Peter Krause played homicide detective Joe Miller, searching for his missing daughter (Elle Fanning) through a mysterious motel room that was a gateway in time and space, in the three-part Sci Fi mini-series The Lost Room. Miller soon found himself embroiled in a secret war over long-lost objects that possessed extraordinary powers that dated back to a fateful day in May 1961. Julianna Margulies, Dennis Christopher and Kevin Pollak also starred.
Daryl Hannah played an unlikely insectoid alien queen planning world domination in Robert Leiberman’s ludicrous mini-series Final Days of Planet Earth, also from the Sci Fi Channel.
Created by Stephen Gallagher, who soon left the project due to ubiquitous “creative differences”, Granada’s Eleventh Hour was shown as four self-contained TV movies based around the concept of “science-gone-wrong”. Patrick Stewart starred as government trouble-shooter Professor Ian Hood who, with his Special Branch minder Rachel Young (Ashley Jensen), investigated such things as a European cloning conspiracy, a flesh-eating virus, a formula to predict the weather and spring water that could apparently cure cancer.
Gallagher was also set to script a TV movie of Dracula before the BBC announced its own version, shown at Christmas. Writer Stewart Harcourt’s attempt to do something different with Bram Stoker’s much-filmed novel resulted in Marc Warren’s laughably effeminate Count and David Suchet’s clearly potty Abraham Van Helsing.
As Las Vegas, the Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore were destroyed over two nights, the North American continent was split in two by a massive earthquake in NBC’s by-the-numbers sequel 10.5: Apocalypse, starring Kim Delaney, Dean Cain and a slumming Frank Langella.
Ray Winstone did little more than walk through his performance as the sympathetic barber who cut the throats of his customers in David Moore’s BBC film of Sweeney Todd, shot on nicely atmospheric Romanian locations. Essie Davis was a nymphomaniac Mrs Lovett who turned the victims into pies, and David Warner played a blind policeman investigating the mysterious disappearances. The “Director’s Cut” was subsequently released on DVD with exclusive unseen footage.
Based on a story by Dennis Wheatley, The Haunted Airman was a short BBC film about a recuperating RAF pilot (Robert Pattinson) who was tormented by terrifying flashbacks. Julian Sands played his sinister doctor.
Number 13 was the latest M. R. James ghost story for Christmas. Greg Wise starred as the academic who discovered that his lodging house contained a ghostly room next to his own.
In Stuart Orme’s two-part Ghostboat, based on the novel by George E. Simpson, David Jason played the only survivor of a World War II submarine disaster who found he was still linked with the past when the haunted vessel mysteriously reappeared thirty-eight years later.
Ian Richardson provided the voice of Death who, with his reluctant assistant Albert (David Jason), had to save Christmas from Marc Warren’s psychotic Mr Teatime and the mysterious “Auditors” in Vadim Jean’s all-star holiday treat Terry Pratchett’s Hog-father, which was shown over two nights on Sky Television. Based on Pratchett’s 20th “Discworld” novel, the author contributed to the script and turned up in a cameo as a Toymaker.
For younger viewers, Pratchett’s time-travel adventure Johnny and the Bomb was adapted as a three-part children’s series starring Zoë Wanamaker, Frank Finlay and Keith Barron.
In Return to Halloweentown, the fourth instalment in the Disney franchise, Sara Paxton starred as teenage witch Marnie, who was on her way to Witch College with a little help from Grandma Aggie (Debbie Reynolds).
John Goodman starred as Saint Nick in NBC’s live-action remake of The Year Without a Santa Claus, based on the 1974 Rankin/Bass claymation original.
Re-Animated, the Cartoon Network’s first live-action movie, was about a young boy who received a brain transplant from the founder of a theme park. Fred Willard played the Walt Disney-like entrepreneur.
The animated Superman: Brainiac Attacks on the Cartoon Network pitted the Man of Steel against his two greatest enemies, Brainiac and Lex Luthor. The network also aired the superhero movies Teen Titans in Tokyo, Ultimate Avengers II and the Japan-set Hellboy: Sword of Storms (featuring the voices of Ron Perlman and Selma Blair).
