Category Archives: television

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.

Battlestar Galactica Rewatch Part 4: Hits and Misses

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(Here’s the latest in my sporadically spaced BSG Rewatch. Click the links for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

Two decades is good for perspective. We have a moment to breathe, to take in a new view (literally; the world around us changes), and we can look back at something with fresh eyes.

So with all these cliches in mind, after rewatching all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica straight through, what worked, and what didn’t?

I’ll start with what worked.

Cylons
The best part of the reboot was the enemy. Heroes are (usually) necessary for any story. We need someone to identify with, a man or woman to root for, to escape into. But, what really makes a story shine is the enemy. We love to hate them, and we sometimes secretly love them as well. A good enemy can be our outlet for all those parts of ourselves we disown. We might not want to literally be Hannibal Lecter, but there’s a small part of us that revels in the villain’s total disregard for good society.

Or maybe this is just me.

Either way, the thing I love most about Battlestar Galactica is the cylons, not so much the chrome toasters but the humanlike twelve. Take Caprica Six. She’s stunning and hot and cruel (she snapped a baby’s neck!) but also riveting. Or Leoben. He’s probably my favorite of the cylon models. Spiritual. Unhinged. Fanatical. Mystical. He was obsessed with Starbuck. He fucked with her mind on New Caprica. No, I wasn’t rooting for him, but I always wanted to know more about him.

Just think about the sheer audacity of the cylons. Their resentment drove them to massacre billions of humans. And they weren’t satisfied with driving them off their home planets. They insisted on hunting down every last one of the 40,000 or so surviving humans. That’s hardcore.

But the writers had the foresight to mix it up. The cylons could have easily become two dimensional. Same old same old. Instead, partway through the series run they changed things. One faction of the cylons splintered. Rather than destroying the humans, they wanted to coexist with them (more on that later). Some villains remained villains, and some became allies. In my opinion, this was one of the best parts of the series.

A Complex Society
Another strength of Battlestar Galactica was the way the writers portrayed a rich and complex society among the ragtag group of survivors. We could have gotten a series about military warfare vs robots. Instead we got a rich tapestry on a human civilization that was struggling to reassert itself in extreme conditions. We got religious fervor. We got dissent. Treachery. Terrorism. Political wrangling.

One episode that stands out for me happened way in the first season. A pregnant woman wants to get an abortion. But her religious community is against it. Laura Roslin, the civilian president, is forced to deal with this. Her dilemma: she’s pro-choice, but she sees the cold facts that there are only roughly 40,000 humans left. Every life is needed. So she goes against her own personal beliefs and outlaws abortion. I thought it was a surprising, daring and wholly logical storyline. Not your typical sci-fi or space opera fare.

Plot Twists
We know the basics of Battlestar Galactica: a ragtag group of humans travels the universe fleeing an overwhelming foe in search of a mythical lost group of humans. Pretty straightforward. But a plot so linear can easily turn stagnant. Luckily the writers mixed it up a little. One standout plot curveball came in the form of a woman named Admiral Helena Cain.

Cain was commander of the Battlestar Pegasus, another Battlestar presumed lost. Only it wasn’t. For months the Pegasus traveled and fought not knowing that the Galactica had also survived. And there were a couple of twists with Cain’s introduction. First, she outranked Adama. Second, her group of survivors had taken a more militaristic turn. She was a harsh and a brutal leader, damn near a dictator, and her group of humans gave us a view of how the Galactica could have turned out under different leadership.

Cain didn’t last long, but she definitely made the show more interesting.

Another twist was the introduction of the Final Five. According to series lore, there were twelve human models of cylons. During the course of the series we got to see six models: One (Cavil), Two (Leoben), Three (D’Anna), Four (Simon), Five (Aaron), Six (Caprica), Eight (Sharon). That left six unaccounted for. You can scratch one off that list, a model named Daniel, a sensitive model who John contaminated out of jealousy (I really wish the series had found a way to resurrect him—definitely a lost opportunity).

