Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Stupid Galactica
I was mostly enjoying the new TV show Battlestar Galactica, but the last episode was full of really lame writing. You can throw the money you want at a show but if the story is bad, if the characters and their actions are not believable then it's just a kids show with better effects (and that's probably an insult to kids).

Spoilers ahead, so bug out if you want to remain pure.

Two incidents jumped out at me, the first was minor, the second major. Firstly when the troops boarded the crippled Cylon base-star and began finding dead Cylons lying around they asked each other "what happened here!?" a BUNCH of times. When some of the Cylons began waking up, coughing and spluttering, staggering around, they asked a lot of "what's going on!?" AGAIN. Not one of them said "maybe they're sick" and when the word "disease" was spoken by one of the Cylons, they all seemed really, really surprised. These are not rocket scientists and I'm going to remember their inability to spot the damned obvious later on. It surprise me that they didn't go aboard with breathing gear and biosuits etc, given that SOMETHING had crippled a base-star and disease was a possibility. If Galactica doesn't carry any, which is certainly possible, or bio-gear isn't part of standard procedure when heading into an unknown area (hello Trek!) then I expect our dumb heros to stumble into more situations like this in future.

The real stinker, though, was the lame-ass death of the Cylon prisoners at the end. If you were in charge of a plan that could end the war with one action, wouldn't you protect every part of that plan? But no....lets leave 5 Cylon prisoners that we NEED to be alive, alone in a room that any morally confused crewman can access. This was a Rumsfeld-level of dumbness and I think Adama should hire a 5-year old child to provide Planning Oversight. Also, why did the prisoners not have guns to their heads at the second the fleet jumped into range of the Resurrection ship? Why the minute-long walk by the soldiers TO the unsupervised prisoners? In that minute, a lot could have gone wrong with the fleet being attacked by Cylons.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. This crap would never have happened on Babylon 5, which is back in production, thank goodness.

Oh, and Helo's moral dilemma with wiping out the Cylons with biological warfare? STFU Donny, you're out of your league. You don't compromise with wiping out an enemy that IS all military and has no "civilian" population. You don't relent against an enemy that has killed 99.99% of humanity and shows no signs of wanting to spare the remaining 50 000 people left alive. They're not human, they're your enemy. And by the way any comparison to terrorism and meatspace politics are null and void: terrorists may be psycho, but they live in and among civilian populations. You can't "kill 'em all and let God sort them out" - it's morally wrong when you can't tell them apart from non-combatants. But Cylons are all fair game and so far I've not seen anything from the writers of this show to change my mind.

1 comment:

Gggg said...

Good analysis. I was beginning to think I was the only one who saw the stupidity emerging in BG. It got worse with every episode until I almost didn't bother to watch the last one.

The first two seasons were top-notch, grade A, awesome. A very close run with Firefly for best scifi show in history.

Then they must have switched writers or something because all we got in season 3 was a bunch of emotional drivel that made no sense whatsoever.