Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Defying Gravity

What a show. Really, really amazing. I am overwhelmed yet again by a finale and so am finding it hard to write. Sigh. And how appropriately commemorative that I write this on the day of the 50th anniversary of the first human space flight!!! :)

Now the worst motherfucking part is that this show like soooo many other great sci-fi shows got fucking canceled after the first season. Actually it got canceled mid-fucking season. Way to give it a fucking chance guys. Flashbacks of Firefly... grrrrr. Another great, felled before its time. Sigh. :( When will they realize the higher budget of sci-fi is worth it?!?! It provides so much more interesting and captivating story lines!! Nothing in our present day is going to feel as exciting as a manned crew touring our solar system! As exciting as having the first human walk on Venus! I didn’t live through humanity’s first walk on the Moon. But now I can begin to imagine how it captivated everyone on Earth. As well some stories, even emotional stories, need a different setting to be explored and told. They simply can’t happen in our world!

Spoiler alert! They’re coming up! :)

Right from the first couple of episodes I was intrigued. Story was interesting, acting was great, production value was high! :) The flashbacks to their training programs 5 years earlier served as really great juxtapositions to some climactic scenes! Sometimes flashbacks were too quick and short and felt waaaaayyy too much back and forth but oh well. Also I thought it would be more of a straight-shooting, near future, heavier on the science, type of show so was a bit disappointed when I found out about Beta and all the almost magical type stuff it could do. I groaned and thought ‘Oh god no! Please don’t muck about with that!’ ... Coz there’s various ways to do sci-fi. You could just assume science is advanced enough to fly us through space, give us better technology and leave it at that. The Star Trek’s mostly do it that way. But then ones like Deep Space Nine get more magicky/ supernaturally, and some books like Anne McCaffrey’s Rowan book series throw in telepathy and telekinesis as huge spaceship-moving-capable forces. I love fantasy more but still usually prefer my sci-fi to be more science-based. But I gotta admit often throwing in some magic-type elements can do wonders for storytelling. Lets you ignore reality to create a more interesting plot or world. ie. Think of Avatar without that magic bond/ connection thing that happened with the Tree of Souls and without the wildlife fighting back.

I found this show coz one of my favourite actresses Christina Cox was in it. I think I first noticed her as the female mercenary in Chronicles of Riddick... she was soooo kick-ass!! Then watched Better Than Chocolate which she was great in! And ever since have been kinda following her and watching her stuff whenever I can. I was thrilled to see her in an episode of Dexter too! She was perfect! I’ve mentioned this in a facebook post but I really feel a lot of the guests on that show do some of their best acting there! Then I watched a Mutant X and First Wave episodes she was in and recently the tv series Blood Ties which I hope to write a blog post about soon! Coz it was awesome! :)

And all the other actors were amazing too! Seeing Ron Livingston in such a serious role after only knowing him from Office Space was weird, but he was totally great! Actually the whole cast were!! Loved them all! And at least it was more multi-cultural than most shows with more visible minorities.

Anyway... just thinking about which other genre shows were great and got canceled prematurely? At the forefront Firefly comes to mind of course. That will be the biggest tragedy of television for a long time!! And Dollhouse. Legend of the Seeker. Rome. I haven’t watched The Cape, but saw parts of it while my boyfriend watched it and it looked quite good, definitely too good to be canceled after only 9 episodes?!?! Also Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was great and should’ve gone past 2 seasons too! Any others?!