Firefly actress Morena Baccarin (Inara) joins the cast of Stargate SG-1 for the tenth season as the new face of the Ori; she’ll have an interesting relationship to one of the regular characters as well. Sci-Fi Channel has announced July 14th as the premiere of the new seasons of SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.
Doctor Who executive producer Russell T. Davies has announced the writers who will be crafting the show’s third season (to premiere around a year from now); Davies himself will write five episodes plus this year’s Christmas special, while Hugo-nominated first season scribes Paul Cornell and Steven Moffatt will be returning; Cornell is expected to write a two-part episode. Who novelist Gareth Roberts, who wrote the interactive story Attack Of The Graske which debuted last Christmas, and script editor Helen Raynor will be making their series debuts as well. (Raynor has already written an episode for Davies’ spinoff series Torchwood, which begins filming next week with Davies’ pilot episode, Flotsam And Jetsam.)
J.J. Abrams, the very busy creator of Lost and Alias and now producer and director of the eleventh Star Trek film, is busily debunking some of the initial press reports about what Trek XI will be about – even though some of those reports come from Paramount itself. Abrams admits to a great fondness for the classic series characters, but says that reports of a “young Kirk and Spock” plotline are premature at best. What the plot will be, however, is as closely-guarded a mystery as half of what’s written on that ultraviolet map of Lost’s island.
At today’s unveiling of the network’s 2006-2007 development slate, Sci-Fi channel revealed that a prequel spinoff is in the works for Battlestar Galactica. The new series, Caprica, traces the Adama family line back over 50 years before the current series, where they, along with members of the Graystone family, witness the creation and eventual uprising of the Cylons. The pilot script is being written by Remi Aubuchon (24, From The Earth To The Moon), and Galactica executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick will oversee the new series as well.
Ana Lucia might be disappearing from the island after all, if only for a few days. Lost actress Michelle Rodriguez opted to serve out a five-day jail sentence for a December drunk driving arrest in Hawaii, where the show is filmed; she pled guilty on Tuesday. Her other option was to serve 240 hours of community service. (She had been ticketed earlier in the year for speeding and driving without insurance.) Lost co-star Cynthia Watros was also arrested for DUI last year, though since it was her first offense, she was ordered to pay fines and court costs totalling over $500 and to take substance abuse courses. The producers of Lost still insist that Rodriguez’ arrest will not result in the character of Ana Lucia being killed off or recast, as has been rumored by numerous fan sites.
Long mired in the far reaches, not of deep space, but “development,” the long-touted Star Blazers film now has producer Josh C. Kline – of whom no record could be found in the Internet Movie Database at the time of this writing – attached to adapt it from its anime roots into a live action feature. Disney Studios optioned the live-action rights from Voyager Entertainment, the current rights holders and distributors of Star Blazers in the English-speaking world, in the 90s. (Star Blazers is, of course, the American-dubbed version of the seminal early 70s anime series Space Battleship Yamato.)
Another new Doctor Who spinoff is spinning up, but this time without the BBC’s involvement. Thanks to a loophole in British copyright law that allows the creators of popular characters to exploit them outside of their original venue – the same law which made numerous semi-official Who fan videos possible in the 1990s – K-9 Adventures is expected to launch within a year. K-9′s co-creator, Bob Baker, is behind the live-action/CGI series which is being developed by the European wing of Jetix, a children’s programming outfit in whom Disney owns a majority stake, and the show is expected to appear on the Jetix Europe channel. The BBC was approached by Baker, but has since issued a statement that the makers of Doctor Who felt that K-9 Adventures would be one spinoff too many. The character has been redesigned heavily from his original appearance (seen above).
