Sci-Fi Storm

My entire family is happy today now that Freeform (formerly ABC Family) has finally renewed Stitchers for a third season! Stars Emma Ishta and Kyle Harris announced it on Facebook Live:

Stitchers follows a secret government team that “stitches” into the memories of the recently deceased in order to find out what they witnessed before their death. It stars Emma Ishta as Kirtsen, the recently recruited “stitcher” with no sense of time or when to stop talking; Kyle Harris as Cameron, the neuroscientist and lead researcher; Ritesh Rajan as Linus, the bioelectric engineer; Eureka alum Salli Richardson-Whitfield as Maggie, the leader of the team; and Warehouse 13 alum Allison Scagliotti as Camille, Kirsten’s roommate and computer expert.

A couple of Syfy castings…first, the pilot for Superman-prequel Krypton found its male lead in newcomer Cameron Cuffe. Cuffe will play Seg-El, Kal-El’s grandfather who is trying to restore the honor of the ostracized House of El. He joins Georgina Campbell, announced last month as the female lead Lyta Zod.

Cuffe will appear as a recurring character in ITV’s (The Halcyon), and appeared in the movie Florence Foster Jenkins.

John Carroll Lynch has joined Channel Zero: The No-End House, the second installment of the creepypasta anthology series, as a series regular. Lynch will play the father of Margot (Amy Forsyth), whose whole world is his family, but below the surface he is a troubled and complicated man.

Lynch has appeared in a variety of movies and TV series, appearing recently in several episodes of American Horror Story: Hotel as John Wayne Gacy as well as American Horror Story: Freak Show as Twisty the Clown, and earlier in a comedic role as Drew Carey’s brother Steve in The Drew Carey Show. He’s also appeared in Ted 2, Fargo, and just directed his first feature film, Lucky.

You really should watch something else. But in case you don’t, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events debuts January 13th on Netflix…

It’s October 1st, which means it Halloween season, and that Syfy’s 31 Days Of Halloween kicks off today! All October, the network will unleash a mix of spooky Syfy originals and nightmare-inducing horror movies, in a cross-platform celebration of the most wickedly wonderful time of the year.

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN highlights include the premiere of Syfy’s original anthology series Channel Zero: Candle Cove, on Tuesday, October 11 at 9/8c. Based on a popular “creepypasta” story shared on the internet, viewers will want to keep their nightlights on for this chilling tale. The spook-a-thon also features the Syfy movie premieres of horror favorites Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Zombieland, The Strangers, Cabin in the Woods, Wrong Turn, Maleficent, I, Frankenstein and Drag Me to Hell. Additionally, audiences will discover new scares with five original Syfy fright films airing Saturday nights, including The Crooked Man, Stake Land 2 and The Night Before Halloween. New episodes of VAN HELSING, AFTERMATH and Z NATION will also continue to air throughout the month.

To accompany this terrifying cache of programming, Syfy will feature blood-curdling Halloween lore, as well as horror movie trivia on air throughout the month. The network will also plunge viewers into the middle of the action at Universal Studios’ “Halloween Horror Nights” with on-the-ground fan interviews. Syfy.com and its editorial arm, Blastr.com, will offer a veritable Halloween editorial graveyard, with daily Top 13 lists, party tips to make your guests scream and horror trope bingo cards, along with interviews with genre insiders. On the network’s social channels, viewers will be asked to submit their best costumes, screams and holiday décor – and the most frightening entries will be featured on-air and on Syfy’s official Snapchat and Instagram Stories of the Week. On Monday, October 31 at 7/6c fans can celebrate Halloween with Syfy’s social team as they take them inside the New York City Greenwich Village Halloween Parade on Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter.

Original programming airing as part of 31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN includes:

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1 at 9/8c – THE CROOKED MAN
Original Syfy Movie Starring Michael Jai White (Spawn) and Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Singing a nursery rhyme summons a demonic figure known as Crooked Man. Once you sing the rhyme, everyone in the house is cursed to die by his hands.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 at 9/8c – DAY OF RECKONING
Original Syfy Movie — Some years ago, the world experienced a “day of reckoning” when creatures came up from below and purged humanity of evil…now, it is happening again.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11 at 9/8c – CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE
Syfy Original Anthology Series — CANDLE COVE centers on one man’s obsessive recollections of a mysterious children’s television program from the 1980s and his ever-growing suspicions about the role it might have played in a series of nightmarish and deadly events. From Universal Cable Productions (UCP), CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE is from showrunner and executive producer Nick Antosca (Hannibal, Teen Wolf), who wrote the CHANNEL ZERO pilot, and Max Landis (Chronicle, American Ultra). The six-part anthology series will continue on Tuesdays at 9/8c through November 22.

CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE New Embeddable Trailer:

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15 at 9/8c – STAKE LAND 2
Original Syfy Movie Starring Nick Damici (Stake Land) and Connor Paolo (Gossip Girl)
Vampires have evolved, and Mister must save a young woman from an evil brotherhood.

SATUDAY, OCTOBER 22 at 9/8c – SHADOWS OF THE DEAD
Original Syfy Movie — A group of teenagers try to escape a creature that lives among the shadows and is hunting them down one by one.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29 at 9/8c – THE NIGHT BEFORE HALLOWEEN
Original Syfy Movie Starring Bailee Madison (The Fosters, Good Witch) and Anthony Lemke (Dark Matter, American Psycho)
When a Halloween prank goes wrong, it unleashes a creature that will hunt each of the participants down and kill them, unless they can figure out how to transfer the curse to someone else.

Just a few TV tidbits to mention today…first a couple casting items…

We have a Maureen Robinson! The Netflix remake of Lost In Space has cast Molly Parker, who played Abby McDeere in House of Cards and will be in the upcoming David E. Kelley Amazon series Goliath, as the mother and scientist who joins her husband John (Toby Stephens) in taking their family into space to colonize another planet. Also cast at this point are Taylor Russell (Judy Robinson) and Max Jenkins (Will Robinson).

Syfy’s second installment of Channel Zero, called The No-End House, has Jeff Ward (Manson’s Lost Girls, Holly’s Holiday) taking on the male lead opposite previously announced Amy Forsyth, on the creepypasta story-based anthology. Channel Zero: The No-End House will air in 2017 and the first installment, Channel Zero: Candle Cove, starts on October 11th.

Another Netflix pilot, a reboot of The Tick, has been picked up for series to release in 2017. Peter Serafinowicz (Guardians of the Galaxy) will play the title character, his sidekick Arthur will be played by Griffin Newman (Vinyl), while Valorie Curry (The Following) will play his sister, Dot.

Lastly, NBCUniversal, Sony and the creators of NBC’s Timeless, which kicks off next Monday, have been hit with a lawsuit claiming that the show was stolen from the Spanish language series El Ministerio del Tiempo (“The Department of Time”) from Onza Entertainment. Follow the link for more details over the claims.

Supergirl gets a little helping hand from her more-famous cousin (played by Tyler Hoechlin) in the Season 2 premiere of Supergirl, now on the CW…the premiere airs October 10th.

The Lost In Space remake at Netflix has its father/son combo…Toby Stephens, who plays pirate captain Flint in Starz’ Black Sails which will be concluding with its upcoming fourth season, will play astrophysicist and commander John Robinson, the role famously played by Guy Williams.

Max Jenkins, who played the young Will on Sense8, will take on the role of Professor Robinson’s youngest child Will, originally played by Bill Mumy. They both join previously announced Taylor Russell (Falling Skies) who will play oldest child Judy.

No word yet on the details of the characters and how closely they will follow the originals.

Syfy, still in a pilot-ordering mood after a string of straight-to-series orders, has ordered up three new pilots.

The Machine, based on the 2013 UK cult film, explores humanity through artificial intelligence when a sentient AI is created, but the military wants to use it for war. Caradog James, who directed the film, is an executive producer with Red & Black Films and John Giwa-Amu, the film’s producer.

The Haunted is a horror/drama written and co-executive produced by Noga Landau (The Magicians) and executive produced by James Frey and Todd Cohen of Full Fathom Five, who produced American Gothic. The show follows four siblings who must face the “ghosts” of their past when they reunite after the death of their parents.

Happy! is based on the graphic novel from Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson. From Wikipedia: The story centered around a beat down New York Detective turned hitman, Nick Sax, who awakes from a heart attack to a conversation with a perpetually upbeat “Unipixisus”, who calls himself “Happy The Horse” and takes the shape of a little blue flying donkey with a Unicorn horn. The creature is a little girl’s imaginary friend and she is in danger. Only Nick Sax can save her as only Nick can see or hear Happy. Morrison and Brian Taylor will write and executive produce, with Taylor directing the pilot. Neal Moritz, Pavun Shetty and Toby Jaffe will also executive produce.

These three join previous pilot orders Prototype, which is not moving forward at Syfy, and Krypton, which is currently casting.

The nostalgia isn’t even cold on all the Star Trek 50th Anniversary celebrations, but CBS chilled things a bit, announcing today that the upcoming new series Star Trek: Discovery would not debut until May, 2017, pushed back from the original January target.

