We join The Doctor, Amy and Rory in the Wild West (they missed their intended target, the Day of the Dead festival by a sizable margin). Turns out that the town they have entered is stuck in a force field that will let no food or weapons in but will let people cross over. The reason for this is because on the horizon there is a teleporting cyborg called The Gunslinger that is out for revenge against the Doctor. No, not our Doctor, but a Doctor called Kahler Jex, who seems like a nice guy. He supplies the town with medical supplies and electricity by using his advanced alien ways and the power from his crashed spaceship.
Category Archives: TV
New Fringe Season 5 Promo!
Here comes another noteworthy Fringe promo. They’re going full bore into preparing us for this whole flash forward thing they showed us last season, this time with a more viral video approach rather than a straight up preview. As we know, the Observers turned from an interesting story element of the mythology of the show, to the forefront of the threat to humanity as we know it. They have become the one, big bad, unifying thing that ties all of the “Fringe” events of Fringe all together in its entirety. The promo itself is fairly simple, with an Observer describing “Residency protocol”, which is just code for the installed curfews on us. He also frequently references “A scan”, which as we saw last season, is tantamount to a horrific psychically induced death, a la Scanners. In fact, assuming it’s intentional, I’m fairly positive it’s a reference to that film.
But of course they can’t show this on TV, but we all know that’s what they mean.
Here’s the promo:
I’m really antsy for this season to come already, as Fringe is a show that is truly unique. Never has a show gone from being truly awful, like it was in Season 1, to one of the best examples of Science Fiction in recent memory, and by far the best Sci-Fi show on television today. If you had asked me that the fifth season of this show would be as good as it is, and be where it is, in relation to the first season, I would have slapped you for trying to trick me into continuing to watch a terrible show. It took the coaxing of several friends repeatedly telling me “it gets better, it gets better, just watch it!”, to trudge all the way though the full first season. When I did, I got to that admittedly pretty clever and enticing last episode, which opened up the show in such a beautiful and revelatory way. It’s climb in quality since then has been exponential, and created some of the best hours of TV I’ve ever seen. Season 3’s “White Tulip“, featuring Peter Weller, also known as goddamned RoboCop, is an incredibly moving and brilliant time travel story that never manages to lose its emotional center, or get bogged down with technical minutiae. That episode alone puts Fringe up in the echelon of brilliant modern TV shows, alongside Battlestar Galactica, Lost, the first season of Heroes, Doctor Who, Carnivale, and even The X-Files.
The flash forward in this season isn’t exactly a new idea itself, as Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse employed the same tactic for its season finales, for both its seasons. Unfortunately, Dollhouse was a muddled, plodding, slow paced show that never found its footing, and meandered about for the whole first season until that decent finale. It’s a bummer that the finale, which might as well have been an entirely different show, was a much better show than Dollhouse ever was. Then Season 2 rolled around, and went back to the same boring, plodding pace, and that was enough for me. Fringe has taken the sudden flash forward concept and ran with it. What will happen to our Fringe team? What happened to Olivia in between now and then? And will the Observers be stopped? Will timelines be changed? Can they be changed? Is there truly no fate but what we make?
There’s even a few noticeable Easter eggs in the promo, that compelled me to grab screenshots for you to analyze and speculate further. Enjoy!
Goddamn, I wish it was September 28th already.
New TV: Matthew Perry in “Go On”
Back in August, yours truly penned an article lambasting NBC for, among other things, their terrible-looking fall lineup. Animal Practice for example is surprisingly still on the air, no doubt because of Weeds mega-star and sarcasm factory Justin Kirk. The suspected lone bright spot, from this author’s perspective, was the new Matthew Perry comedy Go On. The promos made it look a bit formulaic—stereotypical, if you will—but it looked to have potential. If you can’t give the guy who had his TV Guide delivered to Miss Chanandler Bong a chance, then who are you gonna give a chance to when the time comes to review a TV pilot?
The SNL Cast Shuffle Report for Season 38
When the 38th season debuts this weekend, Saturday Night Live will once again have a new look.
Let’s take a moment here…
Are we going to miss Kristen Wiig’s fabulous characters (surely I’m not the only person who has to fight the urge to gleefully announce “APPROVED!” when their credit card goes through successfully at the grocery store) and Andy Samberg’s digital shorts? Of course we are. That’s not even up for debate; but they are not the be all to end all of the entire show.
There is no need to lament on how awful SNL is now and how it isn’t half as it good as it was “back in the day”. Before we can even have that argument we have to realize that “back in the day” has a direct correlation to the pastgazer’s age. Is pastgazer even a word? Can I declare it a word? I am.
Pastgazer (noun) – Someone who is incapable of being excited about the potential future of a television show because they are way too hung up on how it “used to be”.
If the pastgazer is in their 30’s, I assure you their “back in the day” involves Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. Someone in their 20’s (albeit probably their later 20’s) loves them some Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. The 40 somethings are still plodding along singing the Chopping Broccoli song and answering everything, even when not at all appropriate, with “well isn’t that special?” You don’t even want to be in the room when they feel the need to break out their patented “SCHWING!” move. It’s just embarrassing. Then you’ve got the real badasses in their 50’s who scoff at the idea that SNL has been any good since Chevy Chase left… after the first season. They long for the days of random interludes involving bee costumes and Land of Gorch sketches with the Muppets; yes those Muppets, sort of.
