(no subject)

[technoir]

Just saw last nights Battlestar Galactica.

Holy frak that was good.


If you have not seen it yet due to DVRing or watching online, do. It was really first season level good.

Comments

[charlesland.livejournal.com]

Agreed, I am liking it so far with only a couple of reservations.

[hoshiadam.livejournal.com]

It was good. I finally watched the last episode of last season and then these episodes.

[djfanboy.livejournal.com]

...not to mention first season-level FRAKKED UP!

:D

[msrlapin.livejournal.com]

I know, I know, I'm a heretic. But I saw the first two episodes of the series, disliked it immediately (far too dark for my taste), and have never really gotten into the show.

I'll be happy when the show is done and I can jump on a geek train I like with my friends.

[technoir.livejournal.com]

Sorry you are heretic sir. You will be excommunicated from fandom. It is almost as great a sin as saying you don't like Firefly.

The brilliance of the show in my mind does also involve it's darkness. It walked a believable edge of how humanity deals under pressure. It has maintained that pressure through out and in the recent season humanity has become ground down. This particular episode they showed the heroes begin to stand back up again and that felt good.

One of the things that is often lodged as a complaint at Star Trek, the old BSG, Buck Rogers, and even the much loved Babylon 5 is that they are too clean. The present a humanity that is impossibly free of flaw. That the darkness that has walked with us since the dawn has been mostly gotten rid of. Bab 5 is the darkest of that trio and it is still an optimistic vision of humanity. The New BSG came along and said this will be humanity like it is. They followed the original series premise but wrote it with believable characters(mostly) and believable human reactions to constant war.

Now do i want all my scifi to be dark, no. But I don't want all my scifi to be some fantastical and impossibly bright version of the future either. We are humans. We are flawed and I want that reflected in my entertainment from time to time.

of course I enjoyed Millenium as well, so that says a lot there.

[msrlapin.livejournal.com]

You realize, of course, what happens when a minority group drives out the insufficiently pure?

You become Republicans. Heh.

I like my heroes to be better than me, personally. I don't expect Shakesperean characters to be realistic; I expect them to be larger than life, in every dimension. Are Kirk, Picard, and Sheridan "fantastical"? Sure. Can aspiring to be more like them make me feel like I'm making myself better? Yes. Absolutely.

I hate "anti-heroes" with a passion, and Starbuck and Adama veer dangerously into that category. I don't want to see realistic heroes in a story featuring robots and spaceships and prophecies. A grand canvas should have grand actors, not small ones. Adama and Starbuck aren't big enough for me.

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

Heroes? Yeah. No heroes here.

Just people.

[msrlapin.livejournal.com]

...which I'm not looking for in my science fiction. I want stories about "people", I read Grisham or whoever the latest top 10 writer at Borders is.

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I get that you want escapist fantasy. I tend to find that kind of storytelling to be a lot weaker, but I get it all the same.

[msrlapin.livejournal.com]

"Escapist" seems a bit condescending. I'd prefer "aspirational". I like heroes that I can live up to, not ones that are no better than me.

And I'd suggest that every classic of sci fi or fantasy you can name falls under the "escapist" label, since BSG falls so very far into the "grim n' gritty" model. Is Lord of the Rings "escapist"? In what manner is its storytelling weaker than BSG?

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

I don't actually think Lord of the Rings is very good fiction, so your line of argument might already be on a weak footing with me. :)

[moosea1.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm right with you on this one. I want my television viewing to be silly or uplifting. I don't want to be depressed by it. I watched the first two episodes of BSG and never watched it again.

[technoir.livejournal.com]

Let me be clear. I don't say I can't enjoy escapist stories and yes Lord of the Rings is escapist. They can be very enjoyable. Nothing wrong with that.

I find your notion of if you want to read about people you read grisham, who honestly also pop fiction.

Science fiction is star trek but it also the genre that brought us Fahrenheit 451. I do not limit my enjoyment to only the subjects I am comfortable with. I find a hero who is ordinary far more fascinating than the superhuman acts of the more popcorn scifi. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances is always powerful to me. People breaking down is more interesting than a person who never does.

I want stories from time to time that challenge me. I want stories that occasionally make me uncomfortable. You watch Shindler's List knowing you will see the squalor of humanity but you will watch it anyway.

Now am I saying BSG is in the same league as Schindler's List? No of course not, but what really caught me early on is it starts in a dark place and ask's a question about what people will do to survive. There are stories of people becoming broken in that and there are stories of people rising to the level of any hero you can name.

I still love my Star Trek and Bab 5. I just take issue with the notion this is not a genre for showing real people and real issues. In someways it is the perfect genre for it.

[technoir.livejournal.com]

See above..

The short is... I think TV and SciFi as a genre can be art. Art does not have to make me comfortable all the time. I was deeply facinated with BSG from day one and it is nice it has come back to reminding what is good about these characters.

[msrlapin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but who watches Schindler's List more than once? Or watches Schindler's List: The Series, thirteen episodes of misery for a year?

Schindler's List is that sort of art that you walk past once, nod, and then set aside - a better version of this crop of Oscar nominees. (Who's looking forward to watching "The Reader"?)

It's definitely not the sort of art I want in my living room, let alone show to my kid some day. Ditto BSG.

[technoir.livejournal.com]

Ah I guess that is the difference I guess. If there was a show produced that was equal to the art and writing of Schindler's list then I would watch. In the end stories of misery are also stories about hope.

If there is no hope at all, if all there is suffering with no humanity demonstrating it's good as well as it's ill, well that is probably a horror film. I am not a big fan of the torture porn that is in most horror films of late.

I am looking forward to The Reader by the way?

The other end I should point out and have not up till this point. BSG also has it's moments of bad ass. It is a war ship in space. there is certainly more going on than just the people suffering. There are gunfights and Dog fights to thrill the adrenaline junkie in there as well.

[msrlapin.livejournal.com]

Maybe. But I never saw anything even remotely funny in any of the episodes I saw, and that's telling for me. Shakespere stuck a clown into Macbeth. I just can't take hours and hours of misery without leavening it a little bit. BSG is just too thick, heavy, and bitter for me to swallow.

And I just don't see the hope in BSG. Some Very Serious Discussions about torture and jihad, but I was tired of those when I saw them argued - badly - in 24. (I wonder what BSG would have looked like if it was made during the Obama administration? Do you think that the twelve planets might have tried to do something more to reach out to the Cylons other than leave some lonely guy in a desk to take messages? Hope and Change don't seem to be in the BSG vocabulary.)

It makes perfect sense, to me, that Earth would be a wasteland when they found it in BSG. Of course the hope at the end of the rainbow is in ruins. This show doesn't have any other theme in its vocabulary.

Nice journal

[hotgirl4u406.livejournal.com]

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