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.
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Date: 2011-02-07 01:14 am (UTC)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.