Is there anybody out there?

I don't know if there's anyone out there still reading this stuff, but if you are you are probably further along in "Caprica" viewing than I am. I'm several episodes behind because I haven't been home.

I do plan to watch them online or in rerun soon and critique them (read: whine about how the show makes no sense). Just don't want you to think I've neglected this site. At least, I haven't yet.

Reins of a Waterfall

Okay, I know this is a week late. Caprica is just not a priority to me.

I think my thoughts on this episode overall can be summed up in the notion of dramatic irony. Essentially, that's all this episode was and very much what the show is mostly becoming. If perhaps you slept in high school English class, dramatic irony is when you the audience know something that characters do not. This episode was chock full of it. Let's examine that.

1. Zoe is inside of a Cylon body but only Lacy knows that. Everyone else, especially her parents, thinks it's just a large robot. By the way, has Graystone been doing anything with it? Does Amanda even care that he brought this robot home and know it just stands there in her way? Anyway, because we know she's there but they don't, we got that tremendously awkward scene where the Graystones get physical on the table while their daughter stands there watching. Or trying not to watch? They head seemed to turn away. But it's not like Zoe can just move out of the room or they'll think something is up. I wonder what's more awkward: the fact that Zoe sat through this, or the fact that she never referenced it again.

Question: Zoe does move around in the house, right? Like when she was going through her room in the pilot. So... don't the Graystones ever notice that this large robot is never in the same place they left it? Considering that it's programmed to be a weapon that kills with extreme prejudice, does it's ability to roam freely about their house not cause them deep concern? Or has their dead daughter just pulled their focus?

2. Amanda is convinced on very circumstantial evidence that Zoe was a terrorist (and not just friends with one), and a participant if not orchestrator of the maglev bombing. She has even gotten her husband to agree with this, seemingly. We the audience know it isn't true.

3. Zoe finds a way to tap into the holoband (I'd like to know how she does this with no one around. Isn't her father working from home so that he can find out why the Cylon is special? How does she possibly have "alone time"? When he sleeps?). She and Lacy discover a room they've never seen before. When they get light in there, they find Tamara. Now, first of all, the bright ones in the audience knew she was there before the light revealed her. But secondly, this is yet another instance of irony, as we know who she is and how she got there, but Zoe and Lacy do not.

4. Graystone takes Adama back to this virtual room and we know that Tamara was there and is now gone, but Adama is left to believe she wasn't there. I'm already sick of him yelling "Tamara!" Honestly, if this show devolves into a rehash of Michael yelling "WAAAAAAAAALT" on Lost, I'll be disappointed. ...And I already don't expect much from this show.

5. The Adama's don't seem to know that Sam has been helping Will skip Tauron school.

You can see what I mean about dramatic irony. It's troublesome to me. A little bit of that can be helpful to build a story on, but every other scene in this episode was that sort of twist. It strikes me as a desperate attempt at creating drama.

I continue to find the Catholic overtones confusing. Sometimes the parallels are with the polytheists, like the parochial school where the staff are all "sisters" and such. Sometimes it seems to go with the monothesists, like when Sister Clarice has her little "confession" meeting. Is the other guy with the STO? And what sort of abbreviation is that anyway; wouldn't it be more accurate to abbreviate Soldiers of the One as SO or at least SOTO? Anyway, because Sister Clarice is playing both sides, I don't know whether this confessional was part of the Athena school or something else. The discussion about apotheosis was somewhat interesting, though I'm not sure I see how the Zoe avatar fits in. Also, the computerized voice of the other guy seemed suspicious.

We had another interesting opening teaser, this time channel surfing. I like Patton Oswald's appearance! It made me think that he really should have his own late night talk show. If Leno ever does leave NBC and they won't take Conan back, they should give Oswald a call.

Anyway, the plot is moving forward I guess, but I'm kind of underwhelmed by the whole thing. At least Zoe is able to move about in the V Club again, for whatever reason, and we will hopefully find out why Zoe was going to Geminon. But I'm bored of all the unnecessary twists, and Sam Adama is a pain too. I don't much care about him corrupting Will. I don't care to know that he's apparently gay. I also think he's a disgrace to the name of the great Sam Adams. Oh, and Joseph Adama shaking Graystone down for info about Tamara? I thought this guy was a lawyer. Can someone please get Adama in a courtroom already? The only thing I thought might be halfway interesting about Caprica was seeing Adama's father argue cases. Instead, he's a petty thug who can't get over his dead daughter.

I'm going to need more from this show soon. As you can tell by the lateness of this post, I'm not particularly enthused by it.

Favorite line: "I could use a good frak." It continues to underscore how stupid "frak" sounds in these contexts, and it was just so silly in context.

Rebirth

And Caprica begins anew! I'm sorry this post is late, but I've been busy with more important things. Let's begin with a synopsis of what happened on this week's brand new episode of Caprica.

synopsis: Zoe is still trapped in the Cylon body, and it seems that none of the other robot models will run the defense program that worked at the end of the pilot. For some reason, only the Zoe model is the perfect Cylon. Dr. Graystone orders the machine sent to his home so he can further study the reasons. What follows is a sequence with two young techies who bolt the machine down and cart it to Graystone's place. One of these guys views the machine with respect and calls it "she", while the other one is an "it's just a machine" kind of guy. Ultimately, Zoe doesn't take well to being confined, which leads to a struggle and Zoe, with her new robot hand, slices the bad guy's fingertip off. Life for Zoe is very confusing, as she keeps having flashes of the real Zoe's memories. She doesn't know who she is exactly, and now is stuck at home trying to keep secret that she is inside this machine.

Meanwhile, her friend Lacy has been taken under the wing of the Sister from the pilot, who invites her over for lunch. When Lacy arrives, she finds the Sister is some kind of kooky polyagmist, who has several different wives and very young husbands. The wives become troubled when it seems that one of the husbands is flirting with Lacy, and they question what her intentions are toward Lacy.

Adama sees a flash of his daughter Tamara, which startles him. He seeks out Dr. Graystone to find out what became of the the confused Tamara avatar after he left the holoband.

Willy Adama skips school and spends the day with his uncle learning the secrets of being a criminal, essentially, without getting caught.

Amanda Graystone is wracked with guilt for never knowing her daughter. This builds to a scene at the memorial service for the bombing victims where Amanda publicly acknowledges that her daughter Zoe was a Soldier of the One, and that she was a terrorist responsible for the bombing.

With the start of the series proper, I think the show is still pretty good. I'm concerned as to how much strength it will have to go forward, because sometimes it feels like they're just throwing everything out there hoping it will stick. I liked the open sequence we saw through Zoe's eye; the transition from the red Cylon view to the Zoe flashbacks illustrated how confused she was. Also, I know technically this is a Zoe avatar, or Zoe-A as I think the scripts call her and the real Zoe is dead. But I will call her Zoe throughout because it's easier.

The main title sequence was interesting. It gives each character their little moment, and is more evocative than the "footage from the miniseries" opening that BSG had. However, the theme music wasn't as evocative for me, and I don't remember it. Perhaps with frequent viewing it will become more familiar. It's hard for me to say just how successful the opening is, or whether the images chosen are supposed to mean something, but it does establish the series pretty well. I also like that in the precap they put titles up to show who everyone is, a la 24.

We see pyramid again. I missed the edited pilot that aired last week, and apparently they changed the pyramid scene in that to be more like this one. I liked when pyramid was like a basketball court. Here it is set up like football, and that just doesn't seem appropriate to me given the nature of the game. I know maybe they are trying to make it analogous for the audience, but it just doesn't work to me. Pyramid (or triad) is a mix between basketball and squash. It is not a big field game.

I like how they chose to depict Zoe as the robot. We see her as Zoe when it's relevant to Zoe's feelings, and as a robot when the POV is the outside world. It reminds me of when TV series do "body switch" episodes, or Quantum Leap, where we see the character as one thing, but the others in the show see him as another. But I enjoy that she's not just Zoe or just a robot when she looks in a mirror. It's an even back and forth, which underscores the confusion in her right now; is she one thing or another? The fragility of the boys strapping down Zoe was a good image.

I don't really much care for the Willy Adama story right now. I kind of don't get it. But he had a good line when he said they didn't have a family anymore. And I like the mention of "Tauron school". Will says its boring, and his father argues its important for their people. It's a nice connection to something like Hebrew school, and makes the religious parallels not just Christian or Muslim anymore.

I thought Amanda's scenes were very moving toward the end. Of everyone so far, she had a real emotional journey, struggling with who this girl is that she never knew. Her guilt over whether she was responsible for making her daughter this way was very real. I liked most of her eulogy about how Zoe was someone she never knew with a boyfriend she didn't know and beliefs she didn't share. This started to fall apart for me when Amanda leaped to the conclusion that her daughter was a terrorist. Yes, she was of the Soldiers of the One. But don't tell these grieving people that your daughter was responsible! It's an idea put in her head by the detective, but one not yet borne out by facts. It seems this was put in just to propel drama to the next episode. I felt it came off as a device, undercutting the emotion of Amanda's realizations.

The whole thing with Lacy and the polygamy was just plain weird. Now it seems that every random religious idea will just be thrown into the show. Is this supposed to be a dig at Mormon cults (are the husbands and wives all Soldiers of the One?) or is this a reference to open, eastern Grecian ideas (and they are loyal to Athena?)?? The implication that the Sister just collects students who she likes and marries them is creepy.

Unfortunately, I feel like the show in a number of ways is repeating Galactica. There are themes and ideas that ultimately seem to be rehashes. The story is propelled by a catastrophic, tragic event (train explosion/colonial destruction). We have a character who is part robot part person and doesn't know who she is, but has programming in her to kill (Boomer/Zoe). Another character is seeing apparitions of someone close to him (Baltar to Six/Adama to Tamara). This sort of transparent parallelism troubles me and I hope that the show finds its own feet soon and doesn't rely on these crutches.

What is the logic of Ben blowing up the train with Zoe on it if Zoe is his girlfriend and he loves her? What's his motivation?

My other issue with the series right now is it's bending over backwards to not be a sci-fi show (something BSG did too, but less so), and just focus on "human drama". Well, fine, but sequences like following Willy Adama as his uncle throws things through windows and ducks arrest feel too normal to me. I understand it's that whole cyclical idea of history, but it bothers me that this world is not otherworldly enough. There is almost TOO much ho hum normality to it. I do like the idea that smoking is bad because cops can trace your DNA from cigarettes.

The series is off to a decent start. I'm going to keep watching. I just hope I don't get bored. Right now a lot of ideas are being thrown at me to keep me engaged and I don't know how long that will last. I don't really care about the Adama family right now. I'd like to see Joe Adama actually arguing a case or something. And Dr. Graystone seems to have nothing to do. He's just walking around detached from everyone going "why doesn't this work?"

Caprica

In the interest of keeping this blog alive for awhile, and because I could no longer delay since it premiered last night, I have viewed the pilot movie for Caprica. There's a lot to say about it, and it is different from BSG. I tuned in briefly to the SyFy airing of it last night, but the majority of this post will cover the unedited version released on DVD about a year ago.

Once again, the nudity abounds! I was surprised at the nudity in The Plan, and Caprica seems to have even more! The fifth shot of the show is boobies. And I just thought to myself, this is our introduction to this world, we have no bearings yet, and one of the first things they decide to do is flash breasts in our faces? It goes on to include group sex, with some pelvic thrusting, though most is girl-on-girl kissing. We will eventually learn that this is all virtual, and where people go to play out their desires. So the nudity is at least somewhat relevant to the plot, unlike in The Plan, where I never understood why Ellen Tigh was being served by topless bartenders. This footage was of course trimmed out of the television version, and a shot was replaced with a girl in black lingerie rather than nude. I didn't closely compare shots, but they may even have just digitally painted underwear over the nude girl from the other version like they do in anime shows sometimes for Cartoon Network.

Another alteration to the opening last night was the addition of an exterior planet shot under the main title. On the DVD, the words "CAPRICA: 58 years before the fall" appear on black. This cut I think is more effective. I suspect that some suit asked for an establishing shot to make clear that Caprica is a planet. After all, if you are coming into this cold, you wouldn't know, especially since there is a Caprica City.

The opening sequence in the V club is effective, reminding me of other pilots that started in seedy places, like Millennium. Yet, it seemed so over the top at first. There was sex and nudity, people shooting other people, a human sacrifice, all under the auspices of a raucous rave. As the images piled up, I felt almost like the show wanted me to hate humanity; like Caprica deserved the impending Cylon attack. Especially given the legend "58 years before the fall". We soon learned that this was a virtual world instead. But when it was revealed that everyone in the V club were teenagers, it entered a whole new level of disturbing. I suppose I can understand wanting to experience loud parties and drugs in a virtual setting. Maybe even shooting that guy you hate. But the level at which it all hit seemed really excessive. I was most put off by the revelation that Zoe and her friends first started coming for "the group sex, like everyone else". Is it really every teenager's desire to dabble in group sex? Virtual or not, how do you look those people in the eye the next day? And why did this "group sex" seem suspiciously to be primarily lesbian make-out sessions? And forgive me, but how many teenagers today, if you offered them the chance to ritually sacrifice a virgin, would jump at the chance? When a virgin dies in the V club, does she die in real life? The avatar didn't seem to vanish.

This probably is very unfair, but Ron Moore repeats himself yet again. The holoband is essentially the holodeck, only without the confines of a room. The little headsets also are reminiscent of the ones from the TNG episode "The Game".

I'm terribly confused by the religion in this series. On BSG, all the humans were polytheists, and the Cylons were monotheists. This monotheism spread to Baltar from an angel, and he spread it among a cult of women. But it was fringe even then, and didn't seem to originate until Baltar. So I was taken aback to find such a large underground monotheistic movement on Caprica. Is this the same "god" whose angels we saw in BSG? The parochial school to Athena was an interesting touch, though I don't know why they would be Catholic-style nuns complete with habits. And then we learn that the head sister is actually a closet monotheist! The worst thing about it all, though, is that I still am unsure what the show is trying to say about the monotheism. BSG seemed to make clear that there was one true God. Yet, there also had to have been "Lords of Kobol", whoever they were. And here, the monotheists are not only a cult, but are involved in a suicide bombing. This makes them a dangerous fringe group of radicals. I dislike this portrayal.

I do not quite understand Zoe's plan to run away to Geminon. I can understand running away from home, since she's a genius stifled by her family and following a fringe religion, but why Geminon of all places? Geminon is the seat of religious thought in the twelve colonies. The most ardent polytheists, prophets, and scholars are there. ...This is NOT a good escape site for young monotheists!

I'm so tired of the suicide bombings. I was tired of it on Galactica (where they made no tactical sense), and I'm annoyed they used it again. How did Ben get this bomb? Did he make it himself? And why did it have to be on a subway car? To me, especially given when this thing was written, it seemed like a cheap attempt to replicate real life terrorist attacks. It's like the show is screaming "Look at me! I'm relevant!"

I'm surprised at the level of technology on Caprica. they have computerized paper! Certainly this was never seen on Galactica. One could argue that was intentional for the Battlestar, but it strains credibility to me that NONE of the ships or people had any of this digital paper. You mean that Colonial One wouldn't have it? The President on Caprica would have standard paper? Or perhaps it fell out of favor in the span of 50 years, but if so, why? Does it only work for sending information across networks, or can it work on it's own? When Zoe first pulled it out and started typing, my mind went straight to Penny's computer book on Inspector Gadget. They deserve some credit for taking a completely ridiculous idea and making it seem to work.

When mention was first made of Virgis, I thought they meant a planet and not a person. Thankfully, this was not the case, as that would be a continuity error: the planet is named Virgon.

I do not understand what Zoe's plan was with her avatar. I also don't exactly understand how she can have a separate avatar of herself, but never mind that. I'll just go with it. What was she creating it for? How does this other Zoe exist ceaselessly in the holobands? Zoe seemed to have a plan at the start (and it had something to do with the human sacrifices), but that all went out the window after the bombing. Zoe is a super-genius who essentially created artificial intelligence. Doesn't this just make her yet another Wesley Crusher? The teenage kid who can do the thing that none of the professional scientists can do. ...And furthermore, I guess this means that a Wesley Crusher character basically created the Cylons.

