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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.
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I watched Battlestar Galactica.
...
Laura Roslin was cool but that scene was better when Ivanova did it the first time:
And her guns were bigger.
...
Laura Roslin was cool but that scene was better when Ivanova did it the first time:
And her guns were bigger.
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1) Asking me "why isn't Sarah Connor more popular" will result in a thesis-length essay on the ingrained sexism and androcentricism and sometimes outright misogyny in SF/F (not to mention heterocentricism and Eurocentricism), paticularly in genre TV. And yes, that includes Joss Whedon. And no, I don't think the women characters on BSG are particularly good examples of "strong women characters" - a cancer victim, a slutty headcase, a femme fatale and the stand-by-her man wife and mother are not my idea of good examples of interesting and empowered women (especially not when they're the ONLY female characters in a series). More like three stereotypes* and RDM's skanky gender issues in search of a story.
2) I really hate BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. I don't hate Joss Whedon as much as I hate BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. And I enjoy me some hatin' on the Joss. RDM should get some sort of award - I'm a critical viewer but we're talking putting season one out in the trash hate (and I still have X-FILES and XENA crap kicking around. That is how white-hot my hate for the crapfest that is BSG burns).
3) I need to update my layout so that Quantz is displayed properly in my flist. Anyone have any suggestions?
4) Zombies have been seen in the Dallas area. Run, run for you life.
eta - Why "but the guys on BSG all have sucky lives, too" is neither a persuasive argument nor a good enough excuse:
*Laura Roslin is still cool, which is probably why RDM is bound and determined to see her safely shacked-up with a man, emfeebled, stripped of her power and her personal dignity, and dead before the end of the series. Fuck you, BSG, you are aself-congratulatory, faux-intellectual, boiler-plate liberal piece of crap, but so ultimately clueless about how gender, race and sexual orientation are presented in your narrative that I want to shoot skeet with my DVDs (I will trade them in for Homicide instead). Truly progressive narratives do more than change the job labels afixed to their stereotypes.
2) I really hate BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. I don't hate Joss Whedon as much as I hate BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. And I enjoy me some hatin' on the Joss. RDM should get some sort of award - I'm a critical viewer but we're talking putting season one out in the trash hate (and I still have X-FILES and XENA crap kicking around. That is how white-hot my hate for the crapfest that is BSG burns).
3) I need to update my layout so that Quantz is displayed properly in my flist. Anyone have any suggestions?
4) Zombies have been seen in the Dallas area. Run, run for you life.
eta - Why "but the guys on BSG all have sucky lives, too" is neither a persuasive argument nor a good enough excuse:
*Laura Roslin is still cool, which is probably why RDM is bound and determined to see her safely shacked-up with a man, emfeebled, stripped of her power and her personal dignity, and dead before the end of the series. Fuck you, BSG, you are aself-congratulatory, faux-intellectual, boiler-plate liberal piece of crap, but so ultimately clueless about how gender, race and sexual orientation are presented in your narrative that I want to shoot skeet with my DVDs (I will trade them in for Homicide instead). Truly progressive narratives do more than change the job labels afixed to their stereotypes.
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Well, that was a heaping pile of shit.
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Katee Sackhoff is always enjoyable to watch so it's very hard to be completely disinterested in any episode in which she appears. That said, the latest episode almost accomplished it. The entire episode builds to a moment that was spoiled in the teaser, which pretty much destroyed any narrative tension to the A plot, all of which could have been rolled into a single act with no loss. In stead we get a "to be continued" and a teaser for next week, which makes it pretty clear that all the action that should have been in this week's episode will be in next week's instead.
So, with 15 episodes left, the A plot for this week was two thirds spinning its wheels and looking up its own ass, in which characters have the same conversation three times, and one third actual plot - and that's being generous.
I'm no longer worried that BSG will run out of time to wrap up this season, I'm worried that the writer's don't actually have enough story to fill 20 episodes. And since Ron Moore and his writing room have never managed to write an entire season that hung together, it's probably no surprise that season four to date is so damn awful, meandering and bloated with unnecessary and anvilicious character beats.
