Final Day at Comic Con

Sunday.

After I’d slept a lot of saturday I wasn’t going to let it happen again. So I got up early with an alarm, having packed the day before I left Lynn to check out of the hotel and buzzed down to the Convention Centre(er, I know). I wanted to see the Supernatural panel at 11:45 (I’m a massive fan and I don’t care who knows it), so um.. I got in line at 7am. Before Supernatural was Smallville. And apparently Smallville has tons of fans! I only saw the first two seasons, so I’m not very ‘up’ on Smallville, but apparently some of this crowd was down to the fact Tom Welling was rumoured to be showing up for the first time in the show’s Comic Con history. And seriously, this was a BIG line, even at 7am.

So we queued, and at 9-ish the queue was moved closer to the room the panel was going to be in. And we queued some more. Smallville was the first panel of the day in there. But eventually we all streamed into the room and I found myself a decent seat so I wouldn’t have to move for Supernatural. Got a Smallville baseball hat (or IQ-reducer as an ex of mine fondly called them) and settled down for the panel.

There were tons of the cast there, including Callum Blue who’s joining to play Zod. I like him from Dead Like Me, so that was cool. Also Jeph Loeb ran the panel. And yes, Tom Welling was there, which kind of ruined most of the fan questions as people just stared at him (I think he’s fairly gormless looking, perfect Superman!). But it was an entertaining panel and made me want to peek at season 9 at least, so I guess it did the trick. There’s a good write-up of the Smallville stuff here.

And then it was time for Supernatural. Probably my no. 2 most important panel after Lost (also cos I had to miss Chuck for Lost). I already knew the two main actors weren’t going to be there, but that was ok, cos Misha Collins (who plays Castiel) and Jim Beaver (who plays Bobby) were there, along with Eric Kripke, Ben Edlund and Sera Gamble. The Supernatural Wiki has links to all the videos and comments here, and that’s a better summary than I can give perhaps.

During the panel I discovered that the new season is definitely going to start with a shock and a bang, the preview clip was amazing. The actors all seemed good fun, Misha Collins was hilarious. And is probably one of the only ‘good’ guys I like in TV (my tastes run more towards the Ben Linus’ of the world). He’s VERY popular with the crowds and knew how to work it. I just love this show, the witty irreverence and sheer fun of it all. I also discovered my camera zooms more in video mode so got some good little vid clips of it all, but really the ones I linked to are better and less flighty than mine. I didn’t want to watch it all through a camera lens, but to sit back and enjoy the experience too.

And it was definitely worth it. Great panel and great fun.

Then met up again with Lynn who’d missed the queue and went to some other rather strange stuff, before going back to the Exhibit Hall and speaking to Jasika Nicole of Fringe and getting a signed pic saying he was cute. I have to mention that because we tease him for not understanding what a ‘pretty boy’ is. In fact, he still doesn’t!

After Supernatural we queued for Ballroom 20 again, to see Torchwood/Being Human panel. Have to support SOME of BBC America, eh? And I love Being Human, and this year’s Torchwood was much better than previous. Shame to have missed Doctor Who, but I just don’t like it as much as Supernatural. Not Sorry!

Being Human was a really sweet panel. The cast were obviously excited about being over and the crowd cheered them on. Russell Tovey asked for a Mexican wave and got one. Most the questions came from people from the UK, or who’d somehow managed to see the whole show in the US ;p

The clips they showed were a little spoilery in my opinion, but they went down well and I really hope people give it a chance. Not just cos it has vampires in, because honestly the werewolf and ghost stories are more compelling in series 1 of the show. Can’t wait for series 2.

And then the camp. RTD and John Barrowman came to talk Torchwood. Which meant a lot of bigging it up, dissing some fans (in RTD’s case) and shameless flirting (in Barrowman’s). But it was a good season, and deserved the support it got.

After the joint panel, it was time for the Buffy musical that finishes off Comic Con. But we didn’t desperately want to stay for it, so said our goodbyes to Ballroom 20 and went back to the hotel to pick up our stuff and relocate to cheaper hotel (supposedly near airport) for the night. Where I slept like a log and Lynn went for a walk.

And that was it, Comic Con 2009 for me and Lynn. We both had planes the next day and were pretty shattered but elated.

High points for me were: the Lost queue and panel experience, District 9, the preview night, freebies!, the Supernatural panel, swag bags and just being amongst my own geeky kind!

(pricing next post)

Day Two: Friday at Comic Con

Day two had some tough decisions for us, and we also had a bit of a mess-up at the end of the day, but one we perhaps couldn’t have predicted. So, first of all, things we missed:

• Batman (I wanted to go see the Neil Patrick Harris ep)
• The Guild (we tried, but line was too long)
• The Prisoner (clashed)
• Flash Forward (clashed)
• Star Wars:the Old Republic (clashed)
• Jericho (clashed)
• Penguin & DK (book geek panel that clashed also)

That’s a hell of a lot to sacrifice! And it shows some of the decision making we had to do on a daily basis.

So… what did we see?

