Only 8 seasons to go…

In an attempt to further understand the writing phenomenon of Joss Whedon, I have decided to attempt to watch the entire run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, dear reader, I am serious. So far, I’ve made it one whole episode and was so overcome with feeling, that I had to write about the experience.

Y’see, Whedon has a strong following. This is unusual for a writer of television. He is in elite company with the likes of J.J. Abrams and… the writer of that show… about the… stuff.

Anyway, I’ve reviewed a Joss Whedon thing before and it wasn’t pretty. Since then I’ve gained a new respect for him because of Firefly and Serenity. They’re good pulpy sci-fi, but not exactly high art or strong science. His newest venture Dollhouse is teetering precariously on the verge of cancellation and each new episode makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be for the best. Sure, it achieved some semblance of decency in the first season, but there was enough bad stuff in there that execu-producer + series star Eliza Dushku had to plead with people to keep going past episode 6 because “that’s when it starts to get good”.

So it is with a healthy heaping of dubiousness that I approach the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. I was one of the few people who liked (and remembers) the original throw-away movie. What I did not know was that Whedon wrote that original template for the show. With a great cast, I always felt it was an under-appreciated bit of comedy. Even better, it didn’t take itself too seriously, but managed to create tension and a bit of horror.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is no Kristy Swanson. She presents a pretty faithful depiction of 1990s 2000s California without going overboard on valley-girl-isms. There are glimpses of dialogue and I know enough about some of the characters to know that they get to enjoy some serious development over the length of the show. So I’m going to be a little forgiving of the weak action sequences. Maybe they’ll get better!

I think I’ll watch another.

One annoying bit that has irked me from the get-go is the relative inefficiency of the Cylons to completely destroy the humans. It would have been a short series if they were more effective, but let’s be reasonable. Artificially intelligent robots, with biological brains or not, would have some pretty impressive advantages in the realm of killing. Cavil in the final episodes lamented his human physiology. Having to watch a star go supernova “with these eyes” was a great disappointment for him. The mechanical cylons presumably have a wider spectrum of vision, highly-augmented hearing and a whole host of other sensors and doodads to make their given tasks easier. And more efficient.

Some of the scenes from the earlier seasons when humans were on the surface of some planet hiding in the woods and cylons were walking past without noticing them smack of silliness. Also, one of those same cylons with an integrated machine-gun for an arm missing a human at anything inside kill range is similarly ludicrous. They should be able to throw bullets as easily as any human can throw a rock and far far more accurately.

Still, the mechanical cylons were pretty damned awesome. In the episode “Boarding Party”, a group of cylons crash into the docking pylon on Galactica and start raising hell on the ship. One particularly vivid scene where a centurion dives into a group of people, guns-ablaze only to be shot down by a nerves-of-steel Lee Adama was one of the most memorable action scenes in the entire series. They could be terrifying in their swiftness and capability for violence. I only wish they’d been depicted like that more frequently instead of the plodding, inaccurate machines they usually were.

Similarly, the cylon Raiders weren’t piloted they were the pilots. In the episode where Starbuck finds the downed Raider and climbs aboard the gory interior remains, you fully-realize how incredible and alien these things are. Each one is an individual. We knew this from the episode “Scar” where Starbuck and her band of pilots have to contend with a particularly malicious and devious cylon raider in an asteroid belt, but it isn’t until you see the biological interior of the raider that you realize, hey, these things aren’t just spaceships with a chip or a cylon head bolted to a console – they are the ship.

Earlier comments about why these things aren’t capable of killing humans apply 10-fold here, but I’m willing to make allowances for how awesome the space scenes were. Still, most of the scenes were distant shots of squads of vipers plowing through cylon raiders by the hundreds. Each cylon raider should have been a more than capable adversary and this was never really felt.

Cylons were at their scariest when humans screwed up, which, I guess, they owe their entire existence to. Only when the humans made the mistake of linking their computers together did the cylons really come into their own. They seemed capable of taking down any computer system at will, not even requiring a physical connection to it. The Mark VII vipers were immediately made ineffective because of all the linked computer systems onboard. I guess it’s hard to beat machines with machines. Then again, the human Raptors were full of computerized systems. The Galactica had a bunch of separate computers to manage individual systems, only too primitive for the cylons to fully take over. Apparently cylons required a certain degree of complexity in order to take over a ship’s computer. Maybe it’s a warning about ubiquitous wireless technology.

The humanoid cylons could go one further and even interface directly with the machines on board Galactica. Sharon, aka Boomer and Athena (another Sharon)… Model 8 could plug light pipe from the ship’s systems into her arm and take control of that system. The cylon hybrids could do this as well and lived their gooey lives connected to the cylon base ships. That was never really explained, but surely they’d require some sort of physiology to allow that to happen. That should have made the earlier efforts to discover which humans were cylons easier. You’d think.

