Salon: With its hot, androgynous heroine leading the remnants of humanity against evil, God-fearing robots, "Battlestar Galactica" is boldly re-creating sci-fi TV. By Laura Miller.
'Cause, like, this time Starbuck's a girl, and where in the original series everybody had shag cuts, now they're all up to date looking.
Ms Miller, please. If you have to gush for three pages, do me the favor of not starting off by trying to divorce yourself from the genre fans in a sorry attempt to gain some critical credibility. You are talking about a program about robots who can make themselves appear human. I don't ask you to repeat that to yourself over and over while you're enjoying it, but you might say it aloud once or twice before you start typing. Turning a 70s space cowboy into an androgynous female for the Noughts is a "creative" decision made by people who study Q ratings for a living. It's no more a breakthrough than having Cedric the Entertainer play Ralph Kramden is a landmark in civil rights history.
Turning a 70s space cowboy into an androgynous female for the Noughts is a "creative" decision made by people who study Q ratings for a living.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, but unless
....Unless I learn when to hit enter, I'll never get my comments right.
ReplyDeleteI give the Battlestar Galactica creative team more credit than that. Not saying it's Art, or even great TV, but I think even the most curmudgeonly viewer would allow that it's far beyond the original. The writing, plotting, and characterization of the 70s version were seemingly targetted squarely at 10- to 12-year-old boys. I'd say the current model is more at the level of smart senior high-schoolers of any gender.
Case in point: The President is the former Minister of Education (or summat similar) elevated by being the highest-ranking surviving member of the civilian government. She has learned that she has terminal breast cancer and subsequently is either having medication-induced hallucinations or religious visions, but the audience isn't given any kind of pat answer about that. And she's keeping her medical status secret.
The show is Sci-Fi and anyone is welcome to be as disdainful of that genre as of, say, romance novels. But this particular instance is pretty well done.
Ah, I thought the first comment seemed truncated, and I'd started to fear the hurricane got ya. I gots no problem with people enjoying the show. My wife watches it, and I haven't divorced her, though I admit I'm also afraid she may have some video hidden somewhere. I'm too old now to try to save the world from science fiction, and besides, there are bigger problems plus I actually like some of it. I'd just like professional writers to keep their enthusiasms somewhere south of rabid fandom in print. Three pages ought to be sufficient space to gush over the characters in Hamlet. Or The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, at least.
ReplyDelete"...having Cedric the Entertainer play Ralph Kramden..."
ReplyDeleteOr having Ashton Kutcher play Sidney Poitier...