Georg was away for a couple of days, and I did what I always do when he's away: hole up at home with a bunch of DVDs. This time it was Battlestar Galactica. It's a great show! Why did it take me so long to check it out? It's not like everyone I knew was telling me how good it was. No wait, it was exactly like that.
I watched the pilot miniseries and the first four episodes, and the next DVD will get here tomorrow. I can hardly wait: episode 4 ended with a cliffhanger! I love how the First Lady from Independance Day is now the President. I tried to watch the commentary for the first episode -- the one with the 33 minutes thing -- but I couldn't get into the commentary. Too bad because the episode was fantastic. Good commentary must be really hard to do, because so few people are good at it. These guys were a little too self-congratulatory for me. I mean, it's a good show and all, but when they compared themselves to Dostoyevsky I gave up. The Onion AV Club's "Commentary Tracks of the Damned" feature calls that sort of thing the "inevitable dash of pretention." I think I'm better off never listening to commentary tracks unless they're a) by Joss Whedon or b) on a Criterion disc.
Unfortunately I went online to find out whether Battlestar Galactica is still airing and what season they're up to, and I accidently found out a pretty major spoiler (a human character who's actually a Cylon). Dang. It looks like season 4 is about to start, but with season 3 not out on DVD yet I probably can't get caught up before the new episodes start airing.
No worries, the new season doesn't start until January.
I LOVED the first season of BG. I really liked parts of the second season. I thought some of the third season episodes were OK. I'm trepidatious about the fourth season. I think the thing that took the show off track is the same thing that changed ER from a really good ensemble drama to an insufferable bore: misguided character "development." Done poorly, it amounts to entire episodes of some character you may have once liked becoming all broody, tortured and whiny until you can't stand 'em anymore. I really want to hear what you think as you go along--perhaps you will disagree with me ...