Asking the Wrong Questions

I truly do believe that if Moore and his writers don't find a way to tell a story that mirrors present-day events without being overwhelmed by symbolism, Galactica will flounder. In all forms of writing, story must come first: the characters need to be real, the plot needs to make sense, you can't demand too much suspension of disbelief from your viewers. Place story second to ideology, and you'll soon find yourself with neither. "Dear Ronald D. Moore: Scattered Thoughts at the End of Battlestar Galactica's Summer Season" , September 27th, 2005 I think Moore is going to slide into the realm of metaphysics and go completely insane and I want to be there when it happens, not because I think the end result will be moving or awe-inspiring or even any good, but because I think it's going to be really, really big. "The Episode That Broke Me and Other "Crossroads II" Thoughts" , March 27th, 2007 Oh, God, it's totally going to end in mass ...

I'll probably have some more substantial thoughts about Battlestar Galactica in a day or two, but in the meantime it's worth noting that it was a big weekend for science fiction all around, with several interesting developments. The Sarah Connor Chronicles , "The Last Voyage of the Jimmy Carter" - a strong conclusion to last week's equally strong episode, which brings the Jesse-Riley storyline to a satisfying close. There are lots of good character scenes, and the flashbacks-to-the-future aboard the doomed Jimmy Carter are tense and quite creepy, and do more than the rest of the season put together to make Jesse sympathetic while stressing that she's caused as much suffering and horror as was caused her. On the other hand, the plotting is still middling-to-poor, most notably in the first and only encounter between John and Jesse, when the two of them have to pause what is otherwise a riveting conversation in order for John to spew exposition, alternately t...

Some of my recent online reading. Hal Duncan writes about Battlestar Galactica , and, as on most topics, does so intelligently, forcefully, and at great length.  Lots of interesting ideas here: some more exploration of what it means that the show's premise maps more accurately to the Holocaust than to 9/11 (I hadn't, for example, thought of Gaeta as embodying the cliché of the victim made monstrous by his victimhood, mainly because I was too busy being aggravated by the fact that the show's one and only acknowledged homosexual character was being depicted as a villain who kept seeking out powerful, charismatic men to follow), some provocative meditations on just how telling it is that its writers have favored the 9/11 parallel, and mainly a lot of insights into the kind of story the writers produced as opposed to the one they thought they were telling. Dan Hartland is rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories in order of publication.  I read these stories, and the Holmes nove...

What is it with TV scheduling?  It was bad enough that something like half of the shows I follow air new episodes on Monday, but now Friday's become a hot spot as well.  On the other hand, maybe it was a good idea to suddenly supersize the quantity of shows I watch on this night, because quality-wise nobody brought their A-game this week. Battlestar Galactica , "No Exit": This episode was trying to be one part "Downloaded" and one part "quick!  There's only six episodes left in the series and we still haven't tied our wildly self-contradictory backstory in a satisfying bow!"  It's kind of a dud on both counts.  I liked seeing Ellen again, and liked even more that in her present incarnation she has both a spine and self-respect, since in the past it's seemed like she could only muster up one at a time.  I also liked that the episode made some vague gestures towards some of the issues I raised in my most recent Galactica post, including...

Here's a hypothetical scenario for you: imagine that several years after the September 11th attacks there was a violent split in Al Qaeda, and some of its top members had been forced to flee for their lives. Imagine that in their desperation, they turned to the US, offering crucial intelligence in exchange for, not asylum, not immunity from prosecution, not the right to live and move freely in the US, but American citizenship. Or, you know what, that's not bad enough. Imagine that the people in question are members of the SS Einsatzgruppen, the ones who used to walk into Eastern European villages, march the local Jews to a freshly dug pit, and start firing. Imagine that the citizenship they were demanding was Israeli. How would you feel if your government decided to acquiesce to such a demand? Appalled? Offended? Like you wanted to take to the streets, and vote the people who supported this decision out of office? Neither of these scenarios even approach the awfulness of the pr...

Well, what do you know: it's possible to be underwhelmed while expecting an anticlimax. A while back, I came across this quote from Ron Moore in an io9 spoiler roundup : [The revelation of the identity of the final Cylon] will never be as powerful as the build-up. I resigned myself to that a long time ago. The "Who Shot JR" of it all is an instructive lesson: No matter who it is, it's still going to be a bit of a letdown. I considered saying something about this here at the time, but then decided that I'd already said my piece on the topic of the final Cylon. Having watched the premiere of season 4.2 (or whatever the hell we're calling it) and having had that identity revealed to me, I feel that my reaction at the time bears repeating. And it is: fuck you, asshole. How dare you make such pathetic excuses for your own incompetence? That's the kind of bullshit I expect from the writers of Lost , and even they've had the common decency to realize ...

