Christmas has now come to mean the Doctor Who Christmas Special - amongst other things.

This year saw the Doctor - somewhat inexplicably - have the TARDIS crash into the Titanic... Not THE Titanic, A Titanic... which is in SPACE. So despite managing to plough into the interior of the TARDIS (which seems rather silly), it seems to be OK. Naturally the Doctor starts to schmooze and nose around on this space bound Titanic... as it turns out, said Titanic is in orbit around the Earth and filled with aliens... most of whom are indistinguishable from normal humans... but then, so is the Doctor...

After the mandatory foreshadowing of the - let's face it, inevitable - disaster to come, the Doctor meets Kylie Minogue (who is a serving wench). She doesn't burst into song... which - given RTD - one might have expected at some point but no, she does a solid job of acting the part, nothing to wow... but hey, this is Doctor Who... you can't ever expect any really stellar performances because the format practically necessitates hamming up.

Anyway, tis Christmas eve and people want to go visit Earth. The Doctor takes Kylie along for the ride. Meanwhile, Captain Birdseye has gone a bit bonkers - which is what we were all waiting for. The ol' cliche of someone condemning a whole load of people to death - just so their family is looked after. We should probably be glad that a giant space iceberg wasn't what struck the ship, I suppose... not that a comet would have been so out of place...

Naturally, big rocks vs. space ship = bang! Of course, while most of the people are killed the Doctor and Kylie are fine. Along with them are two space Scousers (also, space working class - they won a contest) man and wife... Then there's space jerk... the kind of arrogant high flyer that everyone hates. The space tour guide - who knows the square root of bugger all about Earth and got his diploma from the same place as "Dr" Gillan McKeith... and of course, what voyage in space would be complete without a space alien. In this case, a red midget cyborg space alien... who is some kin of bastardisation of Darth Maul, Mini-me and a gay Satan.

As if being stuck on a damaged ship - sans TARDIS - wasn't enough... the creepy looking angels - fittingly called "The Host" - that populate the ship have gone from mildly unhelpful to straight forward murderin'... with their halos, no less... Oddjob would be pleased. It's not too long before Darth Midget has used his cybernetic bits to generate an EMP to take down some of the Host... quite how a piece of equipment designed to keep him alive can generate an EMP pulse isn't explained... or how it only takes down the Host... Best not to get hung up on these details - especially given the fact the Sonic Screwdriver can do anything from open doors to make a cup of tea.

So, obese space Scouse heroically sacrifices himself by falling into the engine... then Darth Mini-me... then the other space Scouse can't bear to go on living without the other space Scouse and tosses herself into the giant reactor too... what is it with health and safety in the future? Is there such a massive backlash that you're just allowed to have a giant open reactor? With regulations like that, it seems unlikely you'd need meteors to crash into you for a serious accident to happen.

By this point the Doctor has - naturally - twigged that there is more going on here than just a nasty accident... because it's not just the ship that's going to go down... for some reason, the ship crashing into the planet will kill EVERYONE on the planet (that's probably also down to a lack of health and safety regulations... who'd have thought they were ever useful?).

The Doctor being the Doctor - and everyone else being relatively safe for the time being - goes off to get to the bottom of the matter. He does this by just asking the Host some questions. It seems pretty silly, really. You've got your robots set to kill... but if someone says a magic phrase, they stop killing and answer your questions... even aliens are sloppy coders, it seems.

Nevertheless, he manages to get there and finds out Max Capricorn - the same Max Capricorn who owns the company - is hiding out on the ship, in an "impact chamber" that will allow him to destroy the ship and Earth and hence ruin the board that spurned him and land them in jail and then let him quietly sneak off to retire... I suppose we should be glad... at least it wasn't the old insurance scam.

Anyway, Kylie tagged along after the Doctor and appears just after his spiel has run its course. Quite why the Host ignored their order to kill the Doctor and gawked at Kylie driving a forklift at their boss is a mystery... as is why he doesn't ask for help - he's stuff in a life support unit the size of a big fridge/freezer combo. In any respect, enter heroic sacrifice the third.

For some reason, having just killed their boss - the Host decide to help the Doctor who then sets about stopping the ship plummet into Buckingham Palace... with a real cameo from the Queen... didn't the BBC get in trouble for that earlier? Naturally, the Doctor averts crisis for the third year running... Not that a giant ship crashing into London could really make it any more of an urban death maze than it already is... Also, best not to think too much about how the Doctor was able to violate the second law of thermodynamics.

The Doctor then realises he can save Kylie! For obvious reasons of real life practicality - the attempt to revive her fails. Which is a crying shame. Kylie "dies" and Catherine Tate didn't even get horribly mutilated. Well, no one can say the show doesn't make life unfair. So, the day is saved... the Doctor cringes when he realises that the self-serving douchebag survived but a girl he could have had sex with - died. Well, who wouldn't be crushed... Kylie may need to stand on a box to kiss... but she's a fine filly. Much of the nation would have paid for Catherine Tate to fall in an actual nuclear furnace... where was your quality destroying populism then, eh RTD?

The Doctor and the doddering space tour guide abscond via teleportation - whatever happened to TRANSMAT? - to the TARDIS's landing place on Earth where it's snowing. In keeping with previous years, the snow is actually from the spaceship rather than being real. Space tour guide has a credit card with a million pounds on it... how does that work? Regardless, the Doctor says "I travel alone" - a bigger lie than his Scottish accent - and waves goodbye to the senile coot, who is babbling about a house. The blithering space idiot doesn't know a million pounds wouldn't buy you a potting shed in central London.

It worked quite well as a bit of Christmas fun... it felt like it was aiming for a send up of the Poseidon Adventure... but in truth, probably ended up being more of a parody of itself... the overly dramatic music (even the intro and outro). Repeated heroic sacrifices (clearly more is more), the cheesy villain, all the clumsy editing/directing, the stereotype characters, the cliches... OH, the cliches. Still, passes the time... and as Doctor Who goes, it's pretty passable.

It's fair to say that - like an increasing number of people in TV and film - Ricky Gervais opened up with a closing down sale... Or rather, started with something that he was never -realistically - going to top. The Office was - to say the least - a seminal success on every level. Popular, critical and... the other one.

The fact that even the closing episode of The Office was generally met with contempt - quite why it needed a Christmas special, beyond further enriching Gervais, is beyond anyone's ken - showed he was already a one trick pony.

Of course, like many people that have met with some degree of success in comedy the BBC couldn't deny him. Which isn't surprising given the perpetual absence of good or even tolerable comedy on the BBC these days... outside of panel games. So when someone who wrote, directed and starred in a show that won about a dozen awards in two consecutive years...

So, the "safe bet" of Gervais got another show... Extras. In many ways, it follows the traditions of cringe worthy comedy... but it falls short in so many ways... not least the pointless popularism. The main flaw was always going to be... while many people might have spent a summer in an office job, how many people have ever been an actor? It totally removed the element that everyone could relate to. Millions of people in the West must surely have done SOME office work, if only for a a few weeks. How many people ever tried to be an Extra?

Anyway, after two - quite frankly dire - seasons of Extras... Gervais presumably chose to end the agony of the backlash and contempt for him... Not that it's ever likely to stop. Ironic that he set himself on a pedestal of not doing commercials... presumably because that's "selling out". If Extras and The Office Christmas Special weren't selling out... what is?

The Extras Christmas Special... well, fairly dire and pretty much what anyone who has had the misfortune of watching Extras would have expected. It's hard to see the funny side of celebrities making fun of themselves being fame obsessed. They are... it's just the kind of show that would make you want to stab yourself rather than watch another minute of the laboured, played out jokes with CELEBRITIES. It's just unrelentingly trying to hammer home a message as facile as the faux sitcom.

It would be ironic - not to mention gratifying - if Gervais's career was to follow a similar fate of his screen counterparts. Suffice to say, the same mistakes were made as in The Office Christmas Special. He shows little innovation, originality, humour. People need to stop feeding people that live on the gravy train. Gervais had a single good idea that he did well... Extras, Flanimals (how isn't that a sell out?)... his atrociously awful stand-up routines... all simply proved he was a chancer. Let's hope this timorous effort is a final nail in the coffin.

For many years, Microsoft have been considered by most of those with the technical prowess to use a computer for more than five minutes before demanding they be assisted in the strenuous task of sending an e-mail to be the industry's great Satan.

In fact, so ingrained in the psyche is this disdain of MS that we even have companies like Apple basing their corporate image on "Hey, Microsoft suck! We're for the cool people! Or stupid people with money who want to think they're cool! Or maybe just exclusively the latter." Which is fair enough given that most people would generally agree that, yes - Windows sucks.

Which of course makes it somewhat amusing - not least to Bill Gates et al - that it still accounts for 90% of operating systems and pretty much has, since home computers became something that were affordable by the masses. Needless to say that this leads to an almost inexorable truth that most people will eventually be coerced into upgrading Windows when they buy a new PC.

The latest offering being Vista - presumably after you announce the name of a product and then go "oh, uh... did we say 2002? We meant 2003, oops." and then "2003? Noooo, we said 2004!" and so on, someone twigs that perhaps it's best to go with something that can remain the same, regardless of the release date. Vista has pretty much made alllll the promises that all other versions of Windows have made.

It'll be more secure! Faster, stronger! Consume more resources than you ever dreamed! More pointless shiny things to impress slack jaw simpletons and so on. The real problem here is surely this... generally by the time a new Windows platform is released, the old one is getting to be fairly robust. The bugs are ironed out, most of the giant gaps in security have been patched, code has been optimised and things run on it without you needing to run off and get some special new patch or the like. So - just as XP becomes something you could actually think of as a solid, reliable platform... here comes a brand new set of problems!

