No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons

You know I warned you that the chritian mysticism in BSG was much stronger than you were admiting to yourself (this was in your last BSG post Jan 31st). Of course I was wrong too. I thought it was going to be something like a Hindu version of Dick’s Valis, a computational universe working itself out via an evolutionary matrix where a supra consciouness running on quirk and quarks continually recreates itself over an infinite set of multiverses a la Lee Smolins Black Holes. Or something. I could come up with some other stuff. I knew God was going to figure into it but I was NOT expecting them to wave a magic wand and say: It’s GOD except “it doesn’t like to be called that” and then…nothing. I knew the jig was up when Balthar gave his “leap of faith” speech to Cavel. OH NO! I thought, tell me it ain’t so! Instructions not only to Cavel but to the viewer, that we are all going to have to take this on a leap of faith. Bullshit.

I did think that it was otherwise very skillfull, but it utterly failed intellectually. If they wanted to go with fucking mysterian religion at LEAST they could have thrown in some GOOD christian mysticism. Or good robot mysticism. something with some meat. But instead the whole plot becomes a tissue of conveniences useful for telling some good stories but without any coherent metaphysical underpinning. Starbuck has always had a destiny, and the destiny was to have a destiny that is unexplained to anyone.

The short short version of the BSG’s God vision is as follows: man and machine are in conflict. This is a metaphor for the subject/object in philosophy. It’s Dennett’s heterophenomenology vs Chalmer’s hard problem instantiated in robots and men. They duke it out. They need to learn something. God’s plan is that they learn it. What are they supposed to learn? That it’s God’s plan. What is God’s plan? That they go around in circles until they learn it. What is it? God’s plan. What is God’s plan? etc.

What I find frustrating is that there is interesting mythology and philosophy that could have enriched their mysterian nonsense. If they were so content to shovel bullshit they could have shoveled bullshit of a much higher grade. It’s almost like they didn’t take the philosophical conflict that undergirds the man/machine conflict seriously enough. There is so much ore there to be mined and they decided to mine it with a magic wand.

Well, there are those endings that make you wish you never had started watching it all. This one even makes me ponder whether to give up Lost now, before it’s too late to step back from watching another finale where it becomes glaringly obvious that the writers had not the first idea what they were doing only a few eps back, and try to make up for it by pressing a few tears out of your eyes.

Your words ring so true, Peter. Thanks for perfectly expressing what I thought.

I agree. I wanted Kara Thrace to be Daniel, the cylon line that Cavil eliminated. Cavil supposedly “contaminated the amniotic fluid in which all the Seven copies were maturing and then corrupted the genetic formula”. My idea was that somehow that transformed Daniel into Kara, maybe only the Y chromosomes were damaged. And that somehow Kara/Daniel went unnoticed and Kara resurrected somehow on Earth. A lot of hand waving sure… but it’s better than her being a frickin’ angel.

Don’t 60% of Americans believe in angels?

I agree with too much of PW’s sentiment for this post to be interesting. The invocation of deity was egregious and a little sickening.

What bothered me the most was the failure to really explain the recursive nature of the man/machine conflict throughout history.

Since nuked earth wasn’t the ‘real’ earth as we know it does that mean there are a lot of other nuked earth’s and nuked colonies lying around the galaxy?

Also they set free a ship full of centurions and at least one hybrid. What the hell have they been up to for the 150k years between the discovery of the new earth at mankind’s next foray out into space? Also they had a hybrid on board and presumably they would know where people had settled. Hell with their technology and 150,000 years you could reinvent civilization from scratch ten times over.

I was hoping that instead of Sam flying into the sun that he would jump off into the wilds of space and arrive somewhere with a shit load of other discarded fleets drifting aimlessly.

All in all I liked the opera house reveal, more for it’s cinematic if not thematic presentation, but dumping everything on the god wagon just seemed retarded.

Though of all the big errors there were a few little ones that irked me the most. For starters they implied that Hera was mitochondrial eve AND that she was buried with her father and mother. Wouldn’t that make ATHENA mitochondrial eve (assuming the genetics carries over?)

