Pointless, problematic, pernicious
Mar. 24th, 2009 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenOr: The three Ps that rhyme with T which stands for Trouble. (To paraphrase The Music Man.) Right here in River Caprica City.
As promised (though not requested) the things with which I took issue over season four of Battlestar Galactica and that I felt contributed to its lackluster end.
Starting in season 4.0:
-Baltar forming a cult/harem
Verdict: pointless.
The harem never did anything except shelter people a little during the mutiny. Baltar's preaching about the One True God could have been another revolution on par with that started by Gaeta. At one point, even Laura Roslin seemed persuaded by the cult of the One True God (after talking with the converted cancer patient--see 4.6: "Faith"). Then they dropped God entirely and never did another blessed thing except whine about Baltar's cock. If they have even been able to redeem Gaius Baltar and make him genuinely care for them, that might have been something. But they held off on every having him take a stand until the very last moment. (To be fair, that was a very satisfying conclusion in an otherwise dismal finale.) According to Ron Moore, there was supposed to be a Mason Family-esque turn with this group. I don't know what that would have done for anyone, but at least it would have been interesting. As was, we wasted too much time on Baltar jockeying for leadership of this group with the psycho chick and they never did squat, never taught Baltar nothing. (Lee Adama's "You're more ashamed of you than I am" speech did way more to bring Baltar around than his harem ever did.)
-Tory sleeping with Baltar
Verdict: pernicious, pointless
Michael Angeli wrote the script for 4.2, "Six of One," and the man never met a woman he didn't treat like a whore. He also wrote, if I'm not mistaken, "Blood on the Scales," wherein Baltar, safely aboard the basestar, got it on with the most gorgeous Six ever. Her motivation was "she wanted to make him feel better." As far as I can tell, that's what Tory's relationship with him was all about, too, as far as Angeli was concerned. She was supposed to be "spying"--figuring out what, if anything, Baltar knew about Cylons and whether he might not know something about them. And it produced exactly bupkis, but did give Tory a chance to have "whore" added to her scant and less-than-flattering character traits. In the end, even if you could wank Tory's interest in Baltar being genuine (he did speak to her rather movingly about music, which is of great importance to the Final Fivers), Angeli ruined it by setting Tigh as a dirty old man who basically ordered Tory, a woman over whom he has no control, to fuck Baltar. (He did it by not explicitly ordering her to, so Angeli can claim plausible deniability.)
-Tory killing Cally/Cally being a drug addict
Verdict: problematic, pernicious
I am not Cally's biggest fan or anything. Nor did I entirely buy that she would keep her mouth shut about what she knew, especially given her rabid hatred of Cylons. (Which, after her death, was unceremoniously dumped on Seelix and Racetrack because, let's face it, women are racists fucks.) So, maybe she had to die. But did she have to be a drug addict out of nowhere? No. This is like making Gaeta less of a man and putting only assholes on his side during the mutiny: if you make the person suck that much they can be destroyed without reflecting poorly on their destroyer. We can't possibly dislike the Chief, so we have to tear down his wife until she's scum enough that we don't even care when she's murdered. But even then, he can't do it. Tigh can't. We need a sin-eater to take on this job. Gee, is there a SEKRET CYLON who doesn't even have any character that we could assassinate by turning her into a cold-blooded murderer? Say, I think we might have one in the back... Basically, though Cally is nothing like Cain, I object to her death because killing her avoids the issue of having to deal with her. This is a systemic problem of the show, one that only got much, much worse this season. And by having Tory do the deed, it's obvious they only sought to get rid of a problematic character with a character they didn't really care about so none of the ones they did care about would have to look bad.
From there, I loved just about fucking everything to do with the Cylon Civil War, because it made total sense. It made sense that the resident mystic (Leoben), the cuddly Cylon (Sharon), and the true believer (Six/Natalie) would be the ones who'd want to know absolutely everything about the Final Five now that they weren't just some vision that was driving D'Anna crazy. That development, the way the boring, incurious Cylons fell behind Cavil, Cavil's objections to basing their moves on faith in their lost numbers, and even Boomer's decision to break ranks made perfect sense. I buy all of their interactions with the Demetrius crew, Starbuck especially, from the openly hostile to the more cooperative. That was a bit of genius plotting.
