TV: Humanity's children are returning home...today

[sigma7]

Day 01 - A show that should never have been cancelled
Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching
Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season)
Day 04 - Your favorite show ever
Day 05 - A show you hate
Day 06 - Favorite episode of one of your favorite shows
Day 07 - Least favorite episode of one of your favorite TV shows
Day 08 - A show that's had a significant effect on who you are today
Day 09 - Best scene ever
Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving
Day 11 - A show that disappointed you
Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times
Day 13 - Favorite childhood show
Day 14 - Favorite male character
Day 15 - Favorite female character
Day 16 - Your guilty pleasure show
Day 17 - Favorite mini series
Day 18 - Favorite title sequence
Day 19 - Best TV show cast
Day 20 - Favorite kiss
Day 21 - Favorite ship
Day 22 - Favorite series finale
Day 23 - Most annoying character
Day 24 - Best quote
Day 25 - A show you plan on watching (old or new)
Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale
Day 27 - Best pilot episode
Day 28 - First TV show obsession
Day 29 - Current TV show obsession
Day 30 - Saddest character death

Let's split hairs on the semantics of the meme for a second. "Favorite" is an important word, here -- and one that I've been using, really, instead of "best," even though the meme seems to think them interchangeable. They aren't. And this entry's a good example of why.

If I were going to going to name what I thought the best miniseries were, it's a completely different list than what my favorites would be. We'd be talking about Band of Brothers or From the Earth to the Moon or even I, Claudius instead (though From the Earth to the Moon would probably be #2 on each of my lists -- the Apollo 1 episode gets me every time). So let's abandon the illusion of objectivity here. If we hadn't already. Keep in mind that this is coming from a guy who has original VHS airings of Amerika somewhere in the basement.

That said, I never really saw the original V, but I liked The Final Battle (false advertising as it may have been). New V, not so much, even with awesome Baccarin content. The Dune minis suffered in the shadow of the David Lynch movie (or even the Alan Smithee cut), though I approved of the final product. 10.5 was only successful in attempting to be The Core for TV, fitting as many gross scientific inaccuracies and impossibilities into a finite timespan as possible, and even that televisual atrocity got a sequel. Those are the most...notable minis that come to mind right off the bat. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few, but I can't think of any that compete with my final three.

You know me, I like my apocalypses (World War III was a terrible little miniseries, rather boring and implausible, but hey, nuclear war? I'm there) and I like my Matt Frewer, so I enjoyed The Stand, deus ex machina and all. It was only a bit watered-down for TV, and certainly not very distilled (yes, it's a long miniseries, but it's a long damned book)...certainly not one of the worse adaptations I've seen (though your mileage may vary; I know someone who despises the Lord of the Rings movies because their adaptations were not slavish enough to the original texts). I thought it was as definitive a King adaptation as we were ever likely to see -- so the rumblings of a remake make me shake my head very slowly.

patchsassy, who infected me with this meme to begin with, has a most interesting decision for this entry: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I'm only disputing its placement because I don't think it qualifies as a miniseries, at least, certainly not in the traditional sense. Part of its noteworthiness is its existence outside the realm of conventional media -- or, at least, media conventions -- but if we stop playing semantics just once this post and decide, yes, it would qualify for inclusion, it'd fit right here. Clever and catchy music, impossibly powerful stage presence in both Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion, some of Joss Whedon's better writing -- but with his usual tendency on full display (Whedonites, you know what I'm talking about, and worse, that scene, whether badly directed or shot, never evokes what it's supposed to in me; I find myself giggling from how ridiculously incredible it looks every time). Still, it's a series that's good enough that even Marti Noxon's involvement does not immediately kill it dead. That, in itself, is fantastic.

But face it, you knew what #1 was gonna be.

"It's not unknown. I know where it is! Earth. The most guarded secret we have. The location was only known by the senior commanders of the fleet, and we dare not share it with the public. Not while there was a Cylon threat upon us. For now we have a refuge to go to. A refuge the Cylons know nothing about. It won't be an easy journey. It'll be long, and arduous. But I promise you one thing: on the memory of those lying here before you, we shall find it, and Earth shall become our new home. So say we all!"

