As a side-note, I found out about this video from an email I got from someone at 20th Century Fox, which is pretty damn cool.

Share:

Where last week they were wrapping up loose ends (the Intersect was out of Chuck’s head, Fulcrum were in shabbles, Chuck’s father was safe, etc), this week it pulls the rug out from under us with some serious new twists.

Half the staff of the BuyMore has quit, including Chuck, Morgan is planning to move to Hawaii (with Anna) and become a chef, Awesome and Chuck’s sister finally get hitched, Sarah turns down a new assignment to stay with Chuck…and those are the small details.

The big reveal at the end of the episode is a complete game changer for the series going forward (if it gets a third season), as it completely changes the dynamic of Chuck’s character. Long story short (warning: spoiler ahead), Chuck gets the new and improved intersect in his head, before destroying it. The difference being that this new intersect has endoed him with a seeming mastery of (at the very least) close combat skills. Chuck single-handedly(and bare-handedly…) takes down 5 armed Fulcrum agents in the space of about 45 seconds. Thanks to the new Intersect, Chuck is now, it would appear at least, a super-spy.

Chuck takes down 5 Fulcrum agents on his own. The term "wtf" comes to mind.

And of course, in true Chuck fashion, Chuck, when faced with the questioning looks from Sarah and Casey, delivers the final line of the episode (and season…and maybe, but hopefully not, the show). If ever there was a perfect time for a Matrix joke, this was it, and thankfully Chuck was thinking the same thing, and simply said, “I know Kung Fu”.

And that’s where it ends…hopefully to return next season for what could be a very interesting story-arc. I’m conflicted about it myself, since it changes a lot about how Chuck has dealt with things in the past as the “guy that can’t really take care of himself”…but we shall see…assuming it gets picked up for a third season…

Share:

OK, now that that is out of the way. Did you notice the backgrounds are all actual photos? They are, and it’s extremely distracting. It’s like they were too lazy to put any work into the backgrounds at all, and just found some old photos of a school and used them instead.

That would almost be forgivable if the show was funny or entertaining at all…sadly, it’s just not. Which is all the more infuriating due to the fact that it’s got a practically all-star cast of people doing the voice work, including Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Henry Winkler(The Fonz!!!!), who were all pure hilarity in Arrested Development. If this is the sort of thing FOX wants to be running, I’m beginning to really understand their reasons for trying to their best to kill good shows…because this crapfest is nowhere near “good”.

Avoid at all costs if you cherish your brain matter.

Share:

This week we talk about…

- Dollhouse – No 13th episode this season, but it will be on the DVD, as will the original pilot. Still hopeful for a second season.
- Terminator Season Finale
- Chuck – Scott Bakula is Orion, and looks like he will be back…which is a good thing.
- Reaper – Cougar hunting and “shower coffee”
- How I met your mother – Continues to spin its wheels with “being the sports guy, and a home office”
- Caprica Preview…  BSG + sex = might be good
- Red Dwarf is back….and holy SMEG it sucked!
- Mythbusters is back!
- Fringe – some foreshadowing of more “observer” stuff to come.
- Bones – Stephen Fry makes a return this week, and it’s hilarious
- The third Stargate SG-1 movie is a go

The podcast is recorded via talkshoe at 3pm EST on Friday’s. Come join the live chat if you’re around, and send all feedback to us at contact@tvgawker.com

Share:

Cylon version 0.2...or something to that effect.

The series (or at least the pilot) takes place 58 years before the fall (aka, when the Cylons go ape-shit). It’s essentially the story of the people surrounding the invention of the Cylons. I don’t want to get too much into the actual plot, because it’s actually kinda interesting, and it’s definitely the sort of thing that you want to watch with as clean a slate as possible. There’s virtual reality, robot doormen, and everyone says “Frak” a bit too often, beyond that I won’t spoil it too much.

I will say that it’s a VERY different series from what BSG was. It takes place entirely on a planet for one thing, no space travel (yet anyway), and focuses on family drama and character interaction rather than action, though I predict it might be a bit more action oriented in the future…hard to say.

