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lovefromgirlDiscussion of plot and character as they relate to Battlestar Galactica below this cut text. You have been warned.
I kind of tear into Ron Moore, so if you thought the last season made any sense, bear in mind that I didn't, from a writer's perspective, and don't flame me on my own journal for expressing that view. Discussion is cool. Flames get you banned.
I know I'm being spoiled with Babylon 5 and its beautifully coherent plotting, but come on, Ron Moore. I've read amateur work with a more consistent story than that. (I'd like to think I've written some myself, while I'm at it.)
-- Gaeta. Dude, you killed off a gay man of color. That in itself is a problem, but you twisted him into something I hardly recognised in order to do it. The Gaeta we knew, even through New Caprica, had a level head on his shoulders, level enough not to mutiny, for fuck's sake. There were less stable characters with just as much loss in their backgrounds. Suddenly he was bitchy to Kara and ready to off the Admiral?
-- Kara and Lee, and by association, Dee. Her suicide seemed like a convenient clearing-of-the-way towards that relationship, which, for the record, not okay either. Then you poofed Kara out of the picture in the last half-hour of the whole series. So now Lee is completely alone (Daddy didn't come home after Mama mk 2 died, did he?), which is really an awesome way to end the show for the male lead, isn't it! And we're meant to swallow that Kara was dead all along. Katee Sackhoff even got pissy with you over the lack of logic there. Poor Jamie Bamber tried to warn us.
The wrong character came back from the dead, by the way, if we're talking mythology. Anastasia (that was Dee's first name) means "she who will rise again". Don't try to be intelligent about the little things you slip into canon and ignore what's actually pretty widely known.
-- Kara, period. When your plot takes an unexpected but eminently logical turn -- Starbuck being half-Cylon herself because of her dad, maybe? You run with it. You don't look at the people trying to make sense of your work and call them nuts for thinking it. Dying and coming back from the dead only works when the actress knows what she's doing, and it sure looks like you kept her in the dark until it was too late. If you know you're dead, you don't behave like you have a goddamn future. Also, why was that a big secret at all? We've had weirder on this show! Instead of faffing around with all that mistrust because nobody knew what was up, you could've just revealed her borrowed time in the first place.
-- Lee, period. Everything we know about him gets turned on its head in those flashbacks, and for what? No, really, what was the point? I'm still struggling to understand.
-- While we're at it, and I shouldn't have to tell you this, if you're planning to put a love story between two characters at the very center of your work, don't get distracted by some other shiny new character. Anders had possibilities. Being Kara's post-apocalyptic soulmate? Not so much. Hell, you could've had him hook up with Dee. They actually would've done well together.
-- How many planets did humanity frak up? Twelve colonies, New Caprica, Fried Earth, and -then- Kara hears the song that'll take them to the real deal? People don't come back from the dead and fail that hard. She should've been hearing it from the start. Her scene with her dad should've happened a whole season back. Draw out that conflict. Give us a real mystery instead of a fake-out payoff.
-- Baltar's Angels, and I don't mean head!Six. I liked that Six and Baltar had doppelgangers that behaved more like Aziraphale and Crowley. That was cool. The way they found out about each other was funny, even. So if that was always going to happen, why bother with the cult leader thing? Someone else could've done that. Baltar had plenty of redemption possibilities using, oh my gods, the scientific abilities he started with. If I'd spent my adult life in that headspace, it would not leave me easily. (In fact, having spent my childhood geeking out over medicine, I'm probably not going to take off the proto-epidemiologist glasses until I'm dead. The writer in me is what prompted this post.)
-- Hera. Again with the misnomers. In Greek mythology, Hera was a lot more than Eve. In fact, she had a wicked temper and a jealous streak a mile wide. Hestia would've been more appropriate as the goddess of hearth and home. Athena would have made a better Hera, looking at the way her character played out.
-- Helo. If you doom a character, actually doom him. Don't have him saying "Go on, save yourself" and then magically bring him back. Looks like his arterial leg wound wasn't as bad as we thought, ha ha ha! Athena tied that tourniquet just right! Except that she couldn't have done without cutting off circulation to the rest of the leg. If he was rescued and saved, he should've lost that leg.
-- The robot dance?! What the sod? You had room to show us how "this has all happened before, and will all happen again." Instead, you gave us dancing robots.
About the ONLY piece he got right was the piece the actors surprised him with: Adama and Roslin. And that was beautiful. That was the real love story of the show. It couldn't have ended any other way. Brilliant execution; Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos deserve Emmys for their work on this show.
I felt like the last season didn't belong at the end. Development and plot both seemed middle-ish to me. BSG should either have ended earlier, with some serious plot tweaks, or taken one more season to wrap things up. This was not a last season. This was a second or third season with serious timeline issues.
I kind of tear into Ron Moore, so if you thought the last season made any sense, bear in mind that I didn't, from a writer's perspective, and don't flame me on my own journal for expressing that view. Discussion is cool. Flames get you banned.
I know I'm being spoiled with Babylon 5 and its beautifully coherent plotting, but come on, Ron Moore. I've read amateur work with a more consistent story than that. (I'd like to think I've written some myself, while I'm at it.)
