May. 2nd, 2006

lenora_rose: (In this Fateful Hour)
One of the things Colin and I have been doing to escape crazed wedding planning is watching the mini-series and the complete first season of the new Battlestar Galactica.

I'm torn. I like the general look and feel, I like most of the characters who've been given decent screen time, some episodes are fantabulous in themselves, and some scenes even in shoddy episodes still get the "wow, good dialogue!" award.

But the ways it troubles me keep me from putting it up in the much-loved listings. No SF tv-show I liked is remotely near perfect. (I's say the show that could be categorized as fantasy/SF that comes the closest to perfectly pulling off what they're trying to pull of is the Muppets, and what they're trying is a little different from the usual, and itself the cause for most peoples' like or dislike of them.) Firefly has a mix of cheese and don't-look-too-closely-at-the-worldbuilding (Especially not scientifically - while it's true that tech levels are never consistent in the real world, the ways it's inconsistent in that show don't work). But it's got a lot of room to move and play. Buffy's first five seasons had ragged episodes and pacing problems, and the last two just derail. But it has some amazing spearpoints, an excellent "worlds colliding" set-up, and it knows how to use, and abuse, and warp, all the cliches. Babylon 5 has bits of shaky acting, and some seriously wobbly stories, especially in the first and last seasons, and some pieces of story that get dropped and never seen again (Londo Mollari's wife...). But it's got the real epic-arc sweep down.

(And don't start on my guilty pleasure, the Tenth Kingdom, as the list of things wrong with that is longer than the list of things right, and I know it, and I like it anyway. Thus, guilty pleasure. And telling me how it sucks every time I mention it doesn't help or change anything, so don't. Yes, you know who you are. Ahem. For the rest of you, please ignore this digression.)

All of the above also have the whole good characters, good dialogue thing even when what's done with the characters in a given episode is dubious.

Battlestar Galactica... )
lenora_rose: (In this Fateful Hour)
One of the things Colin and I have been doing to escape crazed wedding planning is watching the mini-series and the complete first season of the new Battlestar Galactica.

I'm torn. I like the general look and feel, I like most of the characters who've been given decent screen time, some episodes are fantabulous in themselves, and some scenes even in shoddy episodes still get the "wow, good dialogue!" award.

But the ways it troubles me keep me from putting it up in the much-loved listings. No SF tv-show I liked is remotely near perfect. (I's say the show that could be categorized as fantasy/SF that comes the closest to perfectly pulling off what they're trying to pull of is the Muppets, and what they're trying is a little different from the usual, and itself the cause for most peoples' like or dislike of them.) Firefly has a mix of cheese and don't-look-too-closely-at-the-worldbuilding (Especially not scientifically - while it's true that tech levels are never consistent in the real world, the ways it's inconsistent in that show don't work). But it's got a lot of room to move and play. Buffy's first five seasons had ragged episodes and pacing problems, and the last two just derail. But it has some amazing spearpoints, an excellent "worlds colliding" set-up, and it knows how to use, and abuse, and warp, all the cliches. Babylon 5 has bits of shaky acting, and some seriously wobbly stories, especially in the first and last seasons, and some pieces of story that get dropped and never seen again (Londo Mollari's wife...). But it's got the real epic-arc sweep down.

(And don't start on my guilty pleasure, the Tenth Kingdom, as the list of things wrong with that is longer than the list of things right, and I know it, and I like it anyway. Thus, guilty pleasure. And telling me how it sucks every time I mention it doesn't help or change anything, so don't. Yes, you know who you are. Ahem. For the rest of you, please ignore this digression.)

All of the above also have the whole good characters, good dialogue thing even when what's done with the characters in a given episode is dubious.

Battlestar Galactica... )

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