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  • Battlestar Galactica 1-7: Six Degrees of Separation

    Last episode, Number Six did a pretty good Bruce Banner impersonation, warning Baltar that he wouldn’t like her when she’s angry. In Six Degrees, she makes good on that threat: After Baltar makes fun of the Cylon god a few too many times, the Six in his head disappears, only to be replaced by a real-life Six, who claims to have evidence of Baltar’s treason.

    We can pause, for a moment, to recognize one of the funniest scenes in the entire series: Baltar arrives in Galactica’s command centre to find his fantasy woman standing among the crew. Except she’s not imaginary at all, and Baltar’s discovery of this fact plays out like a Marx Brothers routine. There aren’t a lot of funny scenes in Battlestar Galactica, but I suspect most of them involve James Callis.

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  • How Dangerous is Riding a Bike?

    Helmets credited for drop in cycling head injuries. That seems like an obvious story, right? As Greg Webster, director of primary healthcare information for the Canadian Institute for Health Information says, “it intuitively makes sense.”

    But intuitively, it made sense that the sun orbited the Earth, because that’s what you see when you have a limited perspective or are only looking at a certain set of facts. There are two pieces of compelling data in the study:

    • There were 4,325 cycling-related injuries in 2009-10, compared to 4,332 eight years earlier. Meantime, the number of cycling-related head injuries stood at 665 last year, compared to 907 in 2001-2002.
    • Among the most severe cycling injury admissions of the past decade (those requiring admission to a special trauma centre), 78% of those hospitalized with a head injury were not wearing a helmet when their injury occurred

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  • Battlestar Galactica 1-6: Litmus

    Why only 12 Cylon models?

    If you can make robots that pass for human beings, why limit yourself to 12? Wouldn’t it be easier to conquer and/or destroy humanity if you had 50, or 100?

    But okay, let’s say you only get 12, for reasons I have yet to hear but may be totally plausible. Five Cylons are super secret and special, so you’ve got seven. But why do they have to be identical? They all have the same shape, same hair, same face, often the same clothes. Tricia Helfer changes her hairstyle and puts on glasses a couple of times, but that’s the extent of Cylon diversity.

    Why don’t they have a Fat Doral? Or Bearded Leoben? Or even Boomer With Slightly Shorter Hair? Even if you’re stuck with a basic genetic template, surely, in the future, there are a variety of options for cosmetic enhancement?

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  • Helleresque City Council

    Not a totally irrelevant image! The mage I play in Warcraft is named Kafkaesque

    The word kafkaesque gets thrown around a lot, often by people who have never read a single word written by Franz Kafka. (You should read many of his words; they are quite excellent, particularly when assembled into sentences and paragraphs.) I’ve seen it used to describe some of the recent events at Toronto City Hall, but it doesn’t quite fit.

    Dictionary.com defines it thusly:

    adjective

    1. of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka: the Kafkaesque terror of the endless interrogations.

    2. marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies.

    Aside from a few convoluted voting motions, there’s little that is menacingly complex about Toronto City Council. Quite the contrary, most of council’s recent decisions have been transparently stupid, casually hidden behind a veil of distorted logic.

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  • Battlestar Galactica 1-4/5: The Fall & Redemption of Kara Thrace

    Act of Contrition and You Can’t Go Home Again are two halves of a story, so we’ll knock them both off here.

    Why would anyone think making Starbuck a teacher is a good idea? Yes, she’s the best fighter pilot in the universe, but she’s also undisciplined, insubordinate, and possibly crazy. While there’s no question she knows how to fly a Viper, her true awesomeness lies in her instincts and reflexes. Having Kara Thrace teach pilots how to fly is a bit like the Billy Bishop Flying School.  Surely there’s another pilot – Apollo or Boomer, if you need a main cast member – who could handle at basic training.

    But let’s overlook that plot point, as we have overlooked several plot points and will need to overlook even bigger ones to come. We can even explain it by suggesting that Adama wanted to teach Starbuck some responsibility, that he needed her to be more than just an awesome pilot/sniper/interrogator/strategist. We can even overlook Starbuck’s occasionally excessive awesomeness, since she’s such a fuckup whenever she’s not blowing shit up or punching people in the face.

