Entertainment
The Sci-Fi That Failed Twice And Demands A Third Chance
By Joshua Tyler
| Published
No other genre falls victim to early cancellation more often than science fiction. Networks are notoriously impatient with anything that involves expensive special effects or sets, and SF is labor and cost-intensive.
That short runway for success has deprived us of proper endings to some of the greatest sci-fi stories ever told, so we’re left wondering what happened to the Wild Cards in their war with the Chigs, whether the crew of the Destiny ever found a gate back to Earth, and did Captain Gideon find a cure for the Drak plague before it was too late?
It’s the not knowing that’s the worst, and in the case of one sci-fi franchise, we were left in the dark not once, but twice. This is why V failed, and then failed again!
The Biggest Television Event Of The 1980s
V was created by television writer-producer Kenneth Johnson as a large-scale science-fiction event for NBC. The story begins when massive alien ships arrive over Earth’s major cities, with the Visitors aboard them claiming they come in peace and offering advanced technology in exchange for Earth’s resources. They look like humans, they act like humans, and they seem friendly, so we go all in on cooperation.
As the world falls further under the influence of the Visitors, a small group discovers that their human appearance is only a disguise. In reality, the Visitors are secretly reptilian beings manipulating humanity and harvesting people. As the truth is uncovered, a resistance movement forms to fight back.
When it aired in 1983, the two-night miniseries became a huge ratings success and a pop-culture phenomenon, praised for its spectacle, suspense, and memorable twists.
The Event Becomes A Series
After the huge ratings success of V, NBC quickly ordered a follow-up. In 1984, the network aired the sequel miniseries V: The Final Battle, which continued the human resistance fighting the alien Visitors and again drew strong viewership. Hoping to turn the concept into a long-running franchise, NBC then launched a weekly television series simply titled V: The Series later that same year.
At the heart of V: The Series was more of the struggle between the human Resistance and the Visitors’ full-scale invasion of Earth. It starred popular actors of the time like Marc Singer and Faye Grant, who portrayed resistance leaders Mike Donovan and Juliet Parrish. The aliens were the real selling point of the show, with Jane Badler standing out as the evil leader of the visitors, Diana, and the great Robert Englund, famously known for his role as Freddy Krueger, as Willie, a sympathetic Visitor
Why The First V Series Failed
There were immediate problems. The weekly format required producing far more episodes with a more limited budget. That meant the show drastically reduced the spectacle and large-scale action that made the original events exciting.
It also had a leadership problem. Kenneth Johnson, who’d created the concept, refused to be part of the series. He disliked the sequel miniseries V: The Final Battle and wanted out. Lacking his presence, V lost much of its more complex narrative drive and fell into the boring, predictable monster-of-the-week format most shows of the era used.
At the same time, the show’s narrative was all over the map, as constant changes disrupted the story. Resistance leader Mike Donovan was written out midway through the season when the character was captured by the Visitors. Key resistance member Robin Maxwell, played by Blair Tefkin, also disappeared early in the run.
With major characters gone and the storytelling becoming more episodic, the show lost the tight resistance-movement narrative that made the original miniseries compelling. Throw all that in a blender, and you have a disaster in the making, and the audience bailed.
V: The Series debuted on NBC on October 26, 1984, and on March 22, 1985, it was canceled and off the air. What started out as one of the biggest television events in the medium’s history crashed and burned within a year.
Rebooting V For Battlestar Galactica Audiences
The concept was good. The miniseries was great. There was something here that should have worked. So decades later, ABC tried again, hoping to ride the early 2000s wave of sci-fi interest generated by the success of shows like the rebooted Battlestar Galactica.
V: The Series was brought back by ABC on November 3, 2009, and ran for 22 episodes across two seasons until March 15, 2011. This time, they skipped right over the miniseries and went straight to a new V series, wasting no time at all.
Within minutes, the aliens have landed, and from there it skips forward at a rapid pace, setting up the same intrigue that fans of the first series are familiar with. The aliens, who call themselves Visitors and “Vs” for short, present themselves as human in appearance, and the plot starts rolling.
The Visitor’s representative is Anna, played by the stunning Morena Baccarin (Firefly). She quickly becomes a global celebrity, convincing governments and much of the public that the aliens are humanity’s greatest allies. Behind the scenes, however, the Visitors are secretly infiltrating governments, media, and military organizations while preparing for a long-term takeover of Earth.
The story focuses on several characters who gradually discover the truth and join a growing resistance. FBI counterterrorism agent Erica Evans, played by Lost’s Elizabeth Mitchell, becomes one of the central leaders of the underground fight against the Visitors.
Her son, Tyler, played by Logan Huffman, is drawn to the aliens and joins their human youth program, creating tension between loyalty and suspicion. Journalist Chad Decker, played by Scott Wolf, becomes Anna’s media ally while questioning the Visitors’ true motives.