British-born astronaut Dr. Piers Sellers, who is scheduled to fly this summer aboard the delayed space shuttle Discovery flight, is trying to spark interest in manned spaceflight in his native Britain. Dr. Sellers had to become an American citizen to join a manned space program. He’s also not alone in his opinion – the Royal Astronomical Society began its own campaign in 2005 to convince the British government to get into the manned spaceflight business. (Britain is also a member of the European Space Agency, which does have a manned space program, though its astronauts thus far have only flown on American shuttles or Russian Soyuz capsules. Dr. Sellers is scheduled for a spacewalk during Discovery’s mission, currently slated for July, to inspect and conduct any necessary repairs on the shuttle and to conduct planned repairs on the International Space Station. He previously flew aboard Atlantis in 2002, and is one of only three British-born astronauts to have flown in space.
In a statement confirming J.J. Abrams’ involvement in the eleventh Star Trek movie, Paramount’s official StarTrek.com site has also made it official that former Star Trek executive producer Rick Berman, who assumed control of the franchise when Gene Roddenberry died in 1996, will not have any involvement in the new film. As reported earlier, Abrams is bringing several colleagues with whom he has worked on Lost, Alias and Mission: Impossible III.
It’s as close to a Trek all-star extravaganza as we’re like to get this year: Jeri Ryan guest stars on the upcoming season finale of ABC’s Boston Legal (which stars Trek alumni William Shatner and Rene Auberjonois). All we need now is someone from Next Generation and someone from Enterprise in the same episode, and all the bases are covered.
Entertainment industry newspaper Daily Variety is reporting that J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Alias, and director/producer of Paramount’s heavily-promoted Mission: Impossible III, has signed a deal to produce and direct the eleventh Star Trek film, which has suddenly moved from “off the schedule” to a 2008 release date. Fellow Lost producers Bryan Burk and Damon Lindelof are also signed on as producers of the still-untitled movie, which is said to focus on the first mission for a young James T. Kirk and Spock. Mission: Impossible III (and former Xena/Hercules) writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are on board as scriptwriters. There is currently no word on who will star, or whether such participants in previous Trek projects as producer Rick Berman will be involved.
Another member of the Babylon 5 cast is making an “appearance” in audio Doctor Who this year; Claudia Christian is slated for a guest shot in the upcoming audio play The Reaping, written by Big Finish Productions regular Joseph Lidster and due for release in early September. As the story, starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the sixth Doctor and Peri, is said to feature Peri’s return home to America, there’s naturally quite a bit of speculation that Christian will be playing the part of Peri’s mother. The Cybermen will also feature in the story, which has story links to the late September audio, The Gathering, starring Peter Davison and also written by Lidster, which may also be the story (formerly titled Summer In The City) that reunites the fifth Doctor with bossy former sidekick Tegan (Janet Fielding). (Claudia Christian’s former co-star Peter Jurasik was the first B5 cast member to venture into the Doctor’s world in July 2000′s Winter For The Adept.)
The premiere of the second season of the new Doctor Who in the UK pulled in an estimated 8 million viewers on Saturday, April 15th, beating out not only the BBC’s rival network ITV (which was showing a Harry Potter movie), but in fact pulling a better number than anything else on the BBC that night. At least two million of those viewers appear to have tuned in specifically for Doctor Who.
Grant Naylor Productions, the makers of Red Dwarf, say on their official web site that the release of the final season of the show doesn’t signal the end of the show on DVD. A bare-bones, feature-free release of the final four seasons is due in October of this year, with an “interactive quiz show” DVD to follow in November (keep in mind, these are not only tentative dates, but tentative UK dates).
The European Space Agency’s unmanned Venus Express probe successfully completed a 51-minute braking blast of its engines. putting it into an orbit around the cloud-shrouded second planet. ESA scientists plan to use the instruments aboard Venus Express to look at the planet’s dense, poisonous atmosphere and to try to break through those clouds for a glimpse at the surface; of particular interest is whether or not the massive volcanic mountains on Venus are still active, and how its atmosphere formed. The wind on Venus blasts at a constant hurricane strength, and acid rain pelts the surface. Venus Express does not contain a landing component; the few spacecraft which have landed on Venus have usually stopped sending data home within an hour due to the temperature and crushing air pressure on the surface. The last visitor to Venus from Earth was NASA’s Magellan probe, launched in 1989.