So that left five models who were likely living among the survivors. And among the cylons, only Cavil knew their identity.

When this revelation came, it heightened the tension, not just among the characters, but also the viewers. It became a guessing game—who’s the cylon? What will they do?

As it turned out, the Final Five were an integral part of the Battlestar Galactica story. They were both the catalyst for all the events of the story, and also the resolution. Yes, I have my criticisms, but all in all it was a great twist.

The Use of Mythology
Battlestar Galactica, both the original series and the reboot, is steeped in Greek mythology (Apollo, etc). The colonists pray to the gods (versus the one true god of the cylons). I think in the original series it was to tie the colonists to ancient earth civilization. In the reboot, I suppose it was used to have them seed earth culture (since the reboot takes place 150,000 years in our past).

This mythology permeates their lives. Take Laura Roslin. She’s presented as a humanist atheist type, yet she believes in the prophecy of the Sacred Scrolls of Pythia with all her heart. It drives her actions. It undergirds her clawing for power. She uses this mythology to justify her fight to remain in control of the civilian government, to the point where she almost steals an election.

But Battlestar Galactica developed its own mythology aside from the Greek one. Take, for instance, Kobol. Or the lost Earth colony. This unique mythology formed a continuity within the series. We were continually reminded that all this had happened before, and it would all happen again, and when we finally get to what they called Earth, we see this repetition in action: the events we witnessed in the series are just one small part of a larger story that has repeated again and again. This use of internal mythology resonated. I felt it and I imagined these other stories. That’s what I call effective use of mythology.

The End
As a writer I know it can be incredibly difficult to stick the landing. The television landscape is littered with series that had controversial or unsatisfying endings (Seinfeld, Lost, The Sopranos). While I’m sure some people would disagree, I think Battlestar Galactica gave us a solid ending. We could have gotten lost in space. We could have gone on forever and ever. Instead, the writers brought us home. They gave us final resolutions for all the characters that felt earned and deserved. Would I have loved sequels? Of course. But sometimes it’s good to leave on a high note. (We did get a prequel, and let’s just say sometimes it’s better to leave well enough alone.)

Next up: I dig into the not-so-good.

Battlestar Galactica Rewatch Part 1: History of the Reboot

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Even when it first appeared in 2003, the reboot of the classic 1970s series Battlestar Galactica was considered an instant classic, and not just by me. Part of that success had to do with the megawatt casting of two Oscar nominees, Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell in the leads, and part had to do with the gritty writing and visual style that was all the rage in the early zeroes. Battlestar Galactica started off as a miniseries but quickly launched into a full-time series that lasted four seasons on Syfy, becoming one of that channel’s flagship shows.

I watched it faithfully when it first came out. At the time I loved it. I couldn’t get enough. I was obsessed by the original show as a kid (although it looks incredibly cheesy to me now). I wanted to be Dirk Benedict’s Starbuck! And I was definitely psyched by the prospect of a reboot.

Before I get too far I suppose I should tell you all what Battlestar Galactica (the reboot) was about. A human civilization called the Colonials creates robots called cylons, which rebel and launch a deadly war against them. Decades after a stalemate, human-looking cylons infiltrate colonial defenses, enabling the cylons to launch an overwhelming attack. Out of 20 billion humans, only about 40,000 survive aboard a handful of spacefaring vessels led by the battlestar Galactica. Chased by the cylons, they set out to find a legendary lost colony called Earth.

The miniseries came out as a standalone three-hour event in late 2003. It launched to strong acclaim, both critical (positive reviews, a Saturn Award, Emmy nominations) and audience (83% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes), and then came the series, which was also lauded.

The series was directed by Michael Rymer and written by Ronald M. Moore, who’d previously worked on various Star Treks as a writer and/or producer, and who went on to shows including Helix and Outlander.

