Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Half awake, half awake. At best, half awake. I overslept, which always leaves me feeling slow-witted and slightly hungover. Anyway, we're off to Birmingham in a couple of hours. I hate losing days to necessary errands.
But something I hate even more than that is desperately wanting, nay, needing, to hate something, and then failing to properly muster the longed for hatred. For example, the Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica mini-series, which I watched last night, even though I shouldn't have. After the cancellation of Farscape, and the network's release of trash like Scare Tactics and Tremors: The Series, I've been avoiding Sci-Fi. Not so much a boycott. More like the way you walk around a dead and rotting thing lying on the sidewalk. But I was intrigued by Battlestar Galactica. Even as a pre-teen, I'd recognized the original series was dren. Why resurrect a series that only ran for one season twenty-five years ago for a high-budget mini-series, when you're a network willing to axe the best hour of television (Farscape), supposedly because of budget concerns. No one much watched Battlestar Galactica in 1978. Anyway, I caved in and watched, and am dissapointed to report that I've seen things that suck way worse than this mini-series. It kept my attention and I'll watch night two, if only to see if it remains watchable. They could still lose me. Tricia Helfer is suprisingly creepy as the advanced Cylon "Model 6," sort of a Daryl Hannah-meets-Sandra Bernhardt sort of thing, with a big dose of psycho-bitch thrown in. Katee Sackoff's Kara "Starbuck" Thrace is cute as hell, but manages somehow to be a little too plucky. That's the best of the cast. The rest are varying shades of dishwater gray. The plot, a sort of Pearl Harbor-9/11 fusion, is a tad farfetched (C'mon, really, such lousy defenses with the Cylons still lurking around out there? I mean, they already almost wiped out humanity once). Some of the things that have been kept from the original series, like the names of the colonies, should have been chucked. Don't get me wrong, this is not good fiction. It's just so much better than what I expected that I'm a little tharn.
Check out Greg Peters comic strip Suspect Device for a nice summation of the Marcus McLauren fiasco. Poppy's already linked to this, but I suspect some of you may not have seen it. And there's something I'd like to add. Maybe this is trivial in light of the child having been forced to denounce his family, but wouldn't it be frelling wonderful if Superintendent James Easton were to put half as much energy into teaching his students to spell as he does into policing the private lives of their parents? At seven, surely McLauren should be able to spell better than "wurd" and the truly painful "cep my mouf shut." Obviously, Superintendent Easton is more concerned with running schools that warp and bully than enlighten.
Oh, I wrote 1,333 words on the "Untitled Novella" yesterday, finishing the first third of the story. A shame I can't get back to it until Wednesday.
|
|