The end sequence with Angelic Baltar and 6 talking about New York like the places they’ve seen before just made me a little cranky. There’s a very religious sort of thinking that makes people paranoid whenever a city becomes big, influential and free (morally bankrupt.) It’s almost like they ripped out some pages from the bible belt indoctrination primer and slapped it onto the script.

However I did like the pristine appearance of the new earth and the idea that people could make a choice to break the cycle and start over with a clean slate. I just don’t get why the entire series displays people acting like the blood thirsty brutes that we are and then suddenly morph into a bunch of non-technical hippies right at the end. Oh well.

Still beats the ever living fuck out of the original series.

Since the series first incorporated earth, I downright begged for it not to turn into (as nerds call it) a “shaggy god” story. I did. I thought we were in the clear when it turned out Earth was radioactive. But then we saw Africa (before we saw North America for the broken Earth…apparently “thorough” is not in the job description of the recon crews on galactica and they figured a single hemisphere was sufficient). And, to my horror, protohumans. At that point, I yelled a mental “goddammit” and the episode was ballistic from there, falling under the force of cliche, only to end with a message so on-the-head it would make M. Night Shyamalan blush.

And I agree, the whole lets-give-up-technology thing seemed hilariously implausible. Of all people, the characters should recognize that the trajectory of intelligence is inevitably upwards, all they did was add 150,000 years to the countdown. But regardless, if it were me, I’d give it about a day until I realized what a huge mistake I had made. Or at least until the first epidemic of dengue or the first harsh winter sets in. But it was very emotionally satisfying, and, I suppose, fitting.

Also, Seth, your idea of a derelict graveyard of abandoned ships is great. That would cut the treacle at the end of the episode pretty effectively. Dozens of giant warships of varied design and names, but all just reduxes of the same series of events.

I too thought the ending’s heavy reliance on God, or whatever “it” likes to be called, really dampened the ending. I’m willing to accept a little bit of divine intervention—at least they acknowledge a deus ex machina—but there were a dozen ways to have ended the show that would have been better than how they did it. The emotional, character focused ending, was really quite well done, even if it was a bit of a kick in the gut that half your favorite characters are going to die alone.The greater victory of the species surviving eclipses that.

My theory was that Daniel was Kara’s father, that Cavil somehow missed one of them, and that the mysterious destiny of all the characters was because they were all somehow linked to a collective Cylon subconsciousness.

Seth: It was angel Baltar that made the remark, and he only said that Hera lived in Tanzania with her Cylon and human parents, not that they were buried together. Though even if that were the case, if they couldn’t extract DNA from Athena, then even if they were positive the skeleton were her mother Hera is still mitochondrial Eve.
Though since Ron Moore decided to go that route, tying in the Cylons and Colonials into real life genetic history, how the hell did he miss that Australia wasn’t settled by humans until about 45,000 years ago? Though their spreading out be a rather amusing solution to the multiregional evolution hypothesis. And if I’m not mistaken, the Chief decided to go to Scotland in the middle of an ice age.

Really, though, the thing that bothered me more than “God” being the answer to the questions we all had about the show, was the fact that there were so many questions they simply didn’t even attempt to address. Like how it is that Kara is the harbinger of death and the one to lead humanity to its end and not to be followed? OK, she led them to their “end”, you got us there Mr. Moore. One could say that the hybrids don’t really have humanity’s best interest at heart so even though we were led to believe we can believe them, that’s not really so. And who was the pianist? Kara is an angel that sees other angels?

As for the glowing spine, I just figured that was just symbolic, reminding the viewer that they’re truly not human, despite how they act, rather than a literal luminescence. It would, after all, be a bit of a giveaway if you’re doing a Cylon from behind, or if you were in a dark room.
The USB port in the Eights’ wrists might be unique to their model, so since they already know Sharons are Cylons there’s no need to cut them open to make sure.

Seems I’m the first to represent the dissenting opinion here. 🙂

As Ron Moore said in “The Last Frakking Special,” BSG is all about the characters. The premise of the original series was the structure upon which the writers built the back story and then added what they felt were contemporary touchpoints for their potential audience, imho. These touchpoints were carried mainly on the backs of the characters. In that light, the final episode makes a great deal of sense, both logically and emotionally.

May I remind readers that there is a lot of handwaving in written SF, and that many of the best-loved SF novels are character-centered? This is not to say that no one should care whether the science makes sense, of course, but that the science and the fiction should work in concert to tell a good story. This is entertainment, after all…Hollyweird, right?

