I know, I know. Expecting a season of 24 to make any kind of sense is like expecting Ozzy Ozbourne to give a lecture on theoretical physics.
“The terrorists have a bomb! They got it from the North Koreans! It’s all a plot by Serbs to assasinate the President! There’s a woman with poison hands! And a jet plane! And Jack’s brother is behind it all! And a conspiracy of white guys in suits who talk on cell phones and want to steal everyone’s oil! Also the Chinese!”
Maybe it’s because I rarely bothered sitting through an entire Season of 24. Still 24 is unique, if only because its writers and producers clearly don’t think past a single episode and write everything at night while overdosed on Ambien. “No I’m not guilty of running over 3 people with my Volvo, mutilating a kangaroo and writing an episode of 24… I was on Ambien.”
Still when your show makes much less sense than your average amateurishly produced web series, maybe it’s time to start thinking things through.
On this thrill a minute season of 24, Blackwater or Starkwood kidnaps a scientist to develop a CIP device that can destroy half of America’s infrastructure, and trades it to an African warlord for a WMD that can kill less than 1/10th that many people. But wait this makes even less! Since Starkwood wants to threaten to use the WMD in order to stop a Senate investigation of his company for unethical behavior.
Now that obviously makes a lot of sense. I mean when you’re waving around WMD’s, nobody’s gonna be investigating your ethics anymore. They’re going to be nuking you from orbit.
This entire plot made so little damn sense, that the writers had the President tell Jonas Hodges that he probablyhad a mental breakdown when he came up with this stupid plot. This is a great retcon for explaining that plot, and virtually every ridiculously overcomplicated plot on 24. But it doesn’t tell us that the writers only came up with the plot because they had a nervous breakdown.
Meanwhile Tony birdogs Jack for most of the season and helps him bring down Starkwood, but just to grab the WMD. This involves Tony pretending to be a triple agent, just to get something that the Evil Cabal of Corporations could have just gotten in five minutes by threatening Jonas’ family.
Yeah I know the entire Evil Cabal of Corporations all had nervous breakdowns too. And Tony.
Meanwhile they did it all to get their hands on what is probably the world’s worst WMD, which takes about 6 hours to make you sweat and have spasms. I think they could have gotten a better WMD by ordering for it in the back of a comic book, right next to the X-Ray glasses. But this is what happens when you get discount WMD’s from African warlords, who can’t defend their own country… but can take over the White House.
(I would ask when General Juma had time to get on a plane and come to America, but I’m guessing the answer is that Time and Space had nervous breakdowns too.)
All the while the Evil Cabal of Corporations is planning to use a Muslim terrorist to carry out an attack that will kill lots of people in D.C. At which point they will somehow take power, because that’s how the American system of government works! There’s a terrorist attack and when the President dies, the next in line of succession is a bunch of corporations.
Based on the ending of last night’s episode, they couldn’t actually find a Muslim terrorist that actually wants to kill Americans, so they’re going to force some random Pakistani guy to go do it by taking his brother hostage. Maybe it’s just me, but this Evil Cabal of Corporations doesn’t seem very competent.
Oh but I’m sure this will all be really exciting as Jack rushes to stop a terrorist, while fighting off a deadly no-cure biological weapon that can be stopped with the equivalent of insulin shots and whose worst symptoms are seizures and premature senility.
Luckily there’s an explanation for all this non-stop parade of retardness. It’s simple really. Brannon Braga of Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise now writes for the show. Also Manny Cotto’s brother. Any more questions? I didn’t think so.
Enjoy the rest of the season.
You know the cliches, SciFi is a boys game or a men’s club. It’s full of books that have bosomy babes heaving on the covers while being menaced by tentacled monsters. While the cliches aren’t all that true and women have made a lot of progress in SF, the question is still worth asking.
