A thin week this week as we prepare for the holidays—though there are lots of movies showing on TV, and any sparseness of offerings is more than made up for by the American premiere of the penultimate David Tennant adventure (the final outing being a two-parter airing just after Christmas here in the U.S.). Meanwhile we have new episodes this week from:

• Outer Space Astronauts (2 eps),
• Eastwick,
• Dollhouse (2 eps),
• Sanctuary, and
• Doctor Who.

Guest stars this week include the return of Vincent Ventresca on Dollhouse and Jonathan Young as Tesla on Sanctuary.

Synopses below the jump. For details see the listings (regular or alphabetical). Read more...

MOVIES--Opening this week:

• Avatar (2009). James Cameron's years-in-the-making CGI epic is finally here. More details below the jump.
  -- Trailers, clips, and video--updated!

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A tussle involving author Dr. Peter Watts at the U.S./Canada border is creating a stir in the sci-fi community, with Watts saying he was beaten by border guards as he tried to cross back into Canada. Writers and fans are rallying to to the defense of the author/biologist, best known for Starfish (1999) and its sequels and Hugo-award-nominated Blindsight (2006).

In his blog on Dec. 11, Watts's friend Cory Doctorow, the founder of BoingBoing, reported that Watts had been involved in an incident following the selection of his vehicle for inspection at the border crossing in Port Huron, Michigan. According to Watts's account, he got out of the car to "ask what was going on" and, given no answer, asked again. At this point, in the words of Watts's friend and passenger David Nickle, he was assaulted by a "gang of border guards."

Watts claims he was punched in the face, pepper sprayed, kicked, handcuffed, held overnight, and arraigned without access to counsel, after being asked to waive his Miranda rights. Border Patrol officials, on the other hand, told reports that Watts was belligerent and attempted to "choke" one of the guards. Some are saying both sides have exaggerated the incident, but Watts insists he was mistreated. Read more...

Pam, the savvy vampire played by Kristin Bauer on True Blood, has been promoted to a regular in the latest round of casting news for the HBO hit's third season.

Fan favorite Pam acts the cynical right-hand woman of Eric (Alexander Skarsgard), the sheriff of the vampires' Area 5 and owner of Shreveport vamp bar Fangtasia, where Pam is a screener and bouncer.

Though she's guested in 11 episodes so far her storyline has mainly been ancillary to Eric's, so her promotion--along with other hints that Fangtasia will feature strongly in this season--should signal more screen time for this brassy operator. In fact Alan Ball promised a meatier role for Pam in the third season at the San Diego Comic Con.

Whether this involves a lesbian storyline has yet to be confirmed. Ball has said that he could picture Pam as a lesbian. ("I don't know that that's all she is, but she certainly does seem to appreciate the women," he said), and Bauer was open to the possibility: "I wouldn't be surprised," Bauer said in October. "I think she's pansexual." Bauer guessed Pam's sights would be set on Ginger, the Fangtasia waitress played by Tara Buck: "There are so many hot ones, but I'll pick Ginger," she said. "Ginger's hot. Ginger's fun. She's a screamer and she's a blood donor."

With Avatar's Dec. 18 opening days away and the laborious process of getting it to the screen firmly behind him, James Cameron is looking ahead, promising both sequels to Avatar and a reenvisioning of the classic Asimov story Fantastic Voyage.

Cameron told a London press conference that he'd pitched the expensive Avatar to Twentieth Century Fox by suggesting that up-front costs could be spread out over several franchise films, which wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. "So it really makes sense to think of it as the potential start of a franchise, if you will, or a saga that plays out over several acts, each movie being an act of that saga," he said.

"And I have it mapped out, but I haven't written the scripts yet. It all depends on whether we do well with the first film. But that was certainly the intention from the beginning: to create a foundation for a persistent world."

Avatar is reckoned to have run up $240 million in estimated production costs -- a good chunk more than Cameron's notoriously expensive Titanic -- so Cameron and Fox will certainly be glad to recoup as much as they can -- especially since there's no guarantee the film will do anywhere near as well as that watery blockbuster. (The NJ Star-Ledger did an interesting piece on what's at stake with high-risk films like Avatar, finding that a lot of the key players have protected themselves.)

Cameron also confirmed that he will produce a new version of Fantastic Voyage, the classic about a team of scientists in a miniaturized submarine who navigate a human body to destroy an inoperable tumor.

Richard Fleischer's original 1966 film, a campy but much-loved adventure starring Raquel Welch and Stephen Boyd, will be significantly changed for the 2010 update. "We've been working on a script for Fantastic Voyage, but that's not for me to direct," Cameron said. The director attached to the project at the moment is Tarsem Singh, director of the lyrical 2008 drama The Fall, with Cameron producing. Shane Salerno (Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem) is doing the adaptation.

"It's quite different," he said. "But it's got enough of the original story that you'll still recognize it."

That might not be all you recognize: according to Variety, as part of the process of getting his money's worth for the storied investment in high-tech graphics going into Avatar, Cameron may be planning to use not only the same groundbreaking 3-D CGI, but even some of the environments and other assets, in in Fantastic Voyage and possibly other future films as well.

