Revenge of the Sith is 19 years before A New Hope. Or to put it another way, if ANH was now, RotS and the Jedi Purge would be younger than the start of Battlestar Galactica 2.0 and about as old as the premiere of Lost and the start of the Doctor Who reboot.

NDAs may prevent that for a long, long time.

They did change Frodo’s age. In the books he is 50 and just starting to get towards middle age for a Hobbit. In the movies he was aged massively down to around 18 (Elijah Wood’s age at the time they started shooting).

I think it was really unworkable. Season 2 originally ended with Philippi and they weren’t planning to reach Actium until late Season 3 or some point in Season 4 (I think Heller even mused that they were thinking about doing a full season in Egypt at one point). And they also had a plan for a massive time-jump to the…

There was a joke - which some people thought was serious - that the Rome cast had all blacklisted Game of Thrones as they were annoyed about GoT taking on Rome’s position in the HBO schedule (as the historical-ish sex-and-swords epic). I think that started with Purefoy and McKidd, and later they had to clarify it…

Season 2's pace is generously described as “rapid,” but there’s still a lot of fantastic moments there. His performance in the scene where he has to execute Cicero and Cicero is quite polite and understanding about it and Pullo regrets having to do it but then goes and has a nice day out in the country with Vorenus…

By the time the specials air, it’ll be just under 14 years since the last time we saw Donna. Yasmin Finney was 18 when they filmed her scenes, so between timey wimey and just being vague over the dates they could fudge things.

For more HJB, Bob's Burgers is pretty solid and it's great to see him play a completely different character (with the exact same voice), with occasion musical interludes. Although BB is way less consistent than Archer.

One thing in its favour is the short seasons. The last few have been 8 episodes and they were on 10 before that, and IIRC 12 when it started.

And there’s still the big question hanging over all of this: what role does Heartstopper’s Yasmin Finney have here as the mysterious newcomer Rose?

I had a bunch of SF magazine subs in the early 1990s, so got to follow the development of this one through news/rumour columns at the time. It started off as an option of Arthur C. Clarke’s The Hammer of God, which came out in 1993 (and was itself an extrapolation of the asteroid impact backstory that takes up the…

Because the original B5 story is the only thing in the setting that’s really caught fire and been really good, so I think they want to go back to tap that original story again in a different way (the same way Dragonlance keeps trying to do new stuff but always circles back to the War of the Lancer, or Star Wars keeps…

You don’t, this just tees up the idea of multiple universes and timelines in the B5 setting - the original show actually tried to shoot down that idea but I guess JMS changed his mind - and they give some hint about another timeline where things went differently but don’t get into the specifics too much.

Ages ago. They appeared together on some of the DVD commentaries for the series that began in 2004.

I have a suspicion the reference to multiple universes might be a way of tying the original B5 universe to the new, rebooted version he is planning for the live-action script in development at Warner Brothers (formerly at the CW before they passed on it and, indeed, apparently their entire original 2023-24 lineup). It…

Paradox made an official bid for the licence between CK1 and CK2, but apparently the negotiations so annoyed them that they vowed never to deal with a licensed property again (outright buying White Wolf so they can use their IP in future projects is a way around that, I guess).

It’s interesting because they just took the video game and made it into a board game, and in the process proved why that’s not always a great idea (although it has some pluses as well). Frostpunk feels like a small, focused video game, but the board game makes you realise how hard they must have worked on the…

I’ve played it once and it was mind-boggling, and that’s coming from someone with 60 hours in the video game and a ton of experience in playing very complicated 1980s RPGs and wargames.

The almost entirely optional settlement building crap?

The show relies heavily on wiretaps as an evidence-gathering mechanism, and Season 1 in particular is a cat-and-mouse game as the criminals have various systems in place to avoid wiretaps and the police have to come up with fresh ideas on how to make them work.