Let me lay some golden eggs on you. Over-saturated color-correction is not “style”, lack of focus is not “brisk pacing”, and above all, plot is not story. Learn the difference, please, before you produce television.

Grimm digs into the same landscape mined by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural, but where those fan favorites craft stories about our human needs, wants and foibles that just happen to have monsters in them, Grimm promises to parade its own branded version of our cultural heritage – but fails to produce a coherent tale.

The problems are almost too numerous to mention, but the weakest link is the central cop-out-of-water. He’s mostly a blank, excepting his inexplicably too-much-or-nothing emotional intensity. The wit groans where Buffy would zing. For a show on a national network, the brightness and color-correction are noticeably poor – and that’s before considering the choice to make every tree and weed electrically lush green and all the interior lighting a garish crayon-orange.

The serious trouble with Grimm is simply the lack of story. Things happen, sure, but event is not story. The first few minutes find the hero seeing shockingly inhuman faces on normal people and failing to react in any way - as if he’s numb to something that the show tells us must be brand new to him. Also making its debut in the first few moments – an engagement ring – which may be the easiest way to explain exactly how Grimm goes wrong: the scene implies our hero is planning to propose that night, but why he doesn’t and how that affects him and his relationship are left completely off-screen.

The only bright spot of the show is the Grimm version of the werewolf. The first scene between the hero and the goofy, good wolf is the closest the script ever comes to the zip and charm that shows like Buffy and Supernatural have in spades. It’s also the only scene that clearly has a story worth a scene – a confused hero needs advice and help from a reluctant ally. The rest of the show skids along as if it’s the Cliff Notes of itself, or worse, as if it’s running scared of its own premise, terrified of taking the time to tell the story it’s pretending to tell.

In the end, the idea of the show may take some flack from audience members who can’t find their way into the show, but the real trouble here isn’t that idea, but how that idea was produced – a mish-mash of half-made moments that presents like a storyboard cut for time – and results in a show that is all color – and no soul.

Thankfully there aren’t scads of blondes hunting for knives to stumble into, or a chorus of toddlers going old-testament on us, but the show does go for the “more is more” approach and draws on a lot of horror tropes.  Is it all too much?  Well, if I pinch-hit for the kitchen-sink quip and bring in the melting pot metaphor, we might be able to sell that as particularly American storytelling.  To be frank, I think it works.

Blood and jump-cuts aside, horror is psychological, and the show succeeds on how relentless and all-consuming that quick-fire pile of anguish and imagery feels.  There isn’t just one big, bad nightmare after the family.  Everyone is haunted by their own bevy of imagery.  Any one monster has a weakness (you know, if it bleeds, we can kill it).  On this side of the tv set, we’re staring down the death of a thousand faces: pollution, terrorism, economic downturns, health problems, aging and all the evil little wishlists that flesh is heir to, and none of those blink.  No matter how bright the strobe effect is.

As for the performances, Denis O’Hare and Frances Conroy are both stellar in parts that would otherwise feel ridiculous.  Jessica Lange is superbly cast, but the most valuable player of the pilot was Connie Britton, who deftly manages another truly American minefield – the female protagonist as Marilyn, Mom and Master of Her Manifest Self all in one.

The show could quickly spiral out of control, but that’s true of almost any endeavor.  Psychology is an important element in the American horror genre, and the insanity the show promises is just the sort of catharsis our distrust and dissatisfaction with reality need.  The editing is a little frenetic, but it’s honestly refreshing to dispense with all that nonsense and cut to the meat of the moments.

And now that you’re at the end of my little article, I’ll tell you why this show could really, really work.  It could refuse to tell you the secret of the house, but always tempt you – tempt you to check that basement one more time, for that last clue…

… and lights out.

The rest of the episode uses an interview frame to jump back in time to the mission candidate’s childhoods, but doesn’t suffer unevenness because of it. Eureka works because it embraces its quirks, uses them and moves the heck on.

Highlights include grammar-school Zane hacking the NASA computer to invent a father that never was. Battlestar Galactica alum Aaron Douglas (Chief Galen), shows up as a counselor at the Galaxy Camp where proto-geek Fargo tries and fails to beat his mini-nemisis, who grows up to be Wil Wheaton’s Dr. Parrish.

Wallace Shawn continued his hilarious stint as the HR executive in charge of workplace relationships, but all in all, Eureka wins the gold for the night not because of the geometrically expanding stunt-cast, but because the story and the patter fit together like a proton and an electron.

