Helix Serves Up More Secrets And Paranoia: Today In Science & Science Fiction
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Friday night is often a dead zone when it comes to finding good TV, but thankfully Ron Moore’s Helix has given our DVRs something productive to do with the first night of the weekend. The fourth episode of the show’s initial 13 episode run premieres tonight on Syfy, and you can bet things are only going to get worse up there in the Arctic. Never mess around with creepy black fluids, man. Mulder and Scully could have told you that.
Tonight’s episode is called “Single Strand,” and the synopsis is unsurprisingly vague:
Alan and the team deal with secrets and suspicion as the crisis heightens and deadly consequences follow. Meanwhile, Walker tries to survive on Level R.
One thing I’m most curious to see is how they stretch Helix’s concept out beyond a single season. Will they have to expand the focus beyond the remote Arctic research station? If not, it seems like having the plague/black goop continue to cause problems in that one location could begin to strain credulity. At a certain point you have to figure the shady corporation would just dump thermite down the elevator shafts and cut its losses.
“Single Strand” premieres tonight at 10/9c on Syfy.
Happy Birthday to David Gerrold (January 24, 1944)
Science fiction writer David Gerrold celebrates his 70th birthday today, and GFR wishes him a happy one! Gerrold is probably best known for penning one of Star Trek’s most memorable episodes, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” First aired on December 29, 1967, that episode famously had the Enterprise overrun by adorable, rapidly reproducing balls of fur that didn’t like Klingons one bit. He revisited the Tribbles in the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode “More Tribbles, More Troubles,” and also penned the episode “Bem.” More recently, he’s been involved with the Trek fan series Star Trek: New Voyages, for which he co-adapted and directed an unused script he’d written for The Next Generation.
Outside of Trek, Gerrold has been a prolific writer of science fiction books, including the War Against the Chtorr and Star Wolf series, the latter of which was in the works as a web series, but which failed to meet its Kickstarter funding goals this past summer. We haven’t heard word about whether it will still go forward or if it has found other funding sources. Gerrold also created the lizard-like Sleestaks for the campy kids’ series Land of the Lost, and won a Hugo and Nebula for his excellent novelette The Martian Child, based largely on his own experiences adopting a troubled young child. It was adopted into a 2007 film starring John Cusack.
