put down the Joss Whedon playbook.

[ironymaiden]

i missed the teaser due to the Olympics, so maybe there was a brilliant establishing scene that explained it all. let me know.

i consider the Dee/Lee plot to be unmotivated and arbitrary. perhaps to be charitable, i should say extremely underdeveloped. the handling of Lee has gotten more and more random as the season has gone on.

and yes, we all know that sometimes the wrong people die, but you can't have the Adama family be immune to all sorts of damage every week and take out Billy with one try. fuck that shit. while i've wished that Moore would follow in his footsteps a little more (like keeping a secret for no more than three episodes), arbitrary death is the worst innovation of Joss Whedon.

right now Dee (that's D for disruption) and Cally (Oswald) are at the top of my potential Cylon list.

Comments

[oldmangrumpus.livejournal.com]

My problem was that they so blatantly telegraphed it with Billy offering up help to Mme. Prez at the beginning - and that he didn't look like he got nearly as bad as Kid Adama. But maybe that's the way it is in really life.

Don't think Dee or Cally are Toasters. I'd say Mrs. Tighe, if she didn't already look like #6. I'm betting we'll run into the Rick Worthy Cylon Starbuck saw back home (only she won't see him - at first)

[ironymaiden]

i think Ellen is actually just a worthless human being. well, i hope she is; i think it's important to the ongoing story that we not default to people=good cylon=bad. (i was still rooting for her to take a bullet.)
maybe we won't see any more unknown cylons at all this season - if there are only 12 models and we already know six of them it may not be advantageous to reveal any new ones.

[markbourne.livejournal.com]

Haven't yet seen this one yet -- taped it last night due to house guests -- but I certainly don't mind the spoiler here. It, frankly, doesn't surprise me. IMO, the series has suddenly and surprisingly sped off its rails, with last week's ep being the first sloppily-made, thrown-together crap hour of the series so far. The President's "Star Trek" cancer was a dire portent as well. I can't recall seeing such a sharp downturn in a fave series before. But I'm holding out hope that they'll get the show back on its rail with some evident sense of direction rather than this current ambling about and pulling gimmicky plot points from the Whedon (etc.) trope box.

[ironymaiden]

i came across some commentary indicating that Moore et al thought last weeks' episode was terrible too and we saw the improved recut.
i want to believe that we will see these threads pull together later, but here we've introduced another set of random terrorists when we already know that there's a frakking nuke loose in the fleet. it's like they decided to use their pile of spec scripts to fill time.

[markbourne.livejournal.com]

we saw the improved recut

Eek. If what we saw was and improved recut, I can scarcely imagine what the original was like.

it's like they decided to use their pile of spec scripts to fill time.

They do seem to be spinning wheels without going anywhere (anywhere interesting, at any rate). Too many ragged distractions -- the Lee/Dee thing f'rinstamce -- not attached to a drive shaft that I can spot. I hope they find focus soon and give a rest to just throwing seemingly arbitrary plot poo at us.

[markbourne.livejournal.com]

The President's "Star Trek" cancer was a dire portent as well.

I meant "The President's "Star Trek" cancer cure was a dire portent as well." Big difference there.

[mrdorbin.livejournal.com]

Well, a sudden and impressive change of personality followed immediately by a character's dramatic exit dates back to at least B5. As soon as Billy developed a spine in the first scene (which you missed) I knew he was done for, but that's just plain bad writing. And yes, I totally feel like I missed an episode somewhere where Dee and Lee actually develop feelings for each other. If Dee turns out to be a Cylon, I'm gonna be pissed though, because one of the things that I've loved so far is the way they haven't played the 'which of these characters that you're emotionally attached to is actually evil?' game that I really, really, really hate.

[ironymaiden]

especially since the last Dee-Lee scene i remember was her saying that there was something going on and him being totally confused, followed by her going off with Billy. i know that people make seemingly random reversals IRL, but that doesn't make it good storytelling.

i'm pretty sure that someone else we care about is a cylon, because we were lulled into complacency by the Sharon experience. i'm hoping the season ender is something more exciting and complex than the loose nuke.