Direct Beam Comms – Page 11 – Dangerous Universe

Direct Beam Comms #123

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVApril 15, 2018April 14, 2018

TV

Lost in Space

The Lost in Space franchise has been around longer than the Star Trek franchise, yet while there’s been more than 700 episodes of Star Trek on TV and 13 movies in the last 50 years, with Lost in Space there was only the original 93 episodes of TV that ended in 1968 and one poorly received film in 1998. But the original concept behind the series is even older. It’s based on the novel Swiss Family Robinson from 1812 about a family marooned on an island after a shipwreck which was almost certainly inspired by the even earlier story Robinson Crusoe from 1719.

Lost in Space has been gone so long that there are a few generations of people who’ve grown up without it, and their only connection to the material is the series’ catch phrase, “Danger, Will Robinson!” I know I’ve only ever seen a smattering of classic Lost in Space episodes as I don’t ever remember it rerunning in my area when I was a kid.

While there hasn’t been much Lost in Space since that 1998 movie that starred William Hurt, Mimi Rogers and Gary Oldman there was an attempt to reboot Lost in Space on The WB in 2004 that would have starred Adrianne Palicki (currently starring in The Orville) as Judy Robinson. But that series never got any further than a single pilot episode and was never brought to series.

But now, 50 years after the original 1960s series ended comes a new Netflix version of Lost in Space. Starting Molly Parker and Toby Stephens as Maureen and John Robinson, the duo along with their three kids are part of an evacuation of the Earth after it was hit by a comet causing an ecological disaster. But instead of ending up where they were supposed to be the Robinsons were separated from the rest of their colonists when their ship the “Jupiter 2” crash landed on an uncharted planet. This planet is full of wonders and dangers as the family must overcome obstacle after obstacle in order to survive even their first day lost in space.

I enjoyed this new Lost in Space if there was a bit too much, erm, danger going on in the first episode for my taste. If it’s not the family crash landing on the planet than it’s Maureen breaking her leg or Judy (Taylor Russell) trapped in ice or young Will (Maxwell Jenkins) being lost in a woods … and that’s not all that happens in the first episode that feels overloaded.

Lost in Space isn’t Stranger Things or even something like The Expanse — and I think that’s a good thing. This new show feels more like a family adventure show, something that’s really not made anymore. I’m interested to see where this new Lost in Space goes, if I hope it slows down a bit on the whole family in peril every few minutes thing.

The Expanse

Over the last few years the one bright, shining spot on the Syfy channel has been The Expanse. There was a lot of talk when this series premiered that Syfy was trying to turn its act around, to become more like the channel it used to be that ran series like the Battlestar Galactica reboot rather than what it had become known for more recently as the home to cheap-o movies and schlocky genre reality series. Yet here we are three years later and Syfy still airs those cheap-o movies and is still producing schlocky reality shows.

Oh well, while it might be on a channel questionable character, it doesn’t take away from the fact that The Expanse is still one of the best series on TV no matter where it happens to air.

I remarked at the time The Expanse debuted that we were experiencing a dearth of “very large ships in outer space” shows. Which three years later we still mostly are — there’s also Star Trek: Discovery that covers this same sort of ground too but that’s the only other one I can think of. Which is really odd. We live in a time where sci-fi, horror and other genre series are king yet the most traditional sci-fi show out there of people zipping around the cosmos in ships is still mostly missing from the crop of current series. I’m not sure if this is because that “very large ships” bandwidth is being taken up by 700+ episodes of Star Trek that seem to air in constant rotation on TV, not that I’m complaining since I love that stuff, or if what’s popular sci-fi now are more Earth based shows like Black Mirror or Westworld? But the last few years The Expanse has been filling a very large hole as it were in my sci-fi yearnings since there’s not much else out there new that’s like it.

In The Expanse, it’s a few hundred years in the future where mankind has colonized most of the solar system. People are living on the Moon, Mars and on asteroids out in the “belt.” But even though it’s a bright, shiny future we’re still squabbling over petty things and mankind isn’t going to let a little thing like the discovery of something in the depths of space that threatens all life in our solar system dissuade us from having an all out solar-system war with the Earth on one side, Mars on the other and the people living in the belt caught in the middle.

Much of the first two seasons of The Expanse focused on the lead-up to and the eventual start of this war and this new third season of the show picks up mere moments after the second season ended, with the solar system exploding in war all around the crew of the Rocinante while the one person who might be able to stop the bloodshed Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is being held hostage on a ship far out in space.

