Cogs can think.

There’s kind of a running joke between my best friend and I. Whereas Renate is pretty much a tomboy (although you can’t tell by looking at her), I’m more or less the opposite, immortalised by Renate’s brilliant remark: Thom, sometimes, you’re just like a guy.

It really doesn’t help that my favourite TV series of all time is… Gilmore Girls.

It’s the setting, the acting, the colours, the ever-present feeling of absurdity, like everything and everyone in Stars Hollow is slightly off-centre - Burtonesque, really. And, of course, the dialogue, which is so incredibly well-written, witty, well-executed, and filled to the brim with obscure references to films and music nobody knows. It’s brilliant.

Ever since Eugenia started talking about colour grading, I realised that the crew of Gilmore Girls really know their shit in this field. Every setting has its own grading, making colours pop out, or wash out, in sync with the people and topic of the scene. Emily and Richard’s house in Hartford feels slightly washed out, dark, and imposing - like a thick layer of whale blubber draped over the viewer, pretty much the sensation Lorelai has when she needs to go there. Stars Hollow, on the other hand, is packed with colour, making the town feel alive, happy, and safe - the complete opposite.

This extends to the music, which, throughout the entire series, remains mostly simple - acoustic guitar, a base line, and maybe some other minor instruments, augmented by variations of “la la la la” - you get to know this music, and you know what type of scene is about to come after hearing the first few chords.

Then there’s the characters. This series has some of the best characters from TV history. The main characters are all very well rounded, with detailed histories, but on top of that, Gilmore Girls is packed with incredibly funny flat characters that play a big part in that whole absurdity thing I talked about. Taylor, Kirk, Babette, Patty, Michel, the troubadour - these people are caricatures of themselves.

However, the main attraction of this series is, of course, Laura Graham herself. I don’t know where they found her, what she did before being Lorelai, or even what she’s doing now, but she fits this role so well it makes me wonder if it’s even a role at all. I’m generally quite intelligent and understand the difference between role and actor - but in the case of Lorelai, it’s like role equals actress and actress equals role. It’s not an easy one to portray, but she does it so well, so natural, so… Effortlessly - as if Lorelai is based on Laura herself.

Whether she’s happy, sad, or angry - she’s a joy to watch in whatever she does in this series.

And of course, the whole setting of the series is fascinating. Lorelai, from an old, wealthy, and Europeanesque New England family gets pregnant at sixteen, runs off to a small town, away from her old-world restrictive parents, and finds her place there, raising her kid on her own in this town where everybody seems a little off, a little crazy. She vows to do everything different from her mother, but as time goes by, Lorelai is more like Emily than she’d like to admit, and Rory is more like Lorelai than she cares to admit.

Don’t get fooled by the girl designation of Gilmore Girls. This is top-notch television, and you owe it yourself to watch it, if only to experience something truly unique. I’m currently re-watching all the episodes again.

Battlestar Galactica had very, very few flaws in my book, but there was one thing that always bothered me: the planet Caprica. The problem is that whenever someone on the show said “Caprica”, I thought about “paprika”. In English, you say paprika, while in Dutch it’s paprika. In other words, I was reminded of paprika all the time.

And I really fcuking hate paprika.

That was about my only issue with BSG. For the rest, I’m such a huge fan of BSG that if I’d ever run into Ronald D. Moore, I’d probably start licking his face (assuming Nicki isn’t around, of course). You can imagine that I was really looking forward to Moore’s next endeavour, “Caprica”. Paprika Caprica is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, taking us back 58 years so we can witness the creation of the first Cylon, and the run up to the first Cylon War.

In fact, I was so looking forward to it that I totally missed the pilot, which aired 8 months ago.

I only found that out this morning through Eugenia’s blog post. Luckily, though, it turned out that the original pilot had some issues, which Moore and his crew fixed in an extended and new cut of the pilot which SyFy put on their website. Of course, me living in the The Netherlands and all, I’m technically not allowed to watch it from here - but as my friends know, I’m a James Deanish bad boy, so I put on my nerd pants and fiddled with my network settings until my computer thought it was living in California.

I would’ve preferred South Carolina, if only to totally screw up SyFy’s marketing department.