For the purpose of this exercise we’ll limit our focus to Science Fiction writers that people have actually heard of. This can safely rule out some random book written by Neil Promough in 1965 about Amazons from Mars taking over America while under the influence of mescaline. We’ll also rule out reverse sexism, or sexism by women against men, cause let’s face that would be a little too easy, Joanna Russ or Sherri S. Tepper, anyone?
Non-fiction essays and real life behavior don’t qualify, which leaves Harlan Ellison out. TV Scifi depictions don’t count either, which leaves Gene Roddenberry out, and the constant depictions of female crew members on the original Star Trek as unreliable, unstable and likely to waltz off with any superbeing, e.g. Khan or Apollo, whom they meet up with. We’ll also leave out fantasy, because between Gor and the amazing BDSM adventures of half the leading fantasy series, including the Wheel of Time series.
So who will it be? There’s Robert A. Heinlein. Sure he would throw in supposedly competent female characters, only to condescendingly dispose of them. Take a look at Methuselah’s Children. Mary, the character who kicks off the story, initially seems bold, reliable and competent… only to give in to her fear of aging and dying, and merges herself into an alien consciousness. The other major female character is a young woman who constantly whines about her child, and is repeatedly berated, rejected and threatened by Lazarus.
That sort of thing wasn’t unusual for Heinlein either. Friday marries her rapist and lives happily ever after. In Heinlein novels that was a common enough goal for women who got to be competent and professional enough to catch the leading man’s eye, before reverting to type. By the time Heinlein was in his New Age phase, women were around mainly as playthings, see Stranger in a Strange Land, there to give some witty banter, before stripping down and hanging around the premises.
But Heinlein is too obvious. So let’s try a less obvious writer, Philip K. Dick. Yes PKD isn’t the first and most logical name that springs to mind, but maybe it should be. Read enough Dick and you notice that his idea of women seemed to be a lot like Dave Sim’s. You can’t even begin to count the amount of abusive soul devouring women who show up in his novels, see Ubik. Sure Dick was probably channeling his many ex-wives.
And then there’s PKD’s prize gem, “The Pre-Persons” in which a loving father tries to protect his son from his ruthless devouring wife, in a society where trucks drive around looking for kids to kill, who can’t do quadratic equations, which happen to be the test of personhood. It’s a not very subtle commentary on abortion, but it’s also one of the ultimate depictions of the PK Dick woman, the ruthless monster who devours men’s souls. Or Dick’s anyway.
Still the prize may well go to C.J. Cherryh. Yes I know she’s a woman, which gives her the perfect cover. If the whole Cloud Riders series wasn’t bad enough, there’s Tripoint. Yes Tripoint.
Tripoint is a masterpiece of its sort. You could read the many reviews of it without actually learning what it’s about. It’s the story of Thomas, a boy being raised on a trading vessel by his mother Marie, whom he resents. And with good reason, since C.J Cherryh draws her as the most obnoxious character imaginable.
Marie is also a rape victim, having conceived Thomas after being raped by another ship’s crewmember. But don’t worry though, you’re not supposed to feel sympathy for Marie. You’re supposed to hate her. And C.J. Cherryh even finds a way to blame her for being raped. See Marie agreed to go off with that crewmember into a private space to lose her virginity. Then she changes her mind and protests and cries rape. After a stalemate, the crewmember, and Thomas’ father, decides since he’s being accused of rape, he might as well rape her for real. The narrative in Tripoint treats Marie as being at fault throughout the encounter and treats his behavior as mostly justified.
While Marie plots revenge against him, Thomas runs off and joins his father’s ship, and decides to leave his mother and be with the guy who raped her. Marie is left unable to do anything about it, despite having bankrupted her trading clan to get this far.
Happy ending right? If a man had written Tripoint, he’d have been lynched right next to James P. Hogan. Since C. J. Cherryh is a woman, she seems to get a pass for creating a novel in which the rape victim is the villain, in which her rape was justified and in which the child of the rape goes off to be with his rapist father because he can’t stand his mother.
And that’s why C.J. Cherryh wins the award. Congratulations. We’ll reconvene next year for Science Fiction’s Drunkest, Drunkenest? Writer.