I think that Moore et al had to walk a very fine line between too much stereotypical TV content and too much intellectual content. The viewing public isn’t stupid, but I think that Moore chose the right direction because the show brought in a lot of viewers who wouldn’t otherwise have watched a “sci-fi show.” The characters, as in “ER,” are what kept viewers coming back.

Let’s face it, there’s no perfect novel and no perfect TV series, though several have come close (and a matter of opinion as to which ones). BSG represents the same kind of paradigm change that “Babylon 5”
brought in the previous decade: it’s been proven that audience will stick with a show that has a specified time limit (although in BSG’s case that may have been set after the shows began airing, and not before, as with B5). I don’t think either of those series ever “jumped the shark,” and I applaud the creators and producers for not letting that happen.

As for the spiritual aspects of the series, I think Ron Moore and the writers were following the old dictum that says if there’s a gun on the fireplace mantle in Scene One, it had better be used by the end of the last act. The gun, in this case, imho, was spirituality and the unknown. This theme was woven through the entire series, from unbelief to belief and back again, especially in the character of Laura Roslyn. If the series had ended with a purely technological explanation, I, for one, would have felt let down that such a major theme was dumped at the last minute.

As in many things, it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I think Moore and company should be proud of their show. And I love the idea of Katee Sackhoff driving off the set in her pilot’s uniform on the last day of filming. 🙂 (In the last special, she said that’s what she planned to do).

As an outsider to the BSG community, let me say this: there’s a difference between good characterization with a dash of handwavium and, saying “Every time you notice something like that, a wizard did it!”

Which was really funny when Lucy Lawless said it in Treehouse of Horror X, but less so when a show that briefly starred Lawless actually does it *for real.* Can you have mystical ancient beings in your SF TV? Yes. Farscape did it very well. The difference is that the mystical ancient beings gave the main character knowledge of a MacGuffin that could be grasped with science, not with luck or faith or Dylan. In fact, we see several scenes of the other characters attempting to reproduce the MacGuffin’s conditions with scientific experimentation. They almost get there, several times. So on the one hand, there was a very “human” story about identity and love and trying to find/make a home, but there was also a galactic struggle for innovation against the backdrop of war between two species whose very metabolisms guarantee that they will never be able to occupy the same planets peacefully. In that way, the show was very much about the ethical and political implications of technological innovation, without a wholesale abandonment of science at the end. Having seen the devastating impact of the MacGuffin, nobody shoots their vessels into the sun. Nobody decides to live without antibiotics or electricity or tampons. They just decide to leave the MacGuffin alone. End of story.

So that special mix can be done on TV — with humour and moral ambiguity and grace, and little if any reliance on God or Gandalf. And it can be done on an even shorter timescale: Cowboy Bebop is the perfect example. By episode 26, we’ve been given a beautiful vision of an interstellar, posthuman future complete with FTL jumpgates and cyborg eyes, that still contains humans who are hopelessly mired in their own tragic flaws. Is the show mostly about human foibles? Yes. Do we still get interesting stories about how science and technology might impact our future among the stars? Yes. Can you have your cake and eat it, too? Absolutely.

To turn an old phrase: No showrunner is worth your tears, and the ones who are will never make you cry. I’ve heard people talk about this series like it’s an abusive-but-compelling ex, the kind you can’t help coming back to despite her ultimately hollow ethics. As someone who only saw the show in bits and pieces, I could understand the attraction, but every time I heard “Well, it’s going in a really weird direction, but I’m going to hang with it,” my expectations diminished. Making excuses is a bad sign. Rationalizing is a bad sign. In the end you can only sit back and watch the inevitable downward spiral, as the title becomes a shadow of its former self, its promise ultimately squandered over time like the youth and beauty which once made it so appealing.

And two more things: why did Cavil kill himself? Totally inconsistent for that character.
And why did Adama and the Chief decide that they never wanted to see another human being (including family) for the rest of their lives? Kind of an extreme way to take a vacation, if you ask me.

Pant, pant… okay, I think I’m done now. I’d better go back to my life. Much more of this and no one will think I have one.