Much like with the Battlestar Galactica reboot The Expanse isn’t a show viewers can just start watching now, three seasons in. There’s so much backstory going on from plot to character relationships to politics it’s really only possible to start watching this show from the beginning.

So, if you haven’t seen The Expanse yet do yourself a favor and check the first two seasons first before jumping into this new third one. But it’s worth your time and effort to do so.

Movies

Solo: A Star Wars Story trailer

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #122

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVApril 8, 2018April 7, 2018

TV

Legion

While they might not start out that way, after a while a lot of the villains in superhero movies and TV series become boring and overused. In the Superman movies time and time again it’s Lex Luthor who’s the main baddie and in the X-Men universe it’s Magneto. Not to knock those characters, or the actors who portray them, but in the Superman and X-Men universes there’s literally hundreds of amazing villains that could be used, yet those standby bad guys get used time and time again.

Except the FX TV series Legion, which is part of the X-Men universe, doesn’t use Magneto, or even an antagonist many people would know. Instead, the creator of that series chose to use a relatively obscure villain, the Shadow King.

A little backstory — in the comic book universe David Haller is the son of Professor X and suffers from a condition of multiple personalities where each personality controls a different power. Haller was such a powerful mutant that he, abet accidentally, destroyed the entire X-Men comic book universe a few decades back. The TV series approaches things a bit differently, though still very interestingly.

In the first season of Legion, Haller (Dan Stevens) is a person who’s suffered his entire life with mental illness and ends up in an institution. But it’s an odd place where it seems as if some people there possess strange abilities. And as David begins exploring past memories he comes to realize that he too possesses said “strange abilities” when inexplicable past events suddenly becomes very explicable if the explanation was that David has superpowers. And the reason that David is in an institution rather than running around and using his powers for good is that there’s a mutant parasite called the Shadow King (mostly Aubrey Plaza) who’s attached itself to David’s psyche and is feeding off of him and his powers and keeps him in a delusional state.

I’m a comic book collector and while I’m intimately familiar with the likes of Luthor and Magneto, I was only dimly aware of the Shadow King. Which I really liked in Legion. If I don’t really know a character, then I really don’t know what they’re going to do next, unlike villains who get used all the time. The first season of Legion kept me guessing as to where it was going to end up right until the end which made for what I thought to be one of the best series of 2017.

Now comes a second season of Legion which began last week. Always a series that’s just as much style as substance, but is able to be BOTH rather than just style, the show picks up about one year after the events of last season with the Shadow King on the run and Haller kidnapped by a robotic orb. Now returned to the fold, Haller finds that the group of mutants he was working with in the first season to battle the Shadow King have joined forces with the mysterious “Division 3,” a sort’a government organization, since both came to the realization that the Shadow King’s more dangerous to the future planet than their small group of mutants

But David’s returned a bit different, he seems to be hiding things. And the one place you should never try and hid things is alongside other mutants who can read minds.

I was a bit concerned when watching this latest season of Legion as the show takes some time to ramp up. I was worried that this season was going to be more style than substance, but when the second season story kicked in and made my jaw drop all my fears about where Legion was headed dissipated and I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.

Fahrenheit 451 TV spot

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #121

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVApril 1, 2018March 31, 2018

TV

Barry

I hadn’t heard much about the new HBO series Barry other than it’s been in the works for a few years now which sometimes spells trouble — though this has also happened with other HBO shows like Westworld and that show turned out pretty good. And, luckily enough Barry is pretty good too. In fact I’d go as far to say the first episode was great.

Bill Hader stars as the title character, an ex-Marine turned hit-man for a family friend named Fuches (Stephen Root). Barry isn’t happy and is suffering from depression, not quite knowing how his life got off the rails going from serving our country in the military one year to murdering people for money the next. On an assignment in L.A. Barry is following a target and winds up accidentally attending an acting class with him. And after doing a scene on stage to their teacher (Henry Winkler) the “acting bug” bites Barry and he knows he wants to spend the rest of his life acting. Even if that’s contrary to his profession as a hit-man that demands anonymity.

I was surprised just how much I enjoyed the first episode of Barry. It’s a show that’s got a lot of heart, Barry comes across as a realistic, damaged person who made a hugely wrong choice in becoming a hit-man. But the show is also very funny too. I went from laughing out loud to cringing at times from the tension on-screen, sometimes in the same scene which I can’t remember doing in the last sitcom I’ve watched.

