The Plan is in effect

Absolute Zero

I've re­cently started re-watch­ing the en­tire Bat­tlestar Galac­tica se­ries from the be­gin­ning, and I'm find­ing it sur­pris­ingly awe­some con­sid­er­ing I al­ready know how it plays out. A big part of what made BSG great is all the lit­tle in­ter­ac­tions be­tween the char­ac­ters, and these are first things you for­get. So, I've still got a lot to enjoy.

I watched The Plan on Blu-ray today. In it, you fol­low two Cav­ils while they plot and ex­e­cute their plan to de­stroy hu­man­ity. It takes a lot of the mem­o­rable mo­ments of sus­pense from the minis­eries and sea­son one—when you knew some­thing was hap­pen­ing but weren't given all the de­tails, or when you sus­pected some­one of being a Cylon, etc.—and ex­pands them to show you what was re­ally hap­pen­ing using a lot of old ma­te­r­ial is used to seam­lessly tran­si­tion into the Cy­lons' point of view.

I'm re­ally sad to say that the only part I liked about The Plan was Dean Stock­well's frakkin' amaz­ing act­ing and Bear's equally great score. The Plan has a lot of prob­lems. First and fore­most is that it's lit­er­ally a recap of the minis­eries and sea­son one -- there's no new story. If I had to guess, 25 to 50% of the scenes were ac­tu­ally old aired footage. An­other prob­lem is that all those great mo­ments lost their sus­pense by being ex­panded. And the last major prob­lem is that the new ma­te­r­ial fo­cuses on the "bad" Cy­lons. This seems like a re­ally great idea at first, but what I quickly re­al­ized is that the TV show never made us con­nect with them and as a re­sult I had trou­ble car­ing at all about their scenes. Most of the time I was just hop­ing my fa­vorite human char­ac­ters or "good" Cy­lons would get on screen and give me all those lit­tle in­ter­ac­tions I talked about.

Purely as a BSG geek, there was some in­ter­est­ing new in­for­ma­tion to learn. But bot­tom line? I was bored. I wouldn't rec­om­mend this to any­one. I'm re­ally sorry to say it too, be­cause I and so many oth­ers were look­ing for­ward to it.

Posted on October 24, 2009 in Battlestar Galactica, The Plan

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