If Necessity Is the Mother of Invention, What Will Drive Our Ingenuity

Like most of America, I missed Masters of Science Fiction when it was actually on television, apparently it ran for a month last August on ABC. It was a spin off of Masters of Horror: Season Two Box Set, a show on a channel I don’t get and has the same premise of taking a short story from well respected writers in the genre and turn them into a short film that fits into an hour of television. The DVD set features two episodes that never made it to air.

The cast is decent with John Hurt (Hellboy), John Locke (Lost), Sean Astin (Rudy), Sam Waterston (Law and Order), Brian Dennehy (William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet), Anne Heche (Six Days, Seven Nights), Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange [Blu-ray]), and James Denton (Desperate Housewives). Only Little Brother lacks a decent marquee name. But the real star of the entire series is Steven Hawking who narrates each episode with an intro and outro of them all giving us life lesson of what we should have learned from them.

The stories themselves are your run of the mill Sci-fi stories like living underground in a post-apocalyptic state, the guy whose memory is wiped clean ever hour, the alien visitors, a robot that can feel, mutants that are discarded into outer space, a Big Brother type society, and machines that get too smart. Most of stories take them too seriously for their own good and only Jerry Was a Man is the only one with a sense of humor about it.

But each stories is at the very least watchable, but only hardcore Science Fiction buff would want to add the DVD, which comes with zero extras, to the library. For everyone else, Masters of Science Fiction would be a decent add to your rental service if your queue is getting low.

Masters of Science Fiction gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.