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I dunno. Shall we speculate on Isaac? Spoilers!!!

I noticed that there was a marked difference between Isaac in previous episodes and after he was rebooted in this one. Specifically: he was no longer indulging or respecting other people's feelings. A key moment for me in Isaac's character was when he and the two children, Marcus and Ty, were stranded on a barren planet and the kids were fighting over a video game that Isaac grabbed, threw into the air and shot. "The game is gone," he informed them. "It is never to be spoken of again." He was concerned about the boys' conflict interfering with their continued survival and even though their feelings weren't important to him, he understood that their feelings were important to them.

It's sort of like how Slider_Quinn21 doesn't take media tie-in comic books, novels, animations, webisodes and such seriously, but he knows that I take them seriously, and he doesn't pretend to consider them canon, but he acknowledges that someone out there does and that my feelings about them are just as legitimate as his lack of feeling towards them. There was consideration and respect even from a canon-following robot like Slider_Quinn21 towards a childish fantasist like me, just as there was from an emotion-averse robot like Isaac towards the actual children and humans who must seem childlike to him.

That is not present in Mark Jackson's performance once Isaac is rebooted. In previous episodes, even when dismissing people's emotional investments, Isaac would put in the time to lounge around Dr. Finn's quarters with beer and demands for dinner. When she asked him if she were a bad mother, he immediately answered, "Yes," but lingered to discuss it in more detail. Jackson's post-reboot performance has a very different sense of timing; his behaviour towards Marcus and Ty in his farewell is clipped and dismissive. His proceeding through his farewell party is devoid of slow, careful precision. He throws away Ty's drawing when, even if he didn't value it, he would have previously grasped that Ty valued him having it.

Ty himself notes the discrepancy: why would Isaac take the time to give piano lessons and play games of cognition and skill with the children? There was a level of indulgence to Isaac; that indulgence is absent once the upload is complete. It's almost as though in the upload, the Kaylons removed and/or added some specific programming. It makes me wonder if Isaac, when aboard the Orville, was programmed to be ignorant of the invasion plot. If the spy doesn't know he's a spy, he can't give himself away. After the upload, the Kaylons restored his mission and removed his affection for the crew, for Dr. Finn and for the children.

There's also the fact that there is no explicit onscreen event that indicates completion for Isaac's mission to plot an invasion of Earth. The Kaylons are immediately shown to be capable of remotely commandeering the Orville even before they've stepped aboard. They seem to have stepped up their timetable after being found out, but I wonder if Isaac was shut down because his fondness for the crew became a contradiction with the sleeper programming to gather intelligence to eradicate the Union.

I dunno! Generally, actors like Jackson are contracted for 5 - 7 years, so I assume they'll find some way to keep the actor in the cast. But my concluding point: the day Slider_Quinn21 doesn't indulge my fondness for tie-ins is the day we all know he's been replaced by a robot and we have to tell his wife.

I think THE X-FILES has value as a brand, but in the same way MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE had value in 1996. It was just the name. The MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies are summer action blockbusters; they make small nods to the heists, mindgames and deceptions of the TV show, but the centerpieces are always Tom Cruise and heights. For better or worse, M:I's value was in its name recognition as opposed to the content. THE X-FILES is a name. I could see it being rebooted as a 21st century revitalization of the source material like SHERLOCK; I could also see it becoming a star vehicle for Alison Brie for movie after movie in which she fights CG aliens with everyday objects.

As for payoffs -- I think BUFFY had the right formula: each season has its own myth-arc. I think SUPERNATURAL has the right attitude: complete your myth-arc as planned even if you get renewed after your conclusion. Come up with a subsequent story instead of stretching out your first one. ANGEL had a neat approach where each season tweaked the premise slightly with new characters and new locations.

I think the most interesting challenge in THE X-FILES for a new creator is also its central weakness: the show is decidedly indecisive on whether its universe operates on scientific principles or supernatural principles. The advanced biotechnology of the Colonists has always been an odd fit next to the vampires, angels, demons and evil dolls. Mulder and Scully never comment on this discrepancy; the magical elements of the X-FILES never confront the technological aspects. It's a symptom of Chris Carter treating each episode like its own XF universe.

I think a rebooted X-FILES should confront this head on. Summer Glau’s Mulder and Rupert Grint Scully find themselves going back and forth between the magical and the technological and try to reconcile how they exist. Are the vampires a form of genetic engineering? Are the ghosts the result of telepathic ability? Why doesn't their world operate on consistent principles? Is it the result of some interference in the very nature of reality? Are the aliens from other planets or from an alternate plane of reality? Has some cataclysm corrupted the laws of nature, bending them and twisting them? Is there a person or an organization causing this? What is their endgame?

And this also gives a reboot room to maneuver. At some point, the skeptic has to move towards believing, so what if it becomes a conflict between Grint believing in the magic, Glau believing in the science, and neither ever being entirely right?

Going with the SHERLOCKesque approach of treating the source material with reverence while moving forward in time --

Season 1: Starting with basics: monsters of the week, an alien conspiracy that's infiltrated the government, Mulder and Scully investigating, occasionally aided by the Lone Gunmen. In the season finale, they encounter David Duchovny's Fox Mulder and help him find his way back to his home dimension.

Season 2: The Lone Gunmen join the FBI as consultants and become regulars.

Season 3: Mulder, Scully and the Gunmen are fired from the FBI, decide to restart the Lone Gunmen magazine and rename it X-Files Magazine.

Season 4: The magazine was so successful in Season 3 that with Season 4, they hire more staff, more trainees and the X-Files has gone from Mulder and Scully in the basement to an underground magazine to a global operation.

Season 5: The alien invasion begins and we have a full season of myth-arc intrigue. The arc is resolved in a feature film where the invasion is thwarted by alien technology used to shift planet Earth out of phase from the aliens' dimension, preventing any further extraterrestrial incursion. The X-Files disbands, having served its purpose and proven the existence of aliens.

The entire operation is bought up by the Department of Defense and Mulder asks Scully to marry her. As Mulder and Scully embrace in their house surrounded by their friends and family, we pan away to see William B. Davis' Smoking Man observing the scene...

Season 6: Mulder and Scully are called out of retirement when a new conspiracy arises, one based in magic rather than technology, and the X-Files Division is reopened as a DOD operation.

Season 7: Mulder and Scully are now being hunted by the Smoking Man's monsters and seek help from the Duchovny and Anderson incarnations of their characters from the parallel universe where the Smoking Man originated. We spend a season with David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Summer Glau and Rupert Grint wandering across America, finding monsters of the week.

(Gillian: "I did not want to come back, but my daughter said she'd never forgive me for turning down a chance to work with Ron Weasley.")

Season 8: The Mulders are transformed into vampires by the Smoking Man and the Scullys must find them and cure them before it's too late. (Gillian: "I didn't want to come back, but the chance to stab David Duchovny through the heart was too good to pass up even if he comes back to life after.")

Season 9: With aliens re-entering this reality and the monsters on the loose, the Mulders and Scullys begin a search for the creator of their existence, a mysterious being known only as God. The season ends with the Mulders and Scullys confronting God. God is played by Chris Carter. (Gillian: "I didn't want to come back, but I couldn't turn down the chance to punch Chris Carter in the face.")

Season 10: Carter resolves the multiversal conflict, but at a great cost: the Mulders are trapped in the Glau/Grint universe of monsters and magic and the Scullys are trapped in the Duchovny/Anderson universe of sci-fi aliens. We alternate universes each week as the Mulders and Scullys try to solve cases of the week and find their way home. (Gillian Anderson: "I didn't want to come back, but Rupert Grint said he'd star in an adaptation of my EARTHEND novels if I did.")

Season 11: With the Mulders and Scullys having been restored to the correct universes, Glau and Grint decide they're not ready to stop exploring yet and begin exploring parallel universes. Every week, they visit the universe of a TV show that ended on a cliffhanger and resolve that cliffhanger, so we finally get conclusions to SLIDERS, SARAH CONNOR, PUSHING DAISIES, MY SO CALLED LIFE, FREAKS AND GEEKS, LOIS AND CLARK, QUANTUM LEAP and HEROES and we also find out what happened with Big Eddie in Season 1 of FRINGE and get Walter back to the present day to be reunited with Peter and Olivia.

I watched SLIDERS in IMAX! Sort of.

In COMMUNITY's sixth season, Jeff Winger declares that virtual reality is lame. I didn't doubt it, but I didn't know that for a fact. Jeff's issue with VR was the absurd complications and exertions to perform simple tasks like copying files. In his view, there was no need for a computer system to resemble a real-world environment.

