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Q: Given all the sex and violence in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, will there be anything new in the “uncut” DVD version? — Wayne, Lakewood, CO

The Oracle Speaks:

“There actually isn’t a ton of stuff on the cutting room floor,” Spartacus executive producer Steven DeKnight recently told a gathering of critics in L.A. “Especially in television, you don’t over-shoot like you will on a film. There are some things, mostly of a sexual nature, on the DVD. One involving — I believe we put this shot back — an extra shot of, if you remember the gladiator Segovax that came to a very painful, unfortunate end when they castrated him at the end of that episode. There is an extra shot of him in there that you might not want to see.”

As for sex, he said, “There’s also in episode, I believe it’s [episode] six, in the gladiator orgy scene, there is some additional material. But  practically everything we shoot ends up on the screen.”

Q: I don’t mean this the way it sounds (or maybe I do!), but why did God create the Tree of Knowledge? He had to have created it — he created everything, right? But he already had that knowledge, so why create it at all? It seems like the whole point was to tempt Adam and Eve — I mean, who doesn’t want knowledge? And why is wanting that a bad thing? Would you invite your friends over, make this incredible-looking chocolate cake, and then say to them, “But you can’t have any!” I’m trying to be fair to God here, but it seems like He was being a major jerk. – Justin, Friday Harbor, WA

The Oracle Speaks:

The sad truth is that God comes off like an off-the-charts jerk in much of the Old Testament – which is precisely why it can’t, and shouldn’t, be taken literally.

The Bible isn’t an historical record: it’s a collection of myths and legends designed to explain a certain philosophical and spiritual point-of-view. (In the pre-scientific, non-rational ancient world, it was also used to explain natural world truths, but using it the same way today, in a post-scientific world, is, well, stupid.)

What philosophical point is the story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (its full name) trying to explain?

That the world is far from a perfect place and that, seemingly unlike most other creatures on this planet, we are “cursed” to have an awareness of our plight and of our own mortality.

The Tree of Knowledge also represents free will, a fundamental component in most Western religious thinking. In God’s defense in the story, free will is pointless, symbolically and literally, without other choices. Since God gave Adam and Eve free will, he had to give them the option to “opt out” of paradise.

(Although the story doesn’t quite hang together here, does it? Isn’t free will meaningless without knowledge?)

Furthermore, the Garden of Eden story establishes perhaps the most fundamental component of the Judeo-Christian world-view: that human beings are fundamentally flawed and incomplete, and can only be made whole through a relationship with God (and religion).

Incidentally, I personally disagree with most of the points of the Garden of Eden story and its extremely negative view of the human condition: I don’t agree that human beings are fundamentally flawed in needing of salvation, or that human knowledge is a curse, or that the desire for it is a bad thing.

In this Oracle’s opinion, the limited world-view of the Garden of Eden story would infect Western religious thinking for generations to come, with the forces of religion being on the wrong side of almost every intellectual leap forward, before and since the Enlightenment.

And now The Oracle must go lie down. His head hurts. Next week, we go back to talking about Lucy Lawless’s breasts.

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Q: So I must know: will Lucy Lawless be back in the second season — not the “prequel” — of Spartacus? Basically, did she die in the finale? — MAGPIE, Toronto, Canada

The Oracle Speaks:

First, a spoiler alert.

“She was still twitching at the end of Season 1, if you look,” Spartacus‘ executive director Steven DeKnight said at the recent Television Critics Association conference in L.A.

In other words, yes, she’ll be back, not just in the prequel, but also in the subsequent second season.

“You know, the original plan with Lucy and that character was to kill her at the end of the season,” DeKnight said. “Basically we had John Hannah and Lucy Lawless for only one season. That’s what we could get them for. Towards the end of Season One, Lucy was having such a great time, and we all loved her so much, there was interest in bringing her back. And I got a call from Rob Tapert saying, ‘Starz called, and they’d really like Lucy to come back, and you know, Lucy really wants to come back,’ and I said, ‘Absolutely not. She’s got to die. That’s the way the story goes.’”

But DeKnight soon changed his mind, he said. “The next day I called him up and said, ‘Rob, I got an idea. And we’re thrilled to have — Lucy will be back in Season Two. And where the story goes with her is really something special. I’m very excited about that.”

What of John Hannah? “John Hannah is a little harder to bring back, obviously,” DeKnight joked.

