Fringe - Pilot

Writers: J.J Abrams, Robert Orci & Alex Kurtzman
Director: Alex Graves

Cast: Anna Torv (FBI Agent Olivia Dunham), Joshua Jackson (Peter Bishop), John Noble (Dr. Walter Bishop), Jasika Nicole (Astrid Farnsworth), Blair Brown (Nina Sharp), Lance Reddick (Phillip Broyles), Kirk Acevedo (Charlie Francis), Mark Valley (FBI Agent John Scott), Shaun Shetty (Indian Man), Gregg Blake (Passerby), Bernadeta Wrobel (Flight Attendant), Joan Barrett (Old Woman On Plane), Chris Britton (Dr. Bruce Sumner) & Katerina Taxia (FBI Agent)

When all the passengers on a flight from Hamburg are found dead, FBI agent Olivia Dunham investigates. But the only person who can help has been institutionalized for 17 years, meaning Olivia must gain access to him through his estranged son…

Any television show from the creative minds of J.J Abrams (Alias/Lost/Cloverfield) and writing duo Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (The Island/M:I-III/Transformers) is going to be big news. Fringe is the result of this meeting of minds; a sci-fi thriller heavily influenced by The X Files, with a twist of The Twilight Zone, and all the movie-quality flash $10 million can muster. It also stars actors from Lost, Lord Of The Rings, Dawson’s Creek — and features a lab assistant named after the frail professor from Futurama? If this doesn’t draw an audience of genre fans, nothing will.

Anna Torv (Mistresses) stars as FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, a committed and intelligent investigator having a secretive relationship with hunky fellow Agent John Scott (Mark Valley). Both are part of an inter-agency investigation of an international flight from Hamburg, which appears to have been the target of advanced biological terrorism: every passenger dissolved to the bone.

Despite a prickly relationship with Homeland Security’s Phillip Broyles (Lost’s Lance Reddick), Olivia soon impresses by finding a link between the Hamburg incident and pseudo-scientific experiments carried out by Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who has been institutionalized for 17 years for killing a lab assistant. After Olivia’s lover becomes afflicted with the same contaminant that killed the airline passengers, his body is frozen to delay the cellular degradation, meaning Olivia must gain access to Walter through his estranged genius son Peter (Joshua Jackson) and hope his proficiency in “fringe science” can find a cure…

I really enjoyed Fringe’s Pilot, which manages the difficult trick of introducing all the characters, creating a tonal identity, laying the foundations of a mythology, and never forgets to tell a good story that fills 80-minutes very nicely. Comparisons to The X Files are inevitable, but this manages to be quite different, while definitely playing in the same sand pit. The best injection of freshness comes from the central trio — a female federal agent, a “mad scientist” and his bitter child prodigy. It’s not a typical dynamic, and the show is at its best whenever Torv, Noble and Jackson are allowed to bounce off each other. Crucially, the Pilot made me hungry to see them tackle more bizarre occurrences, which is half the battle of an opening episode.

I was surprised to see Torv shoulder the whole episode, as she a recognisable face, but it’s clear J.J Abrams’ knack for spotting female talent continues, after launching the careers of Keri Russell (Felicity), Jennifer Garner (Alias) and Evangeline Lilly (Lost). Torv is tough and sexy, but has a rawness that nicely prevents her being just another implausibly beautiful FBI babe.

John Noble is great fun as Walter, first seen with a unkempt beard in a mental institution, before proceeding to equip a basement laboratory with gizmos, gadgets and… a cow? While definitely the broader character of the three, used mainly as comic relief in his obscure demands, blunt social interactions and incontinence, Walter’s great fun and could develop very nicely. This episode only needs him to be the eccentric kook, and Noble does that extremely well — while still hinting at hidden depths and complexities, particularly in his frosty relationship with his son.

Speaking of which, Joshua Jackson is also very good as Peter. I never saw much of Dawson’s Creek, so everything I know about Jackson is from the generally poor films he’s been in since leaving that teen drama. And I was pleasantly surprised by his cynical, sceptical, smart-talking character, particularly as my expectation for an Olivia/Peter partnership (of Mulder and Scully-style dynamism) was avoided.

It’s possible, perhaps even likely, they’ll become a firmer partnership in future episodes, leaving Walter in his lab while they do the field work, but time will tell. For now, I liked how Peter is sceptical of his father’s left-field theories and pseudo-scientific background, while still acknowledging his successes — particularly after one scene, where Walter enables Olivia to enter her comatose lover’s sub-consciousness, via a floatation tank and dosage of LSD.

