Frequently Mentioned TV Shows

Babylon 5

Movie

Weekly Columns

• 14 September 2000: Here’s a reason to skip the movies and stay home to watch television [The glory of Babylon I]
• 21 September 2000: Star Trek vs. Babylon 5—which tells the grander tale? [The glory of Babylon II]
• 26 October 2000: A fan’s dream come true: meeting the commander of Babylon 5 [Name droppings IV]
• 17 June 2004: Will we see Dark Shadows again? Will we see Babylon 5 again? Will Molly Bloom? Who knows, but let’s have a nice ramble anyway [Ramble]
• 15 July 2004: It turns out that Thomas Wolfe was wrong; you can actually go home again [Babylon on Puget Sound]
• 23 December 2004: How’s this for an idea for a new TV series: a vampire and his doctor friend travel through time into the future and wind up on a space station near the rim of the galaxy [Still lurking in the Shadows]
• 2 August 2007: One man obsessed about a God he didn’t have faith in, another didn’t believe in God at all, and the third simply made us laugh to high heaven [Through a lens darkly (1918-2007)]
• 20 September 2007: After waiting 5 years, 6 months and 121 days (but who’s counting) to see it, what’s another 768 hours? [Lost and found]
• 2 June 2011: You may remember him getting bad girl Rizzo in trouble or driving a cab in New York, but for some of us he will always be the last man to speak to John Sheridan [Zack Allan (1950-2011)]
• 1 October 2012: It is sad when we lose a favorite actor from a favorite TV series, but what is really important is that world has lost a really nice guy [Commander Sinclair (1952-2012)]
• 3 August 2016: Somewhere out there beyond the rim, the security chief of the last of the Babylon stations is in the universe’s face and making it pay attention [Mr. Garibaldi (1956-2016)]
• 16 November 2016: One brought extraterrestrials vividly to life, one was from Mexico, and one both played an extraterrestrial and saved a village of Mexicans [Adiós]
• 27 January 2021: Once called ‘the Meryl Streep of Yugoslavia,’ her life and career spanned senseless wars on planet earth to senseless wars in the far reaches of outer space [Delenn (1955-2021)]
• 28 September 2021: Until the past few days, I thought the best thing to happen lately was finally finding Grape Nuts cereal in my local shop for the first time since the pandemic began [Our last, best hope for television]
• 19 June 2023: Things I thought were dead are coming back—except (so far) the show I loved which was actually frequently about the dead coming back [Life and Death and Life]

Dark Shadows

Feature Films

House of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1970)
Night of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1971)
Dark Shadows (Tim Burton, 2012)

Documentaries

Master of Dark Shadows (David Gregory, 2019)
Dark Shadows and Beyond: The Jonathan Frid Story (Mary O’Leary, 2021)

Weekly Columns

• 31 January 2002: It’s not as bad as it sounds; he would have been called Barney, for short [Me and my Shadows]
• 13 June 2002: Sci-Fi giveth, and Sci-Fi taketh away [The coming (and going) of Shadows]
• 20 June 2002: Say what you want about Barnabas Collins, you never ever saw his chest glistening with sweat [Mild Passions vs. serious Shadows]
• 1 August 2002: Quick! Name a television series that featured characters played by Kate Jackson, John Karlen, Harvey Keitel, Marsha Mason, and Abe Vigoda! [Back in the Shadows]
• 5 September 2002: If life was harrowing for the Collins clan on the small screen, it got even worse for them when they landed on the big screen [Shadows on the big screen]
• 12 February 2004: And another question: if John Edwards somehow managed to get elected president, would he have to stop doing that Crossing Over show? [Second coming of shadows?]
• 17 June 2004: Will we see Dark Shadows again? Will we see Babylon 5 again? Will Molly Bloom? Who knows, but let’s have a nice ramble anyway [Ramble]
• 23 December 2004: How’s this for an idea for a new TV series: a vampire and his doctor friend travel through time into the future and wind up on a space station near the rim of the galaxy [Still lurking in the Shadows]
• 2 August 2007: One man obsessed about a God he didn’t have faith in, another didn’t believe in God at all, and the third simply made us laugh to high heaven [Through a lens darkly (1918-2007)]
• 5 June 2008: Maybe someday I will get to the point that I am dreaming about looking for the most comfortable place to take a nap [Nightmare on East Roy Street]
• 25 March 2010: These days it seems as though every other book, movie and TV show is about vampires; is the time right for one more? [Foreshadowing]
• 29 July 2010: So in a battle between Barnabas Collins and Abraham Lincoln, who would actually win? [Nerdism reigns in Southern California]
• 10 February 2011: My self-defense mechanisms to protect myself from disappointment cannot keep up any longer and I now must embrace reality: this movie is really going to happen [Looming Shadows]
• 27 March 2012: And when I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, how could I possibly have known that the same filmmaker would one day make Barnabas’s big adventure? [Risen from the grave]
• 19 April 2012: His character defeated death because of a witch’s curse, but he will beat it by having created a character for the ages [Barnabas Collins (1924-2012)]
• 14 May 2012: It’s only May, and already it’s been a great summer for kids who were comic book and television fans in the 1960s [Adapt or die?]
• 16 May 2012: With apologies to Thomas Wolfe, even a vampire can go home again, but that doesn’t mean his home will not have gone through major changes [Welcome home, Barnabas Collins]
• 12 September 2019: No matter how many wooden stakes they keep trying to drive through its heart, it keeps rising from the dead like, well, like a beloved old vampire [Reincarnation]

