Monday, May 23, 2011
End of "Angel: After The Fall"

Back when the Angel TV series got cancelled, the fans of the series [including myself] were pretty disappointed. But not long after that IDW publishing and Joss Whedon came together, and in 2007 the first episode of "Angel: After The Fall" comic series was released. Since then I've been following the comics quite eagerly. In some ways I found them even more entertaining the the TV series were... so yes, you could call me a big fan. The series also had a lot of very cool spin-offs and side stories, my favourite of which was probably the "Illyria: Haunted" series.

Now, after about 5 years of pure awesomeness, the series is over. Last night I read the very last episode of the After The Fall story line, and tonight [if I can somehow manage the time!] I'm going to read the end to "Spike", which is the very last spin-off of the series. So yes, no more After The Fall. That doesn't make me a very happy girl. =/

I should say that I'm certainly not disappointed. The After The Fall series had a great story line, and a pretty fitting end. Unlike the TV series ending, with the comic series you get that feeling of closure. Everything has been truly well explained and concluded. But still, I can't help but wish that there was more! =P

Mind you, this isn't the end of Angel comics altogether. The publishing rights are being passed on to [or more like back to] Dark Horse Comics, and they obviously have their own plans for it. In about a couple of months, Dark Horse is realising an "Angel Omnibus" containing whatever they published during the time the TV series was still running [before the fall era!]. After that, as far as I can see, they're starting an "Angel and Faith" mini series, which apparently takes place after the events of the Buffy Season 8 comics [Dark Horse's].

I haven't read the Buffy Season 8 comics yet, but I'm hoping to manage that sooner or later. And I'm looking forwards to Dark Horse's Angel series. On the cons side, Faith was never one of my favourite characters at all... so... meh. But oh well, I guess I can only wait and see how that'll turn out. 

On a bit of a different direction... in the entire After The Fall series, I found only 1 serious inconsistency, which is pretty interesting seeing how the episodes were written by so many different people. I sort of have a problem with the whole James turned Myresto Mor scenario. Anybody else find that weird? The James character was supposedly an angel for so long in the series, long enough to come across other angels as well as various representatives of the Powers That Be. So how did he suddenly turn out to be some sort of an evil demi-god? I mean, wouldn't other angels or even more importantly the big parents notice that he's just not one of the family?

I think I read somewhere that perhaps in a try to smoothen the situation, it was said that the Cordelia that came to Angel's help as he was dying, was not really Cordelia. But I think we all know that it was Cordelia. And heck, she wasn't the only one who would technically have easily been able to recognize James as a non-angel. But anyway... I try to think of Myresto as a new character altogether... and the plot was great enough to pretty much hide that little inconsistency.

I just hope that in the new Dark Horse Angel appearances, there's going to be room for Illyria and Spike, since they really are bloody fantastic characters and my favourites in the series. I also would really like to see what Connor may do with his new found powers, but I'm afraid we may never know, if the Dark Horse writers try to not make any references to the ATF series. That would be a huge disappointment, so I'm hoping they're not going to completely ignore everything that happened in ATF. 

Anyway... enough comic talk... time to get back to studying... =P

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Saturday, May 07, 2011
Stargate Universe.... CANCELLED???

Ok is this strange, unbelievable, unfortunate, disastrous and all in all extremely bad. SyFailI realize it's old news which due to being extremely busy I found out about now, but anyhow I'm enraged. Steaming mad

Ever since the start of SGU, this is my 4th post about the series. Previously, I wrote this, this, and this one. If you've read those, you probably have an idea as to how I was feeling about the series up to about October of last year. To me, it was a bit of a fail. The first season and beginning of the 2nd season of SGU involved too much soap opera and too little sci-fi for my taste. I kept watching the show, hoping it would finally pick up at some point...

Well guess what, it DID pick up! From the middle of 2nd season, we started seeing much more action. The plot got a lot more interesting, character development started to finally happen, and we started seeing actual sci-fi in there. Improvements kept coming at a high speed, and finally a couple of weeks ago I found myself saying to my boyfriend "hey, SGU is actually getting extremely good now, I can't wait for the next episode!", to which he enthusiastically agreed.

Now, 2 weeks later, and I read that the moment the show got good, it also got cancelled. And if you start looking at the big picture, and the collection of things that made the path to the show getting cancelled... it really looks VERY ugly.

First, SyFy rescheduled the show from Friday nights to Tuesday nights, because apparently Friday nights had to be kept for the most sci-fi, the most brilliant, the most imaginative show out there. It's called WWE Smackdown. Yeah, it' BLOODY WRESTLEING! What the bloody hell does that have to do with science and fiction, I have no bleeding clue!  

On the other hand, lets be honest here, the sci-fi genre [specially what you may call hard-core sci-fi] has never really been the most popular genre with the main stream. Rescheduling of the shows like this together with lack of interest from masses, results in the show having low viewer stats at the time it's first aired. Of course no one cares that many fans record the show to watch when they can due to busy schedules, or that many of us don't even live in North America so we have to watch the show through other channels.

And now for mentioning the obvious... low viewer stats, low DVD sales and basically not enough money being made out of a TV series, means no love from money hungry networks like SyFy who ONLY cares about the profit. So, who cares that this is the successor spin off to one of the most successful, most loved, most amazing series in the history of sci-fi that we're talking about right? And who cares that it still has a lot to offer? And who cares about all the people who have spent years creating all this? The main stream prefers to watch some guys smack each other to pieces [theatrically of course] or some girls chew each other's necks over an ex, so the so called blighted SyFy channel decides to give them exactly that.

Sad fact is that the SyFy channel has no longer anything to do with science fiction. I saw that coming, when they changed the name from Sci-Fi to SyFy, supposedly to explore other possibilities. This is what they meant by it. Just look at the show list for the channel, and you'll see that by killing off SGU, they just removed the last serious science fiction series that they had from the network's list of programs. That's it. SyFy, is officially no longer a science fiction channel.

To add to the disaster pile, it turns out that the untimely cancellation of SGU, also has put a permanent stop to the production of the Stargate Atlantis movie, and any other movies from the Stargate franchise that we may have been hoping for.

SaveSGUA quick look around the web, has made it clear to me how utterly upset, angry and frustrated the fans of the show [not a small number] are. And how hard they're all trying to save the show. I honestly can't say that I'm keeping any hopes up... but who knows, I'm going to join every campaign I come across and sign any petition I can. Maybe something will come out of it after all...

And here's what you should be checking out:

An article from Joseph Mallozzi's website, answering some questions about the show and it's cancellation

A Facebook page called Save Stargate Universe

And since the list of information, support, campaign and petition pages is growing daily, I have created a Verse page where I [or anyone else interested] will be collecting relevant info and links. Check it out!

 

Ahoo "Aasemoon" Pirsoleimani, 1998-2014