This show was never meant to be a single season mini-series. It was clearly meant to test the waters and determine if it had legs to be picked up for a spring or next summer slot. Because of that, those that were into it, I being one, never really got the ending we were looking for. Nothing really got explained in the final episode that we didn’t already know.

We have known for weeks that a big secretive organization kidnapped them and was training them to join their ranks. So it’s really no big surprise when they are taken to level 2 on some derelict ship. They are in training and what do you do with people that are in training? You train them.

It’s also clear that the big organization wasn’t necessarily the bad guys. They actually never killed anyone. The daughter of the ambassador – alive. The people in the body bags that the moron boyfriend cut the thumbs off – all alive. All members of the town – all alive. Clearly big evil organizations don’t go around trying their best to make sure people stay alive. Just not in their mission statement.

It was neat to see Robert Picardo in a guest spot though. The long white Raiden like hair was kinda weird but whatever. The council bit was a bit old really. Warehouse 13 does it with their Regents and its a theme we’ve seen many times. Enough with the councils already. Can we please get mainstream scifi to swing back to the single antagonist super evil guys already? I miss a good bad guy, Scorpius being one of the last true great ones.

Other than that I did enjoy the episode, even though I just spent a few hundred words trashing it. But honestly, i’m trashing it because I want to see more. What’s going to happen in level 2. Why is Joe stuck forever in level 1? How many towns are there that they do this? Just what is the purpose of the plan?

Maybe i’m suffering from Lost-ism of getting way too few answers for years of build up. Persons Unknown only had one season but they did manage to rack up quite a few questions. Will we see another season next summer? Doubtful. Though you never can tell with TV. If there were enough fellow geeks to watch it, who knows. Am I insulting geeks by saying that? Was it geeky enough? Eh, whatever. I’m off to watch Haven.

Now, does that mean it’s all untrue? If one hundred people in a train station are asking for money because their wallet was stolen, are they all lying? Ok, probably, but there is always the chance that they are not. However slim that chance is, it’s still there.

James Randi is a scientific skeptic and big time debunker of all that is paranormal. There was a challenge on his website once for anyone to prove they had psychic abilities, no one ever won. If it weren’t for this one little book I read on amazon I would probably have hung up my paranormal shoes for good and never looked back. After all, with the amount of camera’s that now populate our society, the amount of paranormal researchers out there in the world, you would think that concrete proof would have happened by now. It hasn’t and so therefore it’s all bunk. Right?

Enter J.B. Rhine. This much maligned scientist was someone that had a very curious mind. He conducted, over the course of years, thousands of experiments in the attempt to prove that some type of psychic ability does really exist. Well guess what, he actually did it.

Now is the point that all the skeptics in the world will hammer down my blogdoor and call me an idiot. Not that they would be wrong, but after reading and doing a little research, I had a very hard time finding any scientific body that actually disputed his results. Sure, they disputed him, they disputed his methods, and some did dispute his findings, but that’s all they did. They disputed it rather than point to any specific experiment and say “AHHA! Gotcha Rhiney!”

The book Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory (P.S.), delves deep into Rhine’s experiments and comes out scratching it’s head and saying “hey, no one said he was wrong”.

Now, don’t go thinking you can be a Jedi warrior, or even a member of the First Earth Battalion, but according to Rhine, the idea of telepathy isn’t so far fetched.

Here’s where we have to put the breaks on, however. Rhine and his group did not explore the entire body of the ‘paranormal’ . That’s just not feasible. One thing you simply must do is define what it is you are looking at. Rhine did that. He conducted experiments just about telepathy, nothing else, at least nothing else with conclusive evidence. He did find that over the course of perhaps a million tries, some people could determine an answer without having prior knowledge better than randomly guessing.

A bit of a let down isn’t it? I know we were all expecting jedi mind tricks “I am the man you are looking for ms. hot bikini model”, but no, all that he showed was evidence on minor telepathy.

Keep in mind he never really produced a theory, never said it was aliens, or god, or anything else, other than showing that the phenomena did exist. Which is really pretty freaky.

I don’t know if it really makes me a believe of anything, but the evidence, which I haven’t found has ever been disputed by any scientist or scientific body on the merits of the data itself, really makes you think about it. Now adays the subject is muddled in entertainment and charlatans and its really hard for anyone to do any real research on the subject, which is a shame. Perhaps that will change one day. And wouldn’t it be neat if it did?

