Deutsche Version | CW 01-02 | CW 04

Human Target 1×01 Pilot
The pilot episode certainly looked interesting. The action was well balanced above realistic and below unrealistic. It looks like as if it’s going to be Die Hard or Lethal Weapon in a series format and I certainly will watch more episodes of it.
“You wore a vest? Where’s my vest?” – “I’m your vest.”

24 8×01 – 8×04 4:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Dammit. I should have known better. I decided to watch the season en bloc when it is over. But I just had to peak a little and was already drawn back in…
I love Jack’s new “Are we done here? Can I go home now?” attitude. Of course they aren’t done and Jack can’t go home.
When I read that that Freddie Prince jr. (Wing Commander, Scooby Doo) – He married my Buffy, dammit!!! – would take the part of the leading CTU Field Officer I was a bit worried. But he has gotten older and looks like he can pull it off.
Of course there are again the typical 24 plot points like the incompetent CTU boss, the CTU member who has private problems and I am already wondering who the mole is – but that’s OK, it’s 24 after all.
What I also like is that – aside from the 24 alumni who have returned this season – these episodes feel like a huge School Reunion party: The aforementioned Freddie Prince jr., Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica) – looks gorgeous btw -, Paul Wesley (Stefan in The Vampire Diaries), Cliff Simon (Ba’al in Stargate SG-1), David Anders (Takezo Kensei / Adam Monroe in Heroes, Julian Sark in Alias), Jürgen Prochnow (Dune, Das Boot) and according to the CTU files Callum Keith Rennie (Ray in Due South, Leoben in Battlestar Galactica) will also appear anytime soon.

Life Unexpected 1×01 Pilot
I was made aware of this series at least twice. The second time was a few days ago when blogs reviewed the pilot episode. But I’ve seen bits and pieces of this episode before – most likely in a trailer a few months back. And even though I had forgotten the show in the meantime I now remember that I decided back then that I’d give it a try.
I really liked the pilot. The characters are believable and down-to-earth. Even though the show runs on The CW this isn’t Beverly Hills 90210 or Gossip Girl, this is different. As with every show it now depends on what kind of storylines they are going to tell and how this triangle+attachments is going to work out.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand 1×01 / 1×02 The Red Serpent / Sacramentum Gladiatorum
Lots of nudity (male and female). Even more blood. Better you put a bucket below your telly in case it spills out of the screen. The optic leans more towards 300 than Gladiator, especially when there’s blood flowing. The problem is the story. These first two episodes show how Spartacus became a Gladiator but it didn’t give the viewer an idea what the entire show is going to be about. And that’s why I am not yet convinced. To quote Buffy’s Spike: “I love a good slaughter as much as the next bloke” but I also need a real story in between.
Time will tell … at least you now get the chance you never got with Xena: To see Lucy Lawless in the nude.

Chuck 3×04 Chuck vs Operation Awesome
The only thing I’ve ever seen Brandon Routh in was Superman Returns but here he didn’t remind me of his character there. I like him as addition to the team because he could stir things up a little.
I don’t know if it’s just my imagination because they announced it but the show actually feels a bit less funny and a bit more serious. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an Action Comedy and there’s plenty of fun in it. But the general tone during the spy action seems to have darkened a little since last year. I’m not complaining – I like it.

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Categories: TV Season 2009/10 Diary
Tags: 24 · Alias · Battlestar Galactica · Beverly Hills 90210 · Bones · Buffy the Vampire Slayer · Burn Notice · Cagney & Lacey · Castle · Chuck · Cougar Town · Das Boot · Die Hard · Due South · Dune · Gossip Girl · Heroes · House M.D. · How I Met Your Mother · Human Target · Lethal Weapon · Leverage · Life Unexpected · Scooby Doo · Spartacus: Blood and Sand · Stargate SG-1 · Superman · Supernatural · The Big Bang Theory · The Good Wife · The Vampire Diaries · Two and a Half Men · White Collar · Wing Commander · Xena: Warrior Princess
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Deutsche Version | CW 47-49 | CW 50-01

The Big Bang Theory 3×10 The Athens Recurrence
I do that very rarely but I watched the scene where Penny recites the physics stuff three times in a row. It’s so great to see her keep a straight face and the others get dumbfounded. Sheldon can be so proud of her. 
I also really liked the reference to the pilot when Penny explained why Sheldon sits where he sits.