I was one of the many people wondering (as I did with The Stand above) why the original Battlestar Galactica series was being re-imagined, with some characters' genders arbitrarily switched.... It was a lot of things -- silly, Star Wars ripoff, possible allegory for the Mormon faith -- but it had a faithful following, and it didn't seem to make any sense to resurrect an intellectual property just to...undo it. It didn't seem necessary.

So, I was totally and utterly wrong. Wasn't the first time, wouldn't be the last.

The original Galactica isn't replaced by the 2003 mini-series or the subsequent series. (Hell, you're not even sure they're not in the same continuity.) But the new series upgrades every single aspect of the former -- the cast (even Lorne Greene, and do you know how hard it is to upgrade from Lorne Greene?), the effects (well, one would hope), the emotional stakes (no more "oh wah our civilization is on the brink of extincOH HAY IZZAT A CASINO PLANET?"), the paranoia (now they "look like us," or more specifically, Tricia Helfer, which I think even the Kinsey-scale-0 women have to admit is one huge goddamned upgrade), the moral spectrum (no more evil-versus-good -- everyone this side of Helo is a huge walking swath of gray)....

Despite its sci-fi conventions, it certainly doesn't feel like a sci-fi show most of the time. Imagine a series set toward the end of World War II, in some alternate universe where somehow everyone got atomic bombs and now nothing is habitable -- not the Americas nor Europe nor Asia or Africa or even Australia. And there's one last aircraft carrier, a handful of ships, and they're all looking for the lost continent of Atlantis, all while being incessantly chased by a Zeros and an implacable, gigantic Japanese fleet. That's what this feels like.

At the series' conclusion, Adama gives the speech quoted above, promising the rag-tag fleet that there is a destination, the mythical thirteenth colony, Earth. But he is lying. There's no Earth. The entire human population -- what was 20 billion a few days before has become 50,000 -- is running screaming into the abyss, pursued by its own creations that want nothing more than to wipe them all out. And I remember thinking at the time, "Wow, that's pretty bleak." OH GOD I HAD NO IDEA.

And yet it's Adama's speech moments before the apocalypse begins that's most noteworthy, especially in terms of the long game to follow:

"You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question, why? Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, jealousy. And we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done. Like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. When that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore."

Which is true of Starbuck a few episodes later, when she's forced to tell Adama that it was her error that cost Adama his son's life. Or Kat, who's taken the identity of a dead woman to escape her checkered past. Or Apollo, who'd rather not be a pilot, certainly not for his father. Or Roslin, who's dying. Or Baltar, who got rescued from radiation-saturated Caprica at the last minute and whose unwitting dalliance with a Cylon (well, it was Tricia Helfer flavored...) leaves him complicit in the near-extermination of humanity. Or the five people in the fleet who don't even realize that they're actually Cylons. But that's down the line.

Not that the miniseries is perfect. I really didn't like the rack-zoom in the CGI scenes, and thankfully, that died a quick death in the following series. The drums got a bit monotonous, and the series' music really came into its own. But these are minor gripes. My biggest issue with the miniseries is that it doesn't seem to properly address the scope and the depth of what was about to follow -- but if it had, nobody would have believed it. The difficulty is addressing the miniseries as its own entity and not as a backdoor pilot; maybe I should disqualify it on that basis. Nah. Too late now. It's apocalyptic, it's dramatic without being melodramatic, it has fantastic acting with just the right amount of scenery chewing, tons of terrible choices to make and some excellent storytelling. This one just gets better with age.

Comments

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Totally with you on the BSG miniseries. I never saw the original, but Brian and I were both stunned by it and the following season of television. Masterful stuff.

Now, if someone could explain to me WTF HAPPENED between seasons 1 and the rest that caused the entire thing to go so completely off the rails...that'd be nice. Not that there weren't good episodes in seasons 2 and 3 (I haven't gotten around to watching 4 yet, and am not sure I will), but part of what made the miniseries/first season so amazing was the sense of cohesiveness, of narrative arc, of "there's a whole story here already and even though you don't have all the pieces yet I'm going to reveal them slowly, or even just bits of them, and half the fun is going to be theorizing about how they all fit together because you know they do. And then it was like we got too busy focusing on this or that subplot, or the writers were floundering around trying to figure out where to go next, and we were left wondering "Is this even the same show?" Honestly, it was a little traumatizing, like watching a slow striptease performed by a beautiful and skilled woman...who turned out, under the clothes, to be a robot cobbled together of parts from eight different robots, none of which were particularly useful or beautiful to begin with.

