Battlestar Galactica 2.08: "Final Cut"
Sep. 12th, 2005 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khaosworksThis is the real opening of the second season, as Ron Moore puts it. The first season arc really ends with "Home" Parts 1 and 2, so you can think of it as a standard 24-episode run, the mini-series as 4 episodes, the 13 episodes of the first season and the first 7 episodes of the second.
What's remarkable about "Final Cut" isn't the premise — we've seen it before in Babylon 5's "And Now, For A Word" and "The Illusion of Truth". Stargate SG-1 did the same bit too with "Heroes" Parts 1 and 2 in their seventh season. So the idea of a documentarian's view of our characters isn't new. It's a great narrative device of course; looking at the characters from a third person, outsider perspective is a very postmodern attitude. One example off the top of my head is that most postmodern of fantasies, the Discworld: Pratchett's The Truth was, at its foundation, the same type of story, which looked at the City Watch from a reporter's point of view, and made us realize how creepy the City Watch could be if you stopped and thought about how they kept order in Ankh-Morpork.
So, the idea isn't new. What is remarkable, though, is that the way Mark Verheiden's script uses the device to really show us a side of some characters we've never seen before. Ironically, the very closeness in which we've watched the adventures of these characters in previous episodes has not allowed us to get to know these people as people rather than as heroes. Kat, just a background Viper character for the last few episodes, suddenly cracks in a way that is surprising, but yet sadly plausible. It probably says more about me that I suddenly find Starbuck sexy now that she reveals she knows poetry (and Katee Sackhoff plays the "Can I be a suspect? Please?" adorably).
We see Felix(!) Gaeta off-duty, and he's really a mellow, almost stoner kind of dude, who once got drunk enough to get a tat. We see the ground crew listening tensely, and helplessly to the comm chatter, wondering if the pilots will make it out alive. We find out more about Duala's past, and I gotta tell you, Kandyse McClure is an absolute pleasure to watch — with those expressive, doe eyes and the lines that the writers give her, she's the heart and conscience of the CIC. If I had that voice and face to guide my flight back, I'd fight like hell to make it back alive every time.
Again and again I find myself marvelling at the new series, because in the final analysis, it's not science fiction. BSG is adult, compelling drama, which just happens to be set in a science fictional universe with a science fictional situation. Moore's choice of what he calls naturalistic science fiction was a very good one; in never giving us technobabble, in grounding the day-to-day language in what we normally use instead of giving everyone the cod-Shakespearean dialogue we've expected from television SF since the days of Gene Roddenberry or even Doctor Who, he becomes free — and we become free to witness — the way these people are living with an impossible situation, being the last 48,000-odd of their race. And because we don't have to concentrate on understanding the jargon, we get sucked in totally.
To the point where, at the end of "Final Cut", I had actually forgotten that I knew beforehand that D'Anna Biers — a blonde Lucy Lawless speaking in her natural Kiwi accent, completely unrecognizable as Xena — was actually a Cylon. I remembered a couple of seconds before the reveal, but Lawless had acted her part so flawlessly, and the script and the directing had directed me towards the rest of the story so well, that it completely slipped my mind. If I hadn't read the spoilers beforehand, I would never have guessed. Well, maybe I would have suspected something was up with those two lone Raiders, but I would never have connected it with Biers.
And yeah, I'm a sucker. I was grinning so hard when they used the original Stu Phillips BSG theme over the documentary. The fact that the theme is the Colonial Anthem is a nice touch.
If you've never watched BSG before, or if you know people who've never watched it before, "Final Cut" is a great place to start. 9 out of 10. I only dock it a point because of the rather half-hearted B-plot, that of the death threats to Tigh, which interested me very little.
What's remarkable about "Final Cut" isn't the premise — we've seen it before in Babylon 5's "And Now, For A Word" and "The Illusion of Truth". Stargate SG-1 did the same bit too with "Heroes" Parts 1 and 2 in their seventh season. So the idea of a documentarian's view of our characters isn't new. It's a great narrative device of course; looking at the characters from a third person, outsider perspective is a very postmodern attitude. One example off the top of my head is that most postmodern of fantasies, the Discworld: Pratchett's The Truth was, at its foundation, the same type of story, which looked at the City Watch from a reporter's point of view, and made us realize how creepy the City Watch could be if you stopped and thought about how they kept order in Ankh-Morpork.
So, the idea isn't new. What is remarkable, though, is that the way Mark Verheiden's script uses the device to really show us a side of some characters we've never seen before. Ironically, the very closeness in which we've watched the adventures of these characters in previous episodes has not allowed us to get to know these people as people rather than as heroes. Kat, just a background Viper character for the last few episodes, suddenly cracks in a way that is surprising, but yet sadly plausible. It probably says more about me that I suddenly find Starbuck sexy now that she reveals she knows poetry (and Katee Sackhoff plays the "Can I be a suspect? Please?" adorably).
We see Felix(!) Gaeta off-duty, and he's really a mellow, almost stoner kind of dude, who once got drunk enough to get a tat. We see the ground crew listening tensely, and helplessly to the comm chatter, wondering if the pilots will make it out alive. We find out more about Duala's past, and I gotta tell you, Kandyse McClure is an absolute pleasure to watch — with those expressive, doe eyes and the lines that the writers give her, she's the heart and conscience of the CIC. If I had that voice and face to guide my flight back, I'd fight like hell to make it back alive every time.
Again and again I find myself marvelling at the new series, because in the final analysis, it's not science fiction. BSG is adult, compelling drama, which just happens to be set in a science fictional universe with a science fictional situation. Moore's choice of what he calls naturalistic science fiction was a very good one; in never giving us technobabble, in grounding the day-to-day language in what we normally use instead of giving everyone the cod-Shakespearean dialogue we've expected from television SF since the days of Gene Roddenberry or even Doctor Who, he becomes free — and we become free to witness — the way these people are living with an impossible situation, being the last 48,000-odd of their race. And because we don't have to concentrate on understanding the jargon, we get sucked in totally.
To the point where, at the end of "Final Cut", I had actually forgotten that I knew beforehand that D'Anna Biers — a blonde Lucy Lawless speaking in her natural Kiwi accent, completely unrecognizable as Xena — was actually a Cylon. I remembered a couple of seconds before the reveal, but Lawless had acted her part so flawlessly, and the script and the directing had directed me towards the rest of the story so well, that it completely slipped my mind. If I hadn't read the spoilers beforehand, I would never have guessed. Well, maybe I would have suspected something was up with those two lone Raiders, but I would never have connected it with Biers.
And yeah, I'm a sucker. I was grinning so hard when they used the original Stu Phillips BSG theme over the documentary. The fact that the theme is the Colonial Anthem is a nice touch.
If you've never watched BSG before, or if you know people who've never watched it before, "Final Cut" is a great place to start. 9 out of 10. I only dock it a point because of the rather half-hearted B-plot, that of the death threats to Tigh, which interested me very little.
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Date: 2005-09-12 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 04:55 pm (UTC)Brilliant show.
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Date: 2005-09-13 05:54 pm (UTC)Pratchett's "The Truth" annoyed me a bit, if only that it stole most of the concepts I had been trying to work into a piece of fic for years in which Star Trek and Blake's 7 were just different perspectives on the same universe (I can only think of one episode of Trek that came close to that, TNG "Preemptive Strike").