Two and a Half Men 7×10 That’s Why They Call It Ball Room
This was a cool episode, it had many scenes that made me laugh, for example the couch incident or Alan’s wedding video or the dance lessons. I also liked that Jake had a few more scenes but I still feel they should make at least one entire episode about him again sometime soon.

Bones 5×10 The Goop on the Girl
“You look like sisters.” I really liked Zooey Deschanel’s appearance on the show, it was really funny. It also kinda answers the question why Brennan behaves the way she does even when she had a normal childhood until the age of 16. It must be a gene running in the family.
What I didn’t like was Booth dissing that radio man for having a negative opinion of the U.S.. But I think that’s a cultural difference. In Germany we’ve come to love criticizing our country and everything the parliament (we elected) does.

Castle 2×11 The Fifth Bullet
This one had a really nice assortment of guest actors: Marc Blucas (Buffy’s Riley), Anne Dudek (House’s Cutthroat Bitch) and Carlo Rota (24’s Morris O’Brian). I especially like Carlo because he often plays (he was recently on Stargate Universe, too) these somewhat grumpy character’s that aren’t really likeable (because they aren’t really supposed to be) and he does a great job with them because you actually don’t like the characters but you don’t transfer that to the actor.
But I also liked Marc Blucas in his amnesia role, he was a nice guy.

FlashForward 1×10 A561984
So Dominic’s character doesn’t actually belong to the evil bad guys. But he was still the most interesting character in this episode. I honestly don’t know if I will even remember this show when it starts to air again in 4(!) months.

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Categories: TV Season 2009/10 Diary
Tags: 24 · Bones · Buffy the Vampire Slayer · Castle · FlashForward · Gossip Girl · House M.D. · How I Met Your Mother · Paradox · Stargate SG-1 · Stargate Universe · The Big Bang Theory · Two and a Half Men · V · White Collar
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Deutsche Version | Season 2: Disc 1 | Season 2: Disc 4 – 6

Disc 2

Crackers Don’t Matter

Synopsis: D’Argo has brought an alien onboard who claimed that he could cloak the electromagnetic field of Moya’s. They would become invisible to sensors which has become necessary since Scorpius deployed wanted beacons all over the place. Thy make a test run on Farscape-1 and it actually works and then they agree to follow T’raltixx to his home planet, but they have to pass a cluster of five pulsar stars and their light has side-effects on less-developed life-forms. Soon the crew starts to get aggressive and suspicious towards one another but it doesn’t stop even after they passed the pulsars. Something else is going on.

My Opinion: The funny thing is that John didn’t wear the “armour” shown in the picture above when he was nuts, but when he started to get a clear head again. I love it when fictional characters go crazy and paranoid, it’s a lot of fun to watch them: “Why don’t you want to show me the record, what are you hiding? … So now you suddenly want to show it to me? Why? What’s on it?” and so on. And why was John the hero of the day? Because Humans have less precise senses and aren’t affected as much by the light. Inferiority can help survive.
Spoiler (mark to read):
And I am not sure whether or not we’ve seen the introduction of Harvey. When John sees the transmission by Scorpius during his aggressive phase, Scorpius seems to become real and gives him advise. And Harvey is the mental image of Scorpius which lives in an implanted chip in John’s head. He will be introduced later in this season.

The Way We Weren’t

Synopsis: Chiana finds a Peacekeeper recording device which documents that Aeryn has been on Moya before and that her squadron has killed the former pilot. Aeryn didn’t know that it was Moya because she had been on many Leviathans. Slowly she begins to remember what happened back then and how Pilot became Moya’s pilot. But she’s not the only one remembering, Pilot does it as well and he’s not amused.

