Realizm in Sciffy.
Been busy this week, so forgot to finish this blog about Battlestar Galactia and my dislike of the new direction of the show.
Last Friday I watched two blipverts of the NEW Battlestar Galactia and felt it was TOO DARN REAL.
That's why I stayed away from the 'mini series' last year, because I had heard they were changing it. The original Galactia was a space epic... yes there were parallels to the "MORMON" story but I didn't know that as a kid.
What got me going was that there was an 'air force one' for the colonial president and on it was a dry erase board. Now one would think with the technology that they had, there would be a way to use blinky lights to convey information... Til I saw what the dry erase board was for- which really blew my mind. It had a number- say 62,434, and when they found out that a ship was MIA they changed the number.
Yes that's right- they're keeping a running tally of the Hu-mans left... and that number is gonna go down as the series goes on.
I really find that depressing.
The first series was about hope. Hope for our heroes and hope for their future. Sure the cylons outnumbered them by like a thousand to 1 but the cylons were myoptic crappy shots and so the Galactia had about even odds to survive. With a body count, I'd say the odds are MUCH worse.
The other piece of realism that turned my stomach was they created the 'wall of pictures'. As an ex New Yorker, who still has family in Manhattan, I remember when I went down to NYC in Oct. of 2001. There were posters all over Penn. Station. There were posters all over New York of missing loved ones, asking if you've seen them to please call.
This was a very moving image, esp. when you consider how futile it was. There were no LIVING people found in the rubble of the Towers past like 5 hours of their crashing. But people still put these posters up in HOPE.
I've heard that after the Tsunmi in India- the same sort of pictures went up. This made a bit more sense as not everyone in India has cell phones or even home phones. So if someone was found miles away, lucky enough to be alive, they might not be able to talk and the person who found them might not be able to call a hospital to have them picked up.
However I still think these posters are about false hope. A family's NEED to hope that their family is still alive for one more day.
This made it all the more annoying that they had a wall of pictures on Battlestar Galactia.
They said that the comm channels were busy or some such and they couldn't FAX these pictures all over the fleet. I just was floored by this- I mean I don't know how much bandwidth a jpeg takes... but I know that if someone just wanted text mentioning their family and all who they are related to- well I think that would take only a couple of kilobytes. EASY. I mean if you got FTL ships that can talk to each other, it should take you less then two days to establish who's on the ships and who they're related to....
BUT NO! They had to do the board to compare the fictional bombing of the 12 colonines of Kobol with the trade center tragedy.
I really don't expect the humans to survive, and thus don't plan on watching.
....
Now that said I do like dystopia science fiction. I LOVE 1984, and I think that Fahrenheit 451 should be required reading. But that said, I don't like them turning a series of HOPE into a 'realistic' science fiction show. In this time, since Nov. 2nd, we need HOPE.
Last Friday I watched two blipverts of the NEW Battlestar Galactia and felt it was TOO DARN REAL.
That's why I stayed away from the 'mini series' last year, because I had heard they were changing it. The original Galactia was a space epic... yes there were parallels to the "MORMON" story but I didn't know that as a kid.
What got me going was that there was an 'air force one' for the colonial president and on it was a dry erase board. Now one would think with the technology that they had, there would be a way to use blinky lights to convey information... Til I saw what the dry erase board was for- which really blew my mind. It had a number- say 62,434, and when they found out that a ship was MIA they changed the number.
Yes that's right- they're keeping a running tally of the Hu-mans left... and that number is gonna go down as the series goes on.
I really find that depressing.
The first series was about hope. Hope for our heroes and hope for their future. Sure the cylons outnumbered them by like a thousand to 1 but the cylons were myoptic crappy shots and so the Galactia had about even odds to survive. With a body count, I'd say the odds are MUCH worse.
The other piece of realism that turned my stomach was they created the 'wall of pictures'. As an ex New Yorker, who still has family in Manhattan, I remember when I went down to NYC in Oct. of 2001. There were posters all over Penn. Station. There were posters all over New York of missing loved ones, asking if you've seen them to please call.
This was a very moving image, esp. when you consider how futile it was. There were no LIVING people found in the rubble of the Towers past like 5 hours of their crashing. But people still put these posters up in HOPE.
I've heard that after the Tsunmi in India- the same sort of pictures went up. This made a bit more sense as not everyone in India has cell phones or even home phones. So if someone was found miles away, lucky enough to be alive, they might not be able to talk and the person who found them might not be able to call a hospital to have them picked up.
However I still think these posters are about false hope. A family's NEED to hope that their family is still alive for one more day.
This made it all the more annoying that they had a wall of pictures on Battlestar Galactia.
They said that the comm channels were busy or some such and they couldn't FAX these pictures all over the fleet. I just was floored by this- I mean I don't know how much bandwidth a jpeg takes... but I know that if someone just wanted text mentioning their family and all who they are related to- well I think that would take only a couple of kilobytes. EASY. I mean if you got FTL ships that can talk to each other, it should take you less then two days to establish who's on the ships and who they're related to....
BUT NO! They had to do the board to compare the fictional bombing of the 12 colonines of Kobol with the trade center tragedy.
I really don't expect the humans to survive, and thus don't plan on watching.
....
Now that said I do like dystopia science fiction. I LOVE 1984, and I think that Fahrenheit 451 should be required reading. But that said, I don't like them turning a series of HOPE into a 'realistic' science fiction show. In this time, since Nov. 2nd, we need HOPE.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home