Monthly Archives: April 2025

Battlestar Galactica Part 5: Some Final Callouts

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During my exploration of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica I’ve been pretty non-critical of how they handled the series (See Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 here). Just so I don’t sound like a mindless fanboy, I’ll delve a little deeper into some of my criticisms of the series. After all, nothing in life is perfect. So here goes…

New Caprica
By the end of season two, the colonists are cramped on their ships, tired of fleeing the cylons and giving up on searching for an Earth that doesn’t want to be found. Life isn’t going so good for them.

Meanwhile, the cylons are having issues of their own. Their plan of domination isn’t as simple to achieve as they imagined. And, we have a couple of prominent cylons who begin to doubt the plan. After Boomer shoots and nearly kills Adama, she’s killed and resurrected and is living in conquered Caprica City as a hero among the cylons. Caprica Six, the one who got the nuclear codes from Gaius Baltar, is also in Caprica City, and also a cylon celebrity. She’s been seeing an “angel” in the form of Gaius, and she’s having her doubts about the cylons’ plan of wiping out all of humanity. Together Boomer and Six convince the cylons to try and live together with the humans, rather than wipe them out.

Only “live together with” doesn’t quite mean what we think it should mean. When the humans find a barely habitable planet (named New Caprica), they vote to abandon the search for Earth and settle there. All’s going so-so and then the cylons arrive, not to slaughter the humans but to lord over them. For several episodes (it felt like forever), we’re treated to a planet-bound show about insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. Not exactly thrilling.

I remember reading that the writers were trying to write a commentary about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. ATTENTION ALL WRITERS: be careful using your fiction to critique real-world events. Most times it lands with a thud.

The New Caprica storyline was planet-bound and plodding and, like the colonists, mired in the mud. We got time jumps, which were kind of cool, and we got to see the cylons battling each other, but that’s about it in terms of excitement. I for one was glad when they abandoned that planet and that story for good.

Apollo Loves Starbuck
Another storyline we were forced to deal with during the New Caprica muddle was this stupid romance plot. Let’s leave aside the fact that in the original series, Apollo and Starbuck were a couple of dudes and definitely didn’t hook up. But I guess that with Starbuck’s sex change, the writers decided, hey why not have them bang?

Honestly that’s what it felt like: dumb and crude.

The Starbuck in the reboot wasn’t just some random pilot. She’d been engaged to Apollo’s brother, who died in an accident before the events of this series. She was almost his sister in law. They were almost family, they were friends, they were co-workers. And, again, I repeat myself, the writers decided, hey, why not have them bang?

The writers used this storyline not just to bore us, but also to foul up the marriages of Apollo and Dee, and of Starbuck and Sam. Those relationships could have been much more interesting. Instead they were tossed aside. Plus, while the actors who played Starbuck and Apollo were fine, there wasn’t much chemistry between them.

Rather than a full-blown affair, an undercurrent of unrequited lust would have worked much, much better.

Too much filler
We were blessed to get 74 or so one-hour episodes of the series spread over four seasons (plus the miniseries and a couple of webisodes). But with all that time to fill, you’re inevitably going to get some filler episodes. And boy did we. The one that stands out most for me was called Black Market, where Apollo investigates the fleet’s black market. We get corruption. We get mafia. We even get a prostitute. Hell, we might as well have been watching a wholly different series.

There’s more, of course, and I won’t go through it all, but I think we’ve been spoiled by the Netflix and Amazon Prime model of television viewing. It used to be that a series got picked up season by season for a preset number of episodes, say 20, per season, and the writers were expected to deliver all those hours. Today the series is sold all planned out, if not the entire arc of the show over several seasons, then as one complete season. We’ve become used to tighter stories with less filler.

This leads to another of my critiques, which is…

Plot Holes
All the best shows and books and movies have them. Battlestar Galactica isn’t immune. The most glaring to me, even though I loved the storyline, was the Final Five. When Saul Tigh, Adama’s oldest and closest friend, was revealed to be one of the Final Five, I kept trying to untangle the timeline. He fought in the first cylon war, but he also came to the metal cylons from the bombed-out version of Earth, helped them end the war and create the humanoid cylons.

Or something like that.

Can someone explain that timeline to me?

I get what the writers were tying to do. Having Tigh and his wife, Ellen, be cylons was dramatic and Tigh’s “betrayal” hit Adama, the most prominent character, the hardest. The others: Ellen, Sam, Callie, Tyrol, I could totally buy, and I liked them as cylons. But Tigh? It just felt like a sinkhole-sized plot hole, and it made the identities of all the Final Five feel shoehorned in, as if the writers decided sometime during season two to add them to the show. (Evidence for this, Tyrol and Callie’s son was revealed to be a product of her unfaithfulness. He had to be, otherwise, Athena as the human/cylon hybrid wouldn’t be special.)

