UPN airs the 76th episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Kurtwood Smith guest stars.
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Star Trek: Voyager now streaming on Paramount Plus
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, nearly ten years after its final planetary encounter, suddenly goes quiet. For 66 hours, the space probe returns no signal or telemetry data to Earth, while engineers on the ground send 720 commands to Voyager 2 to begin transmitting again. When Voyager 2 does re-establish communications with Earth, it has switched to a backup transmitter, and the temperature of some on-board components is warmer than expected. The spacecraft has not gone into a safe mode, but reports receiving only 19 of the 720 commands to transmit. At nearly six billion miles from Earth, Voyager 2 is heading for the edge of the solar system at 35,000 miles per hour, and is expected to remain functional into the 2020s, provided the spacecraft experiences no further major faults.
The 163rd episode of Chris Carter’s modern-day science fiction series The X-Files airs on Fox, starring Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, and Robert Patrick. Jeff Gulka guest stars. Duchovny no longer appears in every episode of the series after this episode, a development which is met with some skepticism from the show’s ardent fandom.
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The 95th episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict, airs in syndication, starring Jayne Heitmeyer, Von Flores, Melinda Deines, Guylaine St. Onge, and Alan Van Sprang.
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Earth: Final Conflict now streaming on Amazon Prime
The 129th episode of Joss Whedon’s supernatural series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, airs on UPN. James Marsters and Alyson Hannigan also star.
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Bridging the gap between Star Wars Episode II and Episode III, Cartoon Network premieres the fourth mini-episode of Genndy Tartakovsky’s The Clone Wars animated shorts.
East Side Digital releases the Rediscovering Lost Scores soundtrack compilations, featuring Wendy Carlos’ music from The Shining, Tron, Woundings and more.
A second attempt is made by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency to bring its unmanned space probe, Hayabusa, close enough to gather a sample of surface material from asteroid 25143 Itokawa. It attempts to deploy a mini-rover called Minerva to explore Itokawa from the surface, but a glitch results in a trajectory that leaves Minerva tumbling into space, never to reach Itokawa. Hayabusa lands on Itokawa’s surface itself, though mission controllers don’t realize this for several more days. Contact is lost with Hayabusa for a short while, and when it is regained, the vehicle has left the surface and gone into safe mode.
BBC3 premieres the fifth episode of Russell T. Davies’ science fiction series Torchwood, a more adult-themed spinoff of Doctor Who. This episode is written by Sapphire & Steel creator P.J. Hammond.
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Torchwood now streaming on HBO Max
Soundtrack specialty label Intrada releases a fourth volume of Stu Phillips’ episode soundtracks from the TV Series Battlestar Galactica. The complete scores from the two-part episodes The Living Legend and War Of The Gods are included. The label also announces that this is its final classic Galactica music release.
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The 52nd episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW.
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Streaming service CBS All Access releases the ninth episode of Star Trek: Discovery. Jayne Brook (Chicago Hope) guest stars.
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Star Trek: Discovery now streaming on Paramount Plus
The seventh episode of Mars airs on the National Geographic Channel, inaugurating the show’s second season. The series is a hybrid drama/documentary about a fictional human colony on Mars in 2042, contrasted against efforts to prepare for such a mission in the present day. The series is produced by Ron Howard (Apollo 13). Esai Morales (Caprica) guest stars.
The 143rd episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Lexa Doig (Andromeda) guest stars.
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The CW airs the 55th episode of Legends Of Tomorrow, starring Caity Lotz, Matt Ryan, Brandon Routh, and Tala Ashe.
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Marvel Comics’ most famous editor (and arguably its most famous creator, to the chagrin of some of the artists with whom he worked), Stan Lee, dies at the age of 95, several months after announcing that his days of attending conventions and making public appearances were over. Born in 1922, he began working at Timely Publications mere months after the company’s formation, thanks to a family connection with the company’s publisher, and became interim editor of Timely’s comics output in 1941. Timely had already seen success with artist/writer Jack Kirby’s Captain America, and Lee would not really make his mark until after a three-year sabbatical during which he enlisted in the U.S. Army and turned his talents to writing material supporting the war effort. It was during the early 1960s that Lee’s real influence on the company begin to be known, collaborating with Kirby on The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, X-Men, and others, and co-creating The Amazing Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with artist Steve Ditko. Under Lee’s editorship, Marvel led a revolution in interpreting comic book superheroes as complex, multifaceted, and flawed individuals, many of which remained bankable enough properties to lead to Disney’s 2009 acquisition of the company and rapid expansion of movie and TV adaptations of numerous characters and titles.
Streaming service Disney+ opens for business with the first episode of Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian, the first live-action TV series set in the Star Wars universe, starring Pedro Pascal, Carl Weathers, and Nick Nolte. Returning to the saga’s roots as a space western, this marks Disney’s entrance into the increasingly crowded premium streaming service race.
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Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast
The BBC premieres the first episode of Daleks!, an animated Doctor Who spinoff centered around that franchise’s most enduring villains, on YouTube, featuring the voices of Ayesha Antoine and Nicholas Briggs. This is part of the “Time Lord Victorious” alternate-timeline multimedia event.
