lifeonqueen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lifeonqueen) wrote2009-03-20 06:32 pm
lifeonqueen) wrote2009-03-20 06:32 pm
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On the Last New Episode of BSG
Sometimes, you've got to go with your gut instincts.
When the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries aired in 2003 - before the write-ups in TIME Magazine and the Peabody - to middingly cable ratings (the 4 million-odd audience was then the SciFi Channel's largest audience ever but represented a third of the ratings of THE SOPRANOS, still ruling HBO at the time) and lukewarm reviews, I thought it was an engaging but problematic reboot. The story had dramatic momentum and in 2003, the allusions to 9/11 resonated intensely with the audience. But the characters were a little to paint-by-numbers - Kara Thrace was a caricature of the tough-chick stereotype, Lee Adama was boring but their scenes together provided some of the only genuine dramatic zip to the character interactions. Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell were too obviously above the material they were being asked to play and the way the mini immediately put the two characters at odds planted obvious seeds for a future romantic relationship. The only thing that made me even marginally interested in a potential series, apart from exploring Starbuck and Apollo's fucked-up attraction, was the reveal in the conclusion's last minute that Boomer was a Cylon!
It turns out that revelation, on which so much of the show's mythology would eventually turn, was a last minute addition on the part of the writers. Depending on how you feel about the 80 episodes of TV that followed, this was either an inspired improvisation or an early warning that the producers, David Eick and Ronald D. Moore, with Bushian hubris, had begun their epic without a clear game-plan or exit strategy.
In the ensuing six years, I would come to hold both points of view, sometimes simultaneously. In my final analysis, I find myself sitting in the opposing benches. The long development time between the mini-series and the series premier gave Eick and Moore the space to craft a truly superlative season of television. The 13 initial episodes work together as a tight unit, developing the characters and growing the plot with a sure momentum towards the end of the season. BSG has been coasting on the reputation and goodwill generated by those initial episodes ever since.
Renewed for a second season and rewarded with an expanded order for 20 episodes, Eick and Moore responded with slack storytelling, episodes disconnected from any sense of narrative time, plot elements introduced out of nowhere and dropped in the next episode (anyone heard from the blackmarket lately?), abrupt shifts in characterization and hackneyed, issue-driven storytelling that would have been heavy-handed on an after-school special. I dropped out of BSG half-way through the second season and still have not seen several episodes from that year.
What BSG did have going for it was a surprisingly strong cast with Katee Sackhoff, Grace Parks, Michael Hogan and Aaron Douglas giving performances that far surpassed the material they were given to play. And it was the characters that drew me back to BSG in the third season, only for the show to lose me again.
I think I finally broke up with BATTLESTAR GALACTICA when they killed Starbuck in "Maelstrom", a move that was so patently a red-herring that it was hard to understand why they would go there. As is always the case with BSG, the cast played the hell out of that storyline, but three seasons worth of plot about Kara Thrace's "special destiny" immediately discounted the possibility that the character was truly gone and her re-appearance three episodes later was not only anti-climactic, it was cheap.
When it was announced that BSG's fourth season would be its last, the expectation was that Eick and Moore would return to the taut, tightly-connected writing that distinguished the first season. Instead, the audience was treated to 15 hours of navel-gazing where the story should have been pushing towards a conclusion that matched the scope of the story Eick and Moore began six years earlier. That the final season of BSG is such an unmitigated disaster, slack on the page, abstruse on the screen, means that whatever happens tonight is almost besides the point.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA v.2.0, 2003-2009 - Not with a bang, but a whimper.
When the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries aired in 2003 - before the write-ups in TIME Magazine and the Peabody - to middingly cable ratings (the 4 million-odd audience was then the SciFi Channel's largest audience ever but represented a third of the ratings of THE SOPRANOS, still ruling HBO at the time) and lukewarm reviews, I thought it was an engaging but problematic reboot. The story had dramatic momentum and in 2003, the allusions to 9/11 resonated intensely with the audience. But the characters were a little to paint-by-numbers - Kara Thrace was a caricature of the tough-chick stereotype, Lee Adama was boring but their scenes together provided some of the only genuine dramatic zip to the character interactions. Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell were too obviously above the material they were being asked to play and the way the mini immediately put the two characters at odds planted obvious seeds for a future romantic relationship. The only thing that made me even marginally interested in a potential series, apart from exploring Starbuck and Apollo's fucked-up attraction, was the reveal in the conclusion's last minute that Boomer was a Cylon!
It turns out that revelation, on which so much of the show's mythology would eventually turn, was a last minute addition on the part of the writers. Depending on how you feel about the 80 episodes of TV that followed, this was either an inspired improvisation or an early warning that the producers, David Eick and Ronald D. Moore, with Bushian hubris, had begun their epic without a clear game-plan or exit strategy.
In the ensuing six years, I would come to hold both points of view, sometimes simultaneously. In my final analysis, I find myself sitting in the opposing benches. The long development time between the mini-series and the series premier gave Eick and Moore the space to craft a truly superlative season of television. The 13 initial episodes work together as a tight unit, developing the characters and growing the plot with a sure momentum towards the end of the season. BSG has been coasting on the reputation and goodwill generated by those initial episodes ever since.
Renewed for a second season and rewarded with an expanded order for 20 episodes, Eick and Moore responded with slack storytelling, episodes disconnected from any sense of narrative time, plot elements introduced out of nowhere and dropped in the next episode (anyone heard from the blackmarket lately?), abrupt shifts in characterization and hackneyed, issue-driven storytelling that would have been heavy-handed on an after-school special. I dropped out of BSG half-way through the second season and still have not seen several episodes from that year.
What BSG did have going for it was a surprisingly strong cast with Katee Sackhoff, Grace Parks, Michael Hogan and Aaron Douglas giving performances that far surpassed the material they were given to play. And it was the characters that drew me back to BSG in the third season, only for the show to lose me again.
I think I finally broke up with BATTLESTAR GALACTICA when they killed Starbuck in "Maelstrom", a move that was so patently a red-herring that it was hard to understand why they would go there. As is always the case with BSG, the cast played the hell out of that storyline, but three seasons worth of plot about Kara Thrace's "special destiny" immediately discounted the possibility that the character was truly gone and her re-appearance three episodes later was not only anti-climactic, it was cheap.
When it was announced that BSG's fourth season would be its last, the expectation was that Eick and Moore would return to the taut, tightly-connected writing that distinguished the first season. Instead, the audience was treated to 15 hours of navel-gazing where the story should have been pushing towards a conclusion that matched the scope of the story Eick and Moore began six years earlier. That the final season of BSG is such an unmitigated disaster, slack on the page, abstruse on the screen, means that whatever happens tonight is almost besides the point.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA v.2.0, 2003-2009 - Not with a bang, but a whimper.