Hey, we finally get to see an indoor pyramid game!

The whole notion of people leading this other life inside the holobands felt a lot like The Matrix to me.

I rather liked the way they took on artificial intelligence here. Zoe created her avatar using all available digital information about herself. She couldn't just plug her brain into a computer, so she did it the other way. This struck an interesting chord with me, after it increased my paranoia of the digital age. Yet there is an odd implication to it all; if Zoe can make this avatar, then anyone can make their own secondary avatar. The Zoe avatar was tied somehow to Zoe's real self (i.e. the avatar covered in blood after the bombing). So then the avatar could be loaded into a real living body, Dr. Graystone asserts. What I'm getting at is, doesn't that essentially mean that humans can download like Cylons? Does this imply that the download process was created by the Graystones? That would directly contradict canon, which states it was a Cylon invention known only to the Final Five.

Hey! It's William B. Davis from X-Files! What a nice bit of casting!

Back in season three of BSG, there was a thread of racism against Taurons (or was it Sagittarons? I don't remember). That thread didn't exactly work, and most of it was scrapped. But a lot of that is done here, and is actually handled a lot better. That sort of sentiment works in a world like this. I was surprised to learn that Adama was a Tauron. This adds a whole different wrinkle into the story. On BSG he was always considered Caprican. I wonder if his wife knew he was of Tauron ancestry.

CYLON is an acronym? That's lame. That's really lame. Furthermore, it makes no sense since there were ALREADY Cylons from long ago living on Earth. Did they call themselves Cylons?

I like Joseph Adama. I wonder why the lawyers don't argue their cases on Libra? Maybe those courts are more like supreme courts and only handle very big cases?

The scene where Graystone recreates an avatar of Adama's daughter was really good. I love that she fought the very idea of being alive again. It reminded me of something else, but I really can't remember what. It's driving me crazy.

Zoe is a very good-looking girl who reminds me of Zooey Deschanel. I hope she isn't just a voice stuck in a Cylon for the rest of the series.

On the whole, Caprica had a relatively engaging pilot. It wasn't ponderous and boring like the BSG miniseries. It also wasn't so dark. Caprica is bright and graded, so things are hazy whites and grays. This is better than the horribly murky blacks and blues and the nauseating camera work. I'm liking the look of Caprica. There are things that I don't quite get yet. Other elements are derivative, but the movie at least didn't come off as preachy as the miniseries did. It teetered closely at points, but I think it was more successful. The religion angle is troubling me, and I fear this series will get bogged down in it too much, like BSG did. As a prequel, some bits confuse me and I am worrying about timeline continuity. How come we never knew Adama had a sister? Still, it worked pretty well on its own and for a pilot it was better than I expected. I hope the series proper is able to build on the good points and not devolve into write-ourselves-into-corners storytelling. Caprica is already off to a better start than BSG. I hope the kinks get ironed out.

The Plan

I've finally watched The Plan, and despite all of the hype surrounding it, the movie simply proves that there was in fact no plan at all, as I've suspected since the first season. I was hoping for a plan that would make it make sense, but the show itself clearly shows that there were a lot of different ideas floating around and that the Cylons had no unified plan. This fact ultimately makes The Plan a failure.

I like the little touch of the Universal logo being integrated into the start of the movie. I also like that the opening titles were not seen, unlike in Razor. However, Razor this ain't. That was a great movie. This is only okay. It's interesting that they use the Final Five for voiceover of the usual pre-cap sequence. Unfortunately, the constant reminders of who the Final Five are (and ultimately the closing use of audio from "No Exit") make this movie impossible to be viewed early on. Razor could still be watched after "The Captain's Hand" and nothing would be lost. But even though this movie is set around the time of "Lay Down Your Burdens" as a framing device, it cannot be watched there unless you have already seen the whole series. Or, I suppose it could be watched there, but it would spoil things astronomically. That's kind of a shame.

The overhead shot of the Final Five in the resurrection tanks reminded me of the sleeper pod opening of Alien.

The one big redeeming factor of this movie is Dean Stockwell, who essentially carries the whole movie. If you are a Dean Stockwell fan, it is worth watching for his performance. But I fear that this movie will not play well in isolation as there is very little internal plot, and the sequence of time jumps so quickly that no real context is given if you haven't already watched the series.

For some reason, there is nudity in this movie. I don't know if this is just Eddie Olmos indulging himself or what. The series at times implied nudity and danced around it for television (such as the naked Sharons). I think there's a point at which including some peeks during scenes like that isn't too bad. But why are there topless bartenders? Those seem just thrown in purely to be salacious. Nudity in the sex scene is one thing, but I don't get the gratuitous boobies. I wonder how that will be cut around for the television airing. There was also nudity in the locker room which reminded me of that bit in RoboCop where the guys and girls dress together and it's no big deal.

For me, truly the greatest thing about this movie's existence, and the only real reason to watch it, is that for once in BSG history we finally get to see the attack on all 12 colonies. Or on most of them anyway. One of my biggest complaints about the miniseries was that it was so focused on Caprica. It's great to see all of the destruction that was rampant throughout the system. I don't really like that the base stars are hinged in the middle and can spin around to make these points. That seemed thrown in just to look cool. It was also good to see the pyramid team and what they were doing at the time. We were told about it way back in season 2, but it's different to see it. I don't really like that Simon is the team doctor though. That seems unnecessary. Also, the little badges that the team have on their shirts remind me of Star Trek insignia.

