SciFi Weekend: Fringe Through The Looking Glass; A Partial Explanation on Revolution; Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chome; Neil Gaiman Making Cybermen Scary; Scarlett Johansson’s Shower Scene in Hitchcock

Fringe took a look  Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Found There. Walter looked at another tape and, in an uncharacteristic move, went off on his own. For a moment I thought he might be crossing over to the alternate universe but instead he wound up in a pocket universe. There are now new elements added to this season’s scavenger hunt–a bald-headed kid adopted by the Observers in a previous season who is now missing, and a radio left in his place. It will be interesting to see what type of message comes over this radio.

This was also an episode which concentrated on development for Olivia and Peter, as they continued to morn the death of Etta. The climax of the episode showed them fighting the Observers, with an Observer telling Peter that he knows what he has done but has made a grave mistake. Whether it turns to be good or bad, it may be analogous to hooking Peter up to the machine with its unexpected results. For now Peter is a better fighter, and more vicious in killing the Observer. His vision then took on a blue tint–yet another effect of the Observer implant in his neck (unless he took Viagra). There are also changes in Walter, who is becoming more like Walternate, or the Walter he was becoming before portions of his brain were removed by William Bell. I would assume this is a consequence of replacing these portions of his brain in Letters of Transit.

Revolution primarily continued its adventure of the week format, this time with a watered-down version of Lord of the Flies.  We did learn more about what caused the blackout, leaving more questions. The Mathesons, along with Grace (who was kidnapped earlier this season) were working on a device to generate electricity and instead it did the opposite–stopping electricity completely. Someone from the Department of Defense pressured Rachel into accepting a government contract for this technology, and he turned out to also be the person who kidnapped Grace. It might have made sense for the DOD to be interested in this as a weapon directed against a specific country, but it is harder to see the rational for using this if it also caused the blackout in the United States. It will be interesting to see if we ever get a plausible explanation.

The web series, Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome is now available on line. Episode one is embedded above. An “explosive unrated edition” will be coming out on Blu-ray & DVD February 19, 2013.

It has been confirmed that Neil Gaiman’s episode of Doctor Who will involve the Cyberman, with Gaiman making them scary again:

Speaking to Reviewer.fr he said: “Steven asked me to write a new episode and I said no because I was too busy. And then he wrote and asked if I wanted to make the Cybermen scary again. And I thought back to when I was six or seven years old: ‘The Moonbase’, ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’ … when I saw them when they were first broadcast. The Cybermen were far more frightening than Daleks, because they do not make noise. Daleks move in all directions, shouting ‘Exterminate’, etc..  With Cybermen it’s different. You turned around and bam! There were Cybermen. It’s scary.

“I told [Moffat] that I would revive the Cybermen for the 50th anniversary year and everything that has happened since, and see what I could do. I do not know if it will work, we’ll see.”

He added: “This will be a stand-alone episode, it will be the penultimate episode of Series 7. It has a beginning, a middle and an end.”

Gaiman also stated that the title of the episode, currently believed to be The Last Cyberman, could still change: “‘The Doctor’s Wife’ was’ Bigger on the Inside’, up to two weeks before release. It could be anything,” he said.

Scarlett Johansson is on the cover of V magazine, recreating the Janet Leigh shower scene from Psycho. She found facing Anthony Hopkins to be far scarier than filming a nude scene:

The flick, about the making of Psycho, finds Johansson having to recreate a certain iconic shower scene.

“We only had the luxury to shoot the scene for a day, and everybody was feeling very nervous because it involved water and nobody wants the actor to get wet,” the 27-year-old told V. “They were concerned with modesty and all these things—but I don’t care about any of that stuff and Janet Leigh never did either.”

But Johannsson did admit that it was “terrifying” having costar Anthony Hopkins, who portrays the famed director, point a long kitchen knife in her face.

“Maybe I watched Silence of the Lambs too many times when I was a kid. Maybe I was having some flashbacks. So I didn’t need too much preparation for the scene,” the actress said.

