Outer Space's Outta Sight

I downloaded the first 11 episodes of Babylon 5 and was surprised how they still held up. After watching Farscape, I was expecting it to seem stodgy and slow, and to an extent that was true, but I was still drawn in. They may both be science fiction, but they are very different shows, and Walter Koenig as Alfred Bester is one of the creepiest characters in recent memory.

I also grabbed Babylon 5's In the Beginning and The Gathering movies. The encodes weren't as good as the episodes-a different encoder, a bit grainy in full-screen, but still okay-but the movies themselves were a blast. I'd forgotten just how much detail J. Michael Straczynski put into his creation. Catching up and collecting the rest of the eps is not on the top of my list of things to do, but it is definitely on it.

Battlestar Galactica is, however, closer to the top of things I want to collect. The episodes haven't yet aired on American tv, but intrepid encoders have been posting as fast as they can: 20-80 meg files seem to appear the moment each show ends. I got a 325-meg encode of the first episodes, and it looks pretty tight. The VFX team at Zoic Studios, who worked on Firefly, are involved and it shows. I'm not sure how much similarity it really will have with the original epic, but I'm certainly drawn in. I went and got the original miniseries as well; it's pretty fierce. I'm such a geek.

Super Size Me might be the most terrifying movie I've ever seen. I don't eat much fast food, but I can't imagine ever going into a fast food chain again. It even made me want to take up exercise. What Morgan Spurlock put his body through for one month was more horrifying than anything I've ever seen in a movie, except for maybe Look Who's Talking, or that thing in Alien. The encode wasn't super, but it was good enough. I got a 700-meg file off suprnova, but better ones exist.

Another freebie from DC just didn't do it for me. There wasn't anything wrong with The Flash: Blitz; it just seemed played out. The look and writing were competent and the pacing was fine, but there's nothing new. Geoff Johns, Scott Kolins and Phil Winslade brought a high level of care and professionalism to the project, but it just didn't stay with me. The birth of the new Reverse Flash was clever, as was the character Gregory Wolff, the Warden. But Grodd and the prison-break storyline were tired.