We live in an era where many TV comedies and dramas are so saccharine they’re totally unreliable. So, for a show like Barry to come along that’s so full of pathos and comedy with characters who don’t feel like they’ve been mass-manufactured at the sitcom factory is a breath of fresh air.

The Crossing

I hate to say this since I don’t want to curse the new ABC series The Crossing which premieres this Monday, but it’s the series that reminds me the most of the classic show Lost in its early days. And I mean that in a good way. At least I think so.

Steve Zahn stars as Sheriff Ellis who moved to a small Oregon coastal town to try and get away from big-city problems. Ellis is a modern man who’s called away from his yoga class by deputy Rosario (Rick Gomez) to investigate a body washed up on a beach outside of town. What starts off as a simple drowning turns into a massive tragedy when hundreds of bodies all begin washing up simultaneously. A few are alive but most have drowned. These survivors tell a story of coming from several hundred years in our future where there’s a great holocaust of which the only escape from is to slip into the past. Department of Homeland Security official Emma Rea (Sandrine Holt) doesn’t know what to believe. The people didn’t arrive by boat and there was no plane crash but the survivor’s stories are too incredible to believe.

As the government tries keeping a lid on the situation and Sheriff Ellis is cut out of the investigation things turn when one of the refugees reveals something that might bring the threat from the future to our present.

The Crossing reminds me of Lost in that there’s some mystery as to what’s going on. However, that mystery isn’t where the refugees come from or why they’re here. That’s pretty much spelled out in the first 15 minutes of the first episode which I appreciated a lot. I think if The Crossing had been made ten years ago the entire first season would’ve been, “WHY ARE THE REFUGEES HERE?” The mystery in The Crossing is what exactly is going on in the future, can we stop it from happening and do some of the people from the future want to stop us from trying to stop it. Now that I think of it, The Crossing has a lot of the time travel elements from the 2012 film Looper but not the same plot.

In a lot of ways The Crossing is a stranded sci-fi family series like Lost in Space or Terra Nova. They’re kind’a like colonists or settlers hoping for a better life and have decided our time is the best place for them to land, so to say. I also dug the little sci-fi references hidden in the show. One of the main characters is named “Reece” and another “Leah” — Kyle Reese and Princess Leah anyone?

I really enjoyed The Crossing but it wasn’t perfect, and these little imperfections bothered me in the fact that they might indicate a greater problem with the show that might not be evident one episode in. The biggest problem I had with The Crossing was there’s a big, bad villain in the show who’s obviously the big, bad villain the moment they step on screen. There was no mystery here whatsoever and when something happens at the end of the episode there was no mystery as to what its outcome was going to be either.

Problems like these can add up as the season goes along, but it’s too early to tell if The Crossing is going to be great, good or bad. But still, I’m hoping The Crossing is more Legion than Inhumans.

The Terror

The new ten episode AMC series The Terror debuted last week with the first two episodes. The network has been promoting this show about the real-life 1845 arctic expedition led by Captain John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds) as a horror series. While I liked The Terror, two hours in there wasn’t much to be terrified about in it, though there was loads and loads of atmosphere.

Word of warning — The Terror stars British actors using a wide-variety of accents and 19th century naval slang. Usually accents don’t bother me but I think it was the wide variety as well as the slang that made it so I could only understand every third or fourth word the characters were speaking. Things got so bad I finally gave up on lip-reading and turned on my TV’s closed-caption feature. I think if you’re going to enjoy The Terror you should consider doing this too.

In The Terror, Captain Franklin commands two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and is trying to find the fabled Northwest Passage that would connect the UK directly to the Pacific Ocean. Franklin’s second in command Captain Crozier (Jared Harris) has been to the arctic before and knows its dangers. So when the ships get stuck in the ice and have to spend a freezing winter in the middle of nowhere, he knows their situation is more dire that anyone else suspects. But there’s something else going on here too, a crew member unexpectedly dies and another falls off the mast and disappears into the ocean before the freeze. When one crewman is trying to service the ship he sees a ghostly figure in the water beckoning to him and another is attacked and carried off by a bear… thing, it becomes obvious that things are more dire than even Captain Crozier knows.

The Terror is a bit of H.P. Lovecraft mixed with something along the lines of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World but it moves at so slow a pace it wouldn’t surprise me that if those with short attention spans don’t bail out of the show after the first episode. Most movies tell a complete story in two hours, in two hours of The Terror I only felt as if the story had just started.

But like I said I liked The Terror and will stick with it until the end. Even if since it’s all based on facts it’s easy to find out what really happened to the crews of the Terror and Erebus, minus, I suspect, what’s up with the bear thing.

