Last night my husband and I were watching a new series on ABC called “Masters of Science Fiction”.  It’s hard loving science fiction so much, because the people who write it need to be as smart (preferably smarter) than you are–and Hollywood is not very obliging in that respect. 

The show starts with the discovery of an unidentifiable life form at the crash site of a helicopter in Iraq–potentially interesting right?  There’s all sorts of interesting things that could happen here.  None of them did.  Move to a government facility where they are examining the life form, bunch of stern looking dudes with lots of chest ribbons say they need to call back Captain so-and-so from retirement to deal with this, screen fades.  My husband says, “he’ll be fishing on a lake”.  Sure enough, cue completely hack scene of gruff military man weary of the world but with a good heart…..fishing at the side of a lake.  Hello…people?…screenwriters?  Yeah, have you ever seen Stargate SG-1?  Please.

We should have turned it off right there, but unfortunately we wasted another 40 minutes on a show about angel looking humanoids (presumably aliens although they DNA typed as humans sans gender of course, none of which was explained) basically telling us we better all just get along or else. 

There needs to be a specialist in Hollywood-a Science Fiction Cliche Master–who reads all these scripts and removes the cheesy crap (unless it works, but it’s a fine, fine line).  The brilliant series “Firefly” and “Farscape” get cancelled and this is what we get instead?  It’s a sad, sad time to be a television sci-fi fan.