News has sadly broken that actor and musician James Darren has passed away at the age of 88. He is best-known for his roles on SF shows The Time Tunnel and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as well as a long singing career and Hollywood movie roles in the 1950s and 1960s.
Darren was born in Philadelphia in 1936 as James William Ercolani. He grew up in South Philadelphia and studied acting in New York City. He was discovered by a talent agent and signed to a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures in 1956. His first film was Rumble on the Docks (1956), which resulted in significant attention and fan mail. He continued to star in films such as Operation Mad Ball (1957), The Brothers Rico (1957), The Tijuana Story (1957) and Gunman's Walk (1958).
In 1959 he played third on the bill on Gidget, though his role was effectively the lead. The film had a title song that someone else was going to sing but Darren, who had sang on nights out for years, volunteered to give the song a go himself. His vocal performance impressed the producers and he ended up singing multiple songs for the film. Darren's singing ability attracted the attention of Colpix Records, who had him release a string of pop songs through the 1960s.
Darren continued to play supporting roles in various films and returned to the role of Gidget in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963). However, Darren felt he was not fulfilling his leading man potential, with his success in the Gidget Trilogy and his supporting turn in mega-hit The Guns of Navarone (1961) failing to lead to further leading roles. Darren later suggested his agents had failed to capitalise on his profile at the time. Darren diversified his career by voicing characters on Hanna-Barbera animated film and TV shows at a time when most Hollywood stars ignored the medium.
Darren also met and befriended Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., becoming a junior member of the "Rat Pack" in the 1960s.
In 1966 Darren starred as an android in an episode of Voyage of the Bottom of the Sea. He met the show's creator Irwin Allen and struck up a friendship. Allen then offered him the leading role of Dr. Anthony Newman on his next TV series, The Time Tunnel. The show only ran for a single season of 30 episodes, but attracted a cult following and constant repeats in both the USA and Europe made Darren a familiar television face.
Slightly disillusioned with film, Darren spent the 1970s focused on television and furthering his singing career in nightclubs. He appeared on S.W.A.T., Charlie's Angels, Police Story, Hawaii Five-O, The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, among others. He furthered his profile by presenting the documentary show Portrait of a Legend, interviewing famous musicians about their career.
In 1983 Darren gained renewed fame by playing Officer James Corrigan on the police drama T.J. Hooker, alongside Star Trek star William Shatner. Darren used the opportunity to move into directing, helming several episodes of Hooker before handling episodes of Hunter, The A-Team and Renegade.
In 1998 Darren was cast in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the role of Vic Fontaine, a holosuite lounge singer from 1960s Las Vegas who dispenses advice to the crew. Darren was cast for his real-life singing experience and being a member of the Rat Pack, although the producers also found his association with Shatner amusing. Darren credited the show with a late-stage career revival, leading to him recording two new albums and making further acting appearances. Darren also portrayed a "real" character in the Mirror Universe in one episode, where he was immediately killed off. Darren only appeared in eight episodes in the sixth and seventh seasons, despite fan perceptions he appeared in far more, with his biggest role coming in the episode It's Only a Paper Moon, where he helps Nog (Aron Eisenberg) deal with PTSD triggered by losing his leg in combat.
James Darren passed away on 2 September 2024. He had been suffering from heart issues for several weeks before his passing. He is survived by his second wife and three sons. He will be missed.
The latest campaign was for a tabletop roleplaying game based on his Cosmere universe, which is the setting for many of his most popular book series, including Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive. The roleplaying game includes core rulebooks and setting guides to the worlds of Scadrial (Mistborn) and Roshar (Stormlight). Later material will focus on other worlds, including those of Elantris and the White Sand graphic novel. The setting guides will also include new canonical material provided by Sanderson. There are also add-ons featuring GM screens, miniatures, dice, maps, tokens and cards. The game system uses a d20-driven system inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and will be published by Dragonsteel Entertainment.
The campaign closed this week having raised an astonishing $14,821,921 (£11,288,890) from 53,787 backers. This makes it the most successful tabletop and game-based Kickstarter campaign in the platform's history, eclipsing the $13 million raised by board game Frosthaven in 2020. In 2022 Sanderson raised $42 million in a campaign for four new novels, which remains the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time, and then an additional $4 million for Stormlight-themed miniatures. Earlier this year he ran a $24 million campaign for leather-bound special editions of his books on Backerkit.
The Stormlight branch of the game, including the Stormlight World Guide, Stormlight Handbook and the Stonewalkers adventure, will launch in 2025. The Mistborn branch will launch in 2026.
Sanderson's next published novel will be the fifth novel in The Stormlight Archive, which will be published on 6 December this year. After that he will be writing a new Mistborn trilogy.
