McConnell Promises Conservatives That Republicans Will Work To Restrict Abortions If They Take Control Of Senate

With control of the Senate up for grabs, The Hill reports on one key reason why it is important for Democrats to get out to vote. Mitch McConnell vows to escalate Republican efforts to restrict reproductive rights and promote further government intrusion in the private lives, and bodies, of women:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promised Saturday to focus more attention on limiting abortions if Republicans take control of the Senate in November.

Speaking to the National Right to Life Convention in his home state of Kentucky, the Senate’s top Republican suggested Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has blocked the upper-chamber from voting on bills that would limit women’s rights to abortion, according to conservative website Townhall.com.

But McConnell said he would push abortion-limiting legislation to pressure President Obama to take a stand on the issue.

“For six years, the president has been isolated from this growing movement,” McConnell said. “He will be forced to listen to the cause that’s brought us all here this morning. Senate Dems would be forced to take a stand.”

I fear that the Republicans will really do this, as opposed to their empty promises to work to create more jobs when they took control of the House. Undoubtedly Obama will take a stand and veto such legislation.

SciFi Weekend: Continuum; Arrow; The Flash; Doctor Who; Community; Masters of Sex

Continuum Last Minute

Last Minute, the third season finale of Continuum, was an even bigger game-changer than the previous finales. I thought the season dragged for a while after they set up the situation of two Alec’s, but the addition of Brad and the changes in the time line added considerably to the second half of the season. The final three episodes certainly made up for any slow moments earlier in the season.

At the start of the episode, the couples of Kiera and Brad, along with Alec and Emily, appeared happy to just live quiet lives together and drop out of all the action. Events such as the attempt by Piron Alec to kill Time Travel Alec prevented that from occurring. Earlier episodes dealt with Kiera’s awakening as she realized that the Orwellian future she came from was not worth preserving.  Initially I thought this would lead to her working with Liber8 to prevent the Corporate Congress from taking over. Instead the future has been changed so instead she had to prevent the even worse Terminator-like future which Alec’s time jump ultimately resulted in. If not for her awakening, and other events in recent episodes, we would not have reached the point where Kiera and Liber8 could work together so easily to prevent Piron Alec from accelerating the time line which caused mass destruction rather than tyranny. Ideally they could change things so that neither future has to come about.

While the replacement of Piron Alec with Time Travel Alec, with Time Travel Alec ultimately killing his other self, was the heart of the plot of the episode, it is not clear if it mattered in the end. Kellog already had events in motion to replace Alec as head of Piron. I found this a little unrealistic, thinking that while it was certainly plausible that others in the company would have problems with Alec, they more likely would have replaced him with someone on the inside rather than this outsider. This might also shed a little light on how time travel works on Continuum. Initially the beacon appeared to do nothing, suggesting that Brad’s time line might have been obliterated. It wasn’t until after Kellog took over Piron that the space marines appeared from the future. This suggests a variable future, but also raises the question of whether the future is the same future Brad came from. If so, was it setting up Kellog to control Piron, and not Alec taking over Piron, which really set us on a course towards that future?

With Alec out at Piron, presumably this means he will return to SadTech. While Piron starts out with greater financial resources, and would benefit from Kellog’s knowledge of the future, SadTech has the advantage in scientific knowledge with Alec, along with potential help from others such as Jason and even Lucas. Perhaps a battle between Piron and SadTech starts out the corporate wars of Brad’s future. In Brad’s time line Kellog was the winner, but the third season demonstrated that the future can be rewritten. As we learned two weeks ago that, “No one controls the future. It is an ever-evolving organism, free to change as it sees fit.”

The roles of other characters have also changed this season, and it is not certain how much they will matter (assuming everything is not changed again with a jump to another time line). Having Carlos in charge of the police was instrumental in the effort to switch the two Alecs but Dillon remains alive and may or may not return to his position. Julian knows about the time travelers and his role in fighting the original future, but where does that leave him in this new time line? Characters such as Escher, Sonya, Betty, and most of the Freelancers appear dead after this season, but death might not be a permanent change.

