Battlestar Galactica Mid-Season Finale

It took me a while to catch up on my spring viewing, but I saved the best for last. It has been no secret that I hold Battlestar Galactica as one of the best shows ever, and this final season has been absolutely riveting.The mid-season finale delivered not only a completion of long-sought climax, but opened the door, as the series as done time and again, to all new questions and possibilities previously unfathomed. Now you will indulge me just two(non-spoiler) of my favorite quotes of the season:

• Laura Roslin to Tory, after it is revealed she's been 'sleeping with the enemy': "I don't care whether you are on your knees in prayer or just on your knees, you will get the information." Bam!
• Lee Adama to Colonel Tigh, after a late hour revealation: "You motherfrakker." Bam!

BSG and New Foods: Yuck!

Reader comments can provide a lot of entertainment and insight for me. Take the following viewer comment from Jason, regarding this BSG post a while back:

Not to be pedantic or anything, but in the original BG, nobody had last names. So while the Zac portrayed by Rick Springfield was indeed Adama's son and Apollo and Athena's brother (the new BG did some drastic retooling on the Athena character, from what I understand -- I don't watch the new BG because I'm one of the handful of clueless old grumps who does not, in fact, think it's the greatest TV series ever, no offense), his name was not "Zac Adama." It was simply Zac.

Just to be clear, you understand. For the record. :)

I haven't seen any of the original series episodes since they were first broadcast, which means it not only has been almost thirty years since I've seen them, but that I was only a little tyke at the time, so my memory of the show is a little sketchy. I didn't realize they didn't use last names in the original series, which is kind of interesting.

On the other hand, I needed to pick my jaw up off the floor upon reading the parenthesis-separated portion of Jason's comment. Two huge glaring points here. First, he has heard the 'Athena' character has undergone some 'drastic retooling' in the new series -- something of an understatement if you mean the character does not exist, per se. Certain elements of her character have been 'spread around' to other females on the show, but no one thinks that calling the Boomer cylon "Athena" means she's Adama's daughter.Jason admits that he doesn't watch the show (and apparently gets really bad information about it, to boot) and then says he doesn't think it's the best TV show ever. I could rant about this kind of inane opinion-proffering, but instead I'll just provide an embarrassing example of my own from a conversation with the girlfriend:

Danielle: Try some hummus. It's yummy.
Me: Yuck! I don't like hummus!
Danielle: Really?
Me: Yeah.
Danielle looks at me suspiciously.
Danielle: You've never tried hummus, have you?
Me: (sheepishly) No.

Just for the record, I have watch the first episode of season four and it is money in the bank. And that is not only an informed opinion but incontrovertible fact! Sorta.

BSG Preview and Star Trek talk

Mania's website scored some pretty interesting stuff today. At least if you are a sci-fi fan. Which, as it happens, I am.
First, it has a neat interview with Simon Pegg, who, aside from talking about Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, talks about getting the upcoming roll as a young Scotty in the reboot of Star Trek:

I had just stepped off a plane and I got an email from J.J. Abrams. It was just one sentence: “Do you want to play Scotty?” I showed it to my wife and she laughed, and we carried on laughing all the way home. Then I called J.J. and said, “Are you serious?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “Of course I’d like to play Scotty, but is it the right thing to do? Am I tying myself to something which could run and run?” J.J. just said, “Well if the worst thing that happens is that we get to spend three months together every three years and have a great time, what’s the problem?” I thought that was a good argument, so I said yes.

Mania also posts the a review of the Season 4 premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica. The preview is SPOILER-FREE and gives the episode a solid "A" rating, but I'll just quote from the opening paragraph, which does a great job of encapsulating why the series rocks:

The return of Battlestar Galactica is easily one of the most anticipated events this year, and for those that aren’t anticipating, you’re missing out. This series, up to now, is easily the deepest and most complex science fiction series on television in the last 20 years, maybe of all time. The series takes the social and political commentary from the original Star Trek era and does it in even more intelligent ways. This series isn’t simply a morality play tied to current situations and current culture as was common with Star Trek, it deals in shades of gray and examines the struggle to get to an end that’s right without doing wrong to get there. No individual in this series is the hero in the classic Superman sense and no species really has the moral high ground. BSG portrays all of this without beating you over the head. You could literally make this series as thought provoking as you’d want. You can get into the commentary and rethink your beliefs on everything from what it means to be a family to what it means to be a suicide bomber or you can just watch the series for a well acted and directed science fiction drama. That’s what’s made this a near perfect series. There are other top notch series out there such as the good Star Treks and Firefly, but I don’t believe they ever tried so hard to be both fun sci-fi and relevant in the world in which they have been created as Battlestar Galactica has.

