Brad Ideas - Worldcon panel on BSG surprisingly negative - Comments

Demoralising and Pedantic...?

Disappointed — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:07:37 -0800

Then don't read it, wanker.

Update: Dollhouse Cancelled

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:08:25 -0800

Dollhouse has just been cancelled by Fox. The chances of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles being revived is slim to none. Stupid studio execs.

Update: Dollhouse Ratings Tank

Anonymous — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:18:05 -0700

Just an update on the Dollhouse versus Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles thing. I was really, really pissed that Dollhouse got the green light on a whim and the arguably better TSCC got the axe because the budget wouldn't support both sci-fi shows. The latest news is Dollhouse has tanked in the ratings with its new series premier.

I was reading through some of the history of Star Trek and there was a similar thing going on with its ratings and TSCC. Star Trek had lowish ratings but attracted a premium audience. The ratings systems of the day weren't mature enough to pick up on that so the show got axed. Today, TSCC faced a similar issue with ratings being boosted by deferred viewing on Tivo style devices. It's a damn shame the fan campaign didn't work this time around or we might have squeezed a third series.

Brad is a faggot.

Ronald — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:22:28 -0700

Brad is a faggot.

Your blog

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:43:53 -0700

Dear Brad,

May I say that your BSG content is among the most demoralising and pedantic i've ever read. Your blog should be renamed 'Why I Hate Battlestar Galactica'.

Really, sir, a positive article would have been appreciated.

Edaveg

Avatar Review and Word of Mouth

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:24:51 -0700

BBC radio's art show "Front Row" reviewed Avatar at IMAX London. It's the biggest 3D screen so nobody has any technical excuses, and they said it was confused and underwhelming. I'm not suggesting "Front Row" are an authority on anything or that some people won't like it but the promotion campaign for Avatar whiffs a bit.

Studio executives are said to be "execited". In the current flat and talentless landscape anything that adds novelty interest and thwarts copyright infringement probably does "excite" them but beyond that it's last just years marketing strategy. The trailer gave away bad use of CGI and the whole story. It should be renamed 'Cameron Revolutions'.

Battlestar Galactica. Windows Vista. Avatar. Yay. It's telling when even the pirate networks won't carry something, and both the last series of Battlestar Galactica and Windows Vista were poorly represented. Nobody was that interested even when they could get it for free. You couldn't give it away. I suspect, Avatar will tell a similar story.

Oh, that's better.

DS — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:13:46 -0700

...You opened with a less acerbic tone this time. Much appreciated.

Ayup, there's always a price. I haven't seen T:S yet, which is unusual because I've been a fan of Bale since American Psycho (yknow, before Batman), and didn't entirely hate Terminator 3. It just sort of came and went; I'm sure I'll see it on dvd/bluray at some point. By the same token, I never really associated the angle presented by it with TSCC either. They seemed sort of...separate, with their own agenda. So yeah, I agree, blaming TSCC for anything T:S related just indicates to me that the movie was so poor it has to blame what should have been virtually free advertisement for its inadequacies.

Oh, no. You're back to the harsh language and assertions. See, that's sort of why I take it as black-and-white, and personal. Those words, 'bullshit' and 'chinese meal' are nothing as adjectives if not personal and black-and-white. Aliens was pretty popular, and set the precedent for the action-movie follow-up to the horror in the sci-fi genre (which T2 is to the original T1), not to mention a slew of fun quotes and solidifying the badass-bitch image of Ripley. Titanic made a lot of money. A lot. Avatar, not out yet so I won't comment. I'm not entirely sure how we even got onto Cameron other than maybe some vague association to Summer Glau's character and the Terminator movies. How this relates to the issue of Dollhouse and T:TSCC is utterly beyond me, but hey, whatever. Let's see where the ride takes us.

I'd never tout the man as some big hero and a driving force, so again, not sure where you got that from.

As for your apparent lamentation for Star Wars...uhm...I don't think you should cry too loudly about the state of cinema and the clout of certain directors if you're going to hold even the original trilogy on a pedestal that cites them as unrivaled since. I suggest you read the original discussion between Spielberg and Lucas as they were brainstorming Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some of the crap Lucas comes out with is downright hilarious. Star Wars IV-VI was great, no doubt. But to want 'another in our life time'?...did you miss that little trilogy about the little people and a magic ring?

