Tag: battlestar galactica

Daybreak

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

The BSG finale was…. not really overwhelming and not really underwhelming either. It was medium whelming. It gave an OK sort of resolution to the characters as a whole that’s moderately satisfying as long as you don’t think about it at all.

But if you do think about it….

The promise that the cylons “have a plan” was dropped from the title screens at some point, but it was definitely there early on and they really didn’t have a plan, or understandable motivations at all. They are one dimensional villains apparently driven purely by spite. Other things that weren’t really explained were: the opera house, which seems to have been an extremely complicated allegory to help Hera walk a few metres down a corridor, Starbuck’s resurrection and disappearance, and Hera in general.

Hera was supposed to be special. She was so special we had to endure two ridiculous plotlines to ensure she was the only part-cylon child after the writers accidentally introduced two other part or fully cylon children. The first being Tyrol’s son actually turning out to be a product of the least believable affair in the history of TV, and the second being Six’s pregnancy and miscarriage (peak soap opera). And in the end, Hera turned out to be special because… she becomes mitochondrial Eve. Literally any of the women in the fleet or on the planet could have become mitochondrial Eve!

And then at the end they decided to abandon all technology (including medical technology), because… ??? And everyone’s perfectly happy with that, despite having mutinied only a few episodes ago for far less.

Another special moment: When Adama is picking a replacement admiral to stand in for him while he’s gone, he says “We need someone the fleet admires and respects… so we’re picking this guy who occasionally stands in the background! Well done, extra, you’ve earned it”.

I mean, I enjoyed the series as a whole, even though it went downhill after half way through S2, but you do have to switch your brain off for a lot of the later episodes. Which is frustrating as it was intellectually intriguing to begin with.

I think a good example of doing this stuff well is Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. They managed to keep the intrigue right until the end, and then it concluded in probably the only way that really made sense, but was still unpredictable.

TV

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

Unfortunately, all the TV programs I’m watching are going to end at pretty much the same time. Not through any planning on my part, I’m currently two episodes away from the end of Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse and Clone Wars!

I suppose after Clone Wars there’s Rebels (low expectations) and Bad Batch (high expectations, but not many episodes). I have quite enjoyed Clone Wars. For something that started off as a children’s show, it hits pretty hard in places. And now we’re so close to the end, they writers and producers really upped their game.

I wish I could say the same for BSG and The Expanse. I loved the first four seasons of The Expanse. The fifth, though, has lacked focus. Now I’m two episodes from the end and it’s still meandering without strong plotlines or plot development in general. I thought the 8th episode was particularly bad. Someone on Reddit mentioned that Naomi’s scenes occupied 40% of the runtime for the episode. I don’t mind Naomi, but her on her own running up and down a spaceship over and over again hardly makes for compelling viewing. It feels like Naomi’s plot is the only one that has been fleshed out this season, which is a shame, because it’s just not that interesting. In fact, Naomi is probably the least interesting character of the main cast. The plot with the Martian espionage that Bobby was following at the beginning of the season was classic Expanse, but it’s taken a back seat to the soap opera of Naomi’s family.

I don’t find Marco Inaros a particularly exciting villain. It seems like there are strong parallels to 9/11, but would Bin Laden have made for an interesting fictional villain? He spent 10 years in hiding because he spent all his power on one big but ultimately tactically stupid move. I get the same feelings from Marco. Okay, you did something big, but it was just one event and now you’re on borrowed time.

Battlestar is the same. I just watched ‘Daybreak Part 1’, which is the first of the last three episodes. I think actually it was originally broadcast as two episodes, but iPlayer has split it into three.

I can’t believe how boring it’s become. The last few episodes have been so slow. I thought with it being so close to the end that it would suddenly pick up, but even now on what was broadcast as the penultimate episode, it just feels like a big “so what?”. Half the episode was taken up by flashbacks to before the start of the series. Why are we being told at this late point that Laura Roslin had two sisters who were killed in a car crash? If you wanted to make this part of her character, you should have done it about 70 episodes ago.. Recent episodes also include “Starbuck learns to play the piano” and “let’s spend an hour watching characters give lectures to each other about the mythology of BSG”. I hope it ends well, but there’s barely been any plot development for a long time.

