Just shut up already
Mar. 27th, 2009 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenLast one from me, and then from here on out, I'll just stick to writing fanfiction to fix this mess.
Parts 1 and 2 of "What the frak happened to the last season of Battlestar Galactica?"
Part 3: Hopefully not as long as either of those parts!
Anders the hybrid
Verdict: Oh fuck me.
I've written about this at length. The short, short version:
1) Every Cylon is not like every other Cylon; you can't just put adapters on one to turn it into something else.
2) If you didn't want to deal with this character, why not just kill him? It's not like you haven't done this before, show.
3) This plot thread led to me seeing hybrids orgasming. This is not okay.
I understand that there were real-world constraints on this plot line. Michael Trucco, who plays Anders, was in a serious car accident, and he's the one-in-a-million to have a certain kind of broken neck that didn't paralyze or kill him, and it's hard to know how much of that influenced the writers to stick him off to the side in a role that wouldn't be too challenging. I still call shenangians.
Cavil is the Big Bad Wolf
Verdict: You're not even trying for moral ambiguity any more, are you?
Also covered this already. So much for Cylons having a fundamentally different mindset that would have allowed them to feel blameless for genocide (democratically approved, no less). Actually, they were all just tools of a spoiled little boy. That's much better!
Daniel is not Kara Thrace's father
Verdict: Right, and next you'll be telling me she's an angel.
I'm pretty sure that this ended up not being true solely because the internet figured it out before they could show us. Otherwise, why the resurrection? Why would she spend time talking to a projection of her father about the secret Cylon music he taught her as a kid?
The existence of a 13th Cylon isn't a surprise. The internets also figured that might be the case some time ago (around the time that the 13th tribe's markers kept popping up left and right). Ron Moore says Daniel existed only on paper, and that's exactly right. He is the papered over hole in the numbers of Cylons from 1-8 that the Final Five created. He's where Seven should have been. (I guess Aaron Douglas telliing people he had a number was bullshit then?) Ron Moore says Daniel is a red herring...
...but there is a character in Caprica named Daniel Greystone. If you want your missing Cylon model not to be of any importance, well, there's only one way to say this: UR DOIN IT WRONG.
Hera is the shape of things to come
Verdict: What, you mean she's the reason we have schizophrenia?
Going after Hera accomplished nothing. Earth II was apparently riding around in Kara's brain somewhere, so getting Hera wasn't really necessary to find it. There was no reason to go after Hera at all except as a sop to the generally nice and put-upon Agathons. There were, until they show took them away again, other Cylon kids. Starbuck should have been a Cylon kid. We can get more, too! There are an army of Sixes, Eights, and Twos with all their frothy sexual tension ready to make babies with the fleet. (Is it just me, or would any of the Sixes we've seen integrate with the Fleet have had all the Fleet's babies yesterday? You can't tell me that the engineer Six that went out the airlock wasn't at least a little hot and bothered by the human engineer--else why would they come to blows when no one else did?)
Mitochondrial Eve is such a poorly understood concept. Besides which, Hera didn't magic up some mitochondria that weren't there before. Mitochondria come exclusively from the mother's egg because sperm take only paternal, nuclear DNA into the egg during fertilzation. Meaning that any mitochondria that Hera has came from Sharon. Ergo, all that "Eve" nonsense means is that the Sharons outbred every one else, and Hera's are just the oldest bones they found with those mitochondria. It doesn't mean no one else had kids, just that all the others interbred with offspring of Sharon's daughters/grand-daughters at some point until the Eight-model's mitochondria were everywhere. Whatever, I still find that hard to believe (see above mention of the baby-crazy Sixes).
The point is that none of that makes Hera more specialer than any other half-Cylon baby. The colonials also apparently interbred with ancient aborginal peoples. Wouldn't the first proto-human/human/Cylon baby really be "the shape of things to come"?
If Hera isn't all that special, then just about everything done to capture or rescue her is pointless except to her parents and a few deluded he-Cylons who were freaking out about how they had no resurrection and no ability to reproduce. (The Dorals and Simons are probably wishing they'd been smart enough to join the two-to-one female-to-male Cylon faction of the war. That Leoben was a smart cookie.) The desperate Cylons do not make the strongest case for Hera's super specialness. They'd probably try to engineer male pregnancy if Hera weren't around; she's just easier to take apart and there's not risk to their own bodies that way.
The finale
Verdict: I had the craziest dream! And you were there, and you were there!
The finale sucked. End of line.
I still cannot believe it. Especially the Daniel thing (definitely check that out in there if you haven't heard about a Caprica spoiler). I need fanfiction to fix this nao, kthnxbai.
Parts 1 and 2 of "What the frak happened to the last season of Battlestar Galactica?"
Part 3: Hopefully not as long as either of those parts!
Anders the hybrid
Verdict: Oh fuck me.
I've written about this at length. The short, short version:
1) Every Cylon is not like every other Cylon; you can't just put adapters on one to turn it into something else.
2) If you didn't want to deal with this character, why not just kill him? It's not like you haven't done this before, show.
