Sweet Galactica-y Goodness

The always-excellent Dan Hartland has another Battlestar Galactica piece up at Strange Horizons. It's not exactly a review of the second season--more a meditation about the 'one year later' leap, what it tells us about the writers' attitude towards the show and about Galactica's chances of survival.
The overall impression is not of a show confidently stepping forward towards a grand new format, but rather a series galloping full tilt from a paradigm it's not sure it can write very well anymore, heedless of everything it has set up. Having followed Galactica and expected some follow-through on the old issues, the viewer is instead presented with an episode which pays lip service to addressing them but in fact is merely getting them out of the way. It is a curiously unceremonious narrative, a nervy rather than a gutsy performance.
I find it interesting to note the difference between Dan's approach to a second season summary piece and mine. I discussed the second season's strengths and weaknesses, and had almost nothing to say about the reboot at its end. Dan concentrates on the shift forward and only touches on the season that preceded it. I think Dan is right when he says that the second season "ended by eviscerating itself". Once we acknowledge the reboot, there's very little left to say about the season itself--it has been bled of all significance and importance, and might as well not even have taken place. Which may very well have been the point.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse

The last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelation of serious irregularities in the compilation of the award's ballot, there was a great ferment of conversation and action. Mainstream publications have caught wind of the scandal and publicized it far and wide . Turnover in the few permanent committees that oversee the Hugo trademark and intellectual property has been high . The poor folks at the upcoming Glasgow Worldcon have been scrambling to respond to the evolving situation and to distance themselves from the previous committee—including, most recently, making a laconic announcement that they would refuse any of Chengdu's passalong funds, the budgetary surplus that is traditionally bequeathed from one Worldcon to the next. And stats nerds—of which this community is, unsurprisingly, blessed with a surfeit—have been furiously crunching the nominations numbers and EPH calculations...
Read more

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an Asterisk

It's been a while since we've had one of these dramas. On Saturday, the nominating stats for the 2023 Hugo awards, which were announced in Chengdu, China in October 2023, were released to the public . There was a great deal of anticipation for these numbers, in no small part because of their much-delayed release. Though the WSFS constitution permits Hugo administrators to wait as long as 90 days before releasing the voting and nominating stats, most Hugo teams have them ready to go within minutes of the ceremony's conclusion. Chengdu, in contrast, waited the full allotted period, and even went a little bit over (the voting stats were released separately in December). Once the stats were released, it quickly became clear why the Chengdu Hugo team were hesitant to make them public. There are any number of irregularities and questionable choices in this document that suggest everything from erratic voter behavior, to incompetent collation and calculation of the nomination rank...
Read more

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The first thing that must be said about this movie is that it should not work. It's a prequel to one of the most mind-blowing, groundbreaking, and just plain revolutionary action movies of the 21st century—and prequels are a bad idea in most cases, but all the more so when the character they revolve around has already given you their entire backstory in their original introduction, which is also the final, culminating act of their character arc. (To put it another way, if you had asked me, nine years ago, which character I thought offered more fertile ground for prequel storytelling, Imperator Furiosa or Han Solo, I would have picked Han without a moment's hesitation, and I don't even like Han that much.) And it's a follow-up to a movie whose chief virtue lies in its conciseness—in being a single, drawn-out, pulse-pounding, increasingly deranged car chase. Which means you can either try to repeat that accomplishment, which will inevitably feel a bit old hat; or you can ...
Read more