Have you found where this was ever disputed? Do drop a note if you have.

For the episodes themselves, one on Warehouse 13 and the other on Eureka, they were pretty good. I liked the whole computer upgrade slant and the bringing in of veteran actor Rene Auberjonois. I also liked the Eureka episode with the time slips and the sexual tension of Fargo and Claudia. That said, though both episodes were good in and of themselves, was a crossover really the best thing?

One of the biggest issues with the whole SciFi / Fantasy genre is that they are often lumped together in a big ole ugly soup of fiction. Want to get a book? Go to the scifi/fantasy section. Most of the time that is exactly where the merge of these two end. It is very difficult to crossover Scifi and Fantasy. Has it been done? Sure it has but when it has it’s mostly a Fantasy with Scifi elements. Why? Simple, fantasy is just that, pure fantasy. You can’t write a good solid SciFi book, show, episode, whatever and then suddenly throw in Cthulhu. It just doesn’t really work. Science Fiction is all about where science may go one day. It’s all theoretically possible. Sure there are assumptions and big leaps you have to make, if you read one of the early Asimov books he puts in a disclaimer that it was written with an older scientific understanding of some principle and some leeway should be granted to the story. With fantasy, you can just make it up, no underlining science necessary.

And that is what my issue is with the crossover. Eureka is all about a futuristic, really freakin cool future, where science has grown so far it becomes magical. Warehouse 13 is all about physical objects having super powers because they were, I dunno, surrounding somebody of historical significance. Don’t get me wrong, I like Warehouse 13, a lot actually, but it’s a fantasy show. Very reminiscent of Friday the 13th (the show not the movie), where a group of people go around and find artifacts that have power because of a deal with the devil. That really is just it. Where does the power come from of these artifacts?

If any self respecting scientist, Fargo for instance, was put into Warehouse 13 he’d shit a solid gold brick. Something in the universe has to be generating the power that these artifacts are manifesting. Now, this really isn’t a point that we really get into while watching Warehouse 13 alone by itself, but when you add in a show like Eureka, the believability goes down and we start wondering, why didn’t Fargo freak out?

Yes, I know, i’m going way too far into this, but I’m a geek, its my job.

Again, all in all I liked the crossover, I liked both series episodes of the crossover. But on the bigger stage, that now in the back of my mind these two worlds are merged into one, it makes both worlds a bit less believable. I’ll still watch them both of course, they are good shows, but they (SyFy) better chill out with this crossover bullshit. Next thing you know they’ll be going to valley in Tremors the Series and fighting the worm things. That’ll be the straw that breaks the Targ’s back.

Happy town was a neat show. Honestly. One that took a seriously strong jump for me in interest with the inclusion of Sam Neil. This is a top acting talent as far as I’m concerned. Not to mention Frances Conroy, star of HBO’s Six Feet Under, a top talent in the acting world in her own right and the supporting cast wasn’t bad either. Granted Ms. Conroy was a guest star technically but she certainly added to the show’s talent pool. David Cronenberg even had a guest spot on it for god’s sake and the chick from Cujo! Bet you didn’t think I could pull that one!

Why then am I so upset by this show? I’ll tell you why. The eight episodes we got were good, with one really huge exception, what the fuck was going on? This is a classic case of way too much talent at acting and way too little talent at writing. Well, maybe that’s not entirely fair, though I liked the show and thought it was good, but it just didn’t appeal to the larger crowd and ABC pulled it.

I suppose my biggest gripe here is that we didn’t find out anything. Eight episodes were all we got and the last episode was more of a giant teaser than a series ender. We find out who the magic man, or woman, is, chick from Cujo, and that she is a bartender and is clearly a certified nutbrain. What we don’t find out is how exactly she kidnap people, put them in cages, then submerse them in water, and keep them alive and un-aged for years. Not exactly training you’d get in bartender school. Trust me, I’ve been to it. For real. Don’t ask…

In the end we, the sad and often abused scifi fan base, are left with another show that got cut. Sure it wasn’t a Farscape or Firefly by any stretch, but it was a good mystery with a top notch acting group that is now no more. The asshats at NBC better not pull one of these over on us with Persons Unknown. But then that is technically a miniseries with an end already filmed. Sorta planning for failure I guess. Eh, whatever, as long as I get an ending!