All the other characters are sketchy, but Lance Reddick brings his glowering intensity to bear once again as Broyles — the man who will seemingly become their boss, and who has knowledge of a mysterious “Pattern” of activity around the world. Yes, it seems the Hamburg incident is just the tip of the iceberg, as the second half of the Pilot begins to reveal a worldwide threat — apparently coming from Walter’s multi-millionaire former lab partner, who’s now CEO of global business Massive Dynamics.

Production-wise, director Alex Graves (The West Wing) does a marvellous job of creating a miniature movie, and there are several excellent sequences, such as: the opening, frightening attack on the airliner, Olivia’s hospitalization after an explosion (shown in sharp, bright, audio-visual flashes), and a Bourne-style car chase for the climax. The ambience is slick and accomplished, and while regular episodes won’t be as epic, it’s easy to imagine the vibe Fringe will be aiming for week to week. I also liked the way location legends were shown hanging, three-dimensionally, in mid-air — a trumping of Heroes’ episode titles.

Overall, it’s hard to find much to moan about here. Fringe is clearly a collection of old ideas, but that’s been J.J Abrams’ stock-in-trade for years now. Alias was obviously indebted to countless espionage shows, Lost is Robinson Crusoe-meets-The Prisoner, and Cloverfield was just an American Godzilla. Abrams’ great strength is how he can breathe fresh life into ideas you’d imagine would be quite limiting. I mean, who expected Lost to evolve to where it is now, based on season 1’s Cast Away
en masse?

The biggest problem facing Fringe is how it’s going to tackle science-based subjects in an interesting way, coming after 9 seasons of The X Files. Chris Carter’s ’90s phenomenon soaked up a lot of sci-fi material, and it’s all relatively fresh in audience memory — so is Fringe’s corporate conspiracy and triptych of unusual characters enough to stave off feelings of repetition?

A true measure of Fringe’s success just isn’t possible yet — we need a few more episodes to judge how these characters and its premise will play. But this is definitely a compelling, inventive, engaging, and creepy first step onto the fringe of a brand new TV show. And its final line is killer.

Download Fringe Episode Free

Supernatural TV Show

In the tradition of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Charmed, the series Supernatural TV Show (Sept. 13) is set in the dark world of the unexplained. Sam and Dean Winchester (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles) are two young brothers who are bound to an “other worldly” mission. Traveling the country in their 1969 Chevy Impala, they fulfill their father’s quest to quell the supernatural forces responsible for their mother’s murder 20 years ago.

A joint effort of filmmakers McG, Eric Kripke, and Robert Singer, the weekly, hour-long series Supernatural starred Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as Dean and Sam Winchester, the sons of a dogged and determined “spook hunter.” Since the death of his wife at the hands of malevolent poltergeists, the elder Winchester refused to rest until he tracked down and vanquished all evil paranormal forces in the world. While older son Dean willingly followed in his dad’s footsteps, the young Sam was the rebel of the family, refusing to have anything to with the supernatural and putting as much distance between himself and his father and brother as possible. But when his dad mysteriously vanished, Sam reluctantly teamed with Dean to carry on the family mission. Piling into their 1967 Chevy Impala, the Winchester boys tooled around the country investigating such familiar paranormal mythology, folklore, and urban legends as the Vanishing Hitchhiker, Bloody Mary, the Lover’s Lane “Hook” Killer, and the Native American demon Wendigo, among many others. Essentially a male version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — with a few dashes of Scooby-Doo, The Hardy Boys, and Route 66 tossed in — Supernatural was seen on Buffy’s former home network the WB beginning September 13, 2005.

Get More on Supernatural Here…

Stargate SG1 TV Show

Debuting over ABC on July 27, 1997, the 60-minute science fiction series Stargate SG1 TV Show was a continuation of the 1995 theatrical feature Stargate. The original film starred James Spader as eccentric scientist Daniel Jackson and Kurt Russell as Col. Jack O’Neill, who by being transported into an alternate world via a shimmering “stargate” portal created by an ancient civilization had thwarted a plan by the megalomaniac Ra, ruler of the planet Abydos and leader of the vicious Goa’uld race, to conquer the universe. The TV series began one year after the events of the film, with O’Neill (now played by Richard Dean Anderson) coming out of retirement at the request of Gen. George Hammond (Don S. Davis), now in charge of the Earth’s top-secret.

