I am a big fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender and so I have been really looking forward to watching the follow up television series The Legend of Korra. It has finally started and so far I’ve seen the first few episodes (no spoilers for the latest episode please, I’m generally about a week behind). Obviously it is early days yet, but so far I really like the show.

The show is set 70 years after the original, when Aang is dead and the new avatar Korra is in training. She has mastered water, earth and fire, and now is studying airbending, trained by Tenzin, who is the son of Aang and Katara. The location is Republic City, a city founded by Aang and Zuko after the war in the original series. But while the four tribes are now at peace, there are new tensions between benders and non-benders. As well as training to be the avatar, Korra must deal with the threat of this group of anti-benders, the Equalists. Meanwhile she also enters the world of pro-bending, a sport where teams fight each other using bending.

As I said, I really like the show so far. It has quite a different feel to the original series - the main characters are a bit older, and the setting is much more industrial and modern. But that’s a not a bad thing, and it is good that the show is not going to just rehash the original story. I have enjoyed watching the episodes that I have seen so far, and I am looking forward to seeing how the show develops.

As per this post, I have been watching a lot of Stargate SG-1 over the past week. I have now finished the first two seasons and I will be making a start on season three shortly. I am really enjoying watching this show. I think I had forgotten how much I used to liked it back in the day, but it is all coming back to me now. So it is really great to watch it again, and there have been a lot of good episodes so far. I always appreciate the way it mixes interesting science fiction plots, good action sequences and a great sense of humour. I do think I’m going to stick with my plan of only watching up to the end of season five though, but I’m not sure I would enjoy the show so much without the original team. But I am really loving it at the moment.

I’m pleased to see that a new series of Horrible Histories is back on television. It may technically be a kids show, but I think it is also one of the best sketch shows on television at the moment. This new fourth series even has the League of Gentlemen appearing in it. As well as the three episodes of the new series that have aired so far, iPlayer also has a lot of older episodes up too. I would totally recommend checking it out. (Edit: you don’t have to take my word for it, The Guardian agrees with me.)

I have finally been catching up with the latest episodes of Community. Gosh this show is good. I’m really sad, but not particularly surprised, that it is nearing an end. File it next to Arrested Development under ‘we can’t have nice things’.

So having just finished one massive SF television series, it is time to start on another one. I haven’t seen Stargate SG-1 for ages, although I used to be a big fan, so I am very excited to watch it again. I’m not sure how much I’ll watch, I’m thinking that I may stop when Daniel Jackson leaves, because that is kind of the point I wished I’d stopped watching it the first time around! (Edited to add: yes I know Daniel Jackson comes back, but it was never quite as good after that.) But anyway, I am hoping this will be fun.

So I finally (finally!) got to the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I started my ‘rewatch DS9’ project back in June last year but I had to take a few breaks along the way so I just got around to wrapping it up now. (I admit I skipped a few of the episodes towards the end, just the ones I knew that I had not liked when I watched it before.) I’ve written a bit about the series as I went through it, so all of my posts about DS9 are here in chronological order if you want to read them. I’ve been trying to write a good post to wrap it up here, but I’ve been having trouble summing up what I think about the show.

Firstly, I think it is probably the best of the various Star Trek series, as well as one of the best SF shows on television in general. Beyond that it had always meant a lot of me on a personal level. I’ve mentioned a few times how much of a Star Trek nerd I was as a kid, but I think that describing it like that doesn’t really do justice to the huge impact that the show had on me. DS9 in particular as it was always my favourite. Rewatching it has brought a lot of that back. There were some episodes I didn’t know very well from back before I got really into the show, but then there were also episodes that I knew word-for-word and which really took me back to when I was a kid and basically Star Trek meant everything to me.

Thinking just about the last couple of seasons which I’ve just been watching recently, one thing that occurred to me was that the show really changed in its later years, with the focus on those long story arcs with the Dominion War. Looking back at it, I had always thought that it was at that point that the show was at its best. I think I’ve also argued that the shift in style there was important in shaping future SF shows such as Battlestar Galactica.

