We’re finished, finally finished. Five seasons of the re-imagined/rebooted Battlestar Galactica. It certainly wasn’t cut short like Firefly, for which we can always be thankful.
What is it? That’s easy — it’s a war story. The main characters are the defenders of the last of humanity, the military crew of the titular spaceship. But there are other places and people too — the civilians that truly make up what is left of the human race, and the enemy who chase them through the stars. It’s an epic, a space opera in the least pejorative sense of the word.
And since it’s written on such a grand scale there is plenty of opportunity to examine the minutiae of life and society — fledgling government, military rule, religion, war propaganda — as well as larger questions of humanity. Like any good science fiction, it provides a safe, removed theatre in which to examine some tricky subjects.
If anyone wants to borrow the complete thing, we have a substantial number of DVDs here. I totally recommend it.
It turns out that pre-ordering stuff online is great. Not because it arrives at your door as soon as it’s released, but because you forget it’s on order at all. When it finally comes it’s like a surprise gift from yourself.
Battlestar Galactica: The Final Season was posted to us when we were on holiday.
I wonder if there’s a way to set up “surprise” orders using an online wishlist? Every month, approximately, the system would order something for you. Obviously you’d need to give it some money. Maybe add a certain amount into an account on a weekly basis, and the system would choose it’s next product and — assuming it didn’t have enough cash on hand — wait until the account was flush enough.
Obviously if you add five pounds to the account every week you’re not going to get anything very expensive and it would spoil the excitement if the system waited 8 months without making a single purchase. So there would have to be some cut-off. I suppose the sensible thing is just not to add stupidly expensive items to the automated wish list.
Anyway, all that’s just prelude because I haven’t much to say about BSG yet. We’ve watched the first disc, episodes 1–4. Spoilers from here on, so bail now if you haven’t watched this far!
I’ve just finished Screen Burn, the collection of Charlie Brooker’s TV review columns from the Guardian, collected in book form. In short, if you like Charlie Brooker then you’ll like this.
It was quite interesting for me because it’s been several years since I was a regular TV watcher. Even then, I was never interested in the soaps or reality TV shows for the most part. (With noted exceptions of the hilarity that TMF would occasionally show during the day. Jessica Simpson really is that absurd.) Reading Screen Burn allowed me to live through the worst of dumbed-down TV broadcasting without actually having to watch it.
Most of the programmes were stuff that I have already seen or was not interested in catching. Except when Charlie Brooker gets very excited about 24 about halfway through the book, then the second season comes around — and then the third! The one I haven’t seen! I actually caught a teeny spoiler for the third season completely by accident. I just glanced at the page and bang the information was in my head.
There were a few shows which got excellent reviews but I had never heard of and seem not to have made a big impact. No second series, no transfer to BBC2 from the hinterlands of BBC4.
But mostly, I just read it for the witty rage that is brought to bear on so much of the tedious television programmes. The kind of stuff that I no longer watch.
For her birthday in October I bought Helen the Sharpe box set that was available at the time. Sean Bean as the soldier in Wellington’s army fighting through Spain to Napoleonic France, from the books by Bernard Cornwell. The films (because that is what they are: each episode is 90 minutes long) are excellent fun, but that’s not why I’m here.
I wanted to bring to light the man who plays Dan Hagman in the series, John Tams. He sings the theme song, Over The Hills and Far Away, and incidental songs at regular intervals while the regiment are marching, waiting, sitting by the campfire or burying one of their friends. His aching voice really holds the stories together and makes the viewer feel like they’re there.
John Tams is also, as it turns out, an award-winning folk singer. I stumbled across a compilation of his songs while shopping on Christmas Eve, and it’s been one of the delightful musical discoveries of the season. Have a look for him.
It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?
Coverville episode 381, from November 2007, contains a cover of All Along The Watchtower. The host does his very best to drive home the importance of this particular track to the ending of season three of Battlestar Galactica.
But it’s been a long long time since I last heard that track, and it totally escaped me when we got round to watching the season finale. I kept completing lines, thinking “this is funny, why are they all saying Dylan lyrics?”. Even when the song become part of the soundtrack I still didn’t make that leap. I am clearly an idiot.
But aside from that, exciting stuff! Now I really want to dive straight into season four but that would be bad. We should watch Razor first.
We watched up to episode 8 (“Hero”) of Battlestar Galactica season 3. Then we opened the second box to find two copies of disc 4 and no disc 3 at all! Horror! I took the set back but every single replacement the shop could muster had the same fault. Doubleplusungood.