Stargate Project, to first rescue Jackson (Michael Shanks, taking over from James Spader) then travel throughout the universe with a map of the vast Stargate network to prevent invasion from hostile aliens who might have the ability to transport themselves through the million-and-one portals in space. In addition to the recovered Jackson, O’Neill’s Stargate-1 (SG-1) team included astrophysicist Samantha “Sam” Carter (Amanda Tapping), a woman of high moral principles and a strong sense of feminist values; and Teal’c (Christopher Judge), a member of the alien Jaffa race, who’d broken from his people when he denounced the oppressive Goa’uld as false gods. When actor Michael Shanks decided to take a break from the series during season six, it was contrived to kill off Dr. Jackson (though his soul was transported to another “plane of existence” and presumably retrievable), whereupon his place on the SG-1 team was taken by Jonas Quinn (Corin Nemec), a diplomat from the planet Kelowna who held himself responsible for Jackson’s demise. Others in the cast included Gen. Hammond’s trusted aide Dr. Janet Frasier (Teryl Rothery), who died a hero’s death halfway through season seven; Sam Carter’s father Jacob (Carmen Argenziano), saved from a painful death from cancer when his body became the host for the noble Tok’ra resistance fighter Selmak; Apophis (Peter Williams), the despotic warrior king who’d succeed the original movie’s Ra as leader of the Goa’uld; and the equally odious Anubis (David Palffy), who took over the bad-guy duties after Apophis was blown to smithereens. Originally intended to run for only four seasons on Showtime, Stargate SG-1 proved popular enough to have its life extended for several seasons thereafter, though it moved to another cable network, Sci-Fi Channel, in 2002.

Get More on Stargate SG1 Here…

SmallVille TV show

SmallVille TV show moves around the life of teenager Clark Kent. SmallVille is a town that gets destroyed by a huge meteor shower in October 1989. The meteor was actually a spaceship from Krypton and there was an infant in the spaceship, Kal-El, the only survivor on the planet.

The child was discovered and adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent and they named him ‘Clark Kent’. After his arrival in the town strange things start happen but his extraordinary powers kept secret from the rest of the community. Clark has two best friends, Pete Ross and Chloe Sullivan and a crush on the school’s hottest girl, Lana Lang. Clark deals with his super powers and copes with his friendship with a young Lex Luther. Clark is advised by his parents never to use his awesome superpowers but they are also hiding a secret from him that they found him inside a spaceship. When he begins to develop his powers and discover more and more abilities that will soon transform him into a Superman, Clark begins to take on his mantle as the Man of Steel.

Get More on Smallville Here…

Heroes TV Show

Heroes TV Show is a one- hour drama about the lives of the people all over the world who find that they have extraordinary powers and trying to deal with how this change affects their lives. NBC’s heroes deals with a heterogeneous group of people from all over the world, ranging from a teenager to thirty something that suddenly discover that they possessed superpowers. Some of the superheroes who are introduced to the viewers include politician Nathan Petrelli who has the power of flight; his brother, male hospice nurse Peter Petrelli can absorb the powers of others around him.

Drug Addicted, artist Isaac Mendez, a 28-year-old junkie who has the ability to paint images of the future but only when he was stoned; single mother Niki Sanders, a 33-year-old Las Vegas showgirl who does things that are mysteriously connected with mirrors, Japanese comic-book fanatic Hero Nakamura, a 24-year-old guy who had the capacity to make time stand still or travel through time. D.L. Hawkins, a 31-year-old inmate who can walk through walls, Matt Parkman, a beat cop who can hear other people’s thoughts, and Claire Bennet, a 17-year-old cheerleader who defies death at every turn. Ultimately, this disparate group of folks will be asked to save the world. Heroes are discovering what having superpowers mean to them as well as where their powers come from. Brought together to try to prevent an impending horrific disaster in New York City, these novice superheroes were forced to cope with their new skills and to hopefully channel them for a common purpose of good, all the while being plagued with surrealistic flashbacks and weighted down with traumatic back stories. The ultimate destiny of our nbc heroes is nothing less than saving the world!

The show ran for two seasons and now is returning series.

