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TV

The Password is Courage

I’m not a big anime watcher, usu­ally only falling back on it when I’m in a cod­ing slump and feel­ing re­ally bored. It was on one such oc­ca­sion that I picked up Soul Eater. It’s rare to get such a char­ac­ter-dri­ven story out of main­stream anime. The char­ac­ters, music, art de­sign, style… all of it clicked with me. I fell in love with it from the first episode.

I stopped watch­ing about a month be­fore the story ended so that I could see the final five episodes all in one go. Well, it ended late last month and I only just got around to watch­ing them. Maybe be­cause I was busy, maybe be­cause I didn’t want to admit to my­self that it was over. Lit­tle of both, prob­a­bly.

In the end it was a dis­ap­point­ment. Soul Eater could have been so much more, if only they had fo­cused on the char­ac­ters in­stead of de­volv­ing into a huge ac­tion bat­tle. I guess such an end­ing it is to be ex­pected from some­thing based on a shōnen manga, though from what I’ve heard it de­vi­ated quite a bit from the source, which is still on­go­ing. Maybe I’ll pick that up.

And another…

BSG got a shoutout in last night’s 30 Rock! Elisa (Salma Hayek) was in a shirt, and Frank (Judah Fried­lan­der) said “What the frak?!”.

CSI Cameos

Lots of BSG peo­ple in last week’s sci-fi fo­cused CSI (A Space Odd­ity). I spot­ted Grace Park (Boomer/Athena/Eight), Kate Ver­non (Ellen), Rekha Sharma (Tory), and Ron Moore (se­ries cre­ator). They also men­tioned tak­ing a decades-old TV show and up­dat­ing it to make a hit. Hehe.

You were a frakkin good show

So say we all!

Battlestar Galactica coming to a close, but Caprica remains inbound.

A few weeks ago, for the first time in my life, I watched a TV episode twice. Back to back, with no break in be­tween. Blood on the Scales, for me, was pure gold. The story was in­cred­i­ble, es­pe­cially if you got the chance to see the we­bisodes that sup­plied im­por­tant con­text for it. The act­ing was top-notch. Alessan­dro Ju­liani in par­tic­u­lar, who has had a rel­a­tively small amount of screen time be­fore now, re­ally stepped up to de­liver a won­der­ful mov­ing per­for­mance. The music—oh my sweet god the music. Any­one who knows me well will know my love for the BSG sound­tracks, but the music in this par­tic­u­lar episode spoke to me on such a pro­found level that I lit­er­ally missed di­a­log at points and had to rewind to hear it again. I will be shocked, pleas­antly, if I ever watch an­other episode of any other TV show that af­fects me like this one.

This Fri­day be­gins the final count­down for Bat­tlestar. It will be the first in a three episode arc to end the se­ries. On one hand I am sad to see it go. I will miss not just watch­ing it, but hop­ping on­line af­ter­ward to read Bear Mc­Creary’s en­thralling be­hind-the-scenes sum­mary of the score. But on the other hand, I would rather see it get the strong fin­ish it de­serves than see it be­come the prover­bial Old Yeller like Star­gate: SG-1 did.

But Caprica will be start­ing early next year, so maybe all is not lost. I worry about them milk­ing the mythos to death in it, but these guys trans­formed a corny 70s show into some­thing amaz­ing, so I have a lot of hope. Ear­lier this month, Bear gave an early pre­view per­for­mance of the music of Caprica.