BSgcast 3.15 – “Dirty Hands”
Thankfully, this week’s episode of BSG seems to be a return to form leading into what will hopefully be a stellar last few episodes for Season 3, and Matt + Nat have plenty to say… and disagree about this politically and socially charged story, written by Jane Espenson, of Buffy/Angel/Firefly fame.
This week, the title of Fan of the Week is taken by not one fan, but nearly 900 of them: The Colonial Defense Forces – the first chapter-based fan club for Battlestar Galactica. You should see the effort these folks put into authenticity! It’s even appreciated by some of their honourary members Jamie Bamber, Edward James Olmos and Richard Hatch!
Hope you like it this week… next week looks like a killer!
~Matt + Nat
March 1st, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Baltars amazing accent was a Yorkshire accent. It was a pritty good one too. I come from that area and just thought wow.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Thank you for your comments concerning the Colonial Defense Forces in your latest episode. We aprreciate it. As for your honorary memberships, I am pleased to announce that you have both been granted honorary commisisons as Ensign’s,…
However I will require an email address to send your certificate’s and membership packets to.
So Say We All!
–
ADM Bruce Jenner
Chief of Fleet Operations
Colonial Defense Forces
Battlestar Prometheus BSR-01
MK VII Viper 03002NV “Coder”
CCN: Code Team Leader
-
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Hey Bruce,
We’re so glad you guys enjoyed the CDF shout-out this week! And we’re both excited about the official memberships! You can e-mail us both at matt+nat@bsgcast.com!
~Ensigns Matt + Nat
March 4th, 2007 at 2:31 am
Mmm… Gaeta…
Best part of this week’s episode? Watching it with you guys…
We’re ready to strap it on for next week… whatever the hell that means, you filthy bastard.
March 4th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Ah yes… the moment those words escaped my mouth, I wondered who was going to call me on it!! Don’t tell me I’m the first guy to ask you to strap it on, Casey…
We totally loved watching BSG with you guys this week, we’ll have to line up our visit to Montreal with another Sunday night before the season wraps us!
~Matt
March 5th, 2007 at 8:11 am
A fine yourkshire accent – reminiscent of Malcom McDowell in Clockwork Orange – cithy later !
March 11th, 2007 at 1:57 am
I’m a moderator on the official Nicki “Cally” Clyne fansite. I would hasten to point out, Nat, that in the DVD commentary for Extended Pegasus RDM and David Eick do point out “Cally’s got an entire fan following” “Who could blame them?” (happens when Adama gets the final call from CIC when Cally’s there; he was referring to our “movement” specifically). How can you not like Cally? She won the Season 2 GTA for Best Supporting Actress by a landslide.
It’s a Yorkshire accent, specifically; northern England accent = working class.
RDM confirmed in the podcast that he is indeed from Aerelon and not making that up. In keeping with the “dear god, we cut this entire “Sagitarron storyarc” from all of Season 3.5″, originally Baltar was in fact from Sagittaron, but when they realized they couldn’t have payoff on that, they changed it so that now he is officially from Aerelon.
Dualla’s promotion is simple: the character does whatever the writers need her to do and she’s kind of forced. Most fans online pretty much hate Dualla as a character by this point; she was never popular to begin with, but she got kind of annoying when she just kept changing to meet the demands of the plot. Yes, it made some sense for her to be promoted during New Caprica when most of the crew was gone and they needed more Officers….but they should have demoted her back or something later.
Apollo is next in chain of command after Tigh, not Helo. Nor is it Gaeta. It’s fun to guess who would be “best”, but realistically, it would just go to the next person in command, Apollo.
I don’t like Espenson’s writing: Roslin was acting out of character. You guys may like Espenson, and I don’t question that she’s a good writers, but “The Passage” was the worst episode of season 3. Of course, there are 2 explanations for this that mollify this in regard to Espenson: 1-she has said that her original script was filled with a lot of fun witty banter, and drastically different from what aired 2-maybe 10 full minutes got cut from this episode; and scenes got reshuffled. So I give Espenson herself a pass on that one, but not “The Passage” itself: the editing job ruined it. It’s that…..Kat’s deathbed scene, suddenly having a deep connection with Adama…..came out of nowhere. And in the podcast RDM explained that they actually set it up in a scene in “Occupation” that got deleted. Well that kind of ruined the Kat scene in Passage because now it has no setup. It was really odd to read the bboards after that: half of the people were going “wow, I cried” and the other half (including myself) were saying “wow…that was forced. Kat deserved a better death than that. That didn’t have dramatic impact”. But I digress……
Point is, “The Passage” was a bad outing but admittedly this was due to factors beyond Espenson’s control.
As for “Dirty Hands”…..Roslin acts really out of character, and inconsistently. “Uh uh, Chief, no”…wtf?
One minute she’s acting like a complete hardass….and then at the end of the episode, she radically shifts to being supportive of Chief…..they didn’t give us a transition scene to explain why she was at least more accomodating. And she basically just started straight at the camera and in the last 30 seconds explained the Moral of the Episode. You can’t just have characters say out loud what the moral is, straight to the audience; reminds me of a Futurama joke: The Robot-Devil criticises a play Fry wrote: “Your characters lack subtlety! You can’t just have them say what they feel! That makes me angry!”
The Chief and Cally parts were great though.
***No, I do not want the show to be more like Firefly. I think Firefly was a good show but I never really watched it alot. (sigh) perhaps….this is because you never suffered through “Star Trek Enterprise”. The idea on “Enterprise” was that they wanted to attract new viewers who didn’t watch scifi (hicks) by having a theme song that instead of being classical music…..was a country music song with a guitar. Fans hated it. I mean really hated it. It’s as pervasive as “wesley crusher is annoying”. It seems a small thing, but it became a flashpoint because the idiot producers pretty much acknowledged that the theme song was universally hated, but refused to change it because they didn’t want to be influenced by fans.
There’s a lot of bad memories and open wounds about that, but it amounts to “you tried to dumb down the show and make it “folksy” to attract new viewers by inserting country music”
***Now, on Firefly it was different: the entire concept was based on the idea of “it’s post-Civil War American West in space”; Mal is an ex-Confederate soldier, having to dodge the Union army as he runs around with his motley crew of miscreants through the dusty backwaters where the Union doesn’t have as much control. That’s how Whedon envisioned it (he read “The Killer Angels” and wanted a show based on that). And I actually think, within its own universe, it worked quite well. I mean in the whorehouse episode, the whole thing was basically “new wild west”, or on the amish planet, etc.; they’re out in the backwaters where people are so poor they actually use animals to farm and such, tech is low out on the frontier. The country music and guitars on Firefly entirely made sense.
However, any attempt at pushing “Country music” stuff into another Scifi show not directly based on that brings back painful memories of the “Enterprise” theme song’s attempt to dumb down scifi. I mean instead of doing that, or using tired old classical music for space, originally BSG used things like japanese war drums and such. Multiethnic stuff.
Well, within the episode, having a twanging guitar during particularly dirty heavy work on the flight deck or in the refinery ship actually DID make sense in context; has a great “workin’ man”/industrial dirt feel. Still, I was inwardly cringing, for reasons of my own. I’m glad they didn’t use it more than they did, but what they did use of it wasn’t actually bad.
****So my point is, I like Espenson as a writer on other shows, but so far she has yet to “wow” me. However, I do understand that she has only had 2 episodes to do so in, and I give her a free pass on “The Passage” as other factors were involved. I’m just still waiting to be impressed. Hopefully, though, she’ll be fine. I know she’s good at this stuff.
Pleased to meet you/
hope you guessed my name/
but what’s puzzling you/
is the nature of my game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-vkSO6mS9E
March 13th, 2007 at 12:08 am
This wasn’t the first time Baltar used that accent.
In Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 1 (1st season), Baltar was playing cards with Apollo, Gaeta, and some others, and Head-Six was sitting in the corner talking over Baltar’s shoulder. He was seething over the fact that Starbuck called out Lee’s name during sex, and he used that accent to taunt Apollo:
“You can’t compete with me,” in his normal voice, then “I always win.” in an Aerelon accent. Then Head-Six says “I’ve never seen you like this Gaius. It’s disappointing somehow… common.” Then Baltar says “So sorry to disappoint you… disappoint you all.”
This makes me think that Baltar was telling the truth about his heritage. And it also makes me think that Head-Six really is nothing more than a manifestation if his own subconscious mind.
July 26th, 2008 at 8:39 am
rules poker rule free poker rule
March 21st, 2009 at 5:18 pm
The president was a total bitch this episode.It’s not a democracy anymore, she does whatever she wants and it’s not o.k.
I served in the army and let me tell you something about Adama’s call – when you don’t do as you told you get to jail and you do some time there but nobody shoots you for that. That was a little bit too much.
Maybe Adama and the president have too much power and it’s good that we have Li, Teryl and Baltar to help balance the situation.