hard-​​working woman work­ing as a bar­tender. She is respon­si­ble for the care of her younger sis­ter too. By and large, she lives a nor­mal life. How­ever, this changes when she is hit by a car and gravely injured. Her boyfriend just takes her away to a secret facil­ity where an exper­i­men­tal and top secret pro­ce­dure is per­formed on her, which results in Jaime becom­ing the Bionic Woman. Unfor­tu­nately, this sal­va­tion comes at a steep price.

Of course, NBC has already whipped up a site with some infor­ma­tion on the show includ­ing some videos and images. Be sure not to miss the pre­miere on Sep­tem­ber 26th, 8/​9c. I’m look­ing for­ward to watch­ing the show and I really hope it’s good.

That’s for sure. Well, first things first. Dead Like Me is a tele­vi­sion comedy-​​drama set in Seat­tle. The show is about an 18-​​year-​​old girl called Geor­gia “George” Lass who hap­pens to be the nar­ra­tor too. She dies early in the pilot episode and leaves a whole mess behind. Although she died, she’s not dead yet because she’s des­tined to become a Grim Reaper. These reapers are the min­ions of Death and their job is to col­lect the souls of peo­ple who are about to die. In short, Grim Reapers are the ones who reap souls and escort them to the after­life. The show mainly explores the lives and expe­ri­ences of a small team of reapers and takes a look at the changes in Georgia’s fam­ily after her sud­den death.

The team of reapers is led by Rube, who gets the list of who is to die. He assigns those unfor­tu­nates to his “squad”, by writ­ing the first ini­tial and last name, the loca­tion, and the esti­mated time of death (ETD) on a Post-​​it note. Then there are Mason, Roxy, and Betty who is soon replaced by Daisy. But you can check them out over at the offi­cial site. Unfor­tu­nately, there are only two sea­sons out there because the show was – just like FarScape – unjustly can­celed. Just recently I did a search on the show and I came up with some­thing interesting.

On April 17th, MGM announced that they embark on aggres­sive home enter­tain­ment pro­duc­tion strat­egy mean­ing that they will pro­duce lots of direct-​​to-​​DVD movies and sequels. The announce­ment states that there will be a movie and accord­ing to Ellen Muth all of the orig­i­nal cast is to return for the movie. I like the dark com­edy and the twisted look it takes at life. Hope­fully, they will bring the series back even­tu­ally. I’d really like to see the movie as the first step in that direc­tion. For once, they could make my dream come true.

It almost seemed ages ago that I last wrote about Sanc­tu­ary. I have to con­fess, I was quite busy and, to put it frankly, I lost sight of it. Now I had some time to check on it to see if these all new webisodes are worth my time. The first four webisodes are avail­able for free view­ing at the usual sites, namely YouTube, Google Video, and sim­i­lar sites.

Today, I received a mail con­tain­ing inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion on the upcom­ing TV show Sanc­tu­ary. For those of you who still don’t know what Sanc­tu­ary is about, here’s the syn­op­sis. As for the mail I received, Canada’s Daily Planet recently cov­ered Sanc­tu­ary on the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel. The spot is six min­utes long and includes inter­views with Amanda Tap­ping and Mar­tin Wood. In addi­tion, we got to see the first footage from the show and a look at the video game pro­duc­tion tech­nol­ogy uti­lized to gen­er­ate entire sets. Sanc­tu­ary is almost com­pletely pro­duced in green screen, adding hun­dreds of hours to post-​​production. This approach taps a new poten­tial and takes the term inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment to a new level. The new show will release on the inter­net in May and later as a com­puter game. So, with­out fur­ther ado, here’s the clip:

What exactly is Sanc­tu­ary? I didn’t get any wiser by check­ing out my reli­able source of infor­ma­tion, the Inter­na­tional Movie Data Base. Well, there’s an entry, of course, but it wasn’t that use­ful to begin with.
By vis­it­ing the offi­cial site I was able to enhance my knowl­edge to a cer­tain extent. Now I know that Sanc­tu­ary is a web-​​based series designed for max­i­mum audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion. What the hell? I cer­tainly like these “fea­tures” and I won­der if there’s some­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­ing up here. Curi­ous as I am, I con­tin­ued dig­ging things up. Pretty soon I was rewarded with the plot which is known to be as fol­lows: Amanda Tap­ping – faith­ful Star­gate SG-​​1 view­ers know whom I am refer­ring to – stars as 157 year old Dr. Helen Mag­nus. Helen was engaged to Jack the Rip­per which resulted in the birth of her daugh­ter Ash­ley. Helen’s father started a sanc­tu­ary for super­nat­ural crea­tures col­lected from all over the world, obvi­ously to study them and their emer­gence. Either way, in her work with these crea­tures Dr. Mag­nus has received some kind of longevity, which explains her age. Each episode is about Dr. Mag­nus doing research about mon­strous crea­tures which are the key to the future of humankind.