Vista isn't quite the car crash that 98 and XP were but it's a massive resource whore. All the gains one might make with a new machines evaporate and a machine you thought would be able to calculate the square root of infinity finds itself spending half the time making shiny pointless things flash... and even if you deactivate those, you're likely to find that Vista seldom uses less than a gig of RAM. Granted RAM might be comparable in price per meg to the hourly rate of a Dundonian crack whore but that hardly excuses such wanton squandering when two gigs is only starting to become the standard on new machines.

All there is to look forward to now is the next Windows platform... which will be everything that every Windows promises to be...

Thus far, films of games and games of films have generally failed on many fronts.

Licensed games tend to be thin, unimaginative cash ins... and Uwe Boll is the foremost maker of films of games... If that doesn't sum up the dire nature of them... then you're truly experiencing the bliss of ignorance.

Now Hitman has been "blessed" with a film based on the popular franchise... The game revolves around the antics of bald headed super assassin, Agent 47. Genetically engineered to murder and look damned good in a suit.

The film gets the bald part right, he also kills people and wears a suit... of course, there isn't really much more to it. Naturally, things do not go smoothly for our super assassin. Which means that the film is really more of a poor man's action film. 47 supposedly botches the assassination of the Russian premier but this is actually all a ploy. A vague, dull, generic ploy that is pretty much irrelevant.

It means 47 and some Russian girl run away from people shooting at them... with precious little assassinating and far more bland, generic action which in no way redeems the film. Beyond the protagonist being roughly the same in appearance to 47... there's little to connect it to the game and even less to recommend it as something to watch.

They should have just left it to gamers.

It would be fair to say that Saw has become the bankable horror franchise of the decade. The torture porn exploits of serial killer Jigsaw plenty of fun for the whole family... more or less.

The writers of the series are aware that the secret of a good serial killer film is that, the death of the serial killer is little reason for him to stop murdering. Somewhat differently from other killers, this is a non-supernatural revenge. Nope, as far as can be discerned - Jigsaw is dead as it gets. Lying on the autopsy table, organs all over... and unlike Jason or Michael Myers - he isn't going to sit up and kill anyone... that's not his style.

The plot of the film is... rather irrelevant. Oh, sure - you could follow it and try and work out the twist but that's not really the point. Nope, you want to see the confusing, winding narrative and the torture porn. Yup and the twist.

It lacks the originality of the first film or the polished nature of the second... it's just not that great unless you want to see gore... and the lack of Tobin Bell, well.

The most likely thing to strike you when the first cut scene goes into actual gameplay on Crysis is that it's very pretty. That's of course assuming your graphics card doesn't have a fit at the amount of stuff it has to render and summarily explode. If you're fortunate enough to have a machine able to render the game closer to its upper settings though, you will often be impressed by the game world. The flora and fauna, buildings, vehicles, allies and enemy combatants are all things of beauty... until they're rendered asunder by your murder and wanton mayhem.

Not only are they lovingly detailed but they are also far more interactive. Enemy combatants can be grabbed, tossed or killed silently, (some) trees can be mown down and (some) buildings can be smashed apart. It's rather rewarding to toss a grenade and have a house collapse or use a machine gun and bring down a line of palm trees. Naturally, Half Life 2 had the physics first and the pretty graphics first but Crysis has raised the bar on both. The environment isn't quite as destructible as it might be... but then, this game is already beyond the reach of most without rather new graphics cards... so, presumably the ability to mass murder was paramount over EVERYTHING being reducible to rubble.

Not that Crysis forces you to run around like Rambo, single handedly taking down the entire Korean People's Army or alien hordes by yourself. Stealth and avoidance are perfectly valid tactics here - mostly thanks to the nanotech suit you have. It's rather strange to start a game with essentially the full gamut of abilities but Crysis lets you use all the suit's functions almost from the word go.

The four modes it offers being:

Super speed - running and shooting faster.
Super strength - increased melee damage, jumping higher and tossing stuff further.
Super durability - considerably increasing your ability to take damage.
Cloak - rendering you invisible to enemies.

It also fills up your health over time and offers night vision... Naturally, all these abilities use energy when active. Cloak is easily the most useful, allowing you to take out one or two enemies and then hide and then rinse and repeat until all enemies are dispatched... or simply avoid enemies altogether. Strength is useful for getting onto rooftops and navigating to otherwise inaccessible areas - and punch enemies to dead... speed seems of limited use, given that it can be expended so quickly. Durability is pretty much the "vanilla" flavour here and makes you akin to some kind of... Master Chief.

The suit isn't the only interesting angle to the gameplay. Weapons are all customisable - to various degrees, with different modules you can stick on them. Different types of scopes, flash lights, laser pointers, grenade launchers... nothing that will make them a great deal more efficient but it's a nice touch... even though sticking a sniper scope on a shotgun may be about as useful as putting a rocket engine on a carrier pigeon.

So, you have your super suit and your sniper scoped shotgun and you're ready to murder Korean soldiers like it's going out of fashion... and this game let's you do it in style. Thankfully the KPA has hundreds of them just waiting to meet any number of ends at your hands. Initially, you're just skirmishing. Running around the pretty island, trying to find some wayward hostages... but of course, the course of true gaming seldom runs smooth and you'll soon find yourself in full on hostilities with the KPA, performing tactical missions and such. This is really where the game excels and easily pushes for a place in your FPS affections.

The maps are large and the paths of attack varied. You can creep through the jungle, all sneaky and sly - not killing anyone at all. Or just hop in a vehicle, drive along the roads, mow down the soldiers and smash buildings. Not that that approach is necessarily the best one... there can't be any doubt that your supersuit affords you many advantages over the hapless KPA troops but on Hard difficulty, you can't just wade in and expect to win against a dozen troops - or even a half dozen.

The AI isn't quite as impressive as that in F.E.A.R. though and it's not that uncommon to see it sometimes see it looking in the wrong way when you shoot someone or cloak, although - frequently they'll continue to fire at your last position or creep around on the alert. Fairly competent, certainly and given the large scales of the map, quite effective although it might have been nice to see troops running away but all in all, solid AI.

As implied - there are aliens... that's obvious pretty much from the start but they don't really debut until two thirds of the way through. It's at this point the game goes all Xen on us. What made the game fun was running around large maps, shooting other humans - as sociopathic as that might sound... but after a headache inducing float through an alien city (they clearly forgot to pay their gravity bills) the Koreans are gone and here come the aliens.

The aliens look copyright infringingly close to the "squiddies" from The Matrix. Except they're turquoise instead of red... oh and they fire flechettes instead of using lasers... but otherwise very similar. The aliens like it nice and cold, so the island is turned to ice for this segment of the game... as you might imagine, it's fairly standard - aliens are attacking, get the hell out of dodge. The excitement of the initial part of the game is more or less totally killed - you run from point A to point B. Most of the time, there is little point in doing anything other than running away - being big and metal, the robots take considerably more ammo to go down and their aim is pretty piss poor... so there isn't exactly a reason to hang around unless it's required as an objective.

The game ends with a bit of running around an aircraft carrier and then TWO boss fights... all of which feels totally at odds with the initial segments of the game. While that felt somewhat challenging, the aliens just felt like a tedious objective to slog through and quite at odds with the fun of the tropical island. It's not QUITE the jumping puzzles of Xen or the animal infested final level of Deus Ex but it really robs the game of any greatness.

That isn't to say the game isn't enjoyable - when it excels, it's excelling on several levels but then it feels as if the story of aliens became MORE important than the enjoyability of the game... shooting Matrix style robots is not fun and flying a VTOL that handles like a cow against them is a lesson in tedium. It really feels as if the guy in charge of the level design got up to entering the alien city and then went out on a break and by the time he got back, everyone else had rushed out the last bunch of levels.

It's not the first game that flags after initially impressive levels and it surely won't be the last but with Crysis, it feels as if it actually missed out on the opportunity to be a seminal single player campaign by resorting to the old "Oh, aliens!" shtick and really... boss battles aren't what games like Crysis should be about. Still, despite that the impressive visuals, physics and gameplay in the first segment of this game still shine through and it's easy to find yourself regaling people about your escapades. Anyone with a penchant for supersoldiers or FPSs should play it... just be ready for the little bit of alien heart break.

RDM has been something of a darling of the sci-fi world since he brought a re-imagined BSG back to the small screen. It's no secret that some feel that the show was flagging a bit in season 3 - in much the same way it did in season 2 - but even so, it effortlessly beats everything except Heroes.


Season 4 isn't starting until 2008, so to tide hungry sci-fi fans over - we have been treated to Razor... a film covering events on board Pegasus, from the time of the Cylon attack to before the discovery of New Caprica... Centring almost entirely around a previously unmentioned and unseen Pegasus officer and showing key events on Pegasus from her point of view - specifically several instances that had been mentioned in Galactica.

It suffers from the rather unfortunate inevitability that almost all prequels do - that people and events of a pivotal nature aren't mentioned... ever. As such, it's somewhat throw away but good clean fun nevertheless. In fact, it's more likely to whet your appetite for the show - if only because it plays very much like a feature length episode.

The episode plays out as a number of flashbacks from the point of view of our newly introduced Pegasus officer. Namely three incidents mentioned in BSG - the initial Cylon attack, Kane shooting one of her officers and the seizing of personnel and equipment from a civilian fleet. That is all essentially setting the scene for the meat of the piece... a trip back to the 70s where we finally see OLD SCHOOL CYLONS!

The exact significance of the "hybrid" isn't really elaborated upon beyond the fact it's some kind of bridge between the mechanical and organic stages of the Cylons and hence needs to be blown up, naturally things don't go quite as planned but the Cylons are dispatched and everything wraps up nicely... with just one possible tie-in for the show.

As Galactica goes, this is about as solid as they come... it's not really action packed but it has the high drama that Galactica seems to do so well and without any of the smaltzy romance that marred much of the latter half of season three. It certainly doesn't feel as if it's required viewing - although any BSG fan of merit would see it - but it's certainly fun and it breaks the somewhat longer interim between seasons 3 and 4.