Q: Are lembas magic or is it just a really, really impressive Powerbar recipe? — Jonah, Dallas, TX

The Oracle Speaks:

We know what Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson thinks: in the movies, one bite of lembas bread “is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man” — which is, of course, physically impossible, so magic must be involved.

But in the book, it’s a little different: “one cake” is enough for “a full day’s march,” which is much closer to the laws of physics and means that magic isn’t necessarily involved.

Still, there are repeated references to the fact that lembas don’t just sustain the body; they also sustain the spirit.

“Lembas does put heart into you,” J.R.R. Tolkien writes. “A more wholesome sort of feeling.” And Gollum can’t eat the bread.

This could, of course, all be psychological; when eating lembas, people often think of the elves (and the beauty of Galadriel), which could definitely provide a psychological boost.

But then there’s the fact that the elves, who created lembas, are an immortal, magical race — literally created by the magic of Eru IIuvater. Everything they do is suffused with magic — although not necessarily magic of the spellbook and incantation sort.

And come on: one thin cake for a full day’s march?

Count on it. Lembas are magic.

A more interesting question is why is the word always italicized when plenty of other elven words are not?

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Last week, we reported on Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, the six-episode Spartacus “prequel” series coming in January, created as a result of star Andy Whitfield’s bout with cancer.

But what of the second full season that the producers were already working on when Whitfield’s cancer was discovered?

“The thing about Season 2 is it’s a bit of a different show,” showrunner and executive producer Steven DeKnight tells us. “We start down the path of what most people know about Spartacus — how this rebellion came together. But what always interested me is not that everybody broke out and it was, ‘Rah rah! We’re together! Let’s band together and form an army!’ It’s very contentious. There are a lot of mistakes made. It takes quite a while before they build anything close to an army.”

In other words, if it wasn’t already clear, Starz’s TV Spartacus is a far cry from the version of the story seen in the 1960 Kirk Douglas movie.

“As much as I love the Kubrick/Kirk Douglas movie, [the real history] was not a merry band of people,” DeKnight says. “There was a lot of this faction breaking off and looting and pillaging and then coming back, and there was a lot of infighting. What I take from that, and what I want to illustrate in the show, is that all that infighting comes from personal perspective and people’s desires and passions: some people wanting to be purely free and others wanting revenge. It is all a big mess.”

And, of course, the character of Spartacus will be in the center of the mess.

“One of the things I love working with Spartacus is he’s a hero, but as we’ve seen in Season 1, he doesn’t always do the right thing,” DeKnight says. “He can be reactionary, and he can let his passions drive him, which is something we want to explore. We want to explore how to take this man from that to a true, true leader. We saw a little of that at the end of Season 1.

“Tempers certainly flare quite a bit [in season 2]. Even among heroes there are betrayals, and people who think they are doing the best thing, and people who do the wrong things for the right reasons. It’s a slippery slope. It’s a learning curve for everyone involved in the story.”

What of the first season’s cliffhanger-like ending, where it wasn’t quite clear who was alive and who was dead, especially Lucy Lawless’s Lucretia character?

“I’m of two minds with the cliffhanger season finale [in general],” DeKnight says. “Sometimes it works: I have to go back to Season 2 or 3 of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the Borg and Jean Luc and the cliffhanger ending. But honestly in this day and age with so many channels, you just don’t know if you’re coming back, so my goal with this show is to have a thrilling conclusion to each season, but it’s a conclusion.

“So if it doesn’t come back you can say, ‘Yeah, I would have loved to know what happens next,’ but it’s not like this person is in a burning building and this one is going down in an airplane. Who lived? What happened? I want to put a firm exclamation mark on the end of each season. We’ve got a damn good one coming up in Season 2 and, I think, at the end of the prequel.”

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“We had all these juicy nuggets from Season 1 that we never got to explore,” says Steven DeKnight, the showrunner and executive producer of Starz’ Spartacus series, explaining the motivation behind the six-episode “prequel” series, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, coming in 2011.

“Of course, the big thing was the chance to have John Hannah [who played Batiatus] and Lucy Lawless [who played Lucretia] together again for six episodes,” DeKnight adds. “I adored working with John, loved writing for him. It was a thrill to do that again.”

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena tells the story of Batiatus’ ludus prior to Spartacus’ arrival.

