bsg: completed!
Nov. 13th, 2010 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseIt's been a very big 24 hours for BSG in our household - last night we settled in with pizza and wine to watch the whole extended cut of Daybreak (and a number of the little extended features on the making of the series, afterward), and then today we went to Seattle's adorable little Sci-Fi Museum and Hall of Fame to see the special exhibit on BSG, which opened last month but which we've been waiting patiently to go see until we'd finished the series.
Daybreak
Honestly? I liked it. It wasn't perfect, it didn't handle everything the way I'd have liked it to be handled, but I did feel like it was handled well enough for me to be happy with it. Major plot-lines (the cycle of violence between Cylons and Humans, the civil war between the two factions of Cylons, the place of the Final Five, the visions of the opera house, Hera and her destiny, Starbuck and her destiny, etc) were, for the most part, tied up in a way that was satisfying without being too trite, although I can see how, especially without the warning that the finale might be a bit of a let-down, people were unhappy with the handling of the "and they went down to our Earth and eventually bred with early Humans and led to humanity as we know it" angle could have been very disappointing. I think I might have picked up a little spoileriness to that effect at some point long ago, because I always faintly expected a "twist" like this at the end and was unsurprised when it happened. There was a little too much of "we must abandon our technology in order to become innocent and safe," but at the same time I wouldn't have wanted Our People to be living with technology and influencing the development of this other species, so... it works out, I suppose. I was a little less enthused by the solution of sending the fleet (and Sam!) into the sun, but I likewise couldn't come up with much of a better way to handle the ships and Sam, who is now locked in with the Cylon technology, so... whatever.
Gaius finally made a non-selfish decision (volunteering to go with the team setting out to look for Hera), and he and Caprica get back together (after the hilarious and awesome moment of staring out at their head! versions of each other, and then looking at each other in shock as they realize "You can see them, too?" Yes, dears. You're both crazy. At least now you can be crazy together. Also, Gaius being all "you shouldn't be here," and Caprica pointing out that she's been in a lot more battles than he has ("I suppose you have a point" or something like that is his reply, which is very Gaius), and, fantastically, head!Gaius and head!Baltar are apparently still hanging around 150,000 years later, watching over Humanity and making snide remarks about us and our discoveries (and about Hera and her parents). I was a little "mer" about the implication of Hera as mitochondrial Eve (statistically speaking, it would be pretty unlikely for her to be the earliest common ancestor of all living Humans, I would think), but, as with other things, whatever. It was still oddly charming to think of these people as part of our heritage, in a mythological sort of sense.
Regarding the head!People, and particularly the fact that apparently Kara was, at least for the last season, a head!Person (given the speed with which she vanishes while she's talking with Apollo about what he wants to do): my little brain is happily working away at a theory that the head!People are indeed incarnations of the gods, and I consider head!Gaius and head!Six still being around 150,000 years later as confirmation of this theory. Beyond that, I'm not quite sure what to make of them (or how to explain Kara as a person before we had Kara as a head!Person, nor how to deal with the fact that Kara had, during the season in which she was apparently dead, a head!Father who was feeding her information that would be important to her later.
That said, I still think that Kara's dad was Daniel, the seventh Cylon. It's the best way I can come up with to make sense of him teaching her the song. And it would also mean that Kara was already half-Cylon, therefore making some sense out of her Special Destiny and her connection with Hera and the song and all of that.
The flashbacks: were charming, if, in a few cases, a little unnecessary. I'm not sure we really needed all the lead-up to Roslin joining Adar's campaign, nor necessarily all the stuff with Apollo and Starbuck first meeting (although I will forever love the exchange with Apollo saying "I'm still standing," and Starbuck grinning that million-watt grin and announcing "You know what that means - that means it's time for shots!" Could've done with less of Tigh, Ellen, and Adama in the strip-club, too (and did we really need Adama vomiting practically onto the camera?), although bits of it were cute.