The fact that considerable amounts of time are spent outside of the main cast is surprisingly acceptable. We do KNOW all the characters - except the female lead - and have some acquaintance with them and we get enough of the main cast that we don't forget this is BSG and not BSP but it does distance you somewhat and to have the lead as an unknown makes things just a little harder to swallow. Not that she is a deficient actor. She's quite adept at being the hard ass XO but it's hard to get a lot of character building into ninety minutes...

Still, all in all - a solid effort that any BSG fan could watch and enjoy.

Futurama always somewhat smacked of Matt Groening wanting to show the world that - yes, he COULD be more than the Simpsons... even if it wasn't really that different but then, there are various archetypes that permeate the sitcom genre.

Futurama was always somewhat more confused than the Simpsons... while the yellow family have occasionally "tackled issues", comedy has always been the alpha and the omega of the show... even if it's been ever more scarce in the past decade. Futurama sometimes liked to toss in some poignant aspects that were ill at ease with the comic and whimsical nature of the show.

Regardless, like Family Guy, it was cancelled and yet, has been born again... this time, as a film - Bender's Big Score. Despite the name, the film doesn't really feel "big"... as can happen with film outings of TV shows, it felt much like an episode... just one that happened to last five times as long.

Unlike the Family Guy movie which shamelessly broke into episode sized acts, this is really more one single story and it works quite well. It's not exactly epic in scope or laughs but it's enjoyable and if you've missed the quirky show since it was cancelled, this will certainly fill the Futurama shaped hole in your life.

The plot involves that perennial sci-fi favourite, time travel - Fry has a tattoo with a key to time travel on his ass - ... and actually plays upon the existing show continuity for plot. There are never any really big laughs but there's a consistency. You won't go more than a few minutes without a joke or just a moment of inanity to bring a smile to your face. Even in the actiony ending, there are still very Futurama moments that will make you laugh to yourself.

All in all, it's a good reminder of the show and an enjoyable effort on several levels.

It seems these days that the typical way to deal with an established, popular franchise that has fallen on times, is to give it to some flavour of the month type writer/producer, who will then proceed to "make it their own"... which seems to mean pissing all over it by ignoring continuity, deliberately antagonising established fans (because who cares about them? They'll watch it if you show them paint drying) and doing what they want, regardless of how rubbish it is.

It happened to Doctor Who, it happened to Alien vs. Predator and Transformers and of course, JJ Abrams is working flat out to make sure that Trek fans would rather have a root canal than pay money to see Star Trek XI... naturally, they will but they'll be wishing it was a root canal.

Abrams doubtless thinks that he's hot stuff with the success of Lost - despite the fact that viewership is starting to drop off as the slow minded public start to realise that it'll drag on and on and then at the end, it'll all be a dream... - and MI:3, which is a bad thing. It seem as soon as people get on the Hollywood gravy train, people start sucking... Just look at Kevin Smith and M. Night Shimshamwallawallawhatavideo. Both pulled an Orson Welles and started with quite impressive films, then instantly slid into mediocrity and of course, Abrams wasn't even good to begin with.

This isn't all baseless speculation though... Instead of forging ahead with some interesting new ideas has committed himself to returning to the Kirk era AND time travel. So, boldly going where we've gone in 70+ episodes and 6 (and a bit) films have gone before. Of course, in keeping with screwing over fans, pissing over continuity and generally being unimaginative we can't have the surviving crew don corsets and shine up their Zimmer frames to star.

Nope, we need a new younger cast... that's actually fairly reasonable. The cast were making jokes about how they were past it in films over two decades ago and it was true then. However, the new cast will be playing considerably younger versions of the well known crew. Why? TIME TRAVEL!

Yes, proving how incredibly innovative he is, Abrams whips out just about the biggest sci-fi cliche - which handily gives him a level of immunity from fans complaining about continuity violations... In any event, those pesky Romulans apparently want to kill Kirk or some such and it's up to Spock to make sure that drunken, inter-species womanising and outrageous bluffing become the Star Trek way. Which leads to Old Spock and Young Spock meeting up and us getting Star Trek - the college years.

Fanboys should start putting down tarps now... because it seems certain that there will be a lot of foaming at the mouth to do in the next 12 months... You can start on this - Winona Ryder is Spock's mother. She's going to shoplift the components for him to build a time machine or something.

For a company that has produced two games, Valve has done quite well in dominating the hearts, minds and column inches of the gaming world. Not that it isn't deserved.

Their latest plan is to further endear themselves to the public by releasing further episodes of Half Life 2, to chronicle the further adventures of Gordon Freeman, following directly from the end of the game proper. The Orange Box includes three games - the massively delayed Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal.

Portal is undoubtedly the most innovative of the games and offers a very different experience to the usual FPS. This is essentially an exercise in spacial puzzles - courtesy of the hand held portal device. Guided by a slightly unnerved AI who clearly aspires to be SHODAN. The novelty is that at no time do you ever have anything more than your portal gun and some handy spring heels that make it impossible to take damage from falls.

There isn't much of a story, it's just good wholesome fun... that will likely make you feel a little confused as to how space works... but the fun of simply being able to fly is fantastic. Or rather, fall out of a portal... The game is hilariously short and even the most slow witted of gamers should be able to finish it in an afternoon at most... this is probably for the best as there are only so many puzzles that one can do involving Portals before they become repetitive or simply too difficult to be enjoyable.

Also hilarious is the dialogue of the game... TF2 is very slapstick but Portal has a subtle, adult humour that is rather dark... doubtless it will go straight over the heads of the dullards but then, what doesn't.

As a single player experience - it's a fun afternoon but really given the wait for Episode 2, it should have been more than just a single afternoon.

The adaption of the Resident Evil franchise to the silver screen has been - at best - uneven.

There can be little doubt that the latest instalment owes little beyond the underlying premise (and perhaps the apocalyptic overtones of the forthcoming game) to the game series. Still, the basic concept is followed - Umbrella messes around with deadly mutagenic T-virus, zombies are unleashed, a good time is had by all... who don't die.

Things have not gone very well since the last film and in the opening seconds we discover that essentially the entire world has been infected with the T-virus - despite the best efforts of Umbrella - and hence, we're in a Dawn/Day of the Dead situation where government has broken down and survivors struggle... well, survive, although instead of heading for a mall, Alice's pals from Apocalypse are busing it across the now desertified USA.

After finding a plot device, the gang decide - after Milla toasts some zombie crows - to head for Alaska. Of course, that's further complicated by the fact Umbrella - currently hiding out in bunkers across the globe - are intent on recovering Alice to use her to domesticate the zombies and use them as telesales marketers and of course, evil obsessional scientist is just super keen to get Milla back so he doesn't have to play with clones of her.

Plan "drive to Alaska" is going just great until evil scientist decides to ignore sunglasses wearing head honcho and decides to drop a cargo container full of super zombies on the road there. Naturally, fighting a cargo container full of super zombies thins the ranks, especially with Milla gets mind controlled for a while.

Of course, nothing riles up a telekinetic zombie killer more than super zombies killing her friends, so they head to evil scientists secret base... ostensibly to take a bus load full of people on a small, commercial helicopter from Nevada... to Alaska. Mutagenic virus? Ok. Telekinetic powers? Sure. Global apocalypse caused by slow moving animated corpses? Why not? Small helicopter taking over a dozen people and supplies all the way to Alaska with no chance of refueling? Get outta town. Or possibly the people are all so immensely stupid they don't realise that they'll probably go a few hundred miles, run out of fuel and then be even more screwed than when they started.

Anyways, while the rest of the cast are getting ready for their short flight to Alaska, Milla is headed into evil scientist's bunker... oh, he got bit by one of the super zombies and is now mutating into an evil monster with telekinetic powers too. The ending is pretty grim... an ARMY of Milla Jovovichs. If THAT isn't apocalyptic...

System Shock 2 is - possibly - the very definition of a cult classic. A game that - to this day - enjoys a small but loyal following. To the discerning eye, the graphics are horrible and dated but beneath that exterior is a compelling, involving story and fantastic gameplay... but because of various circumstances, it never had a sequel but now it has a spiritual sequel. Bioshock.

Bioshock - in contrast to its ugly sister - is pretty. Maybe not the most beautiful game there is but close... and really, it looks great. The water effects are wonderful and while it's not quite Half Life 2 when it comes to physics, it does fairly well in that respect.

Of course, while most FPS games are about running around and just shooting things until you win - Bioshock is much more plot driven. It's not just "KILL EVERYTHING!" There are reasons to the murder you commit and of course, thanks to the structure of the game, it's entirely possible to avoid a lot of the conflict... or alternatively you can arm yourself to the teeth, shoot first and ask questions later. It's the kind of game - much in the style of System Shock 2 and Deus Ex - which you could play several times in quite different ways.

The game is relentlessly atmospheric and even in the later stages when you can school the average enemy with relative ease, you'll still find yourself creeping around and hiding in the shadows when you hear enemies on the prowl. The false hope of Rapture is quite compelling... never thrown in your face - merely the quiet tragedy of it all. The game is quite wonderful for that and the fact you can occasionally just look out into the sea is fantastic and quite inspiring.

All of that atmosphere is helped by the story, which pushes you along through this decaying underwater city. As well as the standard weapons you get, the most obvious deviation from a standard FPS is the variety of Plasmids and tonics you get, these give you access to new skills. Everything from telekinesis and electricity to hacking better or hitting harder. To gain these powers you need ADAM, which you can only obtain from creepy little girls... protected by the aptly named "Big Daddy", easily the hardest enemies in the game outside of the bosses. Of course, if you leave them alone - they'll leave you alone but then you'll be denied the Adam you need to stand a chance of beating the later bad guys. You start out with just two slots for each set of skills but you can increase that, as well as your total health and EVE. Of course, there are more tonics and plasmids than there are slots - so you're forced to make some gameplay decisions... although, you're able to change these around at stations in the game.