“We allude to a lot of things in Season 1 that happened in the past but you never see,” DeKnight says. “For instance, we talk about how Ashur was crippled in the arena. We talk about Crixus. And there’s a lot between Thelonius and Batiatus. In Season 1, we just picked up where they hate each other, but where did that come from? You’ve got the whole affair going on between Crixus and Lucretia. How did that come about?”

At one point in the show’s first season, the audience learned that Doctore [played by Peter Mensah] had a wife, but it was only a couple of lines.

“We really wanted to explore that,” DeKnight says. “What happened? You get the feeling that something bad happened but we never say what it was. … We were all very excited to get back in that gladiator world and explore some of these stories, and really bring some of those characters to the forefront that due to time constraints and the weight of the story, we weren’t able to do in Season 1.”

Had star Andy Whitfield not been diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, the prequel probably wouldn’t have existed at all - - although the producers had been considering telling some of these stories in graphic novel form.

“The first thing that happened after all of our concerns was making sure he was okay and giving him enough time to go through treatment and recover,” DeKnight says. “We immediately shut down production in New Zealand. The writers kept working [on Season 2] because we were waiting for the full prognosis and how long the treatment would be. We got close to halfway through the scripts when we got the full prognosis on Andy what the extent of his treatment would be. Cancer is never good, but we were very thankful it was such a strong prognosis.”

Given Whitfield’s expected medical treatment, and given the recovery and training needed to get the actor back in physical shape, the second season had to be pushed to at least summer 2011.

“That would have meant the show would have been off the air 16-18 months, which was obviously a concern,” DeKnight says. “We didn’t want people to forget the show or lose interest.”

The producers’ first idea was doing a two-hour special event.

“I was planning on doing a flashback episode in Season 2 because John Hannah said he loved working with us so much, he graciously said, ‘If you ever want to have me back, let’s see if we can work something out.’ So we were planning a flashback episode, and I figured, ‘Well, why not blow it up into two hours?’”

Starz wasn’t enthusiastic about a two-hour movie. “So [co-creator] Robert Tapert said, ‘Well what about four hours?’” DeKnight says. “Four hours is an odd duck from a writing point of view. You don’t have enough time to build intricate storylines, but it’s too long to do a nice, tight story.”

Finally, Starz gave a counter-offer: how about six hours? “At that point, everybody was in,” DeKnight says. “That’s how the prequel came about.”

Is DeKnight concerned about disappointing fans?

“Oh, absolutely,” he says. “It keeps me awake at night. It’s always very, very dangerous to change the formula that works. It’s a testament to Starz that, even though they had the same jitters, they said, ‘Nope. Creatively we understand what you’re doing, so go for it.’ It is a different show, without a doubt. Will people enjoy it as much? I hope so. I hope they enjoy it more. But it’s definitely a roll of the dice.”

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Clare, Ramirez, Murray

Dustin Clare, a popular Australian actor, has been cast as the lead of Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, a six-episode “prequel” Spartacus series that Starz put into production when lead actor Andy Whitfield was struck with cancer.

Clare plays Gannicus, a gladiator who becomes champion of the Capua prior to Spartacus’ arrival.

Whitfield, who has recovered from cancer treatment, will have a small role in two of the series’ episodes.

Spartacus actors Lucy Lawless, John Hannah, Peter Mensah, and Manu Bennett are also returning, in more substantial roles.

Other new actors joining Clare will be Jaime Murray, who plays a social-climbing friend of Lucy Lawless’s Lucretia, and Marisa Ramirez, who plays a slave-girl.

Spartacus: Gods in the Arena will air next January. A second “regular” season featuring Whitfield will reportedly begin production later this year.

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Q: Now that Andy Whitfield is cancer-free, is there any chance that Starz will cancel the “prequel” Spartacus series and go back to an ordinary second season? — Brett, Brooklyn, NY

A: Probably not. As of June 11th, showrunner Steven DeKnight and his creative staff were well into work on the six-episode “prequel” series.

Keep in mind, however, that Andy Whitfield is scheduled to appear in at least two of those six episodes. (Also keep in mind that the guy just finished treatment for a serious bout with cancer: he needs to train to get back in shape.)

Q: Fantasy sub-genres often seem to have something to do with the times in which they’re popular — e.g. the popularity of “lost world” fiction when Africa was being “explored” in the late 1800s and early 1900s. If this is true, what does the vampire craze really say about today? — Whitney, Buffalo, NY

A: Not what you might think: I think it represents the triumph of feminism.

