Review: Battlestar Galactica (Spoilers!)

April 24, 2005 · Posted in Reviews · Comment 

I have recently watched the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries, followed by the first season of the TV series.

The Bit Without Spoilers

Overall, the series is entertaining enough that I want to see more of it, but I am slightly disappointed. The miniseries was a good start, but the series wasn't as good as I had hoped. A detailed analysis follows below.

The Bit With Spoilers

My two biggest problems with BG are the reset button and the secret, possibly metaphysical superplot.

It's not that I have a problem with the addition of fantastic or supernatural elements to a science fiction setting. There's nothing wrong with prescience, telepathy and mysterious prophecies, if they are done well. However, what I have seen so far does not bode well for the future.

Any devices or phenomena introduced in a science fiction or fantasy series which do not occur in the real world, whether they are classified as fantasy or science fiction elements, should have well-defined limits and behave by some set of rules, otherwise the plot becomes meaningless. It's all right if the limits and rules are not apparent from the start, but they should gradually be revealed, and the magical / hi-tech doohicky should abide by them once they are known.

The cylons appear to be able to call on the aid of an apparently omnipotent and omniscient force. They are constantly able to do impossible or at least highly unlikely things, and clearly have vast resources at their disposal. Nothing we have seen so far indicates any concrete rules governing what they can and cannot do. This is bad, because it means that no matter what happens in an episode the writers can pull out a Deus Ex Machina to make it all better (and have done so several times). It's like the Magical Transporter Beam all over again.

This leads to another problem I have with the cylon plot. The motivations of the cylons are secret. That's fine. The cylons spend the entire season doing arbitrary, inexplicable things which seem to make no sense, and the audience is given no clues that might make the cylons' behaviour fit together in retrospect. That's not fine. It doesn't feel like we're being given glimpses of a coherent big picture – it feels like the writers are making this stuff up as they go along.

Why don't the cylons just wipe the humans out? Given their vast power, they could almost certainly do so if they wanted to. Are they trying to get the humans to lead them to Earth? Why bother? They had access to the Arrow of Apollo, and they knew where Kobol was. They could have found it themselves.

At the moment my (and Simon's) theory is that the cylons are controlled by some kind of giant AI that thinks it's god, and they have some kind of plan for mankind which stems from their kooky religious beliefs. Judging by the way the metaphysical plot is going, they will probably turn out to be at least partially right, and will have some important part to play in the prophecy.

I was having bad Matrix flashbacks during the episode in which Starbuck interrogates the cylon. Sticking in lots of random profound-sounding gibberish does not make a good storyline. I really, really hope that this turns out better tha I think it will.

And then there's the reset button. BG is strongly episodic in nature (possibly the producers are playing it safe after the failure of several sci-fi shows with an emphasis on continuing story arcs). This unfortunately has come to mean that vital developments that occur in an episode are completely ignored by the next. In the middle of the season, Dr Baltar (ostensibly) sets up a procedure for testing everyone in the fleet and detecting cylon agents. The episode ends with Commander Adama's blood about to be tested, and Dr Baltar having years of work ahead of him. And then what? Nothing. We never hear about it again.

Speaking of Dr Baltar, the man is a walking plot hole. He wanders around talking to himself and acting like a deranged lunatic, and nobody notices? Nobody suspects him? Nobody challenges him when he blatantly lies and makes up outrageous crap? Why is he working alone? Are there no other surviving scientists in the entire fleet? Sure, he's supposed to be a genius, but it doesn't take genius to check another scientist's work and determine whether he's actually onto something or just bullshitting.

And we aren't really shown much evidence of his genius, at that. Everyone keeps saying he is one, but he never has any particularly clever ideas – he just wanders around gibbering nervously, and occasionally doing what the cylon tells him.

The other characters' complete inability to see anything suspicious in Dr Baltar's behaviour is only one example of characters doing implausible, silly things in order to advance the plot. Why didn't the command of Galactica do more with the information that the cylons could pass as humans? Why didn't they introduce more stringent security procedures? “Trying to prevent panic” is not a good excuse in a situation where the survival of the species is at stake.

It doesn't look like the writers think very hard about the effect that various events would realistically have on the people of the fleet – including the cataclysm which wipes out most of humanity in the miniseries. When we see glimpses of the ordinary people of the fleet, they don't look like refugees who have just escaped an apocalypse – they look like they're on vacation, or possibly slightly annoyed that their flight has been delayed. They don't look devastated and worried about getting blown out of the sky by cylons, or even particularly tense or upset. They don't look like people whose food and water is being rationed. Politics seems to be carrying on as normal, as if the fleet was a miniature replica of the twelve colonies during peacetime.