Case in point: back over on the Galactica, the final four (minus one) and Baltar spent the episode monologuing at each other about their struggles with identity and God. Thank you, I hadn't been beaten over the head with this plot in a week and my concussion was beginning to clear.
So, with 15 episodes left, the A plot for this week was two thirds spinning its wheels and looking up its own ass, in which characters have the same conversation three times, and one third actual plot - and that's being generous.
I'm no longer worried that BSG will run out of time to wrap up this season, I'm worried that the writer's don't actually have enough story to fill 20 episodes. And since Ron Moore and his writing room have never managed to write an entire season that hung together, it's probably no surprise that season four to date is so damn awful, meandering and bloated with unnecessary and anvilicious character beats.
Case in point: back over on the Galactica, the final four (minus one) and Baltar spent the episode monologuing at each other about their struggles with identity and God. Thank you, I hadn't been beaten over the head with this plot in a week and my concussion was beginning to clear.
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The weekend was marginally productive. No surprise to me but the account of my surgical adventure is not exactly flowing from me for my life writing class. I did get some editing done for the anthology we're putting out, so not all was lost.
Media Consumed Recently:
Movies
Imagine Me & You
TV
30 Rock 2.12
Battlestar Galactica 4.03
Doctor Who 4.03
ER, Bones, L&O:SVU latest episodes
Books
Still working my way through Anna Karenina - Russians are wordy, God!
Doctor Who was a serviceable romp that once again highlighted the differences between Donna and Ten's previous companions. I can see the much more traditional sidekick/partner dynamic NuWho is trying to build between them and I like it. However, the best part of the episode was the trailer for next week - why hello, old friend. You look particularly made of awesome in that jacket. Good to see you, please proceed to kick much ass.
I'm tempted to break up with BSG and if the Internet weren't in love with the show, I would probably wait and watch the whole thing when it comes out on DVD. I'm not loving the idea of waiting another year for the last 10 episodes and I'm not loving the fourth season so far. The performances and individual scenes have been very good. The overall effect, I find to be less than the sum of its parts - with only 20 episodes left, BSG should be starting to give us some answers butis laying more questions on us instead. 17 episodes left and I'm not feeling terribly confident about Ron Moore and his writers' ability to answer them all by the end of the series run. I have a terrible feeling we're going to be stuck with a Trek-esque two-hour finale to wrap things up rather than a proper third act to the series.
I'm also not loving the way BSG is throwing out story beats of all of a sudden like ( spoiler ) More scifi tokenism - it's really not very progressive to have all these strong female characters if you're going to spend all your time making them crazy (Starbuck), grasping (Roslin) and untrusty (Tory, Boomer, Caprica, Gina, Starbuck, Roslin). C'mon, Ron, take your head out of your press clippings and take a look at how you are actually portraying the women on your show.
Finally, Tina Fey has officially made my short list of women I want to be when I grow up. Tina Fey is made entirely of awesomesauce and snark. It's a beautiful thing.
Media Consumed Recently:
Movies
Imagine Me & You
TV
30 Rock 2.12
Battlestar Galactica 4.03
Doctor Who 4.03
ER, Bones, L&O:SVU latest episodes
Books
Still working my way through Anna Karenina - Russians are wordy, God!
Doctor Who was a serviceable romp that once again highlighted the differences between Donna and Ten's previous companions. I can see the much more traditional sidekick/partner dynamic NuWho is trying to build between them and I like it. However, the best part of the episode was the trailer for next week - why hello, old friend. You look particularly made of awesome in that jacket. Good to see you, please proceed to kick much ass.
I'm tempted to break up with BSG and if the Internet weren't in love with the show, I would probably wait and watch the whole thing when it comes out on DVD. I'm not loving the idea of waiting another year for the last 10 episodes and I'm not loving the fourth season so far. The performances and individual scenes have been very good. The overall effect, I find to be less than the sum of its parts - with only 20 episodes left, BSG should be starting to give us some answers butis laying more questions on us instead. 17 episodes left and I'm not feeling terribly confident about Ron Moore and his writers' ability to answer them all by the end of the series run. I have a terrible feeling we're going to be stuck with a Trek-esque two-hour finale to wrap things up rather than a proper third act to the series.