Of course, it all fell apart when they got back to the Fleet. Back to my list...
-Sam shooting Gaeta/Athena shooting Natalie
Verdict: pointless, problematic
Neither Sam nor Athena were punished for what they did. Ostensibly, this was to preserve the fragile truce. In the end, Gaeta's loss was used to undermine his otherwise very good reasons for breaking ranks with Adama over the issue of amnesty for their former enemies. Natalie's death not only achieved nothing, but it deprived us of the one Six who seemed to fucking get it. She got that trust had to start somewhere, and her faction couldn't fall back on old bad habits and actually make a go of a new and better future. The cycle had to be broken. If Natalie had lived to rescue D'Anna, D'Anna would not have been able to stir up shit for no good reason when she got back. Natalie would have had her on a short, short leash. While that would be less fun, perhaps, it would also keep D'Anna from going stupid with the airlocking to get what she wanted. The thing that Natalie realized was that the Final Five were not cool with the other Cylons threatening the Fleet. I even think that Natalie's cooler head might have prevailed where Boomer was concerned. And we wouldn't have had the umpteenth and ultimate Hera kidnapping that led to the suicide mission of immense stupidity.
I also don't love how Athena fell to pieces when Natalie clearly backed the fuck off from Hera. (There was a way more possessive Six--Caprica--in the brig, and Athena has never touched her.)
-Caprica Six's pregnancy
Verdict: pointless, pernicious
The second this was introduced, I smelled trouble. Because the only future I could see where the cycle was broken was one where the Fleet was dependent on interbreeding with the Cylons. (Or all of them becoming Cylons and thereby being able to cheat death until such time as they found a new home--sort of what the Final Five managed.) It had been the rule that until this pregnancy, no Cylon-Cylon matings ever produced children. Even with the love exception, I believe that there were plenty of individual Cylons capable of love with one another (the Sixes are especially good at that) to have produced a child if it were even possible. It made poetic sense that the Cylons, without resurrection, would be as dependent on humanity for a legacy as the humans were dependent on the 2/6/8's helping them stop their immortal enemies by blowing up the hub (thus assuring humanity's future). If whole-Cylon babies are now possible, Cylons do not need humanity at all. And you get an episode like 4.16 "Deadlock" as a result. Where we not only revisited the "women are spiteful, hateful creatures who behave at their absolute worst when disappointed" meme, but we killed off another Cylon baby. I count Nicky Tyrol as having been "killed" off by dint of the ret-conning. We had two other special Cylon babies besides Hera, and we had to lose both. The unlikely, almost-like-abuse relationship of Caprica Six and Tigh was less upsetting than any part of this pregnancy story line that served only to make all involved look and act disgusting.
-Lee Adama becoming president
Verdict: pointless
This show has never known what to do with Lee, but it was obvious that he would take the throne once Roslin fell too ill to serve. Delaying the inevitable for an entire shitty episode like 4.8 "Sine Qua Non" was another time-waster. The hand-waving that allowed Lee to leapfrog over Zarek into the president's slot should have been explored, especially from Zarek's end given that his bitterness at being passed over is a large part of why he mutinies with Gaeta. Certainly, examining the flaw in the relations between the military and the civilian government would have been worth our time more than watching Lee pretend not to know that Romo Lampkin was going to pick him to be president.
After that, aside from D'Anna nonsensically becoming airlock-happy, the rest of season 4.0 played out fairly decently. I didn't love Baltar talking D'Anna down, but they, at least, had a relationship of dependency to excuse this. (UNLIKE SOME OTHER CYLONS ::COUGHCOUGHCAVILCOUGH:: ) I could buy that D'Anna, last seen letting Gaius talk her into pissing off every last Cylon and risking open war with the Fleet, would be responsive to Baltar's advice in that moment. The reveal of the four Final Fivers was rushed, but there was a sense that, with time, they'd get into it. There were enough meaningful looks between Starbuck and Anders to indicate Shit Would Go Down later, when people weren't going out airlocks. The Chief was the Chief. Tigh got to be a hero. Tory got to be a bitch some more. (Sigh.) They got to Earth, and surprise! It was not the paradise they'd hoped for. Given the series' general tendency to give you what you want only bad, this was totally awesome. Because it was the last straw, the latest in a line of what seemed like last straws.