Why is that giant garden on the luxury liner still there? Why hasn't it been turned into farmland? What are these people eating? The vast amount of food required to keep them alive was mentioned briefly. Where is it coming from?

This is like the bad fantasy economy syndrome, where a writer sticks some magical gimmicks into a generic medieval setting, without giving any consideration to the ripple effect they would have on the world, and the way the world would change completely under their influence.

Lastly, a recurring problem I have had with the writing has been the cop-out treatment of difficult decisions. About once per episode, a major character is called upon to make a choice which could potentially cost human lives. And without fail, every time a character does so, something happens to demonstrate that it was clearly the correct choice, so it's all OK. Or the writers set up a strawman, so that no difficult choice actually has to be made.

President Roslyn chooses to leave behind the ships without FTL drives – and the cylons arrive just as the FTL ships leave. Baltar fingers a random person he doesn't like as a cylon spy – and he amazingly turns out to be an actual cylon spy. Roslyn decides to destroy a ship which has been taken over by cylons – and just before the vipers blow it up, we see that there are no more people left inside anyway. There is potential to discuss whether it's OK (or effective) to use torture to extract information which could save lives – but the torture subject is not human and does not think like a human, so the debate is meaningless. Argh!

All these flaws notwithstanding, I think the series still has potential. It would help if the cylons revealed their master plan in the second season. I guess I'll have to wait and see.

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The Weekend of Computer-Related Annoyances

April 4, 2005 · Posted in General, Reviews · Comment 

The Computer

If you don’t use linux, you will probably find this bit exceedingly boring. Feel free to skip to the next section, which is about teeth.

I finally installed Fedora Core 3 on Monday, and this weekend I completed a full yum upgrade. Yum’s complete lack of ability to deal with low-bandwidth connections is very annoying. I am more inspired to apply the rejected wget patch to a new version than ever before.

Yesterday I spent over an hour trying to figure out the nefarious reason behind ps’s insistence on displaying my user id instead of my user name. I went over the user config files, blamed and cursed SELinux, ran which a lot (”ZOMG!!” said Hodgestar, “What if you were h4xX0r3d??!”), and after much experimentation found the procps FAQ and discovered that it was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing – my user name is the only one on the system which is too long to be displayed, and so intentionally gets replaced by the id.

This morning, after the upgrade finished, nautilus stopped working – it would hang when started. The gnome logout also stopped working. This seems to happen to a lot of people after upgrades, and every time it seems to happen for a special and unique reason (for instance, it happened to me at work – for a completely different reason). Since nautilus has no easily accessible verbose output option, it is not very helpful in letting you know what is wrong. We tried a lot of the suggestions which seemed applicable, including rebooting, to no avail. Eventually Hodgestar searched for differences between my installation and his, and discovered that I had an old, obsolete version of bonobo installed together with the new libbonobo (why? It’s a dependency for gnucash. Wtf, man? Fortunately I don’t really want gnucash). We nuked the old bonobo and nautilus started working again.

Rargh! Ada smaaaaash!

The Teeth

Regrettably, it looks like my wisdom teeth will have to come out. And one of them is an evil wisdom tooth of doom, and will apparently require maxillo-facial surgery.

Stupid evolutionary cruft.

At least I only have three of them. And at least the immediate problem which led me to see the dentist has cleared up.

The maxillo-facial surgeon returns from overseas in mid-April. Then I will discover how much this lovely experience is going to cost me (in both money and recovery time).

The Work

Looks like I’ll be moving from my current job (programming Java webapps on Linux) to a new job (coding perl for mobile phones on FreeBSD). It all happened very suddenly. The switch is set to occur at the beginning of May.

The Bridge

I have been taught how to play bridge. I don’t really like it much; card-counting games are too much like work. At least I haven’t played with Hodgestar as my partner – we might not be speaking to each other right now.

The Comic Books

I bought Plague of Frogs (the latest BPRD trade paperback) and Season of Mists (Sandman #4, which I thought I had, but didn’t actually, although I had read most of it). Plague of Frogs is very cool; Mike Mignola wrote it, and it’s the beginning of a new, continuing story arc for the BPRD series.

I have also gone on a Dark Horse 2000AD reprint buying spree – having ordered both of the Devlin Waugh books, the Scarlet Traces hardcover and the Scarlet Traces sequel comics.

The Books Without Pictures

I read Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan), and thought it was very good – even though I usually don’t like cyberpunk. As far as mystery novels go, I think its conclusion was possibly not as neat and satisfying as it could have been, but it did a pretty good job of setting up a science-fictional premise and exploring all of its possible implications.

Now I have started Startide Rising (David Brin).

The Music

Hodgestar and I are eyeing CD Baby speculatively. We want to buy some Floater CDs. We’re looking for more CD-buying accomplices so we can save on the shipping charges.

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