HE'LL SAVE EVERY ONE OF US!

Entertainment Weekly interviews Eric Johnson, star of the upcoming Sci Fi Channel's Flash Gordon.

Among the revealing tidbits that Johnson revealed:

"(Flash is) a marathon winner in his hometown, and he works on cars in his mom's garage. He's pretty regular.

He's got a pretty cool car: a '67 convertible Firebird.

He arrives on Planet Mongo at the end of Part 1 of the premiere. But the thing is, we're able to come back and forth using the old wormhole. Flash's father was a scientist who was developing the technology. I thought he was lost in a fire, but it turns out he was sucked through this wormhole that he created. So now after 13 years, something came back through, and that something is not so nice, and it's looking for me.

We're not going to see any spaceships at this point. But there is some pretty cool stuff on the planet Mongo, I have to say. I saw some early drawings of some things we have to battle. We're gonna have our hands full, that's for sure.
There will be creatures, ships, different types of ray guns...it's pretty intense. There's already been a probe that has gone through, and an android. I fight an android in my kitchen.

We meet Ming the Merciless in the second part of the pilot. We meet him fairly quickly, and we find out right away that this guy is not to be trusted.

Ming is not entirely evil. What's amazing about him is he's an incredibly good-looking, charming guy. He's very physically capable. I mean, this isn't some decrepit old despot. He's a very, very worthy adversary. Flash and Dale are gonna have their hands full. If it came to blows, things wouldn't be one-sided in Flash's favor. I really like [the writers'] take on that. That was something that came up early. They thought it would be far more interesting to make Ming someone that you could understand, to have him be a very capable adversary.

(Dale and Flash are) exes. The story is, basically, we dated during the Clinton administration. She left and went to college, and now she's back in this small town, a reporter from the local newspaper who's engaged to one of the detectives in town. And we have a history.

(They end up side by side) Quite by accident, but we end up spending a lot of time together. So there's a bit of a love triangle in there. And of course, we have the sexy princess Aura and sexy alien bounty hunter Baylin, who also throw a couple wrenches into the works."