With the Doctor Who episode, "Gridlock", airing last night in the UK, the show has retaken the lead from Star Trek with 727 produced episodes over a 44 year history, exceeding all of the Star Trek series combined. Well done, lads and ladies.
According to the Manchester Evening News, Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who, Heroes, The Second Coming) is set to star in a theatrical adaptation of Susan Cooper’s Young Adult novel The Dark Is Rising.
Eccleston will play the main villain, the Rider, who leads the evil forces back and forth through time, in what are described as Harry Potter-style films. The five books in Cooper’s series are optioned and will be produced, depending on the performance of the first film.
Ian McShane (Deadwood) co-stars with Eccleston, for director David L. Cunningham. The Dark Is Rising is set for a September 28th release.
Today we lay out the facts on Painkiller Jane‘s premiere, compliments of creator Jimmy Palmiotti, tell you about how Painkiller‘s co-creator pulls out of the Eagle, dig into Matt Raub’s review of the second Doctor Who of the new season, show you how MySpace just gave a big boost to a prime time show and then take a nostalgic glance back to when CBS was the "sexy" network!
All this, a really groovy Timeline, and – dare I even suggest it? – even more on the big ComicMix Podcast, right here:
And feel free to comment on the ComicMix Podcast below.
So we’re into week two of the Doctor’s new adventures with his shiny new companion in “The Shakespeare Code,” and much as I was last week, I’m still giddy with excitement. Last week we were introduced to Martha Jones, a med student from the present time. And in this week, the Doctor takes Jones on her first trip inside the T.A.R.D.I.S. to the late 1500s, where they meet one of the Doctor’s personal heroes, William Shakespeare.
While this episode got to play a lot with what I like to call the Shanghai Knights jokes. To explain, in the film Shanghai Knights the two main characters would run into famous names in history that only we the audience would know, and reference their lives through punn-ish dialogue, such as telling a adolescent Charlie Chaplin that he talks too much. Either way, the same thing stood for this episode, in which the Doctor is constantly using lines from Shakespeare’s unwritten plays. To which the playwright responds “I should use that!” Cute little dialogue, but lets move onto the nitty-gritty.
Going along with my last review, when I mentioned that the first episode resembled the season one’s episode “Rose,” this episode was very much like season one’s “The Unquiet Dead.” In that episode, a very green Rose tags along with the Doctor to the 1800s where they meet Charles Dickens and solve yet another perplexing mystery. That episode dealt with alien entities possessing corpses making them look like “zombies” to the anybody else but our Doctor, while this week’s episode dealt with ancient aliens who pose as “witches” and get Shakespeare to use his “new words” to open a portal to their home world. Very similar episodes indeed.
With that theory in place, there should be hints of this season’s overall arch. In episode three of season one, they started mentioning “Bad Wolf” and how it was a harbinger of things to come. Now, before the re-launched series, I was never a huge Doctor Who fan, but with the writing and pure concept of continuity that thick over an entire season, I was hooked. I’m only hoping that this episode can keep with that formula.
BBC America has announced a revamped schedule that will thrill many fans of different genres. Beginning shortly, there will be themed blocks airing from 8 pm – 10 pm:
* Murder Mondays – a night of scripted dramas including new seasons of Wire in the Blood starring Robson Green, and Murphy’s Law with James Nesbitt.
* Tuesday Nitro – targeting male viewers with such shows as MI-5, which focuses on British intelligence battling international espionage and global terrorism, as well as the drama Ultimate Force about an elite army unit in dangerous situations.
* Wicked Wednesday – aiming at female viewers with such dramas as Footballers Wive$ with Joan Collins joining for the new season; Hotel Babylon about the antics of an exclusive hotel; Goldplated, a comedy about a rich family who exists on credit cards; and Sinchronicity which follows three young party-goers who are looking for love.
* Big Thursday – will feature new seasons of "larger-than-life" personalities such as Gordon Ramsay and his two shows: Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and Gordon Ramsay’s F Word in addition to the celebrity gossip program The Graham Norton Show.
* Crime Scene Friday – back-to-back crime shows including Whistleblower, The Innocence Project, Silent Witness and Waking the Dead.
* Supernatural Saturday – enters the world of science fiction and the paranormal with such shows as Jekyll, Torchwood, Life on Mars, Hex and Doctor Who.
