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.

What the hell qualifies as sci-fi?

No - this is not going to be a debacle about "future fantasy" and other such time wasting concept... it's about sci-fi... the non-genre, because sci-fi ISN'T A GENRE. In a sense. Perhaps the delineation was more obvious a while ago.

These days, it seems as if everything is getting tossed into the genre. Lost, Heroes and so on and so on... even Buffy and Angel. All unceremoniously dumped into it... even Smallville. Naturally, science fiction leads to the notion of people flying on rocket ships... that's what sci-fi used to be.

Sci-fi seems different now. We must refute the notion that superpowers constitute sci-fi... a century or close, means they're their own genre. Perhaps more legitimately than sci-fi. Lordy, if Heroes keeps it up... they'll be struggling to make enough superhero films and shows.

But it's not really sci-fi, hell the Sci-Fi channel thinks that horror, giant snakes and pro-wrestling are sci-fi...

Sci-fi is sometime in the future, involves techology beyond us and such... anything else probably needs a better name NOT FUTURE FANTASY.

Sometimes, a show sets itself up for a fall. Lost is a prime example of this...

When it started out, the critics were raving about it and it seemed as if everyone was desperate to see the next instalment. The format was certainly novel but ultimately, it was a structure that has led to the stagnation of the show... which seems to have pushed it to the point where the setting needed to change to actually make it look as if the story was moving on.

Ultimately, it painted itself into the corner with the ol' flashback scenario. To the point where it had pretty much shown you as much as it could about all the main characters and so had to introduce new ones to keep things going... because you could pretty much wrap up the plot of the first two seasons in a couple of episodes.

Strange, really but then any show which is so rigidly constrained by its format is never going to have a long shelf life... not that this will stop them pumping out another few years of it... the idea was certainly new - and bound to be imitated - but just coming up with a clever idea doesn't make for a good show... especially when the show is so up itself...

Besides, Lost is really just a big tease... week after week it offers only the merest hint of some big secret and after a while - as with any tease - you simply realise that the teasing has become tiresome and that the answers would always be somewhat disappointing after all the expectation. This is why calling Heroes "this year's Lost" is rather insulting to Tim Kring.