So... this plan that the title speaks of is just Cavil's plan? We are told that the plan was the destruction of all humanity, but that didn't happen. I'm curious why it didn't happen, really. It was a total nuclear barrage! Why wouldn't they have attacked even harder? Why not keep nuking the place? I get that the fleet survived because they didn't have networked computers. I'll buy that. But looking at it this way, if the Cylon plan was to completely annihilate humanity, why are people still alive on Caprica? It makes the survival of Helo and the pyramid team (and the women in the farms) seem really silly. And the existence of the farms isn't really explained. If the plan was to kill them all, why are they experimenting with them? How long has this been going on? At least on the old show, when the colonies were destroyed, they were destroyed. All that was left was the fleet. Keeping that Caprica story was maybe one of the biggest mistakes for the series in its first season because it undermines the Cylon threat.

But anyway, the "plan" we've been told about at the start of every episode was NOT this plan! No matter how much they try to double-talk it, we were told that "they HAVE a plan"; that's have, not had. But really this isn't a plan of a "they" but of a "he", Brother Cavil. It is HIS plan we are watching unfold, and it is confined to the fleet. It has nothing to do with the Cylons who are chasing them nor with the stuff going on on Caprica. They try to tie in Caprica by putting a Cavil with the pyramid team, but his schemes there are really more confined to trying to extract apology from Anders, and he has little to do with the broader machinations on the planet. It turns out this plan we've been told of all along was really just Cavil wanting to make his "parents" feel sorry for making him so human.

What about the transponder things from the miniseries that led to the suspicion of Cylons in the fleet? Why is this not touched on? That seemed to be a major part of the Cylon plan (rather than the Cavil plan), and it is completely ignored. I like the bits where we go into the episodes, like "33", but why ignore the Olympic Carrier incident? This would have been a perfect opportunity to answer whether or not there were Cylons on board.

I give this thing some credit for answering certain lingering questions and for trying to integrate well with previous episodes. Some of this works very well, like Cavil's rescue of Ellen Tigh. I also like the explanation about Shelley Godfrey. We learn that the suicide bombing was Cavil's idea (why, I'm still not sure. If he wanted to do REAL damage, wouldn't he have sent the guy down to the engine room with the suicide vest?), but I like that it's pointed out that the bombing was a failure. When it aired I thought "so they blew up an empty hallway; big deal." Some other elements just don't entirely work. I don't really buy that certain elements like that bombing were plotted so early as they were here. Also, the Leoban story doesn't integrate as well as it should. I don't understand why the order is never given to blow up any of the other ships in the fleet. The movie seems too focused on Galactica, and not on the other Cylons we know are milling about on other ships.

I do like the Simon in the fleet and his relationship. It's an interesting dynamic that plays into the themes the show explored about Cylon/human relationships. The internal Cylon tension between destruction and love is played out in microcosm here. But again, why is he on the Galactica?

Even with all of the Cylons we see here, do we get to the total of 8 in the fleet that Sharon gave us back in season 2? I don't think so. But there are a few more Sixes met here. Also, reference is made to D'Anna, but her work seems to be unrelated to everything else. I guess they couldn't get Lucy Lawless for the movie.

I hate the Sharon stuff, which to me is the biggest failure of this movie. Watching the first season, she doesn't know for sure that she is a Cylon, she only suspects it. But here, we are told that she DOES know. How do they reconcile that fact? They have it so she only remembers who she is when holding a magical elephant figurine! Does this seem stupid to anybody else?

I do like that we learn what became of all the human corpses. Back in "Kobol's Last Gleaming" or thereabouts Kara asked why there are no bodies in the streets. Here we see that they have been gathered and incinerated by the Cylons. What is not made clear is... why? What good is this? Were they ever planning to use these planets, or did they just want to kill all the humans? It's an explanation, but it still betrays an underlying unanswered question.

The later half of the movie doesn't play as well because events jump even more, and it becomes difficult to keep track of after awhile. It's also curious to me that there is no mention at all made of the Pegasus. It might have been interesting to see Gina in the start of the movie and her assignment on Pegasus. Maybe they tried to not step on anything Razor had already done.

There's a weird little subplot with an orphan boy who keeps trying to hang around with Cavil. His name is John. Is he meant to represent Cavil's "younger self", the human self that he avoids? When Cavil killed him, it made me realize that there was a lost opportunity to explain what happened to Boxey. I know the actor is probably all grown up now, but they had a real chance here to explain his sudden absence.

I'm confused about Tyrol's dream. Was he having that dream before the conversation where Simon's wife talks about jumping off the rail? The editing made that unclear to me.

Ultimately, this movie is disappointing because we know where it's all going and in the grand scheme of things it doesn't add anything big. It fills in a few little gaps, and those are appreciated, but it really doesn't stand well on it's own. A good job is done editing together old and new footage, at times using alternate takes and angles from original episodes, and it's nearly seamless. But it just makes me realize what a shame it was that the series was so slapdash from the beginning, and that it could not be entirely explained. It's a good try, but unlike Razor, I don't feel the need to see it again any time soon. But maybe if I ever feel like watching seasons one and two again (which is doubtful), I'll intersperse it with The Plan.

Favorite line: "His jacket was burgundy. This is teal."

BSG: Season 4 review

The fourth season was I guess better than the third, but not by much. There were a couple of good ideas floating around, and it's good to get back to the show being about Earth. But then they found Earth, and it made everyone go crazy, so maybe it wasn't so good after all.

The body count was far too high for me this time around. It smacks of desperation to me for so many primary characters to die, especially in a series that is ostensibly about the survival of humanity. Dualla deserved better. Zerek deserved better. And the Tigh/Six baby did too. You can tell when a series is running out of ideas when they start writing in random pregnancies, and often series where it is obviously a desperate device will then kill said baby. And we got that here. It reminds me of that Promised Land episode (and believe me, my mother was a fan and I would never have watched the show on my own) where the mom had a baby. It was a two-parter and I predicted it would die next week. And it did. Because when you've already got seven people crammed into a trailer, are you really going to throw a baby into that mix week to week? There's also a danger of characters like that ruining a show's dynamic. Dil hurt Rugrats some, and then the show was destroyed by Kimmie. Anyway, the Tigh/Six fetus in the end was a red herring and a waste of our time.

There were a lot of wasted elements in season four. So many elements were started, then either ignored or written off quickly. While they tried to make the most out of the Baltar cult, there just wasn't a story there, and it always felt forced to me. The mythology of the series was almost entirely rewritten, so not everything works together. The "Face of the Enemy" webisodes implied that alliance with the Cylons was a bad idea, but this never really comes about. NOTHING bad really comes of it, so we were being teased with nothing. We had a similar issue with the return of Kara Thrace, which still doesn't make sense. Her appearance and the slap-dash explanation thrown in were about as bad as all the times Baltar was dead but then wasn't on the old series. And then as we got to the finale, we had Ellen turn out to be a Cylon, which completely changes things on New Caprica, sudden mutinies, suicides, loads more annoying Roslin, a magic bullet and a ship coming apart at the seams. It all seemed manufactured to end, rather than naturally ending.

There was some good amidst it all. Once the damage had been done and the mythology had been confused, at least they made an attempt to make some sense of it in "No Exit". And there's that really nice moment when Tigh is talking about love and says he feels it less when he says the words. I think many men relate to that idea, and that's probably the best little piece in the whole season. It's good that they finally do get to Earth, and that a number of points from the old series are hit in some way or other. I don't like the reaveal that this is our distant past, as it leaves no good explanation for the quotes from Shakespeare, Defoe, Emily Dickensen, or "All Along the Watchtower". 

The "colony" where Cavil was conveniently hiding was nothing of the kind; it was a ship. So when was this ship built? Why was this ship built? Was it always hidden there? I didn't like that element at all.

Lee no longer being a pilot ended up dragging his character down because there was soon very little for him to do. He just became a politician, and after awhile they didn't know what to do with that. So that arbitrarily made him President. While the build-up to his leaving the service felt organic to me, what came next never did.

It's a shame that after the good that was Razor, the series returned to a pattern of fits and starts; sound and fury that signified very little. Not everything tied together, and that's too bad. Still, despite the didactic nature of it, the show did return to the themes it began with in the miniseries. Now, I hated that theme, but at least there's a certain poetry to that. And yet the cyclical nature of things ended up being the point of the show. And if that's the case, why does any of this matter anyway? All this happened before. With rumor of Bryan Singer doing his own version soon, must we accept that this will all happen again?

Best episodes: "Guess What's Coming to Dinner", "No Exit", "Daybreak" (though there's a lot wrong with it)

Worst episodes: "The Ties That Bind", "Sometimes a Great Notion"

Daybreak

And now we come to the finale. I've been lazy about posting these notes, so it's about time we do it.

The first thing to notice is that there are no flashes for what's coming in the episode at the end of the title sequence. This is the first episode to do this since the brought them back in season 2. It makes sense, since they wouldn't want to spoil the finale.

The episode's structure began to remind me very much of the finale of TNG, as it goes back in time, and ultimately to the future. And just as on TNG, we start not at the beginning of the series, but before the beginning of the series. Some of these flashbacks are interesting, some are not. In fact, the whole flashback structure made the episode feel much more like Lost than BSG. I don't much like Laura's flashback, but then I don't much like Laura. Why does she have that ugly bump thing in her hair that all the girls are doing now? I just plain don't understand it. There is nothing appealing about it. It just looks stupid. Like you're a conehead or something. Why were we introduced to her sisters only to kill them off, including the pregnant one? It didn't really seem like it connected to anything, it was just an event. And then she went and sat in a fountain for no reason. Somehow all of this leads up to her joining the President's campaign... really??

Hey, Zack's back! At least that's something. I was glad to see some of that relationship which was barely there in "Act of Contrition", but even here it is sidelined to have Kara and Lee all over each other while Zack is passed out on the floor. Missed opportunity. 

Oddly enough, the character with the best flashback is Baltar. With him, we actually get to see a kind of character arc which will also inform his future. I like meeting his father. The best part of it was how Gaius was chided for changing his accent. That's a nice bit of continuity from last season and in a series that has played fast and lose with established facts, I like that they made something of that. It's great that he will eventually come full circle at the end so that he will say that he is a farmer when on Earth.

As long as we're comparing BSG to TNG, am I the only one who thinks it odd that Ron Moore destroyed the Enterprise in Star Trek Generations, and here is destroying Galactica at the end of BSG?

