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San Francisco, 6:10 AM
Sat Nov 28
17 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/16/09
11/16/09
11/16/09
Those rock like Sgt. Rock. Or The Haunted Tank. #inglouriousbasterds
11/16/09
10/28/09
Perhaps "making the decision" is not the right phrase. How about "before realizing they didn't have a frakking clue." #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
oh,wait the writers don't even know #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
She would at times incarnate herself as a human. One of those was Pythia (who lead the 13th tribe to Earth, helped them discover how to precreate and oh yeah, was also Tigh's mom), another was Kara Thrace. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
They never really intended to do anything more with him than that. Somehow Ron Moore did not anticipate that adding another hidden cylon previously unknown and untalked about would cause a lot of curiousity among the fans. *facepalm*
Daniel does appear very briefly in a flashback in the last issue of the Final Five comic. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
10/29/09
*NOTE: "probably" is used very loosely here, and you may not learn anything about anyone or anything by watching Caprica, and will in fact be stuck with a sense of dread as more questions that you didn't know you needed an answer to are brought up, and never answered. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
As for distaste that the writers didn't have a four-year blow-by-blow plan, I have to ask- how else does anything get written? You discover the worthwhile choices as you go. Sometimes you get lost in the maze, but you only discover the interesting implications by seeing the last step fully fleshed out. Half the canon of great novels got written as serials, the first chapters fully fleshed and published before the ending was even conceived of- and some of those have some rather abrupt cutoffs to bring it in on time. And there certainly were plans- each season was rather aggressively interwoven. The ease with which you can mentally substitute a better ending -of a couple varieties- is a pretty sure sign there was a well-built structure up to that point.
Enjoy for posterity that someone made a SF show that actually got to stand on its own merits next to drama written for their content instead of their gee-whiz visuals. Voyager it sure as hell wasn't. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
Actually endings are hugely important. The make or break a story. Even as far back as the ancient Greeks it was considered poor form to use a Deus Ex Machina shortcut to wrap things up.
Just speaking on a personal level, it's hard for me to look at the rest of the show and not think of the ending. It has rather ruined the show for me and suspect a lot of others. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
The continuity in writing eventually got so bad that there were scenes where the actors looked like they gave up trying to make any sense of their characters. Unfortunately, most of this cast didn't have the experience or sheer chutzpah to chew scenery which can at least be hugely entertaining. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
I didn't really like the Sopranos ending. Or the Seinfeld ending. Or the end of the Mayor of Casterbridge, or the last page of Dune. Shakespeare is pretty well laced with saccharine asshat endings. All I am saying is that endings pretty well suck for the same reasons- which, one might argue, stems from the fact, that, in contradiction to what I argued before, endings sometimes aren't all that important. We don't usually need to see the guy get the girl, because its been a forgone conclusion for some time, and trying to pack in a meaningful final blow is quite a puzzle. Granted, the situation is somewhat different, since there were questions in need of answering, but at the end of the day, they got quite consistent A's for four years and then flunked their very last test. I let them walk with their class. Your mileage may of course vary, but given how many people are currently hooked on my passed-around box sets, I tend to give them a pass on the project as a whole, at the end of all things.
If Caprica has a final 45 minutes like that though, I will beat RDM with a tire iron, and then weep while I watch "33" over and over till the cops get there. Well, maybe not a tire iron. Pretension doesn't warrant death. Maybe something with some sting to it though. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
I think if I chopped off all the tech into the sun plus the little head people chuckle in our time and ominous robot montage (possibly the Starbuck *POOF* too) it would be a reasonably decent ending.
I've read a lot of the goings on behind the scenes. I do realize the demands of writing for shows long time where the end date is indeterminable are quite a different animal than writing a film or a novel. However Ron Moore many times got caught up with adding things for the hell of it because he thought it was cool without really mapping out where he was going with it and would always say he would figure it out later.
Eventually though you have to pay the piper and come up with a conclusion. If you add too many mysteries and mystical mumbo jumbo then you end up with some overly complicated tale with too many threads to tie up and paint yourself into a corner.
He quite used the age old god from machine, quite literally, here. Given the subject matter it may have been called for to a degree, but I also feel like he injected too much pessimism and created some quite unintentional messages, like promoting Intelligent Design and radical Luddite agendas.
It was also just too neatly packaged and convenient. Who decided to get rid of all their technology? What if some people disagreed? What happens to people who get sick? Why was nothing left of them? (Moore says they left their mark on the Jungian collective unconscious which we unconsciously rediscovered but I'm not buying it). Etc.
The thing I found interesting is The Plan went a totally different route for its explanations. The head people were not shown, god was barely mentioned and only sarcastically by Cavil, and Shelley, who everyone assumed to be a hocus pocus creation of Head Six, turned out to have quite a rational and plausible explanation.