Also, someone totally needs to make O HAY IZZAT A CASINO PLANET? into an animated lolcat gif. :)

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

That's about the time the plot threads became a wad of yarn the size of the moon. I'm all for expansive mythological mysteries -- but ideally, when you write them into your plots, you should know where they're going, not just provoke a whole bunch of questions for which you don't know the answers. The problem then becomes finding answers that fulfill the mystery and leave the audience satisfied. I will say this for BSG: they answered the questions, to varying degrees of satisfaction, but in a way that exposed the mysteries themselves (we're talking later-season conjurings, like the "Final Five") as being haphazard and contrived.

When you try writing without knowing the answer and just throwing in a bunch of red herrings -- leaving yourself open to make any of those red herrings vital clues at one point or another -- as plot elements along the way, nine times out of ten, it shows. But if you start with the dramatic spine clearly in mind, it will fill out nicely -- like ribs, I guess -- and you'll take body blows of scrutiny a lot better. tl;dr, the showrunners wrote a lot of plot checks that bounced in S2/S3. I'll say that, in my account, at least, most of those eventually got cashed; the finale answered a lot more questions than I ever thought it would, and I even liked most of those answers (though I could understand why some people didn't).

Honestly, it was a little traumatizing, like watching a slow striptease performed by a beautiful and skilled woman...who turned out, under the clothes, to be a robot cobbled together of parts from eight different robots, none of which were particularly useful or beautiful to begin with.

Your art of simile is both terrifying and apropos.

I'll say that season 4 had some pretty solid moments -- the plot's still a bit wayward, but the season 4.5 'premiere' and the first 2/3 of the finale in particular are powerful stuff. Some of the mysteries are kinda arbitrarily answered (especially the Final Five), but the others just might be pleasant surprises.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

(Grr! Why you eat my reply, LJ?)

That's about the time the plot threads became a wad of yarn the size of the moon. I'm all for expansive mythological mysteries -- but ideally, when you write them into your plots, you should know where they're going, not just provoke a whole bunch of questions for which you don't know the answers. The problem then becomes finding answers that fulfill the mystery and leave the audience satisfied. I will say this for BSG: they answered the questions, to varying degrees of satisfaction, but in a way that exposed the mysteries themselves (we're talking later-season conjurings, like the "Final Five") as being haphazard and contrived.

(AUGH MY REPLY WHERE YOU GO AGAIN?)

tl;dr -- S4 had some good moments and some interesting answers. It'll provide very definite closure, that I can guarantee, and will take your breath away at a few junctures, along with possibly your will to live. In retrospect, more of it worked for me than failed; I may be in the minority.

Honestly, it was a little traumatizing, like watching a slow striptease performed by a beautiful and skilled woman...who turned out, under the clothes, to be a robot cobbled together of parts from eight different robots, none of which were particularly useful or beautiful to begin with.

Your art of simile manages to be both terrifying and apropos.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Strange, I got the email notification with your full reply, but it's not showing here. Here it is for posterity:

That's about the time the plot threads became a wad of yarn the size of the moon. I'm all for expansive mythological mysteries -- but ideally, when you write them into your plots, you should know where they're going, not just provoke a whole bunch of questions for which you don't know the answers. The problem then becomes finding answers that fulfill the mystery and leave the audience satisfied. I will say this for BSG: they answered the questions, to varying degrees of satisfaction, but in a way that exposed the mysteries themselves (we're talking later-season conjurings, like the "Final Five") as being haphazard and contrived.

When you try writing without knowing the answer and just throwing in a bunch of red herrings -- leaving yourself open to make any of those red herrings vital clues at one point or another -- as plot elements along the way, nine times out of ten, it shows. But if you start with the dramatic spine clearly in mind, it will fill out nicely -- like ribs, I guess -- and you'll take body blows of scrutiny a lot better. tl;dr, the showrunners wrote a lot of plot checks that bounced in S2/S3. I'll say that, in my account, at least, most of those eventually got cashed; the finale answered a lot more questions than I ever thought it would, and I even liked most of those answers (though I could understand why some people didn't).

