Battlestar Galactica, Season 4, Episode 1

The first episode of the final season of Battlestar Galactica picks up exactly where season 3 ended.   It turns out that Kara Thrace is real and Lee was not imagining her.  While at the bridge Tigh starts imagining himself killing Adama when given orders but realises that he has been zoning out.  The other final four are still fearful of having sleeper programming like Boomer did in the early seasons.

At the hangar, Sam continues to doubt himself until Galen reminds him that they have chosen to be loyal to the human cause.  That being said, Sam sorties with the rest of the VIPERs and begins battling the Cylons.  During the battle one of the Cylon raiders kamikazes into a civilian cruiser, killing 600 humans.

In the battle one of the raiders manages to scan Sam, which prompts the entire Cylon fleet to withdraw from combat.  Once Kara returns to the Galactica, she is greeted warmly by Sam and Lee but is viewed with suspicion by Roslin and Adama, who suspect she may be a Cylon ruse.

Upon her return to the battlestar, Kara is oblivious that she has been “dead” for nearly 2 months and that her VIPER was shown to be destroyed on video.  She keeps making claims that she has seen Earth, the “yellow star (sun)” while crossing through a “gas giant with rings (Saturn)” before returning to the heat of combat.  Most of the crew are skeptical and doubt Kara’s claims.  Also, Thrace is shown to have major headaches everytime the fleet jumps because she claims that they are going the wrong way and only she can feel the right path to Earth.

Meanwhile Baltar has been whisked away by his followers who we learn are part of a cult based on Baltar’s teaching.  Some parallels are made between Baltar and Jesus with his rantings about a “One true God” and his prayers for God to spare a sick child’s life for his own.  It seems like Baltar has attracted a cult of young free spirits who are drawn to his ideas of monotheism without realising it is based on Cylon influences.

Baltar is later attacked in the bathroom by two men who still harbour grudges over his rule in New Caprica.

Roslin visits an imprisoned Number Six to ask her about the Final Five.  Number Six tells the President that she can feel their presence within Galactica.  This implies that Kara is the 5th Cylon as Number Six never had this feeling until her return.

While examining Kara’s VIPER, Galen finds that the fighter is brand new and that there is no data of any sort on the ship’s computers.  This implies that it could be a Cylon ruse reinforced by the fact that there is video of Kara’s original VIPER exploding and Lee as the witness.

The other final Four Cylons are discussing their nature in private.   Sam and Galen bring up the potential problem of Cylon programming kicking in just like what happened with Boomer.  Tigh vows to not harm Adama and makes it a point by leaving the discussion without his sidearm.

Kara and Sam visit Kara’s memorial in the ship.  Sam tells her that he still loves her regardless of what she is while Kara says she would kill Sam if he really was a Cylon.  While they are talking, the fleet makes another jump and Kara gets another headache.  She then decides that she must speak with Roslin and even knocks out her guards and Sam to get to the President’s quarters.

The episode ends with Kara cocking and pointing a gun at the President.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 8 & 9

The WGA strike really took its toll on this show as it ends in a cliffhanger and with unresolved questions. Most of episode 8 centered on decoding the T-888 chip that Cameron kept from an earlier episode and Cromatie’s attempts to find John through the school system.

The hacked T-888 chip reveals that the terminator known as Vick was sent back in time to monitor a Barbara Chamberlain to develop the ARTIE, which would have been an automated system that monitored traffic in Los Angeles. Vick was revealed to have married Barbara and actively encouraged her to develop the programme while secretly removing opposition such as a Jennifer Peck.

They learn that ARTIE would be the nerve centre for Skynet should it ever come into contact with that programme. With this in mind, Sarah decides to have John create a virus that would be uploaded to ARTIE, which was stored in City Hall. Derek and Sarah manage to break into the building and upload the virus, but it fails and they are almost caught by the police.

While John continues to scour Vick’s CPU for memories, the CPU manages to reactivate and almost takes over his computer. However, they manage to stop it before it sends out a signal to other terminators alerting them of John Connor.

Cameron later suggests they use her CPU and hack into the city network so she can go in and disable the system from within. John extracts the CPU from Cameron’s head and gets her CPU to successfully hack the system.

We later learn that Vick had killed Barbara after he had gotten her to successfully finish the ARTIE programme. Cromartie searches every school district for John but Cameron uses Norris to pose as John to throw him off. Sarah then makes a call to buy the Turk.

Episode 9 opens with a flashback of Derek and Kyle Reese playing baseball on 2011 just before Judgment Day starts. In the present, Agent Ellison pays a visit to Charley Dixon asking him about Sarah Connor. He tells him that he seems to believe in her claims but Charley tells him that an agent by the name of Kester has already stopped by asking the same things. Charley later visits Sarah about Ellison and is told to get away from her to save himself.