Another interesting facet - also taken from SS2 - is that you can research your enemies. This is achieved by means of a camera... snapping pictures of enemies eventually allows you damage bonuses and access to new tonics/abilities. It also adds an extra element to gameplay as you sneak up on enemies or quickly photograph them as you're killing them.

There is a limited capability to upgrade weapons... only two upgrades per weapon and the upgrade terminals (one use only) make it a lot less versatile than Deus Ex in this respect. An inventory system would actually have been quite a nice touch but it wasn't really something that was required... although, it may have given the game a tad more depths... as it is, you just hit ammo limits... which are fairly reasonable. Of course, the Plasmids are far more satisfying. Freeze enemies, set them on fire, throw things at them, electrify them, make them attack their enemies or several other things.

In a somewhat surprising contrast to System Shock 2, there isn't a trade off between combat and hacking and such. You can be good at everything... by the end of the game, you WILL be, probably. This means you can run around, hack things, heal up, shoot stuff up and so on and so forth... this means there's no real trade off as you had in Deus Ex... you may favour one style of play but ultimately you can do it all, which makes things somewhat less interesting. The only thing that really limits you, are the number of slots you have (a maximum of six) and that is quite a lot.

Still, it's a pretty game with a great variety of powers, a compelling plot, a wonderful atmosphere and fun gameplay... not for the faint of heart, certainly but easily one of the most enjoyable FPS/RPG type games of recent years... not that there are many of those but still... This really shows what can be done with games when people put some love into them. It's hard not to admire the game and feel a twinge of regret as it's all over...

Flash Gordon... THE WEDDING EPISODE!

Not actually Flash's. Flash's token black friend's brother's and of course, Flash's friend is the best man. Which makes it a trifle unfortunate - if eminently predictable - when the portal to Mongo opens, beasties (paradise bugs) pop out and bite him.

Thanks to our Mongol native, we know that these are fatal. You'd think the best thing to do would be to make an excuse for him or something but no he's taken to the wedding, where Dale has to be a real bitch to him to stop him dying (stops the poison).

Naturally, Flash has to go off and get the cure... from a bunch of women, who aren't keen on men... and keep eunuchs around. So, Flash has to get them an urn back - which requires a trip to Ming's palace... All in all, it unfolds by the numbers from there and isn't very captivating.

The following episode is a big improvement... Flash gets his hopes up when a portal opens and a video shows his father coming through... but then, it seems that ol' dad has got murder on the mind.

We have a good dynamic with Flash and the bounty hunter... and Zharkov is used wonderfully. His paranoid, rantings show a glimmer of the character he was in the movie - which is, naturally great. Eventually Flash realises that his father, this is not (the murdering was a clue) and all is well... the first episode approaching "good".

Seems like remake and spin-off season in sci-fi town. A new Flash Gordon, a spin-off from Terminator and now, a remake of the Bionic Woman... doubtless if they ever manage to get the Wonder Woman film off the shelf, they'll make a new TV show.

Refreshingly, this pilot episode doesn't dawdle. Not quite the running start of Sarah Connor Chronicles... but we've got the basic elements established by the end of the first episode... with a few fun fight scenes. It's pretty straight forward... ordinary student at university - with deaf sister - is doing just super with her professor boyfriend. Until resident bionic psycho bitch (Starbuck!) crashes a truck into them.

This leaves our heroine in pretty rough shape. Just as well her boyfriend is in charge of a secret project to give women bionic body parts, eh? So, she gets her bionic legs... a bionic eye, a bionic arm and bionic ears! Shouldn't they have thrown in a free breast augmentation? Anyway, as you might expect our Eastend girl is somewhat freaked out by getting spiffy new parts and with the help of her fiance, promptly escapes.

Naturally after a traumatic car accident, miscarriage and surgery - she goes straight back to work, where Starbuck stops by to say hello. Starbuck being a nutter prototype who tells our heroine that it's her bionic implants that are activating - kinda like a benign Terminator interface. After this, it's only a matter of time before the two women are battling on roof tops in what is actually a pretty passable display of speed and strength...

All in all, while it did tick several cliche boxes it was a much stronger start than one might have expected. It would have been very easy for the show to simply languish in self-reference and cheesiness but this looked quite promising. Which is surprising to say the least.

The Invasion is clearly missing something... and that's "Of The Body Snatchers" from the title.

Yes, it's a rehash of that classic formula - as if it hasn't been rehashed enough. The twist here is that it's Nicole Kidman trying to fight off those fiendish body snatchers. Also, no pods in sight. It's a virus that comes from an exploding space shuttle. That seems like a pretty dangerous premise for a film... given the 50/50 chance of shuttles not making it to the ground in one piece.

In any respect, space shuttle Plot Device breaks up on re-entry and spreads itself over a sizable area of the USA... whereupon it's discovered that it's got some highly resistant spores on it. It also just so happesn that the guy in charge of this operation is Nicole's ex husband... who seems to be one of the first victims of the BODY SNATCHING VIRUS.

Beyond being a virus, rather than pods or some such - the only difference is that for you to become one of them, you have to enter REM sleep. Actually, there's another difference which is probably more interesting... the body snatched people are unable to innately discern the difference between someone who is on their side and someone who isn't... which somewhat ruins the "us and them" mentality. Part of the whole suspense of these is that they know who is one of them and you don't... here, all you have to do is walk around with the diversity of facial expression of Kurt Russell and you're fine.

Really, this could have been a pretty much standard conspiracy film... the alien body possession adds that little. Even the avoiding sleep aspect isn't that interesting - although perhaps ironically Kidman's struggle to stay awake is akin to the audience's. The film pauses for only a few moments to reflect on the aliens... they're not violent and there are some none too subtle scenes of American forces withdrawing from Iraq and Korea being reunited to demonstrate that in many ways, the aliens represent an alternative to human conflict... but at the price of our passions and humanity.

Naturally though - alien spores are no match truth, justice and the American way and so... the aliens are vanquished, with the help of Kidman's kiddy, who is handily immune. Wouldn't you know it, the alien virus has pretty much no immunity to terrestrial viruses... No doubt, the film makers are banking on their audience not drawing a parallel between that and War Of The Worlds.

In all honesty, it's not surprising that this project was on the shelf for over a year. It's lacklustre, no really interesting performance, the plot is derative and the chase scenes are about as bland and prosaic as they come and honestly struggles to reach the "magical" ninety minute mark. There is no reason to watch this film... unless you're particularly interested in seeing more projectile vomitting than you'd find in The Exorcist... some of it directed at Kidman. To surmise - a waste of time.

Apparently in Smallgate - aka Flash Gordon - Ming The Merciless is not to be called "The Merciless"... and of course, he's not even slightly Asian looking... he's to be a "media savvy dictator". Which is a lot more in keeping with the times but makes him slightly less... well - Ming.

As predicted, we get the Mongol of the week - this time a guy with massive hair, Goualdified voice and LASER WHIP. That aspect of the episode isn't particularly interesting... him being a big "man beast" he's got the intelligence of a block of wood.

The more interesting aspect of the episode is Ming The Media Savvy - not really quite the same, is it? Supposedly his absolute dictatorship is built upon the contamination of the water... and his current monopoly on its distribution. Hence, ice smuggling carries the death penalty.

Now, they don't actually explain the nature of the contamination... but in previous episodes, it was alluded to that it was necessary for sustaining populations... although it's not exactly clear if this was simply through the necessity of water or to feed crops... but if it was any kind of normal contamination, then it would naturally increase as it went up the food chain. Anyway, it seems fairly strange that the ice smuggler should get stopped in a leafy green area with cattle wandering around. Perhaps the contamination only affects humans but then, it's likely that either all with be revealed later or that detail will be overlooked.

Other than banishing the man beast - surprise! Flash finds that the bounty hunter from last week isn't so stand offish - despite having stolen The Predator's cloaking device - and she is going to stay with Flash. So, I suppose we at least aren't quite stuck with the status quo... or at least, we've not yet reached it... sometimes it can take shows a couple of episodes to get their main cast established... see SG-1... ha, another similarity. Although the science guy (is he called Zharkov and if not, WHY NOT?) is no Sam Carter.

Also, by the end of the episode it's entirely clear that Ming really should be called the Merciless - even if he is media savvy - and that whole subplot massively overshadowed the main "Mongo of the week" one in terms of coolness but then... evil dictators generally trump boring man beasts of the week.

The fact the episode is so Earthbound makes the show feel quite limited... despite a lack of rocketships, Flash et al trapped on Mongo and running around would be pretty great... sure, it would follow the cliche of humans getting trapped in some other time/planet/place/dimension/universe but at least it wouldn't have the awkwardness of suburban life. Naturally, this type of "home by dinner" adventuring has been done before but it's somewhat facile. Which is unfortunate, it does seem that the concept of Mongo is quite cool... although we've yet to see the moons of Mongo as anything other than a backdrop. This episode was more promising than the last but only by dint of Ming being great.

One thing the Bourne franchise could do with is an epilepsy warning. The number of scenes where things occur in the blink of an eye or where the camera angle changes dozens of times in the blink of an eye are too numerous to count.

This is however, no deviation from the previous two films. As with the second film, this doesn't really deviate from the original formula... actually, if anything this more similar to the second film as the eponymous protagonist actually has a clue what is going on.

The notable thing about Bourne films is that people seem to think that they're all rather complex in their plots. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's no shocking revelations for anyone but the dullest film goer - he was part of a covert project to make a bunch of ass kicking assassins, it's merely a premise not part of the plot... the plot of these films is... MATT DAMON! Doing a lot of running around, shooting and sneaky spy stuff. All other points are of only minor importance - they aren't movies about characters or complex plots, they're about slick set pieces and big explosions.

