Daybreak, Deus Ex Machina, and Deconstructing Your Entire Narrative In One Fell Swoop

[useyourlove]

More and more I find that people are just militantly pro-Daybreak on Tumblr and insisting that I explain why I find "Daybreak" so repulsive, insulting, and just all around bad. I'm not sure where the hell this sudden flood of militant love is coming from (as opposed to the apparently now cliched old flood of Daybreak-hate.) But I just want to

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[useyourlove]

I agree completely. If you're going to have an arc-driven show you need to know the arc or it's not going to work. I really love BSG but it has so many problems that I hate it almost as much as I love it. It started out really wonderfully because it was doing what scifi does best: making a direct commentary on current events. And the commentary was often such that it was like "take this real world event and recontextualize it and see how people feel about it" which would frequently result in "dear god I have no IDEA how I feel about it." So it removed a lot of the black and white of media spin (which is ironic, given that it was a media product itself). The other driving factor in why it had so much hype was that it was a character drama. It's character driven. It's all about the interpersonal relationships. But they screwed around with those too, so it lost a lot of that drive in the back half of Season 2. If it had all actually gone somewhere? Sure, that's fine. Uneven storytelling is common in TV. But it didn't go anywhere. They didn't have a frakkin' clue what they were doing. They were just doing. And in the end they kind of ruined the whole thing.

I was tempted to watch Lost recently because everyone compares the endings so much. Then I looked it up and it's like six seasons worth of 24 episodes or something and I was like "judging by my reaction to BSG, the ending of Lost would just piss me off, and there's no point wasting my time on all that just so I can be angry."

Also: I need to watch Babylon 5. That's definitely on my list. That's the one that routinely gets cited as "how to do it right."