BSG reviewage

[shadowkat]

Happy today. Got a job. Close to finishing my scarf. And have a week to work on my novel.
Life is okey-dokey.

Enuf personal stuff.

Saw two tv shows last night. Dresden Files - second episode, and BSG. Dresden was by far the most entertaining. Was incredibly bored during most of BSG. That played like one of those irritating music video montages sans the music. From what I read in wisteria's journal the difficulty with the episode was that over half of it was on the cutting room floor - yes, they shave at least 25-28 minutes off for commericials. Also the director made some odd choices regarding the characters - to the extent that a couple of the actors challenged him on it. Apparently Jamie Bamber asked for a scene to be re-written and directed because it felt out of character.

What many people do not understand about the television biz is that filming tv shows is about as much fun as watching paint dry. You spend most of your time sitting around waiting for someone to get the lighting right. A 60 second sequence could take 6 hours or more to film. So imagine being cooped up with your office co-worker from hell on a cold set for 13 hours, sitting around, not being able to do that much? Boggles the mind, doesn't it? This is why they are paid as much as they are. Another thing - imagine working your tail off and having the majority of your "good" scenes cut without your knowledge or input? This is why most actors do not watch their own tv shows. It ain't a glamorous job or even a fun one. It's hard work. I seldom blame television actors for bad performances any more - I blame television directors, editors, producers and writers - mostly because I know they did a million takes and most likely picked the one with the best lighting not the best acting.

Also TV? Done fast. Really fast. Quick medium. So - tend to go into it with low expectations.
You can't make the story too complicated and complex or you won't be able to hammer out a script, get it shot, filmed, and edited in a week. It's not like a movie where you can film the thing for six months. You get a week. If that. If you're really lucky a bit longer and you have to work around people getting sick, having personal problems, etc. So, you want your plot arc to be fairly simple - charted out ahead of time, or you'll end up taking more time than you need to.

TV is magic. What we see on the screen - is not real. It's a magic trick. Smoke and mirrors.
That's why I adore it. Because I love magic, it makes me happy. But at the same time, I'm fascinated by the work that goes on behind the trick. I'm more process oriented than product oriented, find the way we get there far more interesting than the ultimate destination.

In this week's episode of BSG they did the old let's flip between two story threads that on the surface appear to be completely unrelated, but in fact, are related on one important point that is central to the arc we are about to explore.

[Updated: If you loved this episode - go HERE - selenak does an in depth examination of the metaphors regarding Baltar. Go have fun! If you are a Kara/Lee fan - go to wisteria post on BSG including her essays on Kara. If you found the episode somewhat boring and obvious? Read below.]



Like I said above, wasn't enthused about this episode. But I got what the writers were going for. I just thought they'd made the point pretty clearly the week before and it did not need to be hammered into my head. The week before they tell us that Baltar wants to be one of the final five cylons. Note - he's not necessarily convinced he's a cylon, he wants to be one because if he is one of the final five cylons that means he's forgiven, has a second chance at life, will never die, can be redeemed, did not betray his people - albeit inadvertently, and is special and unique - with a destiney. This is a complete reversal from what he initially wanted in Seasons 1-2, where he was terrified he was a cylon and wanted desperately to be human and in complete denial regarding his possible involvement regarding the Cylon's destruction of Caprica. While Baltar is worrying about this, we have Starbuck and the Quadrangle of Doom (or the Dualla/Apollo/Starbuck/Anders quad) - in the midst of this little quad - we have two things linking Starbuck and Baltar - her burned hands and the bit about the eye of jupiter that "helo" of all people remembers and points out that she had on the walls of her apartment and that clearly matches the one in the temple. She confides to Helo that Leoben told her she had a destiney but she'd rather discount it. Now, if you've been paying attention at all you should have picked up the similarities between Starbuck's current situations and Boomer's situations in prior seasons. You should also have picked up on how they are now flipping between Baltar and Starbuck in much the same way they flipped between Boomer and Baltar. But it is admittedly subtle and people came up with decent opposting arguments.

That is until last night's episode. Which was anything but subtle. Starbuck discusses the prophecy with Anders. Then we flip to Baltar who tries killing himself to see if he's a cylon. Back to Lee and the Chief - where Lee literally compares his situation with Starbuck with the Chief's situation with Boomer - by asking, "do you ever think of Sharon?" - after they've commiserated over their bad marriages and fighting with their wives. Just in case we don't see the significance of this, we flip back to Baltar wondering if he's one of the final five again. Then back to Starbuck. Then back to Baltar - this round being tortured, in a manner not unsimilar to the one Starbuck used with Leoben - sense deprivation and water torture (he thinks he's drowning - just as Leoben felt he was drowning). (Just in case you don't see the corollary - we get another scene after the credits where Caprica Six tells Roslyn that Leoben told them she spaced him after he told Galatica what he knew. A direct reference to the prior scene.) Baltar reveals his bit about the final five - we get the resolution of Anders/Starbuck/Apollo/Dualla bit which plays out more or less the same way as Boomers - if you substract the bit that there were two Boomers, and one got killed by Cally. By the end of the episode, I was thinking, yes, I get it, you want me to think Starbuck is one of the final five cylons and that Baltar definitely is not - can we move on please? Because really bored now. And I want more story!!