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  • On the Subject of Bikes, Cars, Pedestrians, and The Law

    In my experience, cyclists have three approaches to the rules of the road:

    • Fully obey all laws all the time. These people are very rare.
    • Cautious rule breakers: They may not follow the exact letter of the law, but still remain considerate and aware. This is where things like the Idaho Stop comes in: They may not come to a complete stop at every stop sign, but they’ll approach the intersection with caution, yield to any traffic or pedestrian with the right of way, and then proceed. This group represents the overwhelming majority of cyclists, as well as the majority of drivers, pedestrians, and human beings in general.
    • Don’t give a fuck: These cyclists ignore signs and lights, have no understanding of the rules of the road, and are most likely to be perceived as jackasses by everyone around them.

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  • Bridesmaids: Hell Is Other People

    Watching people suffer is funny.

    Mel Brooks, who knew a thing or two about making funny movies, said “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Bridesmaids is about people falling into the sewer of failure and disappointment.

    Despite having one of the most misleading trailers I’ve ever seen – several scenes don’t even appear in the film – Bridesmaids is just as funny as you might expect, if not more so. But there’s little that can prepare you for how staggeringly depressing it is. While it’s a movie full of slapstick and silliness, it’s also about failure, loneliness, and the feeling that everyone else is getting on with their lives while you’re still stuck in the mud. Almost no one in the movie is happy, and everyone is envying someone else’s seemingly perfect life. It also features the most depressing cupcake scene ever filmed.

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  • Battlestar Galactica 1-3: Bastille Day

    Richard Hatch in the Old FutureHey, look! It’s Richard Hatch!

    (no, not that one)

    Battlestar Galactica is a remake, as we all know. It’s natural to want to pay homage to the original, but that sort of thing runs the risk of getting silly. Using the original theme music during a newscast was wonderful, but cameos from the “original” Cylons in Razor were gratuitous.

    So where does Richard Hatch fit in? He was one of the stars of the original series. I suppose the instinct might have been to cast him as a veteran fighter pilot, but Galactica went the other way: Tom Zarek was a terrorist – or a political freedom fighter, depending on your perspective.

    Well, there’s not a lot of perspective involved. Zarek is, for the first couple seasons, a sinister semi-terrorist, always plotting some way to seize power.  He gets more interesting later on, but for now, they may as well have given him a handlebar mustache.

    That said, Hatch did the best he could with the role. Zarek may be almost-kind-of-evil, but he always appears intelligent and reasonably charismatic. If he weren’t clearly set up as an opponent for Roslin and Adama, the “freedom fighter” angle might be easier to accept. As it stands, the prison setting in Bastille Day makes him look more like Hannibal Lecter than George Washington.

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  • Battlestar Galactica 1-2: Water

    Grace Park as BoomerThe Cylon Sleeper Agent didn’t get a whole lot of use on Battlestar Galactica. Most of the Cylons, when caught, confessed to being Cylons, and then went about being evil, fleshy toasters.

    But then there’s Boomer, who doesn’t know she’s a Cylon, even while she’s carrying out evil Cylon plots. She wakes up alone, soaking wet, with a bag full of explosives next to her. When Galactica’s water tank blows up, she doesn’t know what to think – she wouldn’t do it, obviously, but it certainly looks like she did.

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  • Battlestar Galactica 1-1: 33

    Battlestar Galactica? Really?

    You’re going to revive a 1970s  sci-fi series that was a flaccid attempt to emulate the success of Star Wars, replete with soap opera performances and 1970s fashion?

    That, in itself, calls for scepticism.

    But to the surprise of many, Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries kicked ass.

    Surely, though, that creativity and quality wasn’t sustainable on an ongoing basis, right? It’s one thing to produce six hours of miniseries, but an ongoing series?

    The creators of Battlestar Galactica must have been aware that the debut of the ongoing series would generate as much, if not more, scepticism than the miniseries. So they responded with 33, an exceptional “pilot” episode, and one of the strongest episodes of the entire series.

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