Fannish Ramblings

The New Voyages team has released their third episode, World Enough and Time starring George Takei as Hikaru Sulu.

At the moment, the episode is only available for download via Bittorrent, though a streaming option is also available. (Check the New Voyages web site for more information.)

I chose the Bittorrent option which took about an hour to download the 370+ MB file. (Your download time may, of course, vary for a number of reasons.)

Two quick notes for those who decide to download it that way:

1. It may be just my download or it’s possible the filename got scrambled at the source. Either way, the file extension should be “.MP4” and not “.MP4(2)”.
2. As you may have guessed from the previous item, this is not a MPG or WMV or even a .MOV file. To view the downloaded version you’ll need a fairly recent version of the QuickTime player. (I have no idea whether there might be some other viewing option, that’s what worked for me.)

I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve had a chance to watch the episode in it’s entirety, but what I’ve seen so far is quite impressive. They’re getting quite good at the visual effects and the acting keeps getting better.

The episode’s somewhere around an hour long which is about 18 minutes longer than any normal length “hour long” episode on TV.

Joss Whedon has pretty much ruled out another Serenity movie, much less a revival of the Firefly TV series. The audience just isn’t large enough for such a movie to be the kind of blockbuster the studios want and he’s moved on to other projects.

Randall Munroe at xkcd.com however has come up with an idea for a really killer Serenity sequel, featuring a member of the Firefly cast.