Themes? Pretty frigging obvious. Baltar requires forgiveness. The Galatica leadership, lead by Gaeta, Tigh, and Roslyn - aren't ready to give it, they want to inflict pain and suffering on him. Starbuck and Lee require forgiveness. They love each other and their spouses. They don't know what they want. They each pick the safe choice. It's going to blow up in their faces. And we'll start the whole silly thing all over again. The Boomer Quad was much better - since the Sharon involved with Chief left, and the Sharon who fell for Helo, never cared for the Cheif. In short the only one in pain still is the Cheif. And it's not Athena/Sharon's fault. Much more satisfying quad. Less realistic perhaps. But satisifying. But hey, what's a space opera without a romantic quadrangle.

I'm not going to get into all the water/rebirth/baptism imagery - except to state is was probably there to re-emphasize Baltar's need to be baptized a new man, to be forgiven for his sins, to be reborn. And the fact that from the cylon perspective he represents the sins of humanity and from the human perspective the sins of the cylons. Poor Judas, sorry, Baltar - not loved by heaven or hell. No place to go. A complete outcast. It's a point they've been making over and over all season - sort of tired of it. Am looking forward to the trial and the return of Richard Hatch's character, who I find more interesting.

Comments

[superplin.livejournal.com]

Hurray for job!!

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Thanks!Driving myself crazy- Second-guessing. But that may have more to do with PMS.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I read on one blog how the torture sequence's didn't seem that big a deal. And I thought - whaaat?? So am glad to see others had troubles with them.

I think the torture scenes were there for two reasons. First one - was to parallel D'Anna Biers torture of Baltar on the cylon base ship. Note it is D'Anna who is the cylon parallel of Laura Roslyn. Those two characters keep being paralleled. In fact D'Anna is the cylon leader and dies when she finds the next generation of cylons in the temple. Roslyn is prophesied to die but is saved when she finds the next generation in Hera. So the torture bit is partly there to underline the fact that there is really no difference between the humans and the cylons. My enemy is me. Or they are mirror images of each other. It also, at the same time, is a thinly veiled poltical statement showing how the US's torture methods are no different than their enemy's, making us no better or worse than the terrorists we are fighting.
Sort of Buffy's statement to Giles in First Date: I know that we do not fight evil by doing evil ourselves. That's not the way to win. It's a lesson I don't think Roslyn, Adama, and Tigh have learned - they are fighting evil with evil, just as the cylons are - and as a result both parties are doomed.

My difficulty with this - is it is sooo bleak. And the imagery is becoming a tad obvious and redundant. How many torture sequences do we need to get the point across? Nor do I think they needed to literally parallel the two to the extent they did with the exact same results. Baltar has the same headgear in last night's episode that he did in the episode when D'Anna tortured him. The only difference is Six is not helping him this round and the pain he feels is fear not a true physical pain. In both sequences - the result is Baltar revealing something that neither interogator understands, and possibly misinterprets. Both hearing what they want to hear. That's why they did it - which in a way is sort of cool - I like parallels - but it also felt a bit heavy handed and obvious. I would have preferred a more subtle parallel.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Commericial mediums can be difficult to create art within - course I'm one of those people who believes art can't really be "objectively" quantified and is really in the eye of the beholder or a matter of "subjective" taste.

But legally? originality is judged by style, format, how you tell the story, not the basic plot of the story. So " a girl who slays vampires" - that's not original. But how Whedon chose to tell this story was - and was "art". Same with BSG - a space opera is not original. Nor is a bunch of people fleeing an enemy. But the way they tell it? That's art.

That said, I agree, some tv series spell out far more than they need to. I don't for example, consider most of the procedurals "quality" tv. The original Law and Order - was artful, original, and not formulaistic. But all the one's who came after it? Formula. Same with CSI - the first CSI - was an original - not the idea, but the style, format, way they told it. The copy-cats, not so much. That's the problem with commericial mediums - you create a new product - it's hugely successful, everyone tries to copy it in order to piggy-back on its success. To the point, you forget sometimes why you liked the original. But that of course is different than spelling out too much, isn't it? I think there's a fine line between telling the audience too much or hammering them over the head repeatedly and telling them too little or being so convoluted you've lost them. JJ Abrhams is an example of a showrunner who often errs on the convoluted side. To the point, that you start to wonder if he even has a plan or is throwing whatever he can find at the screen to see if it sticks. Then we
have writers like Aaron Sorkin or David E. Kelley who have a tendency to use the tv set as their personal soap box, have little respect for their audience, and hammer us over the head with their points. Not always, just at times - to the point it is almost didatic. Whedon did the same thing at times - Hole in The World on Angel was a tad obvious. (Oh there's a Hole in the World now that Fred is gone! We are soo sad. Aren't you sad? Yes, Joss, I got it. We don't need you to repeat yourself. LOL!) It's hard to tell. Then you have other writers, mostly those who do sitcoms - such as Two and a Half Men, which has an annoying habit of ending every joke with "men, men.." or "two and half men men" - yes, I get it. Sitcoms are the worste - they tell you the joke, then tell it again, then repeat it a third time. Which may explain, why I don't watch many of them.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

