This should be a meme. I'm not going to try and hunt you down on IM, mostly because I think it's the wrong time of day, so here it goes. [And hopefully more coherently than last night. Holy run-on sentences, Batwoman!]
I got into this with you last night about how I feel this change, from TV series to movie, is actually a good one for the show in terms of production, quality, and where they need to go now to finish their story. This is especially true, I feel, in light of what happened to SG-1. Yes, ten seasons is an awesome thing, but they had to do both a literal and narrative changing of the guard to do it and the story (such as it was) suffered.
People rag on how this is an inconsistent, poorly done show a lot of times, yourself included, and "joke" about how they have to be in fandom because how else can they fix it? Then they inevitably compare it to the (new) BSG and go "See, this is how sci-fi should be done (oh, and check out Firefly too!)." I always want to laugh (in general, at them) and go "Oh, so, you know nothing about sci-fi and you think because the imperialistic, colonalist attitude of the show is, uh, slightly less apparent it's so much better? That's... cute. Why don't you go back to watching your dramas now?"
It's 'bitchy' and it's mean, but it's true. Even someone in these comments laughed about how her mother likes Andromeda so quality's not an issue. Barring the final season of Andromeda, which suffered the fifth year "What the fuck are we doing?" panic far, far worse than most shows, it was a consistent, well-plotted show. It did what you wish Atlantis would do: it showed the world(s) around them instead of acting like they were in a vacuum except when they were saving the whole universe.
[New] Battlestar Galactica began as a show which blew away most of its precedessors and all of its (then) current competition [save one show, which I'll happily babble about if you want me to] because it was tightly plotted and it used the world of being a vacuum to its advantage. The benefit of having such a tight focus is that when you make errors of judgement it's on a much smaller, less noticeable scale. As soon as it extended to a larger scale, where it tried to flesh out the colonies that had been obliterated and the characters that weren't in the main cast, it started falling apart. The blatant similarities to modern U.S. culture destroys all manners of believability; the painfully awkward parables about current affairs is literally cringeworthy; and Ron Howard seems to be under the (mistaken) impression that if you add more people to a love story it automatically becomes more interesting. Battlestar Galactica, perhaps because it started out so stronger, fails the good sci-fi test much more harshly than SGA ever could have, because SGA never made the pretense of being a Serious Show. (You see this in dramas too, of course, because some shows are more We Are A Social Statement than others.)
The upshot being that whenever someone rags on SGA, or something like Painkiller Jane (which was pretty awesome, for the record, for what it was), or deifies BSG or Firefly (Holy Orientalism Issues, Batman!), I'm very much stuck in the fact that not only is SGA not my first fandom, it doesn't even make my first quarter of a hundred. If you want really not-good, not consistent, poorly developed, with cringeworthy character tropes attached to very hot actors and bad wirework to make it fly, check out Mutant X, one of my first real online fandoms. I can even get you the source.
[1 of ?X]
I got into this with you last night about how I feel this change, from TV series to movie, is actually a good one for the show in terms of production, quality, and where they need to go now to finish their story. This is especially true, I feel, in light of what happened to SG-1. Yes, ten seasons is an awesome thing, but they had to do both a literal and narrative changing of the guard to do it and the story (such as it was) suffered.
People rag on how this is an inconsistent, poorly done show a lot of times, yourself included, and "joke" about how they have to be in fandom because how else can they fix it? Then they inevitably compare it to the (new) BSG and go "See, this is how sci-fi should be done (oh, and check out Firefly too!)." I always want to laugh (in general, at them) and go "Oh, so, you know nothing about sci-fi and you think because the imperialistic, colonalist attitude of the show is, uh, slightly less apparent it's so much better? That's... cute. Why don't you go back to watching your dramas now?"
It's 'bitchy' and it's mean, but it's true. Even someone in these comments laughed about how her mother likes Andromeda so quality's not an issue. Barring the final season of Andromeda, which suffered the fifth year "What the fuck are we doing?" panic far, far worse than most shows, it was a consistent, well-plotted show. It did what you wish Atlantis would do: it showed the world(s) around them instead of acting like they were in a vacuum except when they were saving the whole universe.
[New] Battlestar Galactica began as a show which blew away most of its precedessors and all of its (then) current competition [save one show, which I'll happily babble about if you want me to] because it was tightly plotted and it used the world of being a vacuum to its advantage. The benefit of having such a tight focus is that when you make errors of judgement it's on a much smaller, less noticeable scale. As soon as it extended to a larger scale, where it tried to flesh out the colonies that had been obliterated and the characters that weren't in the main cast, it started falling apart. The blatant similarities to modern U.S. culture destroys all manners of believability; the painfully awkward parables about current affairs is literally cringeworthy; and Ron Howard seems to be under the (mistaken) impression that if you add more people to a love story it automatically becomes more interesting. Battlestar Galactica, perhaps because it started out so stronger, fails the good sci-fi test much more harshly than SGA ever could have, because SGA never made the pretense of being a Serious Show. (You see this in dramas too, of course, because some shows are more We Are A Social Statement than others.)
The upshot being that whenever someone rags on SGA, or something like Painkiller Jane (which was pretty awesome, for the record, for what it was), or deifies BSG or Firefly (Holy Orientalism Issues, Batman!), I'm very much stuck in the fact that not only is SGA not my first fandom, it doesn't even make my first quarter of a hundred. If you want really not-good, not consistent, poorly developed, with cringeworthy character tropes attached to very hot actors and bad wirework to make it fly, check out Mutant X, one of my first real online fandoms. I can even get you the source.
[tbc]