Battlestar Blogging: This Whole Season Covered in a One-Word Post

meh.

SPOILERTASTIC UPDATE: I guess Ihave to clarify and defend my position!  I'm game... one of the reasons i posted a one-word review (meh) is that i just came to the realization that I don't really care about what happens on the show anymore, whereas I used to care enough to frequently talk about it with friends and colleagues. Heck, I missed the episode on Friday night because I forgot that it was on.  Now some of this has nothing to do with BSG.  In between last year's season and this years, I (re- for some of it) watched the entirety of The Wire which is, you know, so good that it is unfair to compare other shows to it.  On top of that, BSG has been off the air for a long tme.  And I'm really busy with various projects right now, so TV watching occupies less room in my brain.

Some of it, however, I think is the fault of the show.  So let me try to make my case:

1) The show has become pretentious. This problem started in earnest with Baltar going on board the Cylon basestar last season.  The constant montage feel that I initially found so exciting has become kind of oppressive.  Bear McCleary's music constantly announces that everything you're watching is important (and DRAMATIC!), even though it frequently is neither. I'll give an example from this week's episode: The scene where Chief gets demoted. Does anyone think that the seemingly-interminable zoom out before the ad break with the pounding drums and oud and whatnot was justified in that moment? The whole show feels like that now. If you want something to be important have something fucking happen in the plot that makes it important don't just use cheap manipulative tactics to convince me of its importance. The religious and spiritual mumbo jumbo which was the achilles heel of the first season (Remember that female Priest who got killed and you were kind of happy about it?) has reared its ugly head tenfold with the Gaius Baltar Lesbian Sex Cult. 

2) The show has lost its relevance.  One of the great things about watching Battlestar has been the way they take a political issue from our world, and look at it through the skewed world of post-devestation humanity. Aaron talks about it a bit in his comment to this post, but let me just say that there's a nice build between Survival in the first season, the usage of the military etc. in season 2, an insurgency from the POV of the insurgents which leads to a political and personal examination of forgiveness in season three to... what, exactly? A debate between polytheists and monotheists about whether worshipping One True God is preferable to worshipping Greek Gods?  REALLY? I mean, I guess you could make a (I would argue thinly reasoned) case that this is somehow analgous to our current theist/atheist debates, or Christian/Muslim debates, but I'm not buying it.  It just feels totally irrelevant. They've created this huge world over the past few seaons and now they've totally left our world to go play in theirs. The one vestage of the sort of stuff that used to be the bread and butter of the show is the Quorom of 12 with President Roslyn which remains from week to week the most watchable part of the show (a good ex. from this week-- I didn't give a shit about what happened to Baltar's Sex Cult, but I loved Roslyn, Lee and the Admiral discussing the best way to deal with it from an idealist and a pragmatic standpoint).

Now, you could make an argument that now they're doing an interesting examination of what it means to be human and alive. And I've found this material intermittently interesting (although it was all covered in Blade Runner in two hours with as much depth as they've explored it across four seasons). but the issue I've had is this. In the prior seasons, questions about the Cylons were examinations of the human character's humanity. Now on the other hand, they're examinations about what it means to be a Cylon, because we're following once-human characters who find out they're not human. Which is interesting but only a kind of fan-fic kind of way because  Cylons don't exist and so philosophical conversations about what it means to be a Cylon are only kind of interseting in a I like this world and have some questions about it kind of way. The moral quandary that Tori is going through right now is not one that any of us will ever have to face within our lifetimes. The moral quandary that Admiral Cain went through on the Pegasus  is one our society is dealing with right now.

(it doesn't help that only two of the four new cylons are characters that we cared about or followed significantly. Tori and Anders are only important for their relationship to powerful people,namely Roslyn and Starbuck. The show has tried to rectify this by suddenly making Tori-- who still gets guest-star billing in each episode-- a major character. But they're creating this out of nothing, we don't really know what she was like, so whatever changes she undergoes aren't dramatic as changes. This is why she has to keep announcing that she's changing.)

3) Speaking of which... who cares about the Cylons? Not me. Remember when they had a plan? I cared about them then. Now they don't have a plan, and I have to hear about the intricacies of their civic institutions and whether or not blah de blah should be lobotomized purple monkey dishwasher. I mean, don't get me wrong, they're setting up a civil war. At least from a plot stand point, that should be exciting. But in The Wire, the set up is interesting in and of itself, rather than ponderous.

Hey, I'll keep watching, and I hope to be proven wrong as the show is born out. And there's positive stuff going on too (the Roslyn stuff,  Chief Tyrol has always been great, killing Callie off etc.) but you know... still... I would say majorly flopping around right now, and as pretty much every scene of the last episode went by I found myself saying "wow, I just don't care".

Comments

[James]

Well put.

[Herxanthikles]

A "meh" on your meh!

[isaac]

herx,

what about this season do you care about? do you think they're spending enough time on that stuff in relation to the other stuff they are spending time on?

[Aaron]

I dunno. If you look at it developing like "The Wire" (and ignore the first season), then the second season is all about military power, the third season is about the abuses of war, and the fourth season is about identity -- and through that, religion -- which I find to be pretty damn relevant and daring for TV.

[freeman]

Meh? Huh. Weird. I think it's pretty damn great.

[cgeye]

Not meh. Building.

Incorporating new icky information, testing relationships, exploring being stuck.

note that there was only one human/cylon battle so far... and then both sides retreated to their corners and started cutting themselves. They've gone emo, which is right for the existential crisis they're in.

[Tim]

"meh"? Really?

Though I admit to not really caring about the one god/many gods debate, I've found this season to be pretty damned exciting. To chose one specific example: I kind of love how Tori came out of nowhere to become one of the most important characters in the show. It's because her character has almost no back-story that I find her transformation compelling -- there has always been something a little sinister about her lurking in the background, and seeing her now give herself permission to do the things she secretly wants is fascinating. And bitch airlocked Callie! With a smile.

Admittedly, last weeks episode was not as exciting as some, but I just chalked that up to building up to the season's main big conflict.

Of course, I haven't watched THE WIRE. Maybe that ruins all other TV for you after that.

[Herxanthikles]

Dude, it was always pretentious. From the miniseries it was asking "Does mankind deserve to survive?" but it sold it. As for the zoom out, if you have the balls to go out there and make the argument that one may make the best of limited opitions, but life still sucks, I will comp you a zoom out. That's plenty relevant to anyone who ever had a long-term relationship, a second-best job, or anything. And of course, it was of one with the tragic view of the show: people break, and sometimes there's nothing really to show for it.

On the relevance and the Cylon front, I think their civil war is keeping both items alive and exciting, especially as the question of what happens when the slaves become masters is a perenniel.

Ultimately, I think we're liking the same things and disliking most of the same things ("Let's make Tori into something else because she had no personality to begin with!") But for some reason the weak links aren't bothering me as much. Maybe it's because BSG, for all its greatness, has never flirted with perfection the way the Wire did. Just in the casting alone, you have a mixture of first raters (Olmos, Sackhoff, Hogan, et al) with the pretty bland folk (you know who you are) with the awful folk (all priests, seers, etc.) and it was just the show. I think that's inured me to its occasional weaknesses. I've been enthralled and rocked by each episode so far. Can't wait for Friday.