Why V Failed Again
V premiered with strong curiosity and solid ratings, drawing viewers eager to see a modern take on the classic V. Critics were mixed on the reboot. Many praised the sleek production values and Morena Baccarin’s performance as the alien leader Anna, but reviews often said the show moved too slowly and lacked the urgency of the original.
Audience response followed a similar pattern. The pilot attracted over 14 million viewers, but interest steadily declined as the season progressed. By the second season, ratings had dropped sharply, signaling fading audience enthusiasm despite a loyal core fanbase.
The new V had a promising start, but the show made some of the mistakes the previous V series had. It tried to save money by avoiding the spectacle that had made the original miniseries such a hit, and instead leaned heavily into slow-burn conspiracy plotting.
Once again, behind the scenes, V was in turmoil. There were showrunner changes between seasons that shifted the tone and direction. Long breaks between episodes disrupted its ability to retain its audience, draining momentum and confusing casual viewers.
So in 2011, ABC canceled yet another V series before its larger alien-occupation storyline could reach a real conclusion.
Why V Deserves A Third Chance
There’s something to V as a premise. It does things no other alien invasion story has ever done quite as well. It’s exactly the right idea, but somehow it has never found the right time.
Maybe that time is now. Rather than rebooting something that already worked once, Hollywood should consider giving V a third attempt and maybe, just maybe, instead of repeating the same mistakes, they could learn from them and make V the stunning, generational hit it was always meant to be.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Most Ambitious Villain Helped Create The Franchise’s Most Complex Hero
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Star Trek: Voyager first came out, the most fascinating character was the Doctor. While Robert Picardo’s performance was superb, it’s fair to say this character was mostly fascinating on a conceptual level. We had seen things like hypercompetent Starfleet captains and exotic aliens before, but what we hadn’t seen was a fully holographic chief medical officer. Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram seemed like the perfect embodiment of the Star Trek ethos. He’s a technological strange new world and new life, all rolled into one.
However, what casual audiences didn’t realize is that the Doctor wasn’t completely unique. Long before Picardo’s character ever sawed bones in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Picard dealt with another extraordinary hologram: Moriarty, the brilliant foe of the famous investigator Sherlock Holmes. Over on The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge accidentally created this villain as a sentient hologram when he asked the holodeck to create a challenge worthy of the android Data. Later, Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor revealed that, in-universe, the holographic Doctor was created because Starfleet took advantage of the same accidental breakthrough that created Moriarty!
It all started in “Elementary, My Dear Data,” the Next Generation episode in which the titular android and Geordi LaForge recreated Sherlock Holmes’ adventures on the holodeck. Thanks to his positronic brain and his encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, Data is able to easily solve every mystery that is thrown at him. That’s when Geordi makes a seemingly simple request. He asks the Enterprise computer to develop a holodeck foe that could actually defeat Data, one of the smartest beings in the entire galaxy.
The computer obliges and creates a sentient version of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ greatest foe. Following Geordi’s instructions, the Enterprise computer included much of Data’s vast programming, which resulted in the holographic character becoming self-aware. Moriarty ended up threatening the Enterprise on two different occasions, and Picard eventually got rid of him by trapping the unknowing villain in a simulation where he thought he had left the holodeck and could explore the stars. This was meant to be a happy ending for Moriarty, but in the show’s typically bleak fashion, Star Trek: Picard later showed us a different, more hostile version of this character created by a malevolent Section 31 AI.
How A Villain Created A Hero
What does all of this have to do with Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager? Elementary, my dear reader! Very early in Voyager’s development (the show didn’t even have a name yet), executive producer Jeri Taylor was inspired by Moriarty to create a new character. As reported in A Vision of the Future-Star Trek: Voyager, Taylor wrote down notes for a holographic doctor “who, like Moriarty, has ‘awareness’ of himself as a holodeck fiction. He longs for the time when he can walk free of the Holodeck.”
A few days later, she wrote down additional notes that contain a startling bit of Star Trek lore. “The Holo-Doctor represents a new, state-of-the-art technology which has capitalized on the serendipitous incident which created Moriarty, and has programmed a holographic character which has self-awareness of his situation and limitations.” While Moriarty is name-dropped on Voyager a couple of times, the show never mentioned what Taylor’s notes seem to confirm: that Lewis Zimmerman could never have created the Emergency Medical Hologram program if not for Geordi LaForge accidentally creating Moriarty on the holodeck.
From Villain To Leading Man?
If that’s not strange enough, there was a period of time when Voyager’s producers were considering making Moriarty a mainstay character on the show. As reported in Star Trek–Where No One Has Gone Before, Taylor’s notes mentioned that “everyone agreed that was a little too broad, and we couldn’t figure out why anyone would take him along.” After dismissing the idea, they decided “that having a holographic doctor with the full consciousness of being a hologram might be fun, and we’d never done anything like that before, except for Moriarty.”