3) This plot thread led to me seeing hybrids orgasming. This is not okay.
I understand that there were real-world constraints on this plot line. Michael Trucco, who plays Anders, was in a serious car accident, and he's the one-in-a-million to have a certain kind of broken neck that didn't paralyze or kill him, and it's hard to know how much of that influenced the writers to stick him off to the side in a role that wouldn't be too challenging. I still call shenangians.
Cavil is the Big Bad Wolf
Verdict: You're not even trying for moral ambiguity any more, are you?
Also covered this already. So much for Cylons having a fundamentally different mindset that would have allowed them to feel blameless for genocide (democratically approved, no less). Actually, they were all just tools of a spoiled little boy. That's much better!
Daniel is not Kara Thrace's father
Verdict: Right, and next you'll be telling me she's an angel.
I'm pretty sure that this ended up not being true solely because the internet figured it out before they could show us. Otherwise, why the resurrection? Why would she spend time talking to a projection of her father about the secret Cylon music he taught her as a kid?
The existence of a 13th Cylon isn't a surprise. The internets also figured that might be the case some time ago (around the time that the 13th tribe's markers kept popping up left and right). Ron Moore says Daniel existed only on paper, and that's exactly right. He is the papered over hole in the numbers of Cylons from 1-8 that the Final Five created. He's where Seven should have been. (I guess Aaron Douglas telliing people he had a number was bullshit then?) Ron Moore says Daniel is a red herring...
...but there is a character in Caprica named Daniel Greystone. If you want your missing Cylon model not to be of any importance, well, there's only one way to say this: UR DOIN IT WRONG.
Hera is the shape of things to come
Verdict: What, you mean she's the reason we have schizophrenia?
Going after Hera accomplished nothing. Earth II was apparently riding around in Kara's brain somewhere, so getting Hera wasn't really necessary to find it. There was no reason to go after Hera at all except as a sop to the generally nice and put-upon Agathons. There were, until they show took them away again, other Cylon kids. Starbuck should have been a Cylon kid. We can get more, too! There are an army of Sixes, Eights, and Twos with all their frothy sexual tension ready to make babies with the fleet. (Is it just me, or would any of the Sixes we've seen integrate with the Fleet have had all the Fleet's babies yesterday? You can't tell me that the engineer Six that went out the airlock wasn't at least a little hot and bothered by the human engineer--else why would they come to blows when no one else did?)
Mitochondrial Eve is such a poorly understood concept. Besides which, Hera didn't magic up some mitochondria that weren't there before. Mitochondria come exclusively from the mother's egg because sperm take only paternal, nuclear DNA into the egg during fertilzation. Meaning that any mitochondria that Hera has came from Sharon. Ergo, all that "Eve" nonsense means is that the Sharons outbred every one else, and Hera's are just the oldest bones they found with those mitochondria. It doesn't mean no one else had kids, just that all the others interbred with offspring of Sharon's daughters/grand-daughters at some point until the Eight-model's mitochondria were everywhere. Whatever, I still find that hard to believe (see above mention of the baby-crazy Sixes).
The point is that none of that makes Hera more specialer than any other half-Cylon baby. The colonials also apparently interbred with ancient aborginal peoples. Wouldn't the first proto-human/human/Cylon baby really be "the shape of things to come"?
If Hera isn't all that special, then just about everything done to capture or rescue her is pointless except to her parents and a few deluded he-Cylons who were freaking out about how they had no resurrection and no ability to reproduce. (The Dorals and Simons are probably wishing they'd been smart enough to join the two-to-one female-to-male Cylon faction of the war. That Leoben was a smart cookie.) The desperate Cylons do not make the strongest case for Hera's super specialness. They'd probably try to engineer male pregnancy if Hera weren't around; she's just easier to take apart and there's not risk to their own bodies that way.
The finale
Verdict: I had the craziest dream! And you were there, and you were there!
The finale sucked. End of line.
I still cannot believe it. Especially the Daniel thing (definitely check that out in there if you haven't heard about a Caprica spoiler). I need fanfiction to fix this nao, kthnxbai.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-27 09:35 pm (UTC)Also, the Daniel thing is fucking ridiculous. I think they had planned for Kara to be half-Cylon right up to the point where they went "... but then we made this whole huge deal of the Agathon brat for NO GOOD REASON!1!1!!!!" See also: Nicky Tyrol, Caprica & Tigh's unborn child.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-27 09:42 pm (UTC)The Daniel thing is fucking ridiculous, especially after I found out that they had gone ahead and given a character in Caprica the same name. I realize that it would have been waaaaay before the humanoid models existed, but still: it's a spin-off of a show with a character that never appeared of the same name. If you can wank that Bob Dylan put FTL coordinates for not just one but TWO habitable planets (not to mention the switch on orders for some robots) into "All Along the Watchtower," I think I can understand Daniel slipping backwards in time to create the metal Cylons. (Daniel Greystone is working on metal Cylons! COME ON, SHOW!!)