Get More on Heroes Here…

Doctor Who TV Show

The quintessential “mortgage lifter” for many a financially flagging PBS station, the long-running British science fiction series Doctor Who was not always a big favorite in America. The series detailed the wide-ranging adventures of Doctor Who, a 750-year-old denizen of the planet Gallifrey, who came to earth in human form by way of a London police call box. In truth, it wasn’t a call box at all, but instead the doctor’s TARDIS, a vehicle which enabled him to travel through space and time. Garbed in a floppy hat, tattered overcoat, and colorful muffler, and hopelessly addicted to “jelly babies,” Doctor Who embarked upon his various journeys through the cosmos, accompanied by a succession of attractive female earthlings. Debuting in England on November 23, 1963, Doctor Who ended up the longest-running science fiction series of its kind in TV history, remaining in active production until the fall of 1989 (not counting the 1965 feature film Doctor Who & the Daleks and a brace of “revival” episodes in 1993 and 1996).

Since no one actor could be expected to devote his life to the series, it was decided early on for Doctor Who to be periodically “regenerated,” obtaining a new body and personality in the process. Thus, the character was portrayed by eight different actors: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann (Richard Hurndall briefly essayed the role in the series’ special 20th anniversary episode in 1983). Though incredibly popular in England and Europe, the series had a hard time getting started in the United States. Time-Life Inc. offered the series for commercial syndication in 1970, 1972, and 1978. Each time, station managers were either resistant to the property or ran the program in “fringe” time slots, often showing the serialized episodes out of their proper order. It helped matters not at all that American TV reviewers poked cruel fun at the series, reserving their nastiest comments for the program’s tacky production values (which, to dyed-in-the-wool fans, was actually part of its charm). Only when the series began popping up on local PBS stations in the late ’70s did Doctor Who finally build up a loyal and dedicated fan following in America. By the mid-’80s, the series was one of the highest-rated noncommercial programs on the market, literally rescuing more than one educational TV outlet from bankruptcy. The BBC revived Doctor Who in 2005, with a new cast.

Click here to download Doctor Who Episodes

Battlestar Galactica TV Show

Battlestar Galactica TV Show is a critically acclaimed and award winning re-imagining of the original 1970s series of the same name. This new version picks up some characters and mythological aspects of the original, but differs radically in approach. Instead of the original’s family-friendly escapism, this new series is darker, using its concept to reflect a post-9/11 world and made relevant to modern times, as well as exploring issues such as the nature of faith and what it means to be human. Battlestar Galactica Television Show how strays from conventional science fiction in that it does not focus on a variety of aliens or showcase technical devices or get bogged down by technobabble. The shows takes a more realistic approach in which space is mostly empty, planets are not always habitable, things break down, resources are finite, and people are not perfect; the “good guys” are not always heroic and the villians can garner sympathy.

The series begins 40 years after the end of what’s known as the Cylon War. This war began when humanity, who live in a group of habitable planets called the Twelve Colonies, created machines to make easier for them: the Cylons. Programmed to be sentient, they were employed to do things from labour to fighting wars. However, the Cylons eventually grew to hate their masters, revolting, thus beginning the Cylon War. The conflict ended when the Cylons agreed to leave the Colonies to make a home on another planet. No one had seen or heard from the Cylons in 40 years until they launched a successful assault on the Colonies that effectively killed all but a few thousand who fled their destroyed homes to seek out the legendary world known as Earth. However, they are constantly being followed by the Cylons. To make matters worse, in the time isolated from humanity, the Cylons had developed themselves to appear human. There are 12 specific models, but each has several copies. They took human form in order to become closer to God, and base their actions on the belief that humanity was a mistake, and that they were themselves created by God (not the Gods that the people of the Colonies worship) to take humanity’s rightful place. Led by the battlestar Galactica, the fleet of surviving ships have to evade attacks both from outside as well as inside, both Cylon and even human. A few of these humanoid Cylons act as infiltrators to destroy the remainer of humanity, some copies not even aware of their Cylon identity. In order to keep chaos from taking over, the fleet tries to uphold the laws that they were bound to before the attacks, but with their extreme situation in mind, certain rules must be bent. Tough decisions must be made that both allow the people their rights and freedom, but also ensure the survival of the human race.

Get More on Battlestar Galactica Here…

Stargate Atlantis - The Daedalus Variations

Episode Number: 84   
Season Num: 5   
First Aired: Friday August 1, 2008   
Prod Code: 504

 

Sheppard’s team finds the Earth ship Daedalus abandoned and without power.

