Spontaneous Musings

On the television front...finished watching the fourth season of BSG (the second half is going to be shown next year apparently). And, The third Season of Weeds - courtesy of netflix, on DVD. Both series are in a way allegories for what is happening now. One is a satire about our consumptive and somewhat self-asborped society, the other a tragic morality play about war and the consequences of an on-going war between two righteous factions, hell-bent on destroying each other in order to survive.

Both series got better as they went along in these seasons, which as I explained to Wales tonight, tends to be the case with most serialized televisions shows. They start out sort of weak, gradually build, and are pretty good towards the end. Or they do the opposite start out strong, then peeter out. Weeds and BSG started weak and got stronger.

Weeds for those who've never seen it, is a wicked satire about a wealthy upper-middle class surburbian family in Southern California. It centers around an anti-hero, named Nancy Botwan who basically deals weed or pot to provide for her family after her husband dies. The fact she does not choose another more honorable and far less dangerous route is part of the point of the series. It's about how people sell their souls in order to have the pretty house, the pretty tv, the great yard, in an enclave with houses that all look exactly alike.
The theme song by Pete Seeger, entitled Little Houses and song by various artists throughout the series - says it all. "Little Houses, little houses on the hillside, made of ticky tacky, that all look just the same, and the people in the houses, grow up and go to University and come out all just the same, made of ticky tacky, and become doctors and lawyers and business executives and they all look just the same..." (lyrics aren't exact because I suck at remembering lyrics and am too damn lazy to google them at the moment.)

If you like satire, which I do, it's quite clever in places. It did go a bit over the top in the third season. I think the writers got bored of the surburban theme, which may explain why they ditch it for the fourth season. [The fourth season, I'm told, takes place in Tijuana and deals with the Mexican drug trafficking.)

BattleStar Galatica - as I sort of stated above- the last four episodes were a heck of a lot better than the first five. It is a bleak series though, not a lot of humor in it unless you count Baltar. If you haven't been watching it, it is a series about a band of humans fleeing cylons (advanced robots that were created by humans ages ago and revolted). It's a more advanced and far cleverer version of Terminator, where the bad guys are a little more complicated and not quite as one-dimensional. In fact in BSG, you're not quite sure who the good guys and bad guys are half of the time.

Unlike Weeds, BSG is a bleak story, about the demise of the human race or how we are doomed to destroy ourselves and do it over and over again. It's an anti-war tale, with glimmers of hope that are quickly dashed. I think that this is the story Ron Moore wanted to tell in DS9 but couldn't because Gene Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be a positive utopian sci-fi, different than all the others out there. Babylon 5 got to get much darker than Ds9 did. (I did not see all of the DS9 episodes, so it is possible I missed the dark period. Wasn't a huge fan of DS9, the characters never grabbed me as much as the ones on B5 for some reason, I don't know why. Speaking of Ds9, the actress who played the number two role on Ds9, Kira, was a guest star on BSG this season, she plays a woman dying of cancer. Took me the longest time to place her, but finally did.) Most sci-fi tends to be on the bleak side. Doctor Who and Star Trek are the exceptions. And even Doctor Who gets pretty bleak at times. Sci-Fi television writers may be a lot of things but optimists aren't among them.

( cut for major spoilers: A Shakespearan Tragedy in 4 Acts.. )