For those of you who do enjoy it - cool; more power to you.
As a long-time, deeply invested fan of Buffy, Star Trek (Classic and TNG mainly) and other culty shows that evoked snide comments from friends who didn’t get it, I completely support and respect everyone’s right to completely enjoy an entertaining show.
But BSG ain’t doing it for me. There’s lots I enjoy - the bad guy (Gaius) is a good bad guy, Tricia Helfer and other hotties are…well, hot. And many of the ideas - the basic contrast of spiritual zealots (Cylons) enforcing their rule on scrappy little guys who have to resort to terrorist-type activities (humans), etc. - great idea.
I want to like it and have a history of enjoying this type of good, hard sci-fi which uses the sci-fi context to explore ideas relevant in our world - and in our heads - today.
But BSG doesn’t do it for me. Why? I guess, in the 6 - 7 episodes I have seen, the best illustration is that boxing match that Edward James Olmos got into. It was so freakin’ melodramatic and overwrought. For a show that takes itself so seriously, having this guy get the crap beaten out of him in an entirely unrealistic fashion and then he stands there and make some Deep Point with obviously-fake blood streaming down his face - it felt like he as back as Castillo in Miami Vice. I couldn’t stop giggling.
I guess I feel like it doesn’t have enough balance between serious/intense and light - something Buffy, Star Trek and other similar shows I did get into have - and yet for all of its intensity, it feels like it slips into, I dunno, more of a soap-opera feel or something.
Is it just me? I am NOT looking to start a flame-war or dis BSG fans. I am just surprise how it turned out to be a show I wasn’t into…
Well, I liked it back when it was Sci-Fi rather than whatever it is now. I want to like it, I used to like it, but I don’t particularly care if Apollo and Starbuck get it on or not. I wanna see shit blow up.
WordMan, I really think it’s the type of show that just a couple episodes don’t cut it.
I did the same thing you did, watch a few episodes of season 3. In passing I mentioned to someone that I liked it (didn’t love it), and for Christmas someone gave me season one.
Watching from the beginning makes a huge difference.
I have a little pet peeve about how the DVD’s are being sold. I thought I purchased season 2 but it was just 1/2 of the season. I guess that’s for a different thread but I think it you watch from the beginning it makes a world of difference.
I have watched up to and through Season 2.0 and don’t particularly like it. It is way too soap-opera, and not enough sci-fi, and I feel they go out of their way to make the military the villains. And I freakin’ hate Starbuck. Why do women always have to be ____? She has to be a tough bitch, she can’t just be a female soldier. Yuck. Ptooey.
If you watched from the start of the show (Miniseries, Cylon War 2.0), you’d see that the show has been on a gradual slide downhill with these last few episodes, as has been stated above, it’s been slowly devolving into a Soap Opera In Space!!!space…space…
if the last 3-4 eps were all I had to go on, i’d also be curious as to the appeal of this show
TPTB, get back to the Dogfightin’, Toaster-bustin’ arse-kickin’ action, let the Soap Opera angle get Airlocked, nobody CARES about the Love Octagon, the Pop-Tart, or any of that wussy “interpersonal” crap
Like B5, it just doesn’t turn me on. None of the characters I find remotely appealing. Contrast
with something like Farscape where all the characters are very broadly drawn (someone else
with a different viewpoint might thus take the opposite argument), and in particular I can
easily identify with John Crichton.
I started to lose patience when it became increasingly obvious that “And they have a plan” was a flat-out lie. The storylines are too ad-hoc for me to keep buying that the Cylons have some overall idea of what to do with the humans.
Yep, the show is losing my interest for pretty much all the reasons people noted above. Not enough Cylon base ships getting blowed up, too much soap opera, and a general lack of actual likeable characters. Based on what we’ve seen of this civilization, the Cylons actually had the right idea in nuking it.
I’m all for gritty realism with tragically flawed heros. But gritty realism with tragically flawed jerks? Not so much.
I recently rewatched the miniseries, and was again blown away (having had the recent season 3 eps. for comparison) by how far this show has slid.
Missing elements:
In the miniseries, there’s all these PA announcements on Galactica. It’s just routine stuff, but it makes it feel like a real warship.
In the miniseries, and earlier in the series, there’s real emoting going on; now it seems like the actors (other than Michael Hogan) are practically phoning their performances in.
