My friends are funnier than me.
Apr. 3rd, 2008 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
murphy987So, my friend and colleauge, after seeing my "50 Reasons I Love BSG" post decided to make her own (no pictures). She emailed it to me today and I have to say, it's fairly awesome! So, with her permission, I am reposting it here (again, spoilers for all three seasons).
BSG Loves
1. Nuclear destruction – Ya gotta love a series that starts with the end of the world.
2. Roslin. Immediately smitten, and also loving the idea that this BSG will balance power with politics (and is not just the “benevolent Moses and his flock” of the original).
3. Brassy chicks in fatigues – Big nod to the “She’s a girl!” mindfrak of Starbuck.
4. Apollo/ Adama/ Roslin dynamic. A lovely thing to watch, throughout the miniseries and Season 1.
5. Lied about Earth. Ha!
6. Mini-series “gotcha” ending – Boomer’s a cylon! WTF! What happens next?!
7. Humanity extermination countdown. Love the numbers on the whiteboard. And the incremental death that follows, episode by episode... (And, once we’ve wrapped our heads around it, let’s discuss abortion…)
8. 33 – Jumpity jump jump jump.
9. Water shortage. I could’ve spent hours obsessing about food/water/clothing/ luxuries/etc. shortages. (Not to mention the hands-on practicalities of assembling a functioning society from a rag-tag fleet of ships.) But willing to take “water” (and the occasional “mining in an asteroid belt/harvesting algae” episode) as the symbolic expression of all of this.
10. Cranky Tyrol. He’s awesome! Show me how to make alcohol, Tyrol! I’m an amateur! Pick me!
11. Billy and Dee. They’re so cute! Teddy bears and kisses, you young puppies of love!
12. Baltar – Even without getting into the acting, the very concept of the character is so much better than the original. And then…there’s the Six in his head. There’s a Six in his head! Endless hours of speculation and amusement. Add to that the twisted make-you-squirm dark comedy of the actor and … wonderful.
13. Starbuck – “BTW, I killed your son; now I’m stuck on a planet and gutting a living Cylon ship to escape…” (pitch, yaw, roll) This is the point where I start to really jones on Starbuck, both acting and character.
14. Oh, and did I mention the living Cylon ship? It’s like a pet…
15. Airlocks. And the Roslin affinity for them. And Roslin as the “comes from squishy” hawk. And Adama as the “comes from the military” dove. A slowly building love.
16. Religion. Polytheism vs. (genocidal robot) monotheism. Plus which, 12 colonies, 12 Lords of Kobol, 12 human cylons. And furthermore, “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” Also, drug-enabled religious prophetic fulfillment. Not to mention, shared religious prophetic fulfillment. Now, let the endless, giddy, “But what does is mean?” begin…
17. Destruction of Boomer. We will take a character and, throughout Season 1, incrementally destroy her very sense of self, until she is finally revealed to be nothing but a hollow vessel. Then we will shatter that vessel, and we won’t fix it. Boomer…sucks to be you.
18. Season 1 “gotcha” ending – Boomer shoots Adama...Holy Frak! What happens next?
19. Crash-landed Crashdown Vietnam-style frak-out, complete with ‘Tyrol’s a better leader’ irony and a newly dark Balter. Oh yeah, he died a hero…
20. Casual use of last-half-of-the-20th Century “pop” political imagery – first Roslin being sworn in ala LBJ, now Boomer being Lee Harvey Oswalded.
21. Starbuck and Apollo pre-consummated Season 2 cuteness/tension…No takebacks!
22. Love. And humans. And the role they play in Cylon reproduction. And the twisted things the Cylons make of this. Leading to…
23. Ovary farms. Say it from the abdomen, girls: “Ewwwww”.
24. Scar…and the notion, creeping around the margins of the tale, that eternal life has a dark and twisted down-side…
25. The dead pilots drunken naming retrospective. How many shows out there could even begin to try to name their red shirts?
