Once again, Flash Gordon is being resurrected for the small screen. I'd like to say it's a great thing for science fiction on TV, but I'd be perjuring myself. The Scifi channel's incarnation of Flash has been "re-vamped" for the modern era, and it's not good news.
What we end up with is not the dashing, heroic figure out to save Earth and Dale Arden from Ming the Merciless, instead we get a slightly goofy, ex-olympic athlete whose only true interest lies in getting his father back, who may or may not be held hostage on Mongo by Ming. So far, at least, Dale Arden isn't Flash's love interest, she's his ex-girlfriend, who is engaged to a nerdy, no-nonsense cop that so far we've only seen about five minutes of. Dr. Zarchov is now a geeky under-graduate student who used to work with Flash's father, and is about as incompetent a scientist as you can be.
Don't look for any rocket ships in this show either, all transport between Mongo and Earth is accomplished via "wormholes" that are called "rifts" on the show. The special effects are under-whelming, especially considering how accessible high-end sfx is these days thanks to computers. That would be forgivable if the story plots were better, but they're not. Every episode so far has been a hackneyed compilation of plots from other, better science fiction shows of the past.
The best thing that could happen to the Scifi channel's Flash Gordon, would be to put it out of it's misery before it's forced to suffer through much more!
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