Wow, tonight/today is a big day for me. I get the new Call of Duty 4 maps today and tonight is the premiere of the Final (sort of) season of Battlestar Galactica. Luckily I don’t have to choose between playing COD or watching BSG because the kind folks over at Sci-Fi sent me a copy of the screener earlier this week. They made me sign away my life to get it, but it was sort of worth it. Here’s the thing, I love all things BSG, but I thought last season sucked. After the amazing first six episodes of the season, it just spun it’s wheels until the big season ending reveal. Watching tonight’s episode, I had that feeling again. Like come on, let’s get to the point and move the story along. I have no doubt that once all 10 eps of this shortened season air, it’ll become clear how brilliant this show still is. BSG opened with a bang, they obviously have a bigger budget for their final season and they spent it beefing up the show’s SFX. There are lots of big sploshings in all it’s CGI glory. The ships make beautiful orange fireballs.
The writers clearly have a plan and now that they know the show has a definite end, I’m 100 percent sure it’s going to go out with a bang. The question is, are they going to play coy with us fans and move everything at a snail’s pace until we get to the big moments. Again, I’m not saying tonight’s episode is bad, it’s really good, but it also felt kind of blah. The problem is, BSG is known for it’s drama and characters and that seemed to take a back seat to the new enhanced SFX. The crew’s reaction to Kara’s return from the dead was spot on. I’m kind of sick to death of the whole “Who is a Cylon?” theme as well. As usual the stuff with Gaius was terrible. It looks like this season he’s going to become some Jim Jones like cult leader – which is just stupid. The ending was definitely intriguing, but the way Sci-Fi built hyped it up, I was expecting a really huge reveal. Something that’s going to propel the story forward or fundamentally change everything. Instead what I got was, that’s it? I know I sound negative; tonight’s premiere is a good opening, just not as great as I wanted it to be.
Final Grade B
EM Review
by Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 4.4.08
Maybe I’ve been spoiled since this is the first time I’ve tried watching the show in real time/on a weekly basis, but I also had that “get to the point” feeling.
SciFi.com has some very perfunctory episode guidelines up: http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/episodes/episodes.php?seas=4&ep=403&act=1
if you manipulate the url a bit in increments of 1 from 403 to 413. The basics seem interesting-ish, but nowhere near as powerful as the New Caprica episodes.