Roseanne

More and more classic series like The X-Files and Will and Grace are getting new season orders sometimes decades after the shows originally ended. The latest of which is the ABC show Roseanne which picks up 21 years after the original run of the series ended back in 1997.

The only difference between this new and the classic Rosanne is that in the original series it’s revealed that husband Dan (John Goodman) had died at the end of the series. But now and a bit of retcon later Dan’s alive and well — and Roseanne is a better show for it. In the 2018 Roseanne, Darlene’s (Sara Gilbert) back living at home with her two kids, D.J. (Michael Fishman) is a soldier back from the war with a daughter of his own and Becky (Alicia Goranson) is widower working as a waitress.

Times are still tough in the Conner household but now even more so as Roseanne and sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) are fighting over politics, Becky is considering taking $50,000 to be a surrogate for another couple’s baby (a hilarious return for Becky #2 Sarah Chalke) and grandson Mark (Ames McNamara) has to deal with bullying in school for how he dresses.

I didn’t expect to like the return of Roseanne as much as I did but I really liked this new/continuation of the series. When so many other ABC sitcoms all follow the same mold these days of having families that feel fabricated where each and every episode ends on a “ahhhhhh, they really love each other” happy ending, Roseanne isn’t afraid to go to the dark places sitcoms used to go to and mine that place for laughs.

I think as long as you’re able to separate out the character of Roseanne Conner from the real-life caustic personality of Roseanne Barr you’ll enjoy this new/old Roseanne as much as I did.

Westworld season 2 TV spot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjVqDg32_8s

Comics

Global Frequency: The Deluxe Edtion

DC is set to release a new collected edition of this now, ULP!, 16 year old series. There’s been talk on and off for years about turning Global Frequency into a TV series, there was even a pilot made a few years ago that never went to series. Maybe this collected edition will light the fire so to say under some producers butt to get a series on the air?

From DC:

Global Frequency is a worldwide rescue organization that offers a last shred of hope when all other options have failed. Manned by 1,001 operatives, the Frequency is made up of experts in fields as diverse as bio-weapon engineering and parkour. Each agent is specifically chosen by Miranda Zero based on proximity, expertise and, in some cases, sheer desperation! Collects the entire 12-issue series!

The Reading & Watch List

Solo: A Star Wars Story Actor Shares New Details About the Troubled Production

Cool Movie Poster of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #120

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVMarch 25, 2018March 24, 2018

TV

Krypton

Superman on TV is nothing new. The on of the first live-action superhero TV series based on a comic book was The Adventures of Superman in the 1950s, there was a popular series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in the 1990s and a very successful teen-oriented show Smallville in the 2000s. And Supergirl on The CW on now is one of the more popular shows airing on that network too. So the new Krypton series on SyFy is really just the latest in a long line of shows based on the man of steel.

Well, kind’a sort’a as Krypton doesn’t actually feature the strange visitor from another planet, its focus is on Superman’s granddad Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) and doesn’t take place on Earth. It tales place on that “another planet” Krypton 200 years in the past.

In that time on Krypton the house of “El,” of which Superman, aka Kal-El will one day be a part of, is no more after Seg’s granddad Val (Ian McElhinney) was executed for insisting that there’s life on other planets which also meant the house of “El” was striped of their rank and name. Seg’s a bit of a wild-card, I think he got into more fistfights in the first episode of Krypton than is usual for a whole season of a similar regular series. When he’s not beating people up he’s running off to be with his girlfriend Lyta Zod (Georgina Campbell). But when mysterious Earthling Adam Strange (Shaun Sipos) appears and tells Seg that the future of Earth, if not the universe is is at stake, Seg must get his life back tougher and finish Val’s work to stop to stop a massive interstellar threat so that his genes can continue on.

Krypton is interesting if it’s a bit all over the place. On the one hand some of the characters and characterizations are as over-the-top as those in the 1940s Superman movie serials, yet in other times Krypton tries to be a modern series with sex and violence and a season-long story. I don’t mind either over-the-top or modern, I just wish the producers of the show had settled on one.

The visuals of Krypton are right in line with the current ethos of the DC movie franchises — dark and dreary like in the Man of Steel movie. I’m not opposed to this, it’s just a different view of Krypton that we’ve thus-far seen on TV. Always before Krypton was this bright, shining beacon of hope, even if the scientists of Krypton couldn’t see that their own demise was coming. The Krypton of Krypton is a worn-down nub of a civilization where people hide from the weather under domes, corruption is rife and most of the populous is under the sway of a religious leader who’s taken over the government of the planet.

