... in which it's a gift-shop now
... OK, I really, really liked the Battlestar Galactica I just watched. So, um, here is my rambling about the miniseries, with the caveat that I haven't seen either the old series or the new one.
I wasn't expecting it to be anything like that harrowing; the "I just wanted to tell you that little girl you talked to before is on one of the non-hardlight ships so SHE'S BEING BLOWN UP RIGHT THIS MINUTE AND LET'S CUT TO THAT" bit was a little excessive, but otherwise, ow they did a good job of what it might actually mean to be in the middle of an all-out extermination of the human race. They really put the effort into that, and just, yeah. I find things like the survivors all trying to get onto the ship when there isn't enough room so much more harrowing and difficult to watch than people getting blown up in ridiculous ways.
I had been given the strong impression previously that Laura Roslin was evil, so I wasn't expecting to like her as much as I did. But she was cool; I especially liked that they let her make mistakes, to not be the perfect President right away while still being a good leader. I was impressed about that generally, actually - it's so rare that a TV show has realistic ambiguity like that. F'rinstance, with Apollo and his dad, you got to see that both of them had their reasons and weren't bad people, while still letting them have real animosity and problems between them. And Starbuck and... fuck, can't remember his name, the guy she punched. They both had their bits of being jackasses (am I right in thinking that her inability to accept his appology is later going to kick her in the arse?) and they both were shown as acting badly despite neither of them being evil.
Talking of Starbuck: OH. MY. GOD. How awesome is she?! Katee Sackhoff is so gorgeous and then she's all asskicking and an actual woman who you can believe in as a somebody that cool and asskicking and she smokes cigars and I shouldn't find that anything like as awesome as I do, but OK, I kind of have a total love for her which is a bit excessive. :D (I really want an icon of her smoking the cigar lying on the bed at the end, actually, if anybody knows where a picture of that might be found; I looked for, like, ages, and nothing. Woe. Though I quite like this icon too.) And I also love that she's a woman when original!Starbuck was a bloke, because not only is that yay for making it a bit less male dominated but also dude, Starbuck/Apollo is totally a slash pairing, hee. And I totally think they should hook up, even if Starbuck was engaged to his brother which makes that a bit iffy. But anyway!
And OMG POLITICS SQUEE. I tend to just. not. care. about bigass explosions and stuff, but I really did here, and a large bit of that was the politics; they gave us reasons to care, and made it realistic enough (like, they swore in Roslin as President! They swore her in, even in the middle of a huge attack! that would so totally happen, because humans are absolutely like that!) and then the interpersonal politics made it feel real too. Like, even when the human race had very nearly been exterminated, that didn't make Starbuck or Adama or anybody else magically a different person, and they all dealt with it in their own way. I am so looking forward to more politics squee as I watch more. Eeeeeeee.
Did I mention I reallyreally like Starbuck? :D There should be more women who rock and are jackasses on occasion and have lives and loves and feelings that don't involve pining over men on TV. I realise again just why so many of my favourite characters are blokes; despite occasional worries about it, I don't think it's because I don't like women, it's because the men are almost without exception better written, made more interesting and have cooler things to do. But not always on BSG, yay.
Also, I like the concepts of it. I think Isaac Asimov is turning in his GRAVE (dude, it's "humanity builds robots and they go nuts and kill people and we have to fight them") but once you get over the technophobia bit, which I will admit took me a leetle while, it's very cool. Cylons looking like people, and all that goes along with it - Gaius using it for his own ends! even if that guy did end up being a Cylon after all... which made me go o_o. Although not as much as freaking Boomer being a Cylon. No, not Boomer! Boomer's great, and had love with that other dude, and had awful moral decisions to make and just, dammit, it's BOOMER! Except she's evil! (I nearly broke my poor housemates' ears with the shrieking, heh.) And poor Starbuck, she's going to be gutted when she finds out. Gah. Woe.
Though they absolutely did not skimp on the emotional hardhitting, and it worked. They showed it was really really fucking bad, and people died and did not come back, and they did that about as much justice as I've ever seen from TV. The silence - god, the silence - it's weird at first, but then it just works, because it won't let you be distracted from the awful reality of what they're actually saying. They also did that with the details; they're so good at the little random details (like "it's a gift-shop now"!) that make you really believe in the world and the people in it, and they do that so that when they then blow those people up you actually have a sense of what that might mean. I was nearer to crying during this than in about a billion Very Special Episodes. It's just so impressive.