I don't like the Anders flashback much. I mean, I like that we actually get to see more of the triad team (I'm still not calling it pyramid), but I don't like all that business about perfection. It is a way for them to act as if he was always that way and to try to point out he was always a Cylon, but it falls flat for me. I guess though they had nothing else for him to do since he's comatose in a tub and will soon fly into the sun.

I don't get the thing with the pigeon and Lee. It doesn't signify anything. It's just there taking up screen time. They cut the Boomer/Helo flashbacks from the aired version but kept this? The only significance is that I realized that pigeon is the only animal we have ever seen on this show. Ever. Unless there were a few birds in some Caprica backgrounds, that's the only animal we've ever seen on a planet. Isn't that odd? When Roslin mentioned how Earth has far more wildlife than all of the twelve colonies, I couldn't help laughing. "Yeah, all the colonies had was one pigeon!" Of course, that raises the obvious question of how pigeons evolved on two seperate planets. But then, the original series had dogs (or daggits). 

I have in my notes "Why is Caprica doing that?" but since it's been almost two weeks, I don't remember what it refers to. But I'm sure I had a point there somewhere.

Now Romo gets to be President? How the frack does that make sense? Is there no law of succession anymore? I mean, that's how Roslin got to be President in the first place. What makes her think she can just pick the random lawyer? Never mind that the office is essentially useless once they hit Earth. It's also a shame when the sleazy lawyer seems more honest than President Roslin.

Hooray! We get to see the old-school Cylon Centurions again! 

And finally we get the reappearance of Head Baltar. It's a nice beat when both Gaius and Caprica realize they can each see them. 

When Helo was shot in the leg, I wrote "Helo's gonna die". And I totally expected it. At first, I thought it a cheat, since they brought him back from death in the miniseries only to kill him at the end of the show. But on the other hand, it seemed to make the most sense. Moore loves the body count, so I figured they'd kill Athena and Helo and then Six and Baltar would raise the baby just as was predicted way back in season one. ...Only that didn't happen. Helo disappears for awhile, but then we see him with a crutch on Earth and everything is fine. Um, what? So all of that stuff from "Kobol's Last Gleaming" onward about Gaius raising the baby NEVER HAPPENS. So he was lied to by an angel? Why then should we believe anything anyone says on this show?? That's a BIG point to never pay off!

I know it's the finale, and they were on a tight schedule. The effects for the most part are good, but in all the battle sequences on the colony ship, the Centurions never look quite right. They look rendered poorly so that the lighting on them doesn't quite match. They look like they were composited in. This is a shame, since they had really been getting good at this.

I have to say, all of the intercutting with the opera house stuff was done in such a way that it almost worked. It's probably the highlight of the episode, and really gives the feeling that it was all connected. Of course, given a minute's thought it makes no sense at all. Why the connection to an opera house on Kobol anyway? why do the final five have glowing hoods? None of that ever actually goes anywhere, but I'll call it a valiant attempt at making connections. At least then some of those events play out. Sadly, the whole Kobol element pretty much drops out of the show, which makes so many of these things confused.

I really don't like or understand Baltar's little speech about God at the end. His ecumenical theosophy that "God is a force of nature beyond good and evil" is silly, at least to this universe. "Good and evil, we created those." Really? So what got them banished from Kobol in the first place? I can sort of see how God would be beyond what humans might define as good and evil, but there must still be things that are good and things that are not, right? Isn't mankind creating his own destruction an evil thing? And frankly, there has to be some kind of "god" entity on this show. HAS to be. Not just because he sent angels, either. The basic mythology of the show is that humans were banished from Kobol by the gods, the Lords of Kobol. Who were they? Were they really the Greek deities? We don't know, but we are led to believe no. Fine, but they have to be SOMEONE, right? Moore's basic mythology, which he laid out on podcast after podcast was that man created Cylons, essentially playing god, and for that they were banished by god or the gods or whoever. So there is SOME deity that set it all in motion. We've also been told that the Cylons believe this power to be the one true God, and that the other gods are false. So were the "Lords of Kobol" real angelic beings who acted as gods on Kobol? Or was there one God there who became twisted in the stories into many gods later on? The most curious thing about it is that angel Six was so adamant that there is only one God and that Baltar would be his instrument. So if she is really an angel, you'd think she really would speak for this God. But then, for the first two seasons, she was still very Cylon in nature, so maybe none of it makes sense. In any case, I really expected as the show went on for there to be a God who wasn't the Lords of Kobol and wasn't quite the Cylon God either, but was an expression of some ultimate truth that both cultures knew about. Instead we are told that god is an indefinable force. Great Gaius. How very "Star Wars" of you.

I like that Tyrol finally learns about Callie and what a jerk Tory was. Did he need to kill her right then? Maybe not. But I'm glad she got what she deserved.

I hated the fact that "All Along the Watchtower" ended up being coordinates, primarily because I expected that. I had that figured out three episodes ago. But she's sitting there trying to plug it into algebra? Though I also have to ask why the song happens to contain the coordinates to Earth. Is this some expression of "god", or is it just a really lucky coincidence? I also hate that Kara has to do the obvious thing of quoting "There must be some kind of way out of here," when she punches it in. What's most offensive about that to me is that it quotes the Hendrix version, not the original. Dylan never sang "kind of", and that phrase weakens the punch of the line. 

What do you know, there's another Earth. Just like I predicted, it really is all like the original series. Only in the old show, the "real Earth" was the second one. Here, the "real Earth" was the ruined one, and this just happens to be our Earth which is not the Earth the prophecies spoke of. Confused yet? It's very lame to me that they just decide to call it Earth. 