My reaction was basically the same as Watts. Cringed at the “leap of faith” speech, and groaned when h. erectus strolled across the screen. And the ending … talk about a literal deus ex machina.

as an addendum, I posted this at another board:

Whatever “it” is, it fulfills the literary function of a god by trivializing the actions and motives of the characters. The fact that all of the prophecies came true strongly suggests that the characters never had any real free will … this, to me, retroactively destroys any drama the series may have had, because it tells us that everything that happened prior to the fleet’s arrival at our Earth went exactly according to plan. Galactica was never in any real danger, all the people who died were supposed to die, and the “chosen ones” like Starbuck were just following a script.

Maybe it’s just me, but that kind of dramatic determinism just kills any sympathy I might have had for the situation of a particular character (and in BSG’s case, all of its characters).

Damn, I almost forgot the biggest and longest running mystery that was never explained – right back when Caprica was attacked Six and Baltar are blown to smithereens by a nuke at Baltar’s house and yet Baltar somehow survives to board Galactica and starts having the visions of Six, etc. Later on I assumed he was a resurrected but not yet activated Cylon, mystery solved, but in fact he never was a Cylon, nor one of the Final Five, nor an angel like Thrace, so… ? Bastards.

I said: “In that light, the final episode makes a great deal of sense, both logically and emotionally.”

His Squidness replied:
“ ‘Emotionally,’ ” perhaps. Logically, no frakking way. By RDM’s own admission, they stuck elements into the story with no idea how to explain them at the time. I can buy the premise that Kara Thrace Mk II was some kind of angelic entity; what I can’t buy, even given that premise, are all the empirical inconsistencies that accompanied her death and return, nuts and bolts that remain completely unaccounted for even if she is an angel. How did Kara’s viper end up crashing on Earth after being crushed in the atmosphere of a gas giant uncounted lightyears away? If the reconstituted Kara was supposed to be some kind of supernatural guide to earth, why was she so shitty at that job? Why does she not even know who or what she is for most of the rest of the series? The list goes on and on.”

1) Having recently read Robert Sawyer’s novel *Calculating God*, I might suggest that the Viper crashed on Earth because Kara Mark One had fulfilled her purpose, and it was time for Mark Two to begin hers.

2) Would you have believed “a more perfect” Kara Thrace? Exactly. Kara Mark Two had to be every bit as messed up as the original in order for Adama and other characters to believe she *was* the original. If she knew what she was, initially, there would be no drama. Why should her discovery of her purpose be any less than the Final Five’s discovery of their Cylon-ness?

“The revelation of supernatural intervention should answer these questions. RDM’s episode left every last one of them hanging, and smugly tells us that it’s not the clay’s place to question the wisdom of the potter. It’s just bad, nigh-well incompetent storytelling.”

You’re entitled to your opinion. 🙂 I would ask you this: how do you know it’s supernatural intervention? “It doesn’t like being called that,” Baltar reminds Caprica in the last episode. If “it” isn’t God, as this line implies, then what is it? Ah, the mystery deepens…

Second question: why do there have to be answers? I recommend Bruce Sterling’s *Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years* (published in 2002), for further reading on this question, in particular the section titled “The Student.”

” ‘As for the spiritual aspects of the series, I think Ron Moore and the writers were following the old dictum that says if there’s a gun on the fireplace mantle in Scene One, it had better be used by the end of the last act.’

“Come on, Janbo. What about the magical viper on the mantelpiece? What about the Opera House on the Mantelpiece? What about— well, you get the idea.”

The Viper isn’t a gun on the mantlepiece, because its presence on the decimated Earth was how Kara learned she wasn’t the original Kara. Therefore, the “gun” was “fired,” in that sense. The Opera House “gun” was also fired in the final episode; it was part of a shared prophetic dream had by Roslyn, Athena, Caprica and Baltar. Dreams often aren’t detail-specific with regard to background, right? And an opera house, to some, might infer a grand drama, a highly emotional scene…

Okay, enough, or I’ll end up writing the whole damn article here!

If it makes you all feel any better, my dad has yet to watch the end of the series because he’s still working his way through the DVDs. On the phone this evening, Mom asked if I had heard anything good about the finale. I was faced with the sudden ethical dilemma of saving my dad from the story’s unsatisfactory conclusion by ruining it for him then and there, or allowing him to make his own mind up later.