You're reading to much into

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:04:48 -0700

You're reading to much into my comments and turning things into a black and white, and personal issue. That would be leaning on things too hard. Perhaps people made the best choices from their perspective but I'm not sure they made the best choices overall. Management and finance aren't encouraging but, as I've suggested, there's always a price.

It's interesting how the producers of Terminator: Salvation blamed T:TSCC for cutting into their numbers. The fact that T4 was poorly conceived and executed and, well, just an unpopular POS didn't seem to enter their minds. Again, too much stupidity and money is riding on it for them to back down. This does not bode well but we shall see.

Aliens was bullshit. Titanic was syrup. Avatar looks like a chinese meal. That's some progression Cameron is making. If Cameron is supposed to be some big hero and a driving force behind sci-fi in the movies I'd rather he didn't bother. He's beginning to get the whiff of Wachowski brothers about him (and look how that ended).

It's depressing to think we may never experience another Star Wars in our lifetimes.

Ahhh...

DS — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:20:02 -0700

Dollhouse vs. TSCC. I knew there had to be something at least slightly personal to this. Until I bit the bullet and watched Dollhouse, I'd have fully agreed. Then again, I did rewatch TSCC season 1 recently, enjoyed it, started season 2 and sort of just let it dwindle. Dollhouse, on the other hand, was painfully bad for the first half and (unsurprisingly) grabbed my attention the moment Whedon was given the reins in episode 6. It's a touchy subject because no one's going to forget the Firefly situation (which most agree was a sad thing), so for Whedon to actually make it to season 2 again is of course a cheer for the fans. As objectively as possible, I consider Dollhouse as Whedon envisaged it to be far more potential as a series than TSCC, which had an inevitable shelf-life due to the outcome being somewhat known. If you've seen Dollhouse you'll know that Epitaph One sort of goes there, but not really.

All I get from your posts is 'I don't like Whedon', which is fair enough. The rest is fairly vacuous speculation. 'The hammer will fall' just makes me laugh -- you're relying on a vagary to ensure my agreement. Of course it'll fall, but if 'when' weren't a factor you would have said 'when'. As for how hard -- who cares? Axed is axed. Canceled is canceled. When it comes to something as black-and-white as 'renew/cancel', the magnitude of the hammer's blow is irrelevant to when it'll strike.

Hammer to Fall

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:47:38 -0700

I don't have anything against good drama but what I've seen so far of Caprica is it ain't good drama. The other thing I'm pissed about is Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles got axed in favour of Dollhouse just because the producer had the hots for Whedon. I disagree with the choices they've made but you might as fight some dumb decision at city hall for all the good it will do. You can laugh and nitpick, and wave hands at "YOU people" but this isn't very smart negotiating tactics. Wrong headed producers and alienated audiences almost always head towards the big bust. The question isn't when is the hammer going to fall but how hard.

Oh, I'm happily Hollywood's b@%tch.

DS — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:21:55 -0700

As I've said elsewhere, I'm a great target audience: not a complete moron so I can grasp deeper nuances, but not so anal that I have trouble enjoying a movie with nothing more to offer than Megan Fox's bouncing attributes and giant fighting robots. I reserve most of my finer discerning tastes for the written word. Anything visual or aural is candy to me -- be it brain or eye.

I like 'speculative or romantic' -- you seem to understand the real meaning of the word 'romance', in the myth sense. In that way, Star Wars was far, far more romantic than speculative. I didn't really see much speculation in it -- just givens. Yep, we have light speed travel. Yep, laser swords. YEP we have psychic power and can channel lightning. Awesome. At the other end of the scale, what Brad terms as 'real sci-fi' (or hard) is all sorts of speculative, and I'll be honest, it sort of bores me. I don't find the what-ifs anywhere near as interesting as the what-ares, regardless of the givens of the narrative world at hand. Oh, that was so poorly worded. Okay -- spec-fic to me dwells too much on the what-if instead of using it to actually, you know, tell a story. And I think that's why Star Wars was so believable: the story made sense. The other stuff, it was just part of the story. Laser swords or magic swords, the Force or magic, light speed or teleporting. They're just devices to facillitate the tale at hand. I don't believe that hard sci-fi always makes that grade.