Sarah and Cameron go to a local internet cafe to look for a Sarkisian, who then offers to meet them in the cafe. In a nearby computer, he offers to sell the Turk for $500,000 and demands they meet him near a park by an ATM. Meanwhile a British man and his goon stop by Carlos’s house to ask them about Sarah Connor and Enrique and kill Carlos’s friends when he refuses. It is implied that they extract the information before killing Carlos. After returning from the park, Sarah and Derek find the British henchman at their home and raises the price to $20,000,000 and demands the money in 24 hours. He also mentions that one of his goons is following John in his field trip to the museum.

Agent Ellison goes to investigate Kester and learns that he is in the FBI database with a resemblance to George Laslow. Meanwhile, Cromartie as Kester is looking for files on Sarah Connor at the same FBI office. Using these strange pieces of information, Agent Ellison manages to convince his superior that Kester is the same person who killed two people in less than 36 hours, had plastic surgery to resemble Laslow, killed Laslow and later got himself into the FBI database. With this in mind, Ellison is able to assemble an FBI tactical team to go after Cromartie. Charley Dixon later hears about the raid from his radio and tries to get there before its too late.

The raid goes horribly wrong with most of the FBI agents except for Ellison being killed and with Cromartie suffering minor damage. Charley arrives just in time to evade Cromartie before finding Ellison and surveying the damage.

While at the museum, John seems upset that no one notices his birthday while talking to Cameron. At the museum, Cameron notices a man following John but is stopped by her teacher from pursuing him. She later manages to kill the goon and stuff him in his Mercedes CLS after the field trip ended and brings the car back to their safehouse. At the safehouse, they examine the corpse and Sarah has Cameron impersonate the dead goon when the British man calls them. He agrees to meet him back at the hideout, but the group has no idea where it is until Carlos’s girlfriend shows up and gives them the location.

It turns out the hideout was the backroom of the Internet cafe and they go after the British man. Cameron, Derek and Sarah pursue the man while John tries looking for anything related to the Turk, but finds the man’s daughter. The British guy later takes John hostage with Sarah in a standoff, but Derek brings in the little girl as a hostage. While comforting the girl, Derek shoots the British guy in the head and we later learn that the father is actually the clerk in the Internet cafe. After taking the dead man’s hard drive, they return to the safehouse.

For John’s birthday, Derek takes John out for some ice cream to have him watch his younger self and Kyle play baseball on a sunny day in a park. There John meets a younger version of his father and Derek reveals that he knew John was his nephew because he had Kyle’s eyes and because Kyle was interested in women like Sarah. After the trip to the park, John hacks the hard drives to learn that there was another buyer for the Turk before Sarah and the British man they killed was not Sarkisian. It turns out that the clerk in the Internet cafe was the Sarkisian and he planted a car bomb in Sarah’s car, which blew up when Cameron started it.

The episode ends with Cameron being blown up, the Turk still at large, and Ellison surviving Cromartie. It was unfortunate that the WGA strike went as long as it did which meant that the full 13 episodes were never produced. This cliffhanger ending could suggest that Cameron does survive the attack to come back in endoskeleton form in episode 10 to find and interrogate Sarkisian and the heroes wind up dealing with a batch of seedy underworld types just to find the Turk with Cromartie after them.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 6

Charley manages to save Derek’s life as he flashes back to the final moments of the Future War while recovering. In his flashbacks, we learn that John Connor has sent Derek and Kyle out on a diversionary mission to get them out of danger from their local base, which was going to be attacked by the machines. Kyle manages to evade the machines, but Derek and his team are captured by the terminators and brought to a safehouse to be tortured for information. Eventually the machines leave their safehouse once someone gave out the location of their base.

During his captivity, one of the resistance fighters confides to him that his name is not William Wisher and that he is the one who created Skynet. It turns out that this person is the same Andy Sarah Connor considered killing in the present. Derek keeps slipping in and out of consciousness in the present, but is given a blood transfusion by John to stabilise his condition. Charley starts suspecting that Derek may be John’s father until Sarah assures him that it is someone else.

Derek and his team return to find almost everyone killed, and a burnt picture of Sarah Connor. It is implied that the battle was basically Kyle Reese’s flashback from the first “Terminator” movie where Sarah’s picture gets burned during the battle. Later, they are met by another tech com regiment who brings them to another base. During the process, he is informed that John Connor and Kyle went with a team to destroy a research facility and Kyle became MIA in the process. It is again suggested that John had sent Kyle back in time as shown in the first terminator movie. Once he arrives at the new base, Derek panics when he sees Cameron until he is reassured that it is a reprogrammed terminator, which is a project John initiated to change the tide of war.

