Table of contents for May 2020 in SFX

SFX|May 2020

Rants & Raves

DARREN SCOTT EDITOR RAVES There’s never been a better time to binge watch a series or two – though perhaps I shouldn’t have gone with Fear The Walking Dead and Survivors. Watching – and tweeting – along with Doctor Who fans around the world via #DoctorWhoLockdown has been great fun. RANTS A very sensible one for me: please stay at home unless absolutely necessary… IAN BERRIMAN DEPUTY EDITOR RAVES Lockdown highlight: turning my regular Doctor Who-watching night with chums into a virtual event. It worked! Of all the Covid-19 memes, my favourite’s been Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s: see bit.ly/peggcorona. Dracula designer Richard Wells’s folk horror anthology crowdfunder looks worthy of support: bit.ly/damntales. JONATHAN COATES ART EDITOR RAVES Netflix has barely been off the TV during lockdown. Started by rewatching…

2 min

SFX|May 2020

Island Life

SCI-FACT! Dennis Kelly's big break on TV came with the BBC Three sitcom Pulling, which he co-wrote with Sharon Horgan. TOO OFTEN, TRAILERS ARE SO spoiler-heavy that there’s barely a surprise left by the time the actual movie or TV show drops. That’s not a brickbat you could ever lob at the marketing of The Third Day, a new six-part drama that sees HBO and Sky buddy up for the first time since the critically acclaimed Cherbobyl. If you’ve watched the trailer from March, you’ll know that it looks scary and odd and unsettling – even if, to its credit, it’s more than a little hazy on what it’s actually about. Okay, so what do we know? That it’s about a man and a woman, played by Jude Law and…

5 min

SFX|May 2020

Going It Alone

SCI-FACT Schumacker says they used Mary Tyler Moore’s character from her eponymous show as a basis for Harley’s go-getting ambition. HARLEY QUINN’S MOMENT HAS clearly come. Hot on the heels of the well-received Birds Of Prey movie, the character bursts into her own animated series this month in the UK. Don’t expect a straightforward follow up to Batman: The Animated Series, however; full of jokes, swearing and graphic violence, Harley Quinn is DC’s first adult animated comedy, a riotous and gleefully profane – new take on the Batman universe The series starts with the end of Harley’s bad romance with the Joker and follows the psychotic former psychiatrist as she goes it alone. That doesn’t mean that she’s on the side of right, of course. “Harley has been portrayed in…

4 min

SFX|May 2020

Beast Mode

SCI-FACT a fan of the Star Beast title, O’Bannon eventually settled on Alien because the word appeared several times in the screenplay. FOLLOWING ITS ADAPTATION OF WILLIAM Gibson’s original script for Alien 3 – published in 2018 – Dark Horse is now turning the late Dan O’Bannon’s original 1976 Alien screenplay into a five-issue mini-series, by writer Cristiano Seixas and artist Guilherme Balbi. Initially titled Star Beast, it features many familiar elements from Ridley Scott’s seminal 1979 film, although there are also many intriguing differences. “As a writer, it was very difficult to keep it as close to the original script as possible,” Seixas tells Red Alert. “I focused a bit more on the philosophical approach on finding another lifeform in the middle of the vastness of outer space.” “Talking about it even just…

First of all, I hope this issue of SFX finds you, your family and loved ones safe and well. In fact I hope it finds you at all – at the time of writing we don’t know if all the shops will have reopened, but thankfully our loyal readers have always been ardent subscribers and downloaders. Now’s the perfect opportunity to take advantage of one of our offers if you’re not! It’s a very strange time we’re living in; I’m sure you feel the same. We thought we’d be writing about a new version of The Walking Dead this month, not experiencing our own almost-deserted streets and looking across empty shelves for supplies. So it’s something of a different kind of issue that we’ve brought to you via our various…

1 min

SFX|May 2020

RYAN KWANTEN

Ryan Kwanten made his (bite)mark in vampiric phenomenon True Blood (2008-2014) as Sookie’s brother Jason Stackhouse. Now he’s teamed up again with showrunner Raelle Tucker for Sacred Lies: The Singing Bones playing Peter, so should we expect more supernatural exsanguination? “No vampires, but definitely some actual haunting going on. Even though we rest within the same genre there’s a marked difference with tone. Jason did have quite a body count next to him and I’d like to think not all of them were his fault, whereas Peter has a hand in his own demise and digging his own grave by the actions he chooses.” Would you like to play the role of Jason again? I’d never say never, but I’d want to have the whole team back. I’d want to make sure everyone was…

1 min

2 min

SFX|May 2020

First Contact

STAR TREKKIN’… Rob Graham, email Star Trek: Picard has been an absolute joy to watch from start to finish and has to be up among the best Star Trek TV shows. Patrick Stewart has been superb with an excellent new cast and it was great seeing Data, Riker and Troi again, though for me Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine was the best of the returning characters and threatened to steal the series from Patrick Stewart, along with the Romulan housekeepers in the first three episodes. Chris Rios and his holograms grew on me as the best of the new characters. Bring on season two. This has become my new favourite series, along with The Mandalorian which is off to an excellent start on Disney+. SFX We loved the Romulan housekeepers too.…

1 min

SFX|May 2020

You Save The World, Then What?

SCI-FACT Chosen Ones features an in-joke relating to the writers of the Illuminae series, which features an in-joke referencing Roth. WELCOME TO THE POST-YA LITERARY WORLD. While Veronica Roth’s new novel, Chosen Ones, has a title that evokes a well-worn YA trope, the book is being marketed as the first “adult” book from the author of the bestselling Divergent series. But, according to Roth, this was no calculated move to reposition herself in a world where YA sales are falling – it just evolved that way. “I came up with the idea and it was not a coming of age story,” she tells Red Alert. “It was more about navigating adulthood. How to deal with your past and figure out how to move forward. And that isn’t a theme that’s…

3 min

SFX|May 2020

AERIAL ASSAULT

Good news for Abnormals: Sanctuary to return eight years after cancellation, with Amanda Tapping reprising her role of Dr Helen Magnus. The coronavirus shutdown means The Flash, Supernatural and Legacies now see their season endings postponed to later in 2020. The season 10 finale of The Walking Dead will also air as a special event episode later this year. Life On Mars/Ashes To Ashes revival in development, combining characters from both series in a “final chapter”. Rosario Dawson playing Ahsoka Tano in season two of The Mandalorian. Michael Biehn also stars as a bounty hunter. Castlevania renewed for a fourth season on Netflix. Richard E Grant to appear in an episode of Marvel’s Loki. Ryan Reynolds to star in and produce Netflix adaptation of ’80s classic arcade game Dragon’s Lair.…

QUESTION 1 Which veteran of the Indiana Jones franchise directed 1990’s Arachnophobia? QUESTION 2 Name the Acromantula that features in Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets. QUESTION 3 What is Spider-Woman’s secret identity in the original Marvel comics? (NB: we are after the first incumbent of the role.) QUESTION 4 PICTURE QUESTION In which 1943 movie did the scantily clad hero encounter this giant spider? QUESTION 5 What links Alias, Heroes, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and 2013’s Big Ass Spider!? QUESTION 6 Which SF author perpetrated the hoax that Arachne was the lost thirteenth sign of the Zodiac? QUESTION 7 Jon Pertwee’s Doctor travelled to the “Planet Of The Spiders” in 1974. But what was the actual name of the world he visited? QUESTION 8 PICTURE QUESTION Name…

2 min