* The Brit Movie – a different British movie each week on Sunday nights and prior to the movie presentation, the network will air Adventure Sundays starting at 7p with new seasons of Robin Hood and Wild at Heart set in the South African bush.
Fans hoping for Torchwood to follow Doctor Who at Sci-Fi Channel as well as those of us without BBC America (curse you, Cablevision!) will no doubt be disappointed.
BBC America has picked up Torchwood, the decidely more adult Doctor Who spinoff starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness. No word yet on scheduling, or how much of the racier stuff will be trimmed for American audiences, if any. As we hear more, we’ll pass it on.
Andy Serkis – a.k.a. Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilory – has been cast as Albert Einstein in an upcoming HBO / BBC co-production, Einstein and Eddington. The "Eddington" part of the title refers to astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the man who actually understood Einstein’s theory of relativity and promoted it to a skeptical scientific community back in 1920. This particular Sir Arthur will be played by David Tennant, who is wrapping his third season as the lead in Doctor Who.
The script was written by Peter Moffat, who previously brought another genius – Stephen Hawking – to the BBC screen.
It’s hard to imagine Serkis playing Einstein, but at least he’ll be doing so in the flesh and not in CGI.
The Doctor is back, and not only does he get a new companion but a new Sonic Screwdriver to boot! I just set my peepers on a back-to-back marathon of last year’s “The Runaway Bride” and the brand-spanking-new season 3 premiere, “Smith and Jones”, and I figured I’d drop in to throw down my two cents on the episode. Be forewarned, there are some spoilerific parts to this review, so if you decide you want to wait until Sci-Fi finally airs the show in 2023, then I’d turn away now.
From the first episode in season 1, I was a huge fan of Billie Piper as Rose Tyler, I thought she was gorgeous, and had incredible range. Though there were a good 12 episodes or so where she cried through the majority of the program, I still couldn’t dislike her. With that said, I was pretty hesitant to like this new companion, the intelligent and attractive medical student Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman. We first get a taste of Agyeman in last season’s “Army of Ghosts” as she was one of first victim of the Cybermen. We now find out she was the cousin of Martha Jones, and that’s a clever touch.
Looking back, this episode can very easily be put in stark comparison to season 1’s opener, “Rose.” Much like in that episode, the majority of this episode is exposition on our new companion’s life, an unexpected conflict, and the random entrance of the Doctor to save the day. Also, there is a scene very reminiscent of “Rose” where the Doctor grabs Martha’s hand and tells her to run…sound familiar? Of course, the doctor is still pining over the loss of Rose, but as established in “Runaway Bride,” it was time to find someone new.
The concept: the hospital where Martha Jones works gets transported to the moon. The Doctor, posing as the meandering patient John Smith, discovers that the transportation as by an intergalactic rhino-police (that’s intergalactic police that look like rhinos, not intergalactic police that only police the rhino population). The transportation was to single out a fugitive that they believe is hiding out in the hospital. The Doctor and Martha jump on the case to find the criminal and get the inhabitants back to Earth before they all lose oxygen.
For the lucky ones who will be watching the Doctor Who season opener soon – and for those who think Daleks make for lovely bric-a-brac – here’s some things to do around the home on a rainy day, courtesy (again) from our friends at Bibi’s Box!
From time to time this blog receives visits of people searching for Daleks. Those incredible extraterrestrial mutant creatures from Doctor Who series are much more popular that I imagined. The first time I made a post about the Daleks I had no idea that it wouldn’t be enough to cover it. Then, a while after, I saw a very nice tutorial of How to Make a Dalek and IR Control Daleks.
Of course that wasn’t enough. Every time there are new stuff about them: crochet and more crochet Daleks (via Quiddity), Dalek cakes and many other kind of related Dalek stuff that fans collect. For fans it’s never enough. And to keep you busy for a while, here is a list of tutorials to you make your own Dalek. Chose the material and start working:
Admit it, you’re jonesing for "Smith and Jones", the first episode of the next season. Or if you aren’t, Gold and Ostrander sure are. And we’re good little enablers over here. With that in mind, we point you to FreemaAgyeman.com, where the Doctor Who BBCi Red Button Preview Video is appearing.
Will that hold you for a while?
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