26. Season 2 D’anna Biers. With Six more likable by the episode, it’s time for a new evil Cylon bitch queen!
27. The faux documentary. All documentaries should be so cornerless.
28. The Pegasus episodes. Wow. Or, as I say endlessly to the television when these episodes are on: “Pegasus is sooo fucked up…” (Yes, “fucked”, not “fraked”. There is nothing frakin’ cute about how fucked up the Pegasus is.)
29. Oh, and have I mentioned my fundamental love of the never explicit or preachy (until we hit Season 3 that is), but always uneasily resonant metaphors for the post-9/11, terrorism, torture, religious fundamentalism, War against Terror, Abu Ghraib world that we live in? Cuz really, if I had to choose only one reason to love BSG, that would be it. No other show – no other piece of North American entertainment, up to the shiniest, most earnest that Hollywood can offer – has managed so effectively, honestly, and so immediately after the fact to hold up the mirror, darkly to our newly troubled souls in these newly troubled times. So there.
30. Oh, and I’m now in love with Tricia Helfer. Official recognition of acting chops given, and retroactive admiration humbly bestowed.
31. Heros of the Cylon. So much to like about that episode! But let’s just start and end with: There’s a Baltar in her head! There’s a Baltar in her head! Frakin’ awesome!
32. That scene…that one scene…the one where a drunken Kara, in the presence of a recently rescued and also drunken Anders, cuts Apollo to pieces. Awww….ya gotta love the emotional fraked-upedness of it all.
33. New Caprica. Betcha didn’t see that coming.
34. Roslin rigs an election. Baltar becomes President. Let’s celebrate by nuking the pleasure ship. Betcha didn’t see that coming.
35. One year jump. Betcha didn’t see that coming.
36. Cylon occupation. Warping of the “Heros of the Cylon” revolution into “Bow to your new Cylon overlords.” Baltar the degenerate puppet President. Tit-for-tat incrementalism. Death lists. Ah, good times, good times.
37. Leoben, the creepy Starbuck stalker.
38. Okay…unfortunately, now we have to dive into a bit of “things I don’t like about BSG”, cuz I had a third season crisis. So, very quickly, here are the things I loved to hate about Season 3:
· But we just got here…why the frak set us up like that if you only planned to spend three episodes on New Caprica?
· So there was a schism about how to deal with the Cylon occupation and it caused the humans to split into collaborators and resistance, both well meaning but fundamentally at odds? This lead to violent conflict and, ultimately, retributive deaths? Well, that doesn’t seem very relevant. Hey, you should explain most of it in pre-season blipverts! And then resolve it three episodes later with a facile truth and reconciliation speech. See? Tidy. No hard feelings. Now let’s screw the pooch for 15 episodes before returning to the theme.
· And hey, while we’re at it, let’s use long hair, a mustache, a fat-suit, and an eye-patch as a proxy for character development… Gah! Okay, now, everybody back to normal!
· Moving on…so were the Cylons channeling Hugh Hefner this season? Glad to know that they did everything that they did so that they could grow into a bunch of aimless, childish pleasure-bots.
· WTF did you do to D’anna Biers? She started out scary…now she’s just a bizarre bearer of “Final Five” plot mulligans…
· Endless Starbuck-Apollo relationship tedium.
· Heavy handed moralizing. BSG lost its light touch, and it saddened me. I have nothing against Helo (unlike others)…but Season 3 was all about “This week, Helo taught me that discrimination is bad, m’kay?” WTF?
· Death of Kat. The noble but flawed character redeems her evil mafia past by stubbornly … waitaminute…evil mafia past? WTF? Couldn’t she just have died? (…And why do this story at all if you’re going to more or less repeat it in Razor?)
Oh, but at the end of it all, I still love this show…so, back to the love…
39. Cylon baseship theme music. I’d happily trade my humanity if I could have that as my theme music!
40. Funky Earth satellite bearing a Cylon plague. Brain cannot even begin to figure out the hows and whys of that. So, I’m choosing to let it lie, in the hopes that a dramatic and utterly relevant explanation will sideswipe us all in Season 4. So say we all!
