Last weekend me and Steve sat down to watch some Cylon action. This had been planned for some time but we were waiting for the right moment, ie: for the DVDs to come out and for Ange to be out of town. Ange hates BSG. Really hates it. If the conversation in the pub ever heads off in a Battlestar direction, she goes nuts. She went down to London for the weekend. We saw our chance and went for it!
BSG series 4
Planning involves beer, another thing Ange gets worked up about. You’d think she’d be glad Steve is hanging around with me – as Rob’s missus Sarah says ‘if Rob goes out with his brother he doesn’t come back until 5 in the morning pissed out of his mind. If he goes to Andy’s he’s home by 11pm and they’ve probably been talking about books’. I paraphrase somewhat.
I’ve got an old hi-fi sperates system hooked up to my downstairs DVD player so it sounds quite meaty for explosions and such, so we come here with our 10 tins of Fosters(each), even though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t touch lager again (I lasted about 6 weeks). My brother Rich is going to watch the first few episodes before he goes to his Halloween party covered in fake blood.
There are 10 episodes and we watch them all. And we (only just) get all our beer drunk. Steve crashes on the sofa as he’s forgotten his door keys and is probably in no fit state to walk anyway. I leave him with headphones on watching the ‘extras’.
My verdict: it was better than OK. Not as good as season 3, with less of the ‘running around in forests with fucking big robots trying to kill them’ that the first season had quite a lot of, and I quite liked. The spaceships are still damn good, but I’m getting immune to the incredible detail of the Cylon ships getting shot apart and their blood (Cylon ships are alive) splattering over the cockpit of the Viper. (Or did they only start showing this in season4?) I still like the flybys of the big ships where you can see tiny, tiny people inside through the windows (or whatever you call windows in a spaceship).
The season seemed a bit rushed, like all the action was condensed into too small a space. Whether this is me projecting or not I don’t know. I was aware that the writers’ strike had buggered up the shooting of season4 so that’s why they only got 10 episodes done, and maybe this coloured my perceptions of it. But when it comes down to it, it’s just a big, long mini-series set on a spaceship where there are lots of evil sexy robots and things exploding. You can’t go wrong with that, can you?
What? Why Bother? 