"I have shown him that a man without hope is a man without fear."

Non-spoiler review for Daredevil: it's okay. Not the travesty some made it out to be, but not a work of beauty either. If you're a fan, watch it - it's made for you. If you're not a fan, you may wonder on occasion where the plot is.

( More detailed discussion, with spoilers, after the cut )

"What you call genocide, I call a day's work!"

The Deep Space Nine Season 1 DVD Boxed Set arrived in the mail a couple of days ago and I've been rewatching the first season. When DS9 was first announced I was one of the nay-sayers - "to boldly sit where no man had sat before", we jeered - but once I saw that they were willing to take chances with the characters, and the darker storylines, and dealing with consequences (as much as a Star Trek series was going to deal with such things) that stretched beyond an hour-long episode, I became a fan. And when the Jem'Hadar appeared at the end of Season Two, the series soared and never quite came back down again.

Like Babylon 5's 1st season, the first season of DS9 is uneven, but holds up a lot better once you have the perspective of the whole saga in mind - there's so many bits in the pilot, "Emissary" that get to me once you realize how different the characters were at the start of the series and how their charcaters and situations changed at the end of those seven years.

And "Duet" is still one of the most powerful hours of television viewing, SF or not, I've ever seen.

"Our free range days are over."

Holy crap.

I just finished watching the first DVD (three episodes) of Ultraviolet, a British SF series done in 1998 about vampires and government-funded vampire hunting organization. Imagine The Initiative from Buffy done as a show on its own, and you might get the initial premise. It's much, much more psychological, though, morally ambiguous and brilliantly written, using the premise to address issues like AIDS, abortion, even child abuse. It's one of those shows I wish I'd written myself.

Basically, vampires have been a parasitic race living off humans for centuries. However, man in the past few decades has gotten to the point where it can destroy itself, and to protect the food supply, the vampires are now organizing to take over and control humanity. At least, that's the official human line. If you listen to the leeches, as they are called, they say they are only defending themselves against a humanity that wants to commit genocide, using Death Squads armed with carbon-tipped hollow-point bullets, ultraviolet lights to detect vampire bites and tear gas laced with allacin (the active chemical in garlic), among other high tech weaponry. Code Fives ("V" for vampire - the word vampire is never used in the series) don't show up in mirrors, nor video or audio, so "surveillance is a bitch." And so it's war.

If you manage to get a hold of the DVD (there's a US edition out as well), go do so.

"Do you know where your loved ones will be in fifty years? A battery farm. Believe me, our free range days are over."