A Discussion: Put on your Thinking Caps - Fic Prompt-a-thon
I often find that I cannot have conversations with fanboys. I don't know why but their conversations tend towards bizarre nitpicking of the writing. Now I find that fangirls are critical too, but in different ways. I don't know, I'm not explaining it well.
Anyways, I spent this weekend mother's helping for a family with an autistic boy, but their ( Read more... )
Anyways, I spent this weekend mother's helping for a family with an autistic boy, but their ( Read more... )
I don't love the New Cap arc for a lot of reasons, but mainly I think because...it's too much of a departure from the show's origins. I like my space family...in space. (And that's ironic considering I am not a SciFi geek in the slightest, and in theory, life on a planet should be more interesting to me.) So I think it lasted just as long as it should have and I would not have any interest in suddenly watching a show that turned into Little Space Family on the Prairie. So I don't think it was underutilized. I'd had quite enough of NC by the time they got the heck out of there.
And I think...it's like any other gimmick you introduce to a TV show with set parameters, if they'd dragged it on for a whole season, I bet they would've lost a lot of viewers (I have no idea when ratings started to nosedive or if there were financial reasons to have the NC arc last only a few eps.) Just like you can't introduce a Cousin Oliver and expect audiences to love it, you can't suddenly re-set your entire show's environs without a bumpy ride ensuing. People like what's familiar, they like to get what they signed up for, and they only like change in small doses usually (or sometimes they don't like it at all).
Now, from a storytelling point of view--Sure, there's tons of stories you could explore about settling on a new planet. Most of them seem very... plot-driven. You'd end up with a lot of Black Markets and Dirty Hands I think unless you were careful with the execution. Even the example you posted is very "Special Episode" --I could see that playing out very much like The Woman King except with bugs rather than racist doctors. Lol.
I much rather they skipped NC and made the reveal of the final five at the end of Season 2. And then you would have had another two whole seasons to explore WHAT IT ACTUALLY MEANT that five people who had been living among them the whole time and were majorly important (so yeah, I would've changed who those five were also) to our core of Bill, Laura, Lee and Kara were discovered to be cylons. In fact, I think I would've made one of those four (at least) a cylon--probably Starbuck since it makes the most sense narratively. I would've liked to see people REALLY dealing with what it meant that someone you loved was the enemy race. I would've liked them to actually dissect what the differences were -- physically, emotionally, etc.--between cylons and humans, rather than sweep it under the carpet with a simple "you just have to accept them and work together". I would've made the last two seasons be about mutiny and strife --and what happens when people discover there are these five cylon sleeper agents that have been in the fleet all along. And what does that mean? And who protects them? And how do they react? To my thinking--all of that got very very short shrift by cramming it into S4 (and actually they ignored it for half of S4 practically).
ETA: If they were going to show the logistics of settling on a planet, rather than that false New Caprica start--why not go whole hog and make them find Earth early too? (Although I'm not sure if prehistoric unpopulated earth would have been the answer there?)
Reply
As for space family... I mean, having people settling on New Cap, I think, doesn't HAVE to mean everyone leaves space. I just think it could lead to a more layered story and have simultaneous parallel stories of what's going on with the fleet and with NC. BUT I see your point.
And, as for the "very special episode" thing... I think those only became "very special episodes" because the show took a departure from the original format... because, dirty hands and the woman king were very much like... Water or Colonial Day or Bastille Day... pretty much all of the first season, and some of the second season (Captain's Hand, the Peggy arc even) were: here is a crisis, lets see how people deal with it. And S3 moved away from that, and then tried to recapture it poorly.
Reply
I just think spending too much time on NC would've been a mistake. Even if there was an alternate storyline on the ships...whenever you split up your main cast it doesn't usually result in good things, I think. It feels less organic, like the show is straining somehow. I guess if they were going to do anything more with NC, I wish it was to focus on the INITIAL setup of the planet, the time between finding it and groundbreaking day.
I still much would have preferred them giving time and better execution and a less rushed treatment of the show's central mystery instead about who the last five cylons were and what that meant for humans and cylons. So poorly handled IMO.
Reply
Yeah, that's kind of what I was going for with this whole thing, sorry if that part wasn't clear. That skipping a year really did the show a major disservice.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment