Sci Fi Friday (Sunday Edition): Leaving The Island; An Alliance With Cylons; Sontarans Return; And Einstein on God

This week’s episode of Lost, There’s No Place Like Home Part I, was first part of the season finale, with the flash forward apparently being not very far ahead of the story on the island. Those on the island face death if they remain, but going out to the freighter might not be even safer, especially after we find there’s a bomb aboard. There’s the last ditch attempt to “move the island” which hopefully will be explained in the two hour conclusion. Could this mean moving the island in time?

In the flash forward we see the Oceanic Six first returning home and giving their cover story. The assumption is that this arrival home comes directly after the encounter with the freighter. While this is the most likely time line, for some time I’ve been wondering if they are misleading us. Perhaps the freighter is a dead end and the Oceanic Six doesn’t return home until a later date.

I’ve thought that Battlestar Galactica was moving a little slowly the last few weeks, but we are starting to see a pay off in this week’s episode, Guess What’s Coming To Dinner. The visions of Athena and Six become a reality for Sharon, but I wonder if killing another Six will make any difference. While presumably the killed Six can no longer be resurrected, she is not the only Six aboard Galactica. An even greater conflict might be in store should they succeed in unboxing the Threes and find out the identity of the final five. The four revealed at the end of last season are bound to try to prevent their identities from being revealed, and I sure doubt they have any interest in going off with the Cylon rebels.

We’ve received some hints about the possible outcome from the Last Supper photo. Now it turns out that part of the picture has changed.

We might have more of Battlestar Galactica to watch than anticipated. Up to three made for television movies might be made later this year.

Viewers of Doctor Who on the SciFi Channel saw a new menace to earth from an old Who villain, the Sontarans. As is common with two part episodes, they do a far better job of setting up the menace than they do of resolving it, but the conclusion is far less disappointing than some previous multi-part shows, such as last year’s stories on the Daleks in Manhattan and last season’s finale, The Last of The Time Lords. UNIT plays a major role but it is hard to think of them the same way after the darker way they were portrayed in Torchwood. For those viewing the BBC episodes, The Doctor meets Agatha Christie.

Moving from science fiction to science, an old letter from Albert Einstein made the news:

A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as “pretty childish” and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a “chosen people,” sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate.

While Einstein’s religious views do not prove anything either way, there have long been people who have felt a need to deny Einstein’s rejection of religion at an early age. While they have taken some quotes from Einstein to suggest he was more religious than he actually was, this letter provides little doubt as to his actual beliefs. For example, Einstein wrote, “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

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