So this seems a good time to look at what’s happened already this season. Obviously, major spoiler warning. Don’t look further if you haven’t seen the first 8 episodes of season 3.
This evening we made our first use of the BBC’s iPlayer “watch again” system to see the first episode of Ashes to Ashes, the sequel to last year’s retro-modern cop show Life on Mars.
We watched it on the laptop over wireless, and received full-screen playback for almost the entire episode. The only “loading…” pause was during the opening credits, for which I’ll happily forgive them. The quality was excellent and I was pleasantly surprised that it even works on Linux-based machines, provided you’ve got the latest Flash player.
I’m not sure what I think about the show yet. It was very jarringly edited — open a door into a different room, the person walks into a different building. I have already developed a healthy dislike for the protagonist’s daughter. I hope she will remain merely a spectre for the rest of the show.
Nothing much happened, though they’ve got a good character for the main part. Like Sam Tyler in the previous, Alexandra Drake should be a good person to base a series around.
At the moment I am reading another crazy Peter Høeg book, The Woman and The Ape. I’ll probably be finished it in another day but it’s looking pretty good so far. After that, I’m looking forward to The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford. It looks like a great deal of geeky fun. I really hope it lives up to its promise.
Musically I have been tied up with Michael Hedges after receiving Beyond Boundaries, a compilation of some fantastic and moving tunes. Hunt it down like your guitar virtuoso life depended on it.
I am looking forward immensely to watching Battlestar Galactica when Helen gets back.
Last week I got a copy of season three of Battlestar Galactica from a friend. We settled down on Friday night for some serious couch-potatoism. The first three episodes didn’t work. It turns out they had been written to the disk as approximately 1 Gb of zeroes. At least they would have compressed well!
So I ran over to MovieBank and rented the first disc of season two of 24. We’d been warned that it was a bit crap, but really I had no how silly it was going to get. We’ve also been told that it picks up from season three onwards. Can we get confirmation of this?
spoilers coming!
I mean, Kim gets threatened by a mountain lion! And kidnapped/held hostage on several occasions! How does she manage it? Can one person really be so incapable? I must admit to feeling very emotional when Jack had to tell his daughter he was about to die. And George Mason saying goodbye to his son too. It was a series for emotional goodbyes.
It was pretty disappointing that we were able to accurately predict nearly every twist (who didn’t see George Mason hiding out in the plane?). It did allow for some good banter between the two of us, betting at which point they would stop telegraphing the twist and actually execute it. It was also really silly the way that antagonists would be wheeled out one after another — as soon as George disappears, Tony becomes a grumpy boss, then Carrie appears to Tony can be a good guy again. Then division boss Chappelle appears so Carrie fades into the background. Sigh.
So, 24 drinking game would involve imbibing something whenever:
You hear the CTU ringtone. (Or every time you hear me say “we’ve got those phones at work!”.)
One character says to another “you have to trust me”.
One character says to another “give me everything you’ve got on” some person.
Someone says “what are you talking about?” when given news of a strange situation (“you’re daughter’s been arrested”, “I’m dying of radiation poisoning”).
The CTU intelligence crew look at each other with suspicion… no, that would be too cruel, that’s all they ever do.
Distractions don’t come more idle than looking up the TV Tropes wiki. It’s such fun.
The page on the stereotype of Hollywood atheist is quite interesting. It gets to the core of the “bitter atheist” — you know, the one that used to believe in God but doesn’t any more because his wife died in a car accident? It has this to say of Battlestar Galactica (the new series):
…features two prominent atheist characters, both of them wildly different:
Admiral Adama, who views humanity as flawed but inherently good, and
ultimately accountable to nobody but themselves for their mistakes in life,
and Gaius Baltar, an egocentric technocrat who ultimately comes to consider
himself a god.
Interesting summary. I haven’t seen enough BSG to be sure, but I’d always pegged Adama as being on the wishy-washy liberal theism fence. You know, Church of Scotland rather than Church of White Jesus From Texas. They forgot one character though — President’s aide Billy, who died in the very next episode after explicitly saying he was an atheist. But that’s what happens when you enter politics looking about 14 years old…
It is sad that the one atheist character who’s super-intelligent, a media personality, a hit with the ladies and a good-humoured guy also happens to be out of his tiny little mind. But you can’t have everything, right? ;-)
More interesting to ask, why are there so few positive role models of scientists in film and TV? The balanced scientists are as few and far between, and there is a lot of cross-over: the cold, calculated, “logical” scientist who can’t understand/engage with human emotion.