Doctor Who Series 4 and 5 news

The BBC released a press release on the status of Series 4 and 5 of Doctor Who. Series Four will air in 2008 which will include a Christmas Special. There will be 3 specials starring Tennant in 2009. Series Five will then air in 2010. This is to allow David Tennant to be able to appear in Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the latter half of 2008 along with Patrick Stewart as Claudius.

The BBC have not announced any casting for Series Five.

Dragon*Con Stargate Stuff

Curse my inability to function on little sleep! Just now getting around to posting the Stargate tidbits from Dragon*Con.

The Stargate Stuff
Tok’ra Spice ClarifiedVanessa Angel, who played the much-maligned character of Anise on SG1, cleared up some things about her character. She was apparently hired to do nine episodes that season and then join the show as a regular; supposedly to cause some jealousies amongst the team. However, she became pregnant three episodes in and just couldn’t complete the role. She also considered Anise to be extremely thoughtful and deliberate and “outside of emotion.” Explains much about how bizarre her character was! (Of course, nothing explains those outfits.)

Filming in the Arctic – Why did Christopher Judge not appear in the scenes recently filmed in the Arctic? Two words: polar bears. He said he pretty much stopped listening after that, but had his decision cemented by the various bathroom issues one encounters there. He stayed home and played golf.

The Return of Beckett Paul McGillion again expressed his appreciation for the fans’ push to bring Carson Beckett back to life. He again teases that the way they bring him back is “very interesting.” (Must be the stock publicity answer for this one.) And he has yet to see if he’s coming back in Season 5.

The Non-Stargate Stuff
Rage of Angels – Christopher Judge’s in-development series will also have a comic book and game associated with it.

Eureka – Both Lexa Doig and Michael Shanks teased about how much fun they had doing Eureka. Lexa is hoping her character can come back. Michael didn’t think his could. Hmm…

More Lifetime Movies! – Both Lexa and Paul have completed movies for Lifetime. Both movies are planned for October air dates.

BSG news out of Dragon*Con

I’m not sure how many CJers actually made it into any of the Battlestar Galactica panels, but for those wondering what the big news was, SyFy Portal has a report: It seems that Jamie Bamber claimed that Sci-Fi’s plan right now is to split the next (and last!) season into two parts – and not airing the second until 2009. Seeing as how bad Sci-Fi is at learning their lessons when it comes to scheduling (among other things) it’s more than a little plausible.

Or it was all a joke. Okay… This is the Sci-Fi Channel we’re talking about, after all. (Thanks, Scoke!)

In a related personal anecdote, Helen and I figured out how to save BSG from being so relentlessly depressing – add a class clown. See, Wash didn’t die. He just fell through a wormhole and ended up on the Galactica. It could totally happen!

Red Shirts: Fate? Or statistics?

If only they’d done these kinds of studies in my statistics class! I might have gotten a better grade.

So is the fabled Red Shirt Phenomenon on Star Trek real? According to a recent statistical analysis, yes, but not as much as one might think.

If you’re wearing a red shirt and beam down to the planet, you have a 53% probability of dying. However, if Kirk gets lucky with the local space hottie? That drops way down to 12%; which puts you in about the same range as the yellow and blue shirts.

They should put this into the Starfleet manual. (via)