Comments | pocochina: the listing continues!

pocochina

the listing continues!

May 31, 2013 02:13

BSG is another show that has been pretty formative for me, though unlike AtS, I have kind of been able to process and mostly have good feelings toward it.

One influence that BSG has had on how I watch shows is that I apply the Laura Roslin Test to fictional 'verses now to see how much credibility I give the major conflict. The Laura Roslin test is ( Read more... )

bsg, me me me

Comments 30

rachg82 May 31 2013, 06:28:36 UTC

Or you'll have conflict resting on the heroes passing around the Dumbass Ball

Hee! Okay, just had to let you know that made me laugh out loud.

pocochina May 31 2013, 16:28:45 UTC

LOL. Reading the Idiot Ball page at TV Tropes cracks me up but I'm....not big on that particular word, "dumbass" sounds funnier.

mfirefly10 May 31 2013, 08:56:55 UTC

BSG!!!

I have SO many thoughts about BSG and I really should organize them all one day and I really need to do a full-series re-watch sometime soon...anyway...

33 = THE BEST, always and forever
Downloaded will always hold a special place in my heart
The Oath/Blood on the Scales - easily the best thing about 4.5

Ranking my favorite BSG characters is nearly impossible. I say nearly because Kara and Sam are my favs, hands down but after that it gets very complicated because I love almost everyone else. I love that you mentioned Tory though because I have a giant soft spot for her and what her narrative SHOULD'VE been after the big reveal.

pocochina May 31 2013, 16:45:21 UTC

DOOOOO IT!

Awww, I like Anders. Kind of a surprisingly dark character, long before the big reveal, but in a way that made a lot of sense.

Sometimes I feel like I fill in a few too many blanks with Tory? but of what we did get, she's so amazing. (FINALE WHAT FINALE.)

local_max May 31 2013, 13:29:29 UTC

Spoilers for the show guys, so ignore the following (I won't spoiler tag the whole thing) if you haven't watched ( ... )

pocochina May 31 2013, 17:05:28 UTC

Now that I've revisited it all in order fairly recently, I think 4.0 is pretty good. The only real dud is SQN.

I was surprised not to have any season finales on that list either. But there's always so much that has to happen, and then the last fifteen minutes are long, looooong setup for cliffhangers, that it's tough to think of them as self-contained episodes.

Boomer is a character that might make the top 10 on some days because I really feel for her. But yeah, I think about her a little bit and start going ".....why. Just, why."

it's funny how few Cylons make it -- or, like, at least of the not-a-secret main set of models.hahahaha, I'M SUCH A TOASTER-HATER. But yeah, I feel like the show had a tendency to wildly misjudge (a) if and when we would feel sympathy for the Cylons and (b) how much that sympathy would affect our judgment of their actions. And so it ended up hitting the wrong notes so much of the time. Like, early on I was assuming they had some sort of feelings (because otherwise, why bother?) and so I didn't need the ( ... )

jedi_of_urth May 31 2013, 17:59:46 UTC

I was MORE on board with that as time went on, not lessI have the same reaction to the Cylons. I always assumed the initial Cylon war was justified; the humans treated the Cylons as unthinking/unfeeling robots when they were developing into more than that and fought back. Fine, understandable, justifiable. But when the war was done...they went into hiding and the humans let it go. If they had reappeared with their new designs and faced robo-prejudice simply because of what they were then it would have been sympathetic. What they did though was kill off 99%+ of the human race and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM WAS IN ON IT. Yeah, the Ones had more (but by no means better) reasons than the others, but the more we learned over the series the more it became clear ALL of them were in on it ( ... )

pocochina May 31 2013, 19:24:07 UTC

What they did though was kill off 99%+ of the human race and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM WAS IN ON IT.You know, I didn't even care so much about the "taking responsibility" angle of that? I could've actually been down with an uber-pragmatic "there's nothing we can do about the past right now" and some contrived plotonium forcing the humans to need the Cylons in order to get to Earth, and then examining what effect that had on the humans &c. Which, I think 4.5 tried to backtrack and do a little, with the damaged ships and the mutiny arc. (ofc, this did necessitate the dumb line "four years without a pit stop!" UM, EXCEPT THE YEAR-LONG PIT STOP WHILE PARKED OVER NEW CAPRICA.) Instead we got lots of wailing about ~both sides needing to ~learn to trust ( ... )

Thread 15

bleodswean May 31 2013, 14:39:51 UTC

I think you're very right about the "Laura Roslin test" and I like that theme in relation to serialized tv. For me, BSG stands apart and somewhat alone because of the themes of resurrection and meaning. Leoben is my favourite and loving the cylons makes the show eminently rewatchable and the story more complex. It's a worthy show.

pocochina May 31 2013, 17:14:14 UTC

BSG stands apart and somewhat alone because of the themes of resurrection and meaning.

Yes! I got into it because of the "West Wing in space" factor but I ended up really loving the mysticism of it, too.

Leoben was a tough character for me to wrap my head around? I found Starbuck very easy to sympathize with and so I think I had this like, protective BOO HISSSS impulse about him even before New Caprica. But now I think he's *really* interesting.

anonymous May 31 2013, 22:15:16 UTC

I definitely have a Laura Roslin test as well! It made watching almost any television problematic for me for months after BSG finished ( ... )

pocochina June 1 2013, 00:59:32 UTC

I definitely have a Laura Roslin test as well! It made watching almost any television problematic for me for months after BSG finished.

Ha, all television has been problematic to me for two and a half years because of the Laura Roslin standard.

That's true, that those two episodes running up to the mutiny are pretty strong. They just kind of didn't make either list, because they're not the strongest of the show, and they're too painful to rewatch often.

Laura has a pretty clear arc around her acceptance of mortality and with it life without taking refuge in the idea of her death having special meaningI like this read on it a lot. From a kind of macro-story perspective, though, it's not so much "bad things happened to this particular character" as the story was taking such bizarre twists and turns that it had to find some way to marginalize her in order to allow as much credibility as possible which is still not much ( ... )

anonymous June 1 2013, 12:18:57 UTC

I think that the big problem with the episodes after the mutiny is structural. The Cylon 'mystery' stuff should have been dealt with much earlier as it is not either dramatically Interesting or thematically coherent enough to have the place it did near the end of the final act. I don't think it's just that Laura's pragmatic ethics don't fit; much of the core of the show becomes tangential for at least three episodes coming straight after a run of episodes that have dealt with lots of central stuff ( ... )