The frenetic pace is present and we move from one city to the next to the next, sometimes with such rapidity it can be easy to miss the change. Not that it really seems to matter. It's best to describe this as a man who thinks he is a thinking man man's action film. It would like you to believe that it's clever and has depth but really, it's shallow and allows for as much facial expression from Damon as you'd get out of a block of wood. Despite the pretence - it's really a fairly unapologetic summer actioner.

As far as sci-fi goes, few franchise approach the notoriety and sheer age of Flash Gordon.

From hilarious racist comic strip to campy black and white drama to children's cartoon to campy cult movie to children's cartoon and now to sci-fi original drama.

The most obvious deviation from the established premise is that there are zero rocket ships. Or at least so far. No, instead the show has opted for a far easier plot device... WORMHOLES! Well, almost. They're called "rifts"... presumably because after Farscape and SG-1, they don't want to look like the only idea they have are wormholes.

Anyway, it starts out with Flash winning a marathon (if you've watched Smallville, you could be forgiven for thinking flash had fallen through one of these rifts from the eponymous town) but of course, it's not long before aliens are invading all the hot spots - highways, bowling alleys and minimarts. Flash doesn't seem too smart though - he punches a metal robot, stops his car to get out and run across an open field and jumps through a rift in the small hope that he'll find his father.

Which naturally gets him and ex-girlfriend Dale - who despite her engagement still have some chemistry - into trouble when they arrive in Mongo and meet Ming. Here we find out why they're sending robots to Earth and so on before they manage to escape and ponder on what an "Imex" is.

Overall, it's not so bad. The acting is decent enough and the effects - while not plentiful - are solid. The main let down is that this really doesn't have much to do with Flash Gordon. It really seems as if the format of the show means that we'll have aliens of the week and Flash saving the world but home for his tea. Not to mention that the "rifts" make this feel as if it's trying to be teen SG-1... or Smallville meets SG-1. It really feels lacking in the kind of epic stuff you had in the movie... and while it's obvious that you can't really compare the two, this doesn't really have any sense of grandeur. Which is rather a shame.

It's clear that there is going to be some kind of story arc (possibly) with Flash's father but beyond that, there isn't really anything to indicate that this will be an episodic drama where we have some enemy come through every week or have Flash go to Mongo every week. Either way, it's a rather lacklustre start that might indicate Sci-Fi feel the name alone will give it time... but hell, that worked for Star Trek for a decade.

Babylon 5 has long been a fan favourite and many had hoped for it to be redeemed.

Indeed, Lost Tales offers such a chance. Of course, surely the point is somewhat missed... B5 was a great show because of characters, story arcs and kiss ass space battles. This seemed to lack... at least two of those. Not only that but it wasn't really a movie but more, two separate episodes.

The first was almost entirely out of character for B5... while religion has played a part of the show in the past, it's never been a focus... here, we suffer some tedious diatribes at the hands of lacklustre Locklear about it in a setting that owes more to The Exorcist than it does to Babylon 5. Making Locklear the main character was a critical misjudgement... she was a one season wonder who had perhaps, two points of interest (neither of which were ineresting) and still she failed... fortunately, she wasn't forced on us like other late comer characters in other show have been.

The second episode, is SHERIDAN... and Galen. It flows a lot more naturally... Galen is a dick, Sheridan is... well, Sheridan. It was a lot more compelling than the first story - which was a lot more relevant. Unlike Locklear's debacle, this played into the general spirit of B5 and, of course... didn't have her horrible acting. Sheridan was solid throughout and the character was... as always, not just a thin excuse for Ivonava (yeah... Locklear wasn't close to being close to being half an Ivonava). While the dilemma this provided was interesting... it really wasn't exciting.

If JMS was doing his best to gain new fans? A lot of money? Well, JMS - you've smoked one too many crack pipes... even HARDCORE fans won't find this that pleasing. It's... at best mediocre. The first tale poor and the second ok... If it's building to something... perhaps it could be good but there's nothing in here to recommend it. It's just so bland... sure, there are some nice touches - quantum space? - like the improved CGI and much, much more detailed model of B5 but really... Pointless.

Terminator - along with Alien(s) and Predator - is one of the most iconic franchise to come out of the 1980s... The first and second film, likely to be timeless classics of the action and sci-fi genre. Many feel that the third film strayed somewhat on this front and it seems hard to argue on that front.

Perhaps Terminator 3's greatest error was that its reach exceeded its grasp. The effects simply weren't good enough for the ambitious stunts. Which, coupled with a so-so story made it weaker than the other films by a long shot. Even Arnie camping it up couldn't put it in the same league as the first two. Which is unfortunate as the franchise really had the potential to deliver.

Those who have their misgivings about the upcoming "Sarah Connor Chronicles" - a TV series that follows the eponymous heroine between the end of T2 and beginning of T3 may then take heart that it requires only a few minutes for it to piss all over the established events of T3. The effects of time travel... perhaps.

The inherent fear of a series set between the two films is obvious - that it would be sans Skynet... and if you don't have a time travelling killer robot from the future trying to ventilate the saviour of humanity, then why even bother? Hence, it should be reassuring to all fans of the franchise that the show does indeed include said time travelling robots and the associated gun heavy mayhem.

Projects like this are inherently difficult - especially when the original actors have been replaced by more budget friendly replacements... the budget is fractional compared to the films and yet, there is an expectation of quality and action. Terminator films may have their moments of reflection upon fate and destiny, the nature of the battle between man and machine... about how one man can change the future but it was always, at its heart, an action film... so, it would only be fair to expect this of the show.

And it does deliver. Not exactly the epic car chases, non-stop climactic action... but still enjoyable and for a film where expectations were so incredibly low - that is impressive.

The Ultimate Universe... It can be looked upon in one of two ways.

The first - as an attempt to make high quality comics that are easily accessible to new comers to comics, not requiring a vast amount of reading of back issues to understands characters, events and so on.

The second - a cheap way of pumping more money out of the same characters, stories - with the added bonus that the comics can now be hipper and edgier!

As with most things, the truth doubtless lies somewhere in between... but the fact remains that as a concept, it has been popular... but it seems that in many ways it has already betrayed the ideals of its inception.

The Ultimate Universe (UU) started out as a "back to basics" style. Character origins were to come from more realistic sources than radiation, magic rings or such. They would come from genetic engineering and other more probable causes. No aliens or other worldly beings... at least, this was the idea behind Ultimate Spiderman and for the most part, it worked.

Naturally though, all good things must come to an end and the success of Ultimate Spiderman spawned many more titles... including but not limited to: The Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four - to name a few. All of which did their part to erode the (relative) realism of the UU. This isn't to say the UU doesn't have enjoyable stories... it does but for a while, it was refreshing to have heroes who weren't slipping off to other dimensions or battling foes from other worlds

It's worth asking if - with the massive success of Heroes - the powers that be at Marvel are kicking themselves. While the Ultimate Universe - at its beginnings - was still very much a classic comic book universe, the parallels are obvious. It was far less contrived than the mainstream DC or Marvel universes... that's not to say that this approach hasn't been attempted before... it has... it's simply never met with such success as Heroes.

She-Hulk fans were always deeply divided over Dan Slott as the writer on the third incarnation of She-Hulk's solo title... some found his joking, verging on fourth wall violating, slapstick anathema... otherwise couldn't get enough of his humour driven stories and wackiness but love him or hate him, he's now moving on to pastures new. Clearly some people approve of the work that Mr. Slott has been doing, as he's getting to play with Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderman... which is probably the comic book equivalent of getting promoted from pencil pusher to management.

Putting aside the oft criticised artwork... just how did Slott's run fair? In terms of sales? Quite well, consider She-Hulk is a second stringer and considered by many fanboys to be a derivative character - probably not helped by the fact she was expressly created for the purposes of securing a copyright on a female Hulk type character... although, it's hard to judge objectively as (especially in recent months) there have been a great number of tie-ins and guest stars. Not least, Civil War and the build up to World War Hulk... which inevitably will have had a beneficial effect on sales.

The comedy certainly wasn't to all fans taste and in many ways, that's understandable. It was often over the top, almost showing off... and in may ways, didn't help the image of She-Hulk that Byrne created... a comedic character, not to be taken too seriously. Dan didn't make that mistake though, in between the kooky there were many moments where Jennifer Walters is forced to evaluate her life as She-Hulk and introspection on duality.

In fact, Dan was rather apt at plumbing this source of angst and creates the circumstances that force Jen to try and understand and come to terms with her powers in a way she hasn't ever had to before. Not least, she had to deal with some of the fallout of the events of "Search For She-Hulk" and "Avengers Disassembled" - most poignantly in "Bone". Which clearly demonstrates that Dan has more strings to his bow than just humour.

For all the flaws that might be perceived in Dan's work, it's undeniable that he has firmly established She-Hulk as more than just a female Hulk. Jennifer's duality is very much the focus of the comic and how she deals with - and sometimes denies - it. The fact Jennifer is forced to be human to work at the law firm does make for more interesting results and her transformation anxiety is an interesting aspect.

That isn't to say that the tile under Slott didn't have action... it did. Just not a great deal of it. This was further hampered by the subpar artists who really didn't do justice to what action there was there. With the possible exception of Paul Pelletier, no one ever really managed to nail the infrequent action scenes... and of course, most of them managed to make She-Hulk look pudgy... hardly fitting for one of Marvel's strongest heroes - male or female.

Other complicating factors were that sometimes, Dan got a trifle bogged down in the minutiae of the comic books in comic books. It was a pre-established fact that events occuring in the Marvel universe are in fact put into comic books but at times, it seems that Slott almost goes out of his way to make sure that this comes into play in plots - even going so far as to have a little cast of comic book geeks who tend to the comic books of Jen's law firm (they're legally admissible as evidence, you know).

So, a somewhat mixed bag... opinions on it will be greatly shaped by what you think She-Hulk should be... Dan does somewhat walk the line at times but it would be wrong to say that he ever really strayed too far from the comedy... now that his run is almost up... what can we expect?