There is no indication that there are any issues with the production, but it rather came from a request by the creative team to allow more time for the pre-production, filming, and post-production phases of each episode because “Star Trek deserves the very best, and these extra few months will help us achieve a vision we can all be proud of,” according to a release from producers Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman.

It seems more like they just realized they needed more time given the scope and needs of the show.

The plan is still for the debut episode to appear on the CBS broadcast network, with the rest of the series available on the CBS All Access subscription streaming service.

You always remember your first.

I’m not talking your first kiss, or first ice cream sundae, or your first rock concert. In this case, I’m talking about your first science fiction show.

I’m not yet 50 years old, but getting close to it. So I don’t remember when Star Trek first aired. But back in those days where we had just a few channels to choose from and not a lot of competition for your eyes, shows had a second chance at life during the daytime and weekends in syndication. Star Trek was one of those shows that found a second life there, and that’s where Star Trek found me.

I got my love of science fiction from my dad. I’m not sure what it was about the shows, but if Star Trek was on he found it and we’d watch it together. Other shows as well – I still remember watching a mostly forgotten show called The Starlost on a little black-and-white TV in the kitchen with him. I also got my love from old school Disney programs as well from watching Mickey Mouse Club reruns. We watched Lost In Space, Space: 1999 and Battlestar Galactica together. But Star Trek was the first.

Star Trek influenced me in so many ways. Before I was even in school, I could tell you the entire plot of any episode from the opening act. I recorded episodes on audio tape using an old Radio Shack cassette recorder on Memorex tapes. (The episode “Wolf In The Fold” gets really creepy with just the audio.) I even acted out my own episode recorded on audio tape – it was very short and very lame, and fortunately lost to the annals of time…but it did involve a third adventure into the Great Barrier…I’m afraid my skills as a science fiction writer haven’t really progressed much either.

There were two things that always drew me to science fiction – space and technology. Space, because it brought all sorts of cool spaceships but also a vast universe of settings and stories, and the “advanced” technology that was shown. Sure, I know know they were just plastic buttons with lights on a black backing, but they looked cool and I wanted to know what each of those buttons did! The communicators that became our cell phones, the computer tapes that were later mimicked by floppy discs, and now we’re even getting to tricorder technology. Although in many ways our technology has advanced further than what was shown back then, it was what they showed that inspired people to develop that which we have today. Star Trek likely accelerated our own technology from the dreams of the past.

I was convinced I would be an astronaut when I was eight just so I could be in a spaceship like the Enterprise. That didn’t happen, although my interest in the space program didn’t wane. I still have science and space program books from then, showing actual current theorized future space travel systems. My technology interests translated into other areas of science, ultimately into computers, where I eventually got two degrees in Computer Science. But I always kept one eye on the stars.

For a long while though, what was on TV remained on TV and didn’t really cross into real life. Conventions were a bit difficult for me to attend early on, but by the time I got to high school I was able to attend my first real convention in Boston. It only had a couple guests and was a fairly formal affair (it was a commercial convention and not of the much better fan-run variety), but it is where I met the late Jimmy Doohan in person, and not by spending hours in line for an expensive signature or photo op – by him coming down before the convention actually opened and shaking hands with everyone in line! Forever a fan of his with that. He was so gracious and friendly. He was the first TV celebrity I ever remember meeting.

While in college, Star Trek returned to TV in the form of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was living with a friends family, where he and I convinced the family to get cable TV wired to our room just so we could watch it. Star Trek influenced computer programmers a lot. There were always references to it somewhere. The granddaddy of internet forums, UseNet, had several discussion groups dedicated to Star Trek. Early computer games either paid homage or overtly referenced it (such as the famous “trek” game where you explored sectors and fought Klingons.) When the Internet started to grow in the early to mid-90s (yet before AOL was truly online), an early multi-player graphical game called Netrek ate up bandwidth at many universities. I was working at a university at a time running the computer systems and network, and hosted a pretty popular netrek server and was even involved in the International Netrek League for several years.

All through these years, the love of science fiction that started with Star Trek has never wavered. Now I’ve been doing science fiction news, mainly on the TV and movie side of things, for 16 years next month. I’ve made friends in the industry that work both in front of and behind the camera. Now I have two daughters who are eager to see the new movies as soon as they come out, sharing the same love of SF that I did then, watched “The Cage” with me tonight, and I have high hopes that they will continue to do love science fiction as I have done.

I may not have reached the actual stars myself yet, but I still do keep an eye on them.

For the 50 years you’ve been around and the nearly 50 that you’ve influenced my life, a most heartfelt thank you to all of the casts, crews, and fans that helped created and keep going this long trek to the stars.