Perhaps if they had shown a bit more of this and a bit less magical robot angels for the end it may have worked a bit better.
Or not. Who knows? Everyone has a different recipe for what would have made a better ending and we're all playing back seat writers. Ultimately though, the reality still is the end greatly disappointed me and, whether right or wrong, lowered my opinion of the entire series.
I should be able to go back and watch the early series and appreciate it for what it is, but I feel like I've since opened Pandora's Box or peeked at Schrodinger's Cat and now I can't go back. It just lost some of the magic. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
I can't think of a single ending to a long-form entertainment that felt totally right. It may just be endemic to the form, that when you've become that invested over that much time into another reality, there's no way to cut you off without making you feel crappy about it. Given that, and the impossibly high hopes for the ending, I figured that as long as BSG didn't completely nuke the fridge I would be satisfied. Hell, I'm glad we even GOT an ending. So many shows don't even get that. And it was good enough for me. They had a definitive conclusion with some poignancy and poetry to it. I figured there were bound to be parts that didn't sit right, but you are going to get those in any ending, and given that, it was serviceable and didn't ruin the rest of the show retroactively at all.
10/28/09
That and the fact that they willingly gave up all the advances they and those before them made so that nothing left of them survived (Jungian subspace hard drives aside).
At least if they had gone with the idea they toyed around with them landing during the time of the ancient Greeks and helping to create that civilization and its many advances we could say that some legacy of their lives and knowledge had survived. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
10/28/09
Still waiting for a Yes or No, however. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
(I'm of the "no they didn't, but she thought about it" school of thought.) #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
But I mean I got a literal 'sugar-mama' vibe where she was trying to entice him into sexy time with shiny promotions and talking him up to the rest of the fleet.
10/28/09
10/28/09
10/28/09
Whatever. The show is finished. And I have ZERO desire to watch The Plan. Thanks, Season 4! #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
10/28/09
How is this different than
"Adama decided to burn the Galactica, like Cortez burning his ships when he got to the New World" #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
Then, at the end of the episode, rather than have a chat about God (excuse me, I know he hates that name), have the Galactica and the fleet circle back to the Earth of today.
THAT'S the cycle repeating itself.
Alas, no cool ending. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
Then Adama would get on his knees and start pounding the ground screaming: "You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Gods damn you all to hell!"
1 out of 3 ain't bad tho right?
10/28/09
I didn't like that ending because after all they've been through...wouldn't it make more sense to keep some ships and Galactica just in case Cylons change their mind? Okay, Galactica's back was broken and the ship was falling apart so that wouldn't be possible...so maybe they could have kept it as a memorial or something.
I have fantasized about several different endings...one where Galactica was Cylon or even god...or one where Galactica and its crew just keeps going...and becomes home for several generations of humans...who establish a new civilization somewhere very far... #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
Besides, even if they weren't, and even with the tech gone, Cavil could have run into the centurions and ahem, cooerced the location of the humans out of them. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/29/09
10/28/09
The series finale was written up on 2 cocktail napkins amidst a drunken stupor, 30 minutes before the actual airdate.
That night, we were all watching a live performance of the cast doing history's most ambitious improve performance off chicken scratch notes.
Oh wait, we all already figured that one out...
10/28/09
10/28/09
Then we got those lovely and superfluous flashbacks. *hurls* #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
10/28/09
The thing that always threw my about the "It's the characters" declaration was that that was exactly the opposite of what they ended up doing- they very abruptly made an Asimov short story-esque Big Idea With a Twist Ending, complete with the painless birth of a new social order (have these people ever not squabbled?) because someone said something "wise" and centuries-hence coda- in which all of the characters who are supposedly being focused on are long dead. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
I really didn't care about Roslin's cougar date and Lee's drunkenly chasing the pigeon was the epitome of where the show went wrong trying to be high art with some quasi deep but ultimately meaningless content injected in. Ron Moore admitted the pigeon didn't mean anything. He just had an image of a bird in his head and told the writers to incorporate it in somewhere. Someone really should have told the emperor he wasn't actually wearing any clothes.
I think my favorite flashback was the Boomer one (or what I thought was the Boomer one). It seemed to me to be the last memory of a dying woman from a happier time. Then I read where Ron Moore said that flashback was all about Adama and it just sort of shat all over it in my mind.
I suppose sometimes it's best to not pull the curtain back and find out who the wizard really is. #battlestargalactica
10/28/09
10/28/09
10/28/09
10/28/09
When no such scenario exists, that is, when the writers have made so much incongruent stuff up that they are totally lost, is it fair to expect us to fill in the holes? I don't think so. #battlestargalactica