FLASH GORDON
Season 1 Episode 3
“Infestation”

The episode kicks off with Rankol doing his Evil Floaty thing, which is probably the high point of this sad, lonely hour.
A wild rift opens up on Nick‘s brother’s wedding day and Nick gets bitten by a “joybug,” a species native to Mongo whose venom causes the ultimate ecstasy high, killing you as you get happier and happier.
There’s a cure, but it’s only available from the Omadrians of Mongo, so Flash and Baylin open a rift to retrieve the cure, while Dale is left on Earth to try and keep Nick alive by making him miserable.

Again, as with episode 2, the narrative is split into two, but this time, neither plot thread is particularly weighty.
Dale saving Nick‘s life by making it a living Hell is peppered by Panou‘s irritatingly goofball performance, while Flash’s encounter with the rabidly feminist Omadrians (they turn their men into eunuchs!) is standard selfless hero schtick: you can do anything to me but I need to save my friend, and no, I’m not leaving Baylin behind because it’s just so wrong to trade one life for another even if I don’t really know her as well as I know Nick, etcetera, ad nauseum.

There’s also some awkward sexual parrying between Flash and Aura which is kind of a tired, repeat performance of Flash and Baylin’s corridor fight from the previous episode, except it’s on a bed. Yawn.
And for the double yawn, there’s that heavy-handed look from the Omadrian leader woman, the look that says, “This young male stranger shows promise, and understands the tyrannical stranglehold Ming has over our world.” Hurrr. I wonder where that’s going, wink wink.

After the previous passable episode, this one just nosedives into I’ve-got-better-things-to-do-than-commit-myself-to-this-floundering-mess-on-a-weekly-basis territory, so it looks like I’m off the Flash for now.
Maybe I’ll check in on Flash and company at some point in the future and maybe the show would have gotten better by then, but in the meantime, Rankol will just have to float down the halls of Ming’s castle unseen by me.
Which is too bad. Like I said, Rankol is creepy in a really cheesy sort of way, so I’m gonna miss the old floater…

Parting shot: They really need to dump that awful opening credits sequence. And jettison that horrible theme.
I say reinstate that Queen standard! Since there already appears to be a healthy amount of cheese in this show’s recipe, what can an old Queen song hurt? And get Sam Jones for a cameo! (If Smallville’s made it a mission statement to offer gigs to Superman alumni, the least this Flash Gordon incarnation can do is show some respect for those that came before.)

(Image courtesy of ifmagazine.com.)

FLASH GORDON
Season 1 Episode 2
“Pride”

This episode is split neatly into two stories: one set on Earth, as Tyrus (Mark Gibbon) tracks down the “violent Mongo lady” (aka Baylin; Karen Cliché, from Mutant X), who was left stranded on our planet at the end of the Pilot, even as Zarkov tries to come up with a functioning rift blaster so Flash can return to Mongo to search for his father; the other, set on Mongo, as a man is caught ice-smuggling (a capital offense punishable by death), an unlikely event which manages to shed light on both the political milieu on Mongo, and Aura’s relationship with Ming.

Curiously, it’s the latter story that proves to be the more interesting, as the father-daughter relationship is given more complexity, even as the seeds for a revolution are planted.
And while that subplot makes the episode noteworthy, the Earth sequences prove to be distracting with light, sitcom-y humour, and Tyrus, who appears to be a caveman armed with two formidable weapons: a laser whip and too much eye liner.

Parting shot: I really love that name: Karen Cliché.

(Image courtesy of ew.com.)

FLASH GORDON
(Pilot)

I’ve been waiting a long time for the Sci Fi Channel to come up with another show that would kick my a$$ into orbit the way the Battlestar Galactica redux did.
Well, my wait isn’t over.
Which is not to say that their Flash Gordon redux is a total waste, but it’s got some ways to go before it can reach a level where I can actually say it’s a good show.

Steven “Flash” Gordon (Eric Johnson, who played Whitney, Lana Lang’s boyfriend from way back in Smallville’s freshman season) is a star athlete whose father Lawrence is a physicist long believed dead. But it soon turns out that Flash’s father discovered a rift to another world and could still be alive, possibly lost in that other realm.
Meanwhile, incursions from that other world begin to occur just as Flash’s ex, Dale Arden (Gina Holden; Final Destination 3 and TV’s Blood Ties) returns to town, and a mysterious stranger driving an RV (Jody Racicot; incidentally enough, also from Final Destination 3 and Blood Ties) shows an interest in the young man.
All this activity leads to Flash and Dale inadvertently entering a rift and winding up in Mongo, where they meet the local tyrant Ming (John Ralston), who wants something called an “Imex” from Lawrence Gordon’s belongings.

The premise and set-up of this latest incarnation of Flash Gordon are pretty standard, and the writing and performances are passable without being particularly noteworthy. Mind you, I’ve seen far worse, but it’s the sort of show I wish were smarter, so it could be a lot more entertaining than it actually is.
As it is, the characters are agreeable without being overly interesting: Flash is written as the modern, capable hero, schooled in the Joss Whedon Academy of Flippant Heroics, while Dale is the modern, capable heroine who apparently also went to the same alma mater. Meanwhile, “RV Dude” turns out to be Zarkov, of the high-strung, twitchy scientist school, whose inventions aren’t particularly effective.
But while Johnson and Holden submit performances that just pass muster, Racicot comes off as a tad too annoying. Ralston‘s Ming is, thankfully, not overplayed, though at the same time, is not particularly a powerful presence either, and the Floaty Dude (Rankol; Jonathan Walker, from George Romero’s Land of the Dead), who is his right hand flunky, is creepy in a cheesy sort of way.
Some of the series’ other characters include Aura, Ming’s daughter, played by Anna Van Hooft, and Dale’s fiancée, Joe Wylee (Giles Panton): the presence of these two pretty much blares “romantic tension” for the two leads.

The Flash Gordon Pilot, awkward and clunky as it is, is pretty underwhelming. It’s not particularly atrocious—as I’ve said, I’ve seen worse—but it clearly lacks the wit and verve of some of the other new Pilots I’ve taken a look at in the four installments of TV Watch (see Archive: August 2007).
Having said that, I’ll be checking out a couple of its succeeding episodes, if only to see if this gets any better.

(Image courtesy of ew.com.)

BLOOD TIES

Pilot
“Blood Price”

(Review)

Dude in Black, about to become a Demon Victim, talking to his Goth Girlfriend on his cellphone: “There’s some guy. He’s wearing a black cape or something. Cool. He looks like the freakin’ Prince of Darkness.”

Based on the series of Victoria Nelson novels by Tanya Huff, Blood Ties kicks off with ex-cop turned P.I. Vicki Nelson (Christina Cox) witnessing the murder of the aforementioned Dude in Black (Juan Riedinger). His Goth Girlfriend, Coreen (Gina Holden, Final Destination 3 and TV’s Reunion), subsequently uses some choice lines (“They’re real. Out there. Walking the night. Looking to slake their unquenchable thirst. Feeding on us the way we feed on cows or chickens.”) and hires Vicki to track down her boyfriend’s murderer, since she’s convinced said murderer is a vampire, and wouldn’t you know it, cops aren’t equipped to handle vampires, much less believe in them.
And as the tabloids go on a frenzy over the string of “vampire” murders, it turns out that there really is a vampire in town, one Henry Fitzroy (Kyle Schmid, The Covenant), a vampire of the sensitive, pretty boy variety, who is both Henry VIII’s illegitimate son and a comic book—ooops, excuse me—graphic novel artist. Henry is incensed at the negative press his kind are getting from the tabloids, and decides to get to the bottom of the murders as well, causing his path to cross with Vicki’s.
Sparks fly, chemistry kicks in, Henry is forced to feed on Vicki after being severely wounded, yada yada. You can see where this is going, right?
Oh, and I forgot to mention, there’s also some residual sexual tension between Vicki and Mike Celucci (Dylan Neal, Pacey’s older brother on Dawson’s Creek), her ex-partner/lover, who happens to get assigned to the murder case as well.

Now, despite my smart a$$ tone above, the set-up isn’t that atrocious. Mind you, it’s close, but what truly sends it plunging over the edge and deep into the Cheesy Abyss is the manner in which the material is approached.
To start with, the lines…
Like this one, from a Morbidly Cheerful Coroner: “Like from teeth. But whatever did the cutting was razor sharp. It cut right through skin, muscle and cartilage in one fell swoop. No animal can do that.”
“In one fell swoop”?! Does anyone actually say that in reality?

There is an awkward air to the show, something about the approach that doesn’t quite gel. Sometimes, it seems that all involved are fully aware that their tongues are lodged firmly in their cheeks, but they never seem to completely commit themselves to that position, leaving the show in a lurch, and squarely in the territory staked out by mongrels like Charmed, territory that just makes me cringe and wince and want to head for the hills. (Or take out contracts on the show’s “creative” team.)
Blood Ties reeks of those ersatz genre works that have been cobbled together by normal people looking in, people who are trying to tell stories of outsiders, but don’t really get how it is to be on the fringes. Thus, it has the overriding feeling of being a perception—a flawed one at that—as opposed to an actuality.

A case in point is the horrible negative stereotype of the psychotically unhinged loser geek (Norman Bridewell, played by Michael Eklund, easily taking Worst Performance of the pilot), whose obsession with getting a chick is what starts all the trouble in the first place, as he works his way towards calling up Astaroth, portrayed here as a bald, white-bug-eyed dude in a robe with a funnily modulated voice.
The requisite Professor of the Occult doesn’t help the cause of the geeks either with lines like, “Every year there’s a few that play one too many games of Dungeons and Dragons and then they start looking into places they have no business.”
Yes, parsing the statement tells me it isn’t meant to denigrate D&D, but for anyone who isn’t really listening, it sure sounds like D&D caused him to call up the bald, white-bug-eyed dude in the robe with the funnily modulated voice. Gasp! D&D must be bad, then!

And as Norman brings the world towards the brink of Armageddon in the name of his woody, he does his best to transform into Cool Goth but only succeeds in reaching Pathetic Wannabe. It might have been funny, if this wasn’t the sort of show that tries to stage a scene in some generic Cool Goth club, but only succeeds in giving us a Pathetic Wannabe.
I mean, this guy gives geeks and Goths a bad name, in… wait for it… one fell swoop! (This show is lucky the graphic novel artist is the vampiric romantic lead, or they would have really cut down on their potential audience.)
There is no attempt whatsoever to show the audience why Norman is so screwed up, he just is. I’d like to think that if he was about to be the cause of the end of the world as we know it, that we’d learn a little bit more about him other than that he draws and plays Everquest.

Written by Peter Mohan (producer on Mutant X) and directed by Allan Kroeker, this one is a klunker, the sort of show that climaxes with a magical showdown involving an open grimoire, a lot of gesticulating, and some dodgy special effects. I’m honestly not sure which one is worse, this, or The Dresden Files pilot.
If either one is better than the other, it’s only by the slightest of margins. I’m talking nanometers, skin-of-your-teeth close.
It’s especially distressing to me since Kroeker not only directed an episode of Wonderfalls (“Crime Dog”), but also the pivotal Battlestar Galactica episodes “Bastille Day” (which introduced Tom Zarek, played by Richard Hatch, the “original Apollo”) and “Resistance” (which introduced Sam Anders, the future Mr. Starbuck).
I mean, come on, Kroeker! BSG to Blood Ties?! Yeesh!

And granted, the fact that Henry is actually the Duke of Richmond and Somerset—who died of consumption just 3 days after his 17th birthday—opens up the narrative to a lot of potential (not the least of which is the fact that if he ever gets it on with Vicki, she’d be guilty of statutory rape). But if they continue to approach the material in this clueless and artless manner, they’ll just be pissing away a good opportunity to tell a hell of a story.

(Image courtesy of tv.com.)