Comments on: A Disquiet Follows My Mid-Season Break

By: Hierohero

Hierohero — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:06:00 +0000

I take most of your points, but I really enjoyed the scenes with roslin and adama, Adama and tigh. I still find the central characters interesting so I’m willing to forgive some of these story misteps. Zarek is another character I like and I want to see where that goes.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:10:44 +0000

Well, I'm not sure why you'd have trouble finding people who don't like BSG; as far as I can tell, the show's been through several rounds of hype & backlash already. Back when I used to read message boards, I'd see tons of complaints. Besides, this is the internet, where you can find groups of people who'll hate anything. I agree that the pacing of the show has always been "unconventional," to the point where I kept feeling like I must've missed episodes, even though I'd seen them all. But I disagree that it was just sloppy or poor planning; I think it worked to the show's advantage in the first couple of seasons, since it made it seem like we were seeing brief segments of a much larger story. They wouldn't have been able to get that kind of scope if they'd tried a "Lost"-style pacing; they wanted to emphasize the feeling that something big is always happening. Where it broke down, I think, is that they'd tried to give themselves enough room for a gigantic story that would span over several years, and are now having to deliver the pay-offs. And sorry, but "Heroes" is just indefensible. It's like they realized from episode 1 that there wasn't enough there to work without the gimmicks, and the gimmicks are the only thing that kept me watching through the first season. I'm still baffled when people talk about it as if it's a real TV show. It's basically just a bigger-budget, gorier version of "Passions" that because it was in prime time and had super heroes, attracted people who'd never admit to watching soap operas.

By: Max Battcher

Max Battcher — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 06:26:32 +0000

I’ve never liked BSG. I wanted to like BSG, but somewhere about halfway through the miniseries I lost all glimmers of sympathy for any of the characters. As I watched the first season and tried to enjoy it my thoughts mirrored some of your own here about the 4th season; I didn’t think the writers had very good long term planning and much of the episode to episode stuff was “what do you think will shock the audience most?”. I’ve kept watching because I’m supposed to watch the show… so many people that I know love the show and think I should love it… but each season has further felt to me that it’s a (bad) soap opera with a skein of sci-fi on top, written by people that don’t know how soap operas work nor how to write (a good) one. I have to apologize anytime I give my opinion on the show, so at this point I’m glad that at least I’ve found one person starting to doubt…

I felt psychic watching “Sometimes a Great Notion” almost on mute (for whatever reason about half the dialog was undecipherable wash in the music mix, headache and fish tank) and knowing just about what every scene would be about before it happened. Of course, I know that I have not spontaneously generated the ability to see forward 5 minutes of television dialog (although that would certainly be a uniquely irritating power to have) and am either simply awesome at “guess the next ‘curve ball’” or the writing is worse than I feared.

(Also, no fair picking on Heroes… I think the scripting problems in V2 and V3 seem directly derived from trying to emulate BSG emo (by way of the worst sorts of comic book emo, which I guess is a prime source for BSG emo) rather than the course that seemed built into the show in V1… some would call it the “Lost” influence and I think it might indeed be the “Pushing Daisies”/”Dead Like Me”/Wonderfalls Bryan Fuller magic, myself. I’m definitely looking forward to V4 in Feb.)