Anyone else watch BSG: Razor?
Nov. 24th, 2007 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerI had a lovely Thanksgiving--partly because Thanksgiving dinner was actually the first real food I'd eaten since Sunday. I had that awful norovirus last weekend, and spent most of the week in bed eating 7-Up and Jello. Sadly, this meant I couldn't bake the gingerbread pudding cake for Thanksgiving like I'd planned, but at least I was well enough to go!
Anyway, tonight I'm happy because I get to break out my BSG tag for new canon!
I do have one important question, though: when exactly during those ten months did Admiral Cain cut and highlight her hair? Was it an attempt at a pick-me-up in the midst of constant death and destruction or what?
Okay, two important questions: once again, where does their endless supply of alcohol come from?
Anyway, tonight I'm happy because I get to break out my BSG tag for new canon!
I don't exactly have an objective view of how I feel about this new episode/movie/thing as a whole, just impressions of individual points. I'm mostly still stuck in "yay new canon!" mode.
But I can say that it felt a bit rushed to me. It tried to expand on Lee's and Starbuck's storylines, fill in info about Adama's experience in the first war and the history of the Cylon hybrid, and have a cohesive story about a new character and Admiral Cain's legacy - that's a lot for two hours. This led to odd things like Gina hardly being introduced as a character before the Pegasus crew found out who she was, which I thought robbed the discovery of its power. It would have been so much more wrenching to watch them all trust her more and more over the course of several attacks and escapes and quiet personal moments before finding out. Maybe three hours would have been better.
I also found it strange that rather than Cain and the crew slowly growing more ruthless as the constant death toll and aloneness got to them, they were pretty much as we saw them ten months later from the very beginning. I understand that RDM wanted to show they had that potential from the beginning, but again, it feels like we lost the progression of tension we could have had without gaining much. It made the whole "are they really so different from us/they were stuck with tough decisions" message of the end (and S2) seem totally false to me.
On the other hand, yay for lots of female main characters! Remember when the show was like this? When the women weren't all men-and-babies, all the time? I have nothing against some of the characters having boyfriends, husbands, and babies, but they should have other concerns too. It was nice to see that again.
And it was nice to see Lee not boring me, though I can't put my finger on why. Maybe he just works better for me as a major but supporting character than as one of the main characters.
It was also very nifty to have more Cylon backstory (and a Cylon legend, even!) and a better explanation for what those hybrids actually are. This gets me excited to see how the whole Cylon storyline plays out in S4. I found the glimpses of the people trapped in that lab very, very interesting. Did the one peeking through the bottom of the door look like Kara to anyone else? Were all twelve models originally real people that the Cylons selected as representatives of humanity to mass produce? And even though I haven't seen the original 1978 series, I cheered when the Retro Cylons appeared saying "By your command."
And Kara! Harbinger of death and doom! But you notice that Grandpa Hybrid doesn't specify whose doom, the tricky devil.
Also, I found the Cain/Gina ship very, very interesting - not because we unfortunately have yet another Evil TV Lesbian Couple (blech! and cliche! and blech!), but because Kendra Shaw and the rest of the officers didn't bat an eye. This tells me that the Colonies and the Colonial military might be a lot more gay-friendly than 2007 US. This is something I have been wondering about.
But back to Cylons. Grandpa Hybrid kept harping on the "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again" quote, which reminds me of my crack theory from ages ago: I think everybody is a Cylon, or at least part-Cylon. Originally, I thought that the stories of twelve tribes of humans and twelve gods living together on Kobol was a garbled account of the humans and their twelve Cylon models back in the day. However, the way it works is that the gods are the creators and not the other way around, right? So I think the gods were the original humans (maybe twelve overseers of the Cylons, and a bunch of people that got left out), and the tribes were the first Cylons. They advanced so far making themselves organic beings rather than machines that they became indistinguishable from humans. They could reproduce like humans, and with humans. There was a war and eventually the Cylons left for their own planets - all this very similar to what happened again when their descendants, who don't know that they were originally Cylons themselves, created their own Cylons. And maybe the thirteenth tribe was made up of the actual humans. Who may have also been Cylons themselves, originally....