Arguably true, but VR also hopes to be like a STAR TREK holodeck, so when I saw a Samsung Gear VR headset for $20 (you slide a Samsung phone into the goggles), I decided I would like to find out for sure. I'm not much of a gamer, but I thought it'd be neat to try watching TV shows on a simulated IMAX screen in virtual reality.

It's extremely lame. Despite the high resolution of my Samsung S7 phone, the magnified lenses of the VR goggles inflate the phone's screen image and create an unfortunate screen door effect; you can see the space between the pixels. You feel like you're in an IMAX theatre -- except the screen is like a low-res cathode ray tube.

However. The SLIDERS DVDs are extremely poor quality transfers with a shocking lack of detail and a very blurry image quality. And, when I put my DVD rips on my phone and watch them in the VR cinema, the screen door pixelation obscures the lousy bitrate and overcompressed picture. Gear VR video makes low-res, substandard SD versions of 90s television look acceptable on a massive CRT-esque screen. I watched "As Time Goes By" in an IMAX theatre setting. I watched "The Guardian" in an IMAX theatre setting. With a Gear VR visor and high-bass Bluetooth headphones.

Well. That was worth twenty bucks. :-)

We must add that, in addition to all of Chris Carter's crimes against television, he mangled THE X-FILES so badly that even Slider_Quinn21 would accept a reboot. :-)

But I actually go back and forth on this. If you go back one page in this thread, you can see me offering proposals for an in-continuity Season 12 featuring a new character and William joining the X-Files office. Since then, I've revisited Season 10, Season 11 and all the comic books.

The case for a revival instead of a reboot (on behalf of Slider_Quinn21): THE X-FILES' story stretches from 1993 to 2018 with 11 seasons and two films. It'd be a shame to put all that away especially when "My Struggle IV" arguably closed off the mythology: all the conspirators were killed off on-camera. In addition, Carter has consistently ignored his own arcs. As of Season 3, Mulder has known of an impending alien invasion; he would only ever mention it for season premieres and finales and sweeps week.

Carter ended Season 9 with an exact date for the invasion; his subsequent XF movie didn't mention it. In Season 10, he called the invasion a hoax and brought an analogous Colonization, the Spartan Virus, in the Season 10 finale. In Season 11, he contradicted himself again. Mr. Y declares that the Colonization plot was actually genuine but aborted as Earth has become unsuited to the Colonists' purposes. Season 11 retcons the Season 10 finale as a vision of the future, but offers no rationale for why the Smoking Man is holding the virus back.

Season 11 shows the Smoking Man completely uninjured when Season 10 showed the Smoking Man hideously scarred. As a result, the Season 11 finale showing Mulder shooting the Smoking Man repeatedly and throwing him off a pier means nothing.

As X-FILES reviewer Darren Mooney observed in X-Cast, at this point, Mulder could decapitate CGB Spender, scoop out his brain, keep it in a jar -- and the Smoking Man would still be back next season. Carter confirmed this opinion in interviews, saying he felt the Smoking Man could have survived.

So, we have a nine season mythology retconned as a hoax and retconned again as genuine but aborted. We have a Season 11 finale that teases the re-return of William, leaves us unsure if Skinner's dead or alive, and offers an end to the series' main villain that cannot be trusted. We have Scully pregnant with the actress refusing to return for any follow-up.

I grudgingly concede that throughout THE X-FILES, Carter has ended episodes indicating that some terrible cataclysm is coming -- only to immediately follow up with a monster of the week that makes no reference to the threat. I concede that yes, you could have THE X-FILES: THE NEXT GENERATION where a new showrunner introduces two new investigators who take over the X-Files division and never speak of Colonization or the Spartan Virus or William again.

However, I feel that any new showrunner would be crippled by this situation. With eleven seasons of three incompatible mythologies in the background, THE X-FILES would never be trusted to develop a new mythos no matter who's running it. The showrunners would be unable to open new arcs involving aliens or government conspiracies without getting entangled in the Colonization, the Conspiracy of Men and the Spartan Virus, none of which Carter had resolved or clarified.

Despite the bulk of THE X-FILES being monsters of the week, I think it is unreasonable to have new showrunners engage in a revival where aliens and conspiracies are off the table or so inextricably linked to Carter's clumsy myth-arc that any new alien conspiracy material would be connected to Carter's mis-steps.

Any future X-FILES production should allow a new writer to make full use of THE X-FILES' defining qualities: a skeptic and a believer, monsters of the week, government conspiracies, and aliens plotting some unknown endgame. It's not fair to saddle a new creator with Chris Carter's incompetence. A new set of hands deserves the clean slate of a reboot. So, once again, I say that we should start over with Summer Glau as Agent Fox Mulder and Rupert Grint as Dr. Dana Scully.

But as another concession, perhaps we'd have a Season 1 finale in which Glau's Mulder and Grint's Scully encounter a rip between universes and they come across a confused Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and as they help him find his way back home to Scully and his child, Duchovny's Mulder congratulates this new Mulder and Scully on their stewardship of the X-Files and passes the torch to them. Before he steps back into the vortex to go home, Duchovny turns to the camera and asks Slider_Quinn21 if this will do, if he can finally retire and move on, and if he can accept this new incarnation of THE X-FILES as a true and valid successor.

:-)

To be honest, I’ve been wondering if you might be onto something about Danielle Panabaker. The truth is, despite having fond memories of her in READ IT AND WEEP and SKY HIGH, I didn’t see her in anything for years until she popped up in ARROW as Caitlin and was revealed as a regular on THE FLASH. I was delighted to see her and actually confused because I’d mistakenly thought Dr. Caitlin Snow on ARROW had been a teenaged intern at STAR Labs. Panabaker had barely aged since she played a high school student in SKY HIGH.

And now, you point out she isn’t really that awesome on THE FLASH and was particularly poor in TIME LAPSE and I had to see that for myself. And you were right — Panabaker was very oddly distant in TIME LAPSE. Following that — well, I got around to watching Panabaker in the movie GIRLS AGAINST BOYS and I still have half an hour left, but this is another movie where there’s gunslinging and people are getting shot in a living room with Panabaker standing right there and... she’s really muted and blank and detached from the scene. Again.

Panabaker isn’t explicitly *bad*, but she really isn’t selling the audience on her character going on a murder spree of her own. She doesn’t convey rage, trauma, madness or homicidal intent. She’s just low-key, thoughtful, quiet, and certainly *adequate*, but there’s more to acting than having the right facial expression.

I think of how Gillian Jacobs brings so much spontanaity and insecurity and madness to Britta or how Alison Brie infuses Annie with a neurotic precision on COMMUNITY or how Anna Torv gives Olivia Dunham a military bearing matched with a melancholy loneliness — and next to them, I’m reluctantly finding that Panabaker has the presence of a well-designed, extremely articulate shop window dummy. A magnificently built one, to be sure. She doesn’t make what’s on paper come alive as a fully-dimensionalized person.

... I’m starting to seriously question my fondness for Danielle Panabaker. I mean, in READ IT AND WEEP, i’m now remembering that it was Kay Panabaker who played most of that role and Danielle was really in specific insert shots and fantasy sequences. And SKY HIGH was really about Michael Angarano as a teen superhero with Panabaker playing a classmate who was hopelessly crushing on him. And in Seasons 1 - 2 of THE FLASH, her job was to take care of Barry, something she fixated on at times because she was mentally using him as a replacement for her deceased fiance.

Is it possible that I only like Panabaker because she was playing a pretty, besotted high school student back when I would have liked for someone who looked like Panabaker to be crushing on me? And because I wouldn’t mind having someone like Danielle Panabaker tasked with keeping me healthy and hydrated and nourished? Do I only like Panabaker because she’s pretty?

..................

Well, it could also be that Panabaker’s range just doesn’t extend to shooting people and that’s just not suited to her strengths as an actress.

Well, I apologize for viewing all of your posts as graduate school theses as opposed to what they are -- off the cuff comments on a message board. It's unreasonable to expect anyone to post on this board and supply a bibliography at the end. Thank you for sharing all of your meetings with various celebrities over the years.

He was all of those things, but I would not call him "nothing more" than that. He was also a loving husband -- yes, he cheated on his wife, but she forgave him his misdeeds and understood his grief. His children forgave him his trespasses and asked SLIDERS fans if we might do the same. I'm willing to do that.

To steal from Richard Curtis, I think every person's life is a pile of good things and bad things and the bad can be glaring and horrific and beneath contempt, but it doesn't erase the good that's there as well.

There's no question that David Peckinpah wrote "Murder Most Foul." His life, his career and his family are all over it.

The little boy in the story is named "Trevor" after one of Peckinpah's sons. The plot is a tribute to Peckinpah's long career in crime fiction; the theme park setting shows Peckinaph's obsession with historical re-enactment which also came to the forefront in Season 4 and 5 as Peckinpah really liked working with The Buckaroos, a group that did the Wild West and Civil War re-enactments.

The ending where little Trevor promises to one day find the sliders again has a sweetly poignant longing, speaking to (a) Quinn's desire to be reunited with his father and (b) David Peckinpah's longing to be reunited with his son.

Well, when Season 3 was firing on most cylinders, I think what we had was a good amount of the original vision of SLIDERS but with more chase scenes, more explosions, more CG trains and it was still recognizably the same show but with more superficial thrills. It had more of FOX's wishes for action, but it was still SLIDERS. I think any story is conceivably a SLIDERS story and I see no reason why SLIDERS' platform isn't wide enough to embrace twisters, dinosaurs and vampires.

Where I think Peckinpah went wrong is that rather than encouraging a wide range of genre pastiches, he became completely fixated on horror and he also didn't see to it that scripts were reviewed for coherence and introductions or make sure that actors delivered their lines correctly or ensure sound editors put in effects. Errors happen on every show, but there's a review process to try to catch and correct them. I'd say that around the midpoint of Season 3, that review process has halted in favour of binge drinking sessions.

I mean, I'd love to see an episode where Quinn and Arturo try to work out the scientific rationale behind vampires and devise a countermeasure to defeat them. (I also wrote one.)

I don't agree with that. I don't agree that Seasons 4 - 5 had to be the way they were. The Sci-Fi Channel was pretty hands off on SLIDERS; they didn't even plan to renew it for Season 5, and I don't see any evidence that they pushed for the Kromaggs or for a "darker" show. (Does it get darker than the zombie apocalypse and the animal human hybrids of Season 3?) I think the showrunners could've done anything they wanted within the budget and Torme would have gladly accepted the cut budget and the total lack of interest from the network allowing him to work unrestricted.

As for the Chandler: there was absolutely no reason to rent and maintain a giant hotel set. If you need a hotel room, you wheel in some wallpapered walls, a dresser, a TV and a bed and that's your hotel. If you need a hotel lobby, you roll out a counter and some dummy windows.

That way, you have the option of removing these dressings and bringing in whatever else you might need -- benches and podiums for a courtroom, shelving and lights for a grocery store, exterior walls and fans to fake a street shot, etc.. FRINGE had a massive budget cut in its fifth season, so they rented a bare studio space that they could reconfigure into labs, hallways, markets for frozen corpses, living rooms, train stations, etc..

There's also the fact that the early Season 3 episodes of SLIDERS are a good synthesis of Tracy Torme's characters and storytelling matched with FOX's preference for action and sexuality. "Double Cross" features eye candy, chase sequences, action and an alt-history of environmental decay and resource depletion.

It was entirely possible to give FOX their action and film in LA and still make it *good*. It was entirely possible to film SLIDERS on a Sci-Fi Channel budget and still aim for strong storytelling. And Peckinpah managed to do this for a few episodes throughout each of his seasons. It'd have been nice if he could have managed it for most of them.

I think a season with more episodes like "Double Cross," "Dead Man Sliding," "The Prince of Slides," "Murder Most Foul," "Season's Greedings," "Prophets and Loss," "Virtual Slide," "Slidecage," "Slide By Wire," "Way Out West," "Applied Physics," "New Gods for Old," "The Return of Maggie Beckett" and "A Current Affair" would have been seen quite favourably. Those are the high points; they should have been the standard.

If Season 3 had aimed for maintaining the quality of "Double Cross" -- strong scripts with more action than previous years -- I think fans would have been fine and FOX would have had some explosions and sexuality to put in the trailers.

Peckinpah was partially responsible for John Rhys-Davies' departure and largely responsible for Sabrina Lloyd's exit. As the showrunner, it was his job to keep the original, contracted for 5 - 6 years cast of the show on the show. To lose one contracted actor might be construed as misfortune, to lose three-quarters of them does not speak well of the showrunner's interpersonal skills, ego or skin. Ultimately, I consider Peckinpah responsible, but I also find him unfortunate.

I don't justify or excuse anything he did, but I'm prepared to find some love and understanding for him the way I hope others would find some for me when I make terrible mistakes in my own life and sometimes in this very community (like the time I accidentally uploaded nude photos of Kari Wuhrer to the Sci-Fi Channel server. The photos were for art. Seriously: I was using photos of Wuhrer from the movie VIVID to make graphics for the INFINITE SLIDES fanfic website.).

So, the X-FILES had a run of comic books from 2013 - 2018 from the publisher IDW. The 2013 - 2015 comics were essentially the SLIDERS REBORN of THE X-FILES: writer Joe Harris wrote SEASON 10 and SEASON 11 with 34 issues that focused on the myth-arc, Colonization and the war between the Rebels and the Colonists. Due to the Revival rendering these comics apocryphal, SEASON 11 #8 was the final issue offering a conclusion to the whole Colonization arc and this avenue for THE X-FILES was abandoned. IDW didn't see the point of publishing a tie-in comic that didn't tie in anymore.

However, Amazon Audible got the X-FILES license for audiobooks and for reasons beyond me, elected to do an adaptation of the SEASON 10 and SEASON 11 comic books called COLD CASES and STOLEN LIVES. Yes, that's right; their idea for tying into the 2016 TV series was to release an audiobook adaptation of material that was in stark contradiction to the series. And they hired David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to perform it. It's interesting -- there was some hope of doing Tracy Torme's fanfic proposal as an audioplay as well (but Torme never finished it). Transmodiar was regularly suggesting that I rope Robert Floyd into doing some sort of audioplay version of SLIDERS REBORN. RussianCabbie wanted the REWATCH PODCAST to perform an audioplay adaptation of my scripts.

Well, I listened to COLD CASES and it is my worst nightmare for how a SLIDERS REBORN audioplay could have turned out. David Duchovny has clearly not read the script and is delivering it as he's skimming it for the first time in a recording booth; there has been no rehearsal or consideration whatsoever for the session. Gillian Anderson is also doing it cold and she's slightly more awake than Duchovny but not by much. They have not recorded together, and there is a terrible sense of Mulder and Scully having had their voicemail greetings clipped and intertwined; they're supposed to be in the same room, they sound like Mulder and Scully action figures with pullstrings delivering canned soundbytes that have been edited into something that vaguely resembles a conversation.

And then there's the fact that Audible didn't hire the entire cast. We've got Duchovny, Anderson, Mitch Pileggi, William B. Davis, and all the Lone Gunmen actors -- but there's no Robert Patrick, Annabeth Gish, Nicholas Lea, and we have actors who aren't even trying to impersonate the originals. It is bizarre to hear Scully talking to a Krycek who isn't Nicholas Lea. I want to call it an uncanny valley effect to hear Doggett and Reyes chatting with voices that aren't their own, but that suggests the actors sound anything like Patrick and Gish and they don't.

The entire project exudes minimality. Audible hired only some of the original cast, didn't build rehearsals into the production schedule, declined to create anything new and instead raided some of IDW's Word files for comic book scripts to serve as content and have performed the most half-assed adaptation possible. It doesn't seem like a professional product. It comes off as the audio track of one of those awful STAR TREK fan films that rope in some of the original actors from time to time.

I hope writer Joe Harris never listened to these, never heard his thoughtful, written-for-print dialogue being performed by the original actors with no concern for how dialogue meant to be read was now being spoken by Duchovny and Anderson recording in separate sessions with no idea of what they're saying or why they're saying it.

I watched TIME LAPSE and Slider_Quinn21 is right. Danielle Panabaker's performance is acceptable for the first half, but there comes a point when her character, Callie, is watching people get murdered in her living room and having a gun put to her face and Panabaker's reactions are muted and sleepy. I'm not sure what's going on here, but in an interview, the director mentioned that the actors all had very different attitudes to how to rehearse and they had extremely limited time to film as the apartment in which they were filming was scheduled for demolition.

TIME LAPSE reminded me of one of my niece's student films, actually -- there was a key moment when an character was supposed to react with terror and shock in response to a ghost, but my niece was shy and didn't tell the actress to emote and failed to provide a cue and therefore never got the shot she needed. Since then, she's learned to be clear and assertive. TIME LAPSE is full of little moments where the direction and the performances just aren't capturing the details needed to convey the situation.