I'm also not loving the way BSG is throwing out story beats of all of a sudden like ( spoiler ) More scifi tokenism - it's really not very progressive to have all these strong female characters if you're going to spend all your time making them crazy (Starbuck), grasping (Roslin) and untrusty (Tory, Boomer, Caprica, Gina, Starbuck, Roslin). C'mon, Ron, take your head out of your press clippings and take a look at how you are actually portraying the women on your show.
Finally, Tina Fey has officially made my short list of women I want to be when I grow up. Tina Fey is made entirely of awesomesauce and snark. It's a beautiful thing.
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So... rewatching BSG season two highlights tonight ("Resistance", "The Farm", "Scar" - basically all the good stuff) and I've discovered that I like Anders. And I like Anders and Kara together. Kind of more than I like Lee and Kara (although Season Two Lee a la "Razor" and "Scar" is cool, which is the point I realized how much I hate Season Three Lee and the whiny, little self-absorbed baby he's become*), which was something of an "oh, damn, girl" moment as my attitude to BSG realigned itself along a new "RDM and writing staff are only half as dumb/annoying as I thought they were" axis**.
Of course, this may all be nothing more than a realization that Michael Trucco is tall and hot and Jamie Bamber is also hot but short and, dude, tall guys always win***. However, it does cause me to reevaluate some of the shit that went down in Season Three (aka the Many Deaths of Kara Thrace****) visa vi Kara's relationship with Lee and her marriage to Sam. I may have to turn in my shipper card*****. Then again, I've theoretically given up fandom, so that shouldn't be an issue.
One thing that hasn't changed, is my unconditional love for Kara Thrace (and for Katee Sackhoff's performance - maybe if the writer's strike goes on long enough the Emmy voters will actually watch something that airs on a channel other than the Big Four and HBO).
Anyway, deeply meta and writerly thoughts will have to wait for coffee. In the meantime, does anyone have a frakkin' clue what the hell the end of Razor meant?
*QED why I actually found myself liking S2 Lee (no, Crossroads alone cannot undo an entire season of sucky characterization).
**Putting Lee and Dee together is still a sucky plot idea and the actors just never sold me on it.
***Brother No. 1: 6'2", Dad: 6'4", Brother No. 2: 6'8" - it's terribly Freudian but life can be tough that way.
****It's a metaphor. Spoilerphobes can frak off.
*****If I take off the shipper goggles and consider the possibility that Kara is not in love with Lee Adama, suddenly their dynamic over three seasons snaps inot focus. She loves him deeply, values his friendship and is sexually attracted to him but whatever hearts and flowers and giddy romantic infatuation she may have felt for him is long in the past (or so deeply suppressed as to be irrelevant), which is why she falls for Sam. Whatever her relationship with Lee is, in Kara's mind in S2, romantic is not it.
Of course, this may all be nothing more than a realization that Michael Trucco is tall and hot and Jamie Bamber is also hot but short and, dude, tall guys always win***. However, it does cause me to reevaluate some of the shit that went down in Season Three (aka the Many Deaths of Kara Thrace****) visa vi Kara's relationship with Lee and her marriage to Sam. I may have to turn in my shipper card*****. Then again, I've theoretically given up fandom, so that shouldn't be an issue.
One thing that hasn't changed, is my unconditional love for Kara Thrace (and for Katee Sackhoff's performance - maybe if the writer's strike goes on long enough the Emmy voters will actually watch something that airs on a channel other than the Big Four and HBO).
Anyway, deeply meta and writerly thoughts will have to wait for coffee. In the meantime, does anyone have a frakkin' clue what the hell the end of Razor meant?
*QED why I actually found myself liking S2 Lee (no, Crossroads alone cannot undo an entire season of sucky characterization).
