the weight of pretention

Battlestar galactica is the show everyone is watching, even those who don't claim to like Scifi, it's topical, it's serious and it's more weighty than those old greek words like hubris.

And I loathe it. I loathe it with a special enmity I only reserve for the premier of the province and anyone remotely associated with the name Chretien.

My problem stems from the entire concept of the show. It claims to be non-specifically topical, dealing with the issue of terrorism, ie how would the last survivors of earth survive whilst continually pursued by robots who are trying to become human (by killing the humans). As a result, we've got more anixt than Lilith Fair and the entire series of Dawson's Creek put together. Everyone's conflicted, so conflicted in fact that there's really no character development at all, everyone's in a rut with their father issues, or their woman trying to be a guy issues. The there's the self proud imagery, the women all fighting over phallic imagery and, my own personal favorite, is the pretentious names, not the least of which is the executive officer named Saul...yeah, like the biblical Paul before he converted. And shocker, Saul turns out to be a sleeper agent. I should mention through, that some of the actors on this program are spectacular, Mary McDonnell especially.

Anways, all this leads up to this month, where battlestar galactica (BSG), in preparation for it's final season, aired a 90 minute episode which features extra backstory to an episode from last season featuring Michelle Forbes (Ensign Ro from TNG) as an admiral of another battlestar who made more draconian decisions than the crew of Galactica. Now the previous arc did not show these attrocities but rather mentioned them as hearsay by the crew, which, in my opinion made the episode better, ambiguity makes for better motivation and better television. Instead this episode takes us through a catalogue of these atrocities in excruciating detail, while taking breaks to show us how none of the characters have really made any kind of headway with their issues, the previously mentioned father issues figure prominently.

scifi is going through some growing pains these days, the vaccum left by the absence of the star trek franchise on the small screen has made for some unexpected successes. Star trek had definitely run its course (and then some), but now we're stuck with an equally underwhelming array of programs, from the successes of Stargate Atlantis and BSG, to the cancellations of stellar shows like Farscape and Firefly, and Doctor Who which rose from the dead in 2005. This recent season of television, instead of bringing in fresh new ideas for scifi, has been rehashing old ones, a re-imagining of the bionic woman, a tv series based on terminator 2, and a new version of the prisoner is scheduled for next season. (the original prisoner staring Partick McGoughan is must see tv FYI). Interestingly, some scifi writers have abandoned network TV and are going into other mediums, JMS, creator of Babylon 5, has returned to his franchise with direct to DVD movies and Joss Whedon has abandonned the visual medium and is writing Buffy comics. The henson company is making webisodes of the their cancelled Farscape series with the hope of creating interest in a return for the series.

So where are the fresh ideas?

Scifi isn't the only genre to be suffering, what i'd term as the HBO genre is also in something of a tail spin, more on that next time.