And if the show had ended there, it would have been fine. Because the show would have ended with giving everyone what they wanted in the worst possible way. Which would have been thematically apropos if nothing else. I'm not opposed to keeping some things a mystery, provided there are enough clues to work out a reasonable answer on your own. (As opposed to the route the show went, giving too many answers that went nowhere, created new mysteries at the last minute, and rewrote the major recurring themes entirely.) If the writers' strike had ended the show forever on that note, we'd know that the cycle had hit Earth, and that the important part was to stop the fucking cycle already. Humanity and Cylons would have to work together to survive one way or another because they were running out of planets (and time to colonize them). However they got to that, that was where they were headed.
Or should have been. Goddamn Ron Moore.
Gah, that's only the problems I had with the first half of the fourth season. And that is the half I liked. I should probably skip the second half, say I hated everything but the two episodes of the mutiny, and just give up.
As promised (though not requested) the things with which I took issue over season four of Battlestar Galactica and that I felt contributed to its lackluster end.
Starting in season 4.0:
-Baltar forming a cult/harem
Verdict: pointless.
The harem never did anything except shelter people a little during the mutiny. Baltar's preaching about the One True God could have been another revolution on par with that started by Gaeta. At one point, even Laura Roslin seemed persuaded by the cult of the One True God (after talking with the converted cancer patient--see 4.6: "Faith"). Then they dropped God entirely and never did another blessed thing except whine about Baltar's cock. If they have even been able to redeem Gaius Baltar and make him genuinely care for them, that might have been something. But they held off on every having him take a stand until the very last moment. (To be fair, that was a very satisfying conclusion in an otherwise dismal finale.) According to Ron Moore, there was supposed to be a Mason Family-esque turn with this group. I don't know what that would have done for anyone, but at least it would have been interesting. As was, we wasted too much time on Baltar jockeying for leadership of this group with the psycho chick and they never did squat, never taught Baltar nothing. (Lee Adama's "You're more ashamed of you than I am" speech did way more to bring Baltar around than his harem ever did.)
-Tory sleeping with Baltar
Verdict: pernicious, pointless
Michael Angeli wrote the script for 4.2, "Six of One," and the man never met a woman he didn't treat like a whore. He also wrote, if I'm not mistaken, "Blood on the Scales," wherein Baltar, safely aboard the basestar, got it on with the most gorgeous Six ever. Her motivation was "she wanted to make him feel better." As far as I can tell, that's what Tory's relationship with him was all about, too, as far as Angeli was concerned. She was supposed to be "spying"--figuring out what, if anything, Baltar knew about Cylons and whether he might not know something about them. And it produced exactly bupkis, but did give Tory a chance to have "whore" added to her scant and less-than-flattering character traits. In the end, even if you could wank Tory's interest in Baltar being genuine (he did speak to her rather movingly about music, which is of great importance to the Final Fivers), Angeli ruined it by setting Tigh as a dirty old man who basically ordered Tory, a woman over whom he has no control, to fuck Baltar. (He did it by not explicitly ordering her to, so Angeli can claim plausible deniability.)
-Tory killing Cally/Cally being a drug addict
Verdict: problematic, pernicious
I am not Cally's biggest fan or anything. Nor did I entirely buy that she would keep her mouth shut about what she knew, especially given her rabid hatred of Cylons. (Which, after her death, was unceremoniously dumped on Seelix and Racetrack because, let's face it, women are racists fucks.) So, maybe she had to die. But did she have to be a drug addict out of nowhere? No. This is like making Gaeta less of a man and putting only assholes on his side during the mutiny: if you make the person suck that much they can be destroyed without reflecting poorly on their destroyer. We can't possibly dislike the Chief, so we have to tear down his wife until she's scum enough that we don't even care when she's murdered. But even then, he can't do it. Tigh can't. We need a sin-eater to take on this job. Gee, is there a SEKRET CYLON who doesn't even have any character that we could assassinate by turning her into a cold-blooded murderer? Say, I think we might have one in the back... Basically, though Cally is nothing like Cain, I object to her death because killing her avoids the issue of having to deal with her. This is a systemic problem of the show, one that only got much, much worse this season. And by having Tory do the deed, it's obvious they only sought to get rid of a problematic character with a character they didn't really care about so none of the ones they did care about would have to look bad.
