SciFi Channel's Alice

I don't know if anyone else saw Alice on the SciFi channel this week, but it was pretty disappointing. It's not that it was in any particular way bad, so much as it was uninteresting. It was basically the same premise as their previous miniseries, Tin Man. Alice takes place in what we would call the future of Wonderland, the original story having taken place in the almost-distant past. There might be people alive who still remember it, but probably not.

Again, it's not bad. It's just nothing new. It feels like the same writers, casting director and production designers had fun with Tin Man and decided to have the same fun with Alice. It's not poorly-written, poorly cast or poorly-designed. Quite the opposite. It's brilliant. It's just the same as Tin Man.

The casting is, in point of fact, pretty near perfect. Colm Meaney as the King of Hearts was brilliantly bumblesome, and the guy who plays Hatter was fun and plucky. The light comedy was as good as Tin Man, the clever interpretation of the characters and themes was equally fun.

The acting was... well... less than brilliant for the most part, but that's not to say bad. There were enough seasoned actors to pick up the slack when the inexperienced ones dropped it. The director was a bit below par for a SciFi Channel series, but the visuals were good enough that you really didn't notice his (or her) shortcomings.

So... As I said, all in all, not bad, just nothing new. If you saw Tin Man, you'll probably be a little disappointed with Alice, just because you've seen it already. If you didn't, you'll love it.

We're cookin' with Hydrogen now, baby.

This is a rant about this week's episode of Stargate Universe. This is a five minute conversation with a three second “I f*#@ing called it.” You probably don't care, but on the off-chance that somebody else watches SGU and also caught this (or didn't), here's my rant.

If you saw Stargate Universe this week, read on. If not, spoilers ahead.

Glad you decided to stick around. So, last week on SGU, Destiny fell out of hyperspace, presumably for a good reason. The initial assumption was that the ship was completely out of power and that the engines simply quit. At this point, I thought “well just open up the solar panels and recharge the batteries. This is an ancient ship. They surely had solar powered spaceships.” But I digress.

Luckily, the remaining shuttle still had power. So they determined that there were three planets orbiting the nearby star that might be habitable. The ship, it seems, dropped out of hyperspace where it did to give those aboard the best shot of survival. It appears that the ship is on a course that will slingshot it around one of the system's gas giants as a breaking maneuver. The crew guesstimates that the maneuver will put them on course to intercept the orbits of the three possibly-habitable planets. But no. Turns out, the ship comes out of the slingshot heading directly for the star. Bad for the people onboard.

Long story short, the shields were still up, but nothing else had power (including internal sensors), so they assumed the shields were down. Everything turns out okay, but there is some suspicion that Dr. Rush knew that the ship dropped out of FTL and shut down so that it could fly into the star, open its solar cells and recharge the batteries. To which I immediately said: “No shit, McFly.” I knew that and I don't have a degree in astrophysics, anthropology, or ancient spaceships.