Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Friday, April 17, 2009

TV Sucking

Sometimes I watch shows on tv and hope they'll be good. Sometimes they aren't so good. Here are reviews of two show I watched this week that weren't so good even though I wanted them to be good. It's a sad thing. Spoilers follow:

Battlestar Galactica Final Episode
In the final episode of Battlestar Galactica, we are instructed that everything is cyclical and all of this has happened before. That's true: in the 90s, there was a sci fi show called Babylon 5 that showed early promise, kicked the genre on its ass in its third season and then stumbled and wheezed through it's final season before collapsing into a heaping pile of jelly in its finale.

Galactica's final episode was a huge, annoying wank of stupidity and sentimentality. Somewhere along the line the show actually morphed from rule-breaking rebel to being like the 70s original ... although the final scene with "imaginary" Six and Baltar is more like something from one of those Gilligan's Island reunion tv movies with the two of them acting like the Howells. The notion at the end is a fitting nod to the 'Chariots of the Gods' roots of the original, but it's not played well.

The first hour is dramatic and things blow up real good, but the second hour showed that the creators had become too sentimental and too attached to the characters to give them fitting resolutions. Every single character has a romantic conclusion and good-bye forced on them ... which was disappointing for a show that never pulled its punches and betrayed the running theme of things being cyclical. I finished watching the last season of The Wire last month, and they delivered a solid final episode -- also showing how things are cyclical -- without the pablum.

The hardest part to watch was the final half hour, when I found myself saying "That's stupid. That's stupid. That's stupid." every 2-3 minutes. That last half hour ranks up there with some of the dumbest tv ever produced. Worse than Friends. I can't stay up all night detailing how annoying it was, so you'll just have to go watch it for yourself on the Space website.

Now, the other show:

Fringe
Wow, it's amazing that they could create such a boring version of the show I was born to love. Fringe, an X Files knock-off, suffers from a bad case of Unnecessary Ensemble Cast Syndrome. The show has a big cast of cardboard characters who are as appealing as using lard for shampoo. Josh Jackson is the only person who really stands out because of the same "I'm acting! Why isn't anybody else acting?" attitude he had on Dawson's Creek.

The episode I watched featured a "scientifically engineered" monster that goes round scratching people. All the write-ups used the term "scientifically engineered" instead of "genentically engineered" ... were they worried about complaints from Monsanto? Scientifically engineered? Why didn't they just say that a "fantastical whiryl-majig conjures a magical beastie"? Monsanto ain't gonna complain if you phrase it like that! Isn't it weird that copywriters have to limp around the words "gentically engineered" because of the baggage of a large corporation that practices genetic engineering ... wasn't there a scene in Blade Runner where Tyrell tells Rachel to change the wording of a memo from "genetically engineered Nexus 6 replicants" to "scientifically engineered sexbots"?

Anyhow, lots of boring stuff happens and the creature turns out to be an unconvincing computer graphic that's looks like something borrowed from 1994. The big problem with the show is that it's far too much like the X Files and has an X Files sensibility about "fringe" phenomena. Well, the X Files started almost twenty years ago, before the internet and Google searches made fact checking as simple as grabbing your phone. You could have a really interesting show about cryptids and aliens and stuff like that if you came at it fresh ... but Fringe is mired in the 90s.

In conclusion, the above forementioned televisual entertainments lacked the sparkle.

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