All told, there were 76 episodes of Battlestar Galactica spread out over four seasons from 2004 to 2009, plus ancillary episodes, including a movie rehashing the entire series from the cylon’s point of view (The Plan), a webisode prequel featuring the young Commander Adama (Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome), and a prequel series, Caprica, that lasted for a single 19-episode season. Caprica was kind of a mess, but it was interesting, at least.

Its strong writing and acting and imaginative plot earned Battlestar Galactica a ton of awards and nominations, including Saturns, Hugos, Emmys, and even a Peabody. Critics mostly praised the show, although some criticized it for being heavy handed (true) and straying too far from the premise of the original series (true).

I don’t know if it can be said that Battlestar Galactica cemented the Syfy channel’s place in the early 21st century cable ecosystem, but it definitely helped. One thing I can say for sure is that Battlestar Galactica has left a towering legacy in the sci-fi universe. Its lofty position in sci-fi lore is cemented, for good reason.

With all this in mind, I decided to rewatch the entire series 20 years on to see how it all held up. At first I thought I could fit everything I wanted to say about it in maybe a few posts, but honestly who likes to read three thousand words on a blog post? So I’ll spread this over several posts and let you all know my verdict.

Wait…Gendercide Is a Thing?

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I like to consider myself a fan of all things speculative–horror and supernatural and sci-fi books, movies, TV shows, etc., and I believe I know a ton about these genres.

Apparently I don’t. The other day I was rabbit holing into the latest of a long line of literary controversies (I won’t go into it here) and I read this article asking whether it’s time do do away with the gendercide trope, a trope I’ve never heard of before.

What is gendercide? It sounds nasty, because it is. Gendercide is where either the men or the women in any given story are killed or die off from some nefarious or mysterious or viral reason. The book that inspired the article introducing me to gendercide is The Men by Sandra Newman. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s about a world where all males suddenly vanish. The remaining women adjust to this disappearance, while videos online depict the men living in a hellish landscape.

There are others, too, such as Y: The Last Man, a comic turned TV show where (almost) all men die of a virus. One of my favorite books, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, is a variant of the gendercide trope; the novel opens in an all-male society where the women have mysteriously died off.

According to TVtropes.org, gendercide isn’t super popular, and most of the time only a variant is used (only some or most of either men or women die or disappear). Stories where the men disappear are more in line with the theme of feminist utopia, and stories where the women vanish are considered dystopic.

In reading about Newman’s book, I found it disturbing that all the men were sent to a hellscape ruled by demons. Oddly, the writer of the article critical of gendercide (and Newman’s book), didn’t write about that disturbing aspect of it. From me, though, disturbing is not a criticism. I want to learn more about this trope, and see how different writers explore it.

New Doctor Who Ups the Stakes

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My ongoing obsession with the BBC classic series Doctor Who continues.

Doctor WhoLast week the 11th season of the (new) Doctor Who began. This season features three big changes: a new Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker, a new head writer, Chris Chibnall, and three new companions.

Having seen the first episode, I can’t wait to see how the new season develops with Whittaker in the title role. Whenever an actor assumes the role he (and now she) brings a fresh take on the Doctor. Usually it takes a few episodes before they find their footing. Chris Eccleston’s loopiness sparked right away. David Tennant and Matt Smith both brought a boyishness to the role that took a little time to grow on me. I never ever warmed up to Peter Capaldi’s overly dour take on the Doctor.

Whittaker was thoroughly charming. There were some rough parts to the season opener–she’s overly giddy at times–but she has a warm confidence that telegraphs a strong future.

There’s one other change that’s more subtle but I think more important. The Doctor’s companions often serve as an audience stand-in. The companion, usually female, is full of wonder and amazement and learns and grows as she travels the universe with the Doctor, surviving one harrowing adventure after another. Danger is at every turn, but no companion in the new Who era has ever truly died.

Rose was exiled to an alternate earth (still alive).

Martha became a Torchwood soldier (still alive, I think).

Poor Donna Noble survived, though only because she had her memories of her adventures erased.

Amy Pond and Rory both survived, though they were banished to the past.