I’m kind’a sort’a interested in seeing where Krypton goes from here, but my guess is that after a few more episodes I’ll probably be done with Krypton for good.

Santa Clarita Diet

All episodes for the second season of the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet dropped last Friday. This series about a realtor/mom Shelia (Drew Barrymore) who one day unexpectedly becomes an undead flesh-eating ghoul, but not turning totally zombie as long as she eats enough human meat was funny enough last season. This new season starts right where the first one left off, with Shelia’s husband (Timothy Olyphant) and daughter (Liv Hewson) along with neighbor (Skyler Gisondo) trying to find a cure for Shelia’s undead-ness before she either totally zombies-out or rots and falls apart.

I liked the first season of Santa Clarita and was looking forward to the second, if I can’t quite all remember what went on in that the first? And I’m usually pretty good at remembering those things. I don’t think that Santa Clarita Diet is a bad series, it’s just there are so many shows on now and they’re all coming so fast and we consume them so quickly, that even if a show is good, if it doesn’t really stand out it can be as quickly forgotten as it is watched.

Nightflyers teaser

Movies

SICARIO, Day of the Soldado trailer

Deadpool 2 trailer

The Titan trailer

Cool TV Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #119

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVMarch 18, 2018March 19, 2018

TV

The X-Files season 11

Over the decades the series The X-Files has had many endings. The first of which was its ending in the 1998 theatrical film, then there was an ending to the series when that finished in 2002, there was also an ending to the 2008 “I want to believe” film and the ending to the series again when it returned to FOX for a short run in 2016, all of which could easily have stood as a series ending but didn’t. So this new ending to the current crop of The X-Files episodes on FOX next Wednesday is nothing new, if this time it feels more permanent than before.

What started this season as a little confusing with the first episode evolved into a strong season of The X-Files with some standout-episodes like the hilarious “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” the nearly dialog free “Rm9sbG93ZXJz,” the creepy “Familiar”and brilliant/gross “Nothing Lasts Forever.” For the most part, the episodes that worked this season were ones not tied to the overall conspiracy mythos. The conspiracy episodes were odd and really didn’t fit well with the stand-alone ones, but still, even a halfway decent episode of The X-Flies is better that most other series episodes out there these days.

Why does this ending to The X-Files feel different then before? It’s because this time Gillian Anderson has said she’s done with the show. Now this has happened in the past with co-star David Duchovny in the early 2000s when he effectively left the series after its seventh season. This time, though, with Duchovny pushing 60 and Gillian Anderson finding success in other shows, I could see this season of The X-Files being the last.

Well, last to a certain extent. Though I’d love to see Duchovny and Anderson return to The X-Files at some point in the future, even Darren McGavin famously kind’a sort’a reprised his role as Kolchak at age 76 in an episode of The X-Files, I think it’s more likely than not that at some point in the near future FOX will reboot the series with a brand new Mulder and Scully or with new characters replacing the old like has been done in the Star Trek and Star Wars films.

Still, to me Mulder and Scully will always be Duchovny and Anderson.

The Expanse season 3 TV spot

Comics

Infinity Gauntlet Box Set Slipcase Hardcover

This nearly 5,000 page edition, that’s no type-o folks, will retail for $450 and is out this week just in time for the release of Avengers: Infinity War.

From Amazon:

The Mad Titan Thanos has gathered the Infinity Gems – and he plans to transform our universe into a nightmarish tribute to his true love, Death! Adam Warlock and the Silver Surfer unite Earth’s heroes and the universe’s cosmic powers to stand against Thanos and his Infinity Gauntlet…but when the dust settles, Adam Warlock’s good and evil sides – the Goddess and the Magus – may prove to be even bigger threats! Witness the birth of the Infinity Watch, as the universe must deal with infinite war and a cosmic crusade! But through all the chaos, what is Thanos’ secret agenda? Jim Starlin’s cosmic masterpiece, the 1990s’ “Infinity Trilogy,” is collected in full in this titanic box set, including every chapter, crossover and tie-in – plus an entire volume of bonus stories and behind-the scenes extras! It doesn’t get more Infinite than this!

Movies

Avengers: Infinity War trailer

The Movie Chain: #99: The Bourne Identity (2002)

Last week: The Martian

The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.

