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Firefly Likely to be Cancelled
rscrawford writes "Zap2It is reporting that Firefly, one of the best science fiction shows to make it on to network television in recent years, is going on hiatus: read, getting canceled. Well, it was an interesting, well-written, provocative and intelligent show on Fox; is anyone therefore surprised that they're doing away with it? It lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. At least they're going to show the original 2-hour pilot in December. (And yet, somehow, Just Shoot Me continues...)"
Good thing it's being cancelled. Every time I turn on my Tivo, there it is, blocking out my Everybody Loves Raymond and King of the Hill: Firefly, Firefly, Firefly. I hit thumbs down three times and it still comes back! Maybe if they cancel it I'll finally get to see the whole season of Just Shoot Me without it being overwritten by fucking Firefly.
Fight the Troll Blacklist
If Firefly had C'tarl C'tarl in it, I'd have watched.
That's funny, 'cause when I watch the show, it's on NBC.
Transistors and Beer!!
It is no surprise because it is not Malcolm in The Middle in the eye of FOX executives.
FOX is not SCI-FI friendly.
Remember FUTURAMA, it's been on the edge of cancellation almost every season.
Doesn't matter iof FIREFLY is a good show, it is no TEMPTATION ISLAND!
FOX is the greatest, FOR ME TO POOP ON!
Only THE SIMPSONS remains.
Wait, let me get this straight...
New TV shows are actually rehashing old plots?
Oh the travesty!
It's on Friday night. Most Friday night shows seem to fail.
"Lise, when you get a little older, you'll realise that Friday is just another day between NBC's Must-See Thursday and CBS's Saturday night Crap-o-Rama."
Once again, everything I really needed to know about life, I learned from "The Simpsons."
I write in my journal
Dark Angel had Jessica Alba in tight hotpants. It didn't need a freaking plot.
True, kind of. That young lady definitely had the best ass on television at the time, but that, by itself, somehow wasn't enough to hold my attention. I suspect it's because I knew this was a network-- Fox, yeah, but a network nonetheless-- and the chance for a glimpse of thong or, bless my stars, of butt cleavage was precisely zero.
Wanna know how to make the highest-rated show on tee vee? Put Jessica Alba in tight pants and have her run around a lot. Guarantee-- right there in the ads-- that there will be at least one gratuitous shot of Jessica's peekaboo thong per episode. Watch the ratings share for male viewers between 12 and death climb steadily toward 100%.
These are pearls I'm giving away here. Pearls, I tells ya.
I write in my journal
Man, oh man. Whenever the topic of TV comes up, some asshole has to pull this same crap. "I only watch Masterpiece Theater, C-SPAN, and those delightful Taster's Choice commercials, cheerio, pip-pip!" A common variation is to throw in one inoffensive guilty pleasure to try to increase your credibility; it's always something like "The West Wing" or "CSI" or "ER," never "WWF Smackdown" or "General Hospital" or "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air."
Stuff it, Lester. If you really don't watch TV, then keep your opinions to yourself and get your snobbish Thurston-Howell attitude the fuck out of this discussion. And if, as is far more likely, you're lying, quit puttin' on airs. Nobody will think any less of you if you admit that you get up early on Saturday mornings to watch reruns of "Chico and the Man" on your local Telemundo affiliate. We're all friends here.
The only thing worse than a snob is a guy who pretends to be a snob.
I write in my journal
Exactly. The show is clearly a ripoff of Cowboy Bebop.
Xena, Warrior Princess (target market: Lesbians).
Correction: Target market: Horny geeks thinking about lesbians.
climate changes on worlds not fully studied (think Wrath of Khan)
(Hang on a sec while I wave goodbye to the topic as it recedes in the distance. Bye-bye, topic.)
See, that always pissed me off. Wrath of Khan is a movie so close to being flawless as to make no difference, but there's one glaring thing that drives me positively bat-shit every time I see it.
They put Khan on Ceti Alpha 5, right? Fifth planet out from Alpha Ceti, which is the brightest star in the constellation Cetus, the Whale. (Astronomy geek.) Six months later, Ceti Alpha 6 (the next planet out) explodes. The shock shifts the orbit of Ceti Alpha 5, and that planet becomes a barely inhabitable rock.