Reading one of Roger Ebert’s reviews today is a sad experience now that he’s become like a college educated version of Grandpa Simpson. But even long before that Ebert, like many modern reviewers, suffered from the whole Pauline Kael approach, the over personalized snarky reviews that really didn’t tell you much about what the movie did right or wrong, but told you a whole lot about the man or woman reviewing it.
That’s why I was surprised when I came across this Dead Poets Society review from Ebert. Surprised? Yes, because Ebert lays down the smack on Dead Poets Society in a limited amount of space while getting down to why that overpraised box of treacle is so full of fail.
Read
“Dead Poets Society” is a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand in favor of something: doing your own thing.
Peter Weir’s film makes much noise about poetry, and there are brief quotations from Tennyson, Herrick, Whitman and even Vachel Lindsay, as well as a brave excursion into prose that takes us as far as Thoreau’s Walden. None of these writers are studied, however, in a spirit that would lend respect to their language; they’re simply plundered for slogans to exort the students toward more personal freedom. At the end of a great teacher’s course in poetry, the students would love poetry; at the end of this teacher’s semester, all they really love is the teacher.
As a caveat Robin Williams’ character is trying to teach the students to love poetry. But nowhere do we see him teaching anything structural about poetry, but appreciation. And you don’t need a teacher for that. But that’s the whole theme of Dead Poets Society and just about every life affirming movie featuring stodgy administrators up against that bright and daring teacher.
No one goes to school to learn to enjoy life, take chances or carpe diem. You can do that on your own time, unless you’re hopelessly retarded, because a teacher isn’t your life coach. The great movie teachers all too often are nothing more than walking talking self-help books. And that’s not what learning is about.
Which fits well with how ignorant about actual learning the movie is. As 17 year olds in a top ranked prep school in 1959, and it’s impossible that they’re as ignorant as they act. A 17 year old prep school student in 1959 who had no idea where O Captain My Captain was from, is hard to believe. But that’s just the beginning.
The society’s meetings have been badly written and are dramatically shapeless, featuring a dance line to Lindsay’s “The Congo” and various attempts to impress girls with random lines of poetry. The movie is set in 1959, but none of these would-be bohemians have heard of Kerouac, Ginsberg or indeed of the beatnik movement.
Or of anything. In one of the endless musical montages, they break out by listening to white boy rock and roll and fencing outside. Yes, fencing.
Real life prep school students were more entitled than their peers. The movie version are oppressed and suppressed. Like every movie about the 1950’s, not made in the 1950’s, Dead Poets Society envisions life for the wealthy WASPs as a hard choice between being corporate drones or prefiguring the 60’s by doing your own thing. The ending panders to just that idea, we’re meant to assume that the students who got up will go on to drop out, drop acid, march for civil rights, and found their own tree farm, while the ones who keep on sitting will support the Vietnam War and vote for Nixon. It’s the kind of simple minded paradigm Hollywood keeps recycling mainly because Hollywood is in love with its own self-made image as daring and transgressive. And movies like Dead Poets Society, filled with phony sentimentality and self-indulgence, starring Robin Williams as another sensitive emotive man-child, and putting self-expression above everything else, reminds us just how hollow Hollywood really is.
Finally a new Star Trek movie spot that manages to make it look like every other Star Trek movie ever made, barring Star Trek II, III, V or VI. Okay well all the TNG Star Trek movies ever made. Which is probably a good thing, since audiences want the same thing with some more attitude. And I’m guessing that despite of the hype, or maybe because of all the hype, that’s exactly what JJ Abrams is going to give them.
Villain check. Villain with some sort of overly complicated plot derived from his cousin in the James Bond universe, also check. . Some sort of explosion or countdown to be stopped before it’s too late, probably also check. Earth is on the line check.
