by theenglish

From the Science Fiction lovers perspective there seems to be very little out there in terms of new television entertainment this year. Compared to a year ago, when Farscape was in full swing, Firefly was just starting, and there was still a Buffy around to watch, I guess I can consider myself lucky that I have so much time for myself now. There is nothing in the way now to keep me from sitting down and writing my Pulitzer Prize winning novel before May sweeps come around.

I have no desire to watch UPN’s updated version of the Six Million Dollar Man, Jake 2.0, and I have never really gotten interested in Stargate SG-1. Please don’t get me started on Andromeda, as I’ll leave that for a future column. I’m really starting to realize that the Sci-Fi saturated airwaves of the nineties were something I took for granted.

Luckily there a still a couple of good Sci-Fi programs out there.

Each week this season, Star Trek: Enterprise has delivered a solid episode. Granted, there hasn’t been any ground-breaking Science-Fiction that has made me want to re-evaluate my place in the universe, but the plots have been crisp and well paced, and the actors have delivered competent performances. Compare this to a year ago, when the episode being broadcast was a rip off of The A-Team and what’s worse is that the A-Team episode was more entertaining. No, this year’s Enterprise stories have been fun. It is too bad though, that the show has fallen so far in the ratings it may never recover.

Angel, the Buffy spin-off with a do-gooder Vampire as the main character, has also started off the season on a high note. After last year’s fourteen episodes of cliffhangers, the Angel writers seem to be taking a more laid back, relaxed attitude and the series has really gotten back some of the charm of the early Buffy The Vampire Slayer seasons. The Angel cast has great chemistry, something that even the arrival of James Marsters (Spike) doesn’t seem to affect. When the show’s production company, Mutant Enemy, announced that Marsters was coming over from Buffy to join the show this year, I was a little worried that he would dominate the program. Thankfully, this doesn’t seem to be happening. He was hardly even in the first episode, and the second episode was a nice slow introduction of his character into the current Angel milieu.

On the lower end of the spectrum, I find that I derive this guilty pleasure watching the WB’s Dawson’s Creek/Roswell hybrid, Smallville. Although I find about half its episodes to be quite good and interesting interpretations of the Superman mythos, the rest are such complete drivel that I change the channel when my wife comes into the room out of sheer embarrassment. I am beginning to suspect that she thinks I am a porn addict or something.

I can’t understand why the show is so popular. John Glover and Michael Rosenbaum do a wonderful job at playing the Luthors, and there have been some great interpretations of Superman’s history, including a nifty appearance by Christopher Reeve last season, but the show falls prey to so many failings, each episode has the potential to be a hit or miss.

In the first two seasons, they had so many kryptonite villains and so many on again, off again moments between Clark and Lana that I keep hoping Rick Berman wasn’t watching the show and thinking that maybe there was another holodeck story left in Star Trek after all. To top it off, by the beginning of the third season Clark has been seen in so many suspicious situations it makes the whole giving Clark glasses as a disguise thing seem like an act of creative brilliance.

To be honest, I really believe that I watch this program out of desperation because other than these three shows, there is really nothing of Science Fiction left on television that even remotely interests me. Thank God, for DVDs as I can entertain myself by watching old Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Buffy episodes until the 2004 fall television season rolls around.