Boomer giving Hera back to her parents and announcing "Tell Adama I owed him one" - this was inexplicably explained as referring to a time when Boomer was being a fuck-up as a pilot and Tigh and Adama gave her a drunken grilling before grudgingly giving her a second chance rather than drumming her out. Um. Is it just me, or would this have made a hell of a lot more sense (and had a lot more emotional impact) as Boomer referring to her shooting him? Not to mention the fact that she was the one who got Hera in trouble in the first place? WTF? That flashback made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and they'd have done better to just leave it out. Although, I did like a connected scene which they actually did leave out - a scene with Boomer and Helo getting ready to leave on a mission, in which Tyrol informs them not to worry when they're coming back, because the deck-crew's developed a new system for them to make landing easier for Boomer... and then they are attacked by the entire deck crew wielding pillows. God, I loved that scene. Stupid, pointless little scene, but I adored it.
Speaking of stupid pointless things that I adore (and which have to do with Helo...), I was charmed by the little flashback to him and Boomer, with Boomer going on about feeling more alive with Tyrol and Helo clearly understanding because he's totally in love with Boomer. Bless. Also, large man carrying small child in one arm and big gun in the other. My ovaries wish the world to know that they approve of this trope. On the other hand, they also wish to register approval of Starbuck the Awesome Battle Commando, so they're clearly not all about the reproduction angle. ;)
Holy crap, every member of the main cast who survived up to this point in the series survived the episode, except Roslin! And we only lost Sam, Racetrack and Skulls out of the secondary cast! ...Well, and Cavil and Four (Simon), too, I suppose, although there are presumably more of them tooling around. I had been expecting a much bigger body-count for the finale. When Helo was shot and then disappeared for most of the rest of the episode (up until the very end when we're already settled on (New) Earth, I was convinced that he was dead (and quite annoyed about it, too), and I briefly thought Athena would die, as well, after she and Roslin had been locked out of the CIC by Gaius and Six. Losing Roslin was still gutting, even though we'd expected it from the beginning, though, and Adama's reaction to her death was very sad and sweet.
Couldn't done without the last bit with the robots, but at the same time it was, I suppose, thematically necessary. I admit, ever since we got into this show I've had a little bit of an "oh, rly?" feeling about news in the robotics field. ;)
I'm very, very sure I'm forgetting things, but suffice to say that I enjoyed it, and am now looking forward to diving headfirst into the fandom in whatever time I have leftover between work and NaNoWriMo. If you have any recommendations for fic, vids, meta, whatever, I'd be thrilled to have links!
The Exhibit
First, annoying little technicalities - the Sci-Fi Museum is a little... sort of a side-project off the Experience Music Project (fairly large museum devoted to music and the music industry). They were originally separate, but have joined together so as to more easily survive the nasty financial situations that affect all museums, and while I suppose the SFM has probably benefited most from this arrangement (they're tiny compared to EMP, and certainly more specialized), it does feel kind of frustrating that there's no distinction between the two in terms of ticketing, etc. Not that it would have mattered in this case, as the SFM is so small that it actually couldn't have feasibly hosted the three full-size ship models that were the centerpieces of the exhibit, so it makes sense to house the BSG stuff in the special-exhibitions area of the EMP instead... but still. We'd been to both the EMP and the SFM proper fairly recently, so we made a bee-line straight for the BSG stuff and didn't spend much (if any) time at anything else.
There was a pretty nice wall graphic explaining the rough plot concept of both the 1978 series and the 2003 series, but I forgot to take a picture of it, so you'll just have to believe me that it was fairly cool (from the standpoint of someone who spent half of last year being lectured about wall graphics, design, and signage for museums, at least). It was a nice way to lay out the general concept for people who didn't know it, although I do always wonder what people who don't know about this sort of thing are really going to be doing at an exhibit about it... Anyway. The usual array of television screens with Ronald Moore, David Eick, Bear McCreary and so on talking, intermixed with shots from both versions of the series (I was amused to note that special effects from the 1978 BSG actually reminded me a lot of special effects from B5), and a fairly amusing touch-screen thing with examples of moral crises from both series, allowing visitors to make their decision based on the information provided, hear the result in the series, and then see how their choice compares to percentages of other visitors who've made choices about that situation. There was also a fairly neat thing about scoring scenes, with an intro by Bear McCreary followed by the opportunity for the visitor to play either a dialogue scene or a space battle scene (from "The Hub") and see it with no music, with "dialogue" music, or with "action" music, switch on and off between the three, and (our favorite part) pretty good motion-activated gong, taiko drum, and two variations on cymbals.
But really, I'm never at a museum for the interactive bits. I'm a bad museum person like that. I just want to see the 'artifacts.'