I guess I'm not really alone there either -- Margaret Weis wrote her trilogy 'Star of the Guardians' and termed it 'galactic romance', I believe was the term. This could have just been because of the stigma against sci-fi at the time, but she'd be the last person to worry about genre prejudices, given her extensive work in helping define the post-Tolkien fantasy genre through Dragonlance.

Broad strokes like 'cinema seems to have been ruined by big budgets' are fun to make, but hardly fair. You can still see an arthouse/indie film at the cinema if you want. More than a few do disgustingly well even with the glossiest-of-the-glossy, the Oscars: Juno and Little Miss Sunshine being prime recent examples. I definitely wouldn't blame fat wallets for the dumbing-down of certain films and genres, at least not exclusively. What interests me is how the same people who demand, post-Buffy (or any other arc-based show of the late nineties you care to name), coherent, relatively drawn-out epic story arcs can sit for two hours and watch the likes of Twilight or Angels and Demons. I honestly believe we have almost different internal mechanisms for receiving and interpretting movies than we do for tv shows. I said I'd gladly be Hollywood's bitch -- and it's true. My taste in TV shows, however, is pretty damn selective.

Sci-fi isn't dead -- it's just changing meaning. I know, that seems semantic, but I think it's an important distinction. I'm absolutely thrilled that the comic-book/cartoon movie is inheriting most of sci-fi's bad habits and traits. I think that sort of grandeur and flashiness belongs in a world of speed-lines and excess, and that sci-fi is all about how humans (or at least sentient beings) exist and thrive in a world that is somehow not ours, whether that's simply due to some paradigm shift or something more extreme, like a whole different definition of 'reality'. Sci-fi isn't dead -- I hope it's just shedding its too-slick skin and hardening up against its own less-than-shiny habitat.

Hm.

DS — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:01:26 -0700

At the risk of coming across as a fan, James Marsters on Caprica definitely ups the stakes for me. It figures, though: you have three BSG stars headed for Whedon's Dollhouse (call it selling out, call it awesome -- I call it a paycheque), so a little Whedonesque export to the BSG stable is far from surprising. As for your comment about the 'already awful BSG', it stands to reason that you'd despise Caprica as well. It plays on the melodramatic strengths and the conceits of seasons 3 and 4 far more than the earlier seasons. And some of us really like that. I suppose if some of us didn't, BSG would have been cancelled much sooner (and I know some of YOU wish it had been. It wasn't, deal with it). So if Caprica, which already has actors I'd be tuned into, BSG or not (especially Stoltz), gains Marsters from Buffy/Angel (and a fun cameo on Torchwood), yay. Thanks for telling me. Sorry you're all disgruntled about it, but glad you mentioned it.

Also, it's 'Espenson'. Kinda hard to take your bombastic vitriol seriously when you can't spell the name of your supposed target right. ^_^ Not that I take bombastic vitriol seriously anyway, but sometimes it's funny. Sometimes.

Return of the Revenge of the Filler Queen

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:38:29 -0700

Just when I thought the BSG franchise couldn't sink any lower Jane Espensen, The Filler Queen, has brought in James Marsters, a former star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to play a leading role in Caprica. I'm sure Espensen is a professional insofar as she does what she's told and turns up on time but her episodes on the already awful BSG were an experience on par with listening to a dentist's drill. If the Sci-fi channel (SyFy, or Slow Fart, or whatever they're calling themselves this week) think this is the future of Sci-Fi on television the management might like to loosen the kneck-ties throttling their obviously oxygen starved brains before their business becomes a (bigger) joke. Oh, business. Yeah. That's what this is about. Sorry, I forgot.

New blood

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:29:16 -0700

I tend to agree with most of that.

Sci-fi and fantasy are lumped together because they're mostly speculative, or romantic: flipsides of the same coin. As long as sci-fi puts sci-fi at the front of peoples minds that's where it will stay. The comment on Tom Clancy is worth running with - he puts situations and people first and the technology or political fantasy elements of his novels are pushed more to the back. While Star Wars has its pluses and minuses it did have a lot of presence on-screen and broad auidence appeal. It seemed believeable. It was real, at least, during the time it was being watched.