PAD has taken over as the main writer and he has left the future of the title suitably vague but it seems that the out and out comedy approach will be dropped in favour of something more serious and that the courtroom drama will be dropped in favour of something more action orientated.

In any event, Dan Slott certainly raised the profile of She-Hulk and probably increased her fan base. He has also taken on the honour of penning more She-Hulk comics than anyone else (taking the title from Byrne). Whatever you think of the title under Slott's auspices, as a character She-Hulk is probably in a much better place now than she was when he took her on and that should elicit some respect, from even the most grudging of fans.

It's perhaps a tribute to Red Dwarf that most British sci-fi of a certain description will immediately warrant comparison... even if the premise of Red Dwarf hasn't really been truly imitated.

The similarities between Red Dwarf and the new comer "Hyperdrive" are thin on the ground. They're both British... they're both sci-fi and they both have a ship as the main background for events to unfold. There the similarities end.

The most glaring one? Hyperspace simply isn't funny. The basic situation being a spaceship, flown by a crew of inepts, advertising Britain to an indifferent universe is - at best - thin. This isn't even slightly assisted by the blandness of episodes. Perhaps the only original idea they have is making the main female character sinfully ugly but then, that's hardly a trade worth emulating because she isn't particularly funny.

That isn't to say that there aren't good actors... Kevin Eldon - from innumerable British comedy shows - and Nick Frost - Sean Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz - have proven themselves many times over... but there simply isn't the material for them to work with. Eldon - as the totally barmy and unhinged security officer - is the only one who really gets a chance to shine. Frost feels like he's struggling to wring as much out of the lines as is possible... but then, there's only so much you can do with a bad script.

Despite entering its second season, the show still feels like many of the BBC's subpar comedy. As if it were treated like an essay by a recalcitrant student, left until the last possible minute and then hurriedly rushed with the minimum of thought and effort. It's clear an attempt was made to create a dysfunctional crew - the mentally impaired cyborg, the angst ridden (and ugly) first officer, the mediocre wannabe captain, the demented security officer and the rest, who are just there to provide bodies.

The best it ever manages to elicit is perhaps a smile or a vaguely amused exhalation but really, there's no punch. It's nigh on impossible to highlight any single failing because the show fails on so many levels. The highest accolade that it can be awarded is that it's about thirty minutes of fairly inoffensive sci-fi related watching. Occasionally, it might warrant a smile or a giggle but it falls into a banal space between different comedic styles.

In many ways, Die Hard was a defining action movie of the 1980s... While it's unlikely that Die Hard 4.0 - aka Live Free Or Die Hard - will enjoy the elevated status of the first but it certainly surpassed the predecessors.

Unlike many other films, Die Hard 4.0 doesn't attempt to be clever, or have a message or anything like that. No stupid fast cutting likely to induce fits or social commentaries or edgy for the sake of edgy.

Willis is perfect as reluctant hero, John McClane - the NYC cop with the knack for being the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time - and he's well matched with Justin Long as the stereotypical errant hacker. There is none of the forced comedy and buddy-buddy that you often get in this genre. Everything seems to flow naturally and even the "lessons" learned don't feel entirely hackneyed.

The action is just what you'd expect from a Die Hard film, over the top but not so much so that you spend the entire time marvelling at how improbable it is. The film is really too much of a romp for you to spend time worrying about such details and as with the others, doesn't spend too much setting the scene. We're very quickly thrust into the midst of action, with houses exploding and guns being fired.

This Die Hard is slightly different from its predecessors in that its somewhat more grand in scale. McClane isn't just saving his wife from terrorists or stopping a bunch of mercenaries... no, this time he's saving the world. The practical effect of this is that Die Hard 4 offers far more diverse settings than any of its predecessors - although, that has been a trend over the course of the franchise but it works well, offering some truly visceral set pieces, courtesy of the resourceful McClane.

All in all, it's a very smoothly crafted action film that works very well and has the kind of heart and special effects that other recent films WISH they could have. It's at its heart, still an old school action film but it's not afraid to try new things... It might not quite beat the original but it's still an unapologetic action thriller.

So... the Transformers movie...

With Michael Bay films, you don't generally have expectations... so much as a mounting sense of dread but then, Hollywood never let a hack director with several critical and financial washouts go without a job - or Paul W.S. Anderson would have starved to death a decade ago - so why not give him something that'll be a hit anyway, eh?

Anyone familiar with the Transformers franchise - in any of its various incarnations - should have been fearful the day they heard Bay was directing... and quite why his name was so heavily promoted is something of a mystery... perhaps it's so people couldn't complain at a later point that they had not been fully apprised of the peril they faced.

As it goes, you'd still think that the basic premise of the franchise is fairly hard to get wrong. You've got a well established cast of characters, all you need to do is put them on Earth and have them slogging it out, good vs. evil... right?

Wrong! At least for Michael Bay, it seems. No... what's more important is the emphasis on teens. Horny, horny teens. Hawny, hawny, hawny, so hawny. Not really, it's the usual - geek meets hottie. Hottie doesn't know geek exists, geek buys car that is actually a giant transforming robot from another planet, geek gets hottie and so on. Let's not forget the soldier who manages to guarantee he survives until the end of the film by talking to his wife and new born. Time was that talk like that would get a man killed.

Anyway, aside from the gritty soldier trying to go see his offspring and the geek doing his best to be Jim from American Pie - there are actually some giant transforming robots in this film... amazingly. Why? Basically, a cubular plot device - the all spark - is what the Autobots and Decpticons were fighting over and it came to Earth a while ago. Megatron came looking for it but crashed in the Artic and with no anti-freeze, was soon incapacitated. Hero geek's great grandfather found Megatron, literally chilling in a glacier and for reasons of plot, his glasses had the position of the allspark transposed onto them.

If that sounds stupid written down, you can only begin to imagine how idiotic it seems when it's put on the screen. Plus a whole subplot about the Decpticons hacking the Internet and having to get the world's most leet hacker to decode their signal... which turns to be nigh on irrelevant.

Really, it's just a horrible mishmash of mediocre teaser action and some laughable excuse for a plot... it's almost like the filler you get in Godzilla films before guys in suits duke it out in Tokyo but a lot more incoherent and cliched. Plenty of forced comedy - which seems to be further liken the Geek to Jim from American Pie - which is more likely to elicit a laugh at its idiocy... or possibly some teeth grinding frustration.

So, eventually after close to two hours of essentially action free tedium, laughable - in the wrong way - attempts at humour, the teen angst/romance and the mandatory secret government agency we get to the money shot... robot on robot action in a city. Quite why the soldiers thought taking the allspark into a populated area was a good idea is never explained but then, this film never pretends to make sense.

The action itself isn't that bad but as you'd expect from a hack director like Bay, there are shaky cameras and fast cuts that should mean this film has a warning for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Many times, there is action which really should be a single continuous shot that either cuts to a different angle or simply goes to see how fast the geek can run. This might be to make sure the effects look more convincing... they are good but there are several moments when you get pulled out the action by the fact that Optimus Prime or Megatron looks like a big blob of CGI.

On the Transformers themselves - the Autobots are more "true" to their original designs but suffice it to say that they've all been horribly reimagined. While it might be into forms that are more practical for very complicated/expensive transformations, they look like a mess... Not nearly as much as the Decpticons though... Most of whom are pretty rubbish looking in their robot state... more an amalgamation of office stationary than deadly killing machines.

All in all, the only things going for this film are the reasonably hot girl and the last 15 minutes - complete with mandatory sequel opening and cheesy use of "more than meets the eye" - which doesn't come even close to stopping this from being a real transforming trainwreck of a movie. Oh, sure fanboys and girls won't leave their seats dry but for anyone with less than fanatical love of the franchise, this will probably be a somewhat subpar action movie/toy commercial.

Really not worth wasting money on - Spielberg and Bay did what they do best. Sucked. A lot.

So, the third season (or series, if you prefer) of the "new" Doctor Who has finished, amid persisting rumours that effectively the entire creative team is to quit, along with Tennent himself... of course, that's the beauty of the format.

Everyone - even the Doctor - is replaceable, or at least... he's replaceable in the sense that the actor that portrays him can be replaced. Which is the important thing. One thing that can't be denied is that RTD has left his mark on this incarnation of Who... which I suppose you could take as a blessing or a curse, depending on how you feel about the show as it is.

Tennent has settled into the role far better than Ecceleston ever did and his new companion is infinitely less irritating. Not only that but we managed to escape Earth - especially circa 21st century - more than we had before, which can only be a good thing. It's really rather embarrassing that a being capable of travelling to any point in space and time tends to get stuck in present day London.

The season arc - although really, I think it's an exaggeration to call it an arc when it's maybe one little hint at the finale every couple of episodes - was somewhat spoiled by the fact it was an all but inevitable occurrence. Not to mention that said finale was written by RTD and hence was rather over the top. A change of creative staff would be interesting, it's unlikely that the mostly one episode stories will alter but maybe we can see some more innovation. At least Billie Piper has gone.

Many films in recent years have had trailers that misled the viewer as to the quality of the film. Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer has set a new precedent in this regard. The trailer in fact, comprises the bulk of the pitiful action in the film.

The concept of Galactus vs. The Fantastic Four has never really been that good. Basically it involves very little action. Instead we have a lot of meaningless and shallow drama. Reed and Jessica Alba are getting married!

Which is all threatened when the Silver Surfer flies around causing giant sinkholes for no reason... oh yeah, remember how Doctor Doom died? He got better. This shows the fundamental lack of imagination that runs through this film... and instead of lots of action... we get a lot of Mr. Fantastic and some general doing the alpha male thing.

In all honesty, there wasn't any reason why this film had to include the Fantastic Four... it could have been any group of sciency people. The powers were mostly an after thought, it seemed. Beyond this staggering mediocrity though,there is a greater insult. Galactus - one of Marvel's most powerful beings - IS NOTHING BUT A CLOUD OF DEADLY SPACE GAS!