Guy Gavriel Kay's latest novel will be published on 25 May 2025.
Written on the Dark will be Kay's sixteenth novel and sounds like it will continue his traditional vein of fantastical fiction inspired by real history and places, in this case "the drama and turbulence of medieval France."
Claire Hendricks is a freelance medium whose skills are put to use putting on seances for the rich and easily-impressed. However, Claire's secret is that she really can see and speak to the dead, including her friend Sophie who has stuck to Claire's side since her own passing years earlier. What seems to be a simple gig, running a seance for the spoilt members of the Wellington-Forge family, takes a turn when a murder takes place, and Claire and Sophie find themselves investigating.
Grave Expectations is the debut novel by British writer Alice Bell, who has spent over a decade in the British video gaming press (most recently as an editor at Rock Paper Shotgun). As novels go this is not a heavyweight tome, but instead a somewhat light-hearted murder mystery romp with some unexpected bite to it.
The novel opens by establishing Claire as a thirtysomething who hasn't quite got her life together, who is constantly weighed down by flashbacks to her youth, her time at university and so forth. This isn't just pointless nostalgia but due to the very real constant presence of her best friend Sophie, who died at 17. Unlike Claire, Sophie has not been able to grow up or move on, and still reacts to everything the way a 17-year-old would, which creates an interesting dichotomy between the characters (who see in each other what the other was, or could have been). This character relationship is fascinating, but not overindulged in this first book: it's clear that what really happened to Sophia (who has no memory of the events leading to her presumed murder) is a series-long mystery that will be better explored in later novels.
The book itself focuses on the Wellington-Forge family, a largely annoying bunch of well-to-dos with some serious dysfunction going on. There's some good comedy to be mined from this, but with some real menace layered in as Claire starts uncovering their secrets.
The book displays some symptoms of debut novel-itis. The pacing is a bit off, with a lot of plot and character development packed into the first 200-odd pages but the novel then meanders a bit (with an extended trip to Brighton) for the next 150 pages or so before everything comes back together for the denouncement. It feels like experience would help smooth over the pacing issues and deliver a punchier narrative. We also get a few moments of over-exposition where it's perhaps not fully necessary.
Ranged against that is some solid character work (especially the Claire-Sophie relationship) and the novel's secret sauce, which is a real sense of acerbic bite to some of the dialogue and some fleeting, but sharp moments verging on horror. The situation Claire and Sophie are in can be played for laughs and even "cosy fantasy" (some sequences recalled the crumpets-and-blood cosiness of Kim Watt's "murder mystery but the detective is a dragon!" sequence, starting with Baking Bad) but Bell will sometimes just unleash a real sense of danger and darkness lurking behind events. These moments are relatively fleeting, but help jolt the reader that this isn't just going to be a sunshine and rainbows story with a high concept.
Grave Expectations (***½) is something of a slight murder mystery novel, but some good character work and moments of sharp wit and grit make it more memorable than you'd expect. Certainly there's enough of interest here to make pressing on with the rest of the series worthwhile. The novel is available now, and the sequel, Displeasure Island, was recently released.
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Warner Brothers have released the trailer for their animated film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, set in the same continuity as Peter Jackson's live-action movie trilogy.
The film takes place about 250 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings and is the story of Helm Hammerhand, the ninth King of Rohan, at a time when his kingdom faced serious threats from within and without.
The film is directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), from a script by Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou. Philippa Boyens, who was a writer-producer on the Lord of the Rings live-action trilogy, is a producer on this project. Peter Jackson is loosely affiliated as a producer/consultant.
The film stars Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand, Gaia Wise as Hèra, Luke Pasqualino as Wulf, Laurence Ubong Williams as Fréaláf Hildeson and Shaun Dooley as Freca. Miranda Otto reprises her film role as Éowyn, serving as the film's narrator.
The film will hit cinemas on 11 December this year.
Blake's 7, the seminal dystopian British space opera series, is getting a re-release on Blu-Ray. The first season will launch on the format on 11 November this year.
Blake's 7, created by Terry Nation, ran for four seasons from 1978 to 1981, chalking up 52 episodes. The show, set roughly a thousand years in the future, saw an ideological revolutionary, engineer Roj Blake, framed for crimes he didn't commit by the despotic Terran Federation and sent to a remote penal colony. Blake escaped with the help of a group of hardened criminals, salvaging an advanced alien starship along the way. Blake wanted to use the ship, dubbed the Liberator, to strike back at the Federation and eventually help destroy it; his criminal comrades had other, more lucrative ideas for what to do with the vessel. The series became infamous for its bleakness, its high cast turnover and remarkable body count amongst the regular cast. The show was also noteworthy for its endlessly quotable dialogue, its dark sense of humour, and sometimes mind-bogglingly bad special effects.