In any case, I finished watching the 90 minute pilot episode a few hours ago, and I must admit that I’m positively surprised. I mean, I always had the fear that the BSG universe would fall into the same trap as Star Trek did (i.e., reuse the exact same character archetypes in different settings 6 times in a row), but none of that happened during the pilot episode: this is a different show, with a completely different setting, and with completely different characters.

And Zoe.

Caprica gets major brownie points right from the start because its actors act natural around all the fancy-pants stuff they have around them. In most science fiction shows, including Star Trek, actors act as if they were present-day humans flung into a modern and advanced world: they explain the workings of tools and equipment ad nausea, which is totally frakking unbelievable and hinders immersion.

You don’t go around staring in bewilderment at your computer or TV every day, now, do you?

The series gets even more brownie points for having that BSG feel when it comes to camera work and music. It’s different, but instantly recognisable to BSG lunatics like myself. Of course, this being a Moore show, the religious theme is present (which I find awesome, as I’m not an arrogant look-at-me-being-all-non-religious-while-at-the-same-time-believing-the-climate-hype type), but the element of racism is present too, and both feel very well done. The special effects are awesome too, and the first ever Centurion is just plain frakking scary.

The only real problem I found was that cheap moment where Daniel Graystone supposedly lost the data of his daughter after loading it into the Centurion. This made no frakking sense whatsoever, as he should’ve kept a backup, and as a major technology dude, he probably had, too. Moore could’ve come up with a more believable scheme here - maybe the Centurion could’ve gone bonkers first, destroying the equipment in the room. The way it happened now felt like cheap cop-out.

Overall though, I most certainly will be watching from January 22, 2010, and onwards. If only to see more Zoe.

Charlie Sheen is fcuking awesome.

That is all.

The Pirate Bay case, summed up.

Music:

Old World: we want to put you through the trouble of going to a store, and buying overpriced CDs, because it benefits the artists us.
New World: we’re lazy, and we want the easiest way possible to get our hands on music, but we are willing to pay for that (iTunes).

Film:

Old World: we want you to buy a DVD ten million yeas after the film’s release, filled to the brim with unskippable warnings about how you are a pirate and a criminal and will go to hell - all on a legally purchased DVD.
New World: we’re lazy, and we want the easiest way possible to get our hands on films.

Seriously, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I buy all my music Old World style (.mp3 sucks ass), and when it comes to film (TV series in my case), I download first, and buy later. This is because most of the series I like aren’t even broadcast and/or sold in my country, so I’m forced to go the way of the pirate. Even if a show does appear on TV here, our local companies fcuk it up by having irregular broadcasting schedules, and we’re always two to three years behind. I see downloading TV shows as the solution to stuff not being broadcast here. If the show is good, I’ll buy it on DVD (BSG, Dead Like Me), and if it isn’t (Lost), I don’t. Hey, just like real TV!

It doesn’t matter fcuk anyway over here. In The Netherlands, you are allowed to download whatever content you want, copyrighted or not.

Last week, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped watching last week’s Lost episode somewhere midway. It was so remote-snappingly bad.

I also know why I’ve had it up here with that overrated piece of junk: there’s absolutely no character development. Sure, there’s character building through the corny flashbacks, but have you ever noticed that the characters in Lost haven’t changed at all over the course of years of in-universe time? Even the group dynamics are exactly the same as during the onset of the series!

Please explain to me how people can go through hell like they have, all the weirdness and hardships and death they’ve experienced - and they’re still exactly the same? They haven’t learned anything? They still all respond to one another in exactly the same predictable way? I haven’t been surprised by any turn of events or any line said by anyone in like 20 episodes. Everything’s so utterly predictable.

In addition, they’re dragging everything on and on and on; the story should’ve been told in four seasons, tops - at least then it’d have decent pacing.

Add to that the cheesy “just-in-time” time travel plot device, and you’ve got yourself a show that started out rather promising, but has since degraded into mediocre bite-sized Hollywood soap opera Americanised flatness.

I didn’t even bother to finish last week’s episode, and didn’t download this week’s. They lost a viewer.

And so I finally gave Firefly another shot. I just finished the 4th episode, so here are a few short first impressions.

