Looking at this year's new television show schedule, it is all too easy to see how the crazy successes of both Lost and Battlestar Galactica have influenced the suits, writers, and pitch-makers in Hollywood. There seems to be a steaming molten mass of monster and science fiction shows this fall. For a long time, it was really confusing. I mean, they all sounded very much alike. From what I could tell, Threshold seemed to be about aliens found at sea; Surface (at one point called Fathom to befuddle our sensibilities even further) was about alien-like sea creatures found in the ocean; Invasion was about a post-hurricane-slapped Florida and also, aliens. From the sea, or to be more exact, the bayou; Supernatural looked to be about creepy things, but I wasn't entirely clear if said creepy things were aliens, sea aliens, or abductions. In my second week of reviewing these shows, I'd also like to note that every single one of them, save Supernatural, which as you'll read isn't technically science fiction, also involves alien takeover or assimilation of humans.

If you're looking for science fiction television in the way of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, or various Stargates, Supernatural is not it. In shamefaced retrospect, I guess I could have determined that very fact from the name, which doesn't even remotely allude to anything scientific about the fiction it peddles, but as I confessed above, I was bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by all the offerings.

Supernatural is about two pretty boys—wait, scratch that, one boy is pretty. The fact of the matter is, I don't find Jared Padalecki all that attractive. No matter how many people insist on calling him "CuteDean" from Gilmore Girls, I think he looks like a bully. And not just any old bully, either—Padalecki looks like the kind of weasely bully that gets other, chunkier Crabbe and Goyles to do his beating and lunch-money-stealing while he stands by with his lank hair and porcine snout and sneers. I do like the way Jensen Ackles looks, though. I remember him as Eric Brady back in the days when I used to spend my lazy college afternoons watching Days of Our Lives, howling with laugher at Marlena's demonic possession. My husband has decided upon dialogue alone that Ackles is "[Dawson's Creek's] Josh Jackson with finer features."

Anyway, the two guys are brothers, and they lost their mother at very young ages to something that sucked her onto the ceiling, ripped open her stomach, and set fire to her. It was a surprisingly gruesome opening to the show. Years later, the boys have grown up and Sam (Padalecki) attends an oddly rural—and constantly dark—Stanford. From his first few moments on the screen, we learn that he's applying to law schools and estranged from his father and elder brother. In short order, his brother Dean (Ackles) appears on the scene to tell Sam that their father has disappeared while off on one of his hunting trips. His demon hunting trips. Yes, it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer all over again, but with boys.

You see, ever since his wife was immolated, Daddy Demon Hunter has been on a bloody mission to track down and destroy the thing that did it. He even got his kids involved at a tender young age. We know this because at one point, Sam bitterly notes to Dean that when he told their dad he was afraid of something in his closet, his father handed him a .45. This is to let us know that Stanford Sam, the embryonic esquire, doesn't share the demon blood lust with his brother and father. Then again, he was only a babe when his mother was nailed to his nursery ceiling and torched, and he doesn't really remember her so well; thus, the sense of detachment that he, Dean, and the viewers will probably struggle with for the whole series.

Dean manages to guilt Sam into helping him look for their father, and the two brothers soon get embroiled in a totally different case of deadly supernatural bridge activity. By the end of the episode, Dean and Sam have conquered and sent an other-worldly murdering manifestation technically known as a "White Lady"—wait, no, that's my favorite cocktail; right, she's technically a "Woman in White"—to her deserved hell and learned that their father has high-tailed it to Colorado. As it was for Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the boys hear a bit of the dun-dun-DUN! when they discover that Daddy Demon Hunter has left behind his precious Diary of Demonic Deeds with military coordinates on where to find him.

Sam attempts to go back to his life at Stanford, leaving it to his brother to run their hunting father to ground, but he has a little surprise waiting for him at home. The young, nubile girlfriend, who showed off more body parts than strictly necessary at the beginning of the episode has, in the grand tradition of the women connected to this cursed family, been nailed to Sam's bedroom ceiling. And then she bursts into flames. So, Sam decides to join Dean after all. I'm beginning to think women would do well to stay away from Sam and his bedrooms.

In conclusion, as I stated above, not much science in this fiction, but I might keep watching as long as it doesn't interfere with the other dozen shows I'm trying to keep up with this year. Along that line, I'm sort of torn about Battlestar Galactica wrapping up the season last week. I love that show, it's so awesome and enthralling and gritty, yet . . . it's sort of a relief to free up the TiVo. Of course, I shouldn't admit that the TiVo is being freed up to capture Ghost Whisperer for us. After dogging her every step and snarking her every word on that television travesty Time of Your Life ("Time of Your Who?" you say. "Exactly," I say.), I can't not watch this show. Must. Slam. Spewitt! I will haunt little Miss Ghost Whisperer to her grave. TO HER GRAVE! I'm a little obsessed.