The pilot episode also contained a few scenes with nudity and some fairly steamy girl on girl action that surprised me a bit, seeing as it’s meant to be aired on Syfy, though I suspect the leaked release is probably an “uncut” version for DVD, rather than the version that will be going to broadcast.

Apparently the glowing spines and creative camera angles are no more.

I’m not sure what I think of the show so far. From the perspective of a BSG fan there are enough little details to be mildly interesting, but it’s trying really hard to be it’s own thing, so having liked BSG is no guarantee you’ll enjoy “Caprica”, and if you didn’t like BSG, you may enjoy “Caprica”, it’s got a very different feel to it than BSG had.

I’d highly recommend checking it out, but I’m not sure if it will be able to keep my interest over the course of a series…I guess we’ll have to wait and see. As a stand-alone experience though, the “Caprica” pilot works well as an extra bit of BSG history for fans, and potentially could expand it’s fanbase to the more “dramatic” side of things…hopefully without loosing too much of it’s Sci-fi roots.

Watch a preview of “Caprica” below…

Share:

So ‘Red Dwarf’ is back. Kinda. Not really. They say it’s back, but after seeing the first episode of it’s return, I have to disagree with them.

First, a little back-story. ‘Red Dwarf’ was a low budget science fiction comedy out of Britain that aired between 1988 and 1999 surrounding the adventures of Lister, a guy who ends up in stasis for a few million years, and ends up as the last human (so it seems at least) in the universe, along with a hologram of one of his dead crew mates, a humanoid creature evolved from his cat during the time he was in stasis, and an android they find in a dead ship. It was pretty damn funny, and grew a fairly stable cult following, but never REALLY took off, and then it died out in ‘99.

Well now they are bringing it back, for 4 new episodes (at least), and a movie. The first of the new episodes played earlier today, and that is why I’m writing is.

It was SMEGGING HORRIBLE!

I hardly recognized the show at all. Beyond having the same actors (though not everyone is back it seems), it barely resembles what the show was in the past at all. For starters, it had no explanation connecting the old series to the new episodes, and seems to have ignored how the series ended (unless they explain it in the other new episodes to come…though it won’t help much at this point if they do). Also, the humour is…uh…well I don’t know where the humour is, but it’s not in the show, that’s for damn sure.

The whole thing plays out like some nightmarish scheme to ruin people’s love of ‘Red Dwarf’. I’m not sure how to explain it other than “painful”.

Ignored backstory + Tentacles + Random unexplained character = Smeghead writers.

The story makes no sense at all so far, though it is “part 1″, so that may change slightly. Though, even within the episode things make very little sense, and it’s seemed like the plot of the whole first episode was geared towards randomly and arbitrarily having a few things happen (without explanation) to create an opening for the rest of the new episodes.

Long story really really short…there is a dimension jumping creature in the water tank, they fight it, and loose, it leaves anyway, a new hologram shows up and starts giving orders, they build a “dimension cutter” by doing…uh…something involving a testicle they got from the creature, and get ready to send Lister into a new dimension to find a girl to repopulate the universe with. All of which completely ignores the last season of the show in ‘99 without explanation…but I won’t even bother going into that.

I’ll be watching the new episodes as they come over the next few weeks, but what I had high hopes would be a great reconnection with a show I loved, has turned out to be a grotesque massacre of childhood memories.

If you’ve seen it, do you agree with my assessment? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Smeg.

Share:

This week we discussed

“Dollhouse”
“South Park”
“Chuck”
“Reaper”
“Heroes”
“Big Bang Theory”
“How I Met Your Mother”
“Family Guy”
“House”
“ER”
“Guiding Light”
The leak of the as yet unreleased “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”

The podcast is recorded via talkshoe at 3pm EST on Friday’s. Come join the live chat if you’re around, and send all feedback to us at contact@tvgawker.com

Share:

First, a quick recap of the episode (spoilers ahead…you’ve been warned).

The episode surrounds a research lab (which seems to be funded by the Dollhouse) on a university campus loosing one of 2 vials of a new drug that acts much like getting really baked on some good herb…so I’ve been told…

The drug seems to have been released on the school population, and a bunch of people start acting pretty wacky, so they send in a bunch of Actives (since they are supposedly immune to the drug) to work things out. Things, of course, get very silly, and even the staff of the Dollhouse get affected by the drug, making for some funny scenes with Topher and Ms DeWitt eating junk food and trying to keep their wits about them (and failing).