The elephant in the room: the western theme draped over this scifi. Weird, odd, but at the same time, infinitely brave and original. And if there’s one thing the dead space-faring scifi market needs it’s originality.

No aliens.

Kaylee is fcuking awesome. Seriously. One of the coolest scifi characters in a long time. And she’s so pretty!

The obviously developing romance between Inara and the captain is a little too cheesy for my taste. From their first scene together I knew these two were going to hook up. I’m going to be infinitely surprised if that doesn’t happen.

I like the depiction of the future: not the utopian nonsense of Star Trek, but the brown and metal dystopia of the Alien series and BSG.

No aliens.

Kaylee!

That is all for now.

People aren’t angry because it had religion, people are angry because just saying “God did it!” is such a completely lame answer. I was a fan from the start, to the end, still am, the religion part never bothered me.

It amuses me when elitists say stuff like “sorry it’s above your level of understanding” considering the people most likely to use “God did it!” IRL are creationists and the like — people totally renown for their intellectual prowess.

Sorry, “God did it!” isn’t above anyones level of understanding.

What is the difference between:

“A higher being did it” (he was not called god).

or:

“Aliens did it” (the general way scifi works)

Both are equally ridiculous, you see, but that’s science fiction for you. I find it endlessly amusing that scifi fans have NO qualms whatsoever about accepting nonsense like time travel, teleportation, aliens that all look like humans, and so on - but have quarrels with accepting “a” supreme being (NOT god, as they specifically said he did not want to be called that) that toys with our lives. Did you complain when Q (essentially gods) came onto Star Trek?

The fact of the matter is that I personally do not find if far-fetched at all to imagine that there are beings far beyond our comprehension, that see us as mere insects to pull legs out of, much like the neighbour kid who uses a magnifying glass to burn ants.

El Reg’s brilliant analysis of Battlestar Galactica. They completely understood what everything was supposed to mean, and really put into words exactly how I feel about it.

And that’s what has made Battlestar Galactica such a satisfying journey. There were no clear answers, just a series of worthwhile questions that involved the intersection of human kind, technology, God, and society.

Spot on. BSG was so much more than just pain, boring, and old been-there-done-that sci-fi.

For the first time in the history of EVAR I’m actually reading fan boards about a series. I love how everyone is torn apart by the finale, and everyone is left wondering what the hell it all means. The best comment is this one:

“Plus, it’ll also piss-off the militant atheists across the board, not just in SF.”

Hah, yeah. A rabid atheist on another board got pretty huffy a couple weeks ago when I said that the head characters were angels. He expected them to be be aliens or something. Neverminding all the talk of God and angels, did he really expect them to turn out to be aliens after all that? This isn’t TNG, where the Devil turns out to be an alien with a holographic device and a cloaked ship. Don’t know why he expected that to turn out that way, especially given that the whole religious angle has been layered on thick since pretty much the beginning, whereas there’s been NO hint about aliens whatsoever.

And really, getting mad over that is silly. So there’s a religious angle. So what? Must everything be antiseptic atheism like Star Trek? Is something different from the sci-fi norm really so bad? Nevermind that it’s silly to take offense over that. That’d be like my taking offense over the existence of Thor as a character in the Marvel Universe, even though I’m Catholic. OH NO! A pagan god running about? How dare they! …And yet, Thor is one of my favorite titles. Amazing the things some people get offended about.

But yes, I was very happy with the finale. The angels were angels, “the hand of God”, as it were, in the form of Racetrack’s dead hand (Poor Racetrack ) finishes off the evil Cylons once and for all (God knows that Cavill would’ve NEVER stuck to the agreement. Once he had resurrection he would’ve started hunting them, again), Kara’s an angel, too, and the Colonials have found a new home. Altogether pretty satisfying. Even though it blew a whole in my theory about the show being set in the far future.

BTW, Anyone else sad about Racetrack’s final fate? Poor, poor Racetrack. What a way to go out. At least she got her wish, though. She ended up filling Hell to the brim with the souls of pretty much every last enemy Cylon in the universe, even if she did do it post-mortem.

As for the end scenes with the robots, I thought that one scene with a bunch of those white robots was hilarious. “The March of the Cylons”. Heh.

I couldn’t agree more. Brilliant analysis.