41. Everybody boxes! They hit because they love…
42. This is an after-the-fact love, but, Tyrol finding the Eye of Jupiter. The Cylon Eye…
43. Okay, horribly telegraphed, but…killing Sharon to get her to the Baseship to rescue Hera. A neat idea. Plus, a nice encounter with “my experiences haven’t warped me at all” Boomer.
44. Oh, and the crazy insane Cylon baseship bathtub pilot. She’s trippy.
45. Kara Thrace and her special destiny tour t-shirts. It’s funny.
46. Season 3 “gotcha” endings – Starbuck lives! Final Four revealed! Cylons attack! Earth! Eeeeee! What does it mean?
47. Bob Dylan as the 12th Cylon. Seriously hairs-on-the-back-of-my-head-stood-up trippy.
· But here’s the thing…Okay, you know how in the X-Files the grey aliens were introduced as the evil conspiracy aliens, and then suddenly there was black oil, and it turned people into black oil aliens, and they turned out to be the evil conspiracy aliens, but that was okay, because eventually it was shown that the black oil aliens were actually the grey aliens in proto-plasmic form, but then suddenly in the first X-files movie the black oil aliens were changing into Geiger aliens, spitting out of human abdomens and eating people’s heads off, with no grey aliens to be found, and they were in Antarctica and a building blew up and there were some bees, and you thought to yourself… “Aw, Jesus...these bastards are just making this shit up.”? Well, my greatest fear is that this will be the case with the BSG “All Along the Watchtower” moment, if not the fourth season in its entirety. But I live in hope.
48. Razor. (The Pegasus is sooo fucked up!) Good to see you again, Admiral Cain. Loved how they could make an already done story all sorts of interesting.
49. Vivisection ship. Say it from the abdomen, girls: “Ewwwww!”
50. I’m now in love with Saul Tigh. Drunken, half-incompetent, half-competent, wife killing, “I am not a Cylon!” Saul Tigh. I’m hoping that in the first episode of Season 4, there’s a good chance I’ll see him naked. That, or the actor doing a two minute stream-of-consciousness monologue, in character, on a late-night talk show. It would be funny.
51. Season 4, Season 4, Season 4! Eeeeeeee!
BSG Loves
1. Nuclear destruction – Ya gotta love a series that starts with the end of the world.
2. Roslin. Immediately smitten, and also loving the idea that this BSG will balance power with politics (and is not just the “benevolent Moses and his flock” of the original).
3. Brassy chicks in fatigues – Big nod to the “She’s a girl!” mindfrak of Starbuck.
4. Apollo/ Adama/ Roslin dynamic. A lovely thing to watch, throughout the miniseries and Season 1.
5. Lied about Earth. Ha!
6. Mini-series “gotcha” ending – Boomer’s a cylon! WTF! What happens next?!
7. Humanity extermination countdown. Love the numbers on the whiteboard. And the incremental death that follows, episode by episode... (And, once we’ve wrapped our heads around it, let’s discuss abortion…)
8. 33 – Jumpity jump jump jump.
9. Water shortage. I could’ve spent hours obsessing about food/water/clothing/ luxuries/etc. shortages. (Not to mention the hands-on practicalities of assembling a functioning society from a rag-tag fleet of ships.) But willing to take “water” (and the occasional “mining in an asteroid belt/harvesting algae” episode) as the symbolic expression of all of this.
10. Cranky Tyrol. He’s awesome! Show me how to make alcohol, Tyrol! I’m an amateur! Pick me!
11. Billy and Dee. They’re so cute! Teddy bears and kisses, you young puppies of love!
12. Baltar – Even without getting into the acting, the very concept of the character is so much better than the original. And then…there’s the Six in his head. There’s a Six in his head! Endless hours of speculation and amusement. Add to that the twisted make-you-squirm dark comedy of the actor and … wonderful.
13. Starbuck – “BTW, I killed your son; now I’m stuck on a planet and gutting a living Cylon ship to escape…” (pitch, yaw, roll) This is the point where I start to really jones on Starbuck, both acting and character.
