Oh, BSG, why are you so inconsistent?
I actually watched this week's BSG when it aired (usually I wait and watch them via On Demand). We're already halfway through the season. Huh.
It's annoying when a show pushes hard at the plotline you care least about--in my case, the Sam/Kara/Lee triangle. Sooooooooo not interested in Kara's love life, or Lee's, or in Sam at all. The boxing episode almost managed to make Lee/Kara interesting for a few seconds, but then that sense of their connection and fucked-up need for each other disappeared again. In that weird random way that's marked everything this season. Good ideas pop up and then vanish into the ether.
(Speaking of randomness, what the hell happened with the last episode, "The Passage"? I can hardly believe Jane Espenson wrote that piece of crap. It was nice of her to kill off Kat, but as Kat was neither a likeable nor an interesting character, I resented all the "Kat was so special and everyone loved her" nonsense. If a show wants a tearjerking character death, they need to kill off an important character. Otherwise, it's just manipulation.)
Anyway, back to "The Eye of Jupiter"--a lot of the stuff that wasn't about the damn love triangle left me confused. Don't they already have the route to earth? And why, at this point, are they so convinced that finding earth will be a good thing, when it may just give the Cylons one more world to destroy?
For that matter, out of all those ships, isn't there someone with a little more expertise in religious history than Chief??? Who apparently is not very bright, considering he spent three-quarters of the episode staring at the giant goddamn eye-shaped symbol and not recognizing it. You'd think there'd be a religious scholar or ten wanting a look at the temple (since apparently some time passed between Chief's discovery of it and the Cylons turning up).
And does anyone understand what the hell is going on with Baltar and the Cylons? I swear, I've been confused since the moment he set foot on the Cylon ship. I don't understand why they haven't killed him, I don't understand why sometimes they're torturing him and sometimes they're letting him wander around freely, and I certainly don't understand why D'Anna is all of a sudden sleeping with him and Caprica Six. I mean, I remember the episode where D'Anna tortured him and he learned to love her for it, but it seems like there should have been another episode in the middle there, somewhere, where such a major emotional (and plot) arc actually got some development. (This relates to last week's episode, too. Did they just forget to show the episode where the food machine gets all buggered up, and severe rationing has to be instituted, and hard decisions have to be made about who gets priority, and some attention is paid to what the hell the 40,000 civilians in the fleet are feeling about all this?)
It's terribly frustrating, because this show can be so damn good sometimes, and other times it just piddles around with inconsequentialities and the angst-of-the-week. I keep wanting to give the writers and producers a good shake and say "You could do better! Why aren't you trying?"
Oh, and once again they bothered to bring in Callum Keith Rennie for an episode and then did absolutely nothing with him. *sigh*
ETA: I'm really irked by Kara saying that marriage is "a sacrament." Because sacramentality is a profoundly Judeo-Christian idea (in fact, sacramental marriage is quite specifically Catholic). And the culture of BSG's humans is supposed to be derived from, or in some way related to, that of classical Greece. I try to cope with the distinctly non-Greek personal names that keep cropping up (Saul, Sharon, Felix, William, etc.), but really, is a little consistency too much to ask for? Kara's follow-up comment (she'd made a vow before the gods) made sense, but the term "sacrament" jarred me way too much.
*****
It's annoying when a show pushes hard at the plotline you care least about--in my case, the Sam/Kara/Lee triangle. Sooooooooo not interested in Kara's love life, or Lee's, or in Sam at all. The boxing episode almost managed to make Lee/Kara interesting for a few seconds, but then that sense of their connection and fucked-up need for each other disappeared again. In that weird random way that's marked everything this season. Good ideas pop up and then vanish into the ether.
(Speaking of randomness, what the hell happened with the last episode, "The Passage"? I can hardly believe Jane Espenson wrote that piece of crap. It was nice of her to kill off Kat, but as Kat was neither a likeable nor an interesting character, I resented all the "Kat was so special and everyone loved her" nonsense. If a show wants a tearjerking character death, they need to kill off an important character. Otherwise, it's just manipulation.)
Anyway, back to "The Eye of Jupiter"--a lot of the stuff that wasn't about the damn love triangle left me confused. Don't they already have the route to earth? And why, at this point, are they so convinced that finding earth will be a good thing, when it may just give the Cylons one more world to destroy?
For that matter, out of all those ships, isn't there someone with a little more expertise in religious history than Chief??? Who apparently is not very bright, considering he spent three-quarters of the episode staring at the giant goddamn eye-shaped symbol and not recognizing it. You'd think there'd be a religious scholar or ten wanting a look at the temple (since apparently some time passed between Chief's discovery of it and the Cylons turning up).
And does anyone understand what the hell is going on with Baltar and the Cylons? I swear, I've been confused since the moment he set foot on the Cylon ship. I don't understand why they haven't killed him, I don't understand why sometimes they're torturing him and sometimes they're letting him wander around freely, and I certainly don't understand why D'Anna is all of a sudden sleeping with him and Caprica Six. I mean, I remember the episode where D'Anna tortured him and he learned to love her for it, but it seems like there should have been another episode in the middle there, somewhere, where such a major emotional (and plot) arc actually got some development. (This relates to last week's episode, too. Did they just forget to show the episode where the food machine gets all buggered up, and severe rationing has to be instituted, and hard decisions have to be made about who gets priority, and some attention is paid to what the hell the 40,000 civilians in the fleet are feeling about all this?)
It's terribly frustrating, because this show can be so damn good sometimes, and other times it just piddles around with inconsequentialities and the angst-of-the-week. I keep wanting to give the writers and producers a good shake and say "You could do better! Why aren't you trying?"
Oh, and once again they bothered to bring in Callum Keith Rennie for an episode and then did absolutely nothing with him. *sigh*
ETA: I'm really irked by Kara saying that marriage is "a sacrament." Because sacramentality is a profoundly Judeo-Christian idea (in fact, sacramental marriage is quite specifically Catholic). And the culture of BSG's humans is supposed to be derived from, or in some way related to, that of classical Greece. I try to cope with the distinctly non-Greek personal names that keep cropping up (Saul, Sharon, Felix, William, etc.), but really, is a little consistency too much to ask for? Kara's follow-up comment (she'd made a vow before the gods) made sense, but the term "sacrament" jarred me way too much.
*****