peck72

It's a quite night in the Blood Service and so I've been grazing the internet for inspiration to write from (probably not the best place but still) and found this instead.

Manga made real

It's a very disturbing set of pictures, but some of the really good ones are scarily authentic looking. I think my favourite is this one. not sure why but it just clicks with me. It did amuse me as well, thinking that this is what the human race would wind up looking like if we ever did interbreed with the alien grays.

This set of nights has also enabled me to have a Battlestar Galactica fest, I'm 10 episodes out of 13 through season 1 and I have to say it really is delivering on the hype about it. Prior to this I'd only seen the mini-series and one first season episode ('Tigh me up, Tigh me down', probably the weakest episode in spite of the v.funny Dr.Balter/Starbuck scene) and so I bought the box set in more hope than knowledge but it is paying off well.

I remember the original series through the lenses of nostalgia but I was too young to get more fanboyish over it than 'Oooh, shiny robots, spaceships, weird damn dog!' and so I've not really worried about the changes they've made regarding casting, etc and have just enjoyed it for what it is. A really, good sci-fi story.

I just hope that the writers have looked far enough ahead to have somewhere to take the story, rather than just keeping the gravy train going round in circles to just keep it going. In my mind stories like this need an overall story arc and a sense of movement along that arc. I don't doubt that it's hard to do but Babylon 5 proved that you can get the balance right by planning ahead. If you have too many self contained episodes then a series will lose it's way but on the flip side too many arc stories and it becomes impenetrable to newbies. Along with this, I suppose, the fear for the producers is that if you build in an overall goal then you build in the end of the series and then you have an unavoidable death to what may be a lucrative little cash cow. Stargate has got around this by having a very open ended remit (to explore and protect) but also having internal story arcs running over several series, Smallville is struggling with it now in that it's remit is 'what happened to Superman before he became Superman' but the older he gets then the closer to donning the cape and y-fronts he gets as well.

Knowing that your show has a set life expectancy would hopefully give an urgency to the story telling and trim the fat from it. Knowing that it didn't have to keep going on just because it could, might of saved the reputation of the X-Files, commiting it to 23 episodes from the very beginning might have produced a much more wide spread appreciation of Firefly. Knowing that you have the security of at least X number of episodes to tell your story would hopefully allow people to experiment and to play with the medium and produce genuinly original and exciting programmes.
Battlestar Galactica has got a greenlight for it's third season (apparently) and will be taking the story onwards for another year at least, with luck they'll know where they are going and how they intend to get there.

Well, I guess I had better get back to doing something for my pittance of pay. Wonder what's on tv?