TrekMovie.com has some wickedly shots from the upcoming TOS-R episode “Journey To Babel”.

SyFy Portal reports a Who rumor that the Master may be returning to menace the Doctor in the third season of the revitalized Doctor Who. If done right, that would be quite cool. For the Master to have survived the TimeWar and to be the only other living Time Lord would create some interesting story possibilities and might also provide the opportunity for some revelations about the War itself.

I figure if some of the Daleks survived, surely there are some other Time Lords out there somewhere.

Via the SyFy Portal:

BSG pulled in 2.05 million viewers, according to industry publication Broadcasting & Cable, bringing it more in line with how the series picked up in January 2024 when it had 2.1 million viewers tuned in for the second half of the show’s second season.

“The Dresden Files” also did well, bringing in 1.89 million viewers compared to 1.73 million it had in the previous week, however the gap between the two shows have widened a bit as “Dresden Files’” uptick was not as dramatic as “Battlestar Galactica’s.”

While Broadcasting & Cable didn’t release actual ratings numbers, 2.05 million viewers for cable usually equates to around a 1.7 or 1.8 rating, bettering the 1.4 the show earned last week when it competed directly with the AFC Championship game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots which pulled in 50 million viewers.

Good deal. Having the first Sunday be up against the AFC Title game was not a good move if the goal was to see if Sunday was going to be a ratings winner. For that matter this week the show will be up against the Super Bowl. I expect that the numbers won’t be so good.

I TiVo’d the Dresden Files but have only watched a few minutes of the first ep. It looks as if it has potential.

Kewl: NBC’s “Heroes” triumphs over Fox’s “24″

It was another win for NBC’s “Heroes” (13.6 million, 6.1 rating/14 share in adults 18-49), although it was down 8 percent in the demo compared with last week’s return to the air. “Heroes” was still the dominant player, with a 13 percent margin in the demo over “24″ (15.3 million, 5.4/12) and 33 percent above “24″ in adults 18-34.

I dunno, but here are the results:

I am: Robert A. Heinlein Beginning with technological action stories and progressing to epics with religious overtones, this take-no-prisoners writer racked up some huge sales numbers.

Here’s a nifty gallery of comparison shots from TOS and TOS:Remastered.

I have watched (or at least fast-forwarded via TiVo to check out the new shots) several of the TOS:R episodes and, on balance, they have been quite nice. The only downside to the project, it seems to me, is that they are doing the remastering as they go, so there is something of a learning curve involved. Also it means that sometimes they can’t do as much as one might like.

I will say that the into shots from “Where No Man has Gone Before” as well as the galactic barrier shots were quite impressive.

Also, the “Corbomite Manuever” (which had a number of f/x shots) was noteworthy. Below is the effect reel. Note, for example, the reflection of the probe on the hull of the Enterprise at about :52.

More comparison shots can be found at Trekmovie.

Also worth checking out: the promo for “Journey to Babel.”

Entertainment Weekly has an interesting piece on the show and on the future of superpowered tv and movies: The Powers That Be.

While I fully take the point made in the EW piece and briefly in the slide-show at the previously-mentioned Slate piece (see previous post), the authors may be giving JMS’ Rising Stars too much credit in terms of basic story inspiration as Rising Stars’ basic premise sounds a lot like that of Wild Cards: an extraterrestrial object causes mass mutation and the creation of super-powered individuals.

Slate has an interesting piece on Comics that reinvent the superhero genre–more specifically it looks, through the lens of Heroes at comics that have looked beyond the normal “men in tights” approach to the super-powered world and have focused, instead, on character issue.

I was intrigued to see that Concrete was still around, as I remember his earliest days (and still have his early books around here somewhere).

One side note that I think intersects with the story, as well as with Heroes itself would be the Wild Cards books from the 1980s which deal with the implications of the sudden acquisition of powers on a large scale in a way that deviated from standard comic book formulae. Of course, they were short stories and later novels, so don’t quite fit with the Slate story. Indeed, I think that the series was recently revived.

Jan Cooper has a theory on Heroes–and it is a plausible one.

Also: does Hiro’s sword (or the history thereof) suggest that heroes have existed for a centuries?

“Heroes” grows Web power

The hit NBC series is relaunching its Web site Monday with new interactive features coinciding with a batch of new original episodes. The multiplatform strategy will deepen the “Heroes” mythos with additional content for Internet and mobile applications.

New add-ons include a real-time, two-screen application that plays out on the PC along with each episode, commentary from cast members set to streamed episodes, and mobile content.

Interesting.