I’m continually surprised by the lines that BSG treads with regards to the different tv genres it incorporates. I’m also surprised to see how many people are simultaneously bored by this season and frustrated by the lack of “realism” in it - not because there’s anything wrong with being bored or frustrated by a show, because as viewers, we’re relating to the characters and situation, and it can’t all be sunshine and roses. Rather, I’m surprised because BSG is still a post-apocalyptic show telling an epic story, so the lines between realism and fiction are necessarily going to be blurred. I think those lines are also blurred through the visual techniques used - the hard lights and documentary style camera work: those tell of realism, of reality tv almost - it feels like we’re not only viewers but voyeurs, simulatneously immersed in the story and detached from it.  Apocalyptic fiction and epic tales all feature fantastical leaps. It’s part of the nature of that type of text - the unexplainable, the mythical, the mysterious, the frustrating sheer unknowness of some aspect.

What’s plausible, what’s implausible is a big debate about most shows, this one is not exception: people thing, Roslin’s cancer, plausible; Gaius as saviour, implausible.  Starbuck wild and out of control - plausible; Tigh as a Cylon - implausible. But at its very foundation, this is a show set in outer space, telling a story revolving around anthropomorphic robots. When the lines start to blur and I start to get nitpicky about what’s plausible and what’s not, that’s my bottom line. It doesn’t always work.

In other news, there’s a nice review up of Frak You! at SFScope - awesome, smart site if you’re at all into speculative fiction and I’m not just saying that because of the review.

From the darkness, you must fall
Failed and weak, to darkness all.

One thing that’s always fascinated me on BSG is the lack of poetry - in fact, most forms of traditional art. The above quote, from “Final Cut,” is one of the only references to poetry throughout the series, with the obvious exception of Starbuck’s wall poetry in her old home on Caprica. Is it a coincidence that it’s Starbuck who both writes the poetry and quotes the verse, and is also seen to be interested in painting? It’s hard to say.

What’s even more interesting though is the link between the lack of poetry and the apocalyptic universe in which the fleet resides. Plato claimed that his perfect Republic would include no poets because they were tricksters and liars; today, we tend to look at poets as messengers of a compressed truth about the world we live in, but to Plato, a poet’s use of troped language was the very opposite of truth and so had no place in the perfect Republic. In BSG, the only poetry that we see is linked to death: Kataris’ verses as a portent of doom for Tigh, and Starbuck’s words written on the wall of a home that has been obliterated.

To survive an apocalypse is to survive the end of all things, but it is also to be the witness of a new time since the apocalypse is both end and what comes after. Perhaps the reason that there is such a lack of poetry - of art - in a post-apocalyptic world is linked to the new vision of poetry as an essence of truth, or a representation of the world. If there is no world, and no truth, if those have been destroyed, then what is there to tell or represent?

In other news, it looks like the writers’ strike may finally be ending, which is great news for the writers and TV fans alike.

(FYI, Starbuck’s wall read:

Methodically
Smoking my
cigarette
with every breath
I breathe
out the day
With every delicious
sip
I drink away the night
stroking my hair to
the beat of his heart
watching a boy
turn into a
Man)