Ok, I'll give you one other tantalizing bit from the actual review:

The writing is solid and the final moments ask questions that will make waiting for the next episode physically painful. It just doesn’t get much better than this series and this episode starts the final season off phenomenally. Seven models of Cylon are out there, four more are in hiding, and one will be revealed. This episode is a don’t miss.

I won't. And this time, with my new HD Sci-Fi channel, it will be spectacular.

BSG: New School

Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, I just found out via Film Fodder that BSG won't be finished, at least the universe. A new series, Caprica, is apparently in pre-production. The premise (via Wiki):

The series will revolve around two families: the Adamas and the Graystones. Joseph Adama, father of future Battlestar commander William Adama, is a renowned civil liberties lawyer who becomes an opponent of the artificial intelligence/Cylon experiments wrought by the Graystones, owners of a large computer corporation that builds the first Cylons. According to Mark Stern, Sci-Fi Channel's Executive Vice President of Original Programming, the script for the two-hour pilot episode concluded with an explanation for how the name "Cylon" was coined.[2] On September 20, 2007, Battlestar Galactica writer and producer Bradley Thompson revealed that Ron D. Moore's script for Caprica has a character coin the term, saying, "A cybernetic life-form node, a Cylon."

Titillating! And comforting, like a warm blanket. Even more interesting is the details about how NBC started tinkering with the series:

According to a statement by Ron Moore in the Season 3 Companion book, the proposed Caprica prequel series will have a story-arc-heavy format like its predecessor; a large reason why the network is reluctant to greenlight the series is because story-arc-heavy series notoriously have difficulty in picking up new viewers, as compared to a series composed of mostly standalone episodes. This was already the cause of friction between Moore and the Sci-Fi Channel at Caprica's parent series — the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica were arc-intensive, with detailed attention to internal continuity, but were not pulling in the Nielsen ratings that the network wanted, so the Sci-Fi Channel pressured Moore into retooling the third season of BSG to consist of largely standalone episodes. This measure actually backfired, as it resulted in negative criticism from both fans and critics, and Moore revealed in the Season 3 finale podcast that the network finally grudgingly admitted that standalone episodes simply do not work in the format of story he is trying to tell.

Complex and thought-provoking shows inevitably need to have story arcs to sustain viewers, which will alienate new viewers, but I think that misses the real reason some shows don't get more viewers: the shows are smart, and the masses are not. BSG has a couple of other things going against it that will never get it CSI ratings: First, it is a science-fiction show. Second, and way more importantly, its religious themes would drive your average mid-westerner batshit crazy. Humans with a polytheistic belief. Cylons with a monotheistic belief. Bam! That was the sound of some viewer's head in Kansas tuning in for the first time. So really, BSG is a liberal weapon of mass destruction. Mmm, genius.

BSG: Old School

Battlestar Galactica fans are chomping at the bit in anticipation of the start of Season 4 this Friday, but in the meantime, NBC has decided to stream episodes from the first series online.I started watching the pilot, and not even two minutes in do we get an appearance by Rick Springfield as a young brash pilot named Zak. Zak Adama, did you say? Alas, we hardly had time to know ye.

Season 4 will also be the final season of the greatest television series ever. Did anyone's head explode on that? It's not an opinion, just plain fact. Look it up. I dare you. Okay, I will concede that Buffy is in the conversation, too, but that's it.