This new release uses the impressive technology used previously on Doctor Who and Red Dwarf to dramatically improve the quality of the video-shot interior scenes, whilst exterior film footage has been rescanned in HD. There is also the option to replace all of the vfx with new material, including newly-recreated model shots, occasional CG sequences and new teleport effects. The release includes a documentary that was shot over a decade ago for the DVD re-release but had to be held back for copyright issues, as well as newly-shot interview footage with surviving crew and castmembers.
Blake's 7 was tremendously influential on J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 (JMS is an avowed Blake's 7 fan), due to its serialised storytelling. Echoes of the show can also be seen in the likes of Firefly (Joss Whedon was studying in the UK when Blake's 7 was airing), with its band of dysfunctional characters forced to work together by circumstance.
There has been several attempts over the years to reboot Blake's 7, with the UK's Sky One getting close over a decade ago, although their take was altogether more cliched (with Blake as a disgruntled ex-soldier driven to revenge by the murder of his wife) and less interesting, but the idea seems on the backburner for now.
Only very tangentially genre-related, but this seems like an outstanding bit of casting. Bill & Ted co-stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are reuniting, this time onstage in a new production of Samuel Beckett's classic play Waiting for Godot. Reeves will play Estragon whilst Winter will play Vladimir.
The production will be directed by Jamie Lloyd and will hit Broadway in autumn 2025.
Reeves and Winter previously starred together in the three films of the Bill & Ted franchise: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) and Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). They reprised the roles in the animated series Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures (1990-91).
After several years in development hell, NBC and Peacock have abandoned their plans to reboot the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
Back in September 2019, NBC tapped Sam Esmail, the creative force behind Mr. Robot, to develop a fresh take on the Battlestar Galactica franchise for their Peacock streaming service. The franchise had been created by Glen A. Larson and aired a single, huge-budgeted season on ABC in 1978, opening to enormous ratings but shedding them by season's end to be cancelled. A spin-off show, Galactica 1980, aired a single, critically-derided half-season in 1980 before being likewise cancelled.
Ronald D. Moore and David Eick resurrected the show with a grittier reboot in 2003, informed by the War on Terror and the Iraq War. The show ran for four seasons and two spin-off TV movies, concluding in 2010. A further straight-to-DVD movie followed in 2013, and a spin-off show, Caprica, aired a single season in 2010-11. This reboot, produced by NBC for the Sci-Fi Channel (later SyFy), was vastly more acclaimed, winning a Peabody and a Hugo Award.
Despite Esmail's high profile, the project struggled to get off the ground, possibly because Esmail only wanted to write and produce, leaving day-to-day showrunning duties to another producer. Michael Lesslie initially took on the project, only to later depart. Derek Simonds came on board in January 2024 in what appears now to have been a last-ditch effort to save the project.
Confusingly, Lesslie and Esmail made competing statements, the former stating the new show would be a fresh reboot of the premise and Esmail saying the new show would exist within the 2003 show's continuity. In January 2022, Universal announced that the new show would exist alongside a fresh feature film take on the franchise, to be written by X-Men screenwriter Simon Kinberg.
Now NBC have confirmed they are terminating their involvement in the project. No reason was given, but it was likely the long gestation time and expense (albeit minor so far) spent on going nowhere, Esmail not having the same profile and clout that he did back in 2019 when the project was getting off the ground, and the considerably more hostile streaming climate, with Peacock not performing as well as it could have done.
Universal are now shopping the project to other potentially interested parties
Tortoise Media has published further allegations against fantasy author Neil Gaiman. Last month, they detailed claims by two women who alleged that Gaiman took advantage of his fame and profile to coerce them into intimate acts they were uncomfortable with. Gaiman has denied the allegations.
One of the new allegations is of Gaiman apparently misreading a situation in the 1980s when he was in his twenties, which he claims was minor. The other allegation is more recent and more serious, suggesting a long-running campaign of coercion in a situation with a serious power differential (Gaiman was allowing a woman and her children to stay in one of his properties rent-free). Gaiman also denies the new allegations.
So far there has been little comment on the allegations by the numerous companies that Gaiman works alongside, such as Netflix (who are airing the Sandman TV series, produced by Warner Brothers) and Amazon (who are producing the final season of Good Omens). UNHCR, the UN refugee agency which Gaiman works for as a goodwill ambassador, has said the allegations are serious but they are still assessing the situation.
Gaiman has also so far only commented on the allegations in responses to the Tortoise Media articles, some handled through his legal team.
The BBC and Disney+ have confirmed they have commissioned a new mini-series spin-off from Doctor Who. The War Between the Land and the Sea enters production next month and will air in 2025.
