Late To This Party

Late to This Party

You know, I know I'm not telling a lot of you anything you don't know already.

But Battlestar Galactica is The Shit.

It's one of those things I avoided for the longest time. I tend to do that nowadays. When people start recommending something, a lot of people, I'll tend to shy away. Because I get my hopes up. I get them up to an unreachable point. And when I finally do watch (or read, or listen to) what this throng of folks has been raving about, I can't help but be disappointed.

There are exceptions. The Usual Suspects was like that. Everybody told me how AWESOME this movie was, but I waited a long time before watching it. It was probably five or six years old before I saw The Usual Suspects. I had to admit. Yeah, Usual Suspects is a fucking great movie.

Amelie was another. It just didn't seem like my cup of tea. But everybody recommended it. From Kevin Smith to my roommate to the clerk at Videoculture who told me to rent it when I couldn't find anything else to watch. I watched it, and thought it was simply a wonderful movie.

With a book, The Da Vinci Code might be an example...I, like Sheila says in this post, enjoyed the book immensely in spite of myself and Brown's irritating writing style...

Music? A recent example, and though I didn't wait long, I had three or four people tell me how much they enjoyed Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome/The Seeger Sessions. I just kinda blew it off, thinking it couldn't be so great. Then I heard "Pay Me My Money Down" on XM Friday, and had to go buy the CD after work yesterday. I love that album.

But anyway, I'm wandering here.

There were lots of reasons I didn't watch Battlestar Galactica. For one, work lately has made it so that watching episodic teevee isn't something you can count on. I really dig Lost, but haven't watched any of this season because I can't count on being home, and my memory's shitty enough that I can't think to record (and there's nothing so fancy as TiVo at Casa de BSTommy). I'll wait for the DVD.

What's more, I like Scrubs, My Name is Earl and The Office. A sitcom is a little easier to pick up on in the middle, so I watch those when I can.

But I couldn't count on being able to watch Galactica, so I didn't even start with it.

Add to that I haven't really found myself digging anything really SF off of the teevee for quite some time...probably since Star Trek Deep Space Nine went off the air...a lot of what's been recommended comes off cheap, or has flashes of brilliance that get obscured by truckloads of crap.

Or they get lured into the trap of sacrificing story for effects.

Or they make it so that you can't identify at all with anybody...

But thanks to the beauty of DVD, and thanks to the nice folks at Netflix, who let you check out just about anything for that one low price...

Folks, Battlestar Galactica is f'ing awesome.

After watching the mini-series from Netflix, I just went and bought the first season. Identified immediately that this is something I can watch, and watch again and probably pull something completely different away from it.

I'm working my way through it slowly. Recognizing that if I wanted to, I could sit and blow through a season in a day, I'm taking it slow.

I'll try to write more on what I think about the show. I love that it's not glorifying anybody here. Nobody's a hero by character design. You have people who sacrifice and do great things, but who have (sometimes deep) character flaws.

I love that it doesn't dwell on its SF aspects, letting the characters tell the story.

I love the bit when Dr. Baltar thinks his mental torment of #6 is invisible to everybody else at one point, when she's arrived to attempt to implicate Baltar. It could have been hammed up so much, but it's a wonderful moment.
Lots of great stuff. Thank Jeebus for DVD.