YOU'VE GOT TO hand it to Maureen Ryan. The woman gets the 'gets.'
If you are like me, you fell off your couch a couple times during last night's mid-season premiere of Battlestar Galactica.
Today she's got a great interview that lifts the veil to Ron Moore's thought process in hashing out the themes of BSG. And there's more goodness from the writers and the episode Director, too. Once again Moore gets full props for cracking open the door on the process wider than just about any other current series.
And the remarkable thing, too? Last night's ep was the one shot as the WGA strike hit. So Moore and none of the writers were around. The Directors and Actors had to muddle through best they could. And boy, could they ever.
I won't quote since it's spoilery if you haven't seen the first of the final 10 eps of BSG. But it's really, really worth a good long read.
11 comments:
We were delighted with surly Adama. So great with the slurred muttering, wandering around asking everyone, "What're ya doin'?!", and reacting to plot points with, "I have no FRACKING idea!" We're with ya, big guy, we're with ya ... keep it up!
And Tigh too, the thoroughly Canadian version of surly. I wonder if the American viewers notice that?
It's too bad Dualla had been so sorely underused of late. It can feel pretty heavy-handed to write back in a character you'd pretty much already written off. Definitely not their finest wordsmithery there ....
But yeah, much of the rest of the episode was excellent.
Oh, to have been a frackin' writer on that frackin' show. And that's what happens when a show is about something. And about something without exposition, lessons preached at you. Terrific ep for Adama and Tigh. And I'm sure the writers have fun working with such a great cast. Usually means you can write any frackin' thing you want and they'll pull it off. Can't wait to see where it goes.
I enjoyed the episode, but am I the only one who noticed how it could have used a few more drafts?
Instead of saying, "Wow, they did such a great job with an early draft" shouldn't someone point out the fact that it was a bit weaker than it could have been because re-writes are GOOD?
Some of the dialogue was pretty lame, and the last line in particular, was so... Horrible... And obvious... Ugh.
I didn't find it lame, really. There were parts in places where a few more passes might have helped, but all that did was freight a little more onto the directors and actors in performance.
This was a good episode for that. (Much better, for instance, than the 30 Rock strike show, which was very first-drafty.)
Wow, Matt, hey, Heather Havrilesky in Salon really agrees with you -- but her whole review is a little tin eared, I think.
For instance...um..."nobody cares about Dee?"
Um.
Really?
Wow.
See every once in a while you see what I call the "Julia Roberts." Which is where some female reviewers blow past and miss something important for the same reason they always accuse men of being out of touch: not anticipating the other side.
There's not a guy I know who "doesn't care about Dee." Dee was adorable, and sexy, and sweet, and suffered through Fat Apollo, and just was generally...wow. Dee was the shiz.
Blam!
It's like all the women - and they were legion a few years ago - who said, "Julia Roberts isn't hot." These are the same people who try to sell us Jennifer Aniston as super hot.
Um. Ask a straight guy -- not always. Just occasionally.
Anyway. Thought you'd find that review interesting, and more in line with your thoughts on the premiere.
It does change over time. At one point, early in the series, my girlfriend and I (for whatever our genders are worth) found Dualla one of the most interesting characters on the show.
She along with Gaeta and a few others represented a strong class of very young recruits, whose reaction to the crisis that started the series was, to us, perhaps the most intriguing.
The other most interesting characters were at the 'top,' including Adama, Roslin and Tigh.
I found it a lot harder to care about those in the middle, like Lee and Kara. Never invested much in them, still don't, because they're like the spoiled children of the fleet, given sufficient power and sway that they never REALLY seem to need to struggle as others do. They get their way.
Anyway, my point is the problem with Dualla, for us at least, was that after she joined Lee ever more in the 'establishment,' she just disappeared. So to have her trotted out like this felt shallow. Her reaction to Earth's desolation would have been more poignant if we actually had seen her, somewhat substantially, eagerly anticipating the landing. But we hadn't.
Some of us were emotionally invested in seeing her get through this anyway.
Damn.
I think my only issue stems not from the polish or lack thereof (this show has stripped these characters down so raw by this point that polish is almost unnecessary), but just in the final Cylon decision.
I don't want to get too spoilery for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I just felt it was a tad weak, and the retconning that by default happens now with everything that happened with this character previously, while smooth, is still just retcon. The interview with Moore even flat out states that the decision wasn't made until midway this last season, long after all the important developments with the character had been made for completely different reasons in the writer's room (one would presume). And now all the fan wanks out there (myself, sadly, posting on Aint It Cool, included) who are looking for deeper meaning can do it until we're blue in the face, but it takes some of the edge off to know that nothing we find is a little nugget we were meant to find, but just something that worked nicely by coincidence.
Then again, I don't know why I'm complaining. It's still friggin' amazing storytelling, no matter how it was arrived at.
I liked it.
I'm trying to stay spoiler free and craft free on this series and just watch it and this episode hung together well for me. Now that i know it was a strike one I'm going to resist the urge to go back and watch for flaws.
I watched on my dvr and fast forwarded through the commercials as quickly as I could and was annoyed that I didn't have the next episode ready to go...
Circumstances didn't help any here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW2_2ihIuzI
(I admit I didn't notice at the time, given that same ad aired approximately 87 other times during the same episode.)
Oh DAMN that is funny. I didn't twig to that at the time anyway.
Ah SPACE, my old digs. Guaranteed, if two planes collided in mid air and killed everyone on board and then rained fire down on the CN Tower, somehow Space would have an ad for air travel on 87 times that night.
They'd probably also push fire.
There's supposed to be somebody to catch those sort of ... unfortunate placements. But somehow, on that group of stations, they never, ever, ever do.
and you wind up giving the client make goods up the bejesus behind.
Post a Comment