however, i did manage to stay awake last night for the entirety of “Point Pleasant,” much to my dismay. it’s The O.C. — with occasional references to the Prince of Darkness. so disappointing.

“I was given the opportunity to watch the recent BATTLESTAR GALACTICA TV
miniseries the other day. Its inaugural screening on America’s Sci-Fi
Channel was very successful, the third most-watched programme they’ve ever
broadcast. Which is still only, you know, four and a half million people,
but I’m given to understand that for a niche cable channel that’s pretty
damned good.

It doesn’t quite have the courage of its convictions.

I watched it because I did a Bad Signal some months ago about the response
to the writer/producer Ronald Moore from hardcore fans of the original TV
series. Fifty-odd ageing fanatic followers of a bad 70s sci-fi TV show
with heavy Mormon overtones, given the opportunity to submit questions to
Moore for a website interview, subjected him to a bizarre inquisition
reminiscent of HUAC interrogations. These people purely radiated hatred
for him, based upon a smattering of earlier comments he made about his
intended approach to the work.

His intent was to jettison everything that made the original stupid —
which was quite a bit, as the original was barely passable as children’s
television — and build a realistic adult sf drama around what was left.
Lose the dumb names, remove idiocies like sound in space, get rid of the
Erich Von Daniken-via-Salt Lake City messianism, maintain a dramatic tone.

He didn’t lose nearly enough to make it a serious piece of work.

The first obvious failure of courage is, in the opening scenes, the
presence of, guess what, sound in space. Which is oddly jarring since the
special effects are excellent. Taking their cue from things like the
effects work of FIREFLY, the camera zooms and shakes to capture vessels in
flight from unusual POVs, the result of Moore’s conviction that the
spaceborne “camerawork” should reflect not an omniscent floating POV, but
actual thinking about where the “cameras” might be located. At the
conclusion of the opening scene, in fact, the “camera” is struck by flying
debris, and our POV spins off into space before fading into black. This is
what’s going to be lifted by the copycats — a return to long- and
middle-distance focus in visual sf to communicate scale. (The AUTHORITY
trick, if you like, borrowed from sf manga)

These very realistic images, occasionally inspired by such things as the
cameras mounted on Apollo spacecraft, rub hard against the goofiness of
Cylon fighters sounding like racing cars as they zoom past our field of
vision.

The original show starred some frankly awful actors. Lorne Greene,
heartdead from years of TV Westerns, had a good voice and little else, and
was surrounded by pleasant yet giftless presences like Dirk Benedict,
Richard Hatch, and The Crying Girl Whose Job Was To Tell The Crew That
Everyone Was Dead. If I wanted to be cruel, I’d note that in the new
version The Crying Girl is now black and gets to smack the tonsils clean
out of a wimpy political aide with her tongue.

Edward James Olmos, in Lorne Greene’s role, is twice the actor Greene was.
Katee Sackhoff, as Kara Thrace (callsign “Starbuck”), plays against her
looks — in repose, she is strikingly pretty, but she spends most of the
piece grinning and gurning — with wild abandon, entirely prepared to make
her character an unpleasant living shitbomb blasting everyone around her
with shrapnel. Mary McDonnell, whom I haven’t seen onscreen since
SNEAKERS, wears an emotional quirkiness close to the surface as the dying
education secretary promoted to President in the wake of human society
being destroyed by the bad old Cylon robot things. She, in particular,
suffers from frame-fucking — hard cutting and dialogue overlapping shots,
denying her complete in-frame performances.

What Moore can’t leave alone are the elements that made GALACTICA fantasy.
In the new version, everyone has English (or, at least, Terran) names —
but they all pray (a lot) to The Lords Of Kobol, and at the end they revive
the whole thing about Earth being a mythic “lost colony”. So the
commander’s name is William, but Earth was colonised at the same time as
their twelve worlds? I call bullshit on you. It’s a logical hiccup, an
element of out-and-out fantasy in something that had been otherwise
rigorously imagined with strong internal logic. How hard would it have
been to have Earth as the original source of the twelve colonies, thereby
closing that loop? That gives you the Lords Of Kobol (dumb name) as the
leaders of the original colonies, perhaps in the mode of Roger Zelazny’s
LORD OF LIGHT. I don’t mean to rewrite the guy — my point is that he
works hard to persuade a viewer to sit down and commit to the piece, and
then leaves a leg off the chair.

I think maybe as a writer working in a visual medium I watch these things
differently to someone looking to be entertained. I was bugged by every
officer on the ship having a different salute, for instance. One service,
one style of salute. Internal consistency is important in sf , because it
asks the viewer to process so much new information. (This is part of why
Star Trek is considered to be worthy of continual renewal — the audience
is already educated in its world.) We need things to recognise, and we
need to be taken in. Show me eight different forms of salute in ten
minutes and I’ll show you a bunch of bloody actors. And a writer-producer
that’s thought hard, but sometimes not hard enough.

There’s a lot of sound acting, some intelligent (and callous) setpieces,
and in general it’s a lot better than it has any right to be. You find
yourself allowing for some occasional tacky and cheap-looking bits, because
it’s trying very very hard. You just about forgive it for Boxey — the
orphan kid from the original, cloned here, and, somehow, with the same
Seventies haircut.

It’s worth watching. It puts most, if not all, recent sf tv in the shade.
It’s not as charming as FIREFLY (too late) became, but it shows ENTERPRISE
up as the plain, thin thing it is. And if it’s Trek alumnus Ron Moore who
illustrates, even with a revamp, that sf tv needs to grow up a bit, then
that seems kind of just to me.”

Also, got your comment on my blog. Am I to read your mention of cooler GWU friends as saying that you went to GW? (I’m sorry to pose it this way, but I didn’t see an e-mail address here, and the one on the old site was bounced back.)