Forecast calls for win with occasional WTF

[sigma7]

Lose the coda and I think you've got me. Hell, take the ham-hands away from the coda and you've still got me. Hera as Mitochondrial Eve I'll buy. I'll buy the tons of dei ex machina from a show with explicit connections to the divine from day one (I rather liked the Skulls/Racetrack combo being infinitely more useful post-mortem than they were in life). I'll even buy the shunning of technology to live on a verdant paradise world compared to what they've put up with. But those last few minutes rankled me -- thankfully the Boston Herald review spoiled me on that time-jump or else I'd be sincerely less enthusiastic. It might've worked handled differently, but I didn't care for that rendering, even with Jimi.

But the big questions got answered, more than I realized, and the big chickens came home to roost -- Cavil, Boomer, even Tory! -- and that first hour was appropriately intense. The little moments -- Cottle, Romo, the theme on the flyby -- for the most part, worked. The truce falling apart, though, that made my day.

Painful to watch -- particularly after the very last jump, wondering if she'd come apart at the seams -- and far from perfect, but good enough.

Comments

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

And now we know why the Watchtower version used couldn't be the Jimi one...it was 150,000 years too soon. :)

[ravenword.livejournal.com]

Just watched it! (Had to DL because we stupidly didn't realize it started at 9:00 last night.)

I'm pissed off about the whole "Starbuck is an angel and just kind of disappears" thing. I had my own theory about her -- I think her father was Daniel, the "artist" Cylon -- Ellen describes how Caval had all of his copies destroyed, but I wonder if one of them did make it to the Colonies like the Final Five. That would explain Kara's connection to the mysterious song that only the Final Five Cylons knew -- her father taught it to her. And it would explain her "special destiny" better if she was a human/Cylon hybrid like Hera. Plus, Hera and Kara! They totally rhyme.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

There are three things I didn't think worked particularly well, and Kara was one of them -- it could've, I think, with a bit more bolstering, but the final product doesn't stand on its own. I know RDM's gone on the record in several interviews as saying that Kara's Something Else, not a Daniel-product, which was certainly easy to conclude given the timing of the Daniel revelations and her own quest for identity (and the revelations of her father-figure piano man). And the idea that she's an ethereal agent who just fades away invalidates quite a bit of her character arc and cheapens what she's gone through, what she's accomplished, I think. We could've done with half an hour less Planet Earth and a bit more trimming of that particular plot thread.

[rainfletcher.livejournal.com]

Now that I've had a week to sit on it, I can safely say that I loved the first hour (yes, I know it's All About The Characters, Stupid, but I loves me some good space battling), but the second left me cold. There are little things, like how it supremely sucks to be Lee Adama, how the idea of the Admiral's post-Roslin hermitage tasted sour (you're going to turn your back on your son, your friend of how many years, and your surrogate daughter that you couldn't have known was about to self-vaporize because Laura died a death that you all knew was coming? Really?), how Starbuck's aforementioned self-vaporization was supremely unsatisfying, how I am somehow supposed to feel happy that CapSix and Baltar got together in the end (sorry, still not over that baby neck-snap thing, and I'm tired of character apologists telling me it was a Mercy Killing), and so on.

The meat of my dissatisfaction, though, is the time period in which they landed. I really think it would have served the story better if they had landed at the true dawn of civilization in the fertile crescent, or the time of ancient Greece, or amidst the dynasties of Egypt. For them to appear 150K years before today means, as far as I'm concerned, that in all the ways that matter, they all died out. All they contributed to humanity was genetic material as they voluntarily allowed themselves to descend into well over 100,000 years of barbarism. Their culture utterly vanished with them, leaving no trace. (Considering that even generous estimates put the earliest cultivation of plants at 15,000 years ago, I guess Baltar didn't do a very good job of teaching his old occupation to the natives.)

Ron Moore has disputed this point, saying that the culture of the colonials merely "vanished into the collective unconscious" to resurface later. I still call shenanigans.

I liked this show a lot better before I started reading about it online -- particularly when I discovered the writers and producers proclaiming with pride that they were just making it up as they went along, and had no real plans for how it was all going to come together. It really showed here at the end.

I'll just go with the idea that the show ended with that reveal of the Earth over the surface of the moon, leaving the rest to be written by the fanficcers of the world.

[endersgame3.livejournal.com]

where are you? its been awhile...

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Still stuff goin' on. It'll sort itself out sooner or later....