There you have it, gentle reader. Without the character of Moriarty on Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’d never have the Doctor on Voyager. In this way, Trek’s most ambitious villain helped create the franchise’s most complex hero. Thanks to Jeri Taylor’s notes, we also know that, in-universe, Lewis Zimmerman would never have been able to create the Doctor if not for Geordi accidentally creating a sentient Moriarty so Data could have fun. In retrospect, this does make Zimmerman’s arrogance that much weirder. After all, he has a lot of attitude for someone who owes his entire career to the two biggest book nerds in the galaxy!
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 19
After days of almost (and complete) darkness, the Moon is finally starting to reappear. We’re currently in the Waxing Crescent phase of the lunar cycle, which means each night until the Full Moon we’ll see it get more illuminated from the right side.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, April 19, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 5% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Despite more of it now being illuminated, the percentage of surface is still too little to be able to spot any surface details. Check again tomorrow.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
NASA states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. We call these the lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Entertainment
Ryan Gosling’s R-Rated Netflix Thriller With An MCU Budget Is Worth Its Weight In Shootouts
By Robert Scucci
| Published
After watching 2021’s Kate, the almighty algorithm threw 2022’s The Gray Man onto my radar, and I can’t say Ryan Gosling has ever disappointed me, so I figured I may as well give it a shot. He has a built-in level of charisma that lets him do his thing, and most of the time it lands. Going into the Russo brothers’ film expecting to see $200 million well spent on action sequences, with the added bonus of Gosling in the mix, I didn’t quite know how things would play out, but I had a hunch I wouldn’t feel let down.
But here’s the problem with straight-to-streaming action thrillers. Films like The Gray Man never get much time on the big screen, and they kind of need it if you want to enjoy them at the highest level. Across roughly 400 theaters, the film only brought in $454,023, which isn’t really its fault. It had a very short run across a disproportionately small number of screens, meaning it was never meant to recoup its budget this way. It’s a Netflix Original, designed to pull huge numbers on streaming.
The reason I see this as a bad thing is because this is an expensive movie. MCU expensive. Waterworld expensive. When that much money goes into blowing stuff up in spectacular fashion, I want to see it on a giant screen. Living in an apartment, I don’t have a fancy audio setup because my neighbors would murder me if I did, and my 44-inch TV is fine for most things, but less than stellar when entire city squares are getting leveled with all guns blazing.
Long story short, The Gray Man is a lot of fun, but it would be even more fun if you could watch it the way it was meant to be seen.
Let’s Not Get Bogged Down By The Details
The Gray Man also has an extremely convoluted plot. Not in a “too many twists” kind of way, but it’s a “load up the guns, spray and pray” kind of movie that would have been better served by simplicity. It’s executed well, but as side characters keep getting introduced in the second and third acts, part of me gets annoyed that I can’t fully shut my brain off because there’s always a new name or face to keep track of after the blasting has already started.
Ryan Gosling is a black ops agent known as Sierra Six, formerly Courtland Gentry. He was locked up as a minor after murdering his abusive father, and CIA officer Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) decides he’s the perfect candidate for a second chance. The deal is simple: Courtland works for him in exchange for his freedom, knowing he’ll be dealing with some very dangerous people.
Once things get rolling, Sierra Six teams up with Agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), and the first mission we see involves assassinating a target named Dining Car (Callan Mulvey). Complications arise when the job goes sideways and Dining Car reveals he’s also part of the Sierra program before succumbing to his wounds. A flash drive gets passed off with vague instructions, and the wild goose chase begins, centering on CIA officer Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page), who sends a swarm of operatives after Six and Dani to retrieve it.
Along the way, we get more backstory on Six’s relationship with Donald and his niece Claire (Julia Butters), who Six previously worked security detail for. This obviously becomes important later because more collateral has entered the equation. The scenes between Six and Claire offer a surprisingly wholesome break from the chaos in Prague, and they’re a welcome addition.
From here on out, you pretty much know the deal. Double crosses stack on top of double crosses, things explode, and there’s so much inter-agency confusion over who’s good and who’s pulling the strings that you almost wish they’d ease up on the exposition and just keep blowing stuff up.
Solid, Pulse Pounding Action Thriller
The Gray Man’s budget absolutely shows on screen from start to finish. The action sequences are gorgeously shot (something that’s not always consistent across Netflix Originals), and at one point Sierra Six is standing on top of a moving tram, firing through the roof while tracking targets through reflections in nearby windows as the city flies past. This comes after he’s handcuffed to a railing in a town square, picking off attackers before they even get a chance to take him out.
Ana de Armas wielding a shotgun after throwing hands is also worth your time because she fully commits when the moment calls for it.
The only real issue I have is the film’s tendency to overload its premise with complexity for the sake of it. Most people don’t turn on action thrillers to do mental gymnastics. At least I don’t. I love psychological thrillers when I want things to get murky, but with action movies, I just want to sit back and watch things explode.
The convoluted plot isn’t a dealbreaker, just a nitpick. Some people enjoy sprawling shadow government conspiracies. It’s just not really my thing, so take that with a grain of salt. It’s still a great watch, just not one you can fully sink into the couch for and completely turn your brain off.
The Gray Man is a Netflix Original, and you can stream it with an active subscription.
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