BBC-TV’s revived Doctor Who series continued to be one of Britain’s most popular programmes. For the second, thirteen-part series, Scottish actor David Tennant took over as a dynamic incarnation of the Time Lord, who shared a more romantic relationship with his companion, Rose Tyler (Billie Piper). The better episodes involved a werewolf murder mystery surrounding Queen Victoria (Pauline Collins), the poignant return of former companions Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and the robot dog K-9, a two-part Cyberman invasion of London, a soul-sucking 1950s TV entity (Maureen Lip-man) and a Satanic creature trapped by the power of a black hole. In the epic two-part finale, an Earth besieged by ghosts and the destruction of the mysterious Torchwood Institute were only a prelude to an apocalyptic confrontation between the Cybermen and the Daleks as Rose made a decision that would change her life forever.
For the show’s Christmas special, “The Runaway Bride”, the Doctor teamed up with comedian Catherine Tate as a sarcastic bride who vanished from her wedding ceremony and ended up on the Tardis. Together they battled Sarah Parish’s impressive giant spider-queen.
Although the first episode of the “adult” Doctor Who spin-off series Torchwood broke the record for the biggest audience for a UK digital TV channel, Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and his Cardiff team of ludicrously bisexual paranormal investigators were never as entertaining as the show that spawned them.
Modern Manchester police detective Sam Tyler (John Simm) was knocked down by a car and apparently found himself transported back to a surprisingly un-PC 1973 in the BBC’s enjoyable and amusing eight-part series Life on Mars (named after the David Bowie song). While Tyler (and the viewers) tried to work out if he had actually travelled back in time or if it was all in his head, he also had to contend with his no-nonsense boss Gene Hunt (the excellent Philip Glenister) and a particularly creepy young girl off the television test card.
Less successful was the BBC’s feature-length remake of Fred Hoyle and James Elliot’s 1961 SF series A for Andromeda, shot on HD video and shown in March. Kelly Reilly starred as the eponymous new biological life form.
Also disappointing, Random Quest was an hour-long adaptation of the John Wyndham story (previously filmed for TV in 1969 and as Quest for Love in 1971). Following a laboratory accident, research scientist Colin Trafford (Samuel West) found himself in a parallel universe inhabiting the body of his namesake and living a very different life.
For those fans still missing Buffy and Angel, rapper Kirk “Sticky” Jones starred as the vengeance-seeking half-human, half-vampire “daywalker”, who teamed up with Jill Wagner’s undercover bloodsucker to defeat the sinister House of Chthon in Spike TV’s surprisingly engaging Blade: The Series, created by David Goyer and based on the Marvel Comics character.
The second, thirteen-episode season of Showtime Network’s anthology series Masters of Horror kicked off in October with Richard Christian Matheson’s loose adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing”, directed by Tobe Hooper and starring Sean Patrick Flanery. The series also included hour-long episodes directed by John Landis, Ernest Dickerson, Brad Anderson, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Joe Dante and creator Mick Garris, and featured George Wendt, Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman, Meat Loaf, Elliot Gould and Tony Todd among the guest stars.
Richard Christian Matheson also scripted “Battle Ground”, the first and probably best episode of TNT’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes, an hour-long anthology show filmed in Australia and based on eight of Stephen King’s lesser-known stories. The series continued through the Lovecraftian “Crouch End” (set in a very peculiar depiction of London), “Umney’s Last Case”, “The End of the Whole Mess”, “The Road Virus Heads North”, “The Fifth Quarter”, “Autopsy Room Four” and “You Know They’ve Got a Hell of a Band”. Guest stars included William H
urt, William H. Macy, Henry Thomas, Tom Berenger, Samantha Mathis, Richard Thomas and Steven Weber.
In Showtime Network’s blackly humorous Dexter, Miami police forensic expert and secret serial killer Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) discovered that his sister’s new boyfriend was the Ice Truck Killer and that he had a familial connection to the mixed-up murderer. Although the season finale marginally failed to live up to the promise of the rest of the series, Dexter was still one of the best new shows on TV, based on Jeff Lindsay’s 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter.
In America, The CW was the network that was created out of the merger of The WB and UPN. Co-owners CBS and Time Warner launched the new channel in September with a $50 million promotional campaign.
In The CW’s Supernatural, Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) finally teamed up with their missing father John Winchester (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to confront vampires and obtain a mystical gun that could destroy the demon that killed their mother. Not only did the boys have to deal with Reapers, a flesh-eating clown and the death of their father, but they also battled the ghost of America’s first serial killer, H. H. Holmes and encountered a seriously homicidal vampire-hunter. In a clever piece of stunt-casting that was guaranteed to turn heads, Linda Blair turned up as a sympathetic cop in an episode entitled “The Usual Suspects”.