Another plot misstep was the mythical nature of Kara Thrace, aka Starbuck. The writers threw in something vague about her father, and childhood visions from the Lords of Kobol, and then she’s the harbinger of doom and she vanishes and reappears and then she finds her own corpse on the bombed-out Earth and at the very end she vanishes while Apollo is talking to her as if she’s an angel or a ghost or something. If there was a plan here, lord knows I had no clue.

Speaking of plans, we were continually reminded that the cylons had a plan. What exactly was this plan? Kill every last human? Breed with them? Live in harmony with them? The Caprica Six in Gaius’s head (an angel or something) continually talked about God’s plan. Which was what? I swear I’m not dumb but this plan was always cloudy to me. It didn’t detract from my enjoyment of Battlestar Galactica, but when you’re reminded every episode that the cylons have a plan, it’s hard to get it out of your mind.

So that’s it for my review of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Despite the theme of this final post I truly loved this series, and if you haven’t watched it for some reason, start tomorrow. Or maybe now.

Power Prompts, Episode 1

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Here’s a new exercise: power prompts. These are timed exercises that center around a specific writing theme. This one was about Character Perspective, which is what a specific character is seeing in the story. This contrasts with Point of View, which is how is the story being narrated. [NOTE: There are three POVs: first person (I), second person (You) and third person (He, She). But this prompt was solely about Character Perspective.]

And the prompt itself: in five minutes sketch three distinct characters. Then, in thirty minutes insert them in a city cafe on a rainy afternoon where they witness stabbing.

Here are my results:

The Characters:
Callie, 35, with her toddler in a stroller, she’s stressed about her job, very type A personality. Her toddler is acting up while she’s on the phone with her sister who’s upset over her fiance’s suspected infidelity. Callie doesn’t have the energy to deal with her sister but she’s trying her best.

Justin, 21, is falling behind in his classes. He’s thinking about dropping out of college – money’s tight, but he doesn’t have any plan b besides wanting to go surfing in Hawaii, and he doesn’t know how he’d tell his father, who’d kill him. His father always makes him super nervous. Even thinking about that conversation makes him sweat.

Marissa, 17, she’s run away from home. She’s sleeping on the couch of a friend of her cousin’s. Her mom’s drinking has gotten out of hand and she can’t be around her anymore. She has $700 in savings and she’s trying to think about what kind of job she can do. She definitely can’t go back with her mother, and she refuses to get stuck in the foster system. She’s not afraid, just determined to get her life started out right, on her terms.

And the Scene:

Marissa wished she had an umbrella. It wasn’t one of the things she even thought to shove in her backpack. Not like she woke up yesterday thinking, yeah, mom’s gonna be on her worst bender ever, so you better pack all the things you’ll need for life on your own. It was after the half empty Jameson bottle went flying across the room and nearly hitting her head that she decided to bolt.

Lucky for her she found a couch to crash on. One week, they told her. One week was more than enough time. As long as the dickhead behind the counter would stop making the millionth flat white and give her the time of day to hand her an application. She could do barista. She could do anything. Anything to stay out of mom’s and anything to stay out of foster care. Six months she’d be eighteen. Nothing could touch her then. But she needed A JOB.

“Listen, all I need is an application,” she told him.

“Okay, give me a minute,” he said, looking through her, looking over her. She pulled up a stool and sat herself right at the counter. She would make him see her, make him give her the time she needed. Five minutes past. The line kept growing, flowing. Then it stopped as a woman pushing a baby stroller, a kid bucking and squirming inside it, cell phone propped against her ear, complaining about her cappucino, about it being too cold or too milky or something, and that baby fussing and whining.

Marissa swore to herself she’d never have kids. Well, at least not until she was old, like 30 or something. Bored and eyeing that barista dude, who was way over his head, sweat stains spreading along his underarms, she went over how much cash she had left. About 700 bucks. Wait, I bought pizza last night, she thought. She deducted that princely sum, and that was when she heard the scream.

It sounded like a goat. She pivoted her head, slow motion, and there, at a table by the door, was a lady dressed in an tan raincoat and Uggs. Her hair was all stringy and wet and her makeup was a mess. The lady reared up and that’s when Marissa saw the knife. It was a steak knife, the kind you get in fancy restaurants. The lady stood tall, then she slammed the knife into the table. Marissa heard a squelch and a scream, a real scream. Then the squirt of blood. That’s when Marissa decided she’d be better off working in a CVS.

God Justin hated this job. Never in his life did he dream of making fancy coffees for people who could barely even look him in the eye. Hey, but it paid the bills. Barely. College wasn’t cheap, and as he made some wall street finance bro his double mocha macchiato, triple red eye and passed it over to the guy who stood glaring and drumming his fat fingers, that’s when it came to him. He’d quit college. It wasn’t a choice. It was a knowing.

