INDELIBLE FRECKLES

Kinda flat out.

• PostmodernBarney has an adorable array of uncomfortable plot summaries.
• There’s an interesting article over the ditch about the journey of multihyphenate Serhat Caradee who, despite having a developed script and a few short films, found he had to shoot ‘pilot scenes’ to attract funding. (Fedora-tip: Lynden Barber.)
• If, like me, you found Battlestar Galactica’s final moments wanting, to quote the late King of Pop, you are not alone. (Fedora-tip: Alex Epstein.)
• The National Post has a cautionary tale about the four acts of a television series’ life. (Fedora-tip: Ben Boychuk.)
• After a looong period of radio silence (hey, he was busy), Josh Friedman has lately thrown up two posts in as many months.
• An excellent New York Times article explores the seduction and corruption of Graham Greene by the silver screen. (Try here if that NY Times link doesn’t work.)
• And English playwright David Edgar has a brill’ extract from his book, How Plays Work, in The Guardian. (Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)

Yeah, it took me a good fortnight to catch up to some people but some people don’t have a menagerie to compete with for The Goddess’ time.

I thought it ended in grand fashion: personal stakes, of course, were high; characters made decisions where I truly cared whether they lived or died; and there was a cool space battle with ultra-high-risk tactical gambits and shit blowing up.

And then as various farewells were worked through, I felt a twitch in the back of my throat*: we’d been with these characters for over 80+ hours of television, spread over four years. It was okay to blink and swallow manfully, grateful that The Goddess’s back was to me.

As the camera pulled back, and pulled back, and pulled back, I sighed with contentment… and then there was a title card… and an epilogue which I thought totally and utterly naff. Which brought up unwelcome questions like:

• So who – or what – is Starbuck?
• Who – or what – is Gaius Baltar if, as the opening credits showed every ep, he was caught in a thermonuclear blast on Caprica?
• What happened to all the mythology/religious/destiny/determinism schtick that really pulled the first two seasons together?

Aw… whatevs.

It was great television. It went places, and I’m not meaning geographically. It told stories, a lot of them familiar, and told them well. And I cared.

Thank you, Mr Moore.

*  A twitch that was definitely absent during the dutiful but interminable farewells in The Return of the King.