Thus making this the stupidest film ever.

It's somewhat ironic that science-fiction is often, sometimes very quickly, surpassed by science fact. Now, that isn't to say that you've missed the advent of artificial gravity or faster than light travel... no, it's often the case that everyday technology can surpass what is demonstrated in TV shows.

It wasn't until the 10th Star Trek film - Nemesis - that we actually saw the use of wireless. Before everything had to be done by a touch screen... and while some Trek fans might think that LCARS - the name of the Federation's interface system - represents the pinnacle of advancement... it seems rather strange that people should even have to be sitting down and hitting buttons at all.

There are instances - mostly notably the Borg - who have massive interface but somewhat laughably, this most technologically upgraded of races seems to suffer one flaw. In Voyager a drone has to get out of its alcove, go to a panel and hit some buttons to see what's going on... surely the whole POINT of having a body full of cybernetic implants is that you're tied into everything.

More to the point, some are predicting that some manner of interface between the brain and computers could be possible within two to three decades. Even at a primitive level this would surely vastly surface even the most sophisticated tactile interface. Hence, the general total lack of neural interfaces - you could probably could them on one hand - in all televisual sci-fi, is somewhat jarring.

There's also a disturbing lack of integration. It took us some years to get a phaser with a light on it (in Doom 3 you could travel to Mars but not get a gun with a light on) and people are forever running from one console to another, tossing around different data pads. Right now, you could go out and buy an integrated mobile, camera, video, PDA etc. etc. 300 years in the future and communication on away missions is limited to an audio channel? Hell, it was a big deal to get Geordi's VISOR linked up to the view screen one time.

Not only this but despite the fact it's actually a piece of cake to do face to face chats, people are CONSTANTLY running all over the ship because five words can't be exchanged in anything BUT person. The ship is under attack but oh, there's plenty of time for us to all run down to engineering and hear three sentences that could have been said over comms. If you ran an actual ship like that, you'd probably be dead before you got there. Although, that could be dismissed as dramatic license.

Still, it doesn't change the fact that while warp drives get faster, shields get stronger and weapons more powerful that the kind of useful and integrated technology we take for granted in society today can be utterly alien in the future.

Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 has made what should be dubbed "The Matrix Mistake".

What is The Matrix mistake? Well, The Matrix was a good film that was a big hit and - magically - became a trilogy when this occurred... a trilogy that consisted of part 1 and part 2a and b... not much of a trilogy.

Pirates seems to make an almost identical mistake... although if there was any coherent vision of how the 2nd and 3rd film should fit together, or indeed any coherent vision for the third film at all, it wasn't anywhere to be seen. There is simply a string of happenings that feel as if they were cobbled together at the last moment, with little rhyme or reason.

Concepts and ideas that are entirely new are treated as if they've been around since the start of the franchise - when it felt as if they'd just been tossed in to move the interminable plot along. The writers surely thought they were being clever but they utterly missed what made the original so charming, an interweaving multi-threaded plot... Were the original film to have a plot akin to a tapestry then PotC 3 would have one more like a tangled ball of string that had been toyed with by a dozen cats.

The action is there but one has to question the motivations of the characters and of course... the fact that not one but two characters are brought back from the dead just makes the notion of suspense ludicrous... after all if they can resurrect people once, why not twice? Just another example of how no one really thought this through.

All in all, it's a jumbled mess of a movie that will doubtless make a lot of money but will probably never enjoy the fond memories of the first. Certainly, the action is in there but really... that's about it. The humour is forced, the performances so-so... forget the romance angle and of course, get ready for the backstory to get periodically yanked from beneath your feet as another new idea is talked about as if it was always there.

How to be a "villain" race...

1. Be ugly looking... the lack of a human face really helps. Also being inorganic means that you can get blasted day in and day out and no one need worry... just look at the original Cylons, or the droids in Star Wars. Of course, failing that you can just wear something to make you a faceless enemy (like stormtroopers) or just be REAAAAL ugly.

2. Make sure to start out really powerful and mysterious but that if you get popular, all that mystery can eventually be explained away in generic, banal, unimaginative ways and that despite the fact when you first turned up you were practically unbeatable that as time passes, giving you a thrashing becomes easier than changing the channel.

3. Under that evil, kill all humans and destroy the universe mentality - make sure you've got a caring, sharing side... because even evil robots and psychotic mutants sometimes need to break down and have a good cry.

4. If you've decided to create a device to destroy or enslave the world/galaxy/universe - make sure to put in a handy flaw that will allow a small force of good guys to destroy it.

5. Make sure you're good at exposition.

6. If you start out all shiny and special effecty, make sure that at some point - for no real reason - you take on human form... that's what your enemy least expects.

7. In the unlikely event of capturing the good guys - never, ever kill them... despite the fact that this will instantly assure your victory. Instead, keep them locked up or just tell them your plans and then act all surprised when they escape or have just wandered off while you drone on.

8. Have a clearly defined hierarchy... At the top you've got the mincing, expositioning leader... he'll generally have a sinister henchman or two and of course, there will be an unlimited supply of faceless drones/stormtroopers/shoeboxes to throw at the good guys...

9. Be terrible at poker... often the good guys will be at your mercy but then! They'll come up with an outrageous bluff - if you're going to be an evil race, you've simply got to accept this, despite the fact it's probably not even possible.

10. Always underestimate the enemy - despite the fact you've lost to them dozens of times, you should never really take the good guys as a threat... so, make sure you toy with them while you congratulate yourself on your imminent victory.

11. Never follow through - always be satisfied that if it seems like a good guy is dead, that he is... even though this has happened repeatedly and he never is. Also, never try the same plan twice. Just because it would have worked last time and would be pretty easy to just do again and do right, it's best to just abandon that plan and move onto the next.

12. Never have a plan B - in the event of your superweapon, overly complex plan or similar failing... never have a contingency, that's the preserve of the good guys... just shake your fist and get out of there... or die.

Some sci-fi comes and goes before it barely has a chance to begin... less than two years ago, or thereabouts there were three sci-fi shows launched on mainstream networks...

Threshold - A team implement an elaborate contingency plan to prevent the bioforming of our planet by an alien race sufficiently advanced to travel interstellar distances, master dimensions out with the regular three and to be able to "hack" our DNA with sound... yet too damned stupid to target their big shiny thing at a major population centre...

Invasion - Invasion of the body snatchers... in Florida but with all the speed and urgency of a glacier...

And Surface - Strange goings on below the seas as a new species is discovered and bad things start to happen.

Invasion was the only one of these to actually get a full season. Surface got left on a pretty major cliffhanger and Threshold didn't even manage to air all of its half season. Threshold is perhaps understandable... it was a generic production from the addled brain of beloathed Trek producer Brannon Braga. About the only thing it had going for it was Brent Spiner and even he didn't see terribly interested in what was going on. You could pretty much have made this any kind of secret cover up show and it wouldn't have made a difference and of course, there was never really any sense of progress and naturally all the clichés were trotted out. Overbearing military, people escaping and so on and so forth. Not that the idea was without merit... it was simply badly implemented in an entirely banal way... so, no surprise it crashed and burned.

Invasion was more of a slow burner. Gradual infiltration of the town... and even the people who got body snatched didn't seem to sure they weren't human any more. Still, it had a building tension in it... clearly enough to keep some people hanging around, certainly more than the other two. Really though, it focused a lot more on the personal drama than the OMG ALIENS, aspect of the story

Surface was the most interesting - kind of a proto-Heroes, actually - and presented several disparate threads that came together. A mystery that began to unfold, some good action... but nothing unrealistic or at least... not jarringly so. The characters were all understandable and true. It would be fair to say that they were quite realistic and not quite from the regular cookie cutter of sci-fi characters... we didn't have any main characters from the military or ex-military running around like Rambo... I guess we DID have the hot scientist but c'est la vie... if a scientist is female it's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE for her not to be hot. Still, it presented the most intriguing multi-threaded story of the three... and yet cut down in its prime.

Naturally, had any of these had "Star Trek" in their titles, they'd have been allowed 3-4 years of rubbish episodes before fans started to get weary of them... Threshold... deserved the axe. Invasion had the potential to be interesting even if it wasn't exactly rip roaring fun... Surface is possibly the greatest loss, it had threaded together a multi-faceted stories and we had just had the mother of all cliffhangers...

Sequels are - without question - a tricky business. The easiest way to fail is to simply rehash or try and out do the original... but then it's equally difficult to succeed by making something different because you risk losing the elements of the original that made it so good. So, the fact that "28 Weeks Later" managed to - despite some pretty horrible trailers - pull it off is impressive.

Perhaps the best analogy would be to say that "28 days later" is to "Alien" what "28 Weeks Later" is to "Aliens". That is to say, "28 Days Later" relies more upon suspense and atmosphere, whereas its sequel is more about a fairly non-stop action rampage. Although, that said the opening sequence is clearly an homage to Danny Boyle and the original - in both directing style and tone.

It would have been easy for this to simply be a simple - RAGE GETS LOOSE AGAIN! There was an element of that... well, it would be a pretty pointless exercise in film making if they didn't have people running around murdering and puking and such. The way in which infection recurs is... something of a stretch but then, there are plenty of stupid people in the world. Still, you'd think that their containment procedure would be somewhat more refined given the highly communicable nature of the disease.

You won't be surprised to hear that this plays into the hands of the virus and soon the American military is making friendly fire seem like the euphemism it is. It managed to be good though - it was its own film - never apologised... For the best... not as good as the original but still good.

Star Trek is often seen as being about an inherently optimistic future... but no one seems to have noticed that The Federation seems to be some manner of inherently undemocratic organisation.

It seems that the Federation Council is some monolithic and detached government run by people in ivory towers. Willing to agree to such monumentally unpopular ideas as the DMZ after the Cardassian war which resulted in dozens of worlds being on the wrong side of the border. When Picard goes to protest the seemingly arbritrary relocation of native Americans (IN SPACE!) he's pretty much told "the Federation Council says we're doing this" and it hardly sounds as if the people were taking it lying down either.

