Most amusing typo of 2010 so far

Just received Battlestar Galactica series 4.5 on Region 1 DVD courtesy of amazon.com where the price had gone down to $17.99 just after Xmas - which meant it was possible to import without incurring additional duty and admin charges (which is what buggered me on the Twin Peaks Season 2 box set a while back.

The Region 1 box sets of BSG have a lot more extras than the rather threadbare Region 2 efforts on Playback, which sometimes don't even have Ron Moore's podcast commentaries. (They can be downloaded from the ludicrously renamed "SyFy" channel website or iTunes but then they are running at NTSC rather than PAL video speeds, so by the end you will be a couple of minutes out of sync with what's happening on screen - unless you import into Audacity or something and slow the podcast down - but who can be bothered?) It's criminal that probably the best sci-fi TV series ever had such a slipshod release on DVD here.

Anyway there is an amusing typo on the back cover of the DVD: "Extended, unaired versions of A Disquiet Follows My Soul, Islanded In A Stream Of Sars [sic] and Daybreak."

I can't remember the episode about Galactica being under attack from SARS, but I'm sure it's a good one.

Review - BSG "The Plan"

I was excited earlier in the week as Battlestar Galactica - The Plan arrived on DVD from the US. Last time a bought a BSG special on US import it was Razor, which was great, but appeared on UK DVD at almost exactly the same time - and I was left feeling a bit of a chump for having assumed it wouldn't make it out here for a while.

This time, UK viewers aren't so lucky: The Plan is not on DVD release here yet, and I don't think Sky have set a date for airing it yet, so it probably won't happen until they do.

But is it any good? An interesting diversion, but not essential, I'd say. NOTE: there are some spoilers below if you haven't seen the rest of the series...

There are two really good things about The Plan. One is some of the best CGI (for the destruction of the colonies) that the series has ever had. The other is Dean Stockwell getting a lot of screen time and being superb, in a his inimitable Dean Stockwell kind of way. The third thing of note is that there is an interesting subplot involving a number 4 Cylon (the "Simon" character - Rick Worthy), which is nothing mega-exciting but nice, in that number 4 was kind of underused in the series in general.

There ain't much else, really - director Eddie Olmos (Adama) did about as good a job as he could cutting between footage from the miniseries and Series 1 and 2, and new footage shot to 'extend' certain scenes, but it's not easy when you're joining together 2009 footage with 2003 footage. How many of us look exactly the same as we did six years ago?

So the whole thing was nice, but a bit 'join-the-dots' - an exercise in weaving in as much backstory and parallel story as possible with the confines of a narrative that had already been pretty thickly sketched. And there are some key personnel absences which make the whole thing less convincing than it could be - for example, given that we know that there was at least one number 3 agent (Lucy Lawless) in the fleet (see series 2 episode "Final Cut"), isn't her absence from the Cavill "briefings" in the chapel a bit strange? I know it was because they couldn't get her back to be in The Plan but it's still a bit inconsistent.

Oh well - given the constraints they were under, it's not a bad effort. But probably for completists only (which of course, is a group I fall into).

Nice BSG review with particularly fine spelling mistakes

Still on a Battlestar Galactica tip: nice review of the series from Richard Vine of the Guardian here.

Complete with classic Grauniad spelling mistakes... 'cylon' misspelt as 'cyclon' twice. Isn't that a kind of washing machine? Well, a toaster was used as a plot device in Season 1...

Back to the economy forthwith.

Battlestar: just 2 episodes to go

The presence of Battlestar Galactica Series 4.5 (which would more sensibly be known as "Series 5" given the gap between the first and second halves of Series 4 due to the 2008 writers' strike) on iTunes means that it has been possible for those of us who don't want to pay subscription money to Rupert Murdoch to watch the shows without having to wait months for the DVD release, or resorting to P2P sites.

Given that I'm pretty busy with work, allotment gardening, music and writing stuff like this, it's got to the stage where Battlestar is pretty much the only thing I watch regularly on TV (well, actually as a download on a monitor, but the only thing intended for TV that I watch anymore.) And I will sure miss it when it is gone.

I won't say much about series 4.5 due to not wanting to give away spoilers for those of you who haven't seen it yet. But, overall, this is up to the standard of the rest of the series and I can't wait to see the final two episodes (Daybreak Part 1 airs tonight in the US and on Tuesday in the UK, with the double-length Daybreak Part 2 airing a week later). I'm not giving much away by saying that the mood of these final episodes is pretty grim - this show started dark and has gradually dimmed to pitch black. Star Trek it ain't.

If there's been one slight problem with the final run of episodes (and I'll return to this in more detail once the whole thing is out on DVD and I'm less worried about spoilers), it's that there has often been so much plot to get through that some of the episodes have had to rush certain things and keep certain elements of the story more offscreen than would be ideal. It's a huge contrast to Season 3, where the second half in particular seemed to be stretched out to turn 13 episodes' worth of material into 20. This time round they could have probably supported 13 episodes rather than 10 in this half of the season. I guess budgetary constraints and network programming were the reasons they decided to stick with 10 (although if you include the prequel The Plan which will air in a few months' time and the fact that Daybreak Pt 2 is double length, Season 4.5 is effectively 13 episodes long anyway...)