Doctor Who

Movies

Doctor Who Am I
Dr. Who and the Daleks

Weekly Columns

• 28 April 2005: A spin-off, a prequel, a remake and something that’s just trashy fun: no, these aren’t movies, they’re TV shows [TV or not TV]
• 11 May 2006: If we could get Doctor Who to help us with our oil problem, maybe he could also use the Tardis to go into the future and borrow a bunch of money from our grandchildren so we can bail out Social Security [Another gusher]
• 6 March 2008: For my money, the last of the time lords is the best of them [The Doctor is in]
• 12 June 2008: If only the Doctor could bring us new episodes immediately from the distant future or go back into time and warn everybody about the missing WMDs [Tube tales]
• 26 June 2008: Maybe in some parallel universe in an alternative timeline, brand new episodes of Doctor Who is on every day of the year [The last temptation of Doctor Who]
• 14 August 2008: Where can I find room in my brain for new movies and TV shows when I haven’t properly achieved resolution with the ones I have already seen? [Loose ends]
• 7 January 2010: Even if a Time Lord lives to be more than nine centuries old, some of us still cannot get enough of him [Who’s next]
• 8 April 2010: Now if only Mr. Ross would have J. Michael Straczynski on to talk about Babylon 5 [Doctor Doctor]
• 24 June 2010: Wouldn’t it be grand to have one’s own TARDIS so that one didn’t have to wait so long for the next episode of the adventures of our favorite son of Gallifrey [Script Doctor]
• 1 July 2010: One wonders, if the general had one of those wrist time travel thingies, would he go back and tell his aides to be more discreet? [Runaway casting call]
• 24 February 2011: The Brigadier (1929-2011)
• 21 April 2011: She gave us the gift of making us feel we were really exploring time and the stars and also the human heart [Sarah Jane (1948-2011)]
• 5 May 2011: Some movie and TV villains never seem to go away, but fortunately sometimes the real ones do [Moment of Silence]
• 9 June 2011: Life for our favorite Time Lord has gotten very interesting indeed [Who’s your daddy?]
• 6 October 2011: If Doctor Who could come back to weekly television after 16 years and Arrested Development could come back after 5 years, what else might be possible? [Doctor wow]
• 17 November 2011: Given all the times the Doctor has had to reboot the universe, I suppose it’s only appropriate that his new movie be a reboot [Woo Who!]
• 21 May 2013: Time again for my annual lament that I am not in Cannes—and a bunch of other stuff [May flies]
• 22 November 2013: The world of Doctor Who: it’s bigger (and better) on the inside [The Doctor: pure gold]
• 26 November 2013: Maybe it couldn’t live up to the hype, but it will definitely outlive the hype [Who hooley: holy cow!]
• 5 September 2014: Who would ever have thought that the earnest young man in a suit chasing a mermaid on the northern coast of Scotland would eventually become the master of the TARDIS? [Tartan Time Lord]
• 28 September 2021: Until the past few days, I thought the best thing to happen lately was finally finding Grape Nuts cereal in my local shop for the first time since the pandemic began [Our last, best hope for television]

Star Trek

Movies

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Leonard Nimoy, 1984)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (William Shatner, 1989)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Nicholas Meyer, 1991)
Star Trek: Generations (David Carson, 1994)
Star Trek: First Contact (Jonathan Frakes, 1996)
Star Trek: Insurrection (Jonathan Frakes, 1998)
Star Trek: Nemesis (Stuart Baird, 2002)
Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, 2013)
Star Trek Beyond (Justin Lin, 2016)