My Opinion: Everyone has a past and naturally Aeryn’s isn’t one painted in pink. I really liked the flashbacks because it gave both Aeryn and Pilot more background and once again it wasn’t all black/white. OK, Aeryn’s past was black, but Pilot’s past wasn’t exactly white. And again there are some parallels to Stargate SG-1: Both Teal’c and Aeryn had to leave everything behind even though Teal’c’s leaving was more a choice than Aeryn’s. Both were necessary to get the show moving but both seemed sudden. And both series showed in later episodes such as this one that it wasn’t such a sudden move after all. It just seemed that way because we the viewers didn’t know their past.

Disc 3

Picture if You Will

Synopsis: Rygel and Chiana trade for some items and Chiana discovers a picture that seems to depict her. But the picture is changing, it seems to predict the future: First her legs get broken and then she dies in a fire. The crew is still shocked about this when the picture suddenly shows D’Argo and his death. Every attempt at destroying the picture fails and they fear to get picked one-by-one. Back at the trading ship they find out that the picture is a creation by Maldis – the sorcerer who captured John and was defeated by Zhaan.

My Opinion: I’d would have liked to see Maldis longer, he’s such a good diabolic character. But to introduce him earlier would have meant to reveal the answer to soon. This way the episode turned from “weird in the beginning” to “really weird in the end”. I love it. The special effects may not be so special but you have to have the idea and the ultimately go through with it and tell the story.

Home on the Remains

Synopsis: The crew is seriously starving and Zhaan begins to blossom (literally). She needs meat or she will die. So Moya lands in the corpse of a Budong*, the greatest space-living creature known. There is a mine and a colony in which Chiana and her brother have lived a while ago. The minerals in the Budong’s bones are valuable, but it’s dangerous because there live other creatures, too, who feed from the rotting corpse or a miner.

My Opinion: I loved the way John killed the Keedva. It simply had to be a homage to Luke’s killing of the Rancor in Return of the Jedi. But I also liked how Chiana was willing to do anything to get meat for Zhaan and how D’Argo couldn’t bear it because he cares for Chiana. We’ve seen traces of this development in previous episodes but after the kiss in the end it’s very obvious.

*The classification of the Budong on the Farscape Wiki is also fun to read:
Height of average adult: Big
Average length: Really big
Average wingspan: Really REALLY big

Season 2: Disc 4 – 6

Categories: DVD / Blu-ray, DVD Marathon, Farscape Marathon
Tags: Farscape · Star Wars · Stargate SG-1
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Deutsche Version

Children of the Gods is the movie-length pilot of Stargate SG-1. It is said that there were creative differences between the producers and the networked “Showtime” chipped in, too. Additionally due to the story-telling of the series some aspects don’t make sense anymore.
Thus someone decided to create a “Final Cut” version of the pilot where scenes are reordered, shortened and the FX were enhanced.

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Categories: Short Review
Tags: MacGyver · Stargate SG-1
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I was getting in the mood and have started watching MacGyver again, starting with the first season from 1985/86.

And I love to see so many known guest actors in it:

Robin Curtis (Star Trek 3 & 4), Peter Jurassik (Babylon 5, Sliders), Nana Visitor (Star Trek DS9), Robert Englund (Nightmare on Elm Street, V), Stephen Williams (The Blues Brothers, 21 Jump Street), Teri Hatcher (Lois & Clark, Desperate Housewives), John de Lancie (Star Trek TNG, DS9, VOY, Stargate SG-1), …

Categories: DVD / Blu-ray
Tags: Babylon 5 · Desperate Housewives · MacGyver · Sliders · Star Trek DS9 · Star Trek TNG · Star Trek VOY · Stargate SG-1 · The Blues Brothers
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Deutsche Version | Stargate: The Arc of Truth

Synopsis: SG-1 takes part in the ceremony where the last Ba’al clone gets his symbiont removed. The last of the System Lords is defeated. But something is happening. First Vala disappears, then Teal’c and then more and more people. Cameron, Sam and Daniel manage to get through the Stargate home but when they arrive on Earth everything has changed. The gate is somewhere in the arctic and Earth’s history of the last 60 years seems to have changed. Another Ba’al clone has changed the past to win in the future.