**Putting Lee and Dee together is still a sucky plot idea and the actors just never sold me on it.
***Brother No. 1: 6'2", Dad: 6'4", Brother No. 2: 6'8" - it's terribly Freudian but life can be tough that way.
****It's a metaphor. Spoilerphobes can frak off.
*****If I take off the shipper goggles and consider the possibility that Kara is not in love with Lee Adama, suddenly their dynamic over three seasons snaps inot focus. She loves him deeply, values his friendship and is sexually attracted to him but whatever hearts and flowers and giddy romantic infatuation she may have felt for him is long in the past (or so deeply suppressed as to be irrelevant), which is why she falls for Sam. Whatever her relationship with Lee is, in Kara's mind in S2, romantic is not it.
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The thing I love about Battlestar Galactica, apart from the space planes and guns and young women with rage issues, is that when it's good, when the writing is on, it will fucking break you. Farscape could do that too, with muppets. Both shows hold a mirror up to the human experience and say this is what life is, this is what life is when you're too busy living your life to notice and we have to put in muppets and space planes and hot chicks and dudes and leather to get you to pay attention. The point it, the point that Jeanette Winterson and her ilk don't get, is that it is about life. Maybe it's life in a crucible but the emotions are just as real as Oepidus and Juliet and Pip and Leopold Bloom's and just because the scenery's a little extreme doesn't mean what's happening on stage isn't meaningful. That it can't touch you, make you feel, make you see the world a different way, a better way. It doesn't mean that it isn't dramatically valid just because half the characters are robots, or werewolves, or even elves. Because when Battlestar Galactica brings the A-game, it will fucking break you.
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I don't care what the Church says, there is a hell and that's where God sends fanfic writers who posit that Kara Thrace finds Lee Adama's attempts to cosset and shelter her "cute." I don't care if it is babyfic, have you ever actually watched the show?
Also, while I'm at it *gag*
Also, while I'm at it *gag*
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Two things about the BSG: Razor "flashback" mini-ep Skiffy aired on Friday:
1 - that guy they have playing young Adama is a fox. His IMDB photo gallery, however, is a triffle disturbing.
2 - I guess that explains why ( vague spoiler for BSG Mini/Flashback no.1 )
1 - that guy they have playing young Adama is a fox. His IMDB photo gallery, however, is a triffle disturbing.
2 - I guess that explains why ( vague spoiler for BSG Mini/Flashback no.1 )
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Robert Frost is still dead.
Staying up until 3 a.m. reading bad fanfic is silly but now I have a jones for Aliens/BSG crossover fic - not that I have time to write that or the six ficlets I owe people, the "Liars, Guns and Money" smut I've owed![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thassalia going on three years now and the only slightly less overdue Samurai Aeryn story that I promised simplystars sometime in 2004. And did I mention I have grad school applications to write and story to edit?
*headdesk*
Staying up until 3 a.m. reading bad fanfic is silly but now I have a jones for Aliens/BSG crossover fic - not that I have time to write that or the six ficlets I owe people, the "Liars, Guns and Money" smut I've owed
thassalia going on three years now and the only slightly less overdue Samurai Aeryn story that I promised simplystars sometime in 2004. And did I mention I have grad school applications to write and story to edit?*headdesk*
1) The season finale of Battlestar Galactica was better than the series finale of Rome, which suffered from trying to fit the climax of a major storyline (the Wars of the Second Triumvirate) and all the assorted character bits into a single hour.
2) "All Along the Watchtower" was an assinine choice for the season finale of BSG. Admittedly, Bear McCreary already broke down the illusion that BSG was about an un-Earthly civilization when he introduced the Adama Family Squabble Ullieann Pipe Chorus but Dylan? That was lame, Ron.
3) I was reading Heather Havrilesky's review of "Rome" on Salon - can someone please tell me when ignorance became some sort of virtue? "Who knew"? Fuck off - the creation of the Roman Empire is hardly some obscure footnote in world history and, frankly Heather, you don't sound cute when you write you were surprised by what happened to the historical characters used in the series, you sound like a cave-dwelling moron. I didn't realize being a TV critic necessitated never actually having read a book. Fool.