And now I have to watch more episodes. Fuck. tellitslant, you up for major geeking when I have?
I wasn't expecting it to be anything like that harrowing; the "I just wanted to tell you that little girl you talked to before is on one of the non-hardlight ships so SHE'S BEING BLOWN UP RIGHT THIS MINUTE AND LET'S CUT TO THAT" bit was a little excessive, but otherwise, ow they did a good job of what it might actually mean to be in the middle of an all-out extermination of the human race. They really put the effort into that, and just, yeah. I find things like the survivors all trying to get onto the ship when there isn't enough room so much more harrowing and difficult to watch than people getting blown up in ridiculous ways.
I had been given the strong impression previously that Laura Roslin was evil, so I wasn't expecting to like her as much as I did. But she was cool; I especially liked that they let her make mistakes, to not be the perfect President right away while still being a good leader. I was impressed about that generally, actually - it's so rare that a TV show has realistic ambiguity like that. F'rinstance, with Apollo and his dad, you got to see that both of them had their reasons and weren't bad people, while still letting them have real animosity and problems between them. And Starbuck and... fuck, can't remember his name, the guy she punched. They both had their bits of being jackasses (am I right in thinking that her inability to accept his appology is later going to kick her in the arse?) and they both were shown as acting badly despite neither of them being evil.
Talking of Starbuck: OH. MY. GOD. How awesome is she?! Katee Sackhoff is so gorgeous and then she's all asskicking and an actual woman who you can believe in as a somebody that cool and asskicking and she smokes cigars and I shouldn't find that anything like as awesome as I do, but OK, I kind of have a total love for her which is a bit excessive. :D (I really want an icon of her smoking the cigar lying on the bed at the end, actually, if anybody knows where a picture of that might be found; I looked for, like, ages, and nothing. Woe. Though I quite like this icon too.) And I also love that she's a woman when original!Starbuck was a bloke, because not only is that yay for making it a bit less male dominated but also dude, Starbuck/Apollo is totally a slash pairing, hee. And I totally think they should hook up, even if Starbuck was engaged to his brother which makes that a bit iffy. But anyway!
And OMG POLITICS SQUEE. I tend to just. not. care. about bigass explosions and stuff, but I really did here, and a large bit of that was the politics; they gave us reasons to care, and made it realistic enough (like, they swore in Roslin as President! They swore her in, even in the middle of a huge attack! that would so totally happen, because humans are absolutely like that!) and then the interpersonal politics made it feel real too. Like, even when the human race had very nearly been exterminated, that didn't make Starbuck or Adama or anybody else magically a different person, and they all dealt with it in their own way. I am so looking forward to more politics squee as I watch more. Eeeeeeee.
Did I mention I reallyreally like Starbuck? :D There should be more women who rock and are jackasses on occasion and have lives and loves and feelings that don't involve pining over men on TV. I realise again just why so many of my favourite characters are blokes; despite occasional worries about it, I don't think it's because I don't like women, it's because the men are almost without exception better written, made more interesting and have cooler things to do. But not always on BSG, yay.
Also, I like the concepts of it. I think Isaac Asimov is turning in his GRAVE (dude, it's "humanity builds robots and they go nuts and kill people and we have to fight them") but once you get over the technophobia bit, which I will admit took me a leetle while, it's very cool. Cylons looking like people, and all that goes along with it - Gaius using it for his own ends! even if that guy did end up being a Cylon after all... which made me go o_o. Although not as much as freaking Boomer being a Cylon. No, not Boomer! Boomer's great, and had love with that other dude, and had awful moral decisions to make and just, dammit, it's BOOMER! Except she's evil! (I nearly broke my poor housemates' ears with the shrieking, heh.) And poor Starbuck, she's going to be gutted when she finds out. Gah. Woe.
Though they absolutely did not skimp on the emotional hardhitting, and it worked. They showed it was really really fucking bad, and people died and did not come back, and they did that about as much justice as I've ever seen from TV. The silence - god, the silence - it's weird at first, but then it just works, because it won't let you be distracted from the awful reality of what they're actually saying. They also did that with the details; they're so good at the little random details (like "it's a gift-shop now"!) that make you really believe in the world and the people in it, and they do that so that when they then blow those people up you actually have a sense of what that might mean. I was nearer to crying during this than in about a billion Very Special Episodes. It's just so impressive.
And now I have to watch more episodes. Fuck. tellitslant, you up for major geeking when I have?