There’s nothing that I’m looking forward to more right now than this:
Season 3 begins on June 1st.
Archive for the 'Television' Category
After a long hiatus, the final season of Battlestar premieres tonight. I’ll be the first to admit that, while I like the new Battlestar, it isn’t my favorite TV show by a long shot. It’s often good TV, and it’s obviously trying really hard, but I feel like the underpinnings of the story are all over the place.
That isn’t necessarily a failing on their part, since it generates a lot of good episodes, and means they aren’t stuck trying to figure out how to show the whole show in reverse if they found that they’ve driven down a storyline that turns out to be a dead end.
But when you try to put their whole “big arc” thing together in a cohesive meta-story it ends up being a sort of mish-mash of different plotlines. They’re trying to get to Earth, or something, to save it and/or them from the Cylons, or something… Right?
It doesn’t really make that much sense, and I have a feeling it’s only going to make a little bit more once the big secrets are all out out on the table.
Here’s a really well done, eight minute long, “catch-up” that someone created, that hits the high points, but also, I think, reveals the weaknesses as well:
I think there’s a a trick to open-ended shows like this, and Lost, which is that you keep the “villains” motivations secret for as long as you possibly can, so that at some point you can surprise the audience by revealing they weren’t really ever as evil as they appeared to be.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that, and it can be really effective since it forces the audience to go back and re-evaluate everything they’ve seen before. But you need to be careful, because it means you have to write around one of the things that are usually the spine of a good story. And in Battlestar the “bad guys” already aren’t all that bad, and they aren’t all that different from the “good guys” who already aren’t all that good.
Whatever it is, it’s working well enough that I’ll still be watching the premiere tonight.
It’s hard to remember now, but in the 90s Xena: Warrior Princess was a force to be reckoned with. Basically a mash-up of history and ancient mythology, the show was shot in New Zealand, and had that otherworldly feeling that worked even more effectively in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. It also had a (mostly) unspoken lesbian “subtext” between the two stars of the show, which gave it a nice “Batman & Robin” quality.
Somewhere in the depths of the third season (1998) they decided to go for the musical episode. As the Buffy episode would do, a few years later, the musical was used as a way to break the tensions that had been building up between the main characters over the last few years.
It also had some good, old-fashioned dance numbers:
It isn’t just basement dwellers, hyper productive CEOs, and information age hipsters who are creating online projects these days. Famous people from traditional media are also trying their hand at creating something new and different. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy and Firefly, is turning his hand to the online world, with his newest effort: Doctor Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog. Here’s what we know so far:
It’s the story of a low-rent supervillain (Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible), the hero who keeps beating him up (Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer), and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to (Felicia Day as Penny).
Did I mention it’s a musical?
This isn’t the first time Joss has delved into the waters of genre musicals. The Buffy episode “Once More With Feeling” was an amazing mix of plot and song. More than that, the sudden outburst of singing is actually explained in the context of the show.
It’s also the last truly great episode of the series; the perfect shark:
Here’s Neil Patrick Harris Singing:
via the newborn DoctorHorrible.net
17
Mar
Why I love Serenity
There are, as far as I can tell, two kind of people in the world: Those who get Firefly, and those who aren’t worth talking to.
Okay, maybe it’s not that bad, but Firefly is a kind of litmus test to tell whether someone loves sci-fi because they love things that are shiny, or they just love shiny things. (That joke was a test of the emergency nerdcast system.) In English it means, do they understand the power of Science Fiction to tell an awesome story, or do they just car that its full of cool stuff that blows up big.
I got together with a bunch of friends to watch Serenity, the Firefly movie, over the weekend. I hadn’t seen the movie since it came out three years ago, and like the series itself, having a little time between now and then to let the moment burn off has made me think of the film with a great deal more kindliness. I suppose at the time it was released I was still just getting over the grieving process from the show. Like most fans I discovered my love for the series on DVD. Not that I hadn’t tried to watch it on broadcast television, but the Fox network did everything in their power to make sure that the experience was less than satisfying. From showing the episodes out of order, to spacing them out weeks apart, only Futurama has suffered a more terrible fate at their hands.
The series has always been long on charm, and the movie captures that feeling of futuristic nostalgia. It’s a mash up cowboys and spaceships; two genres that have shared a common lineage ever since Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry pitched that show as “Wagon Train to the stars.”
Joss Whedon, Firefly’s talented creator is still putting out some new material, including some comic books that take place between the series and the movie, but it seems that the odds of seeing new adventures of the ship and her crew are pretty slim. That’s especially true since the film was a flop in the theaters.
Still, it’s a damn good film, if you’re worth talking to.
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