In NBC’s Medium, the show’s executive producer, Kelsey Gram-mer, showed up as an urbane Death, Molly Ringwald played the victim of a stalker, and psychic Alison (Patricia Arquette) had an It’s a Wonderful Life moment in the second season finale when she discovered what her life would have been like if things had worked out differently. The show was back with a two-hour premiere in November, in which Alison’s dead ex-boyfriend (Arquette’s real-life husband Thomas Jane) turned up.
Following a near-fatal séance at the end of the first season, Lesley Sharp returned as morose medium Alison Mundy, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother (Amanda Lawrence) in a second, eight-part series of Afterlife, created by Stephen Volk.
Meanwhile, Melinda (Jennifer Love Hewitt) had to make peace with her mother to lay a ghost to rest in CBS-TV’s Ghost Whisperer. The first season ended with a plane crash and the death of series regular Andrea (Aisha Tyler). However, the character was back in the first show of the second series. Camryn Manheim joined the cast as Delia, and Jay Mohr played Rick Payne, a professor studying the supernatural.
The Dead Zone returned for its fifth and supposedly final season, filmed back-to-back with series four. In the season finale, Johnny (Anthony Michael Hall) discovered that vice president Greg Stillson (Sean Patrick Flanery), who was being controlled by evil mastermind Janus (Martin Donovan), was the target of an assassin. In a surprise announcement in September, the USA Network picked up the show for a sixth season.
Bill Paterson’s scientific investigator Douglas Monaghan was mostly missing from the six-part, third series of the BBC’s Sea of Souls, and it was left to his assistants Craig Stevenson (Iain Robertson) and psychic Justine McManus (Dawn Steele) to debunk the supernatural manifestations that kept cropping up all over Scotland. In the penultimate episode they encountered a genuine succubus who drained her victims of their life-force.
A group of dull characters discovered that they possessed superpowers and had to “save the cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere), save the world” in NBC-TV’s over-hyped Heroes. The show went on hiatus in December before returning with twenty-two new episodes in 2007.
CBS-TV’s gloomy post-apocalyptic drama Jericho, starring Skeet Ulrich and Gerald McRaney as an estranged son and father among the inhabitants of a Kansas town cut off by a nuclear attack on America, also took a mid-season break in December.
In ABC-TV’s meandering Lost, Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez) and Libby (Cynthia Watros) were both shot dead before the two-hour second season finale in May and, when the series returned, the ruthless Mr Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) was killed off by the show’s mysterious monster. While everybody else was still trying to uncover the secret of the island, a dithering Kate (Evangeline Lily) still couldn’t make up her mind between doctor Jack (Matthew Fox) and bad boy Sawyer (Josh Holloway). To avoid repeats, the show went on hiatus for two months in December to make way for the confusing Day Break, in which Taye Diggs’ disgraced LAPD detective kept reliving the same bad day over and over again (now where have we seen that before?).
Meanwhile, Hurley’s cursed lottery numbers from Lost turned up on a fortune cookie message in the January 25th episode of UPN’s Veronica Mars and appeared the same day on the cover of DC Comics’ Catwoman #51. Now that was really weird!
After five seasons, ABC’s Alias finally came to a two-hour end in May, as secret agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) confronted a group of old foes and attempted to make some sense of the “Ram-baldi” prophecy.
The Sci Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica continued to be the best SF show on television, as the remaining humans escaped from slavery on New Caprica and raced their humanoid enemies the Cylons to find the way to Earth in a two-part, mid-season, cliff-hanger.
USA Network’s The 4400 returned for a third season of thirteen episodes in June, as Tippi Hedren guest starred in the two-hour opener. Government investigators Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) and Diana Skouris (Jacqueline McKenzie) tried to foil Jordan Collier’s (Billy Campbell) plans for mankind, and baby Isabelle mysteriously transformed into a sexy twenty-year-old (Megalyn Echikunwoke).