Good blockbuster sc-fi movies seem to be an increasingly rare event. The last one I really enjoyed was The Matrix. Before that, Total Recall. Cinema seems to have been ruined by big budgets. Games are very slick now but suffering from being over-produced and compromised by porting. Overall, it's a very depressing picture.

It's easy to become cynical and jaded as you get older, like the character in the Robert Redford movie 'The Candidate', and that's another reason why I think it's fair to say sci-fi is dead. It has to die before people can let go of the old memes and established franchises and start cutting new ground. Perhaps, smaller budgets and less rule by committee would help. Certainly, Robert Cialdini makes a persuasive case for leaders consulting but taking the ultimate decision themselves. A few more risk takers who can carry an audience would help.

Being unique

brad — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:42:39 -0700

Other genres of speculative fiction and speak to the future of course, but they will do it in a different way. And it’s not a binary thing. Say you want to do a story about killer robots. You can write the story in a galactic empire with FTL, even though such a thing is to our current knowledge impossible, but if you make the robots themselves impossible, it’s hard for you to provide as compelling a speculation about robot issues. Again it’s a matter of degree. A few small things wrong may not ruin it. If your whole plot hinges on something wrong, it’s just not going to be able to work the same way.

Worldcon panel on BSG surprisingly negative

brad — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:54:22 -0700

On Saturday I attended the Battlestar Galactica Postmortem panel at the World Science Fiction convention in Montreal. The “worldcon” is the top convention for serious fans of SF, with typically 4,000 to 6,000 attendees from around the world. There are larger (much larger) “media” conventions like ComicCon an DragonCon, but the Worlcon is considered “it” for written SF. It gives out the Hugo award. While the fans at a worldcon do put an emphasis on written SF, they also are voracious consumers of media SF, and so there are many panels on it, and two Hugo awards for it.

Two things surprised me a bit about the Worldcon panel. First of all, it was much more lightly attended than I would have expected considering the large fandom BSG built, and how its high quality had particularly appealed to these sorts of fans. Secondly, it was more negative and bitter about the ending that I would have expecting — and I was expecting quite a lot.

In fact, a few times audience members and panelists felt it necessary to encourage the crowd to stop just ranting about the ending and to talk about the good things. In spite of being so negative on the ending myself I found myself being one of those also trying to talk about the good stuff.

What was surprising was that while I still stand behind my own analysis, I know that in many online communities opinion on the ending is more positive. There are many who hate it but many who love it, and at least initially, more who loved it in some communities.

The answer may be is that it is the serious SF fan, the fan who looks to books as the source of the greatest SF, the BSG ending was the largest betrayal. Here we were hoping for a show that would bring some of the quality we seek in written SF to the screen, and here it fell down. Fans with a primary focus on movie and TV SF were much more tolerant of the ending, since as I noted, TV SF endings are almost never good anyway, and the show itself was a major cut above typical TV SF.

The small audience surprised me. I have seen other shows such as Buffy (which is not even SF), Babylon 5 and various forms of Star Trek still fill a room for discussion of the show. It is my contention that had BSG ended better, it would have joined this pantheon of great shows that maintains a strong fandom for decades.

The episode “Revelations” where the ruined Earth is discovered was nominated for the Hugo for best short dramatic program. It came in 4th — the winner was the highly unusual “Dr. Horrible’s sing-along-blog” which was a web production from fan favourite Joss Whedon of Buffy and Firefly. BSG won a Hugo for the first episode “33” and has been nominated each year since then but has failed to win each time, with a Doctor Who episode the winner in each case.

At the panel, the greatest source of frustration was the out-of-nowhere decision to abandon all technology, with Starbuck’s odd fate a #2. This matches the most common complaints I have seen online.

On another note, while normally Worldcon Hugo voters tend to go for grand SF books, this time the best Novel award went to Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book.” Gaiman himself, in his acceptance speech, did the odd thing of declaring that he thought Anathem (which was also my choice) should have won. Anathem came 2nd or 3rd, depending on how you like to read STV ballot counting. Gaiman however, was guest of honour at the convention, and it attracted a huge number of Gaiman fans because of this, which may have altered the voting. (Voting is done by convention members. Typically about 1,000 people will vote on best novel.)