But wait, I hear music…

All Along the Watchtower. It’s a great song. The cover by Jimi Hendrix appearing in the final scene of the show may even be superior to the Dylan original because of the fantastic guitar solos. But, for all Bear McCreary did to vary it with piano and the “eastern” arranged version, is this really a piece of music that would echo through time and space calling humanity and cylons together? Wouldn’t a grander bit of music have been more appropriate? Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”? Maybe something moody from Liszt? Miles Davis’ “So What?” Anything other than a simple three chord folk tune, really. Integrating the lyrics into the show was a cute trick.

What was with 6′s glowing red spine (in the miniseries)? Never explained or repeated. We can assume it had something to do with her “joining” with Baltar or creating that weird mental image of herself in him. Those were never really explained either.

I can kind of forgive the Starbuck is an angel (/unknowable entity/ghost/alien/…) disappearance at the end. By that point I was like, “sure. Why not?” It kind of fit and the sudden disappearance was almost Kubrickian, though I would’ve liked a bit less of a reaction from Lee when he turned around.

Which brings me to the final, annoying bit. The really annoying thing about BSG: The religion. They had prophets. They had visions. They had ancient prophecies foretold and told again in ruined chambers buried on distant planets. Their mythologies roughly equivalent to Roman were superceded by the cylons’ weird monotheism. There was talk earlier in the show’s life that the writers were writing about the lost tribe of Isreal and the whole thing was the Story of Mormon. I don’t know if that’s true or not, and I tried to ignore as many of the religious themes as I could, possibly because that’s the way I deal with it in everyday, non-tv life. In any case, it was frequently annoying. Frequently broke the illusion that I was watching a piece of science fiction. And very frequently provided an easy out for the writers to provide a “reason” for something impossible to happen. Finding a planet? Sure, it was part of a prophecy. Being led to Earth? Starbuck had the Arrow of Hercules in her belt so she knew the way. The president’s having visions? Well, sure, it was prophesyed. And so on. If it were less frequent and maybe a little less intrinsic to how they managed to get around space, I’d have been happier.

So when people say that they couldn’t stand that Starbuck just vanished at the end, I say, “so what? You put up with it for this long”.

With all that said, I have to say that the final wrap-up with the “opera house” was fantastic and powerful. For all the times that I was annoyed in earlier episodes that they were showing me these cryptic visions, in the end I really thought that bit worked. Full props to the writers for that.

Overall, it was a great show. The fact that they didn’t overwhelm the show with the religious aspects and merely made it a part of the story was a good thing. And why not? Having 50-odd-thousand stragglers trying to make it across the blackness of space with no destination while a seemingly limitless army of sentient machines is trying to kill you might require a little help. It would have been easy to be heavy-handed there, but they managed not to be. There was enough to hold my interest throughout that I didn’t really mind the plot devices they used to get from Point Caprica to Final Destination. The varying stories about humans on their last legs struggling to stay alive were compelling, terrifying, frustrating and heart-wrenching in varying degrees, frequently all at once. This is what good story-telling does, it pulls you in and makes you feel it on an emotional level. The journey was a good one and I will miss it.

(also, no Boxey)

“The Wire: The Complete Seasons 1-3″ (HBO Home Video)

One such show is The Wire. Written by David Simon of “Homicide: Life On The Street” fame, it’s about a task force of Baltimore detectives setting up and running a surveillance operation against a notorious drug lord. The case itself is fascinating to watch unfold and takes great pains to explain its development in realistic detail. This is not “Enemy of the State” grade surveillance, but a low-tech wire-tap operation on a bunch of payphones and cloned pagers. Through this simple funnel, the case emerges.

One of the nice things about HBO is that they can run a single story arc through multiple seasons. This show uses the slow build to great effect, giving the characters room to develop and the story to unfold at a more believable pace than most network tv shows. If you’re used to immediate action, this might come as a bit of a shock to you. Stay with it. The pay-off will come.

boolean is listening to: Chromakey Dreamcoat from the album “The Campfire Headphase” by Boards Of Canada

I spent a few minutes trying to calibrate the screen and got it fairly well done, but the panel isn’t exactly top-of-the-line. In fact, it’s somewhere near the bottom. There’s some noticeable grain on screen and I had to roll the gamma back to about 1.7 to bring up some of the shadows and mids. Still, a quick test run with some video streamed from my main desktop machine over wireless seemed to be getting the job done just fine. I look forward to spending tomorrow morning in bed watching cartoons streamed over the wifi.