There’s no real spoilers possible here. The movie description on Netflix summed up everything about the movie. A man that was born 14,000 years ago spills his secret to a room full of colleagues. Well, there is one little spoiler and i’ll share it later on with a warning, but mostly the movie was just what the description said. The idea is at once so simple but so very intricate and filled with imagination that the movie doesn’t need any other plot twist or major surprises. It is a very solid and real look at what a man would be look that had lived for so very long by just some quark of evolution wherein he didn’t age.

On to the review.

First, the basics. The cast is really good. These are not D list actors in some cheesy syfy movie but real class actors that we’ve all seen in many movies. They have one ex star trek alumn John Billingsley, the Greatest American Hero himself William Katt, and the Candyman as well as staring in many Star Trek episodes (various series), Tony Todd. The rest of the cast is solid as well with all characters having a very long history on the screen, most in TV.

The movie jumps right to it and puts the cast in the house of a member of the university facility that is quitting and moving on. Not long into the movie he begins to tell them, for the first time to anyone, that he is very old and has some quark that he lives forever, or at least hasn’t died yet.

The interplay between the characters is where the movie really shines. The story is very well thought out and well reasoned. Someone of that age, 14,000 years, wouldn’t know every inch of history, he would only know those inches that he was part of. It’s not like Highlander where McCloud had a room full of ancient items that he somehow managed to lug around with him throughout several centuries. Rather it’s like how it might really be, just a guy moving on a lot, so people wouldn’t notice he didn’t age.

The movie climaxes with the lead character revealing he was a famous person in history and his contemporaries becoming upset with them. Which is one reason why the movie is so good. I found myself getting upset and angry with the lead character as well. Not because he was an ass, just the opposite, but rather because he got to live so long and see so much and will continue to do so. The other characters raw envy really came across well and very believable.

I changed my mind while writing this and won’t give away the real spoiler in the movie. Best that way as I am sure I wouldn’t do it justice. Suffice to say if you are looking for a good scifi movie to watch one evening, give this one a try. It’s a real unheard of Gem and will leave you wondering if it were possible. The movie certainly presents a solid and believable fiction of someone of advanced age, 14,000 years, quietly walking down the ages. Pretty cool.

The biggest concern I had with the Evo was battery life. No matter where I looked I found people crying about the battery. I did find a few sites and youtube video’s of folks not having any issues so I decided to give it a try. Suffice to say, when I use the Evo heavily, the battery drains. Shocker. I play a game, turn on GPS, etc, it will drain a bit faster than if I don’t. But on a regular days use I quite easily get a solid 12 hours. That is not total stand by either, that’s a checking emails, making a few calls, generally using the phone. Safe to say that with the out of the box battery, it’s not a big deal. Also, you can find some after market batteries that should give more battery life but I haven’t tried them.

The second big concern I found was FPS. The EVO is locked at 30 fps and can’t go higher. Well, honestly, I could care less. I haven’t really noticed a big difference. I suppose if I put my Insignia TV next to a LG or Sony and stare really hard i’ll eventually see some difference but honestly, do you care that much? You shouldn’t.

The next big factor was the network. Sprint is right now better than AT&T, at least in DC. With ATT I would drop calls in my own living room. That is very frustrating. I live in the city and to drop calls on the couch is just unacceptable. Besides, Sprint has 4G partially rolled out in DC, and let me tell you it is fast. If it were really reliable I could ditch Comcast as well. I use the tethering on the EVO for work and that works well also.

So, if you are wondering if the EVO is a good bet or not, I have it, use it regularly and its a solid phone. Video on it is top rate, the screen size is great and the kickstand is just cool. One bad thing about it, 100 dollar mail in rebate. Give me a break. Mail in rebates should die, seriously.

Are you kidding me? Can the news channel that admits to not reporting the news but rather “opinionated” news even get an opinion right? It’s a freakin picture! How do you get that wrong?!?! Oh right, they are racist…

What just boggles my mind is that anyone still watches this channel and actually thinks that they aren’t full of shit. They are. Glenn Beck is full of it, Greta is full of it, the morning show is full of it, they are all nuts and don’t care about the news. What do they care about? Ratings! Why? Ratings equals sponsors which equals commercials which equals money. So what they do is act sensational, misspell oligarchy (Glenn Beck did that, was funny, isn’t he a former alcoholic and college drop out?), and do everything they can to stir up people and get their ratings higher. Problem is people believe what they lie about.