14. Oh, and did I mention the living Cylon ship? It’s like a pet…
15. Airlocks. And the Roslin affinity for them. And Roslin as the “comes from squishy” hawk. And Adama as the “comes from the military” dove. A slowly building love.
16. Religion. Polytheism vs. (genocidal robot) monotheism. Plus which, 12 colonies, 12 Lords of Kobol, 12 human cylons. And furthermore, “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” Also, drug-enabled religious prophetic fulfillment. Not to mention, shared religious prophetic fulfillment. Now, let the endless, giddy, “But what does is mean?” begin…
17. Destruction of Boomer. We will take a character and, throughout Season 1, incrementally destroy her very sense of self, until she is finally revealed to be nothing but a hollow vessel. Then we will shatter that vessel, and we won’t fix it. Boomer…sucks to be you.
18. Season 1 “gotcha” ending – Boomer shoots Adama...Holy Frak! What happens next?
19. Crash-landed Crashdown Vietnam-style frak-out, complete with ‘Tyrol’s a better leader’ irony and a newly dark Balter. Oh yeah, he died a hero…
20. Casual use of last-half-of-the-20th Century “pop” political imagery – first Roslin being sworn in ala LBJ, now Boomer being Lee Harvey Oswalded.
21. Starbuck and Apollo pre-consummated Season 2 cuteness/tension…No takebacks!
22. Love. And humans. And the role they play in Cylon reproduction. And the twisted things the Cylons make of this. Leading to…
23. Ovary farms. Say it from the abdomen, girls: “Ewwwww”.
24. Scar…and the notion, creeping around the margins of the tale, that eternal life has a dark and twisted down-side…
25. The dead pilots drunken naming retrospective. How many shows out there could even begin to try to name their red shirts?
26. Season 2 D’anna Biers. With Six more likable by the episode, it’s time for a new evil Cylon bitch queen!
27. The faux documentary. All documentaries should be so cornerless.
28. The Pegasus episodes. Wow. Or, as I say endlessly to the television when these episodes are on: “Pegasus is sooo fucked up…” (Yes, “fucked”, not “fraked”. There is nothing frakin’ cute about how fucked up the Pegasus is.)
29. Oh, and have I mentioned my fundamental love of the never explicit or preachy (until we hit Season 3 that is), but always uneasily resonant metaphors for the post-9/11, terrorism, torture, religious fundamentalism, War against Terror, Abu Ghraib world that we live in? Cuz really, if I had to choose only one reason to love BSG, that would be it. No other show – no other piece of North American entertainment, up to the shiniest, most earnest that Hollywood can offer – has managed so effectively, honestly, and so immediately after the fact to hold up the mirror, darkly to our newly troubled souls in these newly troubled times. So there.
30. Oh, and I’m now in love with Tricia Helfer. Official recognition of acting chops given, and retroactive admiration humbly bestowed.
31. Heros of the Cylon. So much to like about that episode! But let’s just start and end with: There’s a Baltar in her head! There’s a Baltar in her head! Frakin’ awesome!
32. That scene…that one scene…the one where a drunken Kara, in the presence of a recently rescued and also drunken Anders, cuts Apollo to pieces. Awww….ya gotta love the emotional fraked-upedness of it all.
33. New Caprica. Betcha didn’t see that coming.
34. Roslin rigs an election. Baltar becomes President. Let’s celebrate by nuking the pleasure ship. Betcha didn’t see that coming.
35. One year jump. Betcha didn’t see that coming.
36. Cylon occupation. Warping of the “Heros of the Cylon” revolution into “Bow to your new Cylon overlords.” Baltar the degenerate puppet President. Tit-for-tat incrementalism. Death lists. Ah, good times, good times.
37. Leoben, the creepy Starbuck stalker.
38. Okay…unfortunately, now we have to dive into a bit of “things I don’t like about BSG”, cuz I had a third season crisis. So, very quickly, here are the things I loved to hate about Season 3:
· But we just got here…why the frak set us up like that if you only planned to spend three episodes on New Caprica?
