Oh man, “good series that didn’t get their proper endings” is a whole other thread, dude. Still furious over Carnivale…
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I’m pretty sure I had a huge crush on Claudia back in the day (wife and I actually shared that crush, so yay bonding!), but I can see the appeal to Helena. I liked the twist on H.G. Wells. 
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That theme song is forever stuck in my head… also so sad with how that show just kinda… died. Just realizing how much I miss Eureka, too. It’s easy watching, especially during stressful times.
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I mean, same. I don’t think my Claudia Black crush will ever go away, tbh.
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I bet it doesn’t hold up and it’s also probably actually terrible but I watched a lot of Seaquest DSV (that’s deep submergence vehicle obviously) as a kid which was basically Star Trek underwater with the guy from Jaws and a talking dolphin. Many lego combat submarines were constructed…
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@danielle might appreciate a budget Canadian sci-fi movie that is a ripoff of Alien except it has an INCREDIBLE twist at the end. The Alien can talk and becomes friends with the remaining humans, we learn how afraid it was of them. It helps them repair their ship and they become buddies, and it sacrifices its life to save them. It’s super cheesy but awesome and since no one cares about it anymore instead of finding a VHS tape of it twenty years ago like I did you can watch the whole thing unfold on YouTube.
Oh, I meant Claudia the character from Warehouse 13…HOWEVER, Claudia Black was a mutual crush as well. I mean…duh…it’s Claudia Black! HELLO! 
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I used to live for late night syndicated sci-fi shows back in high school. My favorites were Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda and Invisible Man.
They’re cheesy when I revisit them now but they were my reason for staying up way too late.
The Colony was the weirdest idea, and they just Went For The Damn Thing.
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Yes, Farscape! That was going to be one of my additions to this thread. I think they did great work with what they had, but it’s definitely a budget show (especially the first season) and I love it for that.
There’s something in this discussion regarding the limitations of budget and the benefits that lends itself to the creative process. Farscape using puppets instead of CGI makes it infinitely better in my opinion.
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Yeah, that is a different topic entirely, and worth discussing. The cliffhanger of Carnivale actually makes me feel bad about recommending it to some people. It’s so great, but it just fucking ends. Like, done.
The show Helix on SyFy was some good quality low quality scifi that had a lot of cool ideas. I think it got a second season but they decided to completely change the show from taking place in a single Arctic base to THE WORLD and I lost interest.
Hello I am a Canadian and I am 
here to talk about lexx
(Or Cronenberg)
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Humans are superior!
I liked Farscape when it’s good it was good in interesting way, but perhaps of that, not all that they tried worked for me. But it one of the few shows, who made me go looking for fanfic, to get more histories from this universe
Buffy was the only show that I wrote fanfic for 
A show that I didn’t understand, why it was cancelled was Sarah Connor Chronicles. Perhaps the show that were perhaps too smart/subtle? (I would like to think so) for its own good. A Sci-Fi with time travel that made sense to. The character’s roles are not permanent and every character has breaking point, if they are not already broken. Different AI’s who are alien enough for me to question their actions and motives.
Two scenes from the show
Background song by Shirley Manson (who had also a role in the show)
Background song by Johny Cash (didn’t had a role in the show)
And a fanvid
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Sarah Connor Chronicles is great! I just remember it got a lot of flak for the casting (I don’t get people) and the first few episodes and I think the ratings just never really picked up much after that, damn shame. 
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That it took so long for Tatiana Maslany to win an emmy is criminal. The mental gymnastics that go with that role (playing a clone that’s imitating a different clone) are immense.
Holy heck please everyone watch The Quiet Earth. It’s a ‘last man left on earth’ story that’s told like a fever dream, full of empty 1980s New Zealand streets (I admittedly like it heaps for that because it’s so surreal seeing how small-town everything looks). I really really like it and Bruno Lawrence gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, a very steady and paranoid unwinding of sanity. please please please watch it
EDIT: It was made in NZ in the 1980s it is absolutely low-budget
Z Nation is one of my favourite shows, but it takes place in the Sharknado Cinematic Universe. It has terrible CGI, zombie bears, zombiequakes, and every other thing you’d associate with a bad SyFy movie. Except it’s also got some amazing dramatic tension, interesting worldbuilding, enough of that ‘not taking itself seriously’ to make phytozombies who are half-zombie, half-marijuana but good enough writing and acting to play that straight and have serious action scenes in a pre-Z grow-op greenhouse. Hell, as the series goes on it even gets pretty good on ‘social justice’ stuff, the cast is pretty diverse and white men are definitely not protected by plot armour.
But, like, there are zombabies and one zombie genuinely says ‘braaaains’.
I really like super restrained sci-fi, where very little money is spent on special effects and more focus is on the concepts.
A couple of years ago I saw a super low budget movie on Netflix called Coherence, which fits this perfectly. A group of friends get together for a party while a comet is going past and then they start meeting alternate versions of themselves from very similar other realities, and start to get mixed up about which reality they belong in.
In a similar low budget vein I would recommend Timecrimes, which is a sort of time travel mystery about a man who gets attacked in the woods and runs into a local inventor who helps him escape using a time machine.
While I was young I also particularly enjoyed a BBC show called Crime Traveller, about a detective who teams up with the daughter of a man who invented a time machine to solve crimes. It actually had a really good internal logic, and used the form of time travel where anything they did couldn’t affect the past in any way, as it had already happened, so sometimes weird things would happen in the first part of the episode that wouldn’t be explained until they travelled back and caused it.
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Orphan Black is so good! Tatiana does such an amazing job to play all those roles, man. Gonna miss it after season 5 wraps.