*

Warehouse 13 took a side-step from their pseudo-procedural to dive fully into a long-running storyline. Warehouse is often my favorite SyFy show no matter what block they are running it with, precisely because they usually don’t worry about the consequences of their main idea and just run and tesla-gun with the fun.

The show premise doesn’t hold high-stakes drama very well, because its basically silly – there’s no way any conspiracy could keep the lid on the existence of such powers in the world, given the fact that any historical footnote kicks one loose - every world leader and historic personage would have come across several, and flea markets and garage sales all over the world would explode with weirdness every other day.

Which is why its more fun just to let the premise wind the cast up and let them go after the twisted history of the week. Eddie McClintock really is top-notch as hapless heroes go, and the alternate goofy history of Warehouse 13, rivaled only by fellow SyFy show Sanctuary in their shamelessness – is always clever.

*

I gave the debut of Alphas an F, but the show has grown into itself since. Recent episodes have balanced the case and the characters much better, but this Monday’s was worrisome – a backslide into the kind of sloppy goop the pilot was mired in. Can this particular experiment in gene-splicing super-powers survive? Despite my criticism – I think I’d like it to.

The cold-open was as dark as it was unnecessarily short – a tidbit of backstory that didn’t get from the back to the story. After the title card, we jumped straight into the same kind of frantically laconic, scatter-shot character development that smeared the series premiere into static.

What the episode does do well is present a believable biological enhancement for the villain that really gels with Alphas power premise. What it doesn’t do is make good TV. The dialogue between Dr. Rosen and the antagonist is stilted nonsense, often making the mistake of stumbling around where the story should already be – because the episode needs to save itself for its own plot outline. 

Although Alphas is doing a better job with the cast, like keeping autistic-lite Gary from getting too grating, supposed team-leader Rosen has fallen from the eccentric, interesting Doctor the pilot made him out to be, to a kind of doddering, professor-knows-best, whose psychology feels empty and whose leadership has become unbelievable.

I’ll still watch Alphas, because some episodes work better than others, but the writers haven’t found a groove yet. Eureka and Warehouse 13 aren’t great partners for it – Haven is closer in tone, while Alphas would have done better with some of the fare SyFy has nixed, like SGU and Caprica. There’s a grit to Alphas, and that’s worth keeping to the grindstone to make work.

"We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system," said Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell from the University of California, Los Angeles. "This region of space has been ignored for far too long. So far, the images received to date reveal a complex surface that seems to have preserved some of the earliest events in Vesta's history, as well as logging the onslaught that Vesta has suffered in the intervening eons." 

Long ridges on proto-planet Vesta, which dwarfs most other asteroids, have intrigued scientists analyzing the Dawn mission data. Begun on August 11^th, a full survey of Vesta will include global image mapping in the visible and infrared spectrums. Dawn also carries a gamma ray and neutron detector, and measurements of perturbations in its survey orbits will allow the team to extrapolate the large body’s gravitational field.

"We have been calling Vesta the smallest terrestrial planet," said Chris Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at UCLA. "The latest imagery provides much justification for our expectations. They show that a variety of processes were once at work on the surface of Vesta and provide extensive evidence for Vesta's planetary aspirations." 

Dawn will orbit Vesta seven times during the survey before adopting the ironically named High Altitude Mapping Orbit, which is close enough to allow stereo imagery of the surface.

Not every episode can smack it out of the park like “Let’s Kill Hitler”, but we shouldn’t expect that. Some episodes are just fun stories. This one takes a few more big leaps along Moffat’s plan for the Doctor, including a lot of the great moments with River Song fans have been waiting for (so you won’t find any spoilers here, except this minor one: there’s a great use of the “spoilers” running gag).

    

No doubt about it, the Doctor Who team has gotten much more adept at imagery this season, something “Doctor Who Confidential” often chalks up to the budget, but I think a lot of that is really in the storytelling – giving the team things to show us. That being said, this season has really found the strength of the small scene, one of the reasons the pace is so unbelievably great in episodes like this one. The first few minutes abound with rather good one-liners, including a stab at the history of the TARDIS console room. 

Almost every moment in the first quarter of the show is flawless, fast and funny. The main thrust of the episode isn't really what the title suggests, but the plot does address the main question it brings up: what responsibility does a time traveler really have – to do – or not to do?

    

I won’t say anything else here except to say that new character Mels is great fun. There are plenty of big, timey-wimey plot hooks left all over the floor by the end of the episode, so here's hoping that the rest of the season uses them to tear a few new holes in the universe.