· So there was a schism about how to deal with the Cylon occupation and it caused the humans to split into collaborators and resistance, both well meaning but fundamentally at odds? This lead to violent conflict and, ultimately, retributive deaths? Well, that doesn’t seem very relevant. Hey, you should explain most of it in pre-season blipverts! And then resolve it three episodes later with a facile truth and reconciliation speech. See? Tidy. No hard feelings. Now let’s screw the pooch for 15 episodes before returning to the theme.
· And hey, while we’re at it, let’s use long hair, a mustache, a fat-suit, and an eye-patch as a proxy for character development… Gah! Okay, now, everybody back to normal!
· Moving on…so were the Cylons channeling Hugh Hefner this season? Glad to know that they did everything that they did so that they could grow into a bunch of aimless, childish pleasure-bots.
· WTF did you do to D’anna Biers? She started out scary…now she’s just a bizarre bearer of “Final Five” plot mulligans…
· Endless Starbuck-Apollo relationship tedium.
· Heavy handed moralizing. BSG lost its light touch, and it saddened me. I have nothing against Helo (unlike others)…but Season 3 was all about “This week, Helo taught me that discrimination is bad, m’kay?” WTF?
· Death of Kat. The noble but flawed character redeems her evil mafia past by stubbornly … waitaminute…evil mafia past? WTF? Couldn’t she just have died? (…And why do this story at all if you’re going to more or less repeat it in Razor?)
Oh, but at the end of it all, I still love this show…so, back to the love…
39. Cylon baseship theme music. I’d happily trade my humanity if I could have that as my theme music!
40. Funky Earth satellite bearing a Cylon plague. Brain cannot even begin to figure out the hows and whys of that. So, I’m choosing to let it lie, in the hopes that a dramatic and utterly relevant explanation will sideswipe us all in Season 4. So say we all!
41. Everybody boxes! They hit because they love…
42. This is an after-the-fact love, but, Tyrol finding the Eye of Jupiter. The Cylon Eye…
43. Okay, horribly telegraphed, but…killing Sharon to get her to the Baseship to rescue Hera. A neat idea. Plus, a nice encounter with “my experiences haven’t warped me at all” Boomer.
44. Oh, and the crazy insane Cylon baseship bathtub pilot. She’s trippy.
45. Kara Thrace and her special destiny tour t-shirts. It’s funny.
46. Season 3 “gotcha” endings – Starbuck lives! Final Four revealed! Cylons attack! Earth! Eeeeee! What does it mean?
47. Bob Dylan as the 12th Cylon. Seriously hairs-on-the-back-of-my-head-stood-up trippy.
· But here’s the thing…Okay, you know how in the X-Files the grey aliens were introduced as the evil conspiracy aliens, and then suddenly there was black oil, and it turned people into black oil aliens, and they turned out to be the evil conspiracy aliens, but that was okay, because eventually it was shown that the black oil aliens were actually the grey aliens in proto-plasmic form, but then suddenly in the first X-files movie the black oil aliens were changing into Geiger aliens, spitting out of human abdomens and eating people’s heads off, with no grey aliens to be found, and they were in Antarctica and a building blew up and there were some bees, and you thought to yourself… “Aw, Jesus...these bastards are just making this shit up.”? Well, my greatest fear is that this will be the case with the BSG “All Along the Watchtower” moment, if not the fourth season in its entirety. But I live in hope.
48. Razor. (The Pegasus is sooo fucked up!) Good to see you again, Admiral Cain. Loved how they could make an already done story all sorts of interesting.
49. Vivisection ship. Say it from the abdomen, girls: “Ewwwww!”
50. I’m now in love with Saul Tigh. Drunken, half-incompetent, half-competent, wife killing, “I am not a Cylon!” Saul Tigh. I’m hoping that in the first episode of Season 4, there’s a good chance I’ll see him naked. That, or the actor doing a two minute stream-of-consciousness monologue, in character, on a late-night talk show. It would be funny.
51. Season 4, Season 4, Season 4! Eeeeeeee!