From there, I loved just about fucking everything to do with the Cylon Civil War, because it made total sense. It made sense that the resident mystic (Leoben), the cuddly Cylon (Sharon), and the true believer (Six/Natalie) would be the ones who'd want to know absolutely everything about the Final Five now that they weren't just some vision that was driving D'Anna crazy. That development, the way the boring, incurious Cylons fell behind Cavil, Cavil's objections to basing their moves on faith in their lost numbers, and even Boomer's decision to break ranks made perfect sense. I buy all of their interactions with the Demetrius crew, Starbuck especially, from the openly hostile to the more cooperative. That was a bit of genius plotting.
Of course, it all fell apart when they got back to the Fleet. Back to my list...
-Sam shooting Gaeta/Athena shooting Natalie
Verdict: pointless, problematic
Neither Sam nor Athena were punished for what they did. Ostensibly, this was to preserve the fragile truce. In the end, Gaeta's loss was used to undermine his otherwise very good reasons for breaking ranks with Adama over the issue of amnesty for their former enemies. Natalie's death not only achieved nothing, but it deprived us of the one Six who seemed to fucking get it. She got that trust had to start somewhere, and her faction couldn't fall back on old bad habits and actually make a go of a new and better future. The cycle had to be broken. If Natalie had lived to rescue D'Anna, D'Anna would not have been able to stir up shit for no good reason when she got back. Natalie would have had her on a short, short leash. While that would be less fun, perhaps, it would also keep D'Anna from going stupid with the airlocking to get what she wanted. The thing that Natalie realized was that the Final Five were not cool with the other Cylons threatening the Fleet. I even think that Natalie's cooler head might have prevailed where Boomer was concerned. And we wouldn't have had the umpteenth and ultimate Hera kidnapping that led to the suicide mission of immense stupidity.
I also don't love how Athena fell to pieces when Natalie clearly backed the fuck off from Hera. (There was a way more possessive Six--Caprica--in the brig, and Athena has never touched her.)
-Caprica Six's pregnancy
Verdict: pointless, pernicious
The second this was introduced, I smelled trouble. Because the only future I could see where the cycle was broken was one where the Fleet was dependent on interbreeding with the Cylons. (Or all of them becoming Cylons and thereby being able to cheat death until such time as they found a new home--sort of what the Final Five managed.) It had been the rule that until this pregnancy, no Cylon-Cylon matings ever produced children. Even with the love exception, I believe that there were plenty of individual Cylons capable of love with one another (the Sixes are especially good at that) to have produced a child if it were even possible. It made poetic sense that the Cylons, without resurrection, would be as dependent on humanity for a legacy as the humans were dependent on the 2/6/8's helping them stop their immortal enemies by blowing up the hub (thus assuring humanity's future). If whole-Cylon babies are now possible, Cylons do not need humanity at all. And you get an episode like 4.16 "Deadlock" as a result. Where we not only revisited the "women are spiteful, hateful creatures who behave at their absolute worst when disappointed" meme, but we killed off another Cylon baby. I count Nicky Tyrol as having been "killed" off by dint of the ret-conning. We had two other special Cylon babies besides Hera, and we had to lose both. The unlikely, almost-like-abuse relationship of Caprica Six and Tigh was less upsetting than any part of this pregnancy story line that served only to make all involved look and act disgusting.
-Lee Adama becoming president
Verdict: pointless
This show has never known what to do with Lee, but it was obvious that he would take the throne once Roslin fell too ill to serve. Delaying the inevitable for an entire shitty episode like 4.8 "Sine Qua Non" was another time-waster. The hand-waving that allowed Lee to leapfrog over Zarek into the president's slot should have been explored, especially from Zarek's end given that his bitterness at being passed over is a large part of why he mutinies with Gaeta. Certainly, examining the flaw in the relations between the military and the civilian government would have been worth our time more than watching Lee pretend not to know that Romo Lampkin was going to pick him to be president.