But why is earth on the line? Star Trek used to be about getting the hell away from earth and exploring space. But all the TNG movies seem to get back to earth toot sweet. ST I began all this by sending V’ger to menace Earth. Wrath of Khan left earth alone, STIII The Search for Spock quickly took us to earth, but didn’t menace it. ST IV The Voyage Home, both took us back to earth and menaced it. ST V left Earth alone but destroyed our will to live. So did ST VI The Undiscovered Country.
But it was TNG that really went compulsively James Bond with villains who kept threatening Planet Earth, good old third boulder from the yellow sun. First time around Earth was only on the villain’s path of destruction. Second time around Earth was the target. Third time around Earth got a pass. Fourth time around they decided that the third time around failed because Earth was given a pass, so evil Picard clone in Nemesis went after Earth. Again.
And this time around… EARTH IS ON THE LINE.
Damn it Jim, I wish Earth would upgrade its defense systems already and stop being on the line, so we can go explore some of those strange new worlds and seek our new life and new civilizations, that Star Trek used to be about. From a tactical standpoint, the Enterprise is a long range Starship. Throwing it into home guard mode is stupid. You don’t need a Starship for that. You don’t need quarters for hundreds of people and a ship provisioned for a five year machine just to jaunt around the Sol system. You need something big, ugly, brutish and with a lot of firepower.
But who can argue with EARTH IS ON THE LINE?
A 64-year-old woman has reported to doctors at Geneva University Hospital the presence of a pale, milky-white and translucent third arm.
After examining the case, the woman’s neurologist, Asaid Khateb of the hospital’s experimental neurophysiology laboratory, called the rare phenomenon credible.
The arm appeared to the woman a few days after suffering a stroke, doctors said. But this case of what is known as a supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a genuine head-scratcher
The upshot is that the woman can use the apparitional extremity to relieve very real itches on the cheek. It cannot penetrate solid objects. She does not always perceive the arm but “retrieves” it when needed, doctors told the Swiss news agency.
It is nevertheless the first case known to doctors of a person being able to feel, see and deliberately move a limb that doesn’t exist. The findings are published in the Annals of Neurology.
Of course the third arm still can’t penetrate solid objects and the UN hasn’t taken over the government and isn’t sentencing tax cheats and jaywalkers to the organ banks.
Yet.
I actually have that cover which always makes me wince at just how low the standards for cover art were at Del Rey then. When your cover can be duplicated by a six year old with too much sugar, it’s time to rethink your cover art.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if FOX could air another good SciFi series with clever writing and some action. But Dollhouse, between you and me and anyone randomly browsing this blog, I’m just not feeling it.
Sure with Episode 6 the writing has jumped into gear and no longer plays like it was written by people who couldn’t get work on Knight Rider and that’s nice and all, but guess what it’s just not enough. I like good writing. I savor good writing. I take good writing out on long moonlight strolls by the bay where we sip our mocha lattes and discuss our future together. Then we name our kids. But as fun as all that is, I just need more. A lot more.
Like characters I give a damn about. Yeah that’s a minor issue but it’s actually way up there. That means people we care about fighting the good fight. Without that, why even bother? Which just about covers my response to Dollhouse post episode 6, why even bother?
Sure the writing is better, but what else is? We still get to sit around watching a bunch of meat puppets and the staff who oversee their ongoing rape and exploitation.
When Topher and Amelia get all wacky on the memory thwacking virus, was I really supposed to find their antics cute? I don’t think so. They’re both evil. Buffy Season 6 got by with the geeks mainly because they didn’t do anything genuinely evil until the end. But Andrew post-slashing never struck me as cute or entertaining. Repulsive, creepy and annoying would cover it. It’s why I never had any use for his Season 7 whining or his return in comic form in Season 8. No means no. And ugh means ugh.
Dollhouse doesn’t have characters, it has a bunch of Borg and the humans who control them. And considering how annoying Caroline was in her flashbacks and her Sea Kitten thing, I can’t even hope she gets rescued because I don’t care about her or any of the Dolls. Some of them are victims, but they’re not characters. On the flip side of that shiny gold coin, the humans at the Dollhouse are characters, but perpetrators. It’s like watching Hogan’s Heroes, a version where Colonel Klink and the Nazis keep winning and are the focus of every episode. And the GI’s just don’t matter.
