1.24.2011

FILE UNDER: WHY?

I guess ever since the Star Trek creators released the first blueprints of the Enterprise way back in the 1970s it has become de rigueur to create such supplements for popular science fiction television and films. So now the BSG team has released their big map of the 12 Colonies. They 'solved' the elephant in the living room of how you have 12 inhabitable worlds in one star system by making it a quad-star system. Ho-hum. If they had wanted to do this right, they would have hired Michael Hall of the much-too-smart-compared-to-the-show Galactica Science website - he would have come up with something truly ingenious. The whole 12 different planets thing always makes me think of this:

Unrelated: I got to meet LOST's Michael Emerson (Ben) the other night (cool guy, of course) and told him about my LOST blog (link is upper right)

1.06.2011

ANOTHER FINAL FIVE

This time it was the SyFy Channel's unceremonious dump of the final five episodes of Caprica. I haven't made it through all of it yet, and wound up watching eps partly out-of-order while selecting during playback (which, strangely, didn't seem to matter), but I was actually far more entertained with these eps than with the earlier shows that came down the pike (or is it Picon?).

Love the dykey chubster schoolmarm monotheism leader-lady - she would be great in an over-the-top comedy (maybe new episodes of Absolutely Fabulous if they make 'em? - she could square off against Mo Gaffney), and the Tauron tattoo-mobster subculture w
as fleshed out and made more tangible but it was still a terrible direction to waste the audience's time in the first place. The whole cop-show subplot was just a needless waste of screen time too (someone on staff is a fan of The Shield?), and the roughneck terrorist trainers were a bore.

They still hadn't
brought together the Robot/Real Zoe/monotheism/Cylon culture strands into anything approaching a satisfactory weave ... and Zoe's Rivendell manifestation was just dumb and then minutes later was penetrated anyway. And who is that other girl? Oh yeah, Esai Morales's character's daughter. Why is she still around? - she is useless, and if it is to bond he and Daniel Graystone as fathers who lost daughters, wasn't that dealt with in the beginning? It's like Nina and Michael say on Project Runway edit edit edit! So much of that junk can be thrown out.

I don't have high hopes for the new BSG entry into the Let's See How Much We Can Fuck Up the Legacy of a Good Show Sweepstakes: the prequel series being developed. To say something positive about these last Capricas, I did think the production values looked quite expensive, and I like seeing Eric Stoltz get work
(his best is Waterdance).

1.01.2011

RE-EXPERIENCING THE GLORY

It's been over a year or so since I last watched the BSG miniseries, so today I enjoy it again - such rare entertainment: smart, sophisticated, refined. It shone brightly for ever so brief a time.