The five-part series is co-written by Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies and previous Who writer Peter McTighe, whilst Who director Dylan Holmes-Williams will direct. Jemma Redgrave will reprise her long-running role as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, the head of UNIT, with Alexander Devrient reprising his role as UNIT Colonel Ibrahim. Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Loki) and Russell Tovey (Becoming Human) will lead the new series. Both had previously appeared in Doctor Who, but it appears likely they will be playing new characters.
The new series sees a threat to the human race emerging from the ocean, which UNIT leads the fight against in the Doctor's absence. Unconfirmed rumours say this threat will be the Sea Devils, a popular recurring Doctor Who enemy who recently appeared in the 2022 TV special Legend of the Sea Devils.
In the meantime, Doctor Who fans can look forwards to additional Christmas Specials in 2024 and 2025, and an eight-episode new season, which is already in the can and expected to air in the spring.
Confirming earlier reports, Marvel has successfully lured its most successful directing team, Anthony and Joseph Russo, back to their Cinematic Universe. The two directors will tackle the next two Avengers movies. The first of these has been retitled Avengers: Doomsday and will be released in May 2026, with Avengers: Secret Wars to follow in May 2027. But the Russo Brothers and Kevin Feige also confirmed an old friend will be returning.
Robert Downey Jr., who previously played Tony Stark/Iron Man in nine Marvel movies, is rejoining the MCU as iconic supervillain Dr. Victor von Doom. The announcement was made at the San Diego Comic-Con yesterday.
The role of Dr. Doom, the ruler of Latveria who wants to bring about global order under his rule, was previously played in live action by Joseph Culp in Roger Corman's 1994 movie, Julian McMahon in the 2005 movie and its sequel Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Toby Kebbell in the 2015 film.
The Russo Brothers' longtime writing partner, Stephen McFeely, is also taking over scripting duties on both new films. He previously co-wrote Captain America: The Winter Solder, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, the four films previously helmed by the Brothers.
The move represents a near-inevitable pivot by Marvel Studios once actor Jonathan Majors was convicted of misdemeanour assault and harassment in December 2023. Majors had played the villainous Kangs and various alternate timeline versions of the same character in numerous projects leading up to the next Avengers face-off. Marvel had mused recasting, but, given his last appearance in Season 2 of Loki acted as a good pause point for the character, they have instead decided to move to a different story. It may be they return to the Kang storyline with a new actor at a later date, although perhaps they could be forgiven for just writing off the whole thing as a bad idea and moving on.
Speculation will now be rife that Doom - primarily a Fantastic Four villain before appearing with other Marvel characters - may appear or at least cameo in the 1960s-set The Fantastic 4: First Steps (as it was recently retitled), which is due in cinemas on 25 July, 2025 (although the main villain has already been confirmed to be Ralph Ineson's Galactus). It was also confirmed at the Marvel panel that the Fantastic Four will be (similar to Steve Rogers) travelling to the present to fight Dr. Doom in the two new Avengers films.
Given Marvel's recent creative woes, you can't fault them for turning back to their "dream team" to drag them back to the glory days, although some may also feel it's a shame they could not find a firmer footing with new talent to drive them to new levels of success.
The Twelve Colonies of Kobol have constructed robotic servitors, the Cylons, to improve their quality of life. But the Cylons, gaining self-awareness and knowledge of their status as slaves, have rebelled, fleeing into deep space to build a formidable war machine. The Colonial Fleet has been commissioned to deal with the threat, but political infighting amongst the Colonies undermines its operational efficiency. As the Cylons gain an upper hand, the Colonial Fleet learns of divisions amongst the Cylons themselves. As it seeks victory, the Fleet deploys its ultimate weapon: the Jupiter-class battlestar, foremost amongst which is a ship named Galactica.
Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is a 2017 space strategy game developed by Black Lab Games and published by Slitherine. It is based the rebooted Battlestar Galactica TV show which aired on SyFy from 2003 to 2010, spanning a mini-series, four TV seasons, three TV/DVD movies and a spin-off show, Caprica, which lasted for a single season. I reviewed the original game in isolation here, but for this review I replayed the original game and then all of the (extensive) expansions.
Deadlock plays as the product of an unholy but compelling union between the Homeworld and XCOM franchises. The game is set during the First Cylon War, starting about fifty-two years before the events of the original TV show and, through the original campaign and the five story-based expansions, spans the twelve years of the conflict. The player has control of both the strategic and tactical layers of the war, at least to start with. Through an operations control room on the Daidalos Shipyard, you can build new ship and fleets, research and equip new technologies, and order fleets into battle via a strategic map of the Twelve Colonies. Ignore the Cylon threat for too long and they will occupy entire planets, and their funding will be cut off until you can mount a costly liberation operation.
