The year sci-fi took over the Emmys
The nominees for the 72nd annual Emmy Awards are announced, and genre shows are unusually well represented. HBO’s comics adaptation Watchmen raKes in 26 nominations, including Outstanding Limited Series and the best actor, actress, writing, directing, music, costuming, and design awards in the Limited Series category. The Mandalorian is nominated in 15 categories, including Best Drama Series, music, guest actor, voice-over performance, and visual effects; Westworld is nominated in 11 categories, The Handmaid’s Tale is nominated in ten (including Best Drama Series), Stranger Things nets eight nominations (including Best Drama Series), Star Trek: Picard is nominated in five categories, and Space Force is nominated in four. One nomination each goes to Star Trek: Short Treks, Star Wars: Resistance, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, Lost In Space, Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance, Chasing The Moon, The Boys, Black Mirror, and the interactive feature Doctor Who: The Runaway. CNN’s Apollo 11 documentary is nominated in five categories.
Battlestar Galactica Season 4 soundtrack
La-La Land Records releases Bear McCreary’s soundtrack from the fourth season of Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica reboot. The two-disc set covers much of the fourth season’s highlights on the first disc, with the entirety of the second CD containing music from the three-hour series finale, Daybreak.
More about Battlestar Galactica soundtracks in Music Reviews
Doctor Who Classic Dalek Set #1
British toymaker Character Options releases a boxed set of action figures based on the Daleks as seen in the classic Doctor Who series, reflecting various Dalek redesigns and color schemes from 1963 through the ’70s.
The Outer Limits: Free Spirit
Sci-Fi Channel airs the 141st episode of The Outer Limits. Aaron Douglas (Battlestar Galactica) and Colin Ferguson (Eureka) guest star.
This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.
Farscape: Look At The Princess. Part 2
Sci-Fi Channel premieres the 34th episode of Farscape. Wayne Pygram guest stars as Scorpius.
More about Farscape in the LogBook and theLogBook.com Store
Farscape now streaming on Amazon Prime
Stargate SG-1: Divide and Conquer
Pay cable channel Showtime premieres the 70th episode of Stargate SG-1. Vanessa Angel (Weird Science) guest stars.
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Stargate SG-1 now streaming on Amazon Prime
The Outer Limits: Gettysburg
Showtime airs the 124th episode of The Outer Limits, a revival of the 1960s science fiction anthology series. Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project) and Meat Loaf (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) guest star.
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Crusade: Appearances And Other Deceits
TNT airs the eighth episode of J. Michael Straczynski’s short-lived Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade. This was the last episode produced, though not the last to air.
Star Trek: The Next Generation cancelled
After weeks of rampant rumors, Paramount’s television division finally confirms that the upcoming seventh season of Star Trek: The Next Generation will mark the end of the series on television, with the TNG crew’s big-screen debut to begin filming almost immediately after production wraps on the TV series. Paramount declines comment on the possibility that yet another Star Trek series will replace TNG in syndication.
Beauty and the Beast: The Reckoning
CBS airs the 54th episode of Ron Koslow’s fantasy series Beauty and the Beast, starring Ron Perlman, Jo Anderson, and Roy Dotrice. David Graf and Jeff Corey guest star.
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Beauty & The Beast now streaming on Paramount Plus
Nintendo Game Boy
Nintendo launches a portable video game system with interchangeably cartrdiges, the Game Boy, in North America. Though many industry insiders predict a short life for the handheld game thanks to its ability to quickly drain its batteries and its black & white LCD display, the game included with each Game Boy – the incredibly popular puzzle game Tetris – becomes a selling point in itself. With a price tag of around $100, the entire million-unit allotment of Game Boys shipped to American stores sells out in under two months.
Tales Of The Unexpected: Scrimshaw
ITV airs the 103rd episode of the anthology series Tales Of The Unexpected. Joan HAckett guest stars in the eighth season finale; the series will resume in late 1987.
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Tales Of The Unexpected now streaming on Amazon Prime
Split Enz makes Mental Notes
Mushroom Records releases the debut Split Enz album Mental Notes, the product of two months of concentrated recording sessions in Sydney, Australia (and three years of playing live and building a following). The album is a modest success story in Australia and the band’s native New Zealand, and is critically acclaimed for its originality.
Skylab 3
With the first Skylab crew having salvaged the first American space station, the second crew – designated Skylab 3 – lifts off for another long-term stay in space. Alan Bean, Jack Lousma and Owen Garriott spend 59 days aboard Skylab, performing a spacewalk to conduct further repairs to their damaged space station, investigating the effects of long-duration weightlessness and space travel on the human body, and observing the sun through Skylab’s solar telescope system. A thruster leak in the Apollo command/service module forces NASA to consider a rescue mission.
Ace Of Wands: Seven Serpents, Sulphur and Salt, Part 2
ITV airs the 15th episode of Ace Of Wands, starring Michael McKenzie, Tony Selby and Judy Loe. Russell Hunter guest stars as Mr. Stabs. This episode, like the rest of the series’ first two seasons, is now missing from the archives.
Ranger 7
NASA launches the Ranger 7 lunar probe, built by Jet Propulsion Laboratory and intended to go directly to the moon, transmitting pictures of the surface back to Earth until it impacts the lunar surface. Months of building system redundancies into the Ranger spacecraft have made this vehicle more likely to carry out its mission, and it becomes the first of the Ranger probes to reach the moon with its eyes open. Pictures are transmitted back to Earth as Ranger 7 plunges into the lunar surface near the Ocean of Storms, with photo resolution exceeding expectations. One of the ground controllers at JPL breaks open a jar of peanuts during Ranger 7’s final approach to the moon, starting a JPL tradition that lasts to this day.
Out Of This World: Botany Bay
British broadcaster ABC airs the fifth episode of science fiction anthology series Out Of This World. Written by Terry Nation (who will create the Daleks, Doctor Who’s most enduring foes, a year later), the story stars William Gaunt and Julian Glover, and is one of only two scripts in the series’ run that isn’t based on a prior literary work. This episode no longer exists in the archives.
More about Out Of This World and Out Of The Unknown in the LogBook
Science Fiction Theatre: Beam Of Fire
The 54th episode of the syndicated science fiction Science Fiction Theatre airs on stations across the U.S. Hosted by Truman Bradley, the episode stars Frank Morris and Wayne Gerstle.
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