A brief visit of TV.com revealed that the new series will pre­mier on April 1st, 2007. I’m always inter­ested in new ideas and new sci-​​fi series in spe­cial. But what’s def­i­nitely more inter­est­ing is that Sanc­tu­ary will be web-​​based. Accord­ing to Stage 3 Media which pro­duces the “Inter­net Show”, con­ver­gence is the future of media. It believes that TV, video gam­ing and social net­work­ing will com­bine to become a sin­gle, pow­er­ful enter­tain­ment medium. There­fore, an episode is called webisode (That’s a new one, isn’t it?) and will be avail­able in mul­ti­ple High Def­i­n­i­tion res­o­lu­tions. Sanc­tu­ary will com­bine sci­ence and super­nat­ural to cre­ate a fic­tional online uni­verse where there will be direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the viewer and the cre­ative team.

This is exactly the approach I expected to see when huge TV net­works neglected the inter­net as a means of dis­tri­b­u­tion and began to blame it for their lack of imag­i­na­tion and fore­sight by telling every­body who is will­ing to lis­ten that peo­ple trad­ing with their intel­lec­tual prop­erty really hurt them. Well that’s what hap­pens to enter­prises who miss an oppor­tu­nity. Whin­ing around and suing indi­vid­u­als won’t change the fact that they’re mov­ing too slow. Inflex­i­bil­ity does indeed come with a hefty price, wouldn’t you say? The inter­net is the future and if the great net­works fail to see that fact they’ll have to pay for it later. In the mean­time, it’s time for new firms to step up and right­fully so.

I’m already look­ing for­ward to this new approach and the promised immer­sive inter­ac­tion. At least, I have what’s needed to play Sanc­tu­ary on my PC. Here are the min­i­mum requirements:

• Dis­play res­o­lu­tion of 1024×768
• Sup­port for Flash 8.0

Of course, you should have a fast inter­net con­nec­tion, I wager. Broad­band, most likely. Well, we’ll see. Ah, there’s one thing I nearly for­got to men­tion. Accord­ing to Gate­World David Hewlett will be guest star­ring for sev­eral episodes.

It’s been some time but I finally man­aged to clear up old things and come to terms with oth­ers. Catch­ing up isn’t always easy, is it? How­ever, I’m back for good and I’m back with a new topic. I recently bought all sea­sons of FarScape. This is the best show that has ever been aired on tele­vi­sion. Regret­tably, it’s been unjustly can­celed and a revival of the series seems very unlikely. Frell, the fifth sea­son has never been shot! There’s a mini-​​series to wrap up some of the most impor­tant plot threads because sea­son four left off with a mas­sive cliffhanger. Even this mini-​​series – named Farscape: The Peace­keeper Wars – only exists because of some inde­pen­dent back­ers who offered finan­cial support.

It’s a shame that one of the very best shows ever to have been aired on tele­vi­sion had to met a fate like this. Well, what can I say about FarScape? I guess, noth­ing I could say about it would do the series credit but I’ll try any­way. Maybe I should start by say­ing that there’s no other show quite like FarScape out there. The cre­ative team behind the show has crammed inter­est­ing dialogs and sub­tle details into every episode. That’s why intel­li­gent story telling and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment has been so impor­tant. Because of each character’s flaws the whole plot still works so well. Then there are some ani­ma­tronic char­ac­ters bestow­ing a cer­tain charm upon the show. With this unique com­po­si­tion there comes a behav­ioral dynamic that raises the emo­tional stakes to extremes.

Every­one is about to fol­low his own agenda, act­ing on pas­sions and prej­u­dices. The mix­ture of humor and drama makes for tremen­dous enter­tain­ment, while there’s plenty of action and many twists for adren­a­line junkies. There’s sel­dom a way to make a qual­i­fied assess­ment of how all the issues may turn out in the end. Its utter unpre­dictabil­ity result­ing directly from the rich­ness of the sto­ry­telling allows for so much baf­fle­ment that even shows like Lost are hav­ing dif­fi­culty in draw­ing level with it. The writ­ers have con­stantly sur­prised view­ers. Actions really have con­se­quences and noth­ing stays the same from one event to the next. Finally, there’s the ele­ment of alien­ation. Every­body has at least once expe­ri­enced the strange feel­ing of alien­ation while try­ing to con­nect to oth­ers. FarScape takes this con­cept way fur­ther than many would’ve imag­ined and still man­ages to get a mes­sage through it’s count­less twists and emo­tional cli­maxes: Be true to your­self and everything’ll work out one way or the other.

So, with all that in my mind, how would I describe the show? Spec­tac­u­lar. Mag­nif­i­cent. Bom­bas­tic. Splen­did. Superb. To my mind, FarScape does things bet­ter than “Star Wars” and still stands proud and tall as one of the most inno­v­a­tive and col­or­ful show ever. It is the genre’s bright­est bea­con. Even after all those years no other show can pos­si­bly rival this one. I still hope with all my heart that one day there will be a fea­ture film as well done as the series was. The Peace­keeper Wars served well but there are still some strands to untan­gle, some things to clar­ify, some words unsaid. All good things come to an end, though. Ben and Clau­dia are doing a nice job in the cur­rent sea­son of Star­gate SG-​​1 where the 200th episode ref­er­enced FarScape.

Resources for the curi­ous space-​​adventurer:

Far-​​what?
FarScape (Wikipedia)
FarScape Ency­clo­pe­dia
IMDB