While I’m on the subject of crappy-but-oh-so-polished American sci-fi shows:
Heroes. Really, does anyone care any more? At this point, the best possible outcome would be for the whole thing to be some grandiose arthouse piece that’s deliberately going to loop back on itself, so at the end we’re not merely apparently back where we started, but actually back where we started, to the very last detail.
Or maybe that already happened. Twice. I lose track.
Battlestar Galactica, meanwhile: aw, sheesh. The show’s always lurched from ‘astonishingly bold and fabulous’ to ‘oh, for heaven’s sake, this is awful’. Often within the same scene. By the end of last week’s episode I was almost willing to give up on it; this week I’m glad I didn’t, because the cylons are back. I’ve said it before, but like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park the cylons are much more rounded, believable, and internally-consistent characters than the humans.
When they have a mutiny they really go for it. They don’t play it out in barely 60 minutes then pick up next week as if nothing had happened. Ahem.
It’s that inconsistency of pacing that really bugs me. Somewhere, in all the B-roll and discarded scenes and rough cuts, there’s an outstanding, epic, triumphant series. Filtering through the 48-minute/four ad-break structure, however, the producers have only ever managed to coax glimpses of that show. What we get, then, is a tantalising impression of what might have been, but tragically isn’t.
Five episodes to go, and I’m sticking with it. I’ve come too far not to, now. And at least I know it finishes, unlike that dross Heroes, which could already be recycling plot elements for montage-show repeats, for all the sense it makes.
Actually, that would explain a lot.