There's some chatter about a potential Season 12 of THE X-FILES; Carter will be invited to propose the content and financials for a potential re-revival. But Gillian Anderson is fed up with the show and apologized to the fans for the Season 11 finale. The audience certainly lost interest; the show went from 7 - 8 million viewers in Season 100 to about 3 - 3.3 million in Season 11.

I dunno. Were we talking about a Season 10 revival, my proposal would have been to have Mulder and Scully wrap up the Colonization arc in the season premiere in a single story and then focus on standalones. Instead, Carter decided to stretch out the myth-arc while ignoring nine seasons of detailed continuity. At this point, the show had a second chance to get its house and order and has shown itself incapable of doing so. Despite "My Struggle IV" offering some closure by killing off all the conspirator characters, Skinner is either injured or dead and Scully's pregnancy (again?!) will be another distraction from what has always been the bulk of TXF content: standalone monsters of the week.

Knowing Carter and his total inability to sustain running storylines (while constantly starting them) and his refusal to ever end a story arc, he'll likely have a Season 12 that:

(a) opens with Mulder and Scully again estranged after Scully lost the baby in a miscarriage
(b) reopens the X-Files to investigate the myth-arc and an impending doomsday scenario
(c) reveals that the Smoking Man's alive and extracted the fetus that was Scully's child
(d) ignores the above for a run of standalone episodes follows by
(e) a series finale that has a bunch of action moments and leaves all of the above unresolved.

And that's assuming Gillian Anderson would return. She doesn't want to and I think crap like this is why.

You could conceivably do a revival without Carter or Duchovny or Anderson with new FBI agents stepping into the basement office, but at this point, Carter has accumulated so much baggage with William, the Spartan Virus, Scully's pregnancy, the Smoking Man likely being alive, Skinner's injury and loyalties and whatnot that it'd drag down any new creators and cast members. I wouldn't trust Carter to offer any sensible continuation or finale after the way he used his 16 episodes.

As much as Slider_Quinn21 will object, I think that if THE X-FILES comes back, it's time for a reboot. I know Slider_Quinn21 always prefers revivals, but Seasons 10 - 11 were the revival and given the ratings and the content having alienated Gillian Anderson, this well has been poisoned by the ineptitude of the original creator and his inability to run a show. The time and opportunity for revival has passed. It's time to start over with a new Mulder and Scully and get it right this time.

I'd like Eric Kripke, Joel Wyman and Bryan Fuller to write it.

I actually feel the same way about Panabaker that I do about Cavanagh -- a very talented actor whose material has been increasingly muddled over the course of five years. Cavanagh's issue: the writers started writing his stand-up comedy impressions instead of writing his character and Cavanagh's comedy voices are not a fully-dimensionalized character. Panabaker's issue: the writing has lost Caitlin's original voice and the current characterization isn't a logical fit.

I've never been entirely clear on WHY the series named the character "Caitlin Snow," the name of the DC Comics supervillain Killer Frost. THE FLASH's procedural template did not require a future supervillain on Barry's team nor did they write her as one. Caitlin was a biologist, a scientist, a medical doctor, specifically Barry's personal physician. In Seasons 1 - 2, she was written with a crisply scientific, result-oriented characterization and Panabaker did a great job of selling Caitlin's medical acumen and the perpetual trauma of seeing Ronnie die followed by her betrayal by Hunter Zolomon. Because her name was Caitlin Snow, the expectation was that she'd become a villain -- which wouldn't have made any sense; Panabaker was contracted as a regular. The fate of most if not all villains: they are defeated and written out.

Season 2 showed an alternate universe Caitlin as Killer Frost. That really should have been the end of it. But with the writers looking for FLASHPOINT consequences, they decided in Season 3 to make the prime Caitlin into Killer Frost and... it didn't work. There was no explanation for where this Killer Frost personality came from; it had nothing to do with the onscreen Caitlin. There was no reason for why the Killer Frost persona would be so homicidal and malevolent; it didn't reflect or invert Caitlin's desires. Killer Frost was a villain of the week who kept coming back and was played by one of the regulars and inhabiting the place of a lead cast member -- and it didn't make any sense.

And with Killer Frost being a murderous loon, Panabaker was required to make the Caitlin persona distinct. And without a clear line of characterization as to how Caitlin and Killer Frost were even connected beyond sharing the same body, Panabaker unfortunately flattened Caitlin into generic, guileless innocence while Killer Frost was violent and volatile. With Season 4, the writers remembered that Panabaker was on contract, so they toned Killer Frost down and since then have written Caitlin as a member of Barry's team.

Unfortunately, they've lost Caitlin's voice with all the changes and awkward rollbacks; they've lost the Caitlin/Barry relationship with Barry as her patient. They've lost Caitlin's sense of tragedy and loss because her arc is now focused on this dual persona. They've lost the focus on Caitlin's biology background, so she's just a science girl alongside Cisco. Panabaker's performance is no longer emphasizing Caitlin's scientific nature; instead, she and the scripts are focused on making her Caitlin performance *unlike* Killer Frost and when you define a character by what she isn't, there's no sense of who she is.

Many aspects of THE FLASH have become dulled and faded due to five years of adhering to a formula, occasionally threatening sweeping change but never really wanting to lose anyone from the STAR Labs hallways, and both Caitlin and Harrison Wells have suffered for it.

I've always liked Panabaker. One of my favourite children's movies is READ IT AND WEEP where young high school student Jamie writes a daydream journal featuring a fantasy version of herself, Isabelle ("Is"), who is sharper, wittier, stronger and more well-groomed and who defeats all the classmates and teachers who annoy her. When Jamie's daydream novel is actually printed in the school paper, it becomes popular, is published as a successful novel and Jamie starts having lengthy conversations with her fictitious self, Is, and Is starts taking over Jamie's life.

Jamie is played by Kay Panabaker and Danielle, Kay's older sister, plays Is as the taller, prettier, more self-assured image of what Jamie would like to be. It's a fascinating performance where Kay and Danielle often swap places in the same scene to indicate how the Is-persona is starting to dominate Jamie. Panabaker was also in SKY HIGH playing a superheroine who could control plant life. I'm not saying READ IT AND WEEP and SKY HIGH are cinematic masterpieces -- they're low budget children's movies, but I grew up with Danielle Panabaker and she'll naturally always feel like the cool older sister to me... or, in Caitlin's case, my personal medical doctor.

I think ARROW had a great Season 5 and Season 6 in returning to the street crime origins of Seasons 1 - 2. I’m very happy with this year as well (sorry, Informant). I’m really enjoying LEGENDS’ craziness and zaniness. SUPERGIRL is also having a fabulous year. And all these shows could run indefinitely: ARROW can forever explore Oliver’s trauma by having each villain represent some aspect of his dysfunctionality and poor human resources skills, LEGENDS is about misfits and SUPERGIRL’s refugee metaphor is evergreen.

In contrast, THE FLASH doesn’t have that boundless applicability. THE FLASH has never identified a central metaphor. It’s not about growing up too fast; it’s not about trying to keep pace with the forward motion of the world around us; it doesn’t really have anything to SAY that’s specific to superspeed. THE FLASH has been about Barry trying to resolve his childhood trauma and embrace his future destiny as a legendary superhero. As of the Season 2 finale, it’s all been done.

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of FLASH comics, but the era I read and enjoyed most was when Wally West was the Flash; Barry was dead. Writer Mark Waid was not the first writer to script Wally as the Flash, but Waid identified a central character flaw in Wally to explore in nearly every story: Wally was impatient. It was his greatest weakness.

He was always in a hurry; he was always leaping before looking; he was constantly underinformed and unprepared. At the end of Waid’s run, he explained that he had loved writing THE FLASH because Waid himself had been a deeply impatient person. But, in recent years, Waid had learned how to be patient and as a result, he no longer felt the intimate connection to Wally West that he had before.

THE FLASH as a TV series never found a central point of the human condition. Impatience was not one of Barry’s failings aside from Oliver pointing out that Barry needed to review environments before entering. THE FLASH pinned all its content on the Flash mythology. It worked for two seasons. Now it’s just going in circles. But, I mean — it’s not like the pure frustration of HEROES or the tedium of IRON FIST. THE FLASH has accomplished all of its goals... and it keeps getting renewed every year and has more hours to fill.

