Stuff to talk about this week - 2015 Wk 13

The Walking Dead spinoff is going to be called Fear the Walking Dead, which is, basically, a lost opportunity to be really cool, if you ask me. Like, everyone they've met has called the zombies something else, the world is without communications networks to standardize terminology, and they just add two words to the title they already had?? Boring. Not a good sign. 

Here's what I'm hoping, though:

• It's supposed to be set in a different location, so I hope it's wildly different--inside a city in a cold or dry climate, or something like that. Then the zombies will be different too--less gooey, maybe, and more, like, leathery and dried out and harder to dismember. Or they'll freeze in the winter and spring will be a horror show of zombies coming out of snowdrifts as they melt.
• It's also supposed to start back at the beginning of the story, when the plague is new, so I'm hoping that 1) we get some of the collapse that Rick missed because he was comatose (and crazy-lucky that no one found his room), and 2) that it's somewhat less depressing and bleak than the main show has become. At the beginning of the disaster, there were more people, more resources, more potential for hope, and the main show is running out of all of that.

---

The first joint One Year Mission in space went up yesterday. They're going to study as much as they can to determine a baseline for sending people to Mars, and I'm deliriously happy about it! It's one thing for people to say it's a priority to send people to another world, and another thing entirely to actually take steps toward doing it. This is orbit on the relatively cushy ISS, but it's the longest consecutive stay any US astronaut has done (Russians apparently did long-duration space stays in the 80s and 90s), and it's Important.

• "They will conduct hundreds of science experiments focusing on at least 7 broad areas of investigation including medical, psychological and biomedical challenges faced by astronauts during long-duration space flight."

So we're one step closer to my dream of moving to the Moon or Mars.

--

Slightly old news, but I only just heard of it: The Mars Opportunity Rover was having corrupted-memory issues, and they fixed it with a long-distance software update. How cool is that? Since then, it's apparently crossed the distance of a marathon, so there's that, too.

--

io9 Has a great thread asking about villains we love but who are terrifying on closer inspection. Some included are: Loki, Q, Spike, Crowley, The Master.

--

The first official picture of Deadpool in his suit was tweeted by Ryan Reynolds and I totally jacked it from Tor.com's report. I feel like this perfectly encapsulates what I've seen of him in the comics and what he was not allowed to be in that one Wolverine movie, really. I'm really looking forward to this, now!

---

Mulder and Scully are coming back to us! Six episodes of an actual TV show and Chris Carter is there, and he says something along the lines of "think of it as a 13-year commercial break" and "the world has only gotten stranger since then". I'm so happy that we're getting SIX WHOLE HOURS and not, like, two that I have to pay a theatre to see. This is three times as much content and six times the story of a movie!

I'm hoping for:

• It to feel like the show, just now--not like that second movie that was so dark and isolated and cold and actually too much full of human monstrosity and not enough of mutants or aliens
• Nods to the cliches--dropping phones, running through the woods with overly bright flashlights that somehow don't do anything for the extreme darkness, some indication of clones and bees and black oil
• Mulder and Scully TOGETHER, because when they separate, someone always gets beat up and / or abducted
• All new monsters of the week!
• Preferably a reopening of the X-Files and a rehiring of the agents that worked there. Because X-Files without the FBI is weird and untethered. And they could concievably set it up for a return with a new cast if they can make us like other agents. (Disclosure, I actually did like Doggett and Reyes, but they came too late; if they'd introduced them several seasons earlier they maybe could have inherited the show eventually and not been so hated.)
• I vote Team Fringe takes over.
• That slight goofiness that made the best episodes best--Bad Blood, Clive Bruckman, Humbug--and lightened up the heaviest ones. Wry, irreverent humor in the face of a really weird world that is your job.
• Vindication for Mulder, who has been in hiding for flipping ages. 
• Some plausible way to get the Lone Gunmen back, even if it's just a voiceover because they found a secret journal or something. Because damn, they need those guys.

What're you guys hoping for?