Entertainment Weekly has an interview with Matthew Fox which provides some spoilers as to the upcoming season of Lost. As became clear in the final moments of last season’s finale, we were seeing a flash forward as opposed to a flashback. Jack, Kate, and four others leave the island and become famous as the Oceanic Six. They apparently tell an “incredibly awkward” lie regarding how they returned and the rest did not. The person in the casket in last season’s finale is yet another person who left the island who is not one of the Oceanic Six. Other reports on line claim it is Michael, Walt, Claire, Aaron, Cindy, or Vincent in the coffin. Time travel apparently plays a part. Instead of asking where the island is, the big question might be when. As is foreshadowed in the finale, it also sounds like Jack actually does return to the island.
Entertainment Weekly also has a two page spread (above) with some spoilers regarding the upcoming fourth season of Battlestar Galactica. The picture, modeled on Di Vinci’s Last Supper, leaves a spot open for the final, as of now unidentified, Cylon. Ron Moore has admitted (assuming he is not misleading us) that this means that the final Cylon cannot be one of those shown in the picture. I had already assumed that Starbuck would not be the Cylon after reading previously that she would start out the next season in the brig as a suspected Cylon after her return. They’ve already gone as far as they should with the idea of Baltar being a possible Cylon. Having Roslin be a Cylon would take away from the story of her dying of breast cancer. I also doubted that Adama or anyone in his family would be a Cylon, especially as the family will pay a role in the spin off should the show ever get made.
The fourth season begins April 4, with Battlestar Galactica moving back to Fridays. The DVD collection of the third season will be released on March 25. I assume that it is common for DVD sets to be released so soon before the upcoming season in order to take advantage of synergistic marketing, but I wonder if it wouldn’t make sense to have a longer gap. On a couple of occasions I have watched an entire season in a week in preparation for the new season of a show, but there is a limit to how often I’d consider doing this. Being able to watch older episodes in a more leisurely manner might help shows add to their audience in the new season.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles begins this weekend and the show will be a reboot of the movie series. The show takes advantage of the time travel concept of changing the past to create new time lines. The series takes place after the events of Terminator II, but involves a new time line in which events don’t occur as in Terminator III. If this isn’t potentially confusing enough, there will also be a second trilogy of Terminator movies, without Arnold, taking place after the original trilogy. Summer Glau, best known to science fiction fans as River in Firefly and Serenity, plays the role of Cameron, a Terminator who acts as a protector to Sarah and John Connor. In an interview in Comics Continuum she reveals a little about her character:
Cameron doesn’t feel things, but she almost can. And she can absolutely mimick human emotion. And that’s been the most challenging thing for me. And as an actress approaching a scene, knowing that you can’t really feel anything thing is really complicated and complex.
Barack Obama’s connection to Star Trek became a topic of discussion in the blogosphere this week after The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute had a post about how Jeri Ryan (Star Trek: Voyager) influenced his Senate race. The messy details of her divorce to Jack Ryan, including being forced to go with him to sex clubs, forced Ryan to quit the race. While Obama might still have won a Senate seat, Ryan’s departure from the race allowed him to have an easy victory as Allan Keyes became his opponent instead.