But then one of his panic attacks threatened to bite him in the ass. Dad will absolutely murder me, he thought. Nobody had a father as terrifying as Justin’s. That he was sure of. But this knowing. He had no choice now. That’s the way his mind worked. He tried to reason with himself, talk himself out of it, and he got so lost in this that he forgot about the waiting cappucino. He looked up at the angry girl, the one who’d been pestering him for an application, and he could feel her judging him for being such a shitty barista. He took a breath and shook it off and gave the lady her cappucino, and not two minutes later she was back at the counter, insisting it was too something.

But he wasn’t listening. Tanya was back. Tanya came in sometimes, and it was never good. She looked a mess, more a mess than usual, and she was bothering some old guy sitting near the door just drinking his coffee like any normal person. That’s when he saw the switchblade in Tanya’s hand. He ran around the counter and watched her raise that switchblade in the air. He bounded over a stroller with a crying kid and nearly tumbled to the ground. But before he could reach Tanya, she’d slammed it onto the table.

Justin couldn’t ever remember hearing a person scream so loud.

The last thing Callie needed right now was another of Alicia’s messes. Her sister had the worst taste in men, and Callie long ago vowed to stop giving relationship advice to someone who’d never take it. But here Alicia was again, crying on the other end of her cell about her cheating fiancee. Callie yes’ed and sure’d her, hoping Alicia would take the hint and hang up. She didn’t.

All Callie wanted was a damn cappucino and a few minutes of silence. This was supposed to be her day off, exploring the city with her two-year-old Susannah. But the rain wasn’t letting up and Susannah was fussy beyond belief and then of course there was that presentation she had to wrap up later tonight and now Alicia. She rocked the stroller and listen to her sister bitch while spitting out her order, only to get her cappucino from the vacant surfer dude barista and sip it and find out that it was already lukewarm. Plus, too much foam.

“No, no, no, this will not do,” she told him. Alicia snapped at her. “Don’t tell me how to live my life.”

“No, not you. The coffee,” she said. But Alicia kept on being Alicia, all woe is me. Callie tried to hush Susannah who refused to sit still in her stroller and tell that dopey barista what exactly he did wrong, convinced he was most likely high, when she heard someone yelling, a woman, and then all of a sudden the barista was out from behind the counter pushing past her and nearly falling over Susannah in her stroller. Callie lunged forward instinctively and raced after him to give him a piece of her mind, when she saw the woman, not homeless but definitely something, and the knife, so big, like a goddamn machete. The woman had one hand planted on the table and she raised that knife high and then slammed it into her own hand.

Between the crazy woman screaming, the barista frantically patting at the blood, and Susannah launching into a royal tantrum, Callie decided the best course of action was to head straight back home and crack open a bottle of Cabernet. The last thing she did before scooting past the bloody, writhing woman was hang up on Alicia.

Anatomy of a Story: One More Darrell

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Someone once said books beget books. I can’t find out who. I thought it was Virginia Woolf, and since I read and really liked Mrs. Dalloway, I’ll go with her.

In my case, short stories beget short stories, or more specifically, a throwaway line in a story included in an anthology on time travel was the seed for my short story, One More Darrell, which was published in the anthology Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Three.

I tried to find the exact line and the story it appeared in but I had no luck. It was something about a pill that let you experience a moment in someone else’s life. That struck a chord in me, so I got to work writing.

A brief flashback: I wrote this story during the height of the Covid lockdowns. I’d spent a lot of time on my own in my house drinking too much and lost in the online world. So just like most of the world. That whole experience left me with a profound sense of disconnect. Again like most of the world. And I began to reflect how we as humans tend to lose ourselves in other people’s stories, everything from fiction to theater to movies and TV, porn and video games, even social media to an extent where we become not so much ourselves but a curated persona.

And I also thought of the story in terms of one of the seven deadly sins: envy. It’s a seductive trait. That person over there has a better life than you do in some way. Imagining what they feel like with that benefit, with that gift, with that luck or skill or talent or blessing, can feel great. But it also cuts you off from your own life.

This is the framework I approached in writing One More Darrell. It’s about a near future where you can take a pill that lets you relive a perfect day or hour of someone else’s life. The pills are named. Some are more popular than others. Our poor narrator can barely manage the stress of his life without popping one pill or another, and his fave by far is Darrell. But his world begins to fall apart when he learns that Darrell is going to be discontinued.

This was one of the easier stories for me to write. It came to me pretty quickly, it was fun to write, and it connected with something in my life. Win, win, win. Not all stories are like that. Most are a hell of a lot of work. Hard, hard work.

And to all the so-called writers out there who don’t read fiction, you’re missing out on a universe of inspiration. Go pick up a book and read it. You never know what story will come out of it.