Desert Bus: 127k

Desert Bus just went over 127k, and they have an hour and thirty three minutes left to go. If you have not yet, donate.

Desert Bus III is a go!

Go and donate for the kids.

SGU Follow-Up: Apology Accepted

As if feeling bad about themselves due to my prior review, SGU churns out one of the best things that I've ever seen.

It's smart, it distinguishes itself away from the Voyager and BSG feeling, and what's more, it's actual science fiction.

Apology accepted, Brad Wright.

Now, I can't take back the stuff I said about your earlier episodes, but if you keep this level of writing up, I will pull you off my Awful TV List.

Stargate: Universe, or How We Learned To Settle For Awful TV

There's been an epidemic going around that I've come to call the "Stupid-Smart Show", wherein a show gets on television that holds sums that are just smart enough to make people think that the whole is genius. This idea came into power right after we as an audience witnessed the collapse of the Reality TV genre and following the rebirth of the scripted show. Things such as "Lost" and "Surface" submerged from the depths. But so did trite offerings such as "Invasion" and "The Nine". The ever-growing societal gap between what people consider intelligence and what they consider elitism has not helped at all.

On the frontier of the new wave of dumb shows that hide in the masquerade of brain power is Stargate: Universe, the second spin-off in the Stargate franchise. It is shot better, has better lighting, and sports way better acting than either SG1 or Atlantis. How then, can it be the worst of the three?

Oh, it can. It is.

For a little backstory, the Sci-Fi channel ran a little known show called Battlestar Galactica, about a group of surviving humans on a ship in space. It ended. Kind of, there is a spin-off coming out. There also, on UPN, used to be a Star Trek show called Voyager, about a group of people in a ship. In space. Two very similar concepts but two entirely different plots. Voyager was very much a regular Star Trek series with the added window dressing of trying to find a way home. BSG was a drama that just so happened to be set on a space ship. Sci-Fi didn't even want BSG until the BCC showed interest in it. So it kind of makes perfect sense that Sci-Fi would cannibalize their recently deceased show so badly.

SGU is about a bunch of humans, survived from an attack by a mysterious alien race (which is null and void now that the creators have said there is no main villain), and living on a space ship trying to make its way home. It's such a rip-off, it's not even funny. But people will watch it because they like Stargate and they liked BSG. No matter that SGU has absolutely none of the guts, writing, or depth of BSG. If you stripped away the before-mentioned lighting, cinematography, and acting, it's a regular dumb-as-paste episode of Stargate that we've all seen before.

Hey, I liked SG1's opener. I liked Atlantis' opener. They were acted well. Which makes me wonder why, right after the first episode of each, the level of commitment sank like a witch in a pond. Is it simply a case of the Voyagers (where the cast of Voyager was told not to emote more than the aliens)? So I was wary of Universe. Now, as I've said, the acting is top-notch, so maybe they solved their problem. But it still bugs me, because a lot of the jokes are the same style (and Stargate only has one style of joke: dry wit, and it gets old after a half episode) but are executed with passion.

Don't get me started on the "malfunction of the week" format of episodes. It's bad enough that the ship they are on is the show's MacGuffin. It takes them wherever they need to go in order to find what they need that week.

Talk about lazy writing. Talk about lazy effing writing.
Let me give you an example of SGU's writing:
1) In one episode, they try to get power back online by slingshotting around a planet's gravity.
2) The episode ends with them, still having no power, on a collision course with a sun. The episode ends. No resolution for the current problem of no power.
3) Next episode. They hold a lottery for 17 people to escape on the lone shuttle. This could of been interesting, except for the fact that the don't actually do anything with the lottery plot. All moral conflicts are brushed aside (although, there was one ray of shining light: someone who tries to bribe their way onboard gets picked randomly), and there is only the briefest of riots over the situation.
4) The ship flies through the sun, because that is how it gets its power. Thereby negating the point of not only this episode, but the last one, as well.

Spaceships do not equal science fiction. Ideas equal science fiction. Storytelling equals science fiction. If you have a ship that powers itself by flying through suns, I am bloody sure there is a way to introduce that into your story without making it a Deus ex Machina.

Action without substance does not equal storytelling. Conflict without cause does not equal drama.

SDCC Founder Dies

Shel Dorf, founder of the SDCC, passed away yesterday.