I really agree that TV should be watched with lowered expectations, it is done faster and cheeper than movies, I shouldn't expect it to be tightly scripted and beautifully done. But so often it is, the fact is that I find more TV to watch which is brilliantly written and really entertaining than I find movies to watch which are even tolerable.

But getting into the short-comings of the products of the big movie studios is kind of off topic....

I do feel a let down when I see an amazing episode (like last week's BSG) which makes me expect this week to be just as great, and then it isn't.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Yep, in recent years some tv shows have kicked ass. Which has raised expectations. I'm finding myself less tolerant than I used to be at times.

BSG - frustrates me, because it has brilliant, flawless episodes, like last weeks, and less than stellar the next one. But as Rob Moore stated in the podcast to Black Market (one of the worste they've done) you are going to have a few less than stellar episodes if you are punching out 20 a year, under a time crunch, with networks and advertisers screaming at you to bring home bigger ratings. Nature of the beast.

It wasn't a horrid episode. Had some nice parallel images. The torture of Baltar by Galatica was very similar to his torture by the cylons and for the same reasons. In both cases he did not reveal what the torturers wanted. But something else that suprised them. Also in both scenarios - they believed he had betrayed them and got their people killed and wanted vengeance on someone.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

Actually even 'Black Market' wasn't worthless, I could see why they wanted to include it: it was an interesting idea of life in this situation and it furthered some character development. In a show as good as BSG even the worst episodes have a function, and probably seemed like a really good idea when they broke the story in the writers' room.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

No, Moore justified why they did it and what they wanted to do and why it did not work. What didn't work was the gangster thread. But it did serve a purpose - an important one, which is that kids were smuggled in the colonies and considered commodities. They bring it up more than once - in Black Market, in the episodes regarding Hera, in how Hera is stolen, and with Cacy who is taken by Leoben and passed off as Kara's. They also bring it up in The Passage with Kat. Establishing enough of a foundation that it is more than possible that one of our main characters, outside of Boomer, is a cylon and doesn't know it. They could have been smuggled as a baby over the boundaries and inserted in a family or even switched with another child, much as Roslyn does with Hera. They may or may not use that - since one of the things Moore disliked about the episode was the kids as slaves/smuggled items storyline. But I'm not certain right now, since he brought it up again twice now.

[deevalish.livejournal.com]

Having been on a few tv commercial shoots as an asst. stylist I totally understand an actor's pov of how long things take. Of course, I only had to do 2-3 14 hour days versus a week. But those days were long enough.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Yep. I've watched a couple of location shoots in my area, one or two for Law & Order's and a couple for movies - I can only handle twenty minutes of it. Jim Butcher does a pod cast on Dresden Files - and discusses a visit to the set. When asked about his initial impressions - he stated how boring movie making was - he hadn't realized how boring. It took them six hours to shoot less than 45 seconds of film. And in the commentary to one of the Angel episodes, they mention how they had to reapply Amy Acker's Illyria makeup everytime they did a new take - because the application of a bandage to her neck ruined it. LOL!

I wonder if people realize this when they read about actor skirmishes and fights on sets. They expect all these people to get along beautifully, to be well-behaved. But no one is well-behaved on little sleep, working 14 hour days, five-six days a week, bored, and stressed out. Prime time shows are horrid and dramas? The worste.
ER, 24, Grey's Anatomy, and House - shoot 14 hour days, sometimes longer. The best gigs for an actor are situation comedies - 9-5 gig, with live audience and input. Soap operas are also pretty good hours, steady work, and they only do one or two takes. It takes them say 1 hour, maybe 30 minutes to shoot a 15 minute scene on a soap, while it will take three days for them to shoot a 15 minute scene for a prime time series. Had two actors explain this to me - one in person and one I read. Add to this - the amount of rejection and criticism actors get on a daily basis - more than most of us do. Not a job I'd want.

[anomster.livejournal.com]

Hey, mazel tov on the new job!

"Enuf personal stuff."

Is not! 'Cause we (me, anyway--but doubt I'm the only one) want to know more about this job of which you speak, for you do not speak enuf about it. The only clue I see is that apparently it starts Monday, based on your having a week for the novel? Anyhow, I'm glad to hear there's multiple good stuff happening w/you. Okey-dokey sounds good!

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Can't really go into details in a public post, have no clue who may be reading this.