(no subject)
ktvet06 totally turned me on to Boing Boing this collection of cool blog stuff, so blame her for this post . Anyway recently I have gotten
into the new incarnation of BattleStar Galactica. This version is much better then the old corny late 70's early 80's version. In the original
one the characters had goofy names like "Apollo" and "Starbuck". I know they are from classical and classis literature but it just sounded
so goofy hearing people called that. Well the names are still there in the new version of the show but this time they are only call signs, so it is much much less corny. The first episode of the series is called "33" after the amount of time between when the good guys perform a warp-jump
to get away from the bad guy and when the bad guys figure out where they have gone and warp jump to continue attacking them, 33 minutes. Every time
the good guy jump they start a clock so they know how long they have till the bad guys show up. Well when this time period is such a plot
point fans are of course going to ask "Why 33 minutes?" . It seems the show's creator has created a blog here to talk about the show to fans
and answer questions and stuff. In his most recent entry he takes on the question of why 33. Essentially he says the reason is that they just picked a number
that was long enough for the people on the ship to maybe rest a little bit or take a shower or something, but not long enough to get any real
relief from the onslaught of the enemy (when the show starts all the characters have been up for about 130 hours) This is perfectly fine. Eventually he gets to the
point of his post that the length of time will pretty much be a permanent mystery. This is also fine (unfortunately it will lead to bad fan fiction though)
But between that he goes on to say that they could have come up with a reason with a bunch of technical jargon. But would doing that add
to the drama, would it change the blahh blahh of this character interaction and what not. HE then goes on to say that knowing might even detract
from the experience. This would be fine but for one thing. Why do the characters know it is 33 minutes. of course I'm guessing that after a few attacks someone
noticed a pattern and they started clocking the time they had before another attack, but that isn't for sure. Without an acknowledgement from the
writing staff that the characters just noticed the 33 minute thing people could speculate that they do know why its that time interval (leading
to more bad fan-fiction) So in other words, the writers neither came up with an explanation, nor did they find a way to acknowledge
the mystery, then went on to say when they know everyone was asking why 33 "well we aren't coming up with a reason that would detract from the show"
This just sounds like lazy writing to me. I mean come on, someone could have asked "why 33" on the show. Perhaps one of the exhausted pilots
perhaps the president's assistant. One of the great things about the Star Trek franchise is that the writers actually try to come up with
reasons and explanations behind the technical mumbo jumbo they thing up. The two Star Trek tech manuals I have point to that. Things like the transporters
(the real reason for which was budgetary, it would cost to much to show landing sequences every week) and the similarities in klingon and romulan ships (again
budgetary they just reused the same model) were given some kind of explanation eventually. Of course the greatest was why the klingons looked different in the original show and then
had bumpy heads in the movies and all subsequent shows (real reason of course bigger makeup budget) Which was nicely dealt with with the line
"Ugh, that is something Klingons do not talk about" boom no explanation, mystery preserved, volumes of horrible fan fiction written. You can't just
make up a number and give nothing to the audience then say "yeah uhh, we aren't going to explain that" What you really mean is "yeah we don't feel like it"
what ever. There had better be some clever resolution to the 33 mystery in an upcoming episode