So if you enjoy racist bigot television where they can’t even get a picture right, by all means tune your TV’s to the moron channel and believe all the crapola they spout. And start getting it through your thick head that one black woman picture is good enough for all them folk, they don’t deserve anything more. If you want real news, try CNN.

And lets not forget this is where uber idiot Sarah Palin works. Need I say more?

First, Eureka did something that I have always quite liked. They extended the romance between Lupo and Zane. This has always been a neat twist, which I believe was mastered in Farscape between Erin and Crichton. I mean lets face it, Farscape really rocked that plot twist. How best to extend a romance on a TV show? Make two of one of the love birds, have the girl fall in love with one, that one dies, the other is reunited but has to start all over from scratch. Brilliant.  Eureka didn’t do quite as good a job as that but still it wasn’t bad. Send Lupo to an alternate reality where they hate each other and poof instant romance reboot. So on that score I give them a thumbs up.

Second, Baltar. What’s he doing there? Is he just being thrown in because he’s one of SyFy’s greats? I don’t mind him being on the show but just not sure what exactly he’s contributing so far. He pops in occasionally, gives some stupid sage advice and disappears to smoke cigarettes and bang chicks. Wow, it really is Baltar…

Next, what’s up with the whole Jack’s love interest thing? Can we say being dragged on a bit too long? Just get it over with already. First he’s all about Allison, and then Tess, and then he has Tess, kicks her out, for what? I don’t get it, maybe he’s gay. Still, I’ve just about had enough of Jack’s love life.

And why did they feel the need to replace the robot sheriff? Was there some contract dispute or another job offer behind the scenes? Poor move. Not that I have anything against the new Andy, but the old one was doing just fine. And this one, though it’s only been one episode, feels a little forced for the actor.

Henry’s life seems to have improved but, eh, so what. Now he has a wife that’s just like he is. He basically married himself. Nice going Henry. It’s kinda funny at times but overall doesn’t add much to the story for me.

Allison’s son doesn’t have Autism anymore. Neat.

Fargo seems to be the real changer here. It is fun to watch Fargo, who is a sweet character and a little jumpy, be forced to act like a asshole. We all knew that he had that in him of course, but to see it brought to life is funny. Having him bumble through things and ask Allison how to do them is also funny but it can get old after awhile.

Lots of SciFi shows do this type of plot of course, one of the first was Star Trek. Send your characters into an alternate world and watch as they have to unravel events and situations that are at the same time familiar but also alien. It works for an episode or two but for an entire series change? Even just a season of it feels like it could get out of hand. This is the first I think we’ve seen this plot twist on this scale. Of course, Eureka did it once before with Henry but it was pretty mild compared to this. For me, i’m not yet sure if it’s working. It’s fun right now, but either we’ll forget it happened or they will be forced to decide to switch back to the real, though now alternate, time line. Allison won’t like that for sure.

The post was titled 6 reasons why you’ll never upload your mind into a computer. It basically states that technology will never develop to a point where computers will never crash, storage media will never die, energy needs for computers will never decrease, processing power will never grow and our minds will simply never work in a computer because our brains need a body.

Well, all those points are well and good, and probably wrong as we’ve seen technology does improve with time, but the real question I came up with after readying this inane article was, so what? And that leads me to my 6 reasons why Dvice doesn’t know what they are talking about.

1. So what? Lets say they are right, and you can’t upload a brain to a computer. Big deal? That really isn’t what the main theorists of the singularity are talking about. Basically in a few decades we’ll have really powerful computers that will do really cool things and will drastically change our lives, possibly allowing them to be extended. Not really all that far fetched since looking back in time, that’s what has happened in the past. Average life span has increased with technology, it’s not really so crazy to think it won’t continue to happen.

2. How exactly do you upload a brain to a computer in the first place? Doesn’t that not even make any sense? The general idea that i’ve read is that we’ll eventually be able to manufacture artificial brain cells and slowly make our brains into computers, not take our consciousness, which no one can really define, and move it somewhere. That really doesn’t make any sense anyway.

3. All those points about computers not having enough power, memory not lasing very long, etc, are really pointless. They don’t do all those things because no one has focused on making them do all those things. The first and foremost things today’s computers are meant to do is process data not house a human consciousness (still not sure what it is). Humans will never be able to live in a car if it goes under water. Well no shit, cars aren’t meant to go under water. But if there was some new crazy desire to make them to do that, you can rest assured we would.

4. The Singularity is really a bunch of different things that will happen in the coming decades. People, like the authors of the dvice post, love to point out about how we’ll not live forever. Sure, that is a big part of it all but not the only part. It’s about a revolution similar to the industrial revolution. What really could blow your mind is that the singularity like event has already happened with the birth of the internet. Right now we have access to data on any subject just by typing it into a computer. Unheard of level of information access. Doesn’t that count for something?

5. The dvice.com point 6 of “who gets uploaded” doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. Will rich people go first? Of course you idiots. Who is going first to space on space tourism trips? Rich people! Welcome to human history. The Rich and connected always get the first slice of the pie, nothing new there. Secondly, the dvice people mock the point of this happening “within our lifetimes” then go on to say that nothing is going to happen in the next few decades. Few decades? I plan on living a lot more than a few decades.

6. The dvice.com bozo’s stated that a website http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/singularity debunked all the singularity points but if you actually go there you find tons of articles that support it. Nice job morons.

I for one think that as technology increases so too will the comfort level of people. Also as it increases more problems can be solved. The big ticket item is that soon a computer will be so advanced that you can give it a problem and it will spit out a solution. It will be able to model the human body, test drugs in weeks instead of years and yes, even begin to extend human life. As for uploading to a computer, I don’t even know what the hell that means. Dvice doesn’t know either apparently.

Persons Unknown is not a terrible show but it’s not a really good show either. To set the stage, the show is about seven strangers, sent to live in a hotel, and have their lives recorded, while unknown powerful people watch what happens when people stop acting fake, and start acting Real. Wait, what?

One of the biggest issues with these types of shows is believability. Lost had something about it that allowed people to connect to it. In the real world that we live in the Lost world could exist. Meaning that some mysterious island somewhere in the world’s oceans that had some mysterious power could really exist. Of course, you have to allow dark matter to be real, be on the island, be capable of being manipulated and used by anyone who drinks from a cup of water and becomes “like” someone else. That island could be plopped right down in our ocean and no one would be the wiser. All the events of Lost could have happened, nothing was unbelievable if you accept the islands power to manipulate events.

When we turn our attention to Person’s Unknown, that believability factor starts to go down. First, some ghost town in the middle of no where? Hello Google Earth? The Island in Lost can’t be seen due to metaphysical technobabble but in Persons Unknown there is no ‘power’ preventing anything from working.  Next, kidnapping mom’s in parks and leaving footage of it laying around is hardly the work of an international super powerful group of MTV executives. Again, hello YouTube? Just upload the damn video to the web and it’s a CNN special report of Soledad O’Brien (hotty). Another big unbelievable factor, all those damn cameras. These people have camera’s apparently in every house in every city all over the world. Even if they are powerful enough to intercept Google Earth images and overthrow the YouTube upload process, they’d have to employ a small army of camera installation crews to maintain all that peeping tom equipment. And in one of the episodes, someone broke one of the globe camera’s that was instantly replaced by another in some behind the scenes automated replacement camera system. That’s gotta be one seriously robust replacement system.

The unbelievability aside, the bigger issue I have with the show is how fast things were revealed. Though, in truth, I suppose that’s a bit unfair. It isn’t a full fledged series but really a long running mini-series. Which really is a new development in modern TV. The single season series. That said, even though it only lasts one season, I still think the mystery is all done. We know what each character is about, we know what the big organization is about, sure there may be some big twist ahead but if there is they aren’t showing it much. For really big twists that people don’t see coming, you need something else to keep them watching and interested. Persons Unknown has doesn’t have that anymore. People are kidnapped, two other people are looking for them, either they will join the program, destroy the all powerful group or all die. Anything’s possible with these new single season series.

What ever happens i’ll watch it and comment on it. Stay tuned!