update

[vaznetti]

Good morning and Happy Hanukkah!

I've been browsing around without actually posting much, largely because typing anything but Yuletide fills me with guilt. (As BH reminded me, though, freaking out about Yuletide is something of a tradition for me. I have attempted to persuade him that this year it's different and worse, with no luck.)

We've also been rewatching BSG; we're up to Episode 5. Or 4, depending on how one numbers -- the one with the secret tribunals, anyway. It's an interesting episode. First we get Anders backing out of the tribunal, despite his fierce insistence on Ellen being executed back on New Caprica. Either the writers decided that didn't matter, or Tigh was simply too tactful to mention the hypocrisy; the latter strikes me as unlikely. It's not that I think that it's impossible or unlikely that Anders changed his mind, or that he would be wrong to do so. It just seems that he ought to have acknowledged that he was changing his mind, and such an admission would (to my mind) have strengthened his position.

Then, and even more interesting, the handover of power from Zarek to Roslin -- perfectly legal, but the dialogue makes it clear that the government of the fleet is essentially military rule papered over by constitutional maneuvering. At least, that's how I would interpret Adama's veto over who holds the presidency: Zarek gives up power because if he doesn't Adama will find some excuse to imprison him. Rather like Tigh and Roslin, back in S1. And that impression is strengthened by the immediate aftermath of Roslin's speech: a moment of silence, before Adama rises to his feet to start the deliberate clapping. What happens when they disagree? Should I assume that Roslin goes back to jail?

I don't think the writers had much thought for either of these problems, to be honest -- I don't actually think they know where the story is going at all. I actually thing that the BSG story arc is about as likely to come out making sense as, say, the Alias mytharc was. It doesn't mean that I don't enjoy the show, of course, but I can't say I respect it for the way that plot and character consistency may be sacrificed for cheap references to current events.


That turned out to be more negative than I meant it to -- but I'm going back downstairs to do some writing, and don't really feel like editing it.

Comments

[camille-is-here.livejournal.com]

Happy Hanukkah!

I have to agree about the problems with Battlestar this year, and while it is still the darling of the critics, I think the drop in ratings has more to do with the logical inconsistencies than with the timeslot. So that timeslot change in January probably won't help unless they also get a grip on their storyline.

And in general, I get a little tired of the people who create those lapses dismissing people who object as geeky obssessed fans. You can maybe blind the audience with explosions, and even explosive dialogue, for a while, but ultimately we are a storytelling species, with an instinctive BS meter for narrative lapses. The people who complain are at least still watching. The ratings say that lots of other people feel the same way, but they voted with their remotes.

[vaznetti]

Really. It's a bit like expecting people who read mysteries to forget who got killed at the beginning of the book, or even that there was a dead body at the beginning of the book. I do suspect that making a TV show is a fairly high-stress business, and that we have a good deal more time to think about the story as a whole than the writers do -- but we're not being paid to keep track of the story as a whole.

I didn't know that the ratings were down, but I'm not much surprised to hear it.

...ultimately we are a storytelling species, with an instinctive BS meter for narrative lapses.

Yes. I mean, we'll tolerate all kinds of narrative tricks if we feel like it (this is why soap operas are still in business even when actors come back as their previously-unknown twins), but not if we think the people telling the story aren't interested in it.

[rez-lo.livejournal.com]

The season has kind of frittered away the impact of that bravura two-parter in the beginning, hasn't it? I think your Alias comparison is justified: the established story has not cohered very well and whatever momentum might replace coherence is stuttering instead of picking up with each new complication; and the interesting and relevant implications of the old complications are simply ignored in a lot of cases. I'm still enjoying it, too, but it's not appointment television at this point. I missed last night's ep.

I know Yuletide is being beastly per usual and don't want to distract, but wanted to say: Blessings is wonderful and thank you again. Letter coming later this weekend.

Happy Hanukkah!