Not to say that this kind of thing doesn't happen in real life - doubtless any sufficiently informed person could rattle off a dozen things which have gone against the collective will of the people... but these things can often be appealed and protested. Here the impression was given that the big boys had decided what was happening and everyone else just had to take it. It seems fairly obvious the move wasn't popular as the formation of the Maquis suggests.

In fact, there is perhaps no greater demonstration that the democratic process has failed to accommodate people satisfactorily than said people taking up arms... and the Maquis seemed to enjoy widespread support throughout all the worlds in and around the DMZ. While it seems likely that they were wiped out by the Dominion... the fact that people in a time so apparently enlightened resorted to such methods - and enjoyed support and even defection from more than a few high ranking starfleet officers - speaks volumes about the Federation that are never spelt out.

Perhaps this is all made rather more strange by the fact that Earth seems to be some kind of veritable paradise - and in fact, is described in just that way in DS9 - whereas the colonies are generally shown as pretty poorly developed... Not that we really get a very good idea of how things are in the Federation... still, it seems that the Federation Council pretty much runs the show... and we've never really heard talk about elections or anything like that. It seems that the Federation is run more by some people deciding what's best for everyone more than anything - although, this would hardly be the first time that accusations of communism had been levelled at the show.

It simply seems ironic that a programme which supposedly espouses such an optimistic and bright future seems so utterly devoid of the trappings of democracy - or indeed anything other than some form of benign oligarchy. That couple with the fact that the Federation has had a rather troubled history - war and conflict with pretty much all their neighbours... many more than once - and the problems of discrimination that we've seen - Data was going to be dismantled because he was initially considered property rather than a person, Doctor Bashir risked expulsion from Starfleet simply because his parents had him genetically augmented and The Doctor on Voyager was ostensibly treated as a second class citizen because he was a hologram... and he was the lucky one, the copies in the Alpha Quadrant got stuck working in mines. Taken as a whole, the Federation hardly seems like some kind of utopian ideal it's often portray was as - in fact, in some aspects it seems worse than contemporary Western society.

Science fiction has an unfortunate habit... it likes to put humanity on a pedestal. Somehow, we're just this awesomely wonderful race. Special and wonderful and just lovely. What does it mean?

Basically - humanity isn't much. People think that humanity is the greatest thing ever. Destined to heal the universe, ascend to a higher plane and so and so forth. Even Babylon 5 thought that humans were pretty amazing... despite our lack of comparative technological advancement. Not that it really spelt out all that much.

Unlike Star Trek - which went "Oh by the way, Humans are pretty much awesome and will become omnipotent!" and SG-1, which said "Humans are descended from omnipotent beings!" Hell, Star Trek had the stupidest episode ever where an act of immense stupidity - wilful exposure to a deadly virus - was expounded to make humans somehow special... especially stupid, I'd say.

Farscape was better. It liked to point out that humanity was - of the species shown - the shortest lived, the least resilient... just generally not that great. Which is somewhat ironic given the fact that 99% of races in Star Trek lived easily twice as long as Humans. Men in Black also playfully poked fun.

Dr. Who seems to be uncertain - at times, The Doctor is keen on humanity. Lauding humanity for going off and exploring, then going off about how humanity are "the monsters"... Still, given the focus of the show - especially as it is now - he pretty much has to be enamoured with humans... or the show wouldn't work.

Also, human morality - that is to say Judeo-Christian flag waving, truth, justice and the American Way morality - is the best in the universe and superior to all. Realism isn't an object, eh?

Stargate has become... in many ways the Star Trek of the 2000s... that is to say, a long running show that has spawned sequels... The little known Stargate: Infinity and the better known Stargate: Atlantis... which is to be discussed herein.

Atlantis was... an opportunity for Stargate. The opportunity was to put in a new set of characters, a different enemy and just make for something beyond the general "village on planet P3whatever" format that Stargate had built itself up on.

They did at least manage to escape the mythology aspect... but then, that was one of SG-1's strengths. Even if it got somewhat forgotten toward the end - what with people pretending to be gods being replaced with beings who actually were gods... more or less. Nope the "big bad" for Atlantis was to be diabolical SPACE VAMPIRES!

Who have pretty much disappeared since we found out about Replicators 2.0... and of course, that's in between all the RANDOM VILLAGE and RANDOM PLANET episodes that don't really have much to do with anything... perhaps the most embarrassing thing is that we have a cast that now closely resembles the SG-1 cast, the quipping commander, the science person, the strong and silent guy and the person who knows the cultures and stuff.

Rodney is probably the only truly original character, given that he got his start on SG-1... as kind of an anti-Carter. Weir also got her start on SG-1 (though played by a different actress)... but she seems to serve no real purpose. On paper, she'd seem like an equivalent to General Hammond but in reality she is far, far more irritating and possibly the worst negotiator ever. It feels as if she was put in charge of Atlantis for the sole reason of having a "strong" woman in charge and to create that ever tiresome military/civilian conflict. As it is, all she does is moan on in an irrating fashion - presumably because the writers haven't a clue what to do with her.

The Wraith also became the most quickly nerfed race ever. In the first season... they could take entire clips to take down but by the seasons two, they're going down if you look at them funny
they'd die... and then they became pretty thin on the ground once we discovered there were Replicators in the Pegasus galaxy. Of course, these Replicators are - how handy for the budget! - never evil mechano. Nope, they're just people. They're not very good Replicators!

So, only three seasons in and the show is already pretty much SG-1 - even to the point of having the same baddies... rather embarrassing that it can't stand on its own merits. Sure, the Wraith weren't exactly great but there was potential there but as soon as their civil war started, that was them consigned to the dustbin and now it seems we must dine on Replicators for breakfast lunch and dinner. They were the mid-season cliffhanger AND involved in the season finale cliffhanger. It seems to only prove that the creative team of Stargate has totally stagnated. They can provide you 40 minutes of sci-fi related life wasting but it's never really more than that.

Enterprise - the only post TOS show to get less than seven seasons...

It's been almost exactly two years since this ill fated show departed the small screen forever - managing to surpass DS9 effortlessly for worst finale ever - and it's not really surprising that it didn't last long. Much as with Voyager, it was a concept that was not beyond redemption. In fact, it could probably have been done rather well if any thought or coherence had been lent to the idea.

Naturally, it wasn't though and so even the hopelessly loyal Star Trek fans who swore death before dishonour switched off in their droves - not that the omission of the words "Star" and "Trek" from the title, for a substantial amount of time helped - and by the time Manny Cotto was given creative control over the still warm corpses of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, it was too late.

The show was a step back, both literally and figuratively. By the end of Voyager many fans were starting to feel that there wasn't much to do... TOS and TNG had done the Alpha and Beta Quadrant, DS9 did the Gamma and Voyager did the Delta - which really wasn't the case given that little of the Gamma Quadrant was explored and despite Janeway's deranged detours because of the several big jumpers

Enterprise was clearly conceived to get back to that spirit of exploration that TOS and early TNG had captured and which had so clearly been lost, so much so that in Star Trek: Insurrection Picard even comments "Can anyone remember when we used to be explorers?" Not just that but to have that... Old West sensibility that could sometimes be felt in TOS, people on a frontier... and of course, to dramatically cut the amount of treknobabble.

You can tell that they wanted to send a message that there'd be less treknobabble when in the first episode, Archer is confronted with the phrase "Temporal Cold War" and doesn't understand it. Ironically, the Temporal Cold War would go on to be one of the more problematic elements of this troubled show - a case in point that storylines should be planned out and not just made up as and when it's required.

The main flaws with the show were really more general... its place in continuity, the characters and the plot...

Its place in continuity is rather precarious... Shortly before the formation of the Federation and a couple of generations before Kirk would take the helm. You'd think THE first Captain of a big fancy ship who goes out, does some exploring and saves Earth a few times would be as big a legend as Kirk... oops. Then of course you have the fact that many species introduced in Enterprise - Denobulans - are never seen or heard of again... which makes the already overpopulated Trekverse even more so. Then of course, there was the fact that instead of the Earth/Romulan war we got the Earth/Xindi war... if you could CALL it a war. More like a quest... a pretty dull quest.

Next we have the characters... initially we were promised characters who were "rough around the edges". To be honest, there was no real reason for that... NASA crews aren't rough around the edges... it's not hard to get a ship to be crewed by professionals, after all. As it was - they were all bland... Phloxx was happy and easy going, T'Pol wore a jumpsuit and was stuck up... Archer shouted "REPORT!" a lot and generally taking the moral high horse only when it suited him and the rest just blended together. This was an obvious mistake... TNG could sometimes pull off what wasn't really that great an episode because of the strength of characters... and even in Voyager you could at least relate to the fact Janeway was a crazy bitch or that Tom Paris was irritating.

The plot was problematic - in that it hadn't really been thought through. You'd think that if you were doing a prequel, you'd want it to fit in with the existing stuff... and hence, plan carefully but no... we got a lot of dull episodes. Enterprise was a good chance to establish more precisely how the Trek universe ticked and how the Federation came to be... they ran so low on ideas, they had to have a Borg episode. Then there was mess of the Temporal Cold War... which never really felt it was going anywhere... and of course, the Xindi War... which admittedly had its moments but was problematic in that Archer seemed fairly capable of just switching off his morals - most likely making him an ancestor of Janeway.

The potential for success was there but they made a real fudge of things. The technology was too advance - transporters? Grav plating? And so on. Sure, it wasn't the button pushing ease of Voyager but it still felt better than TOS and that was always going to be a problem. They also totally failed to instil any sense of awe or wonder. It was pretty much the regular "what's going to happen at this planet"? And so on and it all came at a time when Trek couldn't afford such mistakes. The new film looks set to be readying itself to not learn from history.