While I don’t deny that there are some fantastic episodes from that period, nonetheless rewatching it now I was rather surprised that I actually did not like it as much as I thought I had before. I actually preferred some of the more traditionally-Star Trek episodes from the middle seasons. There were also some surprisingly great episodes from the earlier seasons too. Those are the ones I’ll probably rewatch in the future when I just want to see some DS9, whereas I doubt I’d sit down just to watch any of the episodes from the later big story arc.

Anyway, returning to consider the show overall, I thought I’d finish things with a link to this blog post about the show. It is a wonderful summary of the show written by another person who decided to rewatch DS9 years after being a fan of the series. It was actually reading that blog post way back last year that prompted me to watch the show again myself, and I think that writer does a much better job than I ever could of explaining why it is so great. I don’t agree with everything she says about it, but it is well worth a read for any fans of the show who want a better take on it than my rambling here.

Overall, I am incredibly glad that I decided to rewatch it, it definitely rekindled my love of the show and brought back a lot of good memories, as well as being an incredibly good, interesting and enjoyable experience. If you’ve never seen it before, or if like me it has just been ages since you last watched it, I would highly recommend it.

I just rewatched all of Black Books. It had been too long since I last saw it. I’d pass on the drinking and smoking, but if I could sit around all day reading books and being grumpy, that would pretty much be my dream job.

New Doctor Who trailer. This is relevant to my interests.

I really enjoyed the Dirk Gently one off television thing that was on a while ago, so I was excited to learn that they finally got around to making more episodes of that. They are now calling that earlier episode the pilot and saying that this is a new series, and there are three hour-long episodes scheduled. I just watched the first one (available here on iPlayer) and I thought it was pretty fantastic. It is funny, clever and entertaining, plus Stephen Mangan as Dirk and Darren Boyd as Macduff are great casting choices. Overall I just really enjoyed it, it was thoroughly entertaining, and I am looking forward to the next two episodes. I am also reading the book as well (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams) which should keep me entertained until next week!

So I have just finished watching The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff. When I heard that they were adapting the radio show Bleak Expectations for the television I was excited but also a bit skeptical. There was a Christmas special on over the holidays which I enjoyed, and I thought it was good but not as brilliant as the original show overall. After a bit of a break the television show returned with three new episodes which have now finished airing. Again, I enjoyed them, they were funny in places and good enough, but they just seemed to lack whatever it was that made the radio show so brilliant. Overall I liked The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff and I would watch more of the same, and if I had never heard the radio show then I know I would have loved this one a lot more. But ultimately I was also somewhat disappointed and I am looking forward to the next (and sadly probably last) series of Bleak Expectations more than ever.

So remember when I was rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine last year? (Here are all my DS9 posts in chronological order.) I got up to the end of season five and then took a break for a bit because I was so busy after starting my university course. I planned to catch up with it over the Christmas holidays but I never got around to it then either. Now it has been almost six months since I last watched any of it, and I’ve decided that it is about time I got around to finishing it off. Not least because I just bought a Stargate SG-1 boxset and realized that I should probably finish the last massive science fiction television show I started watching before committing to another one! So even though I still don’t have much time, I am going to slowly get through the last two seasons. I just watched the first few episodes and I am already getting hooked back in and regretting the long break away. Expect some more DS9 posts in the near future…

I read this great article in Wired Magazine (which I haven’t read for ages but I picked up a copy at the train station today and it read it on the train home, which reminded me that I need to buy it more often). It’s about an Arab television show competition between young inventors to win investment to develop their products. I thought it really interesting to read about. It is also kind of sad to think that such a show would not be successful here. Our reality television shows are all about getting famous for the sake of being famous. Even shows which focus on business, like Dragon’s Den or The Apprentice, care more about personality than skill. No one really encourages young people to pursue science and technology as something which is cool or worthwhile. I for one would love to watch a show like this, but I doubt that it would ever appeal to British audiences.

I started watching Baccano! at the weekend; six episodes in and I only vaguely know what is going on. But it is great fun so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of it soon. The opening credits are damn catchy, I’ve had the music stuck in my head for the past week!

Complete timeline of Doctor Who from 1963 to present, including episodes, seasons, companions, villains, and more.