There were a handful of outfits from the 1978 series, all of which I found hilariously absurd. Adama's leisure tunic and jacket, Tigh's hideous blue uniform with a cape (a cape!), a standard warrior uniform (along with a panel that included the explanation that it was discovered in the series that women were "just as capable of killing Cylons as men" - amazing!), some kind of multi-legged bug alien custom, and outfit of the Cylon "Imperious Leader." Which was a bit appalling. Lots of velour, lots of designs that made me cringe.
And then there was the new-series stuff.
Gaius' lab coat and Athena's prison garb, okay, sure, kind of interesting in a day-to-day kind of way, but there was also the red dress that Tricia Helfer wore as head!Six, one of Adama's regular blue uniforms, the jacket and skirt that Mary McDonnell wore in the opera house vision, a deckhand uniform (belonging to someone particular whose name I have completely forgotten now), and, my favorite, Katee Sackhoff's flight suit.
I was so happy I even took a picture of that one. It didn't come out very well because the lighting in the exhibit space kind of sucked for photography and I only had my phone (my regular camera is broken at the moment and The Boy doesn't know where his is), but it really was beautiful, and we got close enough to determine that the sort of laminated thing on her right thigh is a flight checklist, oriented to be seen by the person wearing the outfit, which is just awesome detail.
They also had some nifty props, such as one of the gun-camera stills that Starbuck uses in "Scar," one of the grenades, Mary McDonnell's reading glasses from the show (yes, really, and yes, they do have a prescription, judging by the curve of the glass), Tigh's eye-patch, and a set of Starbuck's dog-tags. There was also a fairly large scale reproduction of Galactica done in nice aircraft aluminum by a repro company, which was beautiful but which I found much less enchanting than the full-scale ship models because it wasn't weathered and beaten-up looking. There's just something wrong about a model of Galactica that looks clean.
The full-scale models were freaking awesome, though.
There was Apollo's Mark 3 Viper:
Seen here with the top of the EMP's huge 2-story guitar sculpture in the background of it.
A Cylon raider:
And, my absolute favorite, with which I was totally in love... a Mark 2 Viper.
I adored this thing. I've always loved how ratty and beat-up and real the models of these look on the show, and seeing one so close-up was just a delight. Loved loved loved loved loved this.
Daybreak
Honestly? I liked it. It wasn't perfect, it didn't handle everything the way I'd have liked it to be handled, but I did feel like it was handled well enough for me to be happy with it. Major plot-lines (the cycle of violence between Cylons and Humans, the civil war between the two factions of Cylons, the place of the Final Five, the visions of the opera house, Hera and her destiny, Starbuck and her destiny, etc) were, for the most part, tied up in a way that was satisfying without being too trite, although I can see how, especially without the warning that the finale might be a bit of a let-down, people were unhappy with the handling of the "and they went down to our Earth and eventually bred with early Humans and led to humanity as we know it" angle could have been very disappointing. I think I might have picked up a little spoileriness to that effect at some point long ago, because I always faintly expected a "twist" like this at the end and was unsurprised when it happened. There was a little too much of "we must abandon our technology in order to become innocent and safe," but at the same time I wouldn't have wanted Our People to be living with technology and influencing the development of this other species, so... it works out, I suppose. I was a little less enthused by the solution of sending the fleet (and Sam!) into the sun, but I likewise couldn't come up with much of a better way to handle the ships and Sam, who is now locked in with the Cylon technology, so... whatever.
Gaius finally made a non-selfish decision (volunteering to go with the team setting out to look for Hera), and he and Caprica get back together (after the hilarious and awesome moment of staring out at their head! versions of each other, and then looking at each other in shock as they realize "You can see them, too?" Yes, dears. You're both crazy. At least now you can be crazy together. Also, Gaius being all "you shouldn't be here," and Caprica pointing out that she's been in a lot more battles than he has ("I suppose you have a point" or something like that is his reply, which is very Gaius), and, fantastically, head!Gaius and head!Baltar are apparently still hanging around 150,000 years later, watching over Humanity and making snide remarks about us and our discoveries (and about Hera and her parents). I was a little "mer" about the implication of Hera as mitochondrial Eve (statistically speaking, it would be pretty unlikely for her to be the earliest common ancestor of all living Humans, I would think), but, as with other things, whatever. It was still oddly charming to think of these people as part of our heritage, in a mythological sort of sense.
