New Ways of Thinking
Netflix’s has been providing me with season three of Galactica, and I’ve been mainlining them so I can get caught up and watch season four. And I’ve noticed something. Some shows mainline wonderfully — Buffy, Dead Like Me, Firefly, Veronica Mars. Others — not so much. Unfortunately Galactic falls into the later category.
There’s a lot I like about the show — the look of it, Colonel Ty, the relationship between Adama and Lee, the love between Boomer and Hilo (sp?), the fact that the people are wonderfully flawed and very human. It really is the anti-Star Trek, and I bless Ron Moore for that. But on the most fundamental level this show just doesn’t work, and when you’re watching three and four episodes in a row the seams and cracks really start to show.
For example, I sat through an episode where they had to go through a region of space where stars were being born, and they lost two civilian ships, and a pilot got killed, and I was supposed to care, and I didn’t because it was stupid. They have ships that can make some kind of FTL jump. Why didn’t they go _around_ this region of space. The explanation was that it was “really big”. _But You Have Ships that Can Jump through Space_ So it takes three jumps to go around or over, or under. Space is not a flat highway. There’s plenty of real drama in this show, they don’t need to manufacture it.
I admit the religious themes are starting to make me nuts. So, we’re on this planet with a temple that supposedly was built four thousand years ago, and there’s something about The Five which are like prophets for the humans, but the Cylons think the five are the hidden skin jobs. Huh? It can’t be both since the Cylons weren’t built four thousand years ago. Or is Lucy Lawless just a religious nut job? If so then please make this a good deal more clear.
And why all the scenes of Baltar in bed with two Cylon women who appear to be sleeping? Why are they sleeping? They’re machines. That’s a really inefficient use of time. I wish I didn’t have to sleep. Which brings me to the basic problem I’ve got with the show. The Cylons want to kill 99% of all humans, and sleep with the remaining 10%. Why? I cry plaintively.
Presumably the “Toasters” built the Skin Jobs. So, why are the toasters treated like second class machine citizens. Why doesn’t the bit jefe toaster kick the snot out of the Skin Jobs and make them behave, and tell them to stop creating nutty religions?
And please, don’t try to force a relationship between Lee Adama and Starbuck. There is no chemistry there. None. Nada. Whole minutes are given over to long, lingering shots of these two actors looking at each other. Please go back to drunken Ty, or the Chief, or Adama doing anything — I’d watch him pluck his eyebrows or read the phone book, I’d even watch _him_ sleep.
Okay, the rant is now over. But this does raise a very real issues for creators of shows and show runners. The way people experience television is changing profoundly. People aren’t waiting for a week to pass between episodes. Downloads and Netflix are a reality, and so you need to plot these show so they can be viewed in quick succession.
I don’t exactly know how we do this, but I think it’s a area for fruitful discussion. I’d love to hear other folks analysis of the issue.
And I have to address the derivation of the term “Toaster”. Walter Jon Williams used it first in a Wild Cards story about his robot character, Modular Man. I then borrowed it when I wrote The Measure of a Man, and applied it to Data. Ron has now brought it into the mainstream, but I wanted to give the tip of the hat to Walter Jon who coined the term originally.
April 22nd, 2008 at 8:35 am
The first two seasons of Galactica are best. It’s been sliding downhill ever since. I’d tell you to stop now before you have to really suffer, but the momentum will probably carry you through.
The latest episode killed the show for me. Killed it dead. I’ll probably keep watching through to the end, just for closure. But I won’t enjoy it.
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:25 am
I am so happy to read this rant. At last! Someone who has the same trouble with this show I do. I like a lot of it very much (as you say, what they did to Tigh in season three is trememndous), but the inconsistencies are insane. And wait till you get to the start of season 4, when all the emotional sore spots between Lee and his father and the president are summarily jettisoned. (Though it looks like the one with the president might be redevolped.) As is usual with so much TV, there are never any consequences. People hurt each other terribly, but it’s all forgotten by the next episode.
