A mixed night for the Sci-Fi Channel (possible spoilers!)
On Stargate SG-1, the Jaffa High Council has been replaced by a new government elected by the Jaffa people.
I suppose it's only a matter of time now before Madeline Albright and the Democrats start moaning how much better off they would be if they were still ruled by the System Lords.
Predictably, Battlestar Galactica was yet one more tedious parable on the benighted idiocy of traditional Christians. In this case, the cause celebre was the Sacrament of Abortion, whose virtue the more backward of the Colonial Fleet's inhabitants failed to recognize. I didn't bother to stick around for the ending, which I assume was characteristically unsubtle.
President Roslin has yet to replace President Bartlet as the TV character I'd most like to see impeached, despite the shortness of Bartlet's tenure. But the heavy-handed political messages and pointedly preachy Left Wing social philosophy of this series grows tiresome. A shame, too. It took a concept which the original series had turned into a cultural joke, and made it into what is in many ways a pretty decent series.
Galactica- for the uninitiated- is essentially a metaphorical apologia for the teachings of the Mormon "church."
Doctor Who was good, but flawed. An above-average storyline involving the consequences when Rose impulsively saved the life of her father (she had never met him, and the Good Doctor, with uncharacteristic stupidity, took her back to the day he was killed so that she could see it happen) was marred by some problems in the logic of temporal distortion.
Wouldn't the past stay changed in potentially dangerous ways, despite Dad's heroic (but belated) decision to save the world by jumping in front of that car that kept winking into existence, driving down the same stretch of road, and winking out again? Wouldn't he have had to die at the precise time was supposed to have died, to fix things as completely as he apparently did? And wasn't the present changed in some potentially disasterous ways by the fact that people remained behind who knew about the whole incident?
Many modern physicists believe that a whole new universe is created every time any of us make a decision we could have made differently, and act upon it. Surely something more would have changed than the details of Rose's memories of the stories her mother told her as a child about her father's death (they now involved a "strange young woman" who comforted him as he lay dying, and then disappeared forever).
Oh, well. The Doctor's writing was always uneven in quality, and the scientific logic was never a particular strong point of the series. Tonight's episode passed the Babou Test, though: my wife, who is a tough critic where sci-fi is concerned, liked the episode.
Comments
Possibly. On the other hand, the twee, relatively simple nature of the fix gave us a lot of time for the human drama, which was the real part of the story for me.
It's interesting you're finding BSG to be left wing. One leftist fellow I know is complaining that it's becoming right-wing "fascist pornography." Sounds like they're hitting the right buttons across the board!
J
I seriously doubt that BSG is hitting many right notes. I, too, have been known to resort to "if the Left and the Right both don't like it, it must be doing something right" chain of reasoning. Trouble is, sometimes when the Left and the Right agree in disliking something (the Dafur genocide being a case in point), it's evidence that something is so seriously messed up that even ideological blinders can't hide it. And if the truth be told, I can see the "fascist" argument, though I think it's overblown; Roslin, not Adama, is running the show, and she's a democratically-elected civilian leader. And although contemporary American views on the matter distort it somewhat, post-modernism, after all, shares the Nietschean roots of fascism. Hitler used many of the same arguments used by the misnamed "right to die" movement to justify extending the logic of abortion to well after the kid was born.
Given BSG's sustained and systematic ridicule of Christianity,though, whereever it might be perceived to be on the political spectrum, I find it problematic.