The evolving theme of predictable campfire ghost stories aside, there were some sufficiently creepy moments accentuated by interesting special effects in Supernatural. For example, when the episode's first victim happens upon the Woman in White manifestation, the Woman in White seems to flash and flicker electronically as if she were having problems properly tuning herself in. It was a nice touch if not obviously begged, borrowed, and stolen from The Ring. Additionally, the interplay between the two brothers is quite fetching in that sit-on-your-head-and-fart-on-you sort of way. In one scene, Sam attempts to apologize to his brother for something, but Dean stops him by throwing up his hands and saying, "No chick-flick moments."

It's clear that the overall premise of the show will be the boys questing to find their father to help him destroy the mother-girlfriend killer. However, along the way, they will hunt things like Women in White, Wendigos, werewolves, and maybe even a man with a hook on the end of his hand who likes to surprise young lovers when they park and make out, overlooking the lights of L.A. But see, that whole hook man thing? That totally happened to a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of my mother's. Seriously.

Threshold is an entirely different animal. Here we've got the fiction and the science, we've potentially got aliens from the fourth dimension, and we've even got Data!

In Threshold something has appeared—probably from outer space—and either warped, killed, or assimilated sailors on a military vessel off the coast of Virginia. Enter Carla Gugino—some might remember her as Karen Sisco in Karen Sisco, but I remember her as the round-cheeked, giggly Nan St. George in The Buccaneers—as Dr. Molly Anne Caffrey. Is the similarity between her character's name and that of a famous sci-fi writer entirely coincidental, you may well ask? I doubt it. Dr. Caffrey is a government contingency analyst hired to come up with plans and responses to worst-case scenario events, and the cover name for her worst-case scenario of visitors from outer space is "Threshold." When Caffrey gets the word that "Threshold" has been activated, she is assigned a crack team of genius experts: Brent Spiner as Dr. Nigel Fenway is an aging hippy micro-biologist with holes in his wool sweater; Peter Dinklage as Arthur Ramsay is a boozing, gambling, whoring linguist and mathematician; and Rob Benedict as Lucas Pegg is an over-anxious astronautical engineer.

Of course, you can't have a show about alien visitations without throwing the typical fact-suppressing military types in there as well. Let's see, we're given Caffrey's direct report, Deputy National Security Advisor Baylock, played with grim determination by Charles S. Dutton; and a bland "highly trained covert operative with a mysterious past" named "Cavannaugh," played by the eminently square-jawed Brian Van Holt. I'm sure Cavannaugh is supposed to be the flint against whom Caffrey's steel strikes sparks, but after two episodes, I'm not impressed. They should have cast Connor Trinneer in the role. Aaaand with that statement, my voyage to the dark side is now complete!

Caffrey and her "Red Team" arrive on the drifting ship to find bodies, bodies, and oh look—more bodies! Some of the death masks are so warped, they look like a cross between that episode of The Twilight Zone where the normal-looking woman is an outcast among a race of naturally disfigured people, and the demon faces I've seen in previews for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It's quite unsettling, but in that shiveringly good way.

Leaving the other experts to do their expert things, Caffrey, Cavannaugh, and Pegg watch a ship's video, showing—they hope—what it was that attacked the crew. They are treated to a view of something I can only describe as the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek: The Next Generation hovering above the ship. While watching, one of them suddenly decides that the object must come from the fourth dimension (though how they so quickly hit upon that hypothesis seems to be one of the continuing mysteries of the show), after which pronouncement high-pitched-screechy-glass-cutting-glass noises start emanating from the taped Crystalline Entity. The noise, just like the opening American Idol auditions, causes severe pain and bloody noses in the viewers. The viewers being Caffrey, and her lot, not us. Later, the three who watched the Crystalline Entity's greatest hits discover that they might now be infected by it. They are also getting stalked by one of the surviving (and totally insane) members of the crew.

Threshold certainly brings the Trek power to the show: not only do they have Brannon Braga (former executive producer/showrunner of most recent things Star Trek, excluding Deep Space Nine), and Brent Spiner, but they've also got Mike Sussman, David Livingston, and Andre Bormanis involved somehow.

After watching last week's episode where they had this awesome CGI of a guy's head exploding after almost turning itself into the Crystalline Entity, I have no doubt that they'll soon be calling the growing fans of this show "Threshies." However, I would be remiss if I didn't note that "Threshold" is the name of a particularly bad Star Trek: Voyager episode. I know that's a redundant statement, but still, it bears noting.

I have the sometimes-dubious honor of having a mathematician husband who also knows quite a bit about science-y things. It is because of The Evil Dr. Mathra that I've never been able to be blissfully ignorant when these shows get things dead wrong. To be honest? I wouldn't want to be blissfully ignorant about these things. It really bothers me that shows *cough Numb3rs cough* refuse to do enough basic research to get things right. I'm not saying they have to make all the mysteries of mathematics and physics perfectly plain to the lay person, but at least get your damn terminology right, because it DOES mean something to people like my husband, who are watching and growing ever more purple in the face with each successive factual inconsistency or spout of mathnobabble. (Emphasis on the "no," of course.)