I know, I said I didn't care . But then that's been the arc of my entanglement (it is by now far too long since I could call it fannishness) with Battlestar Galactica since the middle of the second season--I'm annoyed and even disgusted with the show, but I can't seem to break away. SyFy Portal is claiming to have a reliable source about the identity of the final Cylon. They're not revealing who it is, but they have posted a list of five contenders, one of which is, to their knowledge, the real one. I have to say, I hope their carefully worded caveat that this information " could be incorrect, changed, or even part of misinformation " is more to the point than the list itself, because if any of these people turn out to be the final Cylon, I am going to be so disappointed. The revelation that any of these characters are a Cylon would undo so much of the show's character work, not to mention hobble its underlying themes of morality in times of cris...

Now that Comic-Con is over, the folks at io9 can get back to their regularly scheduled mix of quirky science stories, film and TV news, off the wall lists (best TV robots! is actually a rather unremarkable example), and opinion pieces. I'm fond enough of io9. I wouldn't like it to be the only source for genre news and commentary around, and it's certainly not my first stop when looking for same, but I do tend to read it most days. Which is how I ended up, at an ungodly hour this morning, being confronted by a television piece by the blog's editor Annalee Newitz, in which she muses that "There are a lot of cool ways this underrated show could return to TV as something darker, less campy, and more socially relevant, just like Battlestar Galactica did." The show in question? Farscape . Which, Newitz goes on to opine, could be made into "a potential hit" by deepening the moral abmiguity of its characters (Rygel as a former genocidal despot, Zhaan...

I don't care. No, really, I just don't. Granted, my level of interest in Battlestar Galactica has plummeted over the last year and especially over its last half season (funny how that works. When the show was meeting my expectations in its first season, or falling tragically short of them in its second and third, I couldn't shut up about it, but now that I've come to expect mediocrity and gotten just that , I find myself with little reason to care), but I'd like to know how the show ends, and there are questions I'd like to see it answer and issues I'd like to see it acknowledge and resolve. It's just that the identity of the final Cylon is pretty far down that list. I'd be annoyed if it weren't revealed, because the show's writers have made promises, and piggybacked quite shamelessly on the tension created by keeping the final Cylon's identity secret, but on my rapidly dwindling list of reasons to watch Galactica , this revelation do...

Last year, when it was announced that Battlestar Galactica 's fourth season would be its last, I responded to the show's producers saying that "This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end" by quipping "Good luck trying to cram all three into a single season." I wasn't expecting Ron Moore and his writers to take me up on the challenge. Alright, so that's overstating the matter, but there is no denying that in the first half of its fourth season Galactica , which for a season and a half has seemed, not even aimless, but deliberately mired, has regained its momentum. In terms of the show's story--not the Law & Order -style ripped-from-the-headlines political allegory, not the perfunctory issue-of-the-week-in-space anthology show, not the execrable soap opera starring impossibly pretty people behaving like total assholes, not the woo-woo New Agey drug trip, but the actual story of humanity's struggle to s...

I watched three major SF-related shows this weekend, and I was hoping to get a blog post out of at least one of them, but instead I find myself with very little to say. So, I'm going to smoosh all three reactions into a single catch-all post, and hope that there's something more substantial for me to write about in the pipeline. (That said, I'm anticipating a bit of quiet around these parts during April.) Battlestar Galactica , "He That Believeth in Me" - That was surprisingly enjoyable. The first act plays to the show's greatest strength--cool and intense space battles--and wraps up in one hell of an interesting way which makes one of my favorite characters even more interesting, and might even get me over my dubiousness about the identities of the Cylons revealed in "Crossroads." The rest of the episode is also strong, as the show finally starts paying attention to an issue that should have started cropping up in discussions and conversations i...

My review of the Battlestar Galactica TV movie "Razor" appears in today's Strange Horizons . If you've clicked through from there, you might be interested in some of my other posts about the show, or at least in the odd effect of the reverse chronological order they're presented in--you can watch me get less and less bitter, and finally enthusiastic, about the series.

In the podcast for Battlestar Galactica 's first season finale, "Kobol's Last Gleaming II", Ron Moore talks about his original concept for the season-ending cliffhanger (end of act 2 and beginning of act 3): [Baltar] comes into a room and he hears music and it's a recognizable Earth-tune ... It was Jimi Hendrix was playing, actually, and he goes, "God, I recognize that." And then somebody- or somebody s- a voice says, "You recognize that?" And he says, "Yes." And he turns and it's Dirk Benedict. (Laughs.) And Dirk Benedict said, "Hi. I'm God." And you just cut. We just cut out on that. ... that was gonna be the end of that whole storyline and at the episode. I liked it. I thought it was wacky. I didn't quite know what it meant. I thought- I was looking for a surprise. I was still infatuated with Galactica when I watched this episode and listened to the podcast, and even so Moore's words gave me pause. I wa...