The appearance of the space marines raises a number of questions. Are they from the same future Brad came from, considering his reaction was to run rather than make contact with people who might have been sent back to assist him? Even if from the same future, perhaps another faction got control of time travel and received the message from the beacon. If Kellog is now the puppet master, what is he up to? Is future Kellog trying to change the time line he lives in or bring it about? He sent Brad back with vague instructions including to neutralize the zealots, stabilize the “incursion site” and “salt the God-saved Earth.” If the space marines have the same mission, I can see why Brad’s reaction would be to run.

With all the factions we have seen, other than for the space marines we know the least about what the Traveler and Curtis Chen are up to. What does it mean when the Traveler announced, “It has begun.” It no longer appears that their goal is the old Freelancer goal of keeping the future on track and, as it appears that the time line has been altered many times, it is questionable if there really is one correct future to protect. There is no indication whether the original time line can ever be restored, which might mean it is impossible for Kiera to ever return to her family (which she is now realizing). I also fear this means we might not ever find out the specifics of old Alec Sadler’s plan in sending both Liber8 and Kiera back in time.

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Simon Barry discussed some aspects of the finale with  TV Guide Canada:

TV Guide Canada: Let’s talk about a scene fairly early on in the episode, with Kiera kissing Brad. Some would view that as a betrayal of her husband Greg and son Sam, regardless of the timeline we’re in.

Simon Barry: Yeah. I think at a certain point we have allowed Kiera to make her decision that she’s not going home in this season. That protecting the world that she came from is a bad idea because she’s changed her mind on what the right future is. After that moment, she’s made that sacrifice of her husband and her son. That kiss, I think, is indicative of her decision to embrace the life she now has in the present. And Brad can relate to her because he’s had a very similar experience.

TVGC: There were a lot of fun scenes in the finale. I actually yelled ‘What?!’ when the camera cut to Kiera turning to Travis for help.

SB: That was one of those wonderful moments that we discovered in the editing room as opposed to something that I had written. I had written that they had gotten together, but the reveal was in a different place. It just worked so much better revealing him at the end of the scene than the beginning, which was how it was originally written. I have to give major props to Jamie Alain, who edited the episode and came up with that.

TVGC: Speaking of things written into the script, was it written in there that Garza, Travis and Kiera would arrive at Piron’s headquarters walking slow motion and ready to fight?

SB: Yes, you can thank me, that was all me! [Laughs.] Will Waring, who directed it, did a bang-up job with it. Sometimes in the script I’ll put things like, ‘This should be a “holy shit moment in slo-mo.”‘ That was a scene in the script where I wanted the audience to realize that this was a big deal. I wanted it to have the impact that it did.

TVGC: The fight between the two Alecs was pretty impressive. It must have been a difficult shoot, what with making sure the stand-in and Erik Knudsen with coordinating, as well as the CGI.

SB: That whole sequence with Alec on Alec, from a directorial view, was an amazing challenge for Will Waring. He really had to think of every shot in specific terms because this was not a typical fight sequence where you can line up the actors and shoot from different angles. You had one actor playing both sides of the fight. A really specific plan had to be drawn up and also, there was some camera trickery where we had to see both Alecs at the same time, which meant technical challenges as well. And we were doing all of this on the 35th floor rooftop of a building made everything that we were doing even more challenging. Wind, the elements and just a very small space to work in. It was an unbelievably tall order for Will and he really did his homework so that it could be shot.

TVGC: Let’s jump ahead to the big reveal of the episode. The Traveler said, ‘It has begun,’ and Kiera and Brad realized what they did had affected the timeline after all when the soldiers from 2039 arrived.

SB: Yeah. The idea was that they could check the result of what they had done. And of course, Brad’s future is still intact otherwise these guys would never have come back. We wanted to suggest that there was a layer of success.

TVGC: Those were pretty cool suits, but they’re going to stand out on the streets of Vancouver.

SB: Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be standing around looking at them though.

TVGC: Kellog has made his power play and unseated Alec at the top of Piron, suggesting his future turns out the way it is supposed to in 2039.