-- Gaeta. Dude, you killed off a gay man of color. That in itself is a problem, but you twisted him into something I hardly recognised in order to do it. The Gaeta we knew, even through New Caprica, had a level head on his shoulders, level enough not to mutiny, for fuck's sake. There were less stable characters with just as much loss in their backgrounds. Suddenly he was bitchy to Kara and ready to off the Admiral?
-- Kara and Lee, and by association, Dee. Her suicide seemed like a convenient clearing-of-the-way towards that relationship, which, for the record, not okay either. Then you poofed Kara out of the picture in the last half-hour of the whole series. So now Lee is completely alone (Daddy didn't come home after Mama mk 2 died, did he?), which is really an awesome way to end the show for the male lead, isn't it! And we're meant to swallow that Kara was dead all along. Katee Sackhoff even got pissy with you over the lack of logic there. Poor Jamie Bamber tried to warn us.
The wrong character came back from the dead, by the way, if we're talking mythology. Anastasia (that was Dee's first name) means "she who will rise again". Don't try to be intelligent about the little things you slip into canon and ignore what's actually pretty widely known.
-- Kara, period. When your plot takes an unexpected but eminently logical turn -- Starbuck being half-Cylon herself because of her dad, maybe? You run with it. You don't look at the people trying to make sense of your work and call them nuts for thinking it. Dying and coming back from the dead only works when the actress knows what she's doing, and it sure looks like you kept her in the dark until it was too late. If you know you're dead, you don't behave like you have a goddamn future. Also, why was that a big secret at all? We've had weirder on this show! Instead of faffing around with all that mistrust because nobody knew what was up, you could've just revealed her borrowed time in the first place.
-- Lee, period. Everything we know about him gets turned on its head in those flashbacks, and for what? No, really, what was the point? I'm still struggling to understand.
-- While we're at it, and I shouldn't have to tell you this, if you're planning to put a love story between two characters at the very center of your work, don't get distracted by some other shiny new character. Anders had possibilities. Being Kara's post-apocalyptic soulmate? Not so much. Hell, you could've had him hook up with Dee. They actually would've done well together.
-- How many planets did humanity frak up? Twelve colonies, New Caprica, Fried Earth, and -then- Kara hears the song that'll take them to the real deal? People don't come back from the dead and fail that hard. She should've been hearing it from the start. Her scene with her dad should've happened a whole season back. Draw out that conflict. Give us a real mystery instead of a fake-out payoff.
-- Baltar's Angels, and I don't mean head!Six. I liked that Six and Baltar had doppelgangers that behaved more like Aziraphale and Crowley. That was cool. The way they found out about each other was funny, even. So if that was always going to happen, why bother with the cult leader thing? Someone else could've done that. Baltar had plenty of redemption possibilities using, oh my gods, the scientific abilities he started with. If I'd spent my adult life in that headspace, it would not leave me easily. (In fact, having spent my childhood geeking out over medicine, I'm probably not going to take off the proto-epidemiologist glasses until I'm dead. The writer in me is what prompted this post.)
-- Hera. Again with the misnomers. In Greek mythology, Hera was a lot more than Eve. In fact, she had a wicked temper and a jealous streak a mile wide. Hestia would've been more appropriate as the goddess of hearth and home. Athena would have made a better Hera, looking at the way her character played out.
-- Helo. If you doom a character, actually doom him. Don't have him saying "Go on, save yourself" and then magically bring him back. Looks like his arterial leg wound wasn't as bad as we thought, ha ha ha! Athena tied that tourniquet just right! Except that she couldn't have done without cutting off circulation to the rest of the leg. If he was rescued and saved, he should've lost that leg.
-- The robot dance?! What the sod? You had room to show us how "this has all happened before, and will all happen again." Instead, you gave us dancing robots.
About the ONLY piece he got right was the piece the actors surprised him with: Adama and Roslin. And that was beautiful. That was the real love story of the show. It couldn't have ended any other way. Brilliant execution; Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos deserve Emmys for their work on this show.
I felt like the last season didn't belong at the end. Development and plot both seemed middle-ish to me. BSG should either have ended earlier, with some serious plot tweaks, or taken one more season to wrap things up. This was not a last season. This was a second or third season with serious timeline issues.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 08:42 pm (UTC)Oh, Ron Moore, no.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 10:39 pm (UTC)All season, Beloved and I have been confused by the way things are going. I'm sure he's got his own gripes that I haven't addressed.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 11:45 pm (UTC)Also, please, the whole alien as Eve thing is so old it's got whiskers. It's interesting that you mention B5, because in my opinion, in addition to being fabulously plotted, it was the SF show that did the best job of dealing with religious issues I've ever seen. Despite all the talk about God/Gods on BSG, it just didn't measure up.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 12:10 am (UTC)I was half expecting Jesus-Figure!Baltar to die during his speech. Cavil is not that patient. I seriously thought he was going to get this annoyed look on his face, point, and blam. No more Gaius. Would've hurt, but again, would've made sense. I'll trade one plausibly dead Baltar for one vanishing Kara, please.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 12:16 am (UTC)No kidding. All the time Baltar was going on and on, I kept waiting for the hammer to fall. I was glad, though, that the Chief found out the truth about what happened with Cally, and it made sense that he'd react as he did. There were some good moments in the series conclusion, but overall, I'm disappointed.
And I think that JMS as an atheist understood maybe better (at least more neutrally) than a believer the influence of religion on individuals and society.