My Opinion: The elements of this story aren’t new, not even to Stargate SG-1. A time travel after which the Stargate program doesn’t exist also happened in Moebius. And the way the “ripple effect” changed the future didn’t make much sense either. But I still liked this movie, it was nice to see them all again (Don S. Davis in his last appearance) and I liked how Daniel tried to speak to Daniel and how they once again joined forces with the First Prime Teal’c. Also this movie didn’t have any lengths, it felt like a slightly longer regular episode even though it was twice as long.

Categories: DVD / Blu-ray, DVD Marathon, SG-1 Marathon
Tags: Stargate SG-1
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Deutsche Version | Farscape Marathon | Season 2: Disc 1

Disc 1

Premiere

Synopsis: John Crichton is a scientist and an astronaut and he wants to prove that one can use Earth’s gravitational pull to accelerate a spaceship. But something goes wrong and his tiny ship “Farscape-1″ is sucked into a wormhole and John gets stranded … somewhere. He’s thrown directly into a fight between a Peacekeeper command carrier and a prisoner transport ship: Moya, a Leviathan, a living ship. Aboard Moya he meets the hynerian Dominar Rygel XVI, former ruler over 600 billion people, the delvian priest Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan and the luxan warrior Ka D’Argo. Unfortunately for him he looks like a Sebacean – a Peacekeeper. And he gets imprisoned with another Peacekeeper: Peacekeeper Special Command officer Aeryn Sun.

My Opinion: Just like John we are simply thrown into the story and have to figure out what’s going on. I liked the idea of “translator microbes at the brain stem” for the translation issues. The problem wasn’t forgotten and yet easily solved. I also liked all the “Muppets” (most animatronics were created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop): Rygel, Pilot (Pilot is the pilot of Moya, living in a symbiotic relationship with her) the aliens on the first planet John visited. I also liked that Aeryn didn’t simply switch sides “just because” but was forced to run.

Disc 2

I, E. T.

Synopsis: John has still a hard time getting accustomed to this whole new universe when they find a homing device deep in Moya’s guts that has been activated recently. To remove it would be too painful for Moya and so they have to land on a planet and sink the ship into a swamp to dampen the signal. They have to find a way to anesthetize the entire ship in order to remove that device. And suddenly Crichton finds himself in front of people who have never seen an alien before.

My Opinion: With this episode Crichton’s tradition of making cultural references has begun. In this case it was Dagobah and Yoda. And it was funny to see John (who has just learned that Humans aren’t alone in the universe) explain to a woman that her race isn’t alone in the universe and that he can fully understand how she feels right now.

Disc 3

Exodus from Genesis

Synopsis: Some sort of space bug has entered Moya and is crawling through the walls. They begin to disturb Moya’s operations and they are somehow turning the heat up. John is able to capture and kill one and Zhaan dissects it. But soon after copies of the crew members begin appear and start to attack the real crew. And Aeryn’s condition worsens because Sebaceans can’t stand heat and their body functions begin to break down. As if this wasn’t enough a Peacekeeper Marauder closes in and tries to re-take the ship.

My Opinion: This episode introduces another common theme of the show: That not everything is as it appears to be and that such misunderstandings can have fatal consequences. I thought it was a great idea of John’s that he tried to convince that Peacekeeper that Humans can multiply by thousands in no time (nobody knows Humans after all) and that Crais (the command carrier commander) should stay out of his way.

Disc 1

Throne for a Loss

Synopsis: Rygel is pretending to be still the monarch of his people to get a contract for a transport job. But then he is kidnapped because of his “importance” and Moya couldn’t leave orbit even if she wanted to because Rygel used a control crystal as “jewel” in his scepter. D’Argo, Aeryn and John try to get him back and for this they use a strength-enhancing gauntlet which they got from one of the attackers. But unfortunately it makes one not only stronger but also hightens one’s aggresive traits.