Fall Battlestar TV Movie

Usually, the surfing ends up having a theme, and today's is Battlestar Galactica. It started from a Pop Candy reference to a Katee Sackhoff Esquire interview. It didn't occur to me that she's still a baby (27).She's going to play the bad bionic woman in the upcoming TV show (on my list of things to watch in the fall mostly because of this) on NBC. When asked if she's seen the show:

Not until my boyfriend started driving me nuts doing the sound effects. When I finally got the job I was like, "You've got to stop this." And he was like, "Why?" And I was like, "Because I have no idea what you're doing!" And he was like, "You've never seen it before?" He went and bought all the DVDs and made me sit down and watch it. And we both decided that it's still a great show.

First of all, who is your boyfriend so that I can crush him? Secondly, that sounds like something I would do, so he's probably a cool guy. So, even though I will crush him, I promise he will not suffer. Much.Unfortunately, Wikipedia does not list any name or location of Ms. Sackhoff's boyfriend, but it does have a link to Kara Thrace. Then, I end up reading about the synopsis to the last episode of Season 3, just because it was so money. But then I notice a link to the NEXT episode, "Razor", which apparently isn't an episode so much as a full-length TV movie:

According to IGN, "the movie will indeed focus on an untold story about the Battlestar Pegasus, and feature Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes) ... While this story with Cain occurs before she and the Pegasus crew joined up with Galactica, the entire cast of the regular series will appear in the movie, as the Pegasus portion is portrayed via flashbacks"[2].

And just to spice things up, we're going to throw in some hot girl-on-girl action:

According to several unconfirmed reports, it will include flashbacks to the original Cylon War, complete with original series Cylons and spacecraft, and reveal that Cain watched her parents and sister be killed by Cylons. A lesbian relationship will also be hinted at between Cain and Gina [Number Six].

The writers never have disappointed with the series, and according to SyFy Portal, they look to start off Season 4 with a bang:

"Razor," however, won't just be a typical flashback episode, sources tell SyFy Portal. It will bring together fans of both the original 1970s series and the 2003 remake like no episode has before, and it will feature revelations that will make jaws drop and instill fear on what might come in Season 4.

Michelle Forbes -- introduced to genre fans as the Bajoran Ensign Ro in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" -- will reprise her role as the iron-balled admiral in the telemovie, proving to viewers that her sunny disposition wasn't exactly the result of the Cylons annihilating nearly all of the human race. Cain is fighting some demons of her own, one of the biggest ones stretching back to the original Cylon War 40 years before where she watched her parents executed by the 1970s versions of the living machines, and being forced to make the impossible decision of leaving her little sister behind in an effort to save herself.

But the biggest skeleton in Cain's closet will finally come out, so to speak. Remember the disgust Cain had for Gina (Tricia Helfer), the Number Six Cylon prisoner she was holding on Pegasus by the time the military vessel met up with the Galactica? Well, things weren't always that bad between the two ladies. In fact, before her exposure as a Cylon, things were much, much, much, much different.

"Cain and Gina were quite close," a source tells SyFy Portal. "In fact, they were lovers. We don't exactly come out and say it, but you'd have to be sleeping through the middle of all this to not pick up on their relationship."

The only downside is that the TV movie (which will be released simultaneously on DVD, I hear) will be the only Battlestar episode in 2007; the rest of the last season won't be until 2008. At least for a show that loves cliffhangers, it gives good ones.

Battlestar Galactica Series -- Green lighted?
According to Cinescape.com, there's a reliably good chance that Battlestar Galactica may become a series. As I mentioned a while back, I thought the mini-series was pretty damn good and deserving of being a regular program. Looks like my opinion has proved, yet again, to be invaluable to cable executives.

Now if only they will heed my pleas to bring back the wisdom of "Doogie Howser, MD".

East Coast Earthquake
I don't feel a damn thing.

However, I did catch the first installment of the Sci-Fi Channel's new mini-series, Battlestar Galactica, and I was surprised how involving it was. This sexed-up, drama-injected, impressive looking update on the 70's short-lived TV series was an unexpected Monday evening alternative (to sleeping). Now on to the all-too short conclusion tonight. The storyline is written as a four-hour pilot, and if part two holds up, it practically demands a prime-time series.

That had nothing to do with the earthquake.