Vaguely apologist meanderings
I was discussing the first part of Crossroads with danceswithwords , having followed a link to her most excellent reviews, and it made me think about how I process media. Books, movies TV shows, I think it started with books, I read fast and long ago got into the habit of skipping back and forwards from the ending instead of following the whole story word, by word, by word. Do other people do this? It’s a habit that allows you to reread the books and get something slightly different from them every time, which is no bad thing. But it’s also a habit that forces you to withhold judgement on a story until you’ve had time to reflect on it and put the pieces in order. With stories in a serial format that I can’t skip to the end of (TV series being prime examples) I fundamentally don’t trust my first impressions. If anything the reverse, I’m a horribly uncritical reader/viewer once I’ve decided that something is worth sticking with and I tend to prefer the later parts of a series, to see them as carrying the weight of the whole. I enjoy Carefree more than Top Hat even though I can see that the earlier movie has fewer flaws. But flaws aren’t everything.
To return to the original subject of this post, I think this season BSG has gotten less linear in its story telling. The first season was driven by the mystery of the cylon plan, the oppressive sense that something even worse was going to happen. I remember feeling at the time that this was a great structural device but not one that could be sustained indefinitely and it wasn’t. Stuff did happen but in the aftermath the story has necessarily become much more fragmented. Instead of fastening on one plotline or character it’s been offering snapshots of everyone’s lives in a fashion not unlike the shooting process, taking shots from all possible angles and leaving the audience free to edit them together. It’s an approach that suits me as it’s more or less what I tend to do anyway but it could be seen as lazy or half-baked. In some cases it almost certainly was.
To return to the original subject of this post, I think this season BSG has gotten less linear in its story telling. The first season was driven by the mystery of the cylon plan, the oppressive sense that something even worse was going to happen. I remember feeling at the time that this was a great structural device but not one that could be sustained indefinitely and it wasn’t. Stuff did happen but in the aftermath the story has necessarily become much more fragmented. Instead of fastening on one plotline or character it’s been offering snapshots of everyone’s lives in a fashion not unlike the shooting process, taking shots from all possible angles and leaving the audience free to edit them together. It’s an approach that suits me as it’s more or less what I tend to do anyway but it could be seen as lazy or half-baked. In some cases it almost certainly was.