Hold on! Bear with me a sec. What do I mean?

For eons, men have controlled the arts: they wrote (most of) the books and, more importantly, they literally decided what got published. Even female fantasy characters like Wonder Woman were created by men and told from a mostly male perspective (which is why they so often ended up being male sex fantasies).

With the birth of the feminist movement, which finally broke through to mainstream U.S. culture in the 1960s and 1970s, woman finally had a real voice in the direction of society.

But it’s only been the last few decades that women have had the power and influence to truly change the fantasy genre (even more recent pioneering female fantasy characters like Buffy and Xena were created and written mostly by men).

So what kind of fantasy stories are many female authors writing, and many female readers buying? Yup: vampire fiction, movies, and television. It’s also worth acknowledging the nature of vampires has changed recently as a result of the contributions of these women: vampires are now much more emotional, and much more romantic (and also have better abs).

Why do many women tend to be drawn to vampires? Even much smarter minds than the All-Knowing, Fantasy-Question-Answering Oracle have been impaled by this question, so I won’t even hazard a guess.

But I think the fact that many women are drawn to vampires — and that their interest has created a massive, thriving, influential fantasy genre — is yet more evidence that the feminist movement was, and is, a big, fat success.

Q: What really happens when you put a bag of holding inside a bag of holding? — Marty, Flagstaff, AZ

A: The kind of moment that Dungeon Masters live for!

A bag of holding is, of course, a popular Dungeons & Dragons magic item that is a bag that leads to an inter-dimensional space; you can store up to forty times the weight of the bag inside the bag, and it never gets any heavier.

Truthfully, the current edition of the game allows you to put bags of holding inside each other without effect, so you can store an ever-greater amount of stuff. But in older editions of the game, putting one bag of holding inside the other created a gate to astral dimension, destroying the bags and sucking anything within ten feet through the gate.

Current rules or not, if I were the DM and my players placed bags within each other, something out-of-the-ordinary would definitely occur. I can’t say exactly what, but suffice to say that it would involve giant tentacles!

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Andy Whitfield, the star of the Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand who was undergoing treatment for Stage 1 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, has been given a clean bill of health and is training to return to work on the TV show, Deadline.com reports.

His hair, which was shaved for the cancer treatment, has already begun to grow back.

In light of Whitfield’s cancer, Starz had begun work on a six-episode “prequel” series. Whitfield will now appear in two of those episodes.

“After the initial shock – I was a healthy young man and had no idea that this could happen – it was frustrating that the first season was ending on such a high note and we could’ve been rolling into season 2,” Whitfield told the publication by phone from New Zealand.

“I’m [now] raring to go,” he said.

With Andy Whitfield, the star of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, recovering from cancer, the Starz channel has okayed a six-episode “prequel” series that will concentrate on characters played by Lucy Lawless and John Hannah.

The series will show the house of Batiatus (Hannah) before the arrival of Spartacus. Most of the rest of the first season cast will return as well, and the series will also include new characters, including the gladiator who was the champion of the House of Batiatus before Spartacus or even Crixus, a character who will “help fill in the story about the people and politics in the House of Batiatus and ancient Capua as a whole,” according to a press release from the Starz network.

The series will begin production this summer and will air in January 2011.

According to the network, Whitfield is responding well to his treatment for Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.

It’s that time of the year again, when TV fans either set their faces to smug because their favorite shows have already been renewed, or they chew on their fingers and rock back-and-forth in a corner like Gollum because NBC handed out a renewal for the asinine Marriage Ref, but there is still no word on Chuck. (Maybe that second thing is just me. Maybe I’m the only one in clutching a picture of Yvonne Strahovski and whispering “Precious, my precious.”)

Here’s our quick run-down on what’s in, what’s out, and what’s on the bubble for fantasy TV next year.

