Some comments I've made on
Facebook regarding Battlestar Galactica, a continuation on what I said in the previous post (
When TV shows go bad):
One of the plot twists that really bothers me is how Nualla suddenly falls in love with Apollo, pretty much cheats on and dumps Billy the Cutie, and then gets over Billy's death-by-shot-to-arm-and-shoulder and hooks up with survived-a-gunshot-through-my-left-lung Apollo within a month. She goes from adorable sweetheart to "You bitch!" in a handful of episodes.
To me the difference was, at least in terms of the callgirl episode, too striking. It made me think that a space noir series would be cool (along the lines of the Tex Murphy game series; oh, how I love Under a Killing Moon), but also that it really didn't fit with what had already been established in the series. It made the fleet feel more like a gritty city and the President feel like the Mayor (with Admiral Adama as the Chief of Police/Commissioner) rather than the last hope of humanity.
I think I would have enjoyed the branching into space noir more if they introduced a new character or highlighted a regular extra as the detective. Giving Apollo that role felt awkward. If it had been someone new, it would have introduced a new archetype into the series that could be called on in future episodes (an inquisitor or independent investigator).
I would have preferred the Scar side-story if Scar's legend had built itself in front of the viewers over a couple or a few episodes. His sudden legend felt shoehorned into Kara's character-development episode.
1 comment:
It bugs me that they tried something different, took a risk, with Scar and Black Market and were penalized for it. I actually liked the resolution of Black Market a lot because it took a very mature, adult and realistic attitude: something like this is a necessary evil and ought to only be punished when it goes too far.
As for your suggestion that they create a new character to do noir duty, I didn't have a problem with Apollo in this story. A lot of characters were asked to do double-duty because if it was a new guy we wouldn't care as much. This was obvious in stories like the Tom Zarek one where they asked Starbuck to be a sniper because she had "sniper training." (We never hear about this again.)
What, they had a platoon of marines and they didn't have a single sniper? But this way, we had a regular character we care about in the action.
Ironically, I always thought Scar was the single episode most like the original series in the sense that the original series ripped off the plots of tons of western and war movies. Gun on Ice Planet Zero was basically the Guns of Navarone, only on Hoth - and the Magnificent Warriors was a rip-off of...do I even need to say it? Scar was pretty much a war movie story, with a stand-in for the Red Baron and other war movie foes.
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