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Doctor Who might be between seasons, but there are still clips available. In this 1995 clip the TARDIS crew comes back from the future to see The Beatles perform. One girl from the future mentions that she’s heard of the Beatles and has even visited their memorial in Liverpool. She is surprised that they performed “classical music.” It would have been really eerie if she had made reference to the Beatles splitting up, or John Lennon getting shot.

Doctor Who dominates the Hugo Award nominations for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. The show received nominations for Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, Girl in the Fireplace, and for School Reunion. Battlestar Galactica received a nomination for Downloaded, and Stargate SG-1 received a nomination for 200.

The nominees for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form are Children of Men, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, The Prestige, A Scanner Darkly, and V for Vendetta. The nominees for best novels are Eifelheim by Michael Flynn, His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, Glasshouse by Charles Stross, Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, and Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Doctor Who has been renewed for a fourth season, but it has not been announced whether David Tennant will return. The third season starts on BBC One on March 31, with Freema Agyeman as the Doctor’s new companion, Martha Jones, to replace Billie Piper (Rose). The role of companion became more significant with Rose. While much of The Doctor’s backstory was no longer meaningful with the death of the other Timelords, Rose became the first companion to have a real life shown beyond traveling with The Doctor. The replacement of Rose with Martha Jones could provide for a new situations if they utilize Martha in a similar manner. There is no word as to when the fourth season will be aired in the United States, but the first episode should be available for download using bit torrent by later this weekend.

Startrek.com reports that Scotty will be returning to outer space in April:

The first rocket launch to memorialize James Doohan by taking a portion of his cremated remains into space has been set for Saturday, April 28, in New Mexico, with a public memorial planned for the day prior.

The memorial service will be held at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo on Friday, April 27. The Saturday launch will take place at New Mexico’s new “Spaceport America” location adjacent to the White Sands Missile Range. A specific time of day has not yet been set for either event. Both the memorial and viewing of the launch will be open to the general public. Doohan’s widow, Wende, will be present at both events, and other special guests may be announced later.

“While ‘Scotty’ lived this, Jimmy lived for this,” Ms. Doohan said in a press release. “I will be there to see the launch, knowing that Jimmy is participating in an industry which he loved so very much.”

Space Services Inc. (SSI), aka Celestis, provides the memorial spaceflight service by partnering with a launch provider and attaching a canister of modules containing a “symbolic portion” of each participant’s ashes — seven grams or less — to a rocket vehicle, usually as a “secondary payload.”

The Battlestar Galactica third season DVD is expected to be released in August. There have been three posts earlier this week on Battlestar Galactica which include information from Ron Moore regarding some of the mysteries left in the season finale. The post-finale posts on BSG are here, here, and here.

Lost might be joining shows such as Battlestar Galactica and 24 next season in showing all episodes in a single block following the holidays. This week’s episode featured more needless destruction, but this time we can’t blame Locke. We find that the Others aren’t necessarily the most despicable characters now that we have the full story on Paulo and Nikki. The flashback shows that they poisoned the director of a show Nikki guest stared on in order to steal diamonds from him. Most of the flash backs actually occur after crash. The moment that Nikki mentioned that those spiders will paralyze their victims the outcome with the two winding up buried alive was obvious. It was bad enough that Nikki didn’t account for the possibility of being bitten by the spider which bit Paulo. At very least she should have recalled being told that the spider would attract others. Incidentally, that junior high science teacher was quite an expert on very rare species. If only he had been smart enough not to blow himself up.

Seeing what worthless scoundrels the two were made it easy to accept their fate. Paulo certainly had no interest in anything beyond the diamonds. Things might have turned out quite differently for several characters if only he told someone else about the conversation he overheard about how the Others planned to use Michael to capture Jack. The one surprising act of needless destruction was burying the diamonds along with Nikki and Paulo. They could come in handy if ever rescued, and might even be of value in negotiating with the Others.

This was also the second recent episode in which the flashbacks were used differently from the usual scenario of showing a character before they came to the island. This week the flashback took place primarily on the island, A few weeks ago the flashbacks of Desmond were also handled differently. As they are not stuck with the format of always using true flashbacks to the past, I’ve wondered if, in the final season, they might substitute views of the characters after leaving the island instead of flashbacks. This way they could both end the series with a rescue, while also answering questions about what happens to the characters when they return home, with many having left at critical points in their life.

My wish of two weeks ago for Seventh Heaven to be put out of its misery has been fulfiled as word is now out that the show is to be cancelled. I bet there is no last minute reprieve this season. The fate of Veronica Mars is still up in the air with many expecting them to skip forward and show Veronica training to work for the FBI if the show returns next year. Checking the stat counters, I found that the picture of Kristin Bell in SciFi Friday from two weeks ago is beating search engine hits here for Britney Spears, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising considering that Bell has been named #11 on Maxim’s Hot 100 of 2006 list. I imagine her photos in Maxim were to get her fans prepared for her bathtub scene in Pulse.

While it isn’t official, Slice of SciFi quotes David Duchovny as saying that he and Gillian Anderson are in the final negotiations to star in a second X-Files movie. There is no script yet, but reportedly the plan is for it to be a stand-alone story and not part of the alien mythology. It would be easier to write such a story, especially considering how convoluted the mythology stories became, but I think there would be far more interest in seeing what happens after the first movie ended with warnings of an alien invasion to come.

The cover art for the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, has been revealed:

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