Got the mental picture? There's Ceti Alpha 1-4, then Ceti Alpha 5 (Khan's planet), the smoking crater in space where Ceti Alpha 6 used to be, and then (just for sake of discussion) Ceti Alpha 7.
Years go by. Chekhov and whahisname come by and take a long, hard look at what they believe to be Ceti Alpha 6. They beam down, find Khan, learn about the whole Ceti Alpha 5/Ceti Alpha 6 mixup, have a good laugh, all hell breaks loose, and so on.
How the hell did they end up landing on Ceti Alpha 5, thinking it was Ceti Alpha 6? The way I figure it, it's impossible.
Let's say Chekhov and his buddies come flying in to the Ceti Alpha system and start counting planets. There's 1-4, there's 5 (better stay away from there, that's Khan's hood and we don't wear his colors), and there's 6. (Remember, 6 blowed up, so what they think is 6 is actually 7.) They beam down to Ceti Alpha 7 (which they think is 6) and find... nobody. Because Khan's gang is one planet sunward.
So they must not have counted planets. Instead, let's say they just started looking where they believe Ceti Alpha 6 should be-- based on the radius of its orbit-- and find a planet. Assuming that it's Ceti Alpha 6 (it's really 5), they beam down and get into all sorts of trouble.
But for that to have happened, Ceti Alpha 5 would have to be in a more distant orbit than it used to be. This is possible, thanks to orbital dynamics; if Ceti Alpha 6 exploded while Ceti Alpha 5 was either ahead of it or behind in orbit, the "shock wave" (yeah, I know, but nitpicking only goes so far, you know?) would give 5 a push, either speeding it up or slowing it down, which would have the net result of increasing the semimajor axis of its orbit. In other words, the orbit would become more elliptical, with its aphelion farther from the sun than it used to be. If you balance everything just right-- making the explosion the right size, and putting Ceti Alpha 5 in the right place relative to it-- Ceti Alpha 5 could be at just the right distance from its sun when Chehkov's ship arrives to pass for Ceti Alpha 6.
But what are the odds? Remember, Ceti Alpha 5's new orbit isn't circular; it's a more eccentric ellipse with a perihelion inside Ceti Alpha 5's original orbit and an aphelion near or outside Ceti Alpha 6's orbit. So the planet is only at the right distance from its sun to pass for Ceti Alpha 6 twice a year. The odds that Chehov and crew could show up at precisely the right time of year, and that they could, out of laziness or criminal misconduct or whatever, skip the part where you start at the sun and go "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, okay that's the one we want," are just too high to accept.
And that doesn't even get into the fact that an orbit sufficiently elliptical to put Ceti Alpha 5's aphelion at or near Ceti Alpha 6's original orbital radius would almost certainly render the planet completely uninhabitable, not just mostly so.
Why does this bother me so much? Simply because it would have been so easy to avoid it in the scriptwriting stages. If their target had been Ceti Alpha 4 instead of Ceti Alpha 6, no problem. Offscreen, Ceti Alpha 4 explodes, so when the white hats show up, they assume Ceti Alpha 5 is Ceti Alpha 4 (because 4 isn't there any more), and all is well with the world. Simple, easy, and with no impact whatsoever on the rest of the story.
The only reason I can think of for the writer's wanting to use Ceti Alpha 6 instead of Ceti Alpha 4 is simple euphony: Ceti Alpha 6 really rolls off the tongue, while Ceti Alpha 4 feels like you're chewing when you say it.
Okay, now that I go back and re-read this, I realize that this was a really long and essentially pointless rant about a matter of trivia so meaningless that other trivia looks at it and goes, "Pfff, whatever." Sorry about that. Can't do anything about it now, though; the backspace key on my keyboard is mysteriously broken all of a sudden.
I write in my journal
I REALLY can't believe that human beings will still be having sword fights and rustling cattle two centries from now.
The most recent episode took Serenity and crew into the core system. They were in a city that could have been Trantor or Corsicant, or whatever that city was that Bruce Willis lived in, in The Fifth Element. Totally high tech, and well done fx for tv.
The outer planets, where most of the shows take place, is relatively dirt-poor fringe-folk. They are the beaten enemy of a civil war. Mostly second class citizens of the government. It's like the difference between New York City and some unnamed village in Afghanistan. In that context, it makes good sense.
Weren't Luke's aunt and uncle water farmers on Tatooine? For a space opera, that was pretty low tech.
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