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Monday, January 26, 2009

GINO can't end soon enough

I'm watching the rest of the Galactica In Name Only Series out of a perverse sense of duty, and it just keeps getting worse. If you don't know anything about this series, allow me to elaborate. 

The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. And they have a plan.

Part of the plan involves pushing back the date of their creation by several thousand years. See, when they were created by man, they were clunky and inelegant, like walking toasters. But BEFORE they were created by man, and long before they evolved, they were people, and they started their own colony millions of light years away on a planet called Earth, where they created their own centurions that look a lot like Tom DeSanto’s designs. There they ate fresh fruit and played sweet Dylan tunes and wore power suits before blowing themselves up and forgetting who they were. Then they conveniently show up jillions of miles away in the Colonies and, when things get rough on a Cylon-occupied Iraqi planet, the Original Cylons kill as many New Cylons as possible, but not before one of them kills another one after getting his eye ripped out with an ice cream scoop. The one-eyed Cylon hates Cylons most of all, which is why he boinks a model that is WAY hotter than he is and gets her pregnant, even though Cylons can’t get pregnant unless, of course, they’re in love, which is the same lie millions of high school boys have used on their naïve and in-love girlfriends, only with Cylons, it’s true, unless you’re a one-eyed Cylon hater that’s essentially raping the Hot Blonde Cylon but fantasizing that she’s the Cylon wife you murdered, only in your fantasies, she’s wearing a bad wig that makes her look like a three-dollar, 50-year-old hooker. Anyway, the Hot Blonde Cylon is now holding hands with the One-Eyed Cylon and making googly eyes (three eyes in all) at the ultrasound pics, which ticks off the one-legged gay non-Cylon who only likes chicks if they’re Cylons, but you wouldn’t know that unless you’ve seen the webisodes. One-Eyed Cylon is the number two guy among the Non-Cylons, too, but he’s all mad when another Original Cylon starts making demands that the New Cylons be full citizens in the fleet, even though this Original Cylon is not living with the New Cylons and is too busy worrying about being cuckolded by a guy named Hot Dog, which is probably the only part of this long and convoluted paragraph that makes a lick of sense if you really think about it.

All this, of course, is irrelevant to what the writers are really interested in, which is custody disputes, middle-aged lovin’ with Talosian chicks, political haggling, and universal healthcare.

Gaaaargh.

I know I don’t come across as a big fan of this series, so stating that I’m disappointed with where this show is going carries absolutely no weight at all. But I can’t imagine that anyone who’s been admiring the Emperor’s New Clothes for the past four and a half seasons can be pleased with the direction Moore is taking his little opus for the last ten episodes.

You know all those questions you have? Well, Moore has decided to answer all the questions you don’t have first. Maybe he’ll give cursory answers to the interesting questions, but since he doesn’t have any real answers to those, he’s going to focus on the crap that interests him, not the crap that interests you. So the fact that there’s essentially no difference between Cylons and humans will have to wait while we hear Doc Cottle explain patient/ doctor confidentiality as an inconvenient plot twist is retconned away. We watch Adama pick out his suits for about ten minutes; we hear about Roslin’s euphoric withdrawal from cancer meds, and we listen to Kara as she calls Gaeta a gimp, but fortunately, she respects his lifestyle choices, because she’s a closet lesbian herself, I mean, come on, who are we kidding here?

Then there’s the plot which threatens to comprise the remainder of this series, which is yet another tiresome political machination from Tom Zarek, so we get a council that’s agog and a ridiculously bloated press corps barking questions about everything. None of their questions are answered satisfactorily, either, so Moore is nothing if not consistently inconsistent.

This show is out of steam, folks. It’s floundering. It’s farting in the wind. Pick your metaphor; there’s nothing to see here. In the last few moments of the episode, Adama speaks for everyone when he asks his date from the Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet if she cares about anything that’s just happened in the past hour.

“No,” she answers.

Adama laughs. “Neither do I.”

Got news for you, Eddie. Neither does anybody else.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Amen! I've been watching, not out of enjoyment but out of tradition. I finally gave up on this last episode and turned it off about 20 minutes into it. Frak GINO!

January 26, 2009 at 10:37 AM  
Blogger James A. Howard said...

Why not comment on Heroes instead? It should appeal to the same audience for whom you created Gods, Monsters & Jeff Downey.

January 26, 2009 at 1:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The show has become utterly incoherent. It was absorbing in its first three half seasons, but fell apart after that. There's been the occasional sparkle, such as Exodus II, but otherwise it's fare that would embarrass the hackiest Star Trek writer.

Magic cylon blood, radio-transmittable viruses and "love" as a fertility booster might work in a more light-hearted work, but when you're claiming to be "realistic", it just makes you look all the sillier.

This last episode, really, wasn't the worst. It at least had something of a story, albeit it a weak one.

The hardest thing to swallow is the idea that we're supposed to dislike Zarek for not trusting the Cylons. Hello! You can't trust them. They can't trust themselves. Boomer was a good little soldier right up until the moment she shot Adama. She didn't even want to shoot the old geezer. Her programming did it. What other mysteries and surprises are built into these machines. I guess that makes me a "racist" in Moore's terms, but what the hell?

Even allowing them free will, the Cylons are an untrustworthy bunch of pukes. The 8 in the webisodes pulled off a perfect dissimulation. The six we see cooing over her baby snapped another baby's neck--what?--three years ago. That Leoben cat got his kicks torturing Starbuck, and he's supposed to be sort of deep.

The only good thing in the show is Michael Hogan, who's taken what can only be called the shittiest of set-ups and made it interesting. As you noted, there's nothing compelling in any of these characters, but Saul Tigh...I want to see how his story turns out. It'll probably piss me off, but I'll go along for the ride.

January 26, 2009 at 4:06 PM  
Blogger PJG said...

this made even less sense than your usual nonsensical diatribes. congrats.

January 27, 2009 at 10:36 AM  

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