Unlike Carrie, I actually liked season three better than the first two. But I agree with her about season four. Though with me, it’s what they’re doing with Baltar that’s the biggest problem. (Trying not to give up any spoilers here.)
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:39 am
Oops, I misspelled Tigh. I guess it shows I’m not that much of a fan since I can’t get their names right.
Okay, you guys are filling me with trepidation about season four. The first episodes are sitting on my Tivo, and the next disk is arriving today from Netflix. Let’s see how this series of episodes plays out.
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:32 am
That’s interesting. I just watched the most recent episode last night, and I enjoyed it more than I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen so far of the fourth season. The show may (and probably will) falter in how it handles the ramifications of what happened in this episode, but I liked it. Not all of it (I don’t remember the last time a Starbuck scene worked for me), but there was enough there to make me feel like the show was moving forward in an interesting direction.
Overall, though, I think BG has burdened itself with a huge obligation to tie things up with a cathartic conclusion at the end of this season. They need to give concrete — and compelling — answers to the major questions, but I’m not confident that they will.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:23 pm
When my friend and I were reading Wild Cards for the first time as immature 13-year-olds, we snickered quite a bit at Travinicek watching the footage of Modular Man sleeping with an actress and then angrily referring to Mod Man as “toaster-that-fucks.”
That is all.
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Ian, we’ll have a huge discussion about this, I’m sure. I found it a huge betrayal of a certain favorite character, with absolutely no emotional weight. The episode had a lot of good things, and until now the good things about the show have outweighed the flaws. But this lost my trust and faith completely. It’s a loss of faith that’s been building since the finale of season 3.
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I saw George today, and he continues to be baffled about how I can rag on Galactica and like Dr. Who and Torchwood. Let me see if I can address that. He said Dr. Who is like a silly children’s show. Yes, and that’s precisely why great episodes like Blink and The Human Element and Family of Blood work so well. Dr. Who makes no claim to deal with real astronomical issues. Galactica claims to be real and gritty so the bar for keeping it real is that much higher.
Dr. Who deals with morality plays and emotional stories about a character you’re deeply invested in ie the Doctor. When Galactica sticks with those kind of human stories it works better. When it tries to do drama based on actually living in space they often fail.
For example, when Galactica builds an entire episode around the fact that the Cylons blew up your water storage tanks the S.F. viewers go “oh come on”. Water is one of the most common elements in the galaxy. The water that’s released immediately freezes and continues to travel along with the Galactica. You go out with ships and scoop it back up. Yes, you may lose some, but not all of it.
When you postulate killing machines they better be more like Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers then these porn stars. And why are all the women Cylons major babes and the male Cylons are old guys or basically unattractive?
And by the way, gang, I don’t mind spoilers. I know who are the other Cylons, and I’m still watching season three. So feel free to discuss season four — it won’t bother me. Just put a note that it’s a spoiler for folks that might care. Meantime, I got a new disk from Netflix so I guess I’ll see how this set of episodes plays out.
It will keep me from watching the election coverage, and listening to crazy Uncle Pat Buchannan talk about how Barack can’t win. When he went into Pennsylvania down twenty plus points, and is going to hold Hillary to a single digit win.
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:30 pm
“And why are all the women Cylons major babes and the male Cylons are old guys or basically unattractive?”
Susan loves to point this out all the time. It is, unfortunately, too true.
Question is, how many bowls of popcorn are we going to need in Taos on Friday night? Melinda, you better be caught up.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:16 am
I may have to go back and watch this episode again, with an eye toward what you’re describing. I’ll be interested to hear your analysis, Carrie.