• Stargate Universe
• Caprica/The Plan
• Big Bang Theory
• the start of 24
• TV Guide’s Sci Fi Hot list

Now, if we’d skipped food and another trip to the Exhibit Hall, we wouldn’t have missed quite so much, but food is a big part of things and we started later today than we’d meant to (plus bear in mind some of the stuff that clashed , listed above, clashed with one another as well as what we saw).

Stargate Universe we saw because it preceded Caprica/The Plan. I watched the first two series of SG1 but then became overwhelmed with the amount of Stargate out there, so lost track. But that being said the panel was entertaining and showed some trailers for the new show. And I adore Robert Carlyle so I’ll probably give it a chance. It’s still odd to me he’ll be in this show at all, because of his flighty nature, but I’ll be watching and because of that I’m glad I saw the panel. The writers and many of the cast were there, and they explained some of the ways it’ll be different from what went before, but still part of the Stargate family. I think it takes place on a spaceship, if I don’t remember wrong. Mostly for me, it’s all about Robert Carlyle though.

Caprica and The Plan shared a panel which included Ron D Moore, Esai Morales, Edward James Olmos, Grace Park (halfway through), Jane Espenson and others. After clips of both shows they discussed the legacy of BSG and how different a show Caprica is, given that it takes place before all the shit hit the fan, but when it was starting to bubble under the surface with the creation of the Cylon race. Edward James Olmos and Jane Espenson talked at length about The Plan, which for those that don’t know is a TV movie which explains the Cylon plan through BSG and tells the same story through Cylon eyes. This was quite a writing feat for Espenson who described it as rubik’s cube writing, because there’s already a very fixed timeline of events in BSG and she had to work within these. Olmos directed and stated his firm belief that BSG doesn’t have to end with The Plan, if sales and viewing figures are high enough, there may be more offshoots! I’m excited about both ‘shows’, so this was one of the panels I didn’t mind missing others for. Plus watching Esai and ‘Eddie’ interact was priceless, especially Esai’s impression of Admiral Adama!

We didn’t even have to leave the room before the Big Bang Theory panel started, with the entire cast and some of the writers. So we sat and watched. It was a witty panel, but not in the way we’d expected. It’s always a bit of a shock to see how unlike their characters the actors are in terms of Physics knowledge, but it was amusing to see how shockingly similar they were in mannerisms in some ways. It’s a fun show, and something I came to really late, but now I wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s funny to think of it as a sitcom even though that’s what it is. They talked a lot about the fun they have making it, Jim Parsons’ Emmy nod and how the various characters would react to specific things. Enjoyable, but not as funny as we’d perhaps expected from this panel.

Then we saw the cast of 24 before skipping the room. Ok, so they’re adding Katee Sackhoff and Freddie Prinze Jr next year, but I’m almost done with 24 and we needed to go get food and recuperate a little. Though to be honest, I can’t remember what we did. So we either went to the Exhibit Hall or went off-site to go get food. Probably the latter!

We returned to queue for Ballroom 20 during the Dollhouse panel. Yes, I watch the show, but I don’t love it just yet. And they were showing the unseen ep with Felicia Day, which I’d somehow managed to watch, so we kind of figured we’d skip this and queue for the panel we really wanted to see the Sci Fi Hot List. And this is where we made our mistake. We ended up queuing through Dollhouse and Joss Whedon when we could have just walked up and got into the panel. Sometimes the need to queue is hard to guess. I thought the Hot List panel would be much fuller… so we wasted an hour and a half in a very long line, standing next to a She-Ra that everyone wanted to photograph. We also got to see a very disturbing Pikachu, which was some skinny guy in a Pikachu hat and yellow underpants. Seriously!

So the Sci Fi Hot list was important to us because of Zachary Levi. We knew we were going to miss the Chuck panel because of Lost, so we wanted to see him in something! It also had Jim Parsons, Allison DuBois, Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Scott Peters, Kevin Williamson, Rebecca Romijn, John Cho, Marc Guggenheim. And it covered the shows: Big Bang Theory, Chuck, Eastwick, Vampire Diaries, Flash Forward, V and DuBois’ new crime show (which sounded dull so have already forgot about it). Out of the list only Eastwick and Vampire Diaries didn’t interest me at all after we saw clips from them. But I did like that we saw clips from all (for Chuck it was the final scene of S2 instead of any previews). The panel was a great mix and quite lively, with most questions for John Cho, Zachary Levi and Jim Parsons. They had to get in clips from each show, but I actually appreciated that as we hadn’t got to all the panels we’d wanted.

And at that point it was 7:30-ish and I went to find the people I’d agreed I was going to queue for the Lost panel with, who were already lined up and waiting, while Lynn went to grab some sleep. And for the rest of friday, Lynn was back at the hotel while I queued for Lost and got to meet a whole new set of friends from The ODI website and associated community. Highlights of the Friday night included speaking to and meeting Zachary Levi (and having photo taken with him like a true Chuck fangirl), seeing and speaking to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (producers of Lost – when they came to say hi to the line), and just chatting Lost and Comic Con with people insane as me in terms of queuing abilities!  It was definitely worth it!!