ALREADY RENEWED

CW
Supernatural
Vampire Diaries
Smallville

Fox
Fringe

HBO
True Blood (Third season begins in June)

Starz
Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Syfy
Warehouse 13
Eureka
Stargate Universe

ON THE BUBBLE

NBC
Heroes (could go either way, according to Entertainment Weekly)
Chuck (could go either way, according to EW)

ABC
V (could go either way, according to EW)
FlashForward (a long shot, according to EW)

CBS
Medium (could go either way, according to EW)
Ghost Whisperer (a safe bet, according to EW)

Syfy
Caprica (could go either way, according to EW)

Syndicated
Legend of the Seeker (studio exploring options for third season)

ALREADY CANCELED

Fox
Past Life

Both Chuck and Heroes have made it into the final round of E! Online’s annual “Save One Show” competition.  So if you want to be proactive about bringing either one of them back, go vote! If your show is on the bubble and it didn’t make it to E!’s final round, I’ll make room for you in my corner — but don’t touch my photos of Agent Sarah Walker.

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How confident is the premium cable network Starz in the new series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which debuts January 22nd?

They’ve just renewed it for a second season.

They’re doing it preemptively as a vote of confidence in the show, Starz executive vice president of programming Stephan Shelanski told Daily Variety. They also wanted to give the writers and producers a head start on next year’s production.

The title for the second season, which was given a 13-episode order (like the first season), will be Spartacus: Vengeance.

The show stars Lucy Lawless and Australian actor Andy Whitfield, who plays the gladiator (and future rebellious slave) Spartacus in the time of Ancient Rome.

The first episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a new series starring Lucy Lawless that tells the story of the legendary rebel Roman slave, finished shooting this week in New Zealand, and those involved say it includes graphic sex and violence unlike anything ever seen on television.

“[The network] has given us quite a bit of rope with which to hang ourselves,” says Rob Tapert, the co-creator of Xena: Warrior Princess who is executive producing along with Joshua Donen and Spiderman’s Sam Raimi. “It’s unlike anything we’ve done before, because it is very hard and very explicit. It’s harder than 300,” he says, referring to Zack Synder’s explicit 2006 movie adaptation of the graphic novel.

“We have something different,” promises Tapert.

The show, which will bow in January of next year, is being produced for Starz Entertainment, the premium cable network, which estimates that each episode will cost over $2 million. The first season will run thirteen episodes.

“We’re going to cut it back on Starz, which is premium cable, so that they feel it fits within the R-rating slot,” Tapert says. “If it went into a theater, it would definitely be R-rated.”

It’s not just the violence that’s explicit. “Violence and sex,” Tapert says.

Spartacus is played by Australian Andy Whitfield. Lawless, Tapert’s real-life wife, plays Lucretia, the owner of the gladiator school where Spartacus is imprisoned.

“The guys and girls who star in it are stars,” Tapert says. “That is exciting and reassuring.”

The historical Spartacus was a gladiator-slave who lived in Rome from 109 BC to 71 BC. In 73 BC, he led a slave rebellion that eventually included 140,000 escaped slaves.

“The first season is a retelling of the legend of Spartacus leading up to him getting out of the slave prison,” Tapert says.

As with Xena: Warrior Princess, the show will also feature strong female characters. “I come from the Joss Whedon camp, so I love strong women, and I love big sweeping romantic arcs that will probably end badly, just like Joss always does,” showrunner Steven DeKnight (Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) told TV.ign.com.

The action-adventure series will also include gay characters, both male and female. “All of the above,” Tapert says.

Xena: Warrior Princess star Lucy Lawless has signed to play the proprietor of a gladiator camp in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a new series that retells the historical story of a rebel Roman slave, coming next January on Starz. The series is executive produced by frequent collaborators (and the executive producers of Xena) Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi.

The show is a big investment for Starz, a premium cable channel, with a per-episode cost of more than $2 million. As with Xena, the show will be shot in New Zealand, but much of the show will be reportedly be shot on “virtual” sets, mixing live actors and CGI backcrops.

The historical Spartacus lived from 109 to 71 BC. A slave and gladiator, he led an uprising against the Roman Republic in 73 BC. With 200 followers, he escaped the gladiator school of Lentulus Batiatus, the male basis for the character presumably played by Lawless.  Spartacus was eventually joined by 140,000 escaped slaves; together they successfully fought the Republic until their defeat in early 71 BC. Unlike the famous crucifixion scene in the popular 1960 movie, Spartacus’ body was never found.

Like Spartacus, the character of Xena frequently battled Roman emperors and soldiers, and even fought as a gladiator several times herself.

Raimi created the syndicated fantasy series Legend of the Seeker, and he and Tapert are currently that show’s executive producers. Tapert is married to Lawless.