My Opinion: This was an average episode. But it started another Farscape tradition: The usage of nicknames, especially by John.
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Categories: DVD / Blu-ray, DVD Marathon, Farscape Marathon
Tags: Farscape · Stargate Atlantis · Stargate SG-1
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Deutsche Version

Season 1

Disc 1

Pilot

Synopsis: It’s the year 1999 and Judgement Day hasn’t happened – yet. Sarah and John are constantly switching aliases and living placaes. But one day two cyborgs have still found them: One comes in the form of a young girl called Cameron and she was sent to protect John. And the other is a classical terminator. They try to escape him but in the end there’s no place they can hide, just another time.

My Opinion: To fully enjoy the show one has to put it in a parallel universe to the movies. It’s similar to the Highlander movie (There can be only one!) and the series. While I liked the general general idea of the show I had a problem with some story elements. For example: Cameron took the other cyborg out with a power surge. In my unprofessional opinion two minutes should have been enough to somehow destroy him or at least to damage him severely – he can’t resist after all. And some of the stuff in the vault seemed unlikely, too. Even if I knew how to build a microchip in 1965 there wouldn’t be the the technology (wafers etc.) to actually do it. But they had to find a way to push the series forward to today and it was fairly ok.
So I like the story but one mustn’t think to much about the logic.

Gnothi Seauton

Synopsis: They jumped eight years into the future, into 2007. And now all three of them need new identities to blend in. Cameron leads Sarah to a group of resistance fighters who were send back by John to destroy Skynet before it goes operational. But when that fails they have to visit an old friend. Meanwhile John explores the technological differences between 1999 and 2007.

My Opinion: The writers are obviously not very burdened with the complex issues that go with time-travel. It seems that whenever they need it they will send people back and forth through time as if nothing could disrupt the timeline. But if that were so then we would be back on the concept of a time-loop as the movie Terminator had present it (It has always happened that way and always will be, there’s nothing we can do about it). But Terminator 2 had thrown that overboard and declared that the timeline can be changed and (as Doc Brown explained it in Back to the Future 2) that will result in another timeline. I also had a problem with that “Zombie Terminator” who can obviously walk without its head attached – I thought the “eyes” were its optical sensors?
Another thing I noticed: I don’t know how far ahead the pilot was shot and what they thought would happen after it, but I didn’t have the feeling to see a Mrs. Dyson or a detective who was eight years older than in the pilot. They should have used a better mask to make them look younger in the pilot (Look at Bruce Boxleitner in Babylon 5: In the Beginning!)
Too bad Enrique had to die, I would have liked it to see Tony Amendola (Master Bra’tac in Stargate SG-1) more often.

The Turk

Synopsis: Sarah is looking for former employees of Cyberdyne Systems to check whether they are continuing the Skynet project or doing something else dangerous. Connor and Cameron pose as siblings in their new school and try to blend in.

My Opinion: Is it my imagination or did the metall skeleton of that terminator look a bit too shiny? He had been blasted to peaces and has lain in the garbage. Which brings up another question: How did he get there in the first place? He wasn’t within the time bubble and thus hasn’t travelled with the others. What happend to that bank building in the last eight years and why has no one ever found the skeleton or the head – which lay quite open on the side of the street?
And when Sarah burned down Andy’s house the fires looked digital – and fake. Don’t they have the money anymore to burn down a real, wooden facade?

