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Jan. 23rd, 2010 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Some brief & very superficial notes about BSG.
I really can't really decide whether or not I like the ending. Dramatically, I thought the whole of S4.2 (5?) was a bit odd and abrupt and the ending at least made sense of it, because it wasn't about the survival of civilisation any longer, but its deconstruction. Judged and found wanting. OTOH it's a bit depressing, because in a way it makes everything that happened before meaningless, and on some level you're left wondering why you even cared about their struggle, but it's a somewhat interesting turn and I can live with it, even if it does seem a bit like taking the easy way out. Overall, what I sometimes wasn't happy with was the flow of the story—the change between the bigger arcs and the strictly thematic episodes seemed a bit abrupt sometimes, and some themes IMO lacked build-up. The whole 4.2 revolution arc could have been so much more interesting if it had better build-up and actually showed the consequences instead of rushing off into the finale. Which I do understand was due to the show getting cancelled, but still.
Generally speaking, my biggest problem with the show was its religion-heaviness. Maybe it's not even so much my atheism/agnosticism than my ex-catholicism that makes me bristle every time I hear someone talk about a 'one true god' and his plans, but in any case I can't see this as just abstract mythology and shrug it off. I liked the show a lot better every time it focused on the political themes—the Pegasus arc in S2, most of S3 (the arc about the occupation and its fallout until Baltar's trial, the inner-Cylon conflict), the Cylon civil war and the collaboration between cylons and humans in S4. Or as Adama puts it, 'I've had it up to here with destiny, prophecy, with God or the gods.'
Character by character...
Adama and Roslin: I never particularly liked either of them; Adama was too irrational and full of mood swings for my taste, and Roslin... well. What I said before. I liked her a bit better in the later seasons, but my fundamental opinion didn't change much. But I'm not going to lie, I was sniffing a bit in the end. And they had some good and touching moments in S4.
Lee: Remained a very blank page for me, right until the end. The only time I genuinely felt for him was in Unfinished Business, the flashbacks on New Caprica, shouting into the night that he loved Kara. (Really loved that episode, btw; the contrast between the early days of the settlement when they had so much hope for this and the bleakness of how it ended and the ugliness of dealing with the consequences. And the fight was a perfect metaphor for their relationship. I never was a fan of their star-crossed romance, but in that episode I really hurt for both of them.)
Kara: Like Aeryn on Farscape one of the characters I wanted to like, but in the end couldn't, not really. It didn't help that I hated her S3 arc with Leoben showing her her 'destiny' etc. via imprisoning her for months and playing mindgames with her while her husband at least got to blow things up, or the dream-reconciliation with her abusive mother. Sharon choses her fate; Kara is being pushed around all the time. Much of her arc is determined by her mother and her childhood (although to be fair that's also true for Lee; but he at least manages to break away in S3), even while she's fighting it to the point of self-destructiveness, then Leoben pushes her into accepting her 'destiny'/death, and when she's brought back, she's... what exactly? Even still herself? A personified compass needle pointing towards Earth? Discovering her own dead body on Earth was a quite strong moment, but nothing ever came of it, because she never knew what she was. And in the end vanishes into thin air. And I wish I weren't left with the vague feeling that for all the supposed gender equality this show didn't really know what to do with a female character like her.
Dee: Should never have married Lee and let him deal with his issues and Kara on his own, instead of dragging her into it, although at least he had the sense to realise that she was good for him, which Kara just wasn't and would never have been. I do get that with most of humanity extinct and the future of the rest more than uncertain you wouldn't wait around for the perfect and perfectly reciprocal love, but while I liked her a lot in Rapture, I think I'm starting to understand why people were so bothered about Martha pining (somewhat) after the Doctor pining after Rose. Her suicide was completely gratuitous, IMO. But so was Kat's death.
Sam: Supremely boring. I'm trying to think of a memorable moment, but can't.
Baltar: Made me angry a lot. Off the top of my head I can't think of a character on any TV show that annoyed me so constantly and persistently. S4 was the worst; at first I thought being stuck with the Creepy Cult of Baltar was extremely appropriate poetic justice, but then he started to preach monotheism and developed his self-exculpating, narcissistic belief system where God created us all perfect anyway, which conveniently disbands with any need for remorse or insight, and became a religious martyr of sorts, and, just, gah. The only interesting thing about him was that in a way he tended to be the touchstone for the show's (and implicitly the audience's) ethics. Lee's speech at his trial... That was very, very well done. Because my notes actually included something along the lines of that I'd have a lot more sympathies for Baltar's moral dilemma on New Caprica if he weren't such a slimy, egoistic, self-involved bastard. Arrogant, weak, a coward. Gotcha. Ouch. Which isn't saying that this made me like him, because as far as I'm concerned he doesn't even have interesting shades of grey. When he says to Tory 'I think I preferred it when you cried,' that's Gaius Baltar right there.
Number Six: For Christ's sake, how do you fall in love with Gaius Baltar, of all people. Enough said. And way too much talking about God's Plan.