Derek also remembers a reprogrammed terminator going rogue and killing several soldiers before it was stopped by Cameron. Finally, he is summoned by John Connor to go back in time with a team and await further instructions. It becomes clear that Derek has intentions of creating a safehouse and killing Andy once he finds him.

In the present, Charley is shown the remains of the deactivated terminator from the last episode and he is clearly frightened but now understand why Sarah and John left him. Cameron then prepares to destroy all traces of the terminator by first extracting the flesh before incinerating the endoskeleton with thermite. Sarah then orders Cameron to find the missing arm from the last battle and to destroy all pieces of the T-888, but Cameron secretly keeps a piece of the T-888’s CPU for some reason.

After stabilising Derek’s condition, Charley bids Sarah farewell but not before informing her that an FBI agent had visited him asking about her. Derek regains consciousness in the present and John informs him that Kyle was sent back to the past to protect him. He also tells him he died a hero. The episode ends by revealing that Derek is in fact the one who killed Andy with previews showing Agent Ellison showing the T-888’s severed hand to a scientist, Sarah finding a tape, and Cameron acting strange.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Blade Runner: The Final Cut is the definitive version of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the completed Director’s Cut.  This new version contains Deckard staying awake while seeing visions of the unicorn and has all the violent scenes and relevant dialogue restored.  It was quite amazing watching the Final Cut on blu-ray as the 1080p allows for more detail and a greater appreciation of the work the production team put into creating 2019 Los Angeles.  Blade Runner is actually one of Harrison Ford’s better works, Rutger Hauer’s defining film and an underrated film.

And yes Deckard is a replicant or a cylon as Edward James Olmos pointed out in a retrospective interview.

What the hell is this shit?!

Here is a conversation I had with a friend earlier today -

BarryAllen: have you ever seen Club to Death Angel Dokuro Chan?
Me: no
Me: i stopped watching Anime
Me: since the last Ghost in the Shell movie
Me: solid state society
Me: and a few Keroro episodes
BarryAllen: Oh
BarryAllen: I guess you wouldn’t like it
BarryAllen: it’s really otakuish
BarryAllen: like Excel Saga
Me: im not surprised
Me: lucky star seems to be the in thing now
BarryAllen: it’s about this boy who’s going to grow up to invent a way to keep all the girls in world from growing beyond 12
BarryAllen: he’s doing this because he’s a pedophile
BarryAllen: so God sends an angel from the future to go kill him
BarryAllen: but she ends up living with him instead
BarryAllen: and she kills him at least twice per episode
Me: thats not a real premise
Me: you made that shit up
BarryAllen: i have the episode if you want it
BarryAllen: i think it might kill my bandwidth if i sent it to you though haha
BarryAllen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dokuro-chan

BarryAllen: Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan tells the story of Sakura Kusakabe, a second-year junior high school student who sometime in the future is going to offend God by inadvertently inventing immortality. Women are affected so that they stop aging after the age of twelve and Sakura is accused of creating a “Pedophile’s World”.

Dokuro Mitsukai, a member of an order of angel assassins that are called Rurutie, has been sent from the future to kill him. Believing that Sakura can be redeemed, Dokuro decides instead to keep Sakura so occupied that he can never develop the immortality technology.

Due to her impulsive nature, however, she frequently kills him - with her gigantic spiked kanabo- (club) she has named Excalibolg - on a moment’s impulse, returning him to life moments later with angelic magic.

Sabato, another assassin of the Rurutie order who uses her feminine wiles to do her jobs, is dispatched to complete Dokuro’s original mission: Sakura’s assassination.

Me: this is so wrong

Scientology Rules!

This is actually one of the greatest religions ever!  All the stars are members of the Church like Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, John Travolta, Kristie Alley, and even Lisa Marie Presley!  Who can go wrong with all these people being part of such a trendy religion especially the daughter of Elvis Presley!

Recently, an evil journalist by the name of John Sweeney went mad when a nice young man from Scientology tried to clear up some facts about his religion.  It was interesting how the Church was able to help Sweeney become cleared of his body Thetans and then upload their achievement on youtube earlier this week.  Here is a clip of that event in question:

Notice how he went off when the Scientologists were nicely asking him to be more objective after opening up to him and proving how psychiatrists helped create the Holocaust that killed so many people.  Nearly everyone on youtube showed support for the Church of Scientology instead of John Sweeney who risked his life going undercover to report on abuses in Zimbabwe when the BBC was banned from that country!

