Monday, October 12, 2009
An Angel on His Shoulder, A Devil on Hers
The fine folks over at BenBella Books have posted the full text of one of the essays I did for them, "An Angel on His Shoulder, A Devil on Hers", from their title So Say We All: Collected Thoughts and Opinions on Battlestar Galactica, edited by Richard Hatch.
Anyone who has suffered through one of my rants about Battlestar Galactica knows how I feel about the last few seasons of the series, and about the finale in particular, and my ire over the epic fail may obscure the passion with which I raved about the first seasons earlier on.
One of my favorite pastimes is trying to anticipate where things on good television series are headed. The complex ones, I mean, that are clearly built around puzzles and mysteries. Allison and I are currently rewatching Lost from the beginning, and I've been gradually refining my Grand Unified Theory of Lost as we go. From the first moments of the initial BSG miniseries I devoted a fair amount of brain processing capacity to figuring out where the show was heading, what the "plan" of the Cylons was exactly, and what would happen next. This essay represents my thinking at somewhere around the middle of the series, if I recall correctly, sometime shortly after the liberation of New Caprica. You know, right before it All Went Wrong. Of course, my projections and predictions turned out to be entirely wrong ("Oh, you mean they're really angels?! Of course, I should have seen that all along!"), but if you're curious in seeing a kind of under-informed "what if" scenario about just what was going on with the version of Six that haunted Baltar (and the image of Baltar that haunted Caprica Six), this is your chance. Consider it fan-fiction, and leave it at that.
Anyone who has suffered through one of my rants about Battlestar Galactica knows how I feel about the last few seasons of the series, and about the finale in particular, and my ire over the epic fail may obscure the passion with which I raved about the first seasons earlier on.
One of my favorite pastimes is trying to anticipate where things on good television series are headed. The complex ones, I mean, that are clearly built around puzzles and mysteries. Allison and I are currently rewatching Lost from the beginning, and I've been gradually refining my Grand Unified Theory of Lost as we go. From the first moments of the initial BSG miniseries I devoted a fair amount of brain processing capacity to figuring out where the show was heading, what the "plan" of the Cylons was exactly, and what would happen next. This essay represents my thinking at somewhere around the middle of the series, if I recall correctly, sometime shortly after the liberation of New Caprica. You know, right before it All Went Wrong. Of course, my projections and predictions turned out to be entirely wrong ("Oh, you mean they're really angels?! Of course, I should have seen that all along!"), but if you're curious in seeing a kind of under-informed "what if" scenario about just what was going on with the version of Six that haunted Baltar (and the image of Baltar that haunted Caprica Six), this is your chance. Consider it fan-fiction, and leave it at that.
