Battlestar Galactica
Just finished my first rewatch of the original Battlestar Galactica series from 1978 for the first time in forever. Galactica 1980 was horrible aside from "The Return of Starbuck," so I skipped that series and just stuck to the single season of the original.
I'll address the uneven acting first to get it out of the way. If it seems like the actors were reading their lines for the very first time in some of the episodes, it's because they were. The scripts were sometimes completed just before shooting, so the actors had to read them for the first time off of cue cards while shooting the scene. As a kid, I never caught on to this. As an adult, it's glaringly obvious.
Some of the episodes were a bit silly, also for the aforementioned reason. This was meant to be a three-episode miniseries but suddenly became a weekly series, without an adequate budget or time to prepare the scripts. The episode which weren't just plain silly were allegories, many of them for the Mormon church. The "Ships of Light" episode were always my least favorite, even as a kid. The "Eastern Alliance" was a bit on-the-nose with fairly recent Earth history, too. I started laughing during my rewatch when one of the Easter Alliance members spoke with a poorly-faked German accent.
I realize after this most recent re-watch that my fondness for the series is mostly nostalgia, because it reminds me of my childhood. I'll always have a fondness for it, even though it was never great to begin with.
Tags: tv, rewatch, battlestar-galactica, nostalgia
Severance
I posted this on FB, but I plan on giving that up soon, so I am repeating it here:
Someone in a CRT group (on FB), of all places, recently recommended the TV show Severance, a few weeks before season 2 started. So I binged it to be ready for season 2, and it is a wonderfully quirky show which you'll either love or hate. People go through a procedure to separate their work lives from the rest of their lives. Literally. While they're an "innie," they have no memory of the outside world. They have no knowledge of their "outie's" lives at all. To them, they're always at the office. And the opposite is true. Their "outie" has no knowledge of their "innie's" lives, and none of their memories. They go to work, and their next memory is of them leaving work. It's an interesting concept on it's own, but there's also a strange cult, and rituals. Definitely worth checking out.
On a related note, Apple TV+ is also adapting Neuromancer to TV, and has completed a couple of weeks of shooting in Tokyo so far. I'm really looking forward to that one!
Rewatch: Northern Exposure
I just finished a rewatch of Northern Exposure and I forgot how delightfully quirky it had gotten in spots. I also realize that when it was on first-run, I must have stopped watching somewhere during the 5th season.
Overall, it holds up fairly well but definitely has a certain 90's charm. If this were my first watch, at my current age (instead of a younger adult), I'm not sure if that charm would have drawn me in if I weren't already a fan of the characters.
If you were a fan before, it's worth watching again. If you weren't, it's still worth catching a few episodes to see if the charm and the quirkiness draws you in. You'll chuckle a lot, and probably laugh a lot. You'll probably come away caring about the characters, because the show also makes you feel for them.
Tags: tv, northern-exposure
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