At any time you'll usually have a plethora of side-missions to choose from, variations on defending civilian ships or stations from Cylon attack, engaging Cylon forces in a full-on battle or taking out enemy targets like resupply depots or flagships. Main story missions will usually have more elaborate goals and will feature bespoke voice acting and writing. These missions push forwards the overall strategic course of the war as well as developing the characters.
If Deadlock has a main weakness, it's that the voice acting and dialogue is a little weak, and the game has a weird insistence on making the new characters relatives of established characters from the mythos. Having Admiral Cain's aunt hanging out with Helo's grandmother never feels anything other than random. The game does have more fun when Doc Cottle shows up as a young medic, still as outspoken and grumpy as ever. Oddly the game is more reluctant to have Adama show up in the later missions, despite him canonically serving on Galactica at that point. The story itself, as in the general thrust, is very good and gives you a good idea on how the Cylons didn't simply curb-stomp the Colonies during the original war despite their apparent superiority. One weakness is that the game doesn't explain things that happened during the TV show, so if you're playing this solely as a video game on its own merits, there are a few abrupt plot turns that can feel very random without the context of the show.
The actual gameplay loop starts off very compelling: sending fleets into battle, liberating captured colonies and outposts, and pushing back a Cylon thrust in one sector is all very satisfying, especially when deploying early-game, inferior ships and having to cannily use terrain (gas pockets, asteroid fields) or special weapons to overcome usually superior enemy numbers. The strategic metagame is more XCOM than Total War though, with more of a general push of battle rather than deploying forces in detail. Once you've pushed the Cylons back into the Helios Alpha system, the nearest Colonial point to Cylon territory, it's easy to prevent further breakouts into the rest of the Colonies.
The actual space battles are very satisfying. The game is turn-based, although a twist here is that you and the enemy issue orders simultaneously, and you can't tell what orders the enemy are giving. The game then advances time in 10-second chunks with the consequences of your orders now shown, before pausing again to allow you to give orders. Your capital ships have different features, such as direct-fire main guns which fire automatically depending on what enemy ships are in which firing arcs (you can also nominate a target to focus fire on), a variety of missiles (from target-tracking warheads to dumb-fire torpedoes to nukes) and smaller ships to deploy, usually squadrons of Vipers and Raptors. Vipers are very capable, especially when you get the Mk. II variant halfway through the game, and judicious use of them to take out Cylon Raiders, shoot down incoming ordinance and then attack enemy capital ships en masse can make your battles much easier than they first appear.
The graphics are great (for 2017), even if your ships generally feel quite "small," but seeing the recoil as a battlestar's main ordinance engages enemy ships and missiles roar off never gets old. Vipers and Raiders are scaled correctly, so are quite hard to see during battles themselves and you have to rely on unit symbols. Particularly fun is when the battle is over and the game auto-generates a realtime playback of the battle, using dynamic camera angles, documentary-style crash-zooms and so on which all make them look like the space battles from the TV show (the game also allows you to upload particularly cool-looking battles to YouTube, if you wish, though this gets spotty with 4K playbacks).
A weakness of the gameplay loop is that once heavier ships are available, the need to fight side-battles as well as the main story missions becomes fairly predictable. In the latter half of the main storyline, you can find yourself trying to get through main story missions whilst a secondary fleet handles side-missions, normally by just using the exact same tactics each time (launch Vipers, send them to take care of business for you, put up flak screens, destroy lighter, faster enemy ships when they catch up). This can get a little grindy.
The original game is solid and mostly satisfying, despite something of a cliffhanger ending, but the DLC expands the scope of the game enormously. Given most of my review of the original game stands, it might be more useful here to focus on these expansions in order of release.
Reinforcement Pack (2017)
This expansion adds a bunch of new ships, including the Berzerk carrier, which is sometimes useful in early game battles but quickly loses viability compared to battlestars. The Janus heavy cruiser, which is effectively a missile frigate, is much more useful throughout the game and its expansions. The Cylon Phobos and Cerastes are gunships that don't do enough to differentiate themselves from the existing Nemesis-class, through, whilst the mines introduced in this DLC are more annoying than useful.
Broken Alliance (2018)
Broken Alliance works a bit like the old Enemy Within DLC for XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It's an "add-on" for the original campaign. Recognising that the original campaign could be a bit monotonous, this expansion adds an eight-mission side-campaign where the attempt to bring together the Twelve Colonies to sign the Articles of Colonisation is undermined by traitors and saboteurs, resulting in Colonial-on-Colonial battles. It's a solid story with some twists and turns, and it adds a much more useful array of ships to the game: the Minerva-class battlestar is an improvement over the Artemis-class light battlestar of the base game and a much more capable escort to your Jupiters; the Celestra support ship is a fun way to reinforce friendly units; Assault Raptors add massive missile pods to the standard Raptor, allowing it to become a more potent threat to Cylon heavy ships; and the Argos-class basestar is a more formidable Cylon flagship. This DLC is required, I think, to make the base game more enjoyable.
