One quote from the essay...
The hero of the story, Zoe, was virtually missing from the story with nearly 75 percent of the screen time in the past two episodes spent on the religious zealotry of Sister Clarice and Soldiers of the One internal battle for religious control.
...makes me glad that I skipped Caprica. Because while a show about the development of artificial intelligence would be interesting as fuck, I reckoned correctly that Caprica would not be such a show.
Well, to be fair, that quote is only describing the past couple of episodes. The show covers a number of different themes, and I'm sure they will be getting back to the AI stuff.
That said, I haven't been enjoying the show much myself lately, because there is a lot of stuff going on that doesn't appeal to me, like a lot of stuff with mobsters.
I've avoided Caprica, as I've just kinda assumed that Caprica would be about as interested in AI as BSG was.
I reject any attempt to define what story tellers "should not" do. That way lies rigidity at best, censorship at worst. It is always worthwhile to try new things, to challenge people's assumptions about what "should" be. In fact, it is imperative to challenge those assumptions.
A fine sentiment, well expressed.
There's nothing wrong with self-censoring ideas that are merely bad, however.
What you're saying is a fair point as far as it goes, but I stand by my position: it's a matter of what the audience is used to or willing to consider. These days, there's a lot of magic realism, fantasy fiction that's set in the modern world with modern technology rather than the usual medieval fantasy setting. I'm sure there were people who were thrown off by that when the genre was first starting out, but that doesn't mean it was invalid to do it.
There is fiction out there that blends robots and angels, or the equivalent.
Of course there is. I mentioned two. Evangelion and (to put a name on it) Grant Morrison's JLA (actually a whole hell of a lot of superhero comics). In both cases, our heroes inhabit a less literal world than Moore and Eicke built on BSG. Giant robots fight alien angels and the world ends because Shinji is a creep; Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, coexists with Captain America, steroid user. These worlds are emphatically not real.
Sandman was a magical realist work of a sort, too. There, the
point was that the world was only as real or less real than the imagination.
The difference in all these is that they put it on the table. Issue 1 of Sandman, Morpheus is imprisoned by a magical circle. In Zauriel's first appearance in JLA, he's followed by the Host of Heaven who burn down half San Francisco and pull the moon out of its orbit. In the first episode of Evangelion, there's a giant alien angel that gets beaten up by a kid in a gross robot suit while he tries to go five minutes without masturbating. Probably. It's been a while since I've seen Evangelion.
The BSG miniseries, as I recall, was about robots who didn't like humans. Religion is mentioned, but treated as religion--as a piece of worldbuilding.
Imagine if Terminator Salvation, the fourth installment of the series, didn't just suck, but featured Sol Invictus coming out of the sky and saving humanity from Christian Bale's Batman voice and also robot overlords.
It's been done, and it's worked. There's no guarantee it'll work in every case, no, but "should not?" No. To me as a writer, that attitude is just plain chilling.
Oh, it oughtn't be. It's just that works, and genres, often create expectations in their audience, and to dash those expectations must be done with the greatest of care, if at all, and technically adroitly.
I'm not the hugest fan of Buffy, but when Whedon merged musical tropes with a fantasy-dramedy in "Once More With Feeling," there was a genre-appropriate rationalization for all the singing and the song-and-dance was adeptly performed and used to further plot and thematic purposes in a satisfying manner.
As a counterexample from the same show, those geek rapist-murderer guys were painful anytime they were on screen. Yeah, the Buffy sexbot joke was retarded funny,* but I can't imagine a much more obviously foreign element to the show than a sociopathic Anthony Michael Hall, and it
didn't work.
Bringing us back to Battlestar Galactica: closing BSG with a musical number would have been
at least as appropriate to the show as the rapture of Zombie Kara Thrace. But while it is fair to say that they laid
some groundwork for a mystical twist to BSG, it was handled in a technically poor manner, and forced into story with a sledgehammer's sensitivity.
Did anyone, even fans of the finale, find the Opera House premonition to be satisfyingly fruited by the Opera House shots being literally recreated on the Galactica sets, all to accomplish Baltar running two yards down a hallway and doing little of note?
And on a grander scale, the problems with divine intervention are legion, because no matter how convoluted divine intervention winds up in execution, when used as the engine of the plot, God's "Plan" should always--like a well-constructed thriller--be evident, explicable, even obvious in retrospect. None of this can be easily said about BSGod.
As I said, the finale highlighted (highlit?) all the problems inherent in blending the two genres.
Could it never have worked? I dunno. It would have required surer hands than Moore and Eike seemed to possess in regards to how they expected their space opera to play out.**
Given the pitfalls, a maxim such as "IF robots, NO angels" is to be observed. Maxims may be ignored and rules may be broken; and yet it's fair criticism to declare that a work's reach exceeds its grasp if it can't pull off the breach.
Now, I guess with a really literal reading of the maxim, Star Wars would be right out. However, numerous threads here have shown the Force does sometimes coexist uncomfortably alongside the more SFnal elements of Star Wars, to the extent that they have to trade one for the other.
The attempt to have both gave us midichlorians. Make of that what you will.
*And, given how that worked out, apparently flattering. It seems that nothing is more impressive to a woman than banging her robotic doppelganger. And yet Athena didn't think it was that cool.
**Perhaps at all. I'm unsure of Moore's influence over the Pah Wraiths arc, but the final episodes of DS9 collectively form another example of science fiction and mysticism crossing paths and leaving each other and the audience poorer for it. In DS9, it is far more obvious that the problem is structural, than it is for BSG.
).
) Since the show was always about religious war (and much loved for it,) rejecting the end is the same as rejecting the entire series. But no one can honestly pretend to be surprised by it.
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