First, a trifling recommendation: Sky High is kind of fun. Nothing great, but amusing and with a few really great bits. Kind of like The Million Dollar Duck meets The Incredibles in its look.
More seriously: I’m probably the last geek out there to discover Battlestar Galactica. I kept seeing raves and kept thinking, “Oh, come on, how could you make that dreck into anything decent?” Well, it’s about as good as it gets. We plowed through the miniseries, we’re deep into the first season discs (UK version bought at Best Buy) and recording the second season. No spoilers! No spoilers! But I’m really very impressed.
Make that “second last geek out there” – only put it on my Netflix list last week.
I think you’ll be wowed by it.
Despite my love of ideas and my neophileness, execution always matters far more, in fiction, than ideas.
Right. Going to watch the last two eps of the first season tonight. Here you have a show (Battlestar Galactica) where the idea is the same in both incarnations. It’s just that the first show never had any idea at all (in a very 70s way) what to do with an idea where they said, “Let’s tell a story about humans who are the victims of genocide by machines they created and how they flee from the destruction”. They globbed it up with all sorts of silliness. The second version, well, jeezus howdy, they understood perfectly well what kind of idea that is and how to execute it.
I was watching BSG earlier this year while going on a bit of a Singularity book binge — Stross and MacLeod and all that — and I started thinking that the Cylons, with all the religious stuff they’ve got going on, have transcended, or at least some of them have. And they want to bring the humans along. And we all know how unworried about collateral damage transcended AIs are.
I won’t claim it to be a particularly original reading, but it’s marginally better the than ‘robots rise against their creators’ schtick the pilot seemed to promise. I at least hope we’re going to get at least some kind of motivation for the Cylons at some point soon.
Hmm… I hope that last comment wasn’t too spoiler-ish.
Nope! We were thinking the same thing last night as we watched the first season conclusion: that this is all well and good but now they’d better tell us just what the “plan” the Cylons have is, and that also they need to somehow have Galactica and the rest of the humans be legitimately and righteously opposed to that plan, to create dramatic conflict. Occasionally it feels as if the Cylons are getting everything to go just as they intended, and the more that happens, the less interesting the series gets, because then it just becomes a story of puppets and the puppet masters.
*puts on his geek hat*
*sigh*
Actually, the Cylons weren’t human creations in the original Battlestar Galactica. The *idea* of man vs. machine was certainly there, but when the Cylon’s origins were explored it turned out they were machines made by an alien race (the “original Cylons”) that killed their masters, replaced them and co-opted their civilization, and now go around trying to conquer everything.
Which is, yeah, a lot lot lot less compelling than modern Battlestar Galactica.
…I think you can get a lot of symbolic mileage out of the Cylons being monotheists and the humans having a more-or-less-lifted-from-Greek-mythlogy polytheism. It’s not that hard to read the “inhumanity” of the Cylon philosophy as how, say, an ancient Roman citizen might view the rise of the cult of the Risen Christ.