yduras

Here are my first impressions. I haven't quite decided who the official slash couple of SGU is going to be - my best guess is Lt. Scott and Eli, which really does nothing for me.

Dr. Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) - White male. Actor's been in The Fully Monty, Transpotting and a fair amount of British TV. I gather we're not supposed to like him much, possibly until his heart of gold turns up later in the series (hey, it was behind the couch the whole time!). I can already see that one of his plot functions will be to capriciously withhold key information to make sure the crisis doesn't end before the episode does. Unlike many a British actor imported to US TV, they're not making him fake an American accent.

Col. Everett Young (Justin Louis) White male. Actor's been all over American TV. Him, we're supposed to like. I'd like to open a pool for how long he'll be incapacitated - half a season? the whole season? Who knows? He'll be our kindly patriarch, I expect.

1st Lt. Matthew Scott, (Brian J. Smith) White male. A nice Catholic boy who didn't enter the priesthood because he couldn't keep it in his pants. No, seriously. Fortunately, it was an underage girl, so no one cares. He's meant to be our hottie.

Chloe Armstrong (Elyse Levesque) White female. The writers seemed to have been aiming for plucky young thing, but landed on whiny privileged brat instead. Oops. I kept being distracted by her shiny, shiny hair and shiny, shiny lipgloss. Best groomed refugee ever.

Eli Wallace (David Blue) White male. Hey look, another white male - what are the odds? A slacker gamer who got recruited to the best top-secret project ever because of his mad MMO skills. Why they didn't name him Marty Stu and get it over with, the world will never know. Personally, I can almost stand the MMO setup - it's the slacker "an inability to apply himself" thing that I choked on. I get that we're to think he left MIT to take care of his sick mom, but no job, no night school, no ambition whatsoever? That... does not say "genius" to me. Fortunately, for the first couple of episodes, they haven't actually written him as unable to apply himself in a rare case of "tell, don't show" being an improvement.

1st Lt. Tamara Johansen (Alaina Huffman) White female. Actor's been on a fair amount of American TV. Wears an astonishing amount of makeup for a field medic. Her, I like. They haven't covered why she was about to quit her job, but I'm sure it'll come up later in the season.

Master Sgt. Ronald Greer (Jamil Walker Smith) Black male. Actor's been on a fair amount of American TV. Hey, here we are in the last slot for a regular lead and we have our first nonwhite character. And he's not even an alien! Let's see -- bio makes much of his "physical prowess", was in prison at the start of the show, and can't control his rage issues without Col. Young's intervention. Well, ok, as long as we're not brushing up against any unfortunate stereotypes here.

I should point out that the next two characters are not main cast. They're recurring characters and will be in less than half the episodes. Just sayin'.

Camile Wray (Ming-Na) Asian female. Actor has been in tons of movies and tv. We haven't seen much of her yet, but, spoiler alert, this is our much ballyhooed (gasp) lesbian character. Who's in only ten out of twenty announced episodes, so Syfy might want to quit wrenching its arm patting its back for "featuring" a gay character.

Col. David Telford (Lou Diamond Phillips) multiracial male. Actor's been all over American movies and TV. Will be in seven (7) announced episodes. So far, in the one episode he did much in, he's an arrogant SoB who refuses to listen to anybody. I suspect this is more of SyFy's "edgy realism". But, well, how can you not like Lou Diamond Phillips.

The order of names is taken from the SyFy cast page. I left off the last white male on the list, as his character is already written off the show. I assume he's on there because he's a name actor and they wanted to get more mileage out of that. Or maybe he was left on there so it would be less obvious that the three nonwhite characters were all the way at the bottom of the list...

I really appreciate the next day "On Demand" availability of the episodes, since I'd still generally either watch Dollhouse or sleep during that timeslot. (Sometimes I go to bed really early on Friday nights.)

For a show that the bigwigs made a fuss over being more diverse, it sure is the All About White Men show.

So, the SciFi Channel has decided to rename itself 'SyFy'. This is stupid, but aside from being fun to mock, just falls under "Marketing - it's wacky." The official reasoning is that SyFy, not being or resembling an actual word, can be trademarked and will turn up unique search results and that sort of thing.

Some of the other reasons given make it all the way to offensive, though, as well as reinforcing the long-standing impression that the network hates its viewing audience:

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

Mr. Brooks said that when people who say they don’t like science fiction enjoy a film like “Star Wars,” they don’t think it’s science fiction; they think it’s a good movie.

“We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.”

(emphasis added)

Well, I am so glad to hear that I haven't been watching and reading science fiction all my life! Who knew?

Where the makers of Supernatural really get the soundtrack.

You know, as much as I like Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, I really wish they'd capped their "two hour event" at one hour. (Oh, and how are two completely unrealted episoded back to back a "two-hour finale"?)

I've been reading that the Enterprise cast were not happy with the finale, and, holy cow, I can't blame them. ( spoilers )

Ah well, at least it's over.

So I took a quick break to see whether the Stargates were reruns this week, to calculate if that would impact on how late I am going to be here.

The blurb for today's Stargate is... "An old adversary resurfaces with information vital to the government's security."

Well, thanks, that really narrows it down!

I guess we can't accuse them of spoiling anything in the listings, at least.