Exposition: how are they feeding everyone? (Oh, right, I forgot: algae planets!) How are they sustaining their tech base? What is the Cylon plan? You don’t have to give us all of it, but a glimpse here or there might make the episodes seem a lot less like random, pre-packaged parts of sci-fi/soap opera plots banged together at the last frakking second.
Why is a rag-tag fleet of ~40,000 devoting precious time and resources to sustaining a media beyond a daily fleetwide “e-mail,” much less to worrying about what some douchbag refugee in a suit and tie has to say about policies and decisions?
I’m giving this show to the end of this season before changing the channel; it’s been fairly decent overall, but the recent eps. are dragging the series “GPA” down quickly.
Agreed. The show has slid massively downhill since just after the Pegasus showed up, with only the occasional flare of what used to be pretty brilliant television.
One thing they do astoundingly poorly these days is cast extras. These people look like they are unaware that they are being filmed, and not in a good way. It’s like they’re still waiting for somebody to yell, “Action!” The huddled masses of the recent “plague” episode are glaringly awful.
I watched the initial miniseries and the whole first season.
The plot was interesting, and it kept me wondering what would happen next … but none of the characters ever grabbed me, and when season 2 came along, I just never cared enough to go back. I’d like to know what happened, but I’m not interested enough to spend all that time watching the episodes to find out.
Also, I’m old enough to remember the original BSG series – and, as appallingly hokey as that was, it still had that slightly-over-the-top, almost mythic quality that resonates with me, a little, and that the new BSG, as gritty and realistic as it is, can never have. If, er, that makes sense.
I’ll admit that Edward James Olmos was a good actor, but in this show he has the range of Daisy Air Rifle. They all suck. About the only one who is even remotely earning their pay on that show is Mary McDonnel.
They all suck in this series. And this is coming from someone who tried like hell to look past it over two seasons.
I never got into the new show because the idea of the Cylons looking just like humans really didn’t appeal to me. I was not looking forward to an endless parade of “Oh, it turns out he/she was actually a Cylon!” moments. I imagined a final episode where it turns out that EVERY human was actually a Cylon, and all of this fighting ensued because some incompetent Cylon clerk forgot to send out the “You are a Cylon” mass e-mail.
Olmos is, like, the epitome of “average-good-actor”. He’s going to come on your show/movie/whatever, he’s going to do his part decently, he’s good for a dramatic speech when you need it. He isn’t going to bring your show to new heights, but he isn’t going to drag it down, either. He’s a great guy to have around when everyone else (and especially the writing) is getting the job done; see: the miniseries of this, his appearance in the West Wing, etc. etc. Not so much the guy who’s going to carry a series when everything else goes to hell… see: BSG circa now.
My theory is that the big problem is they’ve taken a lot (most?) of the actors out of, well, what they cast them for. Exhibit A is Starbuck, of course - as the bitchy strong-willed fighter pilot, she was above-average to standout; as a central dramatic actress, we’ll be nice and say “not so much”. Same goes for a bunch of the others; I mean, right after Lee finally started to pretend he knew how to act at the start of Season 2, they switched him up to doing something he wasn’t good at again.
Of course, all of that just comes back to the shift of the series away from gritty space opera and into “feelings” soap opera.
Now I can’t say I don’t like it. It’s just that I’m disappointed, frustrated and angry with it. But I’d rather spend an hour being angry with my former favorite show than spend five minutes wasting my time holding back my barf-reflex over 97% of everything else on TV.
I don’t like the characters that much anymore. They were all interesting at first but they’ve failed to develop into anything consistant or anyone I like.
At the moment, about the only character I do still like, and who has remained consistant and true to himself is Helo. He carried the last episode for me. Everyone else phoned in a performance that seemed like it was from a script the writers weren’t through with yet.
Helo is solid. You know what you can expect from him. He’s a good guy, with a heart of gold. He’s not muddled in moral ambiguities. He trusts his heart, and goes with what it tells him. His heart isn’t burdened with hate, fear, and resentment. He isn’t saddled with increasingly irritating amounts of emotional baggage, some of which seemingly comes out of nowhere like it does with the other characters each week.
The other characters, I honestly don’t know what’s going to make them all pissy and hormonal this week, or next week.