A trailer for Hitchcock has also been released:

Stupid Question of the Day: What Would Breitbart Do?

Many conservatives totally fail to understand why they did so poorly in last week’s election. Andrew Marcus at Townhall asks a rather ridiculous question: WWBC–What Would Breitbard Do?

The simple answer is that Andrew Breitbart would probably do what he always did before he died. He would spread lies about the opposition. He would do things such as editing video to make it appear that his opponents said things totally different from what they said.

Another answer is that he would remain on the losing side. We saw this year that, despite a spending amount of spending to spread right wing misinformation, Republican ads and false arguments did not fool the voters. People like Breitbart primarily fool other conservatives into believing their false descriptions of Democratic policies and beliefs, putting them at a disadvantage when campaigning in the real world as opposed to the conservative echo chamber.

But I’ve said too much. Let conservative bloggers adopt WWBD as their new mantra. This will just make it more difficult for conservatives to communicate with people living in the real world

The Religious Right Should Declare Victory And Get Out Of Politics

As I pointed out following election day, the day was a victory for defenders of liberty, and a loss for the extremists of the authoritarian right. The New York Times rubs it in:

Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.

They are reeling not only from the loss of the presidency, but from what many of them see as a rejection of their agenda. They lost fights against same-sex marriage in all four states where it was on the ballot, and saw anti-abortion-rights Senate candidates defeated and two states vote to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

It is not as though they did not put up a fight; they went all out as never before: The Rev. Billy Graham dropped any pretense of nonpartisanship and all but endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Roman Catholic bishops denounced President Obama’s policies as a threat to life, religious liberty and the traditional nuclear family. Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition distributed more voter guides in churches and contacted more homes by mail and phone than ever before.

“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

Yes, their views were rejected, and over time the percentage of people who will vote for a candidate who supports the attitudes of the Republican Party will continue to dwindle. America will enter the 21st century, no matter how hard they try to fight it. Science and reason will replace their anti-knowledge attitude.

The election results are just one indication of larger trends in American religion that Christian conservatives are still digesting, political analysts say. Americans who have no religious affiliation — pollsters call them the “nones” — are now about one-fifth of the population over all, according to a study released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The younger generation is even less religious: about one-third of Americans ages 18 to 22 say they are either atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. Americans who are secular are far more likely to vote for liberal candidates and for same-sex marriage. Seventy percent of those who said they had no religion voted for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

The religious right is countered not only by secularists but by a growing number in the religious community who share the political views of the left:

Meanwhile, religious liberals are gradually becoming more visible. Liberal clergy members spoke out in support of same-sex marriage, and one group ran ads praising Mr. Obama’s health care plan for insuring the poor and the sick. In a development that highlighted the diversity within the Catholic Church, the “Nuns on the Bus” drove through the Midwest warning that the budget proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, would cut the social safety net.

My question for the religious right is why the feel that they must impose their views upon others. They can discourage their own daughters to refrain from having an abortion, but they have no right to deny a woman the right to control her own body. Legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage does not mean they have to partake in either. Do they really not realize that many of us liberals do not either? The difference is that we do not feel that it is morally right to impose our life styles upon others, and see no reason why it would even be desirable to do so if we could.

Why don’t they just declare victory in the knowledge that in secular America they personally have the right to refrain from having abortions, smoking marijuana, or marrying someone of the same sex? Liberals  are the ones who support this view and desire to protect freedom of religion. This was also the idea behind the Founding Fathers forming a secular state characterized by separation of church and state. In the past,  some religious organizations saw separation of church and state as the way to ensure that they were free to follow their own religious beliefs. Stop believing the falsehoods spread by Republicans who support a revisionist history of the founding of this nation. If the religious right would just give up their need to impose their views upon others, they would see that a country moving to the left gives them the freedom to follow their religious beliefs. They should just declare victory in their personal lives and keep their views out of politics–as was proposed by the Founding Fathers.