BSG Season 4 thoughts

[prog]

So I've been watching and enjoying the latest BSG episodes. Here are some thoughts.

Punting two tier-one characters outside of the main story setting seems extreme. (Starbuck getting benevolently exiled, and Apollo switching careers over to the civilian fleet.) I wonder how this will be handled, narratively. The expectation is that the POV will stay with those on board Galactica, but there's no reason they won't end up splitting it up a bit. I predict that we'll get some Meanwhile, on board the SS Boobyhatch action after a couple more eps, similar to how POV visits to the Cylon flagship's shiny interior aren't uncommon now.

Speaking of which, I don't care much who the final Cylon is. Maybe because, in-show, only the Cylons really care about that, and they're so bloody weird about everything that while I love watching them be all freaky at each other, I can't really share their level of concerns about things. Also the fact that most of the Sci-Fi channel's Season-Four marketing campaign is "Ooh! Ooh! Whoooooo could it beeeee?" has gotten on my nerves.

I guess I liked "We removed the functional inhibitors" more than "We installed emotion chips" a la Star Trek. Still strikes me as kind of lame though.

classicaljunkie wondered aloud if the Cylons who got shot up are gonna wake up to find themselves boxed, since it's been suggested before (with D'Anna's story) that the resurrection process is prime time to be pullin that shit on an unfortunate model. This possibility would explain why those models flipped out and tried to run away... (Then again it's not clear how to box up all the other instances of the model who running around in prime condition, short of all-out civil war.)

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've already forgotten about the Helo & Sharon bit. It was a long time ago! Good point.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

It's this kind of thing that stopped me from watching past the first season, although I'll probably catch up once the whole thing is wrapped. What I'd really like to see is a re-edit in which the various sub-plots are handled in a less annoying way.

It's tremendously important when you're trying to spin out a thin narrative to have a lot of separate threads to help create a sense of narrative tension where there is none.

That is, in a rich narrative, you can create suspense and other forms of narrative tension because you have a lot of stuff to show in the main thread, and it just isn't possible to go from the point of knowing the answer exists to knowing what the answer is in two minutes. In a thin narrative it helps to have lots of little sub-plots running around like puppies because even if none of them have much substance they are useful for distracting you from each other.

Some good stories consist of lots of little narratives, but you can tell the good ones because the narrative pacing of each disconnected sub-plot stands on its own, whereas in BSG the narrative pacing of the sub-narratives is too much a product of the need to cut away from other sub-narratives at strategic points. Some of the sub-narratives are just about interesting, but I find the constant inter-cutting incredibly annoying.

What I'd really like to see is a re-edit where the pacing of the sub-narratives is more natural, rather than being artificially enhanced by egregious inter-cutting.