Dark Shadows always seems to lurk in the shadows when it comes to popular exposure. The gothic soap never achieved more than cult status in its original run on ABC from 1966 to 1971, and the 1991 revival on NBC barely registered. But these days, with vampires and other supernatural creatures on the upswing, a Dark Shadows movie seems positioned for visibility at last.

The film version of Dark Shadows will see Tim Burton team up again with Johnny Depp, his favorite actor. Depp will star as vamp Barnabis Collins, the role originally played by Jonathan Frid.

Nothing official on who will star in other roles, including Angelique, played in the series Lara Parker, though there have been rumors.

Producer Graham King told Sci-Fi Wire that, "We're actually going to shoot that film next September/October with Tim Burton and Johnny."

The first draft script is already complete and is currently being rewritten. "We've been working on the script a lot," King said, alongside Burton's work on his current project, Alice in Wonderland. "We've been given a script. John August [Corpse Bride, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory] wrote the first screenplay. We're making some changes, but the film's going to be in production, as I say, September or October of next year." The release date is penciled in for 2011.

So here I was over the weekend snarking about how the werewolves are always showing up in the vampires' franchises instead of getting to have one of their own, and it turns out the folks at Fox were thinking the very same thing.

Fox is developing an epic family drama called Howl, about competing werewolves in a small Alaskan town. The pilot for Howl is being written by Joshua Miller and M.A. Fortin. [Note: Not to be confused with Howl, the forthcoming movie in which James Franco plays Allen Ginsberg. Yeah, definitely don't confuse those two.]

"Alaska is a place where people disappear and now you know why," Miller said. Yeah, it's true--whatever happened to Rob Morrow, anyway? Miller noted that our culture is in a state of flux right now, and werewolves are ideal for reflecting that change in drama. "Metamorphosis and constant change is the basis of werewolf mythology," Miller explained, and the show's themes will include "the psychology of living with change."

EW is grousing that a new werewolf series is not wanted, but that's mostly about the collective shudder going through the industry over MTV insisting on bring back Teen Wolf. Variety noted that one of the very first series on Fox was Frank Lupo's Werewolf (1987), starring future General Hospital heartthrob John J. York. (It's supposed to be out on DVD, by the way, but evidently there are some legal issues with the music.) I seem to remember that as being not terrible. But then, I watched Manimal as a kid, too.

By the way, I was thinking about the werewolf/vampire thing: one thing that keeps recurring in the more recent vampire mythologies is that vamps tend to be social and develop networks or communities; even loner vamps are hooked into a larger, centuries-old vampire society, as on True Blood or Moonlight (and, to a much lesser extent, Vampire Diaries). Werewolves in fiction, on the other hand, by their nature aren't necessarily so; there tend to be either no communities (poor Professor Lupin in Harry Potter) or dysfunctional ones (Jacob trying to break free of his fellow werewolves in New Moon). So the lone werewolf, with his pent up raw violence, makes a nice counterpoint to the effete, institutional corruption of vampires. As it turns out, this is the main theme of the first season of Being Human, with the solution to the vampires' cold ambition being the pandemonium of werewolf savagery.

This summer's science-fiction sleeper Moon has taken top prize at the prestigious British Independent Film Awards.

Duncan Jones's account of space worker Sam Bell's lonely stint on a corporate-run lunar base impressed the judges enough to earn the award for Best British Independent Film. Jones guided Sam Rockwell in an impressive, multifaceted performance in the film, with Kevin Spacey voicing the moon station's level-headed A.I.

Jones, who happens to be the son of David Bowie (the British press are enjoying talking about Jones emerging from his father's shadow with a sci-fi movie forty years after Space Oddity, etc., etc.), was also crowned winner of The Douglas Hickox Award for best debut director at the event.

"It's an indie sci-fi film, and there are not a huge number of those made," Jones told indieWIRE this past Spring. "Namely because sci-fi by its very nature tends to be expensive. We had to approach it as a puzzle; how do we create something that will appeal to Sam Rockwell as an actor, be inventive and dynamic enough for an audience, use those special effects we know will give us the most bang for our buck and do it for less than $5 million."

The previous winner of the BIFA top prize was Slumdog Millionaire. But Moon didn't resonate quite so well in the States, where the reaction was generally in line with a fellow reviewer who walked past me out of the screening shaking her head before turning to me in the elevator to ask, "What did we just see?"

New episodes this week from:

• Outer Space Astronauts (series premiere!),
• Fringe,
• Dollhouse (2 eps),
• Sanctuary, and
• Legend of the Seeker.

Big names from sci-fi history festoon this week's episodes. Guest stars this week include Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping's longtime costar on Stargate SG-1, as an old friend of Magnus on Sanctuary; Leonard Nimoy reprising his role as William Bell on Fringe; and Keith Carradine and Alan Tudyk on Dollhouse.

Synopses below the jump. For details see the listings (regular or alphabetical). Read more...

HOME VIDEO--Out on DVD this week:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009). Harry's sixth adventure, which, despite being a linchpin of the series, is told with hardly any sense of urgency or wonder. More details below the jump.
  -- Compare prices.
  -- Trailers, clips, and video.
  -- Movie Review.
  -- Image Gallery.

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