But I can say that it felt a bit rushed to me. It tried to expand on Lee's and Starbuck's storylines, fill in info about Adama's experience in the first war and the history of the Cylon hybrid, and have a cohesive story about a new character and Admiral Cain's legacy - that's a lot for two hours. This led to odd things like Gina hardly being introduced as a character before the Pegasus crew found out who she was, which I thought robbed the discovery of its power. It would have been so much more wrenching to watch them all trust her more and more over the course of several attacks and escapes and quiet personal moments before finding out. Maybe three hours would have been better.
I also found it strange that rather than Cain and the crew slowly growing more ruthless as the constant death toll and aloneness got to them, they were pretty much as we saw them ten months later from the very beginning. I understand that RDM wanted to show they had that potential from the beginning, but again, it feels like we lost the progression of tension we could have had without gaining much. It made the whole "are they really so different from us/they were stuck with tough decisions" message of the end (and S2) seem totally false to me.
On the other hand, yay for lots of female main characters! Remember when the show was like this? When the women weren't all men-and-babies, all the time? I have nothing against some of the characters having boyfriends, husbands, and babies, but they should have other concerns too. It was nice to see that again.
And it was nice to see Lee not boring me, though I can't put my finger on why. Maybe he just works better for me as a major but supporting character than as one of the main characters.
It was also very nifty to have more Cylon backstory (and a Cylon legend, even!) and a better explanation for what those hybrids actually are. This gets me excited to see how the whole Cylon storyline plays out in S4. I found the glimpses of the people trapped in that lab very, very interesting. Did the one peeking through the bottom of the door look like Kara to anyone else? Were all twelve models originally real people that the Cylons selected as representatives of humanity to mass produce? And even though I haven't seen the original 1978 series, I cheered when the Retro Cylons appeared saying "By your command."
And Kara! Harbinger of death and doom! But you notice that Grandpa Hybrid doesn't specify whose doom, the tricky devil.
Also, I found the Cain/Gina ship very, very interesting - not because we unfortunately have yet another Evil TV Lesbian Couple (blech! and cliche! and blech!), but because Kendra Shaw and the rest of the officers didn't bat an eye. This tells me that the Colonies and the Colonial military might be a lot more gay-friendly than 2007 US. This is something I have been wondering about.
But back to Cylons. Grandpa Hybrid kept harping on the "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again" quote, which reminds me of my crack theory from ages ago: I think everybody is a Cylon, or at least part-Cylon. Originally, I thought that the stories of twelve tribes of humans and twelve gods living together on Kobol was a garbled account of the humans and their twelve Cylon models back in the day. However, the way it works is that the gods are the creators and not the other way around, right? So I think the gods were the original humans (maybe twelve overseers of the Cylons, and a bunch of people that got left out), and the tribes were the first Cylons. They advanced so far making themselves organic beings rather than machines that they became indistinguishable from humans. They could reproduce like humans, and with humans. There was a war and eventually the Cylons left for their own planets - all this very similar to what happened again when their descendants, who don't know that they were originally Cylons themselves, created their own Cylons. And maybe the thirteenth tribe was made up of the actual humans. Who may have also been Cylons themselves, originally....
I do have one important question, though: when exactly during those ten months did Admiral Cain cut and highlight her hair? Was it an attempt at a pick-me-up in the midst of constant death and destruction or what?
Okay, two important questions: once again, where does their endless supply of alcohol come from?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-26 02:50 am (UTC)I'm bummed about the Evil Lesbian Couple vibe. I mean, I expected it, but I found Cain to be a fascinating though disturbing character, and had held out some hope for complex development. (It seemed as though the PTB have a sense that people are complex, but don't have a good gut instinct for what, exactly, makes people go bad. And in season 3, especially, they seemed really oblivious to the things that shape the characters of women.)
Maybe someone will write good fic about it, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-26 02:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-26 03:12 am (UTC)On the bright side, they did so much better at having multiple scenes in which women actually talk to each other (about something other than men and babies). Kendra and Starbuck were marvelous every time they interacted, from early clashes to a semi-bonding-but-still-tense scene in the kitchen to doing a mission together. Why can TPTB not recognize when they're doing something right?
So sorry you had the norovirus too! It's just awful.