While all this is happening, Echo is out on a fantasy date of some kind, and ends up seeing the news of the trouble at the school, her memory glitches, and she starts remembering having gone to that school. She heads over there and ends up in quarantine after one of the Actives assumes she’s been affected by the drug due to her memory problems. Her memory is so glitchy at this point that when her handler, Boyd, gives her the built-in command to go with him, she refuses.

Topher and Ms DeWitt...with the munchies.

Eventually all the Actives start having memory glitches (not so immune after all it seems), and things get pretty strange (and funny at times).

Eventually it all works out and there is a stereotypical moment of awkwardness as people realize what they had been doing.

There are more details, but I won’t ruin everything for ya. All in all it was a pretty good episode I thought. Aparently there are those, like Alan Sepinwall, who wrote on nj.com…

The problem is, I don’t want to see Topher or DeWitt or Dominic be silly. From where I sit, they’re the villains of the piece, loathsome in just about every way, and watching them unleash their inner child, strip down to their undies, or whatever other ridiculous behavior they did isn’t amusing or endearing the way it is when Mr. Sulu runs barechested through the Enterprise with a fencing sword; it’s just creeps acting creepy in a different way.

The problem there, is that Alan has some preconceived notions of who/what/etc the characters are, and their motivations, and he didn’t enjoy the episode because he doesn’t seem to want to see the characters are anything other than one-dimensional evil scum…and that’s just not how Joss Whedon does things.

If you’ve ever seen any of Joss’ past work, you’ll know that very few of the characters he writes are that one-dimensional. The heroes have flaws, the villains aren’t 100% scum about everything, and characters tend to change over time due to events in their lives that make the whole story far more interesting then “there’s the bad guy, and there’s the good guy…watch them fight” type plot lines. TV in general tends to feed into that stereotypically shallow character style, so people are used to easily understanding the motivations of a character as either “pure good” or “pure evil”, and I for one am greatly thankful for the few shows, like “Dollhouse”, that don’t cheapen their characters by dumbing things down to that level of absurd simplicity.

If anything this might be a better episode than the previous one (which was great), simply because it extends that notion that things aren’t always clearcut good and evil, and that you need to understand that any pre-conceived notions you have about the characters may turn out to be wrong.

Share:

This week we discussed

Dollhouse – They weren’t kidding about episode 6.

Kings – Interesting idea bringing biblical “King David” story to modern times…but not my thing so far.

Battlestar Galactica finale – Decent, but serious case of “lazy writer syndrome”

South Park – Still pretty meh…but better

Chuck   – Look for Scott Bakula playing Chuck’s father in a couple weeks

Reaper – father/son issues

Castle – Looking pretty decent after 3 episodes

Heroes – Hiro Gets A Power Back

Doctor Who special coming up!

Big Bang Theory

The podcast is recorded via talkshoe at 3pm EST on Friday’s. Come join the live chat if you’re around, and send all feedback to us contact@tvgawker.com

Share:

Well last night was the 6th episode of the series, and I have to say….holy crap that was good.

It’s been (VERY) slowly building up to an interesting show, with each episode slightly better than the last, in my opinion at least, but this most recent episode jumped “Dollhouse” to a whole other level of awesome.

Finally face to face...sort of.

The main characters finally meet face to face(twice, with Echo having a different personality each time), we learn that there is someone inside the Dollhouse trying to help Agent Helo(ok, that’s not his name, but come on…the BSG finale was last night too!), and that there are dozens of Dollhouses around the world that are up to something beyond the usual business of filling fantasies, and there’s even a reveal of another “Doll” out in the world, but I won’t ruin THAT one for ya. Seriously, go watch the episode…even if you didn’t like the series up until now…it’s worth it.

I’m now very interested to see more of “what Joss wants to do” in the series from here on in…I only wish it hadn’t had to wait until last night. If the first few episodes had been of this quality, the show would be a huge success by now I imagine…here’s hoping they can keep it up now that we’ve gotten a taste of what it could become.

Share: