Giant Freakin Robot

“Anything worth fighting for comes with a cost.” So says Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) in “Anomaly XB-6783746,” the tenth episode in the fifth and final season of Fringe. While the title is a reference to Michael (Roman Longworth), the pint-sized Observer that the team finally tracked down last week, Nina’s remark is an allusion to Walter (John Noble). She’s referring to Walter’s request to re-remove the pieces of his brain that were taken out then put back in.

It was a good news/bad news day for fans of AMC’s The Walking Dead. On the good side, the network officially announced that the show would be returning for a fourth season. The bad news, however, is that showrunner Glen Mazzara would be “parting ways” with the series after the end of the current third season. Why is that bad news? Well, for one thing Mazarra’s leadership is largely credited with the much-improved quality of the current season. Nearly as troubling is that this is the second showrunner to split from the series: Mazarra took over from The Mist director Frank Darabont, who left under less than friendly circumstances during the second season. Now two of Mazzara’s former colleagues from FX’s The Shield have come to the defense of their friend with harsh words about AMC.

The Shield’s Kurt Sutter and Shawn Ryan have gone on to produce shows such as FX’s biker drama Sons of Anarchy and ABC’s excellent but already-cancelled Last Resort, respectively. Sutter also has a history of blunt honesty, and he had previously lambasted AMC in the aftermath of Darabont’s departure. No surprise then that he didn’t pull any punches in the wake of Mazarra being shown the door from The Walking Dead. Here’s Sutter (some NSFW language):

Oh, Blade Runner. Considering how well Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi noir classic holds up, it’s amazing to think that the film is now 30 years old. A loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner’s influence can be spotted in nearly every sci-fi movie that followed. An aesthetic homage is especially prevalent in 2012 releases like Cloud Atlas and the Total Recall remake.

There have been a lot of Star Wars video games over the years. That’s not surprising; there have been a lot of Star Wars everything over the years, from countless novels to comics, toys, spin-off shows, you name it. What is surprising, however, is how good some of those video games have been, especially since games based on a pre-existing property or franchise don’t always have a very good track record. Thankfully, the merger of Star Wars and video games has produced some truly memorable outings such as the Dark Forces games, Knights of the Old Republic, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (we’ll just pretend the sequel doesn’t exist…). One promising game that we never got to see come to fruition was Star Wars: Battlefront Online, a project that LucasArts canceled back in 2010. And while we’ll never know whether it would have been worthy to stand next to those other titles up there, a batch of leaked concept art for the game makes us wish it had made it to shelves.