So no I’m not feeling it. Joss Whedon got rich creating shows with strong characters who fight for things. Dollhouse is completely lacking in that. Unless there are major changes to the series, I don’t see that changing either.
With the original Stargate TV series borrowing some obvious elements from TNG, like Worf, the spinoff was obviously going to be DS9, which is what Stargate Atlantis was, minus the high concept, and plus the evil aliens the cast has to fight. Naturally when we heard that Stargate Universe was going to be about a crew stuck on a starship traveling and lost in space, Voyager came to mind. But while the concept may be Voyager or B5’s Crusade, the execution of Stargate Universe seems to be aiming for a ripoff of Battlestar Galactica instead.
Take a look at that footage and tell me the great minds behind Stargate Universe haven’t spent a lot of time with their BSG DVD collection? Lots of darkness, similar color palette, lots of focus on human chaos and disorder about a large ship. Now if they just bring in shaky cam ship FX shots, the jig will be up.
Of course it’s not like the Stargate shows were original or wanted to be. They were basically action shows in a thin SciFi wrapping. Half the time the original Stargate was basically the A Team with outer space settings. Except unlike the original A Team, whose cast couldn’t stand women, it had a girl on board. And the people who needed their help were conveniently multiracial tribes of serenely happy people living on other planets, of the type Star Trek would somehow keep encountering. In Stargate’s defense, at least its premise provided a justification for that.
Stargate has had the same relationship to Science Fiction that Star Wars did. It borrowed some of the togs and wore them around the house, but it had no actual ideas, just design schemes. Stargate borrowed from Star Trek when it was the dominant paradigm for TV SciFi. With Star Trek gone, Battlestar Galactica was the next obvious target.
So enjoy Stargate Battlestar Universe. In its defense, when it’s canceled a few years from now, there is no way it will go out with a worse ending than BSG did. Think of it as a Do Over that’s more audience friendly.
Make of it what you will.
Having exhausted all its own cliches, 24 brought some Trek people on board. Well they brought Manny Cotto on board, and looks like Manny brought Brannon Braga on board. So the 16th episode of 24’s 7th Season was co-written by Brannon Braga and Manny Cotto.
In it President Taylor’s demented power hungry daughter proposes Rick Berman as a replacement to the Chief of Staff she forced out, countering her mother’s suggestion of Bob Justman. Her argument for Rick Berman, “never underestimate the value of a fresh perspective”.
Considering what Rick Berman did to Star Trek, I think we should totally underestimate it. But for those not in the know, Bob Justman was the producer of Star Trek’s original series. Rick Berman was the executive producer of everything after that, once Roddenberry had been conveniently tucked out of the way. Brannon Braga who co-wrote the episode was the creator and executive producer of half of those shows. So his support for Rick Berman’s fresh perspective might be a little biased.
At least we haven’t gotten any word of J.J. Abrams for Chief of Staff.
Now since the proposal is made by an evil character, I’m not sure if that’s Brannon Braga expressing some regret, or just throwing in an in-joke. I would go with Stupid Door Number 2 on that one.
Once upon a time in the good old days when cars were made in Detroit, skirts were short and everyone hated the Irish; a Science Fiction TV Show meant you would be watching a series focusing on science. SCIENCE. And that was usually the way it went. When James T. Kirk encountered a religion, it was usually a computer programming people to be ignorant, so naturally he blew it up, had sex with some of the locals and flew away faster than light before he could be hit with a paternity suit.
And do you know why he did it? Because James T. Kirk knew what Ron Moore didn’t, that Religion and Science Fiction don’t mix. The great adventure of space is space itself. Take a look at a Nebula, a black hole, the entire Milky Way galaxy. Study a pulsar, discover alien life and alternate forms of evolution. You didn’t need religious awe, when you had the awe of the amazing universe around you.