I think we can all agree that everyone misses Will Ferrell. Surely missing the Spartan Cheerleaders is universal. I chose to live in a world (even if imaginary) where the vast majority of people grieve daily for the loss of those crazy kids.
Thing is, even with seemingly everyone in the universe screaming about how SNL is not as good as it used to be, it is still on the air. Which is more than can be said for many other shows (let’s have a moment of silence for Kings, a great show cut down in its prime. Damn you NBC.) so obviously they are doing something right and someone is watching. A lot of someones. Someones who still like the show. Someones who in 20 years are going to say, “SNL was way better when Nasim Pedrad and Taran Killam were on.” Trust me, it’s gonna happen. This little bit of casting news is for those someones.
After the departure of Kristin Wiig, Andy Samburg, and Abby Elliott, three new cast members have been added to the lineup.
While hailing from various parts of the country, all three recently were active in the Chicago theatre scene.
Aidy Bryant is originally from Phoenix, where she lived before she attending Columbia College, and then went on to make her mark with the Improv Olympic, Annoyance, and most recently, the e.t.c. stage of The Second City theatres.
During her time at The Second City, she had the chance to team up with the Lyric Opera. Who would have ever thought that Gretel was so well adjusted?
Tim Robinson is a Detroit native, starting his career with Second City Detroit before moving on to the Second City touring company and then The Second City mainstage in Chicago. He’s been a busy man – he recently put together a pilot for Comedy Central called My Mans that was unfortunately not picked up. However, in addition to joining the SNL cast, he also has been cast in a midseason sitcom on CBS called Friend Me.
Judging by this sketch with The Second City, we might see Tim right at home with SNL’s “commercials”.
The most recently announced addition is Cecily Strong. She is a Chicago native (well Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago) and also a Second City alumni. She was with the Second City touring company and also performed with the Improv Olympic.
Another commercial sketch, this one is right up SNL’s alley, no pun intended.
Lest the actors get all the attention, it was also announced that there have been two new writers hired for the new season. Neil Casey and Josh Patten both come to SNL by way of the Upright Citizen’s Brigade in New York City.
That’s the news; now all that’s left is to take bets on how many Family Guy voices Seth MacFarlane uses during the opening monologue. Oh and we should begin the countdown to when Jason Sudeikis takes his final bow. While he’s listed on the cast page, he’s made it no secret that he is perhaps tired with SNL, which is sad. Actually I think SNL will totally suck when Jason Sudeikis leaves and I will never watch again!!!! While it was just announced that Mr. Sudeikis is returning for his 8th season, it is unclear how long he will stay though- at least through the elections which we can all agree is a good thing.
I leave you with this – a man who I think we can all agree, will most certainly feel the absence of Kristin Wiig like no one else.
The 38th season premiere will air on Saturday, September 15th with Seth MacFarlane hosting along with musical guest Frank Ocean, and his guest, John Mayer.
Doctor Who: 702 “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”
Just to let you know, there will be spoilers in this review – so be warned. We start in 1334, Egypt, with the Doctor getting a lot of attention from Queen Nefertiti after he has saved her kingdom. They both get whizzed off to a distress signal from Earth (2376) where a ship is on a collision course.
G4 to Change Format: Resemble Something Like GQ
In some of the saddest geek news of the year, G4, which has already been on the decline for the past few years, has finally decided to change the format completely by 2013. NBC Universal, which owns the channel, has decided to go the direction of GQ, slowly pulling themselves away from the TV/Music/Movies/Video Game format the channel was known for. Debuting in 2002, G4 was one of the few places nerds could go watch TV and actually enjoy what was going on.
Then came along Olivia Munn. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Munn-ster, but, as one of my fellow Grizzly Bomb writers pointed out, she once said X-Cube 360….yeah. Speaking of said Grizzly Bomb writer, who happens to be none other than Cheesebadger himself, we began talking about this in detail when he first heard about the change. He brought up some really great points and you can read those below:
They used to have long blocks of a show called Cinematech, which was the cutscenes from games, edited together in a theme. It was interesting. There was also a terrible game show called Game On, where two unfunny comedians tried to play games competitively against each other, to win some inane prize. Sadly that show is probably leagues ahead of the bullshit they’re showing now. It really so gradually became less and less about games I didn’t notice until they hired some no name model to start hosting in place of sarah lane, an actual tech tv senior who was leaving, along with all of the other actual game/tech related people. That no name model? Olivia Munn. In a way, she was the beginning of the end for G4. As likeable as I find her, she’s the epitome of what was wrong, and what is wrong with that channel. A pretty face hired to read lines and pretend they’re interested in geek subjects, and to pander to a geek audience. When she started out, she clearly, CLEARLY had no idea what the hell she was talking about. She called it a “Xcube 360” once. She’s clearly a gifted comedic actress, who carefully and skillfully manipulated a geek audience to gain a fanbase to build her reputation and recognition on, to jump ship and pursue her true intents all along. I don’t blame her, she’s a good actress, but her whole “geek goddess” thing is so goddamn fake.
There you have it, folks. The Badger has spoken. Regardless of the possibly interesting direction G4 could go in, I’m definitely going to miss Attack of the Show, even if it was, as Cheesy said, the beginning of the end. But, seeing that there are literally thousands of channels on TV, it’s hard to imagine a world where a G4 spawn or spin-off isn’t possible. It seems that only time will tell.
This is for hardcore gamers looking for serious media reports…
Grizzly Bomb 