Because apparently it’s God’s plan. Or something. (And, what, you don’t find Dean Stockwell attractive?) Seriously, though, not only are the cylon women uniformly beautiful, but for most of the series the male cylons are bit players (with a few exceptions). Which I’m sure is another manifestation of the eye-candy issue.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Well, to be fair, it’s likely that the water released into vacuum would boil off into vapor– possibly violently. (Looking at the phase diagram for water, just to be sure, I see this is the case regardless of whether the water was stored in liquid or solid form. The episode implies, I think, storage in liquid form [which is sensible, based on storage and perhaps energy considerations] at roughly room temperature and pressure.) So the water would become a rapidly-expanding cloud of very tiny particles (especially if churned up by an explosion). Recovering all that water one molecule at a time, or one micron-sized ice crystal at a time, would be a difficult job. It’s not like the water would hit outer space and turn into an iceberg.
On the other hand, if the water was stored as ice, the sublimation to vapor would probably be slower, so they’d have more hope of recovering the flying chunks before they disappeared. But I’m pretty sure the episode suggests otherwise.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Thanks, Ian. It’s good to have an actual scientist to call upon. I don’t think I was watching closely enough to remember that, and I may be conflating Ty’s game where water is more often stored as ice.
I watched another disk on Tuesday, and liked most of the episodes. I especially liked the Chief’s concern that the society is becoming so stratified, and that people were about to become trapped in professions with the lower class folks getting the shitty jobs.
When this show works well it’s because it’s about people trying to hang onto some kind of civilized society in really difficult circumstances. It’s all the mystic, woo woo, crap that is really driving me crazy.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
In the end, GALACTICA will stand or fall on its conclusion. If Moore and his writers can wrap up everything in a dramatically satisfying way that explains all that has gone before, the series will be a triumph. If not, it will be filed in the same drawer as TWIN PEAKS and X-FILES. The question is, do they know where they are going, or are they just shucking and jiving and making it all up as they go along.
That being said, I still think GALACTICA is the best SF show on TV right now, far and away. I understand what you’re saying about DR. WHO, but I don’t agree that it’s kosher to have two sets of standards here — a fairly lax one for DW, because after all it’s just a children’s show, and a much tougher one for GALACTICA, because it’s more ambitious. “Blink,” for example, is a powerful viewing experience, and likely a strong Hugo contender. They handled the time travel aspects of the plot superbly. That being said, the whole episode rests on one of the sillier notions for an alien species that I have ever encountered in half a century of reading SF (SPOILER COMING) — the Weeping Angels, a species who look like angels, turn to stone if anyone is looking at them, and evidentally feed on the lost potential of unlived lives, or some such hooraw. C’mon. That’s a lot more absurd than anything about the Cylons. It’s even sillier than the original Lorne Green Cylons. We swallow it because the human drama in the forefront is engaging enough, but step back and think and, well…
April 24th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
You misunderstand what I said. It’s not because Dr. Who is a “kids” show. This new re-invention of the franchise quite deliberately says “we are not doing hard S.F. We are doing allegory, much of it with religious themes and exploring stories of loss and loneliness.”
Galactica from the beginning said it was hard and gritty and going to be scientifically accurate with the caveat that we’ve got FTL or Jump capability, or whatever you want to call it.
Ian and I have set that standard for ourselves in Outpost too. Which makes it harder, and makes us really agonize when we make a change for the sake of television. We don’t want people looking at our space station, and saying — but that’s silly and it’s not how it works.
Where I think Galactica goes off the rails is when they leave the hard and gritty ie forming unions, fighting against class barriers, cheating to win an election, shooting collaborators, etc., and start spending all their time with this Cylon religious crap.
April 30th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
An excellent analysis of Season 3, which I consider the nadir of the series to date. Not just for the Starbuck/Lee relationship, which is forced and appalling, but for the general feeling that the writers really lost any sense of coherent direction for the show after the New Caprica arc was concluded. The studio is also to blame for forcing more stand-alone episodes on the production team, meaning that the season lacks the furious pace of the first two (Black Market-style digressions excepted).