In the end, all I could say was, “Dad looks a lot like Cavil, don’t you think?”

I’m not sure I’d recommend anything past the escape from New Caprica to anyone for whom the final five (non-)storyline would present a stumbling block, much less the godshit. But for people who are unlikely to get their panties in a twist about plot holes, I’d just warn them about the finale the same way I warn people about the Prisoner’s grand, impressionistic, nigh-incomprehensible (and brilliant) ending. Take in the sights, don’t worry about the plot. Or in this case, enjoy the character bits and the space battles, and try to ignore RDM’s luddism and mysticism.

Then again, there are some people (here’s looking at you, Squid) who cannot do this. They feel plots are promises instead of excuses (forgivable in written media, a capital crime in television), and they feel personally betrayed when things don’t get wrapped up in a neat little bow. Not to say it should never happen – watching the pieces fall into place is wonderful when it works. But Ronald D Moore is not a writer who can pull that off, as evidenced by, oh, most of BSG (cf Kobol, the Final Five, and the fact that Kara wasn’t dead for long enough for us to really believe she was [unlike Ellen]). A four-year-long television series is not a novel the author can rewrite from the beginning to make things fit together in the end. Nobody in American TV, with the possible exception of the makers of Rome, really have a long-term plan (with a definite ending) which survives contact with network execs, writers’ strikes, oscillating audience numbers, cast contract disputes, timeslot shell games, and most importantly, the finished work itself.

Aside: certain people here (Squid again) also fall for the trap of believing that if a show addresses the presence of certain problems (which the audience will catch onto anyways), it means that the show’s creators have an answer. Folly. It just means they’ve watched enough television themselves. You can see this on Sarah Connor Chronicles, too – they like making gestures in the direction of problems inherent with a time-travel show, but they still (after two seasons – well, one and a half) haven’t come up with anything close to a consistent model of causality.

I think Ray’s nailed it; I doubt Dad will really flip out over the ending, because I’m not sure how important the science aspect of the show is to him. He might actually quite like the mysticism, now that I think of it. Hmm. He’s four episodes into season 4 now, so he’ll have to wait until the 4.5 DVDs arrive. Hopefully I’ll be able to restrain myself until then. Though I may have to ask him how he feels about pre-determined universes in which decisions have no meaning. You know. Just because.

Squid said:
Okay, what this boils down to is saying that it’s the Squid’s fault for expecting to see effective storytelling on television, as if BSG shouldn’t be held to any higher standard than Three’s Company. It’s not a defense of the series; it’s an indictment of the audience’s too-high expectations. But suppose Eddie Olmos suddenly turned into William Shatner, and J. Michael Straczynski started writing BSG’s dialog; would you really respond to my howls of outrage by saying we shouldn’t expect better because “it’s just television”? BSG showed us that it could do better. BSG showed us that televised sf could be fucking brilliant. And ultimately, BSG did not fail “television” standards. BSG failed to meet the higher standard it had already set for itself.

BSG never set that high a standard for the continuing story plot points. Never. There was cautious optimism at best (and outright loathing at worst) when the first Kobol storyline played itself out in its vague and unspecific way. Character-wise, though, it was great. Return of the prodigal, mutinous son, the political reunification of the fleet, and a tenuous alliance between Adama and Roslin. Wonderful shit. Throw in a few Greek tragic references and you’re good. We weren’t actually expecting Roslin’s faith to be literalized in the end.

This runs through the whole show – the plotting is best when it’s the characters’ doing, and worst when it’s the producer’s. In fact, I’d say that the only times BSG was in fact that brilliant were those exact stories – cause and effect due to character interaction, mixed with a little random occurrence just for the hell of it. Whenever the “mysteries” were the focus, it was mediocre (and I feel sorry for Michael Hogan for each of those eps). Yeah, BSG showed it was possible to do it – it failed its own standards often enough that I got used to it. Chalked it up to over-extended seasons (shoulda been 13 eps per, HBO style), uncertain length (we didn’t really know if there’d be a next season for sure until partway through the third) and the tendencies of RDM towards the empty symbolism mentioned above.