April Eden talks to Doctor Who fans at Costumed Comic-Con! http://www.youtube.com/myouterspace

The recording session for “The Zenoids” webisode scripts lasted a few high-octane hours at NRG Studios in Los Angeles. The family fun atmosphere of the recording was helped along by the fact that Shatner, who directed the actors and played alien amphibinoid father Kozmo, asked daughter Melanie to step into the spangled shoes of Ziri, Kozmo’s snarky, starry-eyed daughter. Her husband, sci-fi hero Joel Gretsch (Father Jack on ABC’s V and Tom Baldwin on The 4400) also lent his voice talents to our kooky alien creations.

Additional crazy voices exploded from Troy Baker, famed for voicing games like Call of Duty: Black Ops and anime like Bleach. As caught by the cameras of Entertainment Tonight, a few of the comedic talents starring in Myouterspace’s new sci-fi parody, currently in development, also pitched in.

Congratulations are in order for Myouterspace member Rhonda Eudaly (REudaly on the site) who wrote the dialogue Myouterspace used to record the “Zenoids Fill-In” story. With multi-talented producer, director and actress Amanda Tapping (Sanctuary, Stargate SG-1) playing the family’s heart, Zara, and notable sci-fi author Alan Dean Foster on hand to tweak lines, “The Zenoids” landed a pretty sweet gig.

Tapping, a guest at the MOS launch party at Comic-Con 2010, had joked about coming aboard Myouterspace as a Starship Captain, and now she’s at the conn of Orion, homebase for “The Zenoids” on the website. That’s also where Shatner’s site-runners first men multiple-award-winning Michael Giacchino, composer of Up, Lost and the J.J. Abrams Star Trek. Giacchino has since stepped into the role of governing Myouterspace’s music planet Orpheus, which will soon be announcing another step for “The Zenoids”” – a theme music contest.

The contest will feature animated video created by the winner of last year’s “Animate Shatner” contest, Jeremy Appleman, who also got to sit down with the Admiral for an in-person interview in Burbank. That video features the MOS exclusive virtual set, created in 3D and built in Lightwave for Shatner’s interview with fellow effects enthusiast Dick Van Dyke at last year’s SIGGRAPH convention.

Since last year, Myouterspace.com has gone through a few face-lifts, and reports are that a new streamlined design is in the works. Myouterspace also developed and published apps for the iPhone and Android devices, so mobile members could keep tabs on the go. Currently in Beta, awaiting her first issue, is one of the sci-fi site’s newest projects, the online fiction magazine Anachron, which began accepting submissions for stories and flash fiction just last month. Anachron aims to be the first publisher of science fiction and fantasy short fiction to be created for and by the burgeoning new writers of the cybersphere. Submissions are reviewed and recommended by members of the site to the editorial staff, who also plans to commission artwork for the e-zine from artists right on Myouterspace. 

Mini-contests with Alan Dean Foster’s publisher Open Road Media awarded prizes to flash fiction writers on Planet Creatia, where the hottest community threads include group writing projects like “How the Vest Was Won” and “The Bag”, stories crafted one sentence at a time by member authors. This year, members on the community pages have discussed everything from convention costumes to the untimely demise of fan-favorite Stargate Universe, posted tips on software and online resources and shared their own projects. There’s a long way to go yet, but Myouterspace has grown their online content with science articles and reviews and is expanding their online relationships with the sci-fi community on Twitter and Facebook.

In the year since Shatner took the helm of a helicopter at the San Diego convention center and flew it to our live-streamed launch party on the aircraft carrier USS Midway, Myouterspace has had its ups and downs exploring the how-tos and do-nots of a unique mission. Along the way, the staff has forged partnerships for the future and met some truly talented people from the membership. In the meantime, the creative department has been working hard behind the scenes on interactive tools and projects for our Myouterspacers to participate in, including animated webisode ideas, live-streaming programming with interactive live chat and the expansion of the starship project lineup. 

Last but not least, Myouterspace has been developing a space opera parody concept for awhile now, and the staff have started to think of themselves as characters in their own starship comedy – a brave, few souls on a mission that could lead beyond the stars – or find them careening into the heart of a supernova. Creative Director Sammy Oriti, the mind behind “The Zenoids” and instigator of most of Myouterspace’s madcap creations, keeps the staff inspired – and cracked up – as they face the daily grind of making a galactic media empire out of a few good ideas and a warp-coil full of hope.

Above all, Myouterspace would like to thank all of the members who have been on this strange journey with us. To another year!