One show Informant and I have agreed to disagree on: ANGEL. ANGEL, like THE FLASH, was a paranormal procedural. However, ANGEL periodically shook up its format. Season 1 was about helping a weekly guest-star; Season 2 shifted into Angel’s dysfunction breaking up the team; Season 3 was about Angel accepting a new role as an employee working for the people he used to lead; Season 4 was a 22-episode movie about Angel and his friends facing the Antichrist; Season 5 was about trying to turn the evil law firm they’d fought for four years into a force for good.

Informant argues that ANGEL lost its way by abandoning the Season 1 template and that’s a fair criticism, but I think THE FLASH demonstrates what can happen when a show refuses to build regular evolution into its formula; it can become stagnant, tired, repetitive, predictable and every formula risks becoming formulaic.

I dunno. THE FLASH would benefit from a rest. That said, I’m always happy to see Danielle Panabaker and Tom Cavanagh working.

That's a ridiculous thing to say.

Grizzlor, I question your supposed expertise in such matters. Yes, you've demonstrated some in-depth knowledge. Yes, you've had many, many, many conversations with SLIDERS alumni.

But you've just as often demonstrated shocking ignorance. You claimed Gene Roddenberry was responsible for continuity errors in STAR TREK VI (he had no involvement). You said SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES could have helped FOX earn more money on TERMINATOR SALVATION when SALVATION was a Warner Bros. project.

In one of your most absurd statements, you said that Marvel should sell all their remaining film rights to Sony and FOX. The actual reality: they had already sold Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and Daredevil to Sony and FOX. They were receiving nothing of the outside studios' profits. That's why Marvel self-financed the AVENGERS property.

Now you claim that FOX was somehow responsible for David Peckinpah's misbegotten stewardship of the show. Yes, David Peckinpah blamed FOX for the movie ripoffs. And yes, they are less in evidence in Seasons 4 - 5. But Peckinpah also joined FOX's Peter Roth in getting John fired off SLIDERS. He permitted Kari to harass Sabrina Lloyd and drove Sabrina off the show as well.  He was also responsible for the shoddy stunt standards that got Ken Steadman killed on "Desert Storm" and I know for a fact that you're also aware that he maintained the same dangerous work practices as late as "Easy Slider" where his mistress was not qualified to do stuntwork but hired by Peckinpah anyway.

Throughout Peckinpah's tenure, he did not review scripts to make sure guest-stars were addressed by name (or ensure that Dial or Damron did). He allowed actors to show up drunk and writers to play Solitaire during meetings. He agreed to a massive hotel set that tied up the budget for Seasons 4 - 5 in rental fees that could've gone to locations and props and effects and guest-stars. He let the show end on a cliffhanger.

He was literally referred to as the "boss" right to the end of Season 5 and worked with a disinvolved network for Seasons 4- 5 that clearly let him do whatever he wanted, so the idea that Peckinpah is not responsible for SLIDERS' three year crash and was just a 'manager' for FOX is ridiculous. FOX wasn't even there for the last two seasons. Peckinpah's management and attitude didn't change when FOX was out of the picture.

Tracy Torme would have loved working on the Sci-Fi Channel and he would have been happy to produce material without a single network note.

Now, I am not presenting myself as an expert who knows more than Grizzlor. I get the feeling that Grizzlor has pretty much the same facts that I do and I get the sense from the inside knowledge he does have that Grizzlor and I were both apostles in the lore of Temporal Flux. We’ve clearly read the same information on rights and licensing between studios and TV networks. But we have somehow come to contrary conclusions.

Nevertheless, even from a layperson's perspective: if we agree that FOX wasn't involved in the two seasons that SLIDERS wasn't airing on FOX, if we agree that David Peckinpah was considered "the boss" by Keith Damron and Bill Dial, if we agree that the Sci-Fi Channel was disinterested in SLIDERS -- then it makes no sense whatsoever to say Peckinpah wasn't responsible for SLIDERS' dissolution and demise.

That's not to say that Peckinpah isn't unworthy of pity or compassion, of course. We can see that Peckinpah is responsible for destroying SLIDERS while recognizing that he was a tormented and lonely human being who killed himself with grief. And cocaine and heroin.

Temporal Flux once joked that Peckinpah was burning in development hell. Brand_S once said that Peckinpah was burning in actual hell. I would like to think that Peckinpah, wherever he is, found his son, found some measure of peace and found his way back home.

Something I often wished comic books would do -- I've always thought that each character's comic or line of comics should take place in their own universe but with versions of the other characters. By which I mean that SUPERMAN titles would feature a consistent universe between them, but the FLASH comic book would be set in its own universe.

The Flash could guest-star SUPERMAN or ACTION COMICS or MAN OF STEEL or SUPERGIRL or what-have-you, but it would be the SUPERMAN-universe's version of the Flash and vice versa. Over in SUPERMAN, you might have aliens emigrating to planet Earth, but in THE FLASH, there would be no indication of any such storyline. The JUSTICE LEAGUE title would feature independent versions of the characters and the writer could pick and choose what aspects of the individual titles to acknowledge and which to ignore.

I'd be quite content for each movie to serve its own purpose rather than the larger conglomerate even if that diffuses the original intent of a shared cinematic universe.

This is the saddest thing I have ever read on this forum. I'm sorry to hear this.

Ahem. Slider_Quinn21's views are his own and in no way represent the consensus of this forum were such a thing even to blah blah blah. I'm sorry this happened, Rob. I was going to make this joke about how Batman not only brings out your hatred of old people but of short people as well in the GOTHAM thread, but -- I'll save it for later.

I see no issue with that interpretation.

I think that the rationale for why John is so gentle in this episode in contrast to Sam and Dean's memories of him as a harsh taskmaster -- he's in shock from seeing his sons over a decade older from how he remembers them last, he's in shock from seeing his wife alive again. John never wanted to be a hunter until Mary died; it was Mary who descends from a legacy of hunters and reluctantly showed John her world, and when Mary is alive, John doesn't feel the call to be a hunter anymore.

I cannot stress enough in the name of all that is holy that Informant’s views to which he is entitled and welcome to voice do not represent those of Sliders.tv as a whole.

Informant is perfectly welcome to share his views and others are welcome to disagree. But me -- I just don't think the world needs me (or anyone incapable of getting pregnant) to offer an opinion on abortion. I am going to focus on what really matters, on a mission that is truly for me and me alone -- I must destroy April Fools Day, put it in the ground and dig it back up just to shoot it dead.

I cannot stress enough in the name of the Professor's slide-rule, Rembrandt's AIDS ribbons and Jerry O'Connell's damaged liver that the views in any one post in this thread do not reflect those of Sliders.TV as a whole.

Every once in awhile, I come across a product that I must not only appreciate for my own use but also share with you all for its utlity and revolutionary design. This is not one of those times.

Recently, my sister fried my laptop. She was visiting and she plugged a space heater into the same power bar I use to fuel a 10-year-old laptop I keep plugged into a TV to run streaming services and play local files off an external hard drive. The heater blew the circuit and the laptop no longer powers on. She offered to replace it, but I mentally began calculating how much of her property I’ve destroyed during our association and it seemed best to stop thinking about it while I was not ahead.

I bought a used Chromecast, thinking I could use it with my streaming services and periodically copy locally stored video files to my iPad and stream them to the living room TV. But I was disappointed to find that some video files like my AVI backups of SLIDERS DVDs and my MKV conversions of STAR WARS fan restorations didn’t stream well; the video apps couldn’t handle decoding and casting the file to the TV. I bought a refurbished blu-ray player only to find it couldn’t decode those video files either (despite loudly advertising its ability to do so on the box).

I went to the tech store and began looking at racks and racks of open box Android TV boxes. “These are all garbage,” a salesman told me miserably, gesturing at a small wall of returned, open-box Android boxes. “They are too slow to run streaming services and there is no real market for good ones; most people just buy a smart TV.” My TV, however, is just a 40 inch monitor bought eight years ago.

Anyway. I figured that even a low-powered Android box could handle local video playback. I brought one home, plugged it into the TV — and there’s something quite surreal about seeing Android 4.4, an ancient phone interface stretched to tablet size and then stretched again to fill a TV screen. This MyGica ATV380 is. so underpowered that it lagged and froze until I uninstalled most of the built-in apps. The machine encourages you to use with a remote controller’s arrow keys to move a cursor about a touchscreen interface that’s on a TV. I had to plug in a wireless mouse instead. The built-in video player couldn’t decode a lot of my video formats.

The best that can be said: the manufacturer left the Android interface under their launcher untouched, so I was able to install a personalized homescreen, a file explorer and a video app with the right codecs. It definitely doesn’t have the power to stream Netflix well, and even if it did, it’d be the Android app blown up to a TV screen with the need to use a mouse. But it can play locally stored 1080p video files; the Chromecast can handle screening services and the blu-ray player — well, I only have like seven blu-rays and a bunch of DVDs. And I bought everything used or refurbished, so it cost under a hundred bucks.