After that, aside from D'Anna nonsensically becoming airlock-happy, the rest of season 4.0 played out fairly decently. I didn't love Baltar talking D'Anna down, but they, at least, had a relationship of dependency to excuse this. (UNLIKE SOME OTHER CYLONS ::COUGHCOUGHCAVILCOUGH:: ) I could buy that D'Anna, last seen letting Gaius talk her into pissing off every last Cylon and risking open war with the Fleet, would be responsive to Baltar's advice in that moment. The reveal of the four Final Fivers was rushed, but there was a sense that, with time, they'd get into it. There were enough meaningful looks between Starbuck and Anders to indicate Shit Would Go Down later, when people weren't going out airlocks. The Chief was the Chief. Tigh got to be a hero. Tory got to be a bitch some more. (Sigh.) They got to Earth, and surprise! It was not the paradise they'd hoped for. Given the series' general tendency to give you what you want only bad, this was totally awesome. Because it was the last straw, the latest in a line of what seemed like last straws.
And if the show had ended there, it would have been fine. Because the show would have ended with giving everyone what they wanted in the worst possible way. Which would have been thematically apropos if nothing else. I'm not opposed to keeping some things a mystery, provided there are enough clues to work out a reasonable answer on your own. (As opposed to the route the show went, giving too many answers that went nowhere, created new mysteries at the last minute, and rewrote the major recurring themes entirely.) If the writers' strike had ended the show forever on that note, we'd know that the cycle had hit Earth, and that the important part was to stop the fucking cycle already. Humanity and Cylons would have to work together to survive one way or another because they were running out of planets (and time to colonize them). However they got to that, that was where they were headed.
Or should have been. Goddamn Ron Moore.
Gah, that's only the problems I had with the first half of the fourth season. And that is the half I liked. I should probably skip the second half, say I hated everything but the two episodes of the mutiny, and just give up.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 07:30 am (UTC)The high point of 4.5, for me, was "Someone to Watch Over Me," the one time the show really felt both like it was remembering its mythologies and taking them in a satisfying-for-a-last-season direction. But I'm easy: You give me a real Starbuck episode, and I'm probably going to love it, even while resenting that it's a bit of bait for a story that they're never, ever going to explore.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 12:49 pm (UTC)I agree with everything you said here, and some of the stuff you pointed out made me realize that S4 spent way too much time making a novelty out of MORALLY GRAY ISSUES/CHARACTERS™ Like the whole Cally thing.
In a way this falling apart reminds me a LOT of the X-Files, where Post S5 they slowly began to fall apart at the seams, until S9 where Scully always had tears in her eyes and Mulder (slightly atheist Mulder) was talking about faith and a higher being. WTF people.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 02:53 pm (UTC)I was totally for the mutiny. It had been too long--not since "Dirty Hands," I think--since we'd seen real division going on in the Fleet. If humanity goes too long dependent on Adama and his increasingly worrisome relations with Cylons, I stop believing that any of them would stay with them. They would, like the Hitei Khan ship did, try to break away. So the mutiny was going to happen because absolutely no way would the ships just go "Ooh, basestar is our friend now? I CAN HAZ A SIX FOR A FRIEND?"
What struck me then was how many of those episodes' best parts were in the hands of the most minor characters - the fake Wahlberg who's clearly agonized about how he just can't follow Adama, and the Pegasus asshole (Kelly? I forget his name) who's clearly agonized over EVERYTHING and yet lets the Chief go and helps, eventually
You're mixing up backgrounds, but you're just about right. Kelly has actually been with Galactica from the miniseries (he's in the CIC when Tigh vents the chambers and kills people to stop a fire). The faux-Wahlberg (hee!) is the Pegasus asshole. But I'm going "frak yeah!" to this. Because I really loved that we could follow the logic of the mutineers and that not all of them were rapist fuckwits, "lesser" men, or bitter women (oh, Seelix, why?). I like that they got to be reasonable in their objections for at least part of that.
The high point of 4.5, for me, was "Someone to Watch Over Me," the one time the show really felt both like it was remembering its mythologies and taking them in a satisfying-for-a-last-season direction. But I'm easy: You give me a real Starbuck episode, and I'm probably going to love it, even while resenting that it's a bit of bait for a story that they're never, ever going to explore.
