Giant Freakin Robot

Fringe may be deep in the throes of its fifth and final season, but the series finale on January 18, 2013 won’t be the last television appearance of the sci-fi police procedural. Science Channel is picking up the fan favorite in syndication, and is set to kick off this newfound relationship with an epic Thanksgiving Week Marathon. So when that moment on Turkey Day rolls around when all those family members you only see once a year go around the table and say what they’re thankful for, you can tell them that you don’t have time, that you need to go watch reruns of Fringe. Happy holidays indeed.

I’m always excited to hear about new science fiction projects. Even if they eventually flame out, at first they’re nothing but potential, an ideal bit of genre awesomeness that will eventually be lived up to…or dumbed down. All that being said, I must confess I’m more than a little skeptical to learn of an upcoming ABC science fiction thriller series called a Mila 2.0. While the concept has potential, it’s being developed by Shonda Rhimes, she of Grey’s Anatomy. We should probably expect more soap opera than space opera.

THR says that Rhimes is teaming with Grey’s Anatomy exec producer Betsy Beers and David DiGilo for the project, which follows a young woman who discovers that she is actually a Mobile Intel Life-like Android — MILA — who was designed for covert work by the U.S. government. At least until she began to develop emotions and her scientist “mother” kidnapped her. Rhimes, Beers, and DiGilo will executive produce Mila 2.0, with DiGilo also writing the script. One of DiGilo’s previous produced credits was the Disney sled dog movie, Eight Below. Count that as another potential strike against. On the other hand he’s also penning the upcoming Tron: Legacy sequel. Hopefully that means he’s got at least some talent when it comes to SF storytelling.

Mila 2.0 is based on an upcoming young adult novel of the same name, written by Debra Driza. With The Hunger Games taking of the mantle of “hot young adult series of the moment,” it’s no surprise to see studios looking for what could become the Next Big Thing. Mila 2.0 will be published in March 2013 by Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of Harper Collins.

The first two episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica web spinoff, Blood & Chrome, is now available for your viewing pleasure. There is a lot of excitement surrounding the new web series because it’s the first Battlestar Galactica content since the prequel series, Caprica, was canceled in 2010. The series will be exclusively released on the Internet until it premieres on SyFy in 2013. And while Blood & Chrome has had a long and storied development, producer David Eick says that it was always meant to be a web series rather than a back-door pilot as had been reported.

Blood & Chrome consists of 10 episodes, clocking in at around 12 minutes each. Eick envisioned the web series to play out like an old movie serial from the 1930s. Each episode would end with a cliffhanger and audiences would have to come back the next week to see what happens next to the story’s hero. Eick believes the Internet is the perfect way to deliver episodes like this.

It was always developed, at least from my point of view, as a project for an online environment and it was something we would develop and structurally, narratively build as a 10 part serial. Kind of like the ‘Raiders of the Ark’ style adapted the 1930’s style movie serials where you have 10 minutes of story and a cliffhanger followed by 10 minutes of story and a cliffhanger and after 10 of these episodes it would resolve itself and react structure as a whole movie. So when I set out to develop this, my thinking was to design a mission, sort of speak, of course once the characters and the overall ideas were approved by the network, a mission that could be, as missions are often are in the military sense, divided into 10 smaller missions.

With all the hullabaloo surrounding Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm, the newly announced Star Wars movies, and the questions of who will be involved in them, one exciting bit of upcoming Star Wars material slipped between the cracks. I’m referring to Star Wars 1313, a rather awesome-looking video game that has been described as “Uncharted meets Star Wars.” Good news: from the sound of things the Disney purchase will not affect 1313. That’s a relief, because 1313 has already earned a spot on my must-play list, and it would be a damn shame if it got sunk by the vagaries of the business world.

The folks at Tech Crunch decided to find out the status of Star Wars 1313 for themselves, contacting Disney CEO Bob Iger to find out what the huge deal would mean for the game, if anything. It sounds like 1313 is safe, but Iger also hinted at how Disney might approach future video games. Iger says the company would be “likely to focus more on social and mobile than we are on console.” In other words, expect a lot more stuff along the lines of Angry Birds Star Wars.