Clara Oswald, well, she died. But then the Doctor did his timey-wimey stuff and snatched her away just before the moment of her death. I didn’t get it either but I loved Clara so I was happy.

And then there’s Bill Potts. Turned into a Cyberman. That’s death, right? No. Another timey-wimey thing where she becomes an immortal puddle or something.

With each companion the danger and risk is heightened, but true consequences are denied.

Not so in this season’s first episode. We were presented with a cast of four potential companions: police officer Yasmin, determined bike rider Ryan, his grandmother Grace, and Grace’s husband Graham. While fighting the big bad tooth-faced monster with a name that sounded like Tim Shaw, one of those four potentials dies.

Like, really dies. Buried and all.

Not only that, it was the FIFTH human death shown in just this one episode.

Doctor Who is nominally a children’s show. Yes, characters die, but less often than you’d think. And never, until now, a (near) companion.

Does this mean that any of the three remaining companions could die this season?

Hopefully, and not because I want to see them die, but because I want to see stakes that matter.

 

 

 

Sensuality, Shakespeare and Stranger Things

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Where the hell has Winona Ryder been?

Like half my friends, I just finished binge-watching Netflix’s Stranger Things, an eight-part sci-fi/horror series that’s partly a homage to the 1980s. Overall it was very good, both addicting and entertaining, once I was able to slide into the story.

strangerthingsthumbjpg-6ab191_1280w

A lot has been made of the fact that Stranger Things is set in 1983, and the directors took great pains to ground the series in that time frame. The senses are constantly distracted by elements from the early ’80s — from music to the clothes and hairstyles to the decor of the houses.

I appreciate the effort, but it was overkill, too much of a good thing, and it distracted from the story. Having been alive and aware in 1983 I kept finding myself questioning how accurate it all was, and it seemed too dated.

Luckily, in a stroke of brilliance, they cast Winona Ryder as the lead. She played against type — the woman who made her name as a quirky everywoman played a worried, desperate, and unstoppable mother.

Winona

Winona Ryder is about my age, and when I was younger a lot of guys I knew had crushes on her. But to me she always seemed unformed. She a girl, not a woman. I didn’t get the attraction, and I never followed her career.

Winona_RyderIn these intervening years she’s had some not-so-secret difficulties, as we all have. And when I look at pictures of her now — she’s hot. She’s a woman now, a fully formed adult with all the complications that brings.

In Stranger Things Ryder was effective not just for her acting, but because, in contrast to the set, she was not stylized. She was gaunt and frail. Ryder’s pixie quality was a strength here, as we saw a woman who’s been beaten down by life in many ways but keeps fighting.

Coincidentally, last week I saw Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida in Central Park. One of the actors listed in that play was David Harbour as Achilles, a rambunctious warrior torn between his fellow soldier/boyfriend and a woman he pines for back home.

Harbour, unfortunately, dropped out two days before I saw the play. He tore his Achilles tendon during a performance (you can’t make that up). However, when I started binge-watching Stranger Things the next day, whose name pops up in the credits?

David Harbour, as Chief Hopper.

david-harbour-stranger-things

Like Winona Ryder, he brought a physicality that rooted the show. In one of his earliest scenes he’s outside shirtless smoking a cigarette after a hard night of drinking. He’s pale with a paunch. He’s tired. He’s hung over. And he’s real in a fully relatable way.

Watching Stranger Things was a totally different experience than watching Troilus and Cressida. Compared with television, it’s harder for me to lose myself while watching a play. I’m hyper aware of the fact that it’s fake. Troilus and Cressida was hard-charging. The actors were loud and physical. There was constant movement — touching, scrapping, fighting. The play used these sensory elements to draw me in.

Stranger Things, while fun, was using the sensory elements of 1983 (or a close approximation) as a wink to the audience, and it was distracting. Luckily they cast Winona Ryder and David Harbour as their leads. They were natural, and by using their physicality to ground the show, they ended up saving it.