Regarding the head!People, and particularly the fact that apparently Kara was, at least for the last season, a head!Person (given the speed with which she vanishes while she's talking with Apollo about what he wants to do): my little brain is happily working away at a theory that the head!People are indeed incarnations of the gods, and I consider head!Gaius and head!Six still being around 150,000 years later as confirmation of this theory. Beyond that, I'm not quite sure what to make of them (or how to explain Kara as a person before we had Kara as a head!Person, nor how to deal with the fact that Kara had, during the season in which she was apparently dead, a head!Father who was feeding her information that would be important to her later.
That said, I still think that Kara's dad was Daniel, the seventh Cylon. It's the best way I can come up with to make sense of him teaching her the song. And it would also mean that Kara was already half-Cylon, therefore making some sense out of her Special Destiny and her connection with Hera and the song and all of that.
The flashbacks: were charming, if, in a few cases, a little unnecessary. I'm not sure we really needed all the lead-up to Roslin joining Adar's campaign, nor necessarily all the stuff with Apollo and Starbuck first meeting (although I will forever love the exchange with Apollo saying "I'm still standing," and Starbuck grinning that million-watt grin and announcing "You know what that means - that means it's time for shots!" Could've done with less of Tigh, Ellen, and Adama in the strip-club, too (and did we really need Adama vomiting practically onto the camera?), although bits of it were cute.
Boomer giving Hera back to her parents and announcing "Tell Adama I owed him one" - this was inexplicably explained as referring to a time when Boomer was being a fuck-up as a pilot and Tigh and Adama gave her a drunken grilling before grudgingly giving her a second chance rather than drumming her out. Um. Is it just me, or would this have made a hell of a lot more sense (and had a lot more emotional impact) as Boomer referring to her shooting him? Not to mention the fact that she was the one who got Hera in trouble in the first place? WTF? That flashback made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and they'd have done better to just leave it out. Although, I did like a connected scene which they actually did leave out - a scene with Boomer and Helo getting ready to leave on a mission, in which Tyrol informs them not to worry when they're coming back, because the deck-crew's developed a new system for them to make landing easier for Boomer... and then they are attacked by the entire deck crew wielding pillows. God, I loved that scene. Stupid, pointless little scene, but I adored it.
Speaking of stupid pointless things that I adore (and which have to do with Helo...), I was charmed by the little flashback to him and Boomer, with Boomer going on about feeling more alive with Tyrol and Helo clearly understanding because he's totally in love with Boomer. Bless. Also, large man carrying small child in one arm and big gun in the other. My ovaries wish the world to know that they approve of this trope. On the other hand, they also wish to register approval of Starbuck the Awesome Battle Commando, so they're clearly not all about the reproduction angle. ;)
Holy crap, every member of the main cast who survived up to this point in the series survived the episode, except Roslin! And we only lost Sam, Racetrack and Skulls out of the secondary cast! ...Well, and Cavil and Four (Simon), too, I suppose, although there are presumably more of them tooling around. I had been expecting a much bigger body-count for the finale. When Helo was shot and then disappeared for most of the rest of the episode (up until the very end when we're already settled on (New) Earth, I was convinced that he was dead (and quite annoyed about it, too), and I briefly thought Athena would die, as well, after she and Roslin had been locked out of the CIC by Gaius and Six. Losing Roslin was still gutting, even though we'd expected it from the beginning, though, and Adama's reaction to her death was very sad and sweet.
Couldn't done without the last bit with the robots, but at the same time it was, I suppose, thematically necessary. I admit, ever since we got into this show I've had a little bit of an "oh, rly?" feeling about news in the robotics field. ;)
I'm very, very sure I'm forgetting things, but suffice to say that I enjoyed it, and am now looking forward to diving headfirst into the fandom in whatever time I have leftover between work and NaNoWriMo. If you have any recommendations for fic, vids, meta, whatever, I'd be thrilled to have links!