Tigh: The biggest surprise. I'd never have thought I'd end up liking him, not after how he treated Kara in the beginning, or Sharon, and kept fucking up badly, even if already after S1 I had a bit of a soft spot for him that I wasn't so sure he actually deserved. And he continues to be an not exactly likeable character, but somehow he grew, and not just on me. What completely won me over was the way he dealt with finding out he was a cylon; the irony that this man who had always been so unsure and at odds with himself unexpectedly found greater peace and certainty with that discovery. Revelations was a fantastic episode, telling Adama, and offering himself up as a hostage against the cylons. Liked both how his relationship with Adama was portrayed, and the fact that the show didn't gloss over, but outright acknowledge through Ellen that these male friendships effectively often do relegate women to the second place, so I also really liked it that Ellen, as much as she irritated me sometimes, did get her ending.
Sharon: Liked her, in both incarnations. On some level she plays too much in the self-sacrificing female stereotype, but I really liked her struggle and strength and determination to chose her own fate and identity.
Helo: The other surprise; and not just because I never liked the actor a lot on Dollhouse. Starts out as a rather nondescript character, but I loved his absolute loyalty to Sharon and love for her, his slightly Don Quichote-esque tendencies in uncovering the murders in The Woman King, or preventing the cylon genocide in A Measure of Salvation. One of the really decent characters. I don't think I realised how much I liked him until I thought they'd killed him off in the finale.
Galen & Cally: Started out mostly liking him, especially in S1 with Sharon, but I also liked Cally quite a bit and have such issues with her arc that... *sigh*. Hard to say. At least she (or the writers) ultimately came to the realisation that the circumstances of her proposing to him were indeed a bit fucked up.
Gaeta: *sigh*2 His arc makes me a bit angry, and not just because outing a character (if only on the internet) right before turning him into a (mostly) villain is horrible timing, but also because I liked him a lot, his integrity, what he did on New Caprica, Collaborators and 'I'm not going to beg', and hate that at least to an extent they undermined all that. I wouldn't say that the turn his arc took was entirely out of character; at Baltar's trial you could see he blamed himself for in a way causing the whole disaster by insisting on uncovering the elction fraud, perhaps even suspecting his motives for that, and wasn't willing to make the same mistake twice, or at least that what I thought at the time was the reason for his lie. It's understandable that the loss of his leg and especially how it happened would have made him bitter, and none too happy about the alliance with the cylons, with or without the backstory in Face of the Enemy, which personally I don't like and would prefer to ignore. So it is somewhat convincing, but they could have sold it so much better. And leave him at least a shred of integrity, e.g., trying to put a stop to things once Zarek had the Quorum shot. And speaking of Zarek, I'd hoped for a better end for him, too, because I actually liked him in the New Caprica episodes and afterwards.
I really can't really decide whether or not I like the ending. Dramatically, I thought the whole of S4.2 (5?) was a bit odd and abrupt and the ending at least made sense of it, because it wasn't about the survival of civilisation any longer, but its deconstruction. Judged and found wanting. OTOH it's a bit depressing, because in a way it makes everything that happened before meaningless, and on some level you're left wondering why you even cared about their struggle, but it's a somewhat interesting turn and I can live with it, even if it does seem a bit like taking the easy way out. Overall, what I sometimes wasn't happy with was the flow of the story—the change between the bigger arcs and the strictly thematic episodes seemed a bit abrupt sometimes, and some themes IMO lacked build-up. The whole 4.2 revolution arc could have been so much more interesting if it had better build-up and actually showed the consequences instead of rushing off into the finale. Which I do understand was due to the show getting cancelled, but still.
Generally speaking, my biggest problem with the show was its religion-heaviness. Maybe it's not even so much my atheism/agnosticism than my ex-catholicism that makes me bristle every time I hear someone talk about a 'one true god' and his plans, but in any case I can't see this as just abstract mythology and shrug it off. I liked the show a lot better every time it focused on the political themes—the Pegasus arc in S2, most of S3 (the arc about the occupation and its fallout until Baltar's trial, the inner-Cylon conflict), the Cylon civil war and the collaboration between cylons and humans in S4. Or as Adama puts it, 'I've had it up to here with destiny, prophecy, with God or the gods.'
Character by character...
Adama and Roslin: I never particularly liked either of them; Adama was too irrational and full of mood swings for my taste, and Roslin... well. What I said before. I liked her a bit better in the later seasons, but my fundamental opinion didn't change much. But I'm not going to lie, I was sniffing a bit in the end. And they had some good and touching moments in S4.
Lee: Remained a very blank page for me, right until the end. The only time I genuinely felt for him was in Unfinished Business, the flashbacks on New Caprica, shouting into the night that he loved Kara. (Really loved that episode, btw; the contrast between the early days of the settlement when they had so much hope for this and the bleakness of how it ended and the ugliness of dealing with the consequences. And the fight was a perfect metaphor for their relationship. I never was a fan of their star-crossed romance, but in that episode I really hurt for both of them.)
