(no subject)

[cabbitzilla]

Hrm. I've just finished Season 1. Overall... overall I'm quite impressed, to be honest. It came as no small surprise to discover that I was more attached to the hardware than I was to the actors in the various roles. The slightly revised Vipers are quite nice, the launch tube design was kept, the Galactica herself is the right basic shape, the new Base Stars kick all kinds of ass, and the revised mechanical Cylons are visually sleek (though reminiscent of the Terminators, but what the hell they were impressive too).

The Cylon fighters... well, I'm a bit less impressed with them. When I'm looking at biomechanical constructs, I expect to see the sleek malignance of H.R. Giger... not big lumps of squishy stuff easily ripped out and tossed aside. If it's truly linked to the machine, there is absolutely no need (or reason) to have manual controls. Nice implementation of a later hook, yes, but it got serious eyerolls.

Gaius Baltar. *snicker* 'Delightfully deranged' is what comes to mind. The cuts in and out of his mental visions are interesting, and the bits of conversation that overlap are highly amusing. Now why anyone trusts someone as visibly twitchy and off the rails as he is is anybody's guess, but it is fun. For a while. Gets a bit tiresome when it gets preachy, though. Still, having a madman as Vice President to a hallucinating religious nut President is oddly appropriate.

The gender flip on Starbuck was less of an issue than I'd anticipated; she does well in the role, even if she's a bit less of a wiseass than her male counterpart. Interesting note: When she's using the cane, she's holding it in the wrong hand. :p Cross-body support is what it's intended to be; when used on the same side as the injury it pulls the entire body off balance. Trust me on this one. Lots of folks make that mistake, it seems... I learned the hard way, and have a couple of interesting almost-scars to prove it.

Human-form Cylons. Hrm. Interesting concept, but it begins to lose coherency in the face of a technological society.... where duplicates would eventually be spotted and questions asked. The idea of command-triggered sleepers is one I've seen before in Babylon 5, and in other programs as well. I'm just not convinced that a mere 12 models would be diverse enough to do any real good. I'm nitpicking, I know, but that's been bugging me all along.

My biggest beef? The music. Without the martial anthemic strains shot through it, it just feels.... hollow. Little glissandos here and there was one of the reasons the original became popular; whether it was conscious or not, the cadences of the old music stirred the viewer, kept and held attention, demanded focus. The music used is generally very pretty, but I'd expect it more in a film version of Mists of Avalon.

Which reminds me... hey, meamgrimlock? Did that music ever get put up where I could get it? I can't remember. *sigh* Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. Anyway, that's all from me at the moment. I'm defiantly avoiding reality.

Comments

[emberdarc.livejournal.com]

I haven't watched as much of BSG as I would like. Stupid not-having-of-cable.

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

Such was my problem. I've got friends with cable, which gives me a work around, though.

[emberdarc.livejournal.com]

I dun. Not around here, anyways. I suppose I could always torrent them, though.

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

Demonoid

[emberdarc.livejournal.com]

"Sorry, registrations are closed.

To avoid running out of resources, the new user registrations are closed at the moment.
We open the registrations every few days, so please check back later, and sorry for the inconvenience."

T_T

[wibbble]

Normally I'd agree with you about duplicates in a technological society, but they're not in a normal technological society any more - the colonies are back to, essentially, wilderness and the Galactica fleet have the small problem of not being able to trust most of their computers because of the Cylon's 1337 h4x0ring skillz. They also don't have access to the databases that they would've had prior to the war, since they're all destroyed.

So it's pretty easy to pass for someone else, as long as no one recognises you...

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

That point I'll cede easily, but the hidden agents were in place long before the attack, it would seem. Boomer already had a career with the Colonial Military, which would indicate a long term plan rather than insertion during the chaos. So if you track back on that tangent, the agents have been slowly slipped in over the last... say 5 - 20 years (and likely in the 5-10 range)? The colonies were not in a wilderness situation at that point, and particularly when you've got agents in military forces which are generally more paranoid than civie outfits are.

I may be missing a vital piece in this, though... I haven't gotten my hands on the two part mini-series that kicked this all off. And as I've said, I'm nitpicking and I know that. It just is a minor irritant in an otherwise enjoyable programme.

[wibbble]

IIRC, they make the point that Boomer essentially has no background - her family died in some space thing, and she's from a backwater location anyway.

In some respects, once technology reaches a certain point it's like ID checking reverts to pre-modern times: you can just claim to be from 'far away', since no one on the big planets has access to the birth records from some rock two solar systems away.

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

Hrm. 's probably what Rowan was trying to point out, and I'm just exceptionally dense today.

I'll yield the point there; I've actually seen something similar done, and I've worked under more than one name myself.

[wibbble]

Even these days, it would be incredibly easy for E to lie about things relating to the US (like her addresses, references, or credit history there), because few people would bother to spend the considerable amount of time required to check them.

And as for the many human-like Cylons - I'd imagine that, at first, they wouldn't do that so much. They'd maybe only have one or two of each kind of Cylon out in the wild.

[rowandoll.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to agree with Wibble. There's no way to reference or verify except by word of mouth or person-by-person testing, because there's no networked -anything-. I originally thought it was a throwaway concept until season 2 when networked systems are required to solve a problem...And the cylons pounce like a plague of locusts.

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

I've heard S2 gets rather snarky about that. I've got the first ep coming down now.

As for the agents and sleepers, see my answer to the wibbble above. :P

[meamgrimlock.livejournal.com]

Disk One is up and ready for you to download. I can't put the other disks up until you download that one because my server don' got the space.

I sent you the login and pw via email the night we were talking about it (Or via the chat, I can't remember).

Wait until you get into Season 2. Things get interesting :)

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

I'm not at the apartment, love, so I don't have access to my logs. Help me out, here? I've a paid LJ account, just use that email? Please?

[meamgrimlock.livejournal.com]

And I don't have access to them from work, so I don't remember what they are.
I'll reset 'em tonight or tomorrow, depending on how late I get in from class and re-send.

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

Right. Got it. Sorry to be a pain, love.

*pbth*

[lys1022.livejournal.com]

You should be!!!

*snerk*

Cut it out, Sis. You know that when you're a pain we have no hesitation in stating so to your face. You've got a lot going on, downloading some music probably wasn't hugely high on your priority list, considering surgery and everything else.

No biggie.

*HUG*

Re: *pbth*

[elisabeth.livejournal.com]

I'm still upright and moving, though. 's gotta count for something somewhere.

Braces and crutches and canes, oh my!