I remember how excited I got when The Bourne Identity was released. In 2002 the spy movie genera was waning with the stalwart James Bond franchise experiencing its last gasps before being rebooted in 2006. But otherwise there wasn’t much else out there spy-guy-wise. Enter The Bourne Identity.

Part of the reason I was excited about this one was that it seemed like it was a spy movie meant for my generation. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon of last week’s The Martian) was a young guy at the time and the movie was being directed by Doug Liman who’s previous film Go was, and still probably is, one of my all-time favorite films. Differentiating itself from the Bond franchise, in The Bourne Identity Jason Bourne is a man who’s lost his memory and is in a journey across Europe with Marie (Franka Potente) to find his origins. Along the way he finds that when backed into a corner or threatened he can kick almost anyone’s butt on “autopilot,” can fight his way out of any situation or get out of any building when things look bleak.

Watching The Bourne Identity today I’m surprised as to just how small this movie is when compared to the other films that would come. The big action sequence here is Bourne and Marie in a car chase, except they’re driving an old, beat-up Mini Cooper rather than some flashy car like in the Bond films. Of course, all this would come later and this “smallness” that was a feature of The Bourne Identity was chipped away in subsequent films until now there’s not much difference between Bourne and Bond.

One interesting thing — The Bourne Identity didn’t do that well at the box office when it was released. It certainly made money for the studio, but it wasn’t a smash movie that year. I think what saved the franchise from doom was word of mouth and strong DVD sales. Let’s put it this way — in 2002 The Bourne Identity wasn’t even a top 20 movie in terms of box office. In 2004 The Bourne Supremacy was in the top ten.

Next week: Dance the night away!

Rumor Control

I’ve been overdosing on sci-fi lately. It’s easy to do. These days sci-fi is the most popular type of genera programming so it seems as if every week or two there’s some new sci-fi movie or TV series to come along that demands attention. Be it a series like Black Mirror or movie like Mute, more and more is available every month.

And that’s not taking into account all the classic sci-fi series and movies out there too. In the last few weeks I’ve bought films like 2010, Outland and Akira and series like Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica as well. Some weeks, especially when the Olympics were on and there weren’t too many things to watch, I was sci-fi all the time. If I wasn’t working through series like Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams then I was sampling shows like Altered Carbon while also catching movies like Alien Resurrection on TV. It’s almost like TV programmers have finally figured out that more people than just the geeks like me are into sci-fi and have started adjusting their programming accordingly.

One Sunday I was flipping back and forth between Mad Max: Fury Road and Alien: Covenant with The Martian airing a little later on. I was in heaven.

What’s really cool are things like the two original Netflix movies that debuted the last few months. First was The Cloverfield Paradox and then Mute. While I didn’t think that either of these movies were great, I still dug both of them a lot and thought they were each a lot of fun.

And all these shows and movies seem to be just the tip of the iceberg as it were in 2018 sci-fi wise. There’s also the upcoming new ABC show The Crossing, Krypton on Syfy and Netflix series Lost in Space to look forward to as well as returning shows like The Expanse and Westworld too. And that’s just what’s coming out in the next few months. If the flood of sci-fi that’s been coming out for some time now continues into 2018 I can only imagine what wonders we’ll be brought.

I’ve been watching so much sci-fi the last few weeks/months I had to ask myself the question, is it too much? On the one hand how can “too much” sci-fi be a bad thing? On the other hand there’s so much of it coming out, and so much is good, is the flood of it diluting sci-fi in general? Like will people one day look back on 2018 at some point in the future where sci-fi has returned to its traditional levels, a few series on TV and a few movies a year, and see this year as an aberration?

I’d suppose so. I think we’re living in this weird time when there’s so many outlets for TV be it cable, broadcast, streaming, on demand, online, digital download… and all these outlets want their own original programming means that programmers are willing to take chances on things they might not have a few years ago. So instead of just getting clones of CSI and Grey’s Anatomy we get a lot of interesting shows too like The Orville and Counterpart and what sounds like interesting series like Fahrenheit 451.

I always seem to be able to find interesting things to watch, even in times like in the early 2000s when it was very hard to do so. But these days when there’s so much TV out there and so much of it is great I think it’s now possible to find great things I want to watch just in my favorite niche of sci-fi. My concern is that I’ll get lost in my little pop-culture bubble, will become so immersed in sci-fi that I’ll forget to pop my head out and take a look around at what else is out there. I love sci-fi and I can’t get enough of it, but there’s more out there TV and movie-wise than just sci-fi. Am I right, or am I crazy and should I just enjoy all my sci-fi programs while they last?