Ray Bradbury passed away Tuesday at the age of 91. Bradbury was inspired to write at the age of 12 when a carnival magician tapped him with a sword and said “live forever!” Director and Bradbury fan Steven Spielberg said yesterday “In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination, he is immortal.”
To most people Bradbury conjures up the classic American anti-censorship novel Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles as his most popular works, along with The Illustrated Man,Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. But if you really want to see the broad scope of Bradbury’s work, you could hardly find any creative works more engaging than his TV series The Ray Bradbury Theater and his thick compilation book The Stories of Ray Bradbury or the revised version Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. It is telling that he has a book that highlights one hundred of his best stories. Stories like “The Casket,” a tale of feuding brothers gone very, very wrong that was adapted for screen on Bradbury Theater, or “A Sound of Thunder,” where a misstep on a time traveling hunting trip has terrible ramifications for the future.
Six seasons, from 1985 to 1992, of the popular Canadian series The Ray Bradbury Theater provide a “story of the week” much like Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone,The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the Canadian Friday the 13th TV series. Always creative, each episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater focused on the fantastical, the magical, often a mysterious item inspired by Bradbury’s own possessions, many written by or derived from classic Bradbury tales. In one standout episode, “Great Wide World Over There,” Tyne Daly stars as a woman on an isolated farm with a much older husband. Creepiness, and sometimes outright horror permeates Bradbury’s stories.
Bradbury passed away as Earthlings saw a rare glimpse of Venus passing across the Sun.
Bradbury saw himself as a fantasy writer, and believe audiences miscategorized his works like this as science fiction.
Luckily, The Ray Bradbury Theater is easy to find to catch up on episodes. It’s on the list of series available from Netflix and available for sale at online stores like Amazon.com.
In the hiatus between Season 2 and last night’s Season 3 opener of Warehouse 13, only one question was pecking at viewers’ minds. Why would Agent Myka Bering, played by Joanne Kelly, co-star and female lead of the show, leave after only two seasons? Luckily for fans we don’t have to wait all season to find out.
Warehouse 13–the SyFy Channel series that expands upon the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the thoughtless government lackeys carted off the Ark in the final scene. Okay, not that exact warehouse, but something bigger and better–think the nation’s attic meets the X-Files or the short-lived series The Lost Room. Except with the X-Files you had monsters of the week, and here, like Friday the 13th (the Canadian TV series) or Ray Bradbury Theater, you have an artifact of the week–some seemingly mundane throwaway item that we learn in fact carries some otherworldly power, often causing or created by the famous event or person the artifact is tied to.
Last night’s episode “The New Guy” started with all the regulars back in their stride (minus the missing Myka), with Pete Lattimer (Eddie McClintock) working a textbook case of the out-of-control, would-be artifact-of-the-week with Claudia Donovan (Allison Scagliotti). This time the artifact is one of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars (hey, didn’t I see that in the NYC Hard Rock Cafe?), wreaking electric havok, only to be tamed by Claudia’s cool guitar skills, and a little extra playing after she gives it the purple glove treatment–despite being scolded by Warehouse leader Artie Nielsen, played by the top-notch character actor Saul Rubinek (who played my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation villain Kivas Fajo). A team of Pete and Claudia! Great idea! Even better, Claudia is now the promoted Agent Claudia, long removed from her character’s weaker slacker introduction in Season 1, she now is confident, large-and-in-charge of all Warehouse tech.
But then a rescued hottie flirts with our hero Pete, and he–ignores it. What? From there we are spun into uncertainty–like Pete and company, we need Myka back. Pete is not the same. The guy who Myka referred to as “Artie, it’s Pete, it’s a win when he doesn’t lick anything” is just not his normal hilarious self. And as a viewer you start to wonder how grim the show will be without our reliable straight arrow Myka.
Enter Steve Jinks, played by Aaron Ashmore (Smallville, Veronica Mars, In Plain Sight), an ATF agent who witnesses the strange Hendrix guitar antics, and Pete and Claudia’s resolution, but he can’t believe it. Steve, who has a perceptive skill to know the difference between someone lying and telling the truth, is pushed away at the ATF and Artie taps him as Myka’s replacement. Friendly enough, he still is no Myka, and worse yet, he doesn’t get Pete’s jokes. And Pete drops some great one-liners in this episode. Steve is now the new guy–a full team member and Pete begrudgingly brings him along to pursue the actual artifact of the week, a certain folio (“it’s not a book, it’s a folio”) of letters with popular lines of antiquity that are killing the people who read them–only these are not actual lines uttered by historical people, more like lines from a play. Shakespeare? Wait, Pete knows someone who can help, someone who knows all this “Walter” Shakespeare, the “Bird” of Avon gobbledygook. Myka?
Everything finally comes together by the end, sort of, and we’re off to another season of sleuthing, with a surprise visit by H.G. Wells (Jaime Murray), who will soon be the star of her own ScyFy Channel spin-off, according to Warehouse actors. Another interesting idea. After two seasons Warehouse 13 is picking up steam–the cast is familiar now and play off each other well and with some new guest stars expected this season, including a Star Trek line-up of Rene Auberjonois, Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan, and our favorite Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner as the Warehouse doctor, we have some good TV to look forward to.