And yeah, Squid, your expectations, while reasonable for a novel, are asking too much for an 84-hour movie (I think it was Olmos who said that).

Character-wise, though, it was great. Return of the prodigal, mutinous son, the political reunification of the fleet, and a tenuous alliance between Adama and Roslin. Wonderful shit. Throw in a few Greek tragic references and you’re good

And that is what the average viewer tunes in for – titties, death, explosions, fate, and the soap opera aspects with which they can identify – betrayal, romance, family estrangement and reunion, basic human emotion. Plot? Meh, not so much except where it feeds the soap opera.

Chalked it up to over-extended seasons (shoulda been 13 eps per, HBO style), uncertain length (we didn’t really know if there’d be a next season for sure until partway through the third)

Ah ha. That was part of my question, and my suspicion – if you can’t be sure when it’s over, you can’t be sure when what you hinted at has to pay off, and how long you might have to continue to string the audience along. If you assume you’re about to get canceled, and you tie up the loose plots ends, see the prophecies fulfilled, the symbols play out, and then last minute you get renewed – hoo boy! The gravy train continues to roll one more year or even two or three, even tho’ you got nothing more to write. Yipes.

If anyone followed Chris Carter’s Millenium, that was so evident:
sure they had been canceled after 2 years, Carter ended the entire world, or at least very strongly suggested the ending by plague. For the third season, they had to keep writing, even though they had killed off several major characters out-right. You could really sense how lost they were, plot-wise.

Peter Watts said: “Not just lower budgets, as I understand it; they wanted to get rid of the spaceships and rampaging robots because so much of the potential viewing audience simply refuses to watch shows with those elements just on general principle, no matter how good the critics keep telling them it is.”

Perhaps. As much as the title ‘Battlestar Galactica’ carried a tad too much mainstream baggage, though, the title ‘Caprica’ (which sounds like some sort of yuppie soft drink) could really use some. Robots and spaceships are arguably an easy sell compared to a sort of alternate-Earth epic of corporate dealings. (Speaking of which, how is ‘Kings’ doing ratingswise for NBC? Yeah, not great at all ….)

Knowing that, they still threw all those balls into the air with no idea of how to catch them afterwards.

What you’re saying is that you want an “Amen, brother!” from other people disappointed that the makers of BSG had the resources to do better, but they still took the easy way, the dumbed-down way.

You’re saying that with just a little more effort, BSG could have been literary-level. That they squandered the opportunity to transcend the SF television genre. You wanted what “The Sopranos” did for television mobsters to be done for television robots ‘n’ space battles.

That it?

There’s something about the rules of narrative, here. Forget guns over mantelpieces: stories have to demonstrate a change in circumstance between the beginning and the end. Otherwise, there’s no story, because nothing changed.

So say you have this story about this seemingly-apocalyptic battle between man and machine, in which a few people are expected –destined, even– to play key roles due to their skills and social position, and then you find out that really, this battle is just a repeat of previous battles that occurred years ago and which will likely occur again. In each, men fight machines, and sometimes they work with machines, and they always come to an inevitable impasse after which they attempt to hit a reset button on existence and start fresh. In that story, nothing changes. It’s a rut. A Hegelian rut, but a rut nonetheless.

It also happens to be the plot of the Matrix trilogy.

I don’t know if cycles need to break and things need to change. Look at The Wire … things don’t change, but it’s still probably the best-written TV show ever (with a few flaws now and then).

Just to clarify that throw-away Blade Runner comment: EJO taking off with Roslin seemed to resonate with the final scene of that movie, prefaced of course by Gaff’s comment that it was too bad that Sean Young would not live past her pre-set expiration date when he lets Dekker escape with her.

All the explosions and pretty people were great. At first. (In fact, I myself have been accused of enjoying explosions and pretty people too much. I tend to incorporate them into my own stories, perhaps even at the expense of plot.)

What disappointed me about the end of the Matrix cycle was that it felt as though Neo had not accomplished very much. At the end of the first film, it seemed as though things were definitely changing in the battle between humans and the machines. The tide had turned. The movement had a leader. But the latter two films undermined this feeling by portraying Neo as a placeholder for the One, simply a player in an eternal (and somewhat meaningless) game.