On an unrelated topic, why are you staying up until 1:30 reading bad BSG fic? Nine months, baby, you should pace yourself. Seriously bad fanfic. Seriously, seriously bad - we're talking Mary Sue shit, here. And you realize you're talking to yourself in your LJ, right? And it's out-of-character bad Mary Sue fic. Seriously, this is like, the black tar heroin of fic - the first hit might not be so bad but then you're rolling around on the floor doing a Hendrix and it's adios muchachos... I need Aliens on DVD. Not that that has anything to do with anything but Colonial Marines. Get it? Damn... now I want Aliens/BSG x-over fic. Aliens vs. Cylons... damn, talk about some disappointed facehuggers... hmmm. Not as good, of course, as Cybermen versus Daleks. Nothing is as good as Cybermen versus Daleks. Daleks pwn!....
2) "All Along the Watchtower" was an assinine choice for the season finale of BSG. Admittedly, Bear McCreary already broke down the illusion that BSG was about an un-Earthly civilization when he introduced the Adama Family Squabble Ullieann Pipe Chorus but Dylan? That was lame, Ron.
3) I was reading Heather Havrilesky's review of "Rome" on Salon - can someone please tell me when ignorance became some sort of virtue? "Who knew"? Fuck off - the creation of the Roman Empire is hardly some obscure footnote in world history and, frankly Heather, you don't sound cute when you write you were surprised by what happened to the historical characters used in the series, you sound like a cave-dwelling moron. I didn't realize being a TV critic necessitated never actually having read a book. Fool.
On an unrelated topic, why are you staying up until 1:30 reading bad BSG fic? Nine months, baby, you should pace yourself. Seriously bad fanfic. Seriously, seriously bad - we're talking Mary Sue shit, here. And you realize you're talking to yourself in your LJ, right? And it's out-of-character bad Mary Sue fic. Seriously, this is like, the black tar heroin of fic - the first hit might not be so bad but then you're rolling around on the floor doing a Hendrix and it's adios muchachos... I need Aliens on DVD. Not that that has anything to do with anything but Colonial Marines. Get it? Damn... now I want Aliens/BSG x-over fic. Aliens vs. Cylons... damn, talk about some disappointed facehuggers... hmmm. Not as good, of course, as Cybermen versus Daleks. Nothing is as good as Cybermen versus Daleks. Daleks pwn!....
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1) The Illusionist was a better movie about magic and stage magicians than The Prestige.
2) Even if The Prestige didn't give away the ending 2/3rds of the way through the movie, it would still be a half-hour too long and far too obvious.
3) I like George and Izzie together on Grey's Anatomy. Then again, I've been expecting them to get together since the pilot episode.
4) I think jumping Veronica Mars four or five years into the future to her experiences as a rookie FBI agent is a brilliant idea and exactly what Rob Thomas should have done at the end of the second season.
5) Jason Dohring is a lovely actor but Logan is a spoilt, self-absorbed wastrel - getting smacked around by your dad does not excuse being an asshole, no matter how big and soulful your brown eyes are.
6) Sin City is a better adaptation of a Frank Miller comic than 300.
7) Beowulf and Grendel is a better bad Gerard Butler movie than 300.
8) 300 is a bad movie - yes, $161,706,146 in ticket sales can be wrong - see Revenge of the Sith.
9) Battlestar Galactica has serious problems turning out a coherent full season of episodes and season three is the weakest yet, last two episodes included.
10) Batman could totally take Buffy.
2) Even if The Prestige didn't give away the ending 2/3rds of the way through the movie, it would still be a half-hour too long and far too obvious.
3) I like George and Izzie together on Grey's Anatomy. Then again, I've been expecting them to get together since the pilot episode.
4) I think jumping Veronica Mars four or five years into the future to her experiences as a rookie FBI agent is a brilliant idea and exactly what Rob Thomas should have done at the end of the second season.
5) Jason Dohring is a lovely actor but Logan is a spoilt, self-absorbed wastrel - getting smacked around by your dad does not excuse being an asshole, no matter how big and soulful your brown eyes are.
6) Sin City is a better adaptation of a Frank Miller comic than 300.
7) Beowulf and Grendel is a better bad Gerard Butler movie than 300.
8) 300 is a bad movie - yes, $161,706,146 in ticket sales can be wrong - see Revenge of the Sith.