Anyway. Android TV boxes are stupid. Android is for phones and the software and hardware on these devices are a joke. I think most people should just get a wifi-enabled TV with streaming service apps built in as well as USB ports for hard drives.

Spoilery speculation

When FAST AND FURIOUS actor Paul Walker died, production went to Walker's previous F&F films to complete his final movie. They lifted his face and grafted it onto body doubles. TERMINATORs SALVATION and GENYSIS also did this with Arnold Schwartzenager, the former because he wasn't available and the latter so that Arnold could fight himself.

If SHAZAM needs one shot of Cavill in costume, it can't be that hard to use his likeness via an outtake from JUSTICE LEAGUE. It also can't be that hard to have Cavill perform an hour of filming. Kevin Sorbo had to do a lot of one-hour for one shot shooting days on HERCULES after his stroke.

If WB wants a cameo but can't agree to terms with Cavill, then then I suspect the issue is financial. MAN OF STEEL would have paid Cavill a low six figures, but subsequent films would have raised his salary and profit participation in anticipation of TRANSFORMERS level earnings. Those earnings haven't materialized -- but Cavill's contract would stipulate that WB would have to keep paying him a TRANSFORMERS model salary when that's a model they've abandoned.

Paramount is in the same situation with Chris Pine for a fourth STAR TREK movie as their contract requires that Paramount pay him on the scale of a $300 million budget when their earnings only justify a $100 million budget.

I wonder if WB employing Cavill for a cameo or for effects work would trigger an extension on his existing contract when they may prefer to do what they did with Brandon Routh -- they want to wait until it expires and either re-negotiate with Cavill or recast him. And if they did want to renegotiate -- well, Cavill doesn't strike me as someone who would accept a paycut; he's flat out declared that he plays Superman for the money.

Tom Welling took the role of Clark because he couldn't stand modelling and could either return to being a janitor or become an actor. Welling received a massive increase on SMALLVILLE's last three seasons, but he also took on much more work as he was effectively the showrunner as well as the star. Welling also gave up his salary for the finale to pay Michael Rosenbaum. While we all criticize Welling's refusal to wear the Superman suit for his last hour of the show, we can't question his commitment to the character. Cavill, however, doesn't see himself as the custodian of the character the way Welling or Routh did.

Cavill's a great actor and a great Superman, but I don't think he loves Superman to the point of accepting a pay cut. And I can't fault him for that. If Cavill isn't coming back, I'd like WB to cast an unknown to replace him. I'd like the same for Affleck's replacement.

The entire situation makes me think of SLIDERS (and I know you can all barely contain your amazement). I think we can agree that Kevin Feige and Zack Snyder have very different styles. And I think we can agree that Feige had the support of the studio while Snyder didn't. Warner Bros.'s development strategy: they approved a project's direction and destination, but from BVS onward, they sought to change course AFTER the train had left the station. It's self-destructive and self-defeating, much like Season 5 of SLIDERS.

The Season 5 team bought a script about an interdimensional library under Kromagg attack, and cut the interdimensional library and the Kromaggs. They bought a script about telepathically-piloted Kromagg warships and cut the warships at war. They bought a script about Rembrandt being imprisoned for creating music and cut Rembrandt's arrest. They bought an interdimensional version of CASABLANCA and then decided that they didn't like CASABLANCA.  They tied up their budget renting a giant hotel set and spent many episodes trying to make it something other than a hotel.

Every movie studio (except Paramount?) does this. Sony approved the twenty-fourth Bond film with a script where the villain is Bond's foster brother -- but then, in the middle of filming, they demanded that the foster brother be the 60s Bond villian Blofeld. This resulted in clumsy revisions that couldn't reconcile the villain being both Bond's brother executing a personal vendetta AND the mastermind of the Connery films. Bond's brother and Blofeld should have been two separate villains in two separate films.

Sony approved AMAZING SPIDER-MAN II with a script in which Peter explores the legacy of his dead father and discovers his father is still alive. During filming, Sony complained that this didn't set up a SINISTER SIX movie and ordered it removed, leading to a depressing film where Peter never finds his dad.

At one point, Sony's then-chairwoman declared she would never again greenlight a film without settling all script issues with the director. It's beyond me why she needed to blow hundreds of millions to learn this and it was also beyond her managers as she's not the chairwoman any more.

Why did they buy these scripts? Why did they film them? Why did FOX hire a dark, grounded filmmaker to make a big budget FANTASTIC FOUR movie and then cut the budget while complaining it was too dark and grounded?

Sometimes, studios HAVE to start filming because they can't change release dates or delay airdates. FOX, in particular, needed to produce an FF movie or lose the rights as they lost DAREDEVIL. They can't push pause, so they decide to modify what they have en route. And it doesn't work; even if the result is something as fun as JUSTICE LEAGUE, the publicity is toxic. Studios need to accept that once filming's started, what they've approved is what's being made.

You can't re-edit a film about Peter Parker searching for his father into a launch for SINISTER SIX and expect coherence. You can't have a different director reshoot every scene of Superman in a JUSTICE LEAGUE movie and think your audience won't notice. Whedon would have been better off focusing on his own projects instead of Snyder's and after Snyder left, WB should have assembled their cut with the footage they had.

Or WB could have done what Disney did with the SOLO movie. Disney had most of it filmed with Phil Lord and Chris Miller, but weren't happy with the results, so they hired Ron Howard to reshoot the entire movie and treated the Lord/Miller material as second unit B-roll. But WB was too close to the JUSTICE LEAGUE release date for Whedon to reshoot it wholly.

I'm not saying films can't or shouldn't evolve as they're filmed, but the way Warner Bros. and FOX and Sony have tried is not the way to do it. Again, with MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: the last three M:I films did *not* have completed scripts when they started filming. With the fifth and sixth films, McQuarrie was often improvising scenes, but he made sure that the mission briefing scenes would be shot on isolated soundstages with only one actor and McQuarrie voicing the briefings. This way, they could be refilmed at any point to wrangle the plot into shape. The evolution came from within the films rather than being dictated to the filmmakers.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE IV is also an interesting case: III had married Ethan Hunt off, but everyone involved agreed that Ethan couldn't stay married. However, the storyline of IV, directed by Brad Bird, had Julia assassinated off-camera and led to extremely depressing scenes. Julia's death was at odds with Bird's lighthearted take.

Christopher McQuarrie, brought in for rewrites on IV in mid-filming, suggested a few lines of dialogue and a new end-scene to make it so that Julia was alive. Julia's survival, now implied throughout the film and confirmed at the end, allowed the audience to enjoy Brad Bird's escapist spy thrills. Paramount and McQuarrie helped Bird make the thrilling spy adventure he set out to make and set aside the guilt-and-revenge movie that he didn't want at all.

In contrast, Warner Bros., Sony, FOX, Keith Damron and Bill Dial seemed to be in a constant state of buyer's remorse and sunk cost fallacies, buying material they didn't want to film, refusing to let go of what they regretted having bought, and trying to change it as they filmed it.

Snyder's conflicts with Warner Bros. reminds me of SLIDERS. WB with Snyder's JUSTICE LEAGUE is a lot like FOX with SLIDERS but in reverse; FOX wanted a different tone. FOX wasn't happy with SLIDERS being a comedy; a major point of conflict was the PEOPLE's COURT sequence in the Pilot and they were also at odds with one of the lead characters being a goofy R&B singer. The joking tone of the show was at odds with the sci-fi action series FOX wanted to air -- which meant they shouldn't have bought SLIDERS in the first place. They shouldn't have bought ANY sci-fi project written by veteran comedy writers known for SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and THE NAKED GUN.

If you wanted a thin-crust pizza, would you order deep dish and then put the pie sideways through a bread slicer to trim its height? If you wanted roller skates, would you buy ice skates and try to attach wheels to the blades? If you wanted an Android phone, would you hack iOS hardware to run a buggy, malfunctioning Oreo build? If you wanted a serious sci-fi action show, would you hire writers known for sketch comedy and Leslie Neilsen movies?

If FOX wanted an action adventure sci-fi show, they should have bought TIMECOP and let Torme and Weiss and Universal shop their project elsewhere. And Warner Bros. should not have hired a dark, operatic, horror-oriented director to make superhero movies and then protest his making a dark, operatic, horror-oriented JUSTICE LEAGUE movie.