Stargate SG-1 became TV’s longest-running SF series with its tenth and final series, which also saw the show celebrate its 200th episode (with a Wizard of Oz spoof and numerous in-jokes). Richard Dean Anderson reprised his role as Jack O’Neill in a number of episodes, including a two-part crossover episode with Stargate Atlantis. MGM announced that it would be making two Stargate SG-1 movies once the series was over.
Despite being an interesting variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ABC’s Invasion was cancelled after its first season, without ever resolving its human-hybrid conspiracy.
After being marooned with his rebellious teenage daughter Zoë (Jordan Hinson) in the eponymous town of the Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka (aka A Town Called Eureka), Jack Carter (the likeable Colin Furguson) found himself the new sheriff of a top-secret community filled with geniuses. The first episode attracted an audience of 4.1 million in the US, the most for a series launch in the channel’s history.
Series eight of The WB’s Charmed saw the witchy Halliwell sisters working for Homeland Security with the help of teenage witch Billie (Kaley Cuoco). After 178 episodes, the series bowed out with an episode in which the Charmed Ones travelled back in time to save the world from the forces of evil and finally put their lives in order.
Paul Wesley’s eighteen-year-old orphan discovered that he was a Nephilim, the offspring of an angel and a mortal in the ABC Family limited-run series Fallen, while Matt Dallas learned that he was a teenage clone without a past or any emotions in the ABC Family show Kyle XY.
Over on The CW’s Smallville, which passed its 100th episode early in the year with the death of Clark’s adoptive father Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) from a heart attack (he returned as a ghost), a pregnant Lana (Kristen Kreuk) finally married Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), while Clark (Tom Welling) rounded up a group of escapees from the Phantom Zone. Meanwhile, Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore) was introduced, the Martian Manhunter briefly turned up, and semi-regular Oliver Queen/Green Arrow (Justin Hartley) rounded up past guest stars The Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman to form a nascent Justice League to investigate LuthorCorp’s mysterious “Project 33.1”.
Hyperdrive was a six-part BBC comedy series set aboard the spaceship HMS Camden Lock, whose crew (led by Nick Frost) had a mission to promote British interests across the galaxy. In an attempt to impress a couple of Goth girls, Howard (Julian Barratt) and Vince (Noel Fielding) accidentally summoned the most evil demon known to man in a second season episode of the BBC comedy series The Mighty Boosh.
The team went searching for a woman who disappeared a
fter an exorcism in an episode of CBS’ Without a Trace. A series of bombings in Seattle were linked to a sci-fi novel set in an apocalyptic future controlled by robots in an episode of the same network’s Criminal Minds, and Roger Daltrey guest-starred in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation that paid homage to the classic slasher films of the 1980s.
Not content with its usual lunacy, Bad Girls: A Christmas Special added the supernatural to the final episode of the long-running British women’s prison drama, as the ghost of Larkhill’s supposedly escaped inmate Natalie Buxton (Dannielle Brent) put the frights on G Wing while her rotting body blocked the prison sewers.
Fan-of-the-show Peter Straub played a blind retired police officer on the March 27th episode of the daytime soap opera One Life to Live.
Inspired by the book by Michael Lawrence, the BBC’s Young Dracula was a fourteen-part children’s comedy in which single father Count Dracula (Keith-Lee Castle) couldn’t understand why his son Vlad (Gerran Howell) wanted to turn his back on blood-drinking and become a normal London teenager, much to the disgust of Vlad’s older sister, Ingrid (Clare Thomas).
Filmed in New Zealand, Maddigan’s Quest was based on Margaret Mahy’s book and was set in a post-apocalyptic world.
The animated Zombie Hotel was about eight-year-old twins, Fungus and Maggot, and their dead parents Rictus and Funerella.
An episode of The CW’s animated series The Batman featured new Superman actor Brandon Routh as the villainous Everywhere Man, who used quantum technology to duplicate himself.
Ghostly DC Comics characters Deadman, Mr Terrific, Stargirl and the Shining Knight all turned up in episodes of the animated Justice League Unlimited. After five seasons, the show ended with a two-part episode in which Lex Luthor and the Legion of Doom attempted to reanimate Brainiac.
Fox’s seventeenth annual The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror featured the guest voices of Dr Phil, Richard Lewis and Fran Drescher. The Halloween episode’s three tales of terror included Homer being transformed into a man-eating blob by a meteorite, Springfield’s own version of the Golem, and a spoof on Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast featuring aliens Kang and Kodos.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18 Page 9