I guess there was some mention about it, but I'm a little vague on how the rest of the fleet got to Earth. There was one line about it, but it was still not clear to me.

We soon come to learn that this is Earth in our distant past. Which means the entire series took place literally "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." This also is a great departure from Larson's series, which featured brothers of man "even now" beyond the heavens. 

It's a curious thing, this connection to the original show. Essentially, this episode pays homage to it while simultaneously betraying it. Just as in the original series, mankind reaches Earth and essentially builds its early civilization. But this plays out so much differently. I think the whole attitude can be best expressed by that last shot of the fleet. We get a fly-by that is meant to replicate the shot of the fleet we saw at the end of every old episode, complete with elements of the old theme music under it... and then they all fly into the sun and are destroyed. It's almost as if they are flying the old series into the sun.

I guess the whole "dying leader" thing goes nowhere. I wonder how the Geminons feel about their prophecies not coming true. That's an angle that really should have been played but never was. I'm glad Roslin finally died though. Still, why does Adama just decide then to live off by himself? That seems pretty dumb to me.

Of course the whole notion that all of the fleet would just decide to forsake technology and live like savages, hoping that the neanderthals wouldn't kill them is silly too. I also don't like that it places these events in sub-saharan Africa. Despite where fossilized "human ancestors" are found, I don't buy the African genesis stuff. All early civilization is in the Middle East. I can't jump on the idea that a few simian bones means we evolved in Africa. How do we know these are even ancestral hominids? How do we know mankind evolved at all? How do we know these aren't just extinct species of ape? They call them ancestors because they want to believe it. Still, it just doesn't make logical sense to me for man to evolve in Africa, and then develop writing and iron and wheels and calendars and architecture in Sumeria. Especially if I'm to believe the Galacticans had all of this!

The one thing I will say about the whole ancient Earth thing though is that I'm glad that there was no pangaea. We saw the continenatal masses from space, and they looked pretty much as they do now. I don't really buy the whole pangaea thing since when you really think about it it doesn't make sense. I can believe there are tectonic plates and fault lines and that there's a slight continental drift. But to believe that all of the continents were one big one based solely on the idea that South America's east coast looks a lot like Africa's west coast is silly. There is LAND between them under the ocean! The continents are not just floating islands on the sea! Furthermore, if we are to believe that "native Americans" came over on a land bridge between Russia and Alaska, that would mean that THOSE continents were connected over on that side. If the pangaea argument is correct, not only would Russia and Alaska not be connected at that time, but they would be FURTHER apart! But I digress.

Kara Thrace being the angel of death was a total red herring, and essentially a lie. She never brought about the destruction of humanity (not even close), nor did she really bring death. And then we are to believe she was, what, an angel? That her mission was to bring them to Earth? NO! Her mission was to bring death! Who sent her? Where did she come from? She was corporeal! We saw her and felt her! We watched her pee for crying out loud! So where did she go? Is this just to make her like Jesus or something? And even Jesus physically rose in the same body he died in; Kara did not! Her story makes absolutely no sense at all.

And then suddenly we flash forward 150,000 years. I'm no scientist; is that time frame supposed to be accurate? Anyway, we are led to believe that Hera is the "mitochondrial Eve" from which we all sprung. ...What? So Hera is so important because she was us? That's it? And that means that we are all part Cylon! So I was right; this whole show IS about the Cylons. Why have scientists not found any evidence of any of the other 40,000 humans there; only this one girl? And what about the modern clothing that they were wearing? Why haven't they found zippers in their archaeological digs? And again, how exactly are the skin-job Cylons machines?? They seem just biological. Did Hera only inherit the Cylon biology, but not the mechanisms? And more interestingly, who did she mate with? Was it a human, thus diluting the Cylon blood, or was it a neanderthal? Is the gradual dilution of Hera's Cylon blood over time the reason that we no longer have magic blood that cures cancer?

I knew Ron Moore would give himself a cameo. I don't like that angel Six and Baltar appear at the end. They seem to be there for no reason at all, other than to give this didactic message to us. Nobody sees them except us; so why do WE see them as Six and Gaius? I really hate the ending. It's just obvious and preachy. "Watch out humans, or you could destroy yourselves again..." As if we didn't get that that was the point of the series from the very beginning anyway. And note, they fled from the colonies to escape war and all, then they become us. So isn't this all really inevitable? All this has happened before, and it will all happen again, so do we really have any control over it anyway? And to top it all off, AGAIN I have to sit through "All Along the Watchtower", this time the actual Hendrix recording, as we look at the evolution of robots. I like the driving percussive element, but honestly I don't get why the Hendrix version gets so much devotion. He doesn't even know the words! Can anyone tell me what he sings after "plowmen dig my earth"? Because it sure isn't Dylan's lyric!

Ultimately, the end is a letdown as it was always going to be. The abandoned most of the mythology a long time ago, and then had to find a way to make things seem like they connected. Well, it doesn't all connect. The Kara Thrace story doesn't resolve. The show gets back to it's preachy nihilistic origins. Ultimately, Gaius comes off the best; he even essentially gets away with the destruction of mankind from the miniseries! So this guy who was supposed to be a villain, ends up buddy-buddy with angels who watch over mankind! And I hate that it all comes down to that song; I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to hear that song again.

I'm glad it's over anyway. End of line.

Favorite line: "A perfect face, perfect lace, find the perfect world for the end of Kara Thrace." Why is Anders rhyming? I find this very funny.