Then all that began to change. George Lucas brought in technomysticism, Battlestar Galactica mixed together Mormonism into a frontier travel metaphor. None of that was too bad. Yet. Because Science Fiction on TV was still basically Science Fiction. It might be bad, it might be good, but it was still basically about exploring and experience strange things.
The end began with Babylon 5 and DS9. The X-Files played their part, but it was hardly the series to influence the rest of SciFi TV. Instead B5 and DS9 set the standard for turning Science Fiction TV into Pseudo-Religious gibberish. Henceforth every Starship Captain would also double as The Chosen One, with a great prophesied destiny, e.g. Andromeda. And if it wasn’t him, it would be someone else. There would be tests of faith, discussions on the meaning of religion and none of it would matter a damn.
When Battlestar Galactica ended with the “revelation” that the whole damn thing had been orchestrated by two “angels”, it was the ridiculous but inevitable end that reflected the kind of stupidity that Ron Moore had brought to DS9. Deep Space Nine began with Sisko coming on board and learning to communicate with aliens who perceived time in a whole other way. That was one of DS9’s most intriguing episodes. By the time the series had ended, half the cast was worshiping the aliens as gods, and Sisko had been revealed to be their spawn with a mission to fight the other aliens, who were “evil”. This on a Star Trek series, which had never even accepted that a race was hopelessly evil.
That was what Ron Moore’s injection of religion into DS9 accomplished. It turned Science Fiction into religion. It turned the idea of making contact with an alien race that saw the world differently, into taking their statements on faith, viewing everything that happened as inevitable and outright worshiping them.
I don’t have to tell you what it did to Battlestar Galactica. At least there Ron Moore was honest about wanting to get rid of Science Fiction in favor of religious twaddle. So we had a non-SF series about a bunch of starships created by a society that still drives hummers, uses projectile weapons and corded telephones… all dedicated to the idea of accepting religion and turning into primitive savages by giving up technology.
This is your Science Fiction. This is your Science Fiction on Religion. Any questions?
The worst part of it is that after all that, none of these attempts to inject religion into SF TV actually tell us anything new about either religion or Science Fiction. The idea of aliens who experience time differently than we do is an interesting one. The idea that the Captain is a half-divinity whose mission is to fight evil sparkly aliens by jumping into a pit of fire or something… well it’s not an idea at all. It’s just a collection of badly cribbed cliches.
Science Fiction TV shows have nothing new to tell us about faith. Zero. Zippo. All they can do is dramatize it. And drive the Science Fiction out completely.
It’s time to actually bring back Science Fiction to TV. And I don’t mean Caprica airing on the SyFy channel. I mean Space. The big adventure. Worlds unexplored. Lifeforms that are strange and different than us. The big questions. And to do that, you’ll have to get your frakking religion out of my Science Fiction.
I don’t want to hear any more stories about Faith, or Prophecies or some idiot Hollywood producer’s idea of religion that he picked up by watching an episode of Oprah. Enough. I am not watching them anymore. I want Science Fiction. I want Robert Heinlein, I want Isaac Asimov, I want Arthur C. Clarke. I want the kind of vision of humanity’s technological future that Science Fiction used to inspire.
If you want to tell a story about religion, wait till your next confession.
Thank you Ron Moore.
Five years of running a SciFi series into the ground ended with two hours. Watching the extended pile of flashbacks set to sentimental New Age music you call a series finale brought that to an end. At least until Caprica airs, and dies horribly, along with the minds of the last deluded fanboys who still think your remake was some staggering work of transcendent genius.
Well you sure showed them.
I watched Daybreak Part 2, and every 15 minutes of it made me more and more retarded. First Adama, the XO, both of the Fleet’s Presidents, and half the useful officers, including the original Final 5, go off on a suicide mission to rescue a little girl. Cute.