I think the reveal with Starbuck was obvious, though I have to admit when she started playing "All Along the Watchtower," I got chills. I've fought and fought against the idea of her being a Cylon, but being a half-Cylon? Was cool. And I thought that's what they were doing there. But no. Sigh. I did also like how she was working off about thirty issues with everybody and falling back on her dead guy for support. (Which is totally in character--she only misses the men she loves when she can't have them.) I liked loads of that episode despite some of the anvil-drops.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 03:52 pm (UTC)Season four spent too much time working up neuroses as much as anything. Aside from Tory, who went from 0 to Cylon in a click of the fingers, the other new Cylons all went sort of crazy. Now, granted this is not a bug but a feature of the series, but it sort of contradicted their original plan to just keep an eye on each other and, if one of them started to lose it, take care of it. (With bullets.) It was really irritating that the Chief was like "I have to get out of bed for these secret meetings, so can we hurry it up?" one episode and suddenly WRACKED WITH TRAUMA for being a Cylon in the next. And then back again.
Ugh about The X-Files though. Man, am I glad I never finished that series. I should have applied that same technique to this one.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 05:12 pm (UTC)I saw all of the first half of S4 (ending when they found Nuclear Wasteland Earth) and then watched...man, I don't even think I watched full episodes of S4 Part 2. The only thing I remember is Roslin jogging around the station, which recalled a scene in Spaceballs where Mel Brooks was running to the bridge of the spaceship and told Rick Moranis that he couldn't walk through the massive spaceship cause it would take him too long and the movie would be over.
So back to Sine Qua Non--is that the one with the dead cat metaphor thingie? Cause if so, I did see it. I think I may have thought it was okay at the time, but that may have been me trying to defend a show I used to like.
Season four spent too much time working up neuroses as much as anything
YES. My God if I saw one more cracked person...Cally by far was the worst. That made me so sad when that happened cause it was really offensive on so many levels.
I'm curious: where did you stop with the X-Files? Cause for me, the series ended with the first film. S6-9 are just filler episodes, and each season got progressively worse. The second movie tried to save some of that, and it did. Sort of. But it was still mostly bad.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 07:45 pm (UTC)Hee! I did that just the other day. The doorbell rang and I was on the far side of the apartment and I kept shouting, "Wait! I'm coming!" I arrived out of breath and confessed that if I walked, the movie would have been over. BLANK LOOKS FROM FRIENDS. Sigh.
So back to Sine Qua Non--is that the one with the dead cat metaphor thingie? Cause if so, I did see it. I think I may have thought it was okay at the time, but that may have been me trying to defend a show I used to like.
Despite rants against things in that half season, that episode was the only one that made me fully want to turn the damn set off. (And yes, it was the one with the ghost cat. And then they made that guy president!)
YES. My God if I saw one more cracked person...Cally by far was the worst. That made me so sad when that happened cause it was really offensive on so many levels.
There was a Slate article where the writer accused Cally of being a Victorian throwback, and people jumped down her throat about this, going no, no, Cally just sucked forever and ever. Well, excuse me, but she was right. Cally was never a pleasant person, fine, but she wasn't some drug-addled hysteric before that episode. And letting women destroy themselves in the last act with drugs is a very Victorian sort of plot resolution.
Not to mention one that was invented at the last second to get rid of Cally. The last we saw of her before that episode, she was busy working and being cute with her baby and her husband. Next episode, the Chief mentions she's had trouble sleeping. And then she's on so much Lunesta, she's having rebound insomnia with paranoid delusions at the same time her previously balanced and indifferent-to-being-a-robot husband starts to flip out (also for no reason). GAHH
I'm curious: where did you stop with the X-Files? Cause for me, the series ended with the first film. S6-9 are just filler episodes, and each season got progressively worse. The second movie tried to save some of that, and it did. Sort of. But it was still mostly bad.
I started to fall behind in 5th season, but I saw the movie. I think I might have watched a few Scully-and-Doggett episodes, but that was about it. (The only one I can remember is the T2 alumni reunion where both the T-1000 and Miles Dyson were in it. Oh, Joe Morton, you'll always be Miles Dyson to me!) I don't remember not liking it through season five, just that I got busy and stopped watching it (on Sunday nights, tch!)