I had no idea this song originated in "The Transformers"! One hears it everywhere, but I'd never tried to figure out who did it (I think I assumed it was Van Halen - it sucks in just the right way to be a song by them) or why...

I'm happy to have better genre TV than genre cinema. Genre TV shows really lend themselves to the things that make genre communities thrive. and let's face it, sci-fi, fantasy and horror communities are part of what makes being a genre fan fun.

They're missing my favorite one: Klingon Christopher Lloyd screaming the line to his men moment before the Enterprise self-destructs in Star Trek III!

The trick is not *seeming* like you're making it up as you go along. I don't know what his writing process was like, but Dickens often wrote his novels first as serialized episodes, and no doubt he made up a lot as he went along. Maybe he - like the TV writers of today - altered his plan in the face of fan reaction…

@TimeToWakeUp: That's a good point. According to some articles I read online, the subjects won't received any aid that they couldn't receive on a Mars mission, except in the case of dire emergencies. That helps, although knowing that help is available should things go drastically wrong makes a big psychological…

@TimeToWakeUp: I disagree. The study can help us understand the effects of relative isolation in a small space for a prolonged period of time. Surely, all the causal factors of a Mars mission won't be present, but that's true in general in science: you can learn a lot by studying the effects of one set of causal…

Noble's observation about his character is a version of Lear is really nice. He achieves great things, and then shrinks back from the massiveness of his accomplishments. He divvies them up among others in order to absolve himself of the responsibility, and this leads to a disaster that ends up driving him mad.