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(S01E01) In the first few minutes of Caprica, SyFy's new Battlestar Galactica prequel, you might think the Cylons were perfectly justified to try to annihilate Caprica and the rest of the human race. The show opens on a hedonistic party where people are murdered for fun to throbbing dance music and onstage human sacrifice is cheered by a sweaty crowd.
But, as Battlestar Galactica fans might suspect, Caprica is more complicated than that. (See the full episode here).
Yesterday, the cast and producers of the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica took to the Langham Huntington stage for their panel discussion. If it feels like Caprica has been around forever, it sort of has; the pilot has been available for viewing since at least the early fall. But the series is finally premiering on Syfy on January 22,. and I'm sure everyone's charged up to see it.
The most interesting part of the panel, at least as far as I wad concerned, was when executive producer David Eick explained how they were going to establish that the character of Zoey, played by Alessandra Torresani, is a Cylon whose body is inhabited by the dead girl's essence or soul or whatever you want to call it.
Apparently, some of her scenes will be shot twice, usually when she enters them. First you'll see her in robotic form. Then, when they come back to her, she'll look like Torresani. The former scenes will involve CGI and actors talking to tennis balls, yadda yadda, but Eick felt it was the way to go in order to keep that connection intact with the viewers.
More of our best of the decade coverage, which started on Tuesday. You can read the other posts at the link above. Here, we talk about the best dramatic actresses of the decade.
Television has always been good to the ladies. Actresses have flourished in dramatic series, and in the past decade, we've seen some amazing performances. There have been lawyers, cops, a U.S. president, nurses, doctors, judges, mothers, daughters and even a real housewife from New Jersey whose husband was in the waste disposal business.
Many of these women have already been honored with Emmys and Golden Globes... and now they get the recognition of TV Squad.
Here, then, without further vamping, the best dramatic actresses of the past ten years:
If you're anything like me (first of all, you have my deepest sympathy and secondly, some mild chafing down there is normal), you haven't had the patience to catch up with the brilliance that is Battlestar Galactica but that won't make this song any less funny.
Comedy fanboy recording artist The Great Luke Ski has an eye for obscure musical references and turned Queen's classic stream-of-consciousness nightmare ballad into a near-complete retelling of Battlestar Galactica. A fan of the "great referencer" created the video below.
I don't think anyone cried over the cancellation of According to Jim, which managed to stay on the air seemingly due to some kind of deal with the devil, for eight cruel seasons. But 2009 also saw the end of some of our favorite shows here at TV Squad.
Some of these series finales left us in tears, some of them sparked debate, and a few even left us wondering, "what did I just watch?"
After the jump you'll find a list of six notable series finales for 2009. Feel free to share your thoughts about the finales in the comments, and don't forget to tell us about your favorites that didn't make the list. (And needless to say, there be spoilers below!)
So how's that direct-to-DVD market working out, SyFy? SyFy has just given a big middle finger to those that purchased the DVD of the Caprica pilot by offering the entire episode online via Hulu for free.
It's possible that I'm overreacting. After all, the episode will eventually be shown on SyFy (January 2010, in fact). I haven't had a chance to watch the online version but I'm assuming that the brief nudity from the DVD version has been edited out. It is the extended cut, so I could be mistaken about that.
In retrospect, this is a smart marketing move on the part of SyFy. Most of the Battlestar Galactica fans are pretty technically savvy and have likely watched the pilot already in one way or another. Offering it for free online is the best way of getting potential new fans involved in the Battlestar Galactica franchise, particularly since SyFy is pretty much ignoring the connection in its marketing.
Even better, the whole pilot is embeddable. It appears after the jump if you want to stick around and watch it at TV Squad for a couple of hours.
(S03E09) As soon as I read the episode info and saw that Kripke was going to be making an appearance, I lost all hope of this episode coming anywhere close to matching the brilliance of last week's. I was not wrong. I don't like Kripke. I don't find a speech impediment to be funny, and with him, it's completely extraneous. Sheldon could just have an enemy (I don't doubt he had many, in fact). You don't need to give the character this extra identifying mark.
So not only was I dismayed by Kripke's appearance, his practical joke was just mean-spirited and again, not something that I found funny. I don't like watching people getting humiliated. Sheldon dressed up for a radio interview. That's adorable, and then to not only be embarrassed for absolutely no reason in front of a national audience, but to have his friends laughing at him as well, just made me sad. Luckily, Wolowitz's uh, love triangle with Bernadette and Katee Sackhoff saved the episode for me.
Question: is it possible for Heroes to add enough actors and actresses from cool, hip shows so it also becomes cool and hip again?
Kate Vernon, who played Ellen Tigh (and a Cylon - hope that wasn't a spoiler!) on the Battlestar Galactica remake, is joining the cast of the NBC show. Greg Grunberg first unveiled the news on his Twitter account a couple of days ago. Seems like that's where a lot of breaking news happens nowadays, eh?
Leoben, that tricky toaster, was right: All of thishas happened before, and all of it is happening again.
Battlestar Galactica: The Plan retells major events from the first two years of the celebrated sci-fi series through the eyes of the Cylons. It weaves together recycled scenes from the series with new footage to reveal a first-hand account of the Cylon agenda, or "plan."
The result is a film that feels incomplete, episodic and disjointed. It plays less like a movie and largely like a disk full of high quality bonus material. Most of what happens here feels irrelevant to the series -- almost like it was tacked on to the BSG mythos to satisfy completists and hardcore fans. Still, it's worth watching to see Dean Stockwell carry the film with a fearless performance as the scheming and duplicitous Brother Cavil. The veteran character actor takes center stage in The Plan, and your enjoyment of the film will rest largely on how much you like, or dislike, Cavil and his major role in the series.
Mike will have a review of the new Battlestar Galactica: The Plan film soon, but I wanted to show you a couple of clips from the straight-to-DVD movie directed by Edward James Olmos.
The first clip is a meeting of the Cylons, and after the jump is a look at some of the visual effects.
The geek-friendly guest stars just keep rolling into Big Bang Theory central ... Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff will appear in the Nov. 23 episode of the CBS comedy. This news comes less than a week after former Squadder Wil Wheaton showed up to crush Sheldon's spirit and help boost the show's ratings.
Sackhoff will play herself in the episode, but don't expect her role to be as big as Wheaton's or Summer Glau's last season. The former Starbuck is only dropping by for a cameo, says the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan, but that won't stop Wolowitz from stalking her, and I doubt it'll stop her fans from tuning in and boosting the show's ratings again.
In celebration of the upcoming DVD and Blu-ray release of the Battlestar Galactica movie "The Plan," Maxim is having a cover and series of photos of the two sexiest Cylons in the 12, Tricia Helfer and Grace Park. Not that we need anything to be released in order to appreciate the half-naked bodies of Ms. Helfer and Ms. Park. Dictionary Day would be an adequate reason for me to admire these hard-working actresses.
Notice how all the female Cylon models are quite attractive and the males ... aren't quite. For the females, we have Grace Park, Tricia Helfer, Lucy Lawless, Rekha Sharma and Kate Vernon (who is older, but still quite the knockout). On the male side there are more attractive male-model types (Callum Rennie and Michael Trucco, most notably), but we also have folks like Dean Stockwell, Michael Hogan and Aaron Douglas. When will the latter three be posing for Maxim?
The "Ask TV Squad" column, published every Wednesday, answers your questions about current and past TV shows, as well as about the celebrities appearing on TV. Every week, I will pick a question (or more) sent to us and provide answers in the column. If your question is not picked for a column, it may be answered in a subsequent column or in TV Squad's APB Podcast. To submit questions to the "Ask TV Squad" column, you can post them below in comments or email them at asktvsquad@gmail.com.
This week, I answer questions about Battlestar Galactica, 30 Days, Trauma and how to find titles of songs that played in episodes.
Ron Moore owes a lot to Richard Hatch for keeping the Battlestar Galactica franchise alive long enough for his marvelous reboot. So much so that he gave Mr. Hatch a significant role in his series (Of course his character did end up being killed in front of a firing squad. Make of that what you will).
With that in mind, I present to you the promotional trailer for the 1999 reboot of the franchise that never happened. Subtitled "The Second Coming", it was intended as a continuation of the 1970's series (I'm not sure whether it ignored the mistake that was Galactica 1980). The concept starred Hatch as the new fleet commander (with a cameo by the original Commander Adama, Lorne Greene) as well as a few other familiar faces from the original series. Sadly, it never got picked up. That's a shame because it was around the time of Babylon 5 and the explosion of CGI use on television. It looked more mature and less kitschy than its previous incarnation and might have made for fine television.
Warehouse 13 has welcomed a number of geek-friendly guest stars during its first season, including Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer and former Stargate Alantis lead Joe Flanigan. Another BSG alum, Michal Hogan is set to play Agent Myka's father later this season.
The trend continues tonight with Eureka's Erica Cerra and Niall Matter guest starring as a pair of grifters looking for a big score in Las Vegas. Another Eureka vet, the awesome Joe Morton, will appear on the show in episode nine. (Minor spoilers ahead...)
S01E01) In the first few minutes of Caprica, SyFy's new Battlestar Galactica prequel, you might think the Cylons were perfectly justified to try to annihilate Caprica and the rest of the human race. The show opens on a hedonistic party where people are murdered for fun to throbbing dance music and onstage human sacrifice is cheered by a sweaty crowd. 
More of our best of the decade coverage, which started on Tuesday. You can read the other posts at the link above. Here, we talk about the best dramatic actresses of the decade.
So how's that direct-to-DVD market working out, SyFy? SyFy has just given a big middle finger to those that purchased the DVD of the Caprica pilot by offering the entire episode online via Hulu for free.
Question: is it possible for Heroes to add enough actors and actresses from cool, hip shows so it also becomes cool and hip again?
Leoben, that tricky toaster, was right: All of this has happened before, and all of it is happening again. 
The geek-friendly guest stars just keep rolling into Big Bang Theory central ... Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff will appear in the Nov. 23 episode of the CBS comedy. This news comes less than a week after former Squadder Wil Wheaton showed up to crush Sheldon's spirit and help boost the show's ratings. 
In celebration of the upcoming DVD and Blu-ray release of the Battlestar Galactica movie "The Plan," Maxim is having a cover and series of photos of the two sexiest Cylons in the 12, Tricia Helfer and Grace Park. Not that we need anything to be released in order to appreciate the half-naked bodies of Ms. Helfer and Ms. Park. Dictionary Day would be an adequate reason for me to admire these hard-working actresses.
The "Ask TV Squad" column, published every Wednesday, answers your questions about current and past TV shows, as well as about the celebrities appearing on TV. Every week, I will pick a question (or more) sent to us and provide answers in the column. If your question is not picked for a column, it may be answered in a subsequent column or in TV Squad's APB Podcast. To submit questions to the "Ask TV Squad" column, you can post them below in comments or email them at asktvsquad@gmail.com.
Call it Syfy's answer to The Love Boat. 
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