Posts tagged ‘The X-Files’

Say, is there a cool website name that ends in -scape? No, never mind, let’s talk about something else.

While watching season four of The X-Files — which is quite good so far; the show continually confounds my usual ‘2-3 are the best seasons’ theory. Not that it’s really been awesome yet. It just keeps on keeping on. There’s perhaps been a slow improvement overall after a nadir in the early second season.

Ahem. Sorry, that was just supposed to be an aside. Er, while watching season four, and seeing Mulder flitting about between the various states, it occurred to me why Australians just aren’t as big on science fiction as everyone else on the planet. Americans, Europeans… they’re all used to driving, flying, translocating in any direction and coming across people really quickly. And so, they don’t really get the whole ‘space is really big and empty’ idea. And so, they’re quite happy to accept Star Trek finding a new planet all the time.

Australians understand space. They’re used to driving for over eight hours and finding nothing more interesting than Adelaide. They hear people say we’re light years upon light years from anything else and think, “Oh, right, no point exploring then. We might accidentally arrive in the universe’s Adelaide and we don’t want that.” And then they see Star Trek and wonder: didn’t they get the memo?

Or not. I’m not convinced, but sometimes things just bounce around in your head and you can’t get rid of them. Like the music in this what if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging? video hosted on YouTube.com (well, it was, and might be still at a different URL, but we’ll take this GoogleVideo link instead). Watch, and be similarly cursed. Andy asked me when YouTube.com turned up today and I had to admit I didn’t know. I hate to dash the poor kid’s hopes like that. He looks up to me so. Anyone else know?

Channel Ten is promoting their new US import, Supernatural as coming from “The Director of X-Files“. So, just who is the director of The X-Files, given that the show ran for nine seasons with the usual cycling of directors? Is it writer/creator Chris Carter, who directed a about an episode a season? No. Is it Rob Bowman, the director of numerous episodes as well as the 1998 movie? No — he’s too busy making quality films like Elektra.

So who is it? Well, it could be David Nutter, but it seems that Channel Ten mean be Kim Manners — who has directed boodles of times for The X-Files and twice for Supernatural, and is also co-executive producer on both shows. So it’s “from” him. And not, say, “from” Eric Kripke, the creator and writer of the show. Why not? Why, because then they’d have to say “From the co-creator of Tarzan” and I think we can all see that that’s not so impressive.

A few random points of TV interest:

• I’ve watched the first two episodes of Battlestar Galactica season one, and they’re awesome. I doubt all the episodes will be this tense — I don’t think I’ve been closer to the edge of my seat since the first season of 24. I’m particularly looking forward to getting to the final five episodes of the season, because there are downloadable commentaries from SciFi.com.
• Speaking of which, there was a downloadable commentary for ‘The Christmas Invasion’ as well, where Russell T. Davies revealed that Doctor Who‘s second season will show us the establishment of ‘Torchwood’. Hopefully, it’ll be an historical episode, just because that would be much cooler. How much cooler would it have been if The X-Files had been set in 1897?
• And while I’m on The X-Files — I’m on a segue-roll here — I’m halfway through season two, and I’ve just seen the two-parter that introduced the shapeshifting alien bounty hunter. Which reminded me just how awesome we all thought face-morphing was in the nineties. We’ve come a long way.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent today wrestling with Word. In a 53 page document, I changed one group of bullets to roman numerals, and went on to find that every other set of bullets in the document had suffered a similar fate, and had to change them all back. Even the ones that were supposed to be roman numerals refused to reset their numbering for different lists, greying out the option to do so. This is tremendously uninteresting, I know, but I’m writing it down as therapy. Just ignore me.