The Exhibit
First, annoying little technicalities - the Sci-Fi Museum is a little... sort of a side-project off the Experience Music Project (fairly large museum devoted to music and the music industry). They were originally separate, but have joined together so as to more easily survive the nasty financial situations that affect all museums, and while I suppose the SFM has probably benefited most from this arrangement (they're tiny compared to EMP, and certainly more specialized), it does feel kind of frustrating that there's no distinction between the two in terms of ticketing, etc. Not that it would have mattered in this case, as the SFM is so small that it actually couldn't have feasibly hosted the three full-size ship models that were the centerpieces of the exhibit, so it makes sense to house the BSG stuff in the special-exhibitions area of the EMP instead... but still. We'd been to both the EMP and the SFM proper fairly recently, so we made a bee-line straight for the BSG stuff and didn't spend much (if any) time at anything else.
There was a pretty nice wall graphic explaining the rough plot concept of both the 1978 series and the 2003 series, but I forgot to take a picture of it, so you'll just have to believe me that it was fairly cool (from the standpoint of someone who spent half of last year being lectured about wall graphics, design, and signage for museums, at least). It was a nice way to lay out the general concept for people who didn't know it, although I do always wonder what people who don't know about this sort of thing are really going to be doing at an exhibit about it... Anyway. The usual array of television screens with Ronald Moore, David Eick, Bear McCreary and so on talking, intermixed with shots from both versions of the series (I was amused to note that special effects from the 1978 BSG actually reminded me a lot of special effects from B5), and a fairly amusing touch-screen thing with examples of moral crises from both series, allowing visitors to make their decision based on the information provided, hear the result in the series, and then see how their choice compares to percentages of other visitors who've made choices about that situation. There was also a fairly neat thing about scoring scenes, with an intro by Bear McCreary followed by the opportunity for the visitor to play either a dialogue scene or a space battle scene (from "The Hub") and see it with no music, with "dialogue" music, or with "action" music, switch on and off between the three, and (our favorite part) pretty good motion-activated gong, taiko drum, and two variations on cymbals.
But really, I'm never at a museum for the interactive bits. I'm a bad museum person like that. I just want to see the 'artifacts.'
There were a handful of outfits from the 1978 series, all of which I found hilariously absurd. Adama's leisure tunic and jacket, Tigh's hideous blue uniform with a cape (a cape!), a standard warrior uniform (along with a panel that included the explanation that it was discovered in the series that women were "just as capable of killing Cylons as men" - amazing!), some kind of multi-legged bug alien custom, and outfit of the Cylon "Imperious Leader." Which was a bit appalling. Lots of velour, lots of designs that made me cringe.
And then there was the new-series stuff.
Gaius' lab coat and Athena's prison garb, okay, sure, kind of interesting in a day-to-day kind of way, but there was also the red dress that Tricia Helfer wore as head!Six, one of Adama's regular blue uniforms, the jacket and skirt that Mary McDonnell wore in the opera house vision, a deckhand uniform (belonging to someone particular whose name I have completely forgotten now), and, my favorite, Katee Sackhoff's flight suit.
I was so happy I even took a picture of that one. It didn't come out very well because the lighting in the exhibit space kind of sucked for photography and I only had my phone (my regular camera is broken at the moment and The Boy doesn't know where his is), but it really was beautiful, and we got close enough to determine that the sort of laminated thing on her right thigh is a flight checklist, oriented to be seen by the person wearing the outfit, which is just awesome detail.
They also had some nifty props, such as one of the gun-camera stills that Starbuck uses in "Scar," one of the grenades, Mary McDonnell's reading glasses from the show (yes, really, and yes, they do have a prescription, judging by the curve of the glass), Tigh's eye-patch, and a set of Starbuck's dog-tags. There was also a fairly large scale reproduction of Galactica done in nice aircraft aluminum by a repro company, which was beautiful but which I found much less enchanting than the full-scale ship models because it wasn't weathered and beaten-up looking. There's just something wrong about a model of Galactica that looks clean.
The full-scale models were freaking awesome, though.
There was Apollo's Mark 3 Viper:
Seen here with the top of the EMP's huge 2-story guitar sculpture in the background of it.
A Cylon raider:
And, my absolute favorite, with which I was totally in love... a Mark 2 Viper.
I adored this thing. I've always loved how ratty and beat-up and real the models of these look on the show, and seeing one so close-up was just a delight. Loved loved loved loved loved this.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-15 05:59 pm (UTC)That whole crossover needs to exist, NOW.
Not it! I haven't read GO in...at least eight years, maybe ten. Which means it might be time for a re-read. In which case I suppose I could be it afterward, but would really rather someone else were it...
no subject
Date: 2010-11-15 10:17 pm (UTC)