Holy shit, I somehow had no idea that this existed. Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi camping it up for 30 minutes straight?! There's an entire SERIES of this?! Why was I not INFORMED?!

If you haven't yet see The Brothers Bloom, run don't walk to netflix.

No, it wasn't just you. Same basic problem as Avatar: amazing visuals, trite underwritten script, and the "supporting" actors were to a one lightyears more interesting than the nominal "lead". Charlie Hunnam and Sam Worthington are clearly just slightly different models of the same Bland Buff Blonde Slightly Soulful…

Viacom sells copies of publicly-funded research papers? Do tell me more, your knowledge of this area is fascinating.

The wheels grind slowly. Aceveda walked out of the series as the presumptive mayor, sure — but if there's one thing that was ever a constant about The Shield (and especially in re his character), it's the iron law that Nothing Stays Hidden Forever.

Came here to say this, thank you.

I forget who it was who said it originally, but it's really best to think of Newton not so much as the first real scientist (as he is often conceptualized / portrayed) but rather as the last alchemist.

Most of the really outrageously stupid bits were Lindelof's additions. @re_trace:disqus above links to Spaihts' draft, and while there are still a few rough bits in it (the medical pod is still lampshaded way too hard) it's solid enough: if they'd filmed it as-is we'd've probably all said "not better than 1 or 2, but…

A small bit of googling will turn up his "Alien: Engineers" script draft for what eventually became Prometheus. It's not flawless, but it's substantially better than the Lindelof draft that got filmed. Color me cautiously optimistic.

The biggest and most expensive genre show in the world still can't afford to pay name-brand actors to sit around and do nothing for an entire production season, and those name-brand actors tend to prefer to spend their time doing their work and making money. Michelle Fairley needed to be on-set, in costume and ready…

Amen. I mean, I get that adapting these novels for TV is difficult and they were never going to be able to do it perfectly because a perfect adaption wouldn't even work and blah blah blah…

RIP to the voice of basically every sunday morning of my entire childhood and early adolescence.

Seriously. If the Firesigns aren't worthy of at least a Gateway to Geekery, nobody is.

Did we…know each other as adolescents?

They are not exactly hard to find. Amazon has used copies of the omnibus edition of the first trilogy for $8.

I'd give Nicola Bryant a bit of a pass there. She was a perfectly capable actress saddled with some of the worst scripts ever handed to a Who companion, and a production team that basically saw her as a pair of boobs on legs. In a better universe where 5 and 6 had competent script writing and editing, she'd've been…

That's the amazing thing about the prequels: the cast is full to the brim of ringers and steely-eyed professionals, and not a single one of them can make Lucas' dialogue sound anything other than atrocious. That takes effort, ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah, as far as anyone can tell he somehow, against all odds, came out of the Star Wars publicity machine a completely well-adjusted human being. A pretty nice one, even.

his eyes filled with the resignation that this is his life now—mimicking the motions of his most famous character while standing next to giant mice, at the behest of corporate masters whose bidding it is that he go to Orlando and do what must be done (i.e. participate in theme park photo ops).

If he didn't do most of it himself, and did all that talking without mentioning his fight doubles, then he is an enormous douche.