Sure it seems like Cylons and humans can have kids anyway, but Adama decides to take everyone down to rescue her, and leaves Gaeta’s boyfriend in command, and makes him Admiral on top of that. Because apparently everyone in the fleet loves and respects him, something that happened while we weren’t looking.
As startling as the sight of humans fighting Cylons is for the first time in many years on the show, this brief diversion from the usual BSG storyline of the characters getting drunk, remembering the good times and yelling at each other is only brief.
Instead we soon head for Earth, the real Earth, or Earth 2. There Adama Jr decides we should break the cycle of violence by giving up all technology and living in caves. Because you know technology is evil. First you invent spaceships, then you invent evil robots and it all goes to hell from here. A point driven home by the conclusion in modern day New York City that ominously plays Bear’s reworked Dylan while kids stare at useless Japanese toy robots.
Oh no! Can’t you foolish Japanese people see you’ve doomed the species all over again by building toy robots that fearsomely clap their hands!
Of course even though the Fleet constantly rebels against the Adamas, this time everyone embraces the plan, even though it means living without basic hygiene or elementary medicine. Because I guess everyone in the fleet is down with having lots of dead babies and a lifespan that ends at 40, in order to have a clean slate.
And technology is bad. That is unless you want to fly your girlfriend around to look at some flamingos while you propose to her. Otherwise it’s BAD. Real bad.
And you know what ends the cycle of violence? Going back to a stone age society and resource scarcities. Because it’s technology that kills people, not people.
BSG isn’t unique in its Luddite approach. It’s just an insult to call Luddite New Age crap like this Science Fiction. Science Fiction was about imagining the possibilities. BSG is about ignoring the possibilities and flying your starships into the sun, and looking cheerfully at stretches of grass that are somehow free of predators and diseases that will kill you the moment you try to drink some standing water. That kind of retarded luddism is what Hollywood producers who think their spa getaways are a return to nature bring to the party.
Oh look, let me go put up a cabin. No need to worry, I won’t drop a log on my foot, develop a gangrene infection and die because I’m miles from help and I flew all my raptors into the sun. No, because I’m from Hollywood.
Of course if all that retardation wasn’t enough, for years now Battlestar Galactica was busy promising to explain all its “mysteries”. And then comes the series finale and there are no revelations. Zippo. Unless you count the “revelation” that the whole opera house vision was nothing more than a metaphor for the time that Hera would run away, Baltar and Captica Six would find her, and then stumble into a standoff, that wouldn’t exist if not for them carrying her into it.
Who’s Starbuck? We’re never told. Instead she mouths some nonsense about how glad she is that her journey is over. Who are the Baltar and Captica that they see in their visions? No answer either, except that they apparently work for some powerful deity.
In between all the flashbacks, which take up half the finale, to such compelling moments as Rosyln deciding not to sleep with a younger man and Adama deciding not to retire, and my eyes deciding to glaze over… there’s one thing that is pretty clear. And it’s that Ron Moore saw Return of the King and decided that it would be really great to end the episode 5 or 6 times. Classy.
Tell you what Ron, forget Caprica. I want to see you follow up the rest of this magnificent finale. Damn it, I want Battlestar Galactica Season 6.
I want to see Adama Jr crapping his pants with dysentery. I want to see the Cylon skinjobs and humans uniting in throwing used coffee cans at him because the drought means they have no food and they’re starving to death. I want to see Adama Sr, get sunstruck and wander around preaching his own religion while swilling imaginary booze. I want to see Chief sexually assaulting goats because he decided to spend the rest of his life on an island with no people on it. I want to see Saul and his slutty girlfriend living in a tree and smacking the hell out of each other because she keeps cheating on him with the natives.
And most of all I want to see a giant pile of bones, the remains of the human race on Earth, eaten by lions, killed by disease and common accidents, hunger, and of course by the friendly natives whose spears couldn’t possibly be used for violence. And then I want to see the list of survivors standing at Zero.
Oh and if you could clear up how Eve, an African woman, is really an Aryan blond robot with a glowing spine, that would be cool too.
Sincerely
Me