Kara: Like Aeryn on Farscape one of the characters I wanted to like, but in the end couldn't, not really. It didn't help that I hated her S3 arc with Leoben showing her her 'destiny' etc. via imprisoning her for months and playing mindgames with her while her husband at least got to blow things up, or the dream-reconciliation with her abusive mother. Sharon choses her fate; Kara is being pushed around all the time. Much of her arc is determined by her mother and her childhood (although to be fair that's also true for Lee; but he at least manages to break away in S3), even while she's fighting it to the point of self-destructiveness, then Leoben pushes her into accepting her 'destiny'/death, and when she's brought back, she's... what exactly? Even still herself? A personified compass needle pointing towards Earth? Discovering her own dead body on Earth was a quite strong moment, but nothing ever came of it, because she never knew what she was. And in the end vanishes into thin air. And I wish I weren't left with the vague feeling that for all the supposed gender equality this show didn't really know what to do with a female character like her.
Dee: Should never have married Lee and let him deal with his issues and Kara on his own, instead of dragging her into it, although at least he had the sense to realise that she was good for him, which Kara just wasn't and would never have been. I do get that with most of humanity extinct and the future of the rest more than uncertain you wouldn't wait around for the perfect and perfectly reciprocal love, but while I liked her a lot in Rapture, I think I'm starting to understand why people were so bothered about Martha pining (somewhat) after the Doctor pining after Rose. Her suicide was completely gratuitous, IMO. But so was Kat's death.
Sam: Supremely boring. I'm trying to think of a memorable moment, but can't.
Baltar: Made me angry a lot. Off the top of my head I can't think of a character on any TV show that annoyed me so constantly and persistently. S4 was the worst; at first I thought being stuck with the Creepy Cult of Baltar was extremely appropriate poetic justice, but then he started to preach monotheism and developed his self-exculpating, narcissistic belief system where God created us all perfect anyway, which conveniently disbands with any need for remorse or insight, and became a religious martyr of sorts, and, just, gah. The only interesting thing about him was that in a way he tended to be the touchstone for the show's (and implicitly the audience's) ethics. Lee's speech at his trial... That was very, very well done. Because my notes actually included something along the lines of that I'd have a lot more sympathies for Baltar's moral dilemma on New Caprica if he weren't such a slimy, egoistic, self-involved bastard. Arrogant, weak, a coward. Gotcha. Ouch. Which isn't saying that this made me like him, because as far as I'm concerned he doesn't even have interesting shades of grey. When he says to Tory 'I think I preferred it when you cried,' that's Gaius Baltar right there.
Number Six: For Christ's sake, how do you fall in love with Gaius Baltar, of all people. Enough said. And way too much talking about God's Plan.
Tigh: The biggest surprise. I'd never have thought I'd end up liking him, not after how he treated Kara in the beginning, or Sharon, and kept fucking up badly, even if already after S1 I had a bit of a soft spot for him that I wasn't so sure he actually deserved. And he continues to be an not exactly likeable character, but somehow he grew, and not just on me. What completely won me over was the way he dealt with finding out he was a cylon; the irony that this man who had always been so unsure and at odds with himself unexpectedly found greater peace and certainty with that discovery. Revelations was a fantastic episode, telling Adama, and offering himself up as a hostage against the cylons. Liked both how his relationship with Adama was portrayed, and the fact that the show didn't gloss over, but outright acknowledge through Ellen that these male friendships effectively often do relegate women to the second place, so I also really liked it that Ellen, as much as she irritated me sometimes, did get her ending.
Sharon: Liked her, in both incarnations. On some level she plays too much in the self-sacrificing female stereotype, but I really liked her struggle and strength and determination to chose her own fate and identity.
Helo: The other surprise; and not just because I never liked the actor a lot on Dollhouse. Starts out as a rather nondescript character, but I loved his absolute loyalty to Sharon and love for her, his slightly Don Quichote-esque tendencies in uncovering the murders in The Woman King, or preventing the cylon genocide in A Measure of Salvation. One of the really decent characters. I don't think I realised how much I liked him until I thought they'd killed him off in the finale.
Galen & Cally: Started out mostly liking him, especially in S1 with Sharon, but I also liked Cally quite a bit and have such issues with her arc that... *sigh*. Hard to say. At least she (or the writers) ultimately came to the realisation that the circumstances of her proposing to him were indeed a bit fucked up.
Gaeta: *sigh*2 His arc makes me a bit angry, and not just because outing a character (if only on the internet) right before turning him into a (mostly) villain is horrible timing, but also because I liked him a lot, his integrity, what he did on New Caprica, Collaborators and 'I'm not going to beg', and hate that at least to an extent they undermined all that. I wouldn't say that the turn his arc took was entirely out of character; at Baltar's trial you could see he blamed himself for in a way causing the whole disaster by insisting on uncovering the elction fraud, perhaps even suspecting his motives for that, and wasn't willing to make the same mistake twice, or at least that what I thought at the time was the reason for his lie. It's understandable that the loss of his leg and especially how it happened would have made him bitter, and none too happy about the alliance with the cylons, with or without the backstory in Face of the Enemy, which personally I don't like and would prefer to ignore. So it is somewhat convincing, but they could have sold it so much better. And leave him at least a shred of integrity, e.g., trying to put a stop to things once Zarek had the Quorum shot. And speaking of Zarek, I'd hoped for a better end for him, too, because I actually liked him in the New Caprica episodes and afterwards.