Cast and Crew

Writer:     Alan McCullough, Alan McCullough, Robert C. Cooper

 

Director:     Andy Mikita

 

Star:     Rachel Luttrell (Teyla Emmagan),  Jason Momoa (Ronon Dex),  Joe Flanigan (Major/Lt. Colonel John Sheppard),  David Hewlett (Dr. Rodney McKay)

 

Recurring Role:     David Nykl (Dr. Radek Zelenka),  Chuck Campbell (Technician),  Kavan Smith (Major Evan Lorne)

 

Download Stargate Atlantics The Daedalus Variations

The X-Files: I Want To Believe has a rough opening

I didn’t think going into the weekend that the new X-Files movie had much of a shot at opening at number one. After the opening that the new Batman enjoyed the previous weekend, it was going to be a tough mountain to climb. That being said, I didn’t think number two was an overly ambitious goal. And number three would have been a bit surprising. But number four and $10.2 million? Yikes.

As expected, The Dark Knight once again topped the box office with the biggest second weekend on record. Surprisingly though, Mulder and Scully also trailed Step Brothers and the second week of Mama Mia. The B word is already being tossed around, understandably so. Despite that, studio executives are standing by to assure everyone that with foreign box office and DVD the movie will still turn a profit. That’s all well and good, but I don’t think anyone should be getting their hopes up for round three any time soon.

Download The X- Files Full Episodes

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth

(S04E12) Russell T. Davies seems to include everyone and the kitchen sink in this episode. Appearing in the parent program are Captain Jack, Ianto and Gwen from Torchwood and Sarah Jane and Luke Smith from The Sarah Jane Adventures. Also making appearances are Martha Jones, Martha’s mother Francine, Harriet Jones (former Prime Minister…yes, we know who you are), and British celebrities Richard Dawkins (real-life husband of former Doctor Who companion Lalla Ward) and Paul O’Grady as themselves. Oh, and Rose is back.

The Daleks prove themselves to be the cockroaches of the universe when they once again save themselves from extinction. I find it hard to believe that the emergency temporal shift of Dalek Caan at the end of “Evolution of the Daleks” saved Davros (who is a marvelous combination of Hitler and Stephen Hawking) from certain death in the Time War. Why could a Dalek, no matter how enhanced, get through the time lock on the event? Caan’s insane, precognitive ramblings are kind of fun to watch. No Dalek has ever behaved like that before.

I like how the Medusa Cascade and the Shadow Proclamation are finally defined. The Shadow Proclamation is a weird name for a police force though. Why wasn’t it mentioned in the Judoon’s first appearance in “Smith and Jones” that they worked for the Shadow Proclamation? Did I miss that part? At least we now know why the bees went missing and we get a piece of the puzzle regarding the missing planets.

I liked how the sets from Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures are used for those scenes involving the characters. It’s a good way for the series to save money by using pre-built sets.

The episode was building to a Doctor/Rose reunion, but that was interrupted by a Dalek gun. To my knowledge, this is the first time the Doctor has ever been directly shot by a Dalek. The Dalek guns scramble organic matter, so you’d think they would prevent regeneration. Still, what a great cliffhanger! We all know that David Tennant is signed through next year, so what will happen with the regeneration? Will the Doctor regenerate into Tennant again? Will some sort of timey-wimey stuff happen that prevents it from happening in the first place? Will he regenerate into someone new and next year’s episodes will be “missing” ones? Will they retcon the first four seasons? The mind boggles.

It’s interesting how former-Prime Minister Harriet Jones reappears in a situation much like the one she once described to the Doctor, in which the Earth is in danger and he isn’t there to help. This resulted in the Doctor getting her thrown out of office and I find it hard to believe she doesn’t hold a grudge. We never did see her actually exterminated. I liked how Harriet Jones’ sub-wave network was designed by Mr. Copper, an extra-terrestrial that the Doctor met in “Voyage of the Damned” (he didn’t strike me as an engineer, though).

The core scene of the episode has to be when one of the women working for the Shadow Proclamation approach Donna while she’s sitting on some stairs. The woman apologizes for the loss that is yet to come. One storyline has been blatantly missing in this episode: the one involving the return of the Master from last season. It would better explain how Dalek Caan got through the time lock. What was with the sound of the heartbeat at the beginning of the scene? And how did Donna get the ring she’s wearing?

This episodes represents the culmination of storylines from all four seasons of the relaunched Doctor Who and is loads of fun to watch, even if the plot is so riddled with holes that one could drive a truck through them. The non-stop action and fun in-jokes and references of the episode make up for the superficial plotting. I look forward to next week’s season finale.

Download Doctor Who Episodes Right Now

Next Page »