SB: Yeah. The fact that the soldiers came back and we saw Kellog at the beginning of the episode as this powerful guy was an indication that his control of the future is an important one.

Sacrifice

John Barrowman will be returning as a regular on the third season of Arrow and there is news on four new characters, which also give an idea about the direction of the upcoming season:

‘DANIEL’ | Though Daniel could be a fake name to throw off spoilerholics, this 20something gent — a major recurring character for Season 3 — is a handsome, enigmatic and highly intelligent entrepreneur developing groundbreaking technology. (Picture a business magnate in Ryan Gosling’s body.) Though exuding charm and confidence in public, he privately harbors a tragic past that will drive him to become a tech-powered superhero. Watch for this formidable fella to be a love interest for Felicity and a rival of Oliver’s – both personally and professionally.

‘SETH’ | A well-educated criminal with grand ambitions and a knack for chemistry, this potentially recurring character gains power over his enemies by exposing them to a drug that drains their willpower. Oh, and he is very much a physical match for The Arrow.

TOSHI | Majorly recurring in (at least) the Hong Kong flashbacks, Toshi will serve as Oliver’s teacher and handler, and eventually become a friend. A well-trained operative, skilled in weaponry, combat and intelligence gathering, he is also a devoted father and husband.

AKIKO | Toshi’s wife is another of Oliver’s Hong Kong caretakers, and is herself highly skilled in martial arts.

The Flash

The pilot for The Flash leaked out on line and reportedly included plot elements which could have ramifications for the entire DC television and movie universe. I have heard that The Flash will be appearing in the planned Justice League of America movie but Oliver Queen will not. Here is one report on The Flash pilot:

Earlier today, the first episode of CW’s The Flash leaked online and remained there for an hour, months ahead of the pilot’s planned Fall 2014 release. While several fans are already covering the overall episode, let’s focus on the bombshell within the very last scene.

At the very end of the episode, Harrison Wells — previously mentioned in Arrow, a now-wheelchair bound physicist who helps Barry access his powers and is at the helm of The Flash project — slinks into a hidden room within STAR labs, where a small podium-style projector sits in front of him. He then rises out of his wheelchair, steps forward, and turns on the projector to display the front page of a newspaper from 2024. The headline details: The Flash going missing during a crisis. Oh, also, creepy physicist, are you suddenly a bad guy?

For fans of the DCU, this points directly at the Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline, more famously known by the name of it’s 2005-2006 incarnate, Infinite Crisis. With that in mind, could this mean something huge for the DC Cinematic Universe — or will the Crisis storyline be regulated to TV?

What this could spell out is a wild ride for the cinematic universe, with The Flash already lined up for a team-up movie alongside Green Lantern, and the Justice League already on schedule for 2016. But with such an expansive storyline, this writer doesn’t think DC will go the Crisis route right off the bat.

Still, it’s incredible to imagine that plans are already this big for the DCCU. If they’re preparing for Crisis, they’re pulling out the big guns against Marvel, which — almost ironically — is currently unable to pull all of it’s entities together between production studios for a movie adaptation of one of their most incredible multi-universe crossovers, Civil War.

Doctor Who returns August 23. Steven Moffat also admitted that he knows the biggest secret of all, the Doctor’s real name, but he isn’t telling:

Discussing the situation in a recent interview with The Metro newspaper, Moffat revealed: “No-one can know the Doctor’s name, except each successive showrunner.

“We’re taken into a special room far beneath the BBC and given the ancient and special runes that spell his true and awful name.

“We’re commanded never to reveal what we’ve learned.”

He jokingly added: “Because then the show would have to be renamed Mildred…”

community, season 4, episodic photos, episode 411, still photos, unit photos

The cancellation of Community was the most disappointing news regarding the decisions of the networks. The talks to revive the show have broken down with Hulu. If we are to still get six seasons and a movie, Sony will probably have to find another home for the show very quickly as the cast currently only remains under contract until June 30.

Masters of Sex, one of the best new shows of the 2013 season, returns on July 13. The second season trailer is above.