9) Battlestar Galactica has serious problems turning out a coherent full season of episodes and season three is the weakest yet, last two episodes included.
10) Batman could totally take Buffy.
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At some point between now and the end of Battlestar Galactica's season, I may have to discuss my problems with this season and Ron Moore's attempt to wag the fandom's dog specifically - at least that's my take on what's going on (if you watch, you know what I'm talking about and if you don't, you don't care anyway). For now, a few general thoughts.
[Note: I briefly discuss Zodiac below. I don't consider historical facts spoilers but if you do, beware.]
There are certain dangers when writers don't play fair with their audience whether you're writing fic, novels, comics or television (movies are a slightly different beast). Principally, you risk losing their trust and their attention as a result. The consequences are magnified with the amount of time and money invested in the production - bad fic doesn't get read but bad TV can loose millions and end careers (hence, essential conservatism of publishers and network execs). Generally speaking, creators only need to follow one simple principle of "fair play" when dealing with your audience: if your heroine is going to shoot the bad guy in the third act, you introduce the gun that her daddy keeps in his bedside table in the first act. The innumerable variations on this idea aren't important. What is important is that you are always conscientious as a creator to give your audience all the information they need to reach the same point in the story as your characters - how well or poorly you do this is a question of talent and skill - just look at Shakespeare. But if you try to be coy with your audience, you not only risk losing their attention (either because they're confused or they're pissed off or some combination of both) you risk losing the thread of your own narrative.
For example, the story about a girl who shoots the bad guy who's menacing her is a different story from the one about a girl who is rescued when the dashing detective steps across the threshold and shoots the bad guy who's been menacing her is a different story from the one about girl who is about to shoot the bad guy menacing her when the dashing detective steps across the threshold and pulls the trigger is a different story from the one about the girl who believes she's shot the bad guy who was menacing her only to discover that her gun was loaded with blanks and it was Colonel Plumb with the parlour with a candlestick. The corollary to the principle that you always show the gun in the first act is that once you've shown the gun, you must use it - if you lead your audience to expect a certain result (our heroine shoots the bad guy) you take a risk if you choose not to meet those expectations.
However, that can still be a valid and interesting choice but you as writer need to be aware that your audience (let alone your characters - a post for another time) will react very differently to the ending where your heroine saves herself as opposed to the ending where she is saved. In dramatic narratives, the narrative is meant to create a specific emotional response from the audience be it triumph or tragedy, which is why expectation matters. If you build up your audience to believe that the heroine will pull the trigger and, in that final moment, a shot rings out behind her and we pull back to see the dashing detective emerge from the shadows, a smoking gun in his hand, you've created an expectation that has not been met. Even if the bad guy is still dead on the floor and the heroine and the dashing detective still drive off into the sunset, there is still that unmet expectation to be addressed.
Some writers use unmet expectations to create a specific mood but most, in my experience, don't seem to understand the difference between manipulating an audience's mood and a bait and switch. David Fincher's Zodiac is an excellent example of the former, a police procedural that ends with the same frustrating ambiguity as the real-life investigations into the Zodiac killings. It is a disturbing and unsettling movie, in large measure precisely because it fails to meet our expectation that, at the end of last reel, we'd see the forces of goodness triumphant and order restored. Sunday's episode of Battlestar Galactica is, despite some of the best performances of the season, the one of the latter, I think - the narrative equivalent of taking away the football after your audience has committed to punting.
Even if it all does turn out to be a ploy to foil Internet spoiler hounds on Ron Moore's part, he's sacrificed a big chunk of his audience's faith in his storytelling - your team may, in the end, wind up with a touchdown but your kicker will still remember what it felt like to thud against the deck and will be just that little bit more tentative on the next play.
Trust between people is hard enough to repair when you can talk face to face. Trust between storytellers and audiences is far flimsier and, in my experience, once lost, gone for good. Caveat scriptor.
[Note: I briefly discuss Zodiac below. I don't consider historical facts spoilers but if you do, beware.]
There are certain dangers when writers don't play fair with their audience whether you're writing fic, novels, comics or television (movies are a slightly different beast). Principally, you risk losing their trust and their attention as a result. The consequences are magnified with the amount of time and money invested in the production - bad fic doesn't get read but bad TV can loose millions and end careers (hence, essential conservatism of publishers and network execs). Generally speaking, creators only need to follow one simple principle of "fair play" when dealing with your audience: if your heroine is going to shoot the bad guy in the third act, you introduce the gun that her daddy keeps in his bedside table in the first act. The innumerable variations on this idea aren't important. What is important is that you are always conscientious as a creator to give your audience all the information they need to reach the same point in the story as your characters - how well or poorly you do this is a question of talent and skill - just look at Shakespeare. But if you try to be coy with your audience, you not only risk losing their attention (either because they're confused or they're pissed off or some combination of both) you risk losing the thread of your own narrative.
For example, the story about a girl who shoots the bad guy who's menacing her is a different story from the one about a girl who is rescued when the dashing detective steps across the threshold and shoots the bad guy who's been menacing her is a different story from the one about girl who is about to shoot the bad guy menacing her when the dashing detective steps across the threshold and pulls the trigger is a different story from the one about the girl who believes she's shot the bad guy who was menacing her only to discover that her gun was loaded with blanks and it was Colonel Plumb with the parlour with a candlestick. The corollary to the principle that you always show the gun in the first act is that once you've shown the gun, you must use it - if you lead your audience to expect a certain result (our heroine shoots the bad guy) you take a risk if you choose not to meet those expectations.
However, that can still be a valid and interesting choice but you as writer need to be aware that your audience (let alone your characters - a post for another time) will react very differently to the ending where your heroine saves herself as opposed to the ending where she is saved. In dramatic narratives, the narrative is meant to create a specific emotional response from the audience be it triumph or tragedy, which is why expectation matters. If you build up your audience to believe that the heroine will pull the trigger and, in that final moment, a shot rings out behind her and we pull back to see the dashing detective emerge from the shadows, a smoking gun in his hand, you've created an expectation that has not been met. Even if the bad guy is still dead on the floor and the heroine and the dashing detective still drive off into the sunset, there is still that unmet expectation to be addressed.
Some writers use unmet expectations to create a specific mood but most, in my experience, don't seem to understand the difference between manipulating an audience's mood and a bait and switch. David Fincher's Zodiac is an excellent example of the former, a police procedural that ends with the same frustrating ambiguity as the real-life investigations into the Zodiac killings. It is a disturbing and unsettling movie, in large measure precisely because it fails to meet our expectation that, at the end of last reel, we'd see the forces of goodness triumphant and order restored. Sunday's episode of Battlestar Galactica is, despite some of the best performances of the season, the one of the latter, I think - the narrative equivalent of taking away the football after your audience has committed to punting.
Even if it all does turn out to be a ploy to foil Internet spoiler hounds on Ron Moore's part, he's sacrificed a big chunk of his audience's faith in his storytelling - your team may, in the end, wind up with a touchdown but your kicker will still remember what it felt like to thud against the deck and will be just that little bit more tentative on the next play.
Trust between people is hard enough to repair when you can talk face to face. Trust between storytellers and audiences is far flimsier and, in my experience, once lost, gone for good. Caveat scriptor.
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I give myself a C on the accuracy of my spec' for this episode. The question is ( Maelstrom Spoiler Below )
On the bright side, if the rest of the season continues to suck the way the four episodes between "Eye of Jupiter" and "Maelstrom" sucked, Moore's just saved me $50 on DVDS.
ETA: ( Thoughts on the episode besides the other thing. )
On the bright side, if the rest of the season continues to suck the way the four episodes between "Eye of Jupiter" and "Maelstrom" sucked, Moore's just saved me $50 on DVDS.
ETA: ( Thoughts on the episode besides the other thing. )
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Since I can't be bothered to sign into TWoP and TWoP MBS make me cranky at the best of times, here's what I think's gonna happen to Starbuck in Sunday's BSG ep based on the spoilers I've read and the previews I've seen:
( Spoilers Ahoy, Mateys! )Or I could be totally wrong. We shall see, eh?
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