Disc 1 – My Opinion: The show is enjoyable, the characters are fine. But as you can see the show opens a can of questions for me and they bother me because that makes me thinking that either the writers didn’t see this problems or they thought the viewers wouldn’t notice or that the viewers wouldn’t care. None of which is really an acceptable answer in my opinion. But I will continue to watch and see how it unfolds.
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Categories: DVD / Blu-ray, DVD Marathon, Mini Marathon
Tags: Babylon 5 · Back to the Future · Highlander · Stargate SG-1 · Terminator
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Deutsche Version | Season 3 | Season 5

Disc 1

The Way of the Warrior

Synopsis: A rather large fleet of klingon ships under the command of General Martok arrives at the station and their true intentions remain unclear. But then they start to search ships that try to leave the bajoran sector to look for changelings. Sisko needs a Klingon to shed some light into this: Lt. Cmdr. Worf, son of Mogh. But when the fleet departs for an attack on Cardassia (that is infiltrated by Founders – or so do the Klingons believe), Worf has to make a choice: To stay with Starfleet or to rejoin his people.

My Opinion: Hawk is back! This was a great start to the season. Worf and Martok are great additions to the show and I like how fluent the concept of good and bad guys is. Except for Babylon 5 in other shows of that time the good guys remain good and the bad guys remain the bad guys. There’s rarely a grey area. Yes, the Klingons have been the bad guys once, but since the start of TNG they basically belonged to the good guys and that didn’t change – until now. It also often happened that a race was portrayed in a certain way and there were only a few exceptions to that general portrayal. Only Humans had been shown in all variations of grey. That is also due to the fact that TNG has shown a certain race rarely twice (except for the Klingons). DS9 with it’s “port of call” concept has broken with that and has shown all kinds of Bajorans, Klingons, Cardassians and will continue to do so.

The Visitor

Synopsis: An accident happens aboard the Defiant and Sisko gets vaporized and his son is shocked. But a few months later Ben Sisko reappears in Jake’s quarters and disappears again. Then a year later it happens again. Ben is caught in some kind of subspace bubble and Jake (who was involved in the original accident) is his anchor to this world. While his life goes on, he spends his time either with writing or studying subspace mechanics and after fifty years, Jake has figured out how to save his father.

My Opinion: In general, I liked this episode and (again) the relationship between Jake and his father. The story is very emotional and very well told. What bugs me is the fact that the Dominion war didn’t seem to have happened in that timeline. Firstly this contradicts the things we have learned so far about the Dominion infiltration of the AQ (e.g. in The Adversary) and secondly because that would mean that Sisko’s survival would lead to the greatest war in the history of the AQ with its millions of deaths.

Hippocratic Oath

Synopsis: O’Brien and Bashir detect a crash-landed ship along a trading route in the GQ. But when they approach the planet they get shot down and have to face a group of Jem’Hadar. But these are not regular Jem’Hadar, these one want to be free and for this they need to free themselves from the Ketracel-white drug. Bashir doesn’t believe this is possible due to his experiences with the Jem’Hadar infant in the previous year.

My Opinion: For the first time since the start of their friendship a rift has been created between Miles and Julian. Although it was sad to see, their behaviour was very fitting to each character. Miles has fought in the cardassian border wars and seen what an ruthless enemy is capable of and Julian is still a very enthusiastic doctor who values life above all else. But I am glad that their friendship will survive things like that.
And now we’ve seen Jem’Hadar who can think and act outside their genetically programmed pattern. Again a race has been shown more than one-dimensional and it will happen again.
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Categories: DS9 Marathon, DVD / Blu-ray, DVD Marathon
Tags: Babylon 5 · Smallville · Star Trek · Star Trek DS9 · Star Trek TNG · Stargate SG-1
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This year I made a list what I paid for DVDs for the first time – it would have been better if I hadn’t…

This year I bought 109 items which resulted in 455 profiles. The total costs for this were 1,628.60€ (I transform foreign currencies at once to see what I’ve actually paid).

The average price was 15.66€ per item which is pretty amazing since there are quite a number of season boxes and even full series boxes among them.

My first item this year was the “Angel” complete box which costed 82.19€.

My last item was “The Dark Knight” which costed 9.85€.

My most expensive item was the “Stargate SG-1″ complete box which costed 137.05€.

Categories: DVD / Blu-ray
Tags: Angel · Batman · Stargate SG-1 · Statistics
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