Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

In NBC’s Medium , the show’s executive producer, Kelsey Gram-mer, showed up as an urbane Death, Molly Ringwald played the victim of a stalker, and psychic Alison (Patricia Arquette) had an It’s a Wonderful Life moment in the second season finale when she discovered what her life would have been like if things had worked out differently. The show was back with a two-hour premiere in November, in which Alison’s dead ex-boyfriend (Arquette’s real-life husband Thomas Jane) turned up.

Following a near-fatal séance at the end of the first season, Lesley Sharp returned as morose medium Alison Mundy, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother (Amanda Lawrence) in a second, eight-part series of Afterlife , created by Stephen Volk.

Meanwhile, Melinda (Jennifer Love Hewitt) had to make peace with her mother to lay a ghost to rest in CBS-TV’s Ghost Whisperer . The first season ended with a plane crash and the death of series regular Andrea (Aisha Tyler). However, the character was back in the first show of the second series. Camryn Manheim joined the cast as Delia, and Jay Mohr played Rick Payne, a professor studying the supernatural.

The Dead Zone returned for its fifth and supposedly final season, filmed back-to-back with series four. In the season finale, Johnny (Anthony Michael Hall) discovered that vice president Greg Stillson (Sean Patrick Flanery), who was being controlled by evil mastermind Janus (Martin Donovan), was the target of an assassin. In a surprise announcement in September, the USA Network picked up the show for a sixth season.

Bill Paterson’s scientific investigator Douglas Monaghan was mostly missing from the six-part, third series of the BBC’s Sea of Souls , and it was left to his assistants Craig Stevenson (Iain Robertson) and psychic Justine McManus (Dawn Steele) to debunk the supernatural manifestations that kept cropping up all over Scotland. In the penultimate episode they encountered a genuine succubus who drained her victims of their life-force.

A group of dull characters discovered that they possessed superpowers and had to “save the cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere), save the world” in NBC-TV’s over-hyped Heroes . The show went on hiatus in December before returning with twenty-two new episodes in 2007.

CBS-TV’s gloomy post-apocalyptic drama Jericho , starring Skeet Ulrich and Gerald McRaney as an estranged son and father among the inhabitants of a Kansas town cut off by a nuclear attack on America, also took a mid-season break in December.

In ABC-TV’s meandering Lost , Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez) and Libby (Cynthia Watros) were both shot dead before the two-hour second season finale in May and, when the series returned, the ruthless Mr Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) was killed off by the show’s mysterious monster. While everybody else was still trying to uncover the secret of the island, a dithering Kate (Evangeline Lily) still couldn’t make up her mind between doctor Jack (Matthew Fox) and bad boy Sawyer (Josh Holloway). To avoid repeats, the show went on hiatus for two months in December to make way for the confusing Day Break , in which Taye Diggs’ disgraced LAPD detective kept reliving the same bad day over and over again (now where have we seen that before?).

Meanwhile, Hurley’s cursed lottery numbers from Lost turned up on a fortune cookie message in the January 25th episode of UPN’s Veronica Mars and appeared the same day on the cover of DC Comics’ Catwoman #51. Now that was really weird!

After five seasons, ABC’s Alias finally came to a two-hour end in May, as secret agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) confronted a group of old foes and attempted to make some sense of the “Ram-baldi” prophecy.

The Sci Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica continued to be the best SF show on television, as the remaining humans escaped from slavery on New Caprica and raced their humanoid enemies the Cylons to find the way to Earth in a two-part, mid-season, cliff-hanger.

USA Network’s The 4400 returned for a third season of thirteen episodes in June, as Tippi Hedren guest starred in the two-hour opener. Government investigators Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) and Diana Skouris (Jacqueline McKenzie) tried to foil Jordan Collier’s (Billy Campbell) plans for mankind, and baby Isabelle mysteriously transformed into a sexy twenty-year-old (Megalyn Echikunwoke).

Stargate SG-1 became TV’s longest-running SF series with its tenth and final series, which also saw the show celebrate its 200th episode (with a Wizard of Oz spoof and numerous in-jokes). Richard Dean Anderson reprised his role as Jack O’Neill in a number of episodes, including a two-part crossover episode with Stargate Atlantis . MGM announced that it would be making two Stargate SG-1 movies once the series was over.

Despite being an interesting variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers , ABC’s Invasion was cancelled after its first season, without ever resolving its human-hybrid conspiracy.

After being marooned with his rebellious teenage daughter Zoë (Jordan Hinson) in the eponymous town of the Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka (aka A Town Called Eureka ), Jack Carter (the likeable Colin Furguson) found himself the new sheriff of a top-secret community filled with geniuses. The first episode attracted an audience of 4.1 million in the US, the most for a series launch in the channel’s history.

Series eight of The WB’s Charmed saw the witchy Halliwell sisters working for Homeland Security with the help of teenage witch Billie (Kaley Cuoco). After 178 episodes, the series bowed out with an episode in which the Charmed Ones travelled back in time to save the world from the forces of evil and finally put their lives in order.

Paul Wesley’s eighteen-year-old orphan discovered that he was a Nephilim, the offspring of an angel and a mortal in the ABC Family limited-run series Fallen , while Matt Dallas learned that he was a teenage clone without a past or any emotions in the ABC Family show Kyle XY .

Over on The CW’s Smallville , which passed its 100th episode early in the year with the death of Clark’s adoptive father Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) from a heart attack (he returned as a ghost), a pregnant Lana (Kristen Kreuk) finally married Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), while Clark (Tom Welling) rounded up a group of escapees from the Phantom Zone. Meanwhile, Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore) was introduced, the Martian Manhunter briefly turned up, and semi-regular Oliver Queen/Green Arrow (Justin Hartley) rounded up past guest stars The Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman to form a nascent Justice League to investigate LuthorCorp’s mysterious “Project 33.1”.

Hyperdrive was a six-part BBC comedy series set aboard the spaceship HMS Camden Lock, whose crew (led by Nick Frost) had a mission to promote British interests across the galaxy. In an attempt to impress a couple of Goth girls, Howard (Julian Barratt) and Vince (Noel Fielding) accidentally summoned the most evil demon known to man in a second season episode of the BBC comedy series The Mighty Boosh .

The team went searching for a woman who disappeared after an exorcism in an episode of CBS’ Without a Trace. A series of bombings in Seattle were linked to a sci-fi novel set in an apocalyptic future controlled by robots in an episode of the same network’s Criminal Minds , and Roger Daltrey guest-starred in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation that paid homage to the classic slasher films of the 1980s.

Not content with its usual lunacy, Bad Girls: A Christmas Special added the supernatural to the final episode of the long-running British women’s prison drama, as the ghost of Larkhill’s supposedly escaped inmate Natalie Buxton (Dannielle Brent) put the frights on G Wing while her rotting body blocked the prison sewers.