Work and BSG

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

Today was one of those days at work where you find out that something is URGENTLY needed TODAY. The thing that was needed was completed over a year ago, but it has never been tested in real usage, UNTIL TODAY. And today it is urgent. Despite being completely ignored for the past year. I do get frustrated with this. A few weeks ago there was a similar scenario where a fix for something was urgently required for a demo at 2PM. Well maybe if you have a demo at 2PM, don’t deploy an untested new release at 11AM?

Battlestar Galactica spoilers ahead!

So I’ve now finished S3 of BSG. To be honest it’s dragging. Season 1 and the first half of 2 (up to the end of the Pegasus/Cain storyline) was gripping, but since then it’s meandered a lot towards interesting ideas via some extremely boring ones.

I liked the trial subplot and I liked the lawyer. I liked Lee sticking to his innate sense of right and wrong. He and Helo are quite consistent in that, while some of the other characters oscillate all over the place and become unbelievable and dislikeable (Adama, Roslyn).

But where are we now? Starbuck died, and I didn’t care at all. Because firstly I don’t find her to be a nice person at all, and secondly I didn’t think she was really dead. Now she’s back again, wow didn’t see that one coming.

I’ve been very intrigued by who the final five will turn out to be, but after four of them have just been revealed I feel a bit “well, okay?”. What bearing does it have on the story? It just seemed a bit pointless. And tying it all to a Bob Dylan song was really strange and took me out of the BSG universe while I was watching it. Maybe Bob Dylan is the final cylon. Maybe it works better if you’re not familiar with the song, but the line “said the joker to the thief” is so distinctive that you’re immediately taken out of the program and into whatever relationship you have with the song.

I don’t know, to me it feels like we’re entering Lost territory where the writers have lost sight of the original intrigue and are making things up as they go along and stop focusing on keeping a tight storyline.

Still alive

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I haven’t been on here much for a week or two because I’ve been distracted with a little project. I had this idea that job adverts are really boring and depressing to trudge through, so why don’t I make a bot that crawls job sites, pulls out relevant information, and just shows me the ones that might be interesting? And then I had another idea that was something along the lines of “well that’s a search engine, isn’t it?”. When you write extremely boring enterprise software for a living you can forget how fun it is to program things that interest you.

In tangentially related news I had the LinkedIn email last week where it tells you that you appeared in 37 search results and your searchers work for these companies. I usually just open and discard these emails on autopilot, with no memory of actually doing it, but this time I opened it and was greeted by the logo of my old employer. I found that a bit stressful. I ended up having a nightmare about still working there and haven’t really felt like I’ve settled down again yet.

How strange is it that it’s almost a year and a half ago and they still cause me so much stress. Part of me is fascinated to know who performed the search though. In theory it would be the HR lady but she could barely switch her computer on at the best of times. On the other hand I always suspected that she was an android, so maybe she was just overcompensating so as not to arouse suspicious, and really has a direct mental interface with LinkedIn.

And on the subject of androids… Battlestar Galactica! I am now probably about a third to half way into S3. I am finding it alternates between completely gripping, possibly the best TV I’ve ever seen, but then it seems like the writers go on holiday every so often and they have to quickly make up some stories that take up screen time but add nothing to the plot. It’s quite frustrating really.

Galactic

~ e.v. ~ 1 Comment

Firstly I have to note that this WordPress block editor is terrible. Half the time my cursor just disappears or isn’t where it should be. It’s a bad experience for editing text. I am using Firefox – maybe they only tested it on Chrome.

Sometimes lately I don’t sleep well and the problem is that I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica (the remake). How is anyone supposed to watch some of those BSG episodes at 9PM and then go to sleep before midnight? I didn’t see it when it was on TV originally, though, I have actually seen the original series! I don’t remember much about it except Starbuck was a man (shocking) and there was an episode where he was stranded on a planet with a cylon and they learnt to work together. I used to watch it after swimming lessons (on a Tuesday I think).

Anyway, the remake is on iPlayer so I’ve been watching it. I knew it was supposed to be good but I didn’t know it was this good.