Honestly, it was a little traumatizing, like watching a slow striptease performed by a beautiful and skilled woman...who turned out, under the clothes, to be a robot cobbled together of parts from eight different robots, none of which were particularly useful or beautiful to begin with.

Your art of simile is both terrifying and apropos.

I'll say that season 4 had some pretty solid moments -- the plot's still a bit wayward, but the season 4.5 'premiere' and the first 2/3 of the finale in particular are powerful stuff. Some of the mysteries are kinda arbitrarily answered (especially the Final Five), but the others just might be pleasant surprises.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Oh, and...now it appears. *boggle* All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again, apparently. (Which, by the way, always reminds me of the Information Society instead of BSG. Ah, well.)

I did just watch "The Plan" -- which only goes through the moment the two Cavils are airlocked together, but with spoilers for the revelation of the entire Final Five -- and it's an interesting little film that tries so very hard to sell the idea that there was a plan, and puts together a very elaborate argument to that effect. It comes off as defensive fanfic more than an actual film at times, but it's worth it to see another, drawn-out vision of the attack on the Twelve Colonies. Watchable, but not convincing.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Well, towards the end Ron Moore admitted that there was no "plan", and they were just making it up as they went along. Specific example was that they had no idea at all who the final five were when they introduced that concept.

Which just confirmed my realization that if the Cylons had ever had a "plan", they'd long since gone from plan "A" to plan "Q" or so, hitting every letter along the way.

BSG annoys the crap out of me. At its best, focuses on the people on Galactica, it can be incredibly strong. But almost anything specifically to do with Cylons is incredibly poorly done and thought out. And don't get me started on the last half hour of the finale, which ruined the series as a whole for me. To use the analogy of a show character having to hold the "idiot ball" to justify an out of character plot complication, that puppy had an idiot ball the size of a red giant star.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

"Maddeningly inconsistent" is a valid phrase to use. I've softened on the last half-hour of the finale -- it's stupidity on par with Dana's dating plan, and that's saying something, but the fingerprint of writer fiat is so blatant that I've finally been able to segregate my disdain for that particular development from the show proper, likening it to a show canceled mid-season and forced to tie up plotlines in a ten-minute denouement. But the Cylons' roll-a-motivation made the show unhappily unpredictable, concurred.

You'd love watching "The Plan" MST3K-style, I think -- its dogged retcon-defense of the Cylon plan is so energetic and valiant that you can't help but applaud it for trying. It never works, of course, but its enthusiasm is pitiable.

I am at least able to go back and rewatch episodes of BSG, whereas I can't watch the last season of Lost anymore after its finale.

[jeditigger.livejournal.com]

I really need a BSG icon. Maybe your Helo one.

The miniseries was breathtaking. Period. Just...damn, so good.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I can't think of any other show that has provoked more "holy shit"s from me than BSG, but no moment more awesome than the two-second delay of realization of the implications of "brace for turbulence."

And, of course, "She has no idea what she has ahead of her."

[jeditigger.livejournal.com]

I remember saying aloud something like, "ballsiest freaking move ever." Secured my utter love for Adama, for real.

[patchsassy.livejournal.com]

Like I said in my entry, I really haven't seen many miniseries. I've heard of Band of Brothers and I heard The Pacific was also quite good, but you also don't get exposed to many traditional miniseries if you don't have premium movie channels unless you get them on DVD. I think it was interesting because it wouldn't really count as a movie with a running time of 42 minutes, but it's not really TV friendly either. It's a very odd little show that has such a big following.

I'm glad you're doing this. I haven't seen most of the shows that you're referencing.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I'm glad Dr. Horrible got an Emmy, even if they did have to kinda hand-make a category just for it. It was worthy of its plaudits. And yeah, not having premium channels does put a lot of minis out of my reach, but I figure if they're good enough, they'll diffuse through my f-list and I'll end up picking them up somehow....

If you want to know what happens in the first three seasons of BSG, here's the eight-minute version. But if there's the remotest chance you might Netflix it from the beginning, let me encourage this. It occasionally redefines "bleak" impressively, but seriously awesome drama. I promise it's about as far from Star Trek as you can get.