Here is the BBC episode of John Sweeney’s smear campaign against the legitimate Church of Scientology.  Please note that this report is as objective as those news reports presented on PBS’s Frontline or BBC’s Timewatch.

Tommy Davis was a professional who conducted himself in the most ethical and responsible manner.  The BBC is so biased that it makes FOX News Channel look fair! This is just absurd! Can you believe it?

This South Park episode shows us what Scientology is really about!

From Wikipedia:

he Church of Scientology is a controversial international network devoted to the practice and the promotion of the Scientology belief system. There are widely varying estimates of the number of Church members in the world. The Church of Scientology describes itself as a religious organisation, and it is recognized as such in some countries. While a number of governments now view the Church as a religious organization entitled to the protections and tax relief that such status brings, other sources have called it a pseudoreligion or a cult

Scientology Rules!

28 Weeks Later.

On May 11, the sequel to the surprise hit “28 Days Later” will reach theatres. For those who are unfamiliar with the original film, “28 Days Later” is a sci-fi horror film starring Cillian Murphy in his breakthrough role as a survivor of an artificially created-virus that reduces living beings into violent, zombie-like beings called “The Infected” and the survivors’ need to survive against the Infected and each other.

“28 Days Later” explores a Great Britain that has been entirely ravaged by the Infected within a span of just 28 days and the aftermath of the chaos as survivors try to stay alive. In the last film, we learned that the Infected eventually died off from starvation and from their inability to survive after lasting for about 28 days without food. At the same time, we learned that there were countries that were relatively unscathed from the original plague that destroyed the United Kingdom in “28 Days Later”.

The sequel aptly titled “28 Weeks Later” takes place about 7 months since the events of “28 Days Later”. In the previews, the story still takes place in an alternate 2003, where the United States has taken the initiative in occupying Great Britain and slowly repopulating London with the few remaining survivors. We learn that the majority of the population in Great Britain that numbered approximately 60 million has been reduced to just thousands.

After 28 weeks since the infection, the United States has declared Great Britain to be free of the Rage infection and has divided London into a Green Zone, where survivors are placed in apartment blocks and regularly tested for the Infection, and Red Zones, which are areas still rife with disease, corpses and being cleaned up by the military.

The film opens with a blistering infected attack on a group of survivors during the events of the original film. Title cards give us a timeline following the starvation and demise of the infected. Cut to… (drum roll) 28 weeks later: With the virus seemingly gone, authorities have turned London into a military zone and are beginning the process of repopulation. Survivors are checked in through medical tests and background procedures before being herded into apartments in temporary “safe zones”. It is here, we assume, that all hell will break loose. Robert Carlyle (in top form) takes on the role of the tortured protagonist who is trying to rebuild life with his family, and the gritty hand-held style of the original perfectly sets up the ruined aftermath of the infected apocalypse.

However, things are not what they seem as the Americans discover a potentially infected woman and proceed to contain the situation. Regardless of their actions, the virus spreads once again amongst the population and it is up to the military to use lethal force to contain the situation. Currently there is speculation among bloggers and netizens as to who is the carrier of the Rage virus.

Most have suggested that it is the missing wife of Robert Carlyle’s, who is currently chained in a military facility and shows signs of bite marks. The trailers lend credence to this theory as it shows the character’s corpse riddled with blood before being scorched by fire and they show her and Robert Carlyle’s character kissing in the facility as well.

Others have pointed out that Robert Carlyle’s character, Don, does not show up in the remainder of the movie trailer with the exception of the flashback sequences and the beginning of the film. This suggests that Don and his wife were also running from the Infected around the same time as the heroes in “28 Days Later” with Don believing he lost his wife in the chaos. It’s strongly implied that the wife starts showing symptoms of the Rage virus and infects Don as they are about to kiss in the military facility due to the large amount of infected blood that remains in the wife’s corpse according to the trailers.

There are also hints that the infection begins in the military facility since one of the original soldiers observing Don’s wife shows up as an Infected terrorising the children in another scene. It would be interesting to learn that Sir Robert Carlyle, best known for the “Full Monty”, “Trainspotting” and playing Hitler, is one of the first characters to get killed off to get the movie going.

The trailers indicate that “28 Weeks Later” was shot in Digital Video (DV) like its predecessor and possibly in High-Definition to an extent. The decision to film in DV like the original film gives almost a documentary-like feel to it as well as adding a sense of realism with the events playing out in the film. If this film is as successful as the original, the director suggested that there maybe a sequel since the Infected somehow make it to Continental Europe to set up “28 Months Later”? At least Tony Blair never got the chance to ruin the “28 Days” Britain like he did in real life.

Genre: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Release Date: May 11, 2007