[vaznetti]

There was an article floating around a while ago which suggested thatthe writers were basically making it all up from episode to episode. I felt rather more relaxed after that, because then it's not like they're trying to tell a story and failing -- they're not trying to tell one big story at all.

I think the first four episodes were stunning, but after that, everything went a bit to pieces.

Yuletide is done! I'm so pleased.

[camille-is-here.livejournal.com]

Pleased about Yuletide.

Not pleased that the BSG writers aren't trying to write a coherent story, mostly because it would appear that they were. There are ways of making episodic tv with an underlying theme of "going in this direction, harried by this enemy" and they sort of did that in the first season at least and it worked fine. But that's not what they did this year. I think they got mired in their politics, which was an honorable thing to do, but needed the story to be coherent as well as apposite.

Babylon 5 did a stunning job of commenting on the wars over the breakup of Yugoslavia without losing track of his continuity.

But trying to build a social commentary about current events while building a mythos to sustain your own universe can certainly be tricky.

[vaznetti]

The "they have a plan" at the opening of each episode does rather imply that the writers ought to have a plan as well, but I'm not sure they realize that.

But trying to build a social commentary about current events while building a mythos to sustain your own universe can certainly be tricky.

Yes, although as you say B5 managed to pull it off -- of course my sense was that the writers there took the fictional universe as seriously as (or more seriously than) they took the political story, so the whole thing never became unbalanced. And they were referring to a single modern dilemma, whereas BSG is all over the place, sometimes.

Rewatching the "genocide" episode, it struck me that all the commentary I read was about the humans, none at all about Three and Six torturing Baltar. Why do you think that was?

[camille-is-here.livejournal.com]

I am torn between thinking, "presenting the act was the statement"and thinking that torture has been so incorporated into the American psyche, at least in fiction but maybe also in the real world, that it no longer carries a moral burden which requires commentary. That would be dismaying about us as people.

Also, in that totally calculating writerly way, it would mean a loss of torture as a semeiotic signifier for evil on the side of the bad, and loss of innocence, or sacrifice, or other reveals of character under duress on the side of the good that have made its expression in storytelling a powerfull tool of mythmaking.

[thepouncer.livejournal.com]

BSG has been incredibly disappointing this season for all the reasons you mention. They're not thinking through the logical results of the character's actions, there's massive continuity breaks, things flat out don't make sense in light of earlier events. I feel all the more let down because the first season, and the first half of the second season, were so wonderfully tight - action and characters and plot all perfectly intertwined.

[vaznetti]

On rewatch, I find that I'm picking up what may be subtleties rather than writerly indecision -- particularly, the second half of the one with the Cylon plague. The writing is so clunky that it's a bit hard to know how to read the scene with Helo, Lee, Roslin and Adama, or Helo's later treason, but now I think that the writers were essentially just posing an impossible (or at least, morally difficult) problem and then refusing to take a stand on it. It might have been done more effectively, but there's nothing wrong with the idea. And Adama's refusal to punish Helo mirrors Roslin's amnesty for what happened on New Caprica (although actually it's not an amnesty at all, but a remembering -- amnesty means "forgetting").

But recent episodes have just been... well. Discontinuous nonsense is a nice way of putting it.

[camille-is-here.livejournal.com]

Oddly, they sort of lost me right at the post, when Lee turned up married and fat and Kara was also married, both to someone else. I think that if Lee had been married but not fat they might almost have pulled it off. But his rebellions before had been considered and motivated by a certain set of ideals as much as they were perhaps shaped by his relationship with his father. Then we come back and he's a petulant boy who has married someone he doesn't love to spite Kara, and gotten fat to spite his father (and also, doubtless, to spite his unloved spouse for not being Kara) all of which was stupid and unfortunate. In the first place, he shouldn't have had access to that many excess calories.

In the second place, his rebellions were laughably petty next to, like, leading a coup against the military and getting arrested, and having his father shot in front of him while he's in cuffs and can't do a thing about it.

So, my suspension of disbelief has been tried, although there were such amazing moments as well that I tried to overlook them at the beginning.