Things my husband was heard to scream at Dinklage's "mathematical genius" character during the premiere of Threshold:

• "There's no such thing as 'Fractional Geometry'—it's FRACTAL GEOMETRY!"

• "A Fourier Analysis isn't something you do to analyze, like political analysis—Fourier Analysis itself is a field of study! He could easily have said 'a Fourier Transform' and it would have actually made sense!"

• "There's no such thing as Isomorphic Group Therapy. At all. No. No. Just . . . no."

Moving on to another show, I find that I'm at a loss what to tell you about Surface, because all these water-based alien invasions who emit loud, glass-breaking noises are starting to ebb and flow together. In this show, a new oceanic creature is found by four different groups of people.

You've got the "Awww, it's so cute!" Gremlins/E.T. factor with a kid keeping a baby sea thing as a pet, feeding it fish, watching it paddle around on its back, and listening to it make cat purring noises. Then you've got the "We're gonna need a bigger boat" factor when an adult sea thing, well, eats an entire fishing boat. Of course, there are the requisite character-building moments, but the characters themselves are really quite forgettable. They seem to spend a great deal of time reacting wide-eyed to things they aren't showing us. I wouldn't waste my time with this one.

I admit that I was very much looking forward to Invasion for fairly shallow reasons. No, it wasn't because Eddie Cibrian was showing his dimpled face in it—what IS it with all the soap stars turning to science fiction these days?—as a park ranger, it was because I learned that a relatively unknown and somewhat uncelebrated Canadian actress was starring in it. I adored every single one of the characters Kari Matchett fenced, danced, and drawled her way through in the way-too-soon-canceled and oft-lamented Nero Wolfe Mysteries series on A&E, so I was thrilled to see that she had gotten some steady work—and steady work that I'd be able to watch.

In a morbidly coincidental series opener, Invasion begins with the wild and violent approach of a hurricane somewhere in Florida. Something immense and glowing leaps out of the ocean and engulfs a weather plane that has intentionally flown into the eye of the hurricane. Here we go again.

Matchett is a doctor, the ex-wife of Cibrian, and is currently married to William Fichtner's totally dodgy Sheriff Underlay. During the hurricane, Matchett and Cibrian's daughter runs off to look for her missing cat and sees lights falling from the sky. This is where I thought I was going seriously crazy, because I swear they are the exact same lights falling from the sky as the ones in Surface! Post-hurricane, the little girl tells her father's new wife's brother, Dave (I know, it actually took us several TiVo bul-loop-bul-loops back to figure out all the genealogy), what she saw. Dave, played by Tyler Labine, is one of those boozing deadbeat characters that spend most of their time being disappointing burdens to their family and even more time imagining fantastic conspiracy theories about the government covering up this or that. Once Dave realizes that his step-niece might have witnessed an extra-terrestrial event, he takes her out in one of those ubiquitous bayou boats and finds possible UFO wreckage. While pulling out the possible UFO wreckage, Dave stirs up a gruesome sight. A skull way too stained with dark bayou muck to be a recent dump floats past Dave's horrified gaze. Acting like an abnormally intelligent horror character, Dave gets them the hell out of there.

Meanwhile, Matchett's character, Mariel, goes missing during the hurricane and is later found washed up in a bayou, totally naked, by her creepy sheriff of a husband. Confused and battered, Mariel realizes at once that there's something not quite right with her and tries to talk to her husband about it. Sheriff Underlay, however, blatantly ignores her concerns, all the while quite obviously telegraphing to the viewing audience with suspicious looks, stares, and gazes that he knows far more about her missing hours than he's letting on. By the end of the episode, Underlay has brought Mariel back to where she was found post-hurricane, and whispers "Baby steps" in her ear. I think they're both aliens now.

If this isn't creepy enough, Dave has a slimy surprise in the trunk of his car for his park ranger brother-in-law. At first, it's pretty hard to tell what the mass of branches and leaves is supposed to be, but evidently Dave returned to the bayou to retrieve the mucked skull and what was left of the attached body. As the camera moves in for a closer look at the trunk full the muddy remains, we can see what looks like a human skeleton with something else wrapped around it, stabbing it in various locations. Dave and Park Ranger Russell go back to the bayou whereupon Dave—say it with me—gets yanked under water by something unseen. As Dave recovers in the hospital, we get treated to views of lacerations all over his legs that Dr. Mariel seems far too happy to diagnose as gator bites.

So, hard as it is to judge new shows on the basis of their opening episodes, I can say that Threshold is definitely worth your time—if only to see if someone else's head explodes in the shape of the Crystalline Entity. Invasion didn't grab me as much as I thought it would, but I'll probably give it another few weeks before deciding whether to delete it from my TiVo Wishlist. Surface, as I said above, just didn't grab me enough to leave me wanting more after the pilot episode. Finally, Supernatural is not science fiction but it is definitely a good "sit in the dark with pillows and blankets" show. In fact, it's usually only movies that can achieve that level of creepiness, so I'm definitely going to keep watching this one. However, if the demon hunting brothers start tracking Bigfoot and Dracula, I might lose all interest.