Please be warned: this post contains explicit spoilers for the final Futurama, particularly as it applies to the relationship between Leela and Fry.

Of the four Futurama direct-to-DVD releases over the last fifteen months, I’ve been more disappointed than thrilled. I blame this on the first film: Bender’s Big Score, which was fantastic. It was everything great about Futurama in an hour and a half movie — I laughed, and I thrilled, and I danced, and, yes, I cried.

But The Beast With A Billion Backs, and Bender’s Game, were disappointing to me. I think this is because Bender’s Big Score felt like a movie, whereas the other two felt like three or four episodes clumsily mashed into a film. While the latter is an approach which makes sense (the movies will be broken down into episodes for airing on Comedy Central, or Cartoon Network, or wherever the show airs now). Clearly, my expectations were too high.

Fortunately, Into The Wild Green Yonder feels like a unified film. While it’s not as funny, or as touching, as Bender’s Big Score, I’m glad that if Futurama does end with this film, it ends on a high note. My only criticism is this:

A big part of the plot of Bender’s Big Score is the relationship between Fry and Leela. It’s the reason tears streak down my (now furry) cheeks when I watch it. However, at the end of the film, the reset button is pressed, and the two move their separate ways. At the end of Into the Wild Green Yonder, the two make a connection and it is implied that said connection (of the romantic type) is lasting. I just feel that this is a development that would have made absolute sense at the end of Bender’s Big Score, and here, in this film, it just seems out of place.

Also: the commentary track is funny. They always are.

The big news today, well, yesterday, is that AG Eric Holder plans on reinstating the Federal assault rifle ban which was signed into law during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and was not renewed during Bush’s.

I oppose this move, and allowing it to expire was one of the few things I liked about Dubya. Yes, I wish our former president had actually taken advantage of his political clout to push through some sort of Federal CCW law nationwide. (Yeah … I can’t find something nice to say about him without finding something to criticize, too!)

Despite what people might think, I am not some right-wing conservative. I didn’t vote for McCain, and I didn’t cheer Palin. I voted for Obama. I’m not some liberal nut who’s getting his politics confused, either, I’m actually pretty moderate (with admittedly liberal sympathies).

I’m not going to talk too much about the Second Amendment here — that’s the wrong conversation. And the reason it’s the wrong conversation is because there is a method to legally change the Constitution (we call them ‘Amendments’), and so it isn’t enough to say that gun ownership is a right, rather, it must be argued why gun ownership should continue to be a right. (more…)

As Battlestar Galactica winds down, I was hoping for an exciting episode last Friday night. Instead, this was a clunker that left me scratching my head and wondering just what was it I’d seen. As much as I disliked last week’s “No Exit“, which wasn’t much more than a ton of exposition dumped on the audience, this episode, either from poor writing or lousy editing, was just awful.

Originally, this draft was considerably longer. But, surfing the internet as I do, I came across a few things that opened my eyes about this episode. I will keep my fingers crossed that the DVD release for this season includes a “director’s cut” (yes, there is such precedent: both the 2.5 DVD set and the 3.0 set included extended cuts of episodes).

A commenter on Galactica Sitrep wrote: (more…)