However, I should stress that the first film is a very simple, clear Western narrative that hinges upon the sacrificial king/messianic redeemer. Neo is born, dies, rises again. He comes again in glory to judge the man and the machine, and his kingdom shall have no end. What the latter two films do is, on some level, a critique of messianic thinking. Even messiahs, they remind us, need help. Neo is no longer all-powerful, and is struggling not merely against uncompromising enemies but against fate itself. He moves from a Christian hero to one of a pantheon, a world populated by seraphs and werewolves and dueling oracles. Now he’s an incarnation of something much greater, like Rama being the incarnation of Vishnu in the Ramayana (in which he uses his human form to defeat a demon who had escaped divine control through a celestial loophole, not unlike Smith). His new role means a new game, one in which an apocalyptic battle cannot solve all problems or bring down a new kingdom. Once a redeemer but now merely a champion, Neo simply takes his place in history where he will await another One (really One of Many) to take up the fight. Nothing has been won or lost, just preserved.

So I wouldn’t say that the Matrix violates the rules of “good” storytelling. It tells a very old story — two, in fact, and it’s that bait-and-switch that I found bothersome.

So I wouldn’t say that the Matrix violates the rules of “good” storytelling. – it’s that bait-and-switch that I found bothersome.

*ding!* I see now.

Do you suspect that the creators were flexing to meet market demands – if your audience is using your first movie as a hallucinagens party aid, might they have tailored the next two films to that, at the expense of continuity with movie #1?

I ask because I was probably one of a handful of people in our local theater at the second Matrix movie who were in their right minds. I was watching, thinking, this is sooo visually very interesting, but it makes zero sense. Then I looked around and went, Ah ha – I am watching it with the wrong goggles on. I need some drug goggles. Then all will be revealed.

I never got into The Sopranos; what did they do that was similar?

Particularly similar to “The Wire’s” Towers crew story – it is about a group of men involved in a familial criminal enterprise, where, in the course of business, people are brutally murdered or beaten.

When a character begins to redeem himself in the story line, this is a sure sign he is about to be murdered by an associate.

Several of the characters appear to be sociopathic.

A characters will develop pangs of horrible guilt about his crimes, but not enough to actually back away from the rewards gotten from those crimes.

Characters hiding large stashes from their wives in or near their domiciles.

Few meaningful female characters. Females are shown as money-driven, incapable of independent action, and incompetent mothers; they are dependent non-player characters, so to speak. They provide a “reason” for a male character to commit crimes, and as commenters or documenters of male lives.

There is a strong sense of place – south Jersey, west Baltimore – with filming done in the actual place, and some actors with genuine accents of the locale.

Characters swearing prolifically, drinking too much, and using hard drugs.

For the sake of the enterprise, long-term friends will murder each other personally and at close range.

Someone wants crazy disproportionate revenge for a loved one who got killed in the course of “business.”

There are sleazy titty bars used as legitimate business “fronts” for the criminal enterprise, and this entails hookers with hearts of gold.

Dead hookers aplenty.

Some stupid criminals that talk too much, some equally stupid policement.

The list goes on. Wow, Peter Saunders! I hadn’t realized how close they were until I started listing this stuff out.

The Sopranos differs in that it is a morality tale, with the mafia shown as a spreading evil, a moral contaminant, and the action is held together by Mr. Soprano’s therapist, who acts as documenter and stand-in for the horrified viewer. I don’t think The Wire has a stand in for the viewer, per se.

I’m impressed you managed to give The Sopranos a miss. I don’t have cable, I didn’t escape. *smiles*

I saw the first episode and the vibe didn’t really do anything for me.

To each his own, said the farmer as he kissed the cow.

From what I have been told, if you’re from New Jersey this show is very entertaining, because it has a keen eye for the culture and people of that state.

And the show was very popular! This leads me to believe that New Jersey is much much much bigger than I had assumed. I now think it must be the size of Texas or Alaska. Also that it contains many many color-blind people, because they often look at plates of marinara sauce and think it’s gravy.

Of course, this is just one mole’s opinion. You may have flown over New Jersey can tell for certain.

To get the proverbial cat killed, mostly, I guess. Also, this “Vito Corleone vs. Bill Gates with Cylon centurions around” could get to be fun, actually.

(the pilot was somewhat boring, though)