The slightly rushed feel of this season is a minor problem but it's been a bit compounded by weird editing decisions. One recent episode (I think it was "Deadlock") featured around six or seven shots of Admiral Adama walking round a particular part of the battlestar (I won't say what's being done in the scenes as it gives away too much about the likely conclusion of the show). But it was extremely repetitive and a weird use of scarce screentime when there were more important things that could have been shown instead, but presumably had to be cut for time (or maybe there wasn't the budget to film them?)

Series creator Ron Moore's podcast commentaries (also available from iTunes or from the website at SciFi.com) suggest that several of the episodes from this final batch will be extended when the DVD is released later in the year, and that should help a lot.

The main 'problem' with Battlestar, if one can call it that, is that other recent sci-fi series look extremely mediocre in comparison. I tried watching a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise on Virgin 1 the other day and they were almost unwatchable - it looked so clunky and plastic next to BSG, despite being only a few years older. Partly that may be just because Enterprise was crap from the word go - I dunno. Maybe it was Scott Bakula - Quantum Leap always sucked as far as I was concerned, although Dean Stockwell was great (and he's great in Battlestar too.

Certainly the trailer for Star Trek XI which I saw when we went to see Watchmen earlier this week (and more on that in a later post hopefully) looked good, although a good trailer is absolutely no guarantee of a good movie (and indeed vice versa).

Well, I hope you enjoyed reading about Battlestar - I just HAD to blog about something other than the global economic crisis just for a change, to stop myself going nuts.

BSG Season 4: This is a Live Killer

I haven't reviewed much TV on giroscope for over a year - largely because I haven't had much time to watch that much - but for the last few years I've made some time around Xmas to watch the latest season of Battlestar Galactica. 

Every season so far has been excellent, and I'm very pleased to report that Season 4  is probably the best yet. This time it's only 10 episodes compared with 20 each in Seasons 2 and 3; the original Season 4 has been split into 2 seasons, because the writers' strike delayed production. Season 5 (also 10 episodes) will air on Sky 1 starting this January. Because I refuse to buy anything from the Murdoch empire, I won't be seeing season 5 - legally - until late 2009. But that's OK. I can wait. 

I think BSG works better with the 10-episode format. I genuinely believe it's almost impossible for TV shows to turn out more than about 10 to 15 good 45-minute (i.e. 1 hour with adverts) episodes of a series in one year, no matter how many people they have working on the show. Quantity seems to trade off against quality every time. BSG Seasons 2 and 3 each consisted of about 7 or 8 classic episodes, 5 or 6 very good ones and the rest were OK filler. Only about 10 episodes max in each series were crucial to the plot. By contrast, Season 1 was only 13 episodes and featured virtually no filler at all. Like Season 1, Season 4 cuts the extraneous stuff almost completely - there's a rather half-baked subplot about a Baltar religious cult to pass a couple of idle minutes in some of the episodes, but other than that, this is all meat and no potatoes. 

I won't give away any plot spoilers (the Baltar stuff is no spoiler, believe me) because you need to watch this season yourselves. But I'm just really pleased that, to use a phrase I picked up from Steve's Very True Things blog, BSG has in no way "jumped the shark", whatever some of the numbskull reviewers on amazon.co.uk might tell you. In fact, it may well be that the best is yet to come. More on this same time next year. 

Battlestar Galactica: a guide to DVD Regions 1 and 2 for the perplexed

2 days ago Battlestar Galactica: Razor arrived in the post on US import. As soon as I have a chance - yesterday evening - I gave it a spin in the player. Great stuff, but I'm not going to say anything about the plot here. If you've already seen it plot analysis will be redundant, and if you haven't seen it, you don't need some idiot giving away spoilers in a blog that is only occasionally about TV. Instead I'm going to talk about the huge contrast between how BSG gets released on DVD here in the UK, and the US release.

Razor- which is a TV movie designed to fill the gap between BSG seasons 3 and 4 (18 months or longer) - was shown pretty much simultaneously on Sky in the UK and on whatever channel broadcasts the show in the US, and then rush-released on DVD. The UK DVD release of Razor is atypical because it seems to have the same extras - commentary, deleted scenes, etc. - as the US release. In all the previous BSG releases the UK extras have been minimal - in fact on Season 3 they're non-existent. By contrast, US viewers in Region 1 get commentaries for each episode from series creator Ronald D Moore. The UK version of the Season 2 DVD has the podcasts for the first 4 episodes but nothing after that.

Fortunately the episode commentaries are also available here at the Sci-Fi Channel's US website. However if you are watching the Region 2 DVD whilst listening to a downloaded podcast you need to bear in mind that PAL (Region 2) DVDs run about 4% faster than NTSC (Region 1) DVDs, so your podcast will drift out of sync with the video unless you use an editor like Audacity to slow the mp3 down.

Bizarrely, Season 3 is available here in the UK, but not yet in the US - which has resulted in some people who can't wait importing the UK Season 3 set into the US, which is unusual - normally it's the other way round.

Even more bizarrely, I must mention the flyer that comes with the US edition of Razor - apparently "BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ACTION FIGURES ARE AVAILABLE NOW!" They are available from Diamond Select Toys. The initial choice of figures is somewhat strange - why Hotdog, or Kat, before they've done Baltar, Roslin or Admiral Adama, for example? Also, none of the figures looks anything like their real-life counterpart. That'll be familiar to anyone who bought Star Wars figures back in the late 70s and early 80s... but what's the audience for BSG action figures? The show's not aimed at kids, so who's buying them? Sad thirtysomethings who want to put them on their desks at work? Maybe...