**

When Affleck's departure from the role of Batman was first rumoured, I thought it was the death-knell for the DCEU. And it looks like that's happened: Warner Bros. is no longer pursuing DC properties as a cinematic shared universe. They're not blowing up the existing DC Extended Universe, they're just not focusing on crossovers anymore. Without knowing anything about the motives behind replacing Affleck, I feel that there was a certain economic inevitability.

The problem: Warner Bros. had been following the TRANSFORMERS model with their superhero movies, spending hundreds of millions and hoping to earn a billion or two in global box office the way Michael Bay's movies manage. But the TRANSFORMERS movies are aimed at audiences that don't speak English and see the films subtitled. Marvel got to the 1 billion mark very gradually over time with smaller, cheaper films that built their brand and would have turned a profit even without hitting the 1 billion figure. Warner Bros., however, assumed JUSTICE LEAGUE would reach 1 billion before BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN had even been released and set up a financial model that has proven overoptimistic. JUSTICE LEAGUE's $660 million at box office would have been a success for any of the Phase One Marvel movies.

A Ben Affleck Batman movie under his existing superstar contract and with the Ben Affleck publicity machine and Ben Affleck empire is probably too expensive and would require a box office take that WB now knows many times over that they can't take for granted. Yes, AQUAMAN has cracked $1 billion, but it also only cost $160 million to make and would have been considered a success at earning $480 million in ticket sales and it'd be foolish to assume AQUAMAN's success is the baseline for all future DC projects. THE BATMAN cannot assume international success; WB needs to ensure that even if ticket sales are only a modest $500 million, it will be a profitable film. And the best way to do that is to hire a cheaper actor and make a smaller movie.

Paramount seems to be making similar calculations with STAR TREK. STAR TREK IV has been cancelled. STAR TREK BEYOND, a fine film, earned $343 million on a $185 million budget and was about 62 per cent below what it needed to earn a profit. Paramount asked the stars to take paycuts for a sequel that wouldn't count on international success. The actors understandably declined to accept less than what their contracts promised for a fifth film and the studio decided not to make a fifth film with them.

I don't know how this younger Batman actor would fit into the DCEU going forward given that surely Affleck would need to return for future JUSTICE LEAGUE adventures, but it doesn't look like there will be any future JUSTICE LEAGUE movies with the Cavill/Affleck/Gadot cast anyway. And I think it's okay. It's a new start for the Worlds of DC movies which include the Arrowverse and whatever we call the universe of the TITANS and DOOM PATROL TV shows.

**

As for Snyder's plan, I don't feel Slider_Quinn21 is being entirely fair. I'm not saying that Snyder's Batman and Superman are the pinnacle of adaptations or I liked them any more than Slider_Quinn21 did. But Snyder had a valid creative approach to Batman: as shown onscreen, he believes that anyone who has power over others will ultimately abuse it, and whether that's due to Robin's murder or a mean schoolteacher in his childhood is less important than the force of Affleck's performance presenting that belief.

And Snyder had a strong vision for Superman as well: Superman is perceived as a warrior, but in truth, he's a relief worker; a fireman whom people keep seeing as a soldier. Is it my preference for how to tell a story or to tell Batman and Superman stories? No. But it is a perfectly valid creative path and Snyder executed it well -- or at least he did until  Warner Bros. cut BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN to the ribbons and released an incoherent film to theatres.

Warner Bros. also interfered with JUSTICE LEAGUE, trying to alter a movie after they'd approved the script, approved the director and seen principal photography completed. Slider_Quinn21 wondered why Paramount was so indifferent to Warner Bros. needing a shaven Henry Cavill for reshoots and offering to pay to digitally restore Cavill's beard for MISSION IMPOSSIBLE VI. My speculation: Paramount's view is that they wouldn't ever be in that situation to begin with.

This is strictly anecdotal, but Paramount's approach with Christopher McQuarrie on MISSION IMPOSSIBLE IV (which he helped write), V and VI: they discussed the film, agreed to an approach and then, their involvement was to see to it that he delivered what they'd agreed upon. Paramount didn't try to alter the movie in the middle of filming or afterwards in editing; they chose a director and had him direct.

There were debates between Paramount and McQuarrie. Serious disagreements. Should Ethan's wife from III be present or not? Where should the plane sequence of V go, the beginning or the end? How deep undercover as John Lark would Ethan be in VI? These disagreements were settled before filming began. When McQuarrie wanted to suspend shooting on VI to send a clean-shaven Cavill back to Warner Bros., Paramount stepped in and stopped him, ordering him to continue doing the work they'd both agreed he would do. And while the last three M:I films evolved during filming, nobody tried to revise a spy adventure into a romcom or a documentary. Reshoots were to refine scenes and moments, not replace them.

Warner Bros., in contrast, hired Zack Snyder and then expressed consternation and dismay that director Zack Snyder produced a Zack Snyder film. And they subsequently acted out of fear of bad publicity. They feared that not announcing JUSTICE LEAGUE in advance of BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN would suggest timidity; they feared that holding off on filming JUSTICE LEAGUE after BVS offered mediocre returns would convey failure; they feared that replacing Snyder would indicate low confidence -- but they ended up with bad publicity anyway by bringing in Whedon, engaging in heavy reshoots and being unable to announce an Affleck-led BATMAN, a Cavill-led MAN OF STEEL II or a JUSTICE LEAGUE II.

As much as I loved the JUSTICE LEAGUE movie -- don't buy an iPhone to run Android. Don't buy a show from Weird Al's favourite music video director and expect a serious sci-fi action hour. And don't hire a zombie horror filmmaker to make a lighthearted superhero film.

If you want a Joss Whedon movie, don't hire Zack Snyder. Hire Whedon. Before filming starts. Not during. Not after. Before.

So, the Alara character played by Halston Sage has left THE ORVILLE. This is a weird situation, to put it mildly. In a short 12 episode season, Alara was the focus of two episodes, the first highlighting her youth and lack of command experience, the second focusing on her efforts to conquer fear in her line of work. Which makes it bizarre for the second season to write out the character and actress three episodes in.

No reasons have been given, although Sage and star/showrunner Seth MacFarlane were dating and broke up between Seasons 1 - 2. In addition, Sage has numerous movie roles that would be conflicting the rest of Season 2. I'm not sure which came first. Last I checked, FOX doesn't continue to pay performers who aren't working on their shows anymore, so if she wasn't going to be on THE ORVILLE, she would have had to book other jobs.

Since we don't have any facts, we should probably assume the best and think it was less a Jerry O'Connell/Sabrina Lloyd/John Rhys-Davies situation and more a Yvette Nicole Brown situation (she quit COMMUNITY after Season 5 because her father was ill and she needed to be with him). That said, it does make me think about all the numerous actors in genre shows who have been shockingly ungrateful and who waste time and resources seeing scripts and episodes produced around them to prepare for a lengthy term of duty that they don't actually complete.

I was always appalled by how ROSWELL stars Brendan Fehr, Katherine Heigl and Majandra Delfino were perpetually declaring their eagerness for the show to be cancelled so they could leave to do music and movies as though a TV show for which they'd auditioned and which had granted them a fanbase, exposure and financial security were now beneath them.

David Duchovny is an interesting case, perpetually whining about how bored he was on THE X-FILES. Slider_Quinn21 points to Duchovny as an example of how actors often don't wish to stay when speaking of Jerry, Sabrina and John's departures, but this fails to take note that all these actors signed multi-year contracts. If they didn't want to spend 5 - 7 years working on a TV show, then the Fehrs, Heigls, Definos and Duchovnys of the world shouldn't have auditioned for these roles and spent their lives to that point pursuing such work.

It's interesting that Heigl, Duchovny and Jerry O'Connell, after hitting it big with TV shows, would then act as though their success were completely independent of the very same projects that made their careers. Duchovny's career proved strong with or without his TV show, but Heigl's absurd ego would eventually blow up her career and she's still trying to put the pieces back together.

Temporal Flux and I remarked after TOMCATS that Jerry would be begging Universal for a SLIDERS revival if he had one more disaster; shortly after KANGAROO JACK, Jerry O'Connell fully committed to starring in a SLIDERS movie if there would ever be one and he dropped his stipulation that Charlie be given a role.

