I thought this week's episode was the best of the season thus far. I'm sure there are some of you out there going 'Isaac just likes it when there's violence and people kill people and shit" and to some extent that is sometimes true, but I also think one of the strengths of the BSG creative team is how they handle the more action-driven episodes. They're very good at building tension while having that tension flow from and affect their characters, and they're quite good at making compact, tightly paced white-knuckle rides. Most of my favorite BSG episodes are pretty action-driven: the Eye of Jupiter two parter, the Admiral Cane subplot, the rescue from New Caprica etc.
The other thing is that it keeps them from having long remunerative dialogues featuring actors who aren't good enough to handle them. Case in point: The scene with Anders in tonight's episode which almost gets him back on his really butch "Oh yeah I used to sing this song. For a girl. I'm so tortured." crap but luckily he gets blackjacked and put in the brig before it can go there.
Similarly, Cara Thrace has one boringly angsty scene where Katee Sackoff does that weird heavy-lidded-looks-like-she's-gonna-have-a-seizure thing but soon its back to her being a butch wild west gunslinger which, it bears remembering is what she was cast to do in the first place. I mention this for a moment because I think it's worth keeping in mind that a problem with long running series- especially those like BSG, 24, The Sopranos and 6 Feet Under where the level of long-term multi-season planning is pretty clearly low- is that actors are cast because they can do X, Y and Z and then as their characters grow, they are asked to do A, B and C and might not be able to do it all that well. The way casting in television and film (and increasingly larger-budget theatre) is partly to blame for this, where people are far more interested in casting the role than the actor, everything's done by type etc. As BSG has progressed from being a character-driven action show about humans fightin' robots and trying to have a post-genocide democracy into... whatever it is now (I say that not as an insult but rathe rbeacuse the show is kind of indescribable at this point) they've run into this problem a lot.
A few actors have managed to grow as the show needed them to. Alessandro Juliani, Aaron Douglas, Mary McDonnell and, perhaps most surprisingly, Jamie Bember's Lee Adama (I say most surprisingly because I thought he was the weak point of the show when it started out). Perhaps he was miscast before. Perhaps its just that his American accent has vastly improved. Who knows?
The only long running show i know to completely avoid this trap is The Wire, but that's because David Simon and Ed Burns planed the first three seasons out halfway through writing the first, and planned season four and five out midway through filming the third. Given the way the television market works, this is patently insane, as they were planning out seasons for a low-rated show that was very very close to being cancelled from week to week.
Other things that become crystal clear in this week's episode are that Grace Park is really no longer a main character on the show and that the writers really didn't have any long term plan for Gaius Baltar's Lesbian Wiccan Sex Cult or whatever it is. After spending the entirety of Season 4.0 making strange speeches on the wireless and not really having much to do with the plot, now he goes back to being Spineless Fraud Gaius and they sort of just play the whole thing as one extended joke. Which I didn't mind, it's just interesting to see how literally every single writer on the show has a different view of the Cult and uses it differently down to the level of irony with which it is treated.
Anyway... A good episode all around with a great Wild West Shootout Finish. Old people kicking ass and makin' out with each other &c. Next week's episode looks frakkin' awesome.
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