you could just make shit up.

is the hardware props.

Speaking as one who has been through their dispute resolution process (it doesn't) I am mentally destroyed to discover that many years hence, when mankind has conquered space travel across distances beyond human imagination, we are still buying our door locks, bolts and other DIY accoutrements from bloody Bodgit & Quit.

In the future:
- we will have forgotten how to make electronic stuff waterproof
- also, all electronic components will be made of explosives
- there'll be no circuit breakers or residual current devices
- spaceships will have steam pipes - yep, steam pipes- running through every corridor.

I wouldn't choose to land on a planet called 'Carpathia'; my most immediate association is with Dracula.

You want somewhere called Ambrosia or Suburbia. Possibly Pizzeria.

the first two episodes of Outcasts and frankly it's a bit of a mess at the moment but I'm hoping the massive holes in our knowledge of the whys and wherefores will be filled in over time. My main gripe is the acting which is horribly imbalanced and frankly fairly - hmm what's the word? Oh yes. - shit. Everyone walks around or comes into shot like they've just had a vasectomy or colonic irrigation in the last half hour, stilted with a face that says "my bowels feel bruised". The only exception is the Irishman with a cheeky smile and wink (how novel for an Irishman to have a role like this) who was obviously chosen for his ability to bring a sense of "end of the pier winter season" to the proceedings.

To be fair the actors aren't best served by the script. It is far too wordy with a propensity to feel like explanatory notes rather than real dialogue. Direction seems to have been neglected, the idea of using a visual reference rather than a verbal one completely ignored.

Then there are the clothes everyone wears. I appreciate people may not have had much time to pack before leaving Planet Earth (ba ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba) but did they ALL shop at George at ASDA? As for the sets well it's not that they've bought everything at B&Q it's just that they've filmed all internal shots at IKEA, Warrington.

What keeps me interested is the suggestion that there is more to the series than just rejected ideas from Blakes 7 scripts, that there is a trajectory for all this jawing and cheapness which will allow everyone to loosen their belts and focus on allowing the stories and ideas to unfold naturally rather than as a series of bullet-points with page long footnotes.

Everyone I know who saw previews said it was dreadful in every way. I've got enough to watch so I gave this one a miss. Sounds like it was the right thing to do.

1. Everyone who has survived the earth's destruction is apparently British. Hurrah!

2. All the hardware does indeed look straight out of B&Q, and 3-D TV remains a niche market in the far future. I guess that mobile phones really were bad for you, as it's back to walkie-talkies.

3. The producers clearly looked at the budget and said 'Right - you get 5 mins of CGI per episode. Careful how you spend it'

4. South Africa is clearly the Welsh quarry of the twenty-first century.

5 Contract all of the above with Battlestar Galactica reboot which provided a rationale for all the not-so-future hardware (landlines, flatscreens) right upfront and spends CGI minutes like there's no tomorrow. Though everyone who survives the destruction of the known world is American of course.

(Liam Cunningham) looks remarkably like Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull? ... (sans flute, overcoat and mad hair obviously)

I'm two episodes in, so I'll resist reading all the posts above until I'm up to date, but I'm enjoying it so far. Daniel Mays in particular is very good.

It borrows quite heavily from Lost though: The "Others" (the clones in the desert), the woman looking for her long lost daughter, the fertility problems, the baby...

It's being moved to 10.30pm on Sunday nights. So not a hit then.

It's not the best, and it was never going to be able to compete with BSG, but it's one of the few recent BBC drama series where I do want to know what happens.

I lasted one and a half episodes of Survivors and about 20 minutes of Bonekickers so still watching after 4 episodes is a good sign.

I was trying to explain to Mr Mandy what had happened so far as he's missed 3 episodes and when you compress it like that, you realise that there's a lot going on and some tantalising mysteries still to solve. Though I really can't take Baltar/Berger seriously.

impressions so far:
- Blakes 7 with bells on
- An imagined future world that looks much the same as the current real one
- President blokey - is he deliberately playing the character with Patrick Stewart's voice?
- Hermione Norris - she is the same character as she was in Spooks. Same voice, same mannerisms, same expression (or lack of them)
- "Space Pumpkins"

Watched it - unlikely to again.

The BBC has supposedly thrown a lot of cash at this so will be hoping for a big audience. If it doesn't come, I'm sure it will be repeated on Saturday evenings (a la 'Come Fly With Me')

Given that the staggered arrival of starships on Carpathia is happening well inside human life spans (men and women in their 30s talking about arriving "years ago", later starships reuniting families that were split up on Earth), then it's clear that humanity in the near future has cracked the faster-than-light (FTL) travel conundrum. We can wheech out to planets that are 20, 30, 40 or who-knows-how-many light years away in "a few years"

If we sent them out at just below lightspeed, they would age more slowly in their own frame of reference (c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox) so any given ship's crew *would* arrive in just a few years in its own frame at least. Has anybody referred to what the time on Earth is yet [I've only seen Ep 1]?

And while we are here, are there any other songs about the Twin Paradox except this one ?