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2005-04-18 Entry: "Buck Sunday"

Sunday dawned... and then some time later I crawled out of bed... not too worse for wear after the beer last night which was good as first job was to go and retrieve my car. Which proved to still be there, undamaged, where I left it. Of course, rather than just retrieve it and do something useful with the day, I ended up going to see "Sahara" instead, which was a big goofy action movie that did exactly what it claimed to - blow things up, have some laughs, chase around the desert after a mythical object - all the things you'd expect in a film like this.

I nearly proceeded after this to get my car washed, but there was a big queue and I didn't feel like waiting... however, they open at 8am, so I might have to hit them before going to work tomorrow.

Show five on my five-show-rotation is the one that's been sitting on the shelf the longest, Buck Rogers. Here we are on the second side of disc 2, with "Cruise Ship To The Stars" which has the universe's most perfect female on a cruise ship trying to be captured by some woman with incredible powers (throwing people around with a wave of her hand).

Okay, Buck has to go on the ship to protect the girl, and we learn that the evil woman keeps changing back and forth between her evil self and a timid blonde who befriends Buck... but the timid one doesn't remember her alternate self's actions. But her boyfriend knows... and the dark haired evil version remembers what the blonde does.

The second episode is the very silly "Space Vampire" which sees Buck and Wilma stopping at a space station to drop off Twiki for repairs while they go on to Genesia. But a ship crashes in to the station with all its crew dead, and they stick around to investigate.

They initially think it's EL7 contamination (which is some virus that sends people crazy) but the bodies have been drained of energy and aren't technically dead. There's a lot of previous-episodes continuity here - there's mention of Twiki's girlfriend from the previous episode, and Dr Hewer has managed to kill the plant Buck gave him earlier in the series.

The glowing red blob, that no-one can see, is stalking Wilma. And then she sees the Vampire in the bar. And then it goes and kills the doctor (while waking up one of the dead people).

Of course, this ends with Wilma getting bitten (and sort of turned), and then Buck's planned trap of sending the obvious escape ship flying in to the sun nearly misfires with Wilma having to escape it at the last moment.

Then we're on to Buck's birthday in "Happy Birthday, Buck" and Wilma and Doctor Hewer and trying to plan a surprise party, so Buck gets set nursemaiding a courier. Meanwhile, there's a guy who can tranform any matter by touch alone out for revenge on Hewer for some alleged misdeed many years ago.

This isn't a very good episode, and it's not helped by being broken up by an episode of Charmed with Leo and Piper being shrunk by Wyatt and housed in a doll-house replica of the manor to keep them safe from Zankou and his demonic minions. Zankou is trying to gain control of the manor so he can release the Shadow and gain lots of power... when did the Woogie Man become The Shadow? And Phoebe's mobile phone joke is great - she's been left in charge of the paper, but Paige keeps dragging her off to vanquish the demonic minions, so when the phone rings while she's in the underworld hiding, she comments on the great range she's getting!

Oh, Leo keeps getting injured and has no powers to heal any more... and they don't want to keep getting Wyatt to heal them... but now he's taking over magic school he'll probably be a little bit safer. Considering the history of mortal lovers of the Charmed Ones in previous series, I'm not sure how long Leo would be around if that didn't happen.

Back to Buck, and they appear to have run out of money, as we've got the requisite clip-show in "A Blast For Buck" with a mysterious object being transported into Hewer's office and then a cryptic limerick explaining that "the man from old earth's past" has the key to preventing the terran sands being destroyed in a blast.

There's not really much you can say about a clip-show... and as it finishes the disc, I guess I won't have to (as we're back to the Greatest American Hero in our show-rotation).

I should go to bed at this point, but I'm waiting for the tumble dryer to finish, so as background noise, I'm putting on the pilot episode of Dark Angel... it's been jumping off the shelf recently with me wanting to watch it again (but I've got such a backlog I feel guilty about watching things I've already seen so I haven't gone back to them yet - I do have to watch Firefly again before the film is released though).