However, from the first four eps I think Season 4 is looking a lot more hopeful. The religious storyline is going somewhere and Baltar’s storyline actually makes sense (clearly this is the role he’s been ‘groomed’ for by Head-Six since Season 1). Plus they have the characters sitting around having interesting conversations with one another: some excellent Adama/Roslin exchanges in these opening eps, whilst I think thy had one decent conversation in all of Season 3. Even though some of the weaker stuff from Season 3 is still there, they do seem to be making up for it with better writing and tighter editing this time around.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Pentium FDIV error?
Because as the Cylons continue their centimation[1] of humanity, that extra nine percent will mean that the Cylons are responsible for future generations of mankind and will undoubtedly shape them in a form which they find more acceptable.
____
[1] Like decimation, only squared.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Sorry, got that all wrong. Had believed that “decimate” also meant the taking or killing of nine out of every ten.
My OED just slapped me upside my haid.
May 17th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Ultimately, I think that conflation of “realism” (as a term for a type of storytelling) with the notion of scientific accuracy would inevitably result in the inability to take any TV show in the SF genre seriously. Back when I was a regular reader of Analog and similar Hard SF magazines this was a common ‘plaint with a consistently popular story idea being “What if TV got science fiction right” by which of course they meant a science fiction show that properly took into account things like angular momentum and the relativistic effects of moving 90% of the speed of light.
What they couldn’t grasp is that while there is a considerable group of SF readers (particularly those with engineering degrees) who essentially love reading the literary equivalent of math word problems set in the future, most people will not sit through an hour of TV merely to watch someone figure out how to repair say, an air conditioner, even if the AC is called a “respiratory circulation unit” and is on a spaceship and if it isn’t fixed everyone dies. You’re allowed to spend maybe fifteen minutes on that as a plot element and then the remaining time needs to be spent on aliens who look different from us but have essentially the same problems we did when we were primitive and didn’t have spaceships (i.e. NOW).
As with virtually every other show on television now, the measure of
whether Battlestar Galactica succeeds is whether or not the interpersonal relationships depicted hold the viewer’s interest or not. Since that is an extremely subjective criterion, I will merely note that the show is far more willing to explore emotionally the effects of personal betrayal and the desire to overcome it than, say, ANY of the Star Trek franchises. Joss Whedon’s shows often have explored similar themes, but forgiveness usually comes within an episode or two. The character interactions in any Whedon series are still enough to keep me coming back for more, but it’s usually more likely for a character to die than for them to break all contact off with someone, whether out of principle or pique.
Personally, I think there has been a good enough job of making the origin of everything from the Cylons to how the colonies initially got into space obscure enough that I’m reluctant to term the religious element “pure mysticism,” much less “mystic Hoo-Hah.” On some level, apparently (and I could be misreading this) the Cylons arose from computers that were created by humans, gained some form of self-awareness, and decided that they needed to model themselves after their creators, possibly because they thought it would aid them in conquering them. Apparently, this endeavor resulted in at least some of the models becoming as irrational as humans, with sensory embodiment comes desire for pleasure, fear of pain, and some form of religion. That apparently humans can be contaminated by Cylon ideas just as Cylons can be contaminated by humans is to me fascinating. Far from “hoo-hah” I see it as one of the only TV shows that even attempts to portray this aspect of human nature, neither by condemning it, nor by uncritical acceptance. Much of the mythology may turn out to be encrypted history, and the possibility of a collective genetic memory being triggered and resulting in, among other things, shared visions isn’t THAT improbable….Just sayin’…
May 18th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Very interesting points, Donald. I don’t expect an SF TV show to be rigorous, but I’d like a nod at the science.
It’s actually how Galactica is treating the characters that is making me crazy. It seems like they change personality in order to make a plot point work rather than the other way around. I didn’t notice it so much in the first two seasons, but the second half of season three and all of season four have been just schizophrenic.
I actually liked this week’s episode the best because at least something happened. We’ll see if it ultimately makes any sense.