Anabasis (2018)
The most interesting and experimental of the expansions, Anabasis is a persistent fleet campaign which makes the game play more like Homeworld, and draws on both the original and rebooted TV shows for inspiration. Your fleet consists of warships and civilian vessels. You jump to a star system, pick up more civilian ships and then have to fight your way clear of the Cylons before jumping to the next target. Damage is not repaired beyond what limited ad hoc repairs you can carry out on the fly. Eventually you'll get home or be destroyed in the process. This is a customisable survival mode where you can decide on difficulty, what ships you have etc and score points for how many enemy ships are destroyed and how many civilians you get home. This mode interfaces with later DLC, like the Modern Ships Pack, allowing you to have Mercury-class battlestars like the Pegasus join the fight. This game also adds twelve new side-mission types to the base game, improving its variability immensely. For hardcore fans, this is a must-play.
Sin and Sacrifice (2019)
The first story-based expansion to the game, this is set after the base campaign and introduces a new Cylon general who is a more formidable opponent than the Cylons in the base game. The Colonials have to fight off this commander's more canny attempts to destroy the Twelve Colonies. The DLC also expands the repertoire of battle chatter and adds the Colonial Heracles gunship and the Cylon Gorgon support carrier to the game. The eleven-mission story expansion is pretty good, though suffering from some of the same grindy issues as the base game, and controls the same way.
Resurrection (2019)
Resurrection changes the gameplay of the series significantly. Rather than fighting on the map of the Twelve Colonies and organising battles from the strategy centre of the mobile Daidalos Shipyard, you're now based permanently in the CIC of Galactica, which, in a nice-if-pointless twist, you can now walk around. This is a perfect 3D replica of the set from the TV show, and is very impressive. The ten-mission campaign, set three years after Sin and Sacrifice, sees the Galactica being upgraded for a new phase of the war, as the Cylons seek to split the Twelve Colonies to more easily destroy them.
A welcome feature here is that you can play new story mission sequentially, whilst playing side-missions only to drop the Cylon threat level and make the story missions easier. This allows you to focus on getting through the story with less distractions, whilst still allowing you to fight side-battles and level up your officers and crews. The DLC adds the Jupiter Mk. II battlestar to the fleet, along with the Cylon Cratus-class basestar. Both sides also get heavy bombers to augment their fleets, if you're okay with micro-managing them. This expansion refreshes the gameplay just when it really needs it.
Ghost Fleet Offensive (2020)
Set several years after the previous campaign, this ten-mission story sees the Colonies secretly pooling together a "Ghost Fleet" behind Cylon lines to deliver a devastating blow to their command structure which will hopefully end the war. The new Cylon commander Atropos is close to overwhelming the Colonies' defences and besieging the planets, so the mission takes on fresh urgency. This DLC interfaces chronologically with the Blood & Chrome DVD and introduces the Orion-class frigate from that movie, along with the Colonial Defender and Cylon Medusa. The main story in this one is pretty good, but the new ships are underwhelming.
Modern Ships Pack (2020)
This DLC adds several ships from the timeframe of the TV series to the game. These cannot be used in the story campaigns (which would not make any sense) but can be used in skirmish, multiplayer and the Anabasis mode. The ships included are the Mercury-class battlestar, the Valkyrie-class support battlestar, Colonial Viper Mk. VII, the modern Cylon basestar, the Guardian basestar and the Modern Raider. If you want to see the familiar ships from the TV show, this is a must-have, but is otherwise unnecessary to follow the story.
Armistice (2020)
The final expansion adds an eight-mission campaign which sees the Galactica crew confront their old enemy-turned-ally-turned-enemy, the Cylon scientist Clothos, for the final time. They learn of the existence of a powerful Cylon weapon and track it down to a remote planet where they join forces with the battlestar Columbia in Operation Raptor Talon (the events of which are chronicled in the BSG spin-off movie Razor). This has the most satisfying storyline of the expansions, as it moves directly towards ending the war once and for all, even if the precise events of the final mission don't fully make sense unless you've already seen the TV show.
When combined into one complete package, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is a formidably impressive package. Sixty story missions and an effectively infinite pool of side missions create a campaign that will easily take you over 60 hours to complete. The Anabasis survival/challenge mode is highly replayable and customisable. There are also multiplayer and skirmish modes, and an adjustable difficulty level, as well as different tactics to employ. There is a reasonable variety of ships and weapons to experiment with.
