Parabasis

Battlestar Finale Blogging

The finale of this mini-season was so satisfying yet so open ended, I sort of wished it was just the final episode of the series. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Can We All Agree

That this past week's Battlestar episode was the worst of the season?  Don't get me wrong, not as bad as season 2's infamous Lee-becomes-a-film-noir-detective episode, but still like really really bad?  Even my friends who think Romo Lampkin is a good character (I do not) thought it was bad. Wow.It's a textbook example of how lame it is when you let the audience get ahead of you. 

Brief Battlestar Blogging

Guess What's Coming To Dinner was one of the best Battlestar episodes of all time, right up there with the three-part pegasus episodes, the escape from new caprica and the boxing match.  

Am I the only one who is a little bored with Starbuck? 

"Life On Mars" to be remade by David Kelley

It looks like Life On Mars will be remade for ABC by David Kelley as one of their two new shows in the fall (only two? yikes)!  For those of you who haven't seen the original show, starring John Simm and Philip Glenister, I recommend it. It's great goofy fun, cheesy in all the right ways, with some pretty crackerjack acting from the leads (the whole series is also a total of 16 one hour episodes long, shorter than one season of the US show will be). I doubt the US TV show will go for the same tonal balance as the BBC one, as many of the aspects of the BBC show are resolutely unfashionable, but I'd be interested in seeing what they do with it.

2 Quick Reviews

1) I'll just quote AO Scott on Iron Man: “Iron Man,” directed by Jon Favreau (“Elf,” “Zathura”), has the advantage of being an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least — since it certainly has its problems — a superhero movie that’s good in unusual ways.

2) this week's battlestar: i liked it! maybe more on why later.

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".

A Joke, Right?

Please tell me this is a joke... please? It's gotta be, right? I haven't read supposed feminism this ridiculous since Urbaniak created (see comments)-- er, combatted-- a radical feminist anti-Urbaniak persona on LiveJournal...

Bulgarian Idol

sorry for the light posting today. I've been doing a lot of (non blog) writing this week. More soon.

The Wire's Greatest Plotline?

The post will contain spoilers.

Matt Yglesias claims that the rise and fall of Stringer Bell is the Wire's greatest plot arc. Do you agree, dear reader? I am inclined to agree, but I think there are other contenders. The fall of the Sobotka clan, for example, or the gradual change in Carcetti from 3-5. Also, although it is not complete yet, the arc of Michael's journey from principled, smart, damaged kid in Season 4 to killer, drug dealer and eventual renegade in Season 5 is breathtaking. The scene where he says goodbye to Bug and Dookie in last week's episode was one of the most densely layered and difficult to watch sequences I've ever seen on the show.

But in terms of scope... yes, I think I'd have to agree that the Stringer Bell plot is the greatest of the show. Hmm. Your thoughts?

Quick The Wire Blogging!

Let me just say that I'm not going to comment on this season of The Wire too much until it is over. I think that's a mistake that a lot of online commenters are making. I mean...  would you host roundtable discussions on a book where you all read one chapter and then clucked about how worried you were that it wasn't going to work out?  So, given that David Simon said he considers each season a novel, and each episode a chapter, i think it's worth it to stick it out and keep mum.

But I will also go against the grain and say that so far, while it's certainly not their most successful plotline ever (that would still be Hamsterdam as far as i'm concerned for sheer ballz), I like the newsroom stuff. It feels like the missing piece of the world they've created, and it is handled very charmingly.