But to be fair, actors often have understandable reasons for leaving or wanting to leave. Duchovny had been informed that THE X-FILES was only going to film the pilot in Vancouver before relocating to Los Angeles, an expectation that wasn't met when FOX realized that Vancouver would cost a lot less. \John never quit SLIDERS, he was fired. Sabrina left because Kari Wuhrer was harassing her. Jerry didn't actually quit SLIDERS; his contract ended when Sci-Fi was late in picking up his option for Season 5, although he was deeply uncaring towards the fans in his refusal to do an onscreen exit story. Donald Glover had mental health issues when he left COMMUNITY and Halston Sage clearly gave THE ORVILLE sufficient time to write a departure rather than have Alara vanish between seasons.

I would say the poster child for a foolish departure from a show is Wil Wheaton. He flat out admits in his autobiographies that leaving THE NEXT GENERATION was due to ego and insecurity. He was 16 years-old, stepping aboard a STAR TREK cruise and saw the ORIGINAL SERIES cast drunkenly greeting fans at the pier; he thought they were pathetic losers.

Wheaton later notes that because he blew off STAR TREK before the show was complete, he didn't have the earnings and savings that would have come with sticking it out for seven seasons. Unable to find work or even be paid for convention appearances, Wheaton realized that what he should have done was "work on a great series for a few more years, build up a nice bank account, and then parlay the success of STAR TREK into a film career," but instead, he was reduced to selling autographed Wesley action figures on eBay in order to avoid having the bank foreclose on his house. It wasn't until he published his self-mocking memoirs that he found a new career as a writer.

It's interesting to look at Wheaton and then look at actors like Tom Welling, Jared Padelecki and Jensen Ackles, all of whom landed roles on long-running shows and have appreciated how fortunate they are and how they intend to exploit it fully for money, for experience in producing and directing, for promoting their other businesses -- because most actors never find such opportunities.

Wheaton was getting paid thousands of dollars a week to say "Hailing frequencies open" and if that wasn't enough for him, he could have made his own opportunities. Tom Welling found SMALLVILLE's scripts abysmal, but he took the time between repetitive soap opera dialogue with Kristen Kreuk to job shadow producers and directors, treat SMALLVILLE like film school, and by Season 8, he was running the show. Wheaton is a talented writer and sci-fi fan; he should have pitched stories to Roddenberry and Roddenberry might've liked the publicity of his teenaged cast member also being a teenaged writer.

Anyway. I hope Halston Sage is doing okay and, as I said, I assume it was a sick relative sort of situation.

Watching Episode 10 and [spoilers]

Karen shows up in Frank's darkest hour and demands to know why he wasn't there for her in Season 3 of DAREDEVIL and shrieks at Frank that she was nearly impaled and repeatedly stared down gun after gun and people died right in front of her and WHERE WAS HE? Frank apologizes and says he wasn't on the call sheet for those shooting days and had his own show to star in.

No, I'm just messing with you, she doesn't even bring it up. Which has me assuming then that Frank was there, off camera. :-)

I just watched Episode 9 of THE PUNISHER's second season. Spoilers:

The ending has Frank accidentally gunning down some innocent women when pursuing the villain. This is pretty much the same event in the MAX series that drove Frank to his death. And for the TV adaptation of this event, I'm calling BS on it. THE PUNISHER is determined to avoid controversy and moral ambiguity and any serious indictment of the TV Frank Castle, so I'm expecting this to be reversed with some less-than-shocking reveal that any corpses in that room were dead long before Frank fired on them.

However, it's a knee-jerk reaction and they're not always right. :-)

Wolverine really isn't supposed to be male model youthful. He's old and grizzled and I can see both Hartley and Marsters playing different sides of the icon and creating a great character.

I've never seen DEXTER and don't really want to see a show with a serial killer lead -- which may or may not be why Netflix decided not to do a true-to-comics depiction of the Punisher. Back in 2008, I was a bartender and James Manos Jr., the DEXTER Season 1 producer, did a talk at the venue where I spilled drinks and mis-measured liquor. Manos Jr. said he took a step back after the pilot and quit after the first season because the studio and network felt Dexter would need to be softened and made as likable as possible going forward and he hated seeing Dexter become cuddly and unthreatening and he couldn't stop it, so he left, and he felt DEXTER should have ended before Dexter was de-fanged.

Having never seen the show, I'll leave you to decide how to see the opinion of a creator who by his own admission was slowly disengaging from the show before it had even aired its first episode.

While Netflix is seeking a more adult audience for its Marvel shows, I get the sense that the TV studio only wanted a degree of distance from its brand image of Marvel heroes as heroes and the comic book Punisher is absolutely not a hero, so they kept the superficial trappings of the Punisher -- the backstory, the guns, the appearance -- but the character is quite clearly Wolverine. And maybe they're right. Wolverine is one of the best characters Marvel ever created and Marvel TV had no access to him at the time, so when seeking a show about an special forces soldier with a dark past and a desire for redemption and heroism, they did the Punisher. Kind of a shame; Wolverine would have been great as one of the Netflix shows.

There's nothing revolutionary about liking ANT MAN AND THE WASP; you're just enjoying a competently professional product. Haha! (I had the same joke when Slider_Quinn21 said he read and enjoyed a STAR TREK comic book; I remarked that the rest of the world had been doing that since the 60s when there were no reruns or home videos.)

**

I have watched the first episode of THE PUNISHER's Season 2 and... I don't get it. This is not a review, but I don't see the Punisher in this character who is wandering America, going to bars, sharing a sweetly gentle connection with a tough barmaid, taking her and her son out to pancakes the morning after. This is not the Punisher. The Punisher is a kill junkie. He's an addict. He's addicted to murder. He targets criminals because they're acceptable, because the police and society turn a blind eye to him murdering mobsters, drug lords, human traffickers, child pornographers and loansharks. The Punisher's darkest secret is that he was going to divorce his wife, leave his children and go back to the army on the day they died; their deaths were a convenient justification to feed his bloodlust. He was only ever truly happy when he was at war.

This character on Netflix is not the Punisher of the comic books; this character is a blue collar version of Matt Damon's Jason Bourne or Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt or Wolverine. This is a tactile, gentle man of peace who keeps finding conflict that calls for him to go to war. This adaptation is a tacit admission that the comic book Punisher is too bloodthirsty and horrific to be presented as a TV hero for a mass audience. And taken within those terms, this is a pretty decent show. I'm just thinking that if this was what they wanted to do, they should have used a different character, but I confess that I can't think of any other street level Marvel heroes that would have been available to Marvel's TV division.

Back when I was doing research for the REWATCH PODCAST, I did a pretty deep dive into Dean Cain for LOIS AND CLARK. The only red flag I found on him: an ex-girlfriend accused him of philandering, abuse and drug addiction as part of a nasty custody battle for their son. Cain denied the abuse and immediately agreed to regular blood tests and was ultimately granted sole custody.

Numerous ex-'girlfriends' came to bat for him, saying that Cain had always been very upfront that he was a very busy TV star looking to have casual sex without a serious relationship. Also, Cain had stopped dating and also stopped accepting acting roles when his son was born, electing to spend his extra leisure time with his son and live off his savings for a time to be a father. The pregnancy had been unplanned. Cain hadn't been looking to start a family with a random hookup. His immediate reaction was to basically quit life as a swinging single actor to be a full-time dad.

During this time, I was also reading all the scripts for LOIS AND CLARK and comparing them to the aired episodes. Cain's behaviour was extremely unusual for a leading Hollywood actor and the star of a TV show. Cain had a tendency to insert unscripted pauses into his dialogue -- to give other actors verbal reactions to his character that weren't originally written. Cain had a tendency to give his lines to other actors. As someone who has watched William Shatner and Adam West blatantly perform over their co-stars and guest-stars' dialogue, I have a lot of respect for Cain's behaviour on sets and if he brought this same generosity to the SUPERGIRL set, then there was no cause to dismiss him.

Furthermore, as lovely as it'd be to think that Cain was a Trump supporter and unwelcome on a woke, progressive, forward-thinking show that champions refugees, LGBTQ rights, feminism and wokeness, SUPERGIRL's first two and a half seasons were run by Andrew Kreisberg. That's sexual harasser Andrew Kreisberg who has been fired off his own show for abuse, assault and who knows what else. If there is a moral high ground of wokeness, SUPERGIRL was not on it when they told Cain his services were no longer required.

And from my standpoint, as all of you know, nothing annoys me more than unfinished stories, so much so that I had to finish SLIDERS' story twice. My feeling is that having hired Dean Cain and created an arc for him, SUPERGIRL had an obligation to its fans to complete that arc. They didn't. Admittedly, the person who would have kicked Cain off the show has been kicked off himself and while I dislike the action of voting for Trump, "Trump voter" is not a full character description whereas "sexual assaulter" is pretty comprehensive.