That said, there's still a degree of repetition and grind involved, though far less than on release; Black Lab Games should be congratulated on their exemplary post-release support that took a fairly bare-bones original title and has since fleshed it out into a very comprehensive game. In particular removing the mission choice map is a counter-intuitive move which improves the game tremendously in the later DLC.
The main question is price: the Complete Edition is eyebrow-raisingly expensive, with the original game and the DLC all still being sold permanently at full price. The full package will set you back £90. It's a good game but it's not that good. Fortunately, Deadlock and its DLC are frequently on sale and I've seen the Complete Package go for under £30, which is much more sensible (note that the BattleTech Mercenary Collection has the exact same problem, going for a bonkers £75 when not on sale).
Assuming you can get it for a decent price, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock (****) is an engrossing and rewarding space tactics game, with a good story, interesting unit variety and a formidable amount of content. The voice acting and dialogue could be stronger, but for a low-budget product this is very polished and enjoyable, and for established BSG fans, it has added value in fleshing out ideas the TV show could only hint at. The game is available now on PC (via Steam and GoG), Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
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Steven Erikson has confirmed that his in-progress Witness Trilogy, a sequel to his classic Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence (1999-2011), will now be a quartet.
Erikson published the first book in the series, The God is Not Willing, in 2021 to considerable acclaim and success. His previous two Malazan novels had been the first two books in the Kharkanas Trilogy, Forge of Darkness (2012) and Fall of Light (2016), but had sold relatively poorly, necessitating a shift to a new project.
Erikson had planned to conclude the Kharkanas sequence, writing several hundred pages of the third book, Walk in Shadow, before his publishers convinced him to return to the Witness sequence. Erikson was hundreds of pages into the second book, No Life Forsaken, before realising it was really two books. After this realisation came about, Erikson pressed on to complete both books before submitting them to his publisher.
This process is almost complete (he had two months' work left to do two months ago), and Erikson is hopeful this means that No Life Forsaken and the as-yet-untitled third book can be released in relatively quick succession (though I suspect it'll be in subsequent years) in the near future.
His plan is to then finish Walk in Shadow (which Erikson was also hinting some time ago might also become two books) and the fourth and final Witness novel. Erikson reiterated that Karsa Orlong will only appear in the final book in the series. He also has two additional Malazan novellas under contract.
Possibly not coincidentally, several of Erikson's publishing houses have put up the same placeholder date for No Life Forsaken recently: 28 August 2025. This seems fairly achievable based on Erikson's current progress.
Paramount+ have cancelled their TV series based on the popular Halo video game franchise after two seasons and seventeen episodes.
Amblin Television produced the show in conjunction with Microsoft, Xbox and 343 Industries, who developed the previous three games in the series. This group is now shopping the show to other streamers, but the reportedly high budget makes it a tough sell.
The show had a rough landing for its first season in 2022, with critics mostly left unmoved and fans annoyed by a large number of changes to the source material, including starting the show some considerable time before the games began, omitting key game characters, introducing new characters and killing off fan-favourite characters in different places in the narrative. The second season, released earlier this year, was better and had a stronger reception, finally reaching the events of the games (adapting Halo: Reach and ending where Halo: Combat Evolved begins), although the overall reception was still lukewarm. Paramount+ had indicated that the show had performed strongly for them in terms of viewership, so the decision to cancel was likely due to cost and the streamer's uncertain future, which may have also contributed to a shrinking of its Star Trek portfolio.
Fans may also hold hope that this clears the way for a more source-accurate adaptation of Halo in the future, but given how long it took this project to get off the ground and the declining reception of recent games in the series, that may be rather optimistic.
Whilst flicking through Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross's splendid 2018 book So Say We All: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Battlestar Galactica, I rediscovered the interesting story of writer Ronald D. Moore's work on a TV version of Anne McCaffrey's seminal science fantasy series, The Dragonriders of Pern, in the early 2000s.
The Dragonriders of Pern is a very long-running science fantasy series that began with Dragonflight, published in 1967. Twenty-four novels and two story collections in the setting were published before Anne McCaffrey passed away in 2011; some of the later books were co-written by her son Todd. The series is a rationalised fantasy, with the backstory being that the planet Pern has been colonised by humans from a far future Earth, but they lost their technology and were plunged into dark age by the onset of "Thread," a spore that consumes all organic material. The human colonists were able to genetically engineer a creature similar to the dragons of Earth legend to deal with Thread, destroying it in the air before it could touch the ground. Human dragonriders form telepathic bonds with these creatures to control them. After many centuries, a new, more medieval fantasy-ish society emerges.
Ronald D. Moore was a fan of the book series. He achieved his initial success in television by working as a writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation. His first script, The Bonding, was acclaimed as a character-focused study. However, he also became valued on the writing team for both his encyclopaedic knowledge of the franchise, his fascination with the Klingons (developing much of the lore behind the species) and his strong sense of story. Moore worked on The Next Generation from its third through seventh seasons (1989-94), co-writing the series finale All Good Things... with his writing partner Brannon Braga. The two writers joined forces to write the seventh and eighth Star Trek movies, Generations (1994) and the very well-received First Contact (1996). Subsequent to this he moved over to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and worked on that show from its third through seventh seasons (1994-99), amongst other things developing the USS Defiant and continuing to serve as "the Klingon guy," whilst penning many of the show's strongest episodes.
With Deep Space Nine wrapping up in 1999, Moore decided to move to work on Star Trek: Voyager, then in its sixth and penultimate season, which his former writing partner Braga was working on as effective showrunner. Moore was dissatisfied with the direction Voyager had taken, feeling that the writers had not taken the premise seriously enough. He wanted to have the ship damaged and stay damaged from episode to episode, whilst the crew would be more morally compromised by their journey to get home. Braga and franchise overseer Rick Berman both felt it was too late to make such changes, and Moore, disappointed, decided to leave the franchise altogether.
Moore briefly worked as a consulting producer on Good vs. Evil before joining Roswell in its second season. He developed the background mythology for the show's alien race and wrote some of the show's most popular episodes. After it terminated in 2002, he was offered the opportunity to develop Dragonriders of Pern.
The rights to the property had been circulating for many years, with Irish company Zyntopo Teoranta picking them up in 1996. They partnered with Canadian company Alliance Atlantis to develop the extensive CGI that would be required to depict the dragons and other fantastical elements in the story. They then consulted with Moore to develop the project further.
Moore's by-then long list of credentials had led to doors opening at other companies, and New Regency and Warner Brothers were receptive to the idea: a high concept, a proven scriptwriter with his own fanbase, a very popular book series with a huge number of readers, and fantasy being absolutely huge with the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (still incomplete at that time). They greenlit a pilot episode, hired experienced TV director Felix Enriquez Alcala to direct, and began building sets and casting. They also engaged in concept art and further CG experimenting, developing an "in-the-moment" documentary style for the CG, to make the audience feel they were really on the back of a dragon.
Alcala and Moore were scouting locations in Santa Fe, New Mexico when word came in that the studio was sending them a revised version of the script. For Moore, who'd written the script, this was news, as the script had already been greenlit and they were moving into pre-production. For the studio to request rewrites on a script after it had been completed and drafted was unusual; for them to revise it themselves without informing the showrunner was unheard of. The revised script completely changed the story, which no longer bore any resemblance to Anne McCaffrey's novel. In Moore's words, the studio had "done a WB on it all right, it had become a teenage idiotfest." Moore asked the studio for an explanation and even offered to rewrite his script to incorporate some of the elements they'd wanted added. They replied that their script would be the only one that was going to be shot. The studio agreed to a telephone call the next day.
By pure chance, Moore was due to attend a panel at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills that night. Also on the panel was Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, who'd had his own confrontation with an intransigent, interfering network over his show Crusade, and well-known Star Trek writer and SFF author Harlan Ellison, a well-known fighter for the rights of the writer. Ellison's advice to the audience of aspiring writers was to "stand up and have some principles. Don't whore your talent out to anybody, show some balls in this business. Be about something. What does it really mean to be a writer if you can't protect your talent?"
During the telephone call the next day, Moore reiterated he was not going to make the script that had been sent from the studio: he was happy to rewrite the script to their specifications himself, but not just shoot someone else's crappier version. When the studio exec presented Moore with an ultimatum that they could all just call it a day there and then, they were flabbergasted when Moore agreed. The project collapsed and was cancelled, apparently after almost $2 million had been spent on pre-production and development work.
Moore was glad he'd stuck to his principles but was concerned if this move would make him unemployable; fortunately, it was only a couple of weeks before producer David Eick, whom Moore had met on Good vs. Evil, got in touch. He'd been talking to Universal, who'd been working on a new iteration of Battlestar Galactica with director Bryan Singer. They'd gotten quite far into planning a new take on the franchise, even test-building some props and sets, but Singer had abruptly taken off to work with Fox on X-Men 2 after a substantial amount of money had been offered to him. This had left the BSG project hanging. Eick asked Moore if he'd like to redevelop it with him, and Moore said yes, and the rest there is, as they say, history.
As for Dragonriders of Pern